The Mother

16: What Is to Be Done Is Done

Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Ups and Downs

1958 had been a year of splendid realizations. It was certainly the year in which the Mother fully realized the transitional being, overman, in her body. In a conversation in May of that year, she said that she had been working on this since the moment of Sri Aurobindo’s departure, eight years before, and still more intensely after the supramental manifestation. When on 8 October a child asked her: ‘Mother, will there not be any intermediary states between man and overman [le surhomme]?’ the Mother answered: ‘There will probably be many.’ But then she wanted to make sure that the person who asked the question was aware of the definitions. ‘Man and overman? You are not speaking of the new supramental race [i.e. superman], are you? Are you really speaking of what we here call the overman, that is: the human being born in the human way and trying to transform his physical being which he has received by his ordinary human birth?’ ² The child’s answer is not recorded.

The Mother continued: ‘There will certainly be a countless number of partial realizations. The degree of transformation will differ according to each one’s capacity, and it is certain that there will be a considerable number of more or less fruitful or unfruitful attempts before arriving at something like overman, and even those [the overmen] will be more or less successful attempts. All those who make an effort to go beyond ordinary nature; all those who try to realize materially the profound experience which has brought them into contact with the divine Truth; all those who, instead of taking as their aim the Beyond or the Highest, try to realize physically, externally, the change of consciousness they have realized within themselves – all those are apprentice-overmen. Among them there are innumerable differences in the success of their efforts. Each time we try not to be an ordinary man, not to live the ordinary life, to express in our movements, our actions and reactions the divine Truth, when we are governed by that Truth instead of being governed by the general ignorance, we are apprentice-overmen – according to the success of our efforts more or less able apprentices, more or less advanced on the way.’ ³

Then, after a series of magnificent realizations, came the repercussion; the Black Dragon swept its tail and the Mother went through one of the severest ordeals of her life. This up-and-down movement occurs so frequently in her and Sri Aurobindo’s yoga that it seems to be phenomenon proper to it. After each yogic gain, each climb to formerly unconquered heights, each ascent beyond the previously known, acquired and established, there is a step backward, a sliding down lower than before, more daunting and dangerous, a descent into deeper darkness and horror. According to the Mother each such up-and-down cycle was not only a consolidation of newly acquired terrain, it was also an essential movement of the yoga to descend ever deeper with the Light and the Power gained ever higher.

What also becomes a regular feature of the Mother’s yoga from this time onwards is that many severe ordeals seem to be accompanied or even brought about by an attack of black magic. In December 1958, when the attack was so ferocious that she had to withdraw from all activities and many thought that her life was in peril, she ‘saw’ a young woman pulling her by her hand outside into what looked like the courtyard of the Ashram, not the material courtyard but its occult replica. There a sorcerer was uttering his incantations threatening the Mother’s life and using as his operational contact a thin gold chain of hers. When the Mother managed to break the magic spell, she ‘burst into laughter’ and woke up in her bed. The evil was seen, the magic was mastered, the crisis was over.

It is nonetheless interesting to know that the young woman trying to pull her down into the courtyard was a former close attendant of hers who had died five years before. This woman, Chinmoy, is mentioned in several chronicles as spreading scandalous insinuations and rumours about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Champaklal remembers: ‘At one time C[hinmoy] was very close to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And as happens in the case of many who come too close to them, she also lost her head. She became hostile. This has happened so often and exceptions are rare. Their speech is very sweet. Mother warned me several times against it: “Champaklal, take care, it is slow poison.”

‘C[hinmoy] used to speak nonsense [i.e. slanderous insinuations] and we could not bear it. So once I asked Mother while Dyuman was also present: “What is our position? We cannot bear what she says. Your ways are different and we are afraid that if we react in our normal way, it may run counter to your working. What are we to do?” Mother looked tenderly and lovingly [at us] and explained: “You see, we have been fighting this for the last forty-one years. I have spoken to Sri Aurobindo also about it and he said to me: ‘You know well that it is not a question of this person or that person. Sending away a certain person won’t help us in any way. We are fighting with the hostile force [behind her], not with the person. If you send away one person, it will catch hold of another.’ Now you understand, Champaklal?” And she looked on both of us with great kindness.’ ⁴

The Mother also said that people like this attendant were targeted for possession by the powerful Titan who was put into the world by the great Adversary, and who tried to end the Mother’s life and her mission on every possible occasion. This Black Shadow stalking her at every step attempted to kill her innumerable times, she said, using every human and nonhuman instrument within his scope. This is the cause or explanation of many of the dramatic events forming her Stations of the Cross, but of which she has spoken very little. This was also the reason for Sri Aurobindo’s occult watchfulness and protective care of the Mother, especially on days of intense descent, e.g. the darshan days, so much so that in November 1938 he forgot about himself, so to speak, and was attacked in his turn – something he thought ‘they’ would not dare to do.

When the suffering and the digging into new lower layers of the subconscious were over, the Mother recovered her strength and progressed towards a new height: the first time the supramental force penetrated directly into her material body, without passing through the intermediary mental or vital sheaths. It was an overwhelming experience in which the red and golden supramental light poured into her with such intensity that it caused a burning fever. This happened in the night of 24-25 July 1959 ⁵ with a surprising consequence: suddenly the Mother found herself in the presence of Sri Aurobindo, in his ‘dwelling’ in the supramental world.

This does not mean that the Mother had not met Sri Aurobindo before. In fact, his presence by her side had been constant, as his action in the world had equally been continuous and had resulted, among other things, in the supramental manifestation in 1956. But now something completely new happened: the Mother met Sri Aurobindo not in a psychic, mental or vital part of her personality, but physically, in the world of supramental Matter which, for the first time, had extended to her material body. As we know, the Supramental is a Unity-Consciousness, which means that the supramental world is a unity-world in which everything is present to everything else and participates in its being. Sri Aurobindo could be there because he had supramentalized his inner being, consisting of the sheaths or bodies in which he lived after his departure from the gross material world. It may be said that Sri Aurobindo formerly, as the evolutionary Avatar, had built his stations one after the other on all levels of existence up to the Supramental. Now he had a permanent ‘dwelling’ there too. This did not prevent him from being present and active wherever he wanted in all of the manifestation.

The Mother would later report that together with Sri Aurobindo in his supramental dwelling there were other people close to him. She named Purani, and Amrita, and the amazing Mridu. The explanation of their presence there is not difficult. We remember that, after her experience of the ship of the New World, the Mother had said that some people on Earth were supramentalized in part of their personality, even without their surface consciousness being aware of it. After death we carry with us what we are inwardly. It may be assumed that people who are in part supramentalized are fully mature souls, sufficiently developed to dwell in the supramental world(s), and that the former human beings now with Sri Aurobindo, and ready to come down with him as the first supermen on a supramentalized Earth, are of this kind.

