Preparing for the Miraculous

11: The Kalki Avatar

God must be born on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God.

Sri Aurobindo¹

According to the Hindu tradition, the evolution of life and consciousness on Earth has been supported by a succession of Avatars: the Fish, the Tortoise, the Boar, the Man-Lion, the Dwarf, Rama-with-the-Ax, Rama, Krishna, the Buddha, and the last one, Kalki, who according to the tradition is still to come.

Question: If Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were Avatars, or an Avatar, what or which Avatars or Avatar were they?

1. Avatar

Sri Aurobindo has given clear definitions of the Avatar and Vibhuti on many occasions. For instance: “There are two sides of the phenomenon of Avatarhood, the Divine Consciousness and the instrumental personality. The Divine Consciousness is omnipotent but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature under the conditions of Nature and it uses it according to the rules of the game – though also sometimes to change the rules of the game.” ²

“An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence. A Vibhuti is supposed to embody some power of the Divine and is enabled by it to act with great force in the world, but that is all that is necessary to make him a Vibhuti: the power may be very great, but the consciousness is not that of an inborn or indwelling Divinity.” ³

“In the phenomenon of Avatarhood there is a Consciousness behind, at first veiled or sometimes perhaps half-veiled, which is that of the Godhead and a frontal consciousness, human or apparently human or at any rate with all the appearance of terrestriality, which is the instrumental personality.” ⁴

In the effort to understand and explain the phenomenon of the Avatar the accent has been laid by some on his divinity, by others on his humanity, and by many more on something in between, covering the whole range from divine to human. Although the Avatar is often thought to be a specifically Hindu concept, the most extensive documentation about the various interpretations of the Avatar-phenomenon is to be found in Christianity. (In Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo repeatedly names as Avatars Krishna, Buddha and Christ.) In Christianity its founder is seen – mostly unawares – as an Avatar, for Christ is at the same time the Son of God and the Son of Man. The fundamental difference with Hinduism is that in Christianity Christ is held to be the only Avatar, the one and only Redeemer of a fallen humanity. From a human teacher and miracle worker the theologians gradually exalted him into a divine being, one in essence with God the Father, therefore omniscient and omnipotent, capable of doing anything also while in the human body. A similar belief exists in some forms of Hinduism about its divine incarnations.

Sri Aurobindo countered such notions quite forcefully. “The Avatar does not come as a thaumaturgic magician, but as the divine leader of humanity and the exemplar of a divine humanity.” ⁵ “Certain conditions have been established for the game and so long as those conditions remain unchanged things are not done …” ⁶ As the Mother said: “The true divine power has organized the world according to a certain plan, and in that plan was not included that things would happen in an illogical [i.e. random] way; otherwise from the very beginning the world would have been illogical and it is not.” ⁷

“An Avatar or Vibhuti have the knowledge that is necessary for their work, they need not have more,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. “There was absolutely no reason why Buddha should know what was going on in Rome. An Avatar even does not manifest all the Divine omniscience and omnipotence; he has not come for any such unnecessary display; all that is behind him but not in the front of the consciousness.” ⁸ “My own idea of the matter is that the Avatar’s life and actions are not miracles. If they were, his existence would be perfectly useless, a mere superfluous freak of Nature. He accepts the terrestrial conditions, he uses means, he shows the way to humanity as well as helps it.” ⁹

“We know whatever we have to know for our work,” said Sri Aurobindo to the disciples gathered around him after the accident with his leg.¹⁰ And to a disciple who wrote: “We consider you omniscient,” he answered with a touch of irony: “You do not expect me, surely, to know how many fishes the fishermen of Pondicherry have caught, or how much money they have made of it? [On another occasion he chose as an example of his ignorance what Lloyd George, a famous British politician at the time, had had for breakfast.] Because [the Divine] chooses to limit or determine his action by conditions, it does not make him less omnipotent. His self-limitation is itself an act of omnipotence.” ¹¹

Another topic in the 3rd and 4th century theological controversies was the constitution of Christ, the God-Man. The standpoint, for instance, of the “heretic” sect of the Sabellians, was that Christ was fully and effectively God, also when in his human body, and that consequently, being God, he could not suffer.

