THE MOTHER-92/...18-8. The Caterpillar and the Butterfly ‘The shock was too great to bear and the loss too deep to be told,’1050 writes Nirodbaran. Statements of insight, visions and messages of encouragement by prominent Ashramites were pinned on the notice board in the central Ashram courtyard, and eagerly read and copied by the many who were seeking for every word of solace. Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, sent a message: ‘The Mother was a dynamic, radiant personality with tremendous force of character and extraordinary spiritual attainments. Yet she never lost her sound practical vision which concerned itself with the running of the Ashram, the welfare of society, the founding and development of Auroville and any scheme which would promote the ideals expressed by Sri Aurobindo. She was young in spirit, modern in mind, but most expressive was her abiding faith in the spiritual greatness of India and the role which India could play in giving new light to mankind.’ Sri Aurobindo had passed away and now the Mother had left her body. What remained of their ideals? What remained of everything they had said and written about the superman, immortality, transformation and a New World? What was to be done at present and what in the future? Wasn’t this the latest edition of the sempiternal fiasco? Questions like these were rarely voiced, for everybody tried to put on a brave face, at least in public, but they were in the minds of all sadhaks and devotees, who for the most part had expected to see the Mother as immortal and in a resplendent, divinized body. Not only had many expected to see Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in a divinized body, they had also expected that they themselves would become immortal and share in their divine glory. K.D. Sethna, for instance, writes: ‘Psychologically, one of the most central facts of the early days [of the Ashram] was the conviction that complete divinization of the physical being was not only an aim of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga but also a practical goal. “Supramentalization” was clearly understood to include a complete change in the body itself. What is most significant is that by “body” was meant the physical instrument of even the sadhaks and not simply of the Master and the Mother... In this context I remember some words of Amrita, one of the earliest sadhaks. He used to be often in my room. Once when he was there we heard the sound of a funeral passing in the street. In a whisper as if conveying a secret, he said: “I have the feeling that this will not happen to me.” I did not raise my eyebrows in the least, for most of us who understood the originality of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual vision and his reading of the Supermind’s implications could not help the expectation of a radical body change.’1051 The Mother, who knew the mind of her disciples better than they did themselves, had warned against such notions and expectations on many occasions. We read in Notes on the Way of 1969: ‘I have looked very, very attentively: not for an instant has there been the idea “it must be this,” meaning: this body, that will undergo the transformation.’ And she pinched the skin of her hands. Then she added: ‘And the consciousness began to observe that, if there is nothing in this body which even aspires to be that, this proves that it is not its work.’1052 In April 1972 she said: ‘We are at best — at best — transitional beings.’ The expectation of seeing her supramentalized she called ‘figments of the imagination’. What the disciples, longing for a miracle, never realized was that no earthly being at present could stand the unscreened presence of a supramental being, whose light, being divine, is of a brightness compared to which the light of the sun is dark, as the Mother said. Moreover, the Supramental being the Truth-Consciousness, its unveiled presence would simply annihilate any form of falsehood, which is what the human being mostly consists of, especially in its physical elements. The following quote puts matters clearly: ‘The use of this [physical] body at present is for me simply: the Order of the Will of the Lord that I do as much preparatory work as possible. It [her physical body] is, however, not the Aim at all. We have no knowledge, not the least knowledge of what the supramental life is. Consequently, we do not know if this [Mother pinches the skin of her hands] can sufficiently change to adapt itself or not. To tell the truth, there is no anxiety about this, it is a problem that does not keep me busy very much. For the problem on which I am working consists in building the supramental consciousness in a way that this becomes the being. It is this consciousness which has to become the being. This is what is important, and the rest remains to be seen... To this end, all the [supramental] consciousness which is in these cells has to assemble, to organize itself and to form a conscious being which is able to be conscious of Matter and at the same time of the Supramental. This is what is being done. How far will we be able to go? I don’t know. I do not say that this body will be able to transform itself, I see no sign of this. But there is the consciousness, the physical consciousness, the material consciousness which becomes supramentalized. This is the work that is