The Mother’s Agenda (Full English Text)

The Mother’s Agenda

The Mother Agenda
Full Engllsh Text

This 6,OOO-page work in 13 volumes represents the day-to-day account over 22 years of Mother’s exploration into the body consciousness and her discovery of a “cellular mind”, capable of restructuring the nature of the body and the laws of the species as drastically as, one day, the first stammerings of a “thinking mind” transformed the nature of the ape. It is a timely document of experimental evolution, involving a revolution in consciousness that alters the laws of the species. Whatever the appearances, we are not at the end of a civilisation but at the end of an evolutionary cycle. Are we going to find the passage to the next species, or perish? As scrupulously as a scientist in his laboratory, Mother goes back to the origin of matter’s formation, to the primordial code, and there, ‘by chance’, stumbles upon the mechanism of death – upon the very power that changes death – and upon a ‘new’ Energy which curiously parallels the most recent theories on the subatomic nature of Matter. The key to Matter contains the key to death … as well as the key to the next species.

Mother’s Agenda – Volume I [1951-1960]

This first volume is in great part devoted to what might be called “Satprem’s psychological preparation,” from his arrival in Pondicherry in February 1954, “after having knocked on all the doors of the old world.” Ultimately, he would stay beside Mother for 19 years, listening to her and recording the account of her experiences in the cellular consciousness – what forms the 13 volumes of the Agenda.

Satprem, “True Love,” as Mother called him, was a reluctant disciple. Formed in the French Cartesian mold, a freedom fighter against the Nazis during the Second World War, and in love with his freedom, he was always ready to run away, yet always coming back, drawn by a love greater than his love for freedom. Being with Mother was, in his own words, like “struggling with the jungle, machete in hand – ultimately to melt, to fall in love, so beautiful it is… It was fascinating and detestable, overpowering and warm. One felt like screaming and biting, and running away, but always returning.” Slowly she conquered him, slowly he came to understand the poignant drama of this lone indomitable woman struggling to unseal man’s evolutionary future, to open the door to a new species after man. And how does one open the door to a new species?

540 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume II [1961]

In this year of the first American trip in space, Mother strikes at the heart of “the great mystery”: “It’s double! It’s the same world and yet it’s – what?” In one world, everything is harmonious, without any possibility of disease, death, or accident – “a miraculous harmony” – and in the other world, everything is awry. Yet it’s the same world of matter – separated by what? “More and more I feel it’s a question of a vibration in matter.”

What is this “vertical time” that suddenly opens up a new way of living and being in matter, where things are no longer the inexorable consequence or cause of one another? “A kind of absoluteness in each second.” A brand-new world at each second, without trace, age, or past imprint.

And what is this “massive immobility” in a lightning-fast movement, this “speckling of vibrations,” as if Mother were no longer experiencing her body at a macroscopic level but at the level of subatomic physics? And sixty years of “spiritual life” crumble as “a far more serious illusion” before – a new Divine? Or a new mode of life in matter – the next mode? “I am absolutely in the process of cutting a path through the jungle.”

460 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume III [1962]

This is the year of the Cuban missile crisis and the first Sino-Indian conflict. “Could it be the first sign of something really … big? It seems something has been profoundly disrupted, in the depths,” Mother said. Indeed, the whole earth is disrupted. This year Mother emerges into a “third position” in her body. Neither life nor death as we know it.

Another side of the “web” where physical laws no longer apply and which curiously resembles the subatomic world of “black holes”: time is changed, space is changed, death is changed. Could this be the material site, in the body, where the laws of the world are overturned – they were only our self-imagined laws – and where evolution opens on an incredible bodily freedom, a third position that will be the position of the next species on earth? “The body is beginning to obey another law. The sense of time is disappearing into a moving immobility… A mass of infinite force, like pure super electricity… A movement of undulating, corporeal waves, as vast as the earth… All the organs are changed; everything follows a different rhythm. Such a tremendous power, and so free! Something different … it’s something different! I don’t know if I am living or dead… The nature of my nights is changing, the nature of my days is changing… The physical vibration is becoming porous… No more axis – gone, blown away! It can go forward, backward, or anywhere at all… Ubiquity, or something like that.” And then this cry: “Death is an illusion, illness is an illusion! Life and death are one and the same thing! It’s just a shift of consciousness. Why, this is fantastic!” And then a simple discovery, in the flesh: “The closer you come to the cell, the more the cell says, ‘But I am immortal!'” A third cellular position in which “one becomes incapable of dying because death no longer has a reality.”

Has Mother uncovered another reality of Matter this year, at the age of 84? “Right there, just in the background, is a sort of fairy tale… Something in the making that will be exceedingly beautiful, beyond all expression: a beautiful story Sri Aurobindo was trying to bring down onto the earth – and it’s sure to come!”

