On The Mother

PART ONE

MIRRA

Do not ask questions about the details of the material existence of this body; they are in themselves of no interest and must not attract attention.

Throughout all this life, knowingly or unknowingly, I have been what the Lord wanted me to be, I have done what the Lord wanted me to do. That alone matter.*

THE MOTHER

*The Mother's message of 22 June 1958 to Flame of White Light by T. V. Kapali Sastry (1960). See also MO 13: 45.

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CHAPTER 1

Childhood and Girlhood

I

Since the beginning of the earth, wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of Consciousness, I was there.¹

THE MOTHER

In this high signal moment of the gods

Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss

A greatness from our other countries came ....

A mediating ray has touched the earth

Bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's; ...

A spirit of its celestial source aware

Descended into earth's imperfect mould

And wept not fallen to mortality,

But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.²

SRI AUROBINDO

SHE was born of affluent parents in Paris on Thursday, 21 February 1878 at 10:15 a.m., and was named Mirra. Her parents had come from Egypt to France only a year earlier. Her mother, Mathilde Alfassa, née Mathilde Ismalun, who was born in an Egyptian banker's family and her father, Maurice Alfassa, a Turkish banker and businessman, were both positivists and rationalists. Her mother's antecedents were aristocratic, perhaps with hoary connections with the House of the Pharaohs. In the course of a talk in 1956, she was to refer to a vision of hers which seemed to imply that in far distant times she had been an Egyptian princess:

About two years ago, I had a vision ... of ancient Egypt ... I was someone' there, the great priestess or somebody .... I was in a wonderful building, immense! so high! but quite bare ... except a place where there were magnificent paintings .... There was a sort of gutter running all round the base of the walls .... And then I saw the child, who was half naked, playing in it. And I was quite shocked, I said, "What! this is disgusting!" ... There was the tutor who came .... I spoke to him, told him, "How can you let the child play in there?" And he answered me - and I woke up with his reply­ saying - I did not hear the first words, but in my thought it was ­ "Amenhotep likes it." ... Then I knew the child was Amenhotep. . ..

And I know I was his mother; at that moment I knew who I was .... ³

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It would be enlightening to know who this Amenhotep and who his mother were, but what impresses us in general is the antiquity of Mirra's antecedents: From other hints or pointers given by her, we may say that her origins go back to remote history and even prehistory and no particular race or country can have exclusive claim on her.

In her early childhood, Mirra was rather unlike others of her age. She was not forward, she was not unduly talkative. And she was averse to being fed forcibly. Her mother often felt annoyed because Mirra wouldn't readily eat certain kinds of supposedly nutritious food. Mirra herself felt no resentment against her mother on account of the periodic exercises in forced feeding! As she used to tell people in later years, normally children know what they need, and it is accordingly unwise to force them to eat a specified kind or quantity of food squaring with our own notions of what is good for them.

Already at the age of five or six, Mirra was a child apart:

The child remembering inly a far home

Lived guarded in her spirit's luminous cell, ...

Even in her childish movements could be felt

The nearness of a light still kept from earth,

Feelings that only eternity could share,

Thoughts natural and native to the gods.⁴

She used to sit quiet in a tiny upholstered armchair specially made for her, and as she meditated she would experience the descent of a great brilliant Light upon her head producing a turmoil inside her brain. She had the feeling that the Light was continually growing, and she wished it would possess her completely. Her propensity to such sessions of solitariness, her moods of taut intensity and edged concern, were a source of worry and anxiety to her rationalist mother. Once, while Mathilde was scolding her, young Mirra suddenly "felt all the human misery and all this human­ falsehood" and tears welled out of her eyes. When Mathilde asked the reason, Mirra calmly replied that her tears were because of the world's miseries, for she indeed felt their weight pressing upon her. A world distressed and crying, crying, as if seeking her protection. In this context of the world's pain, the child Mirra couldn't accept the popular notion of an omnipotent God, "one and all alone". As she was to recall over eighty years later:

That is the thing which had made me completely atheist, if one might say so, in my childhood; I did not accept a being who declared himself to be unique and all-powerful, whoever he might be. Even if he was unique and all-powerful .. he must not have the right to proclaim it! It was like this in my mind.⁵

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In France, at the age of seven

She has also acknowledged how the sorrows of others could strangely and powerfully affect her:

At that time I was not yet doing conscious yoga ... I observed it very, very clearly. I told myself, "Surely it is their sorrow I am feeling, for I have no reason to be specially affected by this person's death"; and all of a sudden, tears came to my eyes, I felt as though a lump were in my throat and I wanted to cry, as though I were in great sorrow - I was a small child - and immediately I understood, "Oh! it is their sorrow which has come inside me."⁶

II

Mirra, thus, seems to have learned to live in a world of her own, with its own laws and correspondences and exhilarations. An analogue, perhaps, to the Parrots' Isle into which Gaffer periodically escapes in Tagore's The Post Office: a land of wonders, of hills and waterfalls, of birds flying and singing! As she was to recollect on 18 April 1956, while talking of her own childhood experiences :

There is a world in which you are the supreme maker of forms: that is your own particular vital world. You are the supreme fashioner and you can make a marvel of your world if you know how to use it. If you have an artistic or poetic consciousness, if you love harmony, beauty, you will build there something marvellous which will tend to spring up into the material manifestation.

When I was small I used to call this "telling stories to oneself'. It is not at all a telling with words, in one's head: it is a going away to this place which is fresh and pure, and ... building up a wonderful story there. And if you know how to tell yourself a story in this way ... this story will be realised in your life ....

The dreams of childhood are the realities of mature age.⁷

When Mirra was five, she began experiencing a Consciousness which' she felt as a Light and a Force around her head, and its brilliance never faded. Even when past ninety, she could testify: "Ever since that time when I was five - during the last eighty-six years of my life on earth - I have always seen that, conducted my life with reference to that; that has been my guiding Light."⁸

And so the child Mirra dreamt, and had visions; she wandered in far-off eternities, she structured forms of beauty and love, and felt more at home in these dream-kingdoms than in the prosaic and rather sordid actualities of everyday life. The Child whom Wordsworth apostrophised in his "Immortality Ode" might be Mirra herself:

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Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy Soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher ...

Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest!

When she was between five and seven years of age, Mirra formed the habit of projecting herself - her own willings and those that came from outside - upon a screen as in a cinema, observing herself moving on it, also arranging and organising them in such a way that she at last became conscious of the true direction of her life. The whole experience seemed terribly interesting to her, "the most interesting thing in the world". It was not surprising, therefore, that when her father once wanted her to go with him to a circus, she firmly declined telling him, "No, I am doing something much more interesting than going to the circus!" This was her reaction too to her friends who invited her to go to a meeting where they were to play together: "No, I enjoy here much more!" she would say, and Mirra was quite sincere.⁹

III

Busy as she thus was with her inner worlds where she was "telling stories" to herself - where she was "the supreme maker of forms" - Mirra did not attend to her formal education. The whole family, as the Mother said in a talk of 25 July 1962, had been fretting about it and looking upon her as a retarded child. She didn't even know the alphabet, and the mild shock of recognition of her own ignorance in this regard occurred only around the age of seven. Her brother, who was just a year and half older, used to bring home from school big pictures with captions below them. One day he gave her one of them and she asked him what was written on it. When he told her to read for herself, she asked him to teach her how to do it and he brought her a primer. And, "on the third day I started reading. That's how I learned ... in about a week I knew what should have taken me years to learn."

Around the age of ten she went to a private school, and advanced rapidly enough to be at the head of her class. She had made up for lost time, and there was to be no looking back. Mirra was generally at the top of her class, and won prizes in several subjects. If she started formal school education a little later than other children of her age, she was quite ahead of them in the purity and maturity of her consciousness and sensibility.

She also learned drawing and painting and the piano. And in due course, she grew into an accomplished and rather original artist. About artistic development, she once remarked in later years: "It is impossible to learn the piano or to do painting unless the consciousness enters into the

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hand and the hands become conscious independently of the head." It was an experience that she had long ago.¹⁰

Like her scholastic studies, Mirra's involvement in sports was also unconventional. "I remember having learnt to play tennis when I was eight," she recalled later; it was a "passion" with her, but she seldom played with people of her own age. "I always went to the best players," she confessed, and although they at times looked surprised, they played with her in the end. Of course she never won, but she learnt much.¹¹

Another dimension to her education: once, when as a girl of twelve or thirteen, she was at her grandmother's place, Mirra saw two relatives - a boy and a girl- kissing each other oblivious of the world. It was at first no more than a scene of something new to her. For Mirra "did not know anything about this love". But she could see that they were blissfully happy. Suddenly, however, as though an electric current had passed through her, Mirra too experienced the same joy "even more intensely than them, without the act".¹² Shall we say it was the love that is at the heart of creation and rules the universe? Was it thus she first gained an inkling into one of the familiar manifestations of the sheer Delight of Existence?

