The Mother

8: The Seven Hidden Years

What is known as Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

The Seal is Put

Paul and Mirra Richard, accompanied by Dorothy Hodgson, left Japan in March 1920 and arrived in Pondicherry on 24 April. They probably arrived at Colombo aboard one of the Japanese passenger-cum-freight ships such as the Kamo Maru and transferred to one of the ships of the Messageries Maritimes with final destination Calcutta and Pondicherry as a port of call. ‘I was on the boat, at sea, not expecting anything – I was of course occupied with the inner life, but I was living physically on the boat – when all of a sudden, unexpectedly, about ten⁹¹ nautical miles from Pondicherry, the quality of the atmosphere, of the air, changed so much that I knew I was entering the aura of Sri Aurobindo. It was a physical experience and I guarantee that whoever has a sufficiently awakened consciousness can feel the same thing.’ ²

Needless to say, their voyage was closely watched by the British police, as testified in a report by the Governor of French India, Pondicherry, addressed to the Minister of Colonies in Paris: ‘I have the honour of informing you of the arrival in Pondicherry of Mr. Richard, barrister … Mr. Richard, who arrives from Japan, where he had gone on a mission, is accompanied by Mrs. Myrrha [sic] Richard, his wife, and a Miss Houdgson [sic]. He seems to have settled in the colony for an indeterminate time. As Mr. Richard has long been in rather steady contact with undesirable extremist Indian elements, his passage was reported to the Government of British India by the British police in several ports of the Extreme Orient where he stopped on his way to Pondicherry. Our neighbours [the British] became concerned by his arrival in India, and the Governor of Madras … has asked me to keep his Government informed of the subsequent movements of Mr. and Mrs. Richard and Miss Houdgson, whom he suspects of bearing correspondence from extremists who have taken refuge in Japan addressed to the refugees in Pondicherry, in particular Aurobindo Ghose.’ Ten years after his withdrawal to Pondicherry, Aurobindo Ghose remained as dreaded as ever.

It may have been the harassment by the British authorities that impelled Mirra to write on 20 February, when still in Japan, the following statement: ‘I belong to no nation, no civilization, no society, no race, but to the Divine. I obey no master, no ruler, no law, no social convention, but the Divine. To Him I have surrendered all, will, life and self; for Him I am ready to give all my blood, drop by drop, if such is His will, with complete joy; and nothing in his service can be sacrifice, for all is perfect delight.’ ³

The ‘hellish’ years of tension and struggle in Japan had left their marks. ‘When I came here [from Japan] I was not worth much,’ wrote the Mother, ‘and I did not give myself many months to live.’ Tuberculosis, rheumatism, influenza, filaria and neuritis, a flurrying heart … you name it and she had it.⁴ Yet she considered her return to Pondicherry as ‘the tangible sign of the sure Victory over the adverse forces,’ which seems to confirm that Paul Richard had in fact been an important factor which caused her departure from Pondicherry and Sri Aurobindo six years before.

Richard’s relationship with Mirra and with Sri Aurobindo now reached a critical point. Mirra and Sri Aurobindo had done everything within their power to give him the chance of being converted, but without success. The time had come for Sri Aurobindo and Mirra’s definite collaboration, ‘the seal had been put.’ Richard sensed this, of course, but at first he refused to give in and became even more demonic than before. He knew perfectly well who Mirra was, but he demanded that she would not take Sri Aurobindo as her ‘Lord,’ that she would take himself instead. His outbursts of frustration and anger became so violent that at times he threw the furniture through the window or took Mirra by the throat, strangling her. She called the force of Sri Aurobindo, and it was his yogic power that saved her on every occasion and made Paul Richard depart in the end.⁵

Long afterwards Sri Aurobindo said in a conversation with some disciples: ‘This yoga is like a path cut through a jungle and once the path is made, it will be easy for those who come afterwards. But before that it is a long-drawn-out battle. The more you gain in strength, the greater becomes the resistance of the hostile forces. I myself had suggestion after suggestion that I would not succeed. But I always remember the vision the Mother had. It was like this. The Mother, Richard and I were going somewhere. We saw Richard going down to a place from where rising was impossible. Then we found ourselves sitting in a carriage the driver of which was taking it up and down a hill a number of times. At last he stopped on the highest peak. Its significance was quite clear to us.’ ⁶

Somewhere in November of that year, Richard left. He went at first to the Himalayas and tried to live the life of a sannyasi. There, in Kotgarh, he wrote three more booklets: To India – The message of the Himalayas; New Asia, supposed to be ‘a practical programme of possible work in Asia’ as required from him by Mohandas K. Gandhi; and Messages from the Future. His publisher in Madras introduced him as ‘a prophet in his retreat on the slopes of the Himalayas,’ ‘one of the foremost living philosophers in the world,’ and ‘one who is in the succession of the true prophets.’ ‘India,’ Richard wrote, ‘thou art the heart of Asia. [This is a literal phrase of Sri Aurobindo’s.] How shalt thou live apart from her! Thou art the heart of Asia as China is her brain, Japan her strong arm. How shalt thou live apart from them!’ And once more he announced: ‘One is coming – whom no one knows; and for whom all are awaiting. One, as it were the New God of this Universe, the God of the new man – of the superman.’ ⁷

After two or three years Richard returned to France, then went to England. He married again, which made him a bigamist. Therefore he arranged a divorce from Mirra, to which she readily consented. Dilip K. Roy, who would soon join the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, met him in Nice, the leading French resort on the Côte d’Azur, in 1927, ‘a wreck of a brilliant man so many had admired.’ ‘… One day in deep melancholy in the revealing stillness of midnight he said that of late he had often felt like committing suicide.’ Then he started talking about Sri Aurobindo, ‘the one man to whom I have bowed down in my life as my superior … and the only seer who has truly fortified my faith in a Divine Purpose working through life transforming it secretly like a leaven as it were, and bypassing those who will not change themselves.

‘Yet my faith has not stood me in good stead and I refused to collaborate with the Author of this Purpose because He didn’t claim me as his sole editor, because I was not entrusted by Him with the sole copyright of the series to come – in a word, because I was too self-willed to be a mere contributor to His Book of Life. I had no humility … Yes, I should have had the humility to accept the light he [Sri Aurobindo] had won and could give others who really aspired for it. I should have enlisted under the banner of subservience. That is why I had to leave his mighty aura of the new creation where the rule of mind is going to be replaced by the Supermind, le nouveau Dieu [the new God] …’

‘Sri Aurobindo is the only man who has won through to this vision and, what is more, has got the power to translate it in life by ushering in a new era of the Supramental apocalypse … Yes, he and no one else has the key of the world to be, and my tragedy is that my love of self-will forced me to leave his aegis and choose the alternative of living a pointless life away from the one man whose society I rate over that of all the others put together. Do you wonder now why I should be constantly harping on suicide?’ And D.K. Roy adds: ‘The last words he said on that last night were: “Oui, pour moi Sri Aurobindo, c’est le Shiva incarné [yes, to me Sri Aurobindo is the incarnate Shiva], an Avatar among mortals.’ ⁸

Later, Richard went to the United States, taught there as a university professor and wrote, in August 1950, The Seven Steps to the New Age. During the 1957 visit of V.K. Gokak and K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar to Japan, Dr. Okawa showed them a letter Richard had written him the year before: ‘Dear Friend, I saw you in a dream the other day and I was thinking of you … I am glad that my dreams of a new Asia have come true. [This was a year after the Bandung Conference.] I have spent a number of years in the spiritual desert of America, but I am happy that a new Asia is being born …’ Paul Richard died in 1968.

