THE
REVOLT
OF
THE EARTH
by Satprem
On a very narrow ridge
between the Marvel and the
disaster.
S.
Translated
from the French by Luc Venet
To Sri Aurobindo
to Mother
who have given me all
to
my mother
and the sea gulls of
la Cote Sauvage
1
The Scientific
Middle Ages
Through a wonder cleft
in the bounds of birth . . .
Sri Aurobindo
When
a species fails to find its own sense, it dies or it self-destructs.
We
think of ourselves as French, Chinese or Russian, yellow, white or black; that
is our first barbarism. We think of ourselves as Christian, Hedonist, Moslem,
or what have you; that is our second barbarism. We think of ourselves as
scientists, star explorers—and consumers of every possible species—that is our
third barbarism. We devour everything, but who devours what? We know everything
but who knows what?
13
The
religious Middle Ages have been followed by the scientific Middle Ages. And one
isn’t sure which is the worst.
Yet
it’s simple—and very difficult.
The
evolution of a species does not lie in what it thinks of itself, although the
ability to think may indeed help us to speed up the process and find the sense.
For four hundred million years, it has been clear that the evolution of a
species lies in the body. In order to develop from shark to little seal on the
icecap, it scarcely mattered whether one was a yellow, white or black fish, or
even a scientific fish, because, in any case, that science was a science of
fish, and hence outdated.
“Wait
a minute,” the scientists will say. “We live under the stars, erect on two
feet, and we have telescopes and microscopes with which we count everything,
including your atoms. We can even
state with a straight face that there are one billion atoms in a grain of
salt.”
But
this is wrong. We do not live under the stars or in such an atomic accounting.
We live in death. Our science is a science of death, as is our theology. The
first and foremost fact of evolution, the fundamental fact of life is death;
and we see everything, know everything, and feel every-
14
thing
through that wall of death, much as the fish does through its barrier of water.
The greatest fraud ever committed by “thinking” men has been to call that life.
It’s the most stupendously wrong description in all of history. One cannot even
speak of a symbiosis of life and death, for that “life” is death—a necro-biosis.
Having
lacked the courage to face this simple, primordial fact of the evolution of
species, we have embarked upon all the wrong directions and all the wrong means
of action.
And
it is in the process of blowing up in our faces.
The
man of Lascaux dates back fourteen thousand years, and we still haven’t found
our human secret.
What
wrong turn have we taken, then?
The
imperative is to find a crack in the Wall, the place in the body where lies the possibility of the next step for our
species, or the next species. But first, in which direction should we look? Clearly not in an improvement of our
cerebral cortex or of our various ingenuities, just as the shark could not
become an amphibian by improving the number and capacity of its fins.
15
Amphi-bian
means one who “lives on both sides” (or dies on both sides, if one prefers). We
are not in the least amphibian. We “live” on one side only, that of death, and
all we know of the Earth, the planets, and the stars—not to mention
ourselves—is “the side of death.” How do we find what lies on the other side of
the wall—without leaving a corpse behind?
“Well,
let’s see . . . on the other side of the wall lies ‘pure spirit,’ or else a box
in the graveyard. But then again, where is this ‘wall’ of yours? We’ve never
seen it under our microscopes! We’ve seen tuberculosis, heart failures, truck
accidents, as well as vertebrae in a box. But where on earth is this wall? One
should be able to see it!”
But
we do not see anything, no more than the fish does inside its oceanic fishbowl.
We have defined all the conditions of “life” without realizing they were the
conditions of death. We have said: beyond so many degrees Fahrenheit, it’s
death; beyond so much atmospheric pressure, it’s death; beyond so much oxygen,
it’s death; beyond . . . To enumerate all the beyonds of life would be endless,
for they are all the beyonds of death; they are the walls of our prison, within
which we claim to live the good life (not so good of late).
16
But
it’s a Falsehood.
That
simple, primordial fact of evolution might also give us the key to the next
step of evolution or, as Sri Aurobindo called it, the “New Evolution,” which is
a radical departure from Lamarck and Darwin in that it is truly the dawn of the
first Life upon earth—the necro-biosis decapitated of its false name.
The
great Crack in the wall of evolution.
A
species’ weakness is its best means of passage to something else.
The
next species is not an “improvement” of the previous one. It isn’t something
added, like fins, legs, or wings, or some new convolutions of the cerebrum; it
is something falling away, and that
“something” falling away is essentially what causes the death of all species.
That primordial cocoon covering and ruining everything.
There
is no “superman.” There is another
man, or perhaps a first man, because up until now there have been mostly mortal
animals, equipped with a more or less skillful intelligence for escaping their
sorry condition, either from the top or the bottom.
Neither
the spiritual top nor the material bottom can help us, but the depths of our
body can—such profound depths that they may go
17
back
to an age prior to the trilobites and the lithosphere. We can expect nothing
from extra-terrestrials, but we can definitely expect something from a
tremendously powerful secret within some still-unknown intra-terrestrial.
Hence,
we already have a direction—to indulge in a bit of aquatic, and soon-to-be
amphibian, philosophy—that nothing in this universe can be if it is not for
joy. A creation or “way of being” based on death, hell, and suffering makes no
sense whatsoever, unless we say, like those poor Roman gladiators in the
circus, Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant,
“Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!”
It
seems obvious, too, that this animal body, produced by evolution and built
through countless deaths, has no intelligible sense other than to find the
secret of non-death and the laughter of joy in the very body issuing from
death.
This
is the great evolutionary challenge, and the next step of our species.
The
religious and scientific proponents have misled us.
18
Both
science and religion have crippled us—rendered us stupid—robbing us of our own
powers and evolutionary secret, one by urging us to heaven, the other to a
utilitarian machinery. We are not knowledgeable; we are crippled. Ultimately,
are we even “human”? We are equipped with telephones, telegraphs, planes, and
so on—a scientific, controlled, and indisputable way; every justification not
to search for the key. And to top it all off, a medical science that offers
every opportunity to die from its cures.
But
where is Life in all this?
19
2
The Revolt
of the Earth
Has
no one, then, ever found the key?
There
was Socrates: “Know thyself.”
They
murdered Socrates.
There
was Prometheus, who wanted to bring the Divine Fire to men.
A
myth?
Symbolically,
one could say that in 399 B.C., on the day of the hemlock, the West took a
fatal turn. That day we were irremediably moving away from the key. From that
oasis of grace and beauty whose motto was To
Kalon to epieikes—
23
“what
is beautiful is true”—we were to be progressively overrun by the Roman
barbarism whose cry still resounds today throughout our five continents: panem et circenses, “bread and circus”;
then, slowly but more insidiously, by an octopus-like Church, which pretended
to compensate for the Roman brutality, but nevertheless produced more than a
few gruesome executions at the stake while confining us in a ready-made and
God-sanctioned knowledge from which the sole possible exit was the materialist
revolt, followed by the plunge into a rather abysmal human filth.
The
very filth from which, today, we are unable to extricate ourselves, despite our
deafening triumphs.
We
may have more “bread,” but certainly a lot of “circus,” televised and otherwise,
which seems to breed violence and murder as if they exuded from everywhere—from
our very flesh, from this unknown animal body whose every law and atom we think
we have catalogued and locked forever in the books of our new scientific Church
as in a tomb. But this new Church is a prison and its miracles are cruel. It is
a Bastille more stifling than that of the Capetians or the Inquisition. Our
murders and violence, our drugs and viruses are the cry of the Earth, an
ultimate revolt against
24
ourselves,
for want of having found our own sense of being, just as the materialist revolt
was against an ecclesiastical prison, only more radical and deeper in our
cells.
Will
the religious and scientific Middle Ages be followed only by the Age of the
Brute? Let us not delude ourselves; we are not at the end of a “civilization,”
the way we were at the end of the Roman Empire. We are at the end of the Human
Empire.
