The Mother

12: Sri Aurobindo’s Descent into Death

Sri Aurobindo has come on Earth not to bring a teaching or a creed in competition with previous creeds or teachings, but to show the way to overpass the past and to open concretely the route towards an imminent and inevitable future.¹

– The Mother

Mahananda

In 1946 a very important event took place which nobody was aware of at the time and which is scarcely remembered at present. As we have seen in the previous chapter, by far the greatest part of what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have done for the world on the occult and spiritual plane is not known; it was ‘not on the surface for men to see,’ and they have not spoken about it. Of the little that is known, a kind of habitual selective process in the existing comments and exegeses sifts the supposedly important from the supposedly unimportant, and gradually creates a standard myth. This myth should be put to the test on every possible occasion by renewed study of the available documents, all of them.

In August 1954 the Mother read out from chapter six of Sri Aurobindo’s booklet The Mother a passage following his description of her four universal Powers: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati.⁹¹ ‘There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother, but they were more difficult to bring down and have not stood out in front with so much prominence in the evolution of the Earth-spirit. There are among them presences indispensable for the supramental realization – most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divinest Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers of the universe.’ ² ‘Ananda’ means bliss, absolute shadowless joy, the highest uninterrupted ecstasy. Together with Existence and Consciousness-Force it is one of the three supreme attributes of the Divine, and therefore one of the aspects or personalities of the Great Mother.

Someone in the audience asked what that Personality was and when it would manifest. The Mother had expected the question and she had her answer ready. ‘She has come, bringing with her a splendour of power and love, an intensity of divine joy unknown to the Earth up to then. The physical atmosphere was completely changed by it, saturated with new and marvellous possibilities. But for her to be able to settle and act down here, she needed to meet with a minimum of receptivity, to find at least one human being possessing the requisite qualities in the vital and physical nature, a kind of super-Parsifal endowed with a spontaneous and integral purity, but at the same time having a body strong and balanced enough to be able to bear without giving way the intensity of the Ananda she brought. Up to now she has not obtained what was necessary. Human beings obstinately remain human beings and do not want to or cannot become superhumans. They can only receive and express a love cut to their measure: a human love. And the marvellous joy of the divine Ananda escapes their perception.

‘So, at times she thinks of withdrawing, finding that the world is not ready to receive her. This would be a cruel loss. It is true that for the moment her presence is more nominal than active, as she does not have the opportunity to manifest herself. But even so she is a wonderful help in the Work. For of all the aspects of the Mother, this is the one which has the greatest power for the transformation of the body. It is a fact that the cells which are able to vibrate to the contact of divine joy, which are able to receive and retain it, are regenerated cells in the process of becoming immortal. However, the vibrations of divine joy and those of [ordinary human] pleasure cannot exist together in the same vital and physical system. So one must have totally renounced the experience of all pleasure in order to be in a state capable of receiving the Ananda. But very few are those who can renounce pleasure without, by the very fact, renouncing all participation in active life and plunging into a rigorous asceticism. And among those who know that it is in active life that the transformation must take place, some try to see pleasure as a more or less distorted form of Ananda, and thus justify in themselves the quest for personal satisfaction, creating in themselves an almost insuperable obstacle to their own transformation.’

Ishwari, Kali, Lakshmi and Saraswati’s presence and action among humans is age-old. When, then, had this new Personality of the Mother, the Ananda, come down? The question was put by someone present and she replied: ‘I don’t know the dates. I don’t remember dates. All I know is that it happened before Sri Aurobindo left the body, that he had been told beforehand [about it] and recognized the fact.’

After a silence she continued: ‘There was a terrible fight with the Inconscient. For, as I saw that the receptivity was not what it ought to be, I put the responsibility for it on the Inconscient and it was there that I tried to give battle. I don’t say that this had no result, but there was a great difference between the result obtained and the result hoped for. But I tell you this … You are all so close, you bathe in the atmosphere, but who was aware of anything? You continued to live your life as usual, didn’t you? …’ Then Pavitra said: ‘I think it was in 1946, Mother, for you told us so many things at that time.’ – ‘Correct,’ said the Mother.

‘[The Ananda] came down because there was a possibility, because things had come to a certain stage and the time had come when she could descend. In fact, she descended because I thought it was possible that she might succeed. There are always possibilities, but … they must be materialized.’ It should be kept in mind that, though the Mother speaks about the Ananda in the third person, this aspect or personality, like uncountable others, formed (and forms) an integral part of her. ‘You see, a proof of what I told you is that, at a certain moment, it happened, and that for two or three weeks the atmosphere, not only of the Ashram but of the Earth, was surcharged with such power, yes, with such an intense divine joy creating so wonderful a power, that things which were difficult before could be done almost instantaneously. There were repercussions in the whole world. – I don’t think that there was one among you who was aware of it. You couldn’t even tell me when it happened, could you?’ ³

Freedom at Midnight

True spirituality is not to renounce life, but to make life perfect with a Divine Perfection. This is what India must show to the world now.⁴

– The Mother

India became independent at midnight on 15 August 1947. Lord Mountbatten had been responsible for the choice of the date, thus putting into motion at breakneck speed a sequence of highly important and far-reaching decisions. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have narrated, in Freedom at Midnight, how Mountbatten chose the date on the spur of the moment during a press conference, though he pretended to have had a date in mind. ‘Mountbatten’s decision was instantaneous. It was a date linked in his memory to the most triumphant hours of his own existence, the day on which his long crusade through the jungles of Burma had ended with the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire … His voice constricted with sudden emotion, the victor of the jungles of Burma about to become the liberator of India announced: “The final transfer of power to Indian hands will take place on 15 August 1947.”’ ⁵ This is the birthday of Sri Aurobindo.

The reader may recall that at the beginning of 1920s, Sri Aurobindo gave to Purani the assurance that India would be free – an important statement, for, as Sri Aurobindo was no doubt aware, it would lead to a serious decision in Purani’s life. How could Sri Aurobindo have been so sure? The Mother gives us the surprising answer to this question. ‘After having gone to a certain place [in the occult worlds], I said to Sri Aurobindo: “India is free.” I didn’t say: “She will be free,” I said: “She is free” … It was in 1915 … Even to a question Sri Aurobindo put to me, I answered from the same [occult] place: “There will be no violence of any kind. It will come about without a revolution. It will be the English who will decide to go away because they will not be able to keep hold of the place owing to certain terrestrial circumstances.’ ⁶

(Then a young boy asked her the question: ‘You said that India was free in 1915, but was she free as she is free now? For India is not free as one whole, she is cut up.’ And the Mother answered: ‘The details were not there. No, there must have been a possibility of it being otherwise, for, when Sri Aurobindo told them to do a certain thing, when he sent them that message [in 1942, in connection with the Cripps Offer], he knew very well that it was possible to avoid what happened later. If they had listened to him at that time, there would have been no division. Consequently the division was not decreed, it was a human deformation. It is beyond question a human deformation.’)

