The Mother : Contact
THEME/S
6
(a)
"When anyone writes about me, all the hair on my head stands up. Don't think I am merely being modest. I know where I come from and who I am. But it is the Truth that is important. Stress on the Person seems so much to narrow it."
This is what the Mother told me when I was on a visit to Pondicherry from Bombay. It referred to an article I had written on her in a Bombay newspaper. Having learned my lesson, I took the proper measures when I projected an article for her eightieth birthday in 1958. I announced my plan to her. She opened her eyes wide. At once I added: "Yes, I'm going to write on you but I'm not going to show you my article before publishing it." She looked at me incredulously. Pranab was present and he looked both surprised and amused. I explained: "If I let you see it beforehand, you won't let me say all that I want." The article in question is the one entitled: The Mother — Some General Truths and Particular Facts. It was based on notes taken a few years earlier by a young sadhak after an interview with the Mother and it also incorporated a few talks of mine with her as well as a number of philosophical reflections relevant to some of the occasions and topics recorded.
When it was published and the Mother glanced at it, she spoke to me about a certain incident I had reported of her girlhood. The incident concerned her falling from an elevated place and landing below quite safely on her feet as if she had been carried and taken care of. She said: "There is an inner story to it. What happened outwardly might have been possible even for one who had some control over his body by gymnastic and athletic practice. At a convenient
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time I'll tell you the inner story." Unfortunately the chance never came for the narration. I find that the Mother, in one of her talks to the Ashram children, has related the same incident but more or less in the way I had done. No special inner story accompanies her account. I wish I had pressed her to tell it to me, instead of deciding to wait on her convenience.
It is not in my power to guess what remained unspoken. But perhaps I may try to reflect a little on those words of hers in connection with my Bombay article: "I know where I come from and who I am." They remind me of another statement she made: " If people don't know that I have come from above, they don't know the very first thing about me." This is, of course, a private declaration of one who was conscious that she was an Avatar. But do we understand Avatarhood in its various bearings?
Sri Aurobindo interprets as a parable of evolution the Hindu idea of the procession of the ten Avatars. Vishnu the Supreme Godhead makes a progressive series of incarnations, so that — to take for our immediate purpose the human portion of the traditional sequence — He who was Vamana (the Dwarf Avatar, the Divine in the primitive and mainly physical human stage) becomes afterwards ParasuRama ("Rama of the Axe", the Divine in the kinetic or vitalistic phase of humanity) and then Rama, son of Dasaratha (the Divine as the mental Man, the embodiment of Dharma, the perfect Moral Consciousness) and, again, Krishna (the Divine as the "Overman", openly exemplifying a more-than-mental Consciousness, what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, the world of the Great Gods) and, later, Buddha who shoots beyond the cosmic formula to the sheer Transcendent but to that Transcendent's absolutely immobile aspect (Nirvana, an indescribable Permanence void of all that we know as existence, or, in positive Vedantic nomenclature, Nirguna Brahman, Silent Quality-less Eternal Being) and, finally, Kalki who will come to set right the balance by bringing the Transcendent's power to base on the Transcendent's peace a new earth-order, a terrestrial Heaven. In this tale of evolutionary humanity we would indentify Kalki with Sri Aurobindo (the Master of the Integral Yoga, the Yoga not only of liberation but also of the
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perfect divine dynamism, the Supermind, the all-transformative Truth-Consciousness manifesting as Super- man).
But, if the Mother is as much an Avatar, the supramental feminine counterpart of Sri Aurobindo, what Divine Incarnations was she in the past? When we think of Sita, Rama's wife, or of Radha, the chief feminine figure in Krishna's Godlike play, lila, on earth, we do not bring in the designation "Avatar". They are the closest to it and yet there is a line of demarcation. If the Mother was Sita or Radha, she could not be said to have made an unambiguous Avataric appearance in history. Far more doubtful would be such an appearance in any other woman prominently connected with God's work in the world. The Mother is supposed to have been Mirabai as well as Joan of Arc, but neither of these, for all their wonderful achievements, can count as Avatars. Much less, though still glorious, the births attributed to her as Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt, Cleopatra at a later date and Elizabeth of England. As Mona Lisa, she was a mysterious inspirer of the greatest art, but nothing more. Her present birth seems to be her first manifestation of Avatarhood. It could be that Avatarhood was not needed by her in the past and some other role short of it was sufficient, or the possibility is that the Avataric appearance is the culmination of a long series of births in which the being plays the part of the Vibhuti, one who is missioned and impelled by the Divine without the instrument's awareness of the source of its great destiny and who, for all its greatness, is still, as Sri Aurobindo¹ says. "the Divine working within the ordinary human limits".
