On The Mother

CHAPTER 29

Attack, Defence and Counter-Attack

I

The accident to Sri Aurobindo's leg having occurred on the eve of 24 November 1938, the scheduled Darshan on that day had to be abandoned as related earlier, and the next Darshan too could not be held on 21 February 1939. Then came the Darshan on 24 April, for by then Sri Aurobindo had recovered enough to stand the strain of sitting in the same posture for over an hour while before him flowed the procession of sadhaks and admirers. Except that he could not walk as freely as before, Sri Aurobindo was in good general health. Before the accident, he had had to spend most of his nights and part of the daytime - some ten hours or more in all- writing replies to the letters from the sadhaks. There was now no resumption of correspondence on that frightening scale, and the exceptions were rather rare. Since the proposal was mooted at this time to bring out The Life Divine in book form, the Mother persuaded Sri Aurobindo to take up this work. The sequence of chapters had originally appeared in the Arya month after month from August 1914 to January 1919, and the revision had to be more than notional, and indeed involved also much new writing. Book One saw expansion of the Chapter on "The Double Soul in Man" and the composition of a long chapter introducing the concept of intermediate powers of consciousness between mind and Supermind, the highest and most important of which is Overmind. The exposition of the later chapters was considerably simplified and some new chapters were added. Curiously enough, the progress of the revision ran parallel to the worsening of the political situation in Europe, and once started, Sri Aurobindo seemed to write with phenomenal speed and concentration. As Nirod described the scene:

There he was, then, sitting on the bed, with his right leg stretched out .... No sooner had he begun than followed line after line as if everything was chalked out in the mind, or as he used to say, a tap was turned on and a stream poured down. Absorbed in perfect poise, gazing now and then in front ... he would go on for about two hours. The Mother would drop in with a glass of coconut water ... he took the glass from the loving hand, drank it slowly, and then plunged back into his work! It was a very sweet vision, indeed, the Mother standing quietly by his side with a smile and watching him, and he forgetful of everything writing away; then a short exchange of beatific glances. ¹

He gave installments of the finished script to the Mother, who passed them on to Prithwi Singh for typing; and so the copy went to the Gauranga

Page 408

Press, Calcutta. The first volume subtitled "Omnipresent Reality and the Universe", with its twenty-eight chapters, appeared in November 1939, when Hitler had already overrun Poland and partitioned it with Russia. The second volume of The Life Divine, "The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution", appeared in two Parts in April 1940, synchronising with Hitler's swoop upon Denmark and Norway, followed by the massive invasion of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

We have seen in an earlier chapter how the Arya (in which "The Life Divine" always had pride of place) leapt into life soon after the commencement of the First World War, and now the revision and book publication of The Life Divine likewise coincided with the Nazi lightning offensives against Poland in the East and France and the Benelux countries in the West. Aggression, predatory violence, the descent of darkness, the galloping hooves of Death, the reign of misery, these on the one hand and, on the other, the unfolding of a grand dialectic, the building up of a great synthesis of knowledge, the lighting up of the fires of aspiration, the spirraling of inspiring future possibilities, and the generation of vast circles of peace! Twice within a quarter of a century, Asuric forces had unleashed the dogs of war and destruction and pushed mankind to the brink of the abyss almost; and twice from India, from the same corner, from the same powerhouse of the Spirit, had come the glorious counterblast, the divine affirmation, the ambrosial charter for a new heaven and a new earth. Neither in 1914 nor in 1939 was it a mere fortuitous coincidence; rather was in the proof that the sanction of the Supreme was behind the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And when The Life Divine appeared as a mighty two-volume symphony in 1939-40, it made an immediate impact on sensitive minds, and Sir Francis Younghusband said not long afterwards that it was "the greatest book" that had been produced in his time. Making a pointed reference to the War and the Book, Younghusband wrote in his letter to Dilip:

This war has been a terrible catastrophe and we here in London suffered badly .... But bad as it is the calamity has had one good effect; it has turned men's mind to God .... Ami The Life Divine could not have appeared at a more opportune moment. ²

II

In his lightning Spring offensives against Denmark and Norway, Hitler exploited to the full the tactics of surprise and attack in overwhelming force, and the role of the Norwegian traitor, Quisling, hastened the Nazi victory. Commenting on the happenings, Sri Aurobindo remarked on 15 April:

Page 409

This Quisling of Norway should have been shot. Do you know what he has done? When the Norwegians were defending Trondjheim with their coastal batteries, Quisling sent them directions to stop fighting and when they knew that he had betrayed them it was too late. ³

