Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

Two clarifications

ANSWERS TO READERS' QUESTIONS

1

On the Agenda and the Divine Will

I can see that although you do not favour Satprem for a moment you are genuinely puzzled at the turn that things have taken in relation to the Agenda. Your puzzlement may be summed up as follows: "How is it that the Divine Mother who, by definition, must be both omniscient and omnipotent, has allowed the Agenda to be got hold of entirely by Satprem in spite of her telling her son Andre that in case of publication it should be edited by him — without necessarily meaning utter exclusion of Satprem as collaborator? No matter if the Divine Mother has left her body she cannot cease having all-knowledge and all-power: why then did she not prevent its being published wrongly? Could not her Will have even destroyed by some means the very original if she had wanted? Is it possible that she had changed her once-expressed intention?"

Just because the intention the Divine Mother had once expressed has not been fulfilled you need not suppose she has changed it. Such a philosophy would be too facile. You forget that she undertook her world-work under certain conditions of the universe as it has been and still is — conditions of a difficult and long-drawn-out evolutionary process in which anti-divine no less than undivine forces have play and, because of the Inconscience and the Ignorance that are part and parcel of this process, get the chance of impeding the Divine Mother's work. If it were not so, all could be achieved by a miraculous wave of the wand by her and there would be no need for slow laborious sadhana and no call for what we have termed "the sacrifice of

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Sri Aurobindo" or for the Divine Mother to suffer as she did.

Doubtless, the action of a superhuman will goes on behind the scenes and there are even direct luminous interventions at times but not everthing that we consider as deserving to be done is carried out by it or even regarded as possible to carry out. The universe being what it is, many wrong turns can occur and we have to fight them as best we can with aspiration in our minds and devotion in our hearts. Just because something occurs in a certain way, we are not justified in thinking that this way is divinely ordained.

Of course, we have to believe — with Hamlet — that

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we may.

The Supreme has an over-all action and guides the world's evolution subtly, secretly, on the whole, but in details a host of undivine and anti-divine movements can take place in an evolution that starts from the Inconscience and proceeds through the Ignorance towards the Knowledge. There are thoughts to be rejected, words to be averted, deeds to be countered. Invoking the Divine Mother's help we have to go forward to the best of our lights and take our share in the inner and outer battle. We may commit mistakes, but that does not imply that we should never dare to correct anything but must accept everything as being perfectly in order and requiring no opposition from us. The easy argument, that Satprem could not have ignored the Divine Mother's wish unless she herself had been helping him, is a specious one. If it is right, why do you not equally argue that unless she herself were helping us we could not oppose him? According to this argument whatever happens has automatically her support and assistance. In that case we would end with visioning a chaos of conflicting activities, all of them right at the same time. The element of discrimination and choice, on which the Divine Mother has always insisted, would lose all significance. Her appeal to us to do Yoga, which constantly

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involved that element, would be meaningless.

I know that from a certain standpoint she can be seen as doing everything — and indeed if we pray to her to reveal her hand in all that is unfortunate and tragic and disastrous in our lives we shall get the touch of her Grace and move more and more out of darkness towards her light and feel the worst circumstances aiding the progress of our souls. But even to pray thus to her and gain the benefit of her hidden hand we have to discriminate and choose, encourage faith and aspiration, set aside the cry of despair rising from our all-too-human hearts. Mere fatalism or a blind acquiescence in the formula "Whatever is, is right" should not be the result of the standpoint which I have spoken of. The true result should be a deep equanimity, a freedom from hatred and malice, a calm self-dedicated dynamism — the state of consciousness in which Sri Krishna commanded Arjuna to make a crucial choice and to fight. Let me, however, add that a self-righteous frame of mind in which we grow fanatical and intolerant and exclusivist is not a movement towards a general "Krishna-consciousness" for any fight, but a drive towards a species of Spanish Inquisition or of a Herrenvolk Hitlerism.

What you say at the end of your letter is to my mind correct: "Satprem's Agenda minus Satprem (the Mother's temporary private references, the editor's personal footnotes, etc.) would be quite all right." Perhaps in relation to "minus" I should draw a distinction between the Divine Mother's Satprem and Satprem's own Satprem. She disclosed a great deal to the former and expected him to live up to her will and wish. What a pity that the latter has got so badly mixed up with the "True love" or "Truth-love" that is the real self his spiritually given name was intended to evoke and bring forward!

23.4.1982

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2

On the El Chinchonal Eruption and the Supramental Future

What Sri Aurobindo has said about India's Independence on 15 August — that the date being the same as of his birthday is not a mere coincidence nor a fortuitous accident but the seal and sanction of the Divine Force that guided his steps in the work with which he began life — this statement cannot be generalised to mean that whatever occurs on certain great days in our spiritual calendar or even on this very day is symbolic and significant. Although I have written a long article on many events in world-history that took place on 15 August — an article which was approved by Sri Aurobindo for Mother India — I cannot bring myself to attach much meaning to the eruption of the El Chinchonal volcano in south-east Mexico after centuries of quiescence on 29 March, the date on which the Mother first came to Pondicherry and met Sri Aurobindo — much less to the army reporting about it on 4 April, the date of Sri Aurobindo's arrival in Pondicherry. The Mother never encouraged too much speculation along such lines. Fancy can easily start playing if we take too seriously this sort of matching. When an earthquake occurred in a certain year, Gandhi declared that it was due to old-fashioned Hindus refusing the entry of Harijans into temples. His opponents countered that, because in certain temples the Harijans had been allowed, Mother India had protested by an earthquake. What either party said could be a good occasion for a mirthquake!

Besides, south-east Mexico seems far too out of the range of immediately meaningful places in the Aurobindonian world-vision. And to think of Rudra Pralaya, the world-destructive dance of Shiva, commencing in El Chinchonal is quite a fantasy. The present manifestation, which is to culminate in a supramentalisation of earth-life, has been said by the Mother to need no Pralaya at all. A Pralaya is needed when the beings

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nitely in spirituality. A new experiment has then to be tried. Occult knowledge says that several such experiments were made in the course of universal history. At last has come an experiment which is capable of making endless progress and manifesting the Supermind. So to think in terms of any Pralaya is to forget the special nature of an earth which is assured of an Aurobindonian future.

Don't, however, run away with the idea that this future is just round the corner. I am amazed at your proclamation: "Sri Nolini was wrong when he said (1973) that Transformation was not cancelled but postponed. Neither cancelled nor postponed. Sri Aurobindo Himself said in The Mother India, Letters (p. 49), letter dated 13.8.1933: '...Afterwards there will be a further transformation by the Supramental.' Afterwards' means after 1973."

What Sri Aurobindo wrote about was two steps in transformation made possible for the earth-consciousness by the Divine Mother's embodiment. The first step would be a preparation "to receive the Supramental". The next step, which would come "afterwards", would be the supramentalisation brought about by what has been received, leading initially to a limited new race and not to a supramentalisation of all beings who represent the earth-consciousness. There is not the slightest reference to 1973 or any other date, for no disembodiment of the Divine Mother such as took place on 17 November of that year was in view at that time. Another manner of putting the same situation in essence is in a letter dated 14.1.1932,¹ which begins by speaking of the descent of the Supermind as "a rapid evolutionary process compressed into a few years which proceeds by taking up the present nature into its Light and pouring its Truth into the inferior planes". Then Sri Aurobindo says: "That cannot be done in the whole world at a time, but it is done like all processes first through selected Adharas and then on a wider scale. We have to do it through ourselves first and through the circle of sadhaks gathered around in the terrestrial consciousness as typified here. If a

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few open, that is sufficient for the process to be possible." The letter to which you draw my attention has as little bearing as this one on Nolini's statement.

Nolini meant that since even the second of the two pioneers who were on earth for supramentalisation did not carry out the plan we cannot hope to see the plan achieved in her absence. This is a logical conclusion from Sri Aurobindo's clear-cut declaration in April 1935,² selfless yet underlining the indespensability of his own attainment: "If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself it cannot be done in others." I may add in tune with Sri Aurobindo's basic intention: "If it is also not done in his equal and partner, the Mother, how can it be done in us?" However, workers like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never give up: so they will find ways and means of consummating in the time to come the vision they tried to materialise in the 20th century. There can be no cancellation of it but humanity will have to wait now that both the Gurus are disembodied. There has to be a postponement. At least one of the Gurus will have to return to carry further the project of evolving man into superman.

Indeed, with the Supramental Manifestation on 29 February 1956 in the earth's subtle-physical layer a fact, the advent of supramentalisation of even the gross physical is certain — but in a long process of evolution. The immediate victory the Mother had toiled for in her own body and wished to extend to the bodies of those who had been open to her has not been won and therefore none of us can expect to win it in the present age without her. We must surely do the Aurobindonian Yoga as far as it lies in our power — and a great deal does lie in it. What Sri Aurobindo has termed psychicisation and spiritualisation are within our capacity. We are capable too of at least a touch of the Supermind in our inner being and perhaps some reflection of this touch in our outer nature. But a full establishment of the Supermind in

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anyone cannot be hoped for unless the Mother comes back to the earth.

You may recall Sri Aurobindo's command to her in 1950 some months before he launched his mysterious "sacrifice": "You have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation." If her endeavour to obey it is to succeed, she cannot but visit our earth once more. How she will do it is past anybody's guessing. She may make an extraordinary entry through a selected womb or she may fuse her psychic being from beyond with the psychic being in a grown-up body that is somehow ready on earth or else she may by an occult action project a form of herself directly into our space-time form the subtle-physical plane. Since her work has to be completed she must and will choose to be a part of earth-life again.

Let us do our utmost to prepare ourselves for the mighty event instead of indulging in grandiose dreams about our own abilities and letting our imagination go gambolling over a Mexican eruption or any earthquake such as Gandhi and his critics commented on. Beyond earthquake and mirth-quake let us aspire for the divine birthquake in whatever mode the Mother may adopt.

24.4.1982

References

1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953), pp. 382-3

2.Ibid., p. 216.

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