Beyond Man

Chapter Twenty: The Golden Day

The world unknowing for the world she stood.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

The period from December 1950 to December 1958 has no doubt been the most ‘visible’ in the life of the Mother. From before daybreak till after midnight she was up and about in the Ashram, resting not more than a couple of hours — a rest which could hardly be called sleep. ‘The Ashram had become a rather gigantic enterprise,’ remembers Satprem in his trilogy Mère. ‘She looked after everything in the smallest detail, from the quality of the paper for a book in the Ashram Press to the way of sticking a stamp on a post parcel and the shifting of a disciple to another room with a bit of a garden and a little better aerated on the east-side … And letters without end. And quarrels without end. And the finances — unimaginable and miraculous. And the criticisms — so petty, so absurd! One could make an inquiry even into the Archives of the Quay d’Orsay [the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris] and find out how generations of industrious bureaucrats have secreted their acid reports. It is hard to imagine: not one of them had understood what the Mother meant to France, to their own country!’²

Mother with Prime Minister Nehru, Shri Kamraj Nadar, Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Lal Baladur Shastri (1955)

In 1950 there were 750 disciples, not including the children. When the Japanese invaded India and threatened Calcutta, the Mother had given shelter to relatives of the disciples and to their children in the Ashram, ‘the safest place on earth because of Sri Aurobindo’s presence.’ The presence of the children profoundly disturbed the normal state of affairs in the Ashram and had been a shock and a cause of annoyance to the Ashramites of long standing. Children are brimming with life; children never remain quiet for a long time and are noisy; children have no idea of yoga and but little reverence for its practitioners. An Ashram where men and women lived and moved freely among each other and were treated on equal terms had already caused many raised eyebrows in India. And now those children! One can deduce from many sources that most Ashramites needed time to adapt to such an upsetting change. But the inclusion of the children in the community was very typical of the way Sri Aurobindo and the Mother worked things out. Like with most of their actions, literary or organizational, the occasion of the coming of the children was something which had happened of itself and which was then inserted in the widening compass of their Yoga. In this case it had been the war threatening Bengali families related to Ashramites. And behind all that, we see how the Work, guided by Providence, unfolded more and more after first having been securely implanted in the Earth.

Let us briefly follow this unfolding from the beginning. When Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfassa reached a certain stage in their individual yoga, they met and started spreading their message by founding the Arya. The apparently fortuitous presence of a handful of young political companions around Sri Aurobindo became the initial core of a spiritual community, called ‘Ashram’ for the lack of a better word, at first organized and then led by the Mother. The early life in the Ashram was very strict, this inner strictness being necessary for the laying of the foundations of the outward Work. As the number of disciples increased, the community expanded physically and the disciples progressed spiritually, the Mother could slacken the reins and rely more and more on the effect of her inner powers. In what had become a multifaceted miniature of the world, necessary for a Yoga which was intended to embrace ‘all life’, the youth too were taken in — an indication that the Force, the Shakti of the Mother was now able to cope with this unusual and very demanding expansion of the outward Work. In later years the Ashram, cramped within the town of Pondicherry, would reach something like a physical limit, and in 1968 the Mother will found Auroville, the ‘City of Dawn’. Auroville once more implied an augmentation of the life forms and forces to be taken up into this Yoga of world-transformation; it was or should become as it were the first fruit of a Tree cultivated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and symbolically representing the effectuation of the Great Work of the Avatar on Earth.

A School with a Difference

Make of us the hero warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully the great battle of the future that is to be born against the past that seeks to endure, so that the new things may manifest and we may be ready to receive them.³

(Prayer written by the Mother
and printed in the notebooks
of the Ashram school)

The children had to be kept busy and educated, and therefore the Mother founded a school. This was of course no school like the other schools in India, where even today subdued children sit on the ground with arms and legs crossed, chanting the lines of a lesson they have to learn by heart at the ticking of the rod of a feared schoolmaster. India has outstanding educational institutions too, but relatively few — far too few for that mass of intelligent youth, eager to learn but crushed under the weight of a standardized or rather calcified educational tradition. Sri Aurobindo had denounced that system already during his years as an educator and a politician. The principles of a renewed education he then proposed against the lifeless traditional ones are still worthy of consideration, in India as well as in the so-called advanced countries.