There was then the massive attack on France and the Benelux countries on 10 May. Churchill now formed a new Government in Britain, which Sri Aurobindo thought was a strong one with most of the ablest men in it. and even the inclusion of Amery as the India Secretary wasn't a bad thing since he had said in an interview that India would "soon have to be considered as force independent".⁴ Churchill's fearless imaginative lead notwithstanding, the run of disasters for the Allies continued. The German army, by a surprise move, had pushed swiftly through the Ardennes, crossed the French border on 12 May, and the Meuse the next day; and on 20 May, it had reached Abbeville. Holland and Belgium capitulated in near-despair, and the British Expeditionary Force and the French First Army were isolated and separated from the main French Army. In an effort to escape the encirclement and the threatened annihilation, the British Expeditionary Force in France successfully organised a mass evacuation at Dunkirk, and in the early days of June, 338,400 British and allied troops were safely landed in England through the deployment of almost 1000 sailing vessels of all kinds. Although Weygand now replaced Gamelin as the Generalissimo, it made little difference to the war situation. The German army relentlessly pressed towards Paris and occupied this 'open city' on 14 June. Churchill's bold and magnanimous offer of a union with France was rejected by the French Government (an action that was deeply deplored by the Mother), and on 16 June, the aged Marshal Pétain formed a new Government with the sole aim of making peace with Hitler on any terms whatsoever. After a few more reverses, and the entry of Mussolini into the war against France, Pétain accepted Hitler's draconian armistice terms on 25 June.

Now when England stood all alone against Hitler and the reign of universal Night as the sole bastion of the Light of Freedom, he ordered an aerial offensive as a prelude to invasion. In the ensuing Battle of Britain waged with unprecedented ferocity and ruthlessness, on 15 August - Sri Aurobindo's 68th birthday - 180 Nazi planes were destroyed over England, and three days later, 152 more met the same fate. The air offensive continued in September also but, undeterred by the strain and the damage, Britain stood the trial gallantly, and at last Hitler was forced to abandon the Battle of Britain.

It was in August 1940 when the air battle over Britain was raging in a frenzy of fury and Hitler was fuming and foaming at his mouth and decreeing the annihilation of his enemies, that Sri Aurobindo wrote "The Children of Wotan". The rhetorical question "Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan?" provokes this infernal response

Page 410

from Hitler's hordes overrunning Europe and threatening to overrun the entire world:

We march to make of earth a hell and call it heaven..

The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven;

The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise ....

Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails.

We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.

When they are asked whether they are not afraid of the backlash of divine punishment, they but gleefully and exultingly cry:

We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at his altar.

Our leader is master of Fate, medium of his mysteries.

We have made the mind a cipher, we have strangled Thought with a cord;

Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature's Lord..

We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan's peace.

We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan,

We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage.

A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will,

We are born in humanity's sunset, to the Night is our pilgrimage.

On the bodies of perishing nations, mid the cry of the cataclysm coming,

To a presto of bomb and shell and the aeroplanes' fatal humming,

We march, lit by Truth's death-pyre, to the world's satanic age.⁵

It was much more than just human foresight or poetic fancy and imagination - it was really yogic vision that saw so vividly and described so arrestingly the full implications of Nazi world dominion. The words came under a terrific compulsion as it were, and the mere utterance of the warning was a gesture to arrest the wild and horrifying Rake's progress towards the Satanic Age.

It is important to remember that during the agonising weeks following swoop upon Denmark and Norway and the lightning breakthrough in the West, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were anxiously following the events, and where necessary or feasible, directing a spiritual force in favour of the Allies. Sri Aurobindo's daily talks, morning and evening, with his attendants throw a good deal of light on his close knowledge of the developing events and his shrewd and often prophetic appraisal of men and events in the global political and military drama. For example, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said on 31 May 1940 that the fog that facilitated the evacuation from Dunkirk was "rather unusual at this time" ­ was it, perhaps, the result of divine intervention? Sri Aurobindo, writing of himself in the third person, has also admitted:

In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever

Page 411

necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and a silent spiritual action... there is a spiritual dynamic power which ... is greater that any other and more effective. It was this force which, as soon as he had attained to it he used ... in a constant action upon the world forces. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results or to feel the necessity of any other kind of action. ⁶

Then, more pointedly, he made this categorical admission:

At the beginning [of the World War] he did not actively concern himself with it, but when it appeared as if Hitler would crush all the forces opposed to him and Nazism dominate the world, he began to intervene .... Inwardly, he put his spiritual force behind the Allies from the moment of Dunkirk when everybody was expecting the immediate fall of England and the definite triumph of Hitler, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the rush of German victory almost immediately arrested and the tide of war begin to turn in the opposite direction. This he did, because he saw that behind Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind: it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing of all the work that had been done for her liberation. ⁷

What Sri Aurobindo was directing in support of the Allies was an overmental, not a supramental force; it was not infallible, for much depended also on the receptivity of the instrument, the nature of the field of action and the Asuric concentration at any particular point of time and place. As Sri Aurobindo explained later:

My present effort is not to stand up on a high and distant Supermind level and change the world from there .... I have always said that the spiritual force I have been putting on human affairs such as the War is not the supramental but the Overmind force, and that when it acts in the material world it is so inextricably mixed up in the tangle of the lower world forces that its results, however strong or however adequate to the immediate object, must necessarily be partial. ⁸

It was a global consciousness that acted as a power behind the scenes, but even when apparently ineffective, it left open the possibility of future rectification.

Page 412

III

From certain remarks made by Sri Aurobindo in the course of his daily talks his room, as also his own explicit admission in the passage quoted above, it should be clear that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were not only closely following the fortunes of the War on he various fronts and the vacillations and snap decisions m the chancelleries an cell ones of the world, but they were also intervening whenever or wherever possible with a direct and potent "spiritual dynamic power" which, though it didn't carry the supramental stamp of infallibility, had at least an overmental amplitude and strength. But many in India and several in the Ashram had very different views regarding the War. Britain's difficulty, they thought, was India's heaven-sent opportunity. There were not wanting people either who admired Hitler openly with an almost idolatrous fervour. Nearly everywhere there reigned the ignorance of the lessons of history, and there lay like a pall the even starker ignorance of the clash of the occult forces behind the visible façade. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, however, based their conclusions and actions on the certain knowledge of the movements in the occult world-stair and the light it threw on the actualities of the current world situation. Sri Aurobindo conned the news and reports in the papers, and listened to the news coverage, while the Mother took a deep interest in the BBC feature 'Front-Line Family' put out daily at 4 a.m. Accordingly, whenever the Mother and Sri Aurobindo intervened with a spiritual force, such action was properly correlated to the realities at the Front and the immediate exigencies of the war situation. For a man who kept to his room in remote Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo's knowledge of military and diplomatic moves was most uncanny, the result as much of the study of history as of yogic intuition and direct vision. Thus, for example, on 1 June 1940 when the evacuation from Dunkirk was in progress:

I was wondering why the Allies were not [digging] something like trenches around Dunkirk to defend it more effectively against mechanised tanks, and I now find that they have done exactly that. ⁹

Again, on 21 June, after the fall of France and the total collapse of French resistance:

Russia is following a dangerous policy for herself. Does she think that Hitler will be so damaged by his fight with England that Stalin will be able to destroy him by an attack? When Hitler gets the whole of France he will build up his position very strongly; then he might try to blockade England, since a direct invasion of England is out of the question. ¹⁰

And thus on 29 June 1940:

Page 413

Are they [the French] such fools as to believe in Hitler's words [that the colonies wouldn't be touched]? .. That is the Asuric influence cast all over the world. The Mother says that m Apocalypse there is a prophecy that the before the millennium when anti-Christ will come everybody will believein his sweet words and be deceived and no one will judge him by his acts. ¹¹

Sri Aurobindo was also always frank and forthright about his so-called pro-British attitude. He wanted that Britain should win, not for the sake of its Empire, "but because the world under Hitler will be much worse. ¹²

IV

During the excruciating weeks when the Battle of France was as yet undecided, Sri Aurobindo had viewed as a "serious matter" the pro-Hitler sympathies of some of the Ashramites. That sort of attitude was basically wrong, and might even have led to the suppression of the Ashram itself. He said firmly on 17 May:

If these people want that the Ashram should be dissolved, they can come and tell me and I will dissolve it instead of the police doing it. They have no idea about the world, and talk like children. Hitlerism is the greatest menace that the world has ever met. If Hitler wins, do they think India has any chance of being free? ¹³

This was forthright, but also packed with compassion; foreknowledge was a cross, and only Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew how much was at stake. The Mother too had told Nolini the same morning:

It is treachery against Sri Aurobindo to wish for Hitler's victory. Sri Aurobindo's cause is closely connected with that of the Allies and he is working night and day for it. ... If Hitler or Stalin wins, spirituality is doomed. ¹⁴