If the police had not forgotten about Sri Aurobindo, neither had other people. One of them was Joseph Baptista, who requested Sri Aurobindo to return to British India in order to become the editor of a new English daily paper. It would be the organ of a new political party Tilak and others were intending to form. Another was Dr. Munje, who proposed that Sri Aurobindo take up the presidency of the Indian National Congress. Sri Aurobindo declined both offers politely.

To Baptista he wrote: ‘Pondicherry is my place of retreat, my cave of tapasya …’ ⁹ And in his answer to Munje he said: ‘I am no longer first and foremost a politician, but have definitely commenced another kind of work with a spiritual basis, a work of spiritual, social, cultural and economic reconstruction of an almost revolutionary kind, and am even making or at least supervising a sort of practical or laboratory experiment in that sense which needs all the attention and energy that I can have to spare.’ ¹⁰

After the war Barin had profited from a general British amnesty for all political prisoners. On returning home from the infernal jail in Port Blair, where he had kept himself going by practising yoga, he wanted to become his sejda’s disciple. In April 1920 Sri Aurobindo wrote a long letter to the man who was his brother, comrade in extremist politics and off-and-on companion in the spiritual quest. This letter is one of the ‘stock-taking’ documents in Sri Aurobindo’s life. He makes clear that his is ‘a special way,’ which he calls the Integral Yoga, given to him by ‘the Guru of the world who is within us’ and who ‘gave me the complete direction of my path, its full theory, the ten limbs of the body of the Yoga.’ The old way of yoga ‘would not make the harmony or union of the Spirit and life. It dismissed the world as Maya [Illusion] or a transient Lila [Divine Play]. The result has been the loss of the power of life and degeneration of India … If one cannot rise above, that is, to the Supramental level, it is hardly possible to know the last secret of the world.’ ¹¹

And Sri Aurobindo continues: ‘After these fifteen years [since the beginning of his yoga in 1905] I am only now rising into the lowest of the three levels of the Supermind and trying to draw up into it all the lower activities. But when this Siddhi is complete I am absolutely certain that God will through me give Siddhi of the Supermind to others with less difficulty. Then my real work will begin. I am not impatient for success in the work. What is to happen will happen in God’s appointed time, I am not disposed to run widely and leap into the field of work on the strength of my little ego. Even if I did not succeed in my work I would not be shaken. This work is not mine but God’s. I will listen to no other call. When God moves me then I will move.’

He surveys the situation in India: ‘My idea is that the chief cause of the weakness of India is not subjection, nor poverty, nor the lack of spirituality, nor dharma, but the decline of thought-power, the growth of ignorance in the Motherland of knowledge. Everywhere I see inability or unwillingness to think, thought-incapacity or thought-phobia. However the situation may have been in the Middle Ages, this state of things is now the sign of a terrible degeneration … We are not worshippers of Shakti. We are the worshippers of the easy way … Our civilization has become an acalayatana [something that does not move], our religion a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of religious intoxication. And so long as this sort of thing continues any permanent resurgence of India is improbable.’

He also surveys the situation in Bengal and finds the situation not conducive to developments as yet. For it is clearly not Sri Aurobindo’s intention to remain in seclusion in Pondicherry. ‘These ten years, He [the Guru of the world] has been making me develop it [his Yoga] in experience. But it is not yet finished. It may take another two years, and as long as it is not finished, I doubt if I shall be able to return to Bengal. Pondicherry is the appointed place for my Yoga siddhi [realization], except one part of it – that is, the action. The first centre of my work is Bengal, although I hope that its circumference will be all India and the whole Earth.’

This letter is interesting and amazing because it shows clearly in what measure Sri Aurobindo (and the Mother) had to hew the path of their spiritual progress ‘in a virgin forest’, according to the expression they will use often. Until the end of his life, Sri Aurobindo would keep looking ahead to the moment when he would be able to leave the place of his retreat, ‘his cave of tapasya,’ and take up – physically, bodily, that is to say – his work in the world again. The letter also illustrates the importance of the return and the role of Mirra in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, as we will see in the following section of this chapter.

‘I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples,’ Sri Aurobindo tells Barin. ‘It will be enough if I can get a hundred complete men, empty of petty egoism, who will be instruments of God. I have no faith in the customary trade of the Guru. I do not wish to be a Guru. That at my touch or at another’s some awake and manifest from within their slumbering Godhead and get the divine life – this is what I want. It is such men that will raise the country … Neither am I going back to Bengal now. Not because Bengal is not ready but because I am not ready. If the unripe goes among the unripe what work can he do?’

The Descent

The Sadhana and the work were waiting for the Mother’s coming.¹²

– Sri Aurobindo

‘When I returned from Japan and we began to work together,’ the Mother said, ‘Sri Aurobindo had already brought the supramental Light into the mental world and was trying to transform the Mind. “It’s strange,” he said to me, “it’s an endless work! Nothing seems to get done – everything is done and then constantly has to be done all over again.” Then I gave him my personal impression, which went back to the old days with Théon: “It will be like that till we touch bottom.” So instead of continuing to work in the Mind, both of us … (I was the one who went through the experience – how to put it? – practically, objectively; he experienced it only in his consciousness, not in the body, but my body has always participated.) Both of us descended almost immediately – it was done in a day or two – from the Mind into the Vital, and so on, quite rapidly, leaving the Mind as it was: fully in the Light but not permanently transformed.’ ¹³

This crucial step in the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother needs some clarification. The Mother said almost in passing that Sri Aurobindo ‘had brought the supramental Light into the mental world,’ which is the same as saying that he had realized the Supramental or Supermind in his mental consciousness. These perhaps mysterious words mean nothing less than that Sri Aurobindo had, towards the end of 1920, divinized his mental consciousness. ‘The thinker and toiler’ had, on the mental level which is that of all of us, become the Divine Seer and therefore Doer on that level.

To have an idea of what the ‘Supramental’ or ‘Supermind’ is, we have to take into account that our world is an evolutionary world. There is Matter (the mineral kingdom), the Vital (the kingdom of plants and animals), the Mental (the kingdom of the human being, prepared in the primates), and the Overmind (the kingdoms of the Gods), all with their numerous gradations. We are in the habit of arranging these levels from lower to higher, because the lower is palpably known to us while the higher is something vague we are (possibly) moving towards. But this evolution has been preceded by an involution. The cause of everything is not below, in Matter or in the subconscious and Inconscient, it is – as the Indian wisdom has always known – above: the Ashwatta Tree of the universe is rooted above in That which has manifested everything we are or can be aware of with our present consciousness. That is Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss, which are not only concepts but realms of existence in the highest reaches of the divine manifestation. And the fourth realm of manifestation in which That is still fully Itself is what the Vedas called turiyam svid, a fourth world also consisting of manifold gradations but in which everything is essentially That and conscious of That and therefore One.