Since the Mother stands on an equal and exactly complementary footing with Sri Aurobindo, and since her manifestation as an Avatar now is without a preceding Avatar-series, how should we think of Sri Aurobindo's having such a series behind him for himself? Would there not be a disequilibrium in their historical functions and achievements? There is also the fact that from Sri Aurobindo's letters we can derive the certitude of at least two Vibhuti-figures
¹ Guidance from Sri Aurobindo: Letters to a Young Disciple — Nagin Doshi (Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry, 1974), p. 285.
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of him in the past: Augustus Caesar and Leonardo da Vinci. Should we not take all his previous births to have formed only Vibhutis, just as the Mother's evidently did?
Going by a certain set of his correspondence with a disciple, we would be inclined to say "Yes," We may string together and interpret a number of his statements in it. When asked: "What is the incarnation? From what plane does it take place?", he¹ answered: "An incarnation is the Divine Consciousness and Being manifesting through the body. It is possible from any plane." This must imply either that the Supreme Godhead takes hold of a desired plane and brings its characteristic to earth in a sovereign shape or, better still, that He has a station of Himself on every plane and incarnates from there according to the needs of evolutionary history. Thus He incarnates as Rama from His station on the plane of Mind, and as Krishna from the Overmind plane. Similarly His incarnation as Sri Aurobindo is from His Supermind station. The common factor in all these incarnations is the Supreme Godhead himself. We have a pointer to this Godhead when Sri Aurobindo,² after equating Krishna with the Overmind Divinity, continues: "Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the Overmind leading it towards the Ananda." This at the same time indicates the aspects of Bliss (Ananda) as a speciality of Krishna and echoes the ancient Indian spiritual vision of the Divine Bliss-Self (Anandamaya) as the creator and supporter of all things. The Bliss-Self, acting from one plane or another and incarnating from any plane, is the Supreme Godhead behind all the incarnations and the unifier of them all.
The second issue is whether the Avatar is a sheer descent from above, taking hold of some developed human being and using his outer personality for his manifestation, Sri Aurobindo's reply³ is: "that would be a possession not an Avatar. An Avatar is supposed to be from birth." Here the third issue arises: Does the Avatar, in being born as such,
¹ Ibid., p. 278.
² Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953), p. 208.
³ Guidance from Sri Aurobindo, p. 279.
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follow in general the same conditions as attend the birth of any man? What these conditions are as well as what the Avatar does we gather from Sri Aurobindo:¹ "Each soul at its birth takes from the cosmic mind, life and matter to shape a new external personality for himself. What prevents the Divine from doing the same? What is continued from birth to birth is the inner being." Evidently the Avatar is not only a descent from above but also an "inner being", a soul, evolving from below an individual psychic entity passing from life to life with a new mind, vital being and body are each birth in order to compass a manifold experience.
The next problem is expressed in the query put to Sri Aurobindo about himself and the Mother: "We believe that both you and the Mother are Avatars. But is it only in this life that both of you have shown your divinity? It is said that you and she have been on the earth constantly since its creation. What were you doing during your previous lives?" The answer² was: "Carrying on the evolution." The words suggest that the earth's evolution was carried on by the activity of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in a form other than Avatarhood. The suggestion becomes quite explicit when Sri Aurobindo³ says about their past personalities: "... there is no reason why the Mother and I should cast off the veil which hung over these personalities and reveal the Divine behind them. Those lives were not meant for any such purpose...4 Your reasoning would only have some force if the presence on earth then were as the Avatar but not if it was only as a Vibhuti.”5 Both these answers were given to questions involving what was the biggest puzzle to the disciple's mind: "... how is it that even Sri Krishna, Buddha or Christ could not detect your presence in this world?... If you were on the earth constantly it would mean that you were here when those great beings descended. Whatever your external cloak, how could you hide your inner self — the true divinity — from them?"6 The sense is that neither Sri Krishna, Buddha nor Christ — in spite of being Avatars — were past births of Sri Aurobindo. And in view of the advent of several Avatars before Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
¹ Ibid
² Ibid., p. 282.
³ Ibid., p. 283.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., pp. 282, 283.
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and in view of the affirmation that no Avataric manifestation in the past could be equated to past forms of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, it was pertinently asked: "Since you and the Mother were on the earth from the beginning what was the need for Avatars coming down here one after another?" The response¹ was absolutely definitive: "We were not on earth as Avatars." The conclusion seems inevitable that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were Avatars only in their present lives and that none of the other Avatars could be said to be they. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother came as Vibhutis at the time of those Avatars, and worked veiled either where these Avatars were or at some other place which served as the right context for whatever they had to do.