On 20 May, Sri Aurobindo said that Hitler was really possessed by the Asura:

Human beings by themselves are no match for the Asuras .... Here in Hitler's case it is not an influence but a possession, even perhaps an incarnation. The case of Stalin is similar. The Vital World has descended upon the Physical. That is why the intellectuals are getting perplexed at the destruction of their civilisation, of all the values they had made and stood for. They deny the existence of the worlds beyond the physical and so they are bound to be perplexed.¹⁵

The next morning, he expressed astonishment at the attitude of those sadhaks who, while wanting India's freedom, yet admired Hitler the

Page 414

destroyer of human freedom everywhere. Then, a week later, Sri Aurobindo sent the message that Hitler's Germany was not "God's front" but the Asura's. Even with all these clarifications and admonitions, the few doubting sadhaks wouldn't be convinced, and they continued to ask and ask again. How could the Allied Powers be identified with the Divine cause when they were obviously imperfect and inefficient too at the same time? In a letter of 4 July, the Mother wrote to a disciple that in the terrestrial play there was the constant clash between the pro-Divine and the anti-Divine (or Asuric) forces, and men as well as nations became consciously or unconsciously the instruments of these forces:

If the nations or the governments who are blindly the instruments of the divine forces were perfectly pure and divine in their processes and forms of action as well as in the inspiration they receive so ignorantly, they would be invincible because the divine forces themselves are invincible. It is the mixture in the outward expression that gives to the Asura the right to defeat them.

To be a successful instrument for the Asuric forces is easy, because they take all the movements of your lower nature and make use of them, so that you have no spiritual effort to make.

On the contrary, if you are to be a fit instrument of the Divine Force you must make yourself perfectly pure since it is only in an integrally divinised instrument that the Divine Force will have its full power and effect. ¹⁶

Then came August, and Hitler's decision to launch his Operation Sea-lion, preceded by a furious aerial assault, to effect the invasion of Britain. The first air battle was fought on 12 August, with heavy losses for the Luftwaffe. Was it not odd that Hitler should have fixed 15 August - Sri Aurobindo's birthday - as the day of fiercest aerial onslaught on Britain, a definitive offensive meant to cripple her defences and facilitate a quick invasion and occupation? But on that day and on the 18th August as well, the Luftwaffe received heavy punishment, and with his teeth thus blunted, Hitler could only fret and bark against his enemies. There was a major air raid again on 7 September, and over 100 Nazi aircraft were destroyed; and on 13 September, bombs were dropped on Buckingham Palace. Two days later, Sri Aurobindo remarked: "He [Hitler] had really missed the bus!. .. Now another force has been set up against him. Still the danger has not passed." ¹⁷ It was in this context that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother thought that a positive gesture on their part was necessary, and hence they publicly aligned themselves in September by writing a joint letter to the Governor of Madras enclosing a contribution to the Madras War Fund as a token of their complete adhesion to the Allied Cause:

We feel that not only is this battle waged in just self-defence and in defence

Page 415

of nations threatened with the world domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of the civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity. To this cause our support and sympathy will be unswerving whatever may happen; we look forward to the victory of Britain and as the eventual result, an era of peace and union among the nations and a better and more secure world-order. ¹⁸

A donation had already been sent to the Viceroy's War Fund, and other contributions had been made directly to the French Caisse de Defense Nationale "before the unhappy collapse of France". Besides, Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's open and unambiguous avowal of the Allied cause encouraged some of their disciples or their sons and daughters to enter the Defence Forces of India or otherwise participate in the war effort.

V

The preoccupation with the vicissitudes of the War was but one part of the life of the Ashram, and it was also confined only to one section of the sadhaks. No doubt, when the letter to the Governor of Madras was published in The Hindu (Madras) of 19 September and the fact of the donation to the War Fund became public, there was some bewilderment among the Ashram community, and rather something more outside - even a scream of disapproval. The Indian National Congress had directed that the war effort should not be supported, whereas Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, by precept and example alike, did just the opposite. It was natural that people looking up to the Congress leadership should be confused. Although belonging to one of the Allied nations, the Mother took it upon herself to speak the word of persuasive wisdom and commonsense to a distracted disciple:

When you see your neighbour's house on fire, and yet you do not go to help to put it out, because he has done wrong to you, you risk the burning of your own house and the loss of your own life. Do you not see the difference between the forces that are fighting for the Divine and those for the Asuras?.. Churchill is a human being. He is not a yogi aspiring to transform his nature. Today he represents the Soul of the Nation that is fighting against the Asuras. He is being guided by the Divine directly and his soul is responding magnificently. All concentration must be now to help the Allies for the victory that is ultimately assured .... ¹⁹

On another occasion, when her advice was sought on the question of donations to the War Fund, the Mother said simply: "Sri Aurobindo has

Page 416

contributed for a divine cause. If you help, you will be helping yourselves" ²⁰ This found general, if not universal, acceptance among the sadhaks and disciples. The doubters, however, became a diminishing and vanishing number.