The same point was made in the 1930s to Sri Aurobindo, who had to state: “The Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely, and without any conjuring tricks or pretence.” ¹² “X seems to say that there is no way and no possibility of following [the example of the Avatar], that the struggles and sufferings of the Avatar are unreal and all humbug – there is no possibility of struggle for one who represents the Divine. Such a conception makes nonsense of the whole idea of Avatarhood; there is then no reason in it, no necessity in it, no meaning in it. The Divine being all-powerful can lift people up without bothering to come down to earth. It is only if it is part of the world-arrangement that he should take upon himself the burden of humanity and open the Way that Avatarhood has any meaning.” ¹³

“If the Avatars are shams, they have no value for others nor any true effect, Avatarhood becomes perfectly irrational and unreal and meaningless. The Divine does not need to suffer or struggle for himself; if he takes on these things it is in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if the sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real. A sham or falsehood cannot help. They must be as real as the struggles and sufferings of men themselves – the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them. Otherwise his assumption of human nature has no meaning and no utility and no value. What is the use of admitting Avatarhood if you take all the meaning out of it?” ¹⁴ If an Avatar did only seem to take upon himself the struggles and sufferings of mankind “all I have done or the Mother has done is a mere sham – sufferings, struggles, conquests, defeats, the Way formed, the Way followed, the call to others to follow, everything – it was all make-believe since I was the Divine and nothing could touch me and none follow me.” ¹⁵

An Avatar, according to Sri Aurobindo, “is never in fact merely a prophet, he is a realizer, and establisher … of something essential and radical needed for the terrestrial evolution which is the evolution of the embodied spirit through successive stages towards the Divine.” ¹⁶ “For my yoga is done not for myself who need nothing and do not need salvation or anything else, but precisely for the earth consciousness, to open a way for the earth consciousness to change.” ¹⁷

“The crisis in which the Avatar appears, though apparent to the outward eye only as a crisis of events and great material changes, is always in its source and real meaning a crisis in the consciousness of humanity when it has to undergo some grand modification and effect some new development. For this action of change a divine force is needed …” It should be kept in mind that the real stuff of things is the Spirit, and that therefore everything exists and changes within the Spirit, also what we, human beings, perceive as material. “When the crisis has a spiritual seed or intention, then a complete or partial manifestation of the God-consciousness in a human mind and soul comes as its originator or leader. That is the Avatar.” ¹⁸

“The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary actions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what he is – any of these or all – a significance and an effective power that are part of something essential to be done in the history of the earth and its races.” ¹⁹

2. The World-Arrangement

We have seen that Sri Aurobindo said: “Certain conditions have been established for the game.” He also spoke about “the rules of the game,” “the world-arrangement” and “the arrangement of the omnipotent Divine in Nature.” And he said: “All is possible, but all is not licit – except by a recognizable process.” ²⁰ To realize what is the (cosmic) game, the process or world-arrangement, is of immense importance; it is essential to understand Sri Aurobindo’s worldview and his avataric mission.

The ancient understandings of the cosmos all saw its development in time, and therefore the history of humanity, as cyclic. There is a continuous, eternal succession of the four ages or yugas: Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron, gradually degenerating towards the critical point where all is taken back into its origin (pralaya) and then started again in the same order. “Lord Vishnu mounted on a white horse, with a drawn scimitar, blazing like a comet will come to end the present Kali Yuga and inaugurate a reign of universal goodness, peace and prosperity, he will renovate the creation with an era of purity or Krita Yuga. The four yugas will then proceed in the same order once again, with similar characteristics, and this process will repeat itself till the final dissolution or Mahapralaya.” (V. Ashok)²¹

Sri Aurobindo accepts the essence of the meaning of the cycles and the cycles as such, but in a progressive way, for “the cycles of our evolution move towards a divine result.” ²² We thank to his erudition and spiritual knowledge the coherent, majestic picture of the cosmic manifestation in which fit the partially valid schemes of the religions and mythologies of the past.

The Brahman is twofold: silent, completely absorbed in himself, and active, manifesting himself in a splendour of worlds and beings, for reasons that transcend our understanding and in Hinduism are called his Lila. This effusion of worlds, from the highest formations of Sat-Chit-Ananda down to the lowest of the lower vital, has been explored by Sri Aurobindo and described by him in “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds,” in his epic Savitri. As this endless scale of worlds is, each of them, the expression of Existence and Consciousness, it is also the expression of Ananda, and all their beings enjoy therefore perfect satisfaction and happiness as they are, even those of the lower vital which to us become demonic. Sri Aurobindo has called those worlds “typal” because, not possessed of the urge to change, they are non-evolutionary.

However, the characteristics and possibilities of Brahman are infinite, which means that there also eternally existed the possibility of the Divine seeing himself as his own opposite in his negative aspects. As in the Divine seeing means being, immediately Consciousness turned into inconscience, Truth into falsehood, Light into darkness, Bliss into suffering, Life into death. The Great Mother, who is the executive or manifesting Power of the one Divine, and who therefore was responsible for this tragic reversal, “saw what was happening, and turning to the Supreme she prayed for the remedy and the cure of the evil that had been done. Then she was given the command to precipitate her Consciousness into this inconscience, her Love into this suffering, and her Truth into this falsehood. And a greater consciousness, a more total love, a more perfect truth than what had been emanated at first, plunged, so to say, into the horror of Matter in order to awaken in it Consciousness, Love and Truth, and to begin the movement of redemption, which was to bring the material universe back to its supreme origin.” ²³

The “movement of redemption” is none other than what we call “evolution,” the slow upward climb on the ladder established as the manifestation of the Divine, and which Sri Aurobindo called “involution.” What in present-day science and common thought is seen as an exclusively material process, is by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother put in its complete, spiritual context. Thanks to them humanity is becoming aware of what is really at stake in the universe: the regaining of the divinity which was at the beginning and which will be at the end – the divine “adventure of consciousness and joy.”

