The Mother

10: The Laboratory

My children, you belong to a future that is being built, and it is here that it is being built.¹

– The Mother

The Foundations

Everything was in place for the decisive phase of the effort to bring the Supramental down into Matter, to transform Matter, to divinize the world. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had long known, from the early realizations in their yoga, that this apparently impossible step in evolution – evolution so much condensed and accelerated that it became revolution – was the Work they had come down to accomplish. Thanks to their intense sadhana they themselves were ready; now the representatives of humanity had come and joined them, and continued joining them. ‘We have all met in previous lives,’ said the Mother, ‘otherwise we would not have come together in this life. We are of one family and have worked through the ages for the victory of the Divine and its manifestation upon Earth.’ ² Not only the pioneers, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, had had to descend into Matter, but humanity had to follow. As Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘Since then the Sadhana as a whole has come down along with us into the physical consciousness. Many have followed – some immediately without sufficient preparation in the mind and vital, some holding on to the vital and mind and living still between the three, some totally but with a prepared mind and vital. The total descent into the physical is a very troublesome affair – it means a long and trying pressure of difficulties, for the physical is normally obscure, inert, impervious to the Light. It is a thing of habits, very largely a slave of the subconscient and its mechanical reactions … We would have preferred to do all the hard work ourselves there and call others down when an easier movement was established, but it did not prove possible.’ ³

A young disciple put the following question to Sri Aurobindo: ‘We believe that both 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 you and she have been on the Earth constantly since the creation. What were you doing during the previous lives?’ Sri Aurobindo gave the terse, unforgettable answer: ‘Carrying on the evolution.’ The young disciple, Nagin Doshi, replied: ‘I find it difficult to understand so concise a statement. Can’t you elaborate it?’ Sri Aurobindo answered: ‘That would mean writing the whole of human history. I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another.’ ⁴

The Mother from her side declared: ‘Since the beginning of the Earth, wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of Consciousness, I was there.’ ⁵ An Ashram girl, in later years, asked her four questions. ‘What is the right thing we should expect from You?’ Answer: ‘Everything.’ – ‘What have you been expecting from us and from humanity in general for the accomplishment of Your work upon Earth?’ Answer: ‘Nothing.’ – ‘From your long experience of over sixty years have You found that Your expectation from us and from humanity has been sufficiently fulfilled?’ Answer: ‘As I am expecting nothing I cannot answer this question.’ – ‘Does the success of Your work for us and for humanity depend in any way upon the fulfilment of Your expectation from us and from humanity?’ – Answer: ‘Happily not.’ ⁶

And Sri Aurobindo wrote to Nirodbaran, putting his and the Mother’s work in perspective: ‘The Divine also comes down into the cycle of rebirths, makes the great holocaust, endures shame and obloquy, torture and crucifixion, the burden of human nature, sex and passion and sorrow and suffering, manifests many births before he reveals the Avatar’ ⁷ – as was the case now.

Such were the leaders of the impossible enterprise. But if the Avatar is the Divine, why does he need to go through all these trials and tribulations? Is the Divine not omnipotent, and if so, can he not change anything he wants in the twinkling of an eye? To put the question like this is to forget that everything is the Divine – the world he has manifested and also the laws of this world, the evolutionary process of it. The Divine in the Avatar has to submit to the conditions imposed by Himself. Sri Aurobindo has insisted on this point again and again: ‘My sadhana is not a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and consciousness on Earth.’ And: ‘Certain conditions have been established for the game and so long as those conditions remain unchanged certain things are not done … The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them, but he has to change them first, not proceed, while maintaining the conditions to act, by a series of miracles.’ ⁸ Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Two-in-One, had come to change the conditions of the game.

Therefore they had to take the conditions upon themselves, into themselves. This is what all Avatars have had to do, be they Rama, Krishna, the Buddha or Christ. This, too, is why an Avatar, a direct embodiment of the Divine upon Earth, is indispensable in the process of evolution. Otherwise which element within a species would be sufficiently big, great, broad, large, to take the totality of the conditions upon itself? Or which element within a species could even conceive the need of a change, a transformation, a step ahead in the evolution? (The avataric intervention is not only valid for humanity; we find in the hoary knowledge of the Indian tradition also avatars effectuating the decisive change in the aqueous, amphibian and mammalian stages, and so on.)

Therefore their yoga had to be all-embracing, which is the reason why they called it ‘integral.’ ‘The thing to be done is as large as human life,’ Sri Aurobindo wrote, ‘and therefore the individuals who lead the way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers will consider nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope. For every part of human life has to be taken up by the spiritual – not only the intellectual, the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the vital, the physical; therefore for none of these things or the activities that spring from them will they have contempt or aversion.’ ⁹

‘[This Yoga] is new as compared with the old Yogas: 1. Because it aims not at a departure out of the world and life into Heaven or Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object … Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life. 2. Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realization for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement … 3. Because a method has been precognized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive … Our Yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.’ ¹⁰ Thus wrote Sri Aurobindo.

He also wrote something to be remembered by all traditionalists and fundamentalists: ‘The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past, but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future.’ ¹¹

As we have seen, the basic qualities to be developed in the Integral Yoga are aspiration, surrender, sincerity, and equality or equanimity. But ‘it is always the psychic being that is the real, though often the secret cause of man’s turning to the spiritual life and his greatest help in it,’ we read in The Synthesis of Yoga. ‘It is the very nature of the soul or the psychic being to turn towards the Divine Truth as the sunflower to the sun.’ ¹² The psychic being is ‘the true evolving individual in our nature.’ It is our central, true being that has taken the plunge into Matter for the joy of participating in the evolution and, in a supreme ecstasy of discovery, to become the divinity that it has been and will be in all eternity. Around the ‘divine spark’ the psychic being grows and develops, fed by its experiences in life after life. For this reason the realization of the psychic being was considered by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the first and fundamental of the three essential realizations of their yoga, the other two being the spiritual and the supramental.

During the working out of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, an important change had taken place. At the beginning he practised and recommended the technique of distancing the inner being from the outer, the Purusha from the Prakriti, according to the Sankhya system of yoga. Gradually, however, and especially after the final arrival of the Mother, he recommended more and more the complete turning of the whole soul and its personality towards the Mother. ‘All creation and transformation is the work of the Mother,’ ¹³ he would write. If, as somebody said, the Mother put Sri Aurobindo on a high pedestal, he from his side did the same with her. This important turn in the Integral Yoga was doubtlessly the result of his own experiences and explorations which we find described in Savitri, culminating in ‘The Book of the Divine Mother.’ To understand Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s venture, it is essential not to forget that she was an incarnation of the transcendent, cosmic and individual Divine Mother in a human body, just as he was an incarnation of the transcendent, cosmic and individual Ishwara in a human body. ‘Either she is that or she is not’ and he is that or he is not – and if they were and are not ‘that,’ the whole affair is a figment of the imagination, an elaborate fancy of the mind.

If she is ‘that,’ then she is the Mother of all souls, for the Divine Mother is evidently the mother of everything that is authentically divine or the Divine, and our souls are ‘a spark’, i.e. a portion of the Divine. This makes the centring of the Integral Yoga on the Mother a logical consequence not only because of the ‘division of tasks,’ which meant that the Mother was in front while Sri Aurobindo remained in retirement ‘to work things out,’ but also and essentially because she is the mother of all manifestation, and consequently of all changes in the manifestation, of all transformation. As the cosmic Mother she has brought this universe and all other possible universes into being; she sustains and guides the evolution as Mother Nature or Mother Earth.

