The Mother : Contact
THEME/S
7
(a)
When the Mother's son, André, by the painter Henri Morisset who had married her in the studio-days of her late teens, was to come on a visit to the Ashram on 4th November 1949 after a separation from the Mother for 34 years, she was reported to have joked: "I don't know what he looks like now. I only hope he hasn't become bald." She must have been pleased to find that though his hair was not quite bushy his head was far from having reached the billiard-ball state. The reunion of Maman and fils was said to have been a warm one. The Ashramites were very glad to see the Mother's one and only son. I happened to be on a visit to the Ashram from Bombay in this period.
André was a handsome and affable person, with a fine poise of mind. He was invited to the houses of many Ashramites and the enthusiastic welcome he received included an affectionate laudatory poem by Pujalal. When he left, Kameshwar accompanied him in the car to see him off at the Madras airport. After Kameshwar had returned, the Mother talked to us more or less as follows: "Kameshwar was all curiosity to ask Andre whether he had always known who I am. It seems André told him that he had the sense of the reality from an early age. When he was a boy, I never called any doctor to treat his illnesses. I always cured him by spiritual power. Whenever any harsh opinion was expressed by in-laws, little Andre used to defend me. Once at dinner a criticism of me was made and André rose up to declare spontaneously: 'Ma mère est la vérité' "¹
I asked the Mother why Andre had not come here all those
¹ "My mother is truth"
Page 67
years. She answered: "Why should he have? He had his own life to live in France; and actually, even while he was there, there was no real inner separation. Up till now it was as if there were a screen in my room and Andre was present behind that screen. What has happened now is simply that he has come out in front." Talking with André on one occasion I learned from him that a subtle contact always existed between the Mother and him and that even at a distance he would know if she wanted him to do something.
From my friendship with him and from the various types of work the Mother gave him I gathered that, although he was a graduate of the École Polytechnique of Paris which was a military school for turning out officers and engineers highly qualified in all the scientific disciplines, he had a multitude of talents and capacities and could cope intellectually with almost any kind of commission. I recall that when my associate editor on Mother India, Soli Albless, was planning to go to a philosophical conference at Brussels and some hitch temporarily arose, the Mother suggested that André should take my friend's paper with him and represent him in whatever discussions might ensue.
In later years, when André came on long visits to the Ashram I found that communication to and from the Mother could be at its clearest through him. When the Mother in old age, was a little hard of hearing, André's voice and way of speaking seemed to be on a wave-length most attuned to her. She also showed confidence in his capacity to convey her messages faithfully and I believe she has left some instructions with him about a few matters which would be helpful in case of uncertainty. One of the instructions is said to be that he should see whatever had remained unpublished from the tape-record of her talks in the series from which selections were appearing in the Bulletin under the title "Notes on the Way", she considered these talks as rather impromptu and therefore needing his scrutiny and judgment in case she could not attend to them. I hear that she told him Nolini too should go through the tape-record before its publication. A copy of the whole set covering many years used to be kept in a cabinet in her room. Subsequently it was found that the papers had been removed from there by the persons who had done the tape-recording. The
Page 68
Mother also referred another Ashram-member to the tapes, saying they might be consulted in order to get the type of information needed in the course of the work with which this member had been entrusted.
Of course, André would be the last person to announce publicly that the Mother had given him any special charge. He never forces anything on people's attention in personal matters and is always loth to take advantage of being the Mother's son. He knows too that being physically born from her is not the sole claim to being her child. To him the invocation which Sri Aurobindo's elder brother, Manmohan Ghose, made to his own mother in a moment of high poetic vision would come most naturally:
Augustest! dearest! whom no thought can trace,
Name murmuring out of birth's infinity.
Mother! like heaven's great face is thy sweet face,
Stupendous with the mystery of me.
Eyes, elder than the light; cheek, that no flower
Remembers; brow, at which my infant care
Gazed weeping up and saw the skies enshower
With tender rain of vast mysterious hair!
Thou at whose breast the sunbeams sucked, whose arms
Cradled the lisping ocean, art thou she,
Goddess, at whose dim heart the world's deep charms,
Tears, terrors, sobbing things, were yet to be?
