On The Mother

CHAPTER 53

Darkest before Dawn

I

A significant development in 1961 was the permission graciously accorded by the Mother to one of her disciples, Satprem, to meet her once a week, engage her in conversation, and tape-record the questions and answers. Select fragments of these conversations were published in the Bulletin from February 1965 to April 1973 under the heading "Notes on the Way". Thus the prefatory note introducing the new feature:

These reflections or experiences, these observations, which are very recent, are like landmarks on the way of Transformation: they were chosen not only because they illumine the work under way - a yoga of the body of which all the processes have to be established - but because they can be a sort of indication of the endeavour that has to be made.¹

Cumulatively, these extraordinary conversations are a recordation without a parallel in spiritual history: almost ECG recordings of the very heart of the Ashram, the pulse-beats of the Mother. These are not quite Conversations either; these are musings rather, almost recitations of experience; or call them intimations, insights, soulscapes! The Mother often exclaims: It is interesting!... it is amusing! Or she says with a touch of exasperation: How to say it?... it is very difficult to say!... these words are stupid!... all this is mere words, but it is all we possess!... how to explain? And the Mother says again and again that, when ineluctable experiences are sought to be contained by mere words, the THING escapes from the cumbrous grasp of language, and only some misleading or ludicrous or monstrous falsity remains! Once she says, making a gesture of reversal, "As soon as you try to express, everything becomes false." And whenever she wants to emphasise, she usually repeats three times - like a refrain almost.

Talking to her disciple on 7 October 1964, the Mother said that, while the material difficulties had been aggravated, the power of consciousness had also grown greater and clearer, and its power of action on men of goodwill had likewise increased. Since the previous day something had cleared in the atmosphere, and yet -

the way is still long.... One must last - hold on... one must have endurance. These are the two absolutely indispensable things: endurance, and a faith that nothing can shake....²

Although she had no time or inclination to read newspapers or tune in to the Radio, people told her of upsetting happenings the world over: "It seems that the number of the 'apparently mad' is increasing considerably."

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The Hippies in America, for example! The cracking of the cosmic egg was perhaps, the necessary prelude to the birth of a new world.

But the real problem was to sensitise the most material consciousness, which needed repeated whippings to change its tamas into sensibility, and to awaken in it the conviction that "behind all its difficulties there is a Grace, behind all its failures there is the Victory, behind all its pains, its sufferings, its contradictions, there is Ananda". When the Power that is Truth-Consciousness comes down, under its tremendous weight the resistance of Matter is contained or crushed for the nonce, but not transformed. During physical suffering, for example, when there is a call from within the cells, the pain subsides for a while, and then it returns, and one has to begin all over once again. Without a total transformation of material nature, the changes cannot be definitive.

What is the human body but a conglomerate that keeps together just so long as there is a will behind to keep that so? A few days before 7 October, in a decentralised state of her physical consciousness, there was an intervention of a universal consciousness which made the cells of her body "understand or feel" the problems arising out of the wear and tear on the body and the external difficulties, but the cells "did not attach importance to anything other than the capacity to remain in conscious contact with the higher Force.. It was like an aspiration... 'a yearning', 'a longing' for this contact with the divine Force, the Force of Harmony, the Force of Truth, the Force of Love." They rejected the defeatist suggestions, for this kind of pessimism "appeared to them as a kind of disease... which did not form part of their development", and then,

at that moment, there was born a kind of lower power to act upon... (this physical mind)... a material power to separate itself from that and reject it. And it is after that that there was this turning point.... as if something truly decisive had happened.³

And she felt an instantaneous physical relief, as though she breathed more freely. She saw too that in their own domain the cells were less heavy, proving thereby that "heaviness, thickness, inertia, immobility, is something added" - it is not a quality essential to Matter.

Then, returning to the topic of the upsetting happenings in the world, she concluded that the greatest obstacle to transformation was "to have preconceived ideas... set rules of conduct... social and mental conventions". The best thing was to be "open - truly open in a simplicity... that knows it is ignorant" and to keep "the thirst for progress, the thirst for knowledge, the thirst for transformation and, above all, the thirst for Love and Truth".

There were doubtless people outside the Ashram, and within too, who sometimes wondered why the Mother, if indeed she was the Mother Divine,

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should ever fall ill at all, or should need to battle so long and so unceasingly in the attempt to achieve the desired transformation of the body, or of the material consciousness. But for the Mother, it was not a matter of a personal victory isolated from the rest of the world. She was doing what she was doing for the progressive divinisation of humanity and of earth-nature. But because the Mother was weighted with the burden of all humