On The Mother

CHAPTER 46

A Glorified, not a Crucified, Body

I

A few weeks after the supramental manifestation (about which hardly anything was known at the time), a senior Government of India officer met the Mother and asked her when the Supermind was likely to come down and set things right in the world. "You may take it that it is already here," she said. He then asked her how much longer dishonesty would thrive in private and public life, and what honest people should do in the face of the continued triumph of corruption and dishonesty. The Mother answered:

Generally it continues until things have become so bad that everyone is fed up.... For a time the so-called honest people wonder why they should not follow the ways of the others.... So long as dishonesty continues to receive such support, it goes from strength to strength....

.. .If you stick to your ideals even when the opposing forces seem to be too strong, you will have sufficient followers who will make the limits of tolerance narrower....

In a word, all (or the least) that one can do is to set an example, whatever the consequences. The same official was to return four years later and ask the Mother the same question. This time too the Mother's answer was the same, though phrased a little differently:

When you find that your circumstances are beyond your control, take a mirror and see how much you are contributing to them. If you withdraw your support to the evil, it is sure to become weaker and weaker.

There is somewhere in everybody the root of corruption however apparently tenuous or insignificant, and if only one could take the trouble to locate and remove it, this act of self-purification must start vibrations - chain-reactions - with very far-reaching consequences indeed. Before one could claim the right to call others to question, one should purify the source within oneself. As if to reinforce her advice she said:

Sri Aurobindo gave me all the help, and things progressed for thirty years, when there was a sudden halt. I went up to my room, took a mirror and looked into myself and began to make a few changes. Formerly I used to see people very freely. Now I give interviews very rarely. But the effect is much greater, because I now work from above instead of from the same level. The change I have introduced in myself is already being reflected more and more in others.¹

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The universe is so closely knit that anything that happens anywhere - for better or for worse - has an unescapable effect everywhere. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the massive weight of corruption and dishonesty without, if sundry individuals were to follow in utter sincerity the Mother's precept and example, cleansing and transforming vibrations would fill the air with a sense of urgency and effect the change we now despair of bringing about.

II

On 2 and 3 April 1956, a group of ranking Soviet gymnasts, "many of whom were gold medalists and world champions", visited the Ashram and observed its many departments at work. The visitors gave an exhibition of their gymnastic skill, watched the Ashram children in their sports and games, and also arranged a coaching class for some chosen Ashram gymnasts. In a message to the visitors, the Mother said:

We salute you, brothers, already so far on the way to the physical perfection for which we all aspire here.

Be welcome in the Ashram, amongst us. We feel sure that today one step more is taken towards unity of the great human family.

The team responded in appropriate terms, and expressed their genuine appreciation of the Ashram physical education and sports, and the hospitality they had received. In the course of a conversation with Nolini, the gymnasts remarked that they found the love, affection and solicitude which the Ashram children received from the elders so touching. The self-restraint - especially the practice of brahmacharya - by the Ashramites also produced great interest in the visiting gymnasts.

In the course of a subsequent reference to the Soviet gymnasts, the Mother said:

...we saw with what ease they did exercises which for an ordinary man are impossible.... Well, that mastery is already a great step towards the transformation of the body. And these people who, I could say, are materialists by profession, used no spiritual method in their education.... If they had added to this a spiritual knowledge and power, they could have achieved an almost miraculous result.²

The visit of Acharya Vinoba Bhave and his party to the Ashram in July was no less memorable. He was impressed by the Ashram granary, bakery and other services, and he was all admiration for the two sea-walls (for what is now the Tennis Ground and the Park Guest House) constructed by the Ashram engineers and "workers. The system of education that was being evolved in the Ashram elicited his interest and approbation.

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During his interview with the Mother, she told him that he was doing his missionary work perfectly well, and when she was pressed for a message, added: "Aspire for the Divine, work for the Divine." It was after their visits to the Ashram and witnessing spirituality in action that Jawaharlal Nehru and Vinoba Bhave began to stress in some of their speeches the importance of linking science with spirituality so as to serve as a proper basis for the civilisation of the future.

