Preparing for the Miraculous

8: Sri Aurobindo’s Descent into Death

(This talk was given in Savitri Bhavan on 4 December 2010, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo’s passing.)

“The time is very serious” ²

In June 1946, less than a year after the unconditional surrender of Japan, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nuremberg [where in those days German top Nazis stood trial] have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history. Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended.” If one has the faintest notion of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s decisive interventions in the Second World War, the fiercest and most deadly of all wars, and of its significance in human history, one has to be moved by these words. (The phrase “where is Hitler now?” may well be the softest worded victory bulletin ever.) But then, now that the war was won, why the somber talk about other engulfing blacknesses which nobody else seemed to see? Yet the threat apparently increased, for in April of the following year Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Things are bad, are growing worse and may at any time grow worst or worse than worst if that is possible.” ³

At that point, when Sri Aurobindo was seventy-five years old and after a lifetime of revolutionary avataric Yoga, something at the root of things was blocking the Work. Sri Aurobindo stated forcefully: “I have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco – a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the external nature.” ⁴ The old fiasco was the effort of the previous Avatars to change human nature and make spiritual progress in the material evolution possible. In his Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo had already written: “Not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone. But it is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce forward labour of mankind, tormented and oppressed by the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants, cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and the word of the prophet.”

It is said that Sri Aurobindo never explicitly stated that he was an Avatar. To expect such a statement would demand that Sri Aurobindo broke with his inborn and spiritual discretion. The quotations in the previous paragraph, however, make it abundantly clear, as do many other passages in his writings and acts in his workings, that he considered his yogic effort to be that of an Avatar, and even the most decisive of all avataric missions. On the other hand, where does one ever find a sign of the slightest awareness that in 1947 the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, on which the future of humanity depended, was threatened with annulment?

Nirodbaran, in those days with Champaklal the closest assistant of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, wrote in his priceless Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo: “We observed a noticeable change in his mood. Our talks … diminished. He was no longer expansive; humour, wit, sally, fun, all had shrivelled up and we were in front of a temple deity, impassive, aloof and indifferent. However much we tried to draw him out from his impregnable sanctum of silence, we were answered with a monosyllabic ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or at most a faint smile. … One day taking courage in both hands, Dr. Satyendra asked: ‘Why are you so serious, Sir?’ Sri Aurobindo answered gravely: ‘The time is very serious.’ The answer left us mystified.” ⁵

The Decision

Things must have grown “worse than worst,” for a drastic act became imperative. Of Sri Aurobindo’s decision to perform this act nobody knew at the time. It is only afterwards that some sayings and facts could be seen as indicative of what was to happen. So for instance the following words of the Mother spoken to Dr. Sanyal on the very morning of Sri Aurobindo’s passing: “About a year ago, while I was discussing things, I remarked that I felt like leaving this body of mine. Sri Aurobindo spoke out in a very firm tone: ‘No, this can never be. If necessary for this transformation, I might go. You will have to fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation.’ … After that – this took place early in 1950 – he gradually let himself fall ill. For he knew quite well that, should he say ‘I must go’, I would not have obeyed him and I would have gone. For according to the way I felt, he was much more indispensable than I. But he saw the matter from the other side. And he knew that I had the power to leave my body at will. So he didn’t say a thing – he didn’t say a thing right to the very last minute.” ⁶

Later the Mother would concede: “It is absolutely undeniable that my body has that capacity [of endurance] infinitely more than the body of Sri Aurobindo.” This reminds us of her former saying that she had consciously chosen her parents not only for their mental but also for their physical qualities. She also said later: “I told him that, as to me, it would be absolutely without regret and without difficulty that I would leave my body to go and join him … And he answered: ‘Your body is indispensable for the Work. Without your body the Work cannot be done.’ This is something that was said in 1949, which means a little more than a year before he left.” ⁷

Then there is the amazing avowal of the Mother that she does not seem to have known that Sri Aurobindo, step by invisible step, let death approach. She has confirmed this more than once herself. For instance: “You see, he had decided to go. But he didn’t want me to know that he was doing it deliberately. He knew that if for a single moment I knew he was doing it deliberately, I would have reacted with such violence that he would not have been able to leave. And he did this: he bore it all as if it was some unconsciousness, an ordinary illness, simply to keep me from knowing – and he left at the very moment he had to leave.” Sri Aurobindo had created a blind spot, as it were, in the perception of her who was the Mother of the worlds and had access to all knowledge everywhere if she so desired! Once she said: “I did not believe till the last moment that Sri Aurobindo was going to leave his body.” And K.D. Sethna commented: “This is correct. On December 3rd [Sri Aurobindo passed away on the 5th] the Mother told me that Sri Aurobindo would soon read my articles. Later, when I asked her why she had let me go to Bombay on December 3rd, she said that Sri Aurobindo’s going had not been decided yet.” ⁸

Initially, except for some minor symptoms of kidney trouble, there were no signs of serious health problems whatever. Besides, Sri Aurobindo continued his (outwardly) daily routine as if nothing was the matter. He still wanted to write on modern poetry and a search was on to provide him with volumes of such poetry to read. (He appreciated Mallarmé, Whitman, Yeats and Eliot.) He also dictated, at the Mother’s request, the important series of articles published under the title The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth.

