3
Perhaps the most momentous utterance of the Mother in my memory is one which was no more than a brief passing whisper - a short unfinished phrase, spoken as if to herself and caught almost accidentally by me to make what I could of it.
The occasion was one of those afternoons when I was the only disciple left at the end of her morning's meeting first with the secretaries and then a few others who somehow had happened to be upstairs between the time she came down from her second-floor rooms and the time she sat down for her lunch with Pranab on the first floor behind a screen. At about 12 everyone went home. Only I was left behind, sitting in the small passage between the staircase door and the bathroom. How I came into this exceptional role I can't recollect. But, as I have recounted elsewhere, I sat by myself through her lunch - within earshot of her varied talk with Pranab. Usually I would leave a note under a paper-weight on a small table by which she passed after lunch on her way to the bathroom through another door from a passage beyond the room where we used to do pranam to her and sit while she would give interviews in the Meditation Hall.
On this particular morning I had left no note and she came out towards me from the bathroom without any oral or written reply to my questions. I got up from the mat, knelt at her feet as she stood for a moment before passing on to her siesta in the lunch-comer. After blessing me she just let fall the five words: "To keep one body going..."
As they sank into my mind they got enveloped with a soft light yielding several successive shades of meaning. Evi-dendy the body was her own. Also, it was a body all by itself: one. Further, its singleness was special. Not only was it special but also unique. And it was unique by being more than strikingly different from other bodies. Clearly, it was a body holding a consciousness immeasurably greater than any in
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the world. But it was a body too which Sri Aurobindo, some months before leaving his own body, had charged with a mighty mission: "You have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation." The Mother has herself given a more distinct depth of significance to this charge: she has declared that hers was a body in which for the first time in human history the experiment of physical divinisation was being tried - a most difficult and outwardly a most distressing experiment, entailing a lot of suffering under the tremendous pressure of a divine Power of immortality which had never before brought its unrelenting all-transformative light into a stuff of flesh and bone deliberately accepted to be like our own in essence so that whatever would be achieved in it could represent a general human possibility. Finally, the suggestion of her words was that this body should be able to continue its work on earth and for that it was necessary to do everything which could help. Most pointedly the words implied not only help from herself but from others as well - and the second kind of assistance was rather crucial because sufficient realisation of its need might not come to us. So her whisper connoted what she would never openly insist on: "You, my dear disciples, should see to it that you do nothing to hinder the going on of my body which Sri Aurobindo has marked out for his work and on which the whole future of the world depends."
How have we lived up to the duty to help her? Should we have taxed her less in the way of wanting to be with her? In fact she herself wanted to be with us as much as possible(To. put her divinely developing body in touch with our bodies was the raison d'etre of her incarnation.; Especially as Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from us into physical seclusion in 1926, she felt the need to give herself more and more to our aspiration for spirituality. This feeling must have increased tenfold after he had given tip his own body on December 5, 1950. And though she appreciated the attitude of those who did not wish to encroach on her time, she was very far from pushing away those who yearned to be in her physical
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ambience. To a backward Yogi like me, being near her was half the sadhana and she never grudged the gracious gift of her bodily proximity. What was wrong at times was to consider our petty needs more than her convenience. Thus some of us unduly prolonged the pranam she daily allowed us to make or unnecessarily lengthened out our periodical interviews with her. On occasion we overlooked some physical needs of hers.
I distinctly remember one incident. She had come to a house where several people were lodged. The occasion was the birthday of one of them. She had granted him an interview in his own room. When the interview was over she came out to the veranda on her way to the Playground. The inmates of the house offered flowers to her. One of them said: "Mother, I want to tell you something important. Will you please come into my room?" The Mother answered: "If I come, I shall be late at the Playground and have no time to take a little refreshment in my room there before attending to the Playground activities." The person addressed just kept weakly smiling and would not say: "All right, Mother. I shan't keep you." Obviously, there was a persistent wish to have the Mother in for a special talk. Seeing the disinclination to let her go, the Mother quietly went into the room as desired. She remained there quite a time and came out smiling as usual after the grace shown to one of her children. But she must have missed the refreshment and rest of which her over-taxed body was in need.
She never let us know whatever strain she underwent. She used to stand for over an hour at times in the early morning in the passage-room I have spoken of, receiving pranams and giving blessings. And as she could draw endless energy from the Universal Consciousness she could compel her body to carry on to please her children. But at the time I heard that whisper, her body had already reached the age of eighty years.
