Beyond Man

Chapter Eighteen: The Confrontation with Death

To conquer death, one must be ready to go through death.¹

— The Mother

About a year before, there already had been signs of trouble with the prostate gland, but Sri Aurobindo had cured that with his spiritual power. In November 1950, the symptoms appeared again. To the astonishment of his entourage, he who always had behaved as if he had eternity in front of him suddenly made them understand that he wanted to make haste with certain things, including the finishing of his epic poem Savitri.

Raymond F. Piper, professor of Syracuse University in the USA, has given the following appraisal of Savitri: ‘During a period of nearly fifty years … [Sri Aurobindo] created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language … I venture the judgment that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth’s darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of Supramental spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance. Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute.’²

With its 23,813 lines, Savitri is one of the longest poems in the English language. Its first version dates back as far as Sri Aurobindo’s Baroda period. No less than eleven and maybe twelve versions and revisions have been found. Originally a rather short narrative poem based on a story from Vyasa’s Mahabharata (one of the greatest literary works in the world qua content as well as extent) it gradually expanded by way of experiment into a poetic epic which reaches far ahead in the future. ‘I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level; each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular — if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels, I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.’³

Sri Aurobindo called Savitri ‘a legend and a symbol’. The legend goes as follows: Savitri, daughter of King Aswapati, undertakes in her magnificent ‘carved car’ a journey through the neighbouring kingdoms to choose for herself a husband from among the princes, as was the custom of the time. At the edge of a forest she unexpectedly meets Satyavan and they fall in love. Satyavan is the son of the blind king Dyumatsena who has lost his throne to an usurper and been banished to the forest. Savitri returns home to tell her parents that she has found the man of her choice and that she wants to marry him and nobody else. However, she hears from the heavenly singer and seer Narad that a curse rests on Satyavan: he must die in exactly a year’s time. In her love for Satyavan, Savitri refuses to go back on her decision. The marriage takes place and she goes to live with her husband and his parents in their hermitage in the forest, where she shares the recluse’s way of life and performs assiduously all the duties of an Indian wife.

On the appointed day of Satyavan’s death, Savitri accompanies her unsuspecting husband who goes to cut wood in the forest. There Yama, the God of Death, awaits him with the noose with which he leads the souls into the realms beyond. Savitri refuses to let go of Satyavan and keeps closely following the two in the hereafter, something she is able to do because of her occult and spiritual powers acquired through severe ascetic discipline. Death can neither deter her nor get rid of her whatever be his threats or promises. So great is Savitri’s strength that Yama at long last lets Satyavan return to life on earth. When Savitri and Satyavan return to their hermitage in the forest, a messenger arrives to inform Dyumatsena, who has miraculously regained his eyesight, that the usurper has died and that the people want him back as their king. In this happy ending Savitri alone knows of the drama that has taken place in regions inaccessible to human eyes and thought.

So far the legend, used by Sri Aurobindo as a symbol. Satyavan represents the embodied soul of humanity and Savitri is an incarnation of the Great Mother, descended upon Earth to save that soul from the night of suffering and death. In other words, Sri Aurobindo has transposed the popular story from the Mahabharata into a symbol of the Work of the Mother and himself. By which character in the poem is he then represented? The commentators are unanimous: by Aswapati, Savitri’s father and Lord of the Horse Sacrifice. This is only partially true, and it is at this point that their interpretations go off the rails.

Like all poetry from Sri Aurobindo’s maturity, Savitri too is a description of real facts and experiences from his yoga, and as such his message, formulated in words of mantric power. Savitri is even called by the Mother the message: ‘Savitri, c’est le Message.’⁴ She also says that Sri Aurobindo has revealed the most in Savitri: ‘He has crammed the whole universe in a single book⁹¹ … Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge, and I repeat this: the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of the sound, which is OM … These are experiences lived by him, realities, supracosmic truths … He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition … He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine … He accepted suffering to transform it into the joy of union with the Supreme.’ Each of these words applies to her too, for their Work was that of the one Consciousness in two bodies. Time and again she heard in astonishment — for Sri Aurobindo often read out to her what he just came to write — that in many passages her own experiences were described, sometimes in the smallest detail. ‘All this is his own experience, but what is most astonishing is that it is my experience also. It is my sadhana which he has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw, and the words, the phrases are exactly what I heard.’⁵

