The Mother

6: Speaking the Word

When I came to Pondicherry a programme was dictated to me from within for my Sadhana. I followed it and progressed for myself but could not do much by way of helping others. Then came the Mother and with her help I found the necessary method.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

First Questions

When Mirra met A.G., as Aurobindo Ghose was known since his arrival in Pondicherry, she had her questions ready. These questions were the natural result of her effort at inner development, and some of them we know because she has mentioned them.

One question was about the state of samadhi or trance. As the Mother later narrated to her audience in the Ashram playground: ‘In all kinds of so-called spiritual literature I had always read wonderful things about this state of trance or Samadhi, but I had never experienced it. So I did not know whether this was perhaps a sign of inferiority. And when I came here, one of my first questions to Sri Aurobindo was: “What do you think of ‘samadhi,’ of that state of trance one does not remember? One enters into a condition which seems to be blissful, but when one comes out of it, one has no idea of what has happened.” He looked at me, saw what I meant and told me: “It is unconsciousness … You enter into what is called ‘samadhi’ when you go out of your conscious being and enter into a part of your being which is completely unconscious, or rather into a domain where you have no corresponding consciousness: you go beyond the field of your consciousness and enter a region where you are no longer conscious. You are in the impersonal state, that is to say, a state in which you are unconscious, and that is the reason why, naturally, you remember nothing, because you were not conscious of anything.” So this reassured me and I said: “Well. This has never happened to me.” He replied: “Nor to me.”’ ²

Another of Mirra’s questions was why, in spite of her many talents, she had always been so ‘mediocre’ in everything she did: painting, writing, music … Aurobindo’s answer was simply that this was indispensable for her development. We may infer that people who are extraordinarily gifted in a certain field have to dedicate their life exclusively to the realization of that one talent, while Mirra had to sample as varied an experience as possible and then engage in a totally new and synthetic enterprise.

A third question – in reality her very first one – would prove to be of immense importance for the future. ‘It was the very first question which came up when I met Sri Aurobindo,’ the Mother said later. ‘Should you do your yoga, attain the goal, and then afterwards take up the work with others, or should you immediately let all those who have the same aspiration gather around you and go forward all together towards the goal? Because of my earlier work and all that I had tried out, I came to Sri Aurobindo with this question very precisely formulated. Because the two possibilities were there: either to practise an intensive individual sadhana by withdrawing from the world, that is, by no longer having any contact with others, or to let the group be formed naturally and spontaneously, not preventing it from being formed, allowing it to form by itself, and starting all together on the path. Well, the decision was not at all a mental choice, it came spontaneously. The circumstances were such that no choice was required. I mean, quite naturally, spontaneously, the group was formed in such a way that it became an imperious necessity. And so, once you have started like that, it is settled, you have to go on like that to the end.’ ³

The day after her arrival and her first meeting with Aurobindo, Mirra had an overwhelming experience. We know that she had already realized the Godhead in the heart and the full awakening of the kundalini. Now, with her openness, sensitivity and trained capacity to enter into others, she received from Aurobindo something she did not expect. ‘I was seated close to him [Aurobindo], simply, like that, on the floor. He was sitting on a chair, with a table in front of him, and on the other side of the table was Richard, and they were talking. I did not listen, I sat there just like that. I don’t know how long they went on talking, but suddenly I felt within me as it were a great Force – Peace! Silence! massive. It came, did like this [sweeping gesture at the level of the forehead], descended like that, and stopped here [gesture at the chest]. And when they finished talking, I stood up and left. And then I noticed that I didn’t have a single thought in my mind – that I knew nothing any more, understood nothing any more, that I was absolutely in a complete blank. Then I gave thanks to the Lord, and thanked Sri Aurobindo in my heart.’ ⁴ Aurobindo had imparted his ‘nirvanic’ silence to her, his first great realization obtained when sitting with V.B. Lele in Baroda and which had never left him since. Just before sitting down on the floor, Mirra had confided to him that, try as she may to establish that silence in the mind, she was unable to do it. Aurobindo had given it to her ‘without even intending to,’ just by occult communication and because of her total openness, which in their yoga would be called ‘surrender.’ Years later, when asked by Barin what had struck him most on first meeting Mirra, Aurobindo would indeed say her surrender, which was ‘so absolute and unreserved.’

From the moment their minds became silenced neither Aurobindo nor Mirra ‘thought’ any more as ordinary humans do. In their absolute surrender to the Divine their ‘thoughts’ came to them, were given to them how and when necessary, or when invited. A thought, as Mirra had learned from Théon and as she taught to her audiences in Paris, may be invisible to us because it belongs to a subtle, mental world, but it is all the same a concrete entity. Every human being lives within an occult edifice that consists of ‘constructions’ of thoughts. In people who are incapable of clear thinking, such an edifice is shabbily put together; in people who live mainly ‘in their head’ or in an unassailable conviction, such an edifice can be as impenetrable as a fortress the walls of a prison. In the course of her occult and spiritual explorations, Mirra had carefully built up ‘a magnificent construction’ which Aurobindo, just by his way of being, now destroyed in an instant – and she was immensely grateful for it. She took great care not to spoil the new poise, which never left her again.

As usually happens at the time of a decisive new spiritual experience, Mirra felt as if all the preceding work meant nothing. ‘It seems to me that I am being born into a new life,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and that all the methods, all the habits of the past can no longer be of any use. It seems to me that what I considered as results were nothing more than a preparation. I feel as if I have done nothing yet, as though I have not lived the spiritual life, only entered the path that leads to it. It seems to me that I know nothing, that I am incapable of formulating anything, that all experience is yet to begin. It is as if I were stripped of my entire past, of its errors as well as its conquests, as though all that has vanished and made room for a new-born child whose whole existence is yet to be lived … It seems to me that I have at last reached the threshold I so much sought for.’ ⁵

Then followed what is a regular feature in all true spiritual progress: the repercussion, the downward movement after an uplifting experience or spiritual realization. This is, according to Sri Aurobindo, the Black Dragon lashing out with its tail in an effort to swipe away the spiritual gain. ‘My physical organism suffered a defeat such as it had not known for several years, and during a few days all the forces of my body failed me … Something in this aggregate [her body] which constitutes the instrument I can put at Thy service is still obscure and obtuse; something does not respond as it should to Thy forces, and deforms and darkens their manifestation.’ ⁶ The problem she would have to grapple with at the end was already there at the beginning.

The Launching of the Arya

In Mirra’s diary entries of those weeks we find time and again allusions to the continuous and absorbing practical occupations in which she had to engage. Ever attentive, she soon understood that this harassing, aggressive outer world was the true terrain of the new yoga, not the undisturbed, holy heights of meditation and withdrawal as recommended in the traditional spiritual paths.