During one of her occult explorations with Théon at Tlemcen, the Mother saw in a cave deep under water a reclining divine figure. “In fact, this is the origin of all Avatars. He is, so to say, the first universal Avatar who, gradually, has assumed more and more conscious bodies and finally manifested in a kind of recognized line of Beings who have descended directly from the Supreme to perfect this work of preparing the universe so that, through a conscious progression, it may become ready to receive and manifest the supramental Light in its entirety.” ²⁴ In other words, the divine figure which the Mother saw at the base of the material universe was a personification of the divine Love making the upward climb possible, and to this end incarnating in “Avatars” when the realization of a new level of consciousness became necessary.

We find this confirmed in Sri Aurobindo. “Are we then to suppose an eternal or continual Avatar himself evolving, we might say, his own mental and physical body according to the needs and the pace of the human evolution and so appearing from age to age, yuge yuge? In some such spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first in animal forms, then in the animal man, then in the dwarf man-soul, Vamana, the violent Asuric man, Rama of the axe, the divinely-natured man, a greater Rama, the awakened spiritual man, Buddha, and, preceding him in time, but final in place, the complete divine manhood, Krishna, – for the last Avatar, Kalki, only accomplishes the work Krishna began, – he fulfils in power the great struggle which the previous Avatars prepared in all its potentialities.” ²⁵

And again: “The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibian animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development – Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposite Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.” ²⁶

Considering the origin of the Avatars, as above narrated by the Mother and confirmed by Sri Aurobindo, one could argue that the whole of the manifestation is the Avatar of the Divine, who is present in the atom, the cell, the animal. This is still more valid for the human being, who has in him a soul that is a spark of the Divine growing into a completely developed psychic being, and of whom the Upanishad says: tat tvam asi. When a child asked the Mother: “Mother, are you God?” she answered instantly: “Yes, my child, and so are you.” Sri Aurobindo wrote in Essays on the Gita: “The divine manifestation of a Christ, Krishna, Buddha in external humanity has for its inner truth the same manifestation of the eternal Avatar within in our own inner humanity.” ²⁷ And he wrote in a letter: “If [the Avatar] has something behind him which emerges always out of the coverings, it is the same thing in essence, even if greater in degree, that is behind others – and it is to awaken that that he is there.” ²⁸

But, obviously, there is also an enormous difference between the human and the divine, which Sri Aurobindo explains as follows. “Now it is notable that with a slight but important variation of language the Gita describes in the same way both the action of the Divine in bringing about the ordinary birth of creatures and his action in his birth as the Avatar. … In both cases Maya is the means of the creation or manifestation,” but in the divine birth the Avatar is conscious, and in the ordinary, multiple birth the “Avatar” is not conscious … “[The Avatar] is the manifestation from above of that which we have to develop from below; it is the descent of God into that divine birth of the human being into which we mortal creatures must climb; it is the attracting divine example given by God to man in the very type and form and perfected model of our human existence.” ²⁹

The “something essential in the history of the earth and its races” can only be done by the Avatar if he takes upon him the burden of humanity. Hence the superhuman tapasya and suffering for which some Avatars are exemplary, and which is so often misinterpreted (as we have seen before). For if the Avatar is God, how can he suffer? The double nature of the Avatar, at the same time consciously divine and fully human, is indeed a great mystery, as great as the mystery of the manifestation. It is, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Riddle of this World, a suprarational fact our mind cannot grasp and which therefore has led to endless speculation and controversy in East and West. Sri Aurobindo’s testimony to this point is quite clear and deeply moving.

“When the Divine descends, he takes upon himself the burden of humanity in order to exceed it – he becomes human in order to show humanity how to become Divine. Anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it.” ³⁰ “I have borne any attack which human beings have borne, otherwise I would be unable to assure anybody ‘This too can be conquered.‘ At least I would have no right to say so. … The Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely and without any conjuring tricks or pretence.” ³¹ “No, it is not with the Empyrean that I am busy: I wish it were. It is rather with the opposite of things; it is in the Abyss that I have to plunge to build a bridge between the two. But that too is necessary for my work and one has to face it.” ³²

“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 the earth out of its darkness towards the Divine.” ³³ “Anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it. To quote from an unpublished poem of my own:

He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.³⁴

(Sri Aurobindo is quoting here for the first time a quatrain from that marvellous poem of his “A God’s Labour”, which could also be called “The Avatar’s Song”.)

