The Mother

18: The New Body

It’s always like this, the same answer: a yes, you see. All is well, all is well, all is well – just like it has to be, as soon as one is in it. All is well, just like it has to be. That’s how it is, all the time.¹

– The Mother

Meanwhile the transformation process in the Mother’s body, which was representative of the Earth, went on. The connection, the bridge, the link between the supramental world and our material world was being established in her. Her body was no longer a personal body belonging to somebody known and seen as being the Mother; this, she said, was only an appearance kept up to maintain the contact with the people around her and with all who belonged to the Work. It was still there pour toucher la matière, to keep the contact with Matter. For Matter itself had to be transformed in order to render it suitable to serve as part of the adhara of the supramental body. All this, and more, was going on in that apparently very aged body, now ninety and more years old. A summary description of her body’s transformation looks very abstract, but the actual process in the Mother was very concrete, experiential, often agonizing, often ecstatic, and generally both simultaneously.

In August 1968 she went again through a devastating crisis – one of the crises we know of, that means. ‘There was a moment when things were so acute … Usually I don’t lose patience, but it had reached a point where everything in the being was as it were annulled, everything. Not only could I not speak, but the head was in a state in which it had never been in my whole life: so painful. I didn’t see any more, I didn’t hear any more. Then one day things were really … it was pain, suffering everywhere. The body said, it said indeed very spontaneously and very strongly: “It’s all the same to me if I am dissolved and I am also quite willing to live, but the state in which I am is impossible, it can’t continue. Either to live or to die, but not this.” From that moment it began to be a little better. Then, gradually, things got settled, put in their places.

‘I took down notes. They are not worth much, but I believe they may be useful … [The first note is dated 22 August:] “For several hours the landscape was marvellous, of a perfect harmony. Also, for a long time, visions of the interior of huge temples, of living deities. Each thing had a reason, a precise aim, to express states of consciousness not mentalized. Visions constantly. Landscapes. Buildings. Cities. Everything vast and greatly varied, covering the entire visual field and translating states of the body consciousness. Many, many construction sites, huge cities being built …” Yes, the world that is being built, the future world that is being built. I didn’t hear any more, I didn’t see any more, I didn’t speak any more: I was living in all that, all the while, all the while, all the while, night and day. Then as soon as I was able to note something down, I noted down: “All sorts of construction styles, mostly new, inexpressible. They are not things seen as in a picture, but places where I am present.”’ ²

Then she said: ‘There is another note here about the beginning [of the experience]: “The vital and the mental are sent away so that the physical is truly left to its own resources.”’ ³ She had said almost literally the same in 1962, which shows the continuation and the deepening of the process. The yoga – and this should always be kept in mind – was taking place in the cells of the body, not in the vital, mental or spiritual parts of the being. More and more cells of her body were being spiritualized, even divinized. It was around this time that the Mother stated that the same spiritual experiences and realizations which all the Masters until then had had vitally or mentally, could now be had in the cells themselves, in the Matter of the cells! This staggers the imagination.

‘… The Mental and the Vital: gone! I don’t know if you are able to realize what this means … The Mental and the Vital have been the instruments for pounding Matter – to pound and pound and pound in every possible way, the Vital by its sensations, the Mind by its thoughts, pounding and pounding. But they seem to me temporary instruments which will be replaced by other states of consciousness. You understand, this is a phase of the universal development. They will fall away like instruments which are no longer useful.’ ⁴ This went together with the replacement of the organs and other body parts (the physical expression of the human Vital and Mental) by ‘functional aggregates’ of vibrations directly activated by the Spirit.

However complex, the course of the experience was still much richer, for the Mother had also noted down: ‘Night of the 26th to 27th [August 1968]: Powerful and prolonged penetration of the supramental forces into the body, everywhere at the same time.’ And she commented: ‘Penetration into the body, yes. Penetrations of the [supramental] current I had on many occasions, but that night – which is the night before last – it came all of a sudden, as though there was nothing but a supramental atmosphere. There was nothing but that. And my body was in it. And that [i.e. the supramental atmosphere] was pressing to enter from everywhere, everywhere, everywhere at the same time. From everywhere. You see, it was not a current that was entering, it was an atmosphere that penetrated [the body] from everywhere. It lasted for at least four or five hours … I never saw anything like it, never! It lasted for hours. For hours. And [all the time] I was perfectly conscious. So, when it came and during the time it was there, I was conscious: “Ah, it is for this, it is for this! It is this that you want of me, O Lord! It is for this, it is this that You want.” At that moment I had the feeling that something was about to happen.’ ⁵

Again the most severe ordeal (‘I was in a mess!’) went hand in hand with the greatest ecstasy, both experienced in the Matter of the body. Her body was literally steeped into the supramental Force – which is not something abstract, but as concrete as a red hot fire. The first time something similar happened, in 1959, she thought that her body would burst. This shows what an enormous progress she had made in the years since then, always observing that ‘the Lord’ was dosing the experiences in a way which never transgressed the body’s limits of the possible and bearable, for beyond those limits lurked its dissolution.

‘I’m sure that the movement [of the earthly transformation] has started,’ she said. ‘How long will it take to come to a concrete, visible and organized realization? I don’t know. Something has started. It seems this must be the onrush of the new species, the new creation, or a new creation in any case. A terrestrial reorganization and a new creation. As to me, things have become very acute. It was impossible for me to utter a word, a single word.’ Henceforward we will read more and more frequently that she could not or would not talk; the experiences were inexpressible – and who understood anything when she tried with a great effort to formulate them? ‘I started coughing, coughing, coughing. Then I saw it was decided that I shouldn’t speak. And I remained in that way and let the curve develop. Afterwards I understood. We are not at the end, but – how to say this? – we are on the other side.’ ⁶

Even during the severest agonies she always kept her consciousness of the complex development, and she never lost her sense of humour nor her interest. This is what really appears superhuman to somebody who reads the available documents with openness and some insight. In fact, it was divine. ‘It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine,’ ⁷ Sri Aurobindo, not given to hyperbole, had written. In the Mother’s ordeals we find these words abundantly and often poignantly illustrated. Nevertheless: ‘It was interesting. I cannot say it was not interesting: it was interesting. But there was no contact with the material life, very little. I could hardly eat, I couldn’t walk. In short, it [her body] had become something one had to look after.’ ⁸

‘Happy New Year!’

Then came the upswing again, in a movement which dug ever deeper, ascended ever higher. We simply follow the Mother’s reports about the experience, for they show how careful she was not to distort her experiences by casting them prematurely into a mental formulation. It should be recalled that she herself had fully realized ‘overmanhood’ in 1958, a realization which made now possible the presence of the ‘overman consciousness,’ la conscience du surhomme.

1 January 1969 – ‘In the night it came slowly, and on waking up this morning there was as it were a golden dawn, and the atmosphere was very light. The body felt: “Well, this is truly, truly new.” A golden light, imponderous and benevolent. “Benevolent” in the sense of a certainty, a harmonious certainty. It was new. Voilà. And when I say ‘Bonne année’ to the people, it is this that I pass on to them. And this morning I have passed my time like this, spontaneously, saying: “Bonne année, bonne année.”’ ⁹

4 January – ‘On the first something truly strange happened, and I wasn’t the only one to feel it, some others felt it too. It was just after midnight, but I felt it at two o’clock and others felt it at four o’clock in the morning … What is surprising is that it didn’t correspond at all with anything I was expecting – I was expecting nothing – [or] to other things which I had felt. It was something very material, by which I mean that it was very external – very external – and it was luminous, with a golden light. It was very strong, very powerful. But even so its character was a smiling benevolence, a peaceful joy and a kind of unfolding into joy and light. And it was like a ‘bonne année,’ like a wish.