She, from whose tearing pangs in glory first
I and the infinite wide heavens burst?
(b)
Even from the outward point of view the Mother's relationship with those whose souls had felt in her the Divine Creatrix or even moved towards her with a deep instinct and without any definite mental conception, was exactly as of a physical mother. Champaklal once told me that one could hardly imagine how far the Mother's intimate and tender Grace could go in dealing with certain disciples. However, I have observed that, no matter what closeness one may have to her, she never really gave in where the central truth of the Yoga was concerned. She could be very calm and cool and yet drive home certain aspects of a situation
Page 69
which her supposed "favourite" had failed to see. Actually, with those whom she considered really near in heart and open to her she felt could let herself come out with clear criticism, knowing that they would never misunderstand it and were always eager to stand face to face with the highest ideal. Such children of hers have told her repeatedly that she should never mince matters with them.
The Mother rarely asserted her motherhood unless the child plainly declared his wish for it. The true master is he who never longs to have disciples. I remember how, on my first arrival in the Ashram, I expressed my desire to do Yoga, saying dramatically: "I have seen all of life. Now I want nothing except God." The Mother very sweetly asked: "How old are you?" I answered in a dignified tone: "Twenty-three." Then she said: "And at twenty-three you have seen all of life?" I was a little taken aback at this splash of cold water. The Mother continued: "You are very young. You must not decide anything in a hurry. Stay in the Ashram, look around, see how you feel and calmly come to a decision." Something had already chosen the Mother, and I am sure she had also chosen me. But I realised in the next few months that, under the pressure of the Ashram atmosphere, several sides of me which in my initial enthusiasm I had thought to have outgrown were still there and posing all kinds of problems. I had to tackle them; they were both mental inclinations and sensational-emotional proclivities. The true turn to the Yoga came when, apart from spiritual ideation, something opened in the heart. Then the Mother's child that was deep hidden within rose to the front and was spontaneously accepted as such by the Mother.
I did not want any barrier to exist between her and me. I was anxious to be pulled up by her if she felt that anywhere I showed unconsciousness of belonging to her. How she took me up at my word may be seen from a small incident. Once I spoke to her about a letter which had come from my mother, sister and brother who were at Bombay. I said: "I've just heard from home." The Mother, with a slightly ironical smile, exclaimed: "I have caught you out. You said 'home'. Where is your 'home'?" I understood at once that even in our outermost habit-ridden being we must let the inner truth, the soul's choice and destiny, shine
Page 70
through. The commitment to the Integral Yoga has to be integral.
Sometimes I have wondered at the Mother's inexhaustible patience — a patience stemming from a boundless understanding of one's nature. Sri Aurobindo has written that she and he went through more difficulties than anyone else either now or in the past, for theirs has been the task of being at the core of all the psycho-physical problems of evolving humanity and first solving them in themselves before assuring the frantic or dejected disciple that the apparently insurmountable obstacles can be got over. "How can you trust in our word of confidence unless you believe that we have been through the same complexity of troubles and succeeded in untying every 'knot intrinsicate' of life?" — such in effect is the stand of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This diversified experience within themselves of all types of natures and all species of problems has given them a sympathetic and helpful tolerance that is unique.
I know from my own example how they could hold on to the best part in a disciple's nature and adjust themselves even to some vagaries on his side and to certain trends of behaviour persisting from a particular cultural and social background. They were aware that I had a very westernised mind and a temperament with quite a bit of affinity to the Latin Quarter of Paris. They gave me a lot of liberty of movement and contact.
They were themselves astonishingly broad-minded and full of laughter at the foibles of erring humanity, though they never stopped insisting on the ideals of the Truth they had come to establish. Sri Aurobindo's uninhibited humour may be gauged from a little incident connected with my experiment in learning to ride a cycle. After some private practice on a small scale I took a machine out from Benjamin, the sadhaka who used to keep the cycle-store. On returning home from the long adventure I wrote to Sri Aurobindo:
"My first cycle-ride went off very well. Just one fall into the gutter. A pedal-crank got slightly loose, I had it set right. Scratches on the chain-guard. Couldn't be removed at once; nothing very serious — a few touches of paint will remedy them. I hope the Mother won't mention anything about the pedal to Benjamin."