For this fourth realm of manifestation, the concrete expression of the divine Unity-Consciousness, Sri Aurobindo coined the term ‘Supermind’ or ‘Supramental’ in his writings in the Arya.⁹² (He also called it, but rarely, the ‘Real-Idea.’) The Supermind is a divine level of existence above everything we, mental beings, normally are and can be aware of. It is even above the levels of the Overmind, i.e. the worlds of the Gods, who dominate the manifestation at present, although, as the reader will recall, fiercely challenged by the Antigods or Asuric forces – and Forces are always beings.

The Supermind belongs to the higher hemisphere of the global divine manifestation where everything exists in oneness and is conscious of that oneness. The (apparent) diversification, or fragmentation, or endless division of the oneness into the world as we know it, is the result of the Fall, i.e. the turning away of the four essential divine Forces from their origin, thereby creating the lower hemisphere of (supposed) separate existence from the God to the atom. The higher hemisphere is the domain of the divine Unity-Consciousness or vidya, the lower hemisphere is the domain in which the Unity-Consciousness has been veiled and become avidya, ignorance. The Gods, who are the cosmic Powers, share as it were both domains, for they are still fully conscious of the unity but at the same time agents of the multiplicity. We humans are living in ignorance.⁹³

And so, on Mirra’s advice based on her experiences in Tlemcen and afterwards, she and Sri Aurobindo descended into the Vital. This was a momentous decision with many concrete consequences. One of them was that Sri Aurobindo had to stop writing for the Arya, of which publication was discontinued in January 1920. ‘When you are doing the Sadhana in the mind, then outer activities like the Arya and writing, etc., can go on. But when I came down to the Vital, I stopped all that.’ ¹⁴ Another consequence was a perceptible physical change in Mirra as well as in Sri Aurobindo. As the Mother said: ‘After consciously identifying itself with the Divine, the entire being even in its external parts – Mental, Vital and Physical – undergoes the consequences of this identification, and a change occurs which is sometimes even perceptible in the physical appearance.’ ¹⁵ The testimony to this astonishing fact is unequivocal.

‘When I began with Sri Aurobindo to descend for the yoga,’ said the Mother, ‘to descend from the Mind into the Vital, when we brought down our yoga from the Mind into the Vital, within one month – I was forty at that time, I didn’t look old, I looked younger than forty, but all the same I was forty – after a month’s yoga I looked exactly eighteen. And someone who had seen me before, who had lived with me in Japan and came here, found it difficult to recognize me. He asked me: “But really, is it you?” I said: “Obviously!”’ ¹⁶ This visitor was William W. Pearson, a follower of Rabindranath Tagore. Pearson was mentioned by name in the police report about Tagore’s first visit to Japan and suspected of being influenced by the pan-Asian propaganda of Richard and Okawa. He visited Pondicherry from Tagore’s Vishva Bharati in April 1923, when Mirra was forty-five.

A.B. Purani visited Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1918 and for the second time in 1921. He reports: ‘During the interval of two years his body had undergone a transformation which could only be described as miraculous. In 1918 the colour of the body was like that of an ordinary Bengali – rather dark – though there was a lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating. On going upstairs to see him (in the same house) [in 1921] I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light. So great and unexpected was the change that I could not help exclaiming: “What has happened to you?” Instead of giving a direct reply he parried the question, as I had grown a beard: “And what has happened to you?” But afterwards in the course of the talk he explained to me that when the Higher Consciousness, after descending to the mental level, comes down to the Vital and even below the Vital, then a transformation takes place in the nervous and even in the physical being.’ ¹⁷

T.V. Kapali Shastry has a similar story. He had first seen Sri Aurobindo in 1917 and found a great change when he saw him again in 1923. ‘He found Sri Aurobindo completely changed in his physical appearance; he had then a golden hue on his body which had become fair in complexion, whereas it was brownish-dark when he had seen him last.’ ¹⁸ The fact is confirmed in the reminiscences of, among others, V. Chidanandam, G.V. Subbarao, Dr. Rajangam and T. Kondaraman Rao, who writes: ‘Sri Aurobindo appeared to me like the great Shiva whom I had been worshipping for some time. He was all golden, not figuratively but actually … With a smooth golden body emitting light and flowing locks over his shoulders glowing bright, and shining eyes penetrating deep into everything, Sri Aurobindo was majestic in his appearance. His gait was royal and when he was pacing to and fro in the veranda, he appeared to be drawing force and using it according to his divine will.’ ¹⁹

It is striking how those who saw Mirra in those years describe her as very beautiful. So Kanailal Ganguly: ‘It was the first time that I saw the Mother. She looked at me for a second. She was very beautiful, looked much younger than her age.’ ²⁰ A.B. Purani writes: ‘This time [in 1921] I saw the Mother for the first time. She was standing near the staircase when Sri Aurobindo was going upstairs after lunch. Such unearthly beauty I had never seen – she appeared to be about twenty whereas she was more than thirty-seven years old.’ ²¹ She was actually forty-three. D.K. Roy recalls: ‘She was exceedingly kind to me and listened to me with great sympathy. I was charmed by her personality at once effulgent and soothing. Her being was haloed by beauty, but it was not an earthly beauty.’ ²² Champaklal said: ‘When I saw the Mother, I felt an extraordinary closeness to her and felt and saw in her an embodiment of beauty.’ ²³

Considering the dates, one may conclude that the descent into the vital took place towards the end of 1920, shortly after Paul Richard’s departure. His absence at once allowed Sri Aurobindo and Mirra to proceed with the yoga in a higher gear. The Mother would later say that the work in the vital lasted for several months. Bearing in mind some of Sri Aurobindo’s utterances, they must have descended into Matter – where ‘all the trouble began’ – between 17 April 1923, the date of Pearson’s visit, and 15 August 1924. For Sri Aurobindo said on his birthday of that year: ‘I am at present engaged in bringing the Supermind into the physical consciousness, down even to the submaterial. The physical is by nature inert and does not want to be rendered conscious. It offers much greater resistance [than the vital] as it is unwilling to change. One feels as if “digging the earth,” as the Veda says … I find that so long as Matter is not supramentalized the Mental and the Vital also cannot be fully supramentalized.’ ²⁴ Sri Aurobindo also said that 1923 was ‘a very hard year in my sadhana.’ They must almost at once have gone deeper, into the Subconscient and the Inconscient. It will be remembered that Matter is not the lowest degree of the scale of being, but that it is a formation of the Subconscient and the Inconscient – the absolute Darkness, the Nihil that is the contrary of the absolute Light and All.

