Beyond Man

Chapter Fifteen: A Night in November

For us historical events sometimes have reasons which reason does not know, and the force lines of history may be as invisible but nonetheless as real as the force lines of a magnetic field.¹

— Louis Pauwels

The three darshan days were the highlights of the year in the Ashram. All Ashramites looked forward to them because once again they would see Sri Aurobindo for a couple of minutes, with the Mother at his right side, both of them seated on a sofa in a small enclosed room in his apartment from eight in the morning till about three o’clock in the afternoon, with only one brief breathing pause. One by one the waiting Ashramites and a number of specially admitted visitors then stood for a moment face to face with the smiling embodied Presence who, with the blessing of the day, gave to all what they needed for their inner well-being and progress.

On every occasion, the darshans were prepared by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the occult plane. ‘There is usually a descent, but there is also a great opposition to the descent at these times² … It is true that attacks are frequent at that time.’³ (Sri Aurobindo) The resistance and the attacks of course came from the hostile forces, who used all possible means to prevent each and every descent of the Higher Power and who doggedly fought every spiritual step forward. Sri Aurobindo’s concentration to ward off the attacks was so often required at these times that he put a temporary halt to the correspondence.

On that 23 November 1938 the expectations were once again keen and the air festive. Visitors had come from everywhere, including foreign countries. This time the centre of attention among them was Margaret Wilson, daughter of the American President Woodrow Wilson. She had read books by Sri Aurobindo in the New York Library and had started corresponding with him and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo, at her request, had given her a Sanskrit name, as always significant of the spiritual possibilities he saw in the person rather than an indication of already acquired capacities. Margaret Wilson was now called ‘Nishta’ in the Ashram, a name which, in Sri Aurobindo’s words written to her, meant ‘one-pointed, fixed and steady concentration, devotion and faith in the single aim — the Divine and the Divine Realisation.’

Sri Aurobindo had duly warned her before she undertook the long journey from the United States: ‘We [i.e. he and the Mother] are doubtful about the advisability of your coming here next winter. Your illness [she had arthritis] and the fact that you suffer from the heat stand in the way … Finally, you do not know perhaps that I am living at present in an entire retirement, not seeing or speaking with anyone, even the disciples in the Ashram, only coming out to give a silent blessing three times a year. The Mother also has no time to give free or frequent access to those who are here. You would therefore probably be disappointed if you came here with the idea of a personal contact with us to help you in your spiritual endeavour. The personal touch is there, but it is more of an inward closeness with only a few points of physical contact to support it. But the inner contact, inner help can very well be received at a distance.’⁴

In the silence of the tropical night preceding the busy darshan day, only one light was on — a lamp in Sri Aurobindo’s room. The heaving, roaring breakers must have crashed against the sea-wall as usual. At that time of the year Orion rises in the night-sky. Then the unexpected happened.

‘Between 2.20 and 2.30 the Mother rang the bell,’ writes A.B. Purani, who was on voluntary night duty. ‘I ran up the staircase to be told suddenly that an accident had happened to Sri Aurobindo’s leg and that I should fetch the doctor.’⁵ While going from his room to the bathroom Sri Aurobindo had stumbled over a tiger skin, one of the many presented to him by followers and admirers, and of which two or three can still be seen in his apartment. The first doctor called upon was Dr. Manilal. ‘When we other doctors came up, we saw that Dr. Manilal was busy examining Sri Aurobindo’s injured leg. The Mother was sitting by his side, fanning him gently,’⁶ writes Nirodbaran.

It was clear from the unnatural position of the leg that it was broken. The fracture was more serious than thought at first. An orthopaedic surgeon and a radiologist from Madras were summoned as quickly as possible, with the required equipment to examine and treat Sri Aurobindo in his apartment. Their conclusion: a compound fracture of the right thigh bone. The leg was put in traction.

The news of Sri Aurobindo’s accident caused consternation, commotion and disillusionment all over the Ashram. The darshan everyone had been looking forward to so expectantly would not take place. (Still, a smiling Mother alone gave darshan in the evening.) And in the mind of one and all the question must have arisen: how could Sri Aurobindo, the Mahayogi, the Avatar others were praying for protection, himself have become the victim of an accident? However quietly and with dignity they comported themselves outwardly, most of them were no doubt seriously shaken.

