Our Light and Delight

9

The Mother's Compliments and Criticisms

The Mother, although capable of being a "supreme Diplomat" (a phrase from Savitri) when the Divine Guidance required it, could be quite uninhibited both in the tenderness of Mahalakshmi's Grace and in the severity of Mahakali's Grace — both the movements being straightforward acts for the soul's good and having behind them the Grace of Maheshwari's wisdom and the Grace of Mahasaraswati's skill in works.

We must realise that the same soul, for its good, could receive in clear-cut terms at different times the unqualified compliment and the unconditional criticism. It would be wrong to go exclusively by the one or the other. Each is absolutely true on its own occasion. It is meant to touch the soul, the true path on which it is at the moment or else bring it back to the right path when the direction ahead has been obscured by some wrong impulse in one's own nature or by outside influences of an unsuitable kind.

An example which immediately occurs to me is of one whom the Mother had considered to have "the nature of the Saints" but who happened to drift away from the Ashram after a number of years. I was confused —until the Mother explained that the subconscient could hold the very opposite of the qualities present in the conscious being and this opposite might erupt at any moment under the pressure of circumstances. If one was not sufficiently on guard, the upsurge could bring about a "fall". According to the Mother, the mistake in my psychology was its excessive simplification: I looked at one side with exaggerated emphasis and ignored the rest. To counteract the sadness and discouragement which I felt, the Mother wrote a little later: "I may point out to you that nothing irreparable has happened. Of course the further one wanders away from the path, the more radical will be the conversion needed to return to it; but the return is always possible.' (22-12-1943)

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Amrita had once referred to the person in question as being almost a part of the Mother. And, with the help of the extraordinarily developed soul-quality which the Mother had spotlighted, the invasion of the subconscient was eventually repelled and, after a long passage through a whole "sea of troubles" not only was the old profound relationship with the Mother re-established, but the storm-tossed wanderer came again to the old "haven-heaven". Now the saint-nature has the chance to be permanently at work.

The Mother's compliments are surely no mere emotional responses, much less tactics of convenience. They reach deep down to some basic trait, particularly when that trait has sent a radiation of itself to the outer being either at a certain moment or during a certain period. However, they must never be regarded as an all-time blanket certificate for a perennial halo. There is a tendency in people to publicise such encomiums, and sincere friends are liable to harp on these tributes, forgetting that, although the words of praise were most apt at the time of their utterance and indicate a permanent potentiality in the being, human nature is very complicated and there could be on the part of the complimented individual even a play of cunning, vindictiveness, dishonesty and various deviations from the Integral Yoga. On the other hand, criticisms, no matter how keen, from the Mother cannot be taken as eternal condemnations. They act on the contrary side the same role as the compliments. They hit out at the upthrust of some base attribute for a while and are meant to awaken awareness of it in the person concerned as well as to put others on watch against the possibility of it at some instant in the future. Actually, there is nobody on whom the Mother has not at one moment of another made some sort of cutting remark for the good of that disciple's soul, but if the piercing flame has gone home and the disciple has received it with the insight of his inmost self it could very well happen that the reverse of the criticism, a luminous compliment, would follow in the very wake of the corrective stroke.

Occasionally what looked like a complete about-turn by the Mother has puzzled the sadhaks no end. A very extreme case came to my notice a year or two before she passed away. A sadhak took to her all the required details, including the

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photograph, of a person who wanted to be admitted into the Ashram. He brought back a clear refusal. After the negative news had been conveyed to the applicant, the latter had a talk with another sadhak and told him of the sad result. The second sadhak took it upon himself to put the man's case once more before the Mother. This time there was a clear acceptance. Here seemed indeed a poser. Why did the Mother say No and Yes about the same person on two consecutive days? Was she capricious? Was her judgment clouded on one or the other occasion?

It was supposed that the different personalities of the two go-betweens made all the difference. It was said that the Mother's answer depended on the way the case had been presented. Indeed it it true that the proper attitude has a say in all matters and that there is something called incalculable Grace in the Mother's dealings. But an ever-present truth-sense is also at work in her actions. There is a straight plunging into the heart of a situation and a luminous feeling of the future. Behind it all is the drive, sometimes open, sometimes concealed, often direct, often roundabout, towards the progress of every soul. I should be inclined to essay the paradox that the two contrary answers came not because two dissimilar persons carried the application but because the applicant was himself two different persons on the two days! The man who first applied was not the one who had already suffered the Mother's refusal. The man who applied once more had received the rejecting blow and was thereby a different man. He had felt his ego crumble. The eyes of his soul had suddenly opened and he then approached the Mother not with a demand to be her child but as one who was already in his heart her child and had come in search of his long-lost Mother.