‘It was only when I descended into the Inconscient,’ said the Mother, ‘that I found the divine Presence – there, in the midst of Darkness. It wasn’t the first time. When I was working with Théon at Tlemcen (the second time I was there), I descended into the total, unindividualized – that is, general – Inconscient. (It was the time he wanted me to find the Mantra of Life.) And there I suddenly found myself in front of something like a vault or a grotto … and when it opened I saw a Being of iridescent light reclining with his head on his hand, fast asleep. All the light around him was iridescent. When I told Théon what I was seeing, he said it was the immanent God in the depths of the Inconscient who, through his radiations, was slowly waking the Inconscient to Consciousness. But then a rather remarkable phenomenon occurred: when I looked at him, he woke up and opened his eyes, expressing the beginning of conscious, wakeful action.’ ²⁵

The Foreign Lady

Few companions and followers of Sri Aurobindo knew about the unprecedented yogic sadhana in which he and Mirra were involved, and fewer still, if any, understood its revolutionary significance. Besides, the presence of Madame Richard at Sri Aurobindo’s side was not accepted as a matter of course. For she and Miss Hodgson were now living in the same house as Sri Aurobindo and his companions at 41 Rue Francois Martin. As Nolini writes in his Reminiscences: ‘There came a heavy storm and rain one day [24 November 1920]. The house [where the Mother was staying earlier] was old and looked as if it was going to melt away. Sri Aurobindo said: “The Mother cannot be allowed to stay there any longer. She must move into our place.” That is how the Mother came into our midst and stayed on for good, as our Mother. But she did not yet assume the name.’ ²⁶

Mirra and Dorothy Hodgson’s moving in with Sri Aurobindo ‘caused, understandably enough, a certain amount of uneasiness (if not resentment) among some of the young men living with Sri Aurobindo,’ writes K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in his biography of the Mother. ‘This sudden “invasion” by two European ladies – however unavoidable under the circumstances – was a jolt to the kind of unconventional camp life they had been living so far.’ He also quotes Purani, who wrote: ‘This [Mirra’s moving in] had created a sense of dissatisfaction in the minds of most of the inmates. Man is so much governed by his social, religious and cultural conventions that he finds it difficult to throw them out. Besides, men imbued with strong nationalism would find it difficult to accept one who apparently is a foreigner as an inmate of the house.’ ²⁷

But Purani, on his 1921 visit, could not help noticing that ‘the house had undergone a great change. There was a clean garden in the open courtyard, every room had simple and decent furniture – a mat, a chair and a small table. There was an air of tidiness and order. This was, no doubt, the effect of the Mother’s presence. But yet the atmosphere was tense because Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were engaged in fighting with forces of the vital plane.’

‘I was living in the inner rooms and seeing no one. He [Sri Aurobindo] was going out onto the veranda, seeing everyone, receiving people, speaking, discussing. I saw him only when he came back inside.’ The Mother said this about the period during which she and Sri Aurobindo were staying in the ‘Library House,’ one of the four houses that form the present central Sri Aurobindo Ashram building in Rue de la Marine, and where they moved from the Rue François Martin in 1922. Yet her words are applicable to the time before that move too. Visitors continued to come, many with the intention of being accepted as disciples and staying permanently. ‘There were people in the Ashram [or what was to become the Ashram] who thought that Mother had done no sadhana before she came to India,’ ²⁸ Sri Aurobindo recalled; and he wrote later in a letter: ‘The Mother was not fully recognized or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning.’ ²⁹

Therefore, then as later, Sri Aurobindo had to set matters right. ‘In my own case it [the coming together of him and Mirra, the Mother] was a necessary condition for the work that I had to do. If I had to do my own transformation, or give a new yoga, or a new ideal to a select few people who came in my personal contact, I could have done that without having any Shakti. But for the work that I had to do it was necessary that the two sides must come together. By the coming together of the Mother and myself certain conditions are created which make it easy for you to achieve the transformation. You can take advantage of those conditions.’ ³⁰

What Sri Aurobindo here alludes to is the profound spiritual truth that lies at the basis of the universal manifestation and that we tried to formulate when Mirra became consciously identified with the Great Mother. The One who is All has no gender. To manifest Itself, It had to activate Its Power of manifestation, Its Consciousness-Force or Shakti, who is the Great Mother. To present this truth, the sages have called the part of the One that ‘took the decision’ Purusha, the ‘male’ initiator, and the part that executed the decision Prakriti, the ‘female’ executive, productive force. This is, on the one hand, a spiritual metaphor; in one of her talks at the Playground, the Mother would forcefully deny that there is any such gender difference within the One. On the other hand, in the universe as we know it, the sexes are the concrete expression of the spiritual truth of an initiating and a manifesting Divine. Every God has his Shakti: Brahma and Brahmani, Shiva and Parvati, Vishnu and Lakshmi. But it should be kept in mind that this division of the creative tasks into a male and female part is one of the features of the ‘lower hemisphere,’ and that the infinite Play of the Godhead in the ‘upper hemisphere’ is not bound to a sexual articulation in any way.

This makes us understand in some measure the uniqueness of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the Avatar of the Godhead – i.e. the physical incarnation of the Godhead – in two bodies. For the first time in known history the Godhead has, for Its intervention in the evolution, been embodied in a ‘complete,’ double-poled Avatar, containing the initiating and the creating aspects of Its being in a male and female body. ‘Mother and I are one but in two bodies,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo, and: ‘The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms.’ He would stress: ‘There is one force only, the Mother’s force – or, if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo’s Force,’ in other words his Shakti.³¹ And the Mother would pithily formulate the essence of their relationship: ‘Without him I exist not, without me he is not manifest.’

‘In the beginning Sri Aurobindo would refer to the Mother quite distinctly as Mira,’ reminisces Nolini. ‘For some time afterwards (this may have extended over a period of years) we could notice that he stopped at the sound of M and uttered the full name of Mira as if after a slight hesitation. To us it looked rather queer at the time, but later we came to know the reason. Sri Aurobindo’s lips were on the verge of saying “Mother”; but we had yet to get ready, so he ended with Mira instead of saying Mother. No one knows for certain on which particular date and at what auspicious moment the word “Mother” was uttered by the lips of Sri Aurobindo.’ ³²

‘Most of the disciples did not really understand what the Mother was doing,’ writes Mritunjoy, who had become a disciple himself. ‘They kept a respectful aloofness from her, finding that Sri Aurobindo had given her a very high place in matters of sadhana. She, on her part, did not make herself often visible or easily approachable. The disciples knew that she was a dignified personality but little more than that. Since April [actually November] 1920 she had been living in the same house as Sri Aurobindo and a few others, but she had remained somewhat apart from the daily routine of the sadhaks. They did not really have a chance to understand who she was or what she was preparing for the future … Even at the end of 1925, when Pavitra came, only Amrita and Nolini recognized who the Mother was; the others at most had a formal devotion.’ ³³

For some ‘it was unthinkable that a French lady could be an Avatar.’ When a certain woman wanted to join the Ashram, her mother-in-law, who had always believed the woman to be mad, now saw her suspicions confirmed: ‘What? You don’t worship Rama, Krishna and Shiva, and now you will worship a French woman? Surely you are mad!’ ³⁴ For many, especially the more tradition-minded, it was an almost insurmountable difficulty to accept a foreign lady as being on an equal footing with Sri Aurobindo, let alone as the incarnation of the Divine Mother.

