On The Mother

CHAPTER 23

A God's Labour

I

From the beginning of 1926, the exhausting work of managing the community of sadhaks gathered around Sri Aurobindo, and keeping in touch with their sadhana had been devolving more and more on the Mother, but this silent transfer of responsibility and authority became visible only after 24 November, the Siddhi Day. There was also the additional circumstance of the steady growth of the Ashram community year by year: a more than fourfold increase during the 1926-31 five-year period. Some few left the Ashram, but many more were coming in. All this generated the pressures of expansion, new houses, new services, new departmental heads, and the constant concern to make both ends meet. It is true the Mother was Sakambari herself, as Vashishta Ganapati Muni had declared, and hence her touch betokened largesse and abundance. As Barindra Kumar Ghose later acknowledged, after 1926, "The Yogic Power of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo opened wide the doors of the unostentatious Ashram, so long in the grip of want and difficulty, to the steady inflow of sufficiency and prosperity. Spontaneous offerings came from disciples and admirers."¹

On the other hand, the economy of the Ashram was important only as the base for the individual and col1ective Yoga; and it was integral Yoga too, permitting no exclusions, no lop-sided developments, no violent oscillations between sordid indulgence and extreme asceticism. The Mother had to body forth the col1ective effort of the Ashram, and she had also to deploy the necessary force to advance the sadhana of the steadily growing number of disciples. On the administrative side, there erupted unavoidably a variety of problems.

One of the purely personal problems came from the fact that not al1 the sadhaks could converse in French, or even in English. A dozen or more languages were spoken in the Ashram, and the Mother had to turn them into a viable harmony of tongues. She once told Champaklal: "I understand all the languages ... but the man who wants to say something must be clear in his mind, absolutely clear." The Mother had a way of concentrating and entering into the minds of others, and reading what went on there like an open book. "When I want to know about the sadhaks," she said, "I enter into their consciousness and I know what I want to know."²

The Ashram community, again, included men and women of divers races, religions, creeds, castes. But they were in the Ashram, not as representatives of a nation, religion, creed or caste, but simply as disciples of Sri Aurobindo, trying to practise his Yoga. The Mother didn't like

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chronic backward glances at what one had been in the past, for that would only keep alive "an old and wrong mental attitude".³ No doubt old adhesions died hard, and people often wanted to keep one leg in the past while stretching the other towards the future, as it were, to have the best of both worlds! She would have liked her disciples rather to transcend their old affiliations at one go, but alas, there was much recalcitrance, and she had to make allowances for human frailties. All that called for infinite patience and a generous understanding little short of the Divine.

Aside from the difficulties caused by the polyglot nature of the Ashram community - an advantage, certainly, when the larger aim of the Yoga, world-transformation, was taken into consideration, but a disadvantage on a shorter view - there was the complicated problem of the organisation itself. There was the mass of correspondence between the Ashram and the outside world, and between the sadhaks and Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. As Secretary of the Ashram, Nolini Kanta Gupta, not only distributed the replies of Sri Aurobindo and of the Mother to the various sadhaks every morning, he also rode on a bicycle once a week to the French Post Office to get the Mother's foreign mail in two or three white canvas bags. Pavitra helped the Mother in her foreign correspondence, and was even otherwise a constant help. Amrita looked to many of the details of the internal management. Reports from each department came to the Mother every evening, and urgent matters at almost any time. She took careful note of the work done, and often gave instructions in writing as to the work to be completed next day. She had thus to have her hand on the pulse of every activity and of every person connected with the Ashram.

