Preparing for the Miraculous

7: Bridges across the Afterlife

(This talk was given in Savitri Bhavan at Auroville, on 18 November 2010, in commemoration of the Mother’s passing on 17 November 1973.)

In 1961 the Mother spoke in a private conversation about a certain activity of hers, began when she was in her early twenties and continued since then without interruption. “It must be part of the work for which I have come on the Earth. For even before meeting Théon [her temporary teacher in occultism and the Kabbalah], before having any knowledge, I had experiences during the night, experiences of certain activities during the night in which I looked after people who were leaving their body. And I did that with a knowledge! – although I did not know anything, and neither did I try to know anything, or whatever. I knew exactly what had to be done, and I did it. I was about twenty at the time. …

“As soon as I discovered the teaching of Théon – even before I met him in person – as soon as I read him and came to understand all kinds of things which I did not know before, I started working quite systematically. Every night at the same time I performed a work which consisted in constructing, between the purely terrestrial atmosphere and the psychic atmosphere, a sort of protective pathways through the vital, so that the people [who had just left their material body] would not have to traverse it any more. Because, for those who are conscient but do not have the knowledge, that is really very difficult: it is infernal.” (It is precisely this knowledge which was provided in the Egyptian and Tibetan “books of the dead.”) “It is infernal. So I built that. That was perhaps in 1902-1903 or 1904, I do not remember exactly. But month after month after month I worked at it.

“Afterwards, when I went to Tlemcen, I told all that to madame Théon. She said: ‘Yes, this is part of the work you have come to do on Earth. All those whose psychic being is a little bit awake, and who are able to perceive your Light, will go to your Light at the moment of death, wherever they may die, and you will help them cross beyond.’ And that is a constant work. Constant.” ² Madame Théon was an even greater occultist than her husband. The Mother went two times to Tlemcen, in Algeria, in 1906 and 1907.

The “pathways” the Mother built are what is described by many persons who have been clinically dead as tunnels, bridges or narrow mountain passes by which they feel protected and which they use to cross over directly into the Light. They are able to report this kind of experience because, after having been clinically dead, they came back to life. Although the first reports date from the Second World War, “near-death experiences” started drawing the interest of the general public because of the 1975 book Life After Life by Raymond Moody, a medical doctor. According to a later Gallup poll no less than 8 million Americans claim to have had a near-death experience. Students of the phenomenon claim that the number of near-death experiencers may be much higher, as many persons who have gone through the experience are reluctant to talk about it for fear of ridicule.

The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia defines “near-death experience” as follows: “Mystical or transcendent experience reported by people who have been on the threshold of death. The near-death experience varies with each individual, but characteristics frequently include hearing oneself declared dead, feelings of peacefulness, the sense of leaving one’s body, the sense of moving through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, a life review, the crossing of a border, and meetings with other spiritual beings, often deceased friends and relatives. Near-death experiences are reported by about one-third of those who come close to death. Cultural and physiological explanations have been offered, but the causes remain uncertain. Typical aftereffects include greater spirituality and decreased fear of death.”

As this definition indicates, “the near-death experience varies with each individual.”

Yet Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, “after listening to thousands and thousands of people,” found that there are four successive main phases.³

1. People float out of their bodies; they are totally aware of the scene he or she has left and assume an ethereal shape; they experience wholeness.

2. They are able to go anywhere with the speed of thought; they meet their guardian angels or guides who comfort them with love and introduce them to the presence of previously deceased dear ones.

3. Guided by their guardian angel they enter what is commonly described as a tunnel, bridge or mountain pass; at the end they see a bright light which some call God; everybody agrees on one thing: that they were enveloped by overwhelming love, the purest of love. None wants to return to his or her physical body. All lives are changed after the experience.

4. They are in the presence of the Highest Source some call God; they no longer need their ethereal shape for they become spiritual energy; they experience a oneness, a completeness of existence. Some remember going through a life review, a process in which they confronted the totality of their life; they were made to understand the reason for every decision, thought and action they had had in life.

