THEME/S
A LOOK TOWARDS THE FUTURE FROM
THE STANDPOINT OF NOVEMBER 17,1973
Sri Aurobindo left his body on December 5,1950. The Mother departed from hers on November 17, 1973. But the Ashram which they founded is aware of their presence all the time. The Samadhi in the courtyard of the main Ashram-building—holding the physical remains of both these mighty pioneers of a new world—is a living power. All who have stood before it have known a Light and a Love ready to respond to their prayers and aspirations. A giant Grace breathes out from this simple flower-laden incense-haunted monument of peace. Our hearts feel suffused with the promise of that fourfold state of fulfilled being which Sri Aurobindo has summed up in a master-mantra:
Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest.1
It was to embody such a state in its entirety that the Mother carried on the work of Sri Aurobindo after he had sacrificed, as she has declared, his own physical transformation in order to hasten the divine destiny of the world. As a result of the exhaustion of the forces of Darkness in his willingly accepted "death", he sought for his companion, the Mother, an easier passage in the future to the goal of his Integral Yoga. And, through the Mother's physical transformation, the path was to be cleared for the race to evolve from humanity to supermanhood. Sri Aurobindo meant to concentrate in his co-worker the achievement of his victory in the time to come.
* Mother India, November 1975.
1 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 575: "The Life Heavens".
Page 134
The first step towards this victory was the permanent establishment, in the Mother's most outward self, of that phase of the supramental consciousness which he had called the Mind of Light. And that establishment was a prelude to the progressive illumination, which she subsequently described, of the subtle consciousness within the very cells of the body. But when this illumination had reached—if we may judge from her "Notes on the Way"—a stage preparatory to a radical reversal of
the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,
there took place on the contrary what appeared to be a radical reversal of the entire course of the Yoga. The Mother abandoned the physical frame she had used for ninety-five years in the cause of the Divine's manifestation on earth.
What are we to make of this act of leave-taking by one whom we expected to complete the Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation? And how are we to envisage the shape of the future?
One thing may be immediately said. All the energies the Mother had to spend on her body in the enormous uphill fight for Matter's divinisation have been set free. They are turned now to a general impact on individuals and groups everywhere. Increasingly they are felt as a new cosmic impetus bearing mankind over hurdle after hurdle thrown in its path by agencies mundane and preternatural. Individuals also have known a vast Care bearing them easily along with a strength that is at the same time a sweetness.
But this is one side of the situation. As against the advantage of a greater impact on a universal scale, there is the absence of a pou sto, a fulcrumlike poise on hard earth to move its downward gravitating nature to finer intensities. The focus of divine consciousness held within a human face and form, with a recognisable receptiveness to our calls and a sunshine-smile for every agonised grope of our beings, is missed. And, when we realise that the Mother's body which had kept the now-freed energies busy with its maintenance was precisely the fiery point at which a divine future for the very substance of earth-
Page 135
man was being moulded, we cannot help looking anxiously for sign-posts and guide-lines.
1
On November 17,1973, when the Mother withdrew from her body, the question could not but arise: "Is her work fated to remain incomplete?" If any doubt could be entertained of Sri Aurobindo's project of complete success, the idea of incom-pletion would be out of place and the perplexed mind might find comfort. But how would we reconcile such comfort with the drive of numberless pronouncements by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother? Two brief expressions by Sri Aurobindo of their fundamental goal may be quoted to speak for all.
A letter on January 14, 1932, has the phrase: "...I want to divinise the human consciousness, to bring down the Supramental, the Truth-Consciousness, the Light, the Force into the physical to transform it...."1 The same letter goes on to say: "All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object. The Supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter."2 Here Sri Aurobindo's aim is the Supermind's descent and the process of this descent finally achieves the total transformation of the "physical". That will be the crowning stage of Sri Aurobindo's action and the Divine's manifestation.