Meanwhile, Mirra, whom we will call ‘the Mother’ henceforth, looked after Sri Aurobindo’s household, kept herself at a distance as much as possible, and enjoyed for seven years ‘an integral peace’ – even while being fully involved in her common yoga with Sri Aurobindo, a spiritual exploration and innovation beyond human imagination.

Throwing Stones

The following incident, narrated here by the Mother,³⁵ took place in December 1921 when she, Sri Aurobindo, Dorothy Hodgson and the others who formed the embryo of the future Ashram were still staying in the Rue François Martin. The house, number 41, was afterwards called the ‘Guest House.’

‘There was a time when we were living in the Guest House … How many of us were there in that house? Amrita was there. [turning towards the disciple in question] Weren’t you, Amrita? Do you remember that day? … We had a cook called Vatel. This cook was rather bad-tempered and didn’t like being reproved concerning his work. Moreover, he was in contact with some Musulmans who had, it seems, magical powers – they had a book of magic and the ability to practise magic. One day this cook had done something very bad and had been scolded – I don’t know if any of you have known Datta [Dorothy Hodgson], it was Datta who had scolded him – and he was furious. He threatened us, saying: “You will see, you will be compelled to leave this house.” We took no notice of it.

‘Two or three days later, I think, someone came and told me that stones had fallen in the courtyard – a few stones, three or four, pieces of brick. We wondered who was throwing stones from the adjacent house … We climbed on the walls and roofs to see if we could detect somebody, or stones, or whatever. We found nothing. That happened, I believe, between four and five in the afternoon.

‘As the day declined, the number of stones increased. The next day there were still more. They started striking specially the kitchen door, and one of them hit Datta’s arm as she was crossing the courtyard. The number increased considerably. The interest was growing, and as the interest grew it produced a kind of multiplicative effect. And the stones began falling in several directions at the same time, in places [inside the house] where there were neither doors nor windows. There was a staircase, but it had no opening in those days, there was only a small bull’s-eye, and the stones were falling on the staircase like this [gesture: vertically]. If they had come through the bull’s-eye, they would have come like this [gesture: slantwise], but they were falling straight downwards. So, I think everyone began to become truly interested.

‘I must tell you that this Vatel had informed us that he was ill, and for the last two days – since the stones had started falling – he hadn’t shown up. But he had left with us his helper, a young boy of thirteen, fourteen, quite obese, somewhat apathetic and morose, perhaps a little idiotic. And we noticed that when this boy moved around, wherever he went the number of stones increased. The young men who were living in the house, Amrita among them, shut the boy in a room with all the doors and windows closed … and the stones began falling [in that room], with all the doors and windows closed! More and more fell, so much so that the boy was wounded in the leg …

‘I was with Sri Aurobindo. We were quietly working, meditating together. The young men cast a furtive glance inside to see what we were occupied with and informed us about the goings on, for it was time to tell us that the affair was taking quite serious proportions. I understood immediately what the matter was.’ In order to exhaust all possibilities of an ordinary, physical explanation, the police were called. When one of the policemen heard that there had been a problem with Vatel, he said at once that he knew what the matter was. But from the moment the police arrived not a single stone fell any more. The Mother was watching from the terrace; when she said to Sri Aurobindo that this was annoying, as the police might think that they had been called for nothing, the stones started falling again at once – ‘quite a long way off from the terrace,’ not a single stone fell near her or Sri Aurobindo. The police left, as there was little they could do. The Mother ordered the boy to be sent out of the house immediately and told everybody to keep quiet and not be afraid.

‘I was in the room with Sri Aurobindo and I thought: “We’ll see what this is.” I went into meditation and sent out a little call. I said: “Let’s see, who is throwing stones at us? You must come and tell us who is throwing stones.” ⁹⁴ I saw three small entities of the Vital, those small entities who have no force and just enough consciousness for one single kind of action. They are of no consequence at all, but they are at the service of people who practise magic. When people practise magic, they order them [these small vital entities] to come to their assistance, and they are compelled to obey. To do this there are symbols, there are formulas.

‘So, they [the small vital entities] came [to me]. They were afraid, they were terribly afraid. I said: “Why do you throw stones like that? What does this bad joke mean?” They replied: “We are compelled, we are compelled! It is not our fault, we have been ordered to do it. It is not our fault!” I felt like laughing, but I kept a straight face and told them: “You must stop this, you understand!” Then they asked me: “Don’t you want to keep us? We shall do anything you ask.” I said to them: “But what is it that you can do?” – “We know how to throw stones.” – “That doesn’t interest me in the least, I don’t want to throw stones at anybody. Could you perhaps bring me flowers? Can you bring me some roses?” Then they looked at each other in consternation and answered: “No, we are not made for that, we don’t know how to do that.” Then I said: “I don’t need you, go away, and see to it that you never come back here, for otherwise you will pay for it!” They took to their heels and never came back.

‘The next morning I went down to pay a visit to the kitchen. There were pillars in that kitchen and on one of the pillars I found some signs with numbers as though scribbled with a piece of charcoal, very roughly drawn – I don’t remember the signs now – and also words in Tamil. Then I rubbed out everything carefully and made an invocation, and that was it, the comedy was finished.

‘But not quite. Vatel’s daughter was the ayah in the house, the maid-servant. She came to us early in the afternoon in a state of intense fright and said: “My father is in the hospital, he is dying. This morning something happened to him. Suddenly he felt very ill and he is dying, he has been taken to the hospital. I’m terribly afraid.” I knew what it was. I went to Sri Aurobindo and said to him: “You know, Vatel is in the hospital, he is dying.” Then Sri Aurobindo looked at me, he smiled: “Oh, just for a few stones!” That very evening Vatel was cured – but he never started anything again.’

Then the Mother explained that she came to know who the magician was, and that he had taken much care not to let a single stone fall within twenty or twenty-five metres of Sri Aurobindo, whom he knew to be a great yogi. Black magic, if prevented from having its effect, rebounds on the one who has employed it, which is why Vatel would have died if Sri Aurobindo had not intervened and allowed him to live. And the Mother also explained that the small stone-throwers were in deadly fear of her because her light is the White Light of creation. ‘The true, pure White Light is the supreme Light of construction. You put one drop upon them: they dissolve as if there had been nothing there at all. And yet this [Light] is not a force of destruction, it is a force of construction, but so alien to their nature that they disappear. It is this they feared, for I had called them by showing them this White Light. I had told them: “Look, here is this. Come at once!”’

The Coming of the Disciples

I do not very readily accept disciples as this path of Yoga is a difficult one and it can be followed only if there is a special call.³⁶

– Sri Aurobindo

It will be remembered that the Mother had some questions ready when she met Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1914. The ‘very first’ question was: ‘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? … 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.’ ⁹⁵ Yet this sounds much simpler than the way it actually happened.

