Beyond Man

Chapter Twelve: Krishna and the World of the Gods

In 1926, as we have seen, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had, the supramental realization in the parts of their personality which we might call, using Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, the mental and the vital. This means nothing less than that in these parts of their embodied adhara they were the manifested Divine, not theoretically but factually and practically. That they chose not to proclaim this fact does not diminish the grandeur of it, but as a consequence of its unimaginability, few disciples have been aware of the high degree and the concrete results the efforts of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had obtained at that moment. In naive expectation and without having any notion of the enormous dimensions of the Work, most disciples were looking forward to a sudden physical transformation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the day they would, in a glorified supramental body, turn their faithful followers into an identical glorious state, hopefully in the twinkling of an eye. But first a lot remained to be done and it was very difficult work indeed. In this work, 24 November 1926 was one of the milestones.

In the course of that year Sri Aurobindo began talking quite often about the Gods and their world, called by him the ‘Overmind’. In the first days of November, he said, as noted by A.B. Purani: ‘I spoke about the world of the Gods [in a previous conversation] because not to speak of it would be dangerous. I spoke of it so that the mind may understand the thing if it comes down. I am trying to bring it down into the physical as it can no longer be delayed and then things may happen. Formerly, to speak of it would have been undesirable but now not to speak of it might be dangerous.’¹ It is clear that he expected an important event, involving the Gods, which might have a confusing and even bewildering effect on his entourage if they were not prepared.

We remember that, in the scheme of things, the world of the Gods occupies the highest level of the lower hemisphere, there where the divine Unity is no longer one but for the first time divided in a process that finally leads up to the general Ignorance and Darkness. The One Force was divided into the great cosmic forces and this division resulted ultimately in a material manifestation. Every force is a consciousness and every consciousness a being. The positive cosmic forces are the cosmic Beings called ‘Gods’. ‘They are the various facets of Something that exists in itself. Those beings are endowed with different aspects according to the countries and civilisations,’ said the Mother. The cosmic forces are evidently the same in the whole cosmos, but in the conceptual world of the humans they are called Demeter, Mars, the archangel Gabriel, Anubis or Krishna.

The Spirit’s truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right.²

— Savitri

‘The Gods … are in origin and essence permanent Emanations of the Divine put forth from the Supreme by the Transcendent Mother,’³ writes Sri Aurobindo. ‘Men can build forms [of the Gods] which they will accept, but these forms too are inspired into men’s mind from the planes to which the Gods belong. All creation has two sides, the formed and the formless; the Gods too are formless and yet have forms, but a Godhead can take many forms, here Maheshwari, there Pallas Athene. Maheshwari herself has many forms in her lesser manifestations, Durga, Uma, Parvati, Chandi, etc. The Gods are not limited to human forms — man also has not always seen them in human forms only.’⁴ They were and are often seen as forms of light or as a play of lights.

The world of the Gods is called the ‘Overmind’ in Sri Aurobindo’s terminology. In the history of mankind this world is often considered as the highest form of existence — the one of the high, not terrestrial beings and sometimes of the Supreme Being. ‘That Overmind has ruled the world by means of all the religions,’⁵ said the Mother. Man has tried to represent its dimensions symbolically in his temples and cathedrals.

According to the order of things as seen by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Overmind, however high above the world of our experience, is ‘nothing but the highest gradation of the lower hemisphere’; this gradation is separated from the higher hemisphere of divine Unity by a ‘golden lid’ — the gate human beings cannot pass through without casting off their material body. It is as if by that lid the Light of Unity is filtered into rays of (apparent) division — a division which is subdivided endlessly into our mental consciousness which can no longer conceive of total unity, and ultimately into the so-called elementary particles of matter, into the fields which constitute matter, and into their mysterious basis. ‘It is the line of the soul’s turning away from the complete and indivisible knowledge and its descent towards the Ignorance,’⁶ wrote Sri Aurobindo.

The line that parts and joins the hemispheres
Closes in on the labour of the Gods
Fencing Eternity from the toil of Time.⁷

— Savitri

‘Although [the Overmind] draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation of aspects of the Truth, the forces and their working out as if they were independent truths and this is a process that ends, as one descends to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible Truth above,’⁸ writes Sri Aurobindo in a letter. In The Life Divine he says about the Gods and the Overmind: ‘If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. In the Vedas there are different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony.’⁹

24 November 1926

‘From [the beginning of] 1926, the Mother began to assume more and more of Sri Aurobindo’s responsibilities for the spiritual guidance of the sadhaks [disciples], as if giving him the needed relief so that he might attend to his more important work,’ writes K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in his biography of Sri Aurobindo. ‘An air of intensity began building up slowly, an air of expectancy; and the sadhaks had the feeling that they were on the threshold of new developments. After Sri Aurobindo’s birthday [^15 August], the evening talks took on a new fervour and potency … In the evenings, the group meditation started later and later, not at half-past four as formerly, but at six or seven or eight, and once well past midnight.’¹⁰

For what happened on 24 November 1926, our best source is A.B. Purani, an eyewitness, in his classical report.

‘From the beginning of November 1926 the pressure of the Higher Power began to be unbearable. Then at last the great day arrived, on 24 November. The sun had almost set, and everyone was occupied with his own activity — some had gone out to the seaside for a walk — when the Mother sent word to all the disciples to assemble as soon as possible in the verandah where the usual meditation was held. It did not take long for the message to go round to all. By then most of the disciples had gathered. It was becoming dark. In the verandah on the wall near Sri Aurobindo’s door, just behind his chair, a black silk curtain with gold lace work representing three Chinese dragons was hung. The three dragons were so represented that the tail of one reached up to the mouth of the other and the three of them covered the curtain from end to end. We came to know afterwards that there is a prophecy in China that the Truth will manifest itself on earth when the three dragons (the dragons of the earth, of the mind region and of the sky) meet. Today on 24 November the Truth was descending and the hanging of the curtain was significant.

‘There was a deep silence in the atmosphere after the disciples had gathered there. Many saw an oceanic flood of light rushing down from above. Everyone present felt a kind of pressure above his head. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with some electrical energy. In that silence, in that atmosphere full of concentrated expectation and aspiration, in the electrically charged atmosphere, the usual, yet on this day quite unusual, tick was heard behind the door of the entrance. Expectation rose in a flood. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could be seen through the half-opened door. The Mother with a gesture of her eyes requested Sri Aurobindo to step out first. Sri Aurobindo with a similar gesture suggested to her to do the same. With a slow dignified step the Mother came out first, followed by Sri Aurobindo with his majestic gait. The small table that used to be in front of Sri Aurobindo’s chair was removed this day. The Mother sat on a small stool to his right.

‘Silence absolute, living silence — not merely living but overflowing with divinity. The meditation lasted about forty-five minutes. After that one by one the disciples bowed to the Mother.

‘She and Sri Aurobindo gave blessings to them. Whenever a disciple bowed to the Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s right hand came forward behind the Mother’s as if blessing him through the Mother. After the blessings, in the same silence there was a short meditation …

‘Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went inside. Immediately Datta was inspired. In that silence she spoke: “The Lord has descended into the physical today”.’ And Purani goes on naming all twenty-four disciples present. (A.B. Purani, Life of Sri Aurobindo, p. 125 ff.)

There are different versions of Datta’s words. Rajani Palit writes: ‘Now Datta came out, inspired, and declared: “The Master has conquered death, decay, hunger and sleep!”’ According to Nolini Kanta Gupta, it went as follows: ‘Datta … suddenly exclaimed at the top of her voice, as though an inspired Prophetess of the old mysteries, “The Lord has descended. He has conquered death and sorrow. He has brought down immortality”.’¹¹

In Nirodbaran’s Correspondence With Sri Aurobindo — a correspondence unique in spiritual literature — we read:

‘Nirodbaran: Today I shall request you to “stand and deliver” on a different subject. What exactly is the significance of the 24th of November? Different people have different ideas about it. Some say that the Avatar of the Supermind descended in you.

‘Sri Aurobindo: Rubbish! Whose imagination was that?

‘Nirodbaran: Others say that you were through and through overmentalised.

‘Sri Aurobindo: Well, it is not quite the truth, but nearer to the mark.

‘Nirodbaran: I myself understood that on that day you achieved the Supermind.

‘Sri Aurobindo: There was never any mention of that from our side.

‘Nirodbaran: If you did not achieve the Supermind at that time, how was it possible for you to talk about it or know anything about it?