In these articles he expounded the state of affairs at that time of his Work, of his Yoga of Transformation, explaining the realization of the “Mind of Light,” and the necessity of a range of intermediary beings between the present human and the future supramental species. These transitional species or subspecies in the making he gave no name, calling them in general “a new humanity.” The Mother, however, did give them a name in French, “surhommes,” literally meaning “overmen.” She said: “This was certainly what he expected of us: what he conceived of as the overman, who must be the intermediate being between humanity as it is and the supramental being created in the supramental way … It is quite obvious that intermediary beings are necessary, and that it is these intermediary beings who must find the means to create beings of the Supermind. And there is no doubt that, when Sri Aurobindo wrote this, he was convinced that this is what we have to do.” ⁹

Somewhere in October, solicited from many sides, Sri Aurobindo said to Nirodbaran: “My main work is being delayed.” For, as Nirodbaran wrote: “Many interruptions came in the way. The preliminary work of reading old versions, selections, etc. [of Sri Aurobindo’s own writings being prepared for publication], took up much time before we actually could start [i.e. continue working on Savitri].” Still the urgency in Sri Aurobindo’s remark startled Nirodbaran, as he had never seen Sri Aurobindo hurry for anything. “When the last revision was made and the Cantos were wound up, I said: ‘It is finished now.’ An impersonal smile of satisfaction greeted me, and he said: ‘Ah, is it finished?’ How well I remember that flicker of a smile which all of us craved for so long! ‘What is left now?’ was his next query. ‘The Book of Death and the Epilogue’. ‘Oh, that? We shall see about that later on.’ That ‘later on’ never came and was not meant to come.” ¹⁰ For the subject matter of Savitri were the experiences of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Death had not yet been experienced. And the Epilogue, the happy ending which in this case will be a life of fulfilment on Earth, lies somewhere in the future. Thus reached Savitri, in the words of Nirodbaran, its “incomplete completion.”

The “worse than worst” situation did not subside. The uraemic symptoms increased, for the moment of the great master act of the Avatar had come. After all the work Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had done, after all the burdens and the suffering, the black passages and the dawns of light, something had to be done which is unknown of in the history of humankind. As the Mother would say later: “For the Will of the Supreme to be expressed as it were in contradiction with the totality of the laws of the Manifestation, that happens just at the last moment – at the ultimate limit of possibility.” ¹¹

The Descent into Death

Sri Aurobindo’s “death” was interpreted by most as the natural result of illness and/or advanced age.

In 1924 Sri Aurobindo had said that there were three causes that [then] could still bring about his death: 1. violent surprise or accident; 2. the action of old age; 3. his own choice, when finding it not possible to accomplish his [avataric] endeavour this time, i.e. establishing the supramental Consciousness on Earth, or if something would prove him that it was impossible. What happened in 1950, however, was a fourth possibility not foreseeable in 1924: that he would have to descend into death voluntarily, having in the meantime acquired the powers to do so, in order to make that his endeavour would not end in failure.

Who realized in December 1950 – and even now – that at that time, in that place on Earth, a mystery without precedence was enacted on which humanity’s future depended?

This “tactical” move was possible because the Avatar was present on Earth in his/her physical completeness, i.e. in a male/female body. If the Avatar had been present in only one body, the death of this body would have cancelled out any possibility of accomplishing the present mission successfully. (This illustrates how the planning and the completion of the mission of an Avatar is decided upon and pre-exists outside the dimensions, outside “the theatre” of the material world.)

Sri Aurobindo let himself gradually become more and more ill. In the last few days before his departure the Mother said: “He is losing interest in himself.” The faithful Nirodbaran, gathering his courage in both hands, ventured at last to ask him: “Are you not using your force to cure yourself?” “No!” came the stunning reply. … Then, Nirodbaran writes, we asked: “Why not? How is the disease going to be cured otherwise?” “Can’t explain. You won’t understand,” was the curt reply. On this Nirodbaran reflects: “The big mystery as to his strange attitude and non-intervention still remains.” ¹² None understood, then as now, that Sri Aurobindo descended voluntarily into death to do something in the Inconscient which only the Avatar could execute, in order to prevent that his mission on Earth, in the short or the long term, would come to nothing.

