A brief review of Mother’s yoga of the cells based on Mother’s Yoga, A Compilation From The Mother’s Agenda, published by Mother’s photographs, Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India.
The question is of course, supramentalisation of MATTER.
– The Mother
Even the dump earth
became a sentient force.
The spirit’s tops and Nature’s
base shall draw
Near to the secret of their
separate truth.
Know each other as one deity.
The spirit shall look out
through Matter’s gaze
And Matter shall reveal the
spirit’s face.
– Sri Aurobindo
Savitri, p.709
SABCL, vol.29
The Supramental Matter
This verse contains an important insight of Sri Aurobindo on planetary evolution. According to Sri Aurobindo, evolution is not only “emergent” but also integrative. When life emerges from matter, there is an integration of matter with life creating the living matter of the plant. Similarly when mind emerges from life, there is a further integration of matter and life with the mind creating the living and thinking matter which is our brain. And finally when the supreme Consciousness of the spirit emerges fully from mind in the future, there will be the ultimate integration of the Spirit with matter, life and mind creating the thinking, living and a spiritually or supramentally conscious matter. This supramental transformation of matter happens first in the body of the Supramental Avathar and may spread slowly to other bodies and finally into the entire material substance and life of earth as a whole. When this happens, each particle of Matter and the material space-time matrix becomes conscious of the divine consciousness within it. Space becomes a conscious extension of the substance of the spirit. Time becomes a conscious movement or vibration of the energy of the spirit. Material nature becomes a conscious force, conscious with the consciousness of the spirit.
Mother’s work, narrated in such a meticulous detail in Mother’s Agenda, is to create the spiritually or supramentally conscious matter in her own body by awakening each cell in her body to the consciousness of the spirit. Mother describes the goal of her work in her body in the following passage in Agenda:
“And I clearly feel that the problem could disappear only if the Supreme consciously truly took possession of the cells and made them live, act, move, like that, so they had the sense of the Omnipotence taking hold of them”.
The Cellular Transformation
We must note here that a cell in our human body is one of the most primitive organism of the earth. In the evolutionary ladder, this cell is somewhere near a bacteria or Amaeba, which are one of the first single cell creatures on earth. What Mother was trying to do is something equivalent to transforming an Amaeba into Buddha, consciously united with and also consciously moved by the Supreme consciousness which is the ideal of yoga. But Mother’s goal in Agenda, is to achieve this yogic union in the cells of her body or in other words, what an accomplished yogi achieves in his inner being, in his mind, heart or soul has to be achieved in the cells of her body. This requires more or less the same kind of discipline which a yogi goes through in mind, like for example, becoming more and more conscious, renunciation of the ego, discarding old habits, constant offering and surrender to the Supreme, but all these have to be done in the body, by the cells of the body.
These cells of our body have a mind of its own, which is different from the mind of the body as a whole. Mother makes a clear distinction between the physical mind and the cellular mind or the mind of the cells. The physical mind is the mind of our physical being as a whole, which determines the character of our physical or external personality. For example, Ayurveda classifies human bodies into three categories and describes them in terms of physical as well as psychological qualities. These qualities belong to the physical mind. But cellular mind is still a more ancient and primitive form of mind in the body. Physical mind exists only in human beings but the cellular mind is there in animals and plants. Mother has already illumined, organized and transformed the physical mind in the earlier phase of her yoga. In Agenda, Mother’s work is mostly in the cellular mind.
In the first stage of her work in Agenda, Mother was able to transform the cells or the cellular mind, into some sort of a Bhaktha, a devotee of the Divine, praying and aspiring consciously for union with the Divine. As Mother puts it “When I lie down on my bed at night, there is an offering of all the cells, which regularly surrender as completely as they can, with an aspiration not only for union but for fusion, let there remain nothing but the Divine. It’s regular every day, every single day”. Mother describes an interesting prayer of the cells or the cellular mind which is illustrative.