‘Sri Aurobindo: Well, I am hanged. You can’t know anything about a thing before you have “achieved” it? Because I have seen it and am in contact with it, o logical baby that you are! But achieving it is another business.

‘Nirodbaran: Didn’t you say that some things were getting supramentalised in parts?

‘Sri Aurobindo: Getting supramentalised is one thing and the achieved supramental is another.

‘Nirodbaran: You have unnerved many people by the statement that you haven’t achieved the Supermind.

‘Sri Aurobindo: Good Lord! And what do those people think I meant when I was saying persistently that I was trying to get the supermind down into the material? If I had achieved it on Nov. 24, 1926, it would have been there already for the last nine years, isn’t it?

‘Nirodbaran: Datta seems to have declared on that day that you had conquered sleep, food, disease and death. On what authority did she proclaim it then?

‘Sri Aurobindo: I am not aware of this gorgeous proclamation. What was said was that the Divine (Krishna or the Divine Presence or whatever you like) had come down into the material. It was also proclaimed that I was retiring — obviously to work things out. If all that was achieved on the 24th [November 1926], what on earth remained to work out, and if the Supramental was there, for what blazing purpose did I need to retire? Besides, are these things achieved in a single day?’ (Correspondence With Sri Aurobindo, p. 293 ff.).

This written dialogue took place nine years after the event, and Nirodbaran was not the only one to whom the significance of the ‘Siddhi Day’⁹¹ remained a riddle. Dyuman, for instance, one of the eldest and most respected of the Ashramites, was uncertain about its significance even in 1988, as we shall see later.

In 1961, the Mother made the following declaration: ‘In 1926 … I had started a sort of creation of the Overmind, which means that I had made the Overmind descend into matter, on earth, and I began to prepare all that. (There began to be miracles and all kinds of things.) And so I asked those Gods to incarnate, to identify themselves with a body. There were some who refused categorically. But I have seen with my own eyes how Krishna, who was always in contact with Sri Aurobindo, consented to come into his body. It happened on a 24 November. It was the beginning of “Mother”’ — when Sri Aurobindo put Mirra Alfassa in charge of the disciples, which implied the foundation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and she was called ‘the Mother’ from then onwards. ‘It was Krishna who consented to descend in the body of Sri Aurobindo, to establish himself in it, you understand?’¹²

In 1926 Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had already realized the Supermind in the mental and vital parts of their embodied personality. To bring the Supermind into the material part — the crucial and by far the most difficult step in the process — their material substance and the material substance of the whole Earth first had to be prepared. To this end it was necessary to bring into matter, concretely, actively and dynamically, all levels above the mental, especially the so-called Overmind. Because of the preparatory work done by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Shri Krishna, one of the greater Forces or Gods of the Overmind, had consented, at their request, to descend and establish himself in matter — in Sri Aurobindo’s material body, purified by years of intense and advanced yoga. This means, mirabile dictu, that from 24 November 1926 onwards that body housed two great beings!

In the same conversation, the Mother mentions the exact meaning of Datta’s inspired words — an inspiration which probably was not received in its pure form or only partially understood or remembered by those present. ‘When I went back inside together with Sri Aurobindo, she started talking. She said that she felt Sri Aurobindo speaking within her. She explained everything: that it was Krishna who had incarnated, and that from that moment onwards Sri Aurobindo was going to do an intensive sadhana for the descent of the Supramental [in matter]. That it was an adhesion, as it were, of Krishna to the descent of the Supramental on earth, and that, as Sri Aurobindo would be busy and would not be able to look after the people [the disciples], he had put me in charge, and that I was going to do all the work. And that was that.’¹³ It was as if, from above, Shri Krishna had put the seal of approval on the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that would lead to the realization of the Supramental in terrestrial matter. The Siddhi Day was the day of the definitive certainty that their work would be brought to a good end.

Sri Aurobindo had a very close relation with Krishna. We already know that Krishna had played an important role in his yoga, among other things by dictating him ‘the ten limbs’ of it. Sri Aurobindo himself spoke about ‘the prominent and dominant role’ played by Krishna in his sadhana, which he had worked out ‘with the help of Krishna and the Divine Shakti.’ ‘I always saw [Krishna] near Sri Aurobindo,’ said the Mother. We remember that Krishna was one of the Ten Avatars, more specifically, the Avatar of the Overmind. ‘It was a descent of the Supreme … who consented to participate in the new manifestation,’ said the Mother, and she added: ‘For Sri Aurobindo personally, it made no difference: it was a formation from the past which accepted to participate in the present creation, that is all — nothing else.’¹⁴ In the simplest of words, the Mother opens here a perspective on the past in which the Great Being, now called Sri Aurobindo and the Avatar of the Supermind present on Earth had already been on Earth as Shri Krishna (and probably as other divine incarnations before).