Indeed, how had that accident been possible? Sri Aurobindo said shortly afterwards: ‘The hostile forces have tried many times to prevent things like the darshan, but I have succeeded in warding off all their attacks. At the time the accident to my leg happened, I was more occupied with guarding the Mother and I forgot about myself. I didn’t think the hostiles would attack me. That was my mistake.’⁷ ‘It was because I was unguarded and something forced its way into the subconscient. There is a stage in yogic advance when the least negligence would not do.’⁸ And he also said: ‘I didn’t think they would dare.’

But dare they did, and they had chosen the best possible moment to hit the victim of their attack with a heavy physical blow and at the same time humiliate him in everybody’s eyes. The Mother said about this: ‘It was a formation (a hostile force) and he did not take enough precautions because that force was directed against both of us, more particularly against me. It had already tried a couple of times to break my head — things like that. Therefore [Sri Aurobindo] was under tension to prevent that it seriously might hit my body. And that’s how it managed to approach him unnoticed and break his leg. It was a shocking event.’⁹

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were probably the only ones who could destroy a hostile being by dissolving it into its Origin. The reason why the Adversary had run the risk of an attack like this was that in 1938 Sri Aurobindo had reached a point in his yoga where the general manifestation⁹¹ of the Supramental, the main objective of his effort, had become a distinct possibility. In an earlier chapter we have followed his advance in the previous years and we have seen that he, ‘riding on his Einsteinian formula’, was progressing rapidly. According to several witnesses the Great Event of the Supramental Manifestation could have taken place at any moment in 1938.

Sri Aurobindo himself announced at the time: ‘[The Supramental] is coming down against tremendous resistance.’¹⁰ K.D. Sethna is more categorical: ‘The Truth-Consciousness’s manifestation on a worldwide scale was originally expected by the Mother as far back as that year [^1938],’¹¹ a statement he repeats in several places in his writings. Nirodbaran writes in his Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo: ‘The Mother told a sadhak in 1935 that in ten years’ time she would look as young as a girl of 16. To me also she narrated at length a similar vision of hers, the gist of which is that both of them [Sri Aurobindo and the Mother] had become young and exquisite, so much so that none of the sadhaks could recognise them. From Sri Aurobindo’s letters too we had the intuition that the Supramental descent in the physical was imminent.’¹²

Many years later the Mother declared: ‘There was such constant tension for Sri Aurobindo and me that it interrupted the yoga completely during the whole war. And it was for that reason that the war had come: to stop the Work. For there was an extraordinary descent of the Supermind at that time, it came like this [massive gesture] — a descent … ! That was exactly in 1939. Then the war came and stopped everything, completely. For if we personally had gone on with the Work, we would not have been sure that we had the time to finish it before “the other one” had made a mess of the world, and the whole affair would have been postponed for centuries. That had to be stopped first of all: that action of the Lord of the Nations — the Lord of Falsehood.’¹³

With these words, the Mother put Sri Aurobindo’s accident in perspective. The black forces were running amuck at the time. In 1936, Hitler’s troops had entered the Rhineland, welcomed by priests honouring them with waving censers. The German rearmament programme was already in full swing. The Anschluss with Austria, approved by a plebiscite of more than ninety-nine per cent of the Austrian population, was effected on 12 March 1938. On 29 September of the same year Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the Munich Pact, an agreement that was the death-blow to Czechoslovakia. The pogrom against the Jews in Germany started on 9 November with the infamous Kristallnacht. The crisis over Czechoslovakia, with a threat of general mobilization and war, became acute in those months. The Germans occupied the Sudetenland one week after Sri Aurobindo’s accident, and they paraded in Prague three months later. Spain was in the grip of civil war; Benito Mussolini tried to live out his Caesarian fantasies; the Japanese aggressively enlarged their empire in Asia. The world was on fire.

One of the letters from the Mother to her son André is dated 22 October 1938. In this letter she wrote to him: ‘Speaking of recent events, you ask me whether it was “a dangerous bluff” or whether we “narrowly escaped disaster.” To assume both at the same time would be nearer to the truth. Hitler was certainly bluffing — if that is what you call being boisterous and proffering threats with the intention of intimidating those one is talking to, and obtaining as much as one can. Tactics and diplomacy were used, but, on the other hand, behind every human will forces are acting whose origin is not human and who strive consciously for certain goals. The play of those forces is very complex and generally eludes the human consciousness. But for the sake of explanation and understanding they can be divided into two main opposing tendencies: those who work for the fulfilment of the Divine Work upon earth and those who are opposed to this fulfilment … Hitler is a choice instrument for the anti-divine forces who want violence, upheavals and war, for they know that these things delay and hinder the action of the divine forces. That is why disaster was very close although no human government consciously wanted it. But there was to be no war at any cost, and that is why war has been avoided … for the time being.’¹⁴

