The Mother : Contact
THEME/S
10
The Mother's Blessings — Soul and Body —
St. Augustine and the Early Christians —
A New Disciple's Birth — A Great Moment —
Then and Now
Life with the Mother, life away from the Mother, life again with her — this briefly was my lot from the end of 1927 to the beginning of 1954. And running through that threefold movement of time was the basic theme: life in the Mother.
I say "basic" in a double sense: the support underlying all and the support not always showing itself through all the overlay. As I had appealed to the Mother never to let go her hold on me, no matter how much I might appear to deviate from the path, there was no question of her not being with me, but the possibility existed of my not being fully with her in my conscious parts. Here lies the relevance of the second meaning of "basic". And it is pinpointed in an exchange of letters between us some thirty-six years ago in the context of a course of action on which I had launched and which she had dubbed "silly". Referring to a communication from her, I asked "Why have you omitted those words which mean so much to me and with which you have always ended: 'Love and blessings'?" She replied: "It is purposely that I have omitted the words 'love and blessings', because I did not wish you to think that I am blessing your enterprise — I do not — just because I find it silly. So, do not be misled if I end by love and blessings. These words are for your soul of which you are not just now very conscious, and not for your exterior being." (18-6-1942)
A similar note is struck in another statement of the Mother's: "Understand that blessings are for the best spiritual result, not necessarily according to human wishes." The implication here is that the Mother's blessings may bring
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about in the exterior life even what we commonly consider misfortune. If seeming ill-luck figures in her vision as the shortest cut for the soul to evolve towards the Divine, the blessings will allow it to happen. Usually, they work for exterior good provided this good does not markedly go counter to the soul's profit. Most often the two are compatible and in many cases no special issue of a spiritual kind is involved, so that health, success, prosperity flow freely. But when blessings do not manifest themselves in a favourable outer consequence we must refrain from considering them inoperative: we must try to extract the golden honey of their grace from the core of an apparent disaster. Then the very difficulty will prove to be Sri Aurobindo crushing our ignorance with his mighty embrace.
The soul's benefit, the soul's progress are the Mother's central concern. No doubt, she does not pit the soul against the body in the life of Yoga. It is never her belief that in order to develop spiritually we should neglect physical welfare, as though with the waxing of the soul we should expect the waning of the body. The old asceticism, the ancient mortification of the flesh, the puritanical disdain or rejection of external beauty — these have never been encouraged by her. Even fasting for the sake of chastising the body — leave aside for using it as a tool of moralistic blackmail against a supposed wrong — she did not countenance. Prolonged seclusion itself found little favour if its aim was a shying away from the challenges of outer existence. Indeed a Yoga called "Integral" could hardly subscribe to a lopsided growth of the being and would court failure if anything was deliberately done to harm the physical instrument of the evolving psyche: the final result envisaged of the Integral Yoga is a transformed, divinised body.
Yes, physical welfare is an every-present objective for the follower of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But it is an objective fundamentally linked to the benefit, the progress of the soul. Apart from that central concern it loses ultimate importance. Simple to save one's skin and ensure corporeal happiness cannot, for all the acceptable common sense of it, be an imperative ideal. Otherwise no risks would be worth running for a great cause, no deadly struggles with a force like Hitlerism could be faced. And in a
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certain confrontation that I have observed between the psychic being and the body's life the Mother's procedure was unequivocal.
I recollect the time when a philosopher friend of mine lay unconscious with an attack of meningitis. A telegram came from his sister saying that only a miracle could save his life and that the Mother should be informed. The Mother very gravely received the appeal. Evidently it was a significant moment of crisis and not an ordinary phase of illness. The next day she told me: "I have put the decisive force." I asked what that would mean and whether it would mean a saving of my friend's life. She explained: "The decisive force should ensure that the soul's will would win. If the soul wants to stay in the body but somehow physical conditions tend to push it out, it shall not be pushed out. If, however, the soul wants to leave the body and somehow physical conditions are holding it back, they shall not prevail. The soul knows what is right and my sending the decisive force will give it victory." Obviously, my friend's soul had no wish to cut short its philosophising career. For, it made him survive the crisis, thanks to the Mother's intervention on its behalf.
I have spoken of "life in the Mother" with regard to my deep-down relation with her whether near her in the Ashram or at a distance from her in Bombay. The phrase has for me a special connotation. I shall elucidate it by recalling a brief talk with the Mother about the way I felt Sri Aurobindo's presence. Whenever I have been at his Samadhi I have not been aware so much of him in my heart as of myself within him. I told the Mother of this peculiar sense. "Sri Aurobindo is too big for my heart to hold him. I am conscious of being included in his great form. I nestle in his heart, a small creature enveloped by his huge divinely throbbing love. Always he carries me. I live in him rather than he in me." The Mother commented: "It is really the same thing, but what you have said is the truer manner of putting it." My "life in the Mother" is an identical phenomenon.