I cannot say the Mother always thinks up and plans out her moves. In her outer consciousness she may not always know what the purpose is of the Divine Force that is her true self. She may commit what looks like a mistake on an occasion. I should state that, viewed from purely external stand-points, some of her actions cannot help being considered errors but through those errors there can take place what we may term spiritual shock-tactics. Something unexpected makes a tremendous impact on the hearer and carves

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for him a short cut to a truth about himself of which he was unaware. One has always to probe one's own depths in order to realise the dark spot because of which an apparent misjudgment by the Mother has disturbed one's self-complacence. Instead of wondering how the Divine could make mistakes, one should ask: "Why not, it they help to do the Divine's work with a startling swiftness?" The Divine could certainly make mistakes, but even the mistakes are divine.

Of course the benefit of the Divine's mistakes can be reaped only if the sadhak is ready to look into himself with the conviction that whatever the Mother does is directed to the development of his soul and he has not to rest until by an inlook he has found the wrong turn hiding in some obscure recess of his nature.

Let me recount a personal experience. Sehra and I, when we first settled here together, had at our disposal a fine spacious flat. The proprietor of a flat which we had occupied on a short visit a year or two earlier came to tell me that those rooms which had been once appreciated by us but had later been rented out to another party by him had fallen vacant. Would we like to take them up once more? I thanked the man for coming to us but explained that we were very comfortably lodged already and had no mind to change the apartments. I suggested that if he were in need of a tenant he should go to Amrita and ask him to put someone there. This was at a time when the upper floor of our house, which was occupied by some other sadhaks, was soon to be vacated. We had it in mind to request the Mother to let Sehra's sister Mina occupy it in partnership with us.

A few days after the previous landlord's visit Sehra at the playground put our request to the Mother. Immediately the Mother with a stern face declared: "I have no intention of giving you the upper storey. You have already planned to leave your present flat and go to one you had once occupied." Sehra was absolutely stunned. She could just look her utter astonishment and come away much disturbed and depressed. When I learned of the confusion I at once wrote a letter to the Mother telling her that what she had told Sehra had been exactly the opposite of the real situation. I expressed my wonder as well as the hurt amazement that she could entertain the idea of our having such a deceitful plan

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in our heads. I related what had transpired during my meeting with the earlier landlord. We could not help marvelling how information could get so topsy-turvy and through whom. I had spoken of the landlord's visit only to Udar. And Amrita was the other person who knew of it through the landlord's own meeting with him. Both of them were dear friends and I could not imagine either of them deliberately misreporting to the Mother. Nor could I imagine them not understanding the true posture of things. So we spent an uncomfortable night.

The next day when Sehra met the Mother, the Mother referred to my letter and said: "I understand everything now. But what could I do when I got that report from more than one reliable source? It meant not only deceit on your side but also the drag on me suddenly to pay the rent of your flat until I found some other occupants. Now it is all right and you can have the upper floor for Mina and yourselves." Here was certainly what one might dub a Himalayan blunder. I was never able to sort things out because neither Amrita nor Udar could conceive of any reason for the Mother's having the impression she did have. But I was convinced that there was some important point in the inconceivable actuality. I peered long and deep into myself and caught a strange velleity which should never have taken shape. It was as if we were not satisfied with the wonderful flat that had come to us and were on the look-out for something else. What I told the old landlord was true, for there could be no comparison between what we had and what he offered. But I remember that, time and again, during our outings in the evening we looked to right and left to know whether any apartment had a sign of "To let" for us to go and see the inside. I cannot rationalise this urge at all: it was something obscure and perverse, indicating a spot of ignorant ingratitude. The Mother's incomprehensible slash brought this spot quivering up to the surface and put a stop for good to the neck-craning this side and that for a possible change of residence.