The child has in itself a soul, which has reached a certain phase of its evolutionary growth. This soul is the Divine and therefore contains all knowledge. ‘Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the creature.’⁴ This knowledge is provided from inside by the ‘universal Instructor’ to enable the human being, in this as in other incarnations, to have all necessary experiences for its inner growth, which will ultimately lead to the full maturity of its soul. In the course of the adventure of its incarnations, the human being is guided through all indispensable experiences and protected by its soul. (This is the explanation of the fact that such vulnerable and ignorant beings as humans can reach an advanced age despite the ever present threats to life in the world — as it is a justification for an early death as well.)

Two conclusions can be drawn. First: all children have their very own evolution behind them, built up into their very own personality with its particular way of development; this means that no single educational method can be generally applicable and that each child has to be approached and assisted individually. The second conclusion: the true educator is not a ‘master’ in the sense of a quasi-omniscient authority, formerly and even now still empowered by society to impose his will and inevitably restricted knowledge by pressure and even physical violence. He has to be a Master in the spiritual sense of the word, in order to be able to fathom the inner personality of his pupils or students and to assist them in their true needs. Much more than a bossy authoritarian, he has to be an understanding and patient companion, himself aware of his own possibilities and limitations, to help in the progress of the children — his younger brothers and sisters — on their path of life. ‘Education is a ministry,’⁵ said the Mother. And Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘The greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence.’⁶

This, quite briefly, was the spirit in which the Mother founded the Ashram school and made it prosper. ‘What is important here is that the principle of the education is a principle of liberty,’⁷ she said to the students themselves. ‘The progress you will make because you feel in yourselves the need to make it, because it is an impulse which pushes you forward spontaneously, and not because it is something which has been imposed upon you as a rule: this progress, from the spiritual standpoint, is infinitely superior [to ordinary education].’⁸ ‘If there are among you who do not want to learn and who do not like to learn, they have the right not to learn,’⁹ but in such cases it is the duty of the educator or ‘companion’ to point out to the child the potential consequences of his decision. She wanted them mainly ‘to learn to see oneself, to understand oneself and to will oneself.’ And to the teachers of her school she said: ‘Actually the only thing you have to pursue with assiduity is to teach them [i.e. the students] to know themselves and to choose their own destiny, the road they want to go.’¹⁰ ‘One has to be a saint and a hero to be a good teacher. One must be a yogi to be a good teacher. One must be oneself in the perfect attitude to demand that the students be in a perfect attitude. You cannot demand from anybody what you yourselves are not doing.’¹¹

Where are such teachers to be found? Those requirements inherently belonged to the ideal of all teachers in the Ashram school, for they had chosen to dedicate their life in this Ashram to the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But all of them had been inculcated with the prejudices of their own defective education, which in most cases were the prejudices of the obsolete Indian educational system. This is why the Ashram school had to provide a training at least as much for the teachers as for the students.

‘If we have a school here, it is because we want it to be different from the million schools in the world, it is to give the children a chance of discerning between ordinary life and the life divine, the life of truth, of seeing things differently,’¹² the Mother impressed upon them. ‘We are not here to do only a little better what others do, we are here to do what others cannot do, because they do not have even the idea that it can be done. We are here to open the way of the Future to children who belong to the Future.’ No, the Ashram school was not a kind of monastic school, not an other-worldly breeding ground for aspirant-yogis. Most children had been chosen by the clairvoyant sight of the Mother, no doubt, and if there were others, they also must have had some reason for being there. But the fundamental principle of their education and choice of destiny was freedom; though few have broken the tie with the place of their youth and education after leaving it, only a minority have become members of the Ashram after finishing their studies. And did not the Mother say that only a minority of the Ashram members themselves practised the Yoga? But what about all those others, then? ‘They are my children,’ she said. They were the ‘samples’ who brought the whole of human existence within her atmosphere for her to work upon. They were a prolongation of her physical self.

To show the teachers how it could be done, she herself started teaching the little ones and the adolescents, and if the adults found it interesting they too were welcome to join the class, for instance in the evening at the Playground. There the Mother gave French language lessons which soon turned into the Entretiens, a kind of didactic conversations; these conversations were recorded and written out afterwards, and would become her most widely read texts. ‘The genesis of these conversations deserves to be taken note of,’ writes the editor in an introduction to the first of the six volumes. ‘They did not originate from an arbitrary decision but from a material necessity, like most of the activities of the Ashram, where matters spiritual are always grafted on matters material. The Ashram “school” had been founded in 1943. The children had grown up; they had learned French; new generations had arrived; and there were not enough teachers. The Mother therefore decided that she herself would take classes of French three times a week for the most advanced students. She read a French text from among her own writings, or translations of Sri Aurobindo’s, and the children together with their teachers asked questions. Then, little by little, the disciples also joined the classes and started asking questions.’¹⁴

She sat behind a small table with a reading lamp, before the map of the true India, under the tropical starry sky; on the dirt-ground around her sat the young ones, still in their sports dress, and behind them the adults. In the background, as ever, the roaring breakers of the sea and the hooting of car horns in dusky Pondicherry. And over the top of the highest walls at regular intervals the sweeping ray of the light-house.

Satprem, also present there, writes in his evocative style: ‘In the evening, after her game of tennis, one saw her enter the Playground,⁹¹ very small, tranquil, white, with Japanese getas on her feet, in long pyjama-trousers tied around the ankles and a kamiz⁹² of which the colour changed along with the days — for colours too have their specific power and centre of consciousness — and a head cloth of white muslin because of the wind. But her long hair she had cut. And in “winter” a short cape over her already stooping shoulders … This Playground was actually the centre of her particular laboratory. They did gymnastics there — quite a lot — exercises on the bars, judo, hathayoga asanas, and what not, boxing and horse-vaulting, and so on and so forth. There were the girls in white head-cloths and shorts (shorts in India, in 1950! scandalous! indecent!) together with the boys, in age-groups each with its own colour: the blue group, the khaki group, and green for the little ones, and white once they had become eighteen, gray, etcetera. It was all bright, joyful, it had a kind of transparent atmosphere.’¹⁵

There the Mother took her French translation classes which became the Entretiens (conversations or talks). Splendid texts these are, in a French of great simplicity. But then, she could draw from special sources of inspiration. The children could ask anything they wanted, and she answered clearly, patiently, with a touch of humour or with a force that turned her explanations into revelations. She made them see or experience what she spoke. From those talks alone one could distill a complete spiritual or occult system.⁹³

The Mother during one of the Entretiens at the Ashram Playground, 1951

Satprem has called those evenings ‘the greatest de-occultization’ ever undertaken. Had not Sri Aurobindo written: ‘To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution’? And the Mother possessed the rich experience by which she was able to explain to her audience — or to her readers — the most esoteric subjects in a crystal-clear manner. She taught life to those children — ‘People do not know how to live!’ — with its causes, backgrounds, mechanisms and purposes. And with its difficulties. For those who were present there were destined to tackle these difficulties and conquer them. She taught them the complexity of things, from the smallest to the biggest, with the few that is visible and the much that remains hidden. She had such an enormous cultural, occult and spiritual knowledge, the Mother, and she spoke out of the conscious experience of so many lives. Those present were steeped into a purifying Force which caused all that was best in them to blossom; and she enclosed them under the imperceptible glass of her love and protection — a space in which they could breathe much more freely because she assured them an unpolluted supply of oxygen.

The Ashram school with its section of physical education, its playground and later a well-equipped sportsground, its gymnasium, and its physical ideals far ahead of their time, certainly belongs to the important exemplary realizations of the Mother, since then spread and brought into practice everywhere in the world.

The Transformation of the Cells

The outward, ‘public life’ of the Mother could be watched by one and all throughout the day. She conversed often, not only in the Entretiens, but also personally with all who went up to her, helping, consoling, encouraging and guiding. Yet so little is known about her inner work of supramental transformation, her foremost occupation of which all the rest was only a consequence or application. Looking that period up in the writings of the commentators and biographers, one gets an impression as if the years between Sri Aurobindo’s departure and the Supramental Manifestation in 1956 are a kind of void in which nothing important happened in connection with the transformation. It has even been written that the Mother started the yoga of the cells, which meant the work of her bodily transformation, only at the end of 1958, the year when she in her turn withdrew. Considering the facts and the nature of the Mother this cannot but be a misjudgment.

