Beyond Man

Chapter Fourteen: The Mother and the ‘Laboratory’

People [in the Ashram] are an epitome of the world. Each one represents a type of humanity. If he is changed, it means a victory for all who belong to his type and thus a great achievement for our work.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

The Mother too had gone down into hell, without the slightest hesitation, along ‘the downward road on which I started the descent together with Sri Aurobindo. And there is no end to the labour there …’ ‘O my Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down in the unfathomable depths of Matter, I have touched with my finger the horror and the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity,’² she wrote in one of her last Prayers and Meditations. With an unconditional dedication she had taken up her material task, namely the building of a livable place where the souls who had incarnated as human beings to answer the Call could live in a community in order to contribute, through an increasing self-denial, their effort to the supramental transformation, to the divinization of the Earth. This community was in actual fact a psychological and physical prolongation of the embodied personalities of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Through this community, which consisted of typical characters representing the whole of humanity, they would take in the human race in their work; through those personalities living around and in them, they would work on humanity as a whole. ‘The Earth is a symbolical representation of the universe, and the group is a symbolical representation of the Earth.’³ (the Mother)

The group now had a name, ‘Sri Aurobindo Ashram’, but this was ‘a conventional name’ according to Sri Aurobindo. For the word ‘ashram’ evokes a kind of exotic monastery where Indian monks or ascetics live in isolation and self-abnegation at the feet of a guru, in order to obtain as soon as possible the liberation of their soul and escape from the cycle of rebirths. However, here the perfection of the soul of the sadhaks was no more than the first step; it had to be followed by the perfection of their character and body, and through them by the transformation of the physical body of Mother Earth.

Sri Aurobindo had never felt much for the title of guru, and neither had the Mother. ‘I don’t trust the old profession of guru,’ she said, ‘I am not eager to be the guru of anyone.’ What did she want to be, then? ‘It is more spontaneously natural for me to be the universal Mother and to act in silence through love.’⁴ She therefore declared simply that the sadhaks and sadhikas of the spiritual community she was building up were not her disciples but her children. This meant much more than mere words. As Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘It is true of every soul on earth that it is a portion of the Divine Mother passing through the experiences of the Ignorance in order to arrive at the truth of its being and be the instrument of a Divine Manifestation and work here.’⁵ He also wrote: ‘The soul goes to the Mother-Soul in all its desires and troubles,’⁶ and: ‘It is a far greater relation than that of the physical mother to her child.’⁷

To enlighten the sadhaks about the true nature of the one whom he and they called ‘the Mother’, in charge of the organization of their daily life and the transformation of their being, Sri Aurobindo wrote some letters which were afterwards collected and published under the title The Mother. In this booklet he says: ‘There are three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe. Transcendent, the original supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces. Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature.’⁸

The Mother as Maheshwari is the personification of the supreme power and wisdom, as Mahalakshmi of harmony and beauty, as Mahakali of the combative force which destroys with Love in order to build up what is greater, and as Mahasaraswati she is the omnipotent but meticulous power who organizes the cosmos and the molecule.

The Family of the Aspiration

The Mother was present everywhere simultaneously, in worlds with beings of which we do not even suspect the existence because we cannot possibly imagine them, in the events on the unifying planet Earth, and visibly in that fast growing community in Pondicherry, ‘the cradle of the new world.’⁹ No, this was not an ashram in the ordinary meaning of the word which she was building: it was a testing ground, an experiment in accelerated evolution, a laboratory to work out the species of the future, beyond man. In this laboratory each guinea pig represented ‘an impossibility’ from the evolutionary past which had to be transformed into a possibility of the divinized future of the Earth. ‘Everybody represents at the same time a possibility and a special difficulty which has to be resolved. I have even said, I think, that everybody here is an impossibility.’¹⁰ (the Mother) The transformation of all this was only achievable, as we have seen, by eradicating the impossibility, the falsehood, at its roots in the subconscient and inconscient, or to transform it into Truth. But the evolutionary past with its ‘downward gravitation’, its magnetic down-pulling force, was present in each atom of the body of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as it was in each atom of the body of their disciples and in each psychological movement of their character, in most cases darkening the flame of the soul.

Every sadhak and every sadhika, as the representatives of a certain type of man or woman on earth, were special and had their particular psychological structure with its possibilities and impossibilities. It was the maturity of their soul which had made them into sadhaks and sadhikas, ready to participate in the great adventure. Their preparedness had proved so irresistible that it had driven them to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and that they, perhaps unconsciously but by the ‘instinct’ of their soul, had recognized in them the Masters directing the work for which they had been born on earth as participants. ‘We know that certain groups of people reunite time and again, since the beginning of human history, to collectively express a certain state of the soul,’¹¹ said the Mother. It was ‘the family of the aspiration, the family of the spiritual tendency.’¹² ‘It is evident that all those who are born now and are here now, are here because they have asked to participate and have prepared themselves in former lives.’¹³

This is why the Mother told her children: ‘We have all been together in former lives; otherwise we would never have been able to meet in this life. We all belong to the same family and we have been working together throughout the centuries for the victory of the Divine and his manifestation on the earth.’¹⁴ Deeply moving were her words to that wide-eyed youth of the Ashram school on one of the evenings she was supposedly teaching them French under the starry tropical sky: ‘There are great families of beings who work for the same cause, who have met each other in greater or lesser numbers and who come down in a kind of group. It is as if at certain moments [in the past] a kind of awakening took place in the psychic world, as if a lot of sleeping little children were woken up: “It is time! Quick, quick! Go down!” And they scurried. Sometimes they did not come down on the same spot, they were scattered here and there. In such cases there is inwardly something that bothers them, that impels them. For one reason or another they feel attracted to something, and that is how they are brought together again.’¹⁵ This time, in the present, they had been and were being brought together on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, in Pondicherry.

