The Mother

17: The Passage Perilous

If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claim’st to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night. ||128.37||

He who would save the world must share its pain. ||128.38||

If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure? ||128.39|| ¹

A Kind of Death

‘I am no longer in my body,’ said the Mother on 3 April 1962. If this sounds mysterious, her comments when looking back on the experience of the great pulsations are still more so. ‘It has been a kind of death,’ she said on 12 June, ‘that much is sure – sure, sure, sure – but I don’t say it because, after all, one has to respect the common sense of the people! You see, a little more and I would say that I was dead and that I have come alive again. But I don’t say it.’ ² In the following years she would from time to time make remarks to a similar extent, for instance: ‘It’s really a queer condition: one is no longer alive and one is not dead.’ ³

Once she said, going somewhat deeper into the bizarre condition: ‘Yesterday and the day before, throughout the day, from morning till night, something was saying: “I am or I have the consciousness of the dead on Earth.” I am translating it into words, but it was as if something said: “This is what the consciousness of a dead person is like in relation to the Earth and physical things. I am a dead person living on Earth.” According to the position of the consciousness – for the consciousness is constantly changing its position⁹¹ – it was said: “This is how dead people are in relation to the Earth.” Then: “I am absolutely like a dead person in relation to the Earth.” Then: “I am living as a dead person lives in the consciousness of the Earth.” Then: “I am exactly like a dead person living on Earth.” And so on. I have been going on behaving, speaking and acting as usual, but it has been like this for a long time.’ ⁴

Did the Mother die and come alive again in the night of 12-13 April 1962? There can be no other interpretation of the following words: ‘This reminds me of the fundamental experience I had when I was … when I lived that pulsation of Love, and when it was decided that I had to take up my body again, that I return into my body.’ ⁵ In later years she would say several times that the body with which she was identified was not her body but a body, used for the material contact without which her direct work for the supramental transformation would not be possible.

How to understand all this? Actually it is not a matter of understanding, for we can neither understand it nor can we understand most of her other yogic experiences – we can only try to follow the story of the Mother’s life in order to have a glimpse, a notion of what she has been through, in order to acquire some insight into the importance of her and Sri Aurobindo’s work and into the significance of the unparalleled change the world is going through at present. Only like can understand like, and as they have said so often: real comprehension is possible only through identification. All the same, we can make an effort towards a considered and insightful knowledge based on the facts and the hints given by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo themselves, or on interpretations by trustworthy chroniclers and commentators.

When in 1956 the basic aim of their avataric mission was fulfilled by the manifestation of the Supramental in the Earth-atmosphere, the Mother asked ‘the Lord’ whether she should stay on Earth or not. A clear sign must have been given to her, for she stayed, presumably to speed up the supramental transformation of the Earth, with as her immediate aim the realization of the transitional being, the overman. In December 1959, at the time of her withdrawal into her room, this aim was fulfilled, according to her explicit confirmation, and a new phase of the yoga was entered, the transformation or divinization of the body cells. The Mother had been working on the transformation of the cells ever since the time of her Prayers and Meditations, but from a different level; now her Integral Yoga was a development in the consciousness of her body cells themselves. As always, she went about her accepted task with all the superhuman, divine energy she, the Mahashakti, had at her disposal, and barely three years later came the result we now know: ‘And the thing is done … The skies are full of the songs of Victory.’

It may be appropriate to stop here an instant and look back at the incredible speed with which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s realizations have been effected, taking into consideration the difficulty of their aims. In the span of a human lifetime they realized the supramental Consciousness in their own Mind and Vital. Only six years after Sri Aurobindo’s conscious, ‘strategic’ descent into death, the Supramental manifested into the Earth-atmosphere, whereby a new evolution of the Earth started: the evolution towards its divinization. Two years later the Mother announced the realization of the overman, the transitional being, the indispensable link for the material embodiment of the supramental being. This was immediately followed by the supramental yoga of the cells, whereof the outcome, only a couple of years later, was a Victory the songs of which filled the sky. What Victory?

Let us recall some phrases the Mother dictated the next morning: she had woken up with the full awareness of ‘the Yoga of the World’; ‘all the results of falsehood had disappeared’ with, as a consequence, the disappearance of death, illness and ignorance; it had been accepted that the world should know the supramental Truth and it would be expressed totally, integrally. As this was a culmination of her yoga of the cells, itself the culmination of the Integral Yoga which was the essence of her and Sri Aurobindo’s avataric mission, we must conclude that the goal of the avataric effort was reached in principle, confirmed from Above and sure to be accomplished in Matter. The Supramental has been present in the Earth-atmosphere since 1956; the supramental species has been present in the universal evolution since 1962 in principle and is therefore bound to become a material fact. Its working out is only a question of time.

How long does it take for a new degree of the evolution, for a new species to appear on the Earth in a material form? Until now millions of years. Man’s physical development from his origin as a primate has taken about four million years according to recent scientific estimates. No doubt the presence of the new element in the Earth-atmosphere, the supramental Consciousness and Force, will enormously speed up the transformational process. When, in their often hilarious correspondence, Nirodbaran wrote to Sri Aurobindo: ‘We hear your Supermind is very near – not 50 years I hope! … Don’t forget to make us, at least, feel the Descent. 30 years’ sadhana, by Jove!’ Sri Aurobindo replied: ‘30 years too little or too many? What would have satisfied your rational mind – 3 years? 3 months? 3 weeks? Considering that by ordinary evolution it could not have been done even at Nature’s express speed in less than 3000 years, and would ordinarily have taken anything from 30,000 to 300,000, the transit of 30 years is perhaps not too slow.’ ⁶ This was written in 1936.

Less than thirty years later the Supramental was there, the transitional being was there (at least in the Mother) and the full supramental being was there in principle. How much more time would it take for the supramental being to be there as a perceptible fact? Not long ago, the Mother’s guess had been thousands of years, but in her later Entretiens it had come down to three hundred. A reason for this acceleration may have been that the world, owing to the presence and the action of the double Avatar, had entered a global crisis, life-threatening like all new births, and that a race with time was on to prevent a catastrophe. In the evolution as in history every ‘impossible’ turn or event has come about at the very moment of its greatest impossibility; this time too the sunrise will follow Earth’s darkest night – maybe tomorrow, but surely within the very near future, talking in evolutionary terms. These are the reasons why it is plausible to surmise that the Mother, in her endless love for humankind, took up her body again to hasten the advent of the New World.

Later she described the important changes that had taken place in her during the experience of 12 April 1962. ‘The Mental withdrew [from her material body], the Vital withdrew, all withdrew. At the time when I was so-called ill the Mind had disappeared, the Vital had disappeared, and the body was left to itself, purposely.’ In other words, the mental and vital elements of the adhara, the mental and vital sheaths, that is, had been removed and the only sheath remaining was the physical.⁹² When this happens, normally one dies, for death means that the nonmaterial elements leave the gross material body. ‘And that was the reason: it is precisely because the Vital and the Mental were gone that the impression was given of a very serious illness. And then, in the body left to itself, little by little the cells began to wake up to the Consciousness [gesture of rising aspiration]. Formerly this Consciousness was infused into the body by the Vital – from the Mental into the Vital, from the Vital into the body. When both were no longer there, the Consciousness rose slowly, slowly to the surface [of the cells]. All started with that burst of Love from the highest summit, the upper supreme height, and then little by little, little by little it came down into the body. And then the physical mind – which is something completely, utterly idiotic, which used to turn round and round in circles, always repeating the same, a hundred times the same – little by little became illumined, it became conscious, it became organized. And then it fell silent. Then, in the silence, the aspiration expressed itself in prayers⁷ … And this began when the doctors declared that I was very ill, then was the beginning. For the entire body was emptied of its habits and its forces. And then slowly, slowly, slowly the cells woke up to a new receptivity and opened themselves to the divine Influence directly.’ ⁸ This too was a cosmic first.

‘It was necessary,’ said the Mother, ‘that the capacity to receive and to manifest the Consciousness be obtained by the material cells. What now makes a radical transformation possible is the fact that in place of a seemingly eternal and infinite ascent there is now the appearance of a new type. This is a descent from above. The previous descent [which resulted in the human being] was a mental descent, and this one Sri Aurobindo calls a supramental descent. The [Mother’s] impression is of a descent of the supreme Consciousness which infuses itself into something that is capable of receiving and manifesting it [i.e. the cells of the body as they have become now]. And then, out of this, when it has been thoroughly prepared – how long it will take, one doesn’t know – a new form will be born which will be what Sri Aurobindo called the supramental form, and this will be … it doesn’t matter what, I don’t know how those beings will be called.’ ⁹

There is no doubt that something momentous had taken place. The material embodiment of the supramental species on Earth had become a certainty. ‘There was the certitude that what is to be done is done and that the supramental Manifestation is realized,’ the Mother said the day after her epoch-making experience. ‘It is the denial of all the spiritual assurances of the past [which say]: “If you want to live fully conscious of the divine life, give up your body, for the body cannot follow [the spiritual aspiration].” But you see, Sri Aurobindo has come and he has said: “Not only can the body follow, it can even be the base which manifests the Divine.” The work remains to be done.

‘But now there is a certitude. The result is still far off, very far. There is still much to be done before the crust, the experience of the most external surface as it is, manifests what is happening within – not “within” in the spiritual depths, but within the body. To enable that [surface crust] to manifest what is within … this will come last, and it is good that it is so, for if it came before [the necessary work is done] one would neglect the work, one would be so satisfied that one would forget to finish one’s work. Everything must be finished within, everything must be thoroughly changed, then the outside will express it.’ ¹⁰

But would this realization not remain limited to the Mother’s body alone? How could this yogic feat of hers profit the whole of humanity, how could it contribute to the materialization of the supramental being on Earth? Here we should recall that the consciousness of her cells was being universalized and that her body was being decentralized. Moreover, does not even science tell us now that an event at one point of the cosmos has its repercussions at all other points?

‘Since it is happening in one body,’ said the Mother, ‘it can happen in all bodies. I am not made of something different from the others. The difference is the consciousness, that’s all. It [her body] is made exactly of the same [substance], with the same things. I eat the same things and it was made in the same way, absolutely.’ ¹¹ And she added: ‘All is one single substance, completely the same everywhere, and it was unconscious everywhere. And what is now remarkable is that automatically certain things are happening [gesture indicating points scattered everywhere in the world], totally unexpected, here, there, in people who don’t even know anything.’ ¹² Humanity is evolving unknowingly. ‘It [her supramental realization in the cells] is contagious, this I know for sure. And it [the contagiousness] is the only hope, because if everyone had to go again through the same experience [she went through] …’ ¹³ She did not finish the sentence.

The Earth is unknowingly suffering from an occult contagious epidemic: supramentalization. This epidemic has made the Earth apparently badly ill, for throughout the twentieth century, parallel to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yoga, it has been suffering from high fever, anxiety and instability, resulting in a frenetic succession of mass turbulence, upheavals, revolts, massacres, wars, collapse or reversal of moral values, religious uncertainty and fanaticism, disorienting technical and electronic innovations and mass production. Because or in spite of all that, the Earth has grown one and all destinies are henceforth interlocked. The old values have become hollow, the new are still nonexistent or unperceived – but the foundations for the One World, the preconditions for the New World, are now in place.

Matter, Substance, Vibrations, Light

‘I am trying to do it [the supramentalization of the physical],’ the Mother said, ‘not out of an arbitrary will, not at all: there is simply “something,” or someone, or a consciousness or whatever (I don’t want to talk about it) which uses this (Mother’s body) to try and do something with it. Which means that I do the work and am a witness at the same time, and as for the “I,” I don’t know where it is: it’s not down here, it’s not up above, it’s not … I don’t know where it is, it’s for the requirements of language. There is “something” that works and is a witness of the work at the same time, and is at the same time the action being done: the three things.’ ⁷¹

A strange situation – but ‘interesting.’ Even in her worst suffering the Mother will find everything interesting. Her body had been depersonalized. During the crisis, or rather the victorious realization in the night of 12-13 April 1962, she had left it and taken it up again; but from then onwards she will say that it is not her body any more but a body, although it was the most advanced body in existence for the Work to be done. She had taken it up because she or it had decided that this body would remain on Earth for some more years, supposedly to shorten the time span needed for the manifest presence of the supramental being on Earth.

The process of universalization and simultaneously of decentralization was continuing. There was ‘a universal progress in the cells,’ so much so that they were becoming ubiquitous. ‘The physical person is not only this, it is not only this body,’ she said. ‘I am not sure yet whether the physical person is not the whole Earth – for certain things it is the whole Earth – or whether the physical person is the whole of all bodies with which I am in contact.’ ¹⁴ She did not feel the reactions in her body as more intimate than the reactions in other bodies. The consciousness of her body was no longer individual, ‘I can assure you of this,’ but more and more total. ‘The body is not isolated. It is more or less a multitude with degrees of proximity.’ ¹⁵ Her body was becoming the body of humanity. And when a certain Catholic man hundreds of miles away sought her presence and support because he was dying, she received the extreme unction as concretely as if she had been that person – who in fact she was.

The reason was, once again, that everything in this world is vibrations. Sometimes she will not call the body she had taken up a body any longer, but an agglomerate, more specifically an agglomerate of vibrations. Not only is anything that appears to us solid in reality a more or less stable configuration of vibrations, we live unawares in an enormous vortex of billions and trillions of vibrations. ‘All the time, all the time one is vibrating in response to vibrations which come from outside … If you could see that kind of dance, the dance of the vibrations which is there around you all the time …’ ¹⁶ This occult material reality discovered by science became a living reality to the Mother.

The composition of a living cell was occultly shown to her in order to illustrate what was going on in her body.¹⁷ She found that the cells ‘have a composition and an interior structure which corresponds to the structure of the universe.’ In their internal composition the cells receive the vibration ‘of the corresponding state in the total composition [of the universe].’ The cell, very complex, is luminous in its centre and gradually less luminous towards its surface. In fact, the centre is more than luminous, it is brilliant and irradiates light, and the connection between the cells is ‘from light to light.’ ‘It gave the impression that every cell was a world in miniature corresponding to the all.’ This is the biology of the future, now at best vaguely anticipated in the works of David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, Ilya Prigogine and others.

Where the Mother’s reports of her experiences differed from science was in the fact that, according to her, vibrations were not neutral events which are only quantitatively describable by means of mathematical equations. To her all vibrations possessed qualities, constituting the basis of the qualities we experience in a limited human way.¹⁸ This is the reason why vibrations of light can cause soothing, illuminating, elevating or ecstatic feelings; why vibrations of love can touch our heart; why vibrations of malevolence or hate can disturb our physical balance, even without our knowing that we have been subjected to them; why vibrations of fear or anger can destroy our health; why vibrations of courage or positive thinking can work wonders; why material vibrations can light a star. If matter is as understood by the physicists at present, then vibrations cannot have qualities. But then qualities cannot exist in the universe. Even if one holds that qualities are psychological human projections or superpositions, epiphenomena of reality, there should be an explanation of where the qualities in the human being come from. If there is some truth in the theory of the Great Chain of Being, which materialistic science naturally does not accept, then the non-material gradations – vital, mental, overmental, supramental, Sachchidananda – must each have their own kind of nonmaterial vibrations.