540 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume IV [1963]

This is the year of president Kennedy’s assassination and the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split. While the destructive race between the superpowers intensifies and science questions the laws of the universe, Mother slowly carves the path to the next species on earth.

“The path I seek is always downward,” into the consciousness of the cells. Will it be global death, then, or the beginning of a new world, as the birds followed the reptiles? “I am on the threshold of a stupendous realisation that depends on something very tiny.” She is 85 this year. Will it be a more “intelligent” species within the framework of our physics, or one with a different intelligence that will alter the laws of our physics as the frog alters the laws of the tadpole in its bowl? As she descends closer to the cell, Mother suddenly emerges into a different physical universe: “Everything becomes as if it were seen for the first time, even the movement of the earth and the stars… There’s no distance, no difference, not something seeing and something being seen… One becomes a mountain, a forest, a house… One sees thousands of miles away and up close at the same time – a sort of cellular ubiquity.” And then, yes, this astounding realisation: “The body is everywhere!” A global next species? What happens to the laws of the old physics when the bowl is shattered, when distances no longer exist? “All the usual rhythms are changed… A universal movement so incredibly rapid that it appears motionless… A true physical in the background.”

And what happens to death when one escapes the wear and tear of the time inherent in the bowl? “If this becomes a natural state, death can no longer exist! … It would mean a new phase of life on earth.” And there is not far to go: “The field of experience is right here at every second… We strive to come in contact with something that is right here.” A new cellular consciousness that will form a new physics and perhaps the next biology on earth?

485 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume V [1964]

“The only hope for the future is a change in man’s consciousness. It is up to men to decide if they will collaborate with it or if this change will be enforced on them by overpowering circumstances.” As the new Force infiltrates Mother’s body, it is the problem of the earth that is increasingly in question. How will the earth take that “vibration with the intensity of a superior fire”? “I see very few bodies around me capable of withstanding it… So what will happen?”

This is the year of the first Chinese atomic bomb. Mother is 86. “A minuscule, infinitesimal, speckled infiltration – the miracle of the earth!” A catastrophic miracle? Is not the butterfly a sort of catastrophe for the caterpillar? “Death isn’t a solution, so we are searching for another solution – there must be another solution.” Imperturbably, Mother goes deeper into the cellular consciousness, and deeper still: “A sort of deep-rooted certitude in matter that the solution lies there… It is at that atomic level that the change must take place; the state of infinitesimal vibrations in matter is what it’s all about.” Where time switches to something else: “Perhaps it’s in the past that I go, perhaps in the future, perhaps in the present?…” And even the laws of matter are changing: “The minute you go down to the cellular level, that sort of heaviness of matter disappears. It all begins to be fluid, vibrant again. Which would tend to prove that heaviness, thickness, inertia is something that has been added on – it’s false matter, the one we think or feel, but not matter as it really is.”

A true matter, then, which would be the matter of the next species? “I am on the verge of a new perception of life, as if certain parts of the consciousness were mutating from the caterpillar state to the butterfly state…” And the earth groans and protests – against what? “The whole youth seems to be seized by a strange vertigo…” Will we move to a next species or not?

350 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume VI [1965]

“A whole world is beginning to open up.” This is the year when Mother reaches the “mind of the cells,” pure, beneath the old genetic coating that seems to want to make us a species forever saddled with death: “There’s such an accumulation of power there … as if this were the tail end of the solution.” Another power of consciousness in matter that will undo the old programme: “A sort of memory being set up from the bottom up” – a new cellular memory having nothing to do with old age, illness, death, gravity, and all our “real” world? And simultaneously, at this cellular level free of the old laws, Mother discovers “two worlds within each other: a world of Truth and a world of Falsehood. And this world of Truth is PHYSICAL; it isn’t up there – it’s MATERIAL. And this is what is to come to the fore and replace the other – the true physical.” That’s what Mother called “the transfer of power.” Is it really possible that a marvel of physical freedom is concealed within our cells while we keep seeking illusory external panaceas? “Even if only a tiny number of cells could manage to have the experience of total transformation, to the full, it would be more effective than all the great revolutions. But it is more difficult… Death must be overcome! There should be no more death; that’s very clear.” Is the whole earth not in the process of experiencing that “transfer of power,” as it did when it went from the animal kingdom to the mental kingdom a long time ago? “Everything is giving way. No more support anywhere. It’s the transition to the new movement… And for the old, it always feels like a dangerous loss of equilibrium.”