Even more of a strain than physical exertion was the non-receptivity of people or else their carrying undesirable states of consciousness to her. It was the most natural movement for
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the Mother to open herself completely to her children and quite a lot of psychological "dirt" would get into her and affect her body. There was also the classical case of her falling ill because of the Soup Distribution. She used to put something of her subtle-physical substance into the soup when she sipped it before giving the cup to the disciple who was kneeling in front of her. The cumulative strain was so great that she fell seriously ill. That was the end of the period of Soup Distribution in the Ashram's history. Some sort of reciprocal energy-flow between the Mother and the sadhaks was expected, but evidently there was too little response from us to her and the giving was markedly one-sided. Hence the physical breakdown on her part. Another kind of attack on her was the despatch of ill-tempered letters. Her son Andre once remarked that they affected her body. Even Sri Aurobindo was said to have suffered from such letters. Once a nasty epistie affected his eyes for a while. Our Gurus' attitude to their spiritual children was so trustingly open that they were often caught off their guard, as it were, and had to exert special powers to get back to normal.
In a number of ways I must have been a considerable drag on the Mother, Was that why she let out that unfinished sentence in my presence? I have not heard of anybody else reporting such a hint. Or was she confiding in me a secret as a result of something having happened independently of me, which was more of a drag on her than other occasions? I shall never know. But since that afternoon I have tried not to forget ever how precious, how invaluable, how packed with super-destiny, how centrally significant in the career of our evolutionary cosmos was that one body that held so much sweetness and so much strength for baffled benighted souls -
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.1
(26.7.1992)
1. Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 28, p. 15.
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You have written: "26th June 1969 is the day when the Mother came to save me on the operation table when the operating staff had declared that the patient was dead." The same date -26th June - but in 1938 - is one when according to what the Mother has said, my heart should have stopped by all normal standards yet kept beating because, as she explained in a talk, the habit of remembering and invoking her had been constant - had become second nature -Jin this complicated fellow whose first nature was rather reckless and who had taken 48 times the normal dose of a stimulant drug! It was a mistake bound to cause death but there was, as Sri Aurobindo put it, a divine intervention and the rash disciple's heart is still beating and will complete its eighty-eighth year on November 25.
Don't ever think I have forgotten you. The Samadhi-offering continues and when the offering is made I instinctively turn my head to my left as if you were sitting there in your wheelchair. Now that I too am wheelchaired, we shall make a pretty pair when you next come here and the hearts of both of us go forth to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
You have asked me about my first darshan. My first sight of the Mother was on the very day I reached Pondicherry on December 16, 1927. 1 had been taken by Pujalal, who had received my wife and me at the station, to Purani's room -previously Sri Aurobindo's for 6 years and afterwards mine for 9. Looking out of the north window I saw the Mother walking on the roof-terrace of her house, drying in the sun her just-shampooed hair. This was a most enchanting vision and my heart leapt out to her and since then has kept leaping. The word "leap" is very appropriate to my response to her as compared to my answer to the Divine Call through Sri Aurobindo. I do not leap but sweep towards Sri Aurobindo. A warm deeply reverent continuity of movement is experienced in regard to him, whereas in regard to the Mother there is always a swift and sudden movement of exultation. If I may pick up a clue from this last word, I may say that face to face with the Mother I feel my heart intensely exultant. Fronting
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Sri Aurobindo I know my heart to be immensely exalted. The heart is concerned and dynamised in either case - profound love is astir, but on the one side it is tugged by a dazzle of beauty and bliss while on the other it is drawn by a tranquil glow of compassionate grandeur.
You have referred to a poem of mine, after reading which the Mother had asked everyone present at the time to read. Here it is:
PRANAM TO THE DIVINE MOTHER .
There are two ways of bowing
To you, O Splendour sweet!
One craves the boon of blessedness.
One gives the soul to your feet.
Pulling your touch to ourselves we feel
Holy and happy - we think huge heaven
Comes close with you that we may pluck
A redder dawn, a purpler even.
This is but rapturous robbery
Deaf to infinity's call
That we should leap and plunge in you
Our aching empty all
And, in the surge of being your own,
Grow blind and quite forget
Whether our day be a richer rose,
A wealthier violet.
Precious each moment laid in your hands,
Whatever the hue it bear -
A flame and a fragrance just because
Your fingers hold it dear.
Make me your nothing, my whole life
I would drown in your vastnesses -
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A cry to be ruled by your flawless touch,
Your will alone my peace.
