Notebook of an Apocalypse (Set of Three Volumes)

About the BookI had a Secret, was it to be engulfed once more under the ruins of one "civilization" or another? What is related here, or strives to be related, is the laying bare of an old species that does not know itself, nor its beginning or its Goal, or the reason for its mortal existence. A step-by-step into the unknown of the Earth through a simple human body offering itself to a mysterious Future- which yet is already here within us-and to a species in the making.

The beginning of a new Life, a second Life for the Earth and for men.

Satprem, Mother's witness and confidant for some twenty years, recorded her Agenda and is the author of many books on Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's evolutionary work, including Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness and The Mind of the Cells. After Mother's departure in 1973, Satprem was brutally plunged into this difficult but hopeful work in the depths of the body's consciousness, and began to record the steps of his journey in his Notebooks.

 

Introduction Vol-IFrom age to age, the "avatar" comes to "change the law." We do not realize what this "law" means because we are in it and it seems to us that it can be nothing but an improvement of our habit of being or, on the contrary, the age-old destruction of one civilization after another, only to start again a little better or take up the same old worst, with a few modifications of borders or vocabulary; and what we think "differently" is still a difference within the same animal and human law with perhaps a greater "intelligence"-but it is still the intelligence of a certain law we are confined in or limited to, as were the ichtoids under the waters. And it seems now that with the demoniac means at our disposal, the "difference" will doubtless be catastrophic and pulverizing or asphyxiating-and one starts all over again, perhaps on another planet, with means that will be those of the old law. The crab's pincers will have acquired intelligent thumbs and forefingers to pinch the same old world.

But we have perhaps had enough of it and could feel inclined to dream of some definitive Nirvana on some plateau of no Tibet, which would no longer be the possession of this or that race, unrepentant and cruel.

But someone came to "change the law," and this is prodigious and incomprehensible, for we only understand our old walls and pincers or additional ones as the case may be. This "someone" was called Sri Aurobindo-Mother.

 

Vol- IIOn March 22, 1978, Sujata and I left Pondicherry for good: "free at last!" and took refuge in the Nilgiris in South India. But it was only in July, 1981 that I would complete the materialisation of the thirteen French volumes of Mother's Agenda.

The battle of the Agenda was continuing.

The yoga of the cells was taking shape.

I could not yet believe that I had started walking this "impossible" path of the New Body, but I was right in it! With-out being aware of it, I had not ceased to be in it since that day of November 18, 1973 after Mother's departure, only I took the blows and strove to bear them and go through them one by one. But they had to touch my body in a direct and deadly way for me to realise that, after all, it was "like Mother." For the Experience does not consist in going off into a wonderland-though wonders are always there, as if invisibly supporting all things-but on the contrary it consists in crossing abysses and bumping into every Negation possible, all the Walls our Matter is made of, in order to un-cover the Marvel that changes everything. And nothing is better than heart (and other) attacks for us to discover how our system works and in what grip these poor, miraculous and marvelous cells are, and to catch hold of the key to life-or-death there, and beyond, the key to the other side of all that.

Sujata and I thought we had found the perfect refuge at last, in those mountains, out of reach of the cruel forces and the hideous poison that we had swallowed in Pondicherry day after day…. Far from it! The battle of the Agenda took on even crueler dimensions which embraced the whole of India and further unmasked the game of the Forces. It was not until 1982 that Navajata would definitively lose his case in the Supreme Court of India, where he tried to have it recognised that "Sri Aurobindo is a new religion."

Vol-III

I had spent those years materializing Mother's Message and attempting to give it its Sense, then fighting to keep her Agenda intact and free. But the essential thing remained to be done: to pick up the thread of the true story, the Adventure of the species in the body's cells, and how we can change this entire "human" system, the next step of Evolution before our Earth is destroyed once more by its present inhabitants.