On the day of India’s independence the Mother distributed the following invocation: ‘O our Mother, O Soul of India, Mother who hast never forsaken thy children even in the days of darkest depression, even when they turned away from the voice, served other masters and denied thee, now when they have arisen and the light is on thy face in this dawn of thy liberation, in this great hour we salute thee. Guide us so that the horizon of freedom opening before us may be also a horizon of true greatness and of thy true life in the community of the nations. Guide us so that we may be always on the side of great ideals and show to men thy true visage, as a leader in the ways of the spirit and a friend and helper of all the peoples.’ ⁷

On that occasion the Mother had her flag hoisted above the Ashram, more specifically over the terrace of Sri Aurobindo’s room. She called it the spiritual flag of India. ‘It is the flag of India’s spiritual mission. And in the accomplishment of this mission will India’s unity be accomplished,’ ⁸ she declared on 15 August. The Mother’s flag contains her symbol in gold, centred on a silver-blue background. ‘In the afternoon she appeared on her terrace,’ writes Nirodbaran, ‘when the members of the Ashram greeted her by singing Bande Mataram, after which she called out: ‘Jai Hind!’ [victory to India] with such a look and gesture that we still remember the moment.’ ⁹

This profoundly symbolic act of the Mother, who wanted the flag to fly for three days, was misinterpreted by certain factions in Pondicherry and ‘there was an anti-Ashram riot in which a sadhak was murdered – Mulshankar, who used to massage Sri Aurobindo’s right leg every day. There was even a threat given that the hostile elements would climb up the building and pull the flag down. The Mother refused to take it off until her three days would be over.’ ¹⁰ This was the first of several attacks upon the Ashram in the coming years.

Later the Mother would draw her map of India, which is still there on a wall in the playground. It includes Pakistan (then West Pakistan), Sikkim, Bhutan, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), part of Burma, and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). As the Mother put it: ‘The map was made after the partition. It is the map of the true India in spite of all passing appearances, and it will always remain the map of the true India, whatever people may think about it.’ ¹¹

To understand this, one must realize that every true nation is not only a certain area on a map, but a living being. As Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence. For by its virtue alone she has been one of the immortal nations; this alone has been the secret of her amazing persistence and perpetual force of survival and revival.’ ¹² And the Mother would say: ‘India is not the Earth, rivers and mountains of this land, neither is it a collective name for the inhabitants of this country. India is a living being, as much living as, say, Shiva. India is a goddess as Shiva is a god. If she likes, she can manifest in human form.’ ¹³

Nowhere is there a more profound and positive view of India to be found than with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. We have had a glimpse of Sri Aurobindo’s love of Mother India and his sanctification of her in the pages of his political writings. He studied her past and her cultural riches as few others have done, a study which resulted in books like The Secret of the Veda, The Upanishads, The Foundations of Indian Culture⁹² and Essays on the Gita. Even the framework of his magistral epic Savitri is a story from the Mahabharata. In fact, his whole work is permeated with the living presence of the perpetual Indian values.

‘India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word,’ he wrote, ‘she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an Anglicized oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the Occident’s success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deeper self, lifting her head towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and vaster form of her Dharma.’ ‘God always keeps for himself a chosen country in which the higher knowledge is through all chances and dangers, by the few or the many, continually preserved, and for the present, in this Chaturyuga [the Fourth or Iron Age] at least, that country is India.’ ¹⁴

For her part the Mother said: ‘The future of India is very clear. India is the Guru of the world. The future structure of the world depends on India. India is the living soul. India is incarnating the spiritual knowledge in the world.’ And she wrote: ‘In the whole creation the Earth has a place of distinction because unlike any other planet it is evolutionary with a psychic entity at its centre. In it, India, in particular, is a divinely chosen country.’ ‘India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties of modern mankind. India will be the land of its resurrection – the resurrection to a higher and truer life.’ ¹⁵

Considering the manifold and colossal problems of India at present, all this may sound a bit bombastic. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were ‘spiritual realists’ who saw the difficulties as clearly as the possibilities. ‘We must recognize the great gulf between what we are and what we may and ought to strive to be,’ ¹⁶ wrote Sri Aurobindo. K.D. Sethna, in Our Light and Delight, has a witty anecdote. ‘Two generations ago Tagore said that although India was lying in the dust, the very dust in which she lay was holy. Obviously it was in his mind that this dust had been trod by the feet of the Rishis and Saints and Avatars. Sri Aurobindo’s comment is reported to have been that, whatever might be the case, the dust could not be the proper thing for a man to lie in, and that man had not been created to adopt a prone posture.’ ¹⁷ That Indian spirituality (and its Eastern derivatives), as predicted by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is spreading throughout the world, is undeniable. Truth is one; so are the fundamental human constitution, psychology and spiritual possibilities. The West has laboured and sacrificed the best of its talent towards an essential acquisition: the individualization of the human personality. It lacks, however, the practice and even the idea of spiritual realization, except in a few of its saints and mystics. India, ‘the Asia of Asia’ as Sri Aurobindo called it, has kept and guarded the spiritual realization in its many forms of unification with the Divine. What it lacks, in its turn, is the necessary sense of individualization within the social and material context (though not in its yogis). The time has come, at this unprecedented opportunity offered by the ‘global village,’ for East and West to meet and to fulfil the human potential in an effort that will make the world effectively one, and carry the human species beyond itself into a New World.

Five ‘Dreams’

A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race.¹⁸

– Sri Aurobindo

The Trichinopoly station of All India Radio had asked Sri Aurobindo for a message, to be read by a newsreader and broadcast on India’s Day of Independence. His message began as follows:⁹³ ‘August 15th, 1947 is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age. But we can also make it by our life and acts as a free nation an important date in a new age opening for the whole world, for the political, social, cultural and spiritual future of humanity.

‘August 15th is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps on the work with which I began my life, the beginning of its full fruition. Indeed, on this day I can watch almost all the world-movements which I hoped to see fulfilled in my lifetime, though then they looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement. In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position.’