The Avatar never comes alone. Together with him descend the souls destined to share in the Great Work, ‘the pioneers of the new creation,’ ‘the great dynamic souls,’ ‘the rare souls that are mature.’¹⁶

I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude,
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.¹⁷

— Savitri

‘Mature’ is the psychic being that has gone through the full trajectory of its evolutionary development. ‘Afterwards, it is no longer bound by the necessity to come down on earth; it has finished its development and can freely choose either to consecrate itself to the Divine Work or to go and roam about elsewhere, in higher worlds,’ said the Mother. ‘But generally, once arrived at that stage, it remembers everything it had to go through and it becomes aware of the great necessity to come and help those who are still struggling and in difficulty. The psychic beings of this kind consecrate their existence to the Divine Work. This is neither absolute nor inevitable, they have a free choice, but they do so ninety times out of one hundred.’¹⁸ Sri Aurobindo therefore wrote: ‘Some psychic beings have come here who are ready to join with the great lines of consciousness above … and are therefore specially fitted to join with the Mother intimately in the great work that has to be done. These have all a special relation with the Mother which adds to the past one.’¹⁹

The Mother has at times revealed to the sadhaks some of their past lives in cases where this knowledge could contribute to their spiritual growth; she also told some of them at which moment in a former life they had chosen to collaborate on the future supramental transformation, usually in a past when they had been together with her or near her. A documented case is that of the Frenchman Satprem, one of those to whom she had promised in Ancient Egypt that they would again be together with her on Earth at the decisive time. (The Mother herself has said that she had been, among others, Queen Hatshepsut and Queen Tiy, the mother of the revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaton.) ‘There is a certain number to whom I have given the promise, not all in the same period, in different periods.’²⁰

Another verified case⁹¹ is that of Nata, an Italian sadhak. When on one of his birthdays he was received by the Mother in the room she then no longer left, she asked him whether he had a special wish on the occasion of that day. Nata said that in future lives he wanted to be always together with her on Earth, and the Mother consented. After he had left her room, she turned with a smile towards one of the persons present and said: ‘He does not remember that we have always been together since Egypt.’

All this does not mean that all members of the Ashram were sadhaks or sadhikas in the true sense of the word, i.e. practitioners of the yoga. They were so in the beginning, practically without exception; but as the group grew, more and more persons were accepted because they represented typical problems of the world and who completed that ‘world in miniature’ by their presence without therefore taking up the yoga unconditionally. And besides both these categories, there were birds of different feathers, like the ones who had fallen asleep in their yoga, or who considered the Ashram as a kind of hospitable halfway house on the road to other destinations in life, and so on. In later years, the Mother would say that not even half of the Ashramites were practising or even trying to practice the yoga.

Nor does it mean that the specially descended souls — the ‘free-born’ or les bien nés, the ‘well-born’ — no longer had to struggle with problems because theirs was a mature soul. Nobody was more well-born than Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and in the course of their yoga they had to confront enormous problems, as we have heard from themselves. As incarnated earthlings, the sadhaks, by the fact of their birth, took on the existing ‘impossibilities’ of the current stage of the earthly evolution. Few of them were totally conscious of their true being. Their meeting with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had awakened the soul in some of them, to be sure, while others had felt the irresistible impulse to join in the yoga because of some unforeseen and sometimes improbable or seemingly unimportant event — in the case of K.D. Sethna the reading of an article about the Ashram in a piece of newspaper wrapped around a newly purchased pair of shoes — but this did not mean that they did not have to make a concentrated and long-lasting yogic effort.

The past of each sadhak, just like that of every other human being, was different. ‘Every individual is a special manifestation in the universe, consequently his true way must be absolutely unique,’²¹ said the Mother. She also said: ‘This is precisely the motive of the creation of the universe, namely that all are one, that all are one in their origin; but everything, every element, every being has the mission to reveal a part of that unity to itself, and it is this singularity that has to be cultivated in each and everybody, while at the same time awakening the sense of the original unity.’²²

These almost abstract words mean that in fact there is no general path, no ‘royal road’, not even for a special group as a whole. The way of each one is personal, ‘each one carries his truth in himself, and this is a unique truth, belonging to each one personally and to be expressed by him in his life.’²³ (the Mother) Each disciple of the Ashram, being a representative of a type of humanity in the process of general transformation, had to be guided in a personal way. This actually was the one and only rule the Mother recognized. ‘No rules! By all means no rules!’ she once exclaimed. ‘For me there are no rules, no regulations and no principles. For me each one is an exceptional case to be dealt with in a special way. No two cases are similar.’²⁴ This was, of course, completely in accordance with the view of Sri Aurobindo, who wrote: ‘If there is no freedom, there can be no change — there could only be a routine practice of conformity to the Yogic ideal without the reality.’²⁵ And he therefore wrote to a sadhak: ‘What the Mother wants is for people to have their full chance for their souls, be the method short and swift or long and tortuous. Each she must treat according to his nature.’²⁶

This is the reason why in Sri Aurobindo’s voluminous correspondence one cannot find a cut and dried method of the Integral Yoga. The three established main yogas were the path of love (bhaktiyoga), the path of knowledge (jnanayoga) and the path of works or action (karmayoga). Those three methods of yoga are clearly based on the three fundamental qualities every human being has in himself: feeling, thinking and acting. Everybody must be allowed to proceed on the road towards divine perfection to the extent that these three principal qualities are developed in him, which is always in an unequal measure. The more he develops one of the three qualities, the more the other two will also blossom in due time, till all three are fully developed and the sadhak is ready for the Integral Yoga. For we know that the Integral Yoga begins where the traditional paths end. In this way the fully developed soul reaching the threshold of the Integral Yoga has at its command all necessary means to follow the new way discovered and cleared by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is by their labour that the Integral Yoga has become a possibility at this critical juncture of the terrestrial evolution. The promise in times past given to many by the Mother, and also by Sri Aurobindo, was destined to be fulfilled now. The great Change is happening NOW.

It becomes clear why Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is only for those who feel attracted to it and how only they can be guided by him and by the Mother, whatever be the way by which they have come to this yoga. The pioneers who have opened a new path for humanity always keep helping humanity to follow that path. (One is reminded of the example of the Buddha who out of compassion turned back on the threshold of Nirvana to keep helping humanity on the road to its goal.) This general truth is also valid in the case of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother now that they have left their body.