It will surprise nobody that this subject, however well-documented and confirmed by reliable persons, is the target of doubt and ridicule by scientific and other positivist-minded people. They object, for instance, that the immaterial is in principle unseen, unheard, and unable to be sensed or measured empirically, and therefore improvable. Then they use anything, positivist or not, that might explain those experiences, including dreams arising from Carl Jung’s collective unconscious; recollections of the birth experience, “an explanation proposed by the late Carl Sagan” (who was a cosmologist calling himself an “exobiologist”); the effects of drugs and medicines; carbon dioxide intoxication or oxygen starvation; or a flood of endorphins released by the dying brain. Etc.

Obviously, this flood of experiences exceeds the boundaries of physical science, which by now at least should be used to the astonishing and apparently impossible in its own backyard. Only the science of yoga, and its experiential knowledge of reality and the human personality, can explain them.

A human being consists of more than a body, and even more than a body-plus-mind, as has been the belief in the West since its classical times. To this body-plus-mind may be added a soul, although the Western philosophers and theologians have generally identified the soul with the mind, both being “non-material.” According to the common yogic experience, however, a human being consists of several bodies or sheaths, material, vital, and mental, contained in each other. At the center of this complex being sits the soul or psychic being, which has taken up its bodies in reverse order when descending into a new terrestrial incarnation.

The material body is the one that dies, while the vital and mental bodies survive for some time, still enveloping the soul. It is in this condition that everyone has to traverse the worlds that correspond to the state of his vital body and the development of his mental body. In most cultures and individual cases the mental body does not possess the necessary knowledge to protect the transiting person. The lower regions of the vital plane can be, as the Mother said, “infernal” or hellish, inhabited by hellish beings. (The concept of hell originated from the remembrance of this kind of post mortem experiences.) The Mother constructed the “protective pathways” precisely to protect the deceased against such hellish experiences and to have them transit directly to the plane of the psychic, which is a divine plane.

These protecting pathways are what gives the impression of a tunnel, a bridge, or a narrow mountain pass. Still carried by his vital and mental body sheaths, the transiting person perceives the Light of the higher, spiritual hemisphere (in fact the Mother’s Light). The more he comes nearer to it, the more intense it becomes. As Kübler-Ross writes, that light “radiates intense warmth, energy, spirit and love – love most of all, unconditional love; they feel peace, tranquillity and the anticipation of finally going home.” The experiencers who have gone that far do not want to return to the dark, difficult and painful world which they have left behind; they want to discard their vital and mental sheaths too and enter there where all is existence, consciousness and bliss: the psychic world.

The Mind-Body Problem

As mentioned before in passing, “a Gallup poll published in 1982 estimates that one in twenty adult Americans has had a near-death experience. (This would translate today to more than 15 million out of 312 million adults.) Furthermore, of those people who came close to death, thirty-five percent could report a NDE [near-death experience]. Researchers believe that these figures are conservative estimates. Moreover, these figures indicate the pervasiveness of the experience in the general population. It’s important to add that there is no relationship between a person’s gender, age, socioeconomic class, or religious orientation. NDE seems to be a universal phenomenon.” ⁴

“On 15 December 2001, an unusual article appeared in the medical journal The Lancet. Written by Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist at the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, the Netherlands, it described the results and findings of a series of interviews that took place over a period of eight years. Its subjects were 344 patients who had been successfully resuscitated after suffering a cardiac arrest. The article reported that 18% of the patients told interviewers that they experienced what is commonly termed a ‘near-death experience’, with 12% having what Van Lommel termed a ‘core experience’ – an elaborate perception of the beginning of an afterlife. This result mystified both Van Lommel and his assistants. Van Lommel argued that if there is a purely physiological or medical reason for the experience then ‘most patients who have been clinically dead should report one’.” (Anthony Peake in Is There Life After Death?)

