Beyond Man

Chapter Five: Twelve Pearls

The eternal Goddess moved in her cosmic house Sporting with God as a Mother with her child … ¹

— Savitri

The Mother has said more than once that she had chosen her parents. ‘I have chosen my parents to have a solid physical base, for I knew the work I had to do was very, very difficult and needed a solid base.’² She also said that for her start in life no better training was imaginable than the no-nonsense attitude of the materialistic Mathilde with her constant hammering on the necessity of perfection. Not an easy environment for a child, but ‘a wonderful education’ for someone who had come to do a great and difficult work.

All her inner experiences had occurred totally unexpectedly, which according to the Mother is the necessary condition for them so as not to be falsified. Expectation limits the experience and distorts it. Often expectation even creates the experience which then adapts itself to the artificial, imaginary world of the subject which no longer has any relation with reality. Little then remains of the experience except illusion.

From her early years Mirra was aware of something she could neither name nor describe. ‘There was a kind of inner light, a Presence. I was born with that.’ She went and sat in a little chair, especially made for her, to feel that Presence, which probably exerted a light, rather pleasant pressure on her brain; out of this Presence she then regarded the disconcerting world around her, which lacked so much in comprehension and sympathy, and which was full of lies, anger and friction, of enmity, nastiness and ignorance. The little human children, not yet hardened by life, are so often hurt by the ‘affectionate’ grown-ups around them, who are unaware of the hidden aggressiveness of their words and actions. And in Mirra the Beauty from which she had come remained totally alive. ‘Even in her childish movements could be felt / The nearness of a light still kept from earth.’³ (Savitri).

‘When I was a child of about thirteen, for nearly a year, every night as soon as I had gone to bed it seemed to me that I went out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the city [Paris], very high above. Then I used to see myself clad in a magnificent golden robe, much longer than myself; and as I rose higher, the robe would stretch, spreading out in a circle around me to form a kind of immense roof over the city. Then I would see men, women, children, old men, the sick, the unfortunate coming out from every side; they would gather under the outspread robe, begging for help, telling of their miseries, their sufferings, their hardships. In reply, the robe, supple and alive, would extend towards each one of them individually, and as soon as they had touched it, they were comforted and healed, and went back into their bodies happier and stronger than when they had come out of them. Nothing seemed more beautiful to me, nothing could make me happier; and all the activities of the day seemed dull and colourless and without any real life beside this activity of the night which was the true life for me.’⁴ Thus wrote Mirra in her spiritual diary Prières et Méditations (Prayers and Meditations).

There are many stories about her, such as how, as a demonstration for her friends, she jumped from one corner to another of a twelve meter wide drawing-room, only once touching the floor in the middle with the tip of one foot. Or how when playing in the forest of Fontainebleau, and perhaps chased by her brother, she ran as fast as she could without noticing the high bank of a road cutting through the forest; suddenly she felt projected into emptiness, but something caught hold of her and she descended on the flints of the road as softly as a feather. Or how, during a formal family dinner, she became so spellbound by something in the aura of her nephew that she forgot herself and remained motionless for minutes with her fork in the air. The Mother has told it all herself, so there is no need to weave a web of legends around her. Undoubtedly much more has happened than what she has confided from time to time to the people around her.

Most interesting, however, was the great Presence in that lightly bronzed girl, whom all of us probably would have passed by without noticing anything at all, as we are wont to do. ‘Between 11 and 13 a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man’s possibility of uniting with Him, of realizing Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon Earth in a life divine. This, along with a practical discipline for its accomplishment, was given to me during my body’s sleep by several teachers, some of whom I met afterwards on the physical plane.’⁵

The self-discovery, the self-realization took place gradually. We have already seen how Mirra had found the inner Divine, thanks to the teachings of Alma and Théon in the Revue cosmique. After her two sojourns in Tlemcen and after the review had ceased to appear, she became actively interested in all kinds of occult circles and unorthodox and progressive groups in Paris. It was at that time that she met an Indian who gave her a French translation of the Bhagavad Gita to read.⁹¹ About the same time Mirra got a copy of Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. She was overjoyed that the many questions which had occupied her mind were explained in these texts and that moreover they presented her with a method of spiritual realization. She always took up every task with a total dedication — which she did this time too. Her inner growth progressed from one realization to the next.

But who was she actually? Who was this young Parisian woman who had such extraordinary experiences, who was probably the greatest occultist of her time without anybody knowing, and who by the Presence in her heart had been told that she had to accomplish something special?

Alma, half-blind but clairvoyant, had known who Mirra was. ‘Madame Théon had recognized me because I had the twelve pearls in the correct sequence above my head. She said to me: “You are That because you have that. Only That has that.” It was far from anything I might have imagined, happily!’⁶

Twelve is the number of Mahashakti, the Universal Mother. The twelve pearls are her crown.