All this while, life in the Ashram went on much as usual. The Ashram's departments were expanding, wartime controls and shortages set difficult problems in the context of the steadily increasing number of inmates, and the Ashram, although a sheltered place, couldn't altogether insulate itself from the currents and commotions of the war-torn world. Once The Life Divine had come out, Sri Aurobindo engaged himself in divers ways. There was the War itself, and the need to keep track of its movements and apply correctives wherever possible through the deployment of a dynamic spiritual force; there was the work of revision of his poems and plays for ,publication in a Collected Edition; there was, - as one may infer from their compelling recordation in a series of sonnets, - the shifting kaleidoscope of cosmic experiences; and, of course, there was the work in progress, Savitri.

The Mother had her own exacting schedule of work: Balcony darshan in the morning, collective meditation and selective pranam in the evening, and packed in between, a thousand activities and ministrations. Since, after the accident, the privilege to correspond with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had more or less been withdrawn, the sadhaks were now permitted to talk to the Mother at the time of Pranam after the evening meditation about their problems and difficulties. This again was to impose an unconscionable strain on the Mother, and she was obliged to receive Pranam and listen to the sadhaks for hours on end, shifting the time of her meal and sleep further and further towards the late hours of the night or the early hours of the next morning.

Some idea of the collective evening meditation may be had from this impressionistic account by Surendra Nath Jauhar, a Delhi businessman, who paid his first visit to the Ashram towards the end of December 1939:

We reached the Meditation Hall at about 7 p.m. A few scores of men and women were already seated there with their eyes closed, lips virtually sealed and heads bowed. All the lights had been put out ... there was just a glimmering of light. .. the atmosphere of meditation was infectious ....

Now there was a complete hush. But lo! my eyes suddenly beheld something which looked so utterly superb but so dream-like .... My gaze was fixed at that fairy-like figure whose calm and beautiful face was radiating light and making the whole atmosphere so supernatural that she looked every inch an angel descending from Heaven.

She now stopped and stood at the bend of the staircase, her wide open eyes surveying the scene from one end of the hall to the other. In a few moments she went into a trance .... While she stood there statue-like, I felt as if she was suddenly soaring above .... The halo of serenity and divinity

Page 417

around her was like a circular rainbow in the multi-colours of which my eyes perceived visionary images....

And now suddenly a smile dawned on her lips .... The smile blossomed into a flower and then the petals of blessings and Grace showered down on the entranced devotees .... Her departure was as blissful and mysterious as her advent and my racing gaze in a few moments lost the heavenly track on which trod that divine figure. As the congregation dispersed we learnt that she was the Mother.

Jauhar felt that night that "the fleeting glance of a few moments" had brought to him a felicity which "the toil of a whole life often fails to achieve". This was "the supreme discovery" of his life, the "miracle of Pondicherry" where he lost his heart and won "the soul and the real life". ²¹

When by and by the Meditation Hall was found to be too small to accommodate the growing number of sadhaks and visitors, the Ashram courtyard, suitably expanded with the demolition of some of the smaller structures, became the venue of the evening meditation. The Mother would appear on the low terrace above Dyuman's room (and once Swami Suddhananda Bharati's). From there she commanded a fair and full view of the congregation gathered in the courtyard below, These evening meditations seem to have evoked enriching and liberating experiences for the participants, one of whom, Suvrata (Mme, Yvonne Gaebele) has given fine expression to her feelings at the time. In translation it runs:

O! the sweetness of the evenings in the Ashram gardens,

Where each flower, each ray has a soul ..

Each, each one awaits Thee, O Mother,

And when Thou dost appear, up above the base of black skies,

Lo, our hearts are like the pure monstrance

Where the divine touch comes softly ...

In the silence the gong sounds, a flame

Invisible descends...Joy, Sweetness, Benediction ...

Thou art there now...All is Adoration!