For the Mother this resulted in a new perception of Matter, or rather of the substance which to us appears as Matter. ‘This way of being is still very undefinable,’ the Mother said, ‘but in this research there is a constant perception, translated into a vision, of a multicoloured light consisting of all the colours – all the colours not in layers but as though [gesture of dotting] it was a grouping of all the colours by dots of all the colours … Now I see it [the multicoloured light] constantly, associated with everything, and it seems to be what one might call a perception of true Matter. All possible colours are joined together without being mixed [same gesture of dotting], joined together by luminous dots. Everything is as it were made of that. And this seems to be the true mode of being. I am not yet sure, but in any case it is a mode of being much more conscious. And I see it all the while, with my eyes open, with my eyes closed – all the while.

‘And one has the strange perception – strange for the body, that is – at once of subtleness, of penetrability, if one may put it like that, of suppleness of shape, and not positively of a cessation but of a considerable diminution of the rigidity of the forms – a cessation of the rigidity, not a cessation of the forms but a suppleness of the forms … This will probably be what materially must replace the physical ego, by which I mean that the rigidity of the form appears to be yielding to this new way of being … It is the moment of the passage from one way to the other which is a little difficult. … All the habits are being undone in this way. And it is like this for all the functions: for the blood circulation, the digestion, the respiration … for all functions. And at the moment of the passage it is not so that the one [the new way of being] suddenly replaces the other [the old way of being]: there is a state of fluidity between the two which makes it difficult. It is only this great Faith, totally immobile, luminous, constant, immutable – the Faith in the real existence of the supreme Lord, in the sole real existence of the Supreme – which enables everything to continue to be the same in appearance.’ ¹⁹

The Mother’s experiences not only took her into realms which are being discovered by present-day physics, they also rediscovered arcane findings of the ancient Indian wisdom. She said for instance that in that new, multicolored matter ‘nothing moves, apparently, in a formidable Movement’; that vibration there ‘is so fast that it is imperceptible, that it is as it were coagulated [into forms] and immobile.²⁰ In the Isha Upanishad we find: ‘The Self is one. Unmoving, it moves faster than the mind. The senses lag, but Self runs ahead. Unmoving, it outruns pursuit … Unmoving, it moves; is far away, yet near; within all, outside all.’ ²¹

Nobody noticed anything of all that while the Mother was sitting there in that simple chair of hers and amiably smiling at the person or people in front of her, while plunging that person or those people into the presence of the Lord. (‘I hold myself responsible for anyone I have seen even one second in my life,’ she said.) Neither did anybody know that the Mother all the time had to ‘dim’ her presence to make it bearable to human beings. Sometimes she had to have a look from above, she said, to see whether her body still had a shape, a form. The form was kept up to make the contact with the human beings possible, to make the contact with Matter possible, to distil from gross Matter the New Matter which would be sufficiently refined and plastic to embody the supramental being.

Her physical ego was now practically eliminated, though she was without doubt physically present, there, on the second floor of the north-east wing at 9 Rue de la Marine in Pondicherry. How does it feel not to have or to be a physical ego any more? We cannot even imagine. One is here, there and everywhere immediately when there is a conscious contact, a call, as there were contacts and calls all the time. She was much more busy now than before when she went about in the Ashram, for she was becoming ubiquitous, physically. Many people were climbing up that narrow staircase to the second floor to be received by her, but these were few compared to the ones drawing her attention in an occult way. And there were not only the individuals who drew her attention, but more and more institutions, nations, and the Earth itself – all taken up in the movement of transformation and to that end being worked upon by her – and many entities beyond the Earth.⁹³ Her body had become ‘a finely tuned machine for the reception of vibrations’ and it was never alone. ‘The being is not isolated, the body is not isolated, it is more or less a multitude with degrees of proximity.’ And there was all that which came from outside. ‘The problem of the mental and even of the vital contagion⁹⁴ is practically solved, but the problem of the material contagion is still there.’ There was ‘all that which comes from outside, this perpetual contagion, continuously, continuously, every single minute’ ²² day and night.

In the meantime the transformation of that curious body continued organ after organ, function after function, system after system. (The most painful of all ‘transfers,’ understandably, was the transformation of the nervous system.) Whenever it was the turn of a certain part to be further transformed, it looked as if the Mother was terribly ill in that part. The people around her worried about the endless succession of her illnesses. But time and again she stressed that she was not ill, that it was as if she were ill. She explained that her ‘illnesses’ were the outward expression of processes of transformation. ‘These are not illnesses, these are functional disorders,’ she said.

‘All the habitual rhythms of the material world are changed. The body had founded its sort of feeling of good health on a certain number of vibrations, and when those vibrations were present, it felt in good health; when something came and disturbed them, it had the impression that it was going to be ill or that it was ill, depending on the intensity. Now, all that is changed. Those basic vibrations have simply been taken away, they don’t exist any more. The vibrations on which it founded its opinion of good or bad health: gone. They are replaced by something else, and this something else is of such a nature that “good health” and “illness” don’t make sense any longer. Now there is the sense of a harmony established between the cells, that is established more and more between the cells, and that represents the good functioning, whatever it be: there is no longer a question of a stomach, a heart, or whatever. And the smallest trifle which comes and disturbs this harmony is very painful.’ ²³

What the people who talked to her about her illnesses or asked after her health did not realize was that they emitted thoughts of illness – of illness as normally understood, not of a transformational process – because they were thinking in terms of illness. A thought is not an abstraction, it is something concrete in the mental world, embodied in mental substance, and sure to work out the intention with which it has been charged. When such thoughts were directed at the Mother, she sometimes had to react with vigour, simply to protect herself. Question: ‘How is Mother doing?’ – Her answer: ‘Mother is not doing. There is no person here any more to be doing. Mother does what the Divine wants her to do.’ And she explained: ‘If, for instance, out of curiosity (which is a mental illness of the human being) one starts asking oneself questions – “What may this be? What is its effect? What is going to happen?” (this is what [human beings] call the urge to learn) – if one has the bad luck to be like that, one is sure to have something very disagreeable which, according to the doctors – according to the ignoramuses – becomes an illness or a disturbance of the functioning. But if one does not have this unhealthy curiosity and if one, on the contrary, has the will that the harmony not be disturbed, then it suffices, one could say poetically, to apply “a drop of the Lord” on the spot and it becomes all right.’ ²⁴ The bridge between our world and the supramental world was still in the making, which means that the Mother’s unheard of way of existing in two worlds at the same time, without a link in between, continued. ‘Transitional beings are always in unstable equilibrium,’ ²⁵ she said. Simple words for an extremely complex and risky way of existing. ‘The body itself now truly collaborates as much as it can, with goodwill and an increasing power of endurance. And, really, the turn back to oneself is reduced to a minimum.’ By ‘the turn back to oneself’ (le retour sur soi) she meant the focusing, the turning back of the consciousness onto her old way of being. ‘It still happens, but like something in passing. It doesn’t stay, not even for a few seconds. This – the turn back to oneself – is really an atmosphere that is disgusting, repulsive, catastrophic … There is still the full weight of millennia of bad habits which one may call pessimistic, for they expect nothing but decline, catastrophes, all these kind of things, and it is this which is most difficult to purify, to clarify, to throw out of [her personal] atmosphere. It is so much inside that it feels altogether spontaneous. It is this which is the huge, huge obstacle, this kind of feeling of inevitable decline.’ ²⁶