Now that Sri Aurobindo was physically present with her again, the Mother did something she had postponed doing for ten years: she opened with great care the access to her inner psyche, where she lived in eternal unity with him. We recall that she had closed this access by a yogic act at the time of his departure, in order to prevent her automatically following him. How many realized that, from 1959 onwards, they were in the presence not only of the Mother but also of Sri Aurobindo, physically, albeit in a material substance so different from our gross Matter that the Mother described both substances as two worlds. Sometimes she started spontaneously speaking in English, and explained that Sri Aurobindo was uttering the words through her mouth; or it happened that her handwriting suddenly resembled Sri Aurobindo’s, so concrete was his presence to her, in her.

Angry Sugar Cane

It may be doubted whether it was the Mother’s intention to stop her activities altogether in December 1959. She probably saw her withdrawal as temporary, for she was always ready to continue her effort to the end through thick and thin. The reason her withdrawal turned out to be more radical than intended was that the yoga had entered a new phase: the transformation of the body. Transformation means change, and processes which lead to an unknown change in the body are generally considered illnesses. The inevitable transitional stages of the changes in the Mother’s body as a whole, of its parts (skeleton and organs) and of its elementary constituents (the cells) indeed looked very much like illnesses, and grave or baffling ones at that, although, as we shall see, she asserted time and again that she was not ill, that she was going through the unprecedented experience of physical transformation resulting in temporary ‘disorders’.

She still went out occasionally, to preside over a ceremony at the playground, the sports ground or the school, or on a special occasion elsewhere, at a sugar factory for instance. And hereby hangs an illuminating tale.

Laljibhai Hindocha, building on the pioneering work of his father, was a successful Indian businessman in Uganda, Africa. He first heard of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in 1953 at a talk by A.B. Purani, who was in Uganda on a lecture tour. Towards the end of the same year Laljibhai visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram for the first time. He saw no reason for staying more than a day, but the Mother let him know, through Dyuman, that she wanted him to stay for two weeks. Laljibhai at first protested that he had ‘important commitments to public and social work and business and the affairs of all my companies in Africa,’ including his Miwani Sugar Mills.⁶ When he relented, the Mother asked him to visit all the farms and small industries of the Ashram. ‘Let him observe them and give a report on how we can improve their efficiency and increase the production.’

When the day came that the Mother wanted to hear his report, it was the very first time that Laljibhai spoke directly to her. In the course of their unusually long conversation, he asked the Mother: ‘How is it that we are here?’ – meaning he and his family. The Mother replied: ‘Among those who come here, each soul is destined to come, guided by the divine Planning. You are also under the divine Plan. That is how you are here. You don’t know, but your mother prayed to Uma for a child.⁹¹ Do you know who Uma is? I am Uma. Her prayer was granted and with my blessings to your mother you were born. Since your childhood, in school and in your business I have been with you at each step. We have also been together in our past lives.’ When he took his leave Laljibhai didn’t intend to come back to India before four or five years.

Yet it so happened that one of his sisters, Savita, divorced after a brief marriage and became a member of the Ashram. This meant that Laljibhai, her elder brother, had again to travel from Africa to India some months afterwards to settle his sister’s affairs.⁹² As matters continued developing, and the political situation in Africa looked more ominous year by year, Laljibhai and his family finally settled in the Ashram in December 1957 which, as they suddenly remembered, was the time predicted by the Mother.

Laljibhai wanted to buy the Savana Textile Mill in Pondicherry. When he told the Mother of his intentions, she answered: ‘No, start a sugar factory instead. It will be better for you.’ Again Laljibhai protested: ‘But, Mother, there are a number of problems in starting a sugar factory. It’s an agricultural industry, so it’s difficult.’ A sugar factory depends for its supply on sugar cane growers, and the supply depends on the soil and the unpredictable weather. And he added: ‘I do not even know if sugar cane grows here or not.’ The Mother’s answer: ‘Have faith in the Divine and everything will be all right. Don’t worry about it. This will be my Yoga in the material world and I want you to do it.’

The Mother herself had the new company registered and named it ‘New Horizon Sugar Mills.’ An office was opened on 14 May 1958 in the Mother’s presence. Just then the Government introduced heavy taxation in its new budget. Laljibhai conveyed to the Mother that under the changed circumstances his family might not agree to set up the sugar mill. The Mother asked him to postpone the decision. In an interview she told him: ‘There will be boundless difficulties for me, for you, for the Ashram, for India and for the whole world. There will be such a crisis that people will even lose faith in the Divine. But of this mess and chaos a New World will emerge that will be the victory of the Divine. What difference does it make in the present circumstances whether you undergo suffering and difficulties here in Pondicherry or in Africa?’

Laljibhai started looking for a suitable place for his sugar factory together with Udar, whom the Mother had asked to help him. They took photographs of various locations and showed them daily to the Mother. She picked one of the locations, saying: ‘This is the place. Construct the factory there.’ Time and again, as problems kept cropping up – which gives us an idea of how the Mother had to struggle for the least of her realizations in Matter – she would say to Laljibhai: ‘Have some faith, faith, faith.’ Once he replied: ‘Mother, I have faith.’ The Mother said: ‘No, it is a mental faith, it is not from the heart. It must come from the heart, then it is real faith.’

The New Horizon Sugar Mills, on the road from Pondicherry to Villupuram, was ready for production on 15 September 1960. The Mother was present at the opening ceremony. Towards the end of the ceremony there was a shower and the Mother got a little wet. Laljibhai offered his apologies but the Mother interrupted him: ‘This is an agricultural industry and I wanted to know whether Mother Nature is collaborating in the enterprise. She has given her blessing by sending rain. Now you don’t have to worry.’ According to Laljibhai, for the next thirty years, up to the time of his stating this in 1990, they never had any problem with the weather, with lack of rain or shortage of water, either for the factory or for the crops of the farmers associated with the factory. This is remarkable, to say the least, in a subtropical climate where a failing monsoon and water scarcity are frequent afflictions.

On the same day of the inauguration by the Mother, New Horizon Sugar Mills had also organized a reception for the local and state dignitaries and politicians. To Laljibhai’s immense distress and anxiety, the new machines broke down time and again. For fear of ridicule he prayed to the Mother with his whole heart. The Mother afterwards said: ‘That afternoon, exactly at half past three, I felt that I had to make a little concentration, so I paid attention and saw Laljibhai praying to me. I was having my bath. You know what happens when I am pulled strongly: I’m stopped right in the middle of a gesture, then the consciousness goes wandering off and I can’t do anything, it stops me dead. That’s exactly what happened [on that day] in the bathroom. When I saw what was happening I straightened things out [meaning that she got the machines working again]. Then they must have had their celebration, for I suddenly felt: “Ah, now it has calmed down, it’s all right.”’ The breakdown of the machines, the Mother explained, was due to the huge flows of turbulent vital force violently crushed out of the sugar cane and turning against the machines, the cause of their torment. ‘They kept coming and coming, and I was busy with them the whole time. They were not ugly, [though] not so luminous either. They were wholesome, straightforward, honest forces.’

