Beyond Man

Chapter Twenty-four: The Transfer of Power

Her single greatness in that last dire scene
Must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man.¹

— Savitri

An Agglomerate

There was the certitude that what had to be done had been done and that the Supramental Realization on Earth had essentially been accomplished — six years (only six years) after 1956. We remember that at the time the Mother had asked the Supreme whether she should continue her task in her earthly body; she had asked for an unmistakable sign and she must have received one. This time the decision to remain upon Earth was taken in the midst of the crisis. Those who had taken care of her (‘They have done that splendidly,’ she said) had not been mistaken: it had indeed been a matter of life and death, even more so than they thought.

The Mother had left her body on the night of 12 April 1962, which in ordinary parlance means that she had died. There is no doubt about it. Which means that she had resurrected, for everybody has seen her alive till 1973. We have encountered a lot of extraordinary facts in this story: how the god Krishna took Sri Aurobindo’s body as his own; how the Mother twice renounced the occasion to found the greatest world religion of all times; how the divine Unity-Consciousness manifested on the Earth. Now we hear that the Mother left her body and took it up again in 1962! But it is recorded in the written documents, for instance in the following statements of the Mother, a few selected out of many, put in chronological order.

• ‘… when I was that Pulsation of Love [in the night of 12 April 1962] and it was decided that I take up my body again, that I return into my body …’ (7 August 1963)

• ‘You must have come back [into your body]. You cannot have the authority over your body without having left it. When your body is no longer yourself, not at all — it is something that has been added and stuck onto yourself — when that is like that and you look at it from above (from a psychological ‘above’), then you can again descend into it as the almighty master.’ (20 November 1963)

• ‘Yesterday or the day before, the whole day long, from morning till evening, there was something [in the Mother] that said: “I am … I am or I have the consciousness of somebody who is dead and who is on earth.” I am translating that into words, but it was as if it was said: “It is like this that is the consciousness of somebody who is dead in relation to the earth and to physical things … I am somebody who is dead and who lives on earth.”’ (9 March 1966)

• The Mother talks about herself: ‘During two days the impression of not knowing whether one is alive or whether one is dead … of not being very sure of the difference that makes …’ (14 June 1967)

• ‘If you asked it the question, the body [hers] would say: “I don’t know if I am alive, I don’t know if I am dead.” For, indeed, it is so. For some minutes it has completely the impression of being dead; at other moments it has the impression of being alive.’ (31 May 1969)

What Satprem writes in his trilogy about the Mother is therefore very true: ‘We probably do not understand literally enough that, at the same time, she was really alive on one side and really dead on the other side (ours) — this, while she apparently went on living the old ordinary life.’² He also writes: ‘Mother will make that reflection [dead or not dead] dozens of times, and more and more often, one might say with ever greater urgency, in the course of the years that were to follow.’³

In April 1962 the second stage of the Work of the Avatar was accomplished: six years of intense Integral Yoga representing six hundred or six thousand years of unassisted supramental evolution. The pillars of the bridge connecting the supramental world and our gross material world were put in place. Normally at this point the Work of the Avatar would have come to an end. But it was decided that the Mother would remain on Earth to accelerate the process of transformation in the greatest possible measure. Who took that decision? She herself would probably have said: the Lord. But those cosmic Pulsations of Love represented the great rhythms of the Manifestation. Is the Manifestation, ordained by ‘the Lord,’ not the work of the divine Creatrix? He and She are one, inseparably; but it is good and just to remember that the Great Lady has co-decided that her own presence as the Mother-in-the-sadhana on Earth would be continued.

The fact that to that end a ‘mystery’ of death and resurrection was necessary may give us some idea about the magnitude of the sacrifice undertaken in this case; for the continuation of the process of transformation in a body, with the total universalization of the consciousness of the cells, the transfer of power and the other elements of the transformation of the body, could only be brought about in a corporeal suffering so intense that the Mother at one time would say: ‘I was all the suffering of the world, all felt at the same time.’ And it was not in her nature to use hyperbole unnecessarily. She took up that body again — because of its death no longer hers, but because of its yoga by far the most advanced physical form on Earth — and this meant a voluntary, conscious descent into hell. Such was her Love for humanity.

She found that the vital and mental components or sheaths had been taken away from that body; only the physical sheath remained, the physical interface with Matter. ‘The whole body has been emptied of its habits and forces, and slowly, slowly, slowly the cells have then woken up to a new receptivity and have opened themselves to the divine Influence, directly … The mental has withdrawn, the vital has withdrawn, everything has withdrawn. At the time I was apparently ill, the mental had disappeared, the vital had disappeared and the body was, purposely, left to itself. And it is precisely because the vital and mental had disappeared that people got the impression of a very serious illness.’⁴

Who can live without the vital, without the life force? Who can live without a mental consciousness? ‘One cannot move a finger, speak a word, make a step without the mental being involved.’⁵ We know that the mental is present even in the cells and atoms. And without the life force one is dead. It was a miracle how that body remained alive, how it started talking again with a voice seemingly coming from another world (the voice is an instrument of the life force) and how little by little it again began doing more work than a normal human being might be able to tackle. But something supported it from behind, something that was so much her own self that it took quite a while before she became aware of it, as we will see.