The veiled work, whether at the time of some Avatar or at another phase of history, can be affirmed from the Mother's answer on January 23, 1960 to a student's inquiry about Sri Aurobindo's earlier births: "It is said that Sri Aurobindo in a past life took an active part in the French Revolution. Is it true?" She wrote back: "You can say that all through history Sri Aurobindo played an active part. Especially in the most important movements of history he was there — and playing the most important, the leading part. But he was not always visible." The sense here is surely twofold. First, even when in the fore-front of events the one whom we know now as the Avatar in the form of Sri Aurobindo did not manifest Avatarhood every time. Secondly, even when he was the moving spirit he did not invariably occupy the forefront.
The Mother did not directly refer to the French Revolution, But Sri Aurobindo's presence in it was disclosed to me by Amrita. Amrita said: "Sri Aurobindo told us that he could still feel the edge of the guillotine across his neck. The memory was so vivid." Such a vividness of memory was once admitted by Sri Aurobindo himself to me in another context. He wrote that he had a psychic memory of Dilip as Horace: what was sous-entendu was his own birth as Augustus, who was Horace's patron and whose essential role in Europe's evolution Sri Aurobindo went on to outline to me just as he outlined that of Leonardo.
¹ Ibid., p.285
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To return to our theme: the picture that emerges of Avatarhood would be as follows. There are various lines of Avatarhood. Each line has a separate soul developing from below and presided over by the Divine stationed on one plane or another. This soul passes through various lives as world-helping Vibhutis until the time arrives for the presiding Divine to descend from above into it and constitute the Avataric manifestation. Once that manifestation has occurred, the line concerned has reached its climax, and its work has culminated. The line of mental Avatarhood ended with the appearance of Rama. Krishna marked the close of the line of the Overmind Avatar. The grand finale of the line of Supramental Avatar was Sri Aurobindo. All these Avatars are different in regard to their evolutionary lines and are one and the same solely in the supreme Godhead who they basically are but who has diverse plane-poises or at least starting-points on diverse planes.
The Mother has employed a terminology of her own in speaking about the soul passing through several lives and about the presiding divinity. In her talk of May 21, 1958, while discussing the Ramayana story symbolically, she distinguishes Hanuman as representing "the evolutionary man" from Rama "the involutionary being, the one who comes from above". She explains: "The evolutionary being is the one that's the continuation of the animals, and the other is a being from higher worlds.... But in the evolutionary being there is that central light which is the origin of the psychic being and which will develop into the psychic being., and when the psychic being is full-formed, there is a moment when it can unite with a being from above which can incarnate in it. So this being from above which descends into a psychic being is an involutionary being — a being of the Overmind plane or from elsewhere."
The Mother's explanation provides a truth which holds for all souls. Every soul and not only that of the future Avatar finds its consummation by receiving into itself its own archetype from the higher worlds. An archetype of it exists on all the planes above, just as the Divine has his station on each of them, but at any period of history the one which it will receive will depend upon the plane from which the Avatar has come down for that particular period. In general
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all souls, including the soul meant to be the Avatar, are on a par: all have their corresponding "involutionary" beings. But we have to visualise on every plane a central involutionary self which is the destined Avatar's and around it the other involutionary selves. If there were not a general parity, the Avatar's pioneering life would not be significant for the rest of embodied souls but constitute a shining freak rather than a guiding light for all Nature. The temporary difference is that the Avatar is conscious, overtly, of his divinity, he is aware both of the plane from which there is the divine manifestation and of the Supreme Godhead who has that plane-poise, whereas the Avatar's followers have to develop the divine consciousness. However, we must add that even the Avatar has to go through a sadhana before he becomes the Guru, for otherwise he would not be the true meaningful pioneer in human evolution. On the other hand, it is very necessary for the disciples to remember, side by side with the Guru's example-setting sadhana, the fact of his descent from above, the dynamic truth of Avatarhood stressed by the Mother.
In relation to the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's Avatarhood, the earlier Incarnation that was Krishna has a specially sympathetic and intimate reality. Krishna, the Overmind divinity incarnate, who declared in the Gita his own transcendent Godhead no less than his universal form and his individual Mastership, and who in the self-disclosure at Brindavan let loose the intensest power of the soul's love for and surrender to the Supreme Beauty and Bliss in terms of the very body's sensation — this Krishna is called by Sri Aurobindo "the guide of my Yoga"¹ and was the name which the Mother in France instinctively gave to the lightward-leading presence of Sri Aurobindo in her occult experiences before she ever heard of the Yogi of Supermind. Sri Aurobindo has declared that the work done by him and the Mother is a furtherance of Krishna's and that the descent of Overmind into their physical beings on November 24, 1926 prepared the descent of Supermind and Ananda.² He has termed the Overmind's descent the descent of
¹ Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, p. 209.