In 1962 Laljibhai wanted to go to Africa for some business meetings. As usual he asked the Mother for permission. She said: ‘Why do you want to go to Africa? Things will become worse in Africa. If you have got anything there, bring it out. I give you a maximum of ten years from now to come out of there.’ She told him to come out ‘honourably,’ for otherwise he would be kicked out. ‘There will be chaos from the Cape to Cairo for fifty years to come, and beyond I cannot see.’ In 1972, exactly ten years later, all Indians were forcibly expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin.

The Transformation of the Body

Much is needed to rise above the animal, much more than one thinks.⁷

– The Mother

We have seen that the Mother’s withdrawal had become a necessity because she was entering a new phase of the yoga. Till now she had focused her effort on the realization of the overman, the transitional being between mental man, which we are, and the full-fledged supramental superman. From now onwards her effort would be concentrated on the transformation of the body – of her body and therefore of the body of humanity, because her body would become the body of humanity. This does not mean that she had not known about this before or that many elements of the new effort were not already present and even partially worked out in earlier years, some as early as in the years the Prayers and Meditations were written. This is an Integral Yoga, a global effort from the very beginning, ‘a war on all fronts’ to recall Sri Aurobindo’s simile; every gain made a further progress possible and therefore the tackling of a new aspect of the integrality. The Mother had many names for this new aspect. She called it the yoga of the body, the yoga of the cells, the physical yoga, the yoga of the physical vibrations, the yoga of Matter, etc. The many names of this yoga define the centre of its attention and endeavour.

We are fairly well informed about this yoga of physical transformation due to a series of regular conversations, extending over many years, which the Mother had with Satprem, a French disciple. Satprem, whose other name was Bernard Enginger, was born in 1923 on the coast of Brittany, a place he would always remember with nostalgia. When twenty and a member of the French Resistance he was arrested by the Gestapo and spent one-and-a-half years in German concentration camps. The war, the concentration camps, the post-war upheavals and the Existentialist spirit of revolt and nihilism then pervading France left a deep imprint on him.

He served for a short time as secretary of the French Governor of Pondicherry, but ‘normal’ life could not satisfy him any more and he went to seek adventure in French Guyana, Brazil and Central Africa. However, during his brief stay in Pondicherry he had had the darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, probably in 1949, and he carried The Life Divine with him wherever he went. Ultimately he joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, reluctantly, in 1953.

The published correspondence between the Mother and Satprem in the following years shows the endless patience, understanding and love the Mother showered even on restless disciples like him. Gradually she won him over by taking him into her confidence, even during and after he had gone out of the Ashram several times, always dreaming of new adventures and discoveries in the most exotic places of the globe. She began talking to him on every subject under the sun, including her own past and her ongoing yogic experiences. When Satprem realized the importance of these conversations, he began recording them on tape, and from 1964 onwards published, with the Mother’s consent, some passages in the Bulletin of Physical Education under the title Notes on the Way. Since its inception the Bulletin was published in English and French, and Satprem had become the French editor.

After the Mother’s departure these recorded French conversations were published under Satprem’s editorship as L’Agenda de Mère (later translated as Mother’s Agenda) in thirteen volumes. They are an indispensable source of information not only about the Mother’s yoga in the years 1960-73 but also about her and Sri Aurobindo’s lives and their yoga in general. It is impossible to really know what their avataric mission and their yoga were and are without being knowledgeable about the contents of these conversations.

Five Principles

What I’m talking about are cellular realizations, don’t forget.⁸

– The Mother

To get an idea of the Mother’s Work in the following years, an understanding of some general elements of her yoga is necessary, for here we are entering a terrain where nobody has ventured before. We will have a closer look at these elements in brief and in the simplest possible way. It should be remembered that the Mother had to discover most of it by herself and for the very first time. In some cases she moved forward step by step, all the time groping for a formulation which might be comprehensible to others. True, all spiritual experience is incomprehensible as such because it belongs outside the domain of the mind. ‘I am using words for what is not expressible in words,’ ⁹ she said, and: ‘It [i.e. her experience] is difficult to put into words, it is still too much only an action.’ ¹⁰ Moreover, what the Mother has told is but a minute part of what she actually experienced; she said that to describe one minute of her experience a whole volume would be needed, and that a single one of her experiences represented a complete teaching. Still she made it possible for us to discern some broad outlines, and the marvel of her crystal-clear language lies in the way she managed to formulate the inexpressible in the simplest, though often unforgettably coined phrases.

To begin with, it should be kept in mind that the Mother in the body was also the Great Mother, the eternal divine Creatrix of the worlds. What could be seen of her with physical eyes – and many saw nothing more – was only an outer shell. Once, when a question was put to Sri Aurobindo concerning the Prayers and Meditations, he wrote: ‘It is the Mother in the lower nature addressing the Mother in the higher nature, the Mother herself carrying on the Sadhana of the earth-consciousness for the transformation praying to herself above from whom the forces of transformation come.’ ¹¹

In an Entretien of 1954, the Mother stated clearly that her central consciousness here in the material world was that of the Mahashakti, the Great Mother. On another occasion she said that, occultly, her heart was always a Sun, while higher up there must constantly have been the supramental brilliances unbearable to the human eye. But that was not what the human eye saw, of course. It saw an over eighty-years-old body, shrunken, stooped, almost unsubstantial, and often apparently very ill. Yet when she ‘charged the atmosphere,’ when she transmitted the presence of ‘the Lord’ to somebody in front of her, the Force was so strong that some could not stand it and ran away without further ado. ‘When That comes, when the Lord is present, there is not one in a thousand to whom it is not frightening. And not in the reasoning, not in the mind: directly in the [material] substance.’ ¹² And in the cells of that aged body Divinity concretized; and in that aged body there took shape, little by little, a body consisting of a new kind of substance.

Although this was a new, in a sense culminating phase in her yoga, the principles of the Integral Yoga remained the same throughout. They were the five constants in those thousand-and-one experiences.