Again, Sri Aurobindo's letter of September 15,1935, which couples the Mother with him by name, says: "What is being done is meant to prepare the manifestation of the Supermind on the earth-consciousness down to Matter itself, so it can't be for the physical of myself or the Mother alone."3
This short declaration implies three basic points: (1) Not only
1Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 122.
2Ibid., p. 124. 3 Ibid., p. 450.
Page 136
the higher parts of the earth-consciousness but "Matter itself" is to hold the Supermind's manifestation; (2) Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who are trying in 1935 to bring about this manifestation are to exemplify it in their "physical"; (3) they would not be "alone" in that achievement: others too should succeed by their help.
No doubt, the "physical" of the Mother as well as that of Sri Aurobindo has been given up short of total transformation. But is real failure at all possible? The answer is "No."
What else can the answer be in the face of such words as Sri Aurobindo employed on October 19,1946, when conditions in India looked very unfavourable?— "...I have not been discouraged by what is happening, because I know and have experienced hundreds of times that beyond the blackest darkness there lies for one who is a divine instrument the light of God's victory. I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world —I am not speaking of personal things—which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster."1
Then there is the letter of April 4,1950, to a disciple "badly upset" with his "sense of the present darkness in the world round us". Sri Aurobindo writes: "For myself, the dark conditions do not discourage me or convince me of the vanity of my will 'to help the world', for I knew they had to come; they were there in the world-nature and had to rise up so that they might be exhausted or expelled.... Afterwards the work for the Divine will become more possible and it may well be that the dream, if it is a dream, of leading the world towards the spiritual light, may even become a reality. So I am not disposed even now, in these dark conditions to consider my will to help the world as condemned to failure."2
We may remember that this letter was penned at almost the time when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were aware that one of them had to give up the body in the interests of their work and he had decided that he would go and she would stay for its completion.3
1 Ibid., p. 169. 2 Ibid., p. 172.
3 "A 'Call' from Pondicherry" by Dr. Prabhat Sanyal, Mother India, December 5,1953, p. 87.
Page 137
Even apart from our faith in such direct references by Sri Aurobindo to his own mission, we may dismiss the idea of failure on the basis of our insight into the nature of the Avatarhood we ascribe to him and the Mother.
Generally speaking, in the case of Avatars of any type, real failure cannot be thought of, whatever the surface appearances. Has not Sri Aurobindo exclaimed: "Why should the Divine be tied down to succeed in all his operations? What if failure suits him better and serves better the ultimate purpose? What rigid primitive notions are these about the Divine!"1 If the Divine's (that is, the Avatar's) ultimate purpose is served, the failure which helps it cannot be regarded as a real one. A real failure is the frustration of one's avowed ultimate purpose. The Avatar comes to establish a certain stage in the earth's evolution and always fulfils his mission in the mode intended by the Divinity that he is. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: "The Divinity acts according to another consciousness, the consciousness of the Truth above and the Lila below and It acts according to the need of the Lila, not according to man's ideas of what It should or should not do. This is the first thing one must grasp, otherwise one can understand nothing about the manifestation of the Divine."2
The same view Sri Aurobindo expresses elsewhere also. According to it, the Divine Consciousness of the Avatar, concerned as it is with only two things fundamentally—"the truth above and here below the Lila and the purpose of the incarnation or manifestation"—does "what is necessary" for them "in the way its greater than human consciousness sees to be the necessary and intended way".3
Now, if real failure is out of the question for all Avatars, how much less can it be conceived in connection with the incarnate Supermind? The Supermind, unlike even the highest Overmind consciousness like Sri Krishna's, is the Transcendent not acting indirectly as in Sri Krishna through the supreme grade of the Cosmic Divine, but acting directly, with all the
1Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 411.
2Ibid.
3Ibid., pp. 421-22.
Page 138
power of the more-than-cosmic level, however self-veiled and self-limited for the necessities of the World-play. So to believe that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not succeed and that their plan to supramentalise their own "physical" went quite astray is to entertain a sheer anomaly. Simultaneously, we have to come to grips with the fact that they have shed their bodies and thereby made a straight interpretation of their aim unrealistic. But, before doing so, let us further underline the situation in which we are placed by our argument. We cannot deny Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the full possibility to do what they set out to accomplish.