I seem to repose in her, either with a trance-like yet profoundly aware absorption or with a faint far-away feel of the real Me separate from the superficially engrossed ego.
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In both experiences She the grandiose Goddess contains Amal the meagre Man, suffusing the latter with something of the truth the Chhandogya Upanishad enshrines: "There is no happiness in the little — immensity alone is felicity." A hint also of the truth treasured in the second line of that magnificent Sonnet-close of Sri Aurobindo's is divined:
My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl;
I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl.
Lastly, the truth St. Augustine catches in his "confessions" to God has come home with a touch of its poignant depth to the world-wanderer who had sought with half-blind eyes through year on year the elusive Ineffable to whom the poet in him had endeavoured to give name after mysterious name: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."
These words of Augustine, which I knew before getting acquainted with the Upanishads or becoming familiar with Sri Aurobindo's writings, stood out as the motto of my life the moment I read them in my twenty-second year. Some other utterances also of this multi-mooded Christian of the fourth century kept ringing in my ears. There was that powerful insight into the Divine Nature and its strange dealings with the world, which might be considered to have flashed out to Francis Thompson the "majestic instancy" of his Hound of Heaven : "And lo! Thou pressing at the heel of those who are fleeing from Thee. God of Vengeance and yet Fountain of Pity, who turnest us back to Thee in various ways." At the other end of the Augustinian gamut is the simple solution of all problems of conduct in relation to the Deity: "Love, and do what you will." Once the heart is truly given to the Supreme, an infallible truth-feeling ensures that all our actions move along the right lines. The soul's sweetness and light are the forces featured together here — sweetness of the inmost being's devotion spontaneously generating a decisive light at all times in the direction of the Divine. An analogous simple touch of intuition on the immediacy of the psyche's gestures and perceptions creates the utterance: "In the thrust of a trembling glance I arrived at That Which is." Such enchanting formulas of experience, however, were not reached easily. The frailty in the young
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seeker found tongue in an endearing all-too-human aspiration: "O give me chastity — but not yet!" This turn of temperament was no stranger to me. Finally, how could I fail to remember those words of piercing regret which still breathe a profound fulfilment? — "Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty of ancient days who art ever new, too late have I loved Thee!"
The words refer to Augustine's thirty-third year in which he accepted open baptism and entered the Church. I was more lucky, since I discovered Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram when I was twenty-three, but I too could not help and Augustinian cry, urged by the unique intensity of the soul's taste of God to deem no age young enough to excuse the absence of that taste earlier:
Enhaloed love, why flowerest thou to bless
So late with fume of God my wilderness?
Haven of glory, all-transfiguring peace —
Won with what travail through the heart's dim seas!
O the vain dreams ere this eternity,
O the void hours ere thy Vast flamed in me!
Sri Aurobindo's comment was: "The lines are very good." It consoled me that the Incarnate Divine should accept my despair both as genuine in itself and as expressed in authentic art. But, though I came to know with an undeniable intimacy the adorable Dweller in the deepmost and there were spells during which his proximity and even absorbing presence were constant, the ultimate direct inseverable poise in him lacked. When some photographs were taken a year and a half after my first settlement in the Ashram, the Mother remarked both that I was very photogenic and that I resembled the Early Christians. I had cultivated a fine beard and let my hair grow long. The beard was meant to be in imitation of my old favourite iconoclast Bernard Shaw rather than of any Greek Father of the first Christian centuries. But, in the context of the new life I was leading, the comparison with the religious, who fled into the desert of the Thebaid to escape the world, the flesh and the devil, was more apt.
In the course of time the beard and the hair grew more and more short until, when in 1938 I paid Bombay my third
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visit, the hair became normal and the chin had no hirsute appendage at all. But some fundamental affinity with the Early Christians and with Augustine among the slightly later followers of Jesus lingered. In 1950 my wife Sehra's sister Mina received the initial fire-touch of Sri Aurobindo. When Sri Aurobindo passed away at the beginning of December that year she was startled into the awareness that so grand a being had lived and she had not realised his existence in spite of my having spoken of him time and again to her. She frantically looked for a way to come to Pondicherry while his body lay in state for over five days, but failed. What she felt with a remarkable intensity may well be summed up in four lines that occurred to me apropos of the strange heart-shattering yet soul-stirring event of December 5:
Till the fall of your body a void was my day.