The first principle was that of unity. All is Divine because there is nothing else than the Divine. This statement is the result of direct experience confirmed by mystics in all climes and cultures. In The Synthesis of Yoga Sri Aurobindo had already written: ‘The distinction [between divine and undivine] exists indeed for practical purposes; for there is nothing that is not divine, and in a larger view it is as meaningless, verbally, as the distinction between natural and supernatural, for all things that are, are natural. All things are in Nature and all things are in God. But for practical purposes there is a real distinction.’ ¹³

The Mother’s whole effort consisted in annulling this real distinction, for the result of the supramental transformation should make the Divine concretely present in Matter. As Matter became gradually more ‘porous’ to her, the divine Presence in all became ever more real, visibly, tangibly. She saw everything as vibrations – rainbow-coloured vibrations of the One – and her own vibrating body as a finely tuned receptor of those vibrations. This was quantum physics as experiential reality, as a way of living, based on its underlying truth of the universal unity and experienced in the complexity of all the gradations of being. Unity is the source, unity is the outcome, unity is the way. But the Mother had to transform the consciousness of her cells into a Unity-Consciousness – a change more fantastic than any transformation in any religious vision or fairy tale. She had to wipe out the ‘real distinction’ between our human ignorance and the superhuman omniscient divinity.

The second principle, declared by Sri Aurobindo to be the Alpha and Omega of the Integral Yoga, was surrender. The Mother’s surrender to the Divine, the Lord, her higher Self, was permanent throughout her life. It was the basis of everything she did, of her great yogic acts and of the apparent trifles of everyday life. Her Prayers and Meditations were already pervaded by surrender as by an exalting perfume. It was also the very instrument of her yoga. It was, she said, the only means, the only remedy, the only solution. The principle is simplicity itself: as there is nothing else than the Lord, he is the only Doer and the only deed. The manifestation is his; therefore the evolution within that manifestation can only be his. This means what Sri Aurobindo stated above, namely that ‘the Mother herself carrying on the Sadhana of the earth-consciousness’ is surrendering ‘to herself from whom the forces of transformation come’ – ‘herself’ being identical with the Supreme, That, the Divine, or the Lord, as the Mother was in the habit of calling Him since the beginning of her yoga.

Again, it should not be forgotten that this was now the yoga of the cells. It was no longer sufficient that the surrender be an inner, psychological act: it had to be an action or a voluntary attitude of the cells. The consciousness of each cell had to surrender. This is something awesomely difficult because, first, that consciousness had to be developed to ranges it had never touched before in the whole of existence of the human species, and, second, the cells carry within them the burden, hardened into a behavioural habit, of a catastrophic past. ‘The material consciousness, that is the mind in Matter, has been formed under the pressure of difficulties,’ said the Mother, ‘difficulties, obstacles, sufferings, struggles. It has, as it were, been built up by all that [in the course of the evolution], and that has left upon it a stamp almost of pessimism and of defeatism which is certainly the greatest obstacle’ ¹⁴ – for a confident and joyful surrender, that is.

The Mother’s surrender is there to read about on practically every page of the Agenda and the Notes on the Way. For instance: ‘What is going to happen, I don’t know. The body is not concerned about it, it is all the time like this [Mother opens her hands with palms upwards], all the time: “What Thou willest, Lord, what Thou willest,” with a smile and in a perfect joy.’ ¹⁵ Or near the end of her way: ‘All things on which I sought support for the [yogic] action, it is as if they collapsed on purpose to make me say, even in connection with the smallest trifles: “What Thou willest.” It has become my only refuge.’ ¹⁶ ‘What Thou willest,’ (ce que Tu veux or ce que Tu voudras)⁹³ was her basic mantra. It was there supporting every act in her life, and at the end it will be there among the last discernible words recorded; and when words failed her, she expressed it in a gesture, offering herself and everything she represented, the palms of her hands turned upwards, to the Lord.

Since 1958, she also had a mantra specifically for the transformation of her body. She had heard it in April of that year when watching Dhruva, an Indian film in which this mantra was recited, and had been amazed at the effect it had on her cells. It consisted of three words: om namo bhagavate. The significance of these words, according to the Mother, is: om, I invoke or contact the Supreme; namo, I bow to the Supreme in total surrender; bhagavate, may I be made, as the Supreme is, divine.

The third principle was sincerity. ‘In fact, as long as the ego is there, one cannot say that a being is perfectly sincere,’ the Mother said, ‘even though it is striving to become sincere. One must pass beyond the ego, give oneself up totally to the divine Will, surrender without reserve and without calculating. Then one can be perfectly sincere, not before … Sincerity is the basis of all true realization. It is the means, it is the path, and it is also the goal. Without it you are sure to make innumerable errors and you have constantly to redress the harm you have done to yourself and to others. There is, besides, a marvellous joy in being sincere. Every act of sincerity carries in itself its own reward: the feeling of purification, of soaring upwards, of liberation one gets when one has rejected even a tiny particle of falsehood. Sincerity is the safeguard, the protection, the guide, and finally the transforming power.’ ¹⁷

The Mother had a very special definition of sincerity. ‘Sincerity means to lift all the movements of the being to the level of the highest consciousness and realization already attained.’ ¹⁸ It means putting all the parts of the being under the influence of the central being, the psychic being. The psychic being is divine; all parts without a connection with the inner divine remain under the influence of the non-divine or anti-divine. The divine element in us is Truth; the non-divine is untruth, falsehood. Therefore real sincerity can only exist in the direct presence, in the light of the divine element in us. ‘To be perfectly sincere, it is indispensable not to have any preference, any desire, any attraction, any dislike, any sympathy or antipathy, any attachment, any repulsion. One must live in a total, integral vision of things, in which everything is in its place and one has the same attitude towards all things: the attitude of the vision of verity.’ ¹⁹ This was now demanded of the cells!

The fourth principle was equanimity or equality, which are not synonyms for indifference. ‘The Yoga cannot be done if equality is not established,’ ²⁰ Sri Aurobindo had written many years before. The rationale for the yogic requisite of equanimity is that everything is the Divine, who is impartial or equally loving towards all that he has brought forward into his manifestation. Consequently, the being that wants to become supramental, divine, must be able to show the same impartiality and equality towards all forms of existence. The quality of equanimity is so foreign to the ordinary human behaviour that it may be considered a superhuman quality.

The fifth principle was aspiration, not any longer as a psychological condition but as a longing of the cells. Aspiration is the inner impulse which drives each and every one who sincerely turns towards the spiritual life. However, it could not be the basis from which the transformation of the cells had to start, for they were much too ignorant and enslaved by millennia of dwarfish habits. The Mother often compared the spiritual aspiration to a flame burning in the core of the being, or to a need ‘which takes possession of you and which is so powerful that nothing else in the world has any importance any more.’ ²¹ The kindling of the aspiration towards divinity in the cells could only be the result of a long labour of cleansing. In all its aspects, aspiration is a non-mental longing for something higher, the existence of which the aspiring being feels sure of, even if it has never seen it. The spiritual aspiration stems from the veiled knowledge of the Divine in us. The aspiration to be awakened in the cells of the body has to stem from the veiled knowledge of the Divine in them.