going on. This is what is important.’1053 (26 April 1972) And this is what she has done by building a supramental body out of the supramentalized elements of her physical body. An important factor in the understanding of what happened in the Mother’s body during the last ten years, and ultimately on 17 November 1973, is the simple fact that she had a human body made in the same way as that of the rest of us. This means that the cells of her body, just like ours, consisted for a considerable part of the dregs accumulated during the past millennia. We are the sons and daughters of humanity, which means that we are the offspring of Mother Earth. We carry humanity and the Earth’s onerous past in our cells. Sri Aurobindo, having become fully aware of this, doubted whether these dregs, which he called the ‘residue,’ could actually be transformed, and came to the conclusion that this residual body should be discarded. In the course of her yoga of the cells, the Mother thought she saw indications that even this residue could be transformed, but further progress made her conclude that it would not be possible. Already in 1968 she had said: ‘The body has the feeling of being imprisoned within something. Yes, imprisoned, imprisoned as if in a box. But it sees through it. It sees through it and it can also act, in a limited way, through something which is still there and which must disappear. This “something” gives the feeling of imprisonment. How is it to disappear? That I don’t know yet.’1054 Later, she said that the substance of which we are built is not sufficiently purified to express the supreme Consciousness without deforming it, and that she had the impression that there would be ‘a waste product.’ ‘It will only be the untransformable residue that will really be death,’ she said.1055 Then what happened on that fateful 17 November 1973 ? The best way to understand it may be a simile: the pupation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. When its time comes, the caterpillar spins itself into a cocoon. In this cocoon the pupation takes place, a miraculous transformation into a completely different being: a butterfly. Nobody knows what happens in that cocoon, how the immensely complex process of the pupation comes about. It is one of the innumerable processes in nature which may escape the knowledge of materialistic science for ever, because they happen in other dimensions than that of Matter alone. Can one say that the caterpillar dies in the cocoon? Transformation is not death, it is a change into something else. The butterfly has originated in the caterpillar, from the caterpillar. In a way, the butterfly contains the essence of the caterpillar within itself, and the dried up ‘residue’ in the cocoon is what has to be discarded, because a caterpillar exists within the dimensions of a crawling-world and the butterfly within the dimensions of a flying-world. The human body of the Mother existed in the world of the humans. As her yoga progressed, that body belonged less and less to this world — except for the residue in the cells. For this residue it was impossible to transcend the world of the humans. In the meantime the supramental transformation, the supramental pupation was taking place. The butterfly — the prototype of the supramental body in the Mother — came into existence. She signalled its presence several times in the course of the final years and eventually perceived and described it in 1972. Taking into consideration the logical sequence of the development of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s avataric yoga, the graduality of the perception of the presence of the new being within her, its similarity with Rijuta’s mature psychic and the final confirmation of the personal experience in the Mother, there can be no reason to doubt this. The caterpillar nature in the human beings looked forward to a caterpillar miracle, while the golden butterfly was already there hovering among them. But they did not have the eyes to see it, as they were also unable to imagine or understand the process by which it had come into being. On 17 November 1973 the Mother laid down her residual human body while she continued to exist forever in a body consisting of a supramental substance. The supramental substance as worked out by the Mother is a material substance — otherwise the earthly evolution would have no meaning — though it is composed of a substance more refined than the gross matter known to us. The gross matter of our Mother the Earth is still in the process of transformation. This process is now in an advanced stage thanks to the avataric yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. When gross matter will have become sufficiently subtle and receptive, i.e. transformed, the mature souls, ready and waiting in their soul-world, will descend and incarnate in it. The formation of their bodies will be moulded by the existence of the Mother’s supramental body, the prototype of the new species. It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of delight, the Age of Gold. The Iron Age is ended. Only now The last fierce spasm of the dying past Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed Earth washed of its ills shall raise a fairer brow.105
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 13:03:04 +0000
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