PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION AND YOGA OF THE CELLS (An article by Bhaga for the April-June 2004 issue of 'Life

Positive Plus') * This article has been written by Bhaga in March 2004, at the request of Swati Chopra, then editor of 'Life Positive Plus', a sister-publication of the non- sectarian quarterly Life Positive, the first English language body-mind-spirit awareness magazine in India. The April-June 2004 issue of LP Plus was to be Sri Aurobindo: An Adventure of Consciousness. Apart from 'presenting crucial aspects of the philosophy and spirituality of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother', the issue was to 'attempt an assessment of that work and its continuing relevance, and a re-examining of the expansive and powerful vision they afford to modern minds.' They were looking for somebody who could contribute 'an article on Aurobindonian evolution referring particularly to the Mothers experiments with raising consciousness of individual cells in the body.' Swati Chopra, without knowing that this was precisely one of Bhaga's main fields of research, just happened to contact her about the needed article... She was then very happy with what Bhaga wrote, which was subsequently published in that forthcoming issue.)

The books and the even more important facts Sri Aurobindos and the Mothers best known and most read books do not give the full measure of what their evolutive work for the Earth has been. Way beyond both the intellectually challenging as well as the down-to-earth modes of presentation that Sri Aurobindo on the one hand and the Mother on the other seem to exemplify in those best-known texts, there is an immensely vast and deep work both these pioneers of conscious evolution were quietly accomplishing for decades, secretly preparing in their own being, day after long day of inner labour, the divine future of humanity right here upon Earth. What is truly important about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother isnt really any ashram or future township, however great those might be. If those are to any extent successful, it is thanks to the decisive evolutive victories their founders had won for the Earth, which are still mostly unknown and unspoken of. Their books by themselves are extremely helpful for us, but they arent the most important things either. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could as well not have written a single line about anything, nor spoken a word to anyone about the evolutive changes that were taking place in them, and still, their true contribution to the Earths evolution would have happened just the same. That is the only important FACT.

Supramental seed To grasp the magnitude of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother accomplished, one must first of all understand that for a true Life Divine upon Earth to become realised in its completeness, not only our thoughts and emotions have to be gradually replaced by their divine equivalent, but our body too must undergo the same kind of transformation. Only the Power (that is, the Consciousness), which is beyond the Mind, can effect such a transformation of a first body, in the way it must be effected, if it is to have the needed influence on other bodies. The transformative action must be effected by awakening the little, usually obscure consciousnesses of individual body cells. Only the Supramental Consciousness-Force, as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother came to call it, is able to do that in this required way, that is, by awakening in matter, including FIRST OF ALL the biological matter of our own body cells, the same Supramental Power which as a seed has been lying dormant there since the beginning of Evolution. In previous stages of the Earths evolutive process, it had been first the seed of the Life Power, and then that of the Mind Power, which had awakened one after the other in their respective season. The former had given birth to the myriad plants and animals that express Life Power; the latter gave birth to the human being, endowed with the form and the improved biological equipment required for emitting and receiving that Mind Power better than other existing species: this new species was meant to express the Mental Consciousness to its fullest potential. For the first two evolutive seeds to be awakened and activated, a tremendously long time had been necessary, because there couldnt be any conscious participation from anything existing yet on Earth in this evolutive process. But now, the human species, thanks to its Mind Power, was able to discover there was such a process of evolution: thats what Darwin (and the often forgotten Wallace) did. Even better than that, a human being was able to discover Evolutions own spiritual laws and deliberately hasten the process: thats what Sri Aurobindo did. Such a feat couldnt have been done, like Darwin/Wallaces discovery, by the mere power of the Mind.