Earnest and serious as she was as a rule, on those rare occasions when she complained about food or any such small matter, her mother would tell Mirra to forget about trifles and concentrate on her studies or her work. "You are born to realise the highest Ideal," she would say and send her packing.¹³ Undoubtedly this strictness of her mother did a great favour to little Mirra, and taught her the true discipline of life.

Young and taciturn as she generally was, there was still no question of anybody slighting her or just taking her for granted. Once when a bully, a thirteen-year old boy, started teasing her and other girls, a tremendous wrath suddenly surged up in Mirra, and she seized and lifted him up and threw him down with a thud. It was a lesson the bully would never forget!¹⁴

When she was about fifteen years old, Mirra began taking formal lessons in painting in the Academie Jufian, a noted art school in Paris, and she was the youngest of the pupils in her class. But she was so poised and mature in her behaviour that the other art students called her the Sphinx, and often brought their problems to her. In her quiet way she exuded so much authority that, in a time of crisis, it was the force of her persuasion and the power of her commanding eyes that helped to reinstate a monitress who had been unjustly dismissed from service by the Head of the School.¹⁵

Another interesting facet of Mirra's character was that, even in her childhood and early girlhood days, she wouldn't fuss about ailments and illnesses, nor grow panicky about developing or contracting them. She avoided medication as a matter of principle and sound practical sense. When she had pimples on her throat, she cured herself by rubbing them out! On the use of will-power in this treatment she commented that "it

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was very interesting to see how it worked physiologically". There were "some kind of white cells" charged with the duty of fighting the inroads of diseases, and such cells were apt to increase when a strong will was exerted. In that connection an eminent French physician had told her that it needed a strong will to cure human diseases. ¹⁶

IV

The ardours of formal education, the initiation into the Fine Arts, the discipline of sports, the natural qualities of leadership, the journeys into the inner realms with the compulsion to tell 'stories' to herself and to structure ideal forms, the identification with the world's load of pain ­ these, in their totality, were exacting enough. And she sorrowed with those she saw sorrowing, and death could deeply affect her. Why should death in somebody's house - quite a stranger's too - and the charged atmosphere of bereavement there involve so many others also in its ever-widening ambit?^l7 Perhaps, the apparent separativity and assumed autonomy of 'individual man' didn't really correspond to the inner reality! One should mark the movements of one's consciousness, the vibrations of the vital world, and then one might stumble upon this seminal Truth:

There's nothing separate or independent; there is only one Substance, one Force, one Consciousness, one Will, which moves in countless ways of being .

.. .if one steps back and follows the movement, no matter which line of movement, one can see very clearly that the vibrations propagate them­ selves, one following another, one following another, and that in fact there is only one unity - unity of Substance, unity of Consciousness, unity of Will. And that is the only reality. ¹⁸

It would thus appear that from the age of seven or eight onwards, Mirra was having intimations and experiences whose full import she could gauge only much later. In other words, she was already doing Yoga, though as yet unconsciously; but the insights and inscapes of the time were certainly not of the kind that girls of her age ordinarily had. Mirra vaguely sensed a Presence, a Power, a Love, a marvellous Benevolence, an ineffable Delight - and she was also, with the passage of the months and years, trying to hew pathways across the disconcerting jungles of illusive Appearance to the sanctuary of the Real, the Absolute, the Perfect, the splendorous Divine:

An invisible sunlight ran within her veins

And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliancies

That woke a wider sight than earth could know. ...

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All objects were to her shapes of living selves ...

Each was a symbol power, a vivid flash

In the circuit of infinities half-known;

Nothing was alien or inanimate,

Nothing without its meaning or its call.

For with a greater Nature she was one.¹⁹

V

When she was about twelve, Mirra used to go for solitary walks in the woods at Fontainebleau, and she would often sit for hours at the foot of a tree losing herself in communion with Nature. It was a singular concatenation, the ardent young girl self-absorbed in the infinitudes, and the silent ageless tree with the imperious woods around: quite an equation of the mathematics of the Spirit! The very birds and squirrels made friends with her, and would often perch on her, or crawl lovingly over her. And, indeed, Mirra felt perfectly at peace there in the bosom of Nature, and experienced a sense of identity. Some of the trees at Fontainebleau were supposed to be quite ancient - perhaps two thousand years old or more ­ and it was as though Mirra had captivated the heart of primordial Nature. The trees almost seemed to understand her, and whisper in a familiar language to her. The spirit of a tree had once become aware of the talk of cutting it down, and when Mirra went to sit under it began soliciting her to somehow save it from the threatened destruction. In later life she intervened in several cases and succeeded in staying the murderous axe.²⁰ Her companionship with Nature was thus no pose, no mere figure of speech, but a deep commitment flowing from a sense of spiritual oneness with all life, all Nature.