II

There was, then, the sadhana itself. The Mother's daily routine allowed for four or five hours' contact with the sadhaks - for darshan, for collective meditation, for pranam, for individual interviews. There were the visits to the sadhaks' rooms, the drives in the evenings. In the early months after the Siddhi Day, the daily collective meditation was the time when the Mother invoked the Overmind gods into the sadhaks, and there were brilliant - and, occasionally, startling - results. Several had visions - some slipped into trance-like states - and a few had occasional nightmares. It was as though the divine and the anti-divine forces were invisibly caught in an intestine conflict which was also reflected in the life of the sensitive Ashram community. The nucleus of a New World was being fashioned in the Ashram, and the forces of the Old World were up in arms against it! Anilbaran Roy has recorded how one night (12 December 1926) he had a fierce nightmarish attack by the dark Shakti supporting falsehood, strife and death. During the afternoon meditation, three days later, he saw "a

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ball of golden light on a semicircular base of blue above another semicircle of red light.⁴ He has also recorded how, one evening at the time of meditation, a sadhak acted as one possessed by a great force of consciousness and moved his hands and fingers in "a trance-like hypnotic way" and touched one after another as they bowed to the Mother and spoke about them half-audibly but with a "great force and effectiveness". ⁵ There was the Soup ceremony too in the evenings, with its vast potentiality for a quickening of the pace of the sadhana. Once, on being asked about its significance, the Mother explained:

Have you not heard of Divine Communion in this manner? My flesh and blood are to go to you and form your flesh and blood, but instead of actually giving my flesh and blood to you, I sip this soup, put my force into it and give it to be drunk by you.

It was as though the body and spirit of the Mother permeated the very cells and tissues of the sadhaks' being.⁶

There were, then, the fifteen Sunday morning conversational sessions in 1929. There was the tantalising Flower Game too, and there were talks again in the evenings during 1930-31, and other games as well. Once, says Sethna, it was a matter of balancing an orange on one's head; and the Mother herself did this surprisingly well:

It was a revelatory spectacle, showing how one whom we considered the Supreme Divine incarnate could come down to a funny game like this ... whenever I recollect the sight I think of... the second stanza of Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God .... A figuration of Maheshwari, the Goddess of my first vision, seems also in these lines, and the last of them -

Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour -

calls forth from me, as an equally profound disclosure of the sheer Divine, a new phrase, now too about a "golden Mystery":

Lemon on the head of the Mother, our host of the marvellous Hour! ⁷

In short, there was a quickened tempo of activity in the Ashram throughout 1929 and 1930, and this aw a further heightening or intensification during 1931, and all the Mother's time was filled with ceaseless activity of one or another kind. More sadhaks, more visitors, more problems; more buildings and other property to look after; more services to sustain and regulate; more maladies, inner and outer, and more and more complaints, real or imaginary, to tackle ... endless grouses, endless explanations! Why did the Mother smile - why didn't she smile - when somebody made pranam to her? Why did she go into a trance just when she was about to give the soup-cup? Why did she ... why didn't she ... the queries seemed to multiply. Most people wouldn't - or couldn't - understand the truth of the matter. As T. V. Kapali Sastry saw it:

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Her choice is a free choice, Her Will is the only Free-Will. She chooses, accepts or rejects, not for any human reason but for Her own reason. An dthat Reason is Her own Will, free and far above all our human considerations of worthiness or unworthiness. This is the sense of sarva-tantra-svatantra.⁸

While the Mother was divine-human (divine in essence though human in form and outer activity), the disciples - some of them - were yet all too human, and the days followed one after another with their 24-hour load of work, misunderstanding and reaction of consciousness. The daily Pranam, for instance, far from opening the doors of spiritual perception, only too often happened to stimulate in the sadhaks pettifogging speculations. In Nirodbaran's candid words:

Instead of the Pranam being a spiritual function we made it, to our shame, a dramatic function. Far from absorbing what the Mother was giving us, we tried to watch her movements vis-a-vis each sadhak and sadhika - whether she was smiling at the sadhak or was not at all smiling, how much she smiled; if she touched the disciple with one finger or two, or with only the tip of a finger; if she didn't touch him at all .... And the whole ceremony and the entire day were spoilt.⁹

The Mother was certainly divine, but she was after all housed in a human body, a tabernacle sensitised and protected by Yoga, yet a human body still. The schedule of daily engagements was so tight and so taxing that clearly, in a material sense, she was burning the candle at both ends. And one day - 18 October 1931 - she fell suddenly and seriously ill, and from the next day her daily run of activities - Darshan, Meditation, Pranam, Interviews, Talks, Games, the minutiae of Ashram administration - had to be suspended for over four weeks. Then, on 24 November 1931, she resumed her duties, though on a greatly reduced scale.