The volume of activity undertaken by the Richards in the first months of their stay in Pondicherry is impressive. They had arrived on 29 March and the elections were to be held on 26 April, less than a month later. Trying to make an impact so that he would have a chance of being elected, Paul Richard must have had a hectic schedule of travelling and speeches, for voting was to take place not only in Pondicherry, but also in Karikal (where the Richards went to canvass) and in the other French comptoirs such as Chandernagore. (A.G. wrote to Motilal Roy to try and gather votes for Richard.) One of Mirra’s diary notes is dated ‘Karikal, 13 April 1914,’ and there is no doubt that Mirra stood by the side of her husband throughout the campaign.

As soon as he had some time to spare, Richard went to see Aurobindo and discussed with him all possible topics. Although Richard was not susceptible to Aurobindo’s spiritual realizations, he had an enormous respect for his intellectual powers. Which of them was the first to moot the publication of a review that would expound Aurobindo’s views? In a letter to a disciple Sri Aurobindo later wrote that it was Paul Richard. ‘Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review – and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse.’ ⁷

At the time Aurobindo spoke rather highly of Richard. In a letter written in April to Motilal Roy, he says: ‘Richard is not only a personal friend of mine and a brother in the Yoga, but he wishes like myself, and in his own way works for a general renovation of the world by which the present European civilization shall be replaced by a spiritual civilization … He and Madame Richard are rare examples of European Yogins who have not been led away by Theosophical and other aberrations. I have been in material and spiritual correspondence with them for the last four years.’ ⁸ (This ‘material correspondence’ seems to be lost.) In the same letter he characterizes Richard as a European ‘who is practically an Indian in belief, in personal culture, in sympathies and aspirations, one of the Nivedita type.’

Did Aurobindo know who Richard essentially was, namely an incarnation of the Asura of Falsehood? Given his advanced yogic capabilities there can be no doubt that he did; also, the relationship between Mirra and Richard must soon have become clear, if it had not already been disclosed confidentially to Aurobindo by Mirra herself. If this is correct, then we can understand Aurobindo’s statement in a letter of 5 May that Richard ‘is to know nothing about Tantricism.’ ⁹ One may suppose that Aurobindo wanted as a matter of course to assist Mirra in her effort to convert Richard. For this kind of attempt, they had to take the whole being of the person to be converted into themselves and do his yoga of conversion for him, helping him to the threshold where the ultimate step then would have to be taken by the individual himself. And so it came about that on the front-page of the Arya, the journal heralding the New Age, these three names are printed side by side: Sri Aurobindo Ghose and Paul and Mirra Richard.⁹¹

Of the four candidates for the one seat in the House of Representatives in Paris, Paul Richard came a poor last with a ridiculously small number of votes to his name – in every polling station less than ten, while the winner, Paul Bluysen, got between 1,000 and 4,000. (It was this Bluysen who Richard had come to support four years earlier.) ‘As for M. Richard’s votes,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo to Motilal Roy, ‘they got rid of them in Pondicherry and Karikal by the simple process of reading Paul Bluysen wherever Paul Richard was printed. Even where he brought his voters in Karikal to the poll himself, the results published were “Richard – 0.”’ ¹⁰

The disappointing results of the election notwithstanding Richard intended, according to the same letter, ‘to stay in India for two years and work for the people.’ ‘He has sold one fourth of his wife’s fortune (a very small one) in order to be able to come and work for India, and the money he has can only carry him through the two years he thinks of staying here.’ This is when the three of them decided, on 1 June, to take up the considerable effort of publishing a review in English and French, the English edition of a thousand copies to be called Arya, the French edition of six hundred copies Revue de la Grande Synthèse.

At first, however, the review was intended to be called The New Idea / L’Idée nouvelle. This title, doubtlessly proposed by Mirra, brings to mind the name of the Parisian group she had been leading quite recently. ‘Idea’ in this case should be understood in its full Platonic sense as a supernal reality with diverse effects in the material world. The proposed title tells us two things: firstly, that Mirra saw in Sri Aurobindo’s vision and realization a continuation and accomplishment of everything she herself had learned and realized before meeting him; secondly, that her knowledge contributed to his vision and his formulation of that vision. Many key terms in his philosophy – such as psychic, mental and vital, all to be found in Words of Long Ago – came to him from or via Mirra; so did, for instance, his designation of the Supermind as the ‘Real-Idea,’ a term used in The Life Divine though rarely in later writings.

In the ‘programme’ Mirra had made up, and which is published in Words of Long Ago⁹² the third point reads: ‘To speak again to the world the eternal word under a new form adapted to its present mentality. It will be the synthesis of all human knowledge.’ This is equivalent to what Sri Aurobindo too considered an essential part of his mission, ‘the intellectual side of my work for the world.’ As he had said in his speech at Uttarpara: ‘He [the Divine] has given me a word to speak and a work to do.’ ¹¹ ‘The eternal word,’ the sanatana dharma he and Mirra had already discovered in the respective traditions assimilated by them; ‘the new form’ would be their new formulation of the eternal word, adapted and applicable to the present, pivotal stage of the universal evolution.

The date for the appearance of the first issue of the Arya was set for 15 August, Sri Aurobindo’s forty-second birthday. ‘On 1 June 1914 Sri Aurobindo had nothing ready for the press. By the middle of the month, when the prospectus of the proposed journal was issued, he had worked up some of his Vedic material into the first of his “Selected Hymns.” Before 15 August, when Arya’s first issue was published, he had written one or more installments of four different books: The Secret of the Veda, The Life Divine, The Isha Upanishad, and The Synthesis of Yoga.’ Two of these works, The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, are among the most important books of the twentieth century, an evaluation not lessened by the fact that so many people still do not know about them. ‘During the same two months that Sri Aurobindo performed this astounding intellectual labour, he also saw to all the details of the production and distribution of the new review. The Mother meanwhile translated Sri Aurobindo’s articles for the French edition.’ ¹² She was also the chief executive in sole charge.¹³ Her experience of publishing Théon’s Revue cosmique stood her in good stead. Richard contributed The Wherefore of the Worlds and The Eternal Wisdom, serials that Sri Aurobindo, in addition to the burden of his other work, had to translate from the French.