On the one hand, the supramental Force realized in the physical by Sri Aurobindo, the Mind of Light, had during his confrontation with death been transmitted to the Mother, so concretely that she had felt it as a friction every time that Force entered her body through the pores of its skin. The Mind of Light is the supramental Presence in the cells, and it would indeed be a bizarre supramental phenomenon that would be present in the Mother’s cells, though in a veiled manner, without being active there in one way or another. Maybe it is because Sri Aurobindo wrote little and rather cryptically about the Mind of Light, and because the Mother in the first years after his passing rarely talked about her own sadhana, that the physical presence of the Mind of Light on Earth, in her body, has not been included in the Aurobindonian ‘system of yoga’ by the commentators, and that they do not seem to know very well what to do with it. But supramental is supramental, which means the whole and undivided Divine; a realization of this kind, now effective in the body cells of the Mother, must be considered as an enormous step forward in the Work of transformation, and she surely must have continued building upon it.

One should consider, on the other hand, that the Mother was a cyclone of Force in absolute surrender. ‘Mother’s pressure for a change is always strong — even when she doesn’t put it as a force it is there by the very nature of the Divine Energy in her,’¹⁶ Sri Aurobindo had written. The Mother was the incarnated Shakti, the executive, manifesting Energy of the Divine, there present in that ‘small, tranquil, white’ figure in Japanese getas and wearing an Indian salwar-kamiz. How often has she not said with a smile that she was doing the sadhana ‘at a gallop’, like ‘a hurricane’ or ‘a jet plane,’ without ever halting at an experience. She was a Force, a Will that goes forward step by step and that cannot halt to tell its experiences, to take pleasure in what has been done. ‘I have not lost my time,’¹⁷ she said simply. Now she had taken the Work fully upon her, she had promised Sri Aurobindo that she would do it; and the supramental fire was burning in her cells. Would she, then, have remained inactive during those eight years? Already in a conversation on 6 January 1951, one month after Sri Aurobindo’s departure and hardly a few weeks after the twelve-day interlude, she said: ‘What remains to be changed is the consciousness of the cells.’¹⁸

What was the situation? Sri Aurobindo, after his great realizations which had led him to the inner discovery of the Supermind, had brought it down gradually into the mental, the vital and finally, as the Mind of Light, in the matter of his body. This had become possible only by his work in the Subconscient and Inconscient, as explained in a previous chapter. We find a confirmation of this explanation in a conversation of the Mother in which she talks about the inveterate habits present in all elements of the human body, about the atavistic formation which determines its functioning. And she says: ‘By going down into the subconscient, into the inconscient, one can trace the origin of this formation and undo what has been done, change the movements and reactions of the ordinary nature by a conscious and deliberate action … This is not a common achievement, but it has been done. So one may assert not only that it can be done, but that it has been done. It is the first step towards the integral transformation, but after that there remains the transformation of the cells.’¹⁹

Why are we now hearing time and again about the transformation of the cells and not, let us say, of the atoms? For the problem is the transformation of Matter, is it not? And isn’t the Divine present in the atoms as well, a presence which constituted the precondition of the whole material cosmos evolving out of those atoms? ‘In the centre of each atom of Matter, the supreme divine Reality is secretly present.’²⁰ (the Mother) ‘Every particle of what we call Matter contains all [the other principles] implicit in itself … Where one principle is present in the Cosmos, there all the rest must be not merely present and passively latent, but secretly at work. In fact life, mind and Supermind are present in the atom.’²¹ (Sri Aurobindo) The instrument of the supramental transformation is the adhara, the complex whole of sheaths or ‘bodies’ forming the housing of the soul of which we with our external senses can see only the most external, gross material sheath. In the adhara the contact with Matter occurs via the cells, which of course consist of matter but which contain vital and mental elements too. Cells live and have their own consciousness formed in the course of millions of years of evolution. Each cell is a micro-universe with multiple dimensions, and within the Great Unity it is in contact with the Whole cosmos (as will be demonstrated to the Mother later). ‘You think that you are separated from each other, but all that is the same and unique Substance in you despite differences in appearance, and a vibration in one centre automatically awakes a vibration in another.’²² The microcosm of the cell is the field, the means of the supramental transformation of Matter, where Matter can be touched and ennobled — the indispensable precondition for the supramental body to be realized in this material Creation.

The mental consciousness of the human being encompasses several ‘steps’, several functional gradations. Its most apparent functions are the intellect and reason, although both are considerably influenced by the desires of the vital and by sensory perceptions. Above the ordinary intellect and reason there is pure, abstract reason (Kant’s reine Vernunft), and then the mental means of receptivity to the higher and illumined mind, the intuition and the overmental-spiritual planes above our mind from where it sometimes receives inspirations, intuitions and truthful insights.