Every time there was a turn back to her old self, which was what a great part of her cells still consisted of, the situation became critical. She was taken by an enormous angst, which may have been the angst in the cells faced with a transformation into something which would no longer be their old, habitual, familiar self. Becoming conscious, the cells too saw the immensity of the gap between their animal-human way of existing and the divine way. ‘The difference becomes more and more painful,’ said the Mother. As soon as the attention of her body was not focused on the Divine, did not take its support on the Divine, it became very miserable. To forget the Divine one minute became a ‘catastrophe.’ The old way of being conscious was now comparable to death. ‘Without You is death, with You is life,’ she prayed. This passage, this transition, this transmutation was the most unstable, bewildering, perilous phase of the transformation. But somebody had to do it, somebody somewhere in the long process of evolution.

Concurrently the transformation of the Subconscient was going on, the in-ter-mi-na-ble subconscious, for it was no longer her personal Subconscient, but that of the Earth. From that Subconscient rose up everything that had to be transformed, for the simple reason that the transformation of the body is not possible without the transformation of Matter, and that transformation of Matter is not possible without transformation of the Subconscient. While logically a simple conclusion, in practice this meant years of suffering and toiling in hell. From there surged up the constant suggestions of an imminent catastrophe, and all that had been rejected before, and all that contradicted and opposed the Divine. ‘I think … I don’t know, but this seems to be the first time that the instrument [i.e. the Avatar], instead of having been made in order to bring the “Good Tidings,” the “Revelation,” to light the spark, has been made to try and realize – to do the work, the obscure chore.’ ²⁷ What was measured out to her was ‘three minutes of splendour for twelve hours of misery,’ ‘some seconds of paradise for hours of hell,’ ‘a few marvellous minutes for hours of terror.’

But there was that ‘Solicitude which doses’ the experiences, however extreme. And there was the yogic seesaw effect we know of, and her reports of progress that were sometimes spectacular. For the Mother was building a new, supramental body within her old, material body, along with it, parallel to it. Time after time she noticed that during her occult nightly occupations she was très grande et forte, very tall and strong, which she was not in her material body. She also noticed that she was very young again. And tall, strong and young was how disciples saw her who had an inner contact or experience with her. ‘They see me as I am and they say so.’

As early as 1962 she said that the new body was a body of the subtle physical, which in her case means the supramental. It happened that, in her new body, she went down from her room into the Ashram and did certain things, the results of which were materially there when she asked about it. That new body was, besides, not something temporary or ephemeral, but permanent, she said. ‘I am not very sure that I don’t already exist physically in a true body [i.e. a supramental body]. I say that I am not very sure because the people on the outside have no proof of it.’ ²⁸ As usual she remained very cautious, very scientific in her observations, but the frequency and similarity of the reports leave little doubt about the fact that the Mother had made an enormous progress: she was building the prototype of the supramental body on earth. We will learn more about this later on.

Life on the Outside

The only hope for the future is a change of man’s consciousness and the change is bound to come. But it is left to men to decide if they will collaborate to this change or if it will have to be enforced upon them by the power of crushing circumstances.²⁹

– The Mother

‘I am leading a still much more busy life than the one I was leading downstairs,’ said the Mother. At first she had not understood why the ordeal in April 1962 had been so severe that she had had to cease all her activities among the disciples ‘downstairs.’ ³⁰ If it was something of a momentary significance, why did all that have to cease? But now she understood: it was not something momentary, it was a fundamental yogic operation in which the mental and vital sheaths of her adhara had been eliminated and the body alone remained, directly under the influence of the Supreme and, as we will see, of her psychic being.

‘But now I understand: cut off, I fainted.’ The intermediary layers had been removed, which made the body suddenly feel as if it was ‘cut off.’ ‘That is why the doctor declared that I was ill, I could not move a step without fainting! I wanted to walk from here to over there … on the way, pffft, I fainted. Someone had to hold me so that the body would not fall down. But as to me, I did not lose consciousness for a single minute. I fainted but I was conscious, I saw my body, I knew that it had fainted. I didn’t lose consciousness and the body didn’t lose consciousness either. So now I understand: it was cut off from the Vital and the Mental and left to its own resources. It was simply the body. All it knew, all the experiences it had had, all the mastery that was there in all the states of being – in the Vital, the Mental, and above – all that was gone, and this poor body was left to itself! And then, naturally, little by little, all that was being rebuilt [in the body itself], rebuilt in a conscious, purely conscious being.’ ³¹ The Mother could function again. We will sketch briefly some of the happenings which demanded her attention.

In October 1962 the Chinese crossed in many places their disputed border with India. There had been incidents before, especially since the Tibetan revolt in 1959 when India provided shelter to about nine thousand Tibetan refugees. This incident, too, was serious. The Chinese met with practically no resistance from the Indians, who were ill-equipped for high-altitude fighting and who had never imagined that the Chinese would invade their country. In the previous years Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai had been an oft shouted slogan, and Jawaharlal Nehru still lived in the Bandung euphoria where the ‘third world’ countries had looked like one close-knit fraternity. So deeply was he affected by his disillusionment that it undermined his health and was indirectly responsible for his death in May 1964.

The Mother followed the evolution of the situation closely, not only because one of her emanations is Bharat Mata, Mother India, but also because her spiritual support was entreated from several sides. Private conversations demonstrate her constant attention to the happenings at the front, where she said she was present ‘concretely.’ (She also contributed to the War Fund, at a time when her finances were in very dire straits.) Then, in November, against all expectations, the Chinese, who were in a position to overrun a great part of India without too much difficulty, announced a unilateral cease-fire. Nobody has ever understood why. Confidentially the Mother said: ‘This cease-fire is evidently the result of what I have done.’ ³²

On 21 February 1963, her eighty-fifth birthday, she gave her first darshan from the terrace that had been built for her, together with her now permanent room on the second floor (and the ‘music room,’ where she received guests and on certain occasions played on the Wurlitzer organ which had replaced her old harmonium). From now on, on every darshan day the streets on the east side of the main Ashram building would be filled with people looking up for something like five minutes at that small, stooped figure pouring out over them and over the world, without any gesture or ceremony, her Force and blessings.

On 21 June 1963 the Catholic Pope Paul VI was elected. He had a difficult task cut out for him in succeeding the beloved John XXIII who had initiated a revolution in the Catholic Church, the aggiornamento. John XXIII, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, three exceptional characters and leaders, had created one of the high moments of human understanding and goodwill in an exceptionally harrowing century. The Mother had supported them in their contribution to the advent of a New World. ‘The rapprochement between Russia and America is something I have been working on for years,’ ³³ she said. She also said that Kennedy was receptive and that she had been counting on him. She called his assassination, in November of the same year, an occult murder executed by ‘the same black forces’ which try to gain a hold on every organization or means of power, in order to keep the world subjected to them as it has been throughout human history.