Only the Supreme kept her body still alive, she said. It really was being kept together by a higher Will with a certain purpose. She did not even call it a body anymore but an ‘aggregate’ or ‘agglomerate’ of cells, of vibrations which one way or another went on existing in a mutual relationship. And that so very special and strange body was the battlefield where the struggle for the world was being fought.

That body, as we know, had no longer an ego, it had no longer a central axis of reference in the world of the mortals. It had become nothing but an enormous field of experience and was no longer an individuality. It was present everywhere (le corps est partout), in the people, in the objects, in the events, around her and everywhere on Earth. If even for a moment she withdrew from her everyday occupations, the consciousness of her body became fully identified with the material substance of the Earth, she said — and not only with the material substance but also with that from which matter originated and in which it still has its roots: the subconscious With its caves and pools, with its vermin and obscurity. ‘It is as if the whole Earth is the body’⁶ — her body that was no longer her body.

More and more she had in the cells, in matter, ‘the same experiences one can have on the heights of the consciousness.’ For us it is difficult to imagine what this means, and this causes the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to be misunderstood so often. Most people looked forward rather naively to the transformation of the body. According to their expectations Sri Aurobindo, and after his passing the Mother and the disciples, should suddenly have started radiating like a Sun! Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have written and spoken volumes to explain the conditions of the supramental transformation, and that the transformation of the body, the appearance of a perceptible, immortal supramental body on Earth, would only be the last, the ultimate result of the process of transformation. They were right when they said that they were understood only by very few who could generate the necessary attention and insight to read and comprehend them. The cells first had to become conscious. The golden supramental Light, after having been realized in the mental and vital, had to be brought into the cells, where it would awaken the ever present but hidden Unity-Consciousness. The cells had to be as much, in the same measure, to the same extent filled with the supramental Consciousness as the higher ‘psychological’ levels. In one word, the cells had to be divinized.

In the body of the Mother, in that agglomerate of cells, the process of the divinization of the cells was under way. Some cells were transformed or being transformed — a part of the billions, an ever increasing part of the billions. It was a chore without end, for each cell was connected with near or distantly related elements in the visible or invisible cosmos, on all planes of existence, in the Supramental as well as in the Subconscious and Inconscient where the merciless battle to bring the light had to be waged. The agglomerate of cells in the body of the Mother was a similitude, a representation, a miniature of the Earth which, as we know, is in its turn a condensation and symbol of the universe. The supramental transformation is a cosmic transformation, naturally, for the Supermind is the matrix of the universe — of this and of all other universes.

The Mother’s body became ‘large as the Earth.’ That was how she experienced it; it was the way she lived while sitting there in that simple chair with her arms loosely on the armrests and her feet on a footstool. ‘The person is as it were an image on which to focus the attention,’ she said smilingly … ‘In actual fact, I am nothing but a deceptive appearance.’⁷ She looked like a human being, but she was something completely different from a human being, now also corporeally. She continued to resemble a human being in order to be able to do her work among human beings, so that human beings might still relate to her. But: ‘They have very little contact with what my body really is.’⁸

The Change of Master

‘The transformation starts with the opening of the consciousness to the action of the new forces’⁹ — the opening of the consciousness of the cells by the surrender to the divine Forces, now directly active on Earth, without the consciousness of the cells knowing what changes will occur because of the surrender. It is an act of absolute confidence in the Higher Presence (ce que Tu veux); it is a step into the absolute unknown, ‘whatever may happen.’ The great adventure, never dared before. The base of the consciousness of all cells had to be altered; the base of the dark, conservative, fearful, age-long tortured consciousness of the cells had to be changed into the divine, joyful, all-encompassing and luminous Unity-consciousness. A stupendous change. Up to then all had sought their salvation in a Hereafter; Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wanted the salvation of mankind here, on the Earth, in the cells, in Matter. ‘Le salut est physique,’ said the Mother, ‘the salvation is physical.’ If this is not true, then this creation of a distressing absurdity as it presents itself to us now can only be the work of a deranged Spirit. If the Divine is what he is supposed to be — Being, Consciousness, Bliss — then he cannot have lured his creatures, having come forth from him and existing in him, into this monstrous farce without a divine intention of Love and Supreme Joy being hidden in it or present behind it. The burning question as to the suffering of the ages ran like lava through the sadhana of the Mother. The promise given to humankind since its origin was being redeemed in her, in Mothersriaurobindo. If the Manifestation has a purpose, if Matter has a reason, then the salvation cannot but be physical, also physical, because that purpose and that reason of the whole Manifestation cannot but be divine and therefore Matter too must be divine.

To that end, the prevailing laws had to be confronted and dealt with. In the cells, the Mother said, the automatism of the habits of thousands, not to say millions of years had to be changed into a conscious activity under the direct guidance of the divine Consciousness. The transition of one way of functioning (the habitual) into another (the supramental) she called the ‘transfer of power’ or the ‘change of master.’ The way the cells were functioning before the transition was ruled by laws which were thousands and even millions of years old; the Master of the new way of functioning was the Divine himself, without any intermediary. It was the passage ‘of the ordinary automatical way of functioning to a conscious functioning under the direct guidance and the direct influence of the Supreme … The whole automatic habit of thousands of years must be changed into a conscious action directly guided of the Supreme Consciousness.’¹⁰

Words, yes, abstract words. She could relate her experiences only with words, and this was going to become a big problem for her. But what happens when one experiences such a transition bodily, when in one’s body, one’s organs, one’s cells the ordinary manner of functioning stops, in one’s heart and brain and nerves and stomach and intestine, to switch to a new, never experienced functioning, directly caused by a Force the body is unacquainted with and exceedingly strong?