Dark resistance To hasten the advent of the Supramental Consciousness-Force upon Earth, one had first to become aware that such a Power existed at all, far above the highest spiritual regions traditional spirituality had explored and conquered. And then, after one would have become able to stand the intensity of the vibrations specific to that higher Power, one had to find the way to gradually pull down this ConsciousnessForce towards the Earth, until it would penetrate not only the atmosphere but also the very substance of it. A tremendous task. It is what Sri Aurobindo set out to achieve, but although the results were definitely promising, they were slow, too slow, because of the unconscious but ancient and strong resistances in human beings and in matter itself. He persevered, digging deeper AND DEEPER in the dark layers of the collective subconscious. His poems of that time tell of the potent inner victories, but also of the terrible dark forces to be faced.

In spite of the serious setbacks that the two World Wars represented, with those very same dark forces behind them, Sri Aurobindo and the Mothers inner influence finally prevailed. Secretly helped and inspired by them (that too is usually not known), the Allies won, not that they were perfect, far from it, but at least on the basis of their relative sincerity of purpose, evolution could go on. While Nazism would have meant for the Earth a return to the most obscure, demoniac barbarity, and the true new step in evolution (not the one Hitler spoke about!) would have been greatly delayed. After World War II had been won, Sri Aurobindo realised that the only way to get the Supramental to finish descending once and for all was to do it from outside of the physical plane, from behind the scenes, as it were. So on December 5, 1950, he deliberately left his physical body, transmitting to the Mothers body all the Supramental energy his own had already accumulated.

Step forward This strategy did hasten the descent effectively: hardly a few years later, on February 29, 1956, Mother saw inwardly the moment when the Supramental forces started at last pouring down in an irresistible flow and entering the Earths atmosphere and substance. Since then, it has been a date celebrated every leap year in the Pondicherry Ashram, Auroville and all related places as the anniversary of the Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, as the Mother called it. This is what Sri Aurobindos most specific gift to the Earth has been, which humanity one day will know and be grateful about, for it laid the necessary basis for a whole new evolutive step to begin. Then started the Mothers own specific contribution. First, the human body had to somehow learn how to make itself receptive to the new Force, and how to function with this new Energy instead of the ordinary physical, vital and mental energies a human body normally functions with. Another tremendous task. It is for this nearly impossible mission that the Mother had accepted to stay on in her physical body when Sri Aurobindo saw that he would have to leave his own. He had explained to the Mother that only her body, because of the most remarkable endurance it was endowed with, would be able to bear the enormously difficult (and often painful) process of this beginning of transformation that had to be attempted once the Supramental would be there. Your body is indispensable for the Work. Without your body the Work cannot be done, Sri Aurobindo said to the Mother. Mothers experiments Over the space of the next almost two decades, the Mother (and her bodycells!) gradually discovered for humanity at large the secret of the transformative process that one day will culminate in the first fully supramentalised body. These experiments are chronicled in the 13 incredible volumes of The Mothers Agenda, the invaluable and moving document transcribed by Satprem, a French disciple, from the recorded bi-weekly conversations he had during most of those years with the Mother.