Then Sri Aurobindo enumerates and briefly considers these world-movements – his five ‘dreams.’ ‘The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India.’ Chapter five in this book gave us some idea of the prominent role Sri Aurobindo played in the realization of this dream, and his intervention at the time of the Cripps Offer shows how close India’s freedom remained in his concerns and to his heart. We know practically nothing of the yogic force he applied for the accomplishment of the same goal, but there is no doubt that he kept a watchful eye on all relevant developments. It must be remembered that, in his unadorned words, ‘he has always stood for India’s complete independence which he was the first to advocate publicly and without compromise as the only ideal worthy of a self-respecting nation.’ ¹⁹

But the body of Bharat Mata, Mother India, had been split into two states, so-called India and Pakistan, which itself was grotesquely divided into East and West Pakistan, distanced from each other by no less than thirteen hundred kilometres. Sri Aurobindo’s emphatic pronouncement on this deplorable fact – on this ‘human deformation,’ as the Mother called it – is as noteworthy now as it was in 1947. ‘The old communal division into Hindus and Muslims seems to have hardened into a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that this settled fact will not be accepted as settled for ever or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest. India’s internal development and prosperity may be impeded, her position among the nations weakened, her destiny impaired or even frustrated.’ It may be instructive to compare these prognoses with what has happened since 1947.

And Sri Aurobindo continues: ‘This must not be; the partition must go. Let us hope that that may come about naturally, by an increasing recognition of the necessity not only of peace and concord but of common action, by the practice of common action and the creation of means for that purpose. In this way unity may finally come about under whatever form – the exact form may have a pragmatic but not a fundamental importance. But by whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go; unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India’s future.’ Elsewhere, Sri Aurobindo has confirmed this prophecy explicitly: ‘India will be reunited. I see it clearly.’ ²⁰ The Mother has even predicted how this would come to pass: Pakistan, divided into provinces on the lines of its ethnic populations, would fall apart and the separate regions would seek a confederation with India – which itself, as a solution to its internal problems, would become a still more confederate state than it is at the moment.²¹

Sri Aurobindo’s second dream ‘was for the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilization. Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated; its other still subject or partly subject parts are moving through whatever struggles towards freedom. Only a little has to be done and that will be done today or tomorrow’ – as indeed it has.

‘The third dream was a world-union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind. That unification of the human world is under way … The momentum is there and it must inevitably increase and conquer … A catastrophe may intervene and interrupt or destroy what is being done, but even then the final result is sure. For unification is a necessity of Nature, an inevitable movement … A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race.’

For a fuller insight into the need and the problems of world-unity, the reader may be referred to Sri Aurobindo’s The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity,⁹⁴ two books still as fresh and relevant to the subject as at the time they were written almost a century ago, and now better understandable because so much in them of what then seemed only anticipation and projection has in the meantime taken a concrete shape or is in the process of doing so.

In a letter to the Mother during the First World War, Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘The whole world is now under one law.’ If today this is a fact for all to see and experience, it was far from apparent when that letter was written. Has not every race or people throughout the history of humanity held itself to be the ‘navel of the Earth’ and all other peoples to be barbarians and even non-humans?

In A Message to America, written by Sri Aurobindo in 1949, we read: ‘There is a common hope, a common destiny, both spiritual and material, for which both [East and West] are needed as co-workers. It is no longer towards division and difference that we should turn our minds, but on unity, union, even oneness necessary for the pursuit and realization of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginnings obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere.’

In the same message he also wrote: ‘There has been a tendency in some minds to dwell on the spirituality or mysticism of the East and the materialism of the West; but the West has had no less than the East its spiritual seekings and, though not in such profusion, its saints and sages and mystics, the East has had its materialistic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or identical dealings with life and Matter and the world in which we live.’ ²²

‘The message of the East to the West is a true message,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in the Arya. ‘“Only by finding himself can man be saved,” and “What shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul.” The West has heard the message and is seeking out the law and truth of the soul and the evidences of an inner reality greater than the material. The danger is that with her passion for mechanism and her exaggerated intellectuality she may fog herself in an external and false psychism …’

‘Man also is God and it is through his developing manhood that he approaches the godhead; Life also is Divine, its progressive expansion is the self-expression of the Brahman, and to deny Life is to diminish the Godhead within us … The danger is that Asia may accept it in the European form, forget for a time her own law and nature and either copy blindly the West or make a disastrous amalgam of that which she has in its most inferior forms and the crudenesses which are invading her.’ ²³ And he warned the West: ‘The safety of Europe [i.e. the West] has to be sought in the recognition of the spiritual aim of human existence, otherwise she will be crushed by the weight of her own unillumined knowledge and soulless organization.’ ²⁴

The fourth dream, ‘the spiritual gift of India to the world, has already begun,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in the radio broadcast. ‘India’s spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever increasing measure. That movement will grow; amid the disasters of the time more and more eyes are turning towards her with hope and there is even an increasing resort not only to her teachings, but to her psychic and spiritual practice.’ In the meantime, the spirituality of the East has spread throughout the West in a measure nobody but Sri Aurobindo could have foreseen fifty years ago.

The fifth dream ‘was a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solution of the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties on the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome.’ The ‘personal hope and idea’ would be fulfilled within less than a decade, but the ‘difficulties’ were so ‘formidable’ that they required a drastic step.

‘Such is the content which I put into this date of India’s liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India,’ concluded Sri Aurobindo. It is safe to say that at the time no one knew that All India Radio was broadcasting what may be called Sri Aurobindo’s testament.

Overman – the Transitional Being

Meanwhile, the Ashram school and its Department of Physical Education had grown to such an extent that the Mother wanted to bring out a quarterly magazine, the Bulletin of Physical Education, the first issue of which was published on 21 February 1949. (It was later renamed Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.)

Sri Aurobindo had started revising The Life Divine shortly after the accident to his leg. In 1945 his eyesight deteriorated badly, he probably had cataract in both eyes. From that time onwards he dictated everything to Nirodbaran, who thus became his amanuensis, or his ‘scribe,’ as Nirodbaran called himself. In those years Sri Aurobindo revised for publication not only The Life Divine but some other works too, including The Synthesis of Yoga, and we will soon see how he worked on the revision and expansion of Savitri. The correspondence with the disciples stopped, except with Dilip K. Roy, to whom Sri Aurobindo showed an inexhaustible patience, and K.D. Sethna, who needed his constant supervision and advice for the contents of the fortnightly Mother India (now a monthly), which Sri Aurobindo regarded as his own journal.

The series of eight articles Sri Aurobindo wrote for the Bulletin, at the request of the Mother, appeared in it from February 1949 to November 1950. In 1952 they were published under the title The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth and have been reprinted several times. They are extremely important because here, for the first time, Sri Aurobindo writes extensively about the necessity of a transitional being between man and superman, between the human and the suprahuman. As everything he wrote was the result of his and the Mother’s experience, he must have realized this transitional state in his own body. (His mind and vital had been supramentalized a long time previously.) Not only did this make The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth a sequel to The Life Divine, it also proved to be an explanation of a crucial experience which was soon to happen to the Mother, and of the yogic work she was going to base upon it in the coming years. Let us therefore have a closer look at it.

