Hitler and his God

A Lady from Paris

Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris on 21 February 1878. Her father was Turkish and her mother Egyptian; they had settled in the French capital a few months before her birth. At that time Paris, refashioned by Baron Haussmann, was the cultural capital of the world. It was where the haute couture was created, the greatest concentration of artists lived, department stores, art exhibitions, circuses and cabarets like the Moulin Rouge were visited by an uninterrupted stream of tourists, and the world expositions of 1889 (when the Eiffel Tower was built) and 1900 took place. Paris set the tone in manners and fashion, and the French language was still the lingua franca in Europe, spoken by the educated people and the diplomats of all countries.

Mirra was born in a rather rich bourgeois family. Her brother would become Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa. She herself showed a great independence of mind already at a young age and chose to become an artist in days when painting, together with playing the piano, was a great pastime for women but not a professional option. By enrolling at one of the painting académies in 1893, Mirra got fully involved in the intense artistic activity of that time and became acquainted with the artists. “I knew all the greatest artists of [the end of] the last century and the beginning of this century”, among them Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse. When Mirra entered the artistic world the heyday of Impressionism was already over, and the schools of Post-Impressionism, Pointillism and Fauvism set the tone. In 1897 she married the painter Henri Morisset.

Mirra’s own work was appreciated. Some of her paintings would be selected by the jury of the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the yearly official grand exhibition, in 1903, 1904 and 1905. She considered herself nonetheless “a very ordinary artist”. In the meantime, parallel to her outward activities, an inner life had been developing since her early childhood about which she could confide in nobody. Both her parents were materialists and atheists, and her husband does not seem to have been interested either. “I had such a need to know in me … To know, know, know! You see, I knew nothing, but nothing, except the things of the ordinary life: the external knowledge. Whatever was given to me to learn, I had learned. I had learned not only what I was taught but also what my brother was taught, higher mathematics and all that! [Her brother was a polytechnicien.] And I learned and I learned and I learned – and it was nothing. Nothing gave me any explanation, I could not understand anything!” 951

Till she met an Indian on a visit to Paris who presented her with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, saying: “Read the Gita and take Krishna as the symbol of the immanent God, the inner Godhead.” This was all he told her. “But in one month the whole work was done. The first time I knew there was a discovery to be made within me, there was nothing else more important. I rushed headlong into it like a cyclone, and nothing could have stopped me.” 952 Mirra was a headstrong character, and the floodgates were opened. Now she read all the spiritual literature she could lay her hands on, the Dhammapada and other Buddhist and Hinduist texts. These were, besides, the decades of a general discovery of the art and the religions of the East, stimulated by writers like the Maupassant brothers and by an institution like the very active Guimet Museum in Paris.

On her search for knowledge that could provide her with an explanation of the surface reality she happened, in 1903, upon the Revue cosmique, the organ of Le Mouvement cosmique, founded by Max Théon (pseudonym of Louis Bimstein) and his wife. Contacts with the Théons led to her taking over the administration of the magazine, and to visits with the couple of occultists in Tlemcen (Algeria) in 1906 and 1907. There the Théons led a withdrawn life in a villa surrounded by a magnificent garden at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. Mirra found her appreciation of Théon’s capacities confirmed, no less than her admiration for those of Madame Théon, for whom she always had the highest praise. Soon she herself learned everything there was to be learnt.

“To know these [occult] things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution”, wrote Sri Aurobindo. “Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organize and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic – for there is and can be no other magic than the utilization of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.” 953

Mirra approached occultism with the same scientific but open-minded spirit. “[Occultism] is a knowledge which in the modern world is hardly recognized as scientific”, she said, “but which is scientific in the sense that it has precise procedures and that, if one reproduces the circumstances exactly, one obtains the same results.” 954 “Occultism in the West … never reached its majority, never acquired ripeness and a philosophic or sound systematic foundation. It indulged too freely in the romance of the supernatural or made the mistake of concentrating its major effort on the discovery of formulas and effective modes for using supernatural powers. It deviated into magic, white and black, or into romantic or thaumaturgic paraphernalia of occult mysticism and the exaggeration of what was after all a limited and scanty knowledge. These tendencies and this insecurity of a mental foundation made it difficult to defend and easy to discredit, a target facile and vulnerable.” (Sri Aurobindo 955)

