The Mother : Contact
THEME/S
18
The Mother and Sri Aurobindo did not work only on the physical plane. Behind the physical are subtle realms with influences good, bad and indifferent. The Victory Day of 24 November 1926 brought the Overmind Gods into direct alliance with our Gurus' purpose of earth-transformation and rendered more effective their fight with the occult Evil that acts upon earth from its headquarters on the vital plane either directly or through human beings open to it.
The Overmind dynamism, preliminary to the Supermind power which was the ultimate aim, came into repeated use during the Second World War. This war brought into play two figures whom Sri Aurobindo and the Mother recognised as extending into the physical plane the occult Evil at its most dangerous. Hitler was seen as possessed by the Rakshasa-aspect of that Evil. The Rakshasa is a devouring "Giant" who openly declares his enormous greed and makes no secret of his ambition to dominate the world with a master-race of ruthless henchmen. Hitler's Mein Kampf is a glaringly open manifesto of such greed and ambition. In Stalin Sri Aurobindo and the Mother discerned a phenomenon not merely of possession but of incarnation, a vital being born in a human form and not just employing that form as its medium — and here was the Asura-aspect. The Asura is an all-gripping "Titan" who is even more destructive than a "Giant" but with a cold cunning intelligence which conceals its subversive policy under a mask of high ideals like economic equality and social classlessness. Stalin's pronouncements are all couched in noble-sounding terms borrowed from Marx and Lenin but directed to nefarious ends.
There are several other orders of vital beings bent on harm — like those who bear the Pisacha-aspects. The Pishacha is the "Demon" obsessed with a defiling and mutilating mania: he is utter foulness and ugliness personified. The Pisacha
Page 167
always puts himself slavishly at the service of the Rakshasa and Asura.
The characteristic mark of all these denizens of the vital plane is that the force they express is "typal" and not, like the earth's, "evolutionary". The sign of a typal force is a drive towards mechanical uniformity, rigid regimentation, strict conformity to one type alone — a drive contrary to the many-sided, flexible and free movement of the evolving human soul striving, by means of trial, error, self-correction and through a thousand truths and innumerable impulses, to live and let live more and more abundantly, more and more profoundly.
The Mother and Sri Aurobindo considered the Second World War as their own war because of Hitler's typal tyranny which, if successful, would have blocked their work of spiritual evolution. Sri Aurobindo kept in close touch with every development by means of a radio fixed in his room by Pavitra. Many of us understand that he intervened at various turning-points. But not many realise a most crucial intervention by the Mother. I came to know of it from private sources nearly twenty years ago, directly from Udar and indirectly through André. We may look upon it as based on a prophecy Sri Aurobindo had made at the end of his poem "The Dwarf Napoleon".
This poem ridiculed Hitler's pretensions to equal "the immense colossus of the past" who had arisen as a master-militarist to save the results of that progressive uprising, the French Revolution, from being submerged by the old-world powers ranged against it in all Europe outside France. Indeed, Napoleon was an autocrat, but Sri Aurobindo always pictured him paradoxically as a despotic defender of democracy. As the poem puts it:
A movement of enormous depth and scope
He seized and gave cohesion to its hope.
Far other was Hitler, yet "a mighty Force" had taken hold of him:
In his high villa on the fatal hill
Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,
Dictator of his action's sudden choice,
Page 168
The tiger leap of a demoniac skill.
And Sri Aurobindo concludes:
Thus driven he must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
Until he meets upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil — or thunderstroke of God.
This prophecy was penned in October 1939, when Hitler and Stalin had already signed a pact of non-aggression. Thus Stalin, the "greater devil", seemed close-linked to the lesser — and against them both there could be only God's thunder stroke preparing in the dim future. But within two years — to be precise, on 22 June 1941 - the possibility of Sri Aurobindo's prophetic words coming true loomed up: Hitler attacked Russia. Strangely enough, Stalin was caught somewhat on the wrong foot and there were German victories at the start. But "the Man of Steel" soon showed his diabolic superiority and, after the decisive blow at Stalingrad in 1942 on 25 November (Amal Kiran's thirty-eight birthday, by the way!), the lesser devil was critically weakened. Spiritual-minded historians may surmise that Sri Aurobindo, especially since Russia was now automatically allied to Churchill's England and Roosevelt's America, backed with his Overmind puissance the greater devil temporarily in order to smash Hitler who was at that time the bigger immediate menace to civilisation. But would any of them guess that the folly Hitler committed of turning upon Stalin and drawing the more heinous devilry against himself had the Mother's occult goad behind it?