‘It took me by surprise. I felt it at least for three hours. Afterwards, I didn’t pay attention to it any more … It was very material. They [two or three other persons] all felt it in the same way: a kind of joy, but a joy gentle, powerful and, oh, very kind, very smiling, very benevolent. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a kind of benevolence, therefore it was something very close to the human. And it was so concrete, so concrete! As though it could be tasted, so concrete was it … It has not gone away. One does not feel it to be something that has come to go away again …

‘My own impression was that of an immense personality – immense! That is to say that for [that personality] the Earth was small, small like this [gesture as if holding a small ball in the hollow of her hand], like a ball. An immense personality, very, very benevolent, who came for [the Mother seems to lift the imaginary small ball gently from the hollow of her hand]. It gave the impression of a personal divinity who comes to help. And so strong, so strong, and at the same time so gentle, so all-embracing …’

‘Is it something that will permeate the bodies which are ready?’ asked the disciple with whom the Mother had the conversation. She answered: ‘Yes, I think so, yes. I have the impression that it is the formation which is going to enter, which is going to express itself – which is going to enter and express itself in the bodies which will be the bodies of the Supramental. Or perhaps – perhaps – the overman [le surhomme], I don’t know, the intermediary between the two [between man and the supramental being]. Perhaps the overman: it was very human, but human in divine proportions, you see, human without weaknesses and without shadows. It was all light, all light and smiling and sweetness at the same time. Yes, perhaps the overman.’

8 January – ‘Yes, that’s what it is: it is the descent of the consciousness of the overman. I had the assurance later on. It was the first of January after midnight. I woke up at two in the morning surrounded by a consciousness, so concrete and so new, in the sense that I had never felt it before. And it lasted, absolutely concrete, there, for two or three hours. And afterwards it spread out and went in search of people who could receive it. And I knew that it was the consciousness of the overman, that’s to say, the intermediary between man and the supramental being. That has given to the body [i.e. her body] a kind of assurance, of confidence. This experience has, as it were, stabilized the body, and if it keeps the true attitude, every support is there to help it.’

18 January – ‘So, it’s very consciously active. It’s as it were a projection of power. And it has now become something habitual. There is within it a consciousness – something very precious – which gives lessons to the body, teaching it what it should do, that’s to say, the attitude it should have, the reaction it should have. I’ve already told you many times that it’s very difficult to find the process of transformation when there is no one to give you any indication. Well, this was as it were the reply. It came to tell the body: “Take this attitude. Do this in this way, do that in that way.” And so the body is glad, it is completely reassured, it can no longer make any mistakes. It’s very interesting. It came as a mentor, practical, quite practical …

‘In one of the old Entretiens, I said (when I was speaking there at the Playground): “There is no doubt that the overman will in the first place be a being of power, so that he may be able to defend himself.” It’s that, it’s that experience. It came back as an experience. And it’s because it came back as an experience that I remembered having said it.’

Not only do these passages give us an interesting example of the Mother’s attitude towards her experiences, they also announce the totally novel and extremely important presence of a Consciousness, now active on Earth, which not a single commentator on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Work has taken into account. Every consciousness is in the very real sense a being (the Mother here says a ‘personality’). The Entretien the Mother refers to dates from December 1957. At that time she was in the final stages of her realization of the overman, a being with a supramental consciousness in a human body; this realization was, as we have seen, accomplished in the course of 1958. The overman consciousness is an aspect of the supramental consciousness, which has been present in the Earth-atmosphere since 1956. What the Mother had realized in 1958, now, on 1 January 1969, became an integral part of the evolution, with the task of realizing the intermediary being, the overman, in humanity – ‘it spread out and went in search of people who could receive it’ – and with the power to protect this transitional species.

Why does the overman need protection? Because the world is in the grip of powerful and cunning hostile forces, anti-divine forces, that will mercilessly do everything within their power to prevent a change in the dispensation and the incarnation of any kind of higher species on Earth. How vicious they can be is there for all to read in Sri Aurobindo’s biographical poems and in Savitri. We have also had several instances of their action in the Mother’s life, and there are more to come. Anyone who takes up the yoga has to deal with them.

Life on the Outside (continued)

When the Mother’s yogic exploits allowed her to function in the world of human beings, she took up the daily burden we have described before and which would be trying for a person half her age and free from the ordeals she had to endure. She had become famous and few still saw her as ‘the French Lady.’ In the eyes of the public, Indian and international, she was now a spiritual personality of the first rank, and people of all kinds went to see her or wrote to her for advice, for her decision in all kinds of matters, or simply for blessings. She seldom refused anything. Living concretely in the great Unity, she considered every detail of existence and every event, even the apparently least important, to be a direct expression of the divine Will. And had she not accepted ‘to do the job’?

The records of the meetings with her, of the results of her help and intervention in the lives of people, and of the miraculous Grace which accompanied everything connected with her, would fill several volumes. Yet everything happened in utmost simplicity, and, as she said, when people went to see her, she received them en bon camarade, like a friend. But she seldom spoke to visitors any more because most intellectual questions were a waste of time, and all the rest she saw more clearly than the person in front of her, for by identification she was that person. She could do so much more in silence, provided the door of his or her soul stood ajar and allowed, in the privilege of the meeting, her Force to enter.

At set times of the night all the essential problems of the world, past, present and future, were presented to her for her to work upon them and ‘to put everything in its place.’ Yes, also those of the past, which is possible because they continue to exist in every detail in the akashic records. There was a world in the making, and the Avatar had to see to it that the foundations were securely built. This means, too, that she was in permanent contact with everything that went on in the world. We only know about what she has said concerning the re-founding of the spiritual, religious, social, political and economic institutions which have a role to play in the process of the supramental transformation and, perhaps partly, in the New World. We also know about some facts which drew or were brought to her surface attention.

When she heard about the first astronauts on the moon, she considered the enterprise ‘a game for grown-up children.’ She asked what they were looking for there, as there was nothing left, and spoke the enigmatic words: ‘The moon is very concretely a devastation.’ ¹⁰ But when she was told that the take-off of the astronauts’ capsule on the moon for their return to Earth was a risky affair, she at once went there, she said afterwards, to see that everything went smoothly.

Politicians of all ranks and colours approached her for her spiritual help, even candidates for the Indian presidency. ‘I am not Indian and I don’t want that you push me in front and that then, one day, it’s suddenly said that “a foreigner is meddling in our affairs,”’ she warned.¹¹ But V.V. Giri went to see her, shortly after becoming president, as did the vice-president, as did Karan Singh, the former Maharajah of Kashmir, as did the Dalai Lama. And so did Indira Gandhi, who in 1969 split the Congress into its more conservative wing and her more socially oriented forward wing. The relationship with Indira Gandhi was close, and the prime minister sought her advice and spiritual assistance on many occasions, often with B.D. Jatti, then lieutenant-governor of Pondicherry, as intermediary.

The Mother’s help was especially sought before and during the 1971 war with Pakistan, which would result in the break-up of that country when its eastern part became independent and was called Bangladesh. She followed the developments day by day: when the West Pakistanis mercilessly tried to subdue their poorer and practically defenceless eastern compatriots; when they were murdering as many Bengali intellectuals as possible; when ten million refugees fled from East Pakistan into India and created an enormous economic and social problem; when America, thus forcing India into the Russian camp, chose the side of Pakistan and sent the aircraft carrier S.S. Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal.

