1
If it is a Pralaya, even a Mahapralaya, all is not lost, all is not washed away. Something remains, untouched, deathless, the divine part in you, the Mother’s part in you, the consciousness incarnate and articulate.
Indeed it was your soul that she salvaged out of the inconscience and established in you as a living reality. That was her first and primary task and she has fulfilled it. It was there always, true; but it was a far-off, very distant, almost inactive point of light, an unknown and uncharted star not yet come into the ken of human measure and potency. She has brought it nearer home and established it in our living and dynamic consciousness. She has buoyed it up from the unconscious depths, or brought it down from vague, ethereal, nebulous regions, gradually developed it and nourished it and given it a firm dwelling in our inner regions. She has moulded it into a personality with a name and a form. If we do not recognise it often or always, it is because the outer shell of the senses has not yet been fully opened to it. But it is still there as our inner ruler and guide in spite of and through all obscurities and aberrations.
The next step, the second part of her work, was to build around this soul, this inner being, a body, a material vehicle to express it. To give a concrete divine shape to this soul-reality was her labour at this point. The soul was there, but a god has to come and inhabit it; this godhead, that is to say, a Power, a form of the Mother’s own personality, has to be brought down and the soul integrated into it. Apparently the effort was left off at that point and not completed.
Since the purpose and aim is not an individual realisation or even a realisation in a few individuals, but an achievement of the human race (which means a large or significant part of it), the effort has to be directed to that end. The level of the human consciousness has to be lifted up so that it may be capable of holding and embodying the afflatus that was coming into it for the change. Otherwise an individual representing the human level and forming part of the material consciousness will not be able to do it. Not only the earth-consciousness but the material constitution of the earth has to be transfigured. For the human body to pass through and complete the stages of transformation, it must have parallel echoes in other individuals — not necessarily the whole of humanity, but, as I said, presumably a sizeable part of it. Otherwise the purpose of the change, a global collective change, will not be fulfilled. An isolated individual supramentalised body upon earth would be a freak of Nature, a forced miracle as it were, an anomalous object in Nature, and humanity even at its topmost rung would not find any relation or kinship with it.
So the earth-nature has to be prepared for that end in view — first of all the earth-consciousness in the physical substance and then the raw substance itself. This has to be done as our immediate and urgent business of life.
2
I said that the earth-consciousness was not quite ready yet for the final transformation of the Mother’s body, that is to say, the material substance of the body. Therefore it could not accommodate the incoming transforming force, and it broke: in breaking it must have broken through, through the hard, dense outermost crust of matter — with what results, time will show.
As for us who survive, let us begin from the beginning. Let us start from scratch as it were. We remember Mothers own story, what she did for herself when she came to Sri Aurobindo. She effaced altogether her old personality, her achievements and accomplishments, made a clean slate of her consciousness and laid herself at the feet of Sri Aurobindo like a new-born babe, innocent of the past. Let us also in the same way face the day with our baby-soul in front, for that little being is the Mother’s Presence in us, still aglow with her consciousness.
3
You know, I was very hesitant to read this to you.
In one way it is all right, but…
In fact it is a mental and intellectual presentation of a phenomenon which goes beyond all intellectual and mental measure. This phenomenon is not only extra-intellectual, supra-mental but also supra-cosmic, the sense and bearing of which will be unveiled in the course of time.
Meanwhile, I think the best thing for us to do would be to remain quiet with a serene trust, with all the aspiration of our soul, our soul which is the concrete presence of Mother herself in us, which we carry within us always.
Published April 1974