The Mother knew exactly what Vital Being was egging Hitler on. She has dubbed him "The Lord of Falsehood", a Rakshasa and Asura in one, as it were, who arrogates to himself the title: "The Lord of the Nations." Finding Hitler going from strength to strength, she resolved to imitate the special form in which the Lord of Falsehood always appeared to him at his secret headquarters in the Bavarian Alps and inspired him to fantastic actions which yet proved triumphant. He used to come to Hitler clad in a silver cuirass and with a silver helmet from which a plume-like flame shot forth. Taking the same form in her subtle body and exteriorising her consciousness, the Mother went to the Fuhrer
Page 169
and commanded him to launch on the most fantastic-seeming action of all: an attack on Stalin's Russia, his publicly avowed ally. Hitler, as usual, accepted the order implicitly. In view of the unexpected brilliant successes in the past, there was no question new of his doubting the new man- date delivered out of the same flashing presence by the "sovereign Voice". His resolve to unleash a sudden onslaught on his former partner was unbreakably set.
The Mother, on her way back from him, met the real Lord of Falsehood proceeding; towards the Fuhrer's "bunk" at Berchtesgaden. He was astonished to see his own special form face to face with him. He realised what must have happened. He hurried to Hitler to contradict what had been commanded. But Hitler remained unconvinced and carried out the attack. Secretly he had himself wished to destroy Communist Russia and, when that long-cherished yet hitherto checked dream, which had been outlined in his Mein Kampf, was given so glorious a push forward, he could not help thinking that the second appearance of the guiding spirit was some piece of fraud.
As Sri Aurobindo had predicted, the greater devil brought about the lesser's downfall, but the prediction now revealed an unsuspected significance. At first sight Sri Aurobindo's words would seem to posit two alternatives as responsible in the future for the downfall: either an encounter by Hitler with a more diabolical darkness than his own or else a terrific bolt from the Divine's blue. Now the dividing "or" turned out to imply not a pair of different destructive forces but simply two different names for one and the same Mahakali, for the greater devil was pulled into action willynilly by the hands of the Divine. The Mother, by a bold piece of what we may call a divine outdevilling of the super-devil, the Lord of Falsehood, created directly a head-long clash between the two arch-enemies of Light, and managed to make this very clash a thunderstroke of God.
*
Not every non-evolutionary force from the occult planes is evil. One embodied typal being, who was neither Titan
Page 170
nor Giant nor Demon, came into touch with me from very nearly the beginning of my stay in the Ashram.
It was a young French girl, the eldest child of a highly cultured lady who belonged to a one-time ruling family in Pondicherry but who became a disciple of the Mother although she was not technically an Ashramite. She had her own house in the town and lived there with her husband, three other daughters and a son. This lady was our tutor in French and sometimes when she could not to teach us her eldest daughter took her place. This girl was seventeen at the time, a very clever person of marked talent and an extraordinary fascination, pretty in an unusual way which mostly affected one through her eyes. She had been regarded as dead at birth but seemed suddenly to come alive, a phenomenon characteristic of cases where a being of some other plane than the earth, most often the Vital Plane, takes hold of an infant body.
The Mother, after seeing her as a young girl, confided to her parents that this child of theirs was not human but a spirit from the world of fairies who had wanted to come into contact with the Mother and so had entered a family which was likely to get associated with her. As normal with such entrants, this one had a tremendous fund of energy and a conquering drive of will, added to her sharp intelligence and charming personality. I was nearly ten years older than she and came to be trusted by her. All her difficulties she used to put before me and she was eager to learn whatever I had to teach her. When she became engaged to a tall Apollo of a Swede, she would invite me in the mornings to talk to her on Ibsen or Tolstoy or some other literary celebrity and she would in the evenings amaze more her fiancé with her versatile knowledge.
Inhabiting a human body she could not escape altogether "the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to" and, in spite of her brilliant gifts and natural force and spell-binding beauty, she suffered a good deal. Her marriage was on the rocks after ten years and fate separated her from all her three children. From Europe where she had made her life she returned to Pondicherry and spent her last years here, resuming her old friendship with me and her physical proximity to the Mother. These years were rather unhappy and
Page 171
troubled, but she never lost her energy and esprit. Every now and again one could feel something strange in her. Especially on certain evenings she would carry an atmosphere that appeared to be filled with unknown influences. My personal editorial office was a flat adjoining the one in which she and her old mother lived. So I had ample opportunity to observe her in all her moods.