Firstly, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have stated clearly that the supramental being will be a new creation on Earth which cannot be brought forth by the human being as it is now. The reason is that however advanced or developed a human being may be, it will always carry in its substance an element of the Inconscient which forms the base of its evolutionary materiality. ‘The way we are, we have been created in the ordinary way, the animal way,’ said the Mother, ‘and consequently, even if we transform ourselves, there will remain something of this animal origin. The supramental being as he [Sri Aurobindo] conceived of it, is not at all formed in the ordinary animal way, but directly, through a process that for the moment still seems occult to us.’ ²⁵

The necessity of an intermediary being became clear, as became the insight that every decisive step in the evolution has been brought about by the creation of transitional beings, probably in great numbers. As the Mother said in the same talk: ‘It is quite obvious that intermediate beings are necessary, that it is these intermediate beings who must find the means of creating beings of the supermind, and when Sri Aurobindo wrote this [^The Supramental Manifestation], he was undoubtedly convinced that this is what we have to do.’ ²⁶ The Mother called this transitional being: le surhomme, the overman,⁹⁵ although we should keep in mind that the species ‘overman’ will consist most probably of many different individual degrees of consciousness and physical transformation.

Secondly, a being is what its consciousness is, in other words, the substantial form of a being is the expression of its consciousness. If Sri Aurobindo had realized this new, beyond-human state in his body, he must first have realized a new state of consciousness in his body, in the cells of his body. This new state of consciousness he called ‘the Mind of Light,’ and it is to this Mind of Light that he dedicates a major part of The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth. (This title was not coined by him and does not cover the general contents of the articles. Towards the Supramental Manifestation upon Earth might have been more to the point.)

‘We have supposed not only the descent of the supermind upon the Earth,’ writes Sri Aurobindo, ‘but its embodiment in a supramental race⁹⁶ with all its natural consequences and a new total action in which the new humanity would find its complete development and its assured place in the new order. But it is clear that this could only come as the result of the evolution which is already taking place upon Earth extending far beyond its present bounds and passing into a radically new movement governed by a new principle in which mind and man would be subordinate elements and no longer mind the utmost achievement or man the head or leader … A new humanity would then be a race of mental beings on the Earth and in the earthly body but delivered from its present conditions in the reign of the cosmic Ignorance so far as to be possessed of a perfected mind, a mind of light which could even be a subordinate action of the supermind or Truth-Consciousness and in any case capable of the full possibilities of mind acting as a recipient of that truth and at least a secondary action of it in thought and life.’ ²⁷

The general aim of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s avataric endeavour was the descent of the Supramental into the Earth-atmosphere. Both of them had realized the Supramental in their mind and vital. Sri Aurobindo had realized in the cells, in the matter of his body, a degree of the Supramental which he called the Mind of Light – probably because pure consciousness is also pure light, something we do not see or experience because we are living literally in the darkness of the Ignorance. The next step in the avataric yoga we will see soon.

In November 1949 the Mother met her son André, who had come to Pondicherry on his first visit; their last meeting dated from 1916, when André was eighteen. In October 1916 André had become an artillery officer in the war and had been awarded several medals for valorous service. After the war he had studied at the École polytechnique in Paris, and started making a career in industry as soon as he got his engineer’s diploma. In the thirty-three years of their separation, the Mother, though always in inner contact with him, had written scarcely twenty letters.

Now Mother and son would meet again. According to Champaklal, the Mother said to Sri Aurobindo: ‘Perhaps if we met on the road without being introduced to each other I would not know him, and he too would not recognize me.’ ²⁸ She had arranged for him to be accompanied from Madras by a devotee, so that they would arrive ‘at the Ashram at 5 p.m. on the 21st [November]. She explained that she had all set to be able to spend then a little time alone with me,’ remembered André.

But Pondicherry was still French at the time, and papers were needed to cross from the State of Madras into the French territory. Due to some snag in obtaining the papers, André and his companion were delayed. ‘The sun was setting when we arrived at the Ashram. There Pavitra told me that Mother was expecting me at Golconde, in the room where I was to stay for a few days. It was quite dark when I arrived at Golconde. I hastily climbed two stories and then, in the dim light of the corridor, I saw a white shape with her back against the door in a very familiar attitude.’ ²⁹ The Mother had been waiting for three to four hours.

Afterwards K.D. Sethna asked the Mother why André had not come to see her in all those years. She answered: ‘Why should he have? He had his own life to live in France; and actually, even while he was there, there was no real separation. Up till now it was as if there were a screen in my room and André was present behind the screen. What has happened now is simply that he has come out in front.’ ³⁰ For the rest of his life André became a regular visitor, dividing his time between France and Pondicherry. After Pavitra’s passing, he would even become de facto head of the Ashram School.

Savitri

He has crammed the whole universe into a single book.³¹

– The Mother

Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri consists of nearly 24,000 lines – 712 printed pages in the complete works. He worked on its twelve ever-expanded drafts for half a century, from the last years in Baroda till a few weeks before his leaving the body.

Sri Aurobindo called Savitri ‘a legend and a symbol.’ The legend is a story from the Mahabharata that briefly summarized goes as follows: Savitri, daughter of King Aswapati of Madra, chooses Satyavan, son of King Dyumatsena of Shalwa, for her husband. Satyavan lives in the forest to which his blind father has been exiled by a usurper; there Savitri meets him and falls in love with him. On her return home, the heavenly singer and seer Narad tells her, however, that a curse rests on Satyavan and that he has to die in exactly a year’s time. Savitri remains nonetheless faithful to the choice of her soul, goes back to the forest where Satyavan lives, marries him, and lives there with him till the fatal day. When Satyavan does indeed die and Yama, the god of Death, comes with his noose to take him away, Savitri does not want to let him go. She follows them into the invisible worlds and wins from Yama, after a fierce occult and spiritual struggle with him, the exceptional boon of Satyavan’s return to his body and life in the world.

Sri Aurobindo’s first draft was a relatively short narrative poem, comparable to his Love and Death, in which he stuck to the original legend. Gradually, as his yoga widened and particularly after the coming of the Mother, he saw a symbolic parallel between the Mahabharata story and their own avataric effort. Savitri came to stand for an incarnation of the universal Mother and Satyavan for an incarnation of the soul of the Earth which the Mother, in her Love for it and through her yoga, wins back from the Inconscient, symbolised by Death; Sri Aurobindo more and more substituted himself for the figure of Aswapati, using the role of the latter to describe his own spiritual experiences, discoveries and conquests.