Before the hostilities started, Major General K.K. Tewari, at that time the brigadier of the Indian Signal Corps, was advised by one of his lieutenant-colonels to seek the blessings of the Mother to solve the serious problems he was confronted with. He writes: ‘I did not accept the suggestion immediately … But on deeper reflection a brief letter was sent to the Mother seeking Her blessings for my (unspecified) work. Unknown to others, that same lieutenant-colonel had gone around to almost all the top brass of HQ Eastern Command, from the Army Commander down to the other heads of staff and Arms and Services like me, and we had all received the Mother’s blessings. And it was amazing how the problems began to get resolved in a strange and inexplicable way. What appeared at first to be hurdles, would clear up somehow.’ ¹²

The reader will remember Sri Aurobindo’s prediction that India would become one again. The Mother wrote in 1947: ‘The Soul of India is one and indivisible. India is conscious of her mission in the world. She is waiting for the exterior means of manifestation.’ ¹³

In the meantime, many of the first disciples, some of whom had arrived forty and even fifty years ago, were getting old. (‘I’m the only one here who is young,’ ¹⁴ said the Mother. This may sound ironical, but it was true, considering that according to her youth means the capacity to change and progress. Who was changing and progressing more than she did?) The time came for some of them to lay down their bodies. Purani had already left in 1965. ‘His higher intellectual part has gone to Sri Aurobindo and united with him,’ said the Mother. ‘His psychic is with me, and he is very happy and in peace. His vital is still helping those who seek his help.’ ¹⁵

Amrita and Pavitra left in 1969. About the latter’s passing we find the following statement by the Mother: ‘It was very interesting, the experience I had that night. Nothing like it I ever had in my life. It was in the night before he passed away. The time was nine o’clock. I felt he was withdrawing, withdrawing in an extraordinary manner. He was coming out of himself and gathering and pouring himself into me. He was coming out consciously and deliberately with the full force of the concentrated will. He continued to do so steadily, ceaselessly for hours. It ended about one o’clock, I looked at the time.

‘There was no slackness or interruption or stop at any moment. It was throughout the same steady, continuous flow, without a break, without a diminution in strength. Such a concentrated undiminishing stream it was. The process continued until he was wholly within me, as though he was pumping and exhausting all he was in his body till the last drop. I say it was wonderful. I never experienced such a thing. The flow stopped when there was very little left in the body. I let the body remain as long as it was needed for the work to continue, long, quite long after the doctors declared it dead.

‘As he was in life, he could not have done the thing, I did not expect it of him. It must have been some past life of his that was at work and did the thing. Not many yogis, not even the greatest among them, could have done such a thing. Now he is within here [within the Mother], quite wakeful, looking in a rather amused way at what you people are doing. He is merged in me wholly, by which I mean dwelling in me, not dissolved: he has his personality intact. Amrita is different. He is there outside, one of you, one among you people moving about.’ One recalls the living and dead mingling. ‘At times, of course, when he wants to take rest and repose, he comes and lodges here [in the Mother]. A remarkable story. A great and very difficult thing Pavitra has done.’ ¹⁶

What is also worthwhile mentioning is what the Mother has repeated several times since about 1967: that many newborn children were special, exceptional. ‘The children who are coming now are interesting,’ she said. They were remarkable, had ‘something more,’ were astonishing, open, many of them conscious beings. We have already quoted Sri Aurobindo’s lines from Savitri: ‘I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers / Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life / Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth.’ ¹⁷ Udar remembers: ‘The Divine Mother said to me that these Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers had started coming down. They are souls that have waited for thousands of years for the right time to take rebirth and come down to prepare the world for the Transformation. The Mother asked me to inform everybody about this, so that anyone of her disciples who is expecting a child could consciously aspire for one of these souls to come into the expected child. This had to be done before the third month of pregnancy, as the soul enters the foetus in the third month.⁹¹ The Mother also asked me to warn the expectant mothers who called down such a child that the child born would not be like other children and would not behave in the way other children behave, and so they may have trouble with them. They would have to be patient, understand that the child has a great soul, and give it every opportunity to develop.’ ¹⁸

The Presence and Role of the Psychic Being

Human beings have much more in them than a soul, a ‘divine spark.’ They have in them an evolved ‘psychic being,’ built and shaped by the essence of experiences in their previous lives (which is the essential meaning of reincarnation). This psychic being will ultimately result in the creation of the divine being, in each case different, which they were as part of the one Divine before they plunged into the adventure of evolution, but now with a degree of conscious differentiation making the evolutionary adventure worthwhile. The Avatar too goes through a series of reincarnations of the divine Emanation that formed him/her and which constitutes his/her psychic being. The difference is that, while the psychic being in humans has accepted its awareness of its divine Origin to be totally veiled or ‘forgotten,’ the psychic being of the Avatar always remains or becomes fully aware of its Origin and Essence, although a partial veiling is accepted in lives in which the Avatar acts as a Vibhuti, and although a process (yoga) of rediscovery is required in the avataric life.

We have not heard of the Mother’s psychic being since 1950, at the time of Sri Aurobindo’s passing away, when by a yogic master act she ‘locked it away’ in order to prevent it from following Sri Aurobindo and leaving the body. The door of her psychic being was opened again in 1959, ‘very prudently,’ when the supramental Force for the first time penetrated fully into her body and put her physically into connection with the ‘dwelling’ of Sri Aurobindo. Since then, again, there was no reference to her psychic being – until 1968, after the ordeal we have referred to in the first section of this chapter. Having emerged from the ordeal, she suddenly stated: ‘The vital and the mental have left, but the psychic being has not left at all. It is the intermediaries that have left. For example, the contact with people – the contact with people who are present and even with those who are not here – the relation with them has remained the same, absolutely the same. It is even more constant.’ ¹⁹ We find a confirmation of this in a conversation of 11 September 1968, when in the presence of an American disciple, Rijuta, whose psychic being seems to have been fully developed, the Mother again observed that her own psychic being had remained very much present.

How had she not been practically aware of a fact like this before? She herself gives the reason: she was that psychic being, all the time she acted and perceived out of her psychic being. When looking through a window pane, one is not aware of the windowpane, except when the presence of dust or whatever on it hinders the view. The Mother’s psychic being, as she herself said, was ‘totally transparent.’ ‘The psychic consciousness was wholly in front and governed my life.’ ²⁰ This made her aware of the fact that most of her I’s had actually been her psychic identity speaking. The vital and mental egos had been dissolved long ago. By now the physical ego too was completely dissolved, a yogic accomplishment unimaginable to common mortals. The psychic being, although having an identity, has no ego, for it is wholly divine. And the Mother’s psychic being was that of the Great Mother, ‘like a Sun.’ This, and her increasing supramentalization, made it necessary that she cover her true Self with ‘a veil, and another veil, and another veil,’ otherwise her presence would have been ‘unbearable’ for humans.

On 1 July 1970, the same Rijuta, who acted as a secretary handling the correspondence with the disciples and devotees in America, was again in the Mother’s presence and the cause of a sudden revelation important enough to be quoted in extenso. ‘I had an experience which was for me interesting, because it was for the first time. It was yesterday or the day before, I do not remember. Rijuta was here, there just in front of me, and I saw her psychic being, dominating her by so much (gesture indicating about twenty centimeters), taller. It was the very first time. Her physical being was small and her psychic being was that much bigger. And it was an unsexed being, neither man nor woman. Then I said to myself (possibly it’s always so, I do not know, but here I noticed it very clearly) I said to myself: “But it’s the psychic being, it’s that which will materialize itself and become the supramental being!”

‘I saw it, it was so. There were particularities but these were not well marked, and it was clearly a being that was neither man nor woman, having the combined characteristics of both. And it was bigger than the person and it overtopped her in every way by about this much (gesture surpassing the physical body by about twenty centimetres); she was there and it was like this (same gesture). And it had this colour … which, if it became quite material, would be the colour of Auroville [i.e. orange]. It was fainter, as though behind a veil, it was not absolutely precise, but it was that colour. There was hair on the head, but … it was something different. I shall see better another time perhaps. But it interested me very much, because it was as though that being was telling me: “But you are busy looking to see what kind of being the supramental will be – here it is! It is this!” And it was there: it was the psychic being of the person.

‘So one understands. One understands: the psychic being materializes itself …⁹² and this gives continuity to the evolution. This creation gives altogether the feeling that there is nothing arbitrary, there is a kind of divine logic behind and it is not like our human logic, it is very superior to ours. But there is one [a logic], and it was fully satisfied when I saw this. It is really interesting. I was very interested. It was there, calm and quiet, and it said to me. “You were trying to find out? Well, here it is.” Yes, it is that!