A disciple asked a question: ‘We believe that you and the Mother are Avatars. But is it only in this life that both of you have shown your divinity? It is said that you and she have been on the earth constantly since its creation. What were you doing during-the previous lives?’ Sri Aurobindo’s unforgettable answer: ‘Carrying on the evolution.’¹⁵

Few disciples were aware that Sri Aurobindo literally was Krishna, firstly as the same aspect of the Central Divine that also had manifested in the Krishna Avatar, and secondly because Krishna was permanently present in Sri Aurobindo’s body which, since that 24 November, he had made his own. The Mother has said more than once that the Buddha is still present in the atmosphere of the Earth and goes on working to keep his promise, given out of compassion when he was about to enter Nirvana, that he would assist humanity all along on the road of its complete liberation. It is one of the surprising discoveries in the study of the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that another Avatar, Shri Krishna, was present and embodied on Earth from 1926 to 1950 in the body, in the adhara of Sri Aurobindo.

In Champaklal Speaks, a book in which Champaklal, the faithful disciple and great yogi who served Sri Aurobindo and the Mother all his life, narrates his experiences, he says the following: ‘When I came here to stay, Mahesh came with me. Ostensibly we both came for the same purpose. But I found a difference in Sri Aurobindo’s way of dealing with us. To me he was speaking and showing practices of sadhana. But to Mahesh he was speaking of worship and upasana [devotion] of Krishna. Later I found out that Mahesh had a strong attraction to Krishna and his way was different from mine. One day, however, when he expressed to Sri Aurobindo his difficulty in reconciling his adoration of Krishna with his devotion to Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo told him: ‘There is no difference between me and Krishna.’¹⁶

To Dilip Kumar Roy, who till the end struggled with a similar problem of divided loyalties, Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘Krishna is here in the Ashram and it is his work that is being done here,’ and to another sadhak: ‘If you can give yourself to him, you can give yourself to me.’¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo’s light is the same as the light of ‘the blue God’ Krishna: ‘Whitish blue is Sri Aurobindo’s light or Krishna’s light,’¹⁸ he wrote himself. (The Mother’s light is the pure white diamond light.)

Among the gods who had been unwilling to take up a terrestrial body was Shiva. As the Mother later told: ‘Shiva refused. Shiva said: “No. I will come when you have finished your work, not in a world like it is now. But I am quite willing to help.” It was the day that he was present in my room, and he was so tall that his head touched the ceiling, with that particular light of him that is a mixture of gold and red — tremendous, a tremendous being!’¹⁹ The Mother is the mother of the whole manifested universe and everything it contains — a fact of which her greatest offspring, the positive forces called gods, are the most conscious, as are also the negative forces, the whole fiendish and devilish brood: Asuras, rakshasas and pishachas.

One generally assumes that Sri Aurobindo withdrew in seclusion on that very day of 24 November 1926, but this does not agree with Purani’s testimony in the Evening Talks: ‘The evening sittings used to be after meditation at 4 or 4.30 p.m.’ In Pondicherry nightfall is always between six o’clock in winter and seven o’clock in summer. ‘Around November 24, 1926, the sitting began to be later and later till the limit of one o’clock at night was reached. Then the curtain fell. Sri Aurobindo retired completely after December 1926 and the evening sittings came to a close.’²⁰

