Evolution remains a mystery, even after the Bible, even after Darwin. One sees the creature "being evolved" as the object of many random mutations whose sum adds up to a new coherence in matter, while the other sees it as the exquisite recipient of a new, ready-made Order.

Neither gives the creature the time of day.

What if these "models" were a bit . . . patriarchal and mechanistic in their approach, the product of a dual ignorance of God and of matter? What if the creature mattered? What if she had always mattered, from the plant to the amoeba to the archaeopteryx and finally to the human? What if she were, in fact, a subject, and maybe even a partner in her own evolution?

This is what this "Notebook on Evolution" is about.

But right away, a problem of language arises: Language can never describe or explain evolution, because it can never be more intelligent than we are, since it comes after the being. Explanations and communications will wait until a fully developed new status in matter has emerged.

Therefore there is nothing easier than to laugh away the stuttered communications attempts of a future species. It must not have been easy, one and a half million years ago, for a first hominid in East Africa to sit among his contemporaries while strange new mental vibrations stirred in his small brain. For sure, something was happening, but how could he possibly convey in ape language the beginnings of the mental tidal wave that would produce Einstein? He must have looked rather foolish and weird sitting there, wondering.

Mother wondered a lot. She spent years wondering about the strange new vibrations stirring in, and sometimes overwhelming, her body. She too could not find the words to "describe" or "explain" what was going on in and around her. And since God is always the first and last refuge of the unknown, the natural repository of what we cannot put into an equation, she spoke of a "Supreme Consciousness," of "Supramental Force," or just "That," to try to circumscribe and tame the unnamable — which, nevertheless, would remain a mystery until the very end.

In 1961, at the age of 83, after a lifetime devoted to the Spirit and to spiritual actions, she repudiated the whole spiritual reference as a "total illusion": "The feeling that all one has lived, all one has known, all one has done is a total illusion. It's one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (I found it marvelous and so beautiful, it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now it is the whole spiritual construction as one has lived it that is becoming a total illusion! Not the same illusion, but a far more serious illusion."

What is there beyond the spiritual illusion, at the end of all metaphors, when "God" Himself seems to fail?

"Call it anything you like, it doesn't matter," she said. "It's the Perfection, the Power, the Knowledge we must become. Something — a new way of being."

This Notebook is about that "something," a communication attempt — perhaps from the next species after man — each person will have to make sense of, or not.

The evolution of the species is everywhere around us. It is the most current and ongoing and unstoppable phenomenon in the world. Yet no one seems to pay very much attention to it, except for a few scholarly specialists who report their findings about other species at international conferences or in remote scientific journals. Paradoxically, the human species never studies or observes itself as a part of the evolutionary movement. The one inexorable process that determines our fate on earth far more significantly than any other and far transcends our petty differences of race-religion is left out of all human preoccupations. We investigate every phenomenon in the universe, from the galactic bombardment of elusive neutrino particles in vast pools of water beneath the earth's surface to the speed of the Continental Drift, but strangely we never so much as glance at ourselves as an evolving species. No external endeavor is too great, no outward exploration too remote for our ingeniousness, but we become thunderstruck at the mere notion of turning the microscopes on ourselves.

Mother never used a microscope, either.

The first dramatic change of the next species is a new set of eyes, a strikingly different way of looking at reality. Like the modern high-altitude telescopes, built far away from the interference of city lights in order to peer into the origin of the universe, we learn to look past the pre-imposed meaning of our immediate senses in order to capture the twinkling lights of the next reality. We learn to see and feel the future in the present.

What happens when the lights of the city are left far behind and only the immense blue-black night shines overhead? Is there "something" out there in the darkness? Is it possible that dreaming hard enough, yearning long enough, burning intensely enough will make that future something appear by force, as it were, through the sheer intensity of a flame of aspiration? Can one peer desperately enough into the future to compel it into the present?

The next species — the species after man — is not found at the end of a mental microscope any more than the feathered bird was found in the coils of the reptile; it is found at the end of all human artifices and conceptions:

"The anguish had reached its peak: the sense of the futility of all human efforts to embrace and understand what is beyond the human. What is truly true besides all our conceptions? And it ended in a slight little movement, just as a child would have who knows nothing, tries nothing, understands nothing — but who abandons himself. A little movement of such simplicity, such ingenuousness, such an extraordinary sweetness. . . . And instantaneously came the Certitude — the lived Certitude."

Will we be wise enough to become children again? Will we trade some of our ingenuity for more ingenuousness? Will we be able to let go of our mental shackles and stare down the future with the gaze of purity and innocence?

The future of our species is already there, wholly formed beyond the horizon of our mental night. Our task is to bring it here by bridging that obscure gulf, by piercing the engulfing night by dint of a relentless innocence.

"It seems that the main question was to create a physical being capable of bearing the Power that wants to manifest. And so this body is being accustomed to it. It's as if it had suddenly caught a glimpse of such a marvelous horizon ahead — overwhelmingly marvelous! Yet it is allowed to receive only as much of this as it can bear. It's very much a matter of plasticity: to be able to withstand and to offer no resistance to the Power that wants to manifest."

Nevertheless, isn't this is an untenable position to be in? How can a reptile manifest the future winged bird? How long can a human body, with its needs, its natural functions, bear the appearance of a totally new way of being without breaking or exploding? Mother's last years on this earth testify to an excruciating and impossible contradiction: "If it were a question of ending something and beginning something else, it might be possible to do. But to keep a body alive while at the same time allowing for a new functioning and a transformation — that makes for a very difficult combination to realize."

But she never once looked back. Instead, she wore down the contradiction bit by bit, abandoning herself more and more to "the Power that wants to manifest." In the end, her body had become infused with such overpowering energy that her unsuspecting visitors found themselves either transfixed and mesmerized, or else fleeing in fright. "There isn't any 'I.' It's almost like an empty shell. Yet there is this formidable, all-embracing Force. . . . As if a superhuman Power were trying to manifest through thousands of years of impotence."

Can one human body alone transform itself enough to escape the laws of Homo sapiens? Then what about the rest of humanity?

Yet discovering the code of the next species in one body is to discover it in all bodies and for the entire species. Is it possible that this code has already been discovered but that we don't know it?

"Why the hurry?" some might say. "Wait for Nature to do it."

"Yes," Mother replied, "Nature will do it in a few million years, wasting countless lives and things in the process."

At a time when one species — ours — seems to have exceeded the entire "carrying capacity" of the Earth, when 27,000 species a year are lost due in great part to the 500,000 trees that are cut every hour in tropical forests around the world; when every natural system on the planet is disintegrating and the land, water, air and sea have been transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste; when the immune system of every unborn child may soon be adversely and irrevocably affected by the persistent toxins in our food, air and water — we may no longer have the time to take our time.

In the following pages, Mother relates her own experience.