Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

APROPOS OF UDAR'S COMMENT

IN THE MOTHER INDIA OF DECEMBER 1981

1

A Letter to a Friendly Critic

I am sorry Udar's article in Mother India has proved so offensive to you. I know it hits hard at places but it does not seem to me more offensive than the extract Udar has quoted from the Introduction to Vol. I of the Agenda. Perhaps your reaction is really to what he has said in reply to that extract? As you have singled out this reply, let me first say something about it.

Obviously it is subjective in most part but the provocation is to be understood before one judges it. It is very likely that the "flag" Satprem has mentioned in a derogatory way is metaphorical, but surely he must know that his metaphor happens to answer to a very concrete and significant reality in the Ashram. Possibly you are unaware of the circumstances associated with the Mother's flag. On the Independence Day in 1947, the Mother had her flag hoisted over the building where Sri Aurobindo and she were staying. She said it would fly for 3 days, including August 15. There was an anti-Ashram riot and in it a sadhak was murdered, the sadhak who used to massage Sri Aurobindo's right leg every day. There was even a threat given that the hostile elements would climb up the building and pull the flag down. The Mother refused to take it off until her 3 days would be over. Udar was prominently involved, by the Mother's own orders, in organising the Ashram defence. I was on a visit to the Ashram from Bombay on this occasion. The Mother's flag was the centre of the whole conflict. At that time Golconde too was in great danger of attack: the Mother's flag was flying there also. It still flies and is meant never to be taken down. You should be able to imagine Udar's feelings about it.

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Besides, doesn't the Mother attach to it in the Agenda itself a great symbolic importance?

You consider as "nonsense" Udar's suggestion that there may be a fifth column in the Ashram planning to break up the Samadhi. I do not know anything about breaking up the Samadhi. A friend abroad has been asking that the Samadhi be opened so that one may know whether the Mother's body is really lifeless or is a radiant living presence in spite of the decomposition which was going on while it was lying in state. What put the idea of a plan to break up the Samadhi into Udar's mind was Satprem's reference to "fraternal iconoclasts" who would have "the courage to shatter all effigies". We may think Udar jumped to a wrong conclusion by taking Satprem's menacing words literally. But I am surprised at your implied disbelief in "a fifth column" in the Ashram. The description could well cover certain members. They want the present Trustees — who were appointed by the Mother — to be thrown out and themselves or their supporters installed in their place. They would be very happy if they could persuade — after Nolini has departed — the Government to take over the Ashram in their interests. They do not disapprove of Satprem's hostility to the Ashram.

Before I published Udar's article I sent for all the relevant documents — the Trustees' letter to Satprem and the letter to him by the Mother's son Andre telling him that the Mother had explicitly asked Andre to edit the Agenda. Evidently she had confidence in Andre and not in Satprem. This point brings me to your theme — broached in good faith, I am sure — of people looking at the negative instead of the positive side of Satprem's work. The basic negative side is that he has not attended to the Mother's wish that Andre should read and judge things. To avoid this wish from being carried out he managed to take charge of the typed copy of the Agenda which used to be kept in the Mother's room and towards which she had pointed when giving Andre her instructions. When the basis is an absolute falsehood, what you call the positive side is bound to be a specious splendour.

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No doubt, the Mother's talks are very illuminating — the Agenda in itself (minus the parts the Mother would never have published) is a divine gift to the world, but we cannot forget the ambitious and unfaithful hands that are offering it to us — not only with those parts included but also with malicious and misguiding footnotes. While benefiting as much as we can from the Mother's wealth of wisdom we must not let ourselves be over-impressed and carried away by the labour which Satprem has spent on it and which you in your innocence want us to profoundly appreciate. Have we not always to look first at the sort of force at work behind a project? Constructive energy on a large scale lay behind both Hitlerism and Stalinism, but even though we may learn something from it we cannot get lost in admiration of it. Of course, Satprem is neither a Hitler nor a Stalin, yet a clear tinge of the totalitarian in him is evident from the intolerant, exclusivist single-type mentality he has fixed in the group which follows him.