The life forces (the vital) in us too have a consciousness, the ‘vital mind’, which they use to realize their desires and intentions. (We know for instance how some persons who are not very bright, mentally speaking, are endowed with an instinctive cleverness which renders their possession of the world much more direct and self-assured than that of the ‘clever dogs’.) And the body as such too has a consciousness, by which its fabulous complexity is coordinated and which is strongly influenced by heredity, environment and education, as it is by elements from former lives. Character is partially determined by this body-consciousness (the truth behind the saying that ‘physiology is destiny’). And the organs have their own consciousness, very important for the way in which they function in illness and health. And the molecules and cells have their consciousness, which is a crucial factor in the process of transformation, as we will find out further on. The stuff atoms and particles are made of has a consciousness — a fact formerly held to be alchemistic gibberish by the physicists but now, since the discovery of quantum mechanics, almost a normal way of looking at matter. The exactitude and power of this consciousness is demonstrated by the mind-boggling complexity of the atoms and their potential force, only explicable by the Unity and its Force within which they are formed and exist. A Unity with such enormous power in such tiny units can only be ‘God’ — or whatever name one chooses to give to That. It has been found that Matter equals Energy, and it will be found that Energy is Consciousness:

MATTER = ENERGY = CONSCIOUSNES

This was the basic formula of the genuine alchemists. ‘Matter is a form of Spirit, a habitation of Spirit, and here in Matter itself there can be a realisation of Spirit.’²³ (Sri Aurobindo)

All this is necessary information for the explanation of terms which we will still have to use and which, it must be said, have sometimes been mixed up by the Mother herself. The reason of this confusion was that the word physique in French may mean ‘corporeal’ as well as ‘material’, and that the French word corporel may indicate the body as well as its elements, including the cells. Let us therefore define unambiguously the following terms needed to describe the process of the supramental transformation of the body:

1. The mind of the body: the mental consciousness of the body as a whole; the mastery over the mind of the body is an elementary condition in most yogas and was realized by the Mother long before she went to Pondicherry;

2. The mind of the cells: the very own, age-old consciousness of the cell, the transformation of which is indispensable in order to reach out to Matter-as-such and transform it;

3. The mind of matter: the consciousness in the atoms and elementary particles of so-called gross matter as experienced by our senses, but which seems already to escape the grip of the physicists. ‘Matter itself is found to be the result of something that is not Matter,’²⁴ Sri Aurobindo already wrote in The Life Divine.

Let us now follow some of the phenomena of the process of transformation in the Mother during the period between Sri Aurobindo’s departure and the Supramental Manifestation in 1956.

• On 26 February 1951 she ends her Entretien (about the Gnostic consciousness) with the words: ‘I am telling you this tonight because what has been done, what has been realized by one can also be realized by the others. It suffices that one body has realized it, a human body, to have the assurance that it can be done. You may put that still very far ahead of you, but you may say: “Yes, the Gnostic life is a certainty, for its realization has begun.”’²⁵ The Gnostic life is the supramental life, and that ‘one body’ cannot have been another than hers.

• In her Entretien of 19 April 1951 she talks about the surrender to the Divine, the fundamental attitude in the Integral Yoga. ‘This now has become the very movement of the consciousness of the cells.’ And she mentions ‘the aspiration in the consciousness of the cells for the perfect sincerity of the consecration.’²⁶

• 21 April 1954: ‘There are still a number of years ahead of us before we will be able to talk knowledgeably about how it [the transformation of the body] will come about, but I can tell you that it has begun. If you read attentively the next issue of the Bulletin, which you will get on 24 April, you will see that it has begun.’²⁷ In that issue appeared her ‘Experiences of the Consciousness of the Body’ (actually the consciousness of the cells), followed by ‘New Experiences of the Consciousness of the Body.’ The last series ended as follows: ‘In this intensity the aspiration grows formidable, and in answer to it Thy presence becomes evident in the cells themselves, giving to the body the appearance of a multicoloured kaleidoscope in which innumerable luminous particles in constant motion are sovereignly reorganised by an invisible and all-powerful Hand.’²⁸

In that year — 1954 — the work of the Mother on the cells of her body clearly had reached a sort of climax, given the possibilities at that moment:

5 May. The power to act on the circumstances can be brought down ‘in Matter, in the substance itself, in the cells of the body,’²⁹ she says. ‘This is not a belief, it is a certitude resulting from an experience.’³⁰

One week later: ‘It is as if the cells themselves burst into an aspiration, into a call. In the body there are inestimable and unknown treasures. In all those cells there is an intensity of life, of aspiration, of will-to-progress of which habitually one is not conscious.’

