Beyond Man

Chapter Ten: The Two-In-One

… the deathless Two-in-One, a single being in two bodies clasped … ¹

— Savitri

‘I had met Sri Aurobindo before, but it only began clearly in 1920.’ It, the Great Work they had to undertake together, ‘an alchemic transmutation of all the inner and outer existence.’² (Sri Aurobindo) It was to be a transmutation that would produce the body of a higher species, but this time not within the scope of the lower hemisphere of Existence and not with a gradual change which perhaps might have led to a Nietzschean superman. This new species would possess a supramental, divine consciousness of the higher hemisphere, and accordingly a supramental, divine body.

In a new act of the drama of the world
The united Two began a greater age.³

— Savitri

They knew that their reunification — which would prove to be definitive — meant that the promise given to mankind at its origin would now at last be fulfilled, thanks to them.

Mirra in Japan, 1916

Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, ca. 1918-1920

Her return to Pondicherry was ‘the tangible sign of the Victory over the hostile forces,’ the Mother would later write about herself. She has not expanded on the meaning of these words, but Paul Richard, an incarnation of the Asura of Falsehood, whom she had been unable to convert despite her promise, certainly had something to do with it. The few times she mentioned in passing their stay in Japan and their last months together in Pondicherry leave one with the impression that it must have been a ‘diabolical’ period. It could be that Sri Aurobindo had not deemed his yoga sufficiently developed in 1915 to commence the Great Work together with her at that time. ‘In 1914 I had to go away. He did not keep me, what could I do? I had to go. But I left my psychic being with him.’⁴ This brought her to the brink of death: ‘The doctors had given me up.’

Her return in 1920 effected drastic changes in Sri Aurobindo’s outer way of life which until then was rather Spartan. His four young companions of the first hour who shared these circumstances in Pondicherry deserve to be mentioned by name: Bejoy Nag, one of the co-defendants in the Alipore Bomb Case and who had accompanied Sri Aurobindo on the adventurous journey to Pondicherry; Suresh Chakravarty, known as Moni, who had been sent ahead by Sri Aurobindo to prepare for his arrival and housing by the freedom fighters in Pondicherry; Saurin Bose, who had joined the small group in October 1914 and who was a cousin of Sri Aurobindo’s wife Mrinalini; and Nolini Kanta Gupta, who had arrived in November of the same year and who also had been a defendant in the Alipore case. The financial situation of the group was usually so desperate that Sri Aurobindo once wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘The situation just now is that we have Rs. 1,50 or so in hand … No doubt, God will provide, but He has contracted a bad habit of waiting till the last moment.’⁵

In his Reminiscences Nolini tells about this period: ‘Each of us possessed a mat, and this mat had to serve as our bedstead, mattress, coverlet and pillow; this was all our furniture. And mosquito curtains? That was a luxury we could not even dream of. If there were too many mosquitoes, we would carry the mats out on the terrace for a little air, assuming, that is, that there was any. Only for Sri Aurobindo we had somehow managed a chair and a table and a camp cot. We lived a real camp life.’⁶ They also had a couple of rickety chairs for visitors, and at one time one candle for the personal use of Sri Aurobindo. He took his daily bath under the tap in the courtyard just like the others, but usually he was the last person to do so, using the only towel the household possessed.

Besides his yogic discipline, his study of the Vedas and other subjects, e.g. comparative linguistics, and the writing of plays, essays and articles (during the Arya period sixty-four pages a month), Sri Aurobindo still found time to instruct those of his companions who were eager to learn. Foremost among them were Nolini and Moni, who had had to stop their college studies because of their revolutionary activities. He taught them French, Greek, Latin and Italian, L’Avare, Medea, Antigone, Vergil and Dante. Both Nolini and Moni would gain fame as writers in Bengali.

They had to eat too. ‘We did the cooking ourselves and each of us developed a specialty,’ narrates Nolini. ‘I did the rice, perhaps because that was the easiest. Moni took charge of dal (pulses), and Bejoy, being the expert, had the vegetables and the curry.’ Saurin looked after the visitors who came from the four corners of India and were mostly unwelcome, so much so that Sri Aurobindo had to have a letter published in a Madras newspaper confirming that he had retired from political life and requesting that he not be disturbed in his spiritual work. Money was often lacking to buy the spices of which Indians are so fond, and sometimes they also had to go barefoot out of sheer necessity.

In Pondicherry the young Bengalis were highly rated as football players. (The three professional football teams of Calcutta are even now among the foremost in the country.) Spiritual life was the least of their concerns. ‘We had hitherto known [Sri Aurobindo] as a dear friend and a close companion, and although in our mind and heart he had the position of a Guru, in our outward relations we seemed to behave as if he were just like one of ourselves. He too had been averse to the use of the words “Guru” and “Ashram”.’⁷

The return in 1920 of the Mother, whom most of them already knew from her first stay, caused a thorough change in the life of the small group, which at that time was about twice its original size. ‘The house underwent a great change. There was a clean garden in the open courtyard, every room had simple and decent furniture — a mat, a chair, and a small table. There was an air of tidiness and order. This was, no doubt, the effect of the Mother’s presence.’⁸ Not only did the housekeeping become a lot less problematical, but by her own attitude towards Sri Aurobindo she showed his young companions who he actually was. She must have done this very tactfully, for they knew her as Madame Richard, and although Sri Aurobindo had made them understand that she was far advanced in occultism and spirituality, to them she was a twice-married woman nevertheless. As K.D. Sethna writes: ‘Even in regard to the Mother a group of sadhaks in the twenties, when she returned to India for permanent stay near Sri Aurobindo, was averse to accept her as an incarnation of the Divine — merely because she was from the West and a woman besides, while all the Avatars of tradition had been Indians and, furthermore, exclusively of the masculine gender.’⁹ The resistance against her Western origin will in future from time to time make itself felt sharply with the more traditionally-minded disciples.

Sri Aurobindo had repeatedly made known and even written in the newspapers that he had distanced himself from all political activity, but in 1920 his fame as a politician was still very much alive in the minds of his countrymen. In this year he was offered the editorship of the organ of a new party of which Bal Gangadhar Tilak was one of the co-founders. Yet more important was the offer to be the president of the Congress, ‘the greatest honour the national movement could award.’ As on previous occasions, this time too Sri Aurobindo sent his thanks politely saying that at present he did not want to take political office, as his interest was now exclusively concentrated on his inner development.

In 1920, in a letter to his brother Barin, then recently released from prison, Sri Aurobindo wrote in Bengali: ‘The indwelling Guru of the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory, the ten limbs of the body of the yoga. These ten years he has been making me develop it in experience; it is not yet finished. It may take another two years. And so long as it is not finished, I probably will not be able to return to Bengal.’¹⁰ This shows clearly that it was not Sri Aurobindo’s intention to remain in seclusion in his Pondicherrian ‘cave of tapasya’. He would in future confirm this several times, as late as in 1943 to Dilip K. Roy and even — most astonishingly — in 1950, the year of his passing, to K.M. Munshi.

Many who did not know or understand the true reason of Sri Aurobindo’s withdrawal from the freedom movement were very disillusioned and made no bones about it. Among them was the Gaekwad of Baroda, his former employer, who said: ‘Mister Ghose is now an extinct volcano: he has become a yogi!’ In 1908 Rabindranath Tagore had published in Bande Mataram his poem, still well known in India, beginning with the lines: ‘Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee! / O friend, my country’s friend, O voice incarnate, free, / of India’s soul! …’ Now he complained to Dilip K. Roy: ‘But he is lost to us, Dilip, soaring in the cloudland of mysticism, he won’t return to lead the country again.’¹¹⁹¹ And in Peter Heehs’ biography we read: ‘Among the disillusioned was Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in 1962: “When Gandhiji started his non-cooperation movement and convulsed India, we expected Sri Aurobindo to emerge from his retirement and join the great struggle. We were disappointed at his not doing so.”’¹² This lack of understanding was one of the reasons why, in 1942, Mohandas K. Gandhi refused to listen when Sri Aurobindo insisted that the Cripps offer of dominion status for India be accepted; had it been, the division of the country into India and Pakistan might have been prevented.

In her he found a vastness like his own …

In her he met his own eternity.¹³

— Savitri

The Avatar is a direct embodiment of the Godhead. ‘An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and the power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with the divine power and presence.’¹⁴ (Sri Aurobindo) Being the Son of Man he is also literally the Son of God. To human comprehension this remains an enigma, because the common human contact with the Avatar is, during his lifetime, through the senses or the thinking, and an advanced psychic development is needed to be able to perceive the inner divinity of the Avatar. However, the metaphysical definition of the Avatar and the function of his incarnation in evolution are not difficult to understand according to the traditional formulation.

Less evident is the role of the Great Mother as a divine incarnation, as an Avatar. We have already seen that some traditionalistic, conservative followers of Sri Aurobindo had difficulties understanding it and to accept ‘that French woman’ freely moving among them, as the embodied Godhead. This went on even after Sri Aurobindo had pronounced on the matter and used his authority to declare her an Avatar: ‘The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme.’¹⁵ ‘The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood … It is so that you should regard her as the Divine Shakti … She is that in the body, but in her whole consciousness she is also identified with all the other aspects of the Divine.’¹⁶ When some of his beautiful letters about the Mother had been collected and published as a booklet, the then still very young disciple Nagin Doshi asked him straight out: ‘Do you not refer to the Mother (our Mother) in your book “The Mother”?’ Sri Aurobindo answered laconically: ‘Yes.’