Therefore Sri Aurobindo could write in a letter of 1929: ‘The relation which exists between the Mother here and X (and between the Mother and all who accept her), is a psychic and spiritual motherhood. It is a far greater relation than that of the physical mother to her child; it gives all that human motherhood can give, but in a much higher way, and it contains in itself infinitely more. It can therefore, because it is greater and more complete, take altogether the room of the physical relation and replace it both in the inward and the outward life. There is nothing here that can confuse anyone who has common sense and a straightforward intelligence. The physical fact cannot in the least stand in the way of the greater psychic and spiritual truth or prevent it from being true. X is perfectly right when he says that this is his true mother; for she has given him a new birth in an inner life and is creating him anew for a diviner existence.’ ¹⁴

‘By remaining psychically open to the Mother, all that is necessary for work or Sadhana develops progressively, that is one of the chief secrets, the central secret of the Sadhana,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. ‘The object is transformation, and the transformation can only be done by a force infinitely greater than your own; it can only be done by being truly like a child in the hands of the Divine Mother.’ And: ‘Everyone who is turned towards the Mother is doing my Yoga. It is a great mistake to suppose that one can “do” the Purna [Integral] Yoga – i.e. carry out and fulfil all sides of the Yoga by one’s own effort. No human being can do that. What one has to do is to put oneself in the Mother’s hands and open oneself to her by service, by Bhakti, by aspiration; then the Mother by her light and force works in him so that the Sadhana is done.’ ¹⁵

Establishing the Ashram

You take up the path only when you think that you cannot do otherwise.¹⁶

– Sri Aurobindo

When reading the stories of some aspirants who became disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, we have seen that, in every case, time was given to them to think over their decision, even when they knew from the very first moment of meeting Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that their destiny lay with them. ‘I never push anyone to take the path,’ said the Mother. ‘When you have started, you must go to the very end. Sometimes to people who come to me in a surge of enthusiasm I say: “Think it over, it is not an easy path. It will take time, it will need patience. You will need much endurance, much perseverance and courage and untiring goodwill. Look and see if you are capable of having all this, and then start. But once you have started, it is decided: there is no going back any more. You must go to the very end.”’ ¹⁷

When Nirodbaran, influenced by Dilip K. Roy and others, wrote to Sri Aurobindo that he was fishing for disciples, Sri Aurobindo reacted sharply: ‘Your image of fishery is quite out of place. I fish for no one; people are not hauled or called here, they come of themselves by the psychic instinct. Especially I don’t fish for big and famous or successful men. Such fellows may be mentally or vitally big, but they are usually quite contented with that kind of bigness and do not want spiritual things, or, if they do, their bigness stands in their way rather than helps them … The spirit cares not a damn for fame, success or bigness in those who come to it. People have a strange idea that Mother and I are eager to get people as disciples and if anyone goes away, it is a great blow, a terrible defeat, a dreadful catastrophe and cataclysm for us. Many even think that their being here is a great favour done to us for which we are not sufficiently grateful. All that is rubbish.’ ¹⁸

This being an Integral Yoga in which all aspects of life have to be tackled,⁹¹ the prescription of fixed rules and guidelines was not feasible. (This has led to much confusion concerning the Integral Yoga, and a repeated effort, in spite of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s integrality and openness, to write books about their ‘system’ of yoga.) The simple reason of this individuality of the way is that every human being is a unique and extremely complex whole. Not only does it consist of different layers and parts proper to it and to nobody else, it is also the outcome of a whole range of experiences through many lives, which may be momentarily hidden and forgotten, but which are the constituents of its soul and its adhara. All this is the material given to the human being to work out its yoga, the vibrations composing the individual, private field of it.

‘Each Sadhak has to be dealt with according to his nature, his capacities, his real needs (not his claims and desires) and according to what is best for his spiritual welfare,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. And also: ‘Each one has his own way of doing Sadhana and his own approach to the Divine and need not trouble himself about how the others do it.’ ¹⁹ ‘I believe in a certain amount of freedom,’ he said, ‘freedom to find out things for oneself in one’s own way, freedom to commit blunders even. Nature leads us through various errors and eccentricities. When Nature created the human being with all its possibilities for good or ill, she knew very well what she was about. Freedom for experiment in human life is a great thing. Without freedom to take risks and commit mistakes, there can be no progress.’ ²⁰ And in a letter he wrote: ‘What the Mother wants is for people to have their full chance for their souls, be the method short and swift or long and tortuous. Each she must treat according to his nature.’ ²¹

‘The long rope is needed,’ he would write to Nirodbaran. And the Mother said: ‘Everybody here represents an impossibility that has to be solved.’ ²² The transformation of the physical consciousness into a Divine Consciousness is in itself an impossibility. Each sadhak and sadhika, son and daughter of Mother Earth, contained that impossibility in his or her person. The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is intended to make the impossible possible. The collaborators in their yoga were therefore supposed to do the same, to begin with themselves.

One evening the Mother told her youthful audience in the playground: ‘At the beginning of my present earthly existence I came into contact with many people who said they had a great inner aspiration, an urge towards something that was deeper and truer, but that they were tied down, subjected, slaves to the crude necessity of earning their living, and that this weighed them down so much, took up so much of their time and energy that they could not engage in any other activity, inner or outer. I heard this very often, I saw many such poor people – I don’t mean poor from the financial point of view, but poor because they felt imprisoned in material necessity, narrow and numbing.’

‘I was very young then, and I always used to say to myself that, if ever I had the possibility to do so, I would try to create a small world – just quite a small one, but still … – a small world where people would be able to live without having to worry about food, lodging, clothing and the other imperative necessities of life, so as to see whether all the energies freed by this certainty of a secure material existence would turn spontaneously towards the divine life and the inner realization. Well, towards the middle of my life – I mean what is generally speaking the middle of a human life – the means were given to me and I could realize this, in other words create such conditions of life.’ ²³

As we have seen, Mirra’s first question when meeting Sri Aurobindo in 1914 was whether they would hew out the path in the jungle themselves first and then let the others follow, or whether all would go forward together. It proved to have been an important question, though it did not have to be answered by a voluntary decision: the circumstances, guided from Above, had brought the first collaborators to them as it were automatically, and all had started on the path together. ‘The whole thing [i.e. the Ashram] has taken birth, grown and developed as a living being by a movement of consciousness (Chit-Tapas) constantly maintained, increased and fortified. As the Conscious Force descends in matter and radiates, it seeks for fit instruments to express and manifest it.’ ²⁴ (Sri Aurobindo)

‘When people, born scattered over the world at great distances from one another, are driven by circumstances or by an inner urge to come and gather here,’ said the Mother, ‘it is almost always because they have met in some life or other – not all in the same life – and because their psychic being has felt that they belong to the same family. So they have taken an inner vow to continue to act together and collaborate. That is why, even though they are born far from one another, there is something which compels them to come together: it is the psychic being, the psychic consciousness that is behind. And only to the extent that the psychic consciousness is strong enough to order and organize life’s circumstances, that is, strong enough not to allow itself to be counteracted by exterior forces, by exterior life movements, can these people meet. This is a profound truth of reality. There are large families of beings who work for the same cause, who have been together before in various numbers, and who come down [into the world] in groups as it were.’ ²⁵