Sri Aurobindo was amply proving his theory that a yogi has to be able to turn his hand to anything. Still, he asserted that he was no philosopher. ‘Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher – although I have written philosophy, which is another story altogether,’ he wrote to a disciple. ‘I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry – I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher … I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically.’ ¹⁴

After the accident to his leg many years later, he said to some disciples in his room: ‘If you mean thinking, I never do that. Thinking ceased a long time ago – it has stopped ever since that experience of mine with Lele, the Silence and Nirvana at Baroda. Thoughts, as I said, come to me from all sides and from above, and the transmitting mind remains quiet or it enlarges to receive them. True thoughts always come in this way. You can’t think out such thoughts. If you try to do so, you only make what the Mother calls mental constructions.’ A disciple asked: ‘Was the Arya with its thousands of pages written in this way?’ Sri Aurobindo answered: ‘No, it was transmitted directly to the pen. It is a great relief to get out of the responsibility … I don’t mean responsibility in general, but of thinking about everything. Some thoughts are given, some are reflected from above. It is not that I don’t look for knowledge. When I want knowledge, I call for it. The higher faculty sees thoughts as if they were written on a wall.’ ¹⁵

About the meaning of the name Arya, printed like a hieroglyph in Devanagari script on the frontpage of the review, Sri Aurobindo wrote the following in one of the first issues: ‘All the highest aspirations of the early human race, its noblest religious temper, its most idealistic velleities of thought are summed up in this single vocable … In later times, the word Arya expressed a particular ethical and social ideal, an ideal of well-governed life, candour, courtesy, nobility, straight dealing, courage, gentleness, purity, humanity, compassion, protection of the weak, liberality, observance of social duty, eagerness for knowledge, respect for the wise and learned, the social accomplishments. It was the combined ideal of the Brahmana [the learned priest] and the Kshatriya [the knight]. Everything that departed from this ideal, everything that tended towards the ignoble, mean, obscure, rude, cruel or false, was termed un-Aryan. There is no word in human speech that has a nobler history.’ ¹⁶

And so it made itself heard, that mighty voice at the beginning of the century. ‘The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation – for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment – is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of the Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last – God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.’ This is the first paragraph on the first page of the first issue of the Arya. It is now as vibrant as it was at the time of writing, a century ago.

In the meantime the First World War had erupted.

Parallel to the activities around the founding of the Arya Mirra started a new society called The New Idea / L’Idée nouvelle. This again makes it clear that she had begun working out her programme, of which the fourth point was: ‘Collectively, to establish an ideal society in a propitious spot for the flowering of the new race, the race of the Sons of God.’ Although the lifetime of the new society would be short, something Mirra did not know when she started it, it was significant as a trial run of what later would become the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville.

The reader will recall Mirra’s questions to Sri Aurobindo when she met him for the first time, especially the question whether they should go the way at first alone or immediately take others with them. As the Mother said later, making a choice had not been necessary: some individuals had gathered around them, guided by their psychic instinct.

The first of these were Sri Aurobindo’s companions, of whom the closest were Nolini Kanta Gupta, Bejoy Nag, Saurin Bose and Suresh Chakravarti. They had been joined by a young Tamil Brahmin from Pondicherry, K. Amrita. ‘With those who accompanied me or joined me in Pondicherry,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo, ‘I had at first the relation of friends and companions rather than of a Guru and disciples; it was on the ground of politics that I had come to know them and not on the spiritual ground.’ ¹⁷ They usually had but little money to spend and led their ‘camp life’ in such an improvised way that Motilal Roy, on one of his visits from Chandernagore, was scandalized by the carelessness with which they looked after Sri Aurobindo.

Yet they played excellent football. In this way they befriended some of the youngsters from town. As Nolini writes in his Reminiscences: ‘Among our first acquaintances in Pondicherry were some of the young men here … Sada, Benjamin, Jules Rassendren, David … Gradually they formed a group of Sri Aurobindo’s devotees. The strange thing about it was that they were all Christians. We did not have much of a response from the local Hindus, perhaps they were far too orthodox and old-fashioned. The Cercle Sportif was our rendezvous. There we had games, we arranged picnics, we staged plays, and also held study circles … Afterwards, when the Mother came in 1914, it was with a few men chosen from this group that she laid the first foundation of the work here; they formed the Society called “L’Idée nouvelle.”’ ¹⁸

The aim of the society was stated in the first issue of the Arya. ‘Its object is to group in a common intellectual life and fraternity of sentiment those who accept the spiritual tendency and idea it represents and who aspire to realize it in their own individual and social action … The Society has already made a beginning by grouping together young men of different castes and religions in a common ideal. All sectarian and political questions are necessarily foreign to its idea and activities. It is on a higher plane of thought superior to external differences of race, caste, creed and opinion and in the solidarity of the spirit that unity can be realized … The Society has its headquarters at Pondicherry with a reading-room and a library. A section has been founded at Karikal and others are likely to be opened at Yanam and Mahé [French territories dependent on the Pondicherry administration].’ ¹⁹ To bring in some money Mirra also set up a shop, called ‘Aryan Stores’ and which was to be run by Saurin – who, unfortunately, was not very business-minded.

A humble beginning for sure, but one that demanded a huge amount of energy from Mirra. At first the young men around Sri Aurobindo seem to have been rather distrustful of that European lady, Madame Richard. ‘When it first came to be bruited that a Great Lady like this was to come and live close to us,’ writes Nolini, ‘we were faced with a problem: how should we behave? Should there be a change in our manners? For we had been accustomed to a bohemian sort of life, we dressed and talked, slept and ate and moved about in a free unfettered style, in a manner that would not quite pass in civilized society. Nevertheless, it was finally agreed that we should stick as far as possible to our old ways even under the new circumstances, for why should we permit our freedom and ease to be compromised or lost?’ ²⁰

As Amrita recalls those days when he sought instruction from Madame Richard: ‘Had someone seen the Mother and myself seated on chairs, facing each other, almost as equals, with the book of Yogic Sadhana in hand, he would have been in a fix to know who was teaching whom.’ ²¹ Amrita was still a student belonging to the high and orthodox Vaishnava Brahmin caste. Since Sri Aurobindo’s arrival in Pondicherry, he had felt strongly attracted to him for reasons he could not even rationalize. This caused a severe clash with his Brahmin father and relatives, for caste customs and dress were evidently foreign to everything Sri Aurobindo stood for. One night, during Amrita’s sleep, Nolini (on Sri Aurobindo’s instructions) cut off his shikha, the small tuft of hair on the shaven head of a Brahmin. ‘I got struck with fear. How should I dare to look straight in the faces of my parents and relatives? A Brahmin youth without a shikha was no better than a pariah!’ But he withstood the storm, became a member of the circle of intimates around Sri Aurobindo, who had helped him make the decisive step by cutting the symbolic tie with his past, and later, as one of the Ashram secretaries, became a close collaborator of the Mother.

Because of Mirra’s deference to Sri Aurobindo, his young companions little by little realized who he actually was and how they should behave towards him. ‘The Mother came and installed Sri Aurobindo on his high pedestal of Master and Lord of Yoga,’ writes Nolini. ‘We had hitherto known him as a dear friend and close companion, and although in our mind and heart he had the position of a Guru, in our outward relations we seemed to behave as if he were just like one of ourselves. He too had been averse to the use of the words “Guru” and “Ashram” in relation to himself, for there was hardly a place in his work of new creation for the old traditional associations these words conveyed. Nevertheless, the Mother taught by her manner and speech, and showed us in actual practice, what was the meaning of disciple and master; she always practised what she preached. She showed us, by not taking her seat in front of or on the same level as Sri Aurobindo but by sitting on the ground, what it meant to be respectful to one’s Master, what was real courtesy.’ ²²

It is remarkable how this period of frantic activity was also a period of the most intensive spiritual practice, both for Sri Aurobindo and for Mirra. The Record of Yoga and the Prayers and Meditations bear witness to this. There is no entry in Mirra’s diary dated 15 August 1914, Sri Aurobindo’s birthday and the day the first issue of the Arya appeared. There is, however, an entry on the very next day, showing that the problems had not abated one bit; on the contrary, the inner struggle accompanying them remained as acute as ever.