The problem of the strange and immaterial thing that is “consciousness,” and the way immaterial consciousness can relate to a material brain and have an impact on it, haunts the biological and neurological sciences since Descartes. He had tried to get rid of it by declaring consciousness an “epiphenomenon” of matter, thus sticking a label on a bottle without known contents. Neurology in the present day has not advanced much further. Consciousness is now declared to be “a function” of the material brain. “Most psychologists now believe that consciousness is tied to the activity of neurons in the central nervous system.” (John Holland)

But “most” does not mean all, and some scientists have strongly reacted against such academic obscurantism. Roger Trigg e.g. states: “Science is itself the product of human reason. It can’t, in the end, explain human reason away without explaining itself away.” ⁵ And the eminently reasonable Brian Pippard wrote in a letter: “Too many physicists (and others) take for granted that in due course an explanation will be found of conscious mind in terms of the material operations of the brain. This is to put the cart before the horse – it is through our minds that we know of the brain, and we are more likely to find how they are related by concentrating on the fundamental thing (conscious knowledge) rather than on its derivative (material brain).” ⁶

These questions appear again on the scientific agenda because of the solid evidence of so many near-death experiences. Cardiologist Pim van Lommel concluded: “This experience forces us to reconsider the localization of the consciousness. Is it really in our brain? … All patients mentioned in our paper were clinically dead – one-line EEG, no more activity of the cortex, pupils fixed and dilated, no reflexes left. Still their consciousness remained totally clear and their sensations defined.” And on the Wikipedia website we find the following comment: “Many view the NDE as the precursor to an afterlife experience, claiming that the NDE cannot be adequately explained by physiological or psychological causes, and that the phenomenon conclusively demonstrates that human consciousness can function independently of brain activity. Many NDE-accounts seem to include elements which, according to several theorists, can only be explained by an out-of-body consciousness. For example, Michael Sabom states that one of his contacts accurately described a surgical instrument [used after she was clinically dead] which she had not seen previously.” In other cases persons and their actions and conversations are accurately described under the same conditions, and one NDE-experiencer even remembered the number plate of the truck which had hit and killed him instantly.

Three Illustrations

There is already a wide-ranging literature about the near-death experience, a topic which, if true, will concern all of us at one moment or other. The following three illustrations are chosen because they highlight the phenomenon from various angles.

The 1979 movie All that Jazz, with Roy Scheider and Jessica Lange, was scripted and directed by Bob Fosse, and based on his own life-story. Fosse, “all-round movie and show business man,” won an unprecedented eight Tony Awards for choreography, as well as one for direction. He was nominated for an Academy Award four times and won for his direction of Cabaret.

All that Jazz tells the story of a choreographer and movie director, Joe Gideon, who has led the life many well-known show business people lead, or are supposed to lead, with the relationships, the pills, drinks and drugs, the love, hate and indifference, and the ups and downs of success. Striking for an American movie, and therefore mentioned here, is the fact that, in his moments with himself before the make-up mirror, this professional showman – “It’s show time, folks!” – often finds himself in the company of a beautiful, mysterious lady-in-white with whom he can be totally spontaneous and sincere.

A loose and fast life like his leads slowly but surely to heart problems and the inevitable attack. Still Joe Gideon cannot manage the discipline to bring some order to his life, although he knows full well that his condition is serious. Actually the problem and fear of death obsess him, for he cannot stop viewing and editing his own movie about a stand-up who parodies the successive standard reactions of people when given the news of their imminent death. (The enumeration of these reactions is part of the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who is mentioned by name.) The result of Gideon’s desperate carelessness is more attacks leading up to the fatal one, when in a drugged or comatose state, and a magnificently staged finale, he sees his life as one grand show. Then, when it is all over and the body bag is zipped up, comes the surprise: waiting for him is the beautiful smiling lady-in-white again, to help him on to another world.