As such a ‘family of beings’ is formed by a higher Force in view of a particular aim, so it is constituted of elements which form a meaningful and effective whole in order to accomplish the aim. As the Mother said: ‘I have a sampling here [in the Ashram] of all possible [inner] attitudes.’ ²⁶ And to the youth of the Ashram she said: ‘From the occult point of view [you are] a selection. From the external point of view you might tell me that there are people in the world who are much superior to you and I won’t contradict it. But from the occult point of view [you are] a selection. One can say without being mistaken that most of the young people who are here have come because they have been promised [in a former life] that they would be here at the time of the Realization. They do not remember this.’ ²⁷

‘This is the place of the Realization,’ she averred. One can safely assume that from the very moment she was put in charge of the Ashram, she established and protected it in an occult way, like a yantra. We recall how she had experienced Sri Aurobindo’s atmosphere, or aura, ten nautical miles out at sea on the occasion of her second arrival in Pondicherry. Now her atmosphere was joined and one with that of Sri Aurobindo. The innumerable reports of the special feeling people had and still have when visiting the Sri Aurobindo Ashram originate, without their being aware of it, in this invisible, extended and very strong presence that enabled the ‘place of Realization’ to survive and develop. There are many stories in ancient Indian writings about attacks by Asuras, Rakshasas and Pishachas on the sacred fires and on the ashrams of Rishis and other holy men. Far from being nothing but imagination, they refer to an occult fact all spiritual endeavours have to reckon with – especially an endeavour undertaken to bring to an end the realm of these hostile beings. It is little realized that an important aspect of the sadhana of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother consisted in acquiring and exerting the power to protect the cradle of their New Creation in Matter and all who became involved in it. ‘The Ashram is a first form which our effort has taken, a field in which the preparatory work has to be done.’ ²⁸ (Sri Aurobindo)

The Mother and the Disciples

I am not eager to be the Guru of anyone. It is more spontaneously natural for me to be the universal Mother and to act in silence through love.²⁹

– The Mother

‘When someone is accepted, the Mother sends out something of herself to him and this is with him wherever he goes and is always in connection with her being here,’ ³⁰ wrote Sri Aurobindo. The Mother herself said: ‘With those whom I have accepted as disciples, to whom I have said “yes,” there is more than a tie, there is an emanation of me. This emanation warns me whenever it is necessary and tells me what is happening. Indeed I receive intimations constantly, but all are not recorded in my active memory, I would be flooded; the physical consciousness acts like a filter. Things are recorded in a subtle plane, they are there in a latent state, something like a piece of music that is recorded without being played. When I need to know with my physical consciousness, I make the contact with the subtle physical plane and the disc begins to turn. Then I see how things are, their development in time, the actual result.’ ³¹

What is an emanation of the Mother? Sri Aurobindo explained: ‘The Emanation is not a deputy, but the Mother herself. She is not bound to her body, but can put herself out (emanate) in any way she likes. What emanates suits itself to the nature of the personal relation she has with the Sadhak which is different with each, but that does not prevent it from being herself. Its presence with the Sadhak is not dependent on his consciousness of it. If everything were dependent on the surface consciousness of the Sadhak, there would be no possibility of the divine action anywhere; the human worm would remain the human worm and the human ass the human ass, for ever and ever. For if the Divine could not be there behind the veil, how would either ever become conscious of anything but their wormhood and asshood even throughout the ages?’ ³² This is obviously a quotation from his correspondence with Nirodbaran.⁹²

What one might call a second, more intimate level of the contact of the Mother with the disciples was her ‘self-identification’ with them. As we know, ‘identification’ was held by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to be the only possible way to real knowledge, as all other knowledge is ultimately based on sense data, which are unreliable, and on the mind, which cannot grasp a whole. ‘All [real] knowledge is knowledge by identification. That is, one must become that which one wants to know,’ ³³ said the Mother.

Would a still closer contact be possible, a third level? The answer seems to be in the affirmative, for the Mother said about the first disciples: ‘They were held as though in an egg-shell in my consciousness, so close, you know, that I could direct all their movements, both inner and outer, all the time. Everything was under complete control at every moment, night and day … It was altogether true that I did the sadhana for them all the time!’ ³⁴ Not only was she permanently present with them by means of an emanation of her, not only did she know everything that was going on in them by identification: she carried their inner personality literally within her and did their sadhana, which was new and difficult for them.

We find this confirmed by Sri Aurobindo: ‘The Mother by the very nature of her work had to identify herself with the Sadhaks, to support all their difficulties, to receive into herself all the poison in their nature, to take up besides all the difficulties of the universal Earth-Nature, including the possibility of death and disease in order to fight them out. If she had not done that, not a single Sadhak would have been able to practise this Yoga. The Divine has to put on humanity in order that the human being may rise to the Divine. It is a simple truth, but nobody in the Ashram seems to be able to understand that the Divine can do that and yet remain different from them – can still remain the Divine.’ ³⁵ In another letter he wrote: ‘The Mother does the sadhana in each sadhak – only it is conditioned by their zeal and receptivity.’ ³⁶

This intimate nearness of the sadhaks with the Mother resulted in the Mother receiving all their calls for spiritual and occult help and assistance, for the sadhaks had been advised to live as if she was always present with them – which she was indeed – and to invoke her presence in case of any difficulty. Often such calls stopped the Mother in the middle of a sentence or a gesture, and this kind of work, together with her activities ‘elsewhere,’ kept her busy day and night. Sri Aurobindo had to answer several questions on this subject. One of his answers was: ‘All knowledge is available in her universal self, but she brings forward only what is needed to be brought forward so that the working is done … Mother can see what people are doing by images received by her in the subtle state which corresponds to sleep or concentration or by images or intimations received in the ordinary state; but much even of what comes to her automatically like that is unnecessary, and to be always receiving everything would be intolerably troublesome as it would keep the consciousness occupied with a million trivialities; so that does not happen. What is more important is to know their inner condition and it is this chiefly which comes to her.’ ³⁷

Still, if so desired, she could play back ‘the disque,’ the recording in her universal consciousness, and know the facts which were relevant to be known, even if trivial. ‘You don’t expect her mind to be a factual encyclopaedia of all that is happening on all the planes and in all the universes? Or even on this earth, e.g. what Lloyd George⁹³ had for dinner yesterday?’ asked Sri Aurobindo. ‘Questions of consciousness, of course, she always knows even with her outmost physical mind. Material facts she can know but is not bound to do it. What would be true to say, is that she can know if she concentrates or if her attention is called to it and she decides to know. I often know from her what has happened before it is reported by anyone. But she does not care to do that on a general scale.’ ³⁸

The Mother once said with a smile that time after time sadhaks who wanted to hide something from her came to her in the subtle physical telling her themselves what they were not going to tell her! And she spoke the following words, so limpid in their simplicity: ‘Do not try to appear virtuous. See how much you are united, one, with everything that is anti-divine. Take your share of the burden, accept to be impure and false, and thus you will be able to take up the Shadow and offer it. And in the measure that you are capable of taking it and offering it, in that measure things will change.’ ³⁹

Her intimate identity with the disciples also meant that she had to swallow all their ‘human, all too human’ reactions. Certainly, the real sadhaks were souls who had descended to participate in the Work and were impelled or called to the place of the participation, ‘the place of the Realization.’ But they were also very human. Wasn’t it the humanity in them that had to be transformed – something that had become possible after Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had transformed their own humanity? Sri Aurobindo wrote pertinently to Nirodbaran: ‘I have borne every 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.’ And: ‘You write as if I never had any doubt or any difficulty I have had worse than any human mind can think of. It is not because I have ignored difficulties, but because I have seen them more clearly, experienced them on a larger scale than anyone living now or before me that, having faced and measured them, I am sure of the results of my work.’ ⁴⁰ The same went for the Mother.

Now she had to receive all the dark impulses of humanity in the sadhaks she was helping to change – and through them of the hostile forces that, threatened in their existence, used the sadhaks to attack her. You must have practised a yogic discipline to know how, as soon as you take it up, everything contrary and adverse to it in yourself and around you will lift its head. The powers that rule the world do not like being questioned, contradicted or threatened; and as they are vicious by nature, their response is always inimical, often crushingly so. Whoever wants to do a yoga of transformation has to take up his cross, in a very real sense. The Mother was bearing the crosses, voluntarily, of all those who followed in her and Sri Aurobindo’s footsteps and whom she had taken inside her consciousness.

We have no direct report of the difficulties in the sadhaks and sadhikas the Mother had to face. They were something confidential between her and her children – and she had known very well what was awaiting her when she took up the burden of the task. But sometimes we find an indirect glimpse of what was like a constant turmoil under an ostensibly placid surface. ‘There are Sadhaks who at every step revolt, oppose the Mother, contradict her will, criticize her decisions,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo; and in another letter: ‘I have seen with what constant leniency, tolerant patience and kindness she has met the huge mass of indiscipline, disobedience, self-assertion, revolt that has surrounded her.’ (Sri Aurobindo was not given to hyperbole.) And he wrote about ‘the outward-mindedness and physical-mindedness that dominates the atmosphere.’ ⁴¹

One of the problems that cropped up on many occasions was that of the physical nearness to the Mother. There were people whom she saw more often than others because of material necessity or for other reasons. Sri Aurobindo had to intervene on numerous occasions.⁹⁴ ‘The Sadhaks always imagine in their ignorance that when the Mother sees more of one person than of another, it is because of personal preference and that she is giving more love and help to that person. That is altogether a mistake. Physical closeness and contact can be a severe ordeal for the Sadhak; it may raise the vital demands, claims, jealousies, etc., to a high pitch; it may, on the other hand, leave him satisfied with an outer relation without making any serious effort for the inner union; or it becomes for him something mechanical, because ordinary and familiar, and for an inner purpose quite ineffective – these things are not only possible but have happened in many cases. The Mother knows that and her arrangements in this matter are therefore dictated by quite other reasons than those which are attributed to her.’ ⁴²

Sometimes Sri Aurobindo was forced to put matters bluntly: ‘Your physical mind cannot understand what the Mother does, its values and standards and ideas are not hers.’ And: ‘If people want to understand why the Mother does things, let them get into the same inner consciousness from which she sees and acts.’ Or: ‘The Mother does not act by the mind, so to judge her action with the mind is futile.’ ⁴³

Building a World in Miniature
All creation and transformation is the work of the Mother.⁴⁴

– Sri Aurobindo

‘During the years immediately after she had taken full charge of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram,’ writes Iyengar, ‘the Mother’s resources – spiritual, human, material – had to be canalized simultaneously in multiple directions. With the steady increase in the number of sadhaks, there was a persistent need for renting more houses, reconditioning, fitting and furnishing them, and attending to their proper maintenance … There were, besides, the permitted visitors. There was also the special influx of visitors at the time of the darshans … The problem of accommodating and feeding them all admitted of no haphazard solution …’

‘All this meant the organization of a number of services: the Building Service, under Chandulal the engineer; the Atelier (Workshop) under Pavitra; the Garden Service; the Bakery and the Dining Room; the Domestic Service, a sort of ‘Home Department,’ to deal with the growing number of paid servants; ‘Prosperity,’ to arrange for the supply of everyday requirements of the sadhaks; the Furniture Service; and so on. Almost everything in the outside world had to be in the Ashram as well – but with a difference. The Ashram was verily a miniature world within the larger world that was Pondicherry, or India; it was also a world in a process of change or transformation.’ ⁴⁵

It is interesting to follow the development of the Ashram in the correspondence of the Mother with her son André. Two months after the Siddhi Day, i.e. 16 January 1927, she wrote to him: ‘Our community is growing more and more; we are nearly thirty (not counting those who are scattered all over India); and I have become responsible for all this; I am at the centre of the organization, on the material as well as the spiritual side, and you can easily imagine what this means.’ ⁴⁶

One month later, on 16 February 1927: ‘I think I told you about our five houses, four of which are joined in a single square block surrounded on all sides by streets and containing many buildings with courtyards and gardens. [This was what became the present central Ashram building.] We have just bought, repaired and made comfortable one of these houses [Library House] and then, very recently, we have settled there, Sri Aurobindo and myself, as well as five of the closest disciples.’

On 25 August 1929 the Mother sent a few photographs of the Ashram which ‘at present consists of seventeen houses inhabited by eighty-five or ninety people (the number varies as people come and go).’ On 23 August 1930, she wrote: ‘The Ashram is becoming a more and more interesting institution. We have acquired our twenty-first house; the number of paid workers of the Ashram (labourers and servants) has reached sixty or sixty-five and the number of Ashram members (Sri Aurobindo’s disciples living in Pondicherry) varies between eighty-five and a hundred. Five cars, twelve bicycles, four sewing machines, a dozen typewriters, many garages, an automobile repair workshop, an electrical service, a building service, sewing departments (European and Indian tailors, embroideresses, etc.), a library and reading room containing several thousand volumes, a photographic service and general stores containing a wide variety of goods, nearly all imported from France, large gardens for flowers, vegetables and fruits, a dairy, a bakery, etc., etc. – you can see that this is no small affair. And as I am taking care of all this, I can truly say that I am busy.’ In a letter of 10 February 1933, she wrote to André: ‘I would like to show you our establishment. It has just acquired four houses which I bought in my name to simplify the legal technicalities; but it goes without saying that I do not own them. I think I have already explained the situation to you. The Ashram with all its real estate and moveable property belongs to Sri Aurobindo, it is his money that enables me to meet the almost formidable expenses that it entails … If my name appears sometimes (bank accounts, purchase of houses, of automobiles, etc.) it is, as I already told you, a matter of convenience for the papers and signatures, since I manage everything, but not because I really own them. You will readily understand why I an telling you all this; you can bear it in mind just in case.’ For André was her legal heir.

There are several accounts of the Mother’s daily occupations, the schedule of which changed through the years according to circumstances and necessities. Sri Aurobindo gives a general summary of them: ‘The Mother’s whole day from early morning and a large part of the night also has always been devoted to occupations connected with the Sadhana – not her own but that of the Sadhaks – Pranam, blessings, meditation and receiving the Sadhaks on the staircase and elsewhere, sometimes for two hours at a time, and listening to what they have to say, questions about Sadhana, results of their work or their matters, complaints, disputes, quarrels, all kinds of conferences about this or that to be decided and done – there is no end to the list; for the rest she had to attend to their letters, to reports about the material work of the Ashram and all its many departments, correspondence and all sorts of things connected with the contacts with the outside world, including often serious trouble and difficulties and the settlement of matters of great importance.’ ⁴⁷

In one of her letters to André, the Mother writes: ‘It is true that for a long time I have not slept in the usual sense of the word. That is to say, at no time do I fall back into the unconsciousness which is the sign of ordinary sleep. But I give my body the rest it needs, that is, two or three hours of lying down in an absolute immobility, but in which the whole being, mental, psychic, vital and physical, enters into a complete rest made of perfect peace, absolute silence and total immobility, while the consciousness remains completely awake; or else I enter into an internal activity which constitutes the occult work and which, needless to say, is also perfectly conscious. So I can say, in all truth, that I never lose consciousness throughout the twenty-four hours which thus form an unbroken sequence, and that I no longer experience ordinary sleep, while yet giving my body the rest it needs.’ ⁴⁸

To understand the following communal activities, it should be recalled that the Mother had made the Ashram into a kind of occult force-field especially created to bring about a progress in the general sadhana, which was intended to lead to a physical transformation. At the centre of that force-field were Sri Aurobindo and herself, and the various elements constituting it were the sadhaks, the ‘samples’ of humanity present there to participate in the Great Work, the alchemic transformation of Matter. (This simile was used more than once by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother themselves. It has a profound meaning if one understands what alchemy really was about.) The Ashram activities or ceremonies may appear odd to the person who does not understand their occult rationale. Moreover, the word ‘ceremony’ in this case has no relation to religious ritual, which is a pre-established formal activity according to a fixed code; here it was a living, varying happening, kept up as long as it was useful and changed or dropped altogether when the need for it was no longer there.

For several years the first event of the day was a meeting of the Ashramites with the Mother called pranam, which means ‘bowing, prostration, obeisance.’ The sadhaks passed before the Mother one by one, offered her flowers, touched her feet, received the Mother’s look, and received from her one or several flowers in return. ‘When I give flowers,’ she once explained, ‘it is an answer to the aspiration coming from the very depth of your being … I give you flowers so that you may develop the Divine qualities they symbolize. And they can directly transmit into the psychic all that they contain, pure, unalloyed. They possess a very subtle and very deep power and influence … I can transmit a state of consciousness more easily to a flower than to a human being.’ ⁴⁹

What became a problem was the sadhaks’ interpretation of the Mother’s look. They were unable to interpret it correctly, but tried to do it all the same, with perturbing consequences. The number of letters written to Sri Aurobindo about the Mother’s look during Pranam are legion. The fundamental reason for their misinterpretations was that each sadhak read his own feelings, fears or expectations into her eyes. As the Mother said: ‘From many instances I have come to know that my face is like a mirror showing to each one the image of his own internal condition.’ ⁵⁰ She also wrote: ‘You ought to drop altogether and once for all this idea that I get displeased – it sounds to me so strange! If I would get thus displeased in the presence of human weakness, I would certainly not be fit to do the work I am doing, and my coming upon Earth would have no meaning.’ ⁵¹ And she wrote to a sadhika: ‘I am not looking at defects but at possibilities.’ ⁵²

Still, the complaints about the Mother’s smiling or not smiling, or her ‘stern,’ ‘accusing’ or ‘reproachful’ looks continued, in Nirodbaran’s correspondence too, although Sri Aurobindo had written to him: ‘All this about the Mother’s smile and her gravity is simply a trick of the vital. Very often I notice people talk of the Mother’s being grave, stern, displeased, angry at Pranam when there has been nothing of the kind – they may have attributed to her something created by their own vital imagination. Apart from that the Mother’s smiling or not smiling has nothing to do with the sadhak’s merits or demerits, [spiritual] fitness or unfitness – it is not deliberately done as a reward or punishment.’ ‘The Mother smiles on all without regard to these things. When she does not smile, it is because she is either in trance or absorbed, or concentrated on something within the sadhak that needs her attention – something that has to be done for him or brought down or looked at. It does not mean that there is anything bad or wrong in him. I have told this a hundred times to any number of sadhaks – but in many the vital does not want to accept that because it would lose its main source of grievance, revolt, abhiman [demanding or assertive pride], desire to go away or give up the Yoga, things which are very precious to it. The very fact that it has these results and leads to nothing but these darknesses ought to be enough to show you that this imagination about Mother’s not smiling as a sign of absence of her grace or love is a device and suggestion of the Adversary.’ ⁵³

Ashram life was very strict in the beginning, but the Mother knew human nature well enough to see to it that it had also its relaxed, more colourful moments. She even played games with the disciples, but always in view of the progress of the yoga and according to basic spiritual and occult truths and realities. The special aspect of their personality, their anshan, had its importance, and so had their names and their positions in relation to herself and the others.

For example, she made them choose, after a brief concentration, a text from a book ‘at random.’ The answer they got from the book, preferably a spiritual one, had a direct bearing on their personality or their inner state at the time of ‘drawing’ it. Or she made sentences using flowers, having the disciples guess the meaning of the sentence, for she had given a meaning to most of the flowers growing or known in South India. ‘How do you give a significance to a flower?’ somebody asked. The Mother answered: ‘By entering into contact with the nature of the flower, its inner truth; then one knows what it represents.’ ⁵⁴ The significance she gave generally agreed with the one discovered in olden times and written down in the sacred texts of the Hindus, or in the texts of Ayurveda, the ancient medicinal art.

Then there were the birthdays of the sadhaks and sadhikas, which were considered special occasions by the Mother. ‘It is truly a special day in one’s life,’ the Mother said to a young sadhak. ‘It is one of those days in the year when the Supreme descends into us – or when we are face to face with the Eternal – one of those days when our soul comes in contact with the Eternal and, if we remain a little conscious, we can feel His Presence within us. If we make a little effort on this day, we accomplish the work of many lives as in a lightning flash … This day is truly an opportunity in life. One is so open and so receptive that one can assimilate all that is given. I can do so many things [on this day], that is why it is important.’ ⁵⁵ The birthday, in other words, is a potential day of Grace.

And there were also the ‘darshan days,’ the highlights in the cycle of the Ashram year. Darshan means ‘seeing,’ and by implication the self-revelation of the Deity to the devotee. The three darshan days in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram were the only days on which the disciples could see Sri Aurobindo for a short while. On 15 August, his birthday, 24 November, the ‘Siddhi Day,’ and 21 February, the Mother’s birthday, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother sat together in a small, specially arranged room in his apartment, and the disciples who had received permission to attend came in front of them one at a time, stood still for a moment, put their head on the feet of Sri Aurobindo if they felt like doing so, and received the blessings of both of them.

