The Mother

11: The Mother’s War

I affirm again to you most strongly that this [the Second World War] is the Mother’s war. You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future.¹

– Sri Aurobindo (29 July 1942)

The Attack on Sri Aurobindo

The Ashram was flooded with visitors all looking expectantly forward to the 24 November darshan. The three annual darshan days were always festive occasions, for they were the only times when the disciples and devotees could see Sri Aurobindo up close. Many have reported their impressions. We quote here the experience of Rhoda Le Cocq, an American philosopher, as described in her book The Radical Thinkers: ‘As a Westerner, the idea of merely passing by these two [Sri Aurobindo and the Mother] with nothing being said, had struck me as a bit ridiculous. I was still unfamiliar with the Hindu idea that such a silent meeting could afford an intensely spiritual impetus. I watched as I came up in line, and I noted that the procedure was to stand quietly before the two of them for a few silent moments, then to move on at a gesture of Sri Aurobindo. What happened next was completely unexpected.

‘As I stepped into a radius of about four feet, there was the sensation of moving into some kind of a force field. Intuitively, I knew it was the force of Love, but not what ordinary humans usually mean by the term. These two were “geared straight up”; they were not paying attention to me as ordinary parents might have done; yet, this unattachment seemed just the thing that healed. Suddenly, I loved them both, as spiritual “parents.”

‘Then all thought ceased, I was perfectly aware of where I was; it was not “hypnotism” as one Stanford [University] friend later suggested. It was simply that during those few minutes my mind became utterly still. It seemed that I stood there a very long, an uncounted time, for there was no time. Only many years later did I describe this experience as my having experienced the Timeless in Time. When there at darshan, there was not the least doubt in my mind that I had met two people who had experienced what they claimed. They were Gnostic Beings. They had realized this new consciousness which Sri Aurobindo called the Supramental.’ ²

In those November days of 1938, the focus of all attention in the Ashram was the newly arrived person who was also American: Margaret Wilson, the daughter of former President Woodrow Wilson. She had read books by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and started corresponding with them. Sri Aurobindo had duly warned her before she undertook the long journey from the United States: ‘We [i.e. he and the Mother] are doubtful about the advisability of your coming here next winter. Your illness [she had arthritis and other complaints] and the fact that you suffer from the heat stand in the way.’ ³ Nonetheless, Miss Wilson had persisted in her intentions and had recently arrived. Sri Aurobindo, at her request, had given her the Sanskrit name Nishta.

During the night before the darshan of 24 November all was quiet, for everybody had gone to rest in order to be fit the following morning. As on every night, a lamp remained lit in the apartment of Sri Aurobindo. As on every night, one could hear the breakers of the nearby sea roar and hissingly splash onto the beach. Then the unexpected happened. The narrator is Nirodbaran.⁴

‘Breaking the profound silence the emergency bell rang from the Mother’s room. Purani [who was always on night-duty] rushed up and found the Mother at the top of the staircase. She said, “Sri Aurobindo has fallen down. Go and fetch Dr. Manilal.” Fortunately, he had come for the Darshan from Gujarat. Soon he arrived and saw that Sri Aurobindo was lying on the floor in his bedroom. On the way to the bathroom he had stumbled over a tiger skin.’ Devotees had presented him with several panther and tiger skins. He had struck the tiger skull with his right knee. When failing to get up, he must have called the Mother in an occult way. The Mother had rung the emergency bell. ‘When we other doctors came up, we saw Dr. Manilal examining Sri Aurobindo’s injured leg. The Mother was sitting by Sri Aurobindo’s side, fanning him gently. I could not believe what I saw … But I soon regained my composure and helped the doctor in the examination … Finally the doctor pronounced that there was a fracture of the thighbone.’

The Superintendent of Cuddalore hospital was called, and so were an orthopaedic surgeon and a radiologist from Madras. They arrived late at night, and their verdict was ‘an impacted fracture of the right femur above the knee’; the two fragments were firmly locked together. ‘Both the specialist and the radiologist took a serious view of it,’ writes Nirodbaran, then the Ashram doctor. Sri Aurobindo’s limb was put into traction.

The impact of the news of Sri Aurobindo’s accident on the disciples and devotees was shattering. Not only were they deeply distressed because they had to forgo Sri Aurobindo’s darshan – a smiling Mother gave darshan alone in the evening – they were also flabbergasted at the fact that somebody like Sri Aurobindo could meet with an accident. With hindsight, we can reconstruct the circumstances as follows.

Every darshan was a dangerous affair for Sri Aurobindo and still more for the Mother. The Mother once said that a Titan had been born together with her whose only aim was to counteract everything she did, and if possible to eliminate her. In his correspondence with Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo wrote in February 1934: ‘There is usually a descent [at darshan time], but there is also a great opposition to the descent at these times.’ ⁵ In the first volume of the Talks With Sri Aurobindo we read: ‘The hostile forces have tried many times to prevent things like the Darshan, but I have succeeded in warding off all their attacks. At the time the accident to my leg happened, I was more occupied with guarding the Mother and I forgot about myself. I didn’t think the hostiles would attack me. That was my mistake.’ ⁶ And when somebody asked him: ‘But how could the accident happen?’ he answered: ‘It was because I was unguarded and something forced its way into the subconscient. There is a stage in yogic advance when the least negligence will not do.’ ⁷

The hostile forces are, as we know, real and conscious beings. They exist in a double hierarchy. There is, on the one hand, the hierarchy descending from the Asuras (mental and higher vital) downwards via the Rakshasas (lower vital) to the Pishachas (lowest vital); there are, on the other hand, the hierarchies descending in uncountable strata of beings cascading, as it were, from the main forces in each of the three categories. The lower categories are always with us; they amuse themselves with us and cause the numerous difficulties which make our lives miserable. To the higher ones we ordinary human beings are hardly important. The atmosphere around Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was mostly free of the presence of the lower and lowest hostile beings. The attack on Sri Aurobindo must have been executed by or at the instigation of one of the very great dark gentlemen, the Lord of Falsehood himself. Why?

