Dead World Walking
And a new world being born: glimpses from the Mother’s Agenda
When the UN Resolution on Advancing a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine came up for voting on February 24, 2025, the US was one of the few countries which voted against it, along with Belarus, the DPRK (North Korea), Hungary, Israel, and Russia. (Even Brazil, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia merely abstained.)
During his address to the UN General Assembly, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, uttered this significant phrase:
In times like these, when the world seems out of joint, when the old seems to be dying but the new cannot yet be born….
This calls to mind the Mother’s message for UNESCO (February 1, 1972):
Each one must know if he wants to associate himself with an old world on the verge of death, or to work for a new and better world ready to be born.
What exactly did the Mother mean by a “new world”? A first clue can be found in her “Wednesday class” of July 10, 1957.1 The previous evening a film had been shown in the Ashram’s Playground. It described the lives of Sri Ramakrishna and a rich Bengali widow, who in 1847 built the Kali temple at Dakshineshwar, Kolkata. Seeing this film put the Mother in touch with
all that world of religion and worship … which was the flower of the human spiritual effort towards something more divine than man, something which was the highest and almost the purest expression of his effort towards what is higher than he. And suddenly I had concretely, materially, the impression that it was another world, a world that had ceased to be real, living, an outdated world which had lost its reality, its truth, which had been transcended, surpassed by something which had taken birth and was only beginning to express itself, but whose life was so intense, so true, so sublime, that all this became false, unreal, worthless.
Then I truly understood — for I understood not with the head, the intelligence but with the body — I understood in the cells of the body — that a new world is born and is beginning to grow.... It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of transition where the two are entangled — where the other still persists all-powerful and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where the new one is quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed — unnoticed to the extent that outwardly it doesn’t disturb anything very much, for the time being, and that in the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And yet it is working, growing — until it is strong enough to assert itself visibly.
What does “understand with the body” mean? To begin with, let’s recall that, to Sri Aurobindo, “the worlds are only frames for our experience.... Consciousness is the great underlying fact.” [LD 22] Let us also recall that Consciousness (with a capital C) not only contains all but also, as Being and as Force, constitutes and creates all, and that in our evolutionary world, Consciousness started out involved in its aspect of Being, which gave it the appearance of an inanimate matter.
Prior to that — not in relation to physical time but before there was such a thing as physical time — Consciousness created a series of supraphysical worlds. There are worlds in which each being (a) is conscious of its identity which every other being and (b) experiences the world in perspective, from a particular location within its world. There are worlds, again, in which each being has lost sight of this identity. These effectively separate and only apparently independent beings differ from us in one important respect: only our consciousness is hemmed in by its emergence from submental life; only our freedom is encumbered by the dead matter from which it emerged.
If Life —the aspect of the Force of Conscious Being concerned with creating and maintaining forms — was able to evolve, it was not only because it was involved in matter but also because its evolution was helped by an influx of forces and forms from a supraphysical world. (How could the angiosperms not be the works of accomplished artists? What if not a frenzy of creative ecstasy could have designed the arthropods?) Even so, the emergence of life did little to relieve the inert inconscience of matter. The immensely complex organization of terrestrial life, on both cellular and molecular scales, indicates the measure of matter’s resistance to the emergence of life.
By the same token, if Mind —the aspect of the Force of Conscious Being concerned with the formation of ideas (potentially capable of expressing the infinite Quality at the heart of Conscious Being) — was able to evolve, it was not only because it was involved in matter but also because its evolution was helped by the intervention of beings and forces from a supraphysical world. Even so, the emergence of mind hasn’t done much to lessen the inert resistance of its material base. The enormous complexity of the nervous system supporting embodied mind indicates the scale of resistance, by both matter and life, to the emergence of mind.
As Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1940,
Mind and Life are evolved in Matter, but they are limited and modified in their action by the obligation to use its substance for their instrumentation and by their subjection to the law of material Nature even while they modify what they undergo and use. For they do transform its substance, first into living substance and then into conscious substance; they succeed in changing its inertia, immobility and inconscience into a movement of consciousness, feeling and life. But they do not succeed in transforming it altogether; they cannot make it altogether alive or altogether conscious: life-nature evolving is bound to death; mind evolving is materialised as well as vitalised; it finds itself rooted in inconscience, limited by ignorance; it is moved by uncontrolled life-forces which drive and use it, it is mechanised by the physical forces on which it has to depend for its own self-expression.... Mind and Life do indeed modify the material substance they inhabit and its energies and are not merely determined by them, but the extent and way of this mutual modification and determination are fixed. [LD 732–33]
Evolution, however, is far from finished. What has yet to emerge is the Force of Conscious Being of which mind and life are but subordinate aspects. By subjecting itself to constraints —called by us “the laws of physics” — this Force has set the stage for Conscious Being’s adventure of evolution. But a Force that can subject itself to constraints is also capable of removing them. The liberation of that Force from its self-imposed constraints will be the next great — and in some sense final — step of the adventure, the final evolutionary task to be accomplished.
Later during the same class, the Mother spoke of “a future ... which has begun, but which will take some time to be realised integrally,” and she added:
Meanwhile we are in a very special situation, extremely special, without precedent. We are now witnessing the birth of a new world; it is very young, very weak — not in its essence but in its outer manifestation — not yet recognised, not even felt, denied by the majority. But it is here. It is here, making an effort to grow, absolutely sure of the result. But the road to it is a completely new road which has never before been traced out — nobody has gone there, nobody has done that.
The Mother once remarked: “when man emerged from the animal, there was no way to record — to note and record the process; now it’s quite different, so it will be more interesting” [Mother’s Agenda, November 22, 1967]. In continuation of the passage quoted above, Sri Aurobindo writes:
If there is to be an entire transformation, it can only be by the full emergence of the law of the spirit; its power of supermind or gnosis must have entered into Matter and it must evolve in Matter. It must change the mental into the supramental being, make the inconscient in us conscious, spiritualise our material substance, erect its law of gnostic consciousness in our whole evolutionary being and nature. [LD 733–34]
Of this transformation, this change of the mental into the supramental being, the thirteen volumes of Mother’s Agenda are an incomplete record. Once completed (the transformation, not the record), it will be tantamount to the total elimination of the constraints which the Force of Conscious Being has imposed on itself. The staggering complexity of the human organism was necessitated by the stringent constraints entailed by the Houdini-like nature of evolution. As I wrote in two previous posts (here or here), once these constraints are eliminated, that complexity will no longer be needed; it can be done away with much like a scaffolding or the chrysalis of a butterfly.
But how? How is this possible? The Mother, too, wondered:
if it were a question of stopping something and starting something else, it might be done rather rapidly. But to keep a body alive (to keep it functioning) and at the same time have enough of a new functioning so that it stays alive, and then a transformation — that makes a very difficult combination to realize. I am fully aware of it, fully aware of the immense amount of time that’s needed for this to be done without catastrophe. Above all, of course, when we come to the heart: to replace the heart with the center of Power, a formidable, dynamic power! At what precise moment are you going to eliminate the circulation and throw in the Force? [Agenda, October 6, 1962]
After a short while she added:
In ordinary life, you think of things, then you do them — but this is just the opposite! In this life you have to do things first and understand afterwards —a long afterwards. You have to act first, without thinking. If you think, you get nowhere; you’re just reverting to the old way of doing things.