‘In those early years, a day before the Darshan a list of the names of those participating in the Darshan used to be put up on a board. One and a half minutes were allotted to each person. The names of those permanently residing in the Ashram would come first in the list. Half an hour before the time given people would reach the meditation hall and wait for their turn. A copy of the list would be with the Master. From time to time he would look up the names of those coming in.’ ⁵⁶ (Narayan Prasad)

The Mother not only met the Ashramites several times a day in the central Ashram building, she also went to see them from time to time in their room, and also regularly visited the departments and looked at any work that was in progress. The following is a report of such a visit. ‘Once I got the privilege to meet an elderly Sadhak who was in charge of building-construction at the Ashram in those days. He told me the following incident. “When I was hesitating to take the responsibility to construct the seaside wall of the Park Guest House [one of the Ashram guest houses] the Mother gave the contract to some company from Madras. They tried for two years, and one night disappeared when they could not succeed because of the constant interruption by the sea water. Then the Mother called me and said: ‘This evening I am coming to the Park [Guest House]. You will meet me there.’ She came and asked me how I could finish the construction. In a simple way I told Her that if there was no water I could complete it within a week. On this She said: ‘Take me to the spot and show me up to where you want the water to remain.’ I went into the sea up to knee-level. She concentrated for a moment and said in a definite tone: ‘Bring your easy chair tomorrow and put it here. I give you a week’s time to erect the foundation above the water level, and so long as your chair will be on this spot the water will not come.’ And to the surprise of all of us, that was how it happened. After a week I came to inform Her and offer Her what had been achieved by Her grace and with full success.”’ ⁵⁷ The wall is still very much there.

The Soup Distribution, also called the Soup Ceremony, took place in the evening. There are several narrations of it, all agreeing with the following recollection recorded in a talk by K.D. Sethna to the Ashram students. ‘It was a very important function every evening. It impressed one like a snatch of the Ancient Mysteries. The atmosphere was as in some secret temple of Egyptian and Greek times. In subdued light, people would sit on mats in the hall which is now the Reception Room. At about eight the Mother would come down from the Prosperity Room upstairs and take her seat near the shaded lamp. Champaklal brought down a big cauldron of hot soup and placed it in front of her on a stool. Then the Mother would go into a trance. In the course of her trance her arms would stretch forward over the soup-cauldron. For a minute they would remain there as if she were pouring something of her subtle-physical spirituality into the liquid … Then the Mother would open her eyes and Champaklal would remove the cauldron to one side and give her a big spoon. Each of us in turn would go and kneel before her and offer her our cup … Sometimes in the middle of the pouring she would again be lost in meditation and we had to kneel there even for three or four minutes. Suddenly she would open her eyes and smile in a little shy or embarrassed way. After filling the cup she would take a sip from it.’ ⁵⁸

As Sri Aurobindo explained: ‘The soup [ceremony] was instituted in order to establish a means by which the Sadhak might receive something from the Mother by an interchange in the material consciousness.’ ⁵⁹ This peculiar ceremony was in fact an act of communion with the Mother’s being intended to enable or accelerate the transformation of the physical being of the disciples. ‘Have you not heard of divine Communion in this manner?’ asked the Mother referring to the Christian transubstantiation when somebody inquired about the meaning of the ceremony. ‘My flesh and blood are to go to you and form your flesh and blood, but instead of actually giving my flesh and blood to you, I sip the soup, put my force into it and give it to be drunk by you.’ And Iyengar, who mentions this quote in his biography of the Mother, adds: ‘It was as though the body and spirit of the Mother permeated the very cells and tissues of the sadhaks’ being.’ ⁶⁰ Soup may be a more unusual substance than a wafer made of wheat, though both substances are unquestionably Matter. The fact of transference of the Mother’s spiritualized substance to that of the disciples was a supreme act of spiritual occultism, and it was new because the Integral Yoga and its aim of physical transformation were new. Narayan Prasad wrote, however: ‘It is a pity that we could not assimilate the effect.’ ⁶¹

The Mother’s body was not an ordinary human body anymore (and neither was Sri Aurobindo’s). We have already seen how refined and sensitive it had become after her occult schooling in Tlemcen and the sequence of experiences described in her Prayers and Meditations. ‘Behind the physical body [of the Mother] there are many forms and powers and personalities of the Mother,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo; and: ‘She has many personalities and the body is plastic enough to express something of each when it comes forward.’ ⁶² Many disciples and visitors have told how aspects of the Mother’s physical appearance suddenly became godlike, or of seeing light or lights around her or through her. K.D. Sethna, though a devoted sadhak, was certainly not an uncritical ignoramus, as proven by his many-sided and well-reasoned published works. In one of his talks he narrates the following: ‘Once there was a meditation and, as was my wont, I kept opening my eyes and looking around. After the meditation had progressed for some minutes they fell on the Mother. Well, I have never seen the Mother as I saw her then. She was no longer human. Her whole body appeared to have become magnified and there was a light pervading her and the face was of a Goddess. I can only say that it was the face of Maheshwari.’ ⁶³

Why mention all this? Because it is related to the serious physical crisis the Mother went through in 1931. From 18 October to 24 November she had to withdraw and all her activities were suspended. On the latter date she wrote the last but one of her Prayers and Meditations, which she noted down rarely at that time. ‘O my Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down into the unfathomable depths of Matter,’ it went. ‘I have touched with my finger the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity … I know we are unworthy, I know the world is not ready. But I cry to Thee with an absolute faith in Thy Grace and I know that Thy Grace will save.’ ⁶⁴

What had happened? One may presume that because of her continuous contact with the unregenerated physical substance of the disciples, the Mother was pulled down ‘into the unfathomable depths of Matter’ which are present in all of us. Her ‘illness’ was the outer expression of the battles she had to fight there. Sri Aurobindo wrote with concern to Nirodbaran on this subject: ‘The Mother has had a very severe attack and she must absolutely husband her forces in view of the strain the 24th November [darshan day] will mean for her. It is quite out of the question for her to begin seeing everybody and receiving them meanwhile – a single morning of that kind of thing would exhaust her altogether. You must remember that for her a physical contact of this kind with others is not a mere social or domestic meeting with a few superficial movements which make no great difference one way or the other. It means for her an interchange, a pouring out of her forces and a receiving of things good, bad and mixed from them which often involves a great labour of adjustment and elimination and in many cases, though not in all, a severe strain on the body.’ ⁶⁵

A week later he again wrote to Nirodbaran: ‘I have not yet said anything about the Mother’s illness because to do so would have needed a long consideration of what those who are at the centre of a work like this have to be, what they have to take upon themselves of human or terrestrial nature and its limitations and how much they have to bear of the difficulties of transformation …’ All the same, many months later he clarified some of this. ‘The Mother by the very nature of her work had to identify herself with the Sadhaks, to support all their difficulties, to receive into herself all the poison in their nature, to take up besides all the difficulties of the universal Earth-Nature, including the possibility of death and disease in order to fight them out.’ ⁶⁶

This is a de facto illustration of what ‘those who are at the centre of a work like this’ have to endure, and how concretely the Mother carried the disciples inside her and did their sadhana.