‘When Thy force descends towards the Earth in order to manifest [as it must have done on 15 August], each one of the great Asuric beings who have resolved to be Thy servitors but preserved their nature’s characteristic of domination and self-will, wants to pull it down for itself alone and distribute it to others afterwards; it always thinks it should be the sole or at least the supreme intermediary, and that the contact of all others with Thy Power cannot and should not be made except through its mediation. This unfortunate meanness is more or less conscious, but it is always there, delaying things indefinitely. If even for the greatest it is impossible in the integral manifestation to escape these lamentable limitations, why, O Lord, impose upon me the Calvary of this constraint? … If Thou willest that it be thus, Thou shouldst rend the last veil and Thy splendour come in all its purity and transfigure the world! Accomplish this miracle or else let me withdraw into Thee.’ ²³ For the reader it is impossible even to guess what may have caused this poignant outcry of the soul – as it was impossible during that Pondicherrian summer for their friends and acquaintances to guess the true relationship of Monsieur and Madame Richard.

The Integral Vision and the Integral Yoga

Man is the link between what must be and what is; he is the footbridge thrown across the abyss, he is the great cross-shaped X, the quaternary connecting link.²⁴

– The Mother

This may be the appropriate place to give an idea, in the briefest of summaries, of the vision and yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that is the gist of the writings published during six-and-a-half years in the Arya.

The root of Sri Aurobindo’s vision is Vedic-Vedantic. There is the Brahman, the One without a second, which is everything and next to which there is nothing. ‘The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman.’ ²⁵ (Sri Aurobindo) It exists from all eternity to all eternity and is absolutely self-existing. Its highest attributes are Existence (sat), Consciousness (chit-tapas) and Bliss (ananda). All is That, nothing can exist without being That. ‘Thou art That, O Shvetaketu.’ (Chandogya Upanishad).

For reasons beyond human comprehension, That wanted to know itself: It wanted to objectify Itself in order to have a concrete knowledge of Itself. To that end It activated Its Consciousness-Power, which is the Great Mother of all that is. What this Power sees, exists. Seeing all that was in Itself, the worlds were created, representing the immense rainbow-coloured scale of Being in its endless variety, each peopled with myriad beings incarnating the degree of omnipotent, omnipresent and all-joyous being in which they live immortally. In this way was manifested the world of Existence, of Consciousness, of Bliss, and so came into being the worlds of the Supermind, the Truth-Consciousness with its numberless gradations, all existing in the Unity that is the fundamental characteristic of the Brahman. The creation of the Great Mother was marvellous, flawless, infinite in vastness and detail, and the Brahman mirrored Itself in it and knew Itself in the whole of Its limitless scope.

But in that infinity of the Brahman there was also the possibility to see Itself in Its opposites (which are the Brahman too, as there is nothing else) – to see Its Truth as Falsehood; Its Light as Darkness; Its Power and Life as weakness trailing Death; Its Bliss as Suffering. As we know that, when in the One something arises, when something in It is seen, that something exists. And this is how the ‘Fall’ happened of the four great beings whose acquaintance we have made at the end of chapter three.

At this point Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not follow the Vedantic teaching any longer. Against the broad, eternally unchanging universe arises the evolutionary manifestation of which our world is a part. When this evolutionary manifestation of the Brahman through Its Executrix, the Great Mother, seemed to be going astray, She turned towards Her Lord for assistance, and He told Her to pour Her Love into the black world of the Inconscient; and from the outpouring of Her Love were born the Gods. Her Love also awakened in the immovable, impenetrable darkness of the Inconscient the longing to return to its Origin. And the instruments of the evolution towards that End – which is also the Beginning – are the Avatars, incarnations in the evolution of the Divine Love ever radiating in the depths of our evolutionary world.

All this the One must have wanted to happen, for nothing can exist or come into manifest being without Its consent, and everything consists of Its eternal Essence. It has willed the perilous and long-lasting adventure of the evolution from the dark night of its (apparent) opposites into the ecstasy of the rediscovery of its divine Self, for this too is one of the modes of its Ananda or Bliss.

We humans are part of that adventure. We have a soul; our soul is divine, it is the Divine. If this is true, we are part of the One that has willed the adventure of the night of long-suffering to experience the rediscovery of our inmost Self. To be part of the One means to be the One, for a part of infinity is infinite too. We have chosen the adventure of evolution as a road towards Self-Knowledge, we have chosen to be participants in that adventure – although most of us have forgotten that, our minds being steeped in ignorance. We have forgotten who we are, where we come from and where we are going. But having voluntarily plunged from the brilliant heavens of our eternal Existence into the darkness of this nether corner of the manifestation, we cannot turn back, we cannot quit, and our ultimate destiny is inescapable: the divine ecstasy of re-becoming who we are and have always been. Being human, however, we have no notion of what is divinity, or divine ecstasy, or the inescapable certitude of the happy ending of our seemingly endless journey. That is why we suffer, and feel dejected, and deep down enjoy our desperation.

Evolution is now generally accepted as a scientific fact. In India it has existed for centuries as a spiritual fact: witness the ‘procession’ of avatars from the Fish to Kalki, each one initiating a higher level of evolution. That Matter, Life and Consciousness are the gradations of evolution of our mother, the Earth, is clear to all eyes that see. It is less clear that Matter itself has evolved from the Inconscient into which our evolutionary universe was plunged at its very origin. And not understood at all is the key Aurobindonian concept of involution, which must of necessity have preceded the evolution. ‘Nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not already therein contained,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine.²⁶ ‘Evolution of Life in matter supposes a previous involution of it there, unless we suppose it to be a new creation magically and unaccountably introduced in Nature … The evolution of consciousness and knowledge cannot be accounted for unless there is already a concealed consciousness in things with its inherent and native powers emerging little by little.’ ²⁷ And Sri Aurobindo compares the mounting and descending hierarchy of planes to a double ladder, first lapsing into the nescience of the Inconscient and Matter and then climbing up again ‘through the flowering of life and soul and mind into the infinity of the Spirit.’