Unity, surrender, sincerity, equanimity, aspiration in the cells. They often overlap each other, precisely because their aim is the same: to provide a material body for the One. They were the five main tools the Mother now used to allow the Divine to work the miracle of the cells’ transformation. Nobody had ever done that. Nobody had ever tried to transform Matter, to supramentalize Matter, to divinize Matter, to transmute Matter into its Essence. ‘Matter also is Brahman and it is nothing other than or different from Brahman,’ Sri Aurobindo had written in The Life Divine.²² The transmutation of Matter into its inherent divinity would establish the Kingdom of God upon Earth. The age-long promise to humankind would be fulfilled. Why was it not done earlier? Was it so difficult?

What Would the Supramental Body be Like?

What would the supramental body be like? It would be something like the body humanity has dreamt of through the ages and has ascribed to angels and gods – and more, for it would be a divinized body, fount and instrument of an everlasting ecstasy of which our humanity has no notion. In one of her talks the Mother took the children with her on a fantasy tour of the supramental body. ‘Transformation implies that the whole purely material set-up [of the human body as it is now] be replaced by a set-up of concentrations of force consisting of certain types of vibrations which replace each organ by a centre of conscious energy, moved by a conscious will and directed by a movement coming from above, from the higher regions. No stomach any longer, no heart, no circulation, no lungs, etc. All that will disappear. But it will be replaced by a set of vibrations representing what these organs are symbolically. For the organs are nothing but the material symbols of centres of energy, they are not the essential reality. They simply give a form [to the reality behind them] or in certain circumstances a support.

‘The transformed body will function by means of its real centres of energy and no longer through their symbolic representations such as have been developed in the animal body. Therefore you must first know what your heart represents in the cosmic energy, and what the circulation represents, and what the stomach represents, and what the brain represents. You must be conscious of all that to begin with. Then you must have at your disposal the original vibrations of that which is symbolized by these organs. Then you must slowly gather together all these energies in your body and change each organ into a centre of conscious energy, which will replace the symbolic movement by the real one.

‘You think it will take only three hundred years to do that? I think it will take much more time to obtain a form with qualities which will not be like those we know, but much superior. [There will be] a form that one naturally dreams to be changeable: as the expression of your face changes according to your feelings, so the body will change – not the form, but within the same form – according to what you want to express with your body. It can become very contracted, very expanded, very luminous, very motionless, with a perfect plasticity, a perfect elasticity, and a lightness in accordance with one’s will …

‘There is no end to the imagination: to be luminous whenever one wants, to be invisible whenever one wants. Naturally, bones too are no longer needed in the system, for it is no longer a skeleton with skin and viscera, it is something different: it is concentrated energy obeying the will. This does not mean that there will no longer be any definite and recognizable forms. The form will be built by qualities rather than by solid particles. It will be, by way of speaking, a practical and pragmatic form. It will be supple, mobile, light at will – in contrast to the fixity of the gross material form.’ ²³

Later, the Mother wanted to give an idea of the supramental body to a young Ashramite, Mona Sarkar. ‘You know, if there is something over there on the window sill and I want to take it, I stretch out my arm and it becomes so long, and I hold the thing in my hand without even having to get up from my chair … Physically I shall be able to be here and elsewhere at the same time, I shall be able to be in many places. I shall be able to communicate with many people at the same time. To have something in my hand, I’ll just have to wish for it. I think of something, I want it, and it’s already in my hand. In the transformed body I shall be free from the fetters of ignorance, pain, mortality, and unconsciousness. I shall be able to do many things at the same time. The transparent, luminous, strong, light, elastic body won’t need any material stuff to subsist on … It will be a true being, perfectly proportioned, very, very beautiful and strong, light, luminous or transparent …’ ²⁴

If all this may be thought to be fantastic, it should be pointed out that the Mother actually knew very well what she was talking about, being familiar with all kinds of worlds, substances and bodies through her occult experience. She knew the gods intimately, as of course she knew her own bodies in the various worlds, one of which she described after the experience of the supramental ship. She knew also what the supramental body was like because she had seen it ‘at the limit of the manifested world’ when still at Tlemcen. Also, there is not a single quality or capacity of the supramental body as described above by the Mother which is not known and named siddhi in the yogic schools in India. The huge problem, however, consisted in the realization of such a body on Earth, not as a partial or temporal siddhi, but as a permanent new species.

In theory much of all this looks fine and feasible, but in practice? How does one replace a heart or a skeleton with its vibrational support or reality? How or when does a stomach stop functioning and does its vibrational counterpart take over? Ought the transformation to be worked out one organ at a time, one cell after the other, or all at the same time? For this, indeed, ‘would be a transformation infinitely greater than that of the animal into man. This would be a transition from man to a being that would no longer be built in the same manner, that would no longer function in the same manner, that would be like a densification or a concretization of “something” … Up to now this corresponds to nothing we know physically, unless the scientists have found something I don’t know of.’ And the Mother added: ‘You see, it’s the leap that seems so enormous to me.’ ²⁵

The Burden of the Forerunner

In fact no decisions had to be made, at least not on the level of thought and volition, which is where we make our decisions. The decisions were made by her Self, the Great Mother whom she perceived to be identical with the Master of the Yoga. It might even be said that the decisions were made in eternity, at the origin where the Avatars emanate, and that those decisions were now projected or actualized on the scene of the material manifestation. The Mother in the Sadhana accepted them in total surrender because they could not be anything but the will and the action of ‘the Lord.’ Ce que Tu veux, ce que Tu voudras …

Of course, the Mother’s body, the field of the transformation, was prepared like no other for the ordeal it was now to undergo up to the end of its existence. It had been prepared for this adventure without precedent not only from its earliest youth but from the womb, as we have seen, and its preparation had been steadily more perfected in the course of her spiritual progress. This brings to mind the refinement it must have acquired during her occult training at Tlemcen, when she was able to leave sheath after sheath of her adhara up to the outer boundaries of the manifestation. It brings to mind the shooting star on New Year’s Eve of 1914, when she wished for the union with the Divine ‘for the body,’ and realized this union within the year. And when leafing through her Prayers and Meditations we find at least seven passages in which she records the divine action in her body’s cells.

Yet her body was a human body consisting of the same Matter as ours, otherwise her yoga would not have had any meaning. Therein lay the avataric burden. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in general about the sadhak of the Integral Yoga: ‘He has not only to bear his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world … Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.’ ²⁶ The Mother, now alone, was of course the Sadhak of the Integral Yoga; she was, so to say, inventing the yoga of the body’s transformation single-handed.