² Ibid., p. 208.
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Krishna,¹ with whom, as the result of that event, he "realised identity"² and thereby moved towards the descent of his own supramental status.
(b)
We may cast a glance at this Krishna who, from among the past spiritual figures, has a unique place in Sri Aurobindo's general scheme of the spiritual life. How does he emerge from the Gita which is the authoritative scripture on both Avatarhood and Vibhutihood?
No doubt, Krishna says that he comes from age to age to uphold the Dharma, but does he make it quite clear anywhere in the Gita that the long line of births preceding his Avatarhood at the time of the Bharata War counted any Avatar-life, say, as Rama who in the Hindu procession of the Avatars is held to have come before him? Actually Krishna mentions no name of any past Avatar as once having been himself. Rama is indeed mentioned but solely in the phrase: "Among the warriors I am Rama" (X.31). Rama is listed only as a pre-eminent warrior who, like other pre-eminent figures, is regarded as a Vibhuti of Krishna.
Even the Vibhuti-idea which Krishna illustrates at great length is nowhere given a directly personal connection with his own past births. In dilating on Vibhutis, he alludes (X.37) to himself as being a Vibhuti at the very time that he is Krishna the Avatar, meaning thereby a Vibhuti to be whoever is outstanding in any category of the Divine's work in the world during all periods. He equates himself to being in varied ways the most pre-eminent in every category. And when he speaks in this style he refers not merely to past top echelons but also to contemporary ones: "I am Vasudeva [Krishna] among the Vrishnis, Dhananjaya [Arjuna] among the Pandavas, Vyasa among the sages, the seer-poet Ushanas among the seer-poets" (X. 37). Here the second and third names are of Krishna's own contemporaries who would have their proper lines of earlier births, which would have no identity with Krishna's line proper. How should we gauge the strange situation before us?
¹ Ibid. ² Ibid., p. 209.
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A Supreme Person — "Purushottama" in the Gita's own language — may be conceived, whose self-expressions, both as Avatars and as Vibhutis, may be along several birth-lines, only one of which is the line represented by the figure face to face with Arjuna and with Vyasa as Krishna. The Godhead speaking as Krishna in the Gita may be thought of as having a beyond-Krishna status which finds tongue in an utterance like the one we have just cited. Such a status is in fact attributed to himself by Krishna among the diversity of statuses which he claims as his. Sri Aurobindo¹ recognises it in his comprehensive phrase: "the Krishna of the Gita who is the transcendent Godhead, Paramatma, Parabrahma, Purushottama, the cosmic Deity, Master of the universe, Vasudeva who is all. Immanent in the heart of all creatures..." And such a status would be capable of issuing a multiplicity of Avatars who do not run on a straight single line. Significantly, Krishna, instead of corresponding to the popular Puranic idea of himself as an incarnation of Vishnu running on a straight single line with other incarnations of that member of the Divine Trimurti, makes this member a Vibhuti of his by saying: "Among the Adityas I am Vishnu..." (X. 21). Evidently, to Krishna the Adityas, solar sons of the Infinite Mother-Goddess Aditi, are a class of supernatural beings and Vishnu is its outstanding exemplar or Vibhuti. Like Rama the warrior, he occurs in the Gita's Vibhuti-chapter. All in all, the Gita's doctrine of Avatarhood apropos of Krishna looks far from being as simple as one might imagine from the common Indian notion of the theme.
From all the enumerations connected with it, this doctrine does not counter in any way the picture emerging from the hints we have picked up in Sri Aurobindo about the back-ground of his own Avatarhood and the Mother's.
(c)
And yet there is another side to the medal, equally stamped with the Gita and Sri Aurobindo.
It is true that Krishna does not name for himself any specific past life — Rama, Parasu-Rama, Vamana or any other
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— as a manifestation of Avatarhood. But he definitely mentions a chain of his own past births: "Many are my lives that are past and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know but thou knowest not. O scourge of the foe" (IV. 5). And he associates his supreme divinity with them when he declares: "Though I am the unborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, though I am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my self-Maya" (IV. 6.) This declaration he follows up with those two ringing famous unforgettable statements: "When so ever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil- doers, for the enthroning of the Right, I am born from age to age" (IV. 7,8). It appears impossible to deny that, if not in all, at least in some of those "lives that are past," Krishna "the Lord of all existences" has loosed himself forth into birth as an Avatar.