Sri Aurobindo, August 1950

After his work on The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo started revising and expanding the existing drafts of Savitri. As his eyesight grew gradually worse, he did this with the help of his ‘scribe,’ Nirodbaran. The latter’s report of this work in his Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo is, in its bare simplicity, not only interesting but also very moving. ‘One is simply amazed at the enormous pains he [Sri Aurobindo] has taken to raise Savitri to its ideal perfection,’ writes Nirodbaran.³²

‘I wrote Savitri as a means of ascension,’ explains Sri Aurobindo in one of his many letters on his epic to K.D. Sethna, the very first person to receive and read a few lines of it. ‘I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level … In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.’ ³³ ‘I wonder how he could go on dictating lines of poetry in this way,’ writes Nirodbaran, ‘as if a tap had been turned on and the water flowed, not in a jet, of course, but slowly, very slowly indeed. Passages sometimes had to be reread in order to get the link or sequence, but when the turn came of The Book of Yoga and The Book of Everlasting Day, line after line began to flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream …’ ³⁴

To Mona Sarkar, a young sadhak at the time, the Mother gave a revealing inside view on Savitri. ‘All this is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which he has worked out. Each object, each event, each realization, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words and phrases are also exactly what I heard. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when he was writing, he used to read it to me. Every morning I used to [listen to] him reading Savitri. During the night he would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious: that day after day the experiences he read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word for word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what he said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told him my experiences and that he had noted them down afterwards, no, he knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences he has presented at length and they were his experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.’ ³⁵

The Mother also said to the same young man: ‘Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness. It is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is yoga, tapasya, sadhana, everything, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is Truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the Earth.’ ³⁶

‘Though the hour of work appointed for Savitri and correspondence was shifted to the morning, we could get very little time for Savitri,’ remembers Nirodbaran. ‘Many interruptions came in the way. The preliminary work of reading old versions, selections, etc., took up much time before we could actually start writing … till one day in 1950 [Sri Aurobindo] exclaimed: “My main work is being delayed”’ ³⁷ – to the surprise of Nirodbaran, who had never seen Sri Aurobindo hurry for anything. ‘In these twelve years this was the first time I had heard him reckoning with the time factor.’ ³⁸ There are other reports of his becoming very concerned, though nobody had the faintest inkling about what. When Satyendra, taking his courage in both hands, asked: ‘Why are you so serious, sir?’ Sri Aurobindo answered gravely: ‘The time is very serious.’

We turn again to Nirodbaran’s narrative. ‘When the last revision was made and the Cantos were wound up, I said, “It is finished now.” An impersonal smile of satisfaction greeted me, and he said: “Ah, is it finished?” How well I remember that flicker of a smile which all of us craved for so long! “What is left now?” was his next query. “The Book of Death and the Epilogue.” “Oh, that? We shall see about that later on.” That “later on” never came and was not meant to come. Having taken the decision to leave the body, he must have been waiting for the right moment to go, and for reasons known to himself he left the two last-mentioned Books almost as they were. Thus on Savitri was put the seal of incomplete completion about two weeks before the Darshan of November 24th [1950]. Other literary work too came to an end.’ ³⁹

The ‘reasons known to himself’ may not be that difficult to guess. Savitri was the rendition in the poetry of the future, in mantric poetry, of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s experience. Of two things they did not and could not have the experience: physical death and its mysteries, and ‘the epilogue,’ which should have pictured the advent of the New World, the accomplishment of their avataric endeavour – something possible only in the future, but not yet defined in time and still less worked out in its concrete materialization.

Savitri was regarded as finished by Sri Aurobindo two weeks before the Darshan of 24 November. In the early hours of 5 December, less than two weeks after that darshan, he would voluntarily descend into death.

The Descent into Death

Sri Aurobindo has given up his body in an act of supreme unselfishness, renouncing the realization in his own body to hasten the hour of the collective realization.⁴⁰

– The Mother

Towards the end of his life Sri Aurobindo had at times been suffering from ‘some mild prostatic enlargement.’ ‘During his last months the symptoms of prostatic enlargement reappeared and began to increase slowly,’ ⁴¹ writes Nirodbaran. Ten days or so before the darshan of 24 November – almost immediately after the ‘incomplete completion’ of Savitri – the symptoms worsened again and Dr. Satyabrata Sen, a surgeon and devotee who was on a darshan visit to the Ashram, was consulted. Sen confirmed the diagnosis that the prostate gland had enlarged and proposed an operation, but this was an intervention Sri Aurobindo and the Mother refused to consider.

The darshan was, as usual, a physically exhausting affair for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who had to sit there for hours in a continuous spiritual exchange with hundreds of disciples and devotees. After the darshan the symptoms grew more serious and a catheter was inserted. On the twenty-ninth the Mother had a telegram sent to Dr. Prabhat Sanyal, a prominent surgeon in Calcutta as well as a devotee. Sanyal arrived the next day and diagnosed ‘a mild kidney infection, but nothing serious.’ ⁹⁷

The anniversary of the foundation of the school, 2 December is every year a festive day in the Ashram. This time too ‘the whole Ashram was busy and bustling … Nobody suspected that a profound tragedy was being enacted in the closed chambers of Sri Aurobindo.’ ⁴² Sanyal himself seems not to have suspected that much, for he found the illness so little serious that he proposed to leave on the third. He changed his mind after the Mother reacted negatively to this proposal. Later in the day Sri Aurobindo’s temperature shot up and respiratory distress showed itself for the first time. He ‘lapsed into trance’ and remained like that for almost the whole day. The Mother, quite exceptionally, did not join the activities at the Playground. For the first time she said: ‘He is losing interest in himself.’ She would repeat this to Sanyal late at night.