III

Although the pulse of Ashram life was now beginning to beat again, just as, after 24 November 1926, many a disciple had groused about Sri Aurobindo's withdrawal into seclusion, in October-November 1931 too, the Mother's withdrawal - though for quite other reasons - had caused a good deal of distress and dissatisfaction. As the days passed and still the Mother didn't come out, there were speculations about the Mother's illness. It was rumoured that she was recovering fast and that she could, if she liked, see the sadhaks again. While some of the sadhaks were genuinely anxious, some others were merely impatient, and some petitioned to Sri Aurobindo and asked for light. Where was the harm, they seemed to plead, in the Mother meeting the sadhaks again, receiving

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pranam, and giving her blessings? It needn't prove too tiring, and would help the sadhaks a good deal. Writing to a disciple on 12 November 1931, Sri Aurobindo said that, having had a serious attack, the Mother must "husband her forces in view of the strain the 24th November will mean for her". With a return to the old time-table, a single morning "would exhaust her altogether". With the Mother, a physical contact at the time of Pranam was not "a mere social or domestic meeting with a few superficial movements" that made no difference this or that way:

It means for her an interchange, a pouring out of her forces and a receiving of things good, bad and mixed from them which often involves a great labour of adjustment and elimination and in many cases, though not in all, a severe strain on the body .... I must insist on her going slowly in the resumption of the work and doing only so much at first as her health can bear. ¹⁰

This didn't mean, of course, that the sadhaks had brought about the Mother's illness. Rather was it due, as Sri Aurobindo explained in the course of another letter written four days later, "to a struggle with universal forces which far overpassed the scope of any individual or group of individuals". All the same the illness was a warning against a seemingly too lavish expenditure of the Mother's energies:

Conditions have been particularly arduous in the past owing to the perhaps inevitable development of things, for which I do not hold anyone responsible; but now that the Sadhana has come down to the most material plane on which blows can still be given by the adverse forces, it is necessary to make a change which can best be done by a change in the inner attitude of the Sadhaks .... ¹¹

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - the Mother even more than Sri Aurobindo - had to be at the centre of a struggle with adverse forces, and of a work of change and transformation of the old into a new consciousness. In so far as the Mother was doing the sadhana of the disciples, she had to identify herself with them, in other words sharing their difficulties, even receiving into herself "all the poison in their nature". But she had also to tackle "all the difficulties of the universal earth-Nature, including the possibility of death and disease in order to fight them out". ¹²It was this cumulative strain that had proved a little too much, and precipitated the breakdown. Now there was a clear need to reschedule her daily programme, retaining the essentials but cutting down on the others. Thus, from 24 November 1931 onwards, although the Mother resumed her ministry, it was with a difference; there was to be no harking back to the old spendthrift ways! When this occasioned some murmurs, Sri Aurobindo clarified the position on 7 December 1931:

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As for the Mother drawing back from the old course, routine etc. of her action with regard to the Sadhaks, it was a sheer necessity of the work and the Sadhana. Everything had got into a wrong groove, was ful1 of mixed movements and a mistaken attitude - and consequently things were going on in the same rajaso-tamasic round without any chance of issue - like a squirrel in a cage. The Mother's illness was an emphatic warning that this could not be allowed to go on any longer. A new basis of action and relations has to be built up .... ¹³

He wrote again, three weeks later:

... she was compel1ed by the experience of her il1ness to stand back from the old routine - which had become for most of the Sadhaks a sort of semi­ecclesiastical routine and nothing more .... To resume the soup on the old footing would be to bring back the old conditions and end in a repetition of the same round of wrong movements and the same results. The Mother has been slowly and careful1y taking steps to renew on another footing her control of things after her il1ness .... ¹⁴

Returning to the theme in March 1934, Sri Aurobindo remarked that, since in the way of the Yoga the sadhaks had to be taken inside her personal being and consciousness, their ailments physical and psychological - "their inner difficulties, revolts, outbursts of anger and hatred against her" - were apt to mount attacks on her own body. In some measure at least, this was how she had suffered a serious illness in October­November 1931 on account of "a terribly bad state of the Ashram atmosphere". Sri Aurobindo had then been compelled to "insist on her partial retirement so as to minimise the most concrete part of the pressure upon her".¹⁵