Mirra and Henri Morisset had grown apart. She was now living on her own in the bustling metropolis that was Paris and participated in its life in many ways, as we find in her reminiscences. She tells about its theatre: the popular Grand Guignol with spectacles like Le Bossu (the hunchback), in a way the James Bond capers of those days; the boulevard theatre with the comedies of Georges Feydeau, and the classical performances at the Comédie française. There were her meetings with famous people like the novelists Anatole France and Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis. There was the music of Richard Wagner, Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck and Ambroise Thomas, the composer of Mignon and twenty-one other operas, and the concerts of Eugène Ysaye, the great Belgian violinist.

It is probable that Mirra met Paul Richard, somewhere in 1908, through the Théons, for he too had travelled to Tlemcen to meet them. Richard was a rather ambitious humanitarian, socialist and freethinker who had been a protestant pastor in Lille and became a barrister at the Paris Court of Appeals after having obtained his law degree. In 1910 he sailed to Pondicherry apparently to canvass for the candidate there of his socialist Party; for Pondicherry, as a French comptoir, was entitled to one member of the House of Representatives in Paris. What Richard really was looking for seems to have been a yogi who could initiate him in the occult and spiritual aspects of life which interested him above all else. When soon after his arrival in the sleepy South port town he started asking around, he was told that he was in luck, for a great yogi had just arrived from the north. And this is how Paul Richard met Sri Aurobindo, by whom he was very impressed.

It would take another four years before Richard, this time accompanied by Mirra, whom he had married in 1911, returned to Pondicherry, now to be himself a candidate in the elections for the House of Representatives. In the meantime Mirra had come to know the Sufi master and musician Inayat Khan, on a European tour with his “Royal Musicians of Hindustan”, and she had become especially well acquainted with Abdul Baha, the son and successor of Baha Ullah, the founder of the Baha’i faith.

Mirra had now become so well trained in spirituality and occultism, and she had assembled such an ample experience in these fields, that she might be considered an advanced yogini in her own right. Through her meetings with Eastern and Western masters, she had in fact discovered that a new synthesis was necessary which could lead to the advent of a new world. Her vision had much in common with what Paul Richard told her about the ideas of Sri Aurobindo. Having married Richard, she consented to accompany him to Pondicherry on the second lap of his adventures there, not suspecting what was awaiting her. They arrived in Pondicherry on 29 March 1914. Richard hurried to meet his yogi from Bengal, but Mirra waited till the afternoon of that Sunday, for she wanted to meet the yogi alone to see for herself who he was. The encounter must have been decisive, for she wrote in her diary on 1 April: “A new phase has begun.”

Richard’s electoral efforts were a fiasco; in the gangster world of Pondicherrian politics at that time he was but an unwitting lamb among wolves. He was more successful on another terrain, when he could convince Sri Aurobindo to make his revolutionary vision known to the world by publishing it in a philosophical magazine. The monthly periodical was called Arya and carried on its cover for the first time the name “Sri Aurobindo” Ghose, together with the names of the other two editors, Paul and Mirra Richard. It was in this magazine that Sri Aurobindo published his major works from 1914 to 1921. Month after month he wrote simultaneously chapters of The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Human Cycle, The Secret of the Veda, and other works, each time managing to have his texts ready for the printer just ahead of the deadline. In some cases it took more than twenty years before these works were published in book form.

Soon Sri Aurobindo had to carry the burden of writing and publishing the magazine all by himself, for Paul Richard was expelled from French India because of his relations with the dreaded Aurobindo Ghose. Whenever a terrorist act against the colonial authorities was committed, Ghose, in spite of his fame as scholar and yogi, was still suspected of being the master brain behind it although he was no longer involved in this kind of actions. Paul and Mirra Richard sailed back to a Europe at war. In 1916 Paul Richard managed to obtain a trade commission in Japan, and the Richards again sailed eastward, this time on risky waters because of the German U-boats. Mirra will always remember Japan for the superb beauty she had encountered there time and again, but also for the mental rigidity of the people.