Some of the Mother’s suffering during her last years is abundantly illustrated in The Mother’s Agenda, and partly still alive in the memory of the persons who were physically near to her or to whom it was given to approach her at the time.

In Savitri, the Avatar’s epic, there are many lines evoking the burden he has to bear. For instance:

Mortality bears ill the eternal’s touch …

It sullies with its mire heaven’s messengers …
It meets the sons of God with death and pain. …

The cross their payment for the crown they gave …

He who would save the race must share its pain …

Heaven’s riches they bring, their sufferings count the price …

The Eternal suffers in a human form …

The Creator bears the law of pain and death …³⁵

3. Sri Aurobindo: Avatar

The avatarhood of Sri Aurobindo has been put in doubt on several occasions. There seem to be two reasons for this, the first being that the claim to avatarhood by pseudo-spiritual persons has indeed become very cheap. As the discernment between spirituality, guruship and occult powers is generally vague among those who search for solace or spiritual theatrics, the word “avatar” has, and justly so, become suspect among the sceptically-minded. The second reason, especially among Westerners, is that the word “Avatar” is put on a par with the word “God”, and that this “God” is still commonly seen as the bearded autocrat in nightdress above the clouds or seated on a throne in heaven.

Did Sri Aurobindo never say himself that he was an Avatar? An outright affirmation would, in the first place, have been contradictory with his delicate, tactful character. In the second place, Avatars in general do not seem to proclaim their avatarhood. “Why should the Avatar proclaim himself except on rare occasions to an Arjuna or to a few bhaktas or disciples? It is for others to find out what he is; though he does not deny when others speak of him as That, he is not always saying and perhaps never may say or only in moments like that of the Gita, ‘I am He’.” ³⁶ Besides, the persons who have any specific idea about the mission of the Avatar and the world-crisis in which he incarnates, are rare exceptions. This may be is the reason why Sri Aurobindo wrote that the Avatars were generally recognized as such only by a few, while to the others they were quite human, even though perhaps extraordinary, persons.

“It is a question between the Divine and myself – whether it is the Divine Will or not, whether I am sent to bring that down or open the way for its descent or at least make it more possible or not,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. “Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption – I go on till I conquer or perish. This is the spirit in which I seek the Supermind, not hunting for greatness for myself or others.” ³⁷ When a disciple wrote to him: “I have a strong faith that you are the Divine incarnation. Am I right?” Sri Aurobindo answered: “Follow your faith – it is not likely to mislead you.” ³⁸

Surely, Sri Aurobindo has declared many times that he was an Avatar, not in plain words but in ways which can leave no doubt about the meaning of his statements. A few examples will have to do. “I have said ‘Follow my path, the way I have discovered for you through my own efforts and example. … I have opened the way, now you with the Divine help can follow it.‘” What kind of way or path did he mean? It was “… the path I opened, as Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Chaitanya, etc., opened theirs.” ³⁹

“My experience is the centre and condition of all the rest,” by which he meant the supramental realization on Earth. “If I am seeking after supramentalization, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others. My supramentalization is only the key for opening the gates of the supramental to the earth-consciousness; done for its own sake, it would be perfectly futile.” ⁴⁰

Nagin Doshi, at the time a young disciple, wrote to Sri Aurobindo: “We believe that you and the Mother are Avatars. But is it only in this life that both of you have shown your divinity? It is said that both you and she have been on the earth constantly since its creation. What were you doing during the previous lives?” Sri Aurobindo’s answer, laconic but so full of meaning: “Carrying on the evolution.” ⁴¹ These words bring to mind what he wrote about Sri Krishna: “As for the lives in between the Avatar lives, it must be remembered that Krishna speaks of many lives in the past, not only a few supreme ones, and secondly that while he speaks of himself as the Divine, in one passage he describes himself as a Vibhuti, vrishninam vasudevah. We may therefore fairly assume that in many lives he manifested as the Vibhuti veiling the fuller Divine Consciousness. If we admit that the object of Avatarhood is to lead the evolution, this is quite reasonable, the Divine appearing as Avatar in the great transitional stages and as Vibhutis to aid the lesser transitions.” ⁴²

“The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play.” ⁴³ He wrote “Divine Consciousness” with capital letters. And there is for example the following statement of which we cannot even sound the depth: “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.” ⁴⁴

In the last years of the Entretiens (Questions and Answers), the Mother explained the significance of Sri Aurobindo’s birth on the various levels of existence. Physically, she said, the consequences of his birth will last as long as the Earth; mentally, it is a birth the memory of which will last eternally; psychically, it is a birth which will recur eternally, from age to age, in the history of the universe; spiritually, it is the birth of the Eternal on Earth.⁴⁵

Sri Aurobindo Warrior

Usually the Avatars seem to be contemporaneous with great, world-changing wars in which they play a crucial role. This is easily understandable if one remembers that the intervention of the Avatar is needed at a time of world crisis – “a crisis in the consciousness of humanity when it has to undergo some grand modification and effect some new development” – and that, under the conditions of the evolution up to now, such a kind of crisis generally expresses itself physically in conflicts which we call war.

In Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Vishnu, incarnated as Krishna, delivered the oppressed Pandavas and destroyed the unjust Kauravas. A similar account is given of the descent of the previous Vishnu Avatars, of Rama to destroy the unrighteous oppression of Ravana, of Parashurama to destroy the unrighteous license of the military and princely caste, the Kshatriyas, of the dwarf Vamana to destroy the rule of the Titan Bali. But obviously the purely practical, ethical or social and political mission of the Avatar which is thus thrown in popular and mythical form, does not give a right account of the phenomenon of Avatarhood. It does not cover the spiritual sense, and if this outward utility were all, we should have to exclude Buddha and Christ whose mission was not at all to destroy evil-doers and deliver the good, but to bring to all men a new spiritual message and a new law of divine growth and spiritual realisation. … Always we see in the history of the divine incarnations the double work, and inevitably, because the Avatar takes up the workings of God in human life, the way of the divine Will and Wisdom in the world, and that always fulfils itself externally as well as internally, by inner progress in the soul and by an outer change in the life … The Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacher and saviour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads, after he has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and powerful change not only in the ethical, but in the social and outward life and ideals of the race.” ⁴⁶

(Even the mission of Christ, the “Prince of Peace”, has led to a superabundance of internal and quite physical struggles in Christianity, and to the Crusades and the Wars of Religion. Christ’s own words as quoted in the gospel of Matthew should not be forgotten: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” Matth. 10: 34-36)

Sri Aurobindo is generally seen as in the photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson: the old wise man seated unmoved and unmovably in his big chair, Nirodbaran’s “Golden Purusha”. But if this is the sole aspect of Sri Aurobindo, or the sole one taken into consideration by so many of his perhaps “too ethereally-minded” disciples, when or where did he do the avataric work about which he wrote, for instance, in his correspondence with Nirodbaran, in his letters, poems and Savitri? When and where did he wage his battles against the assailing Titan kings? It is obviously a distortion to see Sri Aurobindo only as the inexhaustible source of Love and Peace, which he was and is for anyone turning towards him, and not as the great warrior who had to fight, together with the Mother, the decisive battles for the new world. Of these battles the three 20th century wars – the First and Second World War and the so-called Cold War (actually one war in three parts) – were partial externalizations.

“My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle; the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in the middle of the 1930s,⁴⁷ when dark clouds gathered over the world and he himself was soon to be attacked in his physical person.

… Each enemy slain revives,
Each battle for ever is fought and refought
Through vistas of fruitless lives.
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the Titan kings assail,
But I cannot rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will.⁴⁸

In Savitri, his spiritual autobiography and testament, we find reports of his avataric battles on many pages, such as:

But though to the outward eye no sign appears
And peace is given to our torn human hearts,
The struggle is there and paid the unseen price;
The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within. …

A million wounds gape in his secret heart. …

Antagonist forces crowd across his path;
A siege, a combat is his inner life. …

His large identity and all-harbouring love
Shall bring the cosmic anguish into his depths …⁴⁹

4. The Mother Avatar

Outspoken or not, the avatarhood of the Mother has been much more controversial than that of Sri Aurobindo. From the beginning there were comments on the fact that Sri Aurobindo had taken her (and Dorothy Hodgson) into his house, and the presence as well as the person of that French lady were often put into question. After all, she had been married twice, wore perfume and make-up, and moved in mysterious ways. Besides, who had ever heard of a female Avatar, and a foreign, French female to boot?

In the letters of which his booklet The Mother is composed, Sri Aurobindo describes the Mother’s three essential aspects: the transcendent Mother, the universal cosmic Mother, and the human Mother in the yoga. A disciple asked him: “Do you not refer to the Mother (our Mother) in your book The Mother?” Sri Aurobindo answered with one word: “Yes.” Then the disciple asked: “Is she not the ‘individual’ Divine Mother who has embodied ‘the power of these two vast ways of her existence’?” Sri Aurobindo answered again with one word: “Yes.” And he explained: “The Divine puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be the Divine. It is a manifestation that takes place, a manifestation of a growing divine consciousness, not human turning into divine. The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood” ⁵⁰ – when she was living in Paris.