The second illustration is a case history from the February 2002 issue of the French science magazine Science et Avenir. Christiane, in her early thirties and pregnant, had a miscarriage resulting in massive bleeding. She was declared clinically dead. In her own words: “I left my envelope of flesh, I slid out of it and rose to the ceiling … I saw my body lying there, with three persons in white blouses very busy around it … Amazed I said to myself: ‘But I am dead!’ This did not upset me. I felt good and that poor body did no longer interest me. I did not regret having left it. … I entered a long, dark corridor. At the end there was a point of light increasing more and more, till it became an immense light that enveloped me, fabulous, warm, full of love and an indescribable happiness. I felt around me an immense, indestructible love. It had nothing in common with the love one may experience here below. I had no longer any other desire than to melt into that infinite light of love …”

And after she had come back: “Why did I not go to the other side? I would have liked to go there so much. … I am no longer afraid of death.”

The third illustration is a historical episode of the Second World War, with Albert Speer as its protagonist. Speer, an architect, is one of two persons who at one time were closest to Adolf Hitler, the other one being Rudolf Hess. In the last phase of the war Speer was Minister for Production, which means that he was the boss of some 12 million slaves – forced workers from conquered countries, among them the Jews who, still more or less healthy, temporarily escaped extermination. In the rapidly worsening circumstances Hitler expected Speer to perform miracles, in other words to continue producing the aircraft, tanks, submarines and canon needed to stem the invasion of the Allies who, from the east and the west, were squeezing Germany in a pincer movement.

In January 1944 Speer had to be hospitalized for a serious knee and lung infection. The moment was not opportune for him because Göring, always covetous of more power, had been intriguing against him, using the sinister Bormann to manœuvre Speer into disfavour with Hitler. The medical institution where Speer’s condition had grown critical was a state-of-the-art Party hospital at Hochenlychen, near Berlin, run by Dr Karl Gebhardt. This was an SS-Gruppenführer and the personal physician of Himmler, who, as Speer said later, had directed Gebhardt to eliminate him.

In Inside the Third Reich, his memoirs, Speer wrote: “The doctors prepared my wife for the worst. But in contrast to this pessimism, I myself was feeling a remarkable euphoria. The little room expanded into a magnificent hall. A plain wardrobe I had been staring at for three weeks turned into a richly carved display piece, inlaid with rare woods. Hovering between living and dying, I had a sense of well-being such as I had only rarely experienced.”

In Speer’s conversations with Gitta Sereny, however, we read what really happened: he, the very ambitious, very materialistic and very matter-of-fact architect, powerful minister and top Nazi, had had a near-death experience! As Sereny reports the particular conversation: “‘I have never been so happy in my life’, Speer said. He was ‘above’, he said, looking down at himself in the hospital bed. ‘I saw everything very clearly. The doctors and nurses hovering, and [his wife] Margaret looking sort of soft and slim, her face small and pale … What Professor Koch and the nurses were doing’, Speer continued, ‘looked like a silent dance to me. The room was so beautiful …’ He smiled at the memory. ‘I was not alone; there were many figures, all in white and light grey, and there was music … And then somebody said: “Not yet.” And I realized I had to go back and I said I didn’t want to. But I was told I had to – it was not yet my time. What I felt then was not something I know how to describe. It wasn’t just sadness, or disappointment – it was a long feeling of loss … To this day I think that I felt things in those hours which the man I know myself to be cannot feel, or see, or say. I tell you one thing: I’ve never been afraid of death since. I’m certain it will be wonderful.’”

Then why hadn’t he written all this in his memoirs? Speer’s answer: “Well, I was supposed to be that super-rational man, you know, writing a definitive book on this terrible history of our time. What do you think readers would have said if in the middle of that book I had suddenly written that I am sure, sure to this day, that I died that night and came back to life? Can you imagine the fun the critics would have had with that?” ⁷

This extraordinary testimony, the authenticity of which is beyond doubt, not only confirms the reality of the near-death experiences, it also raises several interesting questions. For Albert Speer was without any doubt a war criminal responsible for the suffering and death of many thousands of slave workers, and he was as responsible for the slaughter on the battlefields as were Göring (who committed suicide) and the Nazi heads executed at Nuremberg. Although he escaped the gallows by convincing his interrogators that he was a decent man and denouncing his Nazi cronies, most historians today agree that his twenty years of imprisonment, in comparison with the other sentences, was too lenient.