In Sri Aurobindo's letters we have even a few open clues to the unfailing character of the power brought by the Supramental Avatar. A question was put to him in 1933: "It seems to me that if the Supermind is not established in Mother's body-consciousness, it is not because she is not ready for it like us, but because in order to establish it she has first to prepare the physical of the sadhaks and of the earth to a certain extent. But some people take it in the wrong way; they believe that the Supermind has not been established in her body because she has not yet reached perfection. Am I right?" Sri Aurobindo answered: "Certainly. If we had lived physically in the Supermind from the beginning nobody could have been able to approach us nor could any sadhana have been done. There could have been no hope of contact between ourselves and the earth and men. Even as it is, Mother has to come down towards the lower consciousness of the sadhaks instead of keeping always in her own, otherwise they begin to say, 'How far away, how severe you were; you do not love me, I get no help from you, etc., etc' The Divine has to veil himself in order to meet the human."1
Here Sri Aurobindo, speaking of living physically in the Supermind from the beginning, affirms that from the beginning the Mother and he could have had not just a completely divinised consciousness but also a completely divinised bodily existence. To "live" is to be more than merely conscious: it is an organic activity, and when one adds the adverb "physically" one brings in a realisation in terms of the matter com-
1 Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 449-50.
Page 139
posing the organism. Moreover, just to have the physicalised mind or the physicalised life-force turned supramental would not render Sri Aurobindo and the Mother unapproachable or any sadhana impossible to do. As long as some part of the physical being—namely, the material constitution of the body—remained unsupramentalised, a point of contact with Sri Aurobindo and with the Mother would be there for people, and the two Gurus' sadhana of this part's supramentalisation would give people an opportunity to do some sadhana of their own along with the still unperfected Gurus. Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's capacity of living physically in the Supermind from the start must signify nothing short of their capacity of having a bodily existence divinised to the full.
Further, in saying "Certainly" to the correspondent Sri Aurobindo has concurred with the latter's opinion that there never was any question of the Mother's not being ready for the Supermind's establishment in her body-consciousness or of her body not attaining the perfection necessary for the establishment of the Supermind in it. This means that complete success in their present lives was always within the reach of the Mother and, by the same token, that of Sri Aurobindo himself. Hence failure, in the essential sense, could never be anticipated for either of them.
What actually happened may be guessed from another point covered by Sri Aurobindo's "Certainly". The correspondent has opined that the reason why the Mother's body had not been divinised by the time he wrote his letter was that "the physical of the sadhaks and of the earth" had not yet been prepared to the needed extent. This point comes out very clearly in a statement of Sri Aurobindo's in August 1936 on the spiritual fight upon the physical plane: "As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. We have not sought perfection for our own separate sake, but as part of a general change—creating a possibility of perfection for others. That could not have been done without our accepting and
Page 140
facing the difficulties of the realisation and transformation and overcoming them for ourselves. It has been done to a sufficient degree on the other planes—but not yet on the most material part of the physical plane. Till it is done, the fight there continues and, though there may be and is a force of Yogic action and defence, there cannot be immunity. The Mother's difficulties are not her own; she bears the difficulties of others and those that are inherent in the general action and working for the transformation. If it had been otherwise, it would be a very different matter."1
The implications are clear. If the Mother did not drag with her the whole world's difficulties in opening up the most material part of the physical plane, if she did not have to tackle the whole earth-consciousness's resistance to the transformative action and working, she would achieve her own supramentalisation, her body would be divinised and she would be yogically perfect and the Aurobindonian goal would be compassed in toto. There could be no possibility of failure for her and for Sri Aurobindo in themselves: their own personal success was a certainty. The evolutive process, without which no terrestrial achievement can be permanent and grow in expression of the terrestrial plane's Dharma, is bound to take time but the time required for instruments like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would be fairly short. Their supramentalisation, even if evolutively stretched out, would show in its history something of "what men would regard as a miraculous intervention", an amazing rapidity of movement which would come, as Sri Aurobindo has said, "if the human mind were more flexible and less attached to its ignorance than it is".2 In any case, there could be no in-built chance of failure for her and him if they sought supramental perfection for their own separate sake: rather there would be an automatic success.