Still there are those seekers who get acquainted with the work of Sri Aurobindo and feel uneasy because of the lack of a method with fixed rules in his yoga. It may therefore be suitable to quote here the following words of his from 1938, noted down in Talks With Sri Aurobindo: ‘I believe in a certain amount of freedom, freedom to find out things for oneself in one’s own way, freedom to commit blunders even. Nature leads us through various errors and eccentricities. When Nature created the human being with all his possibilities for good and ill, she knew very well what she was about. Freedom for experiment in human life is a great thing. Without freedom to take risks and commit mistakes, there can be no progress.’²⁷

The Relation with the Sadhaks

The Mother, with her profound occult knowledge of human nature, must certainly have been aware of the scope of the task she took on her shoulders, or rather in her heart, from the beginning. This included the petty side of the human character which becomes most readily perceptible where people live closely together. Moreover, the growth in the yogic sadhana is ‘from within outwards’, as Sri Aurobindo has so often reminded his correspondents; this means that persons inwardly advanced in yoga may outwardly still show quite pusillanimous characteristics. The outer transformation comes last, as Sri Aurobindo has so often repeated, and this needs to be kept in mind when we follow the transformation of the Mother further on.

About the communal life Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘Wherever human beings are obliged to associate closely, what I saw described the other day as “the astonishing meannesses and caddishnesses inherent in human nature” come quickly out. I have seen that in the Ashram, in political work, in social attempts at united living, everywhere in fact where it gets a chance. But when one tries to do Yoga, one cannot fail to see that in oneself and not only, as most people do, see it in others, and once seen, then? Is it to be got rid of or to be kept? Most people here seem to want to keep it. Or they say it is too strong for them, they can’t help it!’²⁸

He therefore found it necessary to make clear what things in the Ashram were about. ‘There are only two possible foundations for the material life here. One is that one is a member of an Ashram founded on the principle of self-giving and surrender. One belongs to the Divine and all one has belongs to the Divine; in giving one gives not what is one’s own but what already belongs to the Divine. There is no question of payment or return, no bargain, no room for demand and desire. The Mother is in Sole charge and arranges things as best they can be arranged within the means at her disposal and the capacities of her instruments. She is under no obligation to act according to mental standards or vital desires and claims of the Sadhaks; she is not obliged to use a democratic equality in her dealings with them. She is free to deal with each according to what she sees to be his true need or what is best for him in his spiritual progress. No one can be her judge or impose on her his own rule and standard; she alone can make rules, and she can depart from them too if she thinks it fit, but no one can demand that she shall do so … This is the spiritual discipline of which the one who represents or embodies the Divine Truth is the centre. Either she is that and all this is the plain common sense of the matter; or she is not and then no one need stay here. Each can go his own way and there is no Ashram and no Yoga.’²⁹

Telling words indeed, addressed to the right person at the right moment. The Mother had to bear it all: the resistance of the sadhaks, their revolt, their hatred, their dissatisfaction, discouragement, despair, misunderstanding, dullness and malevolence. They projected everything on her and she had to deal with it as if it were her own condition; she had to bring it into the Light and transform it. For they were living in her, those sadhaks, every minute of the twenty-four hours of her day.

There were periods when she did not sleep more than two hours a day. And her ‘sleep’ could hardly be called so because when resting she did not sink down in the subconscious like we all do, but went on working consciously as the Universal Mother in this universe and in others, and as the embodied Mother where her presence was required on Earth, especially in those whom she had accepted as her disciples and instruments.

‘Seen from the outside, you may say that there are people in the world who are much superior to you, and I will not contradict it. But from the occult point of view, this is a selection,’ she said one evening to the Ashram youth. ‘One can say without being mistaken that the majority of the young ones who are here have come because it was told to them that they would be present at the time of the Realisation. But they don’t remember.’³⁰ And she smiled. At the moment of birth it is as if one drops on one’s head, she said, and because of the blow one forgets everything that has preceded one’s birth.

How have the disciples of Christ been behaving, how those of the Buddha? If one knew the unadorned truth about them, it probably would be a very human chronicle despite the fact of their now being venerated as superhuman saints. What had they understood, let alone realised, of the message of their Masters, both Avatars? Not so very much, considering the words passed down of those Masters themselves. Still those were the souls with a mission then, at the initial turning point of their era, of lasting importance for the whole of humanity.

‘A perfect yoga requires perfect balance,’³¹ Sri Aurobindo had said to his very first followers. Time and again the sadhaks had to be reminded of this primordial condition of their inner work, throughout all their idiosyncrasies and the often bizarre imaginings and distortions which the inner exploration can bring with it. There is no Master who has not been cautioning that spiritual commitment is like fire, which one had better refrain from touching if one is not sufficiently purified.

About the Integral Yoga Sri Aurobindo had warned in a chapter in his Synthesis of Yoga that, ‘This is not a Yoga in which abnormality of any kind, even if it be an exalted abnormality, can be admitted as a way to self-fulfilment or spiritual realisation. Even when one enters into supernormal and suprarational experience, there should be no disturbance of the poise which must be kept firm from the summit of the consciousness to its base … A sane grasp on facts and a high spiritualised positivism must always be there. It is not by becoming irrational or infrarational that one can go beyond ordinary nature into supernature; it should be done by passing through reason to a greater light of superreason.’³² ‘One needs a very solid base,’ said the Mother. ‘Who wants to transform grim reality should not withdraw from it, neither in physical nor in psychological seclusion but come to grips with it like a wrestler with his opponent. Reality being very strong and sturdy and without any intention of letting itself being floored, the wrestler has to be as strong and sturdy if he wants to remain upright, and stronger if he wants to conquer it.’