In these, she confided at least some of what was increasingly happening in her bodygroups of cells here and there, not only awakening but also starting, independently from her, their own yoga. When the Mother, after 1956, begins to speak of the yoga of the cells, she doesnt mean simply herself doing the yoga at the cellular level, but really this rather mind-blowing new phenomenon of the cells themselves turning towards the Divine Presence and doing their best in their own way to evolve towards a divine life. This fantastic document is a must-read for those interested in the future of our human body and of the planet as a whole. Satprem later also published The Mind of the Cells, an introductory book to The Mothers Agenda, written around chosen extracts from those 13 volumes. One can start with this book indeed with great profit, but only the Agenda as a whole can give the full scope of what the Mother went through in order to secure an easier way for those who would follow in her and Sri Aurobindos tracks. One of the happiest discoveries made by the Mother is of capital interest potentially for all of us human being. It concerned the capacity that her own body cells had over the years acquired to receive in the right way the new energy: the Mother found that this capacity was contagious! That is, it could be passed on to other cells in other bodies almost automatically, if there was in the other body the needed receptivity, and this without the other person consciously knowing about it, at least until a certain point. The Mother observed this phenomenon many times, long before she left her body on November 17, 1973. This contagion was actually a most wonderful way, seemingly built-in within the cells, through which Nature had insured that a new way of functioning, once effectively learned by enough cells in one body, could then be passed on to other bodies much more rapidly than if the cells in each body would have had to learn it from scratch, like the very first cells in the first body had had to at the beginning. Cutting-edge science Readers with a scientific background might find all this strangely reminiscent of the discoveries made only two decades ago by British scientist Rupert Sheldrake, about similar phenomena observed in the behaviour of animals and even in chemical substances. Sheldrake has proposed the theory of morphic resonance as the basis of memory in nature...the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species. This is not the only instance when the Mothers direct observation of what was going on in the tiny consciousness of her body cells has received indirect confirmation from scientific quarters. Already in the Agenda, the Mother describes visions she had of Sri Aurobindo or herself secretly collaborating with scientists here and there, who were actually (and unknowingly) inspired by the New Consciousness. In a short article like this one, it is not possible to give several precise examples, but I will just mention some of the topics of research which happen to have become the hottest in science latelyDNA, the human genome, bio photons. Is it surprising that they all have to do with cells? They also have to do with cellular consciousness, of course, but not many of the scientists involved suspect that yet.

A new consciousness All of us have to be aware that the needed transformation of our body will not happen mainly through genetic manipulation from outside, but rather from within, in the way foreseen by Sri Aurobindo and described in his last piece of writing, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth (1949), the only thing he cared to work upon before he left his body, besides his vast epic poem Savitri, which he considered his true legacy to the world. In Savitri, the Mother was to find endless indications and confirmations of her own experiences at the cellular level. But in Book III Canto Four, one finds also a promising prophetic passage, part of a vision of the future of the Earth by one of the main characters. From that whole wonderful passage, I quote a few lines only: Forerunners of a divine multitude, (...) I saw them cross the twilight of an age, The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn... In the Agenda itself, which the Mother subtitled Agenda of the Supramental Action upon Earth, she speaks several times from 1965 on of the new children, that is, newly born children in whom she could see a consciousness much more awake than in earlier babies. For her, this was one more sign of this Supramental Action she could perceive behind many events in the world. It seems, from certain astonishing scientific reports, that some of the recently born children already have a slightly modified DNA. What about the adults from previous generations? Seeing the emphasis that our Collective Mind, especially in the West, is putting nowadays on the body and its health, the importance that the concept of fitness has acquired, the participation which many people now expect in their dealings with their doctors, the right they insist they have to seek alternative, noninvasive therapies whenever possible, one can easily guess that not only all this is due to the influence of the Supramental, but that this new Consciousness-Force is at the same time taking advantage of it all for secretly helping our cells too to change their ways. This is exactly what has started happening, quite unexpectedly, in the body of this very researcher, about 25 years ago; and later I discovered in some of the books I was acquiring (for the specialised library of the research-unit I had been able to start in Auroville, the Laboratory of Evolution), that here and there in the world, some other individuals, a number of them not knowing anything of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, were also suddenly becoming conscious of their body cells and starting to work with them. What I have personally witnessed since about a decade is a totally new, spontaneous interest in the cleaning of cellular memory, as proposed in workshops by other people in the West. Better still, since a few years there is also an interest in the consciousness of cells, and how to help it awaken gradually to its own divine potential: the workshop on this topic which I had been asked to put together first in Auroville, based on Sri Aurobindo and the Mothers own advice, is somehow becoming known elsewhere too. I am being invited to various parts of France, Europe, the Americas and recently for the first time in India (outside Auroville), by people wanting to know and experience something about that whole new field of exploration, and integrate it into their overall evolutive effort.

This is definitely a most encouraging sign about the on-going Supramental Action upon Earth! May our gratitude go to the two Pioneers, who made all this possible, as well as all, which will continue to unfold.