Nobody can say how long the involution – symbolically enacted in the tragedy of the Four Asuras – has taken; it may have happened in an instant. Nor do we know how long the evolution will take, though a very long time for sure. As human beings, we carry all the developed steps of the evolution until now in our being. We consist of matter, the life forces and (mental) consciousness; we have in us, too, the Subconcient and Inconscient below, and the perspectives of the Spirit and its infinite ranges above. On the upward ladder of evolution the human being stands somewhere halfway, in a rather awkward position: half animal, half god. If evolution makes any sense at all, it would be illogical that it stops with the human being. The Divine Creatrix must no doubt be able to do better.

‘Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged from the animal, so out of man the superman emerges,’ states one of Sri Aurobindo’s Thoughts and Aphorisms.²⁸ And in one of the first pages of The Life Divine he writes: ‘The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out Man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god.’ ²⁹

These central points in the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have to be emphasized because they form the foundation of their Integral Yoga. If ‘yoga’ means a (re)unification with the Divine, then evolution as such is a yoga of the Divine: after having distanced Himself from Himself, He moves by means of the evolution towards a Self-reunification in the ecstasy of Self-recognition. The human, being an incarnation of a divine soul and part of the evolution, participates in this yoga of the Divine. However, until now humanity has not been aware of the evolutionary significance of the world and of itself. It has seen the world mostly as static or cyclic, and if in the succession of its many reincarnations it may have had some idea of evolving, this evolution was considered to be individual, not related to the species as a whole.

The revolutionary aspect of the vision and yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother thus becomes clear. For them the world is neither static nor cyclic but evolutionary and ascending towards a goal: its divinization. The evolution is the yoga of the Divine and everything in this evolutionary world is participating in this yoga, whether it is aware of this or not, whether it wants this or not. The time has come for humanity to grow conscious of this process and of the fact that a new species, exceeding humanity, is in the making. A new evolutionary level, just as on every preceding occasion, can only be initiated by a direct intervention of the Divine incarnating in Matter as an Avatar.

The yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is new, because its goal is no longer a personal liberation or the attainment of heaven, which have been and are the goal of all other spiritual and religious endeavours up to the present. Its aim is to actively participate in the transition from the human being to a transhuman, supramental or divine being, to make this transition a concrete possibility. The person who practises the Integral Yoga can have no personal intentions. And the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is integral because a transformation of the existing world into a supramental world demands the transformation of all its parts; the transformation cannot be complete as long as one part remains behind. All those parts are present, in various degrees, in every human being. The human being dedicating itself to this yoga must therefore be transformed totally, including the matter of the cells of its body.

As the Mother wrote in her diary in the months of June and July 1914: ‘Those whom Thou hast appointed as Thy representatives upon Earth cannot rest content with the results so obtained [in an egoistic aspiration for their own salvation] … He who wants to be perfect in Thy manifestation cannot be satisfied with that, he must manifest Thee on all the planes, in all the states of being and thus turn the knowledge he has acquired to the best account for the whole universe … It is a veritable work of creation we have to do … Thou hast made a promise, Thou hast sent into these worlds those who can and that which can fulfil this promise … And since this must be done, this will be done … The Force is there. Rejoice, O you who are waiting and hoping: the new manifestation is sure, the new manifestation is at hand. The Force is there.’ ³⁰

No human being can have an idea of what divinization of the world really means because no human being has an adequate idea of what the Divine is. Therefore the cornerstone of the Integral Yoga is what Sri Aurobindo called ‘surrender’ to the Divine. (We have seen that he himself practised this surrender from the moment he engaged on the path of his spiritual discovery with V.B. Lele in Baroda, and whoever reads the Mother’s Prayers and Meditations will find it on practically every page.) A total surrender by a spiritual aspirant is not without danger, for he will, because of his inner choice and commitment, at once become the target of attacks from all kinds of invisible beings, for whom the transformation of the world as it is at present means the end of their reign. Few are the aspirants who, taking up a yoga like this, have the discernment to tell the demonic inspirations from the divine. This is why the cultivation of a second quality is an absolute necessity in the Integral Yoga: sincerity, knife-sharp, to dissect one’s inspirations, feelings and motivations.

Rare are those people who will surrender themselves without expecting a reward. (The absence of the promise of a short-term spiritual reward makes this yoga incomprehensible to many seekers.) The siddhi (realization) of this yoga can be no other than the divinization of the whole person, including the body. The new, divine species is not an improvement or aggrandizement of the human species; it is a species beyond the human species. Besides, as the Integral Yoga demands an effort of transformation of all parts of the human being, it is an enormous undertaking by any standards. (Sri Aurobindo compared it to a war on all fronts.) For all the good and the bad of the world is present in us and has to be tackled, in the knowledge that the human ‘good’ is not that much better than the human ‘bad.’ From which we may conclude that taking up the Integral Yoga is the result of a calling rather than of a personal decision. It is a pursuit for the mature souls, ‘the pioneer few’ who have incarnated once more to help their human brothers and sisters by dedicating this earthly incarnation to the shaping of a world where suffering, hatred, darkness and death will have no dominion any more.

Indeed, the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is the supreme Utopia, the attempt to realize at last the fulfilment of the promise given to humankind from its beginnings and so often repeated but never made true. Therefore, understandably, humankind has grown weary of promises and utopias, but not so the mature souls who know that a new world is in the making because they have chosen to descend and collaborate in its realization, even though they could have chosen otherwise and remained in the Bliss of their soul-world or Origin.

..All shall be done for which our pain was borne. ||90.32||

Even as of old man came behind the beast
This high divine successor surely shall come
Behind man’s inefficient mortal pace,
Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears:
He shall know what mortal mind barely durst think,
He shall do what the heart of the mortal could not dare. ||90.33||

Inheritor of the toil of human time
He shall take on him the burden of the gods;
All heavenly light shall visit the earth’s thoughts,
The might of heaven shall fortify earthly hearts;
Earth’s deeds shall touch the superhuman’s height,
Earth’s seeing widened into the infinite. ||90.34|| ³¹

The Mother

There is only one thing of which I am absolutely sure, and that is who I am. Sri Aurobindo also knew it and declared it. Even the doubts of the whole of humanity would change nothing of this fact.³²

– The Mother

‘It was in 1914 that the identification with the Universal Mother took place, the identification of the physical consciousness with her. Of course, I knew before this that I was the Mother, but the complete identification took place only in 1914,’ ³³ said the Mother many years later.

Who is the Universal Mother? A few pages before we have seen that when the One wanted to objectify Itself in order to have a ‘concrete’ knowledge of Itself, It activated Its Consciousness-Power. The Mother is the Consciousness-Power of the Divine, which means that She is His power of manifestation. Two points should be emphasized. Firstly, the Mother is in no way inferior to the Divine Himself: She is the Divine essentially, intrinsically. Secondly, the Mother-Power in the Divine would also be there in Him if He were not manifesting any part of Himself. He is She, She is He; they are One.