Then why was such a person sent back, obviously by a direct decision of the Highest Authority, at the crucial period of the war when he was irreplaceable in his ministerial position, and when his leadership contributed directly to the prolongation of the fighting and the cruel death of uncountable lives, military and civilian? Why was he, at that tragic juncture, sent back even against his own will? It would seem that “in heaven” the norms for making the accounts differ from those “here below.” It would also seem that events, whether insignificant or on a world scale – wars, mass deportations and massive catastrophes – are elements or links in processes beyond our understanding.

Knowledge Physical and Spiritual, and its Seasons

If one had read earlier about the Mother’s protective pathways across the afterlife, say before the publication of the first books on NDE, her narrative of what she had accomplished in the beginning of the 20th century might have looked like another of those chimerical experiences mystics think they have. Yet this is only one of many elements in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings which have in the meantime come within the compass of science, and there will no doubt be more to come. For there is a spiritual knowledge which is independent of and more true than scientific materialism, bound by the limitations of the human mind. Spiritual insight is based on direct knowledge; mental activity remains inexorably restricted by the human constitution, as has been recognized by philosophers like Plato, Berkeley and Kant.

Another example of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s “foreknowledge” is the very special nature and purpose of the Earth, as commented upon in the talk “2012 and 1956: Doomsday?” It must suffice here to remind that the Mother said in the 1950s: “From the occult and spiritual point of view, the Earth is the concentrated symbol of the universe. … For the convenience and necessity of the work, the whole universe has been concentrated and condensed symbolically in a grain of sand which is called the Earth. And therefore it is the symbol of all – all that is to be changed, all that is to be transformed, all that is to be converted is here.” At the time she said this, this sort of view was still squarely contradicted by the Copernican Principle⁸, stressing the fact that the Earth was but one planet among possibly billions in the universe, and man no more than an animal among animals. Now, however, when indeed many “exoplanets” are discovered, this certainty is called into question in scientifically argued books like Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, The Eerie Silence and The Goldilocks Enigma by Paul Davies, and The Privileged Planet by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards.

The direct and continuous influence of the mind on the body has time and again been highlighted by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, especially in matters of health and the doctor-patient relationship. At the centre of this topic are the power of a doctor’s suggestions and the placebo effect. In a special file about the intriguing placebo effect and titled “When the spirit cures the body” the French science magazine Sciences et Avenir writes: “This powerful effect has been used since the night of time in the doctor-patient relationship, but without knowing its intimate secrets. Having remained obscure for a long time, it begins to be decrypted by a new discipline called neuro-endocrino-immunology, the study of the interactions between three principal systems of our organism. … The placebo effect does exist!” ⁹

The Mother has explained several times that the brain has the capacity to continue developing during its whole lifetime. Science, on the contrary, held that the enormous mass of neurons of this most complicated of objects in the universe, was fixed once and for all, and that it could only diminish and degenerate. Recently this physiological tenet has been modified drastically. One reads now about the five ages of the brain and the fact that it continues evolving, even in advanced age, on condition that one does not stop stimulating it, in other words that one remains mentally active – or, as the Mother said, that one remains “young.”

In one of the first chapters of The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “For it will be evident that essential Matter is a thing non-existent to the senses and only … a conceptual form of substance, and in fact the point is increasingly reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy.” ¹⁰ Now you find popular science books with a title such as The Matter Myth, and physicists who say: “Speaking as a physicist, I judge matter to be an imprecise and rather old-fashioned concept. Roughly speaking, matter is the way particles behave when a large number of them are lumped together. … Matter is weird stuff …” (Freeman Dyson)¹¹ Or: “Quantum field theory paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. In this theory, little distinction remains between material substance and apparently empty space, which itself seethes with ephemeral quantum activity. … Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less ‘substance’ than we might believe. … Even the apparent solidity of ordinary matter melts away into a frolic of insubstantial patterns of energy.” ¹²