But they did not seek this perfection like that—and there was the rub. Yet it was not such a rub as might lead to failure: it could only lead to a host of difficulties and sufferings and illnesses in the course of an earth-representative sadhana whose
1 Ibid., p. 476. 2 Ibid., p. 471.
Page 141
final fruit would be a success holding out the promise of transformation to all mankind. Carrying within themselves the power to live physically in the Supermind from the beginning and having the ability to be perfectly ready for divinisation of their bodies, they must be expected to have power enough to establish the Supermind in their physical beings in spite of all obstructions accepted from others and from the general earth-conditions. The obstructions might even create an early period during which Sri Aurobindo would not be sure whether he would succeed: evolutionary Avatars have to pass through all human phases. But, however evolutionary, these were Avatars—and Supramental Avatars at that. Consequently, a time must come when Sri Aurobindo would go past possibility and even probability and reach practical certainty and the luminous dominating sense of achievement in the near future. Thus on December 25,1934 he writes:
"I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. For in the terrestrial world the predetermined result is hidden and what we see is a whirl of possibilities and forces attempting to achieve something with the destiny of it all concealed from human eyes. This is, however, certain that a number of souls have been sent to see that it shall be now. That is the situation. My faith and will are for the now."1
Granting the non-failing supramental power in operation through its two chosen emanations who came, as this letter shows, with a small group of beings as collaborators in the work of supramentalisation in the present time and not in another age, we are left with no escape from seeing as a success what has happened to both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and hence as a voluntary fate their passing away without personal supramentalisation. This fate has to be interpreted as having been embraced for nothing less than success but success in a fashion enigmatical to man's non-flexible mind which is attached to its ignorance.
1 Ibid., p. 167.
Page 142
The call on us is to keep steadily before this mind the true nature of the Avatarhood that was Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's—and then to probe the events of the two "deaths". But to reach the proper view we must clear a few crucial points. While refusing to deny the authenticity of the success in spite of those events, we must ask how in view of them the Master and the Mother could be said to succeed in the "now" to which Sri Aurobindo refers and, if they could, under what aspect consistently with their certitude their success would arrive.
2
Obviously, they have altered their original plan. And there is no reason why they should not—provided they fulfil in however oblique and paradoxical a shape their fundamental mission. The Avatar, even the Supramental one, assumes certain human traits in right earnest: otherwise Avatarhood would be a flashing intrusion of the Divine and have no evolutionary significance for the world. In a very effective sense, God has to become like us in order to help us become like Him. God has to undergo our predicaments and take upon Himself our defects, pass through obscurities and come to terms with the manifold play of possibilities that work out the designs of the Supreme, a play calling for various adjustments and alterations, shifts of strategy and shufflings of tactics. The Incarnation takes his stand in the midst of a world-order that has gone on for centuries along lines often in opposition to new truths. The Incarnation enters a game proceeding according to rules partly dictated by the Ignorance through which evolution moves towards Knowledge. These rules are permitted to spring surprises even upon Divinity when It enters the human formula. The humanised Divinity holds on to Its basic vocation but needs to revolutionise Its methods, discard old projects, adopt startlingly new devices.
