INTRODUCTION:- We are before an extraordinary mystery, could truly be a fairy tale. The fairy of the species. We set forth the Galapagos archipelago, where, around 1835, Darwin first conceived his theory of evolution: iguanas are not forever iguanas… nor is man forever a man. We have never been told anything more serious since then—nor more captivating, or let us say more liberating, for it really is a question of finding a way out of captivity. And where is the way out, apart from the explosion of the planet or heavenly, yogic or other salvations which, as we are beginning to see, leave the planet unchanged? “Salvation is physical,” said she whose adventure in the consciousness of the cells I will narrate. Evolution is materialistic, as it should be, or material in any case. What remains to be seen is, what is this Matter? Closed or open? Darwin opened it, as did his contemporary Jules Verne. Max Planck, Heisenberg & Einstein it, as did their impressionist, fauvist or pointillist friends—Matter burst forth on all sides. Sri Aurobindo & Mother belong to that side. Some astrophysicists too. And why should it be closed with the biologists? Sri Aurobindo was ten years old when Darwin died in 1882; he had already left India for London to learn the lesson of Western materialism; Mother, his companion, was four years old in Paris, & in Ulm, Einstenin was three. The New Element:- There was a turning point in the history of our species, but it was probably preceded by many small unintelligible sporadic breakthroughs under this name or that, for who could understand that this was the breakthrough into another species? Only when you become a man can you say, “Oh, so this is what a man is.” Even then, you to yourself only after many progressive experiences which lead you to the conclusion that, undoubtedly, we are not delirious monkeys nor, above all, decadent & disabled primates, for the first obvious fact about the new species is everything that it loses of the old species: the qualities of man are the weaknesses of the ape. The Other State:- A first experience is always very strange, even a bit crazy. All the same, there must have been one moment, one day, when for the first time on this planet, one last old reptile became a first young bird. What is it like when, all of a sudden, you take off & there has never ever been before a bird in any somewhat logical & reasonable sky? It is not at all natural, & more than one old dinosaur must have shrugged a few backbones: “It can’t be, it’s a hallucination.” From hallucination to hallucination, we have produced little men in suits—and now what’s next? One January morning in 1962, I saw Mother arrive looking a little pale &, with her usual, self-mocking air, as if irony were the only bearable way to tackle the new species, without wholly losing one’s hold on the old. Mother was eighty-four the, in her amused & quiet tone of voice, she told me: The Next Reign:- After all, one might wonder what is the advantage of becoming a forest or a river if in this daily life we continue to stumble & grope around searching for the right action, the exact thought, the exact perception & the true intuition? Our human life is beset by error. What differentiates us from other species is not so much that we have dissected molecules, invented the radar & probed space, but that we make mistakes. The animal does not make mistakes, it knows instantly. The entire paraphernalia of our science is in fact a gigantic device trying of a simple little direct knowledge & to supply us with thousands of arms, antennae & meachanisms to replace immediate action. We are totally powerless in the middle of a Machine which is supposed to be powerful for us. Should the Machine fail, we would become sub-animals. The Descent into the Body:- Death is really our question. Until the physical fact of this coffin or that funeral pyre is changed, nothing will be changed & we will continue the “law” that has besieged life since unicellular micro-organisms, even if, for a while, we go off into the “undulation.” “It’s almost as if it were the question I had been given to solve,” said Mother. Mother is, first of all, the battle against death—because had Sri Aurobindo had died in 1950. Like Orpheus & Eurydice. And for twenty-three years, she was going to do battle with “the question” like a lioness. But in fact, one cannot go into the undulation & ubiquitous life without something changing in the regime of death, because what makes the barrier also makes death. And what makes the barrier, what is the cellular mechanism of death? Scientists observe the coordinates of the phenomenon & say: If there is this + this + that, there is death. But why is this so? They have no idea. The next reign is, first of all, one that will have another position in relation to death, that will no longer be inside death. If the mode of life must change, the mode of death must change too, otherwise we go round in the same-old-never-ending story, with a few celestial & ubiquitous illusions between the two.