Among other events of the year was the opening of the Sri Aurobindo International University Theatre, accommodating 1500, and equipped with greenrooms, and a projection-room.³ The Mother's play, The Ascent to the Truth, was performed on 1 December with no less than eight backdrops. The University Centre organised an educative Dolls' exhibition, with a special comer for Japanese dolls. The Mother took particular interest in the exhibition, and it evoked wide interest and unstinted appreciation.

One of the Mother's rare outings was to the Island* where Frederick Bushnell, an American disciple whom she had given the spiritual name "Ananta", lived and pursued his sadhana.⁴

One of the new arrivals in the Ashram during 1956 was young Kireet Joshi. He had paid his first visit in 1952, and since his boyhood he had felt dissatisfied with the kind of academic grind that passed for education in India. An admirer of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, even as a student he lived a life of austerity and high seriousness, and felt attracted to philosophy. His father's political preoccupations notwithstanding, Kireet himself evinced no interest in politics; and although he passed the competitive examination and entered the Indian Administrative Service, he felt like a prisoner among the files and the official procedures. In 1955 he came across The Life Divine, which at once resolved his doubts and hesitations, and he decided to resign from the I.A.S. and join the Ashram at Pondicherry. He became a well-beloved child of the Mother and in the fullness of time she appointed him Registrar of the University Centre.

It was also in 1956 that a Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram was incorporated in New Delhi at a place where once the capital of Prithvi Raj had stood. One of the Mother's ardent disciples, Surendra Nath Jauhar had a piece of property with a fine building on the road to Qutub Minar (the road is now named Sri Aurobindo Marg), and he asked the Mother how best this property could be put to use in the service of the Divine. "But why?" she is reported to have answered, "This place will house the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi Branch, and there certainly will be a Shrine, for which I have been keeping Sri Aurobindo's precious relics."⁵ Things moved swiftly, and in her message of benediction and consecration on 12 February 1956, the Mother declared:

* A small island off "Le Faucheur" - an Ashram plantation on the river at Ariyankuppam to the south of Pondicherry.

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Let this place be worthy of its name and manifest the true spirit of Sri , Aurobindo's teaching and message to the world.⁶

This was seventeen days before the Supramental Manifestation of 29 February, and on 23 April, the Mother inaugurated from Pondicherry the Mother's School at the Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram:

A new Light has appeared upon earth. Let this new School opened today be guided by it.⁷

The "new Light" was a reference to the downpour of the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness on the Playground on 29 February, and the Delhi Branch was exhorted to receive the new Light and to be guided by it in all its aspirations, endeavours and actions.

III

Several of the Playground conversations in F956 had a close relevance to the education of the children of the Ashram. The Mother constantly reminded the teachers that merely because something was being done everywhere - or in other educational institutions - it was not an unquestionable reason for doing the same thing in the Ashram as well. "Ah! thank you," she said on 25 July; "Then why do we have an Ashram? Why do we have a Centre of Education?... It is done everywhere? That is just the reason for not doing it."⁸ "If you always move in the same rut/' she had told the teachers on 13 tune, "you can continue indefinitely in that rut. You must try to get out of it." Another point she urged was that if, say at the age of fourteen, having had an experience of the educational grind, a pupil decided that he wasn't interested at all in that kind of intellectual growth, he should be left free to go his own way. Among other rights, let people enjoy, if they want, the right to "ignorance", that is to say, "ignorance according to the classical ideas of education". Again, she discounted the notion that, in the Ashram, too much stress was laid on games and athletics. Actually, people in the Ashram enjoyed a lot of freedom:

...you have been given a fantastic freedom, my children; oh! I don't think there is any other place in the world where children are so free....

However, it was worthwhile trying the experiment.... But it is very difficult to know how to organise one's own freedom oneself.... But all the same, there is something you must find out; it is the necessity of an inner discipline... instead of having the conventional discipline of ordinary societies or ordinary institutions, I would have liked... the discipline you set yourselves, for the love of perfection, your own perfection....⁹

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Like this necessity of an inner discipline, the Mother gave equal importance to the necessity of devising an integral scheme of education valid for both men and women. As she put it emphatically on 25 July:

What we claim is this, that in similar conditions, with the same education and the same possibilities, there is no reason to make a categorical distinction, final and imperative, between what we call men and women. For us, human beings are the expression of a single soul... if our needs and purposes are of another kind and we don't recognise the physical ends conceived by Nature as final and absolute, then we can try to develop consciousness on another line.