So beautiful and so mighty, Thy forehead crowned with a belt of stars,

Towards us Thou leanest... Thy silk floats in the air. ..

And suddenly, in us, all is wide, all is pure ...

Towards Thee our hearts rise in a rhythm strong and sure,

Thy light answers, enveloping our souls ...

O! the splendour of the evenings in the Ashram gardens ²²

Page 418

VI

A reference has already been made to the Ashram cult of flowers. It was of course much more than a cult;. it was a part of the poetry and discipline of spiritual life. The sadhaks tended the Ashram gardens with infinite love and care, and a thousand flowers seemed to bloom in all the seasons. At time of Pranam, the sadhaks offered flowers to the Mother, and the Mother gave flowers with her blessings to the sadhaks. As mentioned earlier, in the Ashram flowers had their distinctive yogic names, and the offering or receipt of a flower was symbolic of the ardour of the inner aspiration, the magical response of Grace, and the opening of the psychic bud petal by petal, and the progression towards full efflorescence. Remembering her days in Japan, the Mother experimented in flower­arrangement in her room at night, and this was not a means of relaxation, but was always charged with a purpose. Flowers were psychic links between soul and Soul, between Here and Eternity; and every flower in its very fragility carried an elusive and elemental strength defying evil in its every form

like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim hors'd

Upon the sightless couriers of the air. ... ²³

In fact, during the War, the Mother seems to have used flowers as symbols of her spiritual army resisting the mad and maddening march of the "Children of Wotan". The outer flower-formations, flower-emanations, and perhaps even flower-offensives, had links with the potent spiritual­dynamic actions originating from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Only on this basis could we understand what the Mother ordained during the whole course of Hitler's War as described by the French visitor, Lizelle Raymond:

During the whole of the last world war and the two years which followed it, the Mother had all the flowers growing in the Ashram counted with minute accuracy, corolla by corolla, button by button and a meticulously drawn list was made. The disciples, in groups, counted the flowers, thousands of each kind, with blind patience and perfect calm. Visitors used to join them at certain times of the year. In full baskets the flowers were brought to the Mother - a huge offering mute and secret, an ardent sacrifice of beauty to counterbalance the brutal delivery of Nature in one of her crises of destruction. The neutralising Force was acting through the eternal smile of compassion; love was enveloping the dark night, love was answering the calls, calming down the pangs of what was being born and what was dying­ huge sacrifice to the accomplishment of the Word. "All that comes from

Page 419

the Divine must return to the Divine." Tears had become the perfume of offered flowers. ²⁴

There, on the battlefields, lay mangled the flower of Europe's manhood whose death had been decreed by Hitler. And here, in the Ashram, were gathered the day's flowers in an act of adoration to invoke Divine Grace for the early end of the War unleashed by the Asura.

VII

While there was all this solemn resolve to mobilise the flowers of Light against the forces of Darkness, the outer life of the Ashram was not seriously affected by the constraints and anxieties of the War. The Yoga was in its dynamic stage of giving a relentless fight to the Asura, the Lord of Falsehood, the Lord of the Nations! But since all life was Yoga, while other activities went on as before, Hitler's War too was taken in the yogic stride. When the Mother had a few moments to spare after the evening's meditation and Pranam but before retiring, she used to arrange flowers in her room much as a generalissimo deployed his forces on the battlefield. Individual flowers and the specific formations were presumably charged with a nameless occult force of action to counteract movements and possibilities in the distant theatres of the War.

There were also chance spells of unexpected sunshine. On one occasion early in 1940, Champaklal came in and showed the Mother a print of the celebrated 'Mona Lisa', and the following brief conversation ensued:

Mother: Sri Aurobindo was the artist.

Champaklal: Leonardo da Vinci?

Mother smiled sweetly and said: Yes.

Champaklal: Mother, it seems this [painting] is yours?

Mother: Yes, do you not see the resemblance? ²⁵

The Mother had once said, as was mentioned in the first chapter, that she had been an Egyptian princess in one of her early births, and now the implication here is that she was also Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa'. ²⁶ When somebody had asked Sri Aurobindo in 1935 to elaborate his statement that, since creation started, he and the Mother had been carrying on the evolution albeit in disguise, he answered:

That would mean writing the whole of human history. I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another. ²⁷

Page 420

The identification with one or another historic figure had some importance, but not much, for a personality like the Mother with her individual, universal and transcendental aspects of manifestation or non-manifestation; the Mother was the Mother, she was the Mother Divine, and she was a large and unique whole that contained all the multitudes of the manifestation.

Page 421