I have observed that people who are not steeped in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother turn against the Ashram on reading the Agenda. Even an old-time Swiss sadhika stopped coming to the Ashram for years because of the propagandist spirit which has moulded the Agenda. A friend of mine in Holland was also affected with anti-Ashramism by it. I who knew his warm and sincere heart wrote him a clarifying letter and he began to see differently. Apart from this there is the question: "What picture does it present of the Mother?" The Mother, complimentary or critical, spoke from a divine consciousness — and her personal comments were never meant to be carved in "monumental alabaster" for all time. They were made for a purpose and she could say the very opposite the next minute. Even people in the Ashram don't always realise this but people outside who have no feel of the divine consciousness in the Mother are liable to be completely misguided both as to her aim and as to the level of being from which she spoke. While getting a bad opinion of those whom at a particular moment she has criticised they

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are likely also to see her as a repeatedly grumbling back-biter as well as a sower of discord between people and countries.

Then there is the question of fairness in the editor. On the strength of some tapes and letters, I have been assured of subtle manipulation and even of certain talks cut out because they were complimentary to a person who has fallen from grace in Satprem's eyes. The spirit behind the Agenda is very far from being admirable. That is why Nolini refuses to encourage it and not just because Satprem has not let the Trustees have a hand in it.

It is not my intention to show Satprem as all black. I knew him very well for years, I have known his difficulties and his good points and I am sure the Mother has given him some genuine spiritual experiences. But I am afraid they have gone to his head and have failed to touch with refining fire the outer being, the lower part of him to which the Mother's reference can be traced in the Agenda itself. And the Agenda has been turned by him into a powerful means of self-aggrandisement and self-advertisement: he uses it to make himself out to be the one and only apostle of the Mother.

Have you seen the folder he or someone inspired by him has prepared to go with the two English volumes of the Agenda? It smacks of sensational journalism and tries to focus the limelight on him and to present the Mother not as she was — a real Divine Mother working for the good of her children with deepest love and understanding — but as a kind of super-occultist bent only on one object with the help of her single confidant. Do you know that in a recent interview Satprem has allowed the impression to be made that the sole Yoga of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and himself is to change the "programming" of the cells and reveal the Supermind in them by a certain inner process? Except for an endeavour to silence the intellect, the vital being and the physical mind, no sadhana is required. It is as if the numberless spiritual experiences which lay behind the final stage of the Mother's sadhana for the world were of no importance and could be bypassed. What Sri Aurobindo

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called "the one thing needful" — as you may gather from some passages I have published in the December Mother India

—is completely ignored in the new Gospel a la Satprem. To bring out the inmost Psychic Being, the true Soul, to experience the In-dwelling Deity and the immutable Self of selves and the Cosmic Consciousness, to realise the Transcendent Divine, to be filled with the Supreme Peace and Wideness and Illumination and Compassion and Dynamism

—all these sine qua nons of the Supramental Yoga are never mentioned.

Do you believe it is possible to transform the cells of the body without a long process of psychic and spiritual Yoga? The Life Divine, The Synthesis, Savitri and Letters seem to have become superfluous just because the Mother towards the last part of her life was concentrating on supramentalising the cellular consciousness. Could she have hoped to succeed if she had not had behind her a plenary life of Yoga answering to all that is said in those books? What Satprem is preaching to his admirers is a mutilation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother — a path that cannot lead the aspiring soul of the West anywhere near the "Divine Materialism" (to adopt a fine phrase of his own) at which the Mother was at work for the last 15 years of her stay on earth — without, of course, stopping to help us all the time towards the realisations which she herself had compassed and which alone can prepare us for the culminating Cellular Sadhana.

17 December 1981

2

Postscript

I have spoken of Satprem's aim of self-aggrandisement and self-advertisement by means of the Mother's Agenda. A note has come to me from an independent party — a keen-eyed western disciple — drawing attention to a few points which acutely illustrate this very aim:

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Perhaps the most ludicrous of the wild claims made throughout the Agenda, and in televised and published interviews given by Satprem, is in Vol. 13, p. 319 — it would be in keeping with the psychological theorem that "If a lie is big enough, repeated often enough, it will come to convince the most unbelieving".