The difficulty of accepting the Mother on a par with the masculine Avatar had several reasons. One of these was, as already mentioned, that the divine incarnations in all traditions have always been men; moreover those men, once they came to the fore as a divine incarnation, did not keep a feminine ‘complement’ by their side, not even when they had been married. The reason why a very long era, now coming to an end, has been an era of undisputed male supremacy, Is not yet satisfactorily explained. Some ancient cultures are known in which a goddess or goddesses were worshipped, but in practically all cases they have been replaced by male-dominated cultures and religions, and the worship of the mother-goddess has generally been vilified as orgiastic or demonic. In India everybody knows that a god has a wife who is a goddess; she is his shakti, i.e. his force, power or strength, but she is, all the same, always pictured as smaller in size. And in everyday life the husband is literally the god, the lord of the married woman, whom she does not address by his name but calls him ‘the Lord of my house’, and whom she worships with ceremonial pujas just like the statues of the gods in the house.

A second reason for lower respect shown to the Mother-force is the comparison with the Supreme, generally considered as masculine: she is his force, his shakti, having come forth from him and as a consequence of secondary importance. But this is the human interpretation of a metaphysical fact that is inexpressible in words and that is therefore in the ancient texts told by the great seers as a humanized story. One will remember the words from the Upanishad: ‘Prajapati [the Father of all creatures] then was this Universe. Vak [the Word] was second to him. He united with her and she became pregnant. She went out from him and produced all the creation and again re-entered him.’ However, the Power, the Force or the Potency of the Absolute One IS the Absolute One is its totality and in all eternity.

The primordial masculine element is often named Purusha in the ancient Hindu writings and the feminine element Prakriti. When a child, in one of the Mother’s weekly French evening classes, asked for a clarification of the Purusha-Prakriti relationship, she abruptly turned towards Nolini, who with some other adults also attended the classes: ‘Nolini, you will have to explain this … I don’t understand a thing of it. It does not correspond with an inner experience as far as I am concerned. I have never had this kind of experience, therefore I cannot talk about it … To make a division like that and to name the one, Purusha, masculine, and the other, Prakriti, feminine, is something I simply won’t do … To me it is something resulting from — if you will excuse me — a somewhat degenerated masculine mentality … IT IS NOT CORRECT … At the very top there is not the slightest notion of “masculine” and “feminine” … This is a concept that has come from below …’¹⁷

We now understand Sri Aurobindo’s fundamental pronouncements: ‘The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play.’¹⁸ ‘The Mother and I are one but in two bodies.’¹⁹ ‘The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms.’²⁰ The Mother from her side said: ‘Sri Aurobindo and I are always one and the same consciousness, one and the same person.’²¹ Like the ‘masculine’ Avatar the ‘feminine’ Avatar represents the whole Godhead: both are ONE. Therefore a mantra given by Sri Aurobindo in Sanskrit was translated by the Mother as follows: ‘OM — She the Ananda, She the Consciousness, She the Truth, She the Supreme’ (17.11.63). And the Mother once wrote their names as ‘MOTHERSRIAUROBINDO’ to demonstrate their essential unity.

The indivisible unity of the Divine, his manifesting Power and his manifestation are not only of theoretical importance, there are also very important practical consequences. One of these is that the soul, as part of the sexless Divine, is sexless too. In human beings it has to take on a sexual body out of necessity, in its first human incarnations frequently changing from one sex to the other, but keeping one sexual gender, the one of its choice, once it has acquired or is acquiring its maturity. As it is intrinsically sexless, however, in the species beyond man it will manifest in a sexless supramental body.

The sexes are a phenomenon of the lower hemisphere of Existence from the gods down to the lower vital creatures. ‘The concept that has come from below,’ as the Mother said, has therefore been projected from the lower hemisphere of division on the higher hemisphere of divine Unity. ‘It is a concept that is useful psychologically, but that is all.’²² It is not to be denied, of course, that there is a masculine and a feminine sex in the lower hemisphere. The origin of the two complementary sexes obviously has its origin in the functional differentiation between Purusha and Prakriti, the One and its Shakti, its Maya.⁹²