If Sri Aurobindo was Aswapati, then he certainly was a very different Aswapati from the character in the Mahabharata story, whoever the latter may have been. ‘His name was Aswapati. Performer of Yajnas [ceremonial offerings], presiding over charities, skilful in work, one who had conquered the senses, he was loved by the people of his kingdom and he himself loved them.’⁶ Thus read the verses about Aswapati in the Mahabharata. Let us now read Sri Aurobindo’s description of Aswapati in Savitri:

One in the front of the immemorial quest,
Protagonist of the mysterious play
In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms
And limits his eternity by the hours
And the blind Void struggles to live and see,
A thinker and toiler in the ideal’s air …

His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres
Into our province of ephemeral sight,
A colonist from immortality …

His birth held up a symbol and a sign;
His human self like a translucent cloak
Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.⁷

This, of course, is not the dutiful king from the Mahabharata but the Avatar who was Sri Aurobindo. ‘The yoga of the king’ as described in Savitri is not the yoga of the legendary Aswapati but the king-yoga of Sri Aurobindo who here, like in his other poetry, lifts a part of the veil covering his personality and its inner development. For instance, in ‘The Book⁹² of the Traveller of the Worlds’ he describes his occult-spiritual journeys of discovery through the subtle universes constituting the whole range of the stair, the ‘world-stair’, of manifested existence, and thus gives us his most detailed account of the geography of the inner worlds. ‘It is an exact description … amazingly realistic,’ said the Mother. If all this is not convincing enough, it may be pointed out that Aswapati’s name first appears on page 341 of an epic consisting of 741 pages in the Centenary Edition of Sri Aurobindo’s Collected Works. Had this not been intentional, it would indeed have been an incomprehensible oversight of an author who had the same comma deleted and reinstated five times. This key to the reading of Savitri is important because without it, it is impossible to evaluate the proper significance of the epic, which in turn would cause us to overlook some of the most relevant data in the life of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

This epic is like a very old city of which layer upon layer has been built on the foundations of former times. First there was a rather short narrative poem; then, in the various versions discovered after Sri Aurobindo’s demise, he went on building and expanding, making the narrative poem into an epic and deepening, widening and heightening its content, extent and spiritual intensity, till finally the poem became the matchless epic as it is now known to us. Sri Aurobindo has worded for posterity his own Work and that of the Mother in order to allow all prepared souls who read those lines to breathe the same atmosphere and to contact the same realities behind the surface perceptible by the senses. According to the Mother, Savitri even contains the whole supramental yoga. Some parts, however, are less, much less elaborated or elevated, namely the fragments which have remained nearest to the original legend of which it is the function to prop up or frame the construction of the epic as a whole and to establish the lines of its continuity. Only in such passages is Aswapati still the character from the Mahabharata; in the ‘high’ spiritual and overmental parts of the epic ‘the thinker and toiler’, the one ‘in front of the immemorial quest’, ‘the traveller of the worlds’ is Sri Aurobindo himself ‘the first of time-born men who had the knowledge’ which will lead to a new world-order.

‘Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch: as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry,’⁸ Sri Aurobindo wrote to K.D. Sethna. As we know, Sri Aurobindo held Sethna in high esteem as a poet, and it was with him that he conducted an extensive correspondence about Savitri and to whom he sent, in a letter in 1936, the first passage (the opening lines) ever read by eyes other than his own. ‘It took the world something like a hundred years to discover Blake; it would not be improbable that there might be a greater time-lag here, though naturally we hope for better things.’⁹

Somewhere in 1945, Sri Aurobindo’s eyesight deteriorated. He probably had cataract, one of the scourges of India. Nirodbaran now became his amanuensis. ‘He would dictate line after line, and ask me to add selected lines and passages in their proper places, but which were not always kept in their old order,’ writes Nirodbaran. ‘I wonder how he could go on dictating lines of poetry in this way, as if a tap had been turned on and the water flowed, not in a jet of course, but slowly, very slowly indeed. Passages sometimes had to be re-read in order to get the link or sequence, but when the turn came of the Book of Yoga and the Book of Everlasting Day, line after line began to flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on the next day that a revision was done to get the link for further continuation. In the morning he himself would write out new lines on small note books called ‘bloc notes’ [note pads] which were incorporated in the text … . Sometimes there were two or even three versions of a passage. As his sight began to fail, the letters also became gradually indistinct, and I had to decipher and read them all before him. I had a good sight and, more than that, the gift of deciphering his hieroglyphics, thanks to the preparatory training I had received during my voluminous correspondence with him before the accident. At times when I got stuck he would help me out, but there were occasions where both of us failed. Then he would say, “Give it to me, let me try.” Taking a big magnifying glass, he would focus his eyes but only to exclaim, “No, can’t make out.”’¹⁰

As mentioned in the beginning, of this chapter, somewhere at the end of October or in the first days of November 1950 Sri Aurobindo suddenly seemed to be pressed for time to finish Savitri. In the previous years he had worked on all unfinished parts and given them ‘an almost new birth, with the exception of the Book of Death and the Epilogue, which for some inscrutable reason he left practically unrevised’,¹¹ writes Nirodbaran. ‘When the last revision was made and the Cantos were wound up, I said, “It is finished now.” An impersonal smile of satisfaction greeted me and he said, “Ah, is it finished?” How well I remember that flicker of a smile which all of us craved for so long! “What is left now?” was his next query. “The Book of Death and the Epilogue.” “Oh, that? We shall see about that later on.” That “later on” never came and was not meant to come. Having taken the decision to leave the body, he must have been waiting for the right moment to go and for reasons known to himself he left the two last-mentioned Books almost as they were. Thus on Savitri was put the seal of incomplete completion about two weeks before the Darshan of November 24th. Other literary works also came to an end.’¹²

Some ten days before the darshan of 24 November, the symptoms of Sri Aurobindo’s illness worsened again. The prostate gland was swollen and traces of albumin and acetone were found in his urine. After the exhausting darshan day, the symptoms became alarming. Dr. Satyavrata Sen found it necessary to apply a catheter, and Dr. Prabhat Sanyal, a devotee and surgeon of repute in Calcutta, was telegraphically summoned to come to Pondicherry straightaway. He has left us his recollection of those days in an article entitled A Call from Pondicherry. On his arrival at the Ashram he was at once informed by Sen and Nirodbaran about Sri Aurobindo’s condition and accompanied by them up to his apartment. ‘I asked him what the trouble was and whether I could give him any relief. I put to him the regular professional questions, perhaps then forgetting that my patient was the Divine housed in a mortal frame, and he answered: “Trouble? Nothing troubles me — and suffering? one can be above it.” I mentioned the urinary difficulties. “Well, yes,” he answered, “I had some difficulties but they have been relieved, and now I do not feel anything” … I explained to [the Mother] that he was suffering from a mild kidney infection — otherwise there was nothing very serious as far as could be judged from the urine report.’¹³

On 1 December, there was some amelioration; the temperature was normal. ‘He was in a more cheerful mood and even joked with Sanyal.’¹⁴ December 2 was (and is) the day of the annual sports feast of the Ashram youth, which needed a lot of attention and energy from the Mother. ‘As soon as the activities were over, the Mother came to Sri Aurobindo’s room, placed the garland from her neck at his feet and stood there quietly. Her countenance was very grave. He was indrawn with his eyes closed.’ His temperature had gone up again rapidly. On 3 December the temperature again dropped to normal, so much so that Sanyal thought of leaving for Calcutta, but the Mother made him change his mind. In the afternoon the temperature shot up again. ‘Then for the first time, the Mother said, “He is losing interest in himself … ” The long night passed in distress alternating with an indrawn condition. He would wake up, however, only when we wanted to give him a drink. Sometimes, he even expressed a choice in the matter.’

On 4 December Sri Aurobindo all at once strongly insisted that he wanted to sit up, something the doctors only reluctantly allowed. ‘We noticed after a while that all the distressing breathing symptoms had magically vanished and he looked his normal self … We boldly asked him now, “Are you not using your force to cure yourself?” “No!” came the stunning reply. We could not believe our ears; to be quite sure, we repeated the question. No mistake! Then we asked, “Why not? How is the disease going to be cured otherwise?” “Can’t explain; you won’t understand,” was the curt reply. We were dumbfounded.’¹⁵

By midday the symptoms again increased, particularly the breathing. Around one o’clock the Mother said to Sanyal: ‘He is withdrawing.’ A blood analysis showed all the signs of imminent kidney failure. ‘He was now always withdrawn, and only woke up whenever he was called for a drink. That confirmed the Mother’s observation that he was fully conscious within and disproved the idea that he was in an uraemic coma. Throughout the entire course of the illness he was never unconscious,’ writes Nirodbaran; Dr. Sanyal concurs with him in every respect.