On one occasion, however, as Mirra was climbing a hill in the Fontainebleau woods, her foot slipped, and she started falling down. Would she hit the flint stones below? She was unafraid all the same, and she felt as though Somebody was supporting her during her seemingly precipitate fall, and she safely reached the ground as though nothing had happened, as though she had but leisurely walked down the hill.²¹

From the age of twelve, Mirra started doing what we might term Yoga, and her deep interest in occultism also sprouted at about the same time. Doing Yoga meant aspiring steadily for union with the Divine, and this led to the recurrence of certain dreams, visions, and even realisations. She read, and she pondered, and she had long meditative sessions. It was during this period that the faces of certain saintly personages began to appear in her dreams and visions, and almost invariably she would meet these same persons in real life not long after. As she recalled these experiences decades later in 1920:

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Between 11 and 13 a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man's possibility of uniting with Him, of realising Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon earth in a life divine. This, along with a practical discipline for its fulfilment, was given to me during my body's sleep by several teachers ....

Later on, as the interior and exterior development proceeded, the spiritual and psychic relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent.. .. ²²

This auspicious being who generated so special a psychic and spiritual relationship, but whom she wasn't soon to encounter on the physical plane, she was led to call 'Krishna', the Bhagawan of the Gita, although at that time she knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions. But the being appeared with such persistence, such regularity, such clarity of outline and aura of divinity, that she knew it was only a question of time and that she would one day be led up to him and enabled to collaborate with him in the divine work to be done for the world.

VI

Around the age of thirteen, Mirra had a unique experience which returned night after night, and lasted for about a year:

As soon as I had gone to bed it seemed to me that I went out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the city, very high above. Then I used to see myself clad in a magnificent golden robe, much longer than myself; and as I rose higher, the robe would stretch, spreading out in a circle around me to form a kind of immense roof over the city. Then I would see men, women, children, old men, the sick, the unfortunate coming out from every side; they would gather under the outspread robe, begging for help, telling of their miseries, their suffering, their hardships. In reply, the robe, supple and alive, would extend towards each one of them individually, and as soon as they had touched it, they were comforted or healed, and went back into their bodies happier and stronger than they had come out of them. Nothing seemed more beautiful to me, nothing could make me happier; and all the activities of the day seemed dull and colourless and without any real life, beside this activity of the night which was the true life for me. Often while I was rising up in this way, I used to see at my left an old man, silent and still, who looked at me with kindly affection and encouraged me by his presence. This old man, dressed in a long dark purple robe, was the personification - as I came to know later­ of him who is called the Man of Sorrows.²³

The Man of Sorrows was also to figure in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and introduce himself to the heroine in these agonised terms:

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I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he

Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;

To enjoy my agony God built the earth,

My passion he has made his drama's theme ....

Hell tortures me with the edges of my thought,

Heaven tortures me with the splendour of my dreams.²⁴

Mirra knew even at the age of thirteen that she would dedicate herself to the service of humanity, and she wished too that all the world's ills were really concentrated in her so that with one swift determined move she might take their sting away! These night-long vigils spread over a whole year were characteristic of this truly exceptional child, for even the Himalayas of Pain couldn't altogether crush her spirit. An indrawn movement of her immaculate expansive robe, and instantly the healing would begin, and the pain exorcised away.