It is little known that the relation Purusha-Prakriti created a problem to the manifested two-poled Avatar, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. For it has always been, ‘almost for eternities,’ the aspiration of the creative Power to unite with the Creator in a total and unconditional surrender, ‘so that the whole Being might exist’ in the manifestation. Practically speaking this meant that the Mother in her attitude of surrender always put Sri Aurobindo above her, which was the reason why she usually sat down at his feet on the floor or on a small stool. But Sri Aurobindo’s yogic development had revealed the Divine Mother to him, and he on his part had surrendered totally and unconditionally to her. This revelation and his surrender he has expressed in the canto of Savitri called The Adoration of the Divine Mother:

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The Might of all that never yet came down …

Once seen, his heart acknowledged only her.²³

The practical consequence, for himself as well as for his disciples was, as he wrote in a letter: ‘It is not our force but the Shakti of God who is the sole sadhika [practitioner] of this yoga.’ This follows logically from the fact that the evolution is a development back to the Divine Origin and that it is the Divine Mother who has enabled and worked out this development. (This means, besides, that all human beings, as living elements of the evolution, participate in the evolutionary yoga, whether they want it or not.) ‘The whole of life is the Yoga of Nature.’²⁴ ‘All life is yoga. It is therefore impossible to live without practising the supreme yoga.’²⁵

The play of the relations between the Godhead and his manifesting Shakti, who is the Great Mother, is sublimely illustrated in the images of the Mother of God with her radiant Child on her lap — the Child who is her Origin and Lord but of whose embodied existence she is the mother. It is no coincidence that we find this image, well-known from the Roman Catholic iconography, also in Savitri, as already quoted elsewhere in this book.

How then to situate the incarnated Prakriti, the Mother, in relation to the incarnated Purusha, Sri Aurobindo? This is a question of primary importance to the subject of this book; without a clear insight into their two-in-oneness, their Work and its results cannot be understood. The Mother was of course not Sri Aurobindo’s wife, as stated in a couple of guide books for travellers which have probably obtained their information from Pondicherrian tea shop customers. (And neither was she the wife of the French governor of Pondicherry as asserted in an edition of the French Guide du routard.) In most writings and books by their disciples, one reads that the Mother was the ‘collaborator’ of Sri Aurobindo, and some even say his ‘disciple and collaborator’. The rationale of the matter is now known to us, namely that she was an incarnation of the Divine Consciousness and as such the Divine itself. As Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘Either she is that … or she is not and then no one need to stay here,’ meaning in the Ashram. ²⁶

The Mother cannot be called a disciple, devotee or follower of Sri Aurobindo. An opinion like this not only stems from the fact that some regarded her less highly because she was a woman and a Westerner, but also because of a wrong interpretation of Sri Aurobindo’s words concerning her exceptional complete surrender when she first met him in 1914. ‘The first time Sri Aurobindo described her qualities, he said he had never seen anywhere a self-surrender so absolute and unreserved,’ wrote Nolini in his Reminiscences.²⁷ Amrita too, a Tamil from Pondicherry who had been one of the first to join the small ‘group of Bengalis, is quoted as a source in this connection. ‘He told me,’ writes K.D. Sethna, ‘that after the Mother’s arrival in Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo declared to the young men with him at the time, of whom Amrita was one: “I never knew the meaning of ‘surrender’ until Mirra surrendered herself to me.”’²⁸ It is not possible to question these statements by two prominent disciples, but they cover only one side of the relationship and leave out Sri Aurobindo’s reciprocal surrender to the Mother. ‘A vast surrender was his only strength.’²⁹ Moreover, Sri Aurobindo himself has written explicitly, probably to straighten out some distorted opinions among his disciples: ‘The Mother is not a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. She has had the same realisation and experience as myself.’³⁰

‘The Mother stands on an equal and exactly complementary footing with Sri Aurobindo,’³¹ writes K.D. Sethna, the most reliable authority of the Ashram. And he goes on: ‘Side by side though Sri Aurobindo and the Mother stood, she often took the position of a “disciple” and spoke of carrying out a work allotted to her and of promulgating his message to the world. On the other hand, he never tired of declaring her to be not only equal to him but also indispensable for his mission and even suggested that if she were not there as his counterpart he would be incomplete.’³²

It is no easy matter to define the exact relationship between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as some events during their life and some sectarian developments after their passing have amply demonstrated.

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps … ³³

— Savitri

It is significant in the light of the above that several authors have written about the human side of the divine incarnation who was the Mother whereas one seldom reads about the human side of Sri Aurobindo, although there are plenty of letters, for instance in his correspondence with Nirodbaran, to illustrate how ‘human’ Sri Aurobindo was too. That the so-called human side of the Mother is so often mentioned can partially be explained by the fact that she moved day after day among the members of the Ashram, whereas Sri Aurobindo never left his apartment after 24 November 1926. But sometimes there is also a suspicion of the more human and more reassuring quality attributed to the Mother along with her supposed discipleship.