Thus Sri Aurobindo has spoken of an entire change of front from what was being done soon after November 24,1926, when he and the Mother experienced the Overmind descent into their bodies. Looking back from a latter time (October 18,1934) he
Page 143
writes: "...if the Mother were able to bring out the Divine Personalities and Powers into her body and physical being as she was doing for several months without break some years ago, the brightest period in the history of the Ashram, things would be much more easy and all these dangerous attacks that now take place would be dealt with rapidly and would in fact be impossible. In those days when the Mother was either receiving the Sadhaks for meditation or otherwise working and concentrating all night and day without sleep and with very irregular food, there was no ill-health and no fatigue in her and things were proceeding with a lightning swiftness... Afterwards, because the lower vital and the physical of the Sadhaks could not follow, the Mother had to push the Divine Personalities and Powers, through which she was doing the action, behind a veil and come down into the physical human level and act according to its conditions and that means difficulty, struggle, illness, ignorance and inertia..."1
Alluding to the same "brightest period", Sri Aurobindo remarks on January 14,1932: "...the Supramental could very well have come down into Matter under former conditions, if the means created by the Mother for the physical and vital contact had not been vitiated by the wrong attitude, the wrong reactions in the Ashram atmosphere. It was not the direct supramental Force that was acting, but an intermediate and preparatory force that carried in it a modified Light derived from the Supramental, but this would have been sufficient for the work of opening the way for the highest action, if it had not been for the irruption of these wrong forces on the yet uncon-quered lower (physical) vital material plane."2
Again we hear from Sri Aurobindo on December 31, 1934: "It is a little difficult to say whether all have to come down totally into the physical. The Mother and I had to do it because the work could not be otherwise done. We had tried to do it from above through the mind and higher vital, but it could not be because the Sadhaks were not ready to follow..."3
1 Ibid., p. 472. 2 Ibid., pp. 473-74.
3 Ibid., p. 474.
Page 144
A change still more radical and revolutionary in the dynamics of the Integral Yoga was required in 1950. When Sri Aurobindo and the Mother saw the necessity of one of them abandoning the body and Sri Aurobindo chose to withdraw from his physical sheath on December 5, he began to operate from behind the scene as a power of manifestation from the subtle-physical plane where he had established himself and as a power of evolution from the Inconscient where he had thrust the antennae of his consciousness through the dissolution of his semi-illuminated gross-physical substance. His direct role upon the earth was projected into a future when, as the Mother communicated to us, he would come in the first supramental body built in the supramental and not the natural way. From his command to the Mother early in the year that she would have to "fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation", we understood that just as he would represent a non-evolutionary materialisation of the Supramental she would toil on to represent an evolutionary supramentalisation of the Material: they would be the obverse and reverse of the same eternal Truth-gold made current in our Iron Age. The Aurobindonian objective would still be compassed except that, contrary to the original plan, the Master himself would not be the first body in evolutionary history to be divinised. But as he was concerned essentially with the supramentalisation of the earth-consciousness and never involved in any personal race for the Supermind all was well for him so long as his own Shakti, the Mother, with whom he was one in consciousness, was there to be the leader of the evolution, guiding the earth to its fulfilment by supramentalising herself in this life and not in another.
Yes, Sri Aurobindo's departure, although heart-stunning, was yet not absolutely mind-bewildering. It is the Mother's departure that is the extreme enigma. Of course, a radical and revolutionary change of plan is as legitimate for her as for him. But her change has occurred with an ostensible non-completion of the task Sri Aurobindo had entrusted to her. It is this non-completion that hits us hard and acutely challenges us.
Page 145
3
If we are to formulate a satisfying answer, we must set the enigma itself in its proper terms. These terms can only be as follows: "Sri Aurobindo willed—and his willing was in tune with the nature of the Supramental Avatarhood—that from their assumed human bodies a centre would result of a supramentalised physicality for the supramentalisation first of a few of their children and finally of all humanity. He focused his vision of such a centre in the Mother. Now that she has made her exit without actualising his vision, how will she yet manage, as she must, to be in a divine body amongst us to continue carrying the travail of evolution towards the grand finale prophesied by Sri Aurobindo? And what, after her exit at the age of ninety-five, should we understand by fulfilment not in a later age but in the present time?"