We know that it was never Sri Aurobindo’s intention to stay for ever in Pondicherry (and still less to remain enclosed in his apartment). He was fully surrendered to the Divine Will, which guided his progress step by step, but till the end he would look forward to taking up ‘his work in the world,’ wherever that might happen to be. And he saw as an unquestionable necessity the formation of a group of people interested in and dedicated to the goal of the transformation of humankind and the world. The reason for this necessity was that one person can be cosmically expanded in his or her consciousness and even in his or her vital being, but not physically, as the physical being is materially limited to the body and the cells it contains. The Mother’s ‘very first question’ originated certainly from the same consideration. She realized, as did Sri Aurobindo, that it was necessary that other bodies, representing the human species in its entirety, were around them to try to accomplish the yoga of the Earth, or at least to lay its foundations.

In the letter to his brother Barin, Sri Aurobindo had written: ‘You will perhaps ask: “What is the need of a sangha [community]? Let me be free and fill every vessel. Let all become one, let all take place within that vast community.” All this is true, but it is only one side of the truth. Our business is not with the formless Spirit only, we have to direct life as well. Without shape and form, life has no effective movement. It is the formless that has taken form, and that assumption of name and form is not a caprice of Maya. The positive necessity of form has brought about the assumption of form. And to work out the Integral Yoga the form has to be transformed, which is not possible as a personal undertaking but only as a sangha.’ And Sri Aurobindo added: ‘We do not want to exclude any of the world’s activities.’ ³⁷

Sri Aurobindo had initiated the first attempt at a spiritual community through Motilal Roy, the young Bengali who had taken care of him during his brief stay at Chandernagore, and who had provided him and his companions with some funds to alleviate their poverty during the first years in Pondicherry. Motilal Roy had also come a couple of times to visit Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry. About his last visit, in the company of his wife, Iyengar writes: ‘Motilal Roy and his wife, who had come from Chandernagore, were not very happy with the changes they saw in Sri Aurobindo’s house [meaning the presence of the Mother]. Besides, the Prabartak Sangha [Motilal’s community] wanted them back at Chandernagore, while Motilal himself was undecided whether to go or remain with Sri Aurobindo. On receipt of a peremptory telegram from Chandernagore, Motilal and his wife left Pondicherry in August 1921 and the attempt to close the rift did not succeed. Not long after, Sri Aurobindo dissociated himself from Motilal and his Prabartak Sangha, and decided that he would henceforth try to build on the surest foundation.’ ³⁸

But not that soon. Sri Aurobindo first sent Barin to Bengal in order to reconnoitre the possibilities of collecting funds, contacting interested people and founding one or several communities there. ‘The time is approaching though it has not yet come,’ he writes to Barin on 18 November 1922, ‘when I shall have to take up a large external work proceeding from the spiritual basis of this Yoga. It is therefore necessary to establish a number of centres small and few at first but enlarging and increasing in numbers as I go on, for training in this Sadhana, one under my direct supervision, others in immediate connection with me …

‘The first [centre], which will be transferred to British India when I go there, already exists at Pondicherry but I need friends both to maintain and enlarge it. The second I am founding through you in Bengal. I hope to establish another one in Gujarat during the ensuing year. Many more desire and are fit to undertake this Sadhana than I can at present admit and it is only by large means being placed at my disposal that I can carry on this work which is necessary as a preparation for my return to action.’ ³⁹

On the same day Sri Aurobindo wrote to C.R. Das, the nationalist politician and barrister who had defended him so effectively in the Alipore Bomb Case, and who had remained his friend and supporter ever since: ‘I have now a sure basis, a wide knowledge and some mastery of the secret. Not yet its fullness and complete imperative presence – therefore I have still to remain in retirement. For I am determined not to work in the external field till I have the sure and complete possession of this new power of action – not to build except on a perfect foundation. But still I have gone far enough to be able to undertake one work on a larger scale than before – the training of others to receive this Sadhana and prepare themselves as I have done, for without that my future work cannot even be begun. There are many who desire to come here and whom I can admit for the purpose, there are a greater number who can be trained at a distance; but I am unable to carry on unless I have sufficient funds to be able to maintain a centre here and one or two at least outside.’ ⁴⁰

In this letter Sri Aurobindo distances himself from Motilal Roy. ‘One word to avoid a possible misunderstanding. Long ago I gave to Motilal Roy of Chandannagar [i.e. Chandernagore] the ideas and some principles and lines of a new social and economical organization and education and this with my spiritual force behind him he has been trying to work out in his own way in his Sangha. This is quite a separate thing from what I am now writing about – my own work which I must do myself and no one can do for me.’ One by one the disciples started coming and many asked permission to stay close to Sri Aurobindo – which was the reason why 41 Rue Francois Martin became a guest house.

This was not an established community or ‘ashram,’ ⁹⁶ for there were no fixed patterns or relations, no rules, and little room to house the aspirants who wanted to stay. Still, we have seen that Sri Aurobindo wrote to Barin as early as in November 1922 that ‘a centre’ already existed in Pondicherry. And although the Mother kept herself in the background, she gradually exercised her influence not only in Sri Aurobindo’s household but in the apparently haphazard expansion of the community. ‘All my realizations – Nirvana and others – would have remained theoretical, as it were, so far as the outer world was concerned,’ Sri Aurobindo would say many years later. ‘It is the Mother who showed the way to the practical form. Without her no organized manifestation would have been possible. She has been doing this kind of sadhana and work from her early childhood.’ ⁴¹

Among the aspirants can be mentioned Kanailal Gangulee, who was dumbfounded at seeing two cats on the Mother’s shoulders on the occasion of their first meeting; Dr. Rajangam, struck by the Mother’s beauty; T.V. Kapali Shastri, scholar and tantrik; and V. Chidambaram, who would leave us his precious notes of the evening talks with Sri Aurobindo. There were, of course, also the stalwarts who had played a role in Sri Aurobindo’s political life: Nolini, Moni, Sauren, Bejoy Nag (who had rejoined the group after his internment during the First World War) and Amrita, through whom everyone now had to pass who wished to get an appointment with Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo’s presence in Pondicherry attracted people from all over India: politicians, intellectuals, real yogis and pseudo-yogis, the inevitable bizarre characters – and of course those mentioned above together with others who wanted to become Sri Aurobindo’s disciples. It is noteworthy that, according to Purani, Sri Aurobindo said as early as November or December 1920 that the community of those called to his and the Mother’s yoga ‘was already united though unconsciously.’ ⁴² Now they started coming, almost all of them attracted to Sri Aurobindo for reasons they could not rationalize. It is impossible to narrate all their stories, but a few brief cameos should be included, for the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were an intrinsic part of their life and work.