Let us choose two snap-shots, two aspects of the Mother from the rich literature. During her experience of “the supramental ship,” in 1958, she was suddenly interrupted and called back into her physical body by somebody in her room, and at that instant she had a brief glimpse of herself. “My upper part, particularly the head, was only a silhouette of which the contents were white with an orange fringe. Going down towards the feet, the colour became more like that of the people on the ship, that is to say orange; going upwards, it was more translucent and white, with less red. The head was only a contour with a brilliant sun in it. Rays of light radiated from it, which were actions of the will.” ⁵¹ This was the cosmic Mother during a phase of the ongoing supramentalization of the manifestation.

She also described herself on that all-important moment of the supramental manifestation, 29 February 1956. Late on that day she noted down: “This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you [her audience at the Playground and perhaps the Ashram in general]. I had a form of living gold, 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.” ⁵²

About the Divine Mother, i.e. about herself, the Mother said: “She has descended onto Earth to participate in their nature [i.e. the nature of the humans]. For if she did not participate in their nature, she could not lead them farther … But she does not forget: she has adopted their consciousness but she remains in relation with her own, her supreme consciousness … If she did not adopt their consciousness, if she did not suffer their pain, she would not be able to help them. Hers is not a suffering because of ignorance, it is a suffering because of identity. It is because she has accepted to have the same vibrations as they have, in order to be able to enter into contact with them and to pull them out of the state they are in. If she did not enter into contact with them, they would not even perceive her, or no one would be able to bear her radiance …” ⁵³

It is also interesting to compare the following passage from a conversation in the Agenda (27 June 1962) with Sri Aurobindo’s statement “Carrying on the evolution.” “One day I have said that in the history of the Earth, wherever the Consciousness could manifest, I was there – that was a fact. It was like in the story of Savitri: always there, always there, always there, in this man, in that woman. At certain times there were four emanations simultaneously … at the time of the Italian and of the French Renaissance. At another moment also, the time of Christ … This time, as soon as I started practising yoga, all have come together. This is how I remembered them.”

The Mother Warrior

In the Ashram the Mother was usually addressed as “Sweet Mother,” but everybody knew that some of her emanations or individualized personalities, among them Kali or Durga, were great warriors. She carried above her eye the scar of an occult battle. And did Sri Aurobindo not call the Second World War “the Mother’s War”? Of Mahakali, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “There is in her an overwhelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and obstacle. All her divinity leaps out in a splendour of tempestuous action; she is there for swiftness, for the immediately effective process, the rapid and direct stroke, the frontal assault that carries everything before it. Terrible is her face to the Asura, dangerous and ruthless her mood against the haters of the Divine; for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the battle.” ⁵⁴

In the Agenda of 1962 there is a telling part of a conversation where the Mother describes one of her vital beings, l’être blanc avec la hallebarde, the white being with the halberd. (A halberd is a weapon consisting of a long shaft with an axe blade and a pick, topped by a spearhead. In this case the weapon evidently represents a power or powers.) On 23 June the Mother narrated one of her experiences. “All at once I had become, or I saw, a tall being completely white, with a kind of halberd in his hand and the expression of an iron will … It was something like a great transforming power in the vital.”

Four days later she returned to this experience: “It was one of my aspects of being who was present there, like that – who manifested itself like that. It’s a part of my vital being, or rather of my innumerable vital beings (for there are quite a lot). And it is the one who is particularly interested in things concerning the Earth. … But this one [the tall white being] is not a being of human origin, he has not been formed in a human life. It is a being that has incarnated – he has already incarnated – and he was one of those who have presided over the present formation of [the Mother’s] being. But, as I said, I saw him: he was a-sexual, by which I mean that he was neither female nor male. And he represents all what is intrepid in the vital, with a calm but absolute power.”

Not only do these words give us a glimpse, like so much else of what the Mother has communicated, of the complexity, the astonishing variety and the mind-boggling creativity of the worlds behind the façade of our material existence, they also provide us with some notion of the multiple and glorious personalities of the Mother – who was at one time sitting there in that simple chair on the second storey of the Ashram building, bent in the back and subject to the symptoms of old age.

The great World-Mother now in her arose …

A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks
Empowered to force the door denied and closed
Smote from Death’s visage its dumb absolute
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.⁵⁵

5. The Complete Avatar

“There are the Two who are One and play in many worlds … This whole wide world is only he and she …” wrote Sri Aurobindo in Savitri.⁵⁶ The Two-in-One at the origin of the Manifestation were not only known in the Indian tradition, they were also part of the wisdom traditions elsewhere in the world. There was the Absolute, self-existent and self-sufficient in its eternal existence, sometimes called the Silent Brahman; but there was also the duality in the Active Brahman, the self-manifesting Divine, of Ishwara and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti. A Gnostic text from the second century CE has the Great Mother say in words which echo the Vedic scriptures:

It is I who am the offspring of what gave birth to me
[what gave birth to her being the One];
And it is I who am the Mother
[the Great Mother, the one original transcendent Shakti];

It is I who am the wife
[Shakti to Ishwara, in human metaphorical language];
It is I who am the virgin
[for ever the untouchable Origin of all] … etc.