On 11 February 1965 the Sri Aurobindo Ashram was attacked by a Pondicherrian mob incited by certain powers behind the scenes. The apparent reason was the imposition of Hindi by the Central Government on the whole of India. Linguistically India is divided into two parts: the northern part, by far the largest, where all languages are direct derivations of Sanskrit and Hindi is a kind of lingua franca, and the southern part, where the four main languages are Dravidian sister languages. Tamil, the language spoken in Pondicherry as well as in neighbouring Tamil Nadu (formerly the State of Madras), is one of these Dravidian languages. (At present, Tamil is spoken by more people in the world than those who speak French.) As most of the Ashram population consisted of Bengalis and Gujaratis, the anger of the Pondicherrian Dravidians against the imposition by the Indian government – later modified – found a scapegoat in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

The main Ashram building, where Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were staying, is, as we know, at 9 Rue de la Marine, less than two hundred meters from the sea. Yet most of the Ashram houses, school buildings, shops, services and facilities are in the main town. They were an easy target for the rowdy elements who attacked them and tried to burn them before the police could or would intervene. The Ashram population, however, at the time probably better trained physically than any other community in India, put up a courageous resistance wherever possible.

On this occasion, the Mother gave the following declaration: ‘Some people looking at things superficially, might ask how it is that the Ashram exists in this town for so many years and is not liked by the population.

‘The first and immediate answer is that all those in this population who are of a higher standard in culture, intelligence, good will and education not only have welcomed the Ashram but have expressed their sympathy, admiration and good feeling. Sri Aurobindo Ashram has in Pondicherry many sincere and faithful followers and friends.⁹⁵

‘This said, our position is clear.

‘We do not fight against any creed, any religion.

‘We do not fight against any form of government.

‘We do not fight against any social class.

‘We do not fight against any nation or civilization.

‘We are fighting division, unconsciousness, ignorance, inertia and falsehood.

‘We are endeavouring to establish upon Earth union, knowledge, consciousness, Truth, and we fight whatever opposes the advent of this new creation of Light, Peace, Truth and Love.’ ³⁴

On 14 August 1965, after numerous skirmishes along the border, the Second Indo-Pakistan War broke out. (The first was fought in 1947, soon after the independence of both countries.) By mid-September the fighting, which cost 3,000 casualties on the Indian side and 3,800 on the side of Pakistan, reached a stalemate, and the Security Council of the U.N. called for a ceasefire. It organized a peace conference in January 1966 at Tashkent, under Russian aegis, between the Indian prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and the Pakistani president, Muhammad Ayub Khan. Shastri died of a heart attack immediately after an agreement was reached. He was succeeded as prime minister by Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who was to remain in contact with the Mother through the coming years.

In October 1965 the comet Ikeda-Seki appeared in the sky. As Udar remembers: ‘On 29 October 1965 the Mother saw the comet at about 4:30 in the morning, low in the east over the horizon. A few hours before, however, the Mother had met the being of the comet. This being was naturally not human but had a form something like the human. It appeared as a young man – without clothes – with a fair golden-hued skin and reddish hair. The Mother met this being in space but not far from the Earth. He had with him some substance’ – ‘as it were gelatinous,’ the Mother herself would say – and denser than Matter. This substance was to help in the transformation of the Earth, and the being of the comet showed the Mother how to make it circulate in the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘This substance was brought to be added to the earth’s atmosphere to enable it to be prepared for the New Creation. This material gave to the Mother a very fine feeling of ease and harmony and joy – but not the kind of joy felt on Earth.’ ³⁵

Another story out of the ordinary is the following, also told by Udar. Manibhai Patel was one of the ‘African’ Indian businessmen who had returned home. As a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother he wanted to contribute to the launching of Auroville by building a food factory. ‘There was the question of getting the required machinery, which was coming from abroad. There were two possibilities for the import of these machines, either at the [big] port of Madras or at [the very small port] of Pondicherry. I felt we should bring the goods to Pondicherry both because it would cost much less and because it seemed wrong to off-load at Madras while we had our own port. The Mother supported my view and Manibhai ordered the ship to Pondicherry.

‘When the ship arrived – it was a Greek ship – the captain was very disappointed to see the very inadequate crane facilities on the pier. He said it would be impossible to off-load the machinery with them. We had the occasion to have many talks with the captain and spoke a great deal about yoga and spiritual matters. He was inclined to be sceptical and finally said: “If you can off-load all the machines on to that pier, I will believe in all this talk of spiritual Force. Seeing is believing.” We left it at that.

‘Among the machines there was one piece that weighed about six tons, and the question was really about that piece, as the two cranes were only of a three-ton capacity each. [There were actually three cranes, but one was out of order.] I suggested that we would lift it with the two cranes operating in tandem, but the captain was rather doubtful. He said that tandem work was very difficult and needed highly trained crane operators. Anyway, the work was taken up and Manibhai and I were present throughout. All the machines were unloaded without any hitch, till we came to the last, the six ton piece.

‘We decided that we would have a rest and do the work after lunch. While we were away for lunch, those present felt they should continue and try to lift the big machine even in our absence. So a special double boat-lighter brought this machine to the quay side and the two cranes were hitched on to the box. The captain with his officers was in a boat, way off, to watch the impending drama. All this we were told later.

‘The cranes slowly lifted up the box till it came to the level of the quay deck, and then something happened and both the cranes tipped over. The crane operators jumped out of the cranes, and the whole box and two cranes were falling into the sea. It would have been a major accident involving the loss of twenty boatmen, the boats, the machines and the two cranes. But, in falling over, the crane jibs swung inwards and the box came over the deck and landed on it as on a cushion. Both the cranes then came upright again. At that time we came back from our lunch and found a great state of consternation and panic, and then relief.

‘We looked for the captain. He had gone back at top speed to his ship, raised anchor and departed in a great hurry. He sent a message saying that there was something very strange there. He had never seen anything like it in his life and wanted to get away from it as soon as possible.

‘That is the story, but the question I asked [the Mother] was this: Why did this have to happen in our absence? The answer I received is interesting. The whole procedure went on without any hitch because of the unshakeable faith we had in the Mother’s Force. But for the last piece, if we had been there and actually seen the cranes tipping over, that faith might have been shaken and then the disaster would have happened.’ ³⁶

Let us conclude this section with an anecdote from those years told by Nirodbaran. ‘On the first of February, 1963, the month of her birth, I had a strange experience during my morning meditation. It lasted about an hour. I saw many things apparently incoherent, having no logical connection. But I had a very strong impression that something extraordinary was going to take place.

I wrote about it to the Mother in French and got her reply in French … It runs as follows in English:

‘“Last night we (you and myself and some others) were together for quite a long time in the permanent dwelling of Sri Aurobindo which exists in the subtle physical (what Sri Aurobindo used to call the true physical). All that happened there (much too long and complicated to be told) was, so to say, organized in order to express concretely the rapid movement with which the present transformation is going on; and Sri Aurobindo told you with a smile something like this: ‘Do you believe now?’ It was as if he was evoking these three lines from Savitri:

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done. ||11.48||

‘“I think this is a sufficient explanation of the meditation you are speaking of.