In the early evening the respiratory distress returned with redoubled force. He went to his bed and plunged within. ‘It was during this period that he often came out of the trance, and each time leaned forward, hugged and kissed Champaklal on the cheek, who was sitting by the side of his bed. Champaklal also hugged him in return. A wonderful sight it was, though so strangely unlike Sri Aurobindo who had rarely called us even by our names in these twelve years.’¹⁶ Nirodbaran and others have remained puzzled about this unusual behaviour of Sri Aurobindo. Is it not obvious that the Avatar, in his love for humanity, is here taking leave of that humanity in the person of Champaklal? It was ‘the embrace that takes to itself the body of God in man,’ as Sri Aurobindo had written in the Synthesis.¹⁷

In the Ashram only a handful of people, taken into the confidence of a doctor or assistant, were aware of what was going on in Sri Aurobindo’s rooms on the first floor; the Mother did not disquiet the others and continued following her daily routine. After she returned from the playground, she put her garland at the feet of Sri Aurobindo just like any other evening. Again she said to Sanyal: ‘He has no interest in himself, he is withdrawing.’ And Sanyal writes: ‘A strange phenomenon — a body which for the moment is in agony, unresponsive, labouring hard for breath, suddenly becomes quiet; a consciousness enters the body, he is awake and normal. He finishes the drink, then, as the consciousness withdraws, the body lapses back into the grip of agony.’

At midnight the Mother came again into the room. ‘This time he opened his eyes and the two looked at each other in a steady gaze. We were the silent spectators of that crucial scene. What passed between them was beyond our mortal ken.’ One hour later the Mother was back in the room once more. ‘Her face was calm, there was no trace of emotion. Sri Aurobindo was indrawn. The Mother asked Sanyal in a quiet tone, “What do you think? Can I retire for an hour? … Call me when the time comes.”’ And Nirodbaran comments: ‘It may appear strange to our human mind that the Mother should leave Sri Aurobindo at this critical moment. We must remember that we are not dealing with human consciousness … Besides, we know that at this particular hour she had very important occult work to do.’ But the Mother herself has told what actually happened at that moment: ‘As long as I remained in the room he could not leave his body.’¹⁸ With a slight movement of the head he then gave her to understand that she should leave the room.

About ten minutes later Sri Aurobindo asked Nirodbaran by name for something to drink: ‘ “Nirod, give me some drink.” This was his deliberate last gesture. The quantity he drank was very small and there was no apparent need of calling me by name. Those last words still ring in my ears and remain inscribed in my soul,’ writes Nirodbaran. ‘I perceived a light quiver in his body, almost imperceptible,’ remembers Sanyal. ‘He drew up his arms and put them on his chest, one overlapping the other — then all stopped … I told Nirod to go and fetch the Mother. It was 1.20 a.m. Almost immediately the Mother entered the room. She stood there, near the feet of Sri Aurobindo: her hair had been undressed and was flowing about her shoulders. Her look was so fierce that I could not face those eyes. With a piercing gaze she stood there. Champaklal could not bear it and sobbingly he implored, “Mother, tell me Dr. Sanyal is not right, he is alive.” The Mother looked at him and he became quiet and composed as if touched by a magic wand. She stood there for more than half an hour. My hands were still on his forehead.’