Let us pivot again to the chapter of The Life Divine just quoted:
The principle of the process of evolution is a foundation, from that foundation an ascent, in that ascent a reversal of consciousness and, from the greater height and wideness gained, an action of change and new integration of the whole nature. The first foundation is Matter; the ascent is that of Nature; the integration is an at first unconscious or half-conscious automatic change of Nature by Nature. But as soon as a more completely conscious participation of the being has begun in these workings of Nature, a change in the functioning of the process is inevitable. The physical foundation of Matter remains, but Matter can no longer be the foundation of the consciousness; consciousness itself will be no longer in its origin a welling up from the Inconscient or a concealed flow from an occult inner subliminal force under the pressure of contacts from the universe. The foundation of the developing existence will be the new spiritual status above or the unveiled soul status within us; it is a flow of light and knowledge and will from above and a reception from within that will determine the reactions of the being to cosmic experience. The whole concentration of the being will be shifted from below upwards and from without inwards; our higher and inner being now unknown to us will become ourselves, and the outer or surface being which we now take for ourselves will be only an open front or an annexe through which the true being meets the universe. The outer world itself will become inward to the spiritual awareness, a part of itself, intimately embraced in a knowledge and feeling of unity and identity, penetrated by an intuitive regard of the mind, responded to by the direct contact of consciousness with consciousness, taken into an achieved integrality. The old inconscient foundation itself will be made conscious in us by the inflow of light and awareness from above and its depths annexed to the heights of the spirit. An integral consciousness will become the basis of an entire harmonisation of life through the total transformation, unification, integration of the being and the nature. [LD 753]
What is it that remains conscious in us when the old inconscient foundation has been made conscious? When the depths of the old inconscient foundation are annexed to the heights of the spirit, what remains conscious is the body. There will be a single consciousness, and it will be the consciousness of a wholly transformed physical body.
As the beginnings of the supramental life ... develop, perhaps not in a very obvious way but very surely, it becomes more and more obvious that the most difficult way to approach this supramental life is intellectual activity.... [W]hen one comes to the work of transformation of the body, when some cells of the body, more ready than others, more refined, more subtle, more plastic, are able to feel concretely ... this Knowledge that is not intellectual but a knowledge by identity, when one feels this in the cells of the body, then the experience is so total, so imperative, so living, concrete, tangible, real that everything else seems a vain dream. And so we may say that it is truly when the circle is complete and the two extremities touch, when the highest manifests in the most material, that the experience will be truly conclusive. It seems that one can never truly understand until one understands with one’s body. [Wednesday class of May 14, 1958, emphasis added]
The impression is that only the body — receptive, open, at any rate partially transformed — is capable of having the understanding; the understanding of the creation, of what we call the creation: why and how, the two things. And it’s not at all something thought, not something felt; it’s something lived, and that’s the only way to know. [Agenda, October 18, 1969]
To a supramental consciousness,
“knowing” a thing means being able to create it, or change it, to make it last or cease to be — in other words it is Power. That’s what “knowing” means. All the rest is explanations the mind gives to itself. [Agenda, September 8, 1962]
For the body, to know is to have the power to do. [Questions and Answers, April 21, 1954]
The consciousness is on the way to being at once the vision of what is to be and the capacity to realize it. [Agenda, October 30, 1971]
The tension of contrast between what is and what should be (or be done) is fundamental to mental consciousness; it is the mainspring of our present way of acting.
In the mental world, you think of something before doing it (it may happen very fast, but both movements are distinct); here it isn’t like that. [Agenda, November 27, 1962]
Our habitual state of consciousness is to do something for something.... Even we speak of the “supramental realization” as the goal.... There used to be a kind of mainspring, which had its raison d'être and so persisted: do this to arrive at that, and this leads to that (it's more subtle, of course); but this mainspring suddenly seems to have been abolished, because it became useless.... The sense of linking has disappeared: that isn’t the “cause” of this, and this isn’t done “for” that; there is no “there” one is heading towards — it all seems ... an absolute — innumerable, perpetual and simultaneous. [Agenda, April 25, 1961]
I have a feeling that to have access to the highest and purest Power, the very notion of “result” must disappear completely — the Supreme Power has no sense of result at all. [Agenda, August 31, 1962]
But if it’s not a goal, how can the supramental realization be achieved? How can our mental way of knowing and acting be transformed into the supramental knowledge-power? Here is the clue:
There is a constant Reality, a constant divine Order, and it’s only the incapacity to perceive it that makes the present disorder and falsehood. [Mother’s Agenda, July 10, 1963]
Logically, therefore, to make the present disorder and falsehood a thing of the past, we “only” have to be able to perceive this constant divine Order.
