Our Light and Delight

13

The Divine and our Dullness — The Mother

and Food — Not only Guru but True Mother —

Grace towards Youngsters — Freedom

and Discipline

All of us have aspired for the grace of being allowed physical nearness to the Mother. The possibility to be in her presence hour after hour has seemed the greatest luck. Naturally I once exclaimed to her: "Oh Mother, I wish I could live with you!" Immediately she answered: "Do you think it is easy to live with me? There will be a tremendous unceasing pressure on you. You will have to be capable of standing before the highest idea of consciousness every minute."

I realised how far I was from that ideal. So often I would let myself slip from the psychic poise and indulge the trickster ego for little common satisfactions ! Those who have been chosen for physical attendance on the incarnate Divine have spoken of the inner demands the privileged proximity creates. Always the right attitude of humility, always the willingness to change what is deep-set in ourselves, always the ready response of the Wonder in front of our eyes: these are tests very few can successfully pass. And perhaps the dulling of the soul's awareness of the Divinity present before it is the most common failing.

For years I was more or less near the Mother every day from about 9 a.m. to nearly 1.30 in the afternoon. Those hours were the greatest happiness of my life, but I once had to tell the Mother: "I feel terribly depressed because I am getting used to you." Getting used to the marvel of marvels that is the Avatar's existence amongst us may be adjudged the saddest, the most deplorable fact about human nature. The Divine no longer calls forth from us the ecstatic inner cry. We look at a body like our own, at movements such as we ourselves make, and we forget that here is the Supreme in a

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garb that resembles us in order to touch our ordinary humanity and draw it towards depths and heights beyond it. The light that comes through the embodiment — by means of the penetrating or compassionate gaze, the upbearing or enfolding curve of the blissful smile, the gesture of the hand to bless, to support, to lead — all these rarities grow too familiar and lose their moving power. We take them for granted and even begin to be careless about them. Some amusement or other of the normal life may send its lure into the atmosphere of Ananda: this atmosphere may fail to hold us as it should. I know that Nirod has appreciated very keenly the hours he spent attending on Sri Aurobindo after the accident of 23 November 1938. Full well he benefited from the Master's spiritual closeness and poetic creativity. And yet he has frankly confided to me how he would not only miss the precious chance to be in Sri Aurobindo's room after he had finished his duty but also on occasion appear late for duty: what drew him away and kept him out was his passion for playing tennis. I have myself once or twice given up the glory of being near the Mother in the forenoon and chosen to enjoy the Sunday morning show of a picture like "The Brothers Karamazov" at a local theatre.

When I complained to the Mother that I was getting used to her I thought I was the only unfortunate one, but I soon learned that what I experienced was nothing exceptional. Others could suffer even more acutely and be led to strange remedies. A friend of mine would find himself unresponsive to the various photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in his rooms because they were there at all hours for his eyes. He struck upon the device of putting towels over them so that for a number of days the impression of Sri Aurobindo's majestic tranquillity and of the Mother's powerful sweetness would stop being commonplace. Then he would remove the white coverings and stand in excited enchantment before the revelation as if the Avatars in all their heavenly hue had burst upon the earth for the first time in history !

Yes, we could be dull towards the Divine, but the Mother never gave us up. Tirelessly she would tolerate our shortcomings, be sensitive to our needs and keep ever ready to pick us out of our trough of inertia or our slough of despond. But though she never stopped attending to us she would

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rarely lose a chance to correct us. There was no compromising with small desires. At the beginning of my stay I was asked by the Mother to take up painting all the flowers she gave us from day to day. I procured some tubes of watercolour. She used to visit Lalita's room every week and I would be there to meet the Mother along with her. I took off the cap of one tube and, holding the open nozzle near my nose, said: "It has a most appetising smell." At once the Mother's smiling face changed. There was an expression of disgust. She said: "Don't talk to me of eating." In a flash I was made to understand her outlook on food.