What happens when an organ no longer works as it used to? One becomes ill. When it is not at all working as usual? One becomes very ill. And when the organs and the whole system of their connections gets disorganized? … The body of the Mother, each of its parts and the connections between the parts were in a permanent state of crisis, an uninterrupted, apparently catastrophic state of emergency which, according to the norms of medical science, was a deadly state of illness. This was not all the time outwardly noticeable. The graph of the Mother’s health went up and down — usually a brief ‘up’ and a long, dreadful ‘down’ — and at one time it was this organ and then again that other one that was affected. But fundamentally it was one continual crisis her body was experiencing, all those years. She really must have decided from beyond death and in divine Love to take this kind of agony upon her.

‘It’s not a joke,’ she said in English in the middle of a French conversation, but she had often noticed that it was Sri Aurobindo who spoke in English through her mouth or made her think and write in English. (When he let his presence be felt, even her handwriting started resembling his.) ‘It is difficult, it is tough, it is painful,’ she said, and she was not a plaintive character nor squeamish about pain. ‘It is a grim tapasya,’ an arduous yogic effort — and none of the persons around her noticed it. But when it became too much, she sometimes had to interrupt her work for a few days perforce, on doctor’s orders. How gruesome it could be may be read in the conversation Satprem has named l’Agenda terrible, ‘the terrible Agenda,’ or in the conversation at the time her leg was paralyzed.

‘I have a leg that has been dead for a long time (it is just beginning to revive), paralysed … But it was not an innocent paralysis! For three weeks — at least — for three weeks a constant pain, night and day, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, and without any relief, none whatsoever. It was as if everything was torn out of me … One might say that all that time I was nothing but one cry. It lasted a long time. It lasted several weeks. I have not counted them … You know, it was so … it was the problem of the whole world, a world that was nothing but pain and suffering, and with a big question mark: “Wherefore?” … It was really interesting. I believe something will have been done from the general point of view. That was not merely the difficulty of one single body or one single person: I believe something has been done to prepare Matter so that it may receive as it should.’¹¹

She found it interesting, also when it was the turn of her heart and her nervous system to be transformed. She has suffered one heart attack after the other, sudden variations of her heartbeat, a jolting, jarring rhythm of the pulse. ‘Le pouls est plus que fantaisiste,’ she said then, the pulse is more than fanciful. The transfer of the sensitive nervous system, branched out everywhere in the body, was a screaming torture for days on end, without respite.

The Caves and the Pools of Life

There was also the work in the subconscious with all its terrors. We have already mentioned the grottoes and caves of the Subconscient. One could also call that the swamps, or the cesspits, or the mud pools of life. It is the first world which originated from the immobile Inconscient. It is in the Subconscient that things started moving, crawling, hungering, scratching, biting, strangling, devouring. Everything there is lowly, elementary, blind, slimy, sticky. It is a world partially discovered by psychoanalysis which has taken it to be the hidden side of the human being; therefore psychoanalysis discards a priori the subliminal higher vital and mental levels through which we remain in contact with the higher worlds — not to mention the soul. It is difficult to call this kind of analysis of man ‘psychology’ or knowledge of the soul, if one has a real idea of what the psyche or soul actually is. Psychoanalysis has halted at its partial, unsavoury discoveries and refused to go beyond; it has drawn its inspiration from that dark level and based its authority on it; it reduces all who confide themselves into the hands of its priests to the lowest, most distasteful and bestial aspect in them, shutting out in disdain the smallest ray of light from higher worlds. When Sigmund Freud aboard an ocean liner was for the first time approaching the coast of the United States, he said: ‘They do not know that we are bringing them the plague.’ He knew alright.

We have seen more than once that the Inconscient and Subconscient form the basis of Matter and consequently of the cells, of everything our material body consists of. We are those foul worlds under the waterline of our waking consciousness. There is nothing we experience that does not sink down in those twilight zones, peopled by the puny and the big monsters of our deep sea. Everything we have forgotten, everything we have lived through rises up from there again, unexpectedly and irrationally, in our dreams and unquelled emotions. There, we still are the animal, sometimes frightened to death, sometimes a stalking beast of prey. Experiences from long ago, from before the ice ages, remain alive in the animal’s memory in us; in a trice they can break up our world, constructed with so much difficulty. ‘Earthquakes of the soul,’ Sri Aurobindo called them.

That was one of the main places where the Mother had to do the work for the world. It was one of the reasons why she had taken up the physical body which she now no longer considered hers. There she worked ‘in the lowest layers of senselessness.’ ‘I think that not one human being would be able to stand the sight of what has been shown to me,’ she said. In that kind of exploration and transformation one should not be easily frightened. It was worse than the worst horror films; but these were living experiences, gruesome nightmares that did not end when waking up. One can only transform what one has experienced, what one has suffered. She underwent all the terrors of creation, including physical suffering, torture, deliberately and maliciously thought-out torments. In the torture chambers of history, also those of present-day history, nothing was or is invented by men that does not have an origin in those hellish worlds. There resides the source of inspiration and the impulse to bestiality; the torturers have only to follow their instinct in order to regress, voluptuously, to an order lower than that of the beast.