9 July. ‘Drop all fear, all strife, all quarrels, open your eyes and your hearts — the Supramental Force is there.’³¹

3 November. ‘Every part of the being has its own aspiration, which has the character of the part that is aspiring. There is even a physical aspiration … The cells of the body understand what the transformation will be, and with all their strength, with all the consciousness they contain they aspire to that transformation. The cells of the body themselves — not the central will, not the thinking or emotions — the cells of the body open themselves to receive the Force.’³²

11-12 November. ‘The serene and immobile consciousness watches at the boundaries of the world as a Sphinx of eternity and yet to some it gives its secret. We have, therefore, the certitude that what has to be done will be done, and that our present individual being is really called upon to collaborate in this glorious victory, in this new manifestation.’³³

How, in the face of all these unmistakable quotations, could one possibly keep asserting that the Mother commenced her work of transformation in the cells only years later? Besides, when following her evolution in this period one understands that precisely this kind of work was necessary to enable the Supramental to manifest. The cell consists not only of a mental, vital and material but also of a subconscious and an inconscient element; for the Inconscient is the womb from which Matter has originated and Matter still remains wholly impregnated by that dark substance, also in the cell. The Mother was now working out what the fundamental preparatory work of Sri Aurobindo during his life, by his confrontation with death and now behind the veil had made a possibility. It was a task taking up each moment of her time, a concentration night and day besides and above the enormous general labour she was performing, and that constant occult effort was only very partially visible to human eyes. Sri Aurobindo once wrote: ‘It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine.’³⁴ One who realizes what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have done for the Earth and for us, the sons and daughters of the Earth, may well remember this.

Mother in front of the Spiritual Map of India in the Playground, 1952

A Prediction

Then came the announcement of 31 December 1954, new year’s eve. As every year, the Mother had a New Year’s message printed which was now distributed to all those present at the Playground. Generally, those messages are revealing of what is going to happen in the coming year.³⁵ The message read: ‘No human will can finally prevail against the Divine’s Will. Let us put ourselves deliberately and exclusively on the side of the Divine, and the Victory is ultimately certain.’³⁶

Her astonishing commentary: ‘This message has been written because one foresees that next year will be a difficult year and that there will be many interior struggles — maybe even exterior ones. I therefore tell you what is the attitude you have to adopt in such circumstances. Those difficulties perhaps will not last for twelve months but for fourteen months.’³⁷ The Supramental Manifestation took place exactly fourteen months later, on 29 February 1956!

One of the youngsters asked: ‘Will [^1955] be a difficult year for the Ashram or also for India and for the whole Earth?’ She answered: ‘General: Earth, India, Ashram and individuals … It is the last hope of the adverse forces to triumph against the present Realization. If we can stand firm during these months, they won’t be able to do much afterwards, their resistance will crumble. This is what it is about: it is the essential conflict of the adverse forces, of the anti-divine forces, who are trying to push back the divine Realization as much as possible — thousands of years, they hope. And it is this conflict that has reached its paroxysm. It is their last chance. And as the beings who are behind their exterior action are totally conscious, they are fully aware that it is their last chance and they will do everything they can. And what they can is quite a lot. These are no small, ordinary forms of human consciousness; they are not at all forms of human consciousness. These are forms of consciousness who, in proportion to the human capacities, seem divine in their power, their might, and even in their knowledge. Consequently, this is an enormous conflict which is totally focused on the Earth, for they know that it is on the Earth that the first victory must be won — the decisive victory, the victory which will decide the course of the future of the earth.’³⁸

We might briefly call to mind the ‘external’, historical events of that year. The year 1955 was the culmination of the Cold War. It was the year the Warsaw Pact was signed, the first Russian H-bomb was exploded, and the first American nuclear submarine was launched. It was the year of the Conference of Bandung, ‘a revolt of Asia and Africa against the white race’ by the Nassers, Sukarnos and Nehrus. West Germany became a sovereign state. The struggle for power after Stalin’s death raged on in the Kremlin creating an unstable situation with great dangers for the country and the world. China and the Soviet-Union still acted in unison. The nuclear race was in full swing.