As the Mother herself explained: ‘It is their mental and vital formation of me that they love, it is not myself. More and more am I faced with this fact. Everyone has made for himself an image of me in conformity with his needs and desires, and it is with this image that he is in contact, it is through this that he receives what few universal forces and still less supramental forces succeed in filtering through all these formations. Unfortunately these people cling to my physical presence, otherwise I could withdraw into my inner solitude and, from there, do my work quietly and freely; but this physical presence is for them a symbol and that is why they cling to it, for, in fact, they have very little contact with what my body truly is, and with the formidable accumulation of conscious energy it represents.’ ⁶⁷

When the Mother had recovered somewhat, her early morning ‘Balcony Darshans’ started. Our old acquaintance, vociferous and stubborn Mridu, was involved in the coming about of these daily darshans. Prabhakar writes: ‘Mridu-di took it into her head that no morsel of food would pass into her mouth until she had the Darshan of the Mother. And so it happened, an event of great import to all of us. The Mother consented to appear on the “Old Balcony” – so Mridu could see the Mother from her window. Hundreds of others [every morning] were the beneficiaries. It would almost seem the Gods await some excuse to bless us only if we would keep still and maybe lower our heads and raise our eyes. Maybe Mridu-di was the excuse.’ ⁶⁸

The Mother gave us some insight into what happened when she stood there on that balcony at the back of the main Ashram building. ‘Every morning, at the balcony, after establishing a conscious contact with each of those who are present, I identify myself with the Supreme Lord and merge myself completely in Him. Then my body, completely passive, is nothing but a channel through which the Lord passes freely His forces and pours on all His Light, His Consciousness and His Joy, according to each one’s receptivity.’ ⁶⁹ And to the Ashram youth she would explain: ‘When I come out on the Balcony I make a special concentration. You notice that I look at everybody, don’t you. I look from one to the other, I look, I see every one. I know all those who are there and why they are there, and I give each one exactly what he needs. I see his condition and give him what is needed … That’s the only reason why I come out, because otherwise I carry you in my consciousness. I carry you in my consciousness always without seeing you, I do the needful. But this [during the Balcony Darshan] is a moment when I can do it by touching the physical directly, you see; otherwise it is through the mind that it acts, the mind or the vital. But here I touch the physical directly through the sight, through the eye contact. That’s what I do, each time.’ ⁷⁰

Meanwhile, Sri Aurobindo continued his yoga in his apartment. Day after day, year after year he was battling there for the future of the world, to obtain the transformation of Matter which would radically and permanently change this ‘vale of tears’ into ‘a world divine.’ He had acquired such a mastery over his body that nobody could even suspect what was going on or what he was doing. ‘All that was visible to our naked eye was that he sat silently in his bed [after the accident with his leg], afterwards in the capacious armchair, with his eyes wide open just as any other person would,’ reminisces Nirodbaran about the years during which he was Sri Aurobindo’s assistant. ‘Only he passed hours and hours thus, changing his position at times and making himself comfortable; the eyes moving a little, and though usually gazing at the wall in front, never fixed tratak-like at any particular point. Sometimes the face would beam with a bright smile without any apparent reason, much to our amusement, as a child smiles in sleep. Only it was a waking sleep, for as we passed across the room, there was a dim recognition of our shadow-like movements. Occasionally he would look towards the door. That was when he heard some sound which might indicate the Mother’s coming. When he wanted something, his voice seemed to come from a distant cave; rarely did we find him plunged within, with his eyes closed.’ ⁷¹

Sri Aurobindo has left us some glimpses of what was really going on in some of his poems and in his epic Savitri. A few stanzas from that chantingly simple and yet so profound poem ‘A God’s Labour,’ written in 1935, must here suffice.

I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river’s song,
A home for the deathless fire …

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 …
A voice cried, ‘Go where none have gone!

Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou 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.

I left the surface gods of mind
And life’s unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body’s alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.

I have delved through the dumb Earth’s dreadful heart
And heard her black mass’ bell.

I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell …⁷²

Here poetry is not an intricate art of expression but the simplest, most concise way of recording occult and spiritual truth and fact – ‘occult’ because invisible to common mortals, but real and concrete for the ones involved in its working. When one realizes this, one also understands Sri Aurobindo’s saying: ‘My life was not on the surface for men to see’ – and neither was the Mother’s of course.⁹⁵

Iyengar describes the years 1931-38 as ‘the Golden Age of yogic correspondence in the Ashram.’ ‘We could write to Sri Aurobindo any time up to 11 p.m. when the Ashram gate closed,’ reminisces Narayan Prasad. ‘Letters were generally addressed to the Mother and left on a tray in a corner of the staircase near the door on the first floor. We received replies early next morning … Heaps of letters, at times up to a hundred, received his attention every night.’ ⁷³ ‘Champaklal would take the tray to Sri Aurobindo’s room, where Sri Aurobindo read and discussed with the Mother the replies to be given … Generally, it was Sri Aurobindo who wrote the replies, though occasionally the Mother might add a comment of her own or her blessings … In the morning it was Nolini’s responsibility to distribute the letters and notebooks to the sadhaks, and in course of time he became known as the Divine’s postman.’ ⁷⁴

Sri Aurobindo spent eight hours per day, sometimes more, on correspondence with the disciples. ‘When people write four letters a day in a small hand closely running to some 10 pages without a gap anywhere and one gets 20 letters in the afternoon and forty at night (of course not all like that, but still!) it becomes a little too too,’ he wrote to Nirodbaran. Three years later, when Nirodbaran asked if some poems he had sent for evaluation were hibernating, Sri Aurobindo answered: ‘My dear sir, if you saw me nowadays with my nose to paper from afternoon to morning, deciphering, deciphering, writing, writing, writing, even the rocky heart of a disciple would be touched and you would not talk about typescripts and hibernation. I have given up (for the present at least) the attempt to minimize the cataract of correspondence.’ ⁷⁵

It is obvious that Sri Aurobindo would not have undertaken such an epistolary labour if there was no profound reason for it. ‘If I have given importance to the correspondence,’ he explained, ‘it is because it was an effective instrument towards my central purpose – there are a number of Sadhaks whom it has helped to awaken from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience, others whom it has carried from a small round of experience to a flood of realizations, some who have been absolutely hopeless for years who have undergone a conversion and entered from darkness into an opening of light … I think we can say that for the majority of those who wrote there has been a real progress. No doubt also it was not the correspondence in itself but the Force that was increasing its pressure on the physical nature which was able to do all this, but a canalization was needed, and this served the purpose.’ ⁷⁶

It is because of this incredible effort of Sri Aurobindo’s that we have so much information about the Integral Yoga, its problems and the way to tackle them. Nirodbaran’s Correspondence With Sri Aurobindo alone comprises twelve hundred printed pages; Sri Aurobindo wrote about four thousand letters to Dilip K. Roy; his letters to Nagin Doshi have been printed in three volumes; K.D. Sethna has published much of his own ample correspondence; and the three volumes of Letters on Yoga (a selection) in Sri Aurobindo’s Centenary Edition number altogether 1,774 pages.