Suffering and Ecstasy

The Mother had to descend deeper and deeper to bring the Light there also. The cross the Avatar Jesus Christ had been dragging through the streets of Jerusalem up to Golgotha was a symbolic one. His real cross consisted of the fact that he, like all Avatars, had taken the past of humanity on his shoulders, otherwise he would not have been able to help it one step forwards. From the little we know of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have gone through, we get some idea of what an Avatar has to suffer. And this time the step forward was an enormous one: it was the quantum jump from animal man to a Divine Being, skipping the intermediary stage of the god. The bitter cup had to be emptied once and for all. Nobody ever saw a sign of the suffering Sri Aurobindo went through. He hid it even from the Mother, out of Love. She became aware of it only when she had to experience it herself and, Satprem writes, her voice got smothered by tears while talking about it. ‘I got the awareness of everything he has suffered physically.’ She too gave nothing away of ‘the dirty job’ she was doing, not if it was at all possible. She continued receiving people, smiling at them, listening to their inflated or distorted problems, and granting their souls the grace for this and all future lives, which is the privilege of a direct encounter with the incarnated Godhead.

For that she was, the incarnated Godhead, the Great Mother behind the Mother-in-the-sadhana. But that Great Mother could only live in Ananda, in the highest Joy, Ecstasy or Bliss. The Mother-in-the-sadhana had been supramentalized mentally and vitally many years ago and therefore had the golden Sun in her mental and vital chakras; she was now bringing the Supermind with its Ananda into her cells, into her matter. Nonetheless, the suffering was so excruciating that for weeks she had been ‘nothing but a cry’ — a cry which, in the last years, one sometimes could even hear downstairs, in the courtyard of the central Ashram building. Where was then that Ananda?

Strange to say, that Ananda seemed to be always present, also during the suffering and during the terror. In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo has made dear that without Ananda nothing can exist, anywhere, not even for a fraction of a second, because the Ananda, or Joy, or Bliss is an essential part of the Divine. The Ananda ‘is the sole cause, motive and object of cosmic existence.’¹² And in The Mother he wrote about ‘the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter.’¹³ Given this background, we may understand the startling statements of the Mother when she came out of her ordeals, even of the most terrible ones: ‘Always, all the time, in all circumstances, whatever happens, even when this body suffers excruciating pain, there is the soul that laughs joyfully within. That is always there, always … All at once there is a horrendous pain and you say “ah!” — and at the same time I am laughing!’¹⁴ ‘At that time, there was an effort to make [me] comprehend the consciousness of the whole at the same time, simultaneously, everything — to put it simply in order to make myself understood: of the suffering, of the most acute disorder, and of the Harmony, of the most perfect Ananda — both at the same time, perceived together. This changes the nature of the suffering, of course.’¹⁵ But it did not diminish it for all that. ‘A few seconds of paradise for hours of hell’ … ‘three minutes of splendour for twelve hours of misery’ … ‘There are moments that the body might cry out for pain, and … a very small, very small change, almost impossible to express with words, and that becomes beatitude. It becomes … something else. It becomes that extraordinary something of the Divine everywhere.’¹⁶ And even after the paralysis of her leg she would say: ‘Even at the moment that outwardly I was suffering so much and people thought that I belonged wholly to my suffering, even then it did not keep me occupied.’¹⁷

Health, Illness and Transformation

‘The most acute disorder,’ she said, and with disorder she meant what we call a malfunctioning of the body, an illness. Let this be clearly understood: she was not ill, she underwent the process of transformation. An illness is a powerless regression into a malfunctioning of the adhara by which the harmony of its functions is disrupted, and by which the physical body becomes restricted in its life-powers and even, in case of death, deprived of them. As far as the Mother was concerned, however, the ‘malfunctioning’ was a voluntary and always totally conscious submission to the demands of the transformation (even when at first she lost the surface consciousness). In her case the disorganization of the organs and body functions did not result in a diminution of the possibilities of the adhara, but in an augmentation and expansion of them. She once said that her body was ‘being disintegrated forwards,’ into a greater state of being — not backwards into a state of decomposition. It is the difference between a block of marble eroded by wind, rain and changes in temperature, and a block of marble transformed into a work of art by a sculptor’s chisel; the chisel acts faster and sharper than the climatic elements, but its result is that the marble becomes transposed into a higher dimension.

‘One is surrounded by persons who think that you are ill and who treat you as somebody who is ill, and you know that you are not ill.’¹⁸ Her so-called illness was in fact indicative of the degree of resistance against the transformation in her body, of the degree of the yet unillumined subconscient in the cells, of the proportion between the already physically transformed and the not-yet-transformed. When somebody asked her how she was doing, she answered: ‘But Mother is always doing well!’ Indeed, who could have been doing better than she did! And she added that it had been as if she had been ill. It always was as if she was ill — though sometimes as if she was very, very ill. When somebody else asked her how she was going (‘Comment va Mère?) she retorted: ‘Mother is not going (‘Mère ne va pas’). There is nobody to go anymore. Mother goes where the Divine wants her to go … It is always going well. I am convinced that everything that happens is willed by the Divine.’¹⁹ The ‘I’ talking here was the one of the cells, this was the conviction of the cells. Again we encounter the first premise: there is nothing but That. Therefore logically speaking: if there is only That, all that exists and happens can be willed and executed only by That.