We find traces of this attitude towards the Mother in some of the most prominent authors. Nirodbaran writes in Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo: ‘Though Divine, her human motherly instinct could not be forgotten.’³⁴ The following words are from M.P. Pandit: ‘She was supremely divine but equally intensely human.’³⁵ Satprem writes in the second volume of his trilogy about the Mother: ‘She was so human too, this Mother, let there be no mistake; her consciousness was not like ours, her energies were not like ours, but her body consisted of our matter, the same suffering matter.’³⁶ In the same vein we could cull dozens of quotations by other writers or from reminiscences by disciples.

At first sight such sayings seem to be reasonable, and the accentuation of the superhuman aspect of the Avatar, while omitting or glossing over the human side, might look like an act of devotional narrow-mindedness, not to say devotional bigotry. And didn’t Sri Aurobindo write: ‘The Divine has to put on humanity in order that the human being may rise to be divine,’³⁷ and: ‘The Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely and without any conjuring tricks or pretense’?³⁸ The question of the prevalence of either the divine or the human aspect of the Avatar has, throughout history, caused endless disputation and sectarian attitudes — about Christ in Gnosticism and early Christendom in all its varieties, as well as about the Avatars of the Hindus in their philosophical disputations. It is necessary to consider this question in some detail, for it is a matter of importance to our subject, as we will see in the third part of this book.

First some statements by Sri Aurobindo.

About the Avatar in general: ‘The Divine puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be the Divine.’³⁹

About the contacts of the Mother with others, in particular the disciples: ‘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 which make no great difference one way or the other. It means for her an interchange, a pouring out of her forces and a receiving of things good, bad and mixed from them which often involves a great labour of adjustment and elimination and in many cases, though not in all, a severe strain on the body.’⁴⁰

About the relations between the disciples and the Mother: ‘But why do you want to meet her as a “human” Mother? If you can see the Divine Mother in a human body that should be enough and a more fruitful attitude. Those who approach her as a human Mother often get into trouble by their conception making all sorts of mistakes in their approach to her.’⁴¹

And in Savitri he wrote: ‘Even when she bent to meet earth’s intimacies / Her spirit kept the stature of the gods.’⁴²

We also give some pronouncements of the Mother on this subject. About the Avatar in general: ‘They may be sure to misjudge the Divine if they stick to the superficial aspect of his [or her] actions, for they will never understand that what seems to resemble a human way of acting is nevertheless completely different and arises from a source which is not human … The [incarnated] Divine seems to act like other people, but this is only an appearance.’⁴³

About the everyday contact of the disciples with her physical being: ‘They have very little real contact with what my body really is, and with the formidable accumulation of conscious energy it represents.’⁴⁴ The Mother had always liked to play tennis and she kept playing till she was eighty. In this context she said: ‘You have here this extraordinary opportunity of being able to play a game and to take exercise in an atmosphere filled with Divine Consciousness, Light and Power in such a way that each of your movements is, so to say, permeated by the consciousness and the light and the power which is in itself an intensive yoga; and your ignorant unconsciousness, your blindness and your lack of sensitiveness is such that you believe you are giving a game or even helping a good old lady to play for whom you feel a little gratefulness and some kind of affection.’⁴⁵

About her physical body: ‘Each point of the body is symbolical of an inner movement; there is there a world of subtle correspondences.’⁴⁶ This is a truth applicable to all bodies, but each point in hers was conscious.

These statements by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother from various periods and sources speak for themselves and leave no room for relativism or toned down interpretations. Either they were That or they were not That (and if they were That, they still are That). This is not a matter of devotion or bigotry but a question of spiritual fact which one accepts or does not accept. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have never imposed their views on anybody, but it is not possible to understand or explain their Work without clearly defining the basic principles and the outline of it. ‘Humanizing’ their personalities and activities has been catastrophic for the spiritual development of many of their disciples who lacked insight, were doubting or too self-willed; it might also distort the subject of this book. This subject may appear fantastic and unbelievable to the unprepared and surprising and not immediately comprehensible to the interested or like-minded, but in itself it is coherent, meaningful and, with acceptance of the basic principles, logical and irrefutable.

After their complete identification with their Divine Origin, everything Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did, even the most ordinary everyday actions, had a higher intensity and a higher sense. This is exactly the basis of the divine transformation of all things human which they wanted to bring about. We can therefore conclude with K.D. Sethna: ‘All actions of the Divine incarnate have, whether the outer mind is allowed to know it or not, a truth-impulsion’⁴⁷ — an impulse of the Truth-Consciousness that is an essential quality of the Divine, also of the Incarnated Divine.