As she wrote herself about the burden of the Forerunner: ‘There is a spirit of the [human] species. There are collective suggestions which don’t need to be expressed in words [to be received]. There are atmospheres one cannot escape. It is certain – for this I know from experience – that there is a degree of individual perfection and transformation which cannot be realized unless the whole of humanity has made a particular progress … There are things in Matter which cannot be transformed unless the whole of Matter has undergone a certain degree of transformation. One cannot isolate oneself completely, it is not possible … Surely the individual will always be ahead of the mass, there’s no doubt about that, but there will always be a proportion and a relation.’ ²⁷

Even we ourselves, who think that we are separated from the rest of the world in the fortress of our material body, are pervaded by all kinds of invisible elements and influences, as science has found out. Our vital being is like an open house to others; we catch their pleasant or unpleasant moods, the little poisoned arrows they aim at us unseen, their inner discomfort or disorders and, exceptionally, their health or good humour. Our mind is like ‘a market place,’ said the Mother; we don’t realize it, but we could hardly call one thought out of a hundred our own, bathing as we do in the whirling sea of thoughts all around us. And now the Mother had to universalize her body cells, for supramentalization is not possible without universalization. As we just heard from Sri Aurobindo, the sadhak of the Integral Yoga ‘is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.’ Because of all the preparatory work done on her cells in the course of her yoga, the Mother was capable of universalizing them.

Can one even imagine what it means to be universalized? To be as big, wide, infinite as the universe? To contain the universe in oneself? Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had been supramentalized in their mind and vital, and compared to the Supramental, which is the Divine, the universe is ‘like a small picture against a huge background’ (Sri Aurobindo). They had been like that, he apparently sitting there motionless in his armchair, she apparently distributing flowers, playing tennis, talking to her playground audience, making a pact with the life forces of angry sugar cane. Many had experienced an inexpressible, overwhelming feeling when approaching them or contacting them in concentration, as if they were privileged to step for a short while across the threshold of eternity. But who can imagine what universalization means if he or she does not live in it? And now the cells of the Mother’s body were being universalized.

The result was that her body became decentralized. As she once said: ‘In the last few days … there was this experience: a kind of consciousness completely decentralized (I am always speaking of the physical consciousness, not at all of the higher consciousness) a decentralized consciousness which happened to be here, and there, and there, in this body, in that body – in what people call “this person” and “that person,” but this kind of notion does not exist very much any more.⁹⁴ Then there was as it were a universal consciousness contacting the cells, as if it asked these cells for what reason they wanted to keep this combination, if one can call it so, or this conglomerate.⁹⁵ They were made to understand or feel the difficulties resulting from old age, the wear and tear of the body, the external difficulties – in sum, all the deterioration caused by friction and usage. All that seemed to them totally unimportant. Their answer was rather interesting because they didn’t seem to attach importance to anything other than the capacity to remain in conscious contact with the higher Force. Theirs was like an aspiration (not formulated in words, of course), what in English one calls “a yearning,” “a longing” for the contact with the divine Force, the Force of Harmony, the Force of Truth, the Force of Love.’ ²⁸

What happens to a body in course of universalization, to a body that is becoming decentralized? It loses its centre. But everything we do is related to a centre, this centre, this axis: me, I. The universe wheels around us; here and there, yesterday and tomorrow exist in relation to this centre. It was part of the Mother’s yoga that her body, being universalized, would no longer function as an axis of material existence, that now the physical ego too would be dissolved. ‘It is no longer the same thing which makes you act … It is no longer the same centre.’ ²⁹ The old centre was the physical ego, existing within the framework of the laws of the physical world; the new centre was the Divine, directly. The Mother was learning how to live no longer according to the habits of the terrestrial evolution, hardened into so-called ‘laws,’ ⁹⁶ but directly supported by the divine Force. For it will of course be this Force which shapes and determines the new supramental world and all beings in it.

The Mother had to effectuate ‘the transition from an ordinary automatic way of functioning to a way of functioning under the direct guidance and influence of the Supreme … Everything is a matter of changing the habit. The entire automatic habit of millennia has to be changed into a conscious action directly guided by the supreme Consciousness.’ ³⁰ Yes, it is clear that a supramental body, as described a few pages earlier, must function in a manner different from the human body we are so familiar with and which gives us so much trouble. A divine body must be divinely moved, yes, by the supreme Consciousness – one can more or less imagine that. But to change from an animal-human body into a supramental body? Well, somewhere the transition between the two worlds ought to be brought about. But how does one live at the same time in two bodies consisting of two completely different substances and obeying laws of totally different worlds? It was ‘the leap between the two which seemed so enormous.’

The change in the functioning of the body the Mother called ‘the transfer of power,’ or ‘the transfer of master.’ It was ‘the transition from the ordinary automatic functioning to a conscious functioning under the direct guidance and the direct influence of the Supreme,’ ³¹ for that is how the supramental bodies will work. And one of the first times she felt the physical effects of the transition, she said: ‘This change of initiating power, if one may say so, this transfer of power has had upon me the effect of a unique experience, of something that has never taken place before.’ ³² The gestation of the new species in her was a universal first.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have often been asked whether there have been supramental beings on the Earth before. Their answer was unequivocal: some great spiritual beings may have had partial supramental realizations (siddhis) in their mental or vital bodies that showed in their physical body; some may even have had this kind of temporary personal siddhi in their physical body. The generation of a new supramental species, nevertheless, cannot have taken place before because it presupposes a change in the substance, in the Matter of the Earth. If this change had taken place once, it could never have been undone and would still be there – something Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would certainly have been aware of and put to their advantage, for it would have saved them a lot of yogic labour and suffering.

The outcome of all this was that the Mother existed physically in two worlds: our familiar animal-human world and the ever more present supramental world. We remember that the Mother said that the latter existed within the former and that the link between the two was not yet established. How can one physically live simultaneously in two separate worlds? It surely was a risky business, for one of the consequences was sometimes a sudden physical loss of consciousness in the Mother, to the consternation of her attendants.

The two simultaneous ways of existing she called ‘the two rooms,’ or ‘the two worlds,’ or ‘the two consciousnesses,’ so close together that an almost imperceptible turn in the consciousness sufficed to make the change from the one to the other – and yet they were so far apart. The Mother discovered to her surprise the place where the living and the dead consciously co-exist. ‘Last night or the night before I spent at least two hours in a world which is the subtle physical, where the living and the dead intermingle without being aware of any difference. It doesn’t make any difference. There is no difference, there. There were those we call the living and those whom we call the dead, they were there together. They ate together, they moved together, they played together. And all that took place in a pretty light, quiet and very pleasant. It was very pleasant. I said by myself: “Isn’t it funny how the humans draw a line somewhere and say: you’re now dead.”’ ³³ (One of the persons the Mother often met there was Nolini Kanta Gupta, who was then still very much alive.)

The dwelling of Sri Aurobindo, the ship from the New World, the living and the dead existing together – all that was located in what the Mother called ‘the subtle physical.’ At this point it is necessary to explain that she started using this term in a special sense. Normally the subtle physical is a layer of existence on the verge of our perception, containing everything that is to pass into the gross physical (which is why specially gifted persons can have a prevision of it). The Mother once compared it to the vapours emanating from hot sand or from a hot road. But the Mother will more and more use the term ‘subtle physical’ for ‘the real physical,’ which is the same as the Supramental, which became accessible to her physical person because it was being supramentalized to an even greater extent.