We read in K.D. Sethna: ‘When she concluded her talk on 5 January 1955, a few questions were put to her by one of the brightest students of our Education Centre, Manoj Dasgupta. He asked: “You have said that in 1955 the hostile forces will try to give a tremendous blow. If we prove incapable of getting the victory, will the transformation at which our Yoga aims be considerably retarded?” The Mother replied with a grave face: “It will be retarded by many centuries. It is just this retardation that the hostile forces are attempting to bring about. And in spiritual matters up to the present they have always succeeded in their delaying tactics. Always the result has been: “It will be done some other time.” And the other time may be hundreds of years later or even thousands of years. Now again the same trick is being tried.”’³⁹ She added: ‘Maybe all that is ordained somewhere. It is possible. But it is also possible that, whatever has been ordained, it is not good to reveal what has been decided, so that it may come about in the way it has to.’⁴⁰ The Great Mother, out of whose hand flows all that is created, all events and all forces, always knows in the three time-modes (trikaldrishti): past, present and future. Incarnated as the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, however, she had to work out what had been ordained in her difficult sadhana for the Earth.

It must have been a terrible battle that she fought, without anybody being aware of it. ‘The world unknowing for the world she stood.’ Satprem writes somewhere that Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is ‘the invisible yoga par excellence’, and it was most invisible in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is one of the seals of authenticity on their Work.

The Supramental Manifestation

And then it happened. The Sun broke through the mists that had enshrouded the Earth since its beginning and a New Day dawned, the Day of the concrete Presence of the Divine in his creation. We are still blind like new-born babes and therefore do not see that new Light, but some begin to feel its warmth over their face and in their heart.

It was the evening of 29 February in the leap year 1956. At the Playground the Mother had read a passage from the Synthesis; the young ones had asked questions and she had answered them. And when there were no questions anymore, somebody switched off the light as usual for the meditation. It happened during that meditation.

‘This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold,’ wrote the Mother, ‘bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that “the time has come”, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.’⁴¹

The aim for which the supramental Avatar had incarnated on Earth was accomplished. A new evolution, the evolution of a divine species, could begin.

‘My Lord, what Thou hast wanted me to do I have done. The gates of the Supramental have been thrown open and the Supramental Consciousness, Light and Force are flooding the earth. But as yet those who are around me are little aware of it — no radical change has taken place in their consciousness and it is only because they trust my word that they do not say that nothing has truly happened. In addition the exterior circumstances are still harder than they were and the difficulties seem to be cropping up more insurmountable than ever. Now that the Supramental is there — for of that I am absolutely certain even if I am the only one upon earth to be aware of it — is it that the mission of this form is ended and that another form is to take up the work in its place? I am putting the question to Thee and ask for an answer — a sign by which I shall know for certain that it is still my work and I must continue in spite of all the contradictions, all the denials. Whatever is the sign, I do not care, but it must be obvious.’⁴²

So strong had been the Force, on that evening of 29 February, that the Mother thought all those present at the Playground would be flattened out on the ground. But when the light came on again, all stood up from their sitting position and simply walked through the gate into the street, probably looking forward to their supper. ‘If all of you who have heard about it, not one time but probably hundreds of times, who have talked about it yourselves, who have thought of it, hoped for it, wanted it … There are people who have come here for that, with the intention of receiving the Supramental Force and to transform themselves into supermen. But then, how is it that all of you were so foreign to that Force that, when it came, you did not even feel it?’⁴³ Because only like can know or recognize like. As early as in 1950 she herself had said: ‘It is very well possible that at a certain Moment the Supramental Force manifests itself, that it will consciously be present here, that it will act on matter, but that consciousnesses which do not share in its vibration be incapable of perceiving it.’⁴⁴

There were some who had felt the new Force, she hastened to add. Not many — a handful. All in all, five. One of them was K.D. Sethna, who has related his experience to students and teachers of the Ashram school. In the evening of that 29 February he had seen the Mother in his compartment of the night train from Madras to Bombay, with his eyes wide open. ‘On my return to the Ashram she explained what had occurred … She said: “There were only five people who knew about the Supramental Manifestation — two in the Ashram and three outside.” She said: “I don’t mean that anybody actually knew the Supermind had manifested, but something extraordinary happened to some people. Among those three who were outside, I count you.” Puzzled, I asked: “How’s that?” She answered: “Didn’t you write to me that on February 29 at night you had seen me in the railway compartment?” I said: “Yes, but what did happen?” She replied: “Do you remember I promised in 1938 to inform you? I came now to fulfill my promise.”’⁴⁵ Eighteen years later.