One evening she called me and said: "Amal, I feel that I shall die in a week." I laughed off the idea and told her that she had to live for a decade after I was gone. "Please hold my hand for a while," she begged, I did so and cracked some jokes and she was in a better humour when I left. Almost exactly after a week a servant of hers came to my room at about 8 p.m. to say that she was unwell. I left my typing and went to see her. She was in a doze. Knowing that she used to drink beer, I thought she had slightly overdone it and was asleep. I went back to my work. An hour later I was summoned once more. She was still unconscious but was now throwing up watery stuff at intervals. I sent for a doctor who had his residence opposite hers. He was out. I sent for her family doctor. He was not in Pondicherry. I sent to the hospital for a doctor. The reply came that nobody from there could come but an ambulance could be sent. The state of my friend was getting worse: there was breathing difficulty. I asked the ambulance to be sent. A minute before the vehicle stopped at the door my friend ceased to breathe. A few seconds later her heart failed. I did whatever I could to resuscitate her. All in vain. The ambulance men came in with a stretcher. They could give no help. I insisted that she be taken to the hospital. I accompanied her. It was nearly eleven at night. At the hospital I called the doctor in charge to come into the van and examine her. He tried all the possible tests and declared her stone dead. I took her back home.
News was sent to a friend of the family, a Swiss sadhika named Padma. Early next morning she and I went up to see the Mother. I told the Mother the whole story and conveyed the message of my friend's mamma that she wanted her daughter's body to be taken care of by the Ashram and carried by the Ashram people in a coffin to the family's vault. Later in the day the Mother communicated to the shocked
Page 172
old lady that her daughter had returned to her own world and was having a rest which she had badly needed.
Her younger sister — another beauty but with a physical appeal different from the strange "vital" attraction of the dead woman — flew from France and made a fairly long stay in Pondicherry. A fortnight after her arrival, strange things began to happen in the house. Suddenly a gust of wind would be felt in a closed room or a light touch brush one's arm or an oil-lamp inexplicably go out and just as mysteriously re-kindle. The phenomena were reported to the Mother. She sent word that nobody should get perturbed, for the being that had left its human body was playing practical jokes and having a bit of fun at the expense of its erstwhile family.
The family did not seem to miss their departed member much. She had not been very popular with most of them: she generally had the better of everybody with either her glamour or her brains. But the poor of her acquaintance felt a void in their hearts, for she had been a very sympathetic and generous person with them. She was also almost madly fond of children — any child, rich or poor, white or coloured, would be sure of being carried along in her arms and caressed and given sweets. Interestingly, these two traits go well with what popular tradition suggests by that term in common usage: "fairy godmother."
After my friend's death I would wait till a late hour night after night to glimpse an apparition of her. As she had been very close to me, I thought she might visit me. But I never saw her "ghost". The strange memory of her, however, keeps her alive before my eyes: she was the most striking woman I have known because really she was no woman at all.
A case of possession by a hostile and not a friendly vital force was enacted under my eyes in the early in the early days of the Ashram. A fellow-sadhak and a personal friend was a young Indian, an Oxford-educated free-minded "moderner" who yet spontaneously took to Yoga and developed into a fine devotee.
Page 173
Suddenly he changed to an aggressive type, showing all the signs of an old-world religious fanaticism.
The altered attitude first betrayed its symptoms in the way he dealt with the Master's handwritten corrections of the Jnana-Yoga chapters of The Synthesis of Yoga as they had appeared in his monthly Arya of 1914-1921. He had promised to type out the new matter together with the old and pass everything back to Sri Aurobindo. Instead of doing this, he made a present of the original corrected pages to the spies of the British Government who in plain clothes were always hovering around the Ashram houses and seeking evidence to prove that Sri Aurobindo had not yet abandoned his political activity but was secretly continuing it.