According to the testimony of Nirodbaran, a medical doctor, Sri Aurobindo was never unconscious in the course of his “illness.” “It was during this period [on the very last day] that he often came out of the trance and each time leaned forward, hugged and kissed Champaklal who was sitting by the side of his bed. Champaklal also hugged him in return. A wonderful sight it was, though so strangely unlike Sri Aurobindo who had rarely called us even by our names in these twelve years.” ¹³ The Avatar took leave of humanity in one of its purest representatives.

At 11 p.m. on the 4th of December the Mother helped Sri Aurobindo take a drink. At midnight she came again into his room. This time he opened his eyes and the two looked at each other in a steady gaze. “We were the silent spectators of that crucial scene,” writes Nirodbaran.

At 1 a.m. on the 5th of December the Mother came again. Her face was calm, there was no trace of emotion. Sri Aurobindo was indrawn. The Mother asked Dr. Sanyal in a quiet tone: “What do you think? May I retire for an hour? … Call me when the time comes.” On this Nirodbaran reflects: “It may appear strange to our human mind that the Mother could leave Sri Aurobindo at this critical moment.” Yet, the Mother’s clarification is quite different: “As long as I was in the room he could not leave his body. I used all my power to prevent him from departing. So there was a terrible tension in him: the inner will to leave and then this kind of thing [i.e. the Mother] that was holding him there, like that, in his body – because I knew that he was alive … He had to give a sign so that I would go into my room, supposedly to rest (which I didn’t do). And as soon as I had gone out of the room, he left.” He drew up his arms and put them on his chest, one overlapping the other. “Then they called me back immediately.” ¹⁴

Soon afterwards the main personalities in the Ashram were informed and the Ashram photographers called before the endless queue would form to pay their last homage. Two of the photographers’ testimonies are worth comparing. The first one recalls: “I remember clearly that Mother was sitting in the middle room beside Sri Aurobindo’s, where the tiger skins and the Mother’s paintings are displayed. She looked very dejected. She was stooping with a hand on her forehead, and did not notice me as I entered.”

The second photographer, on the contrary, recalls: “When I entered Sri Aurobindo’s abode through the door at the top of the staircase leading from the Meditation Hall, I instantly became petrified by the sight of the Mother sitting on a chair in the central room – the room in which her paintings adorn the walls and the tiger skins decorate the divan. She was seated between the two doors on the southern side of the narrow room with her eyes shut, lost in deep meditation. I have never seen her like that again. To me she looked like the personification of Mother Kali herself, so powerful was the appearance. I stood before her for some time.”

The Mind of Light

On the last day before Sri Aurobindo left his body the Mother said: “Each time I enter the room, I see him pulling down the Supramental Light.” And later: “All the supramental force he had accumulated in his body, he passed on to me and I received it.” ¹⁵

In his memoir A Call from Pondicherry, Dr. Prabhat Sanyal wrote: “She stood there, near the feet of Sri Aurobindo, her hair had been undressed and was flowing about her shoulders.” ¹⁶ Once again, to know what really happened in those climactic hours, we have to turn to the Mother herself. “He had accumulated in his body much supramental Force, and as soon as he left … You see, he was lying on his bed, I stood by his side, and in a way altogether concrete – concrete with such a strong sensation as to make one think that it could be seen – all this supramental Force which was in him passed from his body into mine. And I felt the friction of the passage. It was extraordinary. It was an extraordinary experience. … When he left, there was a whole part – the most material part of the ‘descent’ [the formation in Sri Aurobindo] of the supramental body up to the [physical] mental – which visibly came out of his body, like this [gesture], and entered into mine. And this was so concrete that I felt the friction of the forces passing through the pores of the skin. It was as concrete as if it had been material.” ¹⁷

Here it should be recalled that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had divided the tasks for the accomplishment of their mission. Sri Aurobindo, secluded in his apartment, took upon him the Yoga of bringing down the Supermind into his physical body. As his physical body, like any other human body, was a formation of the terrestrial evolution, this also meant that he was bringing down the Supermind in the very stuff of the Earth.

The Mother had taken upon her the building up of the Ashram, materially as well as spiritually, and the yoga of the sadhaks and sadhikas who, as she once said, were enclosed in her consciousness “as in an egg.” Yet every new realization in his Yoga Sri Aurobindo transmitted to her, and everything that went on in the Ashram the Mother submitted to Sri Aurobindo. This “division of the tasks” is essential to understand what happened between them at the time of Sri Aurobindo’s departure.