I was interested to read your account of the Champaklal-episode at Puri. I wonder what exactly was the relation conceived between Champaklal and the Jagannath temple. Evidently a high value was set on this temple and especially on the special prasad cooked there, which was proposed to be brought to him. But I don't think Champaklal was considered to be blessed by the projected visit by him to the temple or by the sanctified food from it. It must have been the other way around; his value was deemed so high that what was regarded as the highest according to the Hindu religious sense was to be set before him. You say you opposed the plan; you must have done so because you saw in it an undue premium put on traditional Hinduism and an unnecessary link made between traditional Hinduism and Sri Aurobindo's supra-mental spirituality which goes beyond the reign of the Overmind godheads that has prevailed so far in India as in the West. I consider your insight to be deeper than that of the Reception Committee,The Mother did not want any sadhak to be drawn to any past religious institution or ceremony. The seer-knowledge enshrined in the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita is indeed precious and forms an antechamber to the Aurobindonian revelation, but the popular cults and the temples in which they are perpetuated were never encouraged by the Mother. The same holds for the churches of the Western religions. Most followers of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy do not quite realise the line he and the Mother draw between the old Hindu scriptures and the popular practices. Perhaps the personal figure of Champaklal did not encourage the Puri-receptionists to mark such a line. For he throughout his life in the Ashram and in the exemplary service of his Gurus retained on his body the traditional "sacred thread". The Gurus never objected to this thread: they never went out of their way to criticise any old-world foibles of their disciples. They never made it a point to frown on Champaklal's tradi-
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tional sign of his brahmin caste any more than to show disapproval of Dilip's attachment to the sannyasi's ochre-coloured robe.
Not that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother consider temples and churches and mosques superfluous. Ordinary life needs such supports and they have a place in the evolution of consciousness. And the religious instinct of prayer, worship and self-offering is very valuable. In its essence - shorn of egoistic and materialistic motives - it has a place even in the highest Yoga when the being is turned towards a personal Supreme and seeks His manifestation in one's active life.
(15.6.1992)
Thank you for appreciating my poem "Pranam to the Divine Mother". Only one phrase in it you have fallen foul of: the four opening words of the last stanza:
You object: "Is it possible any time or anywhere - in whatever state of consciousness we may be - that we are not in Her lap, not portions of Her? Above all, when She has recognised us as Her children, when She is with us so concretely, when She is doing even the necessary preparations or even the sadhana for us, how can we say or even think or imagine that we are nothing of Hers?"
I am afraid you have not seized my drift - especially in the context of the rest of the stanza. My plea to the Mother is: "Take away from me all selfhood separate from you. Let it be a nothing on its own so that it belongs altogether to you." This is the import conveyed compactly by the words: "Make me your nothing". The next phrase elucidates them by expressing the wish that I may be drowned - lost - in Her
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immensity - with no existence as myself, no activity on my own initiative, no will I can call mine. Only Her will should prevail and its prevailing is the sole fact that can give me peace, filling me with all which would be needed by me, granting me complete fulfilment.
Some earlier lines add another shade to the last stanza. At the beginning of the poem I differentiate between those who try to aggrandise themselves by taking the Mother's grace and those who come to her to surrender their souls. About the action of the former I say:
This is but rapturous robbery,
Our aching empty all.
The suggestion here is that really we are a zero with a painful yearning for self-consummation and that we can have it only by losing ourselves in the infinity of the Divine. The phrases prepare us for the idea that, instead of being our own zero with delusive egoistic hopes of becoming big by falsely assumed riches of the godhead, we should become that godhead's total possession: the Supreme Mother's zero, Her "nothing".
On p. 3 of your letter you have the statement: "I am insincere, so suffering." This implies on the one hand that we suffer because we are insincere and on the other that because we suffer we are proved to be insincere. Our world is a complex and often enigmatic phenomenon. Not only do bad people suffer: the good also do it. Sincerity by itself is no armour against suffering and just by their suffering men are not shown to be examples of insincerity. All of us suffer through the general condition of Ignorance - our lack of the Divine's luminous consciousness. There is also the seeming paradox that even the Avatar or the enlightened soul suffers. The latter has elements of humanity that are still open to dark forces. Our body, for instance, lives under laws that have not
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yet been changed by the spiritual power. The Avatar has similar infirmities and he may even undertake labours for the world that are bound to cause suffering to him. Of course, one should always question whether one is sincere, but merely on the basis of one's suffering one should not sit in sackcloth and ashes bemoaning "Oh, I am such a putrid fellow, shot through and through with pretence and falsehood!" If one can lay one's finger on the cause of one's suffering, well and good: one should then set about removing the cause if possible. Otherwise what is to be done is to offer the suffering to the Divine and implore Him to reveal the cause and in any case to make even the suffering a passage to some good of the soul because the pain is inwardly put in His transmuting hands.
To balance, as it were, your erroneous judgment in two instances, you have a very insightful pronouncement in the course of the touching prayer you have formulated:
Day by day,
Hour by hour,
Your longing
For my perfection
Quickens in my body
New Divine Strength.
I submit to Your
Wonderful purity,
O Supreme and Blissful Lord.
Lines 3-6 struck me at once as inspired and intuitive ihna special way. They point us to a truth not often realised. In the first place, it is that the "Supreme and Blissful Lord" has a heart full of intense concern for our spiritual progress, a keen desire that you and I, stumbling pilgrims towards that heart, may outgrow all our shortcomings and turn perfect and satisfy this heart's boundless love for us. In the second place, the truth is: it is by the Lord's "ache", as it were, for our perfection that we come to have in our embodied human
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existence the renewed surprise of strength after strength of a divine nature. The gracious warmth of Him for us kindles in our aspiring bodies the force fit to take us towards Him. On our own we could never acquire the power to reach the Lord's beatific height.
You have hit upon a side of the Aurobindonian Yoga of self-surrender which divulges the key to its success. We are asked by our Gurus to divest ourselves of all "I" and "Mine" and lay our whole being at the Divine's feet. A childlike helplessness is called for. Why? Surely not simply to make us love the Highest, though that is a grand aim by which we can grow into instruments of Him in our lives. There is a greater reason. By becoming a helpless child in the hands of the Supreme we render it possible for the Supreme to enter our sadhana and tackle our difficulties by means of His more-than-human strength. In other words, by our self-surrender His "longing for our perfection", His love which seeks ever our absolute good and yearns to give our littleness His utter infinite of light and joy and beauty will have a chance for expression. He will take up the problems of our composite being and solve them. Sri Aurobindo has said that the secret of success in sadhana is to know how to let the Divine attend to our weaknesses and deal with them in His magical masterful way. By offering to Him all our troubles, by laying at His mercy our whole defect-ridden self, by our self-surrender we clear a passage for His love to act, we get Him to put Himself at our disposal and we set Him to unravel the numberless knots of our nature. This is a work He is most eager to do and it is a work He alone can do, but He cannot do it unless we abandon ourselves to Him as a child to its mother. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga wants our self-surrender to the Divine so that the Divine may take away from us the whole load of our imperfection, lay His all-transformative love at our service and save us the Herculean labour of cleaning the Augean stable of our condition humaine.
In the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo the Divine's love is all agog to shoulder such a job because this Yoga is of what he desig-
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nates as the Supermind whose purpose is to manifest in the long run a life on earth perfected in every respect, whereas all the other Yogas, no matter what stress they might have put on quotidian objects, trained their sights ultimately on the Beyond. There is a profound reason for the radical difference. The vision of the Beyond as the goal, instead of its being a glorious mid-term for the aim of changing earth root and branch with the splendid powers of the unearthly, is due to a certain lack in what so far was discovered in the Beyond. Convinced that earth-life could not be just a stepping-stone, a mere passage, from the Beyond back to it, Sri Aurobindo could not rest in his supra-terrestrial explorations until he had reached the plane where the archetypes of our whole being wait not merely to be reached but to be invoked for manifestation here below after having been attained. This plane is the Supermind as distinguished from the top of spiritual realisation up to now, which he has named the Overmind.
The distinction between the Divine who is "over" and the Divine who is "super" brings me to your request to me to say "something about our attitude towards divinities such as Krishna, Shiva, Durga and Ganesh". You ask: "In what way do they carry on or participate in the process of Supramental transformation?" You add that your question has no bearing on your own life which is devoted and dedicated to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: you have posed it just "to know and let others know".
Your inclusion of Krishna in the list you have given is not quite proper. According to Sri Aurobindo, Krishna is the Supreme Divine who incarnated as the Avatar on earth through the Overmind formulation of his manifold being. He thus stands apart in one sense from the other deities you mention, who are typical Overmind personages and no more. He may be taken as summing up in his active self the whole Overmind Consciousness while being in his essential self above it. He has a special place in Sri Aurobindo's life and work. We also consider him to have been the greatest form Sri
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Aurobindo took in his series of past lives upon earth. Sri Aurobindo has also said that Krishna's work is being done in the Ashram - not, of course, a mere repetition of this Avatar's earthly activity but a carrying forward of his multiform Overmind drive to a supramental manifestation. That is why so much importance has been accorded to the spiritual event of November 24,1926 which has been called by Sri Aurobindo the descent of the Krishna Consciousness, the mightily luminous Overmind-divinity, into his physical being. This descent opened the way to the descent of the Supermind, towards which Sri Aurobindo set his face when he put the Ashram in the Mother's hands after November 24 and withdrew into seclusion for a dynamic meditation to hasten the supramental advent. However, the special place given to Krishna does not justify any separate cult set up in his name. Krishna has to be seen as merged in Sri Aurobindo.