But
has the human ever been? Or is it yet to be? Man lacks the key to his
evolutionary, physical secret that
would deliver him forever from both his devils and his gods—as well as from his
mortal prison. Evolution cannot stop until it has found all of its secret. That
secret lies in the very seed, in our cells, which may be made of something
other than merely the grimacing deoxyribonucleic acid on which our scientific
sorcerers so pride themselves. And perhaps the very convulsions of our age are
there to prod us toward the Secret.
*
* *
Sometimes, there occur strange conjunctions in history, as in planets, through which one can seize upon great vistas of the human march, and its impasses.
25
Near
the time Socrates was born, Buddha entered into Nirvana, and Aeschylus was
writing his Prometheus. Three great
human seeds of whom the last one remains mysterious and unknown.
One
could say that, with Buddha’s Nirvana, Asia took a turn—not exactly “fatal,”
like that of the West, because it was sweet and kind and compassionate, and
because, even then, it urged the “senseless,” as Buddha called them, to find their
own sense and reality. But that “reality” would thrust Asia into a dead-end
course, at least as far as the earth was concerned, since one was urged toward
a Nothingness from which one should never have emerged in the first place,
short of an aberration whose responsibility was uncertain among God, the Devil,
and ourselves.
But
our materialist science would soon level all that, in both East and West, with
the same murky, utilitarian tide that now covers every continent.
Of
course, one can still enjoy indoor meditations and individual “liberations,”
which are even quite refreshing in the midst of our chaotic world. But
meanwhile the Earth remains in chains, like Prometheus upon his Caucasus, and
in due time the murky osmosis will not leave a single con-
26
sciousness
intact. Indeed, we must also face the fact that the oasis of beauty never
survives the surrounding barbarism, in Tibet no more than in Athens.
And
the tide is gaining ground, as we know. We are today already more than five
billion.
It
is rather frightening.
*
* *
There
remains Prometheus.
But
that seed is still in a state of myth or poetry. It is but a suggestive clue on
a trail extremely muddled and completely intellectualized, while we need a concrete path, a tangible secret,
an evolutionary lever enabling us to
take a decisive step, outside a new ice age or an Apocalypse that would only
cause everything to begin again and again until we reach the secret in our
cells. There is nothing more implacable than a cell; it is obstinacy incarnate,
and billions of years make no difference to it.
So
why not now, since we have already knocked on every conceivable wrong door?
The
Fire . . .
Prometheus
wanted to bring the Divine Fire to men. But where to search for it since all of
India’s secrets urge us toward Transcendence?
27
No,
not all.
Long
before the Greeks, very long before Buddha and the Upanishads, and perhaps even
before the first Egyptian dynasty, some three to five thousand years before our
young Christ, the Himalayan range was the dwelling place of strange songsters,
called rishis, who have left their
hymns and their secrets as intact as those of Thebes’ hypogea and frescoes, for
they were repeated orally from father to son and from master to disciple with
the greatest accuracy in each intonation, as is essential for all sacred formulas.
Of those hymns, called Veda, one Rig-Veda, devoted to the Divine Fire,
has remained and Sri Aurobindo has deciphered it, as Champollion deciphered
with the help of a “Rosetta stone,” or by using some higher knowledge, but
deciphered and rediscovered by the
very experience of Sri Aurobindo’s body and cells—”Oh, so that’s it! That’s
what it means!” The cells re-cognize. We may think what we like, but the body
has its own way of recognizing its mother.
O Fire, thou art the son of
heaven
by the body of the earth . .
.
O Fire, thou art the child
of the waters,
28
the child of the forests,
even in the stone thou art
there for man.*
There
lies a secret.
And
this:
Our fathers by their words
broke the strong
and stubborn places;
they shattered the mountain
rock with their
cry; they made in us a path
. . .
and discovered the Day and
the sun-world.**
That
“rock,” those “strong and stubborn places” may well be our “wall of death” and
the invisible Bastille against which the Earth is in revolt
The
next step of our species.
________
* Rig-Veda, III.25.1. and I.70.2.
** Rig-Veda, I.7.1
29
3
Sometimes
one should be simple and renounce the literary plural to speak in the first person
like the man in the street. “What time is it and where are you going? And what
impels you, o man?”
Thus
spoke Socrates: “Stop awhile, my friend, so we can talk. Not about some truth I
am supposed to possess, nor about the unseen essence of the world, but about
what you were about to do when I met you. You must have deemed it just,
beautiful, or good, since you were
33
about
to do it; tell me what you understand by justice, beauty, and goodness.”*
Justice-beauty-goodness
. . . Good Lord, where on earth have those creatures vanished?
I walk on. I have walked a lot. I have gone across several continents at a gallop. What was it that upheld that course of mine? What current drove my keel? And why did I choose a particular direction, and then another—so many directions—as if I were half-mad yet perfectly clearheaded at the same time? Never has a single “thought” or abstraction impelled me. I am Breton and a sailor, and I like the open seas, the sea gulls, though I was born in Paris, on rue Giordano Bruno (a heretic stubborn enough to be burned at the stake). Things were off to a good start. But on the roads of Afghanistan I kept recalling Malraux: “Let others mistake a surrender to chance for that relentless premeditation of the unknown.” The unknown is something close to the Breton heart (one of my relatives was a ship’s boy on one of the first Cape Horners), and I yearned for the unknown, the adventure, all the more so since the “known” turned my stomach.
But
why was it so? What started me on that course? The sailors say they “cast off
from the
________
* As quoted by Encyclopaedia
Universalis, 15.91.
34
buoy.”
The end of a quest holds what was there from the beginning, and that may be
everyone’s question. The silent question of the child looking out at the
rolling wave and the flurry etching the ocean. “What is this all about? Who is there?”
And
then my question swept upon me like an earthquake. It was May 5, 1945. I was
barely twenty-one as I emerged from a hanger infested with lice, sick with
typhus, contracted in the last days in a concentration camp. I don’t know why I
was saved.
It
was enough to be heretical about everything.
I was a gaping void.
Eighteen
months in human Horror.
No, not the “Nazis,” not the “Germans,” not the “others.” The devastation of Man. Suddenly, I was thrown into a savage world, like that of the red monkeys howling in the night of Guiana. Perhaps they howl in search of their own sense? I would readily have howled for mine.
*
* *
There
are, however, extraordinary instances of Grace. Perhaps certain cries cause
that grace to come down?
Exactly
seven months after emerging from that no man’s land and finding the sea again—
35
which
did not particularly inspire me, except that it loved me and I loved it; there
was something to love—I found myself aboard an old military transport plane
(since there was still no regular transportation during this postwar chaos) en
route for Cairo. My final destination was India, where a Breton cousin of mine
had just been appointed governor.
And
there I was at Giza, before the Sphinx.
I
was petrified.
I
was alone, the hordes of tourists having yet to descend on the world like
Genghis Khan.
I
was twenty-two. I felt like the walking dead. Like an amnesiac child bearing
his hole of pain, I was just two eyes staring at the sands and the Sphinx as at
the infinity of the sea. There was nothing left, just that hole, that pain; it
was the only “thing” left. And “That,” staring at me as if from the depths of
eternity—as if the sea had two eyes.
I
felt so small. What was I?
I
was not even a “man”; my humanity had been brutally torn from me. Can one
ponder about something that is NOTHING? Something that is just a hole, a cry,
and nothing else? A fire, yes. A fiercely burning hole. To be is to be a
burning fire. It dates back to before man, to before
36
these
ages. The first cry upon the mountains of the earth was a fire. It was my being
of fire before that Sphinx.
And
then, something like a revolt, or a betrayed love, but it was “man” who had betrayed
me.
*
* *
Was
there an answer? An answer to what?
I
was not seeking a system of thought or a philosophy! I was seeking . . . a
heartbeat.
I
went toward Upper Egypt—alone, completely alone! I had all of Upper Egypt for
myself! Abydos, Thebes, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, and Nag-Hamadi, where I
stayed by the Nile for six weeks.
I
was stunned. During those six weeks, I lived in a state of deep,
incomprehensible emotion, drinking in that overflowing world. It was empty—a
few ruins strewn among the sands—and yet it was so filled, like those columns
of Luxor, massive, sun-drenched, ever standing and present as if they were
still carrying the god Re on their shoulders. It was alive! It was there.
Suddenly,
the West seemed like a hollow, well-dressed shell; even the Greek columns
seemed effeminate compared to these giants. All of the Western world with its
churches and cathedrals,
37
its
academies and Sorbonnes, seemed like some intellectual artifice—neat and tidy,
good-looking, but so fragile that it seemed to rest on nothing. One strolled
through it as one strolls on a mall, in the middle of what?
While
here, one was engulfed, dwarfed, overwhelmed by a world that was not just a
question with answers, but was the question itself—felt, imbibed, alive, spread
out beneath the sun and soon shattered among the sands, only to begin again and
again, as if by being repeated thousands upon thousands of times the question
itself acquired a power of its own and a presence of fire that was the Answer.
To be
“intelligent” was to be able to drink “that.” Everything else was just deft
little anecdotes to occupy the cerebral cortex. I was suddenly face to face
with a “nothing” that was a formidable something—without words. And that
something always kindled a fire in my heart, as if that fire was the
all-there-is.
Then
Thebes, the hypogea. Everything spoke
to me as no book in the West had ever spoken to me. How odd that there was
nothing to comprehend, yet it was filled with comprehension! Had I lived in the
clouds prior to this? Most definitely not! There had been the Gestapo, which
38
had
plunged me into an abyss of total incomprehension. That Horror was with me, in
the background, everywhere I went, as if all the West led to this. The West’s entire culture, its intelligence, its machines
were like wind swallowed up in a black hole. All one had to do was blow on it
and it would crumble.
But the columns of Luxor would remain standing. And I kept gazing at those frescoes in the semidarkness, at those hieroglyphs replete with a meaning without meaning, and at the great Serpent of Thebes with its little men lined up one after another, each bearing a coil of the great Serpent over his head, journeying on and on through centuries and lives and buried dynasties—all drawn by a unique Destiny toward what?
*
* *
For
that entire month and a half I remained in a state of stupor. I was being born
a second time—to what I didn’t know, since I was no longer the same person who
had once seen the light of day on rue Giordano Bruno. Though I was without a
doubt the person who had died in a certain Gestapo cave.
I
packed my bag and took the night train for Cairo. Was it fortuitous that it was
on February
39
21,
1946, the birthday of someone I had yet to meet and who would irreversibly
change my life—“Mother,” far away in India?
In
the train, I was brooding without words, while the sugarcane fields flowed by
and the moon glistened over the Nile. I was like a dark, burning gaze striving
to pierce the Enigma; one either solved it or blew up. That much was clear. One
couldn’t live with that horror in the pit of one’s stomach. It was my whole
humanity that was dead. And now those desert revenants were trying to inhabit
my intimate hypogeum.
Still,
one evening, near Abydos, I had seen the marvelous statues of my revenants with
their faces smashed—savagely smashed—by some fanatical Moslems (God help me!)
of times past. But are times ever past? One merely goes on beneath the great
Serpent of Thebes, soon to be devoured by formidable jaws. What was it that so
revolted me in this human condition? I stared and stared, sharpening my dark
gaze. Still, there had been Spartacus and his band of rebellious slaves, who
believed they had successfully revolted against the Romans, but then came
Glaber, and the vile Crassus, who had six
thousand of Spartacus’ slaves crucified on the road between Capua and Rome.
40
Crassus
was before Jesus Christ.
Hitler
was after Jesus Christ. Where is the difference? Who will be the next Hitler? Where?
Forty
years later we know that Hitler has disseminated everywhere, and that he has
won the war.
No,
it was not the crumbling of the West I was contemplating in my Cairo-bound
train, but something far more profound and recondite in which a Secret of life,
or death, had to be captured if one did not want to fall, like Spartacus, in a
thousandth futile revolt.
*
* *
Again,
I went back to see the Sphinx. I was on my way to Port Said to catch a British
ship bound for Bombay. To tell the truth. I did not give a damn about much of
anything; I was like a suicide in reprieve.
And there was that amazing Sphinx, as if some Titan had gathered up the Question of the Earth and shoved it into the pit of your stomach without a word. And the sands, all around.
O
man, what time is it?
And
where are you going?
When
Socrates was born, the Sphinx was already two thousand years old.
41
4
What
is it that impels you, o man, or impels us in unseen depths, seemingly making
us wander here and there, suddenly to reveal the miracle yawning by the
roadside? As if that miracle had been “premeditated,” to recall Malraux’s word.
And what course had we traveled before, in the past, to come across this trail
where everything seems to be known, to be in accord, to meet again? This is it
at last; we’re on our way after countless vain footsteps and false starts.
45
I
will never stop wondering at the lightning-like trajectory that, as I was
barely out of my “human” collapse, brought me, first, to the Sphinx’s feet,
before that sand-clasped Enigma, then to that infinite miracle: Sri Aurobindo.
Ten months after the agony of being a typhus patient who did not know whether
he wanted to live and for what, I was before Destiny itself—before life or
death.
It
was the 24th of April 1946. I was twenty-two and a half years old.
I
knew nothing about Sri Aurobindo when I arrived at the “Pondicherry
Government.” I knew only that he was a “revolutionary,” that he had been jailed
by the British, and that he had almost been sent to the gallows.
That
made me like him immediately!
People
said he was also a “sage.”
But
I was a complete layman in regard to the “Wisdom of the East.” I had greater
understanding of Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and the Breton pirates
boarding the Spanish galleons. And, to be perfectly frank, I preferred
Spartacus to the Buddha.
But
on that particular 24th of April, everything was overturned toward a new,
unknown sea.
46
It
was half past two in the afternoon. And the heat was suffocating. Pavitra, a
French graduate from Ecole Polytechnique
(God!), was waiting for me on the first floor of the “Ashram.” He was such a
fraternal and straightforward man, with a smiling gleam in his eyes. I followed
him up a narrow staircase thronged with disciples, then onto a landing, and
then into this . . . absolutely silent—one could almost say solidly silent—room
draped in white linen. Two people were sitting inside.
Somewhat
mechanically. I stepped forward and folded my hands in the Indian fashion, as I
had been told to do. There He was—a mass of immobile power. His face was
suffused in blue light (I thought it was neon lights). He looked at me. That
look felt so vast, oh, vaster than all the sands of Egypt, softer than all the
seas! And everything seemed to be engulfed in . . . something unknown. It
lasted three seconds.
Then
Mother, seated on his right, tilted her neck and chin toward me and gave me a
broad, radiant smile as if to say, “Aah!” I was completely dumbfounded. Three
seconds.
I
returned to my room at the “Governor’s Palace,” sat on my huge bed, which
probably dated back to the Compagnie des
Indes, and
47
stayed
there, stunned, much as I had been stunned by the Valley of the Kings and
Thebes. Something kept on vibrating, vibrating in the depths, far, far away,
beyond all known horizons, and I no longer knew anything. I only knew I had
encountered “something for always.” Three seconds for always. A unique being
unlike anyone I would ever meet. A being.
Then
I felt as if a thumb were being driven into my skull through the top of my
head. It was very strange—a physical
sensation. It felt very still, powerful, yet without sense. Nothing made any
sense!
And
yet, I never felt as alive as I did
on that day.
*
* *
We
are so very poor at expressing what is in our hearts.
We are always obliged to use some convoluted process that goes in roundabout ways. When will we speak in music?
