Excerpts from the Agenda, Vol. 13

by Satprem

My gaze is so intense, my heart so grieved that, at times, I seem to penetrate that tomb. And I seem to discern something very still staring at death straight in the face, and an indomitable will – waiting.

Waiting for our prayer to join hers.

Mother, what do you have to say to these human offspring?

On that November 18, 1973, she said something. I was stunned, aching from head to toe amid those hundreds and thousands of people staring at a “dead body.” The fans were droning, the neon lights were glaring; there was a scent of incense and jasmine in the air; they were making her coffin with all dispatch. But my heart was filled with such an enormous “This-is-not-possible,” as if the entire earth and all the sorrowful men of this earth were crying out in my heart. So then, this was the “end,” as it always was – as at Thebes and Babylon and Buchenwald. It was the end. And we start all over again. It was so overwhelmingly not-possible. Never, ever will I go through it again. Never, ever will there be “another time” with its sorrow and prayers and fruitless pain of being. There were a thousand men in my heart, all alike, who had waited and waited for THAT MOMENT. And there was no moment. We will have to come again in another life and learn again about Euclid and the law of gravity, and sorrow and “happiness” – and end up in a hole again? I was so broken, shattered on that November 18 – there was only a splitting headache and a blank look staring and staring at that procession of dead people. But, suddenly, I had the most stupendous experience of my life. I who had so much complained to Mother of never having any “experience”! I was in no condition to have an experience, or concentrate or pray, or will anything – I was nothing but a headache, an aching body, a kind of frightful nonentity staring at a small white form. An unintelligible masquerade. It was false, screamingly false. A dream. Not real.

All of life was not-real.

Then she lifted me in her arms. She lifted me above my headache, lifted me above that crowd, above all those meaningless little bodies. And I was in a sound-burst. I entered a stupendous peal of bells – vast as the universe, exceeding all universes, all lives, all bodies, and yet WITHIN – A colossal ringing that swept away the worlds, swept away the pains, swept away the whys and the hows; I was one with that formidable SOUND ringing over the universe:

NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING WILL STOP
NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING WILL STOP
NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING WILL STOP...

...ringing and ringing. The whole world was ringing in a torrent of rapturous, irresistible, triumphant joy. NOTHING WILL STOP.... It was the inevitable new world.

Here.
Done.

My whole body was trembling.

Excerpts from the Book, Udar, p.38