No doubt, all this sounds rather esoteric to our ears. To the Mother it was the reality of every minute, night and day. It was a reality full of surprises, new discoveries and very tough challenges, the response to which she had to improvise, to find out, for it had never been done before. She had to move in the grandeur of the Supramental and Divine, and in the minuteness of a person, an organ, a cell, an atom – often on both levels at the same time.

And there was that third, horrific level: the Subconscient. For the new supramental being to be capable of embodiment, gross Matter had to change and become sufficiently subtle to serve as the substance for that embodiment. But we know that the base of Matter is the Subconscient and the Inconscient. Therefore, to change terrestrial Matter the Subconscient had to be purified, or cleared, or conquered, or made subservient to the aim of the Yoga. ‘You have to go on year after year, point after point,’ said Sri Aurobindo, ‘till you come to a central point in the subconscious which has to be conquered and it is the crux of the whole problem, hence extremely difficult … This point in the subconscious is the seed and it goes on sprouting and sprouting till you have cut out the seed.’ ³⁴

The Subconscient is very much what people imagine as hell. It is ‘a mass of horrors,’ said the Mother, full of terrifying, grotesque but devilish inventions of horror. It is life at its cruellest, where wounding, tearing, torturing, crushing, strangling, killing and devouring are the common ways of behaviour; it is the ghoulish cave where our nightmares take shape; it is the whispering, impelling inspiration of the pervert, the brute, the torturer and the sadistic killer.

In 1957 Sehra, a Parsi sadhika and wife of K.D. Sethna, had written a letter to the Mother describing a horrendous vision of hers. ‘I saw people there with human forms, but they were not human beings. They were very huge and hideous, with one or two or three teeth protruding from their mouth … We went a little further and I saw those strange ugly beings dragging out corpses, tearing them into pieces and each one looking at his possession and saying: “Look what I have got!” The different pieces from different parts of the bodies represented different desires and feelings – lust, greed, hatred, jealousy, etc. And the beings who took the pieces and some of who started eating them were themselves representatives of the same desires and feelings. Each got what corresponded to his own nature. All were enjoying themselves over the hold they had on humans. Many of the corpses were also enjoying what was happening to them. They were not really dead but only looked so: they were alive.’ Then a Voice told her: ‘This is where the Mother’s work is going on.’ When Sehra met her the next day, the Mother said to her: ‘You have seen correctly. I am now working in the subconscious. It is a very terrible region and even worse than what you have described.’ ³⁵

Around 1935 Sri Aurobindo said that he would have been less enthusiastic had he known beforehand everything that was in store for him on the path of transformation. The Mother now sometimes spoke in the same vein, and the worst was yet to come. But she went on with her effort, of course, for she had promised Sri Aurobindo that she would do the work, and in 1956 she had remained on earth for that. Je fais le travail, she said simply, ‘I am doing the work.’ But few had any notion of the hellish minutes, and hours, and days she had to traverse.

Her single greatness in that last dire scene,
She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man. ||112.51||

..For this the silent Force came missioned down;
In her the conscious Will took human shape:
She only can save herself and save the world. ||112.55|| ³⁶

The Big Pulsations

It would be misleading to think that the Mother had ‘withdrawn’ because her presence outside the central Ashram building, at 9 Rue de la Marine, had been reduced to a minimum. How could she withdraw, she whose body was becoming the whole world in an ever more literal way? Besides, the daily occupations had not diminished at all. There were the Ashramites waiting for her at a certain hour and place, in the passage from one room to another, before and after she entered her bathroom, before and after she had her scanty meals, before and after her midday rest. Most of these meetings had become standing privileges, and the Mother would never forget anything, not the slightest detail – she who had kept a promise to K.D. Sethna made eighteen years before and which he himself had forgotten.

Then there were the daily audiences with disciples whose birthday it was or who had sent her a special request, with visitors to the Ashram, with secular and religious dignitaries, sadhus, politicians, administrators, cabinet ministers, chief ministers and prime ministers, and sometimes the president of the nation. On an average forty to fifty people per day, but on certain days up to two hundred people would pass through the room Udar built for her on the second floor, above Sri Aurobindo’s apartment. And there were the secretaries and the heads of department, and the cashiers and bookkeepers. There were cheques and documents to sign, with that winged signature of hers representing ‘the Bird of Peace descending upon earth.’ There were dozens of letters to answer. And always there was the ‘cloud’ of invisible presences around her, pulling for her attention. Thus will be the way she ‘withdrew’ till six months before the end.

In the world the decade of the 1960s had begun, with its protests and upheavals among the youth and the young-hearted, with its ‘flower power,’ ‘black power,’ feminist movement and sexual revolution. Much of what was then ‘groovy’ and the ‘in thing’ now seems to have been forgotten or deflated. But the changes initiated in those ten years are still smouldering in the world under the surface; they helped to prepare the new millennium and the greatest Upheaval of all. The Mother had immediately seen their importance and she would say: ‘The whole world seems to be undergoing an action which, for the moment, looks disturbing. It seems that the number of the apparently deranged is increasing considerably. In America, for example, the entire youth seems to be caught by a sort of bizarre vertigo which is disquieting to the reasonable people, but which is certainly an indication that an unusual force is at work. It causes the breaking up of all habits and all rules. It’s good. For the moment it’s a little odd, but it’s necessary.’ And at the end of the same conversation she would say: ‘Fixed rules … the fewer fixed rules there are the better. What is important is a need which only That can satisfy – nothing else, no half measures: only That. And there you go, each one on his way, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the way, it doesn’t matter. Even the extravagances of today’s American youth may be a way. It doesn’t matter.’ ³⁷

In the meantime her superhuman struggle in the Subconscient continued unabated. (Maybe her gains there made the changes, the loosening up in the world possible.) Her conversations in those months touch time and again on the horrors rising massively against her and to which she had to stand up. It was not her personal Subconscient, but the Subconscient of humanity. She understood now why nobody had tried this before and why all the spiritually great had chosen to get out of such a mess by the quickest possible way. Sometimes she asked herself if it was not folly to try and fight ‘against habits millennia old.’

Then came the upward movement, and the Mother emerged from her battles in the suffocating nether regions to a peak higher than the ones reached before. On 24 January 1961³⁸ she experienced the full presence of the supramental Force in her body. During the experience the connection between the supramental and our material world was established. In fact she experienced the supramental Force as a supramental body, ‘a much greater and powerful being’ in her gross material body. This was the very first time that she reported the presence of a new body within her. So strong was the power acting through that supramental body on the world that she had to contain it so as not to cause a catastrophe or a revolution somewhere on Earth. And with that presence and power rose in her a certitude which in French she called not ‘square’ (carrée) but ‘cubic’ (cubique) – unshakeable, unassailable, solid as a rock.