Integral Yoga, as one can gather from many sayings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is not a path for people soft of mind or constitution; it is a yoga requiring the temperament of the heroic warrior. ‘Without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead. Courage, energy and strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action,’³³ wrote Sri Aurobindo. The Mother wrote after his passing away: ‘To follow Sri Aurobindo in the great adventure of his Integral Yoga, one needed always to be a warrior; now that he has left us physically, one needs to be a hero.’³⁴ We have not come for Peace but for Victory, because in a world ruled by the hostile forces Victory has to precede Peace. No, this is not a yoga of ahimsa and no sinecure somewhere in the rarefied air of high hills; it is a battle with very real, implacable, strong and extremely intelligent forces, mostly fought in the dingy basement of our own personality. ‘Our yoga is not for cowards; if you have no courage, better leave it.’³⁵ (the Mother)

The Growth of the Ashram

There is nothing that is impossible to her who is the conscious Power and universal Goddess all-creative from eternity and armed with the Spirit’s omnipotence. All knowledge, all strengths, all triumph and victory, all skill and works are in her hands.³⁶

— Sri Aurobindo

The Ashram grew steadily: 24 members in 1926, 80 to 85 in 1929, 150 in 1936, between 170 and 200 in 1938. In letters to her son André, whom she had not met since 1916, the Mother reported about its material expansion, ‘five cars, twelve bicycles, four sewing machines, a dozen typewriters … an automobile repair workshop … a library and reading-room …’³⁷ It was becoming an enormous undertaking, especially considering the circumstances in India and Pondicherry, at a time when practically everything had to be imported, mostly from France, and at a place where the local conditions were not exactly favourable for material organization. Everything was done on the Mother’s initiative, with her help and encouragement, under her supervision. The various departments and services of the Ashram took shape: the bakery, laundry, tailoring department, kitchen and dining room, nursing home and pharmacy, a printing press (to become one of the best in India), a dairy, and two farms outside the town.

She also wrote to André: ‘I would like to show you our establishment. It has just acquired four houses which I bought in my name to simplify the legal technicalities, but it goes without saying that I do not own them … The Ashram with all its real estate and movable property belongs to Sri Aurobindo … You will readily understand why I am telling you all this; it is so that you can bear it in mind just in case.’³⁸ Here André was made to understand that he could not lay any legal claims to property belonging to the Ashram.

It was also to her son that she wrote: ‘At no time do I fall back into the inconscience which is the sign of ordinary sleep. But I give my body the rest it needs, that is two or three hours of lying down in an absolute immobility, but in which the whole being, mental, psychic, vital and physical enters into a complete rest made of perfect peace, absolute silence and total immobility, while the consciousness remains completely awake; or else I enter into an internal activity of one or more states of the being, an activity which constitutes the occult work and which, needless to say, is also perfectly conscious. So I can say, in all truth, that I never lose consciousness throughout the twenty-four hours which thus form an unbroken sequence, and that I no longer experience ordinary sleep, while yet giving my body the rest that it needs.’³⁹

Her daily schedule changed in the course of the years, but generally speaking one can say that the Mother was occupied among and with the sadhaks from four o’clock in the morning till midnight, and sometimes even later, all the while supervising the activities related to the service of Sri Aurobindo. She did not even have a room of her own and often ate her meal on a cleared corner of a table here or there.

One of the most important Ashram activities was the daily pranam (salutation), when the sadhaks passed by her one after the other and received from her a meaningful flower with the inner support they needed. (The Mother has given names to most of the flowers that grow in South India, in relation with their essence and their true vibration. As was discovered afterwards, the meaning of those names agrees with the significance of the flowers in the old Indian traditions of religious devotion and herbal healing.) But the disciples created problems about the pranam too, just like about everything else. How had the Mother looked at them that day and what had they read in her eyes? And why had she smiled at this or that one yesterday but not today? And if she looked so seriously at that other one, he or she surely must have done something wrong or committed some mischief? The pranam keeps cropping up endlessly in the correspondence. The following is an example from the correspondence of Nirodbaran.

He writes on 28 July 1934: ‘Mother,⁹² there are days when I am awfully afraid to go to pranam, lest I should have the misfortune to see your grave face, with no smile at all. All my despair, melancholy, etc., is intensified after that, while your smile disperses all gloom.’ To which Sri Aurobindo answers: ‘All this about the Mother’s smile and her gravity is simply a trick of the vital. Very often I notice people talk of the Mother’s being grave, stern, displeased, angry at pranam when there has been nothing of the kind — they have attributed to her something created by their own vital imagination. Apart from that the Mother’s smiling or not smiling has nothing to do with the sadhak’s merits or demerits, fitness or unfitness — it is not deliberately done as a reward or a punishment. The Mother smiles on all, without regard to these things. When she does not smile, it is because she is either in trance or absorbed, or concentrated on something within the sadhak that needs her attention — something that has to be done for him or brought down or looked at. It does not mean that there is anything bad or wrong in him. I have told this a hundred times to any number of sadhaks — but in many the vital does not want to accept that because it would lose its main source of grievance, revolt, abhiman [wounded pride], desire to go away or give up the Yoga, things which are very precious to it.’⁴⁰ The problem — a wrong interpretation of the facial expression, corporeal attitude or acts of the Mother — cropped up time after time, it being inspired by ‘the Adversary’ as Sri Aurobindo called him.

When Nirodbaran admits: ‘I know from my own experience that we have abused the pranam,’ Sri Aurobindo replies without mincing words: ‘That is that. The pranam (like the soup the evening before) has been very badly misused. What is the pranam for? That people might receive in the most direct and integral way — a way that includes the physical consciousness and makes it a channel — what the Mother could give them and they were ready for. Instead people sit as if at a court reception noting what the Mother does (and generally misobserving), making inferences, gossiping afterwards as to her attitude to this or that person, who is the more favoured, who is the less favoured — as if the Mother were doling out her favour or disfavour or appreciation or disapproval there, just as courtiers in a court might do … The whole thing tends to become a routine, even where there are not these reactions. Some of course profit, those who can keep something of the right attitude. If there were the right attitude in all, well by this time things would have gone very far towards the spiritual goal.’⁴¹

We have taken a closer look at the pranam because this is an excellent example of the way in which the Mother dealt with the sadhaks and how her ways were perceived or interpreted by them. The pranam, just like the other Ashram activities, was never intended to be a kind of ceremony; it was an occasion on which the Mother could transmit her spiritual force and make it active in the sadhaks.