A.B. Purani was an intellectual and passionate freedom fighter. ‘The concentration of my whole being turns towards India’s freedom. It is difficult for me to sleep till that is secured.’ ⁴³ He was from Baroda and had heard Sri Aurobindo give speeches there after the Surat Conference, at the time of his first meeting with Lele. ‘Ever since I had seen him I had got the constant feeling that he was known to me.’ Purani had subscribed to the Arya and even translated it in Gujarati. He had his first meeting with Sri Aurobindo in December 1918. When he confided to him his passion for the freedom of his motherland, Sri Aurobindo remained silent for a couple of minutes. ‘Then he said: “Suppose an assurance is given to you that India will be free?” – “Who can give such an assurance?”’ ‘I could feel,’ writes Purani, ‘the echo of doubt and challenge in my own question. Again he remained silent for three or four minutes. Then he looked at me and added: “Suppose I give you the assurance?” I paused for a moment, considered the question with myself and said: “If you give the assurance, I can accept it.” – “Then I give you the assurance that India will be free,” he said in a serious tone … You can take it from me, it is as certain as the rising of the sun tomorrow. The decree has already gone forth – it may not be long in coming.”’ Purani visited Sri Aurobindo again in 1921, just after the stone-throwing incident, when he was astonished by the physical change that had taken place in Sri Aurobindo; and he came again in 1923 to stay for good and take charge of the Guest House. We owe him the precious notes of many conversations with Sri Aurobindo, the first data on the life of Sri Aurobindo, and other seminal writings.

Champaklal was a Gujarati Brahmin, born in a family of puraniks, whose profession it is to read the scriptures for the benefit of the local Hindu community. From an early age he had been steeped in the sacred writings and the ocean of stories from the Puranas and other sources. He too was irresistibly attracted by the name of Sri Aurobindo and the reports about him from people who knew him or were his disciples. Together with eleven others he decided to walk to Pondicherry all the way from Gujarat, crossing the Indian subcontinent from the west coast north of Bombay to the east coast south of Madras! Soon most of them dropped out, but then a well-wisher sold his wife’s gold ornaments to buy train tickets for Champaklal and two companions. The trio arrived in Pondicherry on 1 April 1921. Amrita called them to meet Sri Aurobindo ‘at ten minutes to five,’ remembered Champaklal. ‘When we went upstairs Sri Aurobindo was seated there. I saw nothing except him and when I prostrated myself before him I lay there for one full hour. Nobody disturbed me. At the end of the hour Sri Aurobindo placed his hand on my head, blessed me and said: “Tomorrow,” and I got up … You ask me what was my first reaction on seeing Sri Aurobindo. Well, when I had made pranam to him and got up I felt that I had nothing more to do in my life. There was an evident sense of having arrived.’ ⁴⁴ Champaklal would come back to stay for good in 1923 and become a lifelong servitor of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. His brother, Bansidhar, would become an Ashramite four years later.

Dilip Kumar Roy was born into ‘one of the most aristocratic Brahmin families of Bengal.’ His father was a poet and playwright, and Dilip, when still young, made a name for himself as a singer, mainly of religious songs, after having studied mathematics and music in Cambridge. Besides several Indian languages he spoke English, French and German. Among his acquaintances were Mohandas K. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Romain Rolland, Bertrand Russell, Georges Duhamel and Subhas C. Bose. He would become the author of no less than seventy-five books in Bengali and twenty-six in English. His attention had been drawn to Sri Aurobindo by Ronald Nixon, a former British war pilot and Professor of English at the University of Lucknow. (See the footnote on p. 30.)

Dilip K. Roy went to meet Sri Aurobindo in 1924. So deep was the impression Sri Aurobindo made on him that he asked to be accepted as his disciple. Sri Aurobindo found that the right time had not yet come, but Roy thought he had been refused. He went in search of another guru, till one of the yogis he contacted told him that his acceptance by Sri Aurobindo had been postponed because of a hernia in Roy’s left abdomen. ‘Yoga means pressure on these parts, the vitals. Maybe that’s why he [Sri Aurobindo] asked you to wait till it healed up.’ How did this yogi somewhere in a village in north India know? ‘[Sri Aurobindo] just appeared there – yes, just behind you – and told me to advise you to wait. He told me that he would draw you to him as soon as you were ready.’ ⁴⁵ As we have seen, Dilip K. Roy went to Europe in 1927 – actually to make a series of recordings for Edison’s Gramophone Company in New York, but the project did not materialize – where he met Paul Richard. He became a member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1928, but was ‘not a little crestfallen’ because Sri Aurobindo, by that time, had withdrawn and could not be met with any more.

Dilip K. Roy was a moody, tumultuous and rather self-conscious disciple whom Sri Aurobindo had to pacify and encourage by letter after letter – altogether more than 4,000. Sri Aurobindo would even write to him: ‘I have cherished you like a friend and a son …’ and: ‘It is a strong and lasting personal relation that I have felt with you ever since we met … Even before I met you for the first time, I knew of you and felt at once the contact of one with whom I had that relation which declares itself constantly through many lives and followed your career … with a close sympathy and interest. It is a feeling which is never mistaken and gives the impression of one not only close to one but a part of one’s existence … It was the same inward recognition (apart even from the deeper spiritual connection) that brought you here.’ ⁴⁶ Dilip K. Roy would never really accept the Mother despite all the care, material and spiritual, she and Sri Aurobindo took of him.

Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire was a Frenchman with a diploma in engineering from the renowned École polytechnique in Paris. He was exactly twenty when the First World War broke out and he enlisted as an artillery officer. Even during the war he grew more and more interested in occultism and felt a deep attraction to spirituality – against the grain of his education and the Cartesian intellectual environment in France. After the war he was employed as an engineer with the Ministry of Transport and Communications, but in 1920 he left for Japan to study Zen Buddhism. ‘I knew … yes, I knew, for it was a certainty to me – that my life would be a life of spiritual realization, that nothing else counted for me, and that somewhere on Earth, and I mean effectively on Earth, there had to be someone who could give me … who could lead me towards the light.’ ⁴⁷ The Richards had left Japan a few months before Saint-Hilaire’s arrival. In the following four years he ran a laboratory and was involved in ‘many experiences, the study of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, life in the temples and, at night in my home, the continuation of my studies in Indian, Japanese and Chinese spirituality.’

In 1924 Saint-Hilaire travelled to Mongolia in the company of a Mongolian lama. There he stayed nine months in a monastery. Then he felt compelled to travel to India and finally arrived in Pondicherry. (In France he had read the issues of the Revue de la Grande Synthèse, but had not found them of special interest.) ‘[Sri Aurobindo] then told me that what I was searching for could be given to me by several persons in India, but that it was not easy to approach them, especially not for a European. And he went on that he himself was of the opinion that what I was looking for – the identification with God, the realization of the Brahman – was, as it were, the first step, a necessary phase. But it was not everything, for there was a second phase: the descent of the power of the Divine into the human consciousness to transform it, and that this was what he, Sri Aurobindo, was trying to do. And he said to me: “If you want to try this, then you can stay here.” I threw myself at his feet, and that was that.’ Sri Aurobindo would call him Pavitra, ‘the Pure,’ and he would become the totally dedicated secretary of the Mother and afterwards the Head of the Ashram School. Of his first meeting with the Mother he especially remembered her eyes, ‘her eyes of light.’