370 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume VII [1966]

“Humanity is not the last step in the terrestrial creation. Evolution goes on and man will be surpassed. It is up to each one to know whether he wants to participate in the adventure of the new species.” This is the year of the cultural revolution in China. A more profound revolution was being accomplished in a body that was waging the one revolution that would change everything for all the little terrestrial bodies: “We are seeking the process so as to have the power to abolish death… It is the mind of the cells that will find the key.” This is the perilous transition from a human body animated by the laws of the Mind to a next body animated by a nameless law in the heart of the cell: “A coagulated vibration, denser than air, extremely homogeneous, of a golden luminosity, with a tremendous power of propulsion… Everything is becoming very strange. The body is no longer dependent on physical laws.” What was the sensation of the first vertebrate to leave the marine world for another, nameless world in which we breathe today? “For each part of the body, the moment it changes, there is a feeling it’s the end… All the supports have gone. I no longer have a path!” And where is the path to the next species? “There have to be some who make it.” Sometimes, that other “environment” breaks forth: “An instantaneous marvel… A condition in which time no longer has the same reality. An innumerable present. Another way of living.” Eighty years before, a little girl had lived her first revolution of Matter: “When I was told that everything is ‘atoms,’ it created like a revolution in my head: then nothing is true!” A second revolution of Matter takes place at cellular level: old Matter and its overt laws change into a new world and a new way of being in a body.

Mother’s Agenda – Volume VIII [1967]

That year, all the features of the yoga of the cells became clear: “The increasing conviction that perfection achieved in matter is far more perfect than anywhere else. The consciousness expressed in cells that have been transformed is a marvel; that legitimates all these centuries of misery. All these gods, what a fuss they make!” This is the year of the discovery of “true Matter,” without fuss: “In this [cellular] limpidity, there is no longer any problem; the solution precedes the problem. In other words, things are organized automatically.” It is another life mode on earth – “Such a natural way of being!” – in a body free of its mental prison and of the laws of false matter: “This extraordinary feeling of the unreality of suffering, the unreality of illnesses… It does not cure the disease; it cancels it, makes it unreal… And so it is quite clear that, as this process perfects itself, it will mean the victory over death.” In the meantime, “Surveyor” is on its way to dig the lunar soil with its mechanical arm, while our own secrets remain buried in our cells: “We can go anywhere, know what’s happening everywhere, but we don’t even know what’s happening inside ourselves.” The war is raging in Biafra; the Israeli army is marching toward Suez; the U.S. air force is bombing Haiphong; the Chinese are exploding their first thermonuclear device, and on and on. “A tremendous conflict above the earth.” With the stakes of a new earth or the return to the old disaster: “A local and momentary manifestation is not impossible, but a collective transformation of some magnitude is necessary to create a new species on earth… That fact is certain.” Will we understand where the true solution lies, and the marvel concealed in a human body?

Mother’s Agenda – Volume IX [1968]

That year, a fire swept across the world from Warsaw to Columbia, from Nanterre to Alexandria: “There are long periods when things are being prepared, and then there comes a time when something happens, and that something brings a new development to the world – as when man appeared on the earth. Now, it’s a new being.” This is the second turning point in Mother’s yoga. She is ninety. Auroville has just been founded – “A centre of accelerated evolution.” Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are assassinated, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia – what is going on? “I have a strong impression this is intended to teach us something like the secret of the [human, terrestrial] working. We are constantly being shown that the process we have learned is wrong, that it does not conform to reality, and we are being taught the true process by living it.” As if the earth were shut in a glass bowl, prisoner of a “false matter”: “There is as if a web covering the entire earth, and the body is being taught how to extricate itself from it… Gradually, the consciousness of the cells is freeing itself from that domination.” And suddenly, from the other side: “I have never seen or felt anything so beautiful in all my life! … The most wonderful hours one can have on this earth – why are they seeking above what is right here?” The short-lived miracle of 1968 seems to be swallowed up while the walls of our glass bowl are slowly but inexorably exploding in each country, each continent, each branch of human knowledge. “It would seem that an immense period of time will be needed before everything is ready to change. And yet, there is almost a promise that an abrupt change will occur.” Could it be that, one morning, one last turn of the screw of circumstances will propel us into a new consciousness?

380 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume X [1969]

This time Mother has found the “passage,” what she calls the “new consciousness,” that which will open a new world to us, much as an amphibian created a new air by shattering for the first time the surface of the waters: “I don’t know what is happening; it’s a state of intense vibration, like lightning-fast waves, so fast that they seem motionless. And I go to America, I go to Europe… Never has this body been so happy; these cells, other cells – there was life everywhere, consciousness everywhere; all the other bodies were itself!” At the same time, all our physiological aches and pains vanish: “There is as if a dilation of the cells; limits dwindle, fade, then pains go away physically.” And this is not “another world,” it is the earth, our earth, but experienced in a different way: “It’s as if we had entered an unreal falsehood, and everything vanishes the moment we get out of it; it doesn’t exist! And all the artificial means of getting out, including nirvana, are worthless. SALVATION IS PHYSICAL! It is here, it is here. Everything else, including death, truly becomes a lie – there is no disappearance, no ‘life and death’!…” And while she breaks through the walls of our glass bowl, the whole world is in revolt, including the people around her, as if under the pressure of a new air: “A huge number of desires that it [Mother’s body] die, everywhere, they are everywhere! … The whole gamut, from the worries in people around me, the longings for a quick end, to the restless desires: free at last! … I would like not to be put in a box; the cells are conscious… What is going to happen? I don’t know. This defies every habit.” A new species very much defies the world’s old habit. Will the world accept her, or will it ultimately remove her?