Sri Aurobindo’s intriguing words about ‘the soup in the evening’ refer to an activity the Ashramites called ‘the soup ceremony’ and which was held till the day in 1931 when the Mother fell seriously ill. ‘It was a very important function every evening. It impressed one like a snatch of the Ancient Mysteries … The atmosphere was as in some secret temple of Egyptian or Greek times,’⁴² relates K.D. Sethna in a talk. And he writes: ‘Every evening … we used to sit in semi-darkness, meditating. The Mother would be in a chair in front of us. Champaklal would bring a big cauldron of hot soup and place it on a stool in front of her. He stood by while she went into trance. After some minutes, with her eyes still shut, she would spontaneously stretch out her arms, and her palms were poised over the cauldron. She was transmitting the power of Sri Aurobindo into the soup. After a while her eyes opened and she withdrew her hands. Then the distribution started. Each of us went to her, bent down on his knees and gave her his enamel cup. Then with a ladle she poured the soup from the cauldron into our cups. Before handing each cup back she would again withdraw inward with eyes half shut and take a sip … The occult truth behind the ceremony was that she was putting something of her own spiritualised subtle-physical substance into the soup in our cups.’⁴³

Be it noted that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have never really been in ‘trance’, though Sri Aurobindo uses this word in a previous quotation. To go into trance means that one passes into another reality, thereby losing the awareness of the terrestrial reality and not remembering what has gone on in the other reality once one comes back to everyday circumstances. The Mother has said that she and Sri Aurobindo have always remained conscious on any level of reality and that they have always retained the complete awareness and memory of their experiences. A second noteworthy point in connection with the last quotation is that the force the Mother put into the soup, however difficult to name or to define, was clearly intended to work on the material body of the sadhak and to stimulate its transformation or at least its receptivity by means of the nutritious drink it partook of and which via its digestive system penetrated into its cells. Although ‘soup’ may be a rather prosaic food or word, there is no reason to suppose that the water and its other components should be spiritually inferior to, let us say, wheat in the form of bread.

Over and above the collective activities there were also personal meetings of the Mother with the sadhaks, conversations in their room or house, inspections of the various departments and services, and so on. A few sadhaks regularly met with her for some sort of symbolical games. And even on the way from one room to another in the central Ashram building, she was time and again held up by sadhaks with personal or organizational problems. For her nothing was too big and nothing too small or unimportant in a yoga which was meant to encompass all life.

As mentioned earlier, on 18 October 1931 the Mother fell seriously ill. She has never disclosed the causes of that illness. Much later she once told that a ‘titan’, more specifically a powerful emanation of the Lord of Falsehood, was after her life since her birth and that he did not let one occasion go by to bring, if possible, her mission on Earth to a premature end. This may have been one of the causes of an illness serious enough for her to interrupt her activities temporarily. But another cause was certainly the lack of receptivity in the sadhaks.

Sri Aurobindo wrote on 12 November 1931 to one of them: ‘The Mother has had a very severe attack and she must absolutely husband her forces in view of the strain the 24th November [darshan day] will mean for her. It is quite out of the question for her to begin seeing everybody and receiving them meanwhile — a single morning of that kind would exhaust her altogether.’ Then follows the paragraph we have already quoted in an earlier chapter: ‘You must remember that for her a physical contact of this kind with others is not a mere social or domestic meeting with a few superficial movements … It means for her an interchange, a pouring out of her forces and a receiving of things good, bad and mixed from them …’ And he continues: ‘If it had been only a question of two or three people, it would have been a different matter; but there is the whole Ashram here ready to enforce each one his claim the moment she opens her doors. You surely do not want to put all that upon her before she has recovered her health and her strength! In the interest of the work itself — the Mother has never cared in the least for her body or her health for its own sake and that indifference has been one reason, though only an outward one, for the damage done — I must insist on her going slowly in the resumption of the work and doing only so much at first as her health can bear.’⁴⁴

On that occasion we read from Sri Aurobindo’s pen about the significance of his and the Mother’s work: ‘I have not yet said anything about the Mother’s illness because to do so would have needed a long consideration of what those who are at the centre of a work like this have to be, what they have to take upon themselves of human terrestrial nature and its limitations, and how much they have to bear of the difficulties of transformation.’⁴⁵ Two years later, he would refer to this subject once more: ‘The Mother by the very nature of her work had to identify herself with the Sadhaks, to support all their difficulties, to receive into herself all the poison in their nature, to take up besides all the difficulties of the universal earth-nature, including the possibility of death and disease in order to fight them out. If she had not done that [and if he had not done that], not a single Sadhak would have been able to practise this Yoga. The Divine has to put on humanity in order that the human being may rise to the Divine. It is a simple truth, but nobody in the Ashram seems able to understand that the Divine can do that and yet remain different from them — can still remain the Divine.’⁴⁶ These words, put in their historical context, give us a profound insight into the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. We will mention what Sri Aurobindo has written about fighting death and disease when in our story we come to the day that he himself will leave his body.

She resumed her daunting daily tasks as soon as possible. Where she was not corporeally present, her consciousness in one of its emanations was there. There was an emanation of her with everybody she had accepted as sadhak or sadhika and enclosed in her consciousness. Sri Aurobindo explained this: ‘The Emanation is not a deputy, but the Mother herself. She is not bound to her body, but can put herself out (emanate) in any way she likes. What emanates, suits itself to the nature of the personal relation she has with the sadhak, which is different with each, but that does not prevent it from being herself. Its presence with the sadhak is not dependent on his consciousness of it. If everything were dependent on the surface consciousness of the sadhak, there would be no possibility of the divine action anywhere; the human worm would remain the human worm and the human ass, the human ass, for ever and ever. For if the Divine could not be there behind the veil, how could either ever become conscious of anything but their wormhood and asshood even throughout the ages?’⁴⁷ This quotation is taken from his correspondence with Nirodbaran, of course.