Already during the First World War, when writing the instalments that would become The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of the terrestrial evolution contained elements which would only later enter the scientific discussion about the development of the life-forms. In those texts from the Arya we find what Eldredge and Gould would call “punctuated equilibrium” in 1972; the discussion of life in plants and a rather developed mind in higher animals; the statement that species, including the human, cannot evolve beyond themselves by their own effort; the confirmation that there have existed civilizations of which no trace is found today, and that peoples considered primitive a century ago were actually retrograde populations from former times; the standpoint that in evolution there is a design, defined by an Intelligence and worked out by It. Etc. And all this ordered within a coherent system, valid before the positivist theories of evolution (Lamarck, Darwin, de Vries, Neo-Darwinism) were fashioned, and equally valid after those theories have been seriously questioned and will within a not too distant future become history.

Vroeger toen ik groot was! (Before, when I was big) is a remarkable little book by the Dutch author Joanna Klink (1990), with spontaneous reminiscences by small children about the time before they entered their mother’s womb and during their stay in it. They remember their choice of the mother, the moment they entered her womb, and the surrounding circumstances before and during the pregnancy. What is striking here is that everything these children said agrees completely with what the Mother has told on the same subjects. For example, the soul chooses the physical mother and watches over the fetus, even when not yet definitively joining with it; the moment of the definitive union differs in each case and may even take place after birth. The being that is to be born is aware of all that goes on around the mother as it is of its own world. “An unborn apparently perceives, with his vivid awareness, much more than we think,” writes Klink. And: “Children do not believe in death, they still know better.” They also mention quite spontaneously the “silver thread” which connects the subtle with the gross material body, and which, when cut, results in separation (death).

Remembering the Mother

Returning to our main theme, one could ask the question: Why was this invaluable protection after death provided only recently, so late in the history of our species?

An answer on this level of things is not to be given by mental understanding. As madame Théon told the Mother, building the bridges across the afterlife was part of what the Mother had come to do on Earth, and the light mentioned in all NDE experiences is the Mother’s Light. In the words of madame Théon: “All those whose psychic being is a little bit awake, and who are able to perceive your Light, will go to your Light at the moment of death, wherever they may die, and you will help them cross beyond.”

These words refer directly to the status of Mirra Alfassa, the French woman whom we now call “the Mother,” thereby meaning the Great Mother incarnated as the female part of the Avatar Sri Aurobindo-Mother. Before, the Avatar had always been male, and many Hindus still have difficulty in accepting a male-female Avatar. But it is quite clear that if there is an earthly evolution, in which the successive Avatars play a crucial role, and if in the present stage of humanity’s history this evolution is reaching a critical point, the Avatar has to represent in himself the complete human being in order to transfigure it. Only the Great Mother, because she manifests all levels of existence and also transcends them, could perform a task like building bridges across the planes of existence, and constantly help the dying onward to their psychic resting place.

The significance of “she whom we call the Mother” can only be fully understood in her three aspects as the Great Mother of many names, but always “the one original transcendent Shakti;” as Mahashakti, the cosmic Mother of the Gods; and as the incarnated Mother in the Yoga.

The Great Mother is known in all great spiritual and occult traditions, even though variously named and described. We find her in Isis, Cybele, Sophia, and the Virgin Mary. She is the One who became Two – the active Brahman from eternity divided into Ishwara and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti. On the Origin of the World, a gnostic text from around 200 CE, defines her in terms which, if properly understood, agree with those of the Vedantic 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];
It is I who am pregnant
[with all the power and manifestations of the universe];
It is I who am the midwife
[the middle term chit-tapas in the Vedantic sat-chit/tapas-ananda];
It is I who am the one that comforts pains of travail
[who justifies the pains of the evolutionary manifestation];
It is my husband who bore me
[Ishwara is also the Brahman];
And it is I who am his mother
[who gives shape to him in his manifestation – Isis, Mary];
And it is he who is my father and my lord.

