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Mother’s AgendaVol. 1Institut de Recherches Evolutives142 blvd du MontparnasseF-75014 Paris
INTRODUCTION
When we have passed beyond humanity, then we shall be the Man.
Sri AurobindoThis AGENDA ... One day, another species among men will pore over this fabulous document as over the tumultuous drama that must have surrounded thebirth of the first man among the hostile hordes of a great, delirious Paleozoic. A first man is the dangerous contradiction of a certain simian logic, a threat to theestablished order that so genteelly ran about amid the high, indefeasible ferns –and to begin with, it does not even know that it is a man. It wonders, indeed, what it is. Even to itself it is strange, distressing. It does not even know how to climbtrees any longer in its usual way – and it is terribly disturbing for all those whostill climb trees in the old, millennial way. Perhaps it is even a heresy. Unless it issome cerebral disorder? A first man in his little clearing had to have a great dealof courage. Even this little clearing was no longer so sure. A first man is a perpetual question. What am I, then, in the midst of all that? And where is mylaw? What is the law? And what if there were no more laws? ... It is terrifying. Mathematics – out of order. Astronomy and biology, too, are beginning to respond to mysterious influences. A tiny point huddled in the center of the world’s great clearing. But what is all this, what if I were ‘mad’? And then, claws all around, alot of claws against this uncommon creature. A first man ... is very much alone. Heis quite unbearable for the pre-human ‘reason.’ And the surrounding tribesgrowled like red monkies in the twilight of Guiana.One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of theOyapock. Our heart was beating with the rediscovery of a very ancient mystery –suddenly, it was absolutely new to be a man amidst the diorite cascades and the pretty red and black coral snakes slithering beneath the leaves. It was even moreextraordinary to be a man than our old confirmed tribes, with their infallibleequations and imprescriptible biologies, could ever have dreamed. It was anabsolutely uncertain ‘quantum’ that delightfully eluded whatever one thought of it,including perhaps what even the scholars thought of it. It flowed otherwise, it felt otherwise. It lived in a kind of flawless continuity with the sap of the giant balatatrees, the cry of the macaws and the scintillating water of a little fountain. It 
 
‘understood’ in a very different way. To understand was to be in everything. Just aquiver, and one was in the skin of a little iguana in distress. The skin of the world was very vast. To be a man after rediscovering a million years was mysteriouslylike being something still other than man, a strange, unfinished possibility that could also be all kinds of other things. It was not in the dictionary, it was fluid and boundless – it had become a man through habit, but in truth, it was formidablyvirgin, as if all the old laws belonged to laggard barbarians. Then other moonsbegan whirring through the skies to the cry of macaws at sunset, another rhythmwas born that was strangely in tune with the rhythm of all, making one single flowof the world, and there we went, lightly, as if the body had never had any weight other than that of our human thought; and the stars were so near, even the giant airplanes roaring overhead seemed vain artifices beneath smiling galaxies. A manwas the overwhelming Possible. He was even the great discoverer of the Possible. Never had this precarious invention had any other aim through millions of speciesthan to discover that which surpassed his own species, perhaps the means tochange his species – a light and lawless species. After rediscovering a million years in the great, rhythmic night, a man was still something to be invented. It wasthe invention of himself, where all was not yet said and done. And then, and then ... a singular air, an incurable lightness, was beginning to fill his lungs. And what if we were a fable? And what are the means? And what if this lightness itself were the means? A great and solemn good riddance to all our barbarous solemnities.Thus had we mused in the heart of our ancient forest while we were stillhesitating between unlikely flakes of gold and a civilization that seemed to us quitetoxic and obsolete, however mathematical. But other mathematics were flowingthrough our veins, an equation as yet unformed between this mammoth world and a little point replete with a light air and immense forebodings. It was at this point that we met Mother, at this intersection of the anthropoid rediscovered and the ‘something’ that had set in motion this unfinished inventionmomentarily ensnared in a gilded machine. For nothing was finished, and nothinghad been invented, really, that would instill peace and wideness in this heart of nospecies at all. And what if man were not yet invented? What if he were not yet his ownspecies? A little white silhouette, twelve thousand miles away, solitary and frail amidst a spiritual horde which had once and for all decided that the meditating and miraculous yogi was the apogee of the species, was searching for the means, for the reality of this man who for a moment believes himself sovereign of the heavensor sovereign of a machine, but who is quite probably something completelydifferent than his spiritual or material glories. Another, a lighter air wasthrobbing in that breast, unburdened of its heavens and of its prehistoricmachines. Another Epic was beginning. Would Matter and Spirit meet, then, in athird PHYSIOLOGICAL position that would perhaps be at last the position of Manrediscovered, the something that had for so long fought and suffered in quest of 
 
becoming its own species? She was the great Possible at the beginning of man. Mother is our fable come true. ‘All is possible’ was her first open sesame.Yes, She was in the midst of a spiritual ‘horde,’ for the pioneer of a newspecies must always fight against the best of the old: the best is the obstacle, thesnare that traps us in its old golden mire. As for the worst, we know that it is theworst. But then we come to realize that the best is only the pretty muzzle of our worst, the same old beast defending itself, with all its claws out, with its sanctity or its electronic gadgets. Mother was there for something else.‘Something else’ is ominous, perilous, disrupting – it is quite unbearable for all those who resemble the old beast. The story of the Pondicherry ‘Ashram’ is thestory of an old clan ferociously clinging to its ‘spiritual’ privileges, as othersclung to the muscles that had made them kings among the great apes. It is armed with all the piousness and all the reasonableness that had made logical man so‘infallible’ among his less cerebral brothers. The spiritual brain is probably theworst obstacle to the new species, as were the muscles of the old orangutan for this fragile stranger who no longer climbed so well in the trees and sat, pensive, at the center of a little, uncertain clearing. There is nothing more pious than the old species. There is nothing more legal. Mother was searching for the path of the newspecies as much against all the virtues of the old as against all its vices or laws.For, in truth, ‘Something Else’ ... is something else.We landed there, one day in February 1954, having emerged from our Guianese forest and a certain number of dead-end peripluses; we had knocked upon all the doors of the old world before reaching that point of absoluteimpossibility where it was truly necessary to embark into something else or onceand for all put a bullet through the brain of this slightly superior ape. The first thing that struck us was this exotic Notre Dame with its burning incense sticks, itseffigies and its prostrations in immaculate white: a Church. We nearly jumped intothe first train out that very evening, bound straight for the Himalayas, or the devil. But we remained near Mother for nineteen years. What was it, then, that could have held us there? We had not left Guiana to become a little saint in white or toenter some new religion. ‘I did not come upon earth to found an ashram; that would have been a poor aim indeed,’ She wrote in 1934. What did all this mean,then, this ‘Ashram’ that was already registered as the owner of a great spiritualbusiness, and this fragile, little silhouette at the center of all these zealousworshippers? In truth, there is no better way to smother someone than to worshiphim: he chokes beneath the weight of worship, which moreover gives theworshipper claim to ownership. ‘Why do you want to worship?’ She exclaimed.‘You have but to become! It is the laziness to become that makes one worship.’ Shewanted so much to make them become this ‘something else,’ but it was far easier to worship and quiescently remain what one was. She spoke to deaf ears. She wasvery alone in this ‘ashram.’ Little by little, the disciples fill up the place, then theysay: it is ours. It is ‘the Ashram.’ We are ‘the disciples.’ In Pondicherry as in Rome as in Mecca. ‘I do not want a religion! An end to religions!’ She exclaimed.She struggled and fought in their midst – was She therefore to leave this Earth like
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