Page 71
Sri Aurobindo's reply ran:
"All right. You remind me of the servant girl who had an illegitimate child but pleaded to her mistress. 'Please, maam, it is only a very little one." (21.3.1935)
The first two years of my life in the Ashram were rather ascetic by way of reaction from the manner of living to which I had been accustomed before. During them the foundation of Yoga was laid. The intense opening of what Sri Aurobindo terms the psychic being took place. The beard that I started growing and the hair that I refrained from getting cut framed the soul's emergence with an appearance which people dubbed Christlike. But there was an element of fear in the sanctity — a kind of early-Christian flight into a desert in order to escape from the world, the flesh and the devil. When the inner work done in this period was over and the time arrived for the superstructure to be raised upon the part — ascetic part — psychic foundation, the old K. D. Sethna reemerged with his complex modernism so that a proper natural form might be taken by the growing spiritual personality. A reaction set in to the earlier reaction itself. I got into touch with life outside the Ashram and grew acquainted with one or two families in the town. I did not hide the fact from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, but, although the Ashram regime was fairly strict in this period as compared to what it later became, they hardly ever interfered with my freedom.
(c)
Udar — at that time Laurie Pinto — came to Pondicherry a few years after my arrival, to set up a business here in collaboration with Monsieur Gaebelé, member of a very influential French family and himself the husband of a highly cultured lady and the father of four charming daughters, two of them strikingly beautiful. Madame Gaebelé was a devotee of the Mother and the teacher of French to a small group of Ashramites including myself. When Udar arrived, I was already on very friendly terms with the Gaebelé family and soon struck an extremely close friendship with him. He was as westernised as I and had gone one better by having stayed in England for some years and got engaged to an
Page 72
English girl. Although I was doing sadhana and writing poetry, philosophy and literary criticism under Sri Aurobindo's inspiration, I still found the time to meet all my friends.
Sometimes I used to return pretty late at night. My chum premanand and, the then librarian of the Ashram, who stayed in the same building, the Old Guest House, where the Mother had given me the room in which Sri Aurobindo had once stayed for nine years, would always willingly open the courtyard gate for me. But I suppose my late entry was accompanied by an amount of noise which did not agree with the spiritual slumbers of the other residents. Complaints must have gone to the Mother. She must have been expected to cut short my "strayings" from the "razor-sharp path". But, to the surprise of all, she supplied me with a spare key to the house gate, so that I might steal in as quietly as possible at any hour of the night.
Perhaps my redeeming feature was that I had no secrets from the Mother. When I experimented in a spot of wine-bibbing I kept her in touch with its effects. She joked with me at first, saying: "It is quite a test of one's self-control to see if, with some alcohol inside one, one can move one's feet along a straight line drawn with a chalk." Later, when I discovered that a certain craving was felt in my abdominal region, as if there were a small hand in it with clutching fingers all the time. I wrote to the Mother that I saw now what really lay behind the urge to drink and that I had decided to give up my little experiment. She replied: "I am happy at your resolution and I hope you will keep to it. I was going to write to you must choose between seeing me and drink — for I would not see you if you went on drinking — but I am glad to hear that you have made the resolution already." (11-10-1935)
Actually my dallying with Bacchus lasted no more than a week. My fondness for gambling at cards persisted longer. Udar and the Gaebelés proved very good company for this indulgence. From my college days I had the gambling instinct. I put the gains of many a scholarship at stake. The instinct found play in that most glorious, though also pretty ruinous, game of chance: horse-racing. Having been a great lover of equus caballus and consequently a rider too (despite
Page 73
my lame left leg) for at least twenty out of my life's twenty-three years before joining the Ashram, it was an extra-fascinating challenge to me to catch the dominant theme from amid a Wagnerian harmony-hubbub of galloping hooves, and set my wits against the unknown to pluck the heart of the elusive future. When I started reading Sri Aurobindo's books I gave quite a whoop of delight when I found at the end of the chapter "The Planes of Our Existence" in The Synthesis of Yoga the sentence: "... the Purusha has sought in the material universe, as if in a wager with itself, the conditions of the greatest difficult." The attempt of Yoga too Sri Aurobindo views in terms of gambling when he formulates the discouraging and restricting advice of the wise ones and exclaims in response:
Who is the nomad then? who is the seeker, the gambler risking
All for a dream in a dream, the old and the sure and the stable
Flung as a stake for a prize that was never yet laid on the table?