Precisely such is the interpretation by Sri Aurobindo of Krishna's several assertions about himself in the Gita. In the expression "many are my lives that are past", especially when coupled with these succeeding words —" and thine also, O Arjuna" — Sri Aurobindo¹ finds "an air of reference to" Krishna's "various lives", and he adds: "In that case all these many births could not be full incarnations, — many may have been merely Vibhuti births carrying on the thread from incarnation to incarnation." Sri Aurobindo² touches on the same subject when he writes : ".. it must be remembered that Krishna speaks of many lives in the past, not only a few supreme ones and secondly that while he speaks of himself as the Divine, in one passage he describes himself as a Vibhuti, vrsninam vasudevah. We may therefore fairly assume that in many lives he manifested as the Vibhuti veiling the fuller Divine Consciousness. If we admit that the object of Avatarhood is to lead the evolution, this is quite reasonable, the Divine appearing as Avatar in the great transitional stages and as Vibhutis to aid the lesser transitions."
¹ On Yoga II, Tome One (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1958), p. 409.
² Ibid., pp. 405-406.
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Thus the popular notion of Krishna coming every time as the Avatar is not accepted by Sri Aurobindo. He ascribes a large number of Vibhuti-lives to him, yet he does speak of these lives as bridges between a small number of Avataric ones. So, to Sri Aurobindo, the Gita's Krishna comes as an Avatar more than once: not only at the end of his birth-series but also in the course of his sequence of lives Krishna manifests Avatarhood.
One more letter of Sri Aurobindo seems to link up, though rather indirectly, with the Gita's Krishna who is "born from age to age". Here Sri Aurobindo brings in the topic of the life-series of an Avatar undergoing a process similar to the natural one through which the life-series of each of us passes. The Avatar is not simply a descent from above; there is an evolution of a soul-centred mould, physical-vital-mental, in which at certain critical points the descending Avatar Self is revealed. The letter¹ runs:
"...each being in a new birth prepares a new mind, life and body — otherwise John Smith would always be John Smith and would have no chance of being Piyush Kanti Ghose. Of course inside there are old personalities contributing to the new life — but I am speaking of the new visible personality, the outer man, mental, vital, physical. It is the psychic being that keeps the link from birth to birth and makes all the manifestations of the same person. It is therefore to be expected that the Avatar should take on a new personality each time, a personality suited for the new times, work, surroundings. In my own view of things, however, the new personality has a series of Avatar births behind him, births in which the intermediate evolution has been followed and assisted from age to age."
This passage has a particular significance because of the phrase: "In my own view of things..." Sri Aurobindo is speaking in persona propria, not merely expounding a traditional doctrine as when, dealing with the list in the "Hindu procession of the ten Avatars", he² writes: "It was not my own view of the thing that I was giving." But there seems to be a bit of a puzzle in what he says in the wake of that important phrase. From the words "a series of Avatar births"
¹Ibid., pp. 409-10. ² Ibid., p. 406
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we should be disposed logically to conclude not only that the one who is an Avatar has repeated Avataric appearances in that past but also that every past birth was Avataric. Knowing that Sri Aurobindo was himself a Vibhuti on several past occasions and that he took the Gita's Krishna too as having been so, the words cannot be understood in this sweeping sense. Such a sense is hardly borne out by the explanation offered for the term "births" and referring to their following and assisting "from age to age" (the exact Gita- turn of speech) "the intermediate evolution." This explanation would convey that the line of births possessed by one who is the Avatar is marked at the same time by a new personality on every occasion and by a high age-to-age function of each personality, a function which unlike the role of ordinary people's personalities in their various births is always of a leader of the evolutionary process which has gone on in the interval between birth and birth.
The characteristic Aurobindonian vision which we have noticed in relation to the Krishna of the Gita would, therefore, be best articulated if we took something to be missing in the final sentence. Do not the words "intermediate evolution" point to a period between the Avatar-births and remind us of the phrase already quoted: "the Divine appearing... as Vibhutis to aid the lesser transition"? The vision in question suggests the sentence to read: "In my view of things, however, the new personality has not only a series of Avatar-births behind him, but also births in which the intermediate evolution has been followed and assisted from age to age."