‘There is no disease from which I have not suffered. I have taken all the diseases upon my body to see their course.’²⁰ ‘I have in myself the possibility of five or six fatal illnesses.’ ‘I have no illnesses.’²¹ ‘These are not illnesses, these are functional disturbances.’²² ‘It is not a matter of health, it is a matter of transformation.’²³ One could continue quoting statements of hers in the same vein, but this may suffice to give an idea of the living, up to then unknown and mostly misunderstood wonder she was. Let us not forget that the Mother at that time was eighty-five, ninety years of age. Her miraculous body, by its consciousness of the cells present in the whole Earth, was so frail and light that it looked like the shadow or the elementary form of the human body. And on top and in the middle of all that, she was doing an incredible amount of ‘normal’ work.

‘My Blessings are Dangerous’

In the meantime she was still the head of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram with its thirteen hundred members and with the seven hundred students of the Ashram school, now including a kindergarten, sections of elementary and secondary education, and the first two years of higher studies (equivalent to the level of B.A. and B.Sc.). This alone was a task which would keep anyone occupied full-time. She was consulted about everything, took all decisions (and corrected the misunderstood decisions or the deliberately twisted ones with her invisibly acting Power), kept an eye on the finances, signed all documents and cheques (and India was a difficult country where documents and cheques are concerned), took upon her all legal responsibilities, and so on. People are often troublesome. People who want to follow the spiritual path are most often a very troublesome lot, because their effort brings to the fore difficulties which otherwise would have remained unattended, and because the aspirants in their struggle with the ego often, also unconsciously, behave under the influence of a magnified egoism. And because thousands of big and little devils find pleasure in the difficulties they can create for the aspirants to make a mess or worse of their spiritual effort.

In the Ashram there was the core of the serious candidate-yogis and in some cases of really great yogis. If there were some of them present in 1936 already, according to the written testimony of Sri Aurobindo himself, then logically speaking there must have been more thirty years later. But it was not easy, in this most invisible of all yogas, to pick them out, and the ones with the impressive appearances were not necessarily the most advanced. Around them moved the candidate-yogis who at one time had been very serious in their endeavour but who had got stuck somewhere on the path — and the Ashram was, according to Indian norms, not a bad place to spend one’s days in a sinecure. Once accepted by the Mother, she never left you in the lurch, materially or otherwise — and it happened that their yoga unexpectedly got restarted. Around these moved the circle of relatives, acquaintances and friends whom the Mother also had admitted to the Ashram because the whole world had to be represented there, and of those who had found an occupation in one of the groups or associations in the periphery of the Ashram. And around those moved, like free electrons around the nucleus, the ones who felt attracted to the Mother, the Ashram or Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga for some reason or other, visitors from every corner of India and from the whole world, and in some cases profiteers and preying vultures. Most of this population wrote to her, sometimes letters that were interminable and in several installments a day; most of then wanted to be received by her, as long and as often as possible. All were moving in her invisible body.

‘Careful,’ she said with a smile, ‘my blessings are dangerous!’ For her blessings were charged with the grace of the Power to lead the soul in the shortest way to its divine destination, something which seldom agreed with the conscious and unconscious desires of their receiver. To enable people to keep her blessings within their aura, within their atmosphere, she gave them two or three rose petals charged with her Force, as she had learned from Madame Théon many years ago. And she said: ‘In truth, I hold myself responsible for everyone, even for those I have met only for one second in my life.’²⁴

To Mona Sarkar she also said: ‘You will be surprised to see the work I have done for you all. For each one his own path, well shaped, well chiseled, with all the obstacles, all the impediments removed, all that was blocking the way demolished, so that you may be able to walk freely in the full light of the new consciousness towards the Truth.’²⁵ All were her children, probably the vultures too — as long as there was somewhere a spark of sincerity, a spark of a living soul in them. As far as the Mother is concerned one can never say that somebody has wasted a chance of inner development; one can only say that by the contact with her a seed was planted out of which spontaneously a beautiful tree would grow, in this or in a following life.

And there were the birthdays. She received all sadhaks and many visitors on their birthday. The Mother considered that day very special in the life-rhythm of everyone. ‘It is a very special day, for it is the day of decision, the day one can unite with the Supreme Consciousness. For the Lord lifts us on this day to the highest possible region so that our soul, which is a portion of that Eternal Flame, may be united and identified with the Origin. This day is truly an opportunity in life. One is so open and so receptive that one can assimilate all that is given. I can then do many things, that is why it is important.’²⁶ Each one got a beautiful birthday card, made or chosen by Champaklal, with the name of the person, a few words in her handwriting and her signature (representing a bird of Peace). Each one received that smile and that look. Her body was everywhere, therefore surely in each person in front of her too. (‘You are there and I am there.’ ‘I know all of you much better than you know yourselves,’ in past, present and future.) Few would have been able to tell what she had done inside them, but it was always the necessary divine Help, the Grace, the very Best.

She also received so many who, for one reason or another, asked for the grace of a few moments in her presence: newcomers, Ashramites or visitors who were going to leave the Ashram temporarily or for good, personnel with problems in their work, young couples who considered the visit as their marriage ceremony (surely the most effective they could have had), of course the secretaries and heads of departments who represented her in the Ashram organization, ministers and high-ranked functionaries of the diverse Indian states and the Central Government, heads of state and religious leaders … The whole world passed by her there in that room on the second floor, where her chair was always turned towards Sri Aurobindo’s Samadhi — in that room ‘like the bridge of a ship’ surrounded by the yellow flamboyant and rustling palm leaves.