These rather abstract sounding sentences tell us the following: 1. The dangerous international situation was the work of forces inimical to the Divine Work. 2. Hitler was an instrument of those forces. 3. War could have erupted at that moment but was provisionally prevented. The Divine Work was the effort of materializing a higher consciousness, the Supermind, in the terrestrial evolution. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were the protagonists of this Work, which in 1938 had reached a critical phase and could have been accomplished any moment. The antidivine forces did everything possible to avert that accomplishment, for it would have put an end to their sovereignty over the earth. Hitler was their choice instrument. War was inevitable because of the occult all-or-nothing situation in the world, but it was provisionally averted by the divine protagonists for reasons known only to them though certainly related to the massive descent of the Supermind at the time. Nirodbaran asked Sri Aurobindo on 14 December 1938: ‘Did you stop the war the last time there was a chance of it?’ Sri Aurobindo answered: ‘Yes — for many reasons war was not favourable at that time’,¹⁵ — shortly before the Munich Conference. The antidivine forces then turned directly against Sri Aurobindo and took revenge by causing the fall which broke his right thigh.

The reader will remember that in the beginning of this book the question was asked whether it is possible that the history of humanity unfolds in interaction with one or two individuals. In answer to this question we have heard about the nature and the mission of the Avatar. We also have become acquainted with the personalities and the Work of the Avatar of our time, a double embodiment of the Divine on earth named Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. We have learned about their goal and their Work, that would consist in making possible the appearance of a new species on our planet and eventually in the long expected establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. One can conclude from many statements by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that they have played an active and even decisive role in world history.

We now come to the worldwide conflagration still imprinted with painful accuracy in the memory of humankind: the Second World War, called by Sri Aurobindo ‘the Mother’s war’, and of which all explanations remain unsatisfactory. The wind of madness that blew over the earth in those years, the Order of the Death’s Head, the Endlösung for which millions of human beings were killed like beasts, and the fatal fascination exerted by a rather trivial man — all that can hardly be explained by economic charts, population data, armament statistics, or psychological and sociological theories. The interpretation of the Second World War proposed here tallies with a lot more facts, psychological as well as material. Reality is always much more fantastic than the human mind can imagine, as Arthur C. Clarke and others have said. As the twentieth century is rushing towards its end, it is important that we finally understand what it has signified, if we wish to be capable of looking ahead to the events of the coming era with some degree of understanding.

In their eye-opening book first published in 1956, Le Matin des Magiciens, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier wrote about the Second World War: ‘The judges of Nuremberg, spokesmen of the victorious civilization, did not realize that this war had been a spiritual war. The vision they had of their own world was not lofty enough. They only thought that Good had been victorious over Evil without having perceived the profundity of the vanquished evil and the height of the victorious good.’¹⁶ We will look into that presently.

A Look in Sri Aurobindo’s Rooms

Sri Aurobindo’s way of living since 1926 now underwent thorough changes. During twelve years he had had near him only the Mother and Champaklal, that epitome of the faithful servant. Now a team of physicians and volunteers was formed to assist Sri Aurobindo in his physical ordeal. The physicians were Manilal, Satyendra, Becharlal and Nirodbaran, and the other volunteers were Champaklal, Purani and Mulsankar. Theirs was the privilege to be allowed to enter the holy of holies, to see and help Sri Aurobindo and to hear him talk.

To a few of them we owe some information of the daily life in Sri Aurobindo’s apartment and how he passed his days, outwardly that is. Our most important source once again is Nirodbaran, who has published four volumes of Talks With Sri Aurobindo covering the period from 10 December 1938 to 28 September 1941. ‘There was no subject that was not touched, not a mystery that he did not illumine, not a phenomenon that passed unnoticed, humorous or serious, superficial or profound, mundane or mystic. Reminiscences, stories, talks on art and culture, on world problems poured down in abundant streams from an otherwise silent and reticent vastness of knowledge and love and bliss. It was an unforgettable reward he accorded to us for our humble service.’¹⁷

Nirodbaran has also written his personal reminiscences of those years in Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo. From that source we know how Sri Aurobindo was sitting and lying down (during those relaxed conversations often with his hands under his head), what he ate (he was still very fond of Bengali sweets), what kind of mouthwash he used (Vademecum) and that in his rooms imported Chinese spirals were burned to ward off mosquitoes. ‘Be it eating, drinking, walking or talking — he did it always in a slow and measured rhythm, giving the impression that every moment was conscious and consecrated.’¹⁸ Moreover, in this book the fantastic rumours that had been circulating about him for a long time were given the lie once and for all. He did not live in a subterranean cave, he did not float above the ground, and he did indeed take food and rest. Sri Aurobindo himself once said in jest: ‘I shall have to write [my biography] just in order to contradict the biographers. I shall have to entitle the book: “What I did not do in my life.”’¹⁹