‘“My blessings.”’ ³⁷

Founding the City of Dawn: Auroville

When she founded Auroville, the Mother did not act on a sudden idea or impulse, not even a spiritual one: she allowed to become realized on Earth what already existed in another dimension. ‘The conception of Auroville is purely divine and has preceded its execution by many years.’ ³⁸ As early as 1966 she said: ‘It’s certain to work, I know that it exists – the city is already there (since many, many years). What is interesting is that I had made a creation with Sri Aurobindo at the centre. Then, when Sri Aurobindo left, I dropped the whole idea, I didn’t budge any more. And suddenly it began to come back, as if I were being told: “Now is the time, it has to be done.” Good. The Moslems would say: “It is written.” It is written, it is sure to exist. How long it will take I don’t know, but it seems to be going quickly. The city already exists.’ ³⁹ In September of the same year she confirmed: ‘Even if you don’t believe it, even if all the circumstances seem quite unfavourable, I know that Auroville will be. It may take a hundred years, it may take a thousand years, I don’t know, but Auroville will be because it is decreed.’ ⁴⁰

Strong words for another impossibility to be realized, the most material impossibility after the building up of the Ashram, and this time an undertaking on a much larger scale. The Mother was ninety when she inaugurated this Utopia. ‘You say that Auroville is a dream. Yes, it is a “dream” of the Lord and generally these “dreams” turn out to be true – much more true than the human so-called realities.’ ⁴¹

She had already written out the dream and published it in the Bulletin of August 1954. It is one of those texts which echo in spaces beyond our human dimensionalities and behind which one feels the Power of realization. It is called … ‘A Dream.’ The major part of it runs as follows: ‘There should be somewhere upon Earth a place that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of good will, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his suffering and misery, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the care for progress would get precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the seeking for pleasures and material enjoyments.

‘In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their soul. Education would be given, not with a view to passing examinations and getting certificates and posts, but for enriching the existing faculties and bringing forth new ones.

‘In this place titles and positions would be supplanted by opportunities to serve and organize. The needs of the body will be provided for equally in the case of each and everyone. In the general organization intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority will find expression not in the enhancement of the pleasures and powers of life but in the increase of duties and responsibilities. Artistic beauty in all forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, will be available equally to all, the opportunity to share in the joys they bring being limited solely by each one’s capacities and not by social or financial position.

‘For in this ideal place money would be no more the sovereign lord. Individual merit will have a greater importance than the value due to material wealth and social position. Work would not be there as the means of gaining one’s livelihood, it would be the means whereby to express oneself, develop one’s capacities and possibilities, while doing at the same time service to the whole group, which on its side would provide for each one’s subsistence and for the field of his work.

‘In brief, it would be a place where the relations among human beings, usually based almost exclusively upon competition and strife, would be replaced by relations of emulation for doing better, for collaboration, relations of real brotherhood.

‘The Earth is certainly not ready to realize such an ideal, for mankind does not yet possess the necessary knowledge to understand and accept it, or the indispensable conscious force to execute it. That is why I call it a dream.

‘Yet, this dream is on the way to becoming a reality …’ ⁴²

There had already been several occasions in the Mother’s life when she had tried to give shape to the dream in totally different circumstances. The ones we know of are the following.

The first occasion had been before the Second World War. ‘I almost had the land. It was in the time of Sir Akbar, from Hyderabad.’ Akbar’s name may ring a bell with the reader, for he was the dewan (prime minister) of the Nizam who had been instrumental in the funding of Golconde. ‘They sent me some photographs of the State of Hyderabad and there, in those photographs, I found my ideal spot: an isolated hill, quite a big hill, and below it a large flowing river … Everything was arranged. They sent me the plans, the papers and everything, saying that they were giving it to the Ashram. But they laid down one condition … nothing could leave the State of Hyderabad … I asked if it was not possible to have [the condition] removed; then Sir Akbar died and that was the end of it.’ ⁴³ The world of the Aurobindian movement could have looked very different indeed if Auroville had been located in the State of Hyderabad, now Andhra Pradesh, and not near Pondicherry where it is today.

It seems that when the Mother founded, in 1943, the University Centre, which afterwards would become the International Centre of Education, she had a much different, broader conception of it than what the Ashram School has turned out to be. M.P. Pandit remembers: ‘She said in sum: students from different countries, with their different civilizations and traditions, should be given opportunities to stay in independent blocks; students from France, students from Japan, students from America – each in a separate block not demarcated by walls but by the free development of their own pattern of life, so that if any student wanted to know of the Japanese way of life, he could straightaway walk into the Japanese sector, a distinct part of the hostel, mix with the students there, see what kind of food they ate, how they cooked, how they lived. And at that time she said also that each country must have its own pavilion – a pavilion where its own culture at its highest point should be represented in its special characteristic way … She saw the whole area round the Ashram, with all buildings contained in it, split in twelve different segments together forming the Mother’s symbol.’ ⁴⁴ Whatever the accuracy with which M.P. Pandit noted down the Mother’s sayings, it is clear that the ideas behind them resemble more closely the features of Auroville than of the Ashram school.

Shortly after the Second World War the idea of the Ideal City seems to have come knocking again. This time it would have been near ‘the Lake,’ actually a big pond about ten kilometres to the northwest of Pondicherry, where the Ashram had acquired some land. Later the Mother found some notes from that time reminding her to call the two architects of Golconde, Antonin Raymond and František Sammer (who in the meantime had become a Group Captain in the R.A.F.) for planning the ‘tremendous programme.’ It may have been in reference to this occasion or to another one that she said in 1961: ‘What I myself have seen was a plan that came complete in all details, but that doesn’t at all conform in spirit and consciousness with what is possible on Earth now, although in its most material manifestation the plan was based on existing terrestrial circumstances. It was the idea of an ideal city, the nucleus of a small ideal country, having only superficial and extremely limited contacts with the old world. One would already have to conceive (it’s possible) of a Power sufficient to be at once a protection against aggression or ill will (this would not be the most difficult protection to provide) and a protection (which can just barely be imagined) against infiltration and admixture.’ ⁴⁵

In fact, the concept of the Ideal City seems to have been part of the Mother’s Work throughout her yoga of evolution in many lives, and a necessary condition or means to found or to fix the Life Divine upon the Earth. The reader is familiar with the incredible adventure of the founding and fast execution of the Sun City of Akhetaton, some three and a half millennia ago, by the pharaoh Akhenaton under the impulse of his mother, Queen Tiy, who was an incarnation of the Mother. The Mother is reported to have said that, although the Earth was not ready for the supramental transformation at the time, the creation of a city dedicated to the Sun and called ‘Horizon of the Sun’ (which means physical presence of the Sun on Earth) had to be undertaken ‘to assure the continuity of its existence in the mental plane.’

What mental plane? In occultism, the existence of an ‘ether’ in which all events are recorded that ever have taken place and are to take place, is well-known. It is the basis of the belief in a Doomsday Book and a Recording Angel. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother recognized the existence of this recording ether, known in the Indian traditions as akash, and were acquainted with it through their occult experience. Sri Aurobindo wrote for example in The Synthesis of Yoga: ‘All things sensible, whether in the material world or any other, create reconstituting vibrations, sensible echoes, reproductions, recurrent images of themselves which that subtler ether receives and retains. It is this which explains many of the phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc.; for these phenomena are only the exceptional admission of the waking mentality into a limited sensitiveness to what might be called the image memory of the subtle ether, by which not only the signs of all things past and present, but even those of things future can be seized; for things future are already accomplished to knowledge and vision on higher planes of mind, and their images can be reflected upon mind in the present.’ ⁴⁶

The existence of this recording ether may explain the idea of the foundation of another Sun City in southern Italy around 1600, the year Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. The initiator of this Utopian idea was Tommaso Campanella, a defrocked Dominican monk, contemporary of Bruno (also a Dominican) and heavily influenced by him.⁹⁶ Like Bruno, Campanella got into serious trouble with the Inquisition, and was severely tortured and incarcerated for many years. He was, however, clever enough to escape execution and even to practise some magic with Pope Urban VIII himself.