She made an appeal to the assembled children to rise above the so-called instincts and compulsions of Nature and be bold enough to aspire for the richer realisations open to the spiritually awakened human beings:

My children... if you really want to profit by your stay here, try to look at things and understand them with a new vision....

We don't want to obey the orders of Nature, even if these orders have millions of years of habits behind them.¹⁰

Then, addressing the girls, the Mother chided those of them that tied "pretty little pink ribbons in your hair or on pigtails hanging at the back". They looked ridiculous! Of course, if they wanted to play at femineity and "to attract attention and please, and be quite pretty, quite seductive", that was another matter. But to want to do all that in the Ashram was truly ridiculous.

The role of the teacher, the qualifications needed of him, teaching as a vocation, as a sacerdocy, the psychic link that should subsist between the teacher and the pupil, these related themes also figured - directly or by implication - in some of the evening conversations. It should not be forgotten that a teacher stands in a special relation with his pupils, and this throws on him enormous responsibilities. Traditionally the teacher is considered the immemorial Guru, the representative of the Divine! Secondly, the teacher should be able to make his pupils work within a framework of outer freedom and inner discipline. The pupil no doubt has the right to decide either to study or not to study a particular subject; but once he has made the choice - say, to study Mathematics, Philosophy or Geography - he should do it "honestly, with discipline, regularity and method. And without whims". Thirdly, the teacher has to be sufficiently a master of himself to be able to control or influence his pupils by the very force of his personality, even in the stance of purposeful silence. The vibrations of insolence and insubordination could be met by explosive anger and fierce chastisement, but that would be the wrong and wasteful kind of response. "The control of the [wrong] movement," says the Mother, "is the capacity to oppose the vibration of this movement by a stronger, truer vibration

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which can stop the other one." And getting into a temper with pupil? would be wholly infructuous in the long run:

Let us see, you have an indisciplined, disobedient, insolent pupil; well, that represents a certain vibration in the atmosphere which, besides, is unfortunately very contagious; but if you yourself do not have within you the opposite vibration, the vibration of discipline, order, humility, of a quietude and peace which nothing can disturb, how do you expect to have any influence?

This means that, fourthly, a good teacher should be a good man, a man imperturbable with an inner quietude, a man of self-respect and self-control:

One must be a saint and a hero to be a good teacher. One must be a great yogi to be a good teacher. One must have a perfect attitude to be able to exact a perfect attitude from the students.

And, finally, it is a grace granted to one to be a teacher, to be put in charge of young minds and souls and sensibilities. Besides, teaching is also the best way of learning, and one of the means of achieving self-mastery; teaching is a sadhana indeed! As the Mother told her congregation on 14 November:

I have never asked anyone educated here to give lessons without seeing that this would be for him the best way of disciplining himself, of learning better what he is to teach and of reaching an inner perfection he would never have if he were not a teacher.... Those who succeed as teachers here... are capable of making an inner progress of impersonalisation, of eliminating their egoism, controlling their movements, capable of a clear-sightedness, an understanding of .others and a never-failing patience....

...it is a Grace given to you so that you can achieve self-control, an understanding of the subject and of others which you could never have acquired but for this opportunity.¹¹

IV

For the pupils and teachers in the Ashram, of course, the supreme Grace was the presence of the Mother herself, her many-sided ministry, not the least of which being the ministry of words in the Playground. Sometimes the Mother found that the children were not quite attentive to what she said; more often, the attention was not of the right kind. As she explained on 25 July, she generally imparted to her answers a touch of universality:

I never give a personal, individual answer; I reply for everybody to profit by it and if, instead of listening, you continue thinking of what is in your head, it is quite obvious that you lose the opportunity of learning something.

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Again, hers was not a teaching of the academic kind, but the higher sacerdocy that transcended mere classroom instruction. For the children to benefit fully from her evening talks, a certain receptive attitude was needed: not outer silence or classroom attention alone, but something deeper, like the rasika's response to great music which is the language of the soul:

...you must create an absolute silence in your head... like a sort of screen which receives, without movement or noise, the vibration of the music.... Well, to understand a teaching which is not quite of the ordinary material kind but implies an opening to something more deep within, this necessity of silence is far greater still....