Our statement has two "posers": to adopt Sri Aurobindo's own brief categories for the original plan, "the question is as to the when and how." The challenge of the "when" can be immediately met. By the present time, the "now", we have to understand the period which would have been covered by the progress of the Mother's body if, animated more and more by the Supermind, it had persisted on earth in its originally planned course of concentrated evolution towards the supramental completeness. How long would that period be? The Mother has reported Sri Aurobindo as saying that perhaps three hundred years would be needed for the complete transformation of the body. She has also expressed her own feeling that it might take longer but an intense speeding-up of the supramental action may keep the time within the lower limit. So we cannot calculate in terms of less than three centuries. The oblique and paradoxical yet authentic success we have to attribute to the Mother must be allowed this time-span to realise itself. With the Supermind as her guard, her life could have been prolonged to that stretch for the full realisation. Logically, we cannot insist on a smaller stretch for the novel "how" of her fulfilment.
All the same, we may not rule out a shorter duration by virtue of the very novelty involved. Who knows if, just to avoid
Page 146
those three centuries which were the inevitable minimum under the old dispensation, she has struck out a new path which may seem to us a plunge into darkness but is actually a streak of light too rarefied for us to see until it issues once more into our common day? Should we not have faith that she would never do anything except for our advantage—that is, for the purpose of bringing about the Life Divine for us by means of her pioneering fulfilment?
The question would yet remain: "In what form is this fulfilment to be now conceived?" There are only two modes of conceiving it.
One is with reference to the "new body" which the Mother spoke of on several occasions as existing in the subtle-physical plane and acting upon the body in the gross-physical with a view to emerge into it and materially manifest a corps glorieux, "a body of glory", a divinely radiant form. The gross-physical, in order to effectuate the emergence in it of the new body, would have to get transformed to a high degree. Transformation must imply the assumption of the central difficulties of corporeal life and the conquest over them. The tendency to age, to deteriorate in faculties, to grow weak, to harbour the process of decay and run the risk of death—this tendency had to be faced in right earnest and then conquered. The Mother, in her ninety-fifth year, stood evenly balanced, as it were: the difficulties of the human condition were sufficiently borne and the power to prevent them from becoming dominant was in enough exercise but there seemed to be a standstill, a kind of stalemate.
We have to say "seemed" because the Supramental Avatar holds by the right of a direct transcendent origin, the capacity to counter and annul all cosmic laws. The Mother could have brought that capacity into play and moved forward, but the reversal of the problem she had admitted into herself—the problem of "this mortal coil", the tumultuous trouble of the human condition—would probably have taken an inordinate length of time—very much past what would be advantageous to her children. In response to a sudden call from the Truth above and to the hidden requirement of the World-Play, she consented to the dissolution of a body whose cells where passing through the sublime suffering of a radical recast under the Supermind's
Page 147
pressure. The Transcendent, that was her own highest Self, overruled in the interests of His earth-creatures His own planned triumph in a chosen vehicle.
The sole course open to the Mother was to let fall the body she had worn so long and so carefully prepared. This would mean letting someone else's body in the future achieve the fundamental Aurobindonian goal of changing evolutionarily into a divine one. Since both she and Sri Aurobindo had basically sought the supramentalisation of others, such a shift-over of achievement was altogether welcome. But none could be supramentalised without the dynamism of the Avatar who had descended from the Supermind to give supramentalisation to the world: either the Mother or Sri Aurobindo had to be the instrument for the divinisation of earth-creatures. This was the proviso of their very mission. Long ago—on April 20, 1935— Sri Aurobindo laid down the terms of his work: "I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only—I am not doing anything for myself... If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others..."1 Sri Aurobindo's supramentalisation was the sine qua non. And when he left his body, it could not be done in others if it was not done in the Mother whom he had elected as a compact field for his victory. When she left her body, the need still held for a centre which somehow or other would not be different from herself. Someone else's body would naturally have to be divinised now instead of her own, but the proviso of their mission would be satisfied only if to divinise someone else's body she yet worked from a poise on the earth itself. That poise would be indispensable to the pioneering Avatar-spirits that she and Sri Aurobindo were. Hence the question confronting the Mother in her ninety-fifth year of Supramental Avatarhood was: how, while obeying the Transcendent Will and giving up the body she had entered nearly a century before, was she to establish an earth-poise of divinising power?
