On The Mother

CHAPTER 7

Consecration

I

After the elections, from sometime in June, the Richards lived at 7, Rue Dupleix (now 3, Jawaharlal Nehru Street), a north-facing house not far from Sri Aurobindo's in Rue François Martin. In course of time there seems to have developed a certain rhythm in their meetings. Mirra would come to Sri Aurobindo daily in the afternoon between 4 and 4.30, bringing sweet-meats prepared from coconut; she would make cocoa too. Mirra and Sri Aurobindo would compare notes, as it were, regarding their occult and spiritual adventures. They had their hopes and dreams about the future, and in the early months Mirra started learning Sanskrit and Bengali from Sri Aurobindo and made fair progress. The young men who were now living with Sri Aurobindo - Nolini, Moni (Suresh Chakravarty) and Bejoy Nag - would go out at about 5 to play football, and return an hour later. On Sundays, however, Sri Aurobindo walked up at 4.30 in the evening to the Richards' place, and stayed on for dinner, where Nolini and the others would join him. The talks would sometimes go on till late at night, and then Sri Aurobindo would return to his rooms.

A few of the young men with Sri Aurobindo - like Nolini, for example - had been revolutionaries who followed him to Pondicherry, and perhaps they still hoped that he would one day return to Bengal to lead a new movement. There were also boys like Aravamudachari (to whom Sri Aurobindo later gave the name Amrita) who were irresistibly attracted to Sri Aurobindo the Yogi, the master-spirit of the New Age. The coming of Mirra was a phenomenon that at first intrigued the young men, but soon it filled them with a strange rapture of fascination and excitement. Amrita was then a pupil in Calve College, Pondicherry, and along with other school children, though only in small groups, he began to visit Mirra. One day, on Amrita's request, Bejoy introduced him to Mirra, and now a marvellous association began. On Sundays and Thursdays, at 10 a.m., Mirra and Amrita read Yogic Sadhan together, "seated on chairs, facing each other, almost as equals".¹ And in the coming weeks, Amrita began to feel little by little the full force of Mirra's personality:

An image of immeasurable power - that was how I felt the Mother to be whenever I approached her. She, however, held that power in herself without allowing the least display of it. On some occasions the great power would shine forth irresistibly. Our inner sense would perceive this inner radiation if it was awake.

Not only myself but some of my friends of those days ... would approach

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the Mother with our contradictory ideas and doubts and after a talk with her each one of us would be filled with an unaccountable purity and joy and self-oblivious we would come back home talking merrily like people living in a happy world.

On her part, reminiscing about her first impressions in India Mirra used to say in later years how she thought that not only the young men who approached her but even the lowly and the poor and the uncultured were nearer Divinity in their inner essential nature, than those of the same class in Europe. One of her early experiences in Pondicherry was that, as she was walking in meditation, "suddenly through a cut piece of blue cloth, stuck on the walls, she actually saw the Himalayas with all its greenness and grandeur, nay, experienced even its coolness".² Her wings of glory brooded everywhere and all the time, and she saw, heard and experienced things that were shut out to the ordinary mentality. She looked always into the innermost truth of things, and it was not surprising that she could see marvels that were but a sealed book to most others.

II

The 29 March meeting between Sri Aurobindo and Mirra became a fresh start for both of them, although in a truer sense it was but a new phase of their preordained spiritual odyssey on the earth. Sri Aurobindo had realised, as he told Dilip Kumar Roy in 1924, that the transformation of a single individual was not enough; humanity had to ripen too, and be ready for the desired radical change: "For the crux of the difficulty is that even when the Light is ready to descend it cannot come to stay until the lower plane is also ready to bear the pressure of the Descent."³ No modern Rishi Vishvamitra would attempt, by a mere audacious flourish of his yogic wand, the creation of an entire new world. A self-poised and puissant new world, a new heaven and a new earth, were indeed the unfading aim of Sri Aurobindo's massive yogic endeavour; but such a world could not be brought into existence in a hurry or to somebody's order. The way was long, the process difficult; but there surely, at the far end, was the destined goal; and this ought to reassure the spiritual aspirant. It was in this state, facing the problem of self-change and world-change, that the coming of Mirra provided the necessary element of dynamism.