By the fact that all were moving inside her consciousness, she knew everything concerning the most intimate details of their life — an indispensable condition to do their yoga for them. The embodied Mother had ‘a knowledge by intimate contact with the truth of things and beings which is intuitive and born of a secret oneness.’⁴⁸ Her intuition was not what this word commonly means to us, to wit, a kind of irrational capacity of feeling things which may be surprisingly correct but also very unreliable. In Sri Aurobindo’s scheme of the world, intuition is one of the higher spiritual planes. When he wrote that the Mother knew by means of her intuition, he meant that she knew the things by a direct knowledge derived from the Unity-Consciousness where all is known in ‘the three times,’ past, present, future — a Unity-Consciousness that is the Divine Consciousness.

This too was a point which the intellect of many disciples could not fathom and which had to be clarified by Sri Aurobindo. Question: ‘In what sense is the Mother everywhere? Does she know all happenings in the physical plane?’ His answer: ‘Including what Lloyd George⁹³ had for breakfast today or what Roosevelt⁹⁴ said to his wife about the servants? Why should the Mother “know” in the human way all happenings in the physical plane? Her business in her embodiment is to know the workings of the universal forces and use them for her works; for the rest she knows what she needs to know, sometimes with her inner self, sometimes with her physical mind. All knowledge is available in her universal self, but she brings forward only what is needed to be brought forward so that the working is done.’⁴⁹

The Mother herself had more than once explained that the knowledge of events on the various levels of existence was, as it were, stored in the gradations of her consciousness which corresponded to those levels, and that for her embodied personality that passive knowledge could be made actively available if she concentrated on it. This was all the more true concerning the movements in the persons she had taken up in her consciousness and the events, which were for her of special interest for one reason or another.

After her illness the daily ‘balcony darshan’ started unintentionally, and it would go on till the day in 1962 when the Mother could no longer come out of her room. ‘It was the Mother’s habit soon after her return to active work to come out early in the morning to the north balcony adjoining Pavitra’s room … In course of time, a few sadhaks started assembling on the opposite pavement to have a glimpse of the Mother when she came out on the balcony. With the passing of a few weeks or months … almost the entire Ashram would gather, the whole street would be packed with the expectant sadhaks, visitors and others,’⁵⁰ we read in Iyengar’s biography of the Mother.

Just like the balcony darshan, no other Ashram activity of any importance was planned in advance. A need arose for some spiritual reason connected to the Work and made itself felt spontaneously. Some of Sri Aurobindo’s major writings had originated in the same way, casually as it were, in reaction to an article or book he had read (The Human Cycle, The Future Poetry, The Foundations of Indian Culture) or to a text he started commenting upon (The Life Divine, The Secret of the Veda). Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never planned something beforehand, in order not to limit or distort it by a projection of the expectation. They followed their divine intuition and supramental knowledge in total surrender to That which guided their earthly work. ‘There has never been, at any time, a mental plan or an organisation decided beforehand. The whole thing has taken birth, grown and developed as a living being by a movement of consciousness … constantly maintained, increased and fortified.’⁵¹ (Sri Aurobindo)

The Progress of the Sadhaks

It may be that some of the quotations put the members of the Ashram in an unfavourable light. Moreover, the Ashramites have often been attacked because of their external and internal shortcomings, particularly after the passing away of the Mother in 1973. As already mentioned in Sri Aurobindo’s own words, it is mainly where human beings are living day after day closely together that the petty sides of their character become most clearly visible, most childish and even grotesque or embarrassing. All communities in all climes are witness to this phenomenon — be they religious, social, military, utopian or experimental. It is a sorry fact that humans for the greatest part of their surface personality are petty beings, and the habits and mental blindness of ‘these small, pathetic, dwarfish creatures’ deny them any clear discernment. ‘People are exceedingly silly,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo to Nirodbaran, ‘but I suppose they cannot help themselves. The more I observe humanity, the more that forces itself upon me — the abyss of silliness of which the mind is capable.’⁵² He did not come from another planet like the fictional little green Martians, but he saw with a consciousness worlds above the ordinary human mind.

It would be rather easy to make a substantial compilation of the sayings by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother analogous with the following: ‘The Mother and I have to give nine-tenths of our energy, to smoothing down things, to keep the Sadhaks tolerably contented, etc. etc. etc. One-tenth and in the Mother’s case not even that can go to the real work; it is not enough.’⁵³ However, quotations of this kind would present a wrong picture of the Ashram members as well as of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s attitude towards them. For much more important are the letters in which they encourage their disciples, emphasize their positive capabilities and assure them of their everlasting love, support and protection. This is abundantly illustrated, for instance, in the Mother’s letters to Huta, published in White Roses and other collections, in their correspondence with Nirodbaran and K.D. Sethna, and in many other letters. They knew full well what human nature consisted of and consequently what they had taken upon them in their yoga of the collectivity. They also knew that they could expect little in return from human beings, even from the sadhaks of their own yoga. Question: ‘Mother, what can we expect from you?’ The Mother: ‘Everything.’ Second question: ‘Mother, what do you expect from us?’ The Mother: ‘Nothing.’

The Integral Yoga, to which the sadhaks had dedicated their life, was for that matter the most difficult endeavour a human being could take on. Its aim, as we know, was a complete transformation of the human into a divine nature and ultimately of the human body in a body that must be able to contain and express divinity. When somebody once asked him: ‘You have said, Sir, in The Life Divine that only the absolute idealist can persist in this path. How then can ordinary mortals like us … ?’ Sri Aurobindo broke off his question with a polite smile: ‘It is not for ordinary mortals.’⁵⁴ And he wrote: ‘This path of Yoga is a difficult one and it can be followed only when there is a special call.’⁵⁵

It may be assumed that the aspirants accepted by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had this special call. In other words, they may in most cases be assumed to have been ‘mature souls’ because no others were up to the trail-blazing work in collaboration with the Avatar and to representing their earthly brothers and sisters. They must belong to ‘the number of souls sent to make that it will be for now,’ as Sri Aurobindo said. Is there any confirmation to be found of this?