She never advised fasting or cutting down whatever food was necessary. But she discounted all desire to satisfy greed. And greed meant for her not just the urge to gorge oneself with as much stuff as available. It meant also the lip-smacking turn of the consciousness towards even a single morsel. Nothing should be eaten with an appetite gloating on taste. Food which tastes good is to be cooked but from a sense of doing a thing well, from an application of the artistic feeling to the culinary operation and not in order to make the mouth water and the eyes dance with the expectation of enjoying delicacies. The approach to food as to everything else has to be calm and consecrated. Discrimination, yes — but no like or dislike, resulting either in a move towards self-indulgence or in a reaction of recoil. The one mood in front of food has to be: "May it all go to the growth of the Divine within me!"

The Mother assured us that food would be much better digested if it was inwardly offered to the Divine. This offering goes beyond the grace often said before meals in a Christian household. Over and above the gratitude for God's gift of the "daily bread", there has to be a control of animal relish and of the eager push to fill the stomach: the food consumed has to be not for personal pleasure or profit but to equip the body better for the development of the Yogi living in it, the Yogi who has pledged himself to the Divine's Will both internally and externally.

The Mother did not encourage any kind of food-faddism. Cleanliness and restrained spicing were favoured, but too much preoccupation with one type of diet or another implied for her a lowered consciousness, an extreme externalisation of interest. Even on the subject of vegetarianism which is frequently

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linked in the East to the spiritual ideal she had no fixed ideas. In an institution like the Ashram she has established the rule of vegetarian food as the most rational, helpful and economical on the whole, but as between vegetarianism and meat-eating in general she has said that the kind of food consumed does not matter much until the stage is reached when physical transformation concretely starts. Then the body, increasingly Truth-sensitised by the Supermind, will have to be very selective in what subtle vibrations the stuff eaten may set up in the changing metabolic process.

Choosing vegetarianism for the Ashram as a collective body, she yet was ready to make individual exceptions and did not look upon meat-eating as something heinous just as she did not consider the sexual life as abominable in itself but only as unsuited to the ideal of turning all one's energies towards the Divine for a total transformation.

Even in the matter of that life I know of a case in which the Mother went out of her way to write to a young sadhak, asking him to give his wife a child even though he himself was all for absolute abstinence. The girl, who was a recent entrant into the Ashram and whose marriage with this young man the Mother had herself approved and brought about, had confessed to her that while she loved her very much she craved, like any ordinary woman, a child of her own. She honestly tried hard to live without one but could not feel happy. The Mother explained to the husband that the difficulties through which his wife was passing would end with the birth of a baby. The husband and wife were told to stay away from the Ashram during the time the child would be conceived and born and then return with it. The young sadhak could not believe that the Mother could issue such a written command in the teeth of his own prayers to enable him to practise Brahmacharya in spite of marriage. In fact he resisted the command for a long period, feeling he was being Yogic thereby. We often think we are doing the Mother's Will when we are following our own notion of Yoga. To be a spiritual child of the Mother we must blindly do what she wants and not judge whether it is spiritual or not by our own standards or our own understanding of the Aurobindonian revelation. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were not merely Gurus of aspirants bent on a razor-sharp

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yogic path: they took under their wings a vast variety of souls at different stages of evolution: they were Divine Parents who knew the specific need of each of their children and did not prescribe indiscriminate cast-iron rules. Whatever they visioned for a devotee of theirs in the light of a more-than-mental wisdom they attempted to materialise, not sticking hard-and-fast even to their own general guidelines for an institution dedicated to Yogic practice. They preserved the broad framework of this institution but theirs was a many-sided plasticity, dealing with each person according to his or her evolutionary requirement and according to the insight of the Grace which incalculably the evolving soul evoked from them. To obey their direct wish in each instance was the basic law for whoever aspired to be a part of the New Life they had come to create on earth.

A surprise akin to the young sadhak's but in another context awaited a middle-aged Sannyasi who wanted to join the Ashram, He offered as his credentials the ascetic regime he had followed for years. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, while appreciating the capacity for discipline he had developed, saw that he was cast in a rather rigid mould and the relatively free existence enjoyed in the Ashram would be a shock for him in the course of time and make him react in a way healthy neither for him nor for the people he would be in contact with. No doubt, he was genuinely spiritual, but in a life-denying and world-escaping manner which was foreign to a Yoga for a divine fulfilment in the very terms of terrestrial evolution. So he was quietly advised to give up his Sannyasa, live in the ordinary world for a time, face its difficulties and challenges and then come here to confront the complexities of the Integral Yoga. The ascetic was scandalised and went away murmuring he had made a big mistake in thinking the Ashram a spiritual place. The very fact that he could not accept implicitly the word of those whom he had wished to take as his spiritual masters and that he thought of the Integral Yoga on the lines of his own conception of what such a path should be like — this showed that he was not cut out for the New Life with its diverse psychological turns and intricate material situations. The New Life seeks for the secret truth behind every side of mental-vital-bodily nature and for a central stance of peace and purity