And then came the downward movement, deeper than the levels plunged into before. She toiled there for months. At times her embodied existence became so critical that she said she asked to be told if she had to take leave of it. Her departure would not create any practical problems, she said, for she had made all the necessary arrangements. And as we carry the manifestation symbolically in our body, the Mother’s legs were now attacked, for they represent the Subconscient. By an act of evil magic she had been infected with filaria, one of the scourges of India, a mosquito having been the bearer of the malady. She knew when she had been attacked, where and by whom, for ‘it so happens that I am a little conscious,’ she said. She had been able to master the infected evil, but now, plunged day after day into the Subconscient, where our illnesses are part of the demonic arsenal, the infection had become virulent. Her legs were ‘like two rods of steel,’ she said, and she moved forward and up and down the staircase only by an act of the will, seeking support with her arms.

The Mother had to wait for the next upswing in her yoga till the end of February 1962, when one day she awoke with ‘a pair of new legs.’ The filariasis had disappeared overnight as if by miracle. She took it as proof that there were no limits to the possibilities of the body, even the gross material body, once it came under the influence of the Supramental. When going to the playground on 21 February, she had to restrain herself from dancing, she felt so light with her pair of new legs. But then the Black Dragon swung its tail again. The ordeal must have started on 11 March. The situation seems to have worsened in the following days, and on 16 March her life hung by a thread when her heartbeat stopped several times.

On 3 April, ‘after several weeks of grave illness,’ she said the following, which was recorded and afterwards submitted to her for her approval: ‘Just between 11:00 and 12:00 last night, I had an experience by which I discovered that there is a group of people … who want to create a kind of religion based on the revelation of Sri Aurobindo. But they have taken only the side of power and force, a certain kind of knowledge and all that could be utilized by asuric forces.⁹⁷ There is a big asuric being that has succeeded in taking the appearance of Sri Aurobindo. There is only an appearance. This appearance of Sri Aurobindo has declared to me that the work I am doing is not his [i.e. Sri Aurobindo’s]. It has declared that I have been a traitor to him and to his work and has refused to have anything to do with me.

‘There is in that group a man whom I must have seen once or twice [there], who is not with them in spirit, but only in appearance. But he is without knowledge, he does not know what kind of being is there. And he always hopes to make this being accept me, believing it is truly Sri Aurobindo³⁹ … I met this being last night three times, even apologized for sins I have not committed, and in full love and surrender. I woke at 12:00, remembering everything. Between 12:15 and 2:00 I was with the true Sri Aurobindo in the fullest and sweetest relation – there also in perfect consciousness, awareness, calm and equanimity. At 2:00 I woke and noted just before that Sri Aurobindo himself had shown me that he was not yet completely master of the physical realm.

‘I woke up at 2:00 and noticed that the heart had been affected by the attack of this group that wants to take my life away from this body, because they know that so long as I am in a body upon earth their purpose cannot succeed. Their first attack was many years ago in vision and action. I had it in the night and spoke of it to nobody. I noted down the date, and if I can come out of this crisis, I will find it and give it out. They would have liked me dead years ago. It is they who are responsible for these attacks on my life. Up till now I am alive because the Lord wanted me to be alive, otherwise I would have gone long ago.

‘I am no more in my body. I have left it to the Lord to take care of it, to decide if it is to have the Supramental or not. I know and I have said also that now is the last fight. If the purpose for which this body is alive is to be fulfilled, that is to say, the first steps towards the Supramental transformation, then it will continue today. This is the Lord’s decision. I am not even asking what he has decided. If the body is incapable of bearing the fight, if it has to be dissolved, then humanity will pass through a critical time. What the asuric Force that has succeeded in taking the appearance of Sri Aurobindo will create is a new religion or thought, perhaps cruel and merciless, in the name of the supramental Realization. But everybody must know that it is not true, it is not Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, not the truth of his teaching. The truth of Sri Aurobindo is a truth of love and light and mercy. He is good and great and compassionate and divine. And it is he who will have the final victory.

‘Now, individually, if you want to help, you have only to pray. What the Lord wants will be done. Whatever he wills, he will do with this body, which is a poor thing.’

Afterwards, when the transcript of this talk was read to the Mother, she commented: ‘The fight is within the body. This can’t go on. They must be defeated or this body is defeated. All depends on what the Lord will decide. It [i.e .the body] is the battlefield. How far it can resist, I don’t know. After all, it depends on Him, He knows if the time has come or not, the time for the beginning of the Victory. [If the time has come] then the body will survive; if not, in any case, my love and consciousness will be there.’ ⁴⁰

Dramatic words in dramatic circumstances. But this proved to be only the first part of the drama, for on 13 April the Mother dictated in French, probably to Pavitra, the following victory bulletin. Like the previous text, it is not a very idiomatically correct translation from the French, but it is left untouched because of its impact and historic value.

‘Suddenly in the night I woke with the full awareness of what we could call the Yoga of the World. The Supreme Love was manifesting through big pulsations, and each pulsation was bringing the world further in its manifestation. It were the formidable pulsations of the eternal stupendous Love, only Love. Each pulsation of the Love was carrying the universe further in the manifestation.

‘And there was the certitude that what is to be done is done and that the Supramental Manifestation is realized.

‘Everything was personal, nothing was individual.⁹⁸

‘This was going on and on and on and on.

‘The certitude that what is to be done is done.

‘All the results of the falsehood had disappeared: death was an illusion, sickness was an illusion, ignorance was an illusion – something that had no reality, no existence. Only Love and Love and Love and Love – immense, formidable, stupendous, carrying everything.

‘And how to express it in the world? It was like an impossibility, because of the contradiction. But then it came: “You have accepted that the world should know the Supramental Truth and it will be expressed totally, integrally.” Yes, yes.

‘And the thing is done. [long silence]

‘The individual consciousness came back: just the sense of a limitation, a limitation of pain; without that, no individual.

[Then the Mother switched to her native French, of which we give here the translation:] ‘And we set out again on the way, sure of the Victory.

‘The skies are full of hymns of Victory.

‘The Truth alone exists; it alone shall be manifested. Forward! Forward!

‘Gloire à Toi, Seigneur, Triomphateur suprême!⁹⁹ [Glory to Thee, Lord, supreme Triumpher!] [silence]

‘Now, to work.

‘Patience, endurance, perfect equality, and an absolute faith. [silence]

‘What I am saying is nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing but words if I compare it to the experience.

‘And our consciousness is the same, absolutely the same as that of the Lord. There was no difference, no difference.

‘We are That, we are That, we are That. [silence]

‘Later I shall explain better. The instrument is not yet ready. This is only the beginning.’ ⁴¹