‘All that was visible to our naked eye was that he sat silently in his bed, afterwards in the capacious armchair, with his eyes wide open just as any other person would. Only he passed hours and hours thus, changing his position at times and making himself comfortable, the eyes moving a little, and though usually gazing at the wall in front, never fixed tratak-like⁹² at any particular point. Sometimes the face would beam with a bright smile without apparent reason, much to our amusement, as a child smiles in sleep. Only it was a waking sleep, for as we passed across the room, there was a dim recognition of our shadow-like movements. Occasionally he would look towards the door. That was when he heard some sound which might indicate the Mother’s coming. But his external consciousness would certainly not be obliterated. When he wanted something, his voice seemed to come from a distant cave; rarely would we find him plunged within, with his eyes closed.’²⁰ This is how Sri Aurobindo did his Work; this is how, in his subtle body, he moved in this world and in many worlds; this is how he fought the good fight.

In the Battle is the title of a sonnet from the remarkable series written by Sri Aurobindo in the year after his accident. These sonnets provide us with a multifaceted insight in what he was inwardly occupied with, while apparently sitting quietly in concentration — an inconspicuous attitude rendered possible by his complete yogic mastery. In the sonnet mentioned, we read:

All around me now the Titan forces press;
This world is theirs, they hold its days in fee;
I am full of wounds and the fight merciless.²¹

These lines remind one straight away of the passage from A God’s Labour, written in 1935 and quoted in an earlier chapter: ‘My gaping wounds are a thousand and one / And the Titan kings assail …’ Sri Aurobindo has written mostly about his struggles and sufferings and about his yogic realizations in his poetry — but who takes poems seriously? Still it is in his poems and in Savitri that we find most of the facts to build up an understanding of his work and realizations; he probably cast them in this form ‘to front the years’, just like his deeds, and to be conserved for posterity.

Also worth mentioning here is the informative case of Mridu. ‘Mridu was a simple Bengali village widow,’ writes Nirodbaran. ‘She, like the other ladies, called Sri Aurobindo her father, and took great pride in cooking for him. Her “father” also liked very much her luchis [a kind of Bengali delicacy], she would boast, and these creations of hers have been immortalized by him in one of his letters to her. She was given to maniacal fits of threatening suicide, and Sri Aurobindo would console her with, “If you commit suicide, who will cook luchis for me?”’²²

Strange to say: ‘One regular interlude during his meal was the arrival of our rampaging luchi-maker, Mridu. I do not know how she obtained this exceptional privilege. She would come like an innocent lamb with incense and flowers, kneel down in front of the door and wait with folded hands for “her Father’s blessings”. On our drawing Sri Aurobindo’s attention to her presence, he would stop eating and cast a quiet glance at her. Her boisterous, unruly nature would become humble for a while before Sri Aurobindo. Whenever it was reported that she had manifested her violent temper, she was threatened with the loss of this Darshan.’²³

And stranger still the Mother later reported, as one reads in the Agenda, that the by then deceased Mridu was one of those she had met, after Sri Aurobindo’s passing, in his permanent dwelling in the subtle worlds! Which shows once more that it is difficult, especially in spiritual matters, to judge from outward appearances.

Some weeks after his accident Sri Aurobindo began to revise the text of The Life Divine, published more than twenty years before. His revision was so thorough that many new pages and even several chapters were added. This was the greatest volume of prose Sri Aurobindo wrote after terminating the publication of the Arya in January 1921. Nirodbaran observed Sri Aurobindo while he was working on the revision: ‘There he was, then, sitting on the bed, with his right leg stretched out. I was watching his movements from behind the bed. No sooner had he begun than line followed after line as if everything was chalked out in the mind, or as he used to say, a tap was turned on and a stream poured down. Absorbed in perfect poise, gazing now and then in front, wiping the perspiration of his hands — for he perspired profusely — he would go on for about two hours.’²⁴ The Life Divine was published in two volumes, the first in July 1940. The first issue of the Arya had come out on 15 August 1914. It may be by chance that the preparation and the printing of both these important publications corresponded so closely with the beginning of the two world wars. C.G. Jung would have called this a synchronicity. It was, for sure, a very suggestive coincidence.