Until now, and throughout the course of the evolution of life on Earth, the Avatars have always been of the male gender, and a female Avatar may seem rather unorthodox, especially to people familiar of old with the line of male Avatars. It is however obvious that one gender does not represent the full human constitution and condition, nor does it take into account the divine sexless Archetype which supports the evolution and directs it towards its goal.⁵⁷ The time has come to draw the full conclusions from certain well-known formulations by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Sri Aurobindo wrote: “The Mother and I are one but in two bodies.” “The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. … If anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers.” “Whatever one gets from the Mother, comes from myself also – there is no difference.” “The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms.” ⁵⁸

The Mother wrote: “Without him, I exist not; without me, he is not manifest.” ⁵⁹ (Cf. Sri Aurobindo: “There is one force only, the Mother’s force – or, if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo’s Force.”) “Sri Aurobindo and I are always one and the same consciousness, one and the same person.” ⁶⁰ “When in your heart and thought you will make no difference between Sri Aurobindo and me, when to think of Sri Aurobindo will be to think of me and to think of me will mean to think of Sri Aurobindo inevitably, when to see one will mean inevitably to see the other, like one and the same Person – then you will know that you begin to open to the supramental force and consciousness.” ⁶¹ And at one time she unified in writing both their names in the mantric formula “mothersriaurobindo is my refuge”.⁶²

All this is of crucial importance because the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was to effect the transition of our human world to a new, supramental world, to “the life divine.” The supramental being will be a-sexual, sexuality having been a means of Nature to render the evolution of life possible. This is the reason why the Avatar of the Supermind, transcending the evolutionary sexuality, had to be male/female in one, while still, because of the evolutionary necessity, incarnated in two bodies. The Mother’s remark about the white warrior with the halberd, a figure of her own vital, also refers to this: “He was a-sexual, by which I mean that he was neither female nor male.” And those familiar with her work in the Ashram will no doubt remember how, in the youth of the Ashram School, she worked to create a mentality surpassing the common sexual attitudes in order to prepare them for the transition to an asexual species.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were one being, one Avatar. They were:

… the deathless Two-in-One,
A single being in two bodies clasped,
A diarchy of two united souls.

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

An hour began, the matrix of new Time.⁶³

6. The Kalki Avatar

In Hinduism, the Kalki Avatar is thought of as the last of the succession of Avatars, who will come at the end of the present Kali Yuga. The victor of the last, decisive battle with the hostile forces, he will ride on a white (winged) horse and brandish a sword or scimitar. He will vanquish Yama, or Death, and resolve all opposites as well as overcome darkness. He will be the divine man, at one with infinite divinity.

Sri Aurobindo wrote, however: “Too much importance need not be attached to the details about Kalki – they are rather symbolic than an attempt to prophesy details of future history. What is expressed is something that has to come, but it is symbolically indicated, no more.” ⁶⁴ The description of the Avatars dates from the Puranas, in other words from a traditional view that saw the evolution of the cosmos as cyclic. As mentioned before, the Aurobindonian conception of the cosmic evolution is cyclic but progressive. Although the evolutionary development can be traced back to the ancient Hindu scriptures, as did Sri Aurobindo, the general thinking and imagining did not take evolution into account, and one may say that the supramental transformation of the human species into divine beings was not a part of the traditional vision.

In his book Dasavatara – The Ten Incarnations of Vishnu, V. Ashok, for instance, writes: “Lord Vishnu mounted on a white horse, with a drawn scimitar, blazing like a comet will come to end the present Kali Yuga and inaugurate a reign of universal goodness, peace and prosperity, renovate the creation with an era of purity, a Krita Yuga. The four Yugas will then proceed in the same order once again, with similar characteristics, and this process will repeat itself till the final dissolution or Mahapralaya. … At this nadir in human existence a divine Being, who comprehends all things and is the beginning and the end, shall descend upon the earth. He will be born in the family of Vishnuyasas, an eminent brahmin of Sambal village, as Kalki. He will be endowed with eight superhuman faculties. He will destroy the mlechchas, thieves and all those whose minds are set on wickedness. He will then re-establish righteousness on earth, and the minds of the good people who survive at the end of Kali Yuga will be awakened and be made as clear as crystal. These men, who are changed in virtue of that particular time, shall be those who will give birth to a race which shall follow: the Krita Aga or Age of Purity.” ⁶⁵