In the powerful prose of his letters about the Mother, afterwards published as a booklet called The Mother, Sri Aurobindo writes: ‘The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence. The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates …

‘There are three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe. Transcendent, the original supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces. Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature.’ ³⁴

‘Four great Aspects of the Mother, four of her leading Powers and Personalities have stood in front in her guidance of this Universe and in her dealings with the terrestrial play. One [Maheshwari] is her personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and tranquil benignity and inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty and all-ruling greatness. Another [Mahakali] embodies her power of splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force. A third [Mahalakshmi] is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and supple opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace. The fourth [Mahasaraswati] is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things. Wisdom, Strength, Harmony, Perfection are their several attributes and it is these powers that they bring into the world …’ ³⁵ It is these four powers of the Goddess that we find all over the world represented in the manner the peoples have perceived or imagined her and her emanations.

Mirra had known that she was an incarnation of the Divine Mother, not only in one of her aspects but in the integrality of Her being. The great clairvoyant Madame Théon had seen the ‘twelve pearls’ like a crown above Mirra’s head. In fact, Mirra had felt all along, since her earliest childhood, who she was. Her greater Self had chosen her parents, the place where she would be born and the way she would be educated. Her greater Self had provided her with her numerous occult experiences, like the wonderful one of her rising in a golden robe above Paris, giving solace to all who came to her in their need. Yet, like all incarnated souls, she had to go through the effort of overcoming the degradation of being born in a human, material body – though she kept always alive the remembrance of the true nature of her soul.

Now had come the time of the identification of her self with her Self. This crucial event in Mirra’s spiritual evolution must have happened in the last days or on the last day of August 1914, for we read in her diary entry of 31 August the invocation: ‘O Mother, sweet Mother who I am …’ which is the direct formulation of the identification that had taken place. The next day she writes: ‘I have become Thyself definitively,’ and on 4 September: ‘O sweet Mother, I merge into Thee in an immense love … I have become the purifying fire of Thy love.’ The entry of 13 September begins: ‘With fervour I salute Thee, O divine Mother, and in deep affection I identify myself with Thee. United with our divine Mother I turn, O Lord, towards Thee and bow to Thee in mute adoration and in an ardent aspiration I identify myself with Thee.’ And on the next day she writes: ‘There is no longer an I, no longer an individuality, no longer any personal limits. There is only the immense universe, our sublime Mother, burning with an ardent fire of purification in honour of Thee, O Lord, divine Master, sovereign Will, so that this Will may meet with no farther obstacle in the way of its realization.’

This extraordinary series of spiritual statements can leave no doubt concerning the fact of Mirra’s identification with the Great Mother. ‘O divine and adorable Mother, with Thy help what is there that is impossible?’ she wrote on 25 September. ‘The hour of realization is near and Thou hast assured us of Thy aid that we may perform integrally the supreme Will. Thou hast accepted us as fit intermediaries between the unthinkable realities [of the higher worlds] and the relativities of the physical world, and Thy constant presence in our midst is a token of Thy active collaboration.’ And then follow four lines which will reverberate through the rest of her earthly life, the ‘Thou’ here representing the incarnated Great Mother:

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute:
A new light shall break upon the earth.

A new world shall be born,
And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.³⁶

In Savitri, the spiritual biography of the Mother and himself, Sri Aurobindo has worded this memorable event as follows:

In its deep lotus home her being sat
As if on concentration’s marble seat,
Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds
To make this earthly tenement her house. ||127.4||

As in a flash from a supernal light,
A living image of the original Power,
A face, a form came down into her heart
And made of it its temple and pure abode. ||127.5|| ³⁷

..A portion of the mighty Mother came
Into her as into its own human part.. ||117.89||

The First World War and Richard’s Expulsion

The hour is fateful for the earth …³⁸

– The Mother

Historians concur that the eruption of the First World War was generally experienced as the sudden relief from a tension that had built up in humanity in the course of the last decennia, and become unbearable. Documentaries still show the smiling faces of the young men proudly marching to their fate with flowers in the barrel of their rifles, and the hysterical behaviour of the women sending them off. Nobody had an idea of the murderous massacres ahead, the statesmen and generals no more than the others; and once having entered the dance of death they persevered in it like automatons, like puppets manipulated by invisible forces – which was indeed the truth of the matter.

In chapter two we saw how humanity was irresistibly pushed into opening the doors of its inner self after many centuries of fixed and unquestioned traditions, habitual mores and automatic behavior. Like the Impressionists who sought the direct sensation of the artistic experience, psychologists peeled off the surface layers of human behavior, long dried-up into conventions, sociologists and philosophers wanted to revolutionize the established social attitudes, and physicists broke through the appearances of matter and started on a voyage of discovery that is still far from finished. Some deep nerves, some fundamental roots were touched, whose existence had been unsuspected and up to now been dormant, and in humanity a terrifying inner Shadow stood up which very few humans had the discernment or the courage to recognize as their own.

A massive descent of hostile forces from the occult vital worlds corresponded to this awakening of the vital powers inside humanity. ‘Monstrous forces have swooped down upon the Earth like a hurricane,’ wrote Mirra in her diary on 8 August, when the nations were jockeying for positions in the ‘War Game.’ ³⁹ And the Mother would say many years later: ‘The First World War was the result of an enormous descent of the forces of the vital world – the hostile forces of the vital world – into the material world. Even those who were conscious of this descent and consequently armed to defend themselves against it, suffered from its consequences. The whole world, the whole Earth suffered from its consequences … Naturally, men do not know what happened to them; all that they have said is that everything had become worse since the war. That was all they could assert.’ ⁴⁰

The German people, not for the first time and neither for the last, put themselves at the service of those dark forces. ‘Germans knew themselves to be the strongest military power on Earth, the most efficient merchants, the busiest bankers, penetrating every continent, financing the Turks, flinging out a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad, gaining the trade of Latin America, challenging the sea power of Great Britain, and in the realm of intellect systematically organizing, under the concept Wissenschaft, every branch of human knowledge. They were deserving and capable [in their own opinion] of mastery of the world. Rule by the best must be fulfilled,’ writes Barbara Tuchman in A Proud Tower. And she reminds us of the German slogan at the time: Den Deutschen gehört die Welt – the world belongs to the Germans.

On 28 June 1914, a week after the decision to publish the Arya, the Austrian crown prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. The following day Austria declared war on Serbia; on 1 August Germany stood by its Austrian ally and declared war on Russia, and two days later on France; on 4 August German troops invaded neutral Belgium and Britain declared war on Germany; on 12 August Britain and France declared war on Austria; on 23 August Japan declared war on Germany …

The German armies seemed irresistible. Their right flank quick-marched towards the Channel ports while their left flank pushed straight towards the heart of France. The French armies and the British Expeditionary Force retreated in panic. Squeezed between the pincers of the German attack they were on the verge of being annihilated, and the fall of Paris, cultural capital of the world and symbol of Western civilization, seemed certain. The French government had already fled to Bordeaux in the middle of the night.