In the morning of the fourth Sri Aurobindo wanted to sit up and ‘insisted strongly’ when the doctors objected. The Mother helped him to take a light breakfast. ‘We were so happy at this sudden change and thought that at last our prayer had been heard,’ writes Nirodbaran. ‘We boldly asked him now: “Are you not using your force to cure yourself?” “No!” came the stunning reply. We could not believe our ears; to be quite sure, we repeated the question. No mistake! Then we asked: “Why not? How is the disease going to be cured otherwise?” “Can’t explain; you wouldn’t understand,” was the curt reply. We were dumbfounded.’ ⁴³

From midday the symptoms increased again, particularly the breathing difficulty. ‘He is withdrawing,’ said the Mother to Sanyal. ‘He was now always indrawn,’ writes Nirodbaran, ‘and only woke up whenever he was called for a drink. That confirmed the Mother’s observation that he was fully conscious within and disproved the idea that he was in uraemic coma. Throughout the entire course of the illness he was never unconscious.’ ⁴⁴ Sanyal confirms this: ‘Though he looked apparently unconscious, whenever he was offered drinks, he would wake up and take a few sips and wipe his mouth himself with his handkerchief. To all of us it seemed apparent that a consciousness came from outside when he was almost normal, and then withdrew when the body quivered and sank down in distress. He was no longer there!’ ⁴⁵

‘By 5 o’clock again he showed signs of improvement. He was quite responsive. We helped him out of his bed, after which he walked to the armchair to rest. For the moment he seemed a different personality. He sat there with his eyes closed – calm and composed with a radiating consciousness. But this did not last long.’ ⁴⁶ After three quarters of an hour the respiratory distress returned with redoubled force.

‘He went to his bed and plunged deep within himself,’ writes Nirodbaran. ‘It was during this period that he often came out of the trance and each time leaned forward, hugged and kissed Champaklal, who was sitting by the side of his bed. Champaklal also hugged him in return. A wonderful sight it was, though so strangely unlike Sri Aurobindo who had rarely called us even by our names in these twelve years.’ ⁴⁷ Is it not obvious that the Avatar, in his love for humanity, was here taking leave of that humanity in the person of the pure Champaklal? It was ‘the embrace that takes to itself the body of God in man,’ as Sri Aurobindo had written in The Synthesis of Yoga.

Then the Mother, who had gone again to the Playground that day, came back into the room. ‘She laid her garland at the foot of the bed, a thing she did daily,’ writes Sanyal, ‘and stood watching Sri Aurobindo. She looked so grave and quiet that it almost distressed me. I went to the ante-room to wait for her. She entered and I gave her the report and told her that glucose had been given by Satya [Sen] and we wanted to arrange for intravenous infusion, etc. She said quietly and firmly: “I told you this is not necessary. He has no interest in himself, he is withdrawing” …

‘At about 11 p.m. the Mother came into the room and helped Sri Aurobindo to drink half a cup of tomato juice. A strange phenomenon – a body which for the moment is in agony, unresponsive, labouring hard for breath, suddenly becomes quiet; a consciousness enters the body, he is awake and normal. He finishes the drink, then, as the consciousness withdraws, the body lapses back in the grip of agony.’ ⁴⁸

At midnight the Mother went again into Sri Aurobindo’s room and ‘looked intently for some time as if there was a silent exchange of thought between them.’ Then she left – to come back at 1 a.m. on 5 December. In Sanyal’s words: ‘She returned and again looked at the Lord and stood at the foot of the bed. There was no sign of agony, fear, or anxiety on her face … With her eyes she asked me to go into the other room and she followed me. She asked: “What do you think? Can I retire for one hour?” … I murmured: “Mother, this is beyond me.” She said: “Call me when the time comes.”’

‘It may appear strange to our human mind that the Mother should leave Sri Aurobindo at this critical moment,’ observes Nirodbaran.⁴⁹ But the Mother explained later: ‘As long as I was in the room, he could not leave his body. So there was a terrible tension in him: the inner will to leave and then this kind of thing [i.e. the Mother] that was holding him there, like that, in his body – because I knew that he was alive and that he could not be other than alive … He had to give a sign so that I would go into my room, supposedly to rest (which I didn’t do). And as soon as I had gone out of the room, he left. Then they called me back immediately.’ ⁵⁰

This is how Sanyal tells of the end: ‘I stood behind the Master and started stroking his hair which he always liked. Nirod and Champaklal sat by the side of the bed and caressed his feet. We were all quietly watching him. We now knew that anything might happen, any time … I perceived a slight quiver in his body, almost imperceptible. He drew up his arms and put them on his chest, one overlapping the other – then all stopped … I told Nirod to go and fetch the Mother. It was 1.20 a.m.

‘Almost immediately the Mother entered the room. She stood there, near the feet of Sri Aurobindo: her hair had been undressed and was flowing about her shoulders. Her look was so fierce that I could not face those eyes. With a piercing gaze she stood there. Champaklal could not bear it and sobbingly he implored: “Mother, tell me that Dr. Sanyal is not right, [that] he is alive.” The Mother looked at him and he became quiet and composed as if touched by a magic wand. She stood there for more than half an hour. My hands were still on his forehead.’ ⁵¹

Soon afterwards the main personalities in the Ashram were informed and the Ashram photographers called before the endless queue would form to pay their last homage to the Master. Two of the photographers’ testimonies are worth comparing. The first one recalls: ‘I remember clearly that Mother was sitting in the middle room beside Sri Aurobindo’s, where the tiger skins and the Mother’s paintings are displayed. She looked very dejected. She was stooping in front with a hand on her forehead. But she did not notice me as I entered.’ ⁵² The second photographer, on the contrary, recalls: ‘When I entered Sri Aurobindo’s abode through the door at the top of the staircase leading from the Meditation Hall, I instantly became petrified by the sight of the Mother sitting on a chair in the central room – the room in which her paintings adorn the walls and the tiger skins decorate the divan. She was seated between the two doors on the southern side of the narrow room with her eyes shut, lost in deep meditation. I have never seen her like that again. To me she looked like the personification of Mother Kali herself, so powerful was the appearance. I stood before her for some time.’ ⁵³

The details of Sri Aurobindo’s last days have been evoked in some detail to allow us a glimmer of understanding of the momentous event which was surely unique in the history of yoga and in human history as a whole. For the fact is that Sri Aurobindo entered voluntarily into death. The reader will at once reflect that many yogis have been able to enter voluntarily into death, and have effectively done so. In this case, however, Sri Aurobindo’s intention was not simply to put an end to his life, following the normal process of transiting to the other worlds by shedding successively the material, vital and mental body-sheaths. His master act was a confrontation with death in full consciousness and while keeping the vital and mental sheaths, which, as we know, were supramentally transformed. (The Mother described him later on as being in possession of this supramentalized body when she gained access to his dwelling in a certain region of the Supramental worlds.) He did not subject himself to death, he confronted it by entering into it with his supernal consciousness ablaze. An indication of his voluntary intent was the rapidity with which he let the illness develop from a ‘mild infection’ to a fatal condition. A still stronger indication was his surfacing, time and again, from the inner consciousness, where he must have been waging a battle nobody knew of, to the outer consciousness, in a most peculiar uraemic ‘coma.’