...you must be absolutely immobile in your head, immobile like a mirror which not only reflects but absorbs the ray of light, lets it enter and go deep within, so that from the depths of your consciousness it may spring up again, some day or other, in the form of knowledge.¹²

Whatever the questions - and these had a wide range - the Mother's answers came from the higher levels of consciousness, the undulating cadences of her voice were carried to the still depths of the soul, and there was a movement towards the desired psychic change. On 18 July, for example, the discussion turns on Radha-consciousness or "the way in which the individual soul answers the call of the Divine", and after a brief silence the Mother says:

This consciousness has the capacity of changing everything into a perpetual ecstasy, for instead of seeing things in their discordant appearance, one now sees only the divine Presence, the divine Will and the Grace everywhere; and every event, every element, every circumstance, every form changes into a way, a detail through which one can draw more intimately and profoundly closer to the Divine. Discordances disappear, ugliness vanishes; there is now only the splendour of the divine Presence in a Love shining in all things.¹³

The Mother cites the classic instance of Prahlad who saw but Vishnu everywhere, and hence the worst dangers to his life devised by his demon-father, Hiranyakashipu, became only divine benefactions. If, then, one could face any danger whatsoever or any enemy or phenomenon of ill-will with this Radha-consciousness or Prahlad-consciousness of the Divine omnipresence, the danger would cease, the enemy would be immobilised or converted, and the ill-will would evaporate.

On 15 August, again, a question is posed: Why does one feel a different atmosphere on Darshan days'? In answering this question, the Mother is outspoken as well as perceptive and reassuring. Certainly, there is a heavy influx of outsiders on those days, and it cannot but disturb the normal atmosphere of the Ashram. Earlier, when Sri Aurobindo used to give Darshan,

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"before he gave it there was always a concentration of certain forces or of a certain realisation which he wanted to give to people"; and so each Darshan "marked a stage forward". But such "special concentration, now, occurs at other times, not particularly on Darshan days", and "the stages succeed each other much more rapidly". Thus, since his passing, and with the number of visitors becoming a "swamping flood", the situation had changed:

There is an invasion of more or less dark and foreign elements, who may come with goodwill, possibly, but who come with an almost total ignorance and throw it all out in the atmosphere; and so, naturally, if one is the least bit open to what is happening, one feels crushed under the weight of this increased ignorance.¹⁴

Many no doubt find "joy" even in the latter-day Darshans - perhaps more excitement than joy - or, may be, one puts oneself "into a more receptive state in which one receives more". Thus it is for each to make the most of the Darshan, insulating himself from the wrong movements of the crowd, and seeking a corrective within for the temporary lowering of the Ashram atmosphere.

For about a year, readings from The Synthesis of Yoga had served as the basis for the evening conversations in the Playground. The readings concluded on 14 November 1956, and on 21 November the Mother distributed Sri Aurobindo's Thoughts and Glimpses and began readings from this little book of sutra-like apophthegms. The problem raised by the opening aphorism is the need for the transcendence of the mental man: "Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar". Reason has served well during the childhood and boyhood of humanity, but the time has come when man must race beyond Reason in quest of supermanhood:

If you want to attain true knowledge, that is, spiritual knowledge, which can be obtained only through identification, you must go beyond this reason and enter a domain higher than the mind where one is in direct contact with the Light either of the Overmind or the Supermind.¹⁵

In another talk, the question posed is about the nature of the adverse forces, and the way they try to influence human beings. If we are not vigilant, we are apt to be invaded by beings of the vital world — a world of ill-will and disorder, basically an anti-divine world - and they thrive on human vibrations like anger, violence, passion and desire. The wrong suggestions invariably come from outside - the vital world - and can be thrown out before they manage to effect their entry. One may fail at first, or there may be relapses, or one may even develop the foolish feeling of fatality. Always the remedy is simple:

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It is always the same: goodwill, sincerity, insight, patience - oh! an untiring patience and a perseverance which assures you that what you have not succeeded in doing today, you will succeed in doing another time, and makes you go on trying until you do succeed.¹⁶

V

The Mother's New Year message for 1957 was more than a mere message; it was an apocalyptic affirmation:

A Power greater than that of Evil can alone win the victory.

It is not a crucified but a glorified body that will save the world.

When the Mother was asked to explain this on 2 January, she gave its aetiology first. She had been reading a booklet received from America giving a review of a photographic exhibition entitled "The Family of Man". The theme was human fraternity, but methodically and convincingly presented through photographs and quotations. The aim of the booklet was to prevent a future war by spreading the true sense of human fraternity. The Mother, however, thought that the whole effort was rather pathetic, and it occurred to her that the same exhibition could be shown in Pondicherry but with a new conclusion. When she was thinking thus, "quite decisively, like something welling up from the depths of consciousness, came this sentence", and she wrote it down - and that became the New Year message.

In a situation - the cold war situation - in which the world but somnambulistically performs the motions of a vast suicide club, what is the way out? Is mere goodwill enough? Is asceticism or renunciation enough? Is patient sufferance enough? Did the crucifixion end human suffering? Did the saints who retreated into the plenitude of their Nirvanic silence ensure the happiness of mankind? Is the Evil of the world less triumphant today because of the preaching of the idea of human brotherhood? What has misfired all along? It is here that the Mother gets at the heart of the problem:

Because until now evil has been opposed by weakness, by a spiritual force without any power for transformation in the material world, this tremendous effort of goodwill has ended only in deplorable failure and left the world in the same state of misery and corruption and falsehood. It is on the same plane as the one where the adverse forces are ruling that one must have a greater power than theirs, a power which can conquer them totally in that very domain.... This force is the supramental force.¹⁷

In the message, there is a reference to "the victory". But a victory only follows a struggle. The supreme struggle is joined now, and it must conclude with the definitive victory, the victory for the Divine, and the Dawn of the New Age.

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One of the contending forces in the struggle now in progress is Evil (and its progeny), and it is pitted against all that is Good. But more than the power of Evil, it is the apparent impotence of Good that depresses us. The "Power greater than that of Evil" has thus to be also a power more effective than that of Good. In the past, there had been the seesaw between Evil and Good, between the Asuras and the Gods, now this side winning, now the other side; but if there is to be, not just another transient victory but the victory - an enduring and final victory - we need a new Power altogether. In the military sphere, a stalemate is sometimes resolved by the deployment of a new weapon of unprecedented destructive potential. In the war in heaven, as described by Milton, the use of the thunderbolt is said to have thrown Satan's rebel army into confusion and compelled a rout. During the World Wars, the use of the tank and the bomber aeroplane hastened the fall of Germany in 1918, and the release of the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki compelled Japan's surrender in 1945. In like manner, though in a fundamental spiritual sense, a new Power is needed to fight the Evil of the world and vanquish (or transform) it once and for all. The Power greater than that of Evil, and greater than that of the current Good of the world, can only be a new Power of the Divine, the power of supramental Truth-Consciousness that manifested itself, according to the Mother's testimony, on 29 February 1956 and continues as an operative power in human and terrestrial affairs. The Power has arrived indeed, and the final victory cannot now elude us for ever.

The proposition having been stated in general terms, there follows a concrete elucidation: It is not a crucified but a glorified body that will save the world. The spiritual is not the antithesis of the material, and the human body is also the home of the Divine. The sun is a glorious wonder;

Nature can be enchantingly beautiful; it is not the bleak or drought-hit landscape but Nature in breath-taking luxuriance that gives us happiness. Why should it be otherwise with the human being? The story of evolution has ranged from lower rudimentary forms of life at one end to Rama, Krishna, Siddhartha and other personalities who have contributed to the march of civilisation and the growth of consciousness. What more - what next? When man's powers - physical, vital, mental, psychic - can achieve a perfect integration so as to be in continuous touch with the Divine, when man surpasses his present limitations of consciousness and makes himself a willing channel of the new supramental light and force, when the body responds in full to the inner transformation so that it changes into an entirely novel type of physical existence, free from all the ills that make it "this too solid flesh" and grows immune to disease, deterioration and even the stroke of death, then indeed, with his entirely awakened and puissant soul supported by an immaculate "glorified body", he will be able to encompass the salvation of the world and establish the Life Divine in our midst.

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The supramental manifestation is a general power, like the power of gravitation for example; not individuals will control this new power, but this new power will use individuals for its own purposes. In the Mother's words -

It [the Power] acts independently of all individual effort... but it creates individual effort and makes use of it.... It is the Force itself, it is this Power which is your individual effort.