‘And then I understood why the mind and the vital were sent out of this body, leaving the psychic being alone. Naturally, it was that which had always been governing all the movements, so it was nothing new. But there are no difficulties anymore; all the complications that were coming from the vital and the mental, adding their impressions and tendencies, all gone. And I understood: “Ah! it is that, it is this psychic being which has to become the supramental being.”

‘But I had never sought to know what its appearance was like. And when I saw Rijuta, I understood. And I see it, I’m seeing it still, I’ve kept the memory. It was as if the hair on the head was red (but it was not like that). And its expression! An expression so fine, and sweetly ironical … oh! extraordinary! Extraordinary! And you understand, I had my eyes open, it was almost a material vision.

‘So one understands. All of a sudden all the questions have vanished, it has become very clear, very simple. (Silence) And it is precisely the psychic that survives. So, if it materializes itself, it means the abolition of death. But abolition … nothing is abolished except what is not in accordance with the Truth. That which goes away is … whatever is not capable of transforming itself in the image of the psychic and becoming an integral part of the psychic. It’s really interesting.’ ²¹

On the one hand there is the mature psychic being, shaped and perfected through its innumerable rebirths in the earthly evolution; on the other hand there is, or will be, the transformed material earthly substance, sufficiently refined to give an enduring, immortal shape to the mature soul. When the possibility of an adhara for the supramental being will exist, made possible by the presence of the Supramental in the atmosphere of the Earth and speeded up by the Mother’s yoga from 1956 to 1973, the mature souls, who are now ready and waiting, will incarnate as supramental beings. Their coming will be prepared by the intermediary beings, the overmen and overwomen, some of whom are now already present on Earth. A new phase of the earthly evolution, which began in 1956 with the manifestation of the Supramental, will become a tangible fact. The sufferings and indignities humanity had to undergo through the ages will be justified.

Matrimandir

Little by little the residents of Auroville arrived, still mainly from the West. These pioneers chose a tough task, trying to build the dream of the ideal City of the Future in a place which was little more than goat country, in the climatic extremes of a hot and clammy subtropical summer and lashing monsoon rains or calamitous monsoon failures, harassed by a plethora of snakes, scorpions and insects the subtropics had in store for them. The first Aurovillians were a bizarre mixture of idealists, temporarily interested visitors and adventurous or curious hippies. Few, if any, had real knowledge of or insight into Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yogic efforts and realizations, or spiritual experience, or an idea of the scope of the work they were undertaking. No wonder that many, after some courageous idealistic gesturing, suddenly vanished never to be seen again. But they were soon replaced by others, and here and there within the chosen periphery of the future city communities were formed – Aspiration, Promesse, Fraternity, Utility, Forecomers – where many of their members worked courageously and with sincere dedication.

The problems were legion, and all of them were submitted to the Mother, often by the Aurovillians themselves, whom she was always ready to receive. In a life lived together, in the communal life, everything comes out into the open. The many kinds of communities in history – religious, military, Utopian – bear witness to this. The Mother was compelled, reluctantly, to prescribe some guidelines, always warning that generalizations should not fix or kill the inner spontaneity, and that what surfaced without could only be the expression of what was within.

She asserted once again that the City of Dawn was there in the ‘subtle physical,’ fully ready to be worked out on the material plane. ‘The night before last I spent more than three hours with Sri Aurobindo,’ she said on 31 May 1969, ‘and I was showing him all that was going to come down for Auroville. It was rather interesting. There were games, there was art, there was even cooking! But all that was very symbolic. And I was explaining to him as though on a table, in front of a vast landscape. I explained to him on which principle the physical exercises and games were going to be organized. It was very clear, very precise. I was even giving a sort of demonstration, and it was as if I was showing on a very small scale a miniature representation of what was going to be done. I was moving people and things [gesture, as if on a chess-board]. But it was very interesting, and he was very much interested. He was as it were laying down the broad laws of organization … I don’t know how to explain this. There was art and it was beautiful, it was all right. And how to make the houses comfortable and beautiful, upon what principle of construction. And then even the cooking. It was very amusing, each one brought forward his invention. This went on for more than three hours. Three hours of the night is much. It’s a lot. Very interesting.’

When the person to whom she said this objected that the conditions on Earth did not seem propitious, she replied: ‘No, it was right there, it didn’t seem foreign to the Earth. It was a harmony, a conscious harmony behind things: a conscious harmony behind the physical exercises and the games; a conscious harmony behind the decoration, the art; a conscious harmony behind the food, etc. … I saw X today and I told him that the whole organization of the arts and sports, even of food and of all other things, was ready in the subtle physical, ready to come down and embody itself. And I told him: “What is needed is just a handful of earth [gesture of cupping her hands], a handful of earth to make the plant grow. One must find a handful of earth to make it grow.”’ ²²

On 21 February 1971 the foundation stone of the Matrimandir was laid. For this occasion the Mother gave the following message: ‘Let the Matrimandir be the living symbol of Auroville’s aspiration for the Divine.’ Matrimandir means ‘temple of the Mother,’ but in this case the word temple should not be understood in a religious sense. The Matrimandir, in the centre of Auroville, will be a golden globe, with a diameter of about thirty metres, which arises from the Earth. The symbolism is simple: the golden, supramental world is breaking out of Matter as we know it, out of the Earth as it is now; the New World is being born.

If the Matrimandir was only this, the monumental construction would be destined from its very inception to become little more than a tourist attraction, and the Mother was not exactly keen on promoting that kind of attractions. She said more than once that Auroville would have an occult influence in the world, contributing to the world’s unification and transformation. This may be the reason why she gave the colour orange to its symbol, orange being an occult colour and well-known as the colour of the dress of the Indian sadhus (and as the colour of everything on the supramental ship, and of the hair of the mature psychic being in Rijuta). Therefore, although the shape of the Matrimandir is symbolic, the reason for its construction is profoundly spiritual: it’s a kind of dynamo for channelling and directing the Force of the Great Mother to support the development of Auroville and the transformation of the world.

‘The Matrimandir wants to be the symbol of the Universal Mother according to Sri Aurobindo’s teachings,’ ²³ the Mother wrote. ‘It will be the “Pavilion of the Mother” – but not this [the Mother points to herself]: the Mother, the true Mother, the principle of the Mother. I say “Mother” because Sri Aurobindo used that word, otherwise I would have put something else. I would have put “creative principle,” or “principle of realization,” or … I don’t know.’ ²⁴ She also gave the following definitions: ‘The Matrimandir will be the soul of Auroville,’ and: ‘The Matrimandir wants to be the symbol of the Divine’s answer to man’s aspiration for perfection.’ ²⁵

The four enormous pillars designed to support the golden ball were the first constructions to be built in a huge crater, dug out diligently handful after handful in the red earth. The Mother called the pillars after the four Powers of the Great Mother: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. We have briefly commented upon them at the moment when Mirra Alfassa realized her identification with the Universal Mother. Here it may be suitable to evoke her four, ever active Powers again, in Sri Aurobindo’s powerful words from The Synthesis of Yoga.

‘There is nothing that is impossible to her who is the conscious Power and universal Goddess all-creative from eternity and armed with the Spirit’s omnipotence. All knowledge, all strengths, all triumph and victory, all skill and works are in her hands and they are full of the treasures of the Spirit and of all perfections and siddhis. She is Maheshwari, goddess of the supreme knowledge, and brings to us her vision for all kinds and widenesses of truth, her rectitude of the spiritual will, the calm and passion of her supramental largeness, her felicity of illumination; she is Mahakali, goddess of the supreme strength, and with her are all mights and spiritual force and severest austerity of Tapas and swiftness to the battle and the victory and the laughter that makes light of defeat and death and the powers of the ignorance; she is Mahalakshmi, the goddess of the supreme love and delight, and her gifts are the spirit’s grace and the charm and beauty of the Ananda and protection and every divine and human blessing; she is Mahasaraswati, the goddess of divine skill and of the works of the Spirit, and hers is the yoga that is skill in works and the utilities of divine knowledge and the self-application of the spirit to life and the happiness of its harmonies.’ ²⁶ Such are the Powers which will render the emergence of the New World possible.

Since then the construction of the golden Matrimandir has continued through thick and thin and is now completed. The ‘inner chamber,’ the Matrimandir’s main feature, has a diameter of about twenty metres; twelve round pillars apparently support the ceiling, but do not touch it – all this in accordance with the Mother’s vision and directives. The chamber is completely white and its marble floor is covered with a white carpet. In the middle of the chamber a crystal ball with a diametre of seventy centimetres, made especially for the Matrimandir by the Carl Zeiss Werke in Oberkochen (Germany), rests on a pedestal consisting of four gold symbols of Sri Aurobindo, which in turn is placed in the centre of the white marble symbol of the Mother. Night and day a ray of light falls through a central opening in the ceiling of the chamber on the crystal and touches the earth underneath through an opening in the floor. During the day the ray consists of sunlight deflected by a mechanism that follows the movement of the sun; at night, the ray is produced by lights operated by solar energy. There is nothing else in the silent chamber.

Darkest Night

Often it seemed to her the ages’ pain
Had pressed their quintessence into her single woe,
Concentrating in her a tortured world.²⁷

– Sri Aurobindo

The alternating movement went on, higher, deeper. Although these alternations are quite clearly discernible in what the Mother has told us about her yoga, it should be kept in mind that they give, after all, only a schematic picture of the very complex reality the Mother was experiencing every moment. ‘There isn’t a fraction of a second that things don’t move! It’s a continuous, total transformation, a development without cease.’ ²⁸ The more this development advanced, the more she was able to bear and the more heavenly or hellish her experiences became, bodily. It was as if her body had become a battlefield, she said, between the forces of the Old and the New World, between that which stubbornly wanted to remain as it was and that which wanted to replace it.

The process of the ‘transfer of power’ in all parts of her body continued. We remember that this transfer meant the change of an organ or body part from its old, normal way of functioning to a way of functioning directly determined by the divine or supramental consciousness. The Mother was far advanced on the way, much farther than we are able to imagine.

What was most visibly perceptible was the ‘transfer’ in the external functions, for example eating. As her system was unwilling to function in the old manner, how could she manage to eat? she asked. She was never hungry but all the same consented to eat something to keep the body going. Yet her ability to eat depended on the consciousness active at the time of eating. If she paid attention to the taking in of food by means of the old digestive system, she choked and could not swallow anything; if she switched to the Unity-Consciousness, she could eat and drink without even being aware that she was doing it. Sometimes the prompting of her assistants to eat or drink a little more could be heard in the courtyard below. They thought that she was ill, or whimsical, but attuning her consciousness to eat a bite or drink a sip was as important as it was to go through the most intense spiritual experience.

The most painful transfer was that of the nervous system. She often suffered cruelly from the mere presence of certain people who approached her. Her body had become ‘very, very sensitive’ to all vibrations, and many in her presence projected upon her their human, all too human, state of being without being aware of it. Once she asked Satprem, who regularly went to see her in a state of dissatisfaction or revolt, not to be in a bad mood because it made her ill. And the nerves were still more sensitive at the times it was their turn to change into the new way of functioning, directly under the divine influence. The suffering on such days she compared to the general inflammation of the nerves which had befallen her after she had had to leave Sri Aurobindo in 1915, only this time it was ‘extremely acute.’ Again, it was ‘not a joke, but interesting.’

The most dangerous transfer, however, was that of the heart. For years the Mother walked a tightrope between life and death, and the fact that her body remained alive she owed only to the guidance and protection of ‘the Master of the Yoga.’ This, fundamentally, was her Self, the same Self that was causing the ordeals and guiding them in the way that would most profit the intensely accelerated evolution the Mother-in-the-sadhana was undergoing. Nirodbaran wrote about a serious crisis in 1970: ‘The Mother had been suffering from cough and other ailments. The symptoms took a bad turn when Vasudha [the Mother’s personal assistant] left for Bombay before the August Darshan. The heart was irregular; some beats were missing, a usual feature with her whenever she fell ill. There were other complications. She had been uttering piercing cries of agony during the day and also at night. She had done that before too, but this time it seemed to be more acute and far more distressing. We thought it would pass off as had happened in the past. Her condition did improve, but after the Darshan a reaction set in perhaps due to exhaustion. The situation took a serious turn. The heart was found to be the main seat of trouble and the lungs were involved as well. All of us became very anxious.’ ²⁹

Sometimes those piercing cries could also be heard in the courtyard below. They were caused by an ‘angst’ (in this case maybe the best translation of angoisse) such as she had never known before in her life, she said. This angst was not something psychological. The Mother has always been undaunted. ‘Fear has no place in this yoga,’ Sri Aurobindo had said, and she herself had repeated this on every possible occasion. But we should never lose sight of the fact that the yoga was now taking place in the body.

The terrible angst that made her cry out was something in the constitution of the cells of the body, she said, an elemental fear of death, which ‘was actually the fear of the disappearance of the cells’ millennia-old way of being. In the Mother a dying world was crying out in agony, sometimes to the bewilderment of herself and always of the people who could hear her. What made the suffering still worse for her was the realization that Sri Aurobindo, in his yoga, must have gone through similar painful ordeals, sitting there in his chair and concealing his martyrdom from everybody, from her in particular.

Then came the period of darkest night. For the first time the brain was affected so that she could not control some of her movements. Again she said that she was the object of black magic. The hostile forces easily find an instrument for their intentions in the small, egoistic, very ignorant and often very nasty human beings. ‘One of my legs has been dead for a long time – it’s just beginning to revive – paralyzed. One leg [the left one]. So, naturally, everything was difficult. But what is remarkable – I can tell you this immediately – was that the consciousness established here [gesture above the head] became more and more strong and more and more clear, throughout. I worked, I continued to work, not only for India but for the world, and in constant relation, “consulted,” (you understand?), actively … But it will take months, I think, before I’ll be able to see clearly [what happened during the ordeal]. In any case, the general consciousness [same gesture above the head], what one might call the universal consciousness (in any case terrestrial) didn’t leave me one minute. Not one minute. It remained here all the while.

‘It wasn’t an innocent paralysis! For at least three weeks – at least – for three weeks [late December 1970 and early January 1971] a constant pain, night and day, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, without ever diminishing, never. It was as if I was torn apart. So it was out of the question to see anybody. Now it’s over. The pain is quite bearable and the body has resumed more or less its normal life …

‘I noticed how things – the so-called catastrophes, or calamities, or misfortunes, or difficulties – how all that comes just at the right time to help you, just as it’s needed to help you. Indeed, all that which in the physical nature still belonged to the old world, to its habits, its ways of doing and being, its ways of acting, all that couldn’t be handled, it couldn’t be manipulated in any other way than through illness.

‘I can’t say that it wasn’t interesting.

‘But as to me, I kept the contact with everyone, even physically. I don’t know if they remained conscious of it or not, but I kept the contact with everybody. Such things depend on the receptivity of the people. I didn’t feel at all that there was an interruption of the relations or anything of the kind, not at all, not at all. Even at the time when, externally, I was suffering so much and people thought I was completely given over to my suffering, it didn’t keep me occupied. I don’t know how to explain this. I knew quite well that the condition of this poor body wasn’t very bright, but this didn’t keep me occupied. There was all the time the feeling of that Truth which has to be understood and manifested …

‘There was a whole period when I was absolutely inaccessible because I was suffering continuously. One is worthless then. Continuously, continuously. One might say that I was but one cry all the while. This lasted a long time, several weeks. I didn’t keep count. Then little by little it alternated with moments of tranquillity when I didn’t feel the leg any more. And it’s only in the last two or three days that it looks as if everything is put back in order. It was the whole problem of the world – a world which is nothing but pain and suffering, and a big question mark: why? ‘I tried all the palliatives one uses: to change the pain into pleasure, to eliminate the capacity of feeling, to turn one’s attention to something else. I tried all the tricks, but not a single one worked. There is something in this physical world as it is which is not – how to explain this? – which is not yet open to the divine Vibration. And it is this something which is doing all the harm. The divine Consciousness is not perceived, and therefore lots of imaginary things – but very real to the senses! – exist, and That, the only true Thing, is not perceived. But it’s better now. It’s better.