One of the Ashram visitors in those days was the American philosopher Rhoda Le Cocq, who has related the events in her book The Radical Thinkers — Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo. She writes: ‘Unexpectedly, in the afternoon [of 6 December, some forty hours after Sri Aurobindo’s demise], there was another darshan. Sri Aurobindo’s face still did not look deathlike. The skin was golden in colour, the white hair blowing on the pillow in a breeze from a fan. The acquiline profile continued to have a prophetic look.’ The Mother named ‘Power’ one of the photographs of Sri Aurobindo taken by an Ashram photographer on his deathbed. ‘There was no odour of death and little incense was burning. To my astonishment the repeated viewings of his body had a comforting effect. Previously I had always resented the idea of viewing dead bodies.’¹⁹

The legal maximum time for a body to remain unburied in the tropics was 48 hours, and therefore everybody expected the burial to take place on 7 December under the big tree in the Ashram courtyard, where the grave had already been dug. But the Mother had a notice posted on that very same day: ‘The funeral of Sri Aurobindo has not taken place today. His body is charged with such a concentration of supramental light that there is no sign of decomposition and the body will be kept lying on his bed so long as it remains intact.’²⁰

Rhoda Le Cocq writes: ‘From the French colony, already exploding with disapproval and its officials much disturbed by the burial plans, came the rumor that the body must have been “shot with formaldehyde” secretly, to preserve it. Moreover, said the officials, the Ashram was not only breaking the law in burying anyone in the garden, it was worse to keep it so long unburied … On the morning of December 7th, therefore, a French doctor representing the government, a Dr. Barbet, arrived to inspect the body of Sri Aurobindo. At the end, he reported that it was a “miracle”; there was no deterioration, no rigor mortis. It was an unheard of occurrence; the weather had continued to be hot during the entire time. After this official and scientific approval nothing further could be done to prevent another darshan. Visitors were flocking from all over India; and the Indian newspapers now proposed that Sri Aurobindo be suggested, posthumously, for the Nobel Peace Prize.’²¹

On 8 December ‘tension grew among the ashramites, and incredible speculations became the order of the day.’ A phenomenon like this had never occurred in India, where not even yogis whose speciality it was to have themselves buried alive had never performed such a feat. ‘No Indian “living saint” in history had preserved his body after death in this fashion.

‘On the afternoon of December 9th, at 5:00 p.m., the burial service finally took place after another final darshan. A feeling of force and energy remained in the atmosphere around Sri Aurobindo’s vicinity, but that force had now weakened … There was no orthodox religious service at the burial. The coffin, of rosewood with metal-gold rings, much like an old and beautiful sea-chest, was borne from the ashram and lowered into the earth. French officials, all dressed in white, made a line to the left, their faces stern, a bit superior in expression and definitely disapproving of the entire affair. Over the coffin concrete slabs were laid. Then everyone lined up and, one by one, we scattered earth from wicker baskets. It was dark under the spreading tree when each of us had made his last farewell.’

Why has Sri Aurobindo left his body? For the Mother had said to K.D. Sethna, as to others: ‘There was nothing “mortal” about Sri Aurobindo,’ and also: ‘Sri Aurobindo did not die of physical causes. He had complete control over his body.’²² And Sri Aurobindo himself had written about the results of his yoga in Savitri:

The old adamantine vetoes stood no more:
Overpowered were earth and Nature’s obsolete rule;
The python coils of the restricting Law
Could not restrain the swift arisen God:
Abolished were the scripts of destiny.

There was no small death-hunted creature more … ²³

We find the same in his sonnet ‘Transformation’:

I am no longer a vassal of the flesh,
A slave to Nature and her leaden rule … ²⁴

Actually, Sri Aurobindo had advanced much farther in his yoga than his commentators, including the ultrapositive-minded devotees among them, generally assume. Either the latter go to extremes of hyperbolic devotion and praise interlarded with traditional metaphors, or the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s personality and work is left by the others in the shadow of his passing on. This does not mean that true devotion or veneration necessarily has to be based on rational understanding, but one does Sri Aurobindo and the Mother great injustice by overlooking the documents of what has been the greatest, because decisive, intervention in the history of humankind. True, their work has been performed on a plane surpassing the ordinary consciousness of human beings, but the insight into it that the documents allow us can only clarify and increase our appreciation of it.

Sri Aurobindo entered death voluntarily. The Mother said in the same month of December 1950: ‘He was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond the reach of human mentality.’²⁵ No doubt, the fact is so complex and our knowledge of its real factors and background so limited that our ‘understanding’ of them is limited too. The Mother herself has never given a complete explanation and told even years later that she remained puzzled by the event. ‘Why? Why? How often have I not asked that question!’ She had 5,000 copies of an essay by K.D. Sethna printed and distributed among the disciples and devotees to put their anguished mind at rest. Sethna formulated his thesis as follows: ‘Nothing except a colossal strategic sacrifice of this kind in order that the physical transformation of the Mother may be immeasurably hastened and rendered absolutely secure and, through it, a divine life on earth for humanity may get rooted and be set aflower — nothing less can explain the passing of Sri Aurobindo.’²⁶

Let us examine certain facts. The Mother had said several times that Sri Aurobindo had confided to her at one time: ‘We cannot both remain on earth, one of us must go.’ To which she had replied: ‘I am ready, I’ll go.’ But Sri Aurobindo had forbidden that. ‘No, you can’t go, your body is better than mine, you can undergo the transformation better than I can do.’²⁷ She will refer to this vital conversation later: ‘He told me that his body was not capable of enduring the transformation, that mine was more suitable — and he repeated this.’ When did that vital conversation take place? One time the Mother says that it was something ‘that he said in 1949,’ another time that it was ‘before he broke his leg,’ which means in 1938, that early.

It is indisputable that the Mother did not know that he would depart. In The Mother — Sweetness and Light Nirodbaran recounts in detail his conversation with her on his birthday in 1953. He recalls her saying: ‘At any rate, I did not believe till the last moment that Sri Aurobindo was going to leave his body.’ And he gives Sethna’s comment in a footnote: ‘This is correct. On Dec. 3 she told me that Sri Aurobindo would soon read my articles. Later, when I asked her why she had let me go to Bombay on Dec. 3 she said that Sri Aurobindo’s going had not been decided yet.’²⁸ Two days beforehand!

From what precedes we can conclude, firstly, that Sri Aurobindo was fully knowledgeable of the ordeal the supramental physical transformation would mean for a body and that he had unmistakably seen that the Mother’s body was better able than his to undergo that transformation — ‘unmistakably’ because otherwise he surely would have taken on the ordeal himself. In later years the Mother would wholeheartedly agree with the correctness of his decision.

Secondly, he must have seen that, for practical reasons connected with the Work, it was required that a manifested half of the double Avatar, of the Two-in-One, had to go and work ‘behind the veil’ — probably to hasten the result of the Work, certainly because Death and everything related to it could only be transformed by confronting it with the full avataric consciousness, in other words: by consciously experiencing and transforming death. The Mother too must have seen this necessity, which was the reason why she spontaneously declared herself prepared for the occult master act.⁹³

Thirdly — and there is no circumventing this — Sri Aurobindo had worked out the preparation of his voluntary passage through death in such a way that it remained veiled for part of the active consciousness of the Mother and that his intention remained hidden from her — she who could read the worlds and all they contain like an open book. He did this for the reason the Mother herself told us, namely that otherwise she could not have let him go without leaving together with him. We will shortly see what an enormous shock Sri Aurobindo’s sudden corporeal absence impacted on her physical consciousness.

As she told Nirodbaran, indications of Sri Aurobindo’s departure had not been lacking. To begin with there had been the conversation between her and Sri Aurobindo which we have literally reproduced above. There also was the exceptional fact that Sri Aurobindo had allowed himself to be photographed, for the first time since his withdrawal in 1926, by the now world-famous Henri Cartier-Bresson⁹⁴, during the darshan days of April 1950.

Sri Aurobindo in his room, April 1950

Sri Aurobindo in his room, April 1950

A very important indication, in retrospect, of Sri Aurobindo’s impending departure was finally the fact that he had declared Savitri terminated without having worked out the Book of Death and the Epilogue. The Book of Death, barely revised from a very early draft, comprises no more than five pages while occupying a central place in the epic. We have already been reminded several times of the fact that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never spoke speculatively or theoretically but always from their own practical experience, and that Savitri and the poetry of the later years too were based on that experience. Death, however, had not been experienced by Sri Aurobindo, though he must have been aware that the confrontation with death was of essential and indispensable importance to enable the immortality of the new species. This explains the fact that, in Savitri, he has not gone into or formulated what he had not experienced. Seen in the same way, it should be clear why the epilogue of the poem was not written and only follows sketchily the legend as told in the Mahabharata; for the Work is still in progress and its crowning epilogue, the Kingdom of God upon Earth, will be visible, livable and describable only much later.