We have seen that Sri Aurobindo had been making considerable headway in bringing down the Supramental since 1935, the time he discovered his ‘Einsteinian formula.’ Several accounts mention that he and the Mother expected the manifestation of the Supramental into the Earth-atmosphere in 1938. K.D. Sethna testifies, writing about himself in the third person: ‘[The Mother] had told him that she was expecting something great and decisive in the course of the year [^1938] and that he should be back from Bombay, where he had to go for family matters, before the event. The sadhak’s reference [in his diary] ran: “This is the year in which, I believe, the Truth-Consciousness may make up its mind, or rather its Supermind, to descend. I was expecting a wire from the Mother in May. She had mentioned approximately the middle of the year and had promised to inform me at once.’ ⁸

The ‘tremendous resistance’ had become visible in the black and brown forces of Fascism and Nazism in Europe. If the reader wonders what these forces had to do with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s evolutionary effort, the answer is that they had everything to do with it, as will be explained shortly. The rise of Hitler, who became Chancellor of the German Reich in 1933, paralleled the occult Aurobindonian effort. Events were heading for a climax, and a general mobilization in Western Europe was ordered towards the end of 1938. Meanwhile the Spanish Civil War, the ‘rehearsal’ for the worldwide war to come, was fought; a militarized Japan expanded aggressively in the East; Mussolini wanted to revive the honour of Italy on the model of ancient Rome; and Stalin, after having demonically ravaged his own people and eliminated his top military cadres, remained a riddle nobody managed to decipher.

It is clear that the Second World War could have started a year before it actually did. As Nirodbaran puts it: ‘There was a strong possibility that fighting would break out in December, just a week or two after the night of November 23, when Sri Aurobindo had his accident. But, as he indicated in our talks, his Force pushed it back to a later date, for war at that time would have been a great hindrance to his work. It is possible to surmise that the irresistible forces which no human power could check turned their fury on one who had checked them.’ ⁹ On 14 December 1938 Nirodbaran asked Sri Aurobindo: ‘Did you stop war the last time there was a chance of it?’ – Sri Aurobindo: ‘Yes – for many reasons war was not favourable at that time.’ Nirodbaran: ‘But you stopped it at the humiliation of some Great Powers?’ – Sri Aurobindo: ‘I did not care for that.’ ¹⁰ On the one hand the Great Powers in question had not hesitated to betray a helpless Czechoslovakia and showed little greatness in their dealing with the Axis; on the other hand, even if they had been worthy of consideration, the descent of the Supramental, or the preparation for its descent, immeasurably surpassed all that in importance.

On 22 October 1938 the Mother wrote a letter to her son André. ‘Speaking of recent events, you ask me “whether it was a dangerous bluff” or whether we “narrowly escaped disaster.” To assume both at the same time would be nearer to the truth. Hitler was certainly bluffing [at Munich] … Tactics and diplomacy were used, but on the other hand, behind every human will there are forces in action whose origin is not human and which move consciously towards certain goals. The play of those forces is very complex and generally eludes the human consciousness. But for the sake of explanation and understanding, they can be divided into two main opposing tendencies: those which work for the fulfilment of the Divine Work upon Earth and those which are opposed to this fulfilment. The former have few conscious instruments at their disposal. It is true that in this matter quality by far compensates for quantity. As for the anti-divine forces, they have only too much to choose from and always find minds which they enslave and individuals they turn into docile but nearly always unconscious puppets.’ ¹¹

After the accident, Sri Aurobindo’s way of life changed drastically. Until then the Mother and Champaklal, his faithful attendant, had been the only persons to enter his apartment freely. Now a team was formed to look after him. It consisted mainly of disciples who were medical doctors: Nirodbaran, Becharlal, Satyendra, and, when he visited, Manilal; the laymen were Mulshankar, who had some medical training, Champaklal and Purani. ‘Little by little the air of unfamiliarity gave way as Sri Aurobindo began to take cognizance of the new situation and the new conditions that were around him,’ writes Nirodbaran.¹² The Mother also changed her schedule to make Sri Aurobindo’s recovery the centre of her daily occupations. She served his meals, combed his hair and supervised his daily exercises when he started the re-education of his leg by walking on crutches.

There was a time, however, that the Mother was in a state of almost continuous trance. We know how often she was silently called upon by disciples or devotees in physical or psychological distress. ‘Wherever people call the Divine in any form, I answer their call.’ ¹³ Not only did she have to answer these kind of calls, the times were also full of sudden geopolitical turns which could lead to possible disaster – not to speak of the personal attacks she and Sri Aurobindo had to withstand and the unseen battles they had to wage. In December 1938 Sri Aurobindo said to Dr. Manilal: ‘I am not occupied with details of occult working. I have left them to the Mother. She often hears what is said at a distance, meets sadhaks on the subtle planes, talks to them. She saw exactly what was going to happen in the recent European trouble. We know whatever we have to know for our work.’ ¹⁴ Moreover, intending to postpone the war is one thing, postponing it in actual fact is quite another, which required of both of them constant occult attention and ‘putting of the Force.’

Nirodbaran writes about the Mother’s frequently recurring trance states: ‘It was a very trying phase, indeed. She would enter Sri Aurobindo’s room with a somnolent walk and go back swaying from side to side leaving us in fear and wonder about the delicate balancing. Sri Aurobindo would watch her intently till she was out of sight, but it was a matter of surprise how she maintained her precarious balance. Sometimes in the midst of doing his hair, her hand would stop moving at any stage; either the comb remained still or the ribbon tied to his plaids got loose. While serving meals too, the spoon would stand still or the knife would not cut, and Sri Aurobindo had, by fictitious coughs, to draw her out. Fifteen minutes’ work thus took double the time and then she would hasten in order to make up for it.