The Mother has often emphasized that one should allow an inner experience to work itself out as quietly and undisturbed as possible, without wanting to intervene, to understand or to interpret it mentally. An immediate mental interpretation can but deform the experience — worse, it mostly interrupts it. It is clear that the Mother, as after all her great experiences, wanted to be fully certain of the scope of her Cosmic Act on 29 February; she therefore published the announcement of the new Dawn in the Bulletin of Physical Education of 24 April, two months afterwards. There one reads:

Lord, Thou hast willed and I execute:

A new light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.

These were exactly the same vibrating words which she had written many years earlier in her Prayers and Meditations, but what was at the time still a promise for the future, and therefore grammatically written in the future tense, had now become reality and all the verbs were put in the present tense.

And below those words was printed: ‘The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality. It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.’⁴⁶

A new world was born; a new era in the evolution of Mother Earth, the symbolical centre of the cosmos, began. Since that leap day no earthling can escape the effects of the Supramental. In other words, the Divine is since then concretely active in our matter and in all Matter, to transform it and build his Kingdom on Earth. The time this will require may seem long to our human way of experiencing things; for in our childlike naiveté we always expect miracles to happen in a jiffy. But the Miracle is now becoming reality. Who is there who does not feel that we are being carried through the gates of the new millennium in an acceleration, a vortex of time?

‘To celebrate the birth of a transitory body can satisfy some faithful feelings.

‘To celebrate the manifestation of the eternal Consciousness can be done at every moment of the universal history.

‘But to celebrate the advent of a new world, the supramental world, is a marvellous and exceptional privilege.’⁴⁷

Since then we have to read Sri Aurobindo in a completely different light. For everything he did and wrote was focused on the great future Event which he knew to be ‘inevitable’, which he also knew to be ordained somewhere, but which had to be executed by him and by the Mother in a merciless battle. Because of his superhuman decision to enter consciously into death and thanks to his work ‘behind the veil,’ his fifth ‘dream’ became reality hardly six years after his departure. It is of the essence of his heart as Avatar, of his divine Love, to keep helping humanity on the road forward just as he has always done, ‘carrying on the evolution’ till he will be visible for everybody in a transformed world. As the Mother said, he has confided to her shortly after his passing that he would come back in the first truly supramental body. ‘When I asked him (on December 8, 1950) to resuscitate his body, He clearly answered: “I have left this body purposely. I will not take it back. I shall manifest again in the first supramental body built in the supramental way.”’⁴⁸

We also draw attention to the question of the Mother to the Supreme: ‘Now that the Supramental is there … is it that the mission of this form is ended?’ The answer for us now seems self-evident, as everybody knows that she has continued working on Earth till 1973. In 1956, however, the answer was not evident at all, and the question itself shows that she might have left her material body at that time. The following chapters will clarify this important point.

Her question shows, firstly, that the Work of the Avatar, as probably conceived by the Mother up to 1956, was to bring the Supramental upon Earth, in other words to establish the unshakable base of the Kingdom of God on Earth — and that the working out of the supramental Presence into a new world and a new species was to be left to future elaborations perhaps of very long duration. This is completely in accord with everything Sri Aurobindo has told about this matter: that the Avatar comes to do the pioneering work, to prepare the terrain and to plant the magic seed from which the new tree will grow, however much time that may take. ‘What we are doing, if and when we succeed, will be a beginning, not a completion.’⁴⁹

The Mother will repeat more than once in the following years that she was still upon Earth solely because she had promised Sri Aurobindo to do the Work: ‘Je fais le travail’ (I am doing the work). In 1956 she asked for an obvious sign; such a sign must have been given to her. We may reasonably suppose that the result of her work between 1956 and 1973 has accelerated the formation of the supramental species by thousands of years. For at first she predicted that the being beyond man would appear thousands of years later, but towards the end she generally spoke about a period of not more than three hundred years. She has made a sacrifice of seventeen years of often pure hell, as we will see further on, so that our hell in this and future lives might be changed into ‘a joyful pilgrimage’ towards That which is worth being experienced like nothing else.

From K.D. Sethna is the reflection: ‘I wonder when the world will realise that in 1956 the greatest event in its history took place.’⁵⁰ The Mother called 29 February ‘the Golden Day.’