You sank like a sun and made me your west:
O Deathless who died since in no other way
Could you be buried forever in my breast!
Yes, Mina was struck awake to the marvel of the spiritual life, even if the final resolve had not come. And in the meanwhile another influence was brought to bear upon her by a Christian friend who was preparing to be a nun. She presented her with St. Augustine's Confessions. After reading it, Mina passed the copy on to me. I for the second time in my life plunged into it. Although its author fascinated me, Christianity as such had no attraction by now; and Mina too outgrew its temporary influence when she accompanied me on a visit to the Ashram in 1952.
It is not too much to say the Mother proved for her an overwhelming experience. Her deepmost self broke open. That typical sign of the inmost soul budding forth was in ample evidence: the almost constant vision of all kinds of wonderful flowers the moment the eyes were shut. A harmonious happiness overflowed her being. After she had responded thus to the Mother's light and love I took her to an institute of nuns in Pondicherry where some embroidered materials she had wanted were on sale. Its contrast with the Mother's presence and with the Ashram's atmosphere was tremendous. Once and for all the vacillation vanished. Like Sehra, like me, she went through the new-birth that creates
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the disciple of Sri Aurobindo: she became the Mother's child for good.
My own connection with Christianity remained only in the fact that I kept harbouring the Augustinian struggle towards the Divine. There was no draw towards the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as revived in the Vatican's Father in Heaven, no draw even towards the figure of Jesus. What was common to Augustine and Amal was a complex questioning intellectuality, an imagination on fire with the world's varied colourfulness, a passionate heart wide in its sympathy but acute in its leap to the excitement of the senses, a spirit questing for immutable peace in the midst of "this mortal coil". On finishing a re-perusal of Confessions I wrote a general impression of its author:
"Augustine, besides being a powerful and piercing mind, is certainly a man led by the soul in him — the spark of God — towards the Light eternal and he lives in vibrant contact with this Light. But the contact is not complete: he does not feel the soul in a direct and total manner all the time. He is deeply, highly, keenly, hugely religious and touched by marvellous spell of the spiritual as understood in Yogic India, but he is not the full-fledged spiritual man in the Yogic sense. He does not seem to have taken indefeasibly his central seat in the soul: his seat is till in the ordinary human consciousness though at a great elevation or interiority in that consciousness' domain, so that he mainly dwells close to the soul even if not always within it. But it is often by the mind's will and not with a natural poise that he sustains his halo, and just this difference between abiding in the soul and residing very near to it and only sometimes merging in it distinguishes the religious saint from the saint who is spiritual. In the latter category are Francis and Teresa and John of the Cross. Although I do not have Augustine's morbidity about 'sin' nor his attachment to a formal pietism, he is a magnified and consummated version of what I am at the moment. His characteristic disposition markedly anticipates me and his conversion prefigures my own. But once the conversion comes, I should like to pass beyond him to a permanent soul-centredness."
When I next met the Mother during a trip to the Ashram, I mentioned my feeling of the Augustinian Amal. She replied:
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"Yes, Augustine was a fellow very much like you." I told her also that I was tired of my life in the ordinary world and asked her to do something to pull me out of it. She smiled assent.
The great moment arrived in the afternoon of February 12, 1953. I was alone, resting in bed. Suddenly, in some bright amplitude above the head a silent command was given with the strongest emphasis to go and live in the Ashram. I felt one with the source of the command. I got up with a start and stood beside my bed. Almost simultaneous with the overhead impulsion which had strangely absorbed me into it, there was a pull from behind my back on a level with the heart and I seemed to exist no longer in the body but in some inmost profundity of flame, independent of my personal physical form. The words issued from my mouth: "I have made the crucial choice. May Mother and Sri Aurobindo help me!"
Sri Aurobindo has said that our true "I" is the Jiva or Jivatman, a non-evolutionary portion of the Supreme, an expressive part of the many-ness inherent in the One: it presides, from the above-mind region of Cosmic Knowledge and ultimately from the Transcendence, over the series of births in Cosmic Ignorance and guides its own delegate or representative there, the Antaratman or Chaitya Purusha, what Sri Aurobindo calls the Psychic Being, the inmost Soul that develops from life to life through a new mental, vital and physical personality each time. Sri Aurobindo has also said that when the Jivatman decides a turn in our career the absolutely definitive step is taken. Automatically this turn is reflected in the Antaratman. My "great moment" appeared to be an action of the true non-evolutionary "I", immediately echoed by its evolving truth-image. A sense of something radical and undeniable hung about my being and I knew that the road to the Ashram had at last been victoriously cleared.