‘Such trance moods were more particularly manifest at night during the collective meditation below, and in that condition she would come to Sri Aurobindo’s room with a heap of letters, reports, account books, etc., to read, sign or answer during Sri Aurobindo’s walking time. But her pious intentions would come to nothing, for no sooner did she begin than the trance overtook her. Sri Aurobindo took a few extra rounds and sat in his chair watching the Mother while she with a book open, pen in hand, had travelled into another world from whose bourne it was perhaps difficult to return. He would watch her with an indulgent smile and try all devices to bring her down to earth … During meditation too, her condition was most extraordinary. Someone coming for Pranam would remain standing before her trance mood from fifteen to thirty minutes, another had her hand on his bowed head for a pretty long time; all was unpredictable.’ ¹⁵

After things had settled down and everybody got used to the new situation, those privileged to be in Sri Aurobindo’s presence learned how to draw him into conversation. The most complete record of these informative conversations are Nirodbaran’s four volumes of Talks With Sri Aurobindo, covering the period from the accident up to August 1941. He confesses that he has omitted recording at least a third of the talks because of laziness or negligence. In his defence it must be said that he and Champaklal slept every night in Sri Aurobindo’s room and that he sometimes had to note down the conversations at an ungodly hour and after a full day’s work. Gradually he became Sri Aurobindo’s amanuensis. His constant presence with his Master from 1938 to 1950 has made his Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo indispensable reading for anyone interested in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s life.

Nirodbaran writes about the talks: ‘There was not a subject that was not touched, not a mystery he did not illumine, not a phenomenon that passed unnoticed, humorous or serious, superficial or profound, mundane or mystic. Reminiscences, stories, talks on art and culture, on world-problems poured down in abundant streams from an otherwise silent and reticent vastitude of knowledge and love and bliss. It was an unforgettable reward he accorded to us for our humble service.’ ¹⁶ ‘Sri Aurobindo had a pure Cambridge accent,’ writes Udar, ‘and if you didn’t see him, you’d think it was an Englishman speaking.’ ¹⁷

Thanks to Sri Aurobindo’s obedient execution of all prescribed exercises, and maybe still more to his yogic force, all impediments to the healing of his leg were overcome. ‘Sri Aurobindo’s rapid progress became widely known and people began to clamour for a Darshan.’ ¹⁸ Thus the fourth annual darshan came about on 24 April, the anniversary of the Mother’s final arrival in Pondicherry. ‘The devotees would simply come and stand for a brief while before the Mother and the Master, have their darshan and quietly leave … Formerly the Darshan was performed with great ceremonial pomp. Starting at about 7:30 a.m. it ran, with one breathing interval, up to 3 p.m. The devotees offered their garlands and flowers, did two, even three or four pranams to the Mother and the Master, who remained glued to one place throughout the ordeal.’ ¹⁹

‘The Lord of the Nations’ ⁹¹

We feel that not only is this a battle waged in just self-defence and in defence of the nations threatened with the world-domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of civilization and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity.²⁰

– Sri Aurobindo (19 September 1940)

In the already partly quoted letter of October 1938 to her son André, the Mother continued: ‘Hitler is a choice instrument for these anti-divine forces which want violence, upheavals and war, for they know that these things delay and hinder the action of the divine forces. That is why disaster was very close although no human government consciously wanted it. But there was to be no war at any cost and that is why war has been avoided – for the time being.’ ²¹

It is no exaggeration to say that the Second World War has still not been understood, in spite of the thousands of volumes dedicated to it and the fascination it continues to exert on mankind. The reason why its rationale escapes the common understanding is that it has to be sought outside the boundaries of ‘objective’ thinking, which is the only way in which academic historians are able to view the subjects of their studies. ‘It is a universal failing of writers on Hitler to assume that there is nothing mysterious or difficult to understand about him,’ writes Kimberley Cornish. ‘Yet if we ignore the moral dimension of what he wrought – its overwhelming wickedness – then it seems to me that Hitler has a claim to rank as the most extraordinary man the continent of Europe has ever produced. What did he discover that allowed him to do what he did? The truth is that no one has any idea.’ ²²

Louis Pauwels writes: ‘It is well known that the Nazi party proved itself to be anti-intellectual in a blunt and even boisterous manner, that it burned books and classified the theoretical physicists among the “Judeo-Marxist” enemies. It is less well-known in favour of which explanations of the world it rejected the official Western sciences. And still less is known about the concept of the human being on which Nazism was based, at least in the minds of some of its leaders. When knowing this, it is easier to situate the last World War within the framework of the great spiritual conflicts; history regains the breath of the Legend of the Ages.’ ²³

‘One can say that Hitler is not a devil but is possessed by one,’ said Sri Aurobindo;²⁴ he also called him ‘an infrarational mystic.’ Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew perfectly well by which power Hitler was possessed. ‘[Hitler] was a medium, a very good medium,’ said the Mother later. ‘Besides, he became possessed during séances of spiritism. It is then that he was seized by those fits which were described as epileptic. They were not epileptic: they were crises of possession. It was because of this that he had a kind of power, which was not very great for all that. But when he wanted to know something from the Power, he went and retired in his castle, and there, in “meditation,” he truly invoked very intensely what he called his “God,” his supreme God, who was the Lord of the Nations … It was a being that appeared to him in a silver armour, with a silver helmet and a golden aigrette. It was magnificent. And [it appeared] in a light so dazzling that the eyes could hardly see and bear that blaze. It was on such occasions that [Hitler] had his fits … That being is the “Lord of the Nations.” And it is not even the Lord of the Nations in his origin, it is an emanation of the Lord of the Nations, but a very powerful emanation.’ ²⁵

From this and the facts of Hitler’s life we may draw some conclusions. Hitler was an ordinary human being, with a soul and a rather elementary, sentimental but cruel psychological makeup, once compared by Sri Aurobindo to that of a street criminal with the psychic being of a London cab driver. (Stalin, on the contrary, was not human, in the sense that he did not have a soul but was a direct incarnation of a vital being.) ‘It is the vital possession that gives [Hitler] his size and greatness,’ said Sri Aurobindo. ‘Without this vital Power he would be a crudely amiable fellow with some hobbies and eccentricities. It is in these kind of people whose psychic is undeveloped and weak that possession is possible. There is nothing in the being that can resist the Power.’ ²⁶

Hitler went through an occult schooling that is not difficult to trace. It is well-known that he was profoundly influenced by the likes of Dietrich Eckart, who initiated him in the legend of Thule and developed his mediumistic faculties, and Karl Haushofer, responsible for most of Hitler’s geopolitical views including the need of Lebensraum for the German people. The ‘palace’ mentioned by the Mother was Hitler’s villa Berghof on the Obersalzberg at Berchtesgaden, in the Alps, called by his biographer John Toland ‘Hitler’s place of inspiration.’