IV

We have no means of knowing how the Mother herself reacted to the sudden set-back in her health in October 1931. That month of withdrawal and tribulation was certainly a period of great anxiety. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had commenced a work of vast significance, nothing less than the structuring of a new heaven and a new earth; and this set-back seemed to cast a question-mark on the entire future of the Yoga of change and transformation of human and earth nature. It asked for all their dual tapasya to beat back the hostile forces, and not only retrieve the lost ground, but also to start the march again towards the supramental horizons.

In the Mother's spiritual diary, Prayers and Meditations, there are but a few entries after her final arrival in Pondicherry on 24 April 1920.

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The one dated 22 June 1920, with reference to some difficulty in life has already been referred to in chapter 14, section V. The next entry is under 6 May 1927, written at a time of crisis six months after the Siddhi Day calling for a fresh affirmation in the face of growing difficulties internal and external:

One must know how to give one's life and also one's death, give one's happiness and also one's suffering, to depend for everything and in all things upon the Divine Dispenser of all our possibilities of realisation, who alone can and will decide whether we shal1 be happy or not, whether we shall live or not, whether we shal1 participate or not in the realisation.

In the integrality and absoluteness of this love, this self-giving, lies the essential condition for perfect peace, the indispensable foundation of constant beatitude. ¹⁶

What though the field be strewn with difficulty and danger? Offer everything - life and death, success and failure, joy and sorrow-- to Him in love and total surrender. Let His Will be done! The result will surely be power, knowledge, love, delight - and the peace that passeth understanding.

Again, more than a year later, on 28 December 1928 there is a tremendous affirmation. The Mother had weathered the storms threatening the Yoga and the Ashram, and what she now wrote had the ring of divine certitude:

There is a Power that no ruler can command; there is a Happiness that no earthly success can bring; there is a Light that no wisdom can possess; there is a Knowledge that no philosophy and no science can master; there is a Bliss of which no satisfaction of desire can give the enjoyment; there is a thirst for Love that no human relation can appease; there is a Peace that one finds nowhere, not even in death.

It is the Power, the Happiness, the Light, the Knowledge, the Bliss, the Love, the Peace that flow from the Divine Grace.¹⁷

With the sanction of Grace, one has everything; without it, one can have nothing. There is a soul here below, and there is the Supreme Grace above. One has only to aspire aright, reject the false, and make complete surrender, ātmasamarpana Divine Grace will do the rest.

From the poise of this centre of certainty, the Mother's ministry took heroic strides during the next three years. For the first time, the Mother's symbol appeared in Sri Aurobindo's The Mother - as if illustrating its meaning and message. * There was already Sri Aurobindo's symbol: the descending triangle signifying the triple truth of Sat-Chit-Ananda and the ascending triangle (formed by life, light and love) of the triple aspiring response from matter; the junction of the triangles forming a square

*For the Mother's own explanation of her symbol, see Collected Works of the Mother, centenary edition, vol. 13, pp. 64-65.

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representing the perfect manifestation and having at its centre the lotus, the Avatar of the Supreme rising from the waters of the Multiplicity or the Creation. The Mother's symbol henceforth published, may be seen as the one primal Power emanating out of itself four major Powers and twelve subsidiary powers of creation. Actually, the two symbols are but two formulations of the same Truth, uncomplicated and immediately suggestive. There is the union of the many in the One, and there is the play of manifestation, alongside of mediation and transcendence. The Mother's symbol, which is a stylised lotus in bloom, has verily reserves of potency. If one must go into greater detail, one may say that the central circle signifies the Divine Consciousness, the four surrounding petals connote Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati, and the twelve outer petals or twelve powers "the vibrations that are necessary for the complete manifestation". Sri Aurobindo also gave his approval to the interpretation of a disciple that the central circle "of the Mother's symbol of Chakra" meant the Transcendental Power, the four inner petals the four powers working from the Supermind to the Overmind, and the twelve outer petals the powers from the Overmind to Intuition and Mind.¹⁸ But of course the real worth of a symbol is in its fusion of connotative richness and aesthetic appeal. "Always the symbol is legitimate," says Sri Aurobindo, "in so far as it is true, sincere, beautiful and delightful, and even one may say that a spiritual consciousness without any aesthetic or emotional content is not entirely or at any rate not integrally spiritual."¹⁹The Mother's symbol has certainly this "integrally spiritual" power, and helps a great deal to spread the Light in the Ashram and outside.