There is the One that exists beyond time, in all eternity. It has no beginning and no end, it IS. And in the bliss of its being, it wants to see itself externalized. And what it wants, through the fact that it wants it, exists: a manifestation of its endless qualities unfolding before its creating eye in worlds without number, in an endless, inexhaustible act of creation.

It is as if the One divides into two: into something which remains the essence having the joy of the creative self-contemplation and into something that makes this contemplation possible. This division into two is, on the one hand, a very real fact as we can deduce from the existence of our world, but it is, on the other hand, only a Play because the One never really can be divided.

Thus arose in the One the creative impulse, the fiat at the origin of all things manifested, and at the same time arose the consciousness-force by which that impulse is rendered into reality. This consciousness-force is called the Great Mother — she who holds the worlds in the palm of her hand, in whom they originate and dissolve, and to whom a grain of sand or a shell on the beach are as important a creation as a cluster of galaxies.

In God’s supreme withdrawn and timeless hush
A seeing Self and potent Energy met;
The Silence knew itself and thought took form:
Self-made from the dual power creation rose.⁷

— Savitri

The Mother is the consciousness-force of the Divine. The opening words of the Gospel of St John, directly influenced by the Chaldean tradition, are well known: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The Kathaka Upanishad says the same: ‘Prajapati [the Father of all beings] was then the whole Universe. Vak [the Word] had come forth from him. He united with her and she became pregnant. She went out from him and made all these worlds, and she went back to him.’⁸ The Word is Sound; Sound is Vibration; Vibration is the potent concretization in the unbounded All. The basis of creation consists in all eternity of the primal mantra, the Word. And this Word is the Great Mother, worshipped by the children of man under a thousand names. Alma Théon had recognized Mirra as ‘the human image of the deathless Word.’⁹

After Tlemcen, Mirra was no longer the Parisian painter, her horizon had widened. We hear one last time of Henri Morisset when he came to Tlemcen to join his wife and got involved in a vehement quarrel with Théon (about the name of the exact shade of the colour of his robe). After returning from her second stay in Tlemcen, Mirra decided to live alone.

Earlier she had founded a small group of seekers under the name Idéa. She now started another one, L’union des pensées féminines (the union of feminist thought). Her feminist views were in fact the logical outcome of her general way of thinking — trying to find the fundamental truth in all things and therefore going almost automatically against the grain of all conventions, which are distorted truths and therefore lies. And is not the suppression of woman by man one of the most unreasonable conventions in the history of humankind?

We have already seen that Mirra concentrated on an intense inner development guided by the Bhagavad Gita and Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. In her social life she tried to contact persons who represented some aspect or other of her newly discovered values. She became acquainted with Abd ol-Baha, who had succeeded his father Baha Ullah as the head of Bahaism. Inayat Khan, the prophet of Sufism in the West, gave a talk in her house. She also visited occult séances and addressed various circles. And there was Alexandra David-Néel, the modern prophetess of Buddhism and fearless explorer, who would be the first non-Tibetan woman to enter Lhasa in disguise. For a time they met every day and went for walks in the Bois de Boulogne, where the first airplanes, ‘like giant grasshoppers’, with sputtering engines contrived to stay a few seconds in the air.

The legal divorce from Henri Morisset took place in 1908. In that same year Mirra met Paul Richard, who also was very interested in occultism, and who had come into contact with Théon and Alma by reading the Revue cosmique. Paul Richard had received theological training, and had been a minister of the Reformed Church of France in Lille for about ten years. He had felt ever more attracted to politics and occultism. Because of politics he had taken up the study of law, and his interest in occultism had led to his contact with the Théons. Richard was awarded his law degree in 1908 and shortly afterwards became a barrister at the Paris Court of Appeals.

In 1910, Richard journeyed to Pondicherry to campaign in the elections there for the French House of Representatives. Pondicherry (Pondichéry) was French territory and had two elected representatives in Paris. Richard had probably been sent there by the Radical and Radical-Socialist League for the Republican Defense and Propagation, ‘a party that combined a leftist ideology with a conservative financial programme (and a strong Masonic influence)’.¹⁰ Richard was a freemason, and it was his mission to support the election campaign of a certain Bluysen.

However, Richard was also interested in meeting an authentic Indian yogi. He was in luck, for he was told that a very great yogi had just arrived from Bengal and that his name was Aurobindo Ghose. In 1910 Aurobindo consented to receive him. Richard was very impressed by the encounter, so much so that later, in a talk in Japan, he would declare: ‘The hour is coming of great things, of great events, and also of great men, the divine men of Asia. All my life I have searched for them across the world, for all my life I have felt they must exist somewhere in the world, that this world would die if they did not live. For they are its light, its heat, its life. It is in Asia that I have found the greatest among them — the leader, the hero of tomorrow. His name is Aurobindo Ghose.’¹¹

Four years later Richard travelled again to Pondicherry, this time to try and have himself elected. He was accompanied by Mirra, who for pragmatic reasons had married him in 1911. After his first trip to Pondicherry the enthusiastic Richard had shown her a photo of Aurobindo Ghose, but strange to say, Mirra had not seen him for who he essentially was, she had only seen the politician in him.