Mirra too as may be inferred from her first meditations during her stay in Pondicherry, for all her fresh-found peace and surge of immeasurable joy, felt suddenly unburdened of the past, felt supernally free and happy like one wholly surrendered to the Master. The past aims are by no means annulled, but they have undergone a cleansing and gained a glowing new definition. The divinisation of Man, the transformation of Nature - this

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was the ultimate aim no doubt; but she must first perfect the force within before she could turn to the mastery and transmutation of the external world. And so the final plunge of absolute ātma-samarpana was achieved, as may be seen thus imaged in her celebrated Radha's Prayer of 13 January 1932:

O Thou whom at first sight I knew for the Lord of my being and my God, receive my offering.

Thine are all my thoughts, all my emotions, all the sentiments of my heart, all my sensations, all the movements of my life, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood. I am absolutely and altogether Thine, Thine without reserve. What Thou wilt of me, that I shall be. Whether Thou choosest for me life or death, happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes to me from Thee will be welcome. Each one of Thy gifts will be always for me a gift divine bringing with it the supreme Felicity.⁴

There was a storming and dissolution of all barriers, and even the last obstreperous dam dividing her from the Goal had been breached and broken through; and now only felicity was her allotted portion. As she wrote on 10 April 1914:

Suddenly the veil was rent, the horizon was disclosed - and before the clear vision my whole being threw itself at Thy feet in a great outburst of gratitude ....

I seem to have no more limits; there is no longer the perception of the body, no sensations, no feelings, no thoughts - a clear, pure, tranquil immensity penetrated with love and light, filled with an unspeakable beatitude is all that is there and that alone seems now to be myself .... ⁵

This is rather reminiscent of St. Catherine of Siena's description of the unitive state: "The body loses its feeling, so that seeing eyes see not, and hearing ears hear not, and the tongue does not speak .... " Like the wax in the fire, like the ice in the stream, like the scent dissolved in the air, even so separative identity ceases, and only infinite puissance remains:

Thou hast taken my life and made it Thine; Thou hast taken my will and hast united it to Thine; Thou hast taken my love and identified it with Thine; Thou hast taken my thought and replaced it by Thy absolute consciousness.⁶

III

Soon after her arrival in Pondicherry, Mirra paid a visit to Karikal. This visit to a backward spot enabled Mirra to see life in India in the raw - the squalor, the poverty, the misery, the helplessness, the hopelessness of it

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all. She had to stay in a dingy, dirty and dilapidated room infested with white ants. It was as though, as in Sri Aurobindo's "A God's Labour":

A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!

Dig deeper, deeper yet

Till thou reach the grim foundation stone

And knock at the keyless gate."⁷

But Mirra wasn't put out by "these circumstances so complex and unstable", for she saw everything through the eye of the storm, the inner eye of divine calm. Her diary-entry for "Karikal, April 13," reads surprisingly enough:

All is beautiful, harmonious and calm, all is full of Thee. Thou shinest in the dazzling sun, Thou art felt in the gentle passing breeze, Thou dost manifest Thyself in all hearts and live in all beings. There is not an animal, a plant that does not speak to me of Thee and Thy name is written Upon everything I see ....

Oh, may all know Thee, love Thee, serve Thee; may all receive the supreme consecration!

O Love, divine Love, spread abroad in the world, regenerate life, enlighten the intelligence, break the barriers of egoism, scatter the obstacles of ignorance, shine resplendent as sovereign Master of the earth.⁸

Later, in Pondicherry, Mirra meditates on the morning of 17 April on the meaning of the individual human personality, and the need to see it always in integral relation to the Divine. We may call this her own form of viśistādvaita, her qualified non-dualism! In a manifested universe, the sense of "I" must play its part, for to weaken it would be to strike at the root of the manifestation. But to invest the "I" with any notion of autonomy or independence would be the sheerest folly and illusion: "At no moment, in no circumstances must we forget that our 'I' has no reality outside Thee." The same day she has the feeling that "the last veil was almost rent", and she understands the meaning of true impersonal service. But external actions have still the power to precipitate the illusions and soon "the veil closed again" and seemed to her "darker than ever". And so she cries out: "Why this fall into the inconscience of night after so great a light?"⁹ Next morning, 19 April, she makes a distinction between an imperfect and a total identification with the Divine:

There is a great difference between being in the midst of active work, of external action, while keeping one's thought constantly fixed on Thee, and entering into that perfect union with Thee which leads to what I have called "absolute Consciousness, true Omniscience, Knowledge". When one acts, though with the thought fixed on Thee, one is like a blind man walking on the road with a sense of direction, but knowing nothing about the path he is

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following and how, precisely, one must walk so as to neglect nothing. In the other case, on the contrary, there is the clear vision in full light, the utilisation of the least occasion, the plenitude of action, the maximum result.¹⁰

The first stance, then, could only be a preparation for the second. Mirra continues to be a prey to attacks of "inconscience" in her external activity, but she has also learnt "to look at everything with a smile and a tranquil heart". In the strength of her inner faith, in the beauty of her calm serenity, she wakes up to the consciousness of a new freedom, an uncanny if apparently undirected power of movement and action:

All rules have vanished, the regularity of the discipline is gone, all effort has ceased ....

... never before were my mind and heart in so complete a repose. What will come out of that, I do not know. But I trust in Thee, O Lord; Thou knowest the best way of using and developing Thy instrument. ... ¹¹

IV

Early in May, Mirra's health suddenly broke down: " ... my physical organism suffered a defeat such as it had not known for several years and during a few days all the forces of my body failed me. "¹² This seemed to her an indication that "my spiritual energy had weakened, my vision of the omnipotent Oneness had been clouded .... " This point of view was to be elaborated in one of her Conversations of a later period:

The possibilities of illness are always there in your body and around you; you carry within you or there swarm about you the microbes and germs of every disease. How is it that all of a sudden you succumb to an illness which you did not have for years? You will say it is due to a "depression of the vital force". But from where does the depression come? It comes from Some disharmony in the being, from a lack of receptivity to the divine forces. When you cut yourself off from the energy and light that sustain you, then there is this depression, there is created what medical science calls a "favourable ground" and something takes advantage of it. It is doubt, gloominess, lack of confidence, a selfish turning back upon yourself that cuts you off from the light and divine energy and gives the attack this advantage.¹³

At the Core of her being - that is, quintessentially - Mirra was doubtless the changeless un ailing Infinite beyond joy and sorrow, beyond health and disease, beyond faith and doubt, and beyond all such mentally constructed categories; but she was also - that is, representatively - humanity in miniature, a part of all she met, a sharer of all joy and agony. And so her

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prayers and meditations too strike, now one note, now another; now they hymn the halleluiahs of fulfilment, now gently retail the corroding failures and unavailing spasms of ignorant groping humanity. This explains the validity of aspirations and prayers like the one on 9 May:

Let me be a vast mantle of love enveloping all the earth, entering all hearts murmuring in every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace. ...

Break, break these chains .... I want to understand and I want to be. That is to say, this "I" must be Thy "I" and there must be only one single "I" in the world.¹⁴

The prayer is granted, for, writing on 12 May, Mirra records this experience:

This morning passing by a rapid experience from depth to depth, I was able, once again, as always, to identify my consciousness with Thine and to live no longer in aught but Thee; - indeed, it was Thou alone that wast living, but immediately Thy will pulled my consciousness towards the exterior, towards the work to be done, and Thou saidst to me, "Be the instrument of which I have need." And is not this the last renunciation, to renounce identification with Thee .... ¹⁵

Didn't the Buddha, the Bodhisattva, deliberately renounce Nirvana to be able to return to this sullied earth and save the souls of his fellow human beings? Like Buddha, Mirra too, by her firm renunciation only illustrates what Evelyn Underhill calls "that whole movement of Spirit creative and complete toward spirit created and incomplete, that willing self-revelation of the spaceless God in space and time". ¹⁶ Inhabiting by resolved self­ limitation this "intermediate domain between Thy Unity and the manifested world", Mirra would be able to forge closer the links between them, bring His infinitude to the phenomenal world and raise it to receive the rays of His effective Power. The renunciation asked for is all the more readily acquiesced in because Mirra has secured His clear direction as well as loving assurance:

Do not delight in the ecstatic contemplation of this union; accomplish the mission I have entrusted to thee upon earth.¹⁷

One day thou wilt be my head but for the moment turn thy gaze towards the earth.¹⁸

Three days later, Mirra wakes up to the realisation of the unity of Matter and Spirit in the universe as well as in individual man, and to the ladder­ like structure of the interlinked worlds of the single Consciousness:

Thou alone livest, in different worlds, in different forms but with an identical life, immutable and eternal. ...