Hitler was a tool of the ‘Lord of the Nations,’ who, in fact, is the Lord of Falsehood. This Asura, whom the Mother failed to convert in the person of Paul Richard, is already known to us. The important role he played throughout her life and that of Sri Aurobindo, and throughout the history of the twentieth century, becomes increasingly clear. The crux of everything Hitler stands for, and of the series of wars in the twentieth century of which the Second World War was the most devastating, is simply the action of the demonic forces that rule the world. They have tried, with all possible means, to crush Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s endeavour to bring their rule to an end, which is the precondition to transform the existing world into a better, divine world. ‘Hitler stands for diabolical values or for human values exaggerated in the wrong way until they become diabolical (e.g. the virtues of the Herrenvolk, the master race),’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. ‘The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces; the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.’ ²⁷

Very few people, even when familiar with the Nazi doctrines and those of the SS, the ‘Order of the Death’s Head,’ are aware of the deeper layers of Adolf Hitler’s inspiration. One person he allowed a glimpse into his thought processes for some time was Hermann Rauschning, who published their conversations in Hitler Speaks. There he writes: ‘[Hitler] saw his own remarkable career as a confirmation of hidden powers. He saw himself as chosen for superhuman tasks, as the prophet of the rebirth of man in a new form. Humanity, he proclaimed, was in the throes of a vast metamorphosis. A process of change that had lasted literally for thousands of years was approaching its completion … One thing is certain: Hitler has the spirit of the prophet. He is not content to be a mere politician.

‘… “Yes,” Hitler continued, “man has to be passed and surpassed. Nietzsche did, it is true, realize something of this in his way. He went as far as to recognize the superman as a new biological variety. But he was not too sure of it. Man is becoming God – that is the simple fact. Man is God in the making. Man has eternally to strain at his limitations. The moment he relaxes and contents himself with them, he decays and falls below the human level. He becomes a quasi-beast. Gods and beasts, that is what the world is made of … But those who listen to the immemorial message of man, who devote themselves to our eternal movement, are called to a new humanity. Do you now appreciate the depth of our National Socialist movement? Can there be anything greater and more all-comprehending? Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew …”’ ²⁸

One may be surprised to detect in those words as it were the shadow of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s vision of the divinization of the world which is to result in a divine superman. Hitler could hardly have invented all that by himself. The inspiration could only have been distilled into his mind by his ‘God,’ the Lord of Falsehood, even if it was partly communicated or taught to him through intermediaries like Eckart and Haushofer. The pieces of the puzzle fit neatly together and prove that what was at stake immensely surpassed anything that anybody realized. ‘The Vital World has descended upon the Physical,’ said Sri Aurobindo. ‘That is why the intellectuals are getting perplexed at the destruction of their civilization, of all the values they had made and stood for. They deny the worlds beyond the physical and so they are bound to be perplexed.’ ²⁹

As early as the beginning of February 1939, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother stated the global problem clearly. In Sri Aurobindo’s reported words: ‘The problem is to save the world from domination by Asuric (Demonic) Forces. It would be awful to be ruled by the Nazis and Fascists. Their domination will let loose on mankind what are called the Four Powers of Hell – obscurantism, falsehood, suffering and death. Suffering and death mean the horrors of war.’ ³⁰ The Four Powers of Hell are none other than the powers of the four great Asuras.

The Ashram in Difficulty

Understanding of the significance of the war was badly lacking in the Ashram. ‘Unfortunately, in the Ashram itself there were some who wished for Hitler’s victory, not for love of Hitler but because of their hatred of British domination,’ writes Nirodbaran.³¹ The reasoning went as follows: the British are the enemies of India, for they are the colonial power that is occupying it and bleeding it dry; the Germans and their allies are the enemies of the British; therefore the Germans and their allies are the friends of patriotic India. Among the Ashramites there were, as we have seen, former freedom fighters, and for them the above was a matter of elementary logic. Besides, had not Sri Aurobindo himself been one of the foremost freedom fighters? ‘Many, especially in India, were rather happy that England was attacked,’ confirms Udar. ‘Indians, still under the British rule, felt that if England were defeated, India would be free.’ ³²

This kind of reasoning was strengthened by the fact that many idealistic Ashramites chose the side of Subhash Chandra Bose. His close friend in the Ashram was Dilip K. Roy, who at one time had tried to entice him into becoming an Ashramite. Subhash C. Bose was a Bengali who, like Sri Aurobindo, had studied at Cambridge University as a candidate for the Indian Civil Service. He had, however, submitted his resignation before being enlisted and entered nationalist politics under the aegis of C.R. Das, the lawyer-turned-politician who had defended Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Bomb Case and remained a friend ever since. The gifted and ambitious Bose rose quickly to the top and became, in 1927, Joint General Secretary of the Congress with Jawaharlal Nehru.

Bose became fascinated by the Fascist dictators and went to Europe to meet them personally. In 1938 he was elected national president of the Congress. He clashed, inevitably, with Mohandas K. Gandhi and founded within the Congress his Forward Bloc. In 1941 he escaped the watchful eye of the British and reached Germany after an adventurous journey. There he founded the Indian Legion. But he became dissatisfied with Hitler’s assistance to India’s cause and sought the help of the Japanese who had advanced close to India’s borders. With Japanese help Netaji S.C. Bose – ‘Netaji,’ like Führer, Duce and Caudillo, means ‘Leader’ – founded in South Asia the Indian National Army and a provisional government.