Once a repetition of the Avatar-birth, along with a multiplicity of the birth as Vibhuti, is acknowledged, we cannot help asking what Avatar-birth in the past could have been Sri Aurobindo's. Considering the close association he has emphasised of Krishna with himself and of Krishna's work with his own, we are led immediately to affirm that the most luminous anticipation of Sri Aurobindo's Avatarhood was the "blessed Lord" of the Gita: the latter presided over and prepared his further manifestation, the passage from the epiphany of the Overmind to the apocalypse of the Supermind, the firmer and more matter-permeating descent of his earlier point de départ of earthly expression until, as
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Sri Aurobindo has said, an "identity" between them was made manifest not only within but also in the most external field.
The identity can be guessed from some remarks of Sri Aurobindo's about the spiritual light characterising his inner being: "The pale whitish blue light is 'Sri Aurobindo's light' — it is the blue light modified by the white light of the Mother...¹
A whitish blue like moonlight is known as Krishna's light or Sri Aurobindo's light".²
In a letter³ dated August 14, 1945 to Dilip Kumar Roy, who was greatly under Krishna's spell, we have a more explicit personal note:
"If you had an unprecedented peace for so long a time, it was due to my persistent inner pressure; I refuse to give up all the credit to my double, Krishna."
A little earlier letter (June 18, 1943) to the same disciple is even more explicit in a personal vein:
"If you reach Krishna, you reach the Divine; if you can give yourself to him, you give yourself to me. Your inability to identify may be because you are laying too much stress on the physical aspects consciously or unconsciously."
This, of course, does not mean that a cult of Krishna à la Vaishnavism ensures the results of the Aurobindonian yoga: if it did, the appearance of a new Avatar would be otiose. What it means is that a natural devotion for Krishna does not jar with that Yoga and may even help the sadhak provided the supporting background and upholding basis is life in the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother within the dedicated soul.
Yes, the Mother no less than Sri Aurobindo. The utterance to which we have alluded more than once — about Sri Aurobindo's work and Krishna's — occurs in a letter of July
¹ Ibid., p. 78.
² Ibid. By the way, this light has a special bearing for the present writer. For, when the Mother was giving significances to the various flowers offered to her or given by her she told him that the flower special to him was the one signifying "Krishna's light in the mind".
³ Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, pp. 268-269.
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11, 1933 to an aspirant - Narayan Prasad - brought up in a Krishna-charged atmosphere and relates to her rather than to the Master:¹
"The struggle in you (between bhakti for Sri Krishna and the sense of the divinity of the Mother) is quite unnecessary for the two things are one and go perfectly together. It is he who has brought you to the Mother and it is by adoration of her that you will realise him. He is here in the Ashram and it is his work that is being done in this Yoga."
How intimately the Mother is linked at the same time with Krishna and with Sri Aurobindo becomes astonishingly plain when we have Sri Aurobindo's reference to an experience of the Mother at a period when she knew hardly anything about matters Indian, historical or legendary. The reference also leads us on to probe certain complexities in the procession of the Avatars. We have the query: 'When Ramakrishna was doing Sadhana, Mother was on earth physically for the first eight years of her childhood, from 1878 to 1886. Did he not know that Mother had come down? He must have had some vision at least of her coming, but we do not read anywhere definitely about it. And when Ramakrishna must have been intensely calling Mother, she must have felt something at that age." The reply² on July 11, 1935 is:
"In Mother's childhood's visions she saw myself whom she knew as 'Krishna' — she did not see Ramakrishna.
"It was not necessary that he should have a vision of her coming down as he was not thinking of the future nor consciously preparing for it. I don't think he had the idea of any incarnation of the Mother."
The complexities of Avatarhood to which this reply directs us are suggested by the mention of Ramakrishna. In connection with "the Hindu procession of the ten Avatars", Sri Aurobindo marks the distinction the Gita draws between the Avatar and the Vibhuti — the one conscious of the Divine born in him or descended into him, the other embodying some power of the Divine but without the consciousness of an inborn or indwelling Divinity — and then proceeds to comment:³
¹ Ibid., p. 476. ² Ibid., p.474. ³ On Yoga, II, Tome One, p. 474.
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"If we follow this distinction, we can confidently say from what is related of them that Rama and Krishna can be accepted as Avatars; Buddha figures as such although with a more impersonal consciousness of the Power within him. Ramakrishna voiced the same consciousness when he spoke of Him who was Rama and who was Krishna being within him. But Chaitanya's case is peculiar; for according to the accounts he ordinarily felt and declared himself a bhakta of Krishna and nothing more, but in great moments he manifested Krishna, grew luminous in mind and body and was Krishna himself and spoke and acted as the Lord. His con- temporaries saw in him an Avatar of Krishna, a manifestation of the Divine Love.