The Word of Creation

As the Mother was now put in charge of the disciples, the six most carefree years of her life belonged to the past. In 1926 there were only twenty-four disciples, but the number would increase rapidly. In 1927 there were thirty-six and in the following year already eighty-five. The material side of the work demanded by the organization, housing, feeding and financing of the constantly increasing group was by itself enormous, especially in the India of that time. As for the spiritual side, there is no more difficult occupation than that of the true spiritual leader, the guru, for he takes the destiny of his disciples on himself, inclusive of all their difficulties, especially the psychological and therefore least perceptible ones. ‘I carried all of them in my consciousness as in an egg,’ the Mother would say later. It was she who was actually doing their yoga, so much so that Sri Aurobindo had to enlighten the disciples: ‘The Mother in order to do her work had to take all the Sadhaks inside her personal being and consciousness; thus personally (not merely impersonally) taken inside, all the disturbances and difficulties in them including illnesses could throw themselves upon her in a way that could not have happened if she had not renounced the self-protection of separateness. Not only illnesses of others could translate themselves into attacks on her body — these she could generally throw off as soon as she knew from what quarter and why they came — but their inner difficulties, revolts, outbursts of anger and hatred against her could have the same and a worse effect.’²¹

The feeling that she was ‘nothing but a Western woman’ who had come to live in India only a few years before, was still very much present in the minds of some Indian disciples. It even surfaces repeatedly in the literature, e.g. in K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s biography of the Mother: ‘There was no question about her managerial ability, her unfailing friendliness and her personal spiritual eminence. And yet … the ‘Mother’ of the Ashram? … With complete authority to direct its affairs and ordain the destinies of the inmates? After all, some of the sadhaks — so they felt — had been doing quite well in their sadhana under the old dispensation. Why, then, this drastic change? Was it sanctified by Indian tradition? Would it work after all? The new dispensation with the Mother at the head of the Ashram meant, first, an unquestioning acceptance of her as the spiritual Mother, second, a total surrender to her of one’s whole life, and third, a ready and happy submission to the discipline laid down by her for the smooth and efficient functioning of the Ashram.’²²

Sri Aurobindo himself wrote about this problem in 1934: ‘The opposition between the Mother’s consciousness and my consciousness was an invention of the old days … and emerged at a time when the Mother was not fully recognised or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning. Even after they had recognised her they persisted in this meaningless opposition and did great harm to them and others.’ And here follows the well-known declaration: ‘The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play … If anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers.’²³

The Mother embarked on the work, as always, with the force of the full commitment of her immense occult and spiritual knowledge and her supernatural powers. As she herself sometimes said jokingly, she always worked ‘at a gallop’, ‘with the force of a cyclone’ or ‘at the speed of a jet plane’. ‘I have not wasted my time,’ she said. She being an embodiment of the Great Mother, Maheshwari, Mahakali and Durga with their mighty divine capacities were three of her many emanations, and she held in herself the Power which creates the worlds. ‘Mother’s pressure for a change is always strong — even when she doesn’t put it as a force,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. ‘It is there by the very nature of the Divine Energy in her,’²⁴ the Divine Shakti.

The Overmind, personified in Shri Krishna, having established itself in matter, the Mother now started to work out its possibilities without delay. As she herself relates: ‘Sri Aurobindo had put me in charge of the external work because he wanted to withdraw in concentration to hasten the manifestation of the supramental Consciousness, and he had announced to the ones who were there [on 24 November 1926] that he confided to me the task of helping and guiding them; that I would remain in contact with him, of course; and that he would do the work through me. Things suddenly, immediately took a certain form: a very brilliant creation was being worked out with extraordinary precision, wonderful experiences, contacts with divine beings, and all sorts of manifestations which are considered to be miraculous. Experiences followed upon experiences. In brief, it developed in a completely brilliant way which was … I must say extremely interesting.’²⁵

‘I had started a kind of “overmental creation”, to make each God come down in a [human] being,’²⁶ she said. The Mother, as Mother of the Gods and with her exceptional occult powers, had started materializing the Overmind, the world of the Gods, on the Earth. She was in possession of the Word of Creation, the Word that becomes Reality when uttered. K.D. Sethna says: ‘I vividly remember the substance of her account of it to me in an interview. She said she had come to possess the Word of Creation. When I looked a little puzzled she added: “You know that Brahma⁹² is said to create by his Word. In the same way whatever I would express could take place. I willed to express a whole new world of superhuman reality. Everything was prepared in subtle dimensions and was waiting to be precipitated upon earth.”’²⁷

Elsewhere the same author writes: ‘The nine or ten months after the Overmind’s descent were a history of spectacular spiritual events. All who were present have testified that miracles were the order of the day … Those which were common occurrences in those ten months were most strikingly miraculous and, if they had continued, a new religion could have been established with the whole world’s eyes focused in wonder on Pondicherry.’²⁸

A God was embodied in each sadhak — the God he represented in his inmost being. For all of us have a part of the One Godhead in us, and this part belongs necessarily to the divine manifestation. At the origin stands the Great Mother; out of her issued the cosmic Forces who are the Gods; out of them issued the forces which, for the most part, still remain unrealized in us. Sri Aurobindo said that ‘the inner being of every man is born in the ansha [a substantial part] of one Devata [a God] or the other.’ To fathom this gives a deep insight into the glorious destination awaiting each of us and which is the aim of the evolutionary adventure we have undertaken of our own free will and choice.