We can reach an understanding of her answer through an
1 Ibid., pp. 144-45.
Page 148
insight into the transformation she was undergoing. On the one side the transformation was meant to render the gross-physical form increasingly subtle by the action of the subtle-physical Supramental Shape, so that it might be fit to house the latter. On the other side the transformation was meant to render this Shape increasingly dense by the reaction on it of the gross-physical form, so that it might be fit to be housed in the materially visible and tangible. Embracing the decision of the Transcendent, the Mother appears to have abandoned further subtlising or supramentalising the dense stuff of her evolutionary frame and to have concentrated on drawing up into this frame's non-evolutionary counterpart—into the subtle-physical Supramental Shape—the conscious essence of whatever subtlisation the dense evolutionary substance had acquired. By means of such a drawing up, she endowed the non-evolutionary counterpart with some of the "virtue" of the dense matter that had been passing through the transformative travail. The deathless Light proper to the new body waiting behind the scene took on an extra density and, when the old body gave itself up to death, the extra-densified new one got charged with the sense of the other's function and was pulled towards the materially visible and tangible, as if it were henceforth meant to stand not beyond but right over the frontier between its own world and ours.
The Mother we were familiar with is now the new secret body, a superhuman ensheathing. Such a transference from the old body is nothing inconceivable. She actually had the experience, on March 24,1972, of living as the new body with a continuity of consciousness from the old. She says: "I had a body altogether new in the sense that it was sexless... It was very white... It was very slim (gesture of slenderness)—it was pretty. Truly a harmonious form... I was like that, I had become like that... It was quite natural..."1 At the time of the transference the old body had not been dropped: it had just been kept aside. Now it has been allowed to dissolve, and the Mother has only a divine ensheathing. But she has assimilated into it all the at-
1 Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, August 1972, p. 75.
Page 149
tainments of the dissolved sheath in terms of "body-mind" and thereby brought it closer to our longing human arms than it ever could be without the assimilation of those attainments. A veritable Goddess, the Mother is yet within concrete reach of us—we have only to stretch our arms more intensely ripae ulterioris amore, "with love of the other shore", to get the Truth-touch we need for our integral Godward growth. The greater proximity of this compassionate Perfection to our body's soulful cry is what the Mother has accomplished through the apparent withdrawal from us that was her death.
With its greater proximity comes a greater force to carry us towards the Supramental goal. But this proximity is not the whole aim of the Mother's strategy. The earth-poise the Avatar of the Supermind must have in order to supramentalise earth is no more than approached by the proximity. It has yet to be fully realised. And the extra-densified new body has the power to realise it in full. To obtain that power for this body was the final victory won by the Mother. The new body's extra density provides the Mother with the possibility of materialising that body and making it visible and tangible, a supreme Presence in our midst to bring about our evolutionary completion.
But, just as the Mother's sadhana before her passing away was linked with our receptivity to the higher consciousness and could be to a considerable extent quickened or slowed down by the state in which we were, so also her progress towards materialisation from the boundary between two worlds is conditioned in a substantial measure by our response to her stand on that boundary. She cannot materialise herself soon unless we hasten to spiritualise ourselves.
The sudden shock we have received with the Mother's departure and, along with it, the sense that departure has given us of a greater impact from her new body have caused a forward spurt in our Yoga. If we can keep up the intensified aspiration we may hope to see the new body materialised in the near future—in less than a century. Even if our effort for progress gets relaxed the Mother will press for the manifestation. Her children then may not have to wait very long.