“As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he has called the Mind of Light got realized in me,” the Mother said afterwards to K.D. Sethna. “The Supermind had descended long ago – very long ago – into the mind and even into the vital; it was working in the physical also but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. The physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light.” ¹⁸

Sri Aurobindo’s leaving the body meant a traumatic change for the Mother in ways we cannot even try to imagine. Which human can have an idea of the relationship between the embodied Ishwara and Shakti? “There are no words which can describe the collapse that has been for it,” said the Mother later, and by “it” she meant her body. It had been un coup de massue, a sledgehammer blow … “When Sri Aurobindo had left, I saw that I had to cut the connection with the psychic being, otherwise I would have gone with him. And as I had promised him that I would stay on and do the work, I had to do that: I literally closed the door on the psychic.” ¹⁹ It would take almost two decades before she could venture, in 1969, to open that door again.

What Was Threatening
the Accomplishment of the Avataric Mission?

In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo wrote: “There can be no artificial escape from this problem [evil, suffering and death] which has always troubled humanity and from which it has found no satisfying issue. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil with its sweet and bitter fruits is secretly rooted in the very nature of the Inconscience from which our being has emerged and on which it still stands as a nether soil and basis of our physical existence … There can be no final solution until we have turned our inconscience into the greater consciousness, made the truth of self and spirit our life-basis and transformed our ignorance into a higher knowledge; a complete and radical transformation of our nature is the only true solution.” ²⁰ Only Supermind would do. But the bringing down of the Supermind into the body of the Earth, the complete and radical transformation of our nature, was precisely what the hostile forces were trying to prevent at any cost, for it would mean the end of their dominion over the Earth and humanity.

One reads of many masters in several yogic disciplines who possessed the power to lay down their body at will. The difference with Sri Aurobindo’s master act was that he went into death in full consciousness and while keeping the vital and mental sheaths which, let us not forget it, were supramentally transformed. And this he did not in search of escape or dissolution, but to intervene and effect a change somewhere at the bottom of existence, in what he called “the Inconscient,” worse than hell. “He was not compelled to leave his body,” said the Mother. “He chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond the reach of human mentality.”

But why? The Mother’s “Pourquoi?” resounds in so many of her conversations. “He has left before telling us what he was doing. I am absolutely busy making a path in a virgin forest – more than a virgin forest.” ²¹ (Perhaps she was not allowed to know because she – her body – had to do the job. It may not have been permitted to have a knowledge beyond its effort.) “He told me: ‘The world is not ready.’” It looks as if “the world” here means the whole of the manifestation at this point of its evolution. For that was the burden the Avatar had to take upon him, which needed to be transformed in its foundations, and which kept resisting him.

In his marvellous poem “A God’s Labour” – which might also be called “The Avatar’s Song” or “The Ballad of the Avatar” – Sri Aurobindo had described exactly this problem.

A voice cried, “Go where none has gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till you reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate.”

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God’s riddle sleep
On the Dragon’s outspread wings.

True, “the keyless gate,” “the grey Sphinx,” and “the Dragon’s outspread wings,” all concrete elements of his experience, are little more than poetic metaphors to us. But “God’s riddle sleep” is clearly the dark Inconscient, and that was what Sri Aurobindo descended into for an operation which only the Avatar, the very Divine, could perform. We find something similar in his sonnet “The Inconscient Foundation:”

My soul regards its veiled subconscient base,
All the dead obstinate symbols of the past,

The hereditary moulds, the stamps of race
Are upheld to sight, the old imprints effaced.

In a downpour of supernal light it reads
The black Inconscient’s enigmatic script –
Recorded in a hundred shadowy screeds
An inert world’s obscure enormous drift …

There slept the tables of the Ignorance,
There the dumb dragon edicts of her sway,

The scriptures of Necessity and Chance. …

In Savitri we find Sri Aurobindo again confronting “the black inertia of our base” and seeking for ‘the secret key of Nature’s change:”

The ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign …
Incapable of motion or of force,
In Matter’s blank denial goaled and blind,
Pinned to the black inertia of our base
He treasured between his hands his flickering soul …

Into the abysmal secrecy he came
Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,
And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor
Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts
And built the world not knowing what it built. …

He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.