When the awakened, receptive, crusading individual becomes eager to collaborate with the new force and opens himself to its action, he is like one born anew, like one sanctified and glorified by the new change, and in his new poise of strength he will be irresistible:

But the true reaction, the pure reaction is an enthusiastic impulse of collaboration, to play the game with all the energy, the will-power at the disposal of one's consciousness, in the state one is in, with the feeling of being supported, carried by something infinitely greater than oneself, which makes no mistakes, something which protects you and at the same time gives you all the necessary strength and uses you as the best instrument... one's will is intensified to the utmost because it is... an infinite universal Power which makes you act: the Force of Truth.¹⁸

The thrust of the message, then, was that Evil could be mastered only by a greater Power, that such a Power was already at work in the earth-atmosphere, and that its infusion would glorify the human body and make it an infallible instrument for the salvation, or transformation, of the world.

VI

A month later, on 7 February 1957, before the collective meditation, the Mother recalled the supramental manifestation of 29 February and declared that the Force was working "very actively, even while very few people are aware of it," and working both in the Ashram and everywhere else "where there is some receptivity" to this Force. A fortnight hence, on 21 February, the Mother entered upon her eightieth year. At the Sports Ground in the afternoon, the Mother opened the swimming pool, on which the sadhaks and workmen had been labouring for days together to get it ready in time. Neither expense nor labour had been spared to make the swimming pool attain the Ashram ideal of perfection. The water was pumped from two artesian wells, treated with alum and filtered through two sand-gravel beds, and finally treated with copper sulphate and chlorine, before going into the pool. On the first day the Mother watched some of the aquatic exercises in an atmosphere of joy and fulfilment.¹⁹

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She was indeed the Mother divine, yet her physical body couldn't claim immunity from the mounting strain resulting from contact with others and the struggle with universal forces. She suffered a slight haemorrhage in her left eye, and on 6 March she told her listeners at the Playground: "My eye won't allow me to read today." On 8 March, she was still unable to read, but told the story of her old friend Mme Alexandra David-Neel, who, seeing a tiger in front of her in a forest, closed her eyes and went into a meditative stillness and immobility that turned away the man-eater. And the Mother concluded:

Now we are going to meditate like her, not to prepare ourselves for Nirvana (laughter), but to heighten our consciousness!²⁰

After readings from Thoughts and Glimpses for a few weeks, the Mother turned to Sri Aurobindo's culminating prose testament, The Supramental Manifestation. One way or another, the aim was to take the listeners to the inner countries of the Integral Yoga, rather like Virgil guiding Dante through the triple worlds in The Divine Comedy. It is seldom a sheerly sunlit path or the primrose path of easy success, for the invisible adverse forces are always around; but Grace too is near at hand. On 3 April there is a reference to the old religions and humanity's current needs. All great world religions had begun with mystic God-vision but had later been imprisoned in their "intellectual dogma and cult-egoism". If only these divers God-visions could "embrace and cast themselves into each other"! While this is Sri Aurobindo's speculation in Thoughts and Glimpses, the Mother carries the idea farther:

And even this unification which already demands a return to the Spirit behind things, is not enough; there-must be added to it a vision of the future....

Religion exists almost exclusively in its forms, its cults, in a certain set of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual life, and above all what the supramental realisation will be, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities and manifestations and makes them the expression, the vehicle of a higher and more universal truth.

It is not a new religion, much less a synthetic religion, that we want; it is a new life that has to be created and sustained by the new supramental Light, Force and Consciousness.

Further, commenting on the two movements of perfection - from above and from below - the Mother said on 24 April:

The higher perfection is spiritual and super-human. The lower perfection is human perfection carried to its maximum limits, and this may be quite independent of all spiritual life, all spiritual aspiration.²¹

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If to the lower perfection the higher spiritual perfection is also added, the results will be outstanding. That was why Sri Aurobindo has always said: "You must work from both ends, not let go of one for the other."