I
was so shaken, so inexplicably shaken, that, despite my bad English, I threw
myself on everything I could find by Sri Aurobindo: pamphlets, letters,
articles, and a few transcribed conversations. Then, almost at once, I stumbled
upon the
48
following
sentence, five words:
“MAN IS A TRANSITIONAL
BEING.”
It
created a kind of revolution in my head, my heart, my life. Indeed, I could
have ignored altogether that the earth was round and revolved around the sun,
not to mention Newton’s apple and the entire scientific, “enlightened” lot, and
nothing would have been essentially
different in my life; I would only have sailed more beautiful sailboats, on
seas that were not more safe. But that man was a “transitional” being was
astounding news.
One
can sail with portolanos and an astrolabe, or even by the stars, but can one
sail with death in one’s heart? Man’s heart is filled with death. And he sows
it everywhere.
Of
course, I had read Lamarck (or at least what is said about him in philosophy
class), and it had fascinated me, but I would never have imagined that this
triumphant species of ours was nothing more than a link, a kind of “higher”
baboon, and that we were on our way to something else.
My
heart was crying to find that “something else”—not in heaven, not in a Bible of
one kind or another, but in my body! This wounded,
49
cheated
body, burdened with false knowledge, with religious and scientific injunctions
and all the rest of it—all that to end in a human
Horror.
Suddenly,
everything was as clear as daylight! My astrolabe pointed straight to that
star.
Suddenly,
all these human carnivores—pardon me—seemed, well, just a phase, a painful
fecund interlude. Fantastically fecund, since it finally led somewhere! That
being I had seen, Sri Aurobindo—so
dense, so poignant, as if bursting with power, like the columns of Luxor, with
a boundless gaze—that being could not
speak philosophical twaddle; he knew. He knew the way. There was a way.
It
was a fantastic piece of news, as if the first news of my entire life.
I
read on, and it was in the first pages of the Evening Talks, recorded by an old, warm and dynamic man, another
revolutionary, A. B. Purani, whom I had met on the street. It was still an age
when an Indian Socrates would hail you on the street: “O man, where are you
going?”
Indeed,
where are we going?
There
first pages contained another piece of news, or rather a declaration, not of
the “human rights” but of the human task; for we are workers, as it were,
essentially charged with a task.
50
What
task? We are discoverers, but out to discover what? We keep staging revolutions
and dying, collectively or individually, sometimes savagely, until we discover
the task to be performed and the sense of our species.
Sri
Aurobindo said to that old revolutionary Purani, who must have been quite
young, then, perhaps about my age:
It is not a revolt against
the British
government, which anyone can
easily do.
It is, in fact, a revolt
against the whole
universal Nature.
Just
imagine! This really was becoming quite an interesting challenge. How would
Spartacus have reacted? Or Lenin? We can accumulate revolutions endlessly, but
they won’t revolutionize anything, only stir the same elements in the pot from
which nothing, finally, will come out except what we had put in. And what does
seem to come out, in actuality, are voracious little men and ever more
monstrous inventions intended to satiate that insatiable voracity. All our
revolutions crumble or end in corruption because we have not waged that Revolution.
Finally,
as if to drive the point home:
51
If a total transformation of
the being is our
aim, a transformation of the
body must be
an indispensable part of it.*
I
was truly face to face with the Revolutionary. And a revolutionary with a real
course of action.
My
work was laid out before me.
I
had much to discover.
My
astrolabe pointed straight toward the unknown!
________
* The Supramental
Manifestation, p. 24.
52
5
Yet,
I still was not ready.
The
blast of the siren has rent the night, but one keeps wandering through the
port.
I
have wandered so much, but it was part of a growing Fire. Perhaps one has to
reach the point when the moorings break—moorings of every kind. I did not have
many left, except those one does not see, in one’s very own flesh. I suppose
that Breton, too, had to be uprooted; the “best” in us is our greatest
obstacle. These were my last moorings in this senseless world: the ocean, the
55
sea
gulls, the small sunny cove where the surf purls on through infinity and breaks
over a rock adorned with tiny orange lichens. That rock . . .
Then,
abruptly, came the day in December 1950 when my brother brought me the Combat newspaper to my room in Paris:
Sri Aurobindo has gone.
He
has gone.
Oh,
that sense of collapse! That cry in my heart!
He
has gone.
That
being.
It
was the whole earth crying out in my heart. It was the whole earth that was
suddenly impoverished, in tatters, bereft of its Sense.
Sri
Aurobindo . . .
So
I packed my bags and left for French Guiana—the jungle, anywhere, as long as I
would be able to cry out my distress and my lack of human sense to my heart’s
content. If I could no longer leap into the future, let me at least immerse
myself in a verdant prehistory, alive only with monkeys and the shrieks of
macaws.
But
one is always face to face with oneself, the burning enigma that dies and is
reborn. A man is really a question put by the entire earth. It is his
post-simian Destiny, his all-consuming Fire
56
that
will not let up until he reaches the “keyless gate”—the very end, the ultimate
wall where he either finds the answer or dies. The individual is the whole
species; it is one and the same substance. Had I gone down so deeply into this
human Horror simply to say, “Hang it all, I quit”? I had to perforate the Hole,
go to the bottom of it, to the other side of the bottom—yes, wield the Thracian
sword, but not to slay any particular oppressor, for the oppressors are
everywhere! Perhaps everything would
need to be slain! Yet, there was no hatred in my heart, just the comprehension
of and compassion for all things that only suffering and destitution can bring:
yes, to find the way out of this human concentration camp. The roots of the misery. The end of this
radical oppression that drives us against one another and drives us to prey on
every species and on the earth as if it were no more than a wanton woman to be
raped, possessed, and exploited in every possible way for our own fleeting
gains.
For
two whole years I thundered, wandered, wore down my pain, with some moments of
great joy, too, in the wild.
Then
I packed my bag of revolt.
57
There
was still Mother, over there, whom I did not understand at all.
I
overcame my natural aversion for “communities,” “ashrams,” and similar
cloistered places that are custodians of “the Truth,” and I returned to India.
I
was thirty.
*
* *
She
was there.
That mystery.
I
never cared for ashrams and all their business.
But
She. That danger—for me.
I
approached Her as one approaches the reefs of Taillefer, all fringed and bubbling with foam, and so beautiful—an
irresistible peril. I was going to sink there, split my keel!
I
wanted it, and feared it.
But
I have always loved the sea.
And
I loved Mother, as a drowning man loves air.
Yes,
I struggled. I said no and then yes. But how I wanted to know! And she made all
my old comprehensions melt into a . . . flabbergasting unknown. I would put up
a fight, but then my heart would melt into Her, bleeding, wounded.
58
And
She took my revolt into her arms and transformed it into a sword to pierce the
Horror.
“We
are going to do something together.”
To do, yes! I was so fed up with
meditations and speculations! But to do, to knead, yes, to cut through, machete
in hand, as in the forest. First, one must cut through oneself; it is hard and
painful to find the Enemy in one’s own flesh. Nor would I cease finding the
Enemy, increasingly denser, increasingly cruel and inexorable. For to escape
above is well and fine, even lovely, but to go down into this . . . Past a few inches, it isn’t just one’s own
atavistic make-up that one encounters, but the whole earth’s! There are not thousands
of men; there is only one. There are not thousands of enemies; there is only
one. And there is only one Victory: over death. For every other little devil
stems from there.
She
took my hand. She made me her confidant, for nearly twenty years.
Of
course, victory over death does not mean to become “immortal” in this skin of a
higher ape, God knows! But victory over the something-that-causes-death, which
covers the whole earth, or “nourishes” it—that abominable primordial compost.