Our hazardous earthly existence itself Sri Aurobindo's Savitri calls:
The wager wonderful, the game divine.
Of course, brag, poker and pontoon are poor aspects of what in general Sri Aurobindo says about the whole many-layered process of nature:
All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle.
Even horse-racing cannot transmit the profound excitement of the world-adventure as seen by Sri Aurobindo, but in a semi-perverted way it used to relive for me in Bombay the humdrumness of a too conventionally regulated living. Pondicherry could not offer even the thinnest shadow of its thrill. My eyes were starved of the very sight of a horse. But when gambling at cards offered itself, my Yogic detachment and calm could not quite push it away. This too I kept the Mother informed about. She explained to me the occult wire-pulling of forces behind all games of chance. Subtle entities make sport of human beings when the latter think they are being clever at these entertainments. The tactics of these entities is to give us some striking luck and elate us as well
Page 74
as create a false sense of our capacities. They lead us to risk more and more money and then, when we are most confident and hopeful, bring us down with a crash. The more acutely miserable we become, the more they jump in joy.
I dropped my brag, poker and pontoon when the Mother opened my eyes.
Apropos of playing cards, the Mother recounted to me an occasion when she had gambled. I shall tell the story later when I touch on Paul Richard's role in the Mother's life; for, her gambling experiment took place in connection with him.
My friendship with Udar, which was not only on the gambler's level, drew him more and more towards the momentous experiment with both the True and the New that was Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. Communications went on, time after time, through me between the Mother and him. She evidently found in him a bold and large nature and, not long after he had married Mona who had sailed out from England to join her life with his, the Mother took both of them along with their baby-girl Judy Anne (later Gauri) under her wings.
(d)
The Mother's unfailing comprehension of the diverse sides of my being came into view most clearly when I stayed away from the Ashram for several years. A number of times during my first six years in the Ashram there were earnest invitations from my grandfather and mother to visit them. When I refused to go, my mother, brother and sister came to Pondicherry year after year. But grandfather was obstinate and thought it infra dignitatem to visit a fellow nearly fifty years his junior. I also held out. But there was some weakness in myself which cropped up again and again. The Mother tried her best to keep me in the Ashram — and I obeyed her. In 1934 grandfather sent one more invitation, this time pleading that he was getting older and older and might take his leave any time. Actually he lived on for twenty-four years more and died just a few months before he could hit a century. But his threat of making an exit in his seventies sounded rather serious. I put it before the Mother. Now she said, "Yes." I was astonished. My next
Page 75
feeling was of disappointment that she did not say. "No." It was as if she were cutting me loose from herself. A tinge of fear also crept in at the thought of a maelstrom of life like Bombay.
I wrote a number of letters to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. One was in connection with a spell of danger to the Ashram brought about by some hostile elements in the British Government which wanted Sri Aurobindo dislodged from Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo suspended correspondence with us for a fortnight in order to concentrate his Yogic Force on the situation. When the situation had cleared I wrote to him that during the dangerous period I felt as if I could throw away my life with the utmost ease if thereby I could defend the Mother and him. I made an analysis of my own character — the positive and the negative sides — and asked him whether I was right. He replied:
"Your analysis is correct, but the doubts are not your own, they come from outside. It is true you have a capacity for heroism which can come out on the surface if your will helps, but usually it needs difficult circumstances to come out. In ordinary circumstances your vital tends to become dull and needs excitement. You must be careful to resist the encroachment of the outer atmosphere when you go to Bombay." (7-2-1934)
In the interview before my departure I asked the Mother how my life should run in Bombay. She said that I did not need to put special restraints on the ordinary course of things but eat, drink and live normally as a person in Bombay would do. At the end of my talk I said: "Please give me one promise. Never let go your hold on me. Even if something in me wants to leave you, never accept it." She answered: "I am like a fairy godmother. Whatever one wishes to have, I can grant. If you wish to separate from me, that too I can grant. But if you want me never to let go my hold on you, I will keep you in my hands forever."