If, however, she finds it unfitting that she should thus manifest, a second way is conceivable. Indeed, it would be the one
Page 150
inevitable way under the circumstances. And of this possibility too we have a glimpse in some words of the Mother. Three years before she had the experience of living in her new body as if it were the most natural sheath for her—to be precise, on February 15,1969—she said: "...the work is becoming more and more 'exacting'. But I feel (that is to say the body feels very well) that it is part of a training. It looks like that: it must hold on, the body, or otherwise, so much the worse, it will be for another time."1 Again, in the very talk about the new body the Mother pointed to her own and exclaimed: "Is that (Mother points to her body), is that going to change? It must change or it has to follow the old ordinary process of undoing itself and remaking itself."2
This can mean only one thing: as in the past, the Mother may utilise the usual mode of birth, assume once more a body like ours and be amongst her children at the head of earth's evolution. An implication of this meaning is that for the body-supramentalising turn of evolution the rebirth of none except the Mother will do. But her rebirth will not involve going laboriously over the same field that she covered before. Rather, by force of all that her earlier incarnation has done and by the greater proximity it has brought about of her Supramental Shape, this second embodiment will have, despite its unavoidable nexus with world-conditions, a rare rapidity of sadhana and will soon be ready to house that Shape and uplift her children to spiritual supermanhood. When and where the hour of the re-embodiment will strike is left to the wisdom operating through the Supramental Shape in which she now abides. But we may be sure that it will not go beyond the limit of what we have stipulated as her extraordinary life-length if the original plan of supramentalisation had been followed. In saying "another time" she need not be construed as referring to a far-off date and negating the broad sense of "now". The expression simply connotes a bodily existence other than the one that was hers from February 21, 1878. In fact, once she decides on this alternative way of securing her earth-poise, the "when" can be
1Ibid., April 1969, p. 89.
2Ibid., August 1972, p. 81.
Page 151
very near and the "where" is likely to be such as to let her appear amidst her erstwhile family without unnecessary delay.
What we must guard against is letting our imagination run riot. We must not start hunting for signs and make various self-gratifying mental constructions. Although we must keep our eyes open, we must be passive in our receptivity. If the Mother takes birth, she will declare herself in her own fashion and her own good time. We must not superimpose our ignorance-coloured "Lo here!" and "Lo there!". The birth which she will bring about by her direct action will carry the clearest credentials. We shall not need to speak for it. We have merely to watch and wait.
Still, as regards the whole possibility of a second embodiment we have to remember the Mother's expression: "so much the worse." She did not favour "another time" and the mechanism involved: "the old ordinary process" of rebirth. It would have to be the last resort. The preference would undoubtedly go to the direct self-materialisation. Even though we have no open reference to such a mode of re-appearance of the Mother, we know that she looked forward in general to an occult method of birth for human beings. This method was expected to come into force after the Mother had sufficiently divinised her body and established herself firmly for the new world she was building up, the world in which Sri Aurobindo was to come in the first supramental body built in the supramental way. But, with the evolutionary alteration of her course on November 17, releasing new powers of action, the will of Sri Aurobindo for supramentalisation in the present age, and not in a later one, would tend to bring this method into use far sooner.
However, if we take "so much the worse" in its own restricted context, we find "another time" to be disapproved as compared only to the birth the Mother accepted in 1878 and wanted to use for the utmost consummation. Then there would be nothing in particular against the usual process of birth. The two alternatives of reappearance would be on a par.
But neither can become an early reality without our co-operation. We should go all out to create the conditions that would facilitate the wonderful phenomenon of self-materialisation. For the Mother's rebirth too our souls must
Page 152
keep devoted vigil. More than ever before we shall have to open our depths to the Light and Love that were lavished on us for so many years and that still waft to us from the joint Samadhi. Had we answered sufficiently to their call, the original plan might never have been changed. Indeed, to a high degree, it is our "estranged faces" that have made us "miss the many-splendoured thing" that for ninety-five years was our Mother, most divine, most human.
Page 153
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.