Satprem twists the Mother's remark that her body must have the conviction that "it is useful for something" into meaning that the single conceivable usefulness of the Mother's body was not her unparalleled endeavour to supramentalise the corporeal consciousness but rather its usefulness consisted of the support and succour she afforded to her one and only true disciple, and to deprive her of physical meetings with him meant death.

Footnote assertion, p. 319:

"When Mother's door was closed to us [the editorial 'we' he uses throughout] she was being condemned to death. This is the simple truth. But nobody, not a single person, understood or wanted to understand. No-one. Of what were [her jailors'] hearts made?"

The facts are that Andre, the Mother's son, who visited her every evening all through her self-imposed seclusion — except for the first few weeks — would have been entirely co-operative in summoning Satprem or anyone else she might ask to see, and so would her doctor and attendants, but she summoned no-one. The picture which Satprem paints of a woman encircled by malevolent and omnipotent conspirators, while Sri Aurobindo stood idly by and heeded not her abject helplessness in their hands, has been actually accepted by a considerable number of otherwise sane individuals in Auroville and abroad.

Perhaps the saddest part of the frequent misleading twists and the contrary-to-fact assertions rampant in the Agenda is their effect of denigrating the Mother's stature in the juggler's attempt to glorify his own. One thinks in

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particular of the heart-rending episode of the Mother's suffering in 1970 (Vol. 10, September) when a small intimate detail is bared which was spoken in deepest confidence at the moment of a desperate plight, the Mother never dreaming that Satprem would put it on a loud-speaker to the world to enhance his own glory while exploiting a moment's weakness of the Mother at a time of unspeakable bodily stress.

All the falsifications committed in the Agenda, both deliberately and/or unwittingly, diminishing and exploiting the Mother will one day fall away and the incalculable value of her experiments and experiences will be available, stripped of the dross of an errant disciple.

The greatest of falsifications is at the end of the 13th volume where the all-but-shouted drift is that the Mother was driven to her death by the Ashramites she had appointed to look after her. It is true that before her retirement she spoke more than once of some expedient she might employ of forcing the issue of physical transformation which did not seem to get solved in a normal progressive manner. She spoke of the possibility of entering into a cataleptic trance and warned against mistaking it for death. But side by side with this possibility she hinted that, if the body failed to endure and hold out, a new attempt in the future would have to be made. What she might actually do in the present life was never precisely announced. A general clue as to whether she would be in a cataleptic trance or had left the body Would be the fact of decomposition. She let it be understood that, unless decomposition started, the body was not to be put in the Samadhi-vault. Of course, departure from the body would be contingent on her receiving from her own Supreme Self the word that the venture to transform the body would not succeed in this birth. She had said about her body's future: "(...as if the world put the question) Will it continue or will it get dissolved?... But the body knows that it has been

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decided, and that it is not to be told to the body. It accepts, it is not impatient, it accepts, it accepts, it says, 'It is all right, it is as Thou wilt'..."¹

What exactly happened on the evening of November 17, 1973? There were unmistakable symptoms of physical distress. The respiration was acutely in trouble. There was no entering into any kind of trance. A life-crisis was evident. And the upshot was as if the Mother had come to know that the work would not be completed and that no point remained in continuing in a body which was suffering intensely under the pressure of the first experiment in supra-mentalising flesh and blood and bone.

There was not the slightest doubt that the Mother had left her body. The proof of it came soon enough. Small spots of decomposition appeared after a day or so — and then the process increased its speed until the doctors came to the conclusion that the time had arrived for placing the holy and heroic body in the Samadhi.

It is high time a halt was called to the anti-Ashram propaganda whose agitated centre is Satprem — propaganda which can also be termed anti-Mother in the sense that it goes not only against her principal field of work but also against the spirit of Truth, the Truth-Consciousness, which she represented on earth.

3 February 1982

1. Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, April 1969, p. 87.

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