One reads in the Agenda how the Mother once told Satprem that Nolini, one of the first companions of Sri Aurobindo whom we have already met in this story, inwardly could rise at will to the plane of Being-Consciousness-Bliss — that is to say to the highest level of the divine manifestation. After Nolini’s demise, in 1984, several persons have published their remembrances of him. There we read that he had himself told that he was a reincarnation of the Latin poet Virgil, of the French poet Pierre de Ronsard, and of André Le Nôtre who designed the gardens of Versailles. The Mother significantly wrote in one of his birthday cards: ‘Nolini en route towards the superman’, and in 1973: ‘With my love and blessings … for the transformation.’ Nirodbaran, who with the other Ashram doctors assisted Nolini at the end, narrates: ‘A few days later, as he was lying in his bed, I asked him through Anima where his consciousness might be. He answered: “Why, with the Mother!” I wanted more precision. Then he answered: “In the Overmind.” I was simply swept off my feet … Later I learned from Anima that Nolini-da⁹⁵ had confided in her that he was mostly in the Overmind but at times a little beyond it.’⁵⁶ The Overmind is the world of the cosmic beings called Gods; a little higher begins the Supermind.

The same Nirodbaran wrote fifty years earlier to Sri Aurobindo: ‘I sometimes wonder if anyone here is attaining anything at all; has anybody realised the Divine? Please don’t ask me what I mean by the Divine. It is difficult to explain these things.’ Sri Aurobindo answered: ‘Why shouldn’t I ask? If you mean the Vedantic realisation, several have had it. Bhakti realisation also. If I were to publish the letters on sadhana experiences that have come to me, people would marvel and think that the Ashram was packed full of great Yogis! Those who know something about Yoga would not mind about the dark periods, eclipses, hostile attacks, despairings, falls, for they know that these things happen to Yogis. Even the failures would have become Gurus, if I had allowed it, with circles of Shishyas [disciples]! B. did become one. Z. of course. But all that does not count here, because what is a full realisation outside, is here only a faint beginning of siddhi. Here the test is transformation of the nature, psychic, spiritual, finally supramental. That and nothing else is what makes it so difficult.’⁵⁷ The letters with these great realizations have never been published by the sadhaks concerned, supposedly out of discretion.

Another time Sri Aurobindo amended the observations of the same correspondent: ‘The quality of the sadhaks is so low? I should say there is a considerable amount of ability and capacity in the Ashram. Only the standard demanded is higher than outside even in spiritual matters. There are half a dozen people here perhaps who live in the Brahman consciousness — outside they would make a big noise and be considered as great Yogis — here their condition is not known and in the Yoga it is regarded not as siddhi but only as a beginning.’⁵⁸ (Nirodbaran: ‘Could you whisper to me the names of those lucky fellows, those “half dozen people”?’ Sri Aurobindo, in capital letters: ‘NO, SIR.’)

The last two quotations are from 1936. It may reasonably be presumed that the sadhaks Sri Aurobindo had in mind made further progress afterwards and that some of them, like Nolini, reached an advanced stage indeed. They were nevertheless still far from the transformation of the physical body — the reason why the ordinary eye could discern very little or nothing in them. They are the unknown heroes from the first phase of the transformation of the Earth; maybe they are now resting ‘somewhere’ and waiting to continue or accomplish their work when terrestrial matter will be ready for it.

Finally, a remarkable tale on this subject. It is from Champaklal’s memoirs as told in his simple style to a fellow sadhak. Champaklal narrates an event from 1959. ‘[I] informed Mother in the morning of the passing away of Mritunjoy’s elder sister. Mother said: “Yes, she was not keeping well for a long time. She was sick.” When Mother had her breakfast after Balcony [the balcony darshati], she said that she had come to know a very interesting thing. She had seen on the forehead of Mritunjoy’s elder sister (who had just passed away) the symbol of Sri Aurobindo. Mother said she was very much surprised and said to herself: “What? On this … ?” Then she heard Sri Aurobindo saying: “Henceforth whoever dies here, I will put my seal upon him and in any condition unconditional protection will be given.”’⁵⁹ In the Agenda, we find this confirmed in the Mother’s own words.

When the soul leaves the material body, it first stays for some time in the vital worlds in its vital sheath before it passes through the mental regions into the psychic world, to rest there and to assimilate the experiences from the recently concluded life. The lower vital worlds are inhabited by the malicious beings we have already met and who in the West are called devils. The temporary passage of the soul through those lower vital worlds is the rationale of the various types of hell in the religions. Far from being an eternal punishment with which to threaten the faithful, it is a transient experience of the soul, which nonetheless may be very frightening and sometimes even dangerous.

As the Mother said, it had been one of her tasks, from her very childhood, to look after the souls of the deceased and to guide them safely to the world of psychic rest and assimilation. ‘So many people come to her in the night for the passage to the other side,’⁶⁰ wrote Sri Aurobindo. To make that passage safe for all of them, the Mother constructed with her occult powers paths of light which the vital beings would not venture to touch and where therefore they cannot bother the souls of the deceased any longer. In the Mother’s own words: ‘There are now what one might call “bridges”, “protected passages” built in the vital world to traverse all those dangers.’⁶¹ She also said that she had done this work at the beginning of the century and that she had been occupied with it for months on end. ‘It must be part of the work for which I have come on Earth,’ she remarked. So Sri Aurobindo could write: ‘The one who dies here is assisted in his passage to the psychic world and helped in his future evolution towards the Divine.’⁶² As a token thereof he placed his symbol on the forehead of everyone who died in the Ashram.