V

To sum up, between 1926 and 1931, there had been initiated certain adventures in consciousness, leading to conquests in the complementary hemispheres of the material and the spiritual. The eruption of the subterranean dark forces, however, had encompassed the breakdown on 18 October 1931. Then followed the lull, the night of dismay and bewilderment, but superseded by the new dawn of 24 November 1931, and on that day the Mother recorded in her diary:

O my Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down into the unfathomable depths of Matter, I have touched with my finger the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity. But in my heart was the Remembrance, from my heart there leaped the call which could arrive to Thee: "Lord, Lord, everywhere Thy enemies appear triumphant; falsehood is the monarch o the world: life without Thee is a death, a perpetual

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hell; doubt has usurped the place of Hope and revolt has pushed out Submission; Faith is spent, Gratitude is not born; blind passions and murderous instincts and a guilty weakness have covered and stifled Thy sweet law of love. Lord, wilt Thou permit Thy enemies to prevail, falsehood and ugliness and suffering to triumph? Lord, give the command to conquer and victory will be there. I know we are unworthy, I know the world is not yet ready. But I cry to Thee with an absolute faith in Thy Grace and I know that Thy Grace will save."

Thus, my prayer rushed up towards Thee; and, from the depths of the abyss, I beheld Thee in Thy radiant splendour; Thou didst appear and Thou saidst to me: "Lose not courage, be firm, be confident, - I COME."²⁰

The prayer had obviously been wrung from the very depths, de profundis. Five distinct but interwoven waves of Thought make the haunting music of this meditative prayer:

(i) I have made this deliberate descent into Matter, but only to accomplish Your work; and I have wrestled with the horror and filth and falsehood of this Nadir of Inconscience;

(ii) Yet my heart is inviolate still on account of my Remembrance of You;

(iii) My heart cried: "Lord, Your enemies - falsehood, doubt, revolt, passion, ugliness - are triumphant everywhere, and life, hope, faith, gratitude and love are in retreat";

(iv) "Lord, give me the command to conquer, and victory will be Thine. Although the world is not ready, I know that Thy Grace will save it";

(v) As I cried to You, I saw You, and I heard You say, "Lose not courage ... I COME."

All the drama of the recent past is here: the entire descent into the Inferno, the unflagging Light in the sanctuary of the Heart, the plenary call from below, the answering Grace from above. In its content and even in its phrasing, Sri Aurobindo's "A God's Labour" dated 1935-36 seems to be of a piece with the Mother's mantric prayer. When Sri Aurobindo read out the poem to the Mother, she is reported to have remarked: "Lord! how could you thus reveal all my secrets?" A God's labour - an avatar role ­ was always like this: hoping to build "a rainbow bridge" between high heavens and the sordid earth, the God descends into the clay, and willingly enacts the human role. But great is the toil, the tribulation and the travail:

I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire

A bed for the golden river's song,

A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night

To bring the fire to man;

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But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my need since the world began ....

My gaping wounds are a thousand and one

And the Titan kings assail,

But I cannot rest till my task is done

And wrought the eternal wil1.²¹

The Mother has passed "beneath the yoke of grief and pain"; she has given "her life and light to balance here the dark account of mortal ignorance.²² She had explored the falsehood "planted deep at the very root of this she had "plunged through the body's alley blind to the nether mysteries"; and she had seen the source of the earth's agonies and "the inner reason of hell". But she was nothing daunted; she would persevere; it was all part of the avatar's role; and she would not rest till her tasks were concluded in accordance with the Divine Will:

A little more and the new life's doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and brighl.²³

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