Regrettably, the aspirants of the newly formed Ashram were not yet ready for that stupendous transformation which would have made them into overmental beings on Earth. About these days Narayan Prasad has related the following: ‘Between the end of 1926 and the end of 1927, the Mother was trying to bring down the Overmind gods into our beings. But the adharas were not ready to bear them; on the contrary there were violent reactions, though some had good experiences. There was a sadhak whose consciousness was so open that he could know what the Mother and the Master were talking about. One sadhak would get up while meditating and touch the centre of obstruction in someone else’s body. There were others who thought that the Supermind had descended into them. One or two got mentally unbalanced because of the inability to stand the pressure.’²⁹

We go back to the narrative of the Mother. ‘One day, I went as usual to relate to Sri Aurobindo what had happened [in the course of the day]. We had arrived at something really very interesting and I may have shown some enthusiasm in my relation of what had happened. Sri Aurobindo then looked at me and said: “Yes, it is a creation of the Overmind. It is very interesting, it is very well done. You will work miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn the events of the earth upside down, in a word … ” And he smiled and said: “It will be a big success. But it is a creation of the Overmind. And what we want is not success: we want to establish the Supermind on the Earth. One must be capable of renouncing an immediate success to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.” With my inner consciousness I understood immediately — a few hours later, the creation did not exist anymore … And from that moment onwards we have started again on different bases.’³⁰

Later the Mother once more looked back on that incredible moment in the history of mankind when the greatest religion the world has ever known might have been born. ‘He has textually told me: “Yes, it is an overmental creation, but it is not the truth we want. It is not the truth, the highest truth,”⁹³ he said. I said nothing, not a word. In half an hour I undid everything. I undid everything, I really undid everything — I cut the connection between the Gods and the human beings, and destroyed everything, everything. For I knew that as long as it was there, it was so attractive, you know — one saw amazing things all the time — that one might have been tempted to go on with it, thinking: “We will adjust what is necessary afterwards,” but that was impossible. And so I remained quiet half an hour, sitting down, and I undid everything. We had to start something else. But I did not talk about it, I told it to nobody except him. Nobody knew it at that time, for they would have been completely discouraged.’³¹

In 1939, when after the fracture of his thigh Sri Aurobindo again conversed with some of his disciples, he himself would look back on those fantastic months. He said in answer to a question by A.B. Purani: ‘At the time you speak of we were in the vital.’ By this he meant that he and the Mother by then had brought the Supramental Consciousness down into the vital. ‘[It was] the brilliant period of the Ashram. People were having brilliant experiences, big push, energy, etc. If our Yoga had taken that line, we could have ended by establishing a great religion, bringing about a great creation, etc., but our real work is different, so we had to come down into the physical. And working on the physical is like digging the ground; the physical is absolutely inert, dead like stone … You have to go on working and working year after year, point after point, till you come to a central point in the subconscious which has to be conquered and is the crux of the whole problem, hence exceedingly difficult … This point in the subconscient is the seed and it goes on sprouting and sprouting till you have cut out the seed.’³²

The limits of their Work were shifted again and again, every time beyond the horizon of the possible, of their expectation. After that brief brilliancy of the miraculous world of the Gods on the earth, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother descended in the black pit of Matter and of the Inconscient supporting Matter. Only when the Hell of the Night was conquered and exterminated in the underground caves of our world could the Heavens of the One Godhead be founded on earth. That was what they had come for, the Two-in-One — not for a realization somewhere halfway, however glorious. The Mother effaced the greatest most miraculous creation in the history of the world in less than an hour. ‘The greatest power in any hands during human history was set aside as if it were a trifle,’³³ writes K.D. Sethna, and also: ‘This was without any doubt the mightiest deed of renunciation in spiritual history.’³⁴ And nobody knew about it.