Sri Aurobindo has not gone ‘the way of all flesh’ like human beings before him have and still do; he did not die because of a law of nature deemed unbreakable. In the aforementioned words of the Mother: ‘He was not forced to leave his body, he has chosen to do so.’ When Satprem was writing his Sri Aurobindo, ou l’Aventure de la Conscience, he read twice or three times a week the last pages he had written to the Mother. Having arrived at Sri Aurobindo’s passing, he wrote that Sri Aurobindo on 5 December 1950 had ‘succumbed’, using the French word succombé. The Mother corrected him at once: ‘He has not “succumbed’’. It is not so that he was not able of doing otherwise. It is not the difficulty of his work which has made him depart. It is something else … You must use another word than “succumb.” Really, it was his decision that things would be done in another way, because he was of the opinion that the result in this way would come about much faster … But this is a complex explanation which for the time being regards nobody. But one cannot say that he has “succumbed”. “Succumbed” evokes the thought that he did not want to [die], that it happened all by itself, that it was an accident. It cannot be “succumbed.”’²⁹

When a disciple wrote in 1969 to the Mother: ‘May I not be unfaithful to the sacrifice Sri Aurobindo has made for the earth!’, the Mother replied: ‘For his consciousness it was not a sacrifice.’³⁰ It was a technical, practical, occult exigency to hasten the manifestation of the Supermind and the supramental transformation on Earth. It might not be unreasonable to postulate that this acceleration was seen as imperative by Sri Aurobindo to make it possible that the foundations of the divine future of humankind — the task for which the double Avatar had incarnated — might be built while the Avatar, now physically embodied only in the Mother, would still be on Earth. Otherwise, a new incarnation would have been required somewhere in the future, which means that the manifestation of the Supermind would have been postponed.

Sri Aurobindo, totally free of ego, had no personal desires, pride or purposes; the success of the work of the Avatar was to him the only object of importance. His ‘strategic withdrawal’ was possible because the Mother remained behind. Had this not been so, their avataric embodiment and effort would indeed have been a fiasco as far as their main objective, the establishment of the Supermind in the Earth-atmosphere, was concerned. The physical half of the body of the Avatar that was better constituted to undergo the transformation remained upon Earth. As the Consciousness was one but the division of tasks different, Sri Aurobindo had to transmit his yogic acquirements to the Mother to allow her to continue the Work at once and in its total extent. This amazing transmission has taken place immediately after Sri Aurobindo was declared ‘dead’ by Dr. Sanyal. ‘When [Sri Aurobindo] had left, there was an entire part — the most material part of the descent into the material body down to the mental — which visibly left his body and entered into mine,’ said the Mother, ‘and that was so concrete that I felt the friction of the forces going through the pores of my skin … It was as concrete as if it had been material.’³¹ This phenomenon demands some clarification. We will consider it in the following chapter.

And so the Mother could say, looking back in 1970 on the past twenty years: ‘And I see now, I see how much his departure and his work — so … so enormous, you know, and persistent in the subtle physical — how much, how much it has helped! How much he has helped to prepare everything, to change the structure of the physical.’³² In 1972 she said: ‘There is a difference in the power of action. He himself — he himself! — has more action, more power of action now than in his body. Besides, it was therefore that he left, because it was necessary to do so.’³³ And when Satprem once asked her: ‘But why that standstill?’ (caused by Sri Aurobindo’s passing, he meant), the Mother exclaimed: ‘But nothing has come to a standstill! … He had come for that, and he had arranged everything to … to secure a maximum of chances … “chances” by way of speaking: possibilities — to put all the trumps in our hand.’³⁴ And she also said: ‘Sri Aurobindo once told me that he had arranged everything in a way that nothing would be able to disrupt the continuation of his work.’

It can hardly be denied that several commentators have underestimated the degree of Sri Aurobindo’s personal transformation — in so far as the word ‘personal’ is appropriate in his case — being deceived as they were by his so-called ‘death.’ We know now that he went voluntarily into death. We also remember that he was fully supramentalised except for the material part of his adhara, and that personal supramental descents in his body were frequent already in 1938. In the following twelve years his personal transformation, in spite of the upheaval caused by the war, must still have progressed considerably. It so happens that his sonnet ‘Transformation’ is not dated, but it already has the lines:

Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme
And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine
Channels of rapture opal and hyaline
For the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme.³⁵

In other words, the transformation of his body at the time had progressed very far. This is why after he left it, it remained unaffected during 111 hours in the tropics, in an aura of light. And it was the supramental force the cells contained which was transmitted to the body of the Mother.