‘It’s really interesting. I believe something will have been done from the general point of view. It was not merely the difficulty of one body or one person. I believe something has been done to prepare Matter to receive as it must, in the right way. It was as if it received in the wrong way and learned to receive in the right way.’ ³⁰

The following are extracts from a conversation with some disciples. It is a message that is as valid today as when it was spoken in 1972. ‘For centuries and centuries humanity has waited for this time. It’s come. But it’s difficult. I don’t simply tell you we are here upon Earth to rest and enjoy ourselves, now is not the time for that. We are here to prepare the way for the new creation.

‘The body has some difficulty, so I can’t be active, alas. It’s not because I am old. I am not old. I am not old, I am younger that most of you. If I’m here inactive, it’s because the body has given itself definitely to prepare the transformation. But the consciousness is clear and we are here to work; rest and enjoyment will come afterwards. Let’s do our work here. So I’ve called you to tell you that. Take what you can, do what you can, my help will be with you. All sincere effort will be helped to the maximum.⁹³

‘It’s the hour to be heroic.

‘Heroism is not what it is said to be: it is to become wholly unified.⁹⁴ And the Divine help will always be with those who have resolved to be heroic in full sincerity. Voilà.

‘You’re here at this moment, that’s to say upon Earth, because you have chosen to be so in the past [i.e. in a previous life] – you don’t remember it any more, but I do. That’s why you are here. Well, you must rise to the height of your task. You must make an effort, you must conquer all weaknesses and all limitations. Above all you must tell your ego: “Your time is past.” We want a race without ego, that has the divine Consciousness instead of the ego. It is that that we want. The divine Consciousness which will allow the race to develop itself and the supramental being to be born.

‘If you think I am here because I am compelled to, you are mistaken. I am not compelled. I am here because my body has been given for the first attempt at transformation. Sri Aurobindo told me to do it – well, I’m doing it. I don’t wish anyone to do it for me, because … because it’s not very pleasant. But I do it willingly because of the results. Everybody will be able to benefit from it. I ask only one thing: don’t listen to the ego.

‘If there is in your hearts a sincere “yes,” you will satisfy me completely. I don’t need words, I need the sincere adhesion of your hearts. That’s all.’ ³¹

The New Body

The Mother’s progress which we are trying to sketch here was complex, as complex as Life, of which most humans have only a very narrow and superficial notion. The Subconscient and the Inconscient were for her a conscious reality where she fought most of her battles, while for us it is a hidden reality by which we are blindly driven. Simultaneously, there were concretely present to her all the upper levels of existence, the realms of Light, and Beauty, and Joy, and Love. It is true that she gave the proportion between both kinds of experience as ‘three minutes of splendour for twelve hours of misery,’ or ‘ some seconds of paradise for hours of hell,’ but even behind the most terrible suffering there was an inner ecstasy which allowed her to say that the ordeal did not keep her occupied.

What was she trying to realize in those last years of her earthly existence? It was the induction of the supramental substance or Matter into the earthly gross matter, in other words the fusing of both worlds. She said that this took place by a process that she called ‘permeation.’ She reported that the transformation of the consciousness of the body cells from the ordinary consciousness, burdened by the fear and horrors of the past millennia, into a divine Consciousness had taken place in a great number of her cells. ‘The physical is capable of receiving the higher Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness, and to manifest it.’ ³² When stating this, however, she asked herself how far her body would be able to express this change, to what extent her body could be transformed.

As early as January 1961 the Mother had mentioned the presence in her physical body of another body that was ‘bigger, more voluminous’ – we are reminded of Rijuta’s psychic being which exceeded the boundaries of her physical body – and that had ‘such a compact power that it was almost annoying.’ A year later, after her ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ in 1962, she noticed that during the night she was ‘generally tall and strong.’ Around that time, it became a common experience for those who saw the Mother in their dreams or visions to see her as much taller than she was physically. When told about this, she commented that it was ‘the new being,’ and she specified that it was a being not from the Vital but from the subtle physical. As we know, what she called the subtle physical in those years was not a more refined substance than the physical, it was the Supramental. For of that subtle physical she said ‘It is not material and yet more concrete than Matter.’

Towards the end of 1962, she noticed one night that she was very young, physically. ‘It was the subtle physical, of course, but I was very young.’ It was shortly afterwards that she remarked, as we have mentioned before, that she was moving about in the Ashram while lying in her bed, and that the changes which she then brought about in the material world did effectively take place. In August 1963 she said that she was not very sure that she did not already physically exist in a ‘true body.’ She said she was not very sure ‘because the outward senses have no proof of it,’ but ‘for a moment I see myself, feel myself, objectivize myself as I am.’ In November 1964, while lying down after lunch, she saw herself standing beside her bed, very tall, in a magnificent robe. In April 1969, she said that during the night her body was ‘tall and active, it does things.’ ‘It is a body that is physical in the subtle physical and it is already something permanent, in the sense that one remains like that.’ ³³

In 1970, the Mother’s body was bent at the neck and shoulders; yet, at the end of February of that year she said that during the night she found herself in a completely normal body. ‘Is this body replaced by another one?’ Then on 9 May 1970, the Mother had an experience in which she saw her new body. ‘Well, I have seen it, my body – how it will be. It’s quite good.’ The form was not that different from the present human form, but ‘so refined.’ It was sexless, ‘neither man nor woman,’ and its colour was ‘somewhat like the colour of Auroville.’ Once more we are reminded of Rijuta’s psychic being. There is no doubt that all these experiences are convergent and indicative of one of the most wondrous realities imaginable. The Mother by her yoga of the transformation of the cells had built in, or out of, her physical body a supramental body in which she existed while still in her physical body. She was existing in two ‘physical’ bodies at the same time, the one in the gross physical and the other in the subtle physical, which in her terminology meant the Supramental.

The confirmation came on 24 March 1972: ‘For the first time, early in the morning, I saw myself, my body. I don’t know whether it is a supramental body or – how to say this? – a body in transition, but I had a body altogether new, in the sense that it was sexless, it wasn’t a woman nor was it a man. It was very white, but this is because my skin is white, I suppose, I don’t know. It was very slim – it was pretty. Truly a harmonious form. So, this was the first time. I didn’t know anything at all, I had no idea of what it would be like or whatever. And I saw that I was like that, I had become like that.’ ³⁴

The next day the Mother explained how she had seen herself, looking down on her own body and seeing it from the chest downwards. ‘I wasn’t looking in a mirror.’ She again stressed the sexlessness of the body and the slender beauty of the form. ‘You see, I didn’t pay any special attention for I was like that, everything was quite natural. It was the first time, and it was in the night, the day before yesterday.’ When asked whether it was in the subtle physical, she answered: ‘It must be like that in the subtle physical. Also, it was clear that there would not be any longer a complicated digestion as it is now nor the elimination as it is now. It was not like that … I didn’t look to see how it was, because everything was quite natural, so I can’t give a detailed description. Simply, it was neither the body of a woman nor the body of a man, that is for sure. And the outline, the silhouette, was more or less the same as that of a very, very young person. There was as it were a semblance of the human forms [Mother draws a sketch of it in the air], there was a shoulder and a waist – as though the semblance of a form. I see it, but … I saw it as one sees oneself. And there was a kind of veil that I had put on to cover myself. It was a way of being which was not surprising to me, it was a natural way of being … Evidently, what will change very much, what had become very important was the respiratory system. It was upon this that that being greatly depended.’ ³⁵

Thus she reported her incredible accomplishment in the simplest of words. She had built the prototype of the supramental body and was living in it in the most natural way. This prototype, being supramental, is immortal and therefore still exists. The Mother is still present in the Earth-atmosphere in her supramental body, continuing her Work, awakening, inspiring and guiding the transitional beings everywhere on the globe, continuing to transform gross Matter, hastening the world towards its transformation. This she does together with Sri Aurobindo, of whom she said that he was ‘very constantly present,’ and for the celebration of whose birth centenary, on 15 August 1972, she formulated the so simple but profound message: ‘One more step towards Eternity.’ Such is the Work of the Avatar in its simplest definition: one more step towards Eternity. Sri Aurobindo’s descent into death, the supramental manifestation of 1956, the realization of the overman in 1958, the descent of the overman consciousness in 1969 – this whole series of super events with a direct bearing on each and every one of us, whether we are aware of it or not, was now crowned by the formation and permanent existence of a supramental body. Its visible multiplication or reproduction in a refined earthly substance is only a matter of time. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s last estimate was that it would take three hundred years.