As for deities like Shiva, Durga, Ganesh, we have to keep an appreciative attitude towards them as part of the general Overmind Puissance which has been helpful to the Ashram. The Mother was on very amicable terms with them and they must have served her purposes at various times. She has made several smiling references to her relations with Ganesh, one of whose functions is the deployment of money. The Mother has said that he had promised to bring money to her for her work but he is rather lazy and she had to prod him again and again. Durga is surely subsumed in her highest aspect in the play of those four goddess-personalities which, according to Sri Aurobindo, have been put forward by the Mother in her world-work down the ages: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati. Those who have served Sri Aurobindo have often been struck with a detached contemplative grandeur holding at the same time a tremendous reserve of power and felt in this combination the presence of the traditional Shiva. Just as Krishna figures in a number of Sri Aurobindo's poems, so too Shiva has had his role in at least three: the series of twenty couplets titled Epiphany, the sonnet Shiva and that experiment in quantita-
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tive metre Shiva the Inconscient Creator, The Mother has spoken of Shiva sometimes walking with her and also of his having declared that he would take part in her new creation only when the Supermind has completely descended.
Yes, the Overmind deities are accepted in the Aurobindo-nian vision of heaven and earth. But in the practice of our Yoga they are never presented as objects of worship. Specific worship of them is definitely ruled out for a follower of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The Mother has also said in connection with February 29,1956, marking the manifestation of the supramental Light, Consciousness and Force in the subtle-physical layer of the earth that the age-old reign of the Gods is over. We do not rule out their further activity in the world; but it is by a push from the past and not by a pull from the future. For those who are attached to them with a sincere fervour and faith, their effects can be quite beneficent and even be unwittingly preparatory for a Greatness beyond them. So we should never look down upon people's ways of worship,(but we as Aurobindonians can take no part in any cult of the old Gods and Goddesses. To do so would be a retrograde step and an act of unfaithfulness to our Gurus. To visit temple-ceremonies (or for that matter Christian Church-rites or Muslim mosque-rituals) would be to lay ourselves open to atmospheres and influences which grossly or subtly tend to lure us away from the path of spiritual evolution along which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have sought to lead us.
But I may put a footnote to my exposition. The Mother has said that most places of public worship dedicated to traditional deities are really controlled by hostile forces eager to suck up, as it were, and feed upon the adoring ardours of the congregation. They, however, cannot prevent a genuine God-lover from piercing his way to the divinity to whom he has come to offer his prayers; But such a person is not common and most cultists get very small benefit and may even get harmed. Whenever the Mother has found a good spirit presiding over a house of worship and showing some affinity to
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her she has appreciated the phenomenon and even encouraged in one or two cases a sadhak or sadhika to go in and show thereby our friendly attitude. 1 am referring in particular to the Ganesh temple in the neighbourhood of the Ashram. But generally speaking a visit to such a place would be inadvisable because of the rather low psychological atmosphere of the bulk of the devotees. This atmosphere is not necessarily linked to the poverty of the folks. Even where well-off and apparently cultured people congregate, the level of 'their psychology may be just as low: that is, superficial in devotion, thick with worldly desires and ambitions, lacking in true goodwill towards their fellows.
Now to more personal topics. I am indeed grieved that you have to pass through physical troubles which upset your whole system. Of course my good wishes are always there -good wishes in the form of appeals to the Mother to help her physically unfortunate child who is so sincere in his aspiration to be inwardly moulded by her. 1 am glad that time and again you are saved because, as you say, she wants you to continue your journey towards her.
Your keen response to both the world's beauty and the world's misery is certainly creditable. You have yourself had a beautiful past up to your fifteenth year and known subsequent years of acute misery in spite of which you have not lost the ability to smile with the dream of the Mother always in your eyes. Your being moved by the present painful circumstances of the person who has brought in the last few years a good deal of trouble to your life is indeed noble. If there is any way you can be of assistance, take the chance, but unless there has been a change in the mentality of this person don't get involved in her affairs. Leave her to the Mother's wise will.
(30.7.1992)
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