The following quotation from Nirodbaran’s Talks With Sri Aurobindo gives an idea of the urgency of the situation that had developed in the Ashram. Sri Aurobindo: ‘It seems it is not five or six of our people but more than half that are in sympathy with Hitler and want him to win.’ – Purani (laughing): ‘Half?’ – Sri Aurobindo: ‘No, it is not a matter to laugh at. It is a very serious matter. The [French] Government can dissolve the Ashram at any moment. In [French] Indo-China all religious bodies have been dissolved. And here the whole of Pondicherry is against us. Only because Governor Bonvin is friendly towards us can’t they do anything. But even he – if he hears that people in the Ashram are pro-Hitler – will be compelled to take steps, at least expel those who are so. If these people want that the Ashram should be dissolved, they can come and tell me and I will dissolve it instead of the police doing it. They have no idea about the world and talk like children. Hitler is the greatest menace that the world has ever met. If Hitler wins, do they think India has any chance of being free?’ ³³

‘I have all my life been wanting the downfall of the British Empire,’ Sri Aurobindo said, ‘but the way it is being done is beyond all expectation and makes me wish for British victory. And if I want that England should win, it is not for the Empire’s own sake but because the world under Hitler will be much worse.’ ³⁴ He also said: ‘The Asura is more concerned with us than anything else. He is inventing new situations so that we may fall into difficulty.’ ³⁵

The seriousness of the situation made Sri Aurobindo and the Mother publicly declare their standpoint. They did so on two occasions. The first one was in the form of a contribution to the Viceroy’s War Purposes Fund, ‘made as a token of a complete adhesion to the Allied cause.’ Nirodbaran writes: ‘When India was asked to participate in the war effort, and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, much to the surprised indignation of our countrymen, contributed to the War Fund, he, for the first time made clear to the nation what issues were involved in the War … He stated that the War was being waged “in defence of civilization and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and the whole future of humanity …” Giving the lead, he acted as an example for others to follow. But all over the country protests, calumnies and insinuations were his lot. Even his disciples were nonplussed in spite of his explanation why he had made that singular gesture.’ ³⁶ What Nirodbaran does not write is that many accused the Mother, a French subject, of influencing Sri Aurobindo and turning him from his nationalist path towards the Allies.

The second occasion was the Cripps Offer, also called the Cripps Proposals. Great Britain, fully engaged in its life-or-death struggle with the Powers of the Axis, wanted to make sure that India, its ‘Jewel in the Crown,’ would be unreservedly on its side. Therefore on 11 March 1941 Winston Churchill announced that the War Cabinet had agreed upon some proposals which would solve the crisis in India. Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord of the Privy Seal and leader of the House of Commons, ‘would proceed as soon as possible to India to explain personally the solution agreed upon by the Cabinet.’ What Cripps had to propose was dominion status, ‘free to remain in or to separate itself from the equal partnership of the British Commonwealth of nations.’

Sri Aurobindo perceived immediately the advantages and possibilities for India. ‘If the Congress can get Dominion Status without any fighting or struggle,’ said Sri Aurobindo, ‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t accept it. It can build our defence after that and when that is ready, it can easily cut off the British connection. You get all you want without any unnecessary struggle. When you can secede at your will from the British connection, it is practically independence.’ ³⁷ And the Mother said: ‘India … must realize the Grace that is behind this offer. It is not simply a human offering. Of course its form has been given by the human mind, and it has elements of imperfection in it. But that does not matter at all … My ardent request to India is that it should not reject it. She must not make the same mistake that France has made recently [when refusing a close confederation with Great Britain] and that has plunged her into the abyss.’ ³⁸

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother sent Duraiswamy to New Delhi in order to plead for acceptance of the proposals with the leaders of the Congress Party. Duraiswamy was an advocate from Madras who had been a trusted disciple for many years and who had rendered many services to his gurus, although he did not live in the Ashram. Nirodbaran describes Duraiswamy’s departure: ‘The scene is still fresh in our memory. It was the evening hour. Sri Aurobindo was sitting on the edge of his bed just before his daily walking. All of us were present. Duraiswamy, the distinguished Madras lawyer and disciple, was selected as the envoy, perhaps because he was a friend of Rajagopalachari, one of the prominent Congress leaders. He was to start for Delhi that very night. He came for Sri Aurobindo’s blessings, lay prostrate before him, got up and stood looking at the Master with folded hands and then departed.’ ³⁹

The Congress leaders, some of whom might not have forgotten nor forgiven Sri Aurobindo’s withdrawal from politics, did not act on his recommendation. As Indra Sen, who accompanied Duraiswamy, related: ‘We met the members [of the Congress leadership] individually and the sense of the reactions was more or less to this effect: Sri Aurobindo has created difficulties for us by his message to Cripps.’ Sri Aurobindo had sent Cripps a telegram in appreciation of his proposals. ‘He doesn’t know the actual situation, we are in it, we know better, and so on.’ ⁴⁰ However, had they listened to that ‘unknowledgeable’ Sri Aurobindo the partition of India and its dismal aftermath might never have happened. In his brief biography of the Mother, Wilfried quotes The Oxford History of India on the matter: ‘So the golden moment passed and with it the last real chance of establishing a united independent India. The rejection of the offer was the prelude to the partition.’ ⁴¹

Interventions

We have seen with what emphasis Sri Aurobindo stressed that the Second World War was the Mother’s war. This does not mean that it was not his too, of course, and we will learn about several interventions which he made. Moreover, as he wrote about himself in the third person: ‘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.’ ⁴²

We remember that Sri Aurobindo said that he was neither an impotent moralist nor a weak pacifist (see p. 120). ‘It is part of the experience of those who have advanced far in Yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can act and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it, and this power is greater than any other and more effective. 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. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results or to feel the necessity of any other kind of action.’ ⁴³ The same evidently goes for the Mother.