Golconde

There is no building, no room, no corner in the Ashram without an interesting story about it. It is no exaggeration to say that the Mother stood behind and next to everything, not as an authoritarian mother superior but to confer the inspiration, encouragement and realizing power required for the implementation of her work in the Ashram. Everything had its occult incentive, meaning and goal, for the Ashram stood for the world and therefore each action, even in everyday life, was charged with a far-reaching symbolical sense. From the many projects realized by the Mother from scratch, with meagre means and in difficult circumstances, we will briefly consider the ‘guest house’ which she named Golconde.

What the Mother intended with Golconde was typical of the significance of the Ashram as a whole. All sources indicate that she wanted a symbolical architectural achievement of the highest beauty and perfection, giving shape as perfectly as possible to a spiritual intention and power. (Later on, she must have intended the same but on a bigger scale with Auroville.)

Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter: ‘In Golconde Mother has worked out her own idea through Raymond, Sammer and others. First, Mother believes in beauty as a part of spirituality and divine living; secondly, she believes that physical things have the Divine Consciousness underlying them as much as living things; and thirdly that they have an individuality of their own and ought to be properly treated, used in the right way … It is on this basis that she planned Golconde. First, she wanted a high architectural beauty, and in this she succeeded … but also she wanted all objects in it, the rooms, the fittings, the furniture to be individually artistic and to form a harmonious whole.’⁶³

To this end she invited the architect Antonin Raymond, a Czech, notwithstanding his typically French name. Raymond was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he had accompanied to Japan in 1923 to help in the rebuilding of Tokyo after the disastrous earthquake which destroyed most of the city. That was where he met and befriended Philippe Saint-Hilaire, later called Pavitra. In 1938, the year he was invited to design the plans for Golconde, Raymond had built up a successful firm of architects, two of whom would assist him in building Golconde. The one was František Sammer, a student of Le Corbusier and also a Czech; he had assisted Le Corbusier in the building of a housing complex in Moscow, and afterwards he had travelled to Japan where he met Raymond. The other was George Nakashima, an American born of Japanese parents.

About his work for Golconde, Raymond has written:⁹⁶ ‘We lived as in a dream. No time, no money were stipulated in the contract. There was no contract. Here indeed was an ideal state of existence in which the purpose of all activity was clearly a spiritual one. The purpose, as a matter of fact, of the dormitory [later used as a guest house] was not primarily the housing of the disciples; it was the creating of an activity, the materialisation of an idea, by which the disciples might learn, might experience, might develop, through contact with the erection of a fine building. Time and money were of secondary value. This situation was quite other than the usual one of being pinched between a client and a contractor. Here everything was done to free the architect completely so that he might give himself entirely to his art and science.

‘And yet, simultaneously, on the job perfect order was maintained, every nail was counted. Among various disciples chosen to work on the building, this one engrossed in the business of testing the soil might have been a retired dentist; the one responsible for opening and closing the gate — he actually had been a banker — did his job with a consciousness impossible to obtain in a world where a man listens to the sound of the 5 o’clock whistle. There were engineers among the disciples [Pavitra, Chandulal and Udar]: everyone lent a hand.

‘Under the invisible guidance of the leaders of the Ashram, whose presence was always felt, to whom daily all was reported, whose concern was the spiritual growth of each member of the community, I achieved the best architecture of my career. Golconde, the dormitory was called.’⁶⁴

This name is the French version of ‘Golconda’, at that time a famous gold mine near Hyderabad, the town which, before India’s independence, was the capital of the state of the same name ruled by an immensely wealthy Nizam. (Hyderabad is now the capital of the Union state of Andhra Pradesh.) It was this Mohammedan Nizam who, at the request of his diwan (chief minister), had donated one lakh rupees for the building of the guest house. A lakh is 100,000. Nowadays an average car costs three to four lakhs in India, but in 1938 a lakh of rupees was still a considerable sum. As Udar Pinto, one of the engineers, remembers: ‘Today, one lakh does not seem much, but in those days it was indeed quite a large sum, as its buying power was over twenty times what it is now [in 1990], especially at Pondicherry where things were remarkably cheap. A ton of cement, good Japanese cement, cost only around 25 rupees and steel about 200 rupees per ton. Pondicherry was then a free port and there were absolutely no customs or import charges or restrictions. And as we had then a good off-loading pier, shipments from Japan came directly to Pondicherry.’⁶⁵ Udar was responsible for the manufacturing of the tools, accessories and fittings in metal required for Golconde. Nearly all of these objects were custom-made, and to this end Udar had started a workshop with the sum of exactly 1 (one) rupee. The workshop was called Harpagon by the Mother, after the main character in the comedy L’Avare (The Miser) by Molière.

What were the qualities that made it Antonin Raymond’s best architectural work? In the prologue we have already quoted Charles Correa’s high opinion of it. At the congress Solar World, held in Perth, Australia, in 1983, the following was said about Golconde: ‘In one of the most remote parts of India, one of the most advanced buildings in the world was constructed under the most demanding circumstances concerning material and craftsmen. This reinforced concrete structure was completed primarily by unskilled volunteers with the most uncertain supplies, and with virtually every fitting custom-fabricated. Yet this handsome building has world stature, both architecturally and in its bio-climatic response to a tropical climate, 13° N of the equator.’⁶⁶ An entrant in a photographic contest organized by the International Asbestos-Cement Review in 1959 noted: ‘In Golconde severity has melted into dream-delicacy; sensitive lines, varied yet harmonious surfaces and a simple distribution of simple masses have magically combined to create a visual poem in space … a photographer’s dream.’⁶⁷

The work had started on 10 October 1937; it would take ten years for Golconde to be completed. The Second World War had loomed on the horizon, but the trio of architects, obliged to return to their homeland, never lost contact with their work and with the Ashram. The plans were worked out under the supervision of the Ashram engineers, but the materials from other countries arrived with much delay or not at all, and the prices sky-rocketed. Still, no quarter was given as to the quality of the building. In a quiet neighbourhood of Pondicherry, a stone’s throw away from the central Ashram building and about two hundred meters from the blue sea, Golconde still stands in all its originality and well-preserved beauty.