Unless it is a “rock,” as the Vedic rishis called it, those mysterious sages of
the beginning
59
of
humanity who already seemed to have known the end, the Goal:
O Seers . . .
weave an inviolate work,
BECOME THE HUMAN BEING
create the divine race . . .
sharpen the shining spears
with which you cut the way
to that which is immortal.
Become
the human being.
This
was five to seven thousand years ago! There was a long way to go to become what
we have yet to be. The tomorrow of the Earth. Following a few fecund
convulsions.
Mother
took me by the hand. She made me the witness to her incredible advance toward
the tomorrow of the Earth, toward the Man yet to be.
I
saw her toil, heard her moan, listened to her cries, sometimes her despair, her
experiences a bit . . . dizzying, and saw her smile, always, as long as She
could. She tried to the very end. Her breath was increasingly short as she
gasped for air in the middle of that ashramite jungle which
________
* Rig-Veda, X.53
ff.
60
only
understood its own little humanity. She cut through it, through those men and
women who were not distinct but one and the same “quagmire,” as She called it,
with a few gilded trimmings and some spiritual flights, because, despite
everything, we are completely ambiguous. She hewed a path through those
“refractory fortresses.” She laid siege to the new species through the very resistance of the old, as the fish on the sand
lays siege to the sun through its own asphyxiation and convulsions, which are
the asphyxiation and convulsions of the old species as a whole. It is in the
body one has to hew! It is against one’s own self one has to become! It is
against the whole world one has to dare unearth that which is not yet of this
world.
A
new being is a peril for all. It disturbs everything, challenges everything,
goes against every existing law. But of course, the New Law must be wrested
from the very negation of our own body—and all bodies, as there is only one
body!
She
hewed and hewed. She hewed as much as She could, from inside her golden
dungeon, surrounded by cruel guardians and a variety of serpents. Finally, She
had no more words; She had only that large gaze which goes through time and
walls, that inexpressible smile of compassion
61
for
the open wound that we all were. She would take my hands, close her eyes,
secretly drawing me toward what I had yet to understand, what I had yet to be.
And, as I know now, She planted into my heart and my body a few particles of
that new Seed—that hope for the earth.
“I
want to walk some more,” She said the day before that 17th of November 1973.
She,
the intrepid.
She
who has given me everything, who has done everything for me—for all of us. And
unknown to all.
She,
more ancient than Thebes, who has wrested the Sphinx’s secret—our secret.
Oh,
her hands so fresh and strong holding mine—so strong, as if She were pulling me
and trying to pull the entire Earth.
“What
time is it?” She asked me a last time. Those were the last words I heard from
Her.
The
time. What time is it for the Earth?
*
* *
She
has gone. . . .
I
was fifty years old.
62
6
I
have difficult things to say.
What
language to use?
At
dawn, in my prison cell at Fresnes,* my heart was filled with a great burning
silence as I listened to the boots in the corridor.
After
Mother’s departure, there was not the sense of collapse I had experienced when
Sri Aurobindo had gone. There was that same burning silence.
________
* Where the police held French Resistance fighters in World War II before sending them to the firing
squad.
65
I
was no longer facing my own little person wondering about itself and its
destiny. I was listening to other boots marching in the corridors of the world.
I was, simply, facing Man’s destiny and the Earth’s question. Was there no
hope, then? Were we going to begin again with fathers and sons and the Tables
of the Law and Euclid and a thousand and one insurrections for nothing, not to
mention all those horrors in accelerated motion? And babies by the millions to
continue with new fathers and grandfathers? It was as if I were reliving the
uselessness of all those lives and the deaths of all those men, as well as
their last question. Were we going to begin again in a cradle only to leave
once more with the same question? I had the “chance” to die on the way and go
on living with that question.
No,
not “death,” but countless deaths and the very Sense of our species.
I
knew that Sense, not in philosophical but in physiological terms. A man about
to die is hardly concerned with philosophy; he is in the throes of very
physiological convulsions. As is the Earth at present.
66
I
knew that secret, but it had to be lived. It had to be transmitted.
It
was an awesome responsibility.
But
first, that fabulous document of Mother’s own progression—The Agenda—had to be
preserved. Those gropings and stammerings of a new species, those cries of
triumph and heartbreaks should in no way fall in the clutches of a new Church.
A difficult battle ensued, one that need not be told here. Giordano Bruno was
stubborn, and so am I. Today, happily, there is no more burning at the stake,
but there are still assassins in canyons. And I think there are assassins
everywhere, as my brother Rimbaud had seen: Voici
venir le temps des assassins, “The age of assassins is upon us.”
It
took me eight years to materialize that fabulous message of six thousand pages
and to try—oh, what a task!—to map out a “service path,” as they say in the
jungle, through this green deluge, no longer related to prehistory but to a
history yet to be born and still incomprehensible to anyone.
And
what did I understand myself?
To
understand is fine, but one only understands in one’s own flesh, as one
understands the sea by diving into it and scratching oneself
67
on
the rocks. And then what? More books? Yes, but one does not become a little
seal basking in the sun by reading a manual! To become was indeed the pressing point. Those “readers” would no
doubt read, perhaps even open their eyes to that extraordinary Sense, but when
the empire is crumbling—our human empire—when our earth is plundered as no
Attila has ever done before, when the human consciousness is becoming
increasingly clouded and overrun by a sly barbarism, and the twilight is
stealing upon us, isn’t there something more to do? Well, precisely, to do.
It
was a terrible challenge.
I
did not dare. Yet it kept haunting me.
Have
I had the privilege, the grace, to listen to Mother, to know Sri Aurobindo, to
touch that Secret of the Vedic rishis, merely to write books about it? If no
one had followed the Vikings or Christopher Columbus, America would have never
existed. If no one had asphyxiated in a dried-up swamp and “invented” pulmonary
breathing earthlings would never have existed. Someone had to follow!
Yet,
I was ashamed to try. Why ashamed? It seemed so beyond the measure of a tiny
individual! But if no tiny individual follows, however
68
feeble
he may be, however mixed like all his human brothers in the general quagmire,
then what hope it there? There is no need to be “superior” or superintelligent
to take a step toward the next species, nor is it necessary to possess special
virtues, because our superiorities, “intelligence,” and virtues are precisely
the syndromes of the old species. Indeed, it is not a matter of becoming a
“superman” but something else, something else entirely. It is a matter of
having courage.
And
such great thirst!
So
I said to myself, “Why not?” The way someone named Charcot set out for the
Arctic Sea. He perished at sea.
But
others followed.
*
* *
My
job as a scribe was over; who knows if in Thebes, at Mother’s feet, I had not
already listened to the tale of another humanity? But time advances stealthily
while the Sun god awaits. “They discovered the Day and the sun-world,” said the
Veda. It was such a long time ago!
Could
it be that the time, the hour, the day has come at last? The darkness is never
so great as before dawn. Sri Aurobindo had said it.
69
I
have difficult things to say that have long been hidden behind myths, legends,
lost trails—and so much blood.
I
was very troubled at the idea of picking up the trail where She left off.
But
I took the plunge. It has been seven years—over seven years—day after day and
hour after hour, since I have undertaken that labor. The Vedic rishis called it
“digging.” It is like riding a storm that uproots everything; everything is
laid bare. But once in the middle of the storm, you cannot pause for a rest;
you ride it out or you sink.
I
have been in this storm for seven years, isolated, cut off from the word; yet,
I have never seen so much of the world! Oh, what horrors! The Earth is possessed as it has never been in any
Middle Ages. Based on the experience of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, I knew I had
to be absolutely alone and secluded to undertake such a work. One may be
physically secluded, but all the tunnels of the Earth lead to oneself, as well
as much malfeasance, as if one were up against everything.
I
have made so many discoveries since that day in 1982, discoveries that Sri
Aurobindo had made, that Mother had made, that perhaps John
70
of
Patmos had made on his island of exile, as well as the rishis. And I realize
that I had not understood anything, or so little, though I had been a witness
and even written books—a trilogy—to try to explain Mother’s journey. One
understands nothing until “it” descends into your own body like an earthquake.
Then one says, “Ah!” and one is thunderstruck as before the Secret of the Earth
and the centuries.
But
a final interrogation mark, a last step remains, and nothing will truly be
known until we reach the end.
I
had said I no longer wanted to write, because words seemed so utterly
frivolous, but sometimes it is necessary to cast a bottle to the open sea. Yet,
during these seven years—and who knows how many more?—I have kept a journal of
that perilous Odyssey, as I felt the necessity to leave some traces. I call it
my “Notebooks”; Notebooks of an
Apocalypse. The Greeks knew, as did John of Patmos, that this famed
“Apocalypse,” which has elicited so many monsters (although there might be,
after all, a few tremors and some “beasts” . . . already visible), simply meant
“to lay bare,” apo-kalupsis. It is
the time of laying bare the horrible thing that we see crawling everywhere.
71
I
do not know whether these “Notebooks” will ever see the light of day. Perhaps
they will be overtaken, outdated by the “Day” of the Vedas, made obsolete by
the facts. But I have felt inwardly compelled, virtually forced, to write these
pages, as day after day I can see that this task of the new species is
exhausting, and . . .one never knows.
I
wanted to leave a few hints, or at least a few “pointers”—I will give only
two—about what I have observed, “laid bare” in my own body, day after day.
And
in God’s hands!
72
7
In
what direction to search?
Until
now, the “direction” was all decided for us as well as for all the species
before us: Nature would plunge us into the appropriate conditions and there was
nothing to search for. The body would do the “searching,” struggling as it
could in the middle of an earthquake, a flood, a drought, a breakdown in our
feeding or breathing habits, or some asteroid slamming into the earth and
burying us under an ice age. But in every case it is the body that searched.
75
Today,
it is also the body that searches, but in a different way. For it is completely
buried, not under an ice age, but under a technical and scientific and medical
age that chokes it to death and deprives it of its own resources—of its own
self-knowledge, one could say. Though it could well be that this age of
witchcraft or, rather, fakery—for this is a time of fakers and deceivers—is
part of Nature’s design of suffocating us in such a ghastly way as to compel
us, or to compel a few more especially asphyxiated individuals(!), to find the
evolutionary key. The real key. The one that began this whole affair. Finding
the next step of a species has never required a lot of “bodies.” All that is
required is a crack in the old customary armor; a few slip through, and it’s
another world.
A
crack, yes; a fault, precisely. As
long as things roll on and work or fly or swim in the same usual, comfortable
environment, one is merely “improving” the environment and its living
conditions, but one is already a stationary or declining species, or is set on
a self-destruction course, as our anti-human virus portends.
And,
God knows, this so-called human age of ours is full of faults, which our
sciences and religions try to patch as best they can. But our
76
ship
is sinking, and the more we try to improve our conditions, the heavier we
become; the more we attempt to rectify our mistakes, the more we reinforce the
prison; the more “wonderful” it is, the more suffocating.
It
makes no sense whatsoever to improve such an “environment.”
So
where to search? How to search in something that does no yet exist?
If
the fish had had the “idea” of searching, it might have poked its head outside
its water, soon to realize or understand in its gills that this was death. For
every species, evolving to “something else” is like a stepping into death; that
something else does not exist, and
yet it has to exist!
Thus,
death may be one of the conditions to explore. That is where we have to poke
our heads and, if possible, our whole bodies.
But
what, exactly, do we know about death? Nothing, precisely, except what we are
told by the scientists, sorcerers, and priests of the old environment, who are
merely the ministers of the old Prison or, rather, its keepers, and who will
assert with the greatest authority that beyond these scientific and medical
bars lies “death”—which is simply the death of their science. Those are simply the conditions of their life inside the
77
prison.
The pope of fish wouldn’t have said it any differently.
We
are totally mistaken when we regard death as a corpse that has been unfortunate
enough to deviate from the medical chart or to be crushed beneath the wheels of
a truck.
And
then, on the other side of the bars, we will supposedly find heaven, or hell,
depending on our proportion of sins and virtues in the old environment. Or else
“nothing”—still, by their death those “nothings” appear to have produced quite
a number of species in the course of time!
But
what if there is something else on the other side of the bars? What if there is
another Sun, like that of the little amphibians lolling on the sand?
But
then, how to pass to the other life and remain alive? Yet, in every
evolutionary transition, a representative on the verge of death, as it were, has managed to remain alive. A first
mutant has begun to wriggle, crawl, or trot.
Every
transition has to pass through death, or a form of death.
Every
death emerges into a new form of life.
The
Vedic rishis spoke of the “great passage,” mahas
patah.
78
This
may well be the first direction to search in. But not “search” with artificial
means—microscopes, test-tubes, theories—rather, search in one’s own body.
Search
for death? In one’s own body?
But
where is it, outside our medical
catalogs? In what location of the
body does it hide? If we want to fight an enemy, we have to catch hold of it
somewhere, by its tail, wing, or coat of mail.
*
* *
In fact, there is no need to “search for death”; it’s right here. It is the most present, and the most invisible, of all things.
The
greatest discoveries are utterly simple, and completely incomprehensible
because they contradict something that is so fundamentally obvious, or
“natural,” that it means nothing to
our consciousness.
If
a peasant of the Middle Ages had been told that “the Earth is round,” he would
have scratched his head and said, “Well, maybe, but my field is still flat;
and, at any rate, whether round or square, I can walk on it, and that’s all
that matters to me.”
I
spent some twenty years beside Mother and, like the peasants of the Middle
Ages, there was
79
something
fundamental I had failed to grasp. One day, as I was making some comments to
Mother, She exclaimed, “But it is my constant
experience that life and death are the same thing!”
I
had understood her to mean that the state called “life” and the state called
“death” (on the other side of a tomb or of a round earth) were the same thing,
i.e., there is life after death, and that life is as living as ours—which is
really quite clear, and one would have to be quite primitive not to know it,
but that’s another story. This is not, however, what Mother meant! She meant
that our life is death itself, i.e.,
there is no “other side”; we’re already in death! Or, to put it differently, we
are on the wrong side and life has yet to
be.
For
the person I was fifteen or twenty years ago, this was incomprehensible. My
field was still flat. And for the highly intellectualized people we are, it
seems merely like a play on words, a mental game: you can call white black, or
you call the black of life white, but what does it change?
It
changes absolutely everything!
One
cannot understand that fundamental
discovery (and to understand it means nothing if it does not lead to a practical means of action) unless one
has parted with the intellect and found
80
oneself
in the state of a body pure and
simple, or in the state of the essential animal that we are beneath our
manifold garbs—a physical state we never experience, yet which holds our
secret. If any animal, say, a fish, could feel its condition as mortal, the way
Mother felt her condition as mortal, that would mean it already knew of another state, which it would properly feel as
life. And compared to that new, other state, it could then say, “I am or was
living in death. My aquatic life is a state of death compared to that other
Sun.”
But
what Mother further meant—I understood it only later, when I myself engaged in
the work and began to experience raw matter, as it were, the body stripped of
its artifices and atavisms; for, very clearly, even a baby is born fully dressed up—what Mother meant was
far more fundamental and radical than that! It is not just the life of a given
species that is death compared to the next life of another species, as the
death of the fish is the life of the little lizard scurrying in the sun. Not at
all!
It
is all of life, all that we call
“life,” beginning with the first blue algae of Greenland or the first
annelids—what we call the first life on Earth—that is in a state of death. Life has never been
81
born!
It has yet to be. Ever since the dawn of earthly existence, death has seized
us, and it keeps devouring us insatiably from one species to the next. It is
death that lives.
“Well,
all right, but my field is still flat,” will say the intellectual peasant that
we are.