Sri Aurobindo’s reference to the positive effects of his correspondence allows us to understand that there were disciples in the Ashram who made substantial headway in their yoga. ‘The quality of the sadhaks is so low?’ he asked in answer to a remark by Nirodbaran. ‘I should say there is a considerable amount of ability and capacity in the Ashram. Only, the standard demanded is higher than outside even in spiritual matters. There are half a dozen people here perhaps who live in the Brahman consciousness – outside they would make a big noise and be considered as great Yogis – here their condition is not known and in the [Integral] Yoga it is regarded not as siddhi but only as a beginning.’ ⁷⁷

On the same subject Sri Aurobindo wrote to him: ‘If you mean the Vedantic realization, several [in the Ashram] have had it. Bhakti realization also. If I were to publish the letters on sadhana experiences that have come to me, people would marvel and think that the Ashram was packed full of great Yogis! Those who know something about Yoga would not mind about the dark periods, eclipses, hostile attacks, despairings, falls, for they know that these things happen to Yogis. Even the failures would have become Gurus, if I had allowed it, with circles of Shishyas [disciples]!’ ⁷⁸⁹⁶

It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that Sri Aurobindo remained secluded in his apartment only writing letter after letter, having his meals, and doing his spiritual work sitting in his big armchair. He was after all the Mahayogi, the Great Yogi. He wrote about himself: ‘In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action … It was this force which, as soon as he had attained it, he used, at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces.’ ⁷⁹ In the next chapter we will give some illustrations of this assertion.

Time and again Sri Aurobindo complained confidentially to Nirodbaran that the correspondence prevented him from doing ‘his real work.’ His real work was, of course, the bringing down of the Supramental into Matter, upon Earth. The reader will recall that after the experiment of the overmental creation, the whole Yoga had descended into Matter and that the work there was like ‘digging the earth.’ Seven years later, on 4 April 1935, Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘I am too busy handling the confounded difficulties of Matter,’ and the next day: ‘Just now I am fighting all day and all night.’ Reading A God’s Labour may give added meaning to these prosaic words. One should also bear in mind that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were involved in this work.

On 11 April 1935 Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘I presume it [the Supramental Consciousness] will come anyhow, but it is badly delayed because, if I am all the time occupied with dramas, hysterics, tragic-comic correspondence (quarrels, chronicles, lamentations), how can I have time for this – the only real work, the only thing needful?’ On 19 April, he wrote: ‘Never has there been such an uprush of mud and brimstone as during the past few months … It was not inevitable – if the sadhaks had been a less neurotic company, it could have been done quietly. As it is there is the Revolt of the Subconscient.’ And on 14 May: ‘It [the Supramental] was coming down before 24 November but afterwards all the damned mud arose and it stopped.’

Then, suddenly, on 16 August, a victory bulletin arrived from the avataric front: ‘[I] am travelling forward like a flash of lightning, that is to say zigzag but fairly fast. Now I have got the hang of the whole hanged thing – like a very Einstein I have got the mathematical formula of the whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure.’ This important milestone in his Yoga was reached the day before, on 15 August, his birthday. Soon he will declare, in a humorous, playful way, that he had got hold of ‘the tail of the whale,’ meaning the Supramental. And on 25 November he wrote: ‘My formula is working out rapidly, but it has nothing to do with any Darshan descent. It is my private and particular descent, if you like, and that’s enough for me at present. The tail of the supermind is descending, descending, descending. It is only the tail at present, but where the tail can pass, the rest will follow.’ ⁸⁰ It was a gigantic step forward, and everything Sri Aurobindo wrote on the subject leads us to suppose that he had the goal of the yoga in sight. But the Adversary was not to be underestimated.

One has to look back at the contemporary circumstances in Pondicherry to realize the extent of the Mother’s effort in building up the Ashram. She was behind every move, every initiative, every material realization, and she decided about the smallest details. And all this without a regular financial income, without stable resources. ‘It has been an arduous and trying work for the Mother and myself to keep up this Ashram with its ever-increasing number,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1937, when there were more than 150 inmates, ‘to make both ends meet and at times to prevent deficit budgets and their results …’ ⁸¹

Until now the Mother had used, adapted and expanded the existing buildings and facilities, which even today are outstanding examples of the care spent on their upkeep. But in her was always a dream – or a memory seeking its permanent concretization? – of constructing, materially, visibly, a kernel of the new world she and Sri Aurobindo were trying to bring down on the Earth. In 1937, the first step towards a much larger undertaking, which would ultimately lead to Auroville (and the Aurovilles to come), took shape on a plot of land near the central Ashram building. Thanks to a grant from the Nizam of Hyderabad, obtained through his diwan Hyder Ali – who was a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother – she started building Golconde.

The chief architect was Antonin Raymond, a Czech and student of Frank Lloyd Wright, who had accompanied his teacher to Japan in 1923 to help rebuild Tokyo after a disastrous earthquake. There he had become acquainted with Pavitra, then still Philippe Saint-Hilaire, who now recommended him to the Mother. The architects assisting him were František Sammer, also a Czech, and George Nakashima, an American Japanese. The Ashram engineer was Chandulal, and Udar, a recent Anglo-Indian disciple formerly named Lawrence Pinto, was put in charge of the manufacturing of the tools, accessories and fittings, nearly all of which were custom-made.

Sri Aurobindo writes: ‘In Golconde Mother has worked out her own idea through Raymond, Sammer and others. First, Mother believes in beauty as a part of spirituality and divine living; secondly, she believes that physical things have the Divine Consciousness underlying them as much as living things; and thirdly that they have an individuality of their own and ought to be properly treated, used in the right way, not misused or improperly handled or hurt or neglected so that they perish soon and lose their full beauty or value; she feels the consciousness in them and is so much in sympathy with them that what in other hands may be spoilt or wasted in a short time lasts with her for years or decades. It is on this basis that she planned Golconde.’ ⁸²

About his work on Golconde, Antonin Raymond has written: ‘We lived as in a dream. No time, no money were stipulated in the contract. There was no contract. Here indeed was an ideal state of existence in which the purpose of all activity was clearly a spiritual one. The purpose, as a matter of fact, of the dormitory [later to be used as a guest house] was not primarily the housing of the disciples; it was the creating of an activity, the materialization of an idea, by which the disciples might learn, might experience, might develop, through contact with the erection of a fine building. Time and money were of secondary value. This situation was quite other than the usual one of [the architect] being pinched between a client and a contractor. Here everything was done to free the architect completely so that he might give himself entirely to his art and science. And yet, simultaneously, on the job perfect order was maintained … Under the invisible guidance of the leaders of the Ashram, whose presence was always felt, to whom daily all was reported, whose concern was the spiritual growth of each member of the community, I achieved the best architecture of my career.’ ⁸³

The Second World War erupted and caused the construction of Golconde to take ten years, but the work went on even in the most difficult circumstances and in spite of price increases tenfold and more. The result is still there for all to see. But as people not familiar with the facts often suppose that statements concerning matters such as these are most often bloated by hype, the following statement about Golconde made at the Solar World Congress, held in Perth, Australia, in 1983, may be apropos: ‘In one of the most remote parts of India, one of the most advanced buildings in the world was constructed under the most demanding circumstances concerning material and craftsmen. This reinforced concrete structure was completed primarily by unskilled volunteers with the most uncertain supplies, and with virtually every fitting custom-fabricated. Yet this handsome building has world stature, both architecturally and in its bio-climatic response to a tropical climate, 13°N of the equator.’ ⁸⁴