To whomever could stand it, she gave un bain de Seigneur. How to translate this — a bath in the Lord? An immersion in the Lord? She saw the persons in front of her as her very own self and she put the soul in them directly into contact with their true, their divine Being, with the One she called the Lord, present in everything but thickly veiled. She took away as many of those veils as the inner being of the person in front of her could stand, for even the angels protect their eyes with their wings from the naked flaming Presence, ‘brighter than a thousand suns.’ (Of herself, she said: ‘I always have to cover myself with veils — one veil, another one, and another one — otherwise people could not bear it.’ And: ‘The best veil of them all is the body,’ her body for which so many thought they had to have compassion.) In the person in front of her she heightened the spiritual voltage somewhat, she ‘moved the needle a bit’ of his spiritual potentiometer to see how receptive he or she was. For the person himself that was a sort of an initiation. But there were those who could not bear that Power, even in a small dose, and some of them even ran out of the room without further ado! There were others who did not feel anything at all and kept politely smiling, souls still in the bud.

She got piles of letters, more than Sri Aurobindo at the time, for she had become known much more to the outside world. Whomever they thought she was, God or a lady with occult talents, it was always worthwhile (and it cost nothing) to ask her opinion about a purchase, an investment, a planned or childless marriage, a long journey, a risky undertaking, a health problem, and what not. ‘I am not a soothsayer!’ she protested, ‘I don’t read tea leaves!’ And there was the sadhak who narrated his past in every detail because he found it so interesting, and that other one who wrote page after page about the ‘spiritual’ furnishing of the new room he was going to shift into. And there was the man who extensively set forth his revolutionary theories by which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would become known worldwide, and the pedagogue and the physicist with their latest findings, and the writer with his brand-new manuscript …

All correspondence was not innocent. A sadhak narrates in his memoirs how he had brought a letter of an acquaintance and handed it to the Mother. She supposed the sadhak himself had written that letter and opened it without first protecting herself as she used to do. All at once, tells-the sadhak, the Mother doubled up for pain as if she had received a blow in her stomach. For there were the hostile elements who tried literally to hit out at the Mother, also by means of the written word. Words are forces. We are so much used to the written and printed word that we no longer realize that it is an occult device carrying the spirit of the writer and communicating it to the reader to the degree of his intelligence and receptivity. What we experience by reading Paradise Lost, Of Mice and Men or Ulysses is not caused by the printed configurations we call characters, but by the vibrations communicated by means of those configurations which enable us to enter into contact with the mind of the writer.

There were sadhaks and sadhikas in difficulty, angry, revolted or spiteful, who projected their own errors upon her and threw their inner dirt at her, sometimes even in an extremely vulgar or nasty way. They could permit themselves to do so because the Mother reacted exclusively with love, patience and understanding. She never took something personally, for in the lies and distortions, as in the poisonous and aggressive abuse directed at her, the problems of the world were present. The inner horrors with which she had to struggle in the Subconscient cropped up in the persons around her who were open to them. These things should not amaze us, for we shelter them in ourselves; it is they which turn our world into the pitiful place it is — and she wanted to work on all that because she wanted to change it.

The Work in the World

All that was part of her work, the most external part. But for her the external and internal were never separated; everything was one single movement, one single event, and that global reality proceeded in her universalized being. She was here and at the same time in many other worlds; she was present now and at the same time in the past and in the future. (She once even said that certain events or clusters of events from the past came to her to be rectified.) There were the beings of the worlds of the Gods, familiar to her like close relatives, and many of whom were direct emanations of herself. ‘Krishna walked together with me … Shiva was present in this room …’ The hostile beings too were fascinated by her earthly incarnation and approached her to find out, in their eternal hunger for egoistic aggrandizement, whether they too might perhaps profit and grab some nourishing spiritual morsel.

She worked in the philosophical, religious and political structures of the world to integrate them into the process of transformation. This she mostly did during the night. ‘I do not sleep in the common manner. It looks as if I am asleep, but I am not sleeping and I do not “dream”: I am doing things. I am doing things and I am fully conscious, with the same sort of consciousness as when awake … I go to America, I go to Europe, I go … all the time, I go to places in India. And all that — so much work, work, work — during the night.’²⁷

She did not want the world to perish or to break down because of the pressure of the golden supramental Power which was exerting its weight on it She wanted the existing structures to change from within. This is what started happening: political edifices are being changed because of the inner intenability of certain systems; religions are being changed from within — for instance Christianity by the charismatic movements and Islam by its confrontation with the Western democratic spirit. ‘In the night I am always given a state of the human consciousness which has to be put straight, one after the other. There are millions of them.’²⁸