On 29 May, the discussion hinges on Sri Aurobindo's view that humanity in the mass may not "rise in a block into the supermind"; there will be "stages of ascent". Amplifying this, the Mother says that even with our present received body and mind, once they open themselves to the supramental influences, we might

...enter a transitional zone where the two influences meet and interpenetrate, where the consciousness is still mental and intellectual in its functioning, but sufficiently imbued with the supramental strength and force to become the instrument of a higher truth.²²

The infusion of the new consciousness can tone up the body as much as the vital and the mind, and there will emerge a new spontaneity of infallible efficiency undreamt of before.

On 9 July, the Mother saw in the evening a Bengali film, Rani Rasmani, with a picture of the temple at Dakshineshwar and the statue of Kali which, according to the Mother, represented an attempt to recapture "all that world of religion and worship, of aspiration, of man's relations with the gods". For the Mother herself, this was something belonging to the past, for she had "concretely, materially, the impression that it was another world, a world that had ceased to be real, living, an outdated world". She also knew that this old world had been already transcended, and something new, sublime, intense was taking its place. She knew in the very cells of her body that "a new world is born and is beginning to grow". Next day, on 10 July, she made a reference to this experience, and then recapitulated her startling - and wonderful - experiences after the Siddhi Day (24 November 1926), and how when once she held the key to the Overmind creation she had, on Sri Aurobindo's advice, desisted from using it and preferred instead to wait patiently for the Supermind creation. Then, thirty years later, the "new world" was born, and although largely engulfed in the old world, the new forces were then quite active. Her concrete experience the previous evening of the pastness, the irrelevance, of the old world of the gods was itself a proof that the new forces were active:

...the old world, the creation of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, was an age of the gods and consequently the age of religions....

In the supramental creation there will no longer be any religions....

But all this is in the future; it is a future... which has begun, but which will take some time to be realised integrally.... We are now witnessing the birth of a new world; it is very young, very weak - not in its essence but in its outer manifestation - not yet recognised, not even felt, denied by the majority. But it is here... making an effort to grow, absolutely sure of the result.

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But the road to it is a completely new road which has never before been traced out.... It is a beginning, a universal beginning....

...a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails - a real adventure.²³

For the Mother it is an adventure, and her talk is an invitation to dare the wind and the weather, to make an assault on the Everest of Truth, to take a leap into the Next Future that lies beyond the present and beyond the merely continuing future that will only be a repetition of the poisoned past and present.

VII

Two weeks later, on 24 July, the Mother explains the mystique of transformation of the old into the new. A new world, yes, is in the offing - but not something wholly imported from outside: it is the present world itself that is going to be - that is already in the process of being - transformed into the new. The Supermind, the key to transformation, "in principle is at the very bedrock of the material world as it is"; and the manifestation of the supramental consciousness from above (which had occurred almost eighteen months earlier), must now progressively bring the imprisoned Supermind to the surface in order to accelerate the pace of transformation. The powers of resistance of the material world are formidable still, and an intestine struggle is going on; and this is the reason for the touch of sadness and tone of urgency in the Mother's words:

People sleep, forget, they take life easy ^ they forget, forget all the time.... But if we could remember... that we are at an exceptional hour, a unique time, that we have this immense good fortune, this invaluable privilege of being present at the birth of a new world, we could easily get rid of everything that impedes and hinders our progress.²⁴

About three weeks later, on the eve of Sri Aurobindo's 85th birthday, the Mother said that, instead of questions and answers, the children and the sadhaks should have a meditation of remembrance of "his ever luminous, living and active consciousness" that was advancing the supramental realisation. She also described his advent as "an eternal birth in the history of the universe".²⁵ When pressed to explain the phrase, the Mother said on 4 September that the meaning was a little different on the different planes but also complementary:

Physically, it means that the consequences... of Sri Aurobindo's birth will be felt throughout the entire existence of the Earth. And so I called it "eternal", a little poetically.

Mentally, it is a birth the memory of which will last eternally....

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Psychically, it is a birth which will recur eternally, from age to age, in the history of the universe.... That is, the birth itself is renewed, repeated, reproduced, bringing every time perhaps something more - something more complete and more perfect....

And finally, from the purely spiritual point of view, it could be said that it is the birth of the Eternal on Earth....

All that, contained in two words: "eternal birth".

And she concluded by advising those who failed to understand her words or felt that they didn't express the truth properly, to tell themselves, "Perhaps I am not on the plane where I would be able to understand"; and to look behind the words for something more than just words.