A school essay written by Mirra in 1893 when she was fifteen has been luckily preserved, and it throws abundant light on the high seriousness of her life and thought. The essay on a subject set by the teacher is entitled "The Path of Later On", and the whole point of the parable is given in the epigraph: ''The path of later-on and the road of tomorrow lead only to the castle of nothing-at-all. "²⁵ A young student, daunted by the homework he has to do, decides he would do it later on, and prefers to go to sleep hoping that a night's rest might tone him up. He begins dreaming, and finds himself at a crossroads where he takes the primrose path that is terribly captivating: "Ah! how pleasant it is to breathe the scented breeze, while the sun warms the air with its fiery rays!" He hears, though he doesn't heed, the voices that warn him not to be misled by the soft and the easy: " ... do not fall asleep in the present; come to the future." It is significant that Mirra should have stumbled upon what was to be one of the cardinal exhortations of her whole life. In the fable, the young traveller perseveres in his folly. He is carried farther and farther on the crest of a wave of compelling ease, but the worm of uneasiness gnaws within: "Where am I? Where am I going? .. What does it matter? Why think, why act? Let us drift along this endless road; let us walk on, 1 shall think tomorrow." He is lured insensibly to a ravine, it becomes deeper and deeper, there are pale human figures rolling in the ravines, wallowing in their wretchedness, owls, crows and bats hiss in his ears, he is indeed lost in Death's ghost­ kingdom, and he has reached at last a deformed enormous castle peopled by "the terrible phantoms who bear the names of Desolation, Despair, Disgust with life". He now finds himself remorselessly pushed to the edge of the abyss, and when he feels that he is about to succumb, he falls from his bed and wakes up with a start. The hideous nightmare is over, and he opens wide his blinking eyes. He has learnt his lesson, and he will never again "put off until tomorrow what he could do today". It was all so simple:

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the path he had followed was "later-on", the road was "tomorrow", and what he would reach was a mere dream-edifice, the castle of "nothing-at-all"! It is but a school essay, yet it is touched with authenticity and elemental force. "Every word is in its right place," says Samir Kanta Gupta, "and the words invariably are the right ones, and the ensemble gives vividly the concrete picture of a terrible conflict in the conscience of the young traveller."²⁶

VII

By the time Mirra had moved from girlhood to young womanhood, the Light had grown in her day by day and her face took on a new glow:

A lovelier light assumed her spirit brow

And sweet and solemn grew her musing gaze;

Celestial-human deep warm slumbrous fires

Woke in the long fringed glory of her eyes

Like altar-burnings in a mysteried shrine.

Out of those crystal windows gleamed a will

That brought a large significance to life.²⁷

While deep within her being there reigned a supernal calm, there were not wanting squalls and cacophonies without, there were maladjustments and mighty falsities enough, and there were upheavals and cruel admonitions; and Mirra felt quite ill at ease with them all. For example, when she was seventeen or eighteen, she heard of a 'Charity Bazaar' in Paris. Although the sponsors of a charity bazaar usually thought of the whole thing more as an outlet for amusement than as an exercise in charity, still as a result of the publicity and the sales some residual money was ultimately siphoned off for ameliorative purposes. But on this particular occasion something unimaginably frightful happened:

All the elegance, all the refinement of high society was gathered there .. Now, the bazaar was very beautiful but not solidly built, because it was to last only for three or four days. The roof was of painted tarpaulin which had been suspended. Everything was lighted by electricity .... There was a short-circuit, everything began to blaze up; the roof caught fire and suddenly collapsed upon the people ... all the elite of the society were there - for them, from the human point of view, it was a frightful catastrophe.²⁸

Naturally enough there was a scuffle, and a stampede, and a frantic attempt to escape from the fast enveloping conflagration. Those well­ mannered people - they were really from the cream of Parisian society ­ were of a sudden transformed by fear into entrapped animals desperately seeking a way. of escape. Afterwards, there were loud lamentations in society, big funerals and many stories.

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But what stung the sensitive Mirra was that the catastrophe, far from inducing introspection and humility, only provoked a Dominican to declaim in the course of his funeral oration that the disaster had served the people right: the victims had not lived according to the law of God, and no wonder He had punished the transgressors with death by fire! Mirra felt repelled by this ridiculous notion of sin and punishment, "a Christian idea, which falsifies our idea of the Divine".²⁹ This notion of a God who could be vindictive enough to inflict the extreme penalty on so-called 'sinners' was wholly repugnant to Mirra; and she felt that, if philosophy tried to squeeze the universe into the petty size of the human mind, theology did cruder things still.

But the question remained: Was there a causal connection between upheavals like earthquakes, floods and outbreaks of fire on the one hand, and the tally of human transgressions and misfortunes on the other? Mirra felt with her whole being that it was wrong to forge any such logical relationship. What, then, was the truth about the matter? In her later years, she was to explain the correct position as follows:

Perhaps the truth is rather that it is one and the same movement of consciousness that expresses itself in a Nature ridden with calamities and catastrophes and in a disharmonious humanity. The two things are not cause and effect, but stand on the same level. Above them there is a consciousness which is seeking for manifestation and embodiment upon earth, and in its descent towards matter it meets everywhere the same resistance, in man and in physical Nature.³⁰

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