Let
us leave the scientific peasants to their ignorance; but for those who search,
who asphyxiate, and who walk on a round earth, this is a fantastic key.
Within
a body of our animal species, there is something physical—Mother was perfectly physical, with ninety-five years of
human experience—that is at the dawn of the first Life on Earth, something
Mother knew and that I have discovered after her. Something completely unknown
to us, unknown to every species, which is going to revolutionize and change the
face of the earth. As Sri Aurobindo said: “A revolt against the whole universal
Nature.”
We
are in a certain invisible earthly concentration camp, and within that
concentration camp (very much alive for us), we witness a phenomenon we call
“death,” which we blame on typhus, the heart, the liver, cancer, old age,
exhaustion, the viciousness of a mean neighbor, a car accident, or what have
you. But that isn’t so! It isn’t
82
illness,
age, or any physiological data that causes
death. It is the WALLS of the concentration camp that causes the death of
everything within those walls.
That
changes everything! It changes our entire course of action. For we need not
invent thirty-six thousand types of penicillin, thirty-six thousand supersonic
wings, or countless gimmicks to mitigate our drastic infirmity; we need to find
a cure for the WALLS. Then everything
will be cured. We need to get out of the Camp, and there will be Life—in
freedom.
Salvation
is physical, said Mother.
We
are in a universal black dungeon, invisible to us, and we go about in that
dungeon as a matter of course, thinking it is our daylight and our life, making
all kinds of “wonderful” discoveries, even peering at the whole universe
through the dungeon walls, using the ingredients of the dungeon to accomplish
atomic, electronic, and medical “miracles,” even flying through the air of the
dungeon and tinkering with genetics in an attempt to improve our nocturnal
species—whereupon the dungeon disintegrates.
And
something else emerges. Something else entirely.
83
We
had never been born, never been “men”—we were merely hemeralopes, like the
axolotls in the underground lakes of Mexico. We had never seen the daylight,
never seen life. We were living dead.
Then
our walls crumble.
And
it’s another Earth.
It
is “another heaven,” as John of Patmos had seen.
It
is the Day, as the Vedic rishis saw some five or seven thousand years ago.
They shattered the mountain
rock with
their cry;
They made in us a path . . .
They discovered the Day and
the sun-
world . . .
the pregnant hill [our own
matter, our dun-
geon] . . . parted asunder,
heaven was perfected.*
________
* Rig-Veda, I.71,
V.45.
84
8
The “I Know”
of the Body
There
is a second momentous key.
Actually,
it is the first one to emerge.
For
so many years I had listened and thought I understood, but when it breaks out
in the body, the “field” is no longer flat at all. It even lies gaping before
an incredible, and perilous, unknown. Of course, it is perilous to become the
unknown! It is not; yet, somehow, it becomes. It becomes with each step. Each
step is unknown; yet, somehow, one puts a foot down on something. It’s truly
like being born anew from one
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minute
to the next, except one does not come out of the womb of one’s mother and into
a ready-made world. A baby cries; one cries, too. Often. One comes out of the
womb of a formidable Mother, perhaps She who breathed all these stars into
existence.
And
kindled all these little fires.
Oh,
we think we are so profound and learned. What a joke! We are profoundly and
learnedly asleep on a strange fire that smolders there, and which is about to upset all our profundity and
learnedness. What children we are!
Right there in the body.
That
mystery.
What
is needed is for us to descend into it with all our hearts, with all our
cries—not with electronic eyeglasses or any of those artificial utensils that
reveal only a grimace, a caricature of the reality. They make fakes that look
so genuine! To the ancients, say, the rishis, only that which a man can know
and achieve by himself is properly
human. If they had known of our electronic, telephonic, astronautical, and
mechanical artifices, they would have regarded them as profoundly dishonest,
like servants eavesdropping on or parroting their master. They would have said,
“This is a dishonest civilization.” The mas-
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ter
is consciousness. The power is consciousness. Everything can be done through consciousness. But no sooner had we
deprived ourselves of that master than we embarked on all the wrong powers and
all the wrong knowledge—a caricature of knowledge—thus subjecting ourselves to
the yoke of a cruel despot that would eventually drive us faster and faster
into a disastrous non-humanity.
Thus,
the true-false or the false-true has now overrun all of human consciousness, to
the point that we are swimming in a sea of falsehood and in such an
hallucinating and mesmerizing false reality of matter that all genuine
approaches are clouded.
Truly,
an animal howling at the dawn of life on earth is already a kind of longing and
searching for something. We would do better to start that way.
That
burning gaze on the walls of my prison cell at Fresnes was already a step—at
the dawn of no life, since this one was on the brink of death. A gaze on
NOTHING. And that “nothing” becomes so intense and burning that it is already
something. There is no preconception about matter or the universe in such
moments. There is something that goes right through. There is,
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precisely,
a first human step on no continent and no “field,” since that field has
collapsed.
And
from one collapse to another, one digs down.
And
it becomes more and more “nothing”—the dark, a wall—which becomes more and more
fire as one goes down.
It
is an horrendous pit.
It
is a desperate condition, more desperate than that of a man about to die, for
at least that death is an issue. Yet that very desperation is fire. It would
seem that fire is the only thing that is
in this whole horrendous affair.
One
digs and digs, as the Vedic rishis said, through countless layers and quagmires
that bring to light all the grandfathers in the world along with all their
stories, just like our own, as if there were only one man on this whole planet; and all the horrors of the past, just
like the present ones, as if there were only one ill, only one pain in these millions of lives. And so many wild
beasts. And the night grows increasingly suffocating as one keeps searching,
digging with one’s scalpel of fire to find the root of that pain—and wring its
neck once and for all.
No,
the “horrors” are not what we think. It is that Pain in the depths—like a
choked cry. Per-
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haps
a cry of love that became covered over with night and falsehood. Something that
has created death in order to lose itself, only to find itself again, and to
keep finding itself until we free the Secret in the depths of this unfathomable
body.
I
have been digging long.
We
miss the trail because we try to clothe in words, explanations, “stories,” and
psychological terms something that is just a hole reaching farther and farther
into primary human matter, together with a growing Fire.
That
fire is the Trail, like a river
leading to its source: if we go upstream, we reach the goal; if we go
downstream, we are tossed into the estuary along with the debris, our endless
debris and dust. And then the pain of beginning all over again.
But
it is a Source of Fire.
A
prodigious un-covering.
We
can never say enough that “to discover” is first and foremost to un-cover.
*
* *
I
can only speak of my own experience, as I could speak of my experience in the
jungle of French Guiana, or on the difficult seas among the Belle-Ile reefs. Seven years of
experience in this
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unknown
Matter condensed in a few pages, though to tell the facts of Nature does not
require a lot of words.
Thus,
I have dug in this body of mine as fiercely as one struggles to uproot a
horror, and it was becoming scorchingly hot, perhaps as in the depths of a
bottomless mine shaft. Then, one day, a kind of revolution occurred in the
depths of this body, as if thousands and millions—an innumerable quantity—of
microscopic volcanoes had been kindled, un-covered. Volcanoes that might be
even smaller than a cell, but so innumerable and unrestrained—indeed,
un-restrained—that I watched and experienced all this with a sense of
bewilderment and exultation, much as one might behold a phenomenon of nature, a
thunderstorm, or an earthquake. Stupendous, innumerable fires in the depths of
this bodily matter. Then that entire mass was seized with an irrepressible urge
and began to rise and rise, shaking off all restraints and coverings, gathering
itself in an uncontrollable upward thrust, as if overhead, somewhere above the
body or outside these walls, a giant magnet (I don’t know what else to call
it), a colossal force of attraction was drawing out these innumerable freed
fires. I absolutely felt as if I were dying—that’s it, the
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Enemy
immediately shows its face! Death is certainly . . . fascinating. From then on,
I would confront it regularly, day in and day out, see—experience—how things
really are. My horror, precisely. That which no one knows until the very last
moment. The secret of our bodies.