The Mother has asserted repeatedly that Sri Aurobindo did not have to leave his body for ‘natural’ reasons, he did not have to go the way of all flesh. ‘He was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond the reach of human mentality,’ ⁵⁴ she said. She would confirm on several occasions, for example to K.D. Sethna and to Satprem, that Sri Aurobindo did not ‘succumb’ to death; that he did not die of physical causes; that he had complete control over his body. Sri Aurobindo has written so himself in some passages in Savitri (e.g. p. 83) which are clearly autobiographical, and for instance in his sonnet Transformation:

I am no longer a vassal of the flesh,
A slave to Nature and her leaden rule …⁵⁵

Then, why did he leave his body? We have seen that Sri Aurobindo said, with ever greater urgency, that the times were serious and that he wanted to finish his main work. Serious the times certainly were, even after the elimination of Adolf Hitler, instrument of the Lord of Falsehood. But the Asura had other instruments on Earth. In the first place there was Stalin, considered by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to be an even greater evil than the Führer. The Cold War was at a high pitch, with the production of weapons capable of destroying not only all civilization but all life on Earth. Mao Tse-tung had become the ruler of China. The Korean War had erupted. Sri Aurobindo’s significant comment on this war to K.D. Sethna was as follows: ‘The whole affair is as plain as a pike-staff. It is the first move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these northern parts and then of Southeast Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with regard to the rest of the continent – in passing, Tibet as a gate opening to India. If they succeed, there is no reason why domination of the whole world should not follow by steps until they are ready to deal with America.’ ⁵⁶⁹⁸

These outer circumstances, however, must have developed simultaneously with a profound inner reason, which nobody knows, for confronting death. What we do know is that the Supramental was on the verge of manifesting in 1938. We know also that, as Sri Aurobindo had written in his poem A God’s Labour, something impossible had to be made possible, something unconquerable had to be conquered:

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.’ ⁵⁷

Now he had gone to ‘the very root of things / Where the grey Sphinx guards God’s riddle sleep / On the Dragon’s outspread wings’ – not only in yogic concentration, but with his whole avataric personality, to make the impossible possible. The result of his action and the confirmation of our supposition will be the manifestation of the Supramental only six years later, in 1956. Undoubtedly this manifestation was finally made possible by Sri Aurobindo’s unprecedented yogic master act.

In 1924 Sri Aurobindo said that there were three causes that could still bring about his death: (i) violent surprise and accident; (ii) the action of old age; (iii) his own choice, when finding it not possible to accomplish his endeavour this time, i.e. establishing the supramental Consciousness on Earth, or if something would prove to him that it was not possible. What happened in 1950 was a fourth possibility not foreseeable in 1924: that he would have to descend into death voluntarily, having in the meantime acquired the powers to do so, in order to make his endeavour possible. This ‘tactical’ move was possible (the words of our ignorance are so inadequate) only because the Avatar was present on Earth in his/her physical completeness, i.e. in two bodies. If the Avatar had been present in only one body, the death of this body would have cancelled any possibility of executing the present mission. This shows that the planning and the completion of the mission of an Avatar is decided upon and pre-exists outside the scope of the material world.

We cannot even guess in what Sri Aurobindo’s master act specifically consisted – ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Sri Aurobindo said to his assistants. The Mother herself has never given a complete explanation and said years later that she remained puzzled by the event. ‘Why? Why? How often have I not asked that question!’ To put the mind of the anguished disciples and devotees at rest, she had five thousand copies printed of an essay by K.D. Sethna, The Passing of Sri Aurobindo. He formulated his thesis as follows: ‘Nothing except a colossal strategic sacrifice of this kind in order that the physical transformation of the Mother may be immeasurably hastened and rendered absolutely secure and, through it, a divine life on Earth for humanity may get rooted and be set aflower – nothing less can explain the passing of Sri Aurobindo.’ ⁵⁸ At that point in time K.D. Sethna could not know about the imminent manifestation of the Supramental.

One reads in many writings that there had been some indications foretelling the passing of Sri Aurobindo. There had been Sri Aurobindo’s hurry to finish Savitri. There had also been the fact that for the first time since the Mother’s coming he let himself be photographed by the world-famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Both occurrences can only be taken as indications post facto.

Actually the only clear indication was something that had happened in early 1950 and that only the Mother knew. She said to Sanyal on the very morning of Sri Aurobindo’s passing: ‘About a year ago, while I was discussing things, I remarked that I felt like leaving this body of mine. He spoke out in a very firm tone: “No, this can never be. If necessary for this transformation, I might go, you will have to fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation.”’ ⁵⁹ On another occasion she recalled this conversation as follows: ‘I told him: “If one of us must go, I want that it should be me.” – “It can’t be you,” he replied, “because you alone can do the material thing.” And that was all. He said nothing more. He forbade me to leave my body … After that – this took place early in 1950 – he gradually let himself fall ill. For he knew quite well that should he say “I must go,” I would not have obeyed him and I would have gone. For according to the way I felt, he was much more indispensable than I. But he saw the matter from the other side. And he knew that I had the power to leave my body at will. So he didn’t say a thing – he didn’t say a thing right to the very last minute.’ ⁶⁰

When Sri Aurobindo said to the Mother ‘you alone can do the material fact,’ he was looking to the future, to the time of the immensely difficult work of the transformation of the body. It is even reported that he said: ‘Your body is better than mine.’ This returns us to the Mother’s choice of her parents, and the physical strength and equilibrium of Maurice Alfassa, her father.

And then there is the amazing avowal of the Mother that she does not seem to have known that Sri Aurobindo, step by invisible step, entered into death. She has confirmed this more than once herself. For instance: ‘You see, he had decided to go. But he didn’t want me to know that he was doing it deliberately. He knew that if for a single moment I knew he was doing it deliberately, I would have reacted with such violence that he would not have been able to leave. And he did this: he bore it all as if it were some unconsciousness, an ordinary illness, simply to keep me from knowing – and he left at the very moment he had to leave.’ ⁶¹ Sri Aurobindo had created a blind spot, as it were, in the perception of her who was the Mother of the worlds and had access to all knowledge everywhere if she so desired! We are reminded of her saying that he ‘is losing interest in himself’ before anyone else present even sensed what was happening. Yet, in his love and because of practical necessity Sri Aurobindo prevented her from knowing, for she would have gone in his stead, or she would have followed him.