The ingratitude, on concentrated thinking, disclosed itself as all the more out of place when I recalled how our flat had fallen to our lot. At the time the Mother first expected us to settle in the Ashram and sent out Amrita to arrange

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for our living quarters he particularly sought to engage the very flat in which we had once stayed and whose landlord later came to offer it to me. In the list of his failures the lack of success in getting this flat was the most prominent. When our exodus from Bombay was postponed but its ultimate occurrence was certain at the beginning of the following year, the Mother kept Amrita on the alert for a suitable flat. At one point Nolini wrote to me that Amrita had found the best possible accommodation and that the Mother had fully approved of it. A few months later he wrote again saying that somehow the ideal accommodation had been snatched out of Amrita's hands: I was asked to come to Pondicherry myself and help find a flat.

I phoned to Navajata's travel agency and booked a train-ticket. The next day I went by bus to collect it. As I alighted at the stop nearest to the office I was hailed by a young Muslim whom I had met a year earlier in Pondicherry.

"Hullo, where are you off to?"

"I'm going to settle in Pondi and I am on my way to collect my train-ticket."

"Where will you be staying there?"

"I have to look for a flat."

"May I make a proposal? I have a flat in Pondi but my business has not turned out well and I want to dispose of the flat. Would you like to take it?"

"I should certainly like to see it. Will you put me in touch with your landlord and request him to show me your flat?"

My friend pulled out a notebook from his pocket and wrote a short letter and gave it to me. I thanked him and went to the travel agency.

On reaching Pondicherry I contacted Amrita and showed him the letter I had brought with me. He was amazed. What I had been offered was the very set of rooms that had slipped from his hands owing to the intervention of a third party. The third party happened to be the young Muslim who had later to leave Pondicherry. It struck me as nothing short of a miracle of the Mother's Grace that the man who had taken away the flat approved for us by her should have been waiting at the precise bus-stand where I had to alight in order to get my ticket for the trip to Pondicherry, which would decide where we should settle.

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I believe that the tendency in us not to feel completely content with the result of such Grace was an utterly wrong movement. It is in my view also significant that the question of this flat should have arisen between the Mother and us from the appearance of the proprietor of the rooms which had been sought for but missed by Amrita at the time when, owing to certain unfortunate psychological factors of which I have written elsewhere, the Mother's plan to bring us to the Ashram could not be fulfilled. Everything hung together as though by some occultly planned "coincidence" to create an occasion for the wrong movement in us to be touched by the finger of light. But how could it have been touched without that inexplicable misunderstanding by the Mother which shook us up, sent us nearly out of our wits and made us cast about for some reason for the apparent irrationality?

The Mother's actions were always inspired by an inner truth — and the inner truth has many facets. Almost from hour to hour, if not from moment to moment, there is a kaleidoscopic switch from one to another, though not always in a very marked manner. Naturally, the Mother's direct and immediate insight into this truth gets expressed variously. Of course, a certain central mould of soul-personality persists throughout a life-time, but it is not a rigid cast either. Always the outer mental-vital physical being is a constantly changing mixture, and according as the sun-white rainbow-shimmered soul looks out or not, the Mother responds with compliments or criticisms, while keeping always the vision of the soul's ultimate unfoldment before her. In the story I have recounted, her action, impelled by that vision, took two contrasting forms, one of which was more bewildering in its radical sweep than usual. Most often the criticism is attuned more to the apparent play of a fault and is not so subtly oriented.

The lesson for an observer of the Mother's diverse "reactions" is that he must not jump to easy and final conclusions. Rarely, even one who has been very highly complimented may lose his way and his life may terminate not with a celestial bang but with an all-too-mundane whimper. I may end with an example which is rather saddening, especially to me who knew the person intimately. Sri

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Aurobindo once asked Nirodbaran if this sadhak, along with another well-known name in the Ashram, was not doing the Aurobindonian Yoga, who was doing it? He also declared him a born Yogi. I remember how the Mother used to direct newcomers very frequently to have a talk with this friend of mine who had a radiant dynamic personality. Normally he led a somewhat secluded life. When the Ashram expanded and a lot of new activities involving youngsters came up, there was a sudden change in his poise. Later I could see a gradual loss of perspicacity in him and a lowering of the ultimate ideal. Finally he went out of the Ashram. His bent of leadership remained and he could influence people along fairly fruitful lines in the ordinary world-field, but the Mother lost all interest in his movements and even expressed her dissatisfaction now and again. His failure to consummate the initial lofty promise has been to me the most tragic episode in the Ashram's history of sadhaks' ups and downs serving as occasions for the Mother's compliments and criticisms.

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