The young man's rebellion came to a head one morning when he rushed up to the door leading to the Mother's interview-room. Dilip Kumar Roy was with her. He came to the door to answer the loud knockings. As soon as he opened it. The rebel stepped in. Dilip, having a bulky body, served as a good buffer between the Mother and the intruder, but his stalling tactics by means of what he later jokingly dubbed "brute strength" were not conclusively successful. The intruder was attempting to push past him. The Mother, who had come up behind Dilip, saw the situation worsening and shouted: "Purani! Purani!" Purani had his room nearby downstairs. He was the most fiery inmate of the Ashram. He had been famous as one of the inspirers of young Gujarat in the Nationalist struggle against British domination, an expert wrestler, a fearless fighter, an all-round heroic personality. I remember Amrita telling me: "Purani has a gigantic vital being, something approaching the Mother's." He had also some occult powers. When he ran up in answer to the Mother's call, he grabbed the intruder by the arm and tried to pull him downstairs. The latter clutched whatever was available and resisted Purani. Purani told me that the fellow had stood his ground and stuck to the door as if with superhuman strength, the kind of capacity that comes to possessed persons. With jerk after jerk Purani loosened his opponent's hold and moved him from the top of the staircase and finally with one terrific pull dragged him scurrying non-stop down the steps right to the bottom on the ground floor. There he challenged him: "Do you want a fight? I am ready."
Page 174
The opponent knew that a vital energy greater than the one which had entered into him was pitted against it. Without a word he turned away and disappeared. Shortly afterwards he ran off from the Ashram and became a sort of wandering fakir.
Almost two decades later he returned for a while. The Mother allowed him to get free food in the Ashram's Dining Hall but he had to have his quarters outside. She could not forget his early good days of devotion when he had made an offering of his money of the Ashram.
Apropos of occult forces and entities, I may set on record two extraordinary phenomena. To one of them not only I but Sehra, her sister Mina and a Goan servant-girl of ours can testify. I say "extraordinary", not "unprecedented". In fact, it was paralleled by a series of happenings to which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as well as Amrita and some others had been witness. We have all heard of how stones mysteriously started falling inside the "Old Guest House" (41, later 11, rue Francois Martin) in the winter of 1921, about a year and a half after the Mother had returned for good to Pondicherry. On Sri Aurobindo's advice she had taken up quarters in this building where he was himself residing. The strange story as told in Sri Aurobindo's own words is included in Dilip Kumar Roy's Among the Great and the Mother has recollected it in her Questions and Answers. The phenomenon I am going to describe took place in the first house I occupied — 13 rue Ananda Rangapillai — on my arrival in Pondicherry in 1954 for permanent residence. Sehra and I were staying downstairs and Mina in a room upstairs.
One night a brick-piece came crashing against Mina's door. The next day a similar object struck against a door on our ground floor. Stray pieces kept coming for a few more days. On the fourth day while Sehra was working in our garden in the early morning, a number of such objects began falling around her, though not with any murderous speed. When I came back from the Balcony Darshan she told me of the perplexing incident. The brick-pieces fell at several other times and we thought that somebody was doing mischief from the terrace of a house across the side-street, where some building job was in progress. I spoke to Kameshwar who was the Mother's man for all relations with
Page 175
the police. He came to our house and looked at the pieces. We were asked to wait a little before bringing the police upon the scene.
The same night we arranged a secret watch on the veranda of our first floor. From our hiding-places we kept an eye on the empty opposite terrace. Two hours passed but nothing happened. When we were on the point of turning in, a brick-piece flew at a terrific velocity from an unknown direction and broke into fragments against the outside wall of one of the rooms. The next day Sehra took a few samples of the missiles to the Mother and spoke to her about them. The Mother asked if we had lately dismissed a servant. She recalled how Datta had done the same in 1921 and stones had fallen within the house: the dismissed cook had employed a black-magician to harass Datta and the other inmates. She also inquired whether there was a young person of puberty-age at our place, for such a person could serve as a medium for the occult force exercised. We had dismissed a servant but we had dismissed a servant but we had no adolescent residing with us. Then she said: "You must see whether on any part of the house cryptic signs have been chalked. If they are there, rub them off. If they are not there, the phenomenon is directly an occult one: beings of the Vital Plane are amusing themselves at your expense with the help of available bricks in the neighbourhood. I strongly suspect that they are responsible. But, if they are, I will take action at once."
We searched for cryptic signs. None could be discovered. The Mother was right. For, from that day no brick-pieces came furiously flying or slowly dropping. Peace was completely restored. Kameshwar was told not to bother the police. The Mother had turned off the invisible culprits by her own invisible means.