Sri Aurobindo has closely related the Kalki Avatar with the Krishna Avatar. “Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the overmind leading it towards Ananda.” ⁶⁶ “… The last Avatar, Kalki, only accomplishes the work Krishna began – he fulfils in power the great struggle which the previous Avatars prepared in all its potentialities …” ⁶⁷

“Krishna opened the possibility of overmind with its two sides of realization, static and dynamic. Buddha tried to shoot from mind to Nirvana in the Supreme, just as Shankara did in another way after him. Both agree in overleaping the other stages and trying to get at a nameless and featureless Absolute. Krishna on the other hand was leading by the normal course of evolution. The next normal step is not a featureless Absolute, but the supermind. I consider that in trying to overshoot, Buddha like Shankara made a mistake, calling away the dynamic side of the liberation. Therefore there has to be a correction by Kalki.” ⁶⁸

“No system indeed by its own force can bring about the change that humanity really needs; for that can only come by its growth into the firmly realized possibilities of its own higher nature, and this growth depends on an inner and not an outer change. But outer changes may at least prepare favourable conditions for that most real amelioration – or on the contrary they may lead to such conditions that the sword of Kalki can alone purify the earth from the burden of an obstinately Asuric humanity. The choice lies with the race itself; for as it sows, so shall it reap the fruit of its Karma.” ⁶⁹

Mothersriaurobindo: the Kalki Avatar

Here the time has come to repeat our question at the beginning: According to the Hindu tradition, the evolution of life and consciousness on Earth has been supported by a succession of Avatars. If Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were Avatars, or an Avatar, what or which Avatars or Avatar were they?

The reason that this question has to be put now, sixty years after Sri Aurobindo left his body and thirty-seven years after the Mother left hers, may have been the misleading picture of the Kalki Avatar as upheld by tradition: a male warrior on a white horse with a sword.⁷⁰ The reality seems to be quite different, although it agrees in every detail with the world as it has evolved since ancient times. Divinization, i.e. supramentalization of humanity in a material Earth, requires a more complete representation of the human being, it requires the complete male/female Avatar. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, two great warriors in one, waged the last battles against the hostile forces, some of which we know about (e.g. the twentieth century wars), most of which we are ignorant of, as we are ignorant of the totality of their being and action. Their all-important mission as the last Avatar was to lay the foundations of a new, supramental world, in which “evolution itself will evolve.” (In 1956, after the supramental manifestation, the Mother cried out, almost chanted: “A new world is born, born, born!”)

Most important, and rarely referred to, was the role Shri Krishna played in Sri Aurobindo’s avataric realization,⁷¹ thereby demonstrating Sri Aurobindo’s statement: “The last Avatar, Kalki, only accomplishes the work Krishna began.” Shri Krishna was the guide of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, as well in Alipore Jail, when studying the Gita and putting it into practice, as in Pondicherry, where it was from Shri Krishna that he received the detailed programme of his yoga. The Thoughts and Aphorisms and The Record of Yoga bear witness to this. In 1926 Shri Krishna descended into Sri Aurobindo’s body.⁷² This means that from 1926 till 1950 Shri Krishna was incarnated on Earth, without anybody being aware of it. (This may, moreover, be the reason that the light or aura of Shri Krishna and Sri Aurobindo is the same light blue light.)

About the historical Krishna, king of the Vrishnis, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “I suppose very few recognized him as an Avatar – certainly it was not at all a general recognition. Among the few those nearest to him do not seem to have counted – it was less prominent people like Vidura etc. … Those who were with Krishna were in all appearance men like other men. They spoke and acted with each other as men with men and were not thought of by those around them as gods. Krishna himself was known by most as a man – only a few worshipped him as the Divine.” ⁷³ The same could now be said about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who are hardly known outside the circles of their followers, and, if known, not recognized for what they were and did – for what they are and are doing.

Krishna, like Christ and the other Avatars, has only gradually grown into a recognized incarnation of the Divine. It would actually be better to say “a generally recognized incarnation of the Divine,” given the ease with which chelas see their guru, sometimes rightly, as a realized being which they declare, unrightly, to be an Avatar. The task of the Avatar is always out of the ordinary, relevant for the whole of humanity, and revolutionary, initiating a radical new element in the spiritual evolution of life on Earth.

In 1957 the Mother said: “The spaces which separate these various incarnations [of the Avatars] seem to have become shorter and shorter, as if, for as much as Matter became more and more ready, the action could accelerate and become more and more rapid in its movement, more and more conscious too, more and more efficacious and decisive.” ⁷⁴ The dazzling pace at which Mother Earth and her human offspring are changing, in ways unprecedented in history, is a sure sign that something huge is happening, equivalent to the coming about of a new world, which could only be effected by the spiritual and material action of the ultimate Avatar, Shri Kalki.