But
first, when those countless microscopic volcanoes broke out of my walls, out of
their prison, by being sucked upward, and my old normal body felt it was dying,
this very same being and body was nevertheless overwhelmed with an
inexpressible sense of exultation—joy, oh, of a kind I had never, ever known in
all my life, not even in a full-blown storm at sea off la Cote Sauvage! A physical delight, as if those countless
particles of fire were recognizing their source, their Mother, what they had
been searching for life after life, through one body after another, through an
endless desert of agitated existences. Now that Thirst was fulfilled at last,
satisfied to the full with that nectar.
As
if the body had reached the Goal of the Ages.
There
are no words to express that.
One
might say it was all of the body’s love meeting its timeless Love. One “loves”
thousands of things—the ocean, the sea gulls, differ-
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ent
people—but That was the very source,
the place where one can immerse oneself without restraint, without “others,”
without sense of you or me, without walls at last.
It
was outside our dungeon.
Then
the junction took place between those innumerable bodily micro-volcanoes and
their great fire “outside,” their fount of nectar, and that same Fire “above”
(I don’t know how to say it) began to descend into my old dungeon.
And
that’s when the whole difficulty and peril, and the whole discovery, arose.
That’s
when we begin to realize the reality of our bodies and of our substance as
intellectual animals—the earthly
reality, for there are not endless kinds of bodies nor endless kinds of
substances. We may think of ourself as a sage, a sailor, a doctor in one kind
of science or another, or as a democratic head of state of the West or the
East, but we are really an old dungeon and the entire Earth is in a dungeon.
*
* *
When
that formidable material Reality began to descend into my own matter, a sense
of panic and agony swept over me—a long agony. Panic can be overcome.
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We
think we know the reality of Matter and all the stars, but we are merely like
echinoderms or periwinkles wrapped in an original shell that keeps us separated
from reality. Through our walls, we can send out all the periscopes and
telescopes we like, but our instruments will only let us perceive and
understand what our internal structure or constitution allows us to perceive
and understand. They are only instruments of echinoderms, and this is only a
knowledge of echinoderms. How does an eagle see the galaxies? He sees galaxies
of eagles, and we see galaxies of humans, that’s all.
But
reality, that formidable material reality, is something else altogether.
In
truth, we need to tear down our whole millennial structure in order to have
access to that Reality. This is the agony mentioned earlier. It is the
demolition of the dungeon.
And
that dungeon is death itself. It is the something that causes the death of our
species and of all species since the dawn of a life that has never been life.
But
here, suddenly, the body has felt Life, discovered Life, drunk in that nectar.
These myriad cells have inexpressibly touched their Source outside the shell;
these myriads of little fires have
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imbibed
the Great Fire whence they issue as from a primary Mother. They KNOW. The cells
KNOW. Henceforth, they can bear the trial.
They
know, as if for all time and from the beginning of time; they re-cognize this
as an infant recognizes his mother. And nothing and no one, no death or any
specter of death, will ever be able to remove this from their internal
vibration. It is like a new physiological memory. And this is what will help us
along that passage through death, that demolition of the dungeon—that “rock,”
as the Vedic rishis called it, which separates us from Life at last.
For
that invasion of Life into our old organic structure is like an invasion of death!
It means the death of our old way of being. Everything is reversed! Then one
becomes aware of what death really is; that is, one becomes aware of what we
call “life.” Under that invasion, every distress signal in the body starts
ringing. That Sun is there, and our entire night begins to screech and be torn
apart—I’m dying, burning, bursting, collapsing. There is a crushing pressure.
This is perhaps what the fish on the sand feels as it gasps for air and has to invent a new way of breathing, or
die.
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A
new way is needed to breathe that Life. It cannot be found in one day: it is a
long agony. Mother used to say, “If I did not know how the process works, it
would be a constant agony.” And I made the same discovery when, some five years
ago, I remarked to my friend Luc, who had come to interview me. “In this
business, you spend your time dying without dying.” Five years later, it
continues. To take a step toward another species is a lengthy task. It requires
a long adaptation to a new, and crushing, Sun.
But
there is this mighty “I KNOW” of the body.
Strangely,
there are as if two bodies, one in the other. One that knows irrevocably and
for all time, against the whole world; it KNOWS the Life it has touched. And
the other, the old mortal body, slightly above, as if covering the first
one—the product of untold ancestors who have repeatedly instilled death into
it, death for the least thing that questions the old ancestral rhythm. And that
one does not know in the least! It only knows the old law. However, these are
not two different bodies, but one and the same, as if under the control of, or
grappling with, two conflicting laws and realities.
Sailors
speak of a boat as having two parts: the “quick works” below the waterline and
the “dead
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works”
above. But it is still the same boat! And so deep within, below the surface, is
that body, borne by that prodigious new current, that prodigious new breath,
which cries, “I KNOW—I KNOW—I KNOW and even if I die, I still KNOW!” while the
other, above or outside, whimpers, “I’m dying—I’m dying—I’m dying!”
But
it is actually death that is dying.
Yet,
every sign of the approaching or crushing death concurs and hits us in the
face, in the heart, in the brain, or in these old stiff vertebrae, crushed
under the weight of that crushing Life. It may be similar to the lunar man who
must slowly, carefully remove his space suit to accustom himself to another
gravitation.
Thus,
we have a key, a tremendous key, namely, this “I know” of the body. Then we
discover the enormous concentration camp in which we live, individually as well
as collectively, on earth. We discover that this body, our body, is entirely
manufactured by death, that it is
living death, while thousands and millions of guardians keep tearing it,
confining it, threatening it, and shouting at every moment. “Farther than this,
it’s death; beyond this point, it’s death; your heart will collapse, your
strength is faltering, you’ll be crippled, you’ll lose your mind.”
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And
all of it is complete nonsense. Millions of guardians of death, armed with
medical and ancestral machine-guns and with the most convincing—painfully
convincing—physiological signs.
But
we learn, we have to learn that every
physiological sign is a lie contrived by
death to keep us in its snare. We have to learn or die. Like the fish on
the sand. And if we flinch, we really die. Indeed, it’s exactly like a
concentration camp! There is something that KNOWS in such a poignant, such an
irresistible way: “The open air lies on the other side!” And: “I want—I want—I
want to get out of this!” Things are totally impossible; one can’t go on
anymore, one is at the end of one’s rope, ready to drop, this is the end; yet,
somehow, that CRY of LIFE bursts forth—the something that makes us go through
the obstacle.
Along
this new course, this ordeal of the new species (there is no other way of
putting it), time and time again the impossible must become possible. After each such “operation,” there seems to
be a divine Smile saying, “See, it’s totally impossible; and yet, it’s totally
possible!” Each day one steps into a new possibility, which becomes possible by stepping into it,
step after step, second after second. Until the body has
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wholly
uprooted the death that dwells in it—unmasked
death, that frightful falsehood concealing a marvelous Love and trying to pass
for life itself.
Every
one of our sensations is fabricated by death.
And
that Life uproots death.
It
feels like being uprooted through and through.
That
Life is what is in the process of uprooting the entire Earth, every nation,
every human being.
It
is the demolition of the dungeon.
The
slow invasion of the new Life.
And,
at the other end, a new species that will change the face of the earth.
The
twilight of man is the beginning of the free Man and the divine life on earth.
“May
Earth and Heaven be equal and one,” said the Veda.
“A
new Heaven and a new Earth,” said Saint John of the Apocalypse.
The
resurrection from the dead is our resurrection.
It
is the last revolt of the Earth.
It
is Sri Aurobindo’s revolution.
And
Mother’s love.
Friday,
July 7, 1989
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