Disciples

I do not very readily accept disciples as this path of Yoga is a difficult one and it can be followed only if there is a special call.⁴⁸

— Sri Aurobindo

After 1920, more disciples arrived, people who felt the urge to dedicate their life to the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Some of them would not prove up to the severe demands of this integral path and would leave it, sometimes after many years; others would become the pillars of the work. There are names that have become well-known for a variety of reasons: Dyuman, Champaklal, Barin, Purani, Dilip Kumar Roy, Pavitra, Pujalal, Nirodbaran, K.D. Sethna (of his Ashram name Amal Kiran), etc. Others, and not necessarily less notable, have given their best in anonymity. In 1925 there were about fifteen of them, according to Pavitra; a year later, when, the small group around Sri Aurobindo and the Mother officially became an ashram, called the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, there were already twenty-four. We have some idea about the life of some members of the group like Nolini, Bejoy and Barin, because it coincided for the most part with the political life of Sri Aurobindo. By way of illustration, we are giving here a brief sketch of the well-documented lives of two other disciples with very dissimilar backgrounds and whom we will meet again further on.

Let us first take the above-mentioned Pavitra. He was a Frenchman, called Philippe B. Saint-Hilaire before Sri Aurobindo gave him his Sanskrit name signifying ‘the Pure’. He had an engineering diploma from the renowned École polytechnique in Paris. Immediately after finishing his studies — ‘in 1914 I was exactly twenty’ — he was enlisted for the war as an artillery officer. Even during the war he got more and more interested in occultism and read the books of the French occultists. His preoccupation with occultism stemmed, however, from a deep attraction to spirituality. After surviving the war, and having been employed as an engineer with the Ministry of Transport and Communications — ‘I had a whole section of the Seine, mostly in Paris, under my direction’ — he left for Japan in 1920 to study Zen Buddhism. ‘I knew — yes, I knew, for it was a certainty to me — that my life would be a life of spiritual realization, that nothing else counted for me, and that somewhere on earth, and I mean effectively on earth, there had to be someone who could give me … who could lead me towards the light.’⁹³

Paul and Mirra Richard had left Japan a few months before Pavitra arrived there. ‘I heard about them. We had common friends. What I heard about them interested me very, very much and I decided to write to her.’ But he got no answer, not even to a second letter. In the following four years he got involved in ‘many experiences, the study of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, life in the temples and, at night in my home, the continuation of my studies of Indian, Japanese and Chinese spirituality.’ He went through ‘alternations of light and darkness, of advance and standstill — all kinds of difficulties met with by those who are searching for the light, and who search for it alone, or apparently alone.’

Pavitra, as an engineer and chemist, was a true scientist. The editor of Conversations avec Pavitra, the annotation of Pavitra’s conversations with Sri Aurobindo, writes in his preface the following intriguing paragraph: ‘In a brief monologue, part of a theatre play, Pavitra represented a chemist (like himself) who in the course of his experiments accidentally finds a very simple method to liberate nuclear energy from common metals (not only from rare metals like thorium and uranium) by a chemical process — a way which would have brought enormous powers within the reach of whomever — and who destroys his discovery. We strongly suspect that he was relating his own experiences in the laboratories of Japan, before he went on his way to the monasteries of the lamas in Mongolia and afterwards to India.’

The journey to Mongolia, in the company of a Mongolian lama who taught him his language, took place in 1924. ‘And so I left [Japan]. We had to cross northern China to reach the monastery where only Tibetan lamas were living.’ He was there for nine months, passing the severe winter ‘well protected and completely cut off from all contacts.’

Years earlier he had chanced on an issue of the French edition of the Arya. He had found it interesting, ‘but, to tell the truth, it had not touched me more than the rest.’ Now he felt compelled to travel to India. ‘To the others — my family and friends — I said: “I am coming back to Europe by way of India,” but inwardly I knew that I would stay in India.’

‘At that time [in 1925], Sri Aurobindo still talked with his disciples. He was so kind to me. I explained to him the way I had followed and what I was looking for … The first day it was I who did the talking.’ That night, he was received by the Mother. ‘Of the Mother I especially remember her eyes, her eyes of light.’ The next day, he again had a meeting with Sri Aurobindo, who this time did the talking himself.

‘He then told me that what I was searching for could be given to me by several persons in India, but that it was not easy to approach them, especially not for a European. And he went on that he himself was of the opinion that what I was looking for — the identification with God, the realization of the Brahman — was, as it were, the first step, a necessary phase. But this was not everything, for there was a second phase: the descent of the power of the Divine in the human consciousness to transform it, and that this was what he, Sri Aurobindo, was trying to do. And he said to me: “If you want to try this, then you can stay here.” I threw myself at his feet, and that was that.’