A sadhak asked her the question: ‘I think that always, at every moment, someone or other is calling You and You answer. Doesn’t this disturb Your sleep or Your rest?’ She answered: ‘Day and night hundreds of calls are coming — the consciousness is always alert and it answers. One is limited by time and space only materially.’²⁹ ‘I am constantly seeing some beings, consciousnesses, concentrated parts [of beings], subtle bodies around me, all kinds of elements and movements — aspirations, desires, complaints, and all sorts of things … But I am not always hearing miserable or unpleasant stories. No, there are beautiful things too, and fair meetings of souls, pure thoughts, noble aspirations which are directly coming to me and all sorts of interesting things happening around me. It is a real game that is taking place before me, with such a diversity … I am blessing them, one after another, relieving them, protecting them, pouring a little bit of peace and love on each one according to his need, his capacity, his receptivity, so that each one may be touched by the Grace and go away happy and satisfied. That is what I am constantly doing in spite of my usual work. And it is difficult to meet every one physically. But in this plane everything happens very quickly and simultaneously. I am not limited by what people call time and space. You understand, I am doing many things at the same time without anybody seeing it or being aware of it.’³⁰

Her body consciousness, the consciousness of the cells of her body, was present everywhere, not by way of speaking, not abstractly, but concretely, in physical reality. This does not mean that she registered in her mind, in her active consciousness everything that happened in the world (how many fish the fishermen in Pondicherry had caught or what Lloyd George had had for breakfast, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in jest). She had not been ‘thinking’ any more for many years; she did not utilize a mental consciousness for it had been ‘sent packing’ in 1962. What she spoke was said by ‘something’ in her; what she formulated was phrased by ‘something’ in her, only when necessary and not at other times, by a specially delegated ‘I’ to enable her to keep functioning among human beings. Using the mental consciousness, which is ours, would for her have been equal to falling back into the old species, which is ours. When something like that happened against her will, (through ‘illness’ or because of an attack of black magic, or in a moment of reduced consciousness during her ‘sleep’), the effect was like that of a suffocation, a strangulation, like being grabbed by the coils of the Subconscient and of Death. For to the supramental Unity-Consciousness, larger than the cosmos, infinite like the Godhead himself, our narrow mental cage is a form of death. Death is like thickenings, membranous thickenings in the subtle flow of omnipresent Life; but it is of such thickenings that the stuff of our consciousness consists, our mental consciousness is made up of evolutionary callosities. When these hardenings will be burned away by rays of the supramental Radiation, Life will become fully alive in us, we will possess eternal life.

The Mother was present in the happenings of the world, in the world movement, also at that exceptional moment in history when John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and John XXIII instilled new hope into mankind after years of Cold War and the tense opposition of the two big world blocks. It was the end of the colonial era, and the Mother had great hope that the two imperialistic superpowers would look for ‘approachment’. But the Lord of the Nations would not let himself be dethroned that easily. The Mother called the murder of President Kennedy an occult assassination. ‘The murder of Kennedy has disturbed a lot of things from the standpoint of the general Work … It is a victory of that [black] Force over the Force that tries to follow more harmonious ways.’³¹ It is a fact that, in spite of all official clarifications, statements and so-called irrefutable proofs, this assassination remains shrouded in mystery. A year later, Khrushchev was sidelined by the Stalinists. And after the open attitude and the reformations of the ‘transitional pope’ John XXIII, the conservative Roman Curia took hold of the helm of the Catholic Church again.

But the Sixties were in full swing. ‘The whole world is being subjected to an action which at the moment is upsetting’, said the Mother. ‘It seems that the number of “apparent madmen” is increasing considerably. In America, for instance, the whole youth seems seized by a sort of strange euphoria, possibly disquieting to reasonable people, but certainly the indication that an unusual force is at work. It means a break with all customs and all rules. It is good. It looks somewhat “strange” at the moment, but it is necessary.’³² In Prague the ‘Velvet Revolution’ was about to happen.

The world was in ferment. The old order started coming apart at the seams. This was the beginning of the great Turning Point, of the ‘supramental catastrophe’ as the Mother called the momentous transition necessary for the birth of a New Era, a New Order, a New World. The readers of this book are knowledgeable about the true cause of the two World Wars and know where the elements of the new fermentation have to be looked for, namely in the Power operating behind the supramental transformation, having then as its centre the transformed physical body of the Mother that had become one with the world. The transformation, the supramental mutation in her cells vibrated also in everything in the world that was attuned to it.

There were new wars. There was the Indo-Chinese War in 1962, so disenchanting and humiliating for the credulous and totally unprepared Indians who thought they were living in friendship with the Chinese: Hindi-Chini bhai bhai! (the Indians and the Chinese are brothers). The Mother never underestimated the Chinese. Had Sri Aurobindo not written that they would invade Tibet — as happened in 1959 — to use it as a gateway to India?

The Indian Army was helpless against the hordes of the People’s Army descending from the ‘roof of the world.’ India lay wide-open before them. The tantric yogi who had been Satprem’s guru, Panditji, wrote to the Mother to announce that a new world war and a global catastrophe had been revealed to him. The Mother knew that the Asura of Falsehood, alias the Lord of the Nations, was doing his utmost to bring about an apocalyptic destruction. According to the tantric yogi, the Indo-Chinese War would be the occasion that would initiate the catastrophe. The Mother applied all her power. And Satprem writes in a footnote to one of the conversations at the time: ‘On 20 November [^1962], without anything justifying this kind of expectation, the Chinese announced unilaterally a cease-fire and the withdrawal of their troops at a time they were making spectacular gains without encountering any resistance. Nobody has ever known why.’³³

There was also the Indo-Pakistan War in 1965. The strong viewpoint of Sri Aurobindo that India and Pakistan must be reunited, and the prophecy of the Mother that Pakistan will fall apart and that its regional sub-states will at their own initiative ask for a federal reunification with India, have already been mentioned in this book.