"Shankara and Vivekananda were certainly Vibhutis; they cannot be reckoned as more, though as Vibhutis they were very great."
Adverting to several of these names again and bringing in one new name, Sri Aurobindo writes that he fully accepts "Chaitanya's position as an Avatar of Krishna" and that the "outbursts of the splendour of the Divine Being [in him] are among the most remarkable in the story of the Avatar". Then he adds: "As for Ramakrishna, the manifestation in him was not so intense but more many-sided... I would not care to enter into any comparison as between these two great spiritual personalities: both exercised an extraordinary influence and did something supreme in their own sphere...¹ He was certainly quite as much an Avatar as Christ or Chaitanya..² Mahomed would himself have rejected the idea of being an Avatar, so we have to regard him only as the prophet, the instrument, the Vibhuti. Christ realised himself as the Son who is one with the Father — he must therefore be an amsa avatara, a partial incarnation...³. As for the unconscious Avatar, why not? Chaitanya is supposed to be an Avatar by the Vaishnavas, yet he was conscious of the Godhead behind only when that Godhead came in front and possessed him on rare occasions. Christ said 'I and my father are one', but yet he always spoke and behaved as if there were a difference. Ramakrishna's earlier period was that of one seeking God, not aware from the first of his
¹ Ibid., p. 412. ² Ibid. ³ Ibid.
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indentity... And supposing the full and permanent consciousness, why should the Avatar proclaim himself except on rare occasions to an Arjuna or to a few bhaktas or disciples?'¹
From all this we may arrive at a few conclusions about Avatarhood. First, there are full Avatars and partial ones. Secondly, even among partial ones — Chaitanya, Christ, Ramakrishna — there is a difference. Each of them is equally powerful an Avatar as the other two, but the first-named is clearly an Avatar of the line of Krishna, to which Sri Aurobindo belongs, the rest may have a different line. Thirdly, since Sri Aurobindo and Ramakrishna were contemporaries and since the Mother saw the former and not the latter as Krishna, the latter evidently belongs to a line which is not the same. Fourthly, since Sri Aurobindo was present as the Vibhuti Augustus Caesar when Christ lived, the line of Christ too must be dissimilar.
So we come to the vision that the Purushottama has more than one line of Avatar and that two general categories may be distinguished; the central Avatar and the peripheral Avatar — the central expressing the Divine Plenitude directly, the peripheral doing it indirectly — the central conveying a sense of totality in various manners, the peripheral a sense of particular qualities — the central coming in periods of great evolutionary transitions, the peripheral in those of a less crucial character. When the peripheral Avatars are on earth, the line along which the central is manifested may show itself either in Avatarhood or in Vibhutihood, depending on whether the age concerned is crucial or not. Our own age Sri Aurobindo has considered crucial and so we should not be surprised that Ramakrishna and he were co-present — Ramkrishna by his intense synthesis summing up 'the world's and especially India's past spirituality and rendering the inner ground ready for the novel leap forward that is Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga of Supramental Descent and its labour towards even physical transformation. A testimony to Ramakrishna's relation in the inner domain to that leap is an admission by Sri Aurobindo² in a letter, most probably
¹ Ibid., p. 423.
² Supplement, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Pondicherry, 1972, Vol. 27, p. 435.
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of 1913, to Motilal Roy in the course of a comment on the Ramakrishna Mission:
"What you say about the Ramakrishna Mission is, I dare say, true to a certain extent. Do not oppose that movement or enter into any conflict with it.. Remember also that we derive from Ramakrishna. For myself it was Ramakrishna who personally came and first turned me to this Yoga. Vivekananda in the Alipore Jail gave me the foundations of the knowledge which is the basis of our Sadhana. The error of the Mission is to keep too much to the forms of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and not keep themselves open for new outpourings of their spirit, — the error of all Churches and organised religious bodies."
It should be obvious that the central line of Avatarhood covers Rama, Krishna, Sri Aurobindo, and in a somewhat odd way, Chaitanya. Obviously, too, we cannot cling to the inference we originally drew that Avatarhood comes only as a culminating life just once along any line. Indeed, the Mother seems to have brought forth her divinity in a recognisably Avataric form in her present life alone, but Sri Aurobindo surely produces the impression of having had openly Avataric lives in the past. Supposing our impression to be accurate, how are we to reconcile it with his statement; "We were not on earth as Avatars"?