This is how Pavitra recounted how he had reached the destination of his pilgrimage to the children of the Ashram school forty years later, when already for many years he had been one of the closest collaborators of the Mother and the head of the very same school. And he concluded: ‘There was not yet an ashram then. There were only a few houses belonging to Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother mainly looked after Sri Aurobindo — also a little after the disciples, but they were more or less left to themselves. So I have had the enormous privilege to meet Sri Aurobindo every day, to listen to him, to hear him answer daily the questions we put to him.’

These daily conversations of Sri Aurobindo with his disciples have been partly noted down by some of those present, among others by V. Chidanandam and especially by A.B. Purani, who has collected his notes in the book Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo. In his introduction Purani writes: ‘[Sri Aurobindo] came dressed as usual in dhoti, part of which was used by him to cover the upper part of his body … How much these sittings were dependent on him may be gathered from the fact that there were days when more than three-fourths of the time passed in complete silence without any outer suggestion from him, or there was only an abrupt yes or no to all attempts at drawing him out in conversation. Even when he participated in the talk one always felt that his voice was that of one who does not let his whole being flow into his words; there was a reserve and what was left unsaid was perhaps more than what was spoken. What was spoken was what he felt necessary to speak.

‘Very often some news item in the daily newspaper, town-gossip, or some interesting letter received either by him or by a disciple, or a question from one of the gathering, occasionally some remark or query from himself would set the ball rolling for the talk. The whole thing was so informal that one could never predict the turn the conversation would take. The whole house therefore was in a mood to enjoy the freshness and the delight of meeting the unexpected. There were peals of laughter and light talk, jokes and criticism which might be called personal — there was seriousness and earnestness in abundance.’⁴⁹

Dilip Kumar Roy was born in ‘one of the most aristocratic Brahmin families of Bengal.’ His father was a poet and playwright, and Dilip, when still young, made a name for himself as a singer mainly of religious songs, after having studied mathematics and music in Cambridge. He spoke several Indian languages besides English, French and German. Among his acquaintances were Mohandas K. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Romain Rolland, Bertrand Russell, Georges Duhamel and Subhas Chandra Bose. He would become the author of not less than seventy-five books in Bengali and twenty-six in English.

It was Ronald Nixon, a former British war pilot and professor of English at the University of Lucknow, who, in 1923, had first drawn Dilip’s attention to Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita, saying that never before had he read such a masterly exegesis of the Bhagavad Gita. Nixon was an ardent devotee of Shri Krishna, so much so that shortly afterwards he gave up his career as a professor and withdrew, under the name Krishnaprem, to Almora, accepting as his guru Yashodama, a very cultivated woman who was the wife of the vice-chancellor of the University of Lucknow.⁹⁴

His appreciation of the Essays on the Gita led Dilip to read other works of Sri Aurobindo and eventually to meet the Mahayogi (great yogi) himself, which he did for the first time in 1924. He has written down in detail the two conversations he then had with Sri Aurobindo. ‘A deep aura of peace encircled him, an ineffable yet concrete peace that drew you almost at once into its magic orbit. But it was the eyes that fascinated me most — shining like beacons. His torso was bare except for a scarf thrown across.’⁹⁵

So deep was Sri Aurobindo’s impression on Dilip that he asked to be accepted as his disciple. Sri Aurobindo, however, thought the time was not yet ripe, and the disillusioned aspirant-yogi left Pondicherry under the impression that he had been refused. All the same his spiritual aspirations did not prevent him from leading an extremely active social life, with song recitals, lectures and meetings of all kinds, for the most part in the higher social circles. He described his temperament as ‘pre-eminently social’ and he enjoyed ‘exulting in the sunlit soil of travel, music, laughter and robust optimism.’ ‘I became popular and made friends, numerous friends — thanks to my patrimony, musical gifts, social qualities and lastly the pathetic awe and esteem that people feel when you can talk glibly about continental culture in continental languages.’

But Sri Aurobindo’s refusal kept nagging him. Sri Aurobindo had said: ‘I can accept only those with whom yoga has become such a necessity that nothing else seems worthwhile. In your case it hasn’t yet become so urgent. Your seeking is for some sort of partial elucidation of life’s mysteries. This is at best an intellectual seeking — not an urgent need of the central being.’

Having gone back to Calcutta, Dilip sought acceptance as a disciple from Swami Abhedananda, a direct disciple of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa. ‘But a friend of mine, a quondam disciple of Sri Aurobindo, intervened at the psychological moment and took me to consult a friend of his, a Yogi with remarkable occult powers. It was in a far-off village where we had to be his guests for the night.’ Dilip told the yogi ‘how desperate was his need of a Guru’. The yogi said nothing but: ‘Sit down and close your eyes.’ Dilip was not accustomed to being talked to in such an abrupt way, but he obeyed all the same, ‘a little nettled’. ‘I don’t know how long we sat there with closed eyes, for a deepening peace had made me lose count of the passage of time.’