It is he who is my force
[because I am his force, Shakti];
I am in the process of becoming
[the complete Divine is growing up in the Manifestation],
Yet I have borne a Man as lord
[the cosmic Purusha, the archetype of what humanity is to become].

The Mother herself gave us a glimpse of Mahashakti, the cosmic Mother, when she narrated one of her experiences on 3 February 1958. “The supramental world exists permanently and I am there permanently in a supramental body. I had proof of it this very day, when my earth-consciousness went there and remained there consciously between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. Now I know that what was lacking for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relation is an intermediate zone between the physical world as it is and the supramental world as it is …” She saw this intermediate zone as “a huge ship, as large as a city, which was a symbolic representation of the place where this work is going on.” On board of this ship were people “destined to become the future inhabitants of the supramental world. They were trained for their task and ready to go ashore.”

The Mother was in charge of the whole enterprise from the beginning and throughout the proceedings. “I had prepared all the groups myself. I stood on the ship at the head of the gangway, calling the groups one by one and sending them ashore.”

During this experience the Mother was suddenly interrupted and called back into her physical body by somebody in her room, and had at that instant a brief glimpse of herself. “My upper part, particularly the head, was not much more than a silhouette of which the contents were white with an orange fringe. The more down towards the feet, the more the colour looked like that of the people on the ship, that is to say orange; the more upwards, the more it was 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.”

And then there is “the Mother in the Yoga” who this time had not come as a Vibhuti (Hatshepsut, Jeanne d’Arc, Elisabeth I¹³) but as the Avatar. Many devotees have difficulty in understanding the three aspects of the Mother, as she said herself. Most of them expect her to be shiningly divine in all her earthly ways, twenty-four hours a day. And that she was, of course, but not like the temple Gods or the Gods in the Puranas. For she was here not only in a human body, she had also to take upon her or rather into her the full human condition in order to transform it, more specifically the human condition of the disciples. To be a real guru is a task of which the disciples usually have no idea, for it means taking their shortcomings, deformations and subconscious darknesses upon oneself. Being the Avatar of the age meant not only that; it meant also having to suffer and transform all that was low and animal-like below and preceding the human condition.

One reads from the pen of several authors that “the Mother was so human.” M.P. Pandit for instance wrote: “She was supremely divine but equally extremely human.” This is a misconception of the Mother which interprets her perceptible actions and her gracious relations with people according to the human ways. Indeed, she had to move among the disciples, the Ashram youth and the visitors; she had to answer all kinds of questions instantly; she had to make decisions constantly; and she had to respond immediately to requests, prayers and inner expressions of adoration and love, but also to attitudes of anger, malevolence and even hate. Yet it was she who said: “It has come to the point that even those who are here put on me feelings and reactions which are purely human.” In Savitri Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Even when she bent to meet earth’s intimacies / Her spirit kept the stature of the Gods.”

Some still consider the Mother to have been a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. It is therefore important to state that such was not the case. Sri Aurobindo had his amanuensis, Nirodbaran, write to Arindam Basu: “The Mother is not a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. She has had the same realization and experience as myself.” And he wrote in a letter: “What is known as Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.” ¹⁴ The equivalence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is evident when considering the following basic declarations. Sri Aurobindo: “The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play.” The Mother: “Without him I exist not, without me he is not manifest.” These pronouncements reflect the truth of the Divine essence and its manifestation. “There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realization; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.” ¹⁵

The Mother herself narrates, in Words of Long Ago, how in 1912 she had noted down “the whole program of what Sri Aurobindo has done and the method of doing the work on Earth. … I met Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1914, two years later, and I had already made the whole program.” That program reads as follows: “The general aim to be attained is the advent of a progressive universal harmony. The means for attaining this aim, in regard to the Earth, is the realization of human unity through the awakening in all and the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity, which is One. In other words: to create unity by founding the Kingdom of God which is within us all.