We have to note that merely in one letter Sri Krishna is named by the disciple apropos of his wonder how Avataric personalities whom he designated "portions" of the Divine could have failed to know that the Divine's very self — that is, the Being of the Supermind-plane — was constantly on earth and hence in their time as Vibhuti. The detailed questions and answers touch only on Buddha and Christ. We have Sri Aurobindo saying: "... If the Mother were in Rome in the time of Buddha, how could Buddha know as he did not even know the existence of Rome?¹ ... So if the Mother was present in the life of Christ, she was there not as the Divine Manifestation but as one altogether human. For her to be recognised as the Divine would have created a tremendous disorder and frustrated the work Christ came to
¹ Guidance from Sri Aurobindo, p. 283.
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do by breaking its proper limits."¹ It is on the heels of these replies that Sri Aurobindo explains that the Mother and he were not present in an Avataric shape on the earth-scene. Sri Aurobindo must have overlooked the single occasion on which the disciple wrote of Krishna by name. There is no letter of his in which, naming Krishna, he has allowed the impression that he could have been somebody else when the magical flute-player of Brindavan and the majestic charioteer of Kurukshetra was in the midst of men, the glorious figure about whose "historicity" Sri Aurobindo² has said that if we accept it "there is this great spiritual gain that one has a point d' appui for a more concrete realisation in the conviction that once at least the Divine has visibly touched the earth, made the complete manifestation possible, made it possible for the divine supernature to descend into this evolving but still very imperfect terrestrial nature."
(d)
We may round off our discussion with a piece of occult insight by the Mother. She has spoken of Avatarhood not only it terms of the highest Superconscient as the source but also in those of the deepest Inconscient which is the seeming opposite of the Divine. Within that Inconscient she has seen the Divine Himself, plunged there by His own will and lying hidden as a concrete Being who is the initiator of evolution. She³ has suggested this mysterious figure to be the subject of those two lines in Savitri where Sri Aurobindo describes the end of the symbolic night preceding the symbol dawn:
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.4
In elaborating upon her vision she mentions in her talk of May 28, 1958 "a very old tradition", more ancient than
¹ Ibid., pp. 284-285.
² On Yoga II, Tome One, pp. 433-434.
³ About Savitri with Some Paintings, Published by Huta (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1972), p. 14.
4 Savitri (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972) p. 3.
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the Vedic and Chaldean and constituting their origin. Explaining this tradition she¹ recounts:
"... it is said that when, as a result of the action of the adverse forces — known in the Hindu tradition as the Asuras — the world, instead of developing according to its law of Light and inherent consciousness, was plunged into the darkness, inconscience and ignorance that we know, the Creative Power implored the Supreme Origin, asking him for a special intervention which could save this corrupted universe; and in reply to this prayer there was emanated from the Supreme Origin a special Entity, of Love and Consciousness, who cast himself directly into the most inconscient matter to begin there the work of awakening it to the original Consciousness and Love.
"In the old narratives this Being is described as stretched out in a deep sleep at the bottom of a very dark cave, and in his sleep there emanated from him prismatic rays of light which gradually spread into the Inconscience and embedded themselves in all the elements of this Inconscience to begin there the work of Awakening.
"It one consciously enters into this Inconscient, one can still see there this same marvellous Being, still in deep sleep, continuing his work of emanation, spreading his Light; and he will continue to do it until the Inconscience is no longer inconscient, until Darkness disappears from the world — and the whole creation awakens to the Supramental Consciousness.
"And it is remarkable that this wonderful Being strongly resembles the one whom I saw in vision one day, the Being who is at the other extremity, at the confines of form and the Formless. But that one was in a golden, crimson glory, whereas in his sleep the other Being was of a shining diamond whiteness emanating opalescent rays.
"In fact, this is the origin of all avatars. He is, so to say, the first universal Avatar who, gradually, has assumed more and more conscious bodies and finally manifested in a kind of recognised line of Beings who have descended directly from the Supreme to perfect this work of preparing
¹ Questions and Answers 1958 (the Mother's Centenary Library, Pondicherry, 1977), Vol. 9, pp. 332-334.
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the universe so that, through a continuous progression, it may become ready to receive and manifest the supramental Light in its entirety.
"In every country, every tradition, the event has been presented in a special way, with different limitations, different details, particular features, but truly speaking, the origin of all these stories is the same, and that is what we could call a direct, conscious intervention of the Supreme in the darkest Matter, without going through all the intermediaries, in order to awaken this Matter to the receptivity of the Divine Forces.
"The intervals separating these various incarnations seem to become shorter and shorter, as if, to the extent that matter became more and more ready, the action could accelerate and become more and more rapid in its movement, more and more conscious too, more and more effective and decisive.
"And it will go on multiplying and intensifying until the entire universe becomes the total Avatar of the Supreme."
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