“I am tired of our infirmity. But it is not to rest that this body aspires, it aspired to the plenitude of your consciousness, it aspires to the splendor of Your Light, it aspired to the magnificence of Your Power, above all, it aspires to the glory of Your all-powerful and eternal Love… The other states of being, the vital, mind, may enjoy the intermediate contacts… The Supreme Lord alone can satisfy me.”
The last part of the prayer indicates clearly that this is not the power of the vital, mental or spiritual being of the Mother, but the cellular mind of her body. In those higher parts, Mother has already attained perfect union with the Divine. She has to renounce or surrender her experiences and realisation in these inner realms and descend into her body-consciousness to do her work of transformation in the body. Referring to these splendid experiences in her mind and vital, Mother says “I voluntarily renounced all that in order to go further. And when I did it, I understood what people here in India mean when they say: ‘he surrendered his experience’.”
Progressing further, Mother sets the goal for the next stage of the cellular transformation as: “the capacity to fall silent and to intervene only on the Impulse from above. To intervene only when set in motion by the Supreme Wisdom, for every action to be done”. We must remember here that this goal is not for the mind or vital or even the physical mind but for the cellular mind. Silencing the mind to receive the higher inspiration from the spiritual realms is a well-known discipline in the Indian Yoga. In Mother’s Yoga of the cells this silence has to be brought into the cellular mind. In the following passage from Agenda, Mother indicates that the cellular mind in her body has learnt to become silent.
“When the transforming action on the cells is constant, this material mind begins to become organised, that’s the wonderful thing… It begins to become organised, that’s the wonderful thing… And then, as it becomes organised, it learns to FALL SILENT, – that’s the beautiful thing! It learns to keep calm, silent and to let the Supreme Force act without interfering”.
Spiritual Experiences in the Body
Another very interesting feature of Mother’s Yoga in the cells is the spiritual experiences she was having in her body. All the fundamental spiritual experiences she had in her vital and mental being, she was having them again in her body-consciousness. “The body (this is becoming interesting) has the same experiences on the heights of the consciousness, the same experiences (supramental ones, we could say, because, well, there, it’s really supramental) as the vital, the mind and the inner beings had previously… It’s going through the same experiences – the body itself. That happened the last few nights: it suddenly remembered the time (some twenty years ago, for instance) when those experiences were experiences of the vital, the mind, the psychic being and above. It was the way of being there (gesture above), but the body was left out: it was in a different way, in its own way. But now, it’s the body: the same experiences, the very same, come back to it like that, and with a certitude and solidity in their base that are incomparable!”
As Mother indicates in the last part of the above passage, these experiences in her body were so tremendously concrete, in comparison her earlier experiences in her inner being were like ethereal illusion. It is something similar when a seeker has a spiritual experience of the illusion of the world when he is still living in his mental being. In this experience, which is the spiritual source of Mayavalla, the entire material world which we experience with our senses, with all its material concreteness appears as an unsubstantiated and illusory shadow-play or an image or a film in a formless, featureless and timeless self of a Reality, which is felt as the only Reality infinitely more concrete than the material reality of the world. Mother’s past experiences in her mind and vital and the entire spiritual history of the old world appeared to her with a more or less same illusory nature in comparison to her experiences in her body. As Mother explains:
“And truly, with the feeling that ALL one has lived, all one has known, all one has done, all of it is a perfect illusion – that’s what I was living yesterday evening. And then …
It’s one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (some find this painful, but I found it so wonderfully beautiful and happy that it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now the whole spiritual construction as one has lived it is becoming … a total illusion! Not the same illusion, a far more serious illusion.”
Another important point to note here is that Mother didn’t give much importance to the transformation of the outer bodily appearance. She was working mainly for the transformation of the body-consciousness. According to the Mother, change in the outer appearance will be the last result and consequence of the complete transformation of the cellular consciousness of the body. As Mother elaborates:
“We think that this appearance (Mother points to her body) … to the ordinary consciousness it seems to be the most important thing … its obviously the last thing that will change … The important thing is this change in the CONSCIOUSNESS… which has taken place”.