“The following is therefore the most useful work to be done: 1. For each individually, to be conscious in himself of the Divine Presence and to identify himself with it. 2. To individualize the states of being that till now were never conscious in man and thus to put the Earth in connection with one or more of the fountains of the universal force that are still sealed to it. 3. To speak again to the world the eternal word under a new form adapted to its present mentality. It will be the synthesis of all human knowledge. 4. Collectively, to establish an ideal society in a propitious spot for the flowering of the new race, the race of the Sons of God.” ¹⁶

She has worked out this program in intimate collaboration with Sri Aurobindo – once formulating their one divine personality as “mothersriaurobindo” in writing – and she has gone on working it out when alone in her avataric body. They had come to lay the foundations of the future and to build the archetype of the supramental species. This is a rather well documented real story, more fascinating than any myth, in which one sees the constant interaction of the three personalities of the Mother. In her conversations during the last years, as well as in the transformation of the cells of her physical body, it was unfortunately the human aspect that was most visible to human eyes.

Day by day and year after year Sri Aurobindo fought his occult and spiritual battles without anybody around him being aware of it; one only gets some glimpses of his “real Work” in his poems and in Savitri. The Mother has spoken about her battles in the subconscient, her physical sufferings and some of her victories. But who was aware that that Being sitting there in a simple armchair, on the first floor of the central Ashram building in Pondicherry, was no longer what the eyes perceived? Her back was bent and her visible body reduced to its elementary humanity; her invisible body within the visible one was glorious. On 24 March 1972 she said: “For the first time, early in the morning, I saw myself, my body. I don’t know whether it is a supramental body or – how to say this? – a body in transition. But I had a body altogether new, in the sense that it was sexless, it wasn’t a woman nor was it a man.¹⁷ It was very white, but this is because my skin is white, I suppose, I don’t know. It was very slim … It was pretty, truly a harmonious form. So, this was the first time. I didn’t know anything at all, I had no idea of what it would be like or whatever. And I saw that I was like that, I had become like that.”

The tears and the desperation at the time of the Mother’s passing were the human reaction resulting from the human perception of a life which had attempted and succeeded to incorporate, for the first time in the history of the Earth, the Supermind into Matter. She and Sri Aurobindo accomplished the impossible, so much beyond the human comprehension that their accomplishment today is a living reality to not more than a handful of followers. Her body – specially chosen and composed with care in her mother’s womb, and declared by Sri Aurobindo to be better than his for the initial attempt at the supramental transformation – her body lying there was not a cause for grief but the token of a triumph without precedent.

Coda

In Champaklal Speaks we read the following anecdote from the time the Mother still gave darshan on the balcony of the central Ashram building in the morning: “When Mother had her breakfast after ‘Balcony’, she said that she had come to know a very interesting thing. She had seen on the forehead of Mritunjoy’s sister (who had just passed away), the symbol of Sri Aurobindo. Mother said that she was very much surprised and had said to herself: ‘What? On this one? …’ Then she heard Sri Aurobindo saying: ‘Henceforth whoever who dies here [i.e. in the Ashram], I will put my seal upon him, and in any condition unconditional protection will be given.’”

We find this confirmed by the Mother herself in the Agenda conversation of 24 June 1961. Mritunjoy’s sister was psychologically in a terrible state, said the Mother: Elle n’avait pas la foi – she did not have the faith. This led the Mother to ask Sri Aurobindo what happens to people who do not have the faith when they are in the Ashram and die there. Sri Aurobindo said: “Watch.” The woman in question was in the act of leaving her body at that very moment, and the Mother “saw on her forehead the symbol of Sri Aurobindo in a kind of solid golden light … And because of the presence of that symbol the psychological condition did not have any importance any more, for nothing could touch her.” As we have seen, it is the psychological condition at the time of death which attracts the corresponding worlds and their beings. Then Sri Aurobindo said to the Mother: “All those who have lived in the Ashram and who die there have automatically the same protection, whatever their inner state.”

At the time Auroville did not yet exist. Would it be unreasonable to surmise that a similar recognition and protection might be given to those who had the faith and surrendered their lives to the same ideal in Auroville?