The second extraordinary phenomenon is very recent. The time was a little after 2 a.m. on 19 December 1978. I happened to be awake in bed. In the bed across the room Sehra started moaning very piteously. I thought she was doing so in sleep, as on some occasions she had done during a nightmare. As she went on moaning, I spoke loudly to her and then got up and touched her so as to rouse her from sleep.
She answered: "Someone has attacked me with a stick and
Page 176
beaten me on my head," I said: "It's only a bad dream. Don't worry." But she complained of severe pain in the head and shouted to our servant Lakshmi who was sleeping in the next room. I said: "There is no need to wake her. Tell me what you want." She went on shouting for Lakshmi. I called out also and Lakshmi came in.
Before this I had switched on the light. When Lakshmi came, I pulled back from Sehra's head the counterpane which had been over it. The sight before our eyes was horrible. Above the upper ridge of the left eye there was a huge ugly lump and a swelling along the bone between the eye and the ear. In the middle of the lump was a point where the skin seemed slightly abrased: it was a reddish spot as if the stroke of the stick had especially fallen there.
What we saw was unbelievable. How could a beating received on the head in a dream have such a strong physical effect? I have read accounts in journals of occultism in which people getting hurt in dreams showed visible marks. The Mother also has in one place spoken of the body showing signs of mishaps experienced in a dream. But never had I witnessed such a consequence and never could I have imagined that so concrete and severe an injury to the body might appear as the result of a nightmare.
If I had not been absolutely sure that Sehra had not got up and fallen somewhere, I would not have believed a nightmare had hurt her so grievously. But here was no room for doubt. She had not got up at all after she had been to the bathroom just before retiring at about 10.30 p.m. on the night of the 18th. Besides, if she had fallen in the bathroom or on the way to it or back from it she would have cried out from that place and not from under her counterpane in bed. I could at once have known — and so would Lakshmi or her daughter who early that night had been sleepless and later asserted that she had not heard Sehra go to the bathroom any time after 10.30 or so. Again, our bathroom door creaks very loudly whenever opened or closed and is likely to wake up anyone who is not too heavy a sleeper. It is quite certain from my own evidence as well as from that of others that the terrible hurt was received during a nightmare.
Sehra asked Lakshmi to apply lightly a balm to the hurt
Page 177
area. She also asked for water to drink. The great pain continued for some time, accompanied by a splitting headache. We did our best to make her comfortable. I sat by her, soothing her and invoking the Mother's help. Gradually she fell asleep.
At about 3.15 she woke up, wanting to go to the bathroom. I took her there. When she saw her face in the mirror she was amazed at the gravity of the hurt.
I brought her back to bed and she slept up to 6.30 in the morning.
While drinking her coffee she recalled that she had started dreaming of going to meet the Mother. Before she could proceed she was crossed by some being and dealt a blow with a stick. The blow was aimed at her head and meant to break it. Somehow it was diverted to the area of the left eye and it landed on the temple above it.
The enormous swelling subsided just a little during the day by getting spread along the temple, but the entire part round the eye became a deep blackish red and the skin below the eye was puffed up. (It took Sehra nearly seven weeks to get back to normal.)
The whole event proves how dangerously one can be attacked by a hostile force in one's sleep. One must always call the Mother's protection and be on guard even in a dream. People have got up with pain in some parts of the body — e.g. the abdomen — after a nightmare. I was myself once attacked during one of my out-of-the-body rambles several years ago and the sensation was as if the spine had been smashed. But there was no physical injury left. Sri Aurobindo in Savitri has written of how a spiritual worker in the subtle world
Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes
And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.
But I think that in the Ashram's history the case I have reported is the first in which a misadventure in the dream-state got translated so substantially in the body.
I may end by striking a spiritually optimistic note. When I had an occasion to relate the incident to Huta, she suddenly lighted upon an implication I had not guessed. I had seen only the frightful possibility of hostile blows having
Page 178
more and more gross-physical consequences. I had not let my mind appraise all-round the critical point at which the workings behind the scene might have arrived. But she exclaimed: "What has happened shows that the Divine Force also can now have a direct effect upon the body. If the dark powers have this new possibility, the inner Light and the higher Consciousness can just as well emerge into the body with concrete changes in it if we are truly receptive!"
Page 179
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.