But the experience of that afternoon was not merely a short outburst of Grace. It persisted for a number of weeks, during which I hardly had the sensation of living in my body. The body existed without its usual reactions to the world. Although it did everything as before, I lived
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exclusively high up and out behind. In this condition I visited Pondicherry for the darshan of February 21. I told the Mother that she had done what I had requested her to do.
In an attempt to catch the strange event in a poem plumbing the actual posture of things for pointers to things to come, I wrote:
Above my head I am one with God's huge gold,
Behind my heart God's white-fire depth am I;
But both these freedoms like far dreams I hold,
Wonderful futures caught in a cryptic eye —
A light without lids — suspended timelessly
'Twixt flickering glimpses of mortality.
I am they and yet no part of body or mind
Shares in their splendour: a nameless strength alone
Possesses every limb. A block of stone
Dead to all hungers, void of smile or sigh,
The outer self endures the strokes of time,
But feels each stroke flash from beyond, behind
The world of man, a smite of the God on high
And the God at my back to rouse from the rapt peace
Of my stone-mass a shapeliness sublime
That shall be God to the very finger-tips
By the falling of brute superfluities.
Treasuring that sculpture yet unborn, I wait
For the luminous outflowering of my fate —
Blindness that is a locked apocalypse!
Of course, for the apocalypse to be unlocked must take a long series of years: the Aurobindonian fulfilment is a glory beyond the dreams of all past Yogas — the total divinisation of gross matter itself. Many lives would be required now that the Mother is not on the scene to carry us forward willynilly and to expedite the process of transformation. But after certain critical experiences one acquires an inner surety because one feels that, however slow the movement, there will be no turning back.
In the wake of what happened on February 12 of 1953 there was the exodus to the Ashram with Sehra (and my dog Bingo) for final irrevocable settlement a year later, followed by a surprising little statement by the Mother when I
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harked back to a feature of 1929. Among the several photographs of mine, recalling the Early Christians, one was particularly striking. Whoever has seen it has admired it for the suggestion of spirituality. I found it among my mementos of the old days and showed it to the Mother on May 24, 1954. I had written behind it: "To my dearest Mother with gratitude for what she can make of me in spite of myself." The Mother gazed at it quizzically. I said: "If it were not my own picture, I would call it "A Study for the Head of Christ'." "Yes, " she replied. She continued to gaze and remarked: "Very interesting." Then I asked her: "Why do you say that?" She explained: "there is an element of acting and pretending. I should like to ask you why you were playing Christ. It is different from your present state. At that time you were trying to look spiritual. Now there is a great change."
This was such a bewildering announcement that I cried out: "It sounds like a paradox, Mother. At present I don't at all appear so spiritual." "Yes, but my comment is quite true." Then I asked: "This picture goes back to a period before I may have had the need to look spiritual. There was a truth pressing through." "Even so," she answered, "the reality is now."
The whole talk was at once a disappointment and an immense fillip. It rather spoiled my Christ-study, but it meant that she was very pleased with the new Amal and that my diffidence in the days after the serious business of all-round Yoga had restarted was ill-founded. The words I had written behind the photograph should hold for those very days.
Trying to understand the phrase — "an element of acting and pretending" — I recollected the situation in which the picture had been taken. My mother, brother and sister had come for the first time to see me a year and a half after I had joined the Ashram. I was afraid to meet the contacts of the world I had renounced. I used to meet them no more than twice a week. I would go to the French hotel where they were staying, and I would attempt to create a special mood, practise an attitude of aloofness and call upon the psychic being to put its mark on my outer self, my face towards the world. The new spirituality lacked spontaneous strength. It was like an unearthly phantom which I had to pull down
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from its ether and throw like an aura around my body. No doubt, there were hours when the aura came of itself and the psyche seemed to flow in the very blood-stream. But, by and large, a steady effort had to be maintained and a kind of fear lurked, fear to confront the common course of human life lest it should prove stronger than the Deity within.
Later than the period of the Christ-photograph something of a wide serenity came as a gift of Sri Aurobindo, along with a fixed tender intensity as a boon from the Mother. But the triumphant sense expressed in the opening phrase of a poem of mine¹—
I stand here for all time, rooted in God —
took shape a quarter century after I had originally stepped into the Ashram.
Not that the unending God-rootedness has put a finis to every defect of human nature. It may even seem that — to adapt Scott's couplet —
The way is long, the wind is cold,
The minstrel is infirm and old.
Yes, many are the shortcomings to be got over, and the years are flying. But the golden seed sown in a moment of supreme Grace bears, in the midst of all impediments from within and without, the conviction caught in that line of Sri Aurobindo:
I, stumbling, clouded, am the Eternal One.
1 Mother India, May 1978, p. 306.
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