At this critical moment in world history the following incident happened in Pondicherry, as narrated by the Mother herself. ‘I used to sit on the terrace to meditate every morning, facing Sri Aurobindo’s room. That day I was inside my room, but looking at Sri Aurobindo’s room through a small window. I was in meditation but my eyes were open. I saw Kali [the black goddess of power and destruction] entering through my door. I asked her: “What do you want?” She was dancing, a truly savage dance. She told me: “Paris is taken, Paris will be destroyed!” We had no news at all, it was just in the beginning of the war. I was in meditation. I turned towards her and said to her: “No, Paris will not be taken, Paris will be saved” – quietly, just like that, but with a certain force. [On another occasion the Mother would say that it was Mahashakti herself who said “no.”] She made a face and went away. And the next day we received the dispatch … posted on the gate of Government House. We got the news that the Germans had been marching upon Paris and that Paris was not defended; the way was quite open, they had to advance only a few kilometres more and they would have entered the city.’ ⁴¹ But they did not persevere in their effort.

In fact, General von Kluck, commanding the right flank of the Germans, had overestimated the disarray in the French and British armies. Instead of continuing his march and taking Paris, which would have been an easy matter, he turned left too early in order to try and encircle the enemy. This gave the defenders of Paris the chance to attack him in the flank. The German march came to a halt and the first trenches were dug on the river Marne.

The war also put Sri Aurobindo and the other freedom fighters, or swadeshis as they were called in Pondicherry, under increased pressure. The British had not forgotten him, far from it. Had not Lord Minto said that ‘he could not rest his head on the pillow till he had crushed Aurobindo Ghose’? ‘The British Government and numbers of people besides could not believe that Sri Aurobindo had ceased from all political action.’ ⁴² We have seen that he was suspected of being the instigator of the murder of the District Collector of Tirunelveli. The British exerted all possible pressure to have Sri Aurobindo expelled from the French territory, but five Pondicherrians were found to sign an attestation to the ‘good conduct’ of Sri Aurobindo. In his Reminiscences Nolini calls them the ‘five noble men.’

At the beginning of the war a German battleship, the cruiser Emden, caused havoc in the Bay of Bengal by firing a few shells at the British possessions. Madras, too, was targeted and half the population fled miles inland. Though Pondicherry was nor hit, hundreds fled the town in panic when the ship passed by. This visible German presence made the freedom fighters still more suspect as possible spies, and the French now seemed willing to throw them out.

‘The British Government brought increased pressure on the French: they must do something drastic about their political refugees,’ recalls Nolini. ‘Either they should hand them over to the British, or else let them be deported out of India. The French Government accordingly proposed that they would find room for us in Algeria … If we were to refuse this offer, there might be danger: the British authorities might be allowed to seize us forcibly. I can recall very well that scene. Sri Aurobindo was seated in his room in what was later called the “Guest House,” rue Francois Martin. We too had come. Two or three of the Tamil nationalist leaders who had sought refuge in Pondicherry came in and told Sri Aurobindo about the Algeria offer and also gave a hint that they were agreeable to it. Sri Aurobindo paused a little and then said, in a quiet clear tone, “I do not budge from here” … Sri Aurobindo had spoken and they could hardly act otherwise.’ ⁴³

In this matter the British government in London had directly addressed the French government in Paris, where Mirra’s brother, Matteo, occupied at the time a senior post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘He [Matteo] did a great deal in Africa [where he became Governor-General of the French Congo], but other people got the benefit. It is men like him who built up France and also made it possible for the Ashram to continue here. Otherwise I might have had to go to France, or else to America … When the Mother came here and I met her, her brother got interested. These things look like accidents, but they are not. There is a guidance behind these events.’ ⁴⁴ The file concerning the swadeshis in Pondicherry landed in Matteo’s hands; he put it in his bottom drawer and nothing came of it.

Bejoy Nag, however, found out that the British police meant business. He was arrested as soon as he left Pondicherrian territory in October 1914 under the Ingress into India Ordinance. Bejoy was ‘regarded by the Bengal Police as an exceptionally dangerous person,’ read his police file, ‘and the records of the Madras special police in Pondicherry bear out this opinion.’ For not only was Bejoy one of the accused in the Alipore Bomb Case, he was also bearing a written authorization ‘empowering him to travel as agent for the Arya,’ which proved his ongoing connection with Aurobindo Ghose. Poor Bejoy would be interned till after the end of the war.

Paul Richard had tried to intervene with the authorities in favour of Bejoy before the latter’s departure. He stood little chance of success as he himself was one of the prime suspects on the list of the British police, who characterized him as a ‘rabid socialist’ and anti-colonialist, knowing that he was a close acquaintance of Aurobindo Ghose. ‘Monsieur Richard is a French subject and a defeated candidate for the Pondicherry seat in the French Chamber of Deputies. He is reported to hold dangerous opinions and started a society called the “Union de la jeunesse Hindoue” [sic] for the political, religious and literary education of young men in Pondicherry. He is constantly in the company of extremists there and himself claims a five years’ friendship with Arabindo Ghose.’ ⁴⁵

‘Richard’s situation in Pondicherry also was undermined by the outbreak of war, but in his case no intervention, inner or outer, could prevent his expulsion from the colony. Like all Frenchmen on the service rolls, Richard was called up in the general mobilization of 3 August 1914. He remained in Pondicherry for six months, during which time he made a belated attempt to cultivate good relations with the British … Late in January [1915] the government of Pondicherry acceded to British insistence and ordered his expulsion. Richard’s appeal against this ruling was unsuccessful, and on 22 February the day after the Mother’s thirty-seventh birthday, he and she departed from Pondicherry.’ ⁴⁶

One may suppose that they reached Colombo on the Dupleix of the Messageries Maritimes. There they boarded the Japanese ship Kamo Maru on 26 February. It seems that in Colombo the British police confiscated the Sanskrit grammar Sri Aurobindo had prepared for Mirra. The first entry in Mirra’s diary on board the Kamo Maru, also the first after her departure from Pondicherry, shows what a terrible blow the separation from Sri Aurobindo was to her. ‘Solitude, a harsh, intense solitude, and always this strong impression of having been flung headlong into a hell of darkness! Never at any moment of my life, in any circumstances, have I felt myself living in surroundings so entirely opposite to all that I am conscious of as true, so contrary to all that is the essence of my life … For the moment the clear-sightedness is lacking; never was the future more veiled.’ The next day she wrote: ‘Each turn of the propeller upon the deep ocean seems to drag me farther away from my true destiny, the one best expressing the divine Will; each passing hour seems to plunge me again deeper into that past with which I had broken, sure of being called to new and vaster realizations …’ ⁴⁷