The Second World War was not the outcome of politics, economic systems, or national or racial relations gone wrong, although all this played a role in it. It was fundamentally, as we have seen above, about the destiny of the world. It was, after the First World War, the greatest eruption of forces in a century which produced the changes that are leading to an acceleration in the long evolution of the Earth. ‘The Allies stand on the side of the revolutionary forces,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. ‘I have not said that at random, but on what to me are clear grounds of fact … We made it clear in a letter that we did not consider the war as a fight between nations and governments (still less between good people and bad people) but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric … The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces; the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished. That is the whole question and all other considerations are either irrelevant or of a minor importance.’ ⁴⁴

This means that this world war was directly related to the turning away of the four fundamental divine Powers from their Origin, thereby becoming the four great Asuras who are at the basis of our world and who have ruled over it throughout its history despite the opposition of the gods. It is true that in the course of humanity’s evolution the gods have conquered their share of the world, as proven by the rise of the religions, but it is equally true that all religions have been perverted by the Asuras and their underlings, and that the anti-divine powers still rule the world. To convert or eliminate the Asuras and make the descent of a divine world on Earth possible was the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It was also what the Second World War was about.

The reader may recall how in the Beginning the Universal Mother turned towards ‘the Lord’ and prayed that he should redeem what had gone wrong. At that moment the Lord ordered the Mother to infuse her divine Love into the manifestation. This resulted, on the one hand, in the creation of the Gods, on the other in ‘ensouling’ the manifestation – an ensoulment that on the occult side of the evolution has led to the World Soul being individualized in the many souls of humanity, and in the building up of the individual psychic being in every human being.

When we connect the Mother’s role in the evolutionary action with what was at stake in the Second World War, and consider that the Mother on Earth embodied the transcendent, universal and individual Mother, it becomes intelligible why Sri Aurobindo called this war ‘the Mother’s war.’ Udar narrates in his Reminiscences that, at the beginning of the Second World War, when Sri Aurobindo still gave Hitler a fifty-fifty chance of becoming the Ruler of the World, the Lord of Falsehood often came to the Mother to ‘boast about all the troubles and defeats he was inflicting on the Allies.’ ⁴⁵ The Mother herself has said that she and the Asura often met and conversed with one another. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘I am his mother,’ and: ‘There is a very profound relation.’ For who else but she had emanated him and his three companions, and who else was responsible for the manifestation as it is? There is nothing but That, and she was (and is) That in its Creative Aspect.

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo followed the events in every possible detail. They read the newspapers, especially the Hindu, but the reports were often days behind the events. Therefore they also followed every evening without fail the news bulletins of the B.B.C. There was no radio set in the Ashram, but Udar had a large radio set with all that was necessary to receive the B.B.C. So every night Pavitra, together with Pavita, went to his house to listen to the 9:30 news. Pavita, an English woman whose civil name was Margaret Aldwinckle, had been the secretary of Paul Brunton, the still widely-read writer on occult and spiritual matters, before she became an Ashramite. ‘Pavita would take the news down in shorthand, go home, type it out and send it to Sri Aurobindo, so that he could read the news the same night … Later on, when the situation became grave, they had a radio set installed in the Ashram. I think in those days the whole programme of the Ashram was arranged in such a way that Sri Aurobindo could be free to listen to the B.B.C. broadcast.’ ⁴⁶

We have already seen that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother postponed the war in 1938 and how the Asura retaliated with a direct attack on Sri Aurobindo. Another of their interventions was at Dunkirk towards the end of May 1940. The German tanks had steamrolled through Belgium and the Belgian king, Leopold III, had surrendered. At once the British Expeditionary Force was cut off from its reserves and its ports, and was on the verge of surrendering or being annihilated. ‘There is no way out for them unless Dunkirk can hold on or if they can rush through the gap from the French line,’ ⁴⁷ said Sri Aurobindo. This was a crucial situation, for, if the B.E.F. was eliminated, Great Britain would be practically defenceless and Hitler, without much additional effort, would have become the Master of Europe and, according to Sri Aurobindo, possibly of the world.

‘Inwardly, he [Sri Aurobindo writes about himself] put his spiritual force behind the Allies from the moment of Dunkirk when everybody was expecting the immediate fall of England and the definite triumph of Hitler, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the rush of German victory almost immediately arrested and the tide of war began to turn in the opposite direction.’ ⁴⁸ To this day nobody knows why Hitler, who could easily have crushed the B.E.F., hesitated and finally let Göring do the job with his bombers – a job which he bungled. And nobody knows why literally out of the blue, in those sunny days of May, a fog descended over the region. ‘Not only was Dunkirk itself enshrouded but all the Luftwaffe fields were blanketed by low clouds which grounded their three thousand bombers,’ writes John Toland in his biography of Adolf Hitler.⁴⁹ When the Luftwaffe finally got into action, a ragtag fleet of about 900 ships and boats had carried 338,226 British and Allied troops across the Channel between 24 May and 4 June, and the war could be continued. ‘[The British] were saved by divine intervention during this war,’ said Sri Aurobindo a few months later. ‘They would have been smashed if Hitler had invaded England at the right time, after the fall of France.’ ⁵⁰

One of the problems for the Mother and Sri Aurobindo was that at first they did not find on the side of the Allies a suitable human instrument for their action. As history tells us, the Allied statesmen who played a part in the developments before the outbreak of the war were not of impressive calibre. But then Winston Churchill became prime minister of Great Britain. He showed a capacity of leadership and strength that inspired every one on the allied side and gave them enough confidence to pursue the battle with the Axis. Maggi Lidchi-Grassi, who was close to the Mother, writes: ‘The Mother told the author of how Sri Aurobindo used to tell her of the words that he would put into the mouth of Churchill before the famous broadcasts, and certain passages were spoken by Churchill word for word. I have not found any written references to this in the texts written on Sri Aurobindo, but his secretary Nirodbaran had heard of this, and Dyuman … has confirmed it … Anu Purani tells me that her father A.B. Purani, one of the few people who saw Sri Aurobindo every day, told her the same thing.’ ⁵¹ Udar too confirms this.⁵²

