Experience of 5 November 1958
New Year Message for 1959
Here is the origin of this message:
Last evening in the class,fnMother's weekly “Wednesday class”, held at the Ashram Playground. I noticed that the children, who had a whole week to prepare questions on the text we are reading, did not find a single one. A terrible somnolence! A total lack of interest! When I had finished my reading, I said to myself, “But what is there in these brains that does not take interest in anything but their small personal affairs? After all, what is happening inside there, behind these forms?”
Then during the meditation, I began going down into the mental atmosphere of the people around me, in order to find there the small light, the thing that responds. And I was literally dragged down to the bottom, as if into a hole.
In this hole I saw what I am still seeing. I went down into a fissure, as it were, between two steep rocks, rocks made of something harder than basalt, black, metallic at the same time, with edges so sharp that you had the impression that were you simply to touch them, you would be flayed. It was something that seemed to have no bottom and no end, and it became narrower and narrower like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no room left even for the consciousness to pass. The bottom 362was invisible, a black hole, and that went down and down and down, without air, without light, only a kind of glimmer, like a reflection at the peak of the rocks, a glimmer that came from beyond, from something that could be the heavens, but something invisible. I continued to slide down the fissure and I saw the edges, the black rocks, cut with scissors, as it were, shining like a fresh cut, the edges so sharp that they were like knives. Here was one, there another, there another, everywhere, all around. And I was dragged, dragged, dragged down,—I went down, down, down and there was no end to it, it became more and more oppressive, stifling, suffocating.
Physically, the body followed, it participated in the experience. The hand that was on the arm of the chair slipped down, then the other hand, then the head bent down in an irresistible movement. Then I said to myself, “But this must stop, for if it continues, my head will be down on the ground!” (The consciousness was elsewhere, but I was looking at my body from outside.) And I asked myself, “But what is there at the bottom of this hole?”
Hardly had I formulated the question when it was as if I had touched a spring that was there at the very bottom of the hole, a spring I had not noticed yet, which acted at once with a tremendous force and at one bound shot me up straight into the air; I was cast out of the fissure into a limitless, formless vast which was infinitely comfortable—not exactly warm, but it gave a comfortable impression of inner warmth. After this painful enough descent, it was a kind of super-comfort, an ease, an ease at its maximum. And my body immediately followed the movement, the head at once became straight again. And I lived all this without objectifying it at all; I was not taking stock of what it was, I did not look for any explanation of what was happening; it was what it was, I lived it and that was all. The experience was absolutely spontaneous.
It was all-powerful, infinitely rich; it had no form at all, no limit—naturally I was identified with it and that is why I 363knew that it had neither limit nor form. It was as if—I say “as if” because it could not be seen—as if this vast was made up of countless imperceptible points, points that did not occupy any place in space (there was no space, you see), points that were a deep warm gold; but this was only an impression, a translation. And all that was absolutely living, living with a power that seemed infinite. And yet it was immobile, with an immobility so perfect that it gave a feeling of eternity, but with an unbelievable inner intensity of movement and life—it was inner, self-contained—and immobile, immobile in relation to the outside, if there was an outside. And it had a boundless life—it may be spoken of as infinite only by way of image—and an intensity, a strength, a force, a peace, the peace of eternity, a silence, a calm, a power capable of everything.
And I did not think it, I did not objectify it, I lived it comfortably, very comfortably. This lasted for a very long time—for the rest of the meditation.
It was as if that contained all the wealth of possibilities. And all that though it had no form, had the power to become forms.
After a moment I asked myself, “What is this, to what does it correspond?” Naturally I found out afterwards, and finally this morning I told myself, “Well, it is just to give me my message for the coming year.” Then I transcribed it—naturally, you cannot make a description, it is indescribable. It was a psychological phenomenon and the forms were nothing but a way of describing the psychological state to oneself. And this is what I noted, obviously in a mental way. I have described nothing, I have only stated a fact:
Generally the inconscience gives the impression of something 364amorphous, inert, formless, neutral and grey—formerly, when I entered into the zones of inconscience, that was the first thing that I met; but in my experience yesterday, it was an inconscience hard, rigid, coagulated, as if coagulated for a resistance. It was a mental inconscience; all efforts make no impression on it, nothing can penetrate it. And this inconscience is much worse than a purely material inconscience. It was not the original inconscient; it was, if one may say so, a mentalised inconscient. All this rigidity, hardness, narrowness, fixity, opposition come from a mental presence in the creation: this is what the mind has brought into the inconscient. When the mind had not manifested, the inconscient was not like that: it was formless and had the plasticity of formless things. That plasticity has disappeared.
The beginning of the experience is a very expressive image of the action of mind in the inconscient; it has made the inconscient aggressive—it was not like that before—aggressive, resisting, obstinate. That was precisely the starting-point of my experience. I was in fact trying to look into the mental inconscience of people, and this mental inconscience refuses to change, while the other did not; the purely material inconscience has no mode of being, it does not exist, it is not organised in any way. While this one is an organised inconscience, organised through the beginning of a mental influence—and it is a hundred times worse! It has now become a much greater obstacle than before. Before, it did not even have the power to resist, it had nothing, it was truly inconscient. Now it is an inconscience organised in its refusal to change! So I wrote, “most hard and rigid and narrow”—the idea is of something which presses you, presses you—“most stifling”.
Then I wrote, “I struck upon an almighty spring.” That means precisely this: in the deepest depths of the inconscient, there is a supreme spring that enables us to touch the Supreme. Because at the very bottom of the inconscience there is the Supreme. It is the Supreme who enables us to touch the Supreme. This is the “almighty spring”.
365It is always the same idea that the highest height touches the deepest depth. The universe is like a circle; it is represented by a serpent that bites its own tail. That means that the supreme height touches the most material matter without any intermediary. I have said this many times, but here it was an experience of the thing as I had it.
Finally I said, “a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world”. This does not refer to the primordial creation, but to the supramental creation; so this experience does not correspond to a return to the supreme origin of all. I had altogether the impression that I was projected into the origin of the supramental creation: it is something of the Supreme that has already been objectified precisely for the sake of the supramental creation.
There was in fact this entire impression of power, of warmth and of gold. It was not fluid, but like a powdery mist. And each one of these things (they cannot be called particles or fragments or even points, unless point is taken in the mathematical sense, a point that does not occupy any place in space) was like living gold, a powdery mist of warm gold—one cannot call it bright, nor can one call it dark; neither was it light: a multitude of small points of gold, nothing but that. One could say that they touched my eyes, my face… and with a tremendous force! At the same time, there was the feeling of a plenitude, of an all-powerful peace—it was rich, it was full. It was movement at its maximum, infinitely more swift than anything that one can imagine, and at the same time it was absolute peace, perfect stillness.
And this almighty spring was a perfect image of what happens, is bound to happen and will happen for everybody: all at once you shoot up into the vast.
The experience that I have just described was followed by another which was also noted down at the time.fnSee the following talk of 15 November 1958.