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amidst a constant circling of co-operative work, an inmost aloneness with God simultaneous with a radiating manifold of human relationships which have to be looked upon as the expression of the multiplicity inherent in the one world-creative Divine Father-Mother of a myriad manifestation.

Indeed, under the Mother the Ashram life, by combining liberty with light never constituted a field of laissez-aller, each member permitted to live entirely as he liked. Outwardly, kindness, courtesy, consideration, the will to collaborate were invariably expected by the Mother. Inwardly, equanimity towards all conditions, aspiration to the Highest, rejection of egoistic trends, surrender to the soul's intuition and to the word of the Guru were the ideals ever set before the sadhak. But there was no uniform law of action: each one's svadharma, every sadhak's true mould of being and line of nature, were sought to be evoked. A set of rituals was never prescribed: a wide scope of individual spiritual experience was accepted and allowed. The Mother granted the utmost freedom possible for spontaneous development.

All the more she offered it to the youngsters whom she took into her fostering fold. I remember how my sister Minnie's daughter Jean — later named Jayini by the Mother — was received when she came to the Ashram to become the Mother's child. I have already mentioned the way her need in the marriage which the Mother had sanctioned was tackled. What I have to say further will show another aspect of the Grace the Mother could pour on a young soul. Both Jean and her two brothers had been born in Bombay under the Mother's creative eye, as it were: her help had been received all during the prenatal months and they grew up in the atmosphere of deep devotion which my sister had always carried about her ever since in her late teens she first came into touch with the Mother. Gladly now the Mother welcomed my niece's prayer to enter the Ashram. Minnie had asked the Mother whether she would take the young girl into her care. The Mother replied that she certainly would but that she would look after the girl in her own way and not necessarily in any way expected of her — according to family norms or community customs. I took Jean to the Mother — a slim, pretty seventeen-year-old with a somewhat sad face and a rather restrained manner. After the interview in which the Mother

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was all gracious smiles I spoke to her alone about Jean and asked her what she thought. Later I wrote down her words and sent them to her for confirmation. She commented: Ca va ("It's all right"). My report, which has been included without my knowledge, as well as without mention of its subject, in Champaklal's Treasures (p. 133), ran:

"Jean is a very refined girl, and she is extremely sensitive, easily hurt. Never scold her or speak harshly to her of force her to do anything. I find her very nice. But she looked so frightened — I don't know who could have told her about me that she should feel like that. Tell her that I found her very nice. She is very refined but somehow she has been living all tightened up. Let her feel quite free, don't try to put any ring around her. Let her feel completely relaxed and free here, and tell her that she should relax and just feel as if she were all the time in sunshine." (16-9-1968)

It should be clear that the Mother never had the school-mistress mentality. She was all for a happy flowering unique to each soul. But I must repeat that she did not want life to be without any discipline. She dwelt again and again on the need of discipline in order to realise anything worthwhile. What a modernist would call an "unrepressed" life in a "permissive" society was very far from her dream of the future humanity. Surely such an existence would be out of the question in an Ashram explicitly concentrating on the transcendence of common human nature and on the invocation of its divine counterpart. It would have no place, either, in a less demanding mode of inner progress like Auroville where unity with one's fellow is put more in front than union with the Divine. The Mother could be very patient and tolerant and understanding: she knew that Yoga could not be perfected soon and that several aspirants have necessarily to go slow, she was aware also that human unity is a gradual growth, but the Ideal, whatever it be, should be kept constantly in sight. While the multi-faceted being of man should not be compressed or coerced, impoverished or rendered lopsided, the sense of lightness and freedom required for its evolution cannot be properly developed unless one makes a repeated effort to resist the downward drag of petty impulses and does one's best to fight free of egoism.

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