For a reader of the four volumes of Talks as noted down by Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo’s insight into Hitler’s intentions and manoeuvres, and his foreknowledge of the turn events would take are simply amazing. He took Hitler’s programme as spelled out in Mein Kampf seriously and knew of his intention to exterminate the Jewish race at a time when many in and outside Germany were still praising the Führer to the skies. When Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, was gushing about ‘peace for our time,’ Sri Aurobindo, after seeing a photograph in a newspaper, compared Hitler at Munich to a spider ready to pounce on a fly, Chamberlain. He saw that, after Dunkirk, the British fleet was the only force able to resist Germany and that therefore the French fleet should at no price fall into Hitler’s hands. It did not; most of it fell into British hands and the rest was sunk at Toulon by its own crews. He saw that Hitler, pushed from behind by the Asura, was aiming for world domination.⁹²

He saw that Hitler’s ultimate aim, however far-fetched this may seem to the academic student of history, was the conquest of India, because it was the guardian of the spiritual destiny of the world. ‘It is a very simple thing to see that Hitler wants world domination and that his next move will be towards India,’ Sri Aurobindo said on 23 May 1940. He thereby confirmed his words of a few days earlier: ‘It is a well-known fact that Hitler has an eye on India. He is openly talking of world empire. He will turn towards the Balkans, crushing Italy on the way, which would be a matter of three weeks, then Turkey and then Asia Minor. Asia Minor means ultimately India. If there [in Asia Minor] he meets Stalin, then it is a question as to who wins and comes to India.’ Hitler had been instructed in Indian occultism and mysticism by Eckart and Haushofer, and, besides, he was the instrument of the Asura, who knew best of all what India stood for. This explains the simultaneous pincer movement of the Axis Powers (through southern Russia, Africa and the Middle East) and Japan (through Burma) towards the Indian subcontinent. That such was in fact Hitler’s intention has been documented in my book Beyond Man.

But there were other diabolic forces incarnated on the Earth and, as they are all big, unyielding egos, they fought each other even as they fought everybody else. One of these other hostile forces, and perhaps the most ruthless of them all, was Joseph Stalin. It has already been mentioned that, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Stalin was not an ordinary human, but a directly incarnated vital being with no soul. As in the case of so much else concerning Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, this assertion is supported by facts, and Stalin’s dire deeds are recorded in history for all to read.

In 1939 he made a secret pact with Hitler, but no one could doubt that both dictators only wanted to gain time before springing at each other’s throat. Hadn’t Hitler made abundantly clear in Mein Kampf, and in so many speeches, what he thought of Communism and of the Slav peoples, those ‘subhumans’? As early as June 1940 Sri Aurobindo had said: ‘I think the next war will be between Russia and Germany.’ ⁵³ It was indeed. Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against Russia in June 1942 to the consternation and desperation of all experienced officers in the Wehrmacht, who knew that at that point Germany was unable to fight a war on two fronts and who were proved right in the end. Sri Aurobindo had said earlier that he had never seen a person who followed the dictates of the Asura as faithfully as Hitler. Had the Asura made a mistake in this case?

The occult fact is that on a certain occasion the Mother took the place of the Lord of Falsehood and persuaded a hesitant Hitler – the plans for Operation Barbarossa had been ready for months but the attack was postponed several times – to go ahead with the invasion of Russia. Two days later the guns started thundering, the Stukas screaming, the tanks rolling. We find the Mother’s occult intervention confirmed by Udar, who writes that ‘the Mother told me this the very next morning after her visit to Hitler’; by K.D. Sethna, who wrote about it in Mother India; and by the Mother herself who talked about it in at least two recorded conversations, the first one on 5 November 1961, the second on 12 January 1965.⁵⁴ The reader will remember her description of the way the Lord of Falsehood appeared to Hitler as his God. (If she knew this, she must have known a lot of other things about which she never said a word. ‘People have no idea of what is going on [in the occult plane], they know nothing,’ she would say.) However, on returning from her meeting with Hitler she met the Asura, who was furious and promised to do as much damage as possible before she would be able to dissolve him back into his Origin.

We remember how the Mother saved Paris in 1914 by preventing the Germans from taking ‘the cultural capital of the world.’ She seems to have done the same during the Second World War. On 13 June 1940, when the Germans were less than thirty kilometres from Paris, Sri Aurobindo said: ‘Paris has been the centre of human civilization for three centuries. Now he [Hitler] will destroy it. That is the sign of the Asura. History is repeating itself. The Graeco-Roman civilization was destroyed by Germany,’ ⁵⁵ at the time of the Germanic invasions into the Roman Empire. True, Hitler did not give the order to destroy Paris as long as he had it in his grip, but he did so the moment he saw that it was going to escape him. Collins and Lapierre, in their bestseller Is Paris Burning?, quote the order from the German headquarters, which was Hitler’s order: ‘Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins.’ But the Mother was guarding the metropolis where she had spent the first part of her life, for she said later, in a recorded conversation on 5 November 1961, that an emanation of her had been protecting Paris ‘every night of the last war.’ ⁵⁶ And Collins and Lapierre write that on the day of its liberation ‘every Parisian looking out of his window … could gaze at one of the wonders of the war: Paris was unharmed.’

Regretfully, the published Talks With Sri Aurobindo go only as far as the first days of 1941, with rare exceptions. The main reason why the Talks stopped was, according to Nirodbaran, that Sri Aurobindo became more and more silent and concentrated. ‘In the last years there was practically a silent attendance on a silent Presence.’ ⁵⁷ This was most probably due to the huge occult task he and the Mother were involved in hour after hour. The Mother would later talk about the constant tension they were subjected to, and that the Asura’s aim of the war was precisely to bring their yogic realization to a halt. They had no choice but to fight the Asura, for otherwise they were not sure that they would be able to effect the supramental manifestation before the Earth had been completely subjected by the hostile forces or destroyed by them.