In a certain attitude, everything becomes divine. Everything. And what is marvelous then is that when you have the experience that everything becomes divine, everything that is contrary quite simply disappears (fast or slow, right away or little by little, depending on circumstances). ... That is to say, becoming conscious that everything is divine is the best way to make everything divine, to eliminate all opposition. [Agenda, October 16, 1971, emphasis added]
Let this sink in: becoming conscious that everything is divine is the best way to make everything divine.
Suddenly, for a moment, I saw as ... as the Divine sees the world. There was no longer the human vision. And I saw something so marvelous.... It was so marvelous I can’t describe it.... Obviously, it has to begin with the consciousness, and afterwards, little by little, things will become such, meaning, become aware of themselves such as the Divine is aware of them. [Agenda, November 27, 1971]
While for our present consciousness the tension of contrast between what is and what should be is the prime motivator, for a consciousness on the way to the supramental realization, the same tension of contrast exists between Reality and an unreal, superimposed Falsehood.
But what is this creation? … Separation, then wickedness, cruelty (the thirst to cause harm, we might say), then suffering (again, the joy of causing suffering), and then disease, decomposition, death, destruction. (All that is part of a single thing.) … The experience I had was the unreality of those things, as though we had stepped into an unreal falsehood, and when you step out of it, everything vanishes — it does not exist, it isn’t.... What to us is so real, so concrete, so dreadful, all that does not exist. It’s … stepping into Falsehood. [Agenda, May 31, 1969]
Truly, the ordinary state... is consciously death and pain, while in the other state, death and pain appear absolutely ... unreal! [Agenda, October 18, 1969]
But what is very clear and comes very often — very often — is the perception of a superimposition of falsehood over a real fact. [Agenda, April 18, 1961]
One thing must inevitably cease: the deformation, the veil of Falsehood covering Truth.... If the veil is removed, things will necessarily be completely different, completely: they will be as we experience them when we emerge individually from that deformed consciousness. [Agenda, July 18, 1961]
[The body is given] a demonstration of the Power at work so that all this ... vain dream of life as it is ... can be turned into a marvel, just like that, simply through a reversal of consciousness. The experience is repeated in every detail, every field, like a demonstration by fact. And it’s not a “long process” of transformation: it’s like a sudden reversal (Mother turns over two fingers), and instead of seeing ugliness, falsehood, horror, suffering and all that, the body suddenly lives in bliss. And all things have remained the same, nothing has changed, except the consciousness. [Agenda, December 21, 1968]
The world is the same — it is seen and felt in a totally opposite way. Everything is a phenomenon of consciousness — everything. Only, it is not a matter of this consciousness or that.... It is the human way of being conscious versus the divine way of being conscious. [Agenda, December 25, 1971]
One is a world of Truth and the other is a world of Falsehood. And this world of Truth ... must come to the fore and take the place of the other. [Agenda, February 24, 1965]
The notion of “subjective” and “objective” still belongs to the old world.... To put things simply, the Power that gives the subjective experience and the objective realization is the same. [Agenda, June 9, 1962]
It would be futile to ask whether the abolition of Falsehood, in all its horrid manifestations, will eventually be so objective as to be real even to those whose consciousness remains untransformed, for there won’t be anyone whose consciousness has not been transformed.
Suggested reading (not only) for those among my esteemed readers who know little or nothing about Mirra Alfassa, to whom Sri Aurobindo began referring as “the Mother” in 1926, the year he went into seclusion for the rest of his life:
The “Wednesday classes” were conversations of the Mother with the members of her Wednesday evening French class, held at the Ashram’s Playground between 1950 and 1958. The class was composed of disciples of the Ashram and students of the Ashram’s school.
In the interregnum between the old and the new, monsters tend to appear: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”― Antonio Gramsci [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci]
Important and very helpful article. And yes : very much needed.
Thank you .