Before parting I put one arm around her shoulders and drew her near to me. She led me to a big photograph of Sri Aurobindo and asked me to kneel before it. The same night I took the train to Madras. The whole journey was full of her face before my shut eyes. I could hardly sleep. I was going far from her after six and a half years.
Page 76
My experience in the turmoil of Bombay was hardly pleasant except for the fact of meeting dear family-members. Until I established some sort of balance between me and the city-whirl, every face I saw seemed to come hurling like a coconut towards me and hitting against my chest. Soon after my arrival I contracted scarlet fever, bringing a high temperature that went down by slow degrees over almost a week. It was 105 F, one whole day, then 104 the next day and so on. A severe headache persisted all through. I am a person who, despite sustained reading and prolonged brain-work, never suffers from headaches. Only during this fit of fever and once before when I had an attack of bubonic plague I experienced pain in the head — indeed pain with a terrific vengeance. But all through the illness I had the firm assurance of a cure and not the slightest idea of any danger. The Mother later told me that it was my sense of certainty of her help that made the curative power of her Grace work so well and save me from the possibility of meningitis which is a common sequel to scarlet fever.
After I returned to the Ashram I felt an extreme pull towards the Mother and, looking back on my seven years of stay in the Ashram, I wrote to her: "Pardon my writing to you without any specific reason; but I felt like telling you that you are my darling. In spite of my thousand and three imperfections, this one sense remains in me — that you are my Mother, that I am born from your heart. It is the only truth I seem to have realised in all these years. A very unfortunate thing, perhaps, that I have realised no other truth; but I deeply thank you that I have been enabled to feel this much at least."
Sri Aurobindo replied: "It is an excellent foundation for the other truths that are to come — for they all result from it." The Mother added under his reply: "My blessings are always with you." (17-9-1934)
My second visit to Bombay happened in 1936. Before leaving, I wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "Won't you tell me something to which I can always turn for help and contact during my stay in Bombay?" The answer was: "Remember the Mother and, though physically far from her, try to feel her with you and act according to what your inner being tells you would be her Will. Then you will be best able to feel
Page 77
her presence and mine and carry our atmosphere around you as a protection and a zone of quietude and light accompanying you everywhere." (12-12-1936)
When I went to Bombay for the third time — at the end of February 1938 — circumstances so developed that I was in great perplexity in the matter of returning as planned. I stayed on for over a year and then wrote to the Mother: "My heart is pulled towards you and I want to come back. But certain things are keeping me here and I feel that they will keep drawing me even if I return at present. What should I do? But please know that whether I come just now or not I cannot ever break away from you. I pray to you not to abandon me."
The Mother's reply, dated April 24, 1939 ran: "My dear child, blessings of the day....Just received your letter of 21st; it came to me directly (without the written words) three days ago, probably when you were writing it, and my silent answer was categorical; remain there until the necessity of being here will become so imperative that all else will completely lose all value for you. My answer now is exactly the same. I want only to assure you that we are not abandoning you and that you will always have our help and protection."
The letter is notable not only for its proof of the Mother's occult powers and its deep understanding of my all-too-human two-ways-tugged being but also for the evolutionary truth it enshrines. Our choice of the spiritual life must come ultimately as a sheer necessity of our nature: then alone is it the seed of a true growth into godhead. Merely mental decisions will not work. Not even a desire to obey the Divine's call is enough. A spontaneous leap from within has to take place. Then no experience will be a superimposition, a pre- carious thing however grand. All will be a glad flowering and whatever arrives will stay for good.
This does not mean that we may wander about with a lazy reliance on the Divine to do everything for us. We must create the right conditions for the soul to get a chance to emerge. But until the soul truly peeps out, even if it does not fully emerge, we are not ready to plunge into the uncharted ocean of the Infinite.
Page 78
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.