The Sun and The Rainbow

The Mother's Gayatri

The most sacred Mantra of the Rigveda (III.62.10), the Gayatri of Rishi Vishwamitra, directs us to the Solar Godhead of Truth

— Surya-Savitri:

Tat savitur varenyam

bhargo devasya dhimahi

dhiyo yo nah prachodayat

Let us meditate

on that most excellent light

of the divine Savitri

that it may impel our minds.

It is hardly possible for the Mother to have come across this great formula of Yogic progress in Paris in 1911. But just at that time, she gave a speech to a Women's Association. It makes a study of the anatomy of thought and explains how thinking can be controlled and turned into a perfect servant. Her speech ends with the exhortation:

"I would like us to make the resolution to raise ourselves each day, in all sincerity and goodwill, in an ardent aspiration towards the Sun of Truth, towards the Supreme Light, the source and intellectual life of the universe, so that it may pervade us entirely and illumine with its great brilliance our minds and hearts, all our thoughts and our actions."

Here is indeed a spontaneous reflection of the master Mantra — rather a recurrence of it from the same depths that it originally surged up from. But what is even more striking is that the Mother's version anticipates in living essence the

Page 116

new Gayatri which Sri Aurobindo has been inspired to give us, crystallising the aspiration for the direct descent of the Supermind into our earthly being:

Tat saviturvaram rupam

jyotih parasya dhimahi

yannah satyena dipayet

Let us meditate

on the most auspicious (best) form of Savitri,

on the Light of the Supreme

which shall illumine us with the Truth.

Page 117