The Cittá del Sole (City of the Sun) is the title of Campanella’s most famous work; it was probably written in 1602, during his imprisonment. ‘The City of the Sun was to be on a hill in the midst of a vast plain,’ we read in Frances Yates. ‘In the centre, and on the summit of the hill, there was a vast temple, of marvellous construction. It was perfectly round, and its great dome was supported on huge columns.’ ⁴⁷ ‘[Campanella’s] ideas of a City of the Sun were a combination of two important concepts,’ writes Gareth Knight: ‘1. the central importance physically and philosophically of the Sun; 2. the fourfold pattern of a city that is a representation of the cosmos … The City as an archetype of an ideal heavenly and earthly society is fundamental to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and is also to be found biblically in the Book of Revelation, where the Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem, descends from on high at the end of the world … The holy city of Jerusalem is then described as being four-square, with the number twelve playing an important part in the design.’ Tommaso Campanella ‘hoped to establish his city on Earth as herald of a new age … The fourfold theme was again dominant. Four main roads led to the centre where there was a circular domed temple … All property would be held in common …’ ⁴⁸

The resemblances to Auroville are striking. Auroville is being built on a plateau in the midst of a vast plain. In the centre and on the summit of the hill there is the Matrimandir, the Temple of the Mother, a marvellous construction which is round and supported on four huge columns. Auroville means City of Dawn and is closely connected with the supramental transformation, the Sun being the symbol of the Supramental. The basic plan of Auroville is a spiral nebula, divided into four sectors. The Matrimandir, supported by four pillars, is at the centre of Auroville and is surrounded by twelve gardens. The Mother’s symbol itself consists of a central dot (representing the One), surrounded by a first ring with four sections (the four cosmic Powers of the Mother) and by a second ring with twelve sections (the twelve powers of the Mother necessary for the execution of her Work). If, in addition, one considers that Campanella hoped to establish his city on Earth ‘as the herald of a new age,’ then the resemblance between his City of the Sun and Auroville can hardly be coincidental but must have hidden links. Campanella, like most of the prominent Renaissance men, was a practising magician and may well have had access, knowingly or unknowingly, to the akashic records.

‘The physical decision to launch Auroville was taken at the end of 1964 during the World Conference of the Sri Aurobindo Society, an international organization which the Mother had started in 1960 and of which she was the president.’ ⁴⁹ In September 1965 the Mother wrote: ‘Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is human unity.’ ⁵⁰

From then on things moved quickly, so much so that the inauguration of the City of Dawn⁹⁷ could be planned for 28 February 1968.

The Mother had to write the city’s charter for the occasion. Satprem remembered vividly: ‘We still see her, half-standing half-sitting on a stool, writing the “Charter of Auroville” on that window sill, equipped with a big piece of parchment and a too thick felt-tipped pen which made her handwriting look like cuneiform characters. “I don’t write pompous solemnities,” she said turning in our direction (and there was always that witty glimmer in her eyes).’ ⁵¹ And she wrote in the original French:

Charter of Auroville

1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.

2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.

3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realizations.

4. Auroville will be a site of spiritual and material researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.⁵²

When she had finished writing the charter, the Mother said descending from the stool: ‘There. It is not I who wrote all this. I have noticed something very interesting: when it comes, it is imperative, no arguing possible. I write it down – I am forced to write it down, whatever I may try to do … It is therefore evident that it does not come from here: it comes from somewhere up there.’ ⁵³

These were the words which resounded from loudspeakers in her voice on that 28 February 1968, in French and English, over a blazing plain of red laterite located on a low lying plateau on the southeast coast of India, a few kilometers north of Pondicherry, in the state of Tamil Nadu. The charter was broadcast directly by Akashvani, the Indian national radio. And it was preceded by the Mother’s salutation: ‘Greetings to all men of goodwill. Are invited to Auroville all those who thirst for progress and aspire to a higher and truer life.’ ⁵⁴

For the ceremony, five thousand people had been transported in buses to a spot in the middle of nowhere. As a symbol of human unity young representatives from 124 countries and from the States of India dropped a handful of earth from their homelands inside a marble urn, shaped like a lotus bud. ‘The inauguration was impressive and UNESCO passed a resolution of support, but when the people went home that day, the wind blew over a desolate plateau with only a banyan tree, a marble lotus, a scattering of palmyras, and a vast expanse of eroded red laterite earth, scarred by canyons that run between villages down to the Bay of Bengal. The actual city area of Auroville was uninhabited and used by the surrounding villages to graze cattle and goats, and gamble with the monsoon rain for a crop of millet or peanuts.’ ⁵⁵

The Mother seems to have laid down that the maximum number of inhabitants should never exceed fifty thousand, because a city is no longer liveable with a population beyond this number. As master plan she chose the model of a spiral galaxy, one of the designs by the Architect of the Universe himself. She divided the future city into four zones: international, residential, cultural and industrial.

What are the goals of Auroville? From the statements made by the Mother, one may conclude that there is something like a minimum goal and a maximum goal.

The minimum goal is the realization of human unity. As we have seen above: ‘The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.’ The Mother also stated: ‘In Auroville simply the goodwill to make a collective experiment for the progress of humanity is sufficient to gain admittance.’ ⁵⁶ On another occasion she wrote: ‘From the psychological point of view, the required conditions are: 1. To be convinced of the essential unity of mankind and to have the will to collaborate for the material realization of that unity; 2. To have the will to collaborate in all that furthers future realizations.’ ⁵⁷ This is the reason why she called the city ‘the tower of Babel in reverse.’ The people came together to build that tower but separated during the construction, now their representatives would be uniting during the construction of the City of Dawn. (Auroville has many echoes in the history of humanity.)

Nonetheless, the minimum goal is not fully attainable without the realization of the maximum goal, which is the working out of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, in other words, the realization of the new, supramental species on Earth. This is an immensely challenging objective, but there is no doubt that it is at the core of the foundation of the City of Dawn. The Mother considered the future city to be ‘a centre of transformation, a small nucleus of men who are transforming themselves and setting an example to the world.’ ⁵⁸ ‘We would like to make Auroville the cradle of the superman,’ ⁵⁹ she wrote, and again: ‘We shall endeavour to make Auroville the cradle of the superman.’ ⁶⁰ In fact, the sources quoted here are misleading. As we have seen, the Mother was very much aware of the necessity of the realization of the surhomme, the intermediary being or overman, before the manifestation of the superman would be possible. Checking the original French source, we find that in both cases she used the word surhomme, e.g. Auroville voudrait être le berceau des surhommes, which translated literally means: ‘Auroville would like to be the cradle of the overmen.’

This makes the objective of the new city not less difficult, for the overman is supposed to have a supramentalized consciousness albeit in an animal-human body. Where would they come from, the candidates for superconsciousness? None of them would be realized yogis; many would not even be trainee-yogis or candidates for the spiritual life. All things considered, it is strange that anybody at all came to stay in that barren place to dedicate his or her life to the ideals of the Auroville Charter. Who among them had an idea of the Integral Yoga, which is the most difficult undertaking imaginable for a human being? As recently as in 1961 the Mother had written: ‘Is it possible to find a spot where the embryo or seed of the future supramental world could be created? The plan had come in all its details, but it is a plan which, in its spirit and consciousness, does not conform at all to what is possible on Earth at the moment; and yet, in its most material manifestation, it was based on earthly conditions … One would have to conceive of a power great enough to be a protection against both aggression or bad will … and against infiltration, mixture … The problem is the relation with what is not supramentalized, to prevent infiltration, mixture – that is, to prevent this nucleus from falling back into an inferior creation.’ ⁶¹

Now, decades after its foundation, Auroville is still there and continues growing in spite of numerous difficulties. It may therefore be supposed that seven years after the aforementioned quotation the power of protection was strong and secure enough to render the project possible, and that this power has remained active.