Cats

An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
Whether she is spirit, woman or cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.⁴⁸

– Sri Aurobindo

‘I have studied cats a lot; if one knows them well, they are marvellous creatures,’ said the Mother. As the young people around her did not understand the Mother’s exact relation with these animals, which in India are seldom kept as household pets, their attitude may be characterized as uncomprehending, to put it mildly. Champaklal remembers: ‘During those early days, Mother herself used to prepare a pudding. Of that pudding she would put aside a small quantity in a small dish; she would add a little milk to it and stir it with a spoon till it became liquid and consistent. She showed me how to do it and was particular that no grains should be left unmashed. And when she passed on the work to me, I followed her directions to the utmost. And do you know for whom this part of the pudding was meant? For cats! Later on I learnt that they were not really cats but something more. You would be interested to know that at times Sri Aurobindo also made fish ready for these “cats,” removing the bones etc.’ ⁴⁹

Nolini reminisces in amazement: ‘The style in which these cats were treated was something extraordinary. The arrangements made for their food were quite a festive affair; it was for them alone that special cooking was done, with milk and fish and the appropriate dressings, as if they were children of some royal family – all went according to schedule. They received an equally good training: they would never commit nuisance within doors for they had been taught to use the conveniences for them.’ ⁵⁰ Everyone thought that the Mother had a special attachment to these cats, but the truth was very different.

When the Mother was in Tlemcen and deeply involved in occult practices, the ‘king of the cats’ made a covenant with her that gave her special powers over the members of his species. Human beings have an individual consciousness, developed in various degrees, but animals have a collective consciousness that is mostly called instinct and centered in the ‘king’ of their species – which goes to show how much truth there actually is in legends and folktales. The ‘king of cats’ is a being from the vital world, which means that the members of his species incarnate vital forces. Cats are generally held to be independent animals, but the Mother said that one can communicate with them on condition that one knows how to apply one’s vital force. Her concern with the cats in the household was indeed a special one: she wanted to find out whether it was possible to make them skip one or several evolutionary steps. Her experiments with these animals were experiments in evolution.

She told many stories about cats, for instance about the one that always slipped under her mosquito net and slept with her head against the Mother’s shoulder, stretched out like a human being. This cat also wanted to give birth to its kittens on its back, like a woman, and the Mother had to intervene to make her take the convenient posture. When the Mother wanted to find out the reason for this strange behavior, one night she saw a Russian woman with three small children whom she adored and for whom she was trying to find shelter. The Mother did not know the exact circumstances, but the woman and her beloved children had obviously been in distress and been killed in desperate circumstances. The vital, motherly part of that Russian woman had in one way or other reincarnated in the cat who, when she had three kittens, did not leave them alone, not even to eat or to answer the call of nature. When the Mother made her understand that she had nothing to fear, the cat brought her kittens one by one and put them between the Mother’s feet; only then did she go outside to do the necessary.⁵¹

Kiki behaved in a still more unusual way: he meditated. When it was time for the daily meditation, he jumped in Sri Aurobindo’s chair and nothing or nobody could remove him from there. As Pujalal remembered: ‘Sometimes before he [Sri Aurobindo] came, one of the housecats found it comfortable to occupy his chair – perhaps as a matter of right – and would not leave the chair for the Master … And the ever-considerate Master never disturbed the confident cat in any way whatsoever, but simply, nay, precariously sat on the little border-space all the time he remained there.’ ⁵² The Mother said: ‘It did not wait for anyone to get into the chair, it got in first itself! And regularly it went into a trance! It was not sleeping … it was in a trance; it used to start up, it certainly had visions … It was in a profound trance. It remained thus for hours together. It was awakened and given food, but it refused to eat: it went back to its chair and fell again into a trance! This was becoming very dangerous for a little cat … But it was no ordinary cat.’ ⁵³ Kiki was a cat ‘which was very, very unhappy about being a cat, it wanted to be a human being. It had an untimely death. It used to meditate, it certainly did a kind of sadhana of its own, and when it left, a portion of its vital being reincarnated in a human being. The little psychic element that was at the centre of the being went directly into the human species, and even what was conscious in the vital of the cat went into a human being. But these are rather exceptional cases.’ ⁵⁴ It was an animal in which the psychic being had skipped many incarnations, many evolutionary psychic gradations to enter directly into a human body. The Mother knew to which person that human body belonged, for she said it was rather a simpleton, but this does not prevent the psychic leap from having been an exceptional and considerable one. ‘It was a cat doing yoga – this is what it was – to become a human being.’ ⁵⁵

The same Kiki liked to play with scorpions and one day he was stung. ‘But it was an exceptional cat. He came to me – he was almost dying – and he showed me his paw where it was stung. It was already swollen and in a terrible state. I took my little cat – he was really sweet – and put it on a table and called Sri Aurobindo. I told him: “Kiki has been stung by a scorpion, he must be cured.” The cat stretched its neck and looked at Sri Aurobindo, his eyes already a little glassy. Sri Aurobindo sat down in front of him and looked at him. Then we saw how this little cat gradually began to recover, to come round, and an hour later he jumped to his feet and went away completely healed.’ ⁵⁶ Sri Aurobindo had looked at Kiki for twenty or twenty-five minutes, after which it fell asleep, and when it woke up an hour later, it was as healthy as ever.

During those years, the disciples who had received permission would gather around Sri Aurobindo and ask him questions about everything under the sun. Sri Aurobindo’s answers were noted down by Chidambaram and Purani, who writes in his introduction to those ‘evening talks’: ‘As years passed the evening sittings went on changing their time and often those disciples who came from outside for a temporary stay for Sadhana were allowed to join them. As the number of Sadhaks practising the yoga increased, the evening sittings also became more full, and the small veranda upstairs in the main building was found insufficient. Members of the household would gather every day at the fixed time with some sense of expectancy and start chatting in low tones. Sri Aurobindo used to come last, and it was after his coming that the session would really commence.

‘He came dressed as usual in dhoti, part of which was used by him to cover the upper part of his body. Very rarely he came out with chaddar or shawl and then it was “in deference to the climate” as he sometimes put it. At times for minutes he would sit gazing at the sky through a small opening at the top of the grass-curtains that covered the veranda of the upstairs in no. 9 Rue de la Marine. How much these sittings were dependent on him may be gathered from the fact that there were days when more than three-fourths of the time passed in complete silence without any outer suggestion from him, or there was only an abrupt “Yes” or “No” to all attempts at drawing him out in conversation. And even when he participated in the talk one always felt that his voice was that of one who does not let his whole being flow into his words, there was a reserve and what was left unsaid was perhaps more than what was spoken. What was spoken was what he felt necessary to speak.

‘Very often some news-item in the daily newspaper, town-gossip, or some interesting letter received either by him or by a disciple, or a question from one of the gathering, or occasionally some remark or query from himself would set the ball rolling for the talk. The whole thing was so informal that one could never predict the turn the conversation would take. The whole house therefore was in a mood to enjoy the freshness and the delight of meeting the unexpected. There were peals of laughter and light talk, jokes and criticism which might be called personal – there was seriousness and earnestness in abundance.’ ⁵⁷ But suddenly the evening talks would come to an unexpected end.