Laying Down the Body

More and more, and in an absolute way, I see – I see, yes, I see, I feel – that everything has been decided. And you understand, life, existence, indeed the world itself would make no sense if it were otherwise.³⁶

– The Mother

Towards the end, the Mother’s conversations became shorter and shorter. Almost every time she would say that she would not, could not, or was not allowed to speak. Peux pas parler … Her Consciousness was absolutely clear, she confirmed, and she was working uninterruptedly on many levels, but this was, of course, not what one saw on the outside. On the outside there was illness, old age, decay – while the centre of what was apparently sitting there was packed with supramental Power continuously irradiating from her. What she kept repeating, in all circumstances, was Ce que Tu veux, audibly or inwardly, expressing her total surrender to ‘the Lord’ with a gesture of her hands, palms upwards.

Who could understand? From 1965 onwards extracts from her conversations with Satprem had been published under the title Notes on the Way in the quarterly Bulletin, but this was hardly sufficient to work out the lines of the Mother’s evolution in her yoga. And how to connect one’s external perception of her, let us say since 1962, with ‘the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo’? Certainly, there was in an ever growing number of disciples and devotees the devotion, the inner connection, and an effort at yoga. But there was almost no understanding.

Ce que Tu veux were the words accompanying her withdrawal into the seclusion of the last six months, when nobody saw her any more except her four personal assistants and her doctors. There was also her son, Andre, who went to see her every evening. ‘Bonsoir, maman,’ one could hear him saying downstairs in the courtyard, for he had to raise his voice a little; and on her inquiring about his wellbeing: ‘Ça va bien, maman.’

The state of her health became critical towards the end of March 1973. Still she made an effort to take up her daily schedule again, but on 20 May all meetings were cancelled. ‘She said she didn’t have any control over her body. From then onwards she completely stopped seeing people and almost all the time remained in bed with her eyes closed,’ ³⁷ said Pranab, the chief source of information about what happened in the last six months. ‘On 21 May 1973, when we were waiting at the staircase,’ writes one of the secretaries, ‘I remember, Champaklal came out of the Mother’s room with a grave face and said: “I don’t think Mother will ever see people again.” In fact, Mother did not receive people any more from that day.’ ³⁸

She still gave darshan on 15 August, in spite of her precarious physical condition. There she came, that small, stooped figure, dressed in a white robe and a silver cape. She moved slowly up to the railing of her terrace on the second floor, leaning on the arm of Pranab. Thousands of eyes in the streets below looked up at her. The sky was vehement. And she looked at them, seeing each one individually, as she once said, and poured into them all they could receive. And she looked at the world and poured into it all it could receive. And after a few minutes she turned around and disappeared into her room, not to be seen again until 18 November.

Nobody knows what happened in the months of her final seclusion. Her close attendants, whom she had praised so high for the care they had taken of her body during the critical weeks in 1962, now looked after her day and night, we may assume with the same attentive and selfless dedication. ‘During the last six months that she was confined to bed, she spoke very little. Most of the time she remained with her eyes closed … Whatever she said was mostly about her body, that she was feeling pain, that she was feeling cold, that she wanted water. Or she asked us to place her in such a way that she did not have pain but could be comfortable. This is all that she said. She never said anything about our work, about the Ashram or about anybody.’ ³⁹ Six months in the yoga of the Mother was a long time, taking into account the speed with which her experiences followed each other and the fact that now she had a supramental body.

‘On 10 November, we noticed that she developed a kind of hiccup,’ said Pranab. ‘Then the doctor examined her and found that her blood-pressure was very low, her heart extremely weak, and that there was a frequent missing of beats. In fact, the heart started failing from that time … In the night of the 13th, at about 10 o’clock, she told me to lift her shoulders up from the bed.’ Her body must have been burning, for she asked time and again to be lifted up for a few minutes, and she had developed bedsores on her back also.

On the 14th she said: ‘Make me walk.’ This reminds us of how she walked for hours when, about two years before, her left “leg was ‘dead’ and she felt that her right leg too might become paralysed. These three words bear witness to her fighting spirit, ready and willing to go to the extreme limit of all possibilities, until the end. It is a concentrated, determined expression that we see on her face in the deathbed photos, so different from what she had looked like as recently as in April and May, in the last days she saw people. ‘We were hesitant [to make her walk], but as she insisted, we lifted her up from the bed. She could not walk, staggered a little, almost collapsed. Seeing this, we put her back in bed. We saw that her face had become absolutely white and the lips blue. Then we decided that whatever she might say, we must not take her out of the bed again.’ At about four o’clock in the morning, ‘she started saying: “Pranab, lift me up and make me walk. My legs are getting paralysed. If you help me to walk again, they will become all right.” But we did not listen.’

From the 15th onwards ‘she became absolutely obedient,’ said Pranab. Time and again she asked to be lifted up from the bed for a while. Then, in the evening of the 17th, while her son André was with her, Kumud, one of the attendants together with Pranab and Champaklal, was alarmed by the unusual movements the Mother made. Dr Sanyal was called, and so was Pranab. ‘I arrived at about five past seven and saw that Dr Sanyal was already there examining her. Dyuman also had come. I went and felt Mother’s pulse. It was still there, beating at long intervals. There was still some respiration. But slowly everything stopped. The doctor gave an external heart massage to her. It had no effect. Then he declared that Mother had left her body. This was at 7:25 p.m.’

‘She fought and tried up to the end,’ said Pranab. ‘She had a tremendous will and she was a great fighter and she fought and tried to do what she had taken upon herself … Her suffering had to be seen to be believed … Actually, I was holding her when she left her body. It looked to me as if a candle was slowly extinguishing. She was very peaceful, extremely peaceful.’ ⁴⁰

A European sadhak recalls: ‘On 18 November, at about seven o’clock in the morning, my downstairs neighbour pounded nervously on my door and on my window. He shouted: “The Mother is dead! They say that the Mother is dead!” As I woke up, I slowly realized the significance of his words; I got out of my bed and simply knelt on the floor, a gesture of surrender with the words reminiscent of her fundamental surrender: “Your will be done.” I cycled through the park to the Ashram. It was a gloriously sunny day. I met other Ashramites who were already coming back from the Ashram on foot or on cycle, and who looked at me with very serious faces to see if I was aware of the shocking news.

‘A long queue was winding around the central Ashram building consisting of Ashramites and people from town of all kinds and standings. The first ones had been allowed into the building a little past four. There was whispering and crying, and the atmosphere was one of deep dejection. Order was maintained by boys and girls of the Ashram led by their “captains” of physical education. It did not take long before I too could enter the building and then the meditation hall. There she lay under humming electric fans, the Mother, whom I had last seen six months before. She appeared to be sitting rather than lying down. If I had not known that this was the Mother, I would not have recognized her, so much her face had changed.’ ⁴¹

In the morning of 20 November, the Mother’s body joined Sri Aurobindo’s in the Samadhi in the courtyard of the main Ashram building. It was put in the upper chamber she had kept there for herself since 1950.

The Caterpillar and the Butterfly

‘The shock was too great to bear and the loss too deep to be told,’ ⁴² writes Nirodbaran. Statements of insight, visions and messages of encouragement by prominent Ashramites were pinned on the notice board in the central Ashram courtyard, and eagerly read and copied by the many who were seeking for every word of solace. Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, sent a message: ‘The Mother was a dynamic, radiant personality with tremendous force of character and extraordinary spiritual attainments. Yet she never lost her sound practical vision which concerned itself with the running of the Ashram, the welfare of society, the founding and development of Auroville and any scheme which would promote the ideals expressed by Sri Aurobindo. She was young in spirit, modern in mind, but most expressive was her abiding faith in the spiritual greatness of India and the role which India could play in giving new light to mankind.’

Sri Aurobindo had passed away and now the Mother had left her body. What remained of their ideals? What remained of everything they had said and written about the superman, immortality, transformation and a New World? What was to be done at present and what in the future? Wasn’t this the latest edition of the sempiternal fiasco? Questions like these were rarely voiced, for everybody tried to put on a brave face, at least in public, but they were in the minds of all sadhaks and devotees, who for the most part had expected to see the Mother as immortal and in a resplendent, divinized body.

Not only had many expected to see Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in a divinized body, they had also expected that they themselves would become immortal and share in their divine glory. K.D. Sethna, for instance, writes: ‘Psychologically, one of the most central facts of the early days [of the Ashram] was the conviction that complete divinization of the physical being was not only an aim of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga but also a practical goal. “Supramentalization” was clearly understood to include a complete change in the body itself. What is most significant is that by “body” was meant the physical instrument of even the sadhaks and not simply of the Master and the Mother … In this context I remember some words of Amrita, one of the earliest sadhaks. He used to be often in my room. Once when he was there we heard the sound of a funeral passing in the street. In a whisper as if conveying a secret, he said: “I have the feeling that this will not happen to me.” I did not raise my eyebrows in the least, for most of us who understood the originality of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual vision and his reading of the Supermind’s implications could not help the expectation of a radical body change.’ ⁴³

The Mother, who knew the mind of her disciples better than they did themselves, had warned against such notions and expectations on many occasions. We read in Notes on the Way of 1969: ‘I have looked very, very attentively: not for an instant has there been the idea “it must be this,” meaning: this body, that will undergo the transformation.’ And she pinched the skin of her hands. Then she added: ‘And the consciousness began to observe that, if there is nothing in this body which even aspires to be that, this proves that it is not its work.’ ⁴⁴ In April 1972 she said: ‘We are at best – at best – transitional beings.’ The expectation of seeing her supramentalized she called ‘figments of the imagination’. What the disciples, longing for a miracle, never realized was that no earthly being at present could stand the unscreened presence of a supramental being, whose light, being divine, is of a brightness compared to which the light of the sun is dark, as the Mother said. Moreover, the Supramental being the Truth-Consciousness, its unveiled presence would simply annihilate any form of falsehood, which is what the human being mostly consists of, especially in its physical elements.

The following quote puts matters clearly: ‘The use of this [physical] body at present is for me simply: the Order of the Will of the Lord that I do as much preparatory work as possible. It [her physical body] is, however, not the Aim at all. We have no knowledge, not the least knowledge of what the supramental life is. Consequently, we do not know if this [Mother pinches the skin of her hands] can sufficiently change to adapt itself or not. To tell the truth, there is no anxiety about this, it is a problem that does not keep me busy very much. For the problem on which I am working consists in building the supramental consciousness in a way that this becomes the being. It is this consciousness which has to become the being. This is what is important, and the rest remains to be seen … To this end, all the [supramental] consciousness which is in these cells has to assemble, to organize itself and to form a conscious being which is able to be conscious of Matter and at the same time of the Supramental. This is what is being done. How far will we be able to go? I don’t know. I do not say that this body will be able to transform itself, I see no sign of this. But there is the consciousness, the physical consciousness, the material consciousness which becomes supramentalized. This is the work that is going on. This is what is important.’ ⁴⁵ (26 April 1972) And this is what she has done by building a supramental body out of the supramentalized elements of her physical body.

An important factor in the understanding of what happened in the Mother’s body during the last ten years, and ultimately on 17 November 1973, is the simple fact that she had a human body made in the same way as that of the rest of us. This means that the cells of her body, just like ours, consisted for a considerable part of the dregs accumulated during the past millennia. We are the sons and daughters of humanity, which means that we are the offspring of Mother Earth. We carry humanity and the Earth’s onerous past in our cells. Sri Aurobindo, having become fully aware of this, doubted whether these dregs, which he called the ‘residue,’ could actually be transformed, and came to the conclusion that this residual body should be discarded. In the course of her yoga of the cells, the Mother thought she saw indications that even this residue could be transformed, but further progress made her conclude that it would not be possible.

Already in 1968 she had said: ‘The body has the feeling of being imprisoned within something. Yes, imprisoned, imprisoned as if in a box. But it sees through it. It sees through it and it can also act, in a limited way, through something which is still there and which must disappear. This “something” gives the feeling of imprisonment. How is it to disappear? That I don’t know yet.’ ⁴⁶ Later, she said that the substance of which we are built is not sufficiently purified to express the supreme Consciousness without deforming it, and that she had the impression that there would be ‘a waste product.’ ‘It will only be the untransformable residue that will really be death,’ she said.⁴⁷

Then what happened on that fateful 17 November 1973 ? The best way to understand it may be a simile: the pupation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. When its time comes, the caterpillar spins itself into a cocoon. In this cocoon the pupation takes place, a miraculous transformation into a completely different being: a butterfly. Nobody knows what happens in that cocoon, how the immensely complex process of the pupation comes about. It is one of the innumerable processes in nature which may escape the knowledge of materialistic science for ever, because they happen in other dimensions than that of Matter alone. Can one say that the caterpillar dies in the cocoon? Transformation is not death, it is a change into something else. The butterfly has originated in the caterpillar, from the caterpillar. In a way, the butterfly contains the essence of the caterpillar within itself, and the dried up ‘residue’ in the cocoon is what has to be discarded, because a caterpillar exists within the dimensions of a crawling-world and the butterfly within the dimensions of a flying-world.

The human body of the Mother existed in the world of the humans. As her yoga progressed, that body belonged less and less to this world – except for the residue in the cells. For this residue it was impossible to transcend the world of the humans. In the meantime the supramental transformation, the supramental pupation was taking place. The butterfly – the prototype of the supramental body in the Mother – came into existence. She signalled its presence several times in the course of the final years and eventually perceived and described it in 1972. Taking into consideration the logical sequence of the development of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s avataric yoga, the graduality of the perception of the presence of the new being within her, its similarity with Rijuta’s mature psychic and the final confirmation of the personal experience in the Mother, there can be no reason to doubt this. The caterpillar nature in the human beings looked forward to a caterpillar miracle, while the golden butterfly was already there hovering among them. But they did not have the eyes to see it, as they were also unable to imagine or understand the process by which it had come into being.

On 17 November 1973 the Mother laid down her residual human body while she continued to exist forever in a body consisting of a supramental substance. The supramental substance as worked out by the Mother is a material substance – otherwise the earthly evolution would have no meaning – though it is composed of a substance more refined than the gross matter known to us. The gross matter of our Mother the Earth is still in the process of transformation. This process is now in an advanced stage thanks to the avataric yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. When gross matter will have become sufficiently subtle and receptive, i.e. transformed, the mature souls, ready and waiting in their soul-world, will descend and incarnate in it. The formation of their bodies will be moulded by the existence of the Mother’s supramental body, the prototype of the new species.

It comes at last, the day foreseen of old,
What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed,
Vision and vain imagination deemed,
The City of delight, the Age of Gold.

The Iron Age is ended. Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed
Earth washed of its ills shall raise a fairer brow.⁴⁸

By Way of an Epilogue

When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast
And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thief’s in the night shall be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.

A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,

The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.

In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
The days become a happy pilgrim march,
Our will a force of the Eternal’s power,
And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.

A few shall see what none yet understands;
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.⁴⁹