Returning on 25 September to the question of an intermediate race (the supermen) between present-day human beings with their link with animality and the supramental race of the distant future, the Mother says,

I think - I know - that it is now certain that we shall realise what he [Sri Aurobindo] expects of us, It has become no longer a hope but a certainty....

...It is as though all the cells of the body were athirst for that Light which wants to manifest; they cry put for it, they find an intense joy in it and are sure of the Victory.

This is the aspiration that I am trying to communicate to you, and you will understand that everything else in life is dull, insipid, futile, worthless in comparison with that: the transformation in the Light.

Next week, the Mother explains how in the supramental vision "one has a direct and total and immediate knowledge of things", but when one wants to describe this knowledge to others, the Mind of Light becomes the mediator:

...things have to be said or even thought or expressed one after another, in a certain order and a certain relation with one another; the simultaneity disappears.... We must necessarily make use of an inferior process to express ourselves, and yet, at the same time we have the full knowledge.... Omniscience is there in principle, it is there, perceptible, but the total power of this omniscience cannot act since it needs to come down one plane to be able to express itself.²⁶

In the meantime, it was felt by some that, while the Ashram was certainly expanding, this was perhaps at the cost of a lowering in the general consciousness of its activities. First, about the conditions of the collective yoga, the Mother had a symbolic dream on the night of 2 July, and she spoke about it the next day in the Playground. The dream or vision was of an immense hotel "in which all earthly possibilities were accommodated in different rooms", but everything was in a state of constant transformation;

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there was order and organisation, and there was fantastic chaos! Somewhere at the centre of the hotel, there was a room reserved for a mother and her daughter who were constantly arguing, the mother wanting to keep things as they were, the daughter wanting something quite new. The daughter then left her mother since they couldn't agree, and went round on a tour of inspection of the hotel, but when she wanted to go back to her room, she wasn't able to find the way. She therefore asked the manager-directress to help; she came with the key of the room and took "all sorts of routes, but so complicated, so bizarre"! The daughter followed patiently, but just when they reached the room, the manager disappeared! As the Mother saw it,

...the mother is physical Nature as it is and the daughter is the new creation. The manager is the mental consciousness, organiser of the world as Nature has made it until now.... The disappearance of the manager and her key was a clear indication that she was quite incapable of leading to its true place what could be called the creative consciousness of the new world.²⁷

What was lacking in that most complicated modern hotel was "the mode of consciousness which would transform this incoherent creation into something real, truly conceived, willed, executed, with a centre which is in its true place... a real effective power". A gnostic or supramental collectivity "can exist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each of its members, each one realising his... identity with all the other members... all as one, within himself... by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realisation". But due to the interdependence between the individual and the collectivity even one who is "the very first in the evolutionary march" is pulled back by the state of the rest. That is why "the effort for individual progress and realisation should be combined with an effort to try to uplift the whole mass and enable it to make the progress that's indispensable for the greater progress of the individual: a mass-progress... which would allow the individual to take one more step forward".²⁸

Again, when the question was put to her on 21 August, the Mother made a fairly comprehensive statement. While the Ashram was certainly a community made up of sundry individuals with widely different characteristics, the progress of the collectivity was as important as that of the individuals. The need for a deeper collective consciousness and individuality had been felt for some time, not only among the Ashram inmates, but among the Aurobindonians outside as well. This feeling had become stronger after the Supramental Manifestation, and there had grown an aspiration, an "inner effort to create this 'collective individuality'". But every change, every shift in emphasis, was bound to produce certain reactions. The need to curtail individualism in the interests of the collectivity had thrown up difficulties of adjustment:

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And above all... this has created a certain inner interdependence which has naturally lowered the individual level - a little - except for those who had already attained an inner realisation strong enough to be able to resist this movement of... "leveling".... The general level is on a higher plane than it formerly was, but the individual level has dropped in many cases... weighed down by a load they did not have to carry before, which is the result of this interdependence.

If the Ashram was to last, it had to "make progress in its consciousness and become a living entity". The challenge to the individuals was that they should increase their aspiration and dedication so as to advance the health of the collectivity through the health of the constituent cells. "We are rather far away in the spiral [of progress] from the line of realisation we had some years ago," she admitted, but added reassuringly, "but we shall come back to it on a higher level."²⁹

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