It may be recalled how between her eleventh and thirteenth year she had met several seers in her sleep. ‘Later on, as the interior and exterior development proceeded, the spiritual and psychic relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent; and although I knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions at that time I was led to call him Krishna, and henceforth I was aware that it was with him (whom I knew I should meet on earth one day) that the divine work was to be done … As soon as I saw Sri Aurobindo I recognized in him the well-known being whom I used to call Krishna.’¹²

She wanted to meet him alone that first time on 29 March 1914. And there he stood at the top of the staircase waiting for her, exactly as the ‘Krishna’ she had seen in her visions. The next day she wrote in her diary: ‘It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance, He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.’¹³ This time it was not Aurobindo Ghose but Sri Aurobindo whom she had perceived.

The Avatar is an earthly incarnation of the Divine. It is as if a part of the divine Self separates from the whole and descends to accomplish a special task in creation. That is why one can say that in a sense every human being is an Avatar, for man carries in him a growing ‘psychic being’, the core of which is a ‘divine spark’. (A child once asked the Mother: ‘Mother, are you God?’ She answered: ‘Yes, my child, and so are you.’) But the soul in man has taken up the adventure in the night of the Inconscient and regains only gradually, in life after life, the remembrance of its origin. The Avatar, on the contrary, remains constantly conscious of what he is, namely that One. All the same, when he takes on an earthly body, the incarnating divine personality has to undergo a process of becoming conscious by which it progressively realizes its innermost Self, till the divine nature takes possession of the incarnation directly and fully.

At first Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfassa were not at all aware of their avatarhood; at one time both of them had even been convinced atheists. Mirra had been taken aback when Madame Théon told her who she was in the essence of her being, ‘because That alone has that’, the crown with the twelve pearls. It is not known when exactly Aurobindo became the conscious Avatar Sri Aurobindo — probably during the first year of his withdrawal in Pondicherry and surely before his first meeting with Mirra Richard, as her diary note on 30 March 1914 confirms. (The name Sri Aurobindo was publicly used from 1926 onwards. Before that time everybody in Pondicherry called him ‘AG’ after his initials. It was also from 1926 that Mirra was called ‘the Mother’.)

But we know when Mirra became ‘the Mother’. Sri Aurobindo had confirmed the correctness of Alma’s vision, and he had said to Mirra: ‘You are She’, meaning the Great Mother. He repeated his confirmation several times in later years, mostly in answer to questions of Indian disciples who had problems in accepting an Avatar who was not only a woman, but a twice-married French woman to boot! ‘It was in 1914 that the identification with the Universal Mother took place, the identification of the physical consciousness with Her. Of course, I knew before that I was the Mother, but the complete identification took place only in 1914.’¹⁴ — ‘The great World-Mother now in her arose.’¹⁵ (Savitri) — In her Prayers and Meditations we read on 13 September 1914: ‘With fervour I hail Thee, O divine Mother, and in deep affection identify myself with Thee. United with our divine Mother I turn, O Lord, to Thee, and bow to Thee in mute adoration and in an ardent aspiration I identify myself with Thee.’¹⁶ (In mystical texts the Divine is often experienced in such intimate terms that He is addressed in the most affectionate form, the Mother here using Tu and Toi in the original French.) In the same diary we find already on 31 August: ‘Mother, sweet Mother who I am …’ and then again on 14 October: ‘Mother divine, Thou art with us; every day thou givest me the assurance and, closely united in an identity that grows more and more total, more and more constant, we turn to the Lord of the Universe and to That which is beyond in a great aspiration towards the new Light. All the earth is in our arms like a sick child who must be cured and for whom one has a special affection because of his very weakness.’

Sick she was, the earth, for a month earlier the First World War had erupted.

It is at this point that the important historical event took place, mentioned at the very beginning of this book and called by Barbara Tuchman ‘von Kluck’s Turn’. In 1970 the Mother again referred to it. She told once more how Kali had entered her room dancing and had cried out: ‘Paris is being taken! Paris is being destroyed!’ But this time she narrates how the Great Mother herself, the Mahashakti with whom she had identified, came into the room behind Kali and said no, very simply but irrevocably. Now we have a somewhat better idea of the power by which an intervention of this kind was made possible.

Without the world knowing, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Two who were One, had found themselves and each other. The earth shook with the fury of the war; maybe it was her way of reacting to the incarnated promise of a new era.