After a stay of four years at Tokyo and Kyoto, the Richards returned to India, closely watched by the British police. Mirra would never leave Pondicherry again. Paul, however great his admiration for Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge, could not accept his spiritual superiority, for he had ambitions of his own; he would end as a professor at an American university.

In the first years of her life in Pondicherry, Mirra practically led a life of seclusion, discreetly creating a suitable material environment in which Sri Aurobindo could work out his yoga. When his yoga reached the point that, in 1926, he had to retire fully for its continuation, she came forward to take up the leadership of the community which had formed around Sri Aurobindo, and which was now called an “ashram” for lack of a better than the traditional word. An ashram is a spiritual community around a guru. The “Sri Aurobindo Ashram”, however, was not conceived as a closed community, witness the presence of women on an equal footing with the men, and later of children. It was meant to be the seedbed of an integral life creative of a new world, and therefore had to remain open to the world, of which it had to accept the problems and try to find their solutions. It was symbolically situated in the middle of the town.

Mirra was now “the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram” after Sri Aurobindo had started calling her the “Mother”. Sri Aurobindo stopped seeing people and continued his great spiritual work unseen and unknown. The only glimpses we have of it from those years are passages in the stream of letters he wrote to the growing number of disciples, and in some poems. After the high tide of literary, philosophical and yogic creativity of the Arya period he wrote no other works, although he constantly continued rewriting and expanding his epic Savitri, begun at Baroda and finished in the last days of his life. The Mother was always present with the disciples and built up an exemplary community which was a world in miniature. During the Second World War she would even set up a system of education for the children of the refugee families connected with the Ashram and who fled before an invasion by the Japanese.

About Golconde, a guest house constructed under the Mother’s direction in a street near the main Ashram building, the following statement was made at the “Solar World Congress” in Perth, Australia (1983): “In one of the most remote parts of India, one of the most advanced buildings in the world was constructed under the most demanding circumstances concerning material and craftsmen. This reinforced concrete structure was completed primarily by unskilled volunteers [i.e. Ashramites] with the most uncertain supplies [the work was interrupted by the Second World War and the prices of the materials increased tenfold], and with virtually every fitting custom-fabricated. Yet this handsome building has world-stature, both architecturally and in its bio-climatic response to a tropical climate, 13° N of the equator.” 956

The main effort of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga consisted in realizing a higher form of consciousness, called by him “Supermind”, and bringing it down into matter, so that it might work itself out and create a new, higher species. “Matter” here signified in the first place his own material body, used as the part of the matter of humanity which would serve as the representative centre of descent. From his Correspondence with Nirodbaran, his frequent written exchanges with the Ashram doctor, we know that after all those years of uninterrupted effort this descent was imminent. But it was at that moment that forces adverse to his effort and the progress of humanity attacked him personally (he fell and broke his thigh) in order to postpone or even cancel the realization. The same forces were mustering their legions in the world and caused the outbreak of the Second World War, to which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother attached so much importance that it interrupted their yoga for the duration.

Even when the Second World War, or the second act of “the Twentieth Century World War”, was finished, Sri Aurobindo declared the global situation to be as grim as ever, if not more. Humanity had now acquired unprecedented destructive powers, and the attempts at world conquest by the communist block raised the fear of a third and final act of the Twentieth Century World War: Armageddon, the ultimate destruction. It was in these circumstances that Sri Aurobindo, for reasons unknown to his exegetes, left his body to work again behind the scenes, this time not of politics but of the perceptible world. The Mother continued the yoga in the body and announced in 1956 that the descent of the Supermind in the earth atmosphere had finally taken place. “A new world is born”, she said. From conversations with disciples we can gather an idea of the work she then took up: the essay at transformation of the human body into the body of a new species. She reported having succeeded in building what one might call the “archetype” of the new species, and laid down her old material body in 1973.