Then …
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of the Ignorance …

He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable …

Matter and Spirit mingled and were one.²²

As the Mother said: “All goes well as long as there is not the will of transformation. It is the protest against the will of transformation. … It is the introduction of something totally new into Matter, and therefore the body protests. … There is a whole part of Nature which is collaborating, but not in this. Distinctly, clearly, it wells up from the subconscient and the inconscient. … It’s something that wells up from below. … All the time it comes up from below.” ²³ This was the reason why Sri Aurobindo had to descend into death. That he was successful, that he found the key to the impossible and cured the source of darkness at the bottom of things, we know from the fact that hardly six years later the Supermind manifested in the Earth atmosphere, and a new world was born.

Triumph

There is no known person who at the time of Sri Aurobindo’s passing had the slightest inkling of what was happening. “You wouldn’t understand,” he had said. We have seen how, during that extraordinary episode, the behaviour of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother also was time and again misinterpreted in a too human way – misinterpretations which, written down by the eye-witnesses, would become part of the standard story built around the event. If we know a little better now, if we have at least some ground for a more meaningful interpretation, it is because the Mother in later years has reminisced about those days on several occasions.

The result of the lack of understanding was, in many, doubt and desperation. What use was it to continue dedicating one’s life to a supramental transformation and the conquest of death when the Guru, or Master, or Avatar and bringer of the new vision had succumbed himself to death? Therefore the Mother gave the following message on the 14th of December: “To grieve is an insult to Sri Aurobindo, who is here with us, conscious and alive.”

At least there had been signs that Sri Aurobindo had not left in the ordinary way. Nirodbaran wrote in his Twelve Years: “I also saw, to my utter wonder and delight, that the entire body was suffused with a golden crimson hue, so fresh, so magnificent. It seemed to have lifted my pall of gloom and I felt light and happy without knowing why. … Pointing to the Light the Mother said: ‘If this Supramental Light remains we shall keep the body in a glass case.’ It did not remain and on the fifth day, on the 9th of December in the evening, the body was laid in a vault.” ²⁴

And K.D. Sethna, many years afterwards, would write in Mother India, the Ashram periodical of which he was the editor: “I marked that there was nothing like what people usually speak of when they stand before someone dead. They refer to the expression of peace on the face. I saw the very opposite. Certainly not any stamp of agitation but the unmoving source of a sovereign dynamism. A tremendous power seemed to emanate from the face and figure. Wave after wave of it filled the room and surrounded me. I perceived an overwhelming air of Conquest … From the flaring nostrils to the way in which the legs were stretched out, slightly apart, there was a natural aspect of domination. Spontaneously, effortlessly an assertion of empire could be experienced. Here was a silence, transcendent of all creation – an ultimate absolute of the ineffable – from which originally had flowed forth a creative energy and which now was sending out a power of re-creating all life. Such was the mysterious death of Sri Aurobindo.” ²⁵ The poet that was K.D. Sethna had seen better than most of his less intuitive co-disciples.

“What we are doing will be a beginning, not a completion,” Sri Aurobindo had written in a letter.²⁶ He, as no one else, knew how difficult his envisioned transformation of Homo sapiens actually was, beginning with the bringing down of the Supermind into the body of the Earth and continuing with the transformation of the human body, as it were petrified in its evolutionary structures. The manifestation of the Supermind had been felt to be imminent in 1938-39, a possibility which may be reckoned as the main reason of the fierce counteraction by the hostile forces: the Second World War. At that point Sri Aurobindo was not even confronted by the possibility of the “fiasco” which threatened his and the Mother’s mission. This may give us at least some idea of the dimensions of the whole enterprise and of the greatness of the two Protagonists who stood up, Sri Aurobindo in 1950 and the Mother in the following years, against the assembled Powers still holding the entire manifestation in the palm of their hand.

Now we are further again. Sri Aurobindo’s intervention at the root of things has enabled the manifestation of the Supermind in 1956. His words about the capability of the Mother’s body have proved true, and in the following years she has gradually realized the archetype of the supramental body by means of her physical body. By these two realizations the appearance of the next step in the evolution, the supramental being, has been brought nearer centuries if not millennia. Ours, humans of goodwill and aspiration, is the task of the intermediaries between the two species, of building the bridge over an enormous evolutionary gap.

In this we are not alone. If we can tune ourselves to them, we are helped by four powerful aids: the Supramental Force, active since 1956; the Consciousness of the Overman, active since 1 January 1969 ²⁷; Sri Aurobindo’s presence; and the Mother’s presence. For Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s Work of building the New World cannot have been limited to their years of incarnation in a physical body. Helpers of the progress of the Earth and humanity during the whole of the past, they are undoubtedly there to help them now, after their initiation of the new evolution in its critical present phase.