It may be supposed that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo also directly intervened in the Battle of Stalingrad and in bringing the USA into the war. There is, however, one more intervention of theirs of which we are certain: the halting and reversal of the Japanese invasion of India. On 19 March 1944 a Japanese army of 230,000 men crossed the Indian border in the Northeast and headed towards the town of Imphal. Three thousand soldiers from Bose’s Indian National Army took part in it. It was ‘a forgone conclusion’ that Imphal would fall, in spite of the dogged resistance by the British and Indian troops loyal to the British Crown. But suddenly the monsoon rains poured down, more than a month early, and ‘the Japanese chances of success were washed away,’ writes Hugh Toye. ‘It became a military catastrophe of the first magnitude.’ ⁵⁸

Sri Aurobindo writes about himself in the third person: ‘When negotiations [with Stafford Cripps] failed, Sri Aurobindo returned to his reliance on the use of spiritual force alone against the aggressor and had the satisfaction of seeing the tide of Japanese victory, which had till then swept everything before it, change immediately into a tide of rapid, crushing and finally immense and overwhelming [Allied] victory.’ ⁵⁹ Nirodbaran describes how at one point the situation for the Allies was desperate everywhere, in Africa, in Asia, in Europe. Then he continues: ‘At this jubilant moment of the enemy, India’s destiny intervened. A heavy downpour from heaven inundated the dense Assam jungles for days together, so that, bogged in the flood and mud, the invading [Japanese] army with its [Indian] liberation force had to liberate itself from the wrath of Nature and beat an ignominious retreat. Yet rain during that season had never been heard of before.’ ⁶⁰

When the Second World War, which is still casting its shadows upon us, came to an end, the Mother wrote the following prayer: ‘The Victory has come, Thy Victory, O Lord, for which we tender to Thee infinite thanksgiving. But now our ardent prayer rises towards Thee. It is with Thy force and by Thy force that the victors have conquered. Grant that they do not forget it in their success and that they keep the promises which they have made to Thee in the hours of danger and anguish. They have taken Thy name to make war, may they not forget Thy grace when they have to make the peace.’ ⁶¹

The war ended when the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, addressing the nation directly for the first time in history, broadcast on 15 August 1945 a message declaring the unconditional capitulation of his country. Fifteenth August is the birthday of Sri Aurobindo.

The Coming of the Children

On 2 December 1943 the Mother started a school for about twenty children. The threatening presence of the Japanese troops on India’s borders, its attempt at invasion and a few minor bombardments had frightened the population, and many Bengalis who had relatives in the Ashram sought refuge there. Of course they brought their children with them. As the Mother said later: ‘When people found out that Pondicherry was the safest place on Earth [because of Sri Aurobindo’s and her own protection], and when they arrived here with a throng of small children and asked if we could give them shelter, we could not send them back, could we?’ ⁶²

She went on to say that in the early years life in the Ashram was ‘very, very, very strict … So long as one keeps all the ties which bind one to life, which make you a slave to ordinary life, how can one belong to the Divine? … We tried to create an atmosphere where only one thing counted: the divine life.’ Now things changed, and not for the better according to many sadhaks and sadhikas encrusted in the habits of their frugal Ashram life. Children mean life, movement, noise, immediacy of needs, longings, outspoken and direct. Children are disturbing, often annoying and upsetting, and the serious disciples could do without all that. Otherwise, why had they chosen to stay in the Ashram? But once again ‘circumstances’ or ‘destiny’ or ‘Providence’ had decided otherwise. Just as the formation of the Ashram had come about automatically, now a concurrence of events necessitated its expansion. Besides, wasn’t this an ‘Integral Yoga,’ hadn’t Sri Aurobindo written that ‘all life is yoga,’ and shouldn’t therefore its practitioners be capable of facing all aspects of life in their world in miniature?

The Mother, of course, had immediately seen the meaning of it all and the necessity of an expansion of the Ashram life, for this exacted a broadening of the yoga. As she would later say: ‘It [the presence of the children in the Ashram] has an advantage: we were too much on the outside of life. There were many problems which did not occur [in the former Ashram way of life] and which, if one had wanted to manifest oneself fully, would suddenly have cropped up. We have taken on the problems [of an all-round communal life] a little too early, but it was necessary to tackle them. This way one learns a lot of things, one overcomes a lot of difficulties. But it becomes more complicated. And it may be that in the present conditions, with such a great number of elements who don’t have the faintest idea why they are here, greater efforts are demanded from the disciples than before.’ ⁶³

‘I don’t regret that we have taken them [the children],’ said the Mother, ‘for I believe that there is much more stuff for the future among the children, who know nothing, than among the adults, who think they know everything.’ But, yes, ‘children are very absorbing creatures. Everything must be organized for them, everything must be arranged in view of their well-being, and the whole way of life changes. Children are the most important persons, when they are there everything turns around them – and the entire organization of the Ashram changed completely.’ ⁶⁴

The Mother herself took up teaching, assisted by some Ashramites who had recently joined the community, which went on growing despite the difficult financial and material times. There was Sisir Kumar Mitra, who had been a professor at Tagore’s Vishva Bharati and who now became the Head of the school; there was Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya, who would become the head of the Department of Physical Education and a very close assistant of the Mother.⁹³ We will see more about the Ashram school in a later chapter.

Looking from a distance at how the Ashram developed, one might say it grew like a beautiful tree: at first planted, watered and protected with great care (the early years); then supported in its growth so that it might form a strong stem in optimal conditions (the ‘very strict’ period); then forming a wealth of branches and leaves (expansion and the coming of the children); then bearing fruit and seed (e.g. Auroville and other developments present and future). An evolutionary revolution is a huge undertaking; what one has seen of the material realization until the present day is only the beginning. And who can watch the bright-eyed Ashram youth without thinking of their little sisters and brothers all over the world, in this new millennium craning their necks towards a tomorrow which few venture to describe or foretell? Those who doubt or fear can be reassured by Sri Aurobindo’s promise in Savitri:

I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life. ||90.28||

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm.. ||90.29||

..Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth.. ||90.31|| ⁶⁵