These are only a few of the known circumstances in those years into which the Mother intervened directly. The intention here is not to emphasize the spectacular aspects of her Work. She herself has never vaunted them. She persistently kept performing ‘la besogne obscure,’ the dark, unseen, unknown labour, in its hidden minutest details as important as in its visible historical consequences — more important perhaps, because more fundamental.

For the transformed cell emits its supramental vibrations to which all correspondent elements in the world are automatically tuned. This has always been the clandestine influence of the yogi, also before the supramental Yoga. ‘Thou thinkest the ascetic in his cave or on his mountain-top a stone and a do-nothing. What doest thou know? He may be filling the world with the mighty currents of his will and changing it by the pressure of his soul-state. — That which the liberated sees in his soul on its mountain-tops, heroes and prophets spring up in the material world to proclaim and accomplish.’³⁴ In the case of the Mother it was no longer a by yoga liberated soul but a liberated body which was directly working from its matter onto Matter everywhere.

A World under Construction

Alexander Dubcek and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Jan Palach immolating himself, the students of Nanterre, the war in Vietnam and its repercussions in the USA, Kent University, the foundation of Auroville … We have arrived in 1968. ‘I am certain that the [supramental] revolution has begun … A terrestrial reorganisation and a new creation … We have not arrived at the end but … we are on the other side.’³⁵

Again she had gone through a crisis, one of the severer ones. It had been so bad that her helpers had had to take care of her body, just like in 1962. There are more parallels between the two crises. This time too she said that her mental and vital had been taken away from her, ‘sent packing.’ ‘Do you understand what this means?’ she asked Satprem. No ordinary human being could survive such an operation. Now everything was happening in the materiality of that magical body, apparently old, ravaged and very ill (her heart had been heavily battered), but at the same time the eye of the cyclone, the battlefield where all forces were fighting each other in the struggle for the new world against the masters of the old one. No, this could not possibly have been a repetition of 1962, as has been written, not after six years of that Yoga, not in the Yoga of the Mother. ‘I never hold on to an experience. I am all the time, all the time going forward, all the time underway. You know, the work of the transformation of the consciousness is going so fast, has to be done so fast, that one does not have time to enjoy or to halt at an experience, or savour the satisfaction of it for a long time. It is impossible.’³⁶

For hours on end, while the people around her thought she was on the verge of death, she was present in magnificent landscapes and cities of the future. (The supramental world is waiting close nearby to manifest in Matter.) ‘During several hours the landscapes were marvelous, of a perfect harmony. Also for a long time visions of the interior of immense temples, of living godheads. Everything had a reason, a definite goal, to express non-mentalized states of consciousness. Constant visions. Landscapes. Constructions. Cities. Everything immense and of a great variety, occupying the whole field of vision and rendering states of the consciousness of the body. Many, many constructions, immense cities under construction …’³⁷ It was a world under construction, she said. She had noted it all down. And she had not only seen that: she had been that — those landscapes, those temples with living Gods, those cities. ‘It is not “seen” as when one sees a painting: it is being in it … And thinking had nothing to do with it. I could not even describe it. How could one describe it? One can only begin to describe when one begins thinking.’³⁸ She was in everything with her body consciousness, which must have been more and more supramentalized as otherwise it would not have been able to participate in a supramental world.

She had also noted: ‘Mighty and long-lasting penetration of the supramental forces into the body, everywhere simultaneously.’³⁹ And she explained that: ‘Penetration into the body, yes. Penetrations by [supramental] currents I have had several times, but that night that came as if there was nothing else but a supramental atmosphere. There was nothing else but that. And my body was in it. And that was pushing to enter into it, from everywhere, everywhere, from everywhere at the same time … from everywhere. You see, it was not a current that entered into me: it was an atmosphere which was penetrating from everywhere. It lasted more than four or five hours.’⁴⁰ If one finds ‘atmosphere’ a little vague, one should not forget that there are no abstractions in the Supermind. ‘The head down to the neck was the least receptive part,’ because it is the most mentalized part, she explained. Wonderfully beautiful, unique those experiences had been, although at the same time she had looked critically ill. ‘j’étais dans une bouillie, mon petit!’ (I was in such a mess, my boy) she said to Satprem, meaning that her body had been in a state of endless agony.

‘And therefore, you see, one cannot say that it [her body] was suffering, one cannot say that it was ill, that is not possible. It is not possible.’⁴¹ At times she cried aloud for pain, and at the same time she was in a state of supreme ecstasy, not vaguely, not abstrusely, not somewhere in an unreal world, but in the intensified concreteness of the Supermind of which one drop to us would be like liquid fire, of which one spark would cause us to disintegrate. For that is a world of the free energies which are present here in the bound state of the atom: it is the world of divine Energy.

The story of the vital and mental which had been sent packing is provided with a footnote: ‘Some days afterwards, Mother added: “The vital and the mental have left but the psychic being has not left at all. It is the intermediaries that have left. For instance, the contact with the people (the contact with those present and even with those who are not present), the relation has remained the same, completely the same. It is even more stable.”’⁴² This perception of the presence and the role of the psychic being, mentioned in passing, will prove to be of crucial importance.