He had arranged everything so that the continuation of his Work would not be disrupted. ‘He cast his deeds in bronze to front the years.’ Aere perennius … In no article, essay or book can one find what he actually meant by that, what actually was the base of the Work he had come to build and on which the Mother would continue building. Nowhere are mentioned those crucial passages in Savitri, from the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, where the Traveller, who was none other than Sri Aurobindo, descends into the night of the Subconscient and Inconscient. ‘The ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign’ in ‘the black inertia of our base’.

Into the abysmal secrecy he came
Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,
And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor
Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts
And built the world not knowing what it built.

There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,
There is the record of the vanished stars.

There in the slumber of the cosmic
Will He saw the secret key of Nature’s change …

He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,
Knew death for a cellar in the house of life,
In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace
Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain
And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.

Then in Illusion’s occult factory
And in the Inconscient’s magic printing house
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,
Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code
And the articles of the bound soul’s contract,
Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.

Annulled were the tables of the law of pain …
He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable
Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things
A paean-song of the free Infinite
And the Name, foundation of eternity,
And traced on the awake exultant cells
In the ideographs of the Ineffable
The lyric of the love that waits through Time
And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss
And the message of the superconscient Fire …

Hell split across its huge abrupt facade
As if a magic building were undone,
Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream …

Healed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made
And sorrow could live no more in Nature’s breast:
Division ceased to be, for God was there.

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray.

Matter and spirit mingled and were one.³⁶

That is what Sri Aurobindo has done. He has descended into the lower reaches of existence — ‘delve deeper, deeper still’ — and there has changed the programme which produces life as we still know it at present. At the roots of life, he has made possible the supramental transformation; its realization is on the way and will manifest materially in the future. Since December 1950 he has kept working behind the veil of gross matter ‘to change the structure of matter’ in order that his reprogramming of the foundations of existence should be worked out more rapidly. He has ‘given all trumps’ in the Mother’s hand to bring the Work for which both of them had come to a successful end.

In a sonnet from 1940, ‘The Inconscient Foundation’, we find a confirmation of Sri Aurobindo’s work of world re-creation:

My mind beholds its veiled subconscient base,
All the dead obstinate symbols of the past,
The hereditary moulds, the stamps of race
Are upheld to sight, the old imprints effaced.

In a downpour of supernal light it reads
The black Inconscient’s enigmatic script
Recorded in a hundred shadowy screeds
An inert world’s obscure enormous drift;
All flames, is torn and burned and cast away.

There slept the tables of the Ignorance,
There the dumb dragon edicts of her sway,
The scriptures of Necessity and Chance.

Pure is the huge foundation left and nude,
A boundless mirror of God’s infinitude.³⁷

To conclude the story of Sri Aurobindo’s life in this book, we accompany Rhoda Le Cocq on that last darshan of 24 November 1950.

‘As a Westerner, the idea of merely passing by these two [Sri Aurobindo and the Mother] with nothing being said, had struck me as a bit ridiculous. I was still unfamiliar with the Hindu idea that such a silent meeting could afford an intensely spiritual impetus. I watched as I came up in line, and I noted that the procedure was to stand quietly before the two of them for a few silent moments, then to move on at a gesture from Sri Aurobindo. What happened next was completely unexpected.

‘As I stepped into a radius of about four feet, there was the sensation of moving into some kind of a force field. Intuitively, I knew it was the force of Love, but not what ordinary humans usually mean by the term …

‘Then, all thought ceased, I was perfectly aware of where I was; it was not ‘’hypnotism’’ as one Stanford friend later suggested. It was simply that during those few minutes, my mind became utterly still. It seemed that I stood there a very long, an uncounted time, for there was no time. Only many years later did I describe this experience as my having experienced the Timeless in Time. When there at the darshan, there was not the least doubt in my mind that I had met two people who had experienced what they claimed. They were Gnostic Beings. They had realized this new consciousness which Sri Aurobindo called the Supramental.’³⁸

Sri Aurobindo, Mahasamadhi, 5 December 1950