As yet Auroville is very little understood, as is the work and life of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Its basis is a totally new effort of yoga, while the criteria used by those unfamiliar with the Integral Yoga are without exception based on spirituality and religion as it is supposed to be and has been in the past. In Auroville there are – or there should be – no dogmas, no gurus, no sects, no religious uniforms, no ceremonies. Fundamentally Auroville is based, like the divine Manifestation, on Love and Freedom. This means that the essential Aurovillian effort is one of individual inner development within the social context of a city, founding its general growth on the Charter. Auroville is being built in the soul of its inhabitants; its outer materialization reflects their inner realization.

This means that there should be no religion at Auroville. The Mother insisted on this point on many occasions. One of her statements runs as follows: ‘We want the Truth. For most men, it is what they want that they label the truth. The Aurovillians must want the Truth whatever it may be. Auroville is for those who want to live a life essentially divine but who renounce all religions whether they be ancient, modern, new or future. It is only in experience that there can be the knowledge of the Truth. No one ought to speak of the Divine unless he has had experience of the Divine. Get experience of the Divine, only then will you have the right to speak of it. The objective study of the religions will be a part of the historical study of the development of the human consciousness. Religions make up part of the history of mankind and it is in this guise that they will be studied at Auroville – not as beliefs to which one ought or ought not to adhere, but as part of a process in the development of the human consciousness which should lead man towards his superior realization.’ ⁶²

In 1969, shortly after the founding of Auroville, the Mother stated: ‘The task of giving a concrete form to Sri Aurobindo’s vision was entrusted to the Mother. The creation of a new world, a new humanity, a new society expressing and embodying the new consciousness is the work she has undertaken. By the very nature of things, it is a collective ideal that calls for a collective effort, so that it may be realized in the terms of an integral human perfection. The Ashram founded and built by the Mother was the first step towards the accomplishment of this goal. The project of Auroville is the next step, more exterior, which seeks to widen the base of this attempt to establish harmony between soul and body, spirit and nature, heaven and Earth, in the collective life of mankind.’ ⁶³

One marvels at the power of the impulse in humanity towards the realization of its utopias throughout its history. Auroville may be called ‘the Utopia of all Utopias,’ its aim being the concrete realization of the Divine on Earth, in a human body, and the great change of ‘the vale of tears and darkness’ into a materialized Divine Life. The Mother seemed to be quite sure of the success of the fantastic enterprise she was launching: ‘The city will be built by what is invisible to you. The men who have to act as instruments will do so despite themselves. They are only puppets in the hands of larger Forces. Nothing depends on human beings – neither the planning nor the execution – nothing! That is why one can smile.’ ⁶⁴

May 1968

Almost immediately after the foundation of Auroville a kind of shock wave went through the youth of the world, with its main focus in France. On 22 March 1968 the students occupied Nanterre University in the suburbs of Paris. A week later the authorities decided to suspend classes in Nanterre. On 1 May the trade unions organized a march in support of the students and to press for better wages. Two days later students held meetings in the Sorbonne University and the police entered that ancient institution for the first time in history. Two days later the first barricades went up in the Latin Quarter and the provincial universities were occupied by their students. Huge demonstrations followed and the majority of universities and schools in France shut down. On 10 May barricades went up all day in Paris; this was a day of police brutality and hundreds were wounded. Three days later there was a massive general strike: ‘France shuts down.’ The Sorbonne University was occupied again, and so were the Odeon Theatre and the Renault Auto Works at Cléon on 24 May. Another night of terrible rioting. Ten million people went on strike. On 29 May half a million people demonstrated in Paris. The next day de Gaulle announced the dissolution of parliament in a broadcast to the nation. And the next day the students’ movement fizzled out!

Why mention these events in a biography of the Mother? The first reason is that she followed them with a keen interest and commented upon them. She said that it was clearly the future that was awakening, wanting to chase away the past. The police, she said, represented the defence of the past. It was the highest Power which forced the people to do what they had to do. ‘This has not at all the character of a strike, it has the character of a revolution.’ ⁶⁵ The second reason is that these events in France and elsewhere on the globe coincided with the foundation of Auroville, and may have been the shock waves of the Force brought down for its accomplishment.

In this view, some slogans painted on the walls of Paris during May 1968 are surely remarkable. ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible.’ ‘To build up a revolution also means to break all the chains within one’s person.’ ‘Forget everything you have learned. Begin to dream.’ ‘The imagination is coming to power.’ ‘I have something to say, but I don’t know what.’ ‘The new society must be founded on the absence of all egoism, of all egolatry. Our way will be a long march of fraternity.’ ‘Novelty is revolutionary; truth also.’ ‘Every teacher is a student, every student is a teacher.’ ‘Action should not be reaction, but creation.’ ‘The emancipation of the human being will be total or it will not be.’ And many more slogans in the same vein. In these formulas something resounds which was also there in the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Some have written that the events of May 1968 were ‘an extraordinary initiative, inconceivable some weeks before.’ ⁶⁶ ‘The principal representatives of the thought behind 1968 have made history without knowing which history they were making,’ write Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut.⁶⁷ These authors give no less than eight causes of the May events as formulated by the academic historians: May 1968 was a plot by the highest French authorities; it was a crisis of the university as an institution; it was as it were a bout of public fever, caught especially by the youth; it was a crisis of civilization; it was a class conflict of a new type; it was a social conflict of the traditional type; it was a political crisis; it was a simple concatenation of circumstances …

The fact is that without any previous indications or forewarnings the youth worldwide suddenly seemed possessed by an impulse towards liberation from all that was old, established, conservative, authoritarian, fossilized, with a thirst to live something that was more true, authentic, pure, fresh, young, joyful and worth living. This ‘something new’ they could not formulate. They therefore invented the most absurd justifications of their acts side by side with the most sublime, which made the people with coagulated minds sneer at such a grotesque flash in the pan. One should not forget, however, that the ‘Prague Spring’ was also an aspect of this worldwide movement. The way this first effort towards ‘a socialism with a human face,’ initiated by Alexander Dubcek in Prague, was rudely suppressed by troops of the Warsaw Pact, is still alive in the memory of many.

In general it may be considered that the events of 1968, though by themselves short-lived and though most of their participants dropped back into a very ordinary life, are still active under the surface of global development. With the hindsight we have, May 1968 may be related to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Communist Bloc and the events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 – as ‘extraordinary’ and as ‘inconceivable some weeks before’ as May 1968, and with as many or more theses to explain them. When the Mother was asked by a youngster when one would see concrete, visible signs of the action of the Supramental, she answered that there had been such signs throughout most of the twentieth century. The working of the New Force in the world may be the real explanation of ‘inconceivable’ events like May 1968 and the collapse of the Communist Bloc. ‘This is the time of the unexpected,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in the beginning of the century, and the Mother predicted that the Unexpected would increase its activities and sudden changes. ‘Things will take a clear turn in the year 2000,’ she said somewhere in July 1962. We have entered the new millennium. ‘Now we are going to see,’ she said.