560 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume XI [1970]

The beginning of the terrible years. It is as if Mother had found the secret of the change, conquered all she could in her own body, and she now sat there, amid the disciples, taking in all the resistance of the old species. “The change IS DONE. Everything is raging like wild beasts, but it is finished.” A new mode of being of the consciousness of the cells had appeared on earth, much as a new mode of being, called Life, had once appeared in inert Matter – except that this time it was “overlife”: “The feeling that there is a way of being of the cells that would be the beginning of a new body, but when that happens, the body itself feels on the verge of death.” What would be the “feeling” of the first corpuscle to experience life? “The body has a feeling it has reached the point of … the unknown. A very, very strange sensation. Like a new type of vibration. It is so new that – it’s not exactly an anguish, but it’s … the sense of the unknown. The mystery of the unknown.” And there, what we call “death” is like the inside of the bowl for the former fish, yet it is not “another world”: “It is surprisingly one within the other! Is that possible? Well, overlife is life and death together.” Then, this cry of the breakthrough: “What appears to us as ‘the laws of nature’ was an absurdity!” Another terrestrial world where the old mortal laws of the glass bowl collapse into … something else? “I just have had a fantastic vision of the cradle of a future … that is not very far away. It is like a stupendous mass hovering above the earth.” But will the disciples let her go to the end?

320 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume XII [1971]

The last turning point in Mother’s yoga, from which she emerges with a cry: “I walked a long, long time. I was nothing but a cry, all the time, as if everything were being torn from me. It was the whole problem of the world.”

This Agenda is increasingly strewn with heartrending little cries. It was not enough to have found the secret for herself; others too had to understand, her own disciples, those dominions shut in their egoistic power.

“They don’t have faith! ‘She’s old, she’s old’: an atmosphere of resistance to the change; ‘it’s impossible, impossible’ – from every side… Not a single minute should be wasted; I am in a hurry… The reign of the Divine must, oh, must come… If the entire Russian block turned to the right side, that would be an enormous help! The victory is certain, but I don’t know which path will be followed to reach it… We should cling, cling so tightly to the Truth… They no longer listen to me.”

She is 93 years old. She gropes her way in the unknown. “I see better with eyes closed than with eyes open, and it’s physical vision, absolutely physical, but a physical that seems fuller. The consciousness of the cells is what must change; everything else will follow naturally! I have the feeling I am on my way to discovering the illusion that must be destroyed so that physical life may be uninterrupted: that death is the result of a distortion of consciousness.”

Will she be heard? Will she be allowed to continue? “Only violent death could stop the transformation. Otherwise the body knows that the work will go on and on…” And then this cry: “There will be a miracle! But what, I don’t know.”

395 pages

Mother’s Agenda – Volume XIII [1972-1973]

“Before dying falsehood rises in full swing. Still, people only understand the lesson of catastrophe. Will it have to happen for them to open their eyes?”

This is the year of Watergate, Nixon’s first trip to China, the murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich, the first oil embargo. It is Mother’s last path. A path strewn with heartrending little cries and staggering visions. The end of one world, the beginning of another … if we wish, and even if we don’t. “Sometimes it’s so new and unexpected that it’s almost painful.” And Satprem asks her, “But is it a state outside matter?” “No, I am not going out of this material life, but … it appears different. But it’s curious. And it’s physical; that’s what is extraordinary! As if the physical had become double… A new state in matter. And ruled by something other than the sun, I don’t know by what… I am touching upon another world. Another way of being … dangerous, but wonderful.” Satprem intently listened to her increasingly halting breath as she gasped for air – a breath that seemed to come from another side of the world: “There’s no difference between life and death. This is neither life nor death; it’s … something. You see, it isn’t that death disappears; both are changing into … something one doesn’t yet know, which seems both extremely dangerous and absolutely marvelous.” What if “death” were only the other, material side of our human bowl, a sunny shore for a forthcoming species? A new state on both sides of the world in which both life and death change into … something else? “I am walking a very thin and narrow line…” And then this cry, this entreaty: “Let me do the work!”

On November 17, 1973, she passed away – why?

395 pages