‘She stood there, near the feet of Sri Aurobindo: her hair had been undressed and was flowing about her shoulders,’ Sanyal writes. ‘With a piercing gaze she stood there.’ Once again we have to turn to the Mother for a glimpse into what happened at that climactic moment. ‘He had accumulated in his body much supramental Force, and as soon as he left … You see, he was lying on his bed, I stood by his side, and in a way altogether concrete – concrete with such a strong sensation as to make one think that it could be seen – all this supramental Force which was in him passed from his body into mine. And I felt the friction of the passage. It was extraordinary. It was an extraordinary experience.’ ⁶²

This was when the Mother received the Mind of Light in the cells of her body. We have already seen what the Mind of Light is. We have also seen that, since November 1926, there had been a sort of ‘division of tasks’ between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Because of the unity of their Consciousness, she remained in direct contact with his yogic struggles and realizations; everything that happened in him she knew at once and shared in it. He, for his part, participated in the goings on in the Ashram and in the disciples, through the correspondence and by yogic means. But she had been put in charge of the material build-up, while he was concentrating on fixing the Supramental in matter, which meant in the first place the matter of his own body. Now he had entered into death fully conscious and with all his yogic acquisitions – except those of the physical body, for the laying down of the physical body is of course what ‘death’ is about. That is why another component of his master act consisted in transmitting the supramental acquisitions, the supramental stuff of his physical body to the Mother, who from now on had to continue alone and take on both parts of the task.

‘As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he has called the Mind of Light got realized in me,’ the Mother said to K.D. Sethna. ‘The Supermind had descended long ago – very long ago – into the mind and even into the vital; it was working in the physical also but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. This physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light.’ ⁶³

The transmission of the Mind of Light from Sri Aurobindo’s body into the body of the Mother, ‘with such a strong sensation as to make one think that it could be seen,’ happened immediately after Sanyal declared that the life of his physical body had come to an end.

‘On 6 December I entered Sri Aurobindo’s room before dawn,’ writes Sanyal. ‘The Mother and I had a look at him; how wonderful, how beautiful he looked, with a golden hue. There were no signs of death as science had taught me, no evidence of the slightest discolouration or decomposition. The Mother whispered: “As long as the supramental light does not pass away, the body will not show any signs of decomposition, and it may be a day or many more days.” I whispered to her: “Where is the light you speak of – can I not see it?” I was then kneeling by Sri Aurobindo’s bed, by the Mother’s feet. She smiled at me and with infinite compassion put her hand on my head. There he was – with a luminous mantle of bluish golden hue around him.’ ⁶⁴ Major Barbet, the French physician of the Hospital, examined Sri Aurobindo’s body and signed the death certificate together with Sanyal.

The American philosopher Rhoda Le Cocq has noted her impressions of those days in the book already mentioned. She writes about 5 December: ‘Already it had been decided, despite the objections of the French colonial governor, that Sri Aurobindo would be buried in the courtyard of the main building [of the Ashram], beneath a huge spreading tree. The male Ashramites, including the visiting doctor [probably Sen], began to build the tomb … There was weeping, but no hysteria. By afternoon men and women passed baskets of earth from hand to hand, as the digging continued beneath the tree. Then there was a new announcement. For all of us there, there would now be a second darshan …

‘Again, the following morning on 6 December, we all filed past. The “force field” which I mentioned earlier seemed to remain about the body and throughout the room. Dressed in white, upon a white couch before the windows, Sri Aurobindo now lay in state … Unexpectedly, in the afternoon there was another darshan. Sri Aurobindo’s face still did not look deathlike. The skin was golden in colour, the white hair blowing on the pillow in a breeze from a fan. The aquiline profile continued to have a prophetic look. There was no odour of death and little incense was burning. To my astonishment, the repeated viewings of his body had a comforting effect. Previously I had always resented the idea of viewing dead bodies …’

7 December. ‘From the French colony, already exploding with disapproval and its officials much disturbed by the burial plans, came the rumour that the body must have been “shot with formaldehyde” secretly, to preserve it. Moreover, said the officials, the Ashram was not only breaking the law in burying [a dead body] in the garden, it was worse to keep it so long unburied … On the morning of 7 December, therefore, a French doctor representing the Government, a Dr. Barbet, arrived to inspect the body of Sri Aurobindo. At the end he reported it was a “miracle;” there was no deterioration, no rigor mortis. It was an unheard of occurrence; the weather had continued to be hot during the entire time.’ ⁶⁵

8 December. ‘When I asked Him (8 December 1950) to resuscitate his body,’ said the Mother later, ‘He clearly answered: “I have left this body purposely. I will not take it back. I shall manifest again in the first supramental body built in the supramental way.’ ⁶⁶

9 December. Rhoda Le Cocq writes: ‘On the afternoon of 9 December, at 5:00 p.m., the burial service finally took place after another, final darshan. A feeling of force and energy remained in the atmosphere around Sri Aurobindo’s vicinity, but that force had weakened now … There was no orthodox religious service at the burial. The coffin, of rosewood with metal-gold rings, much like an old and beautiful sea chest, was borne from [Sri Aurobindo’s room into the courtyard] and lowered into the earth. French officials, all dressed in white, made a line to the left, their faces stern, a bit superior in expression and definitely disapproving of the entire affair. Over the coffin, concrete slabs were laid. Then everyone lined up and, one by one, we scattered earth from wicker baskets. It was dark under the spreading tree when each of us had made this last farewell.’

‘To grieve is an insult to Sri Aurobindo, who is here with us, conscious and alive,’ proclaimed the Mother on 14 December. This was no empty rhetoric. In the following years she would time and again refer to his concrete presence and the enormous work he was doing ‘behind the scenes’ to hasten the manifestation of the Supramental and the transformation of her own body. Moreover, we know about some of Sri Aurobindo’s realizations, and we know that his ‘death’ was not what death is generally supposed to be.

How can one better take leave of Sri Aurobindo than with the following lines of Savitri, from the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, most of which was written in the last months of his life. The traveller is none other than Sri Aurobindo himself.

Into the abysmal secrecy he came
Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude
And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor
Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts
And built the world not knowing what it built. ||64.34||

There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,
There is the record of the vanished stars. ||64.35||

There in the slumber of the cosmic Will
He saw the secret key of Nature’s change. ||64.36||

..He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,
Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,
In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,
Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain
And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates. ||64.38||

Then in Illusion’s occult factory
And in the Inconscient’s magic printing house
Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance. ||64.39||

Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,
Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code
And the articles of the bound soul’s contract,
Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape. ||64.40||

Annulled were the tables of the law of pain.. ||64.41||

..He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable,
Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things
A paean-song of the free Infinite
And the Name, foundation of eternity,
And traced on the awake exultant cells
In the ideographs of the Ineffable
The lyric of the love that waits through Time
And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss
And the message of the superconscient Fire. ||64.43|| ⁶⁷

That is where the ‘Traveller of the worlds’ went and what he did. It is where Sri Aurobindo went and what he did, totally unknown to the world. And he arranged everything so that the continuation of his work would not be disrupted. ‘[He] cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.’ ⁶⁸