His friend gave him a nudge and he opened his eyes. The yogi said: ‘But why are you hunting for a guru now that Sri Aurobindo himself has accepted you?’ Dilip could not believe what he heard and asked for some explication. ‘But it is simplicity itself,’ said the yogi. ‘[Sri Aurobindo] just appeared there — yes, just behind you — and told me to advise you to wait. He asked me to tell you that he would draw you to him as soon as you were ready. Is that explicit enough?’

‘His eyes twinkled in irony,’ writes Dilip. ‘”Look here,” he chimed in his forthright way, “shall I tell you something more convincing still?” He seemed to deliberate a moment before he added: “Tell me: do you happen to have some ailment in your left abdomen?” I stared at him in blank surprise. “But how did you know?” “I didn’t — that is, not before he told me.” “T — told you?” I stammered. “B — but who?” “Who else but your Guru — who has come here to tell you that you already had been advised by him to wait till the ailment was cured before you practised yoga … But what is it?” “It’s hernia. A tug-of-war caused the rupture.” “That explains it. For yoga will mean pressure on these parts, the vitals. Maybe that’s why he asked you to wait till it healed up. ”’

In March 1927, Dilip was invited to make a series of recordings for Edison’s Gramophone Company in New York, but for some reason or other he never got farther than Europe. A lecture-demonstration of his music in the house of a Countess in Nice, was probably attended by an acquaintance of Paul Richard, who went to see Dilip the next day in his hotel. Dilip knew him from hearsay, mostly from Rabindranath Tagore who had met the Richards in Japan and had spoken in great praise of Paul. To Dilip’s amazement, Paul Richard confessed ‘in the revealing stillness of midnight’ that he often thought of committing suicide. He never got over the fact that he had not been able to accept Sri Aurobindo for what he really was, ‘the one man to whom I have bowed down in my life as to a superior … and the only seer who has truly fortified my faith in a Divine Purpose … He and no one else has the key of the world to be, and my tragedy is that my love of self-will forced me to leave his aegis and choose the alternative of living a pointless life away from the one man whose society I rate over that of all the others put together.’

The meeting with Richard, ‘a wreck of a brilliant man so many had admired,’ strengthened Dilip’s need to put himself under Sri Aurobindo’s ‘aegis’. ‘I decided to return home, but not before an operation I had undergone so that my hernia might not stand in the way of my being accepted. Also I saw [Bertrand] Russell in his Cornwall home, gave a few lectures here and there and booked a passage home in November, 1927.’ After a short stay in Bengal, he arrived for the second time in Pondicherry in August 1928.

‘I was a little crestfallen to learn that Sri Aurobindo had in the meanwhile gone into seclusion.’ He had an interview with the Mother, who told him that Sri Aurobindo had said to her that he was now ready to practise his yoga. ‘I was accepted and came finally to follow their lead three months later … dedicating all I had to what I have learned to love more and more as the holiest cause to which I could possibly consecrate my life.’

His sadhana had some encouraging ups but also many downs of doubt, dejection and revolt. As Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have said repeatedly: ‘Everybody here represents an impossibility that has to be made possible.’ Nobody came to them without a reason and they possessed the knowledge to discern each person’s past and future, his difficulties and his potential. During one of Dilip’s dark nights, Sri Aurobindo would even write to him: ‘I have cherished you like a friend and a son,’⁵⁰ and: ‘It is a strong and lasting personal relation that I have felt with you ever since we met … Even before I met you for the first time, I knew of you and felt at once the contact of one with whom I had that relation which declares itself constantly through many lives and followed your career … with a close sympathy and interest. It is a feeling which is never mistaken and gives the impression of one not only close to one but a part of one’s existence … It was the same inward recognition (apart even from the deepest spiritual connection) that brought you here.’⁵¹

Dilip Kumar Roy always held his guru in high esteem, but he never fully understood who Sri Aurobindo actually was nor the mission he had come to execute on Earth. The Mother he never accepted inwardly, and in the second edition of his book Sri Aurobindo Came to Me he even deleted all references to her. After Sri Aurobindo’s passing he left the Ashram without further ado to start, together with Indira Devi, the Hari Krishna Mandir in Poona. A permanent fruit of his sadhana and of Sri Aurobindo’s inexhaustible compassion and comprehension are the four thousand highly illuminating letters Sri Aurobindo wrote to him on various topics. Many of those letters have been included in Sri Aurobindo’s collected correspondence; they have their place side by side with Nirodbaran’s correspondence with Sri Aurobindo and Satprem’s talks with the Mother.