O my sweet Master, Thou hast caused a new veil to be rent, another veil

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of my ignorance and, without leaving my blissful place in Thy eternal heart, at the same time In the Imperceptible but infinite heart of each of the constituting my body.

Strengthen this complete and perfect consciousness. Make me enter into the details of its perfection and grant that, without leaving Thee for a single moment, I may constantly move up and down this infinite ladder, according to the necessity of the work Thou hast prescribed for me.¹⁹

This early description of the "perfect consciousness" as a ladder has an affinity to what the .Mother. was to say in the course of one of her Conversations of 1931 In Pondicherry:

The consciousness is like a ladder: at each great epoch there has been one great being capable of adding one more step to the ladder and reaching a place where the ordinary consciousness had never been. It is possible to attain a high level and get completely out of the material consciousness; but then one does not retain the ladder .... To go up and down and join the top to the bottom is the whole secret of realisation, and that is the work of the Avatar. Each time he adds one more step to the ladder there is a new creation upon earth .... The step which is being added now Sri Aurobindo has called the Supramental. .. and the chief spirit or force, the Shakti active at present is Mahasaraswati, the Goddess of perfect organisation.

... Once, however, the connection is made, it must have its effect in the outward world in the form of a new creation, beginning with a model town and ending with a perfect world.²⁰

It is significant that Mirra had intuitively lighted upon the key ideas and programmes of her sublime future ministry: the Yoga of divine works, the transformation of the atoms, the very cells of the human body, the collective Yoga of a big Ashram community, the bringing to birth of Auroville, the City of Dawn, and the sending forth of tendrils of aspiration and effort meant to usher in a new world - a new Heaven and a new Earth. Again and again, the diary-entries for the latter half of May reiterate this tremendous equation of Spirit and Matter, the need to coax a descent of the Spirit from the sunlit heights of Sachchidananda to the lowest rungs of the ladder of consciousness, the abysm of the Inconscient, so as to compel an ascent from the darkness and the fathomless zero below to the light and beatitude above, and above all the role of man to enact in his life the alchemic drama of transformation from the human to the Divine. Mirra sees the Divine in the "radiant particles" of her being; each atom of the aggregate that is herself will "be awakened to receive Thy sublime influence":

My whole being down to its smallest atom aspires for the perfect knowledge of Thy presence and a complete union with it ....

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Thy divine love floods my being; Thy supreme light is shining in every cell .... ²¹

May the God with form who manifests in this aggregate be entirely moulded from Thy complete and sublime love .... ²²

Thou hast Thyself accepted to be thus submerged in Matter so as to awaken it gradually to consciousness .... ²³

... matter has to be vigorously churned if it is to become capable of manifesting entirely the divine Iight.²⁴

In each of the domains of the being, the consciousness must be awakened to the perfect existence, knowledge and bliss .... But what is very important, as well as very difficult, is to awaken the being to this triple divine consciousness in the most material world .... ²⁵

Thou settest in motion, Thou stirrest and churnest the innumerable elements of this world, so that, from their primal darkness, their primeval chaos, they may awaken to consciousness and the full light of knowledge .... ²⁶

I penetrate all things; living within the heart of each atom I kindle therein the fire which purifies and transfigures .... ²⁷

These reiterated words of divination seem to embody in seed-form the whole Ashwattha-tree of the future Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

V

Between May and June 1914, Mirra identifies herself with the Earth (25 May), becomes Earth's mouthpiece (31 May), receives the Lord's assurance (9 June) and wins the role of executrix of the Divine dispensation (14 June). In the first of the four diary-entries, Mirra explains that the "I" of the prayer is the whole Earth:

All the hearts of men beat within my heart, all their thoughts vibrate in my thought, the slightest aspiration of a docile animal or a modest plant unites with my formidable aspiration, and all this rises towards Thee, for the conquest of Thy love and light, scaling the summits of Being to attain Thee, ravish Thee from Thy motionless beatitude and make Thee penetrate the darkness of suffering to transform it into divine Joy, into sovereign Peace.²⁸

In the second, Mirra describes her experience of being at the same time the Earth and the Divine:

When the sun set in the indrawn contemplation of the calm twilight, all my

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being prostrated itself before Thee, O Lord, in mute adoration and complete self-giving. Then I was the whole earth and the whole earth prostrated itself before Thee, imploring the benediction of Thy illumination, the beatitude of Thy love. Oh, the kneeling earth that supplicates to Thee, then is ingathered in the silence of the night, waiting in both patience and anxiety for the illumination so ardently desired. If there is a sweetness in being Thy divine love at work in the world, there is as great a sweetness in being the infinite aspiration which rises towards that infinite love. And to be able to change thus, to be successively, almost simultaneously, what receives and what gives, what transfigures and what is transfigured, to be identified with the painful darkness as with the all-powerful splendour and, in this double identification, to discover the secret of Thy sovereign unity, is this not a way of expressing, of accomplishing Thy supreme will?²⁹

In the third of the earth-prayers Mirra as medium receives a benediction which she communicates to the world:

O beloved children, unhappy and ignorant, O thou, rebellious and violent Nature, open your hearts, calm your forces, for here comes the sweet omnipotence of Love, here is the pure radiance of the light that penetrates you. This human hour, this earthly hour is beautiful over all other hours. Let each and all know it and rejoice in the plenitude that is given.

O sorrowful hearts and careworn brows, foolish obscurity and ignorant ill-will, let your anguish be calmed and effaced.

Lo, the splendour of the new word arrives: "Here am I. "³⁰

The individual, the universal, the Transcendent - Mirra is now this, now that, and anon the other; these prayers and meditations too thus come to us, now from one plane, now from another; and, of course, even as Mirra is somehow triumphantly all three at the same time (the individual aspirant, the universal earth-mother, and also the Mother beyond all human comprehension), these exhalations and inhalations of her soul, of the spirit that is in her and that is her, also preserve in their sum their unique integrality and unity. When she meditates, mankind prays by proxy; when she prays, she prays for mankind, she prays that mankind may be saved. Her dreams and visions, her waking nights and plans, are filled with the needs, aspirations and hopes of hungry Man, hungry for perfect, existence, knowledge and beatitude. She would be the link, the intercessor, the Paraclete between the hungry obscure phenomenal world and the pure blissful resplendent Lord. If Mirra, identifying herself with the earth, bends her knees and raises her hands in supplication and prayer, no less does she bring down from above, for present solace and ultimate redemption, those nectarean intimations, boons, benedictions, which, as Wordsworth would say:

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... be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence; truths that wake,

To perish never.

She is able with her inner ear to hearken to the Infinite and register the assurance "Here am I." She is thus clairvoyant collaboratrix and mighty mediatrix in one: and all the time she is also Mirra, supplicant and mystic and mother.

Nay more - for the mediatrix and collaboratrix is also the creatrix. While knowledge is necessary, knowledge by itself is not enough. There remains the work of manifestation, of transformation - a stupendous programme! Accordingly, in the fourth of the earth-prayers, Mirra turns to her tasks as the creatrix of the new Age that is to witness the divinisation of Man and the transfiguration of the world. The very idea thrills her whole being, and the vow of self-consecration is articulated anew, and acquires the accents of predestination:

It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being so that this Force, unknown to the earth till today, may manifest in its plenitude. To this travail I am consecrated, O Lord, for this is what Thou wantest of me. But since Thou hast appointed me for this work, Thou must give me the means, that is, the knowledge necessary for its realisation. We shall unite our efforts .... Thou hast made a promise, Thou hast sent into these worlds those who can and that which can fulfil this promise ....

In us must take place the union of the two wills and two currents, so that from their contact may spring forth the illuminating spark.

And since this must be done, this will be done. ³¹

VI

"It is a veritable work of creation we have to do," thus Mirra, on 14 June 1914. "And since this must be done, this will be done." The words thrill with a definitive ring, they seem to be charged with a radiant urgency, they have the sharp tone of finality. What were the shaping events behind the scenes which this wonderful prayer unmistakably reflects?

As early as 5 May 1914 Sri Aurobindo had written to Motilal Roy intimating that Paul Richard, although unsuccessful in the election, was trying to start an association of the young men of Pondicherry and Karikal "as a sort of training ground from which men can be chosen for the

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Vedantic Yoga". In a letter written about a month later, Sri Aurobindo informed him that they were starting a monthly philosophical Review giving the foundations of "my theory of the ideal life towards which humanity must move"³², and in close connection with this intellectual work thesis, they had started in Pondicherry a society called L'Idée Nouvelle, the New Idea, with the object of spreading Vedantic Yoga.

As explained by Sri Aurobindo, the object of L'Idée Nouvelle was "to group in a com on intellectual life .and fraternity of sentiment those who accept the spiritual tendency and Idea It represents and who aspire to realise it in their own individual and social action". ³³ Mirra of course took an active interest in the work of the society. The young men who joined it were expected to transcend the inhibiting notions of race, religion, creed, caste and dogmatic opinion, and seek unity in the solidarity of the spirit. Members were required to devote some time every day to meditation and self-culture, and also to seek opportunities of service to others. The society had its headquarters at Pondicherry, with a reading-room and a library, and had a branch at Karikal.

Possibly on 1 June, it was decided to launch the monthly philosophical view, Review, Arya, under the joint editorship of Sri Aurobindo, and Mirra and Paul Richard. The idea was set forth in some detail in Sri Aurobindo's letter to Motilal Roy, to which a reference has already been made. The Arya was to be in English with a simultaneous French edition. "In this 'Review," Sri Aurobindo wrote,

my new theory of the Veda will appear as also translation and explanation of the Upanishads, a series of essays giving my system of Yoga and a book of Vedantic philosophy (not Shankara's but Vedic Vedanta) giving the Upanishadic foundations of my theory of the ideal life towards which humanity must move. You will see so far as my share is concerned, it will be the intellectual side of my work for the world.³⁴

In a single sentence Sri Aurobindo was giving an atomic glimpse of the massive Arya sequences to be - notably, The Secret of the Veda, the Isha and the Kena in translation and commentary, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. The Review was also to serialise Paul Richard's The Eternal Wisdom, a collection of "the central sayings of great sages of all times". It was proposed that the annual subscription of this 64-page monthly journal should be Rupees six. As Sri Aurobindo and his collaborator hoped to achieve 850 regular subscribers for the English and about 250 for the French edition, it was thought that the journals would, not only pay their way, but also leave a modest surplus to help the editors to maintain themselves on a reasonable basis.

Sri Aurobindo's letter to Motilal Roy referred to one other important matter as well: the relationship between Vedantic Yoga (or the Yoga of knowledge) and Tantra Yoga (which meant, in this context, the Yoga of Action).

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Since his plunge into politics about a decade earlier, Sri Aurobindo had successfully combined Vedantic Yoga and nationalist - and even revolutionary - political action. But after the Muzzaferpore bomb tragedy involving the death of two innocent European ladies and his own yearlong "ashram-vas" in the Alipur Jail (where he had experienced the omnipresent Divine or Vasudeva, and had also glimpsed the "overhead" or above-mind states of consciousness), Sri Aurobindo had done some rethinking about the ends and means of his political work. There was the brief but glorious period of editorship of the Karmayogin and the Dharma during 1909-10, but he had withdrawn deliberately, in obedience to an inner command, from Calcutta, his scene of action, first to Chandernagore in mid-February 1910 and in April, to Pondicherry. The four years of "silent Yoga" there had led to a reassessment of values, and a realignment of forces. Sri Aurobindo now felt that action, political or other, however high-minded, was fraught with disastrous failure, unless such action was properly backed by infallible knowledge. In other words, without an adequate grounding in "Vedantic Yoga", Karmic or "Tantric Yoga" might prove to be no more than a trap and a danger. Hence the importance he would now give to the new journal, Arya, and the society L'Idée Nouvelle. As he explained to Motilal Roy:

Remember that Tantra is not like Vedanta, it is a Yoga for material gains, that has always been its nature. Only now not for personal gains, but for effectivity in certain directions of the general Yoga of mankind.

The earlier decadent stage of Tantra, he added, exists now "only in a scattered way ineffectual for any great aid of humanity". The second stage, "our new Tantra [which in this context meant the revolutionary activities in Bengal] succeeded at first because it was comparatively pure ... but since then two things have happened. It has tried to extend itself with the result of bringing in undesirable elements ... [and] tried to attempt larger results from a basis which was no longer sufficient. ... " The need had arisen therefore to refashion the goals and the instruments:

A third stage is now necessary, that of a preparation in full knowledge no longer resting on a blind faith in God's power and will, but receiving consciously that will, the illumination that guides its workings and the power that determines its results. If the thing is to be done it must be done no longer as by a troop stumbling on courageously in the dark and losing its best strength by failures and the results of unhappy blunders, but with the full divine power working out its will in its instruments.³⁵

In Sri Aurobindo's view, the desiderata for such effective action were (1) that "the divine knowledge and power should manifest perfectly in at least one man in India", and (2) that "others should receive the same power and light". Supposing that Sri Aurobindo, as the consummation of his sadhana,

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should be able to fulfil the first condition, the people coming under his influence would also "increase and prosper provided always they do not separate themselves from me by the Ahankara":

The power that I am developing[.) if it reaches consummation, will be able accomplish its effects automatically by any method chosen.³⁶

We now know that what Sri Aurobindo had in mind was "supramental knowledge and power", which he was to describe with such persuasive and prophetic eloquence in The Life Divine. Mirra too had been thinking along the same lines, e.g., of "the clear vision in full light, the utilisation of the least occasion, the plenitude of action, the maximum result"³⁷. They expected, partly through the intellectual offensive of the Arya, and partly through the working of the New Idea groups, to create favourable circumstances for the fulfilment of the second condition, namely the accession of the light and power to a sufficiently strong or 'critical' group. The journals and the society were thus to discharge complementary tasks:

The spread of the idea is not sufficient, you must have real Yogins, not merely men moved intellectually and emotionally by one or two of the central ideas of the Yoga. Spreading of the idea is the second necessity, for that the Review at present offers itself among other means. The other means is to form brotherhoods, not formal but real .. for the practice of the Vedantic yoga .... ³⁸

To sum up, as Sri Aurobindo worked it out, one man at least should first be able to stand forth as the repository of the Knowledge and the Power; then, he should have means of propagating this Thought to the world; and finally, the select people who have been converted to the new Thought should form themselves into brotherhoods, or cohesive groups, ready and able to function as worthy vessels or the new Knowledge and Power.

VII

Read, then, in the light of Sri Aurobindo's letters to Motilal Roy, Mirra's solemn affirmation on 14 June 1914-

It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being so that this Force, unknown to the earth till today, may manifest in its plenitude -

receives the necessary clarification. The "work of creation" meant the new society, the new journals and the new brotherhoods, and particularly the invocation of the new Force (the Supermind), "unknown to the earth till today". For the redemption of the Earth and Man from the giant evils of ignorance, egotism and mortality, this new Light (the Supramental) that

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was at the same time immaculate irresistible Power had to be made to "manifest in its plenitude". "And since this must be done, this will be done. "

Such being the background, it is not difficult to grasp the implications of Mirra's meditations and prayers of this time:

Now that the whole being is more and more deeply plunged into material activity, into the physical realisation which includes such a multitude of details .... ³⁹

If the hour has come, as Thou lettest me know, for the new forms of Thy realisation, these forms will inevitably be born.⁴⁰

On 16 June she mentions a descent, a radiation and a receptivity. The Splendour descends, and the elements below that are pure and plastic group themselves to receive it in order "to reconstitute as perfectly as possible in this world of division the divine Centre which has to be manifested". On 17 June, Mirra as good as dismisses the entire past - for the best is yet to be! Out of the dead past will rise a great future, or "new elements adapted to the new manifestation" -

Give us the Thought, give us the Word, give us the Force. Enter the arena of the world, O new-born Unknown One!

This might be Mirra's greetings to the unravelling Supernatural Dawn.

After her meeting with Sri Aurobindo on 29 March, there is often some ambiguity in the Prayers and Meditations whether, when she says "Master", "Lord", "Thou" or "Thee", she has the Divine in general in mind or Sri Aurobindo himself. Perhaps she didn't pause to make any academic differentiation. Rather, it was spontaneous, sometimes the general, sometimes the embodied, Divine:

O Lord, my adoration rises ardently to Thee, all my being is an aspiration, a flame consecrated to Thee. (4 April)

O Lord, Lord, grant that Thy sovereign Power may manifest; grant that Thy work may be accomplished and Thy servitor be consecrated solely to Thy service. (3 May)

Before the immensity of this programme, the entire being exults and sings a hymn of gladness to Thee. (13 June)

O sweet Master, sovereign Transfigurator, put an end to all negligence, all lazy indolence, gather together all our energies, make them into an indomitable, irresistible will. (12 July)

O my sweet Master, Thou art the sovereign Ruler of our destinies; Thou art the omnipotent Master of Thy own manifestation. (19 July)

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What matters is only the crystalline purity and sincerity of the utterances. recorded on 21 June:

To be at once a passive and perfectly pure mirror, turned simultaneously without and within, to the results of the manifestation and the sources of this manifestation, so that the consequences may be placed before the guiding will, and to be also the realising activity of that will, this, more or less is what a human being ought to be .... To combine these two attitudes, of passive receptivity and realising activity is precisely the most difficult of all things. And that is what Thou expectest of us, O Lord, and as Thou dost expect it of us, there is no doubt that Thou wilt give us the means of realising it.

Mediatrix, collaboratrix, creatrix - the roles mingle and merge. "What has :be will be, what has to be done will be done,"⁴¹ but there are obscure resistances that have to be met, and one must especially guard against the temptation to see the future in the images of the past or present:

It is always wrong to want to evaluate the future or even to foresee it by the thought we have about it, for this thought is the present ... a mental activity of the nature of reasoning .... ⁴²

What we need is the capacity to work without attachment, and "to develop the capacities of individual manifestation without living in the illusion of personality".⁴³ Even as Mirra had stressed in her 1912 manifesto (referred to in chapter 2) that the "typic society" of the future should be "hierarchised, if possible", on 24 June she affirms that, "from the point of view of the manifestation, the work to be carried forward upon earth, a hierarchy is needed"; and she explains "hierarchy" thus on 30 June:

Each activity in its own field accomplishing its particular mission, without disorder, without confusion, one enveloping the other, and all graded hierarchically around a single centre: Thy will ... -

which is really "the divine Centre" of the entry for 16 June. There is here the lightning-flash illuminating the future, visualising both Sri Aurobindo Ashram (as it was to grow from 1926 onwards) as also Auroville in 1968 and after, with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the "divine Centre". It is necessary to add, too, and this has been emphasised already, that the "hierarchy" Mirra had in mind was of the spiritual, not of the bureaucratic or financial realm. It would be more like the felly, the spokes, and the hub of a revolving wheel- in other words, a dynamic, variegated, yet integral unity and harmony.

When we are rid of all sense of superiority and inferiority, the feeling of paralysing and purblind incompetence, and the all-too-human error of aggressive egotism - "a global error repeated in millions and millions of

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forms"⁴⁴- when the whole individual being has cleansed itself of widespread taint and forged union with the All, then indeed the propitious hour for the descent of omnipotence and the transformation of our earth nature will arrive at last, and bring with it the splendour of the new puissance and sovereignty. No wistful dream this, this coming splendour; it will surely come. The Divine and the Earth, the Divine and Man, are now fully and solemnly committed to this stupendous change and transformation. While there is the reiterated assurance to aspirant earth:

What has to be done will be done. The necessary instruments will be prepared. Strive in the calm of certitude.⁴⁵

The Force is here. Rejoice, O you who are waiting and hoping: the new manifestation is sure, the new manifestation is at hand.⁴⁶

... the Force is there ... already at work in the higher worlds beyond thought as the power of sovereign transfiguration, and also in the inconscient depths of Matter as the Irresistible Healer. ⁴⁷

Mirra affirms at the same time her own (and the earth's) readiness to respond in full measure:

Do not spare me, act with Thy sovereign omnipotence; for in me Thou hast put the will to an entire transfiguration.⁴⁸

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