‘This is an exile from every spiritual happiness … Strong is the growing sense of rejection, and it needs all the ardour of an untiring faith to keep the external consciousness thus abandoned to itself from being invaded by an irremediable sorrow … If only it were possible to come definitively out of this external consciousness, to take refuge in the divine consciousness! But that Thou hast forbidden and still and always Thou forbidst it. No flight out of the world!’ (Many years later and in circumstances as dramatic we will hear similar exclamations.) ‘The burden of its darkness and ugliness must be borne to the end even if all divine succour seems to be withdrawn.’ Mirra traversed the Dark Night of the Soul.⁴⁸

Why did she have to leave Sri Aurobindo? All answers to this question are no more than suppositions. An important factor was surely the presence of Paul Richard. The Mother would later say that Sri Aurobindo felt relieved by his departure. She, bound to her vow to convert Richard, could not let him leave alone. Another aspect of the situation was that Sri Aurobindo was deeply involved in working out his yoga, as witnessed by the entries in the Record of Yoga. However far advanced in comparison with ordinary mortals, he was still on his way towards the supramental realization, of which he would have the mental part in 1920. Much of the Arya was written not from a supramental but from an overmental standpoint, as he would concede afterwards and as the Mother would note several times when commenting on his Thoughts and Aphorisms, written in 1914-15. A third point was that the time had not yet come for working out her ‘programme’ in the way she had started so energetically since her arrival in Pondicherry, her personal situation and the state of the world not yet allowing for it.⁹³

On 18 March the Richards arrived in a Paris at war and left the city again on the 29th, travelling to Lunel in the south of France. Mirra’s illness, which had started when the Kamo Maru entered the Mediterranean, now became serious. ‘The hour has not yet come for joyful realizations in outer physical things. The physical being is plunged once again into the dull, monotonous night from which it wanted to withdraw too hastily … The body, despite its indisputable goodwill, is so profoundly shaken that it cannot manage to regain its equilibrium.’ ⁴⁹ The Mother herself would comment on this entry: ‘The prayer refers to an experience I had when I was not physically well and was in fact narrowly saved from death. I had an inflammation of the nerves.’ ⁵⁰ This is an extremely painful condition that she described as ‘the maximum of intense pain’ everywhere in the body. The reason was that, by an act of spiritual occultism which she herself later would brand as ‘reckless,’ she had left her soul with Sri Aurobindo, thus leaving her adhara on its own among the world forces in upheaval.

But however infernal the experiences she had to go through, what she had become was forever irreversible and gradually grew active again. Even when critically ill she took up her occult work, at Lunel and afterwards at Marsillargues, the birthplace of Paul Richard, where he had to go for reasons of his mobilization. There she was visited by her son André, now an officer in the army, who heard for the first time about Sri Aurobindo. ‘The heavens are definitively conquered,’ Mirra wrote in Marsillargues, ‘and nothing and nobody could have the power to wrest them from me. But the conquest of the Earth is still to be made; it is being carried on in the very heart of the turmoil; and even when achieved, it will still be only a relative one; the victories in this world are but stages leading progressively to still more glorious victories.’ ⁵¹

The causes of her ordeal became clear to her. In the Integral Yoga, transformation of Matter means in the first place transformation of the body, which is our direct contact with Matter. We remember how on New Year’s Eve 1913 – a day not long past, but already belonging to a totally different world – she had wished the identification with the Divine ‘for the body’ and had obtained the fulfilment of her wish within the year. Soon she would write: ‘Thou hast taken entire possession of this miserable instrument [her body, or rather, her adhara] and if it is not yet perfected enough for Thee to complete its transformation, its transmutation, Thou art at work in each one of its cells to knead it and make it supple and enlighten it, and in the whole being to arrange, organize and harmonize it. Everything is in movement, everything is changing; Thy divine action makes itself felt as an ineffable spring of a purifying fire that circulates through all the atoms.’ ⁵² That early she was already working on what would be one of the main tasks of her incarnation on Earth: the yoga of the cells, the effort to build a divine body by transforming the human body.

In the beginning of November 1915 the Richards were back in Paris. ‘In Paris, during the war, there were two kinds of bombardments. The first kind was by a big cannon, called the ‘Big Bertha’, and this Big Bertha launched [enormous] shells on Paris. And the other kind was by zeppelins loaded with bombs which the Germans flew over Paris … One night, on the point of closing the window, she [Mirra] saw a zeppelin in the sky. She heard the alarm which was sounded and at the same time an enormous explosion, and the whole house was shaking.’ ⁵³

‘I have visited trains,’ said the Mother, ‘each one bringing between five and six hundred wounded from the front. It is a moving sight, not so much because of all that those unfortunate men are suffering, but above all because of the noble manner in which most of them bear their sufferings. Their soul shines through their eyes, the slightest contact with the deeper forces awakens it. And from the intensity, the fullness of the powers of true love which could, in their presence, be manifested in perfect silence, it was easy to realize the value of their receptivity.’ ⁵⁴ ‘The last months I spent in Paris were truly fantastic. And it can’t be told. The life in the trenches, for example, is something that cannot be told … All the horrors of the vital world had descended upon Earth …’ ⁵⁵

‘I remember very well that when the war – the First World War – started and I offered my body in sacrifice to the Lord so that the war would not be in vain, every part of my body, one after another [Mother touches her legs, her arms, etc.], or sometimes the same part several times over, represented a battlefield: I could see it, I could feel it, I lived it. Every time it was … it was very strange, I had only to sit quietly and watch: I would see here, there, there, the whole thing in my body, all that was going on. And while it went on, I would put the concentration of the divine Force there, so that all – all that pain, all that suffering, everything – would hasten the preparation of the Earth and the Descent of the Force. And that went on consciously throughout the war.’ ⁵⁶

‘All the hostile forces in the spiritual world are in a constant state of opposition and besiege our gains; for the complete victory of a single one of us would mean a general downfall among them,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo to Mirra. ‘All is always for the best, but it is sometimes from the external point of view an awkward best … The whole Earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations and I am sceptical of finding any place where the clash of struggle will not pursue us.’ ⁵⁷ This means that in Pondicherry he took his share of the universal battering. For in the Integral Yoga the attainment of a universal consciousness is one of the necessary stages, and we know that Sri Aurobindo had already realized that consciousness in the jail of Alipore. And universal consciousness means universal presence and sensitivity.

The following is the first part of Mirra’s entry in her diary on 26 November 1915: ‘The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity. Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew in greatness progressively, methodically, breaking down every barrier, shattering every obstacle, that it might contain and manifest a force and a power which increased ceaselessly in immensity and intensity. It was a progressive dilation of the cells until there was a complete identification with the Earth: the body of the awakened consciousness was the terrestrial globe moving harmoniously in ethereal space. And the consciousness knew that its global body was thus moving in the arms of the universal Being, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to It in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe and one with it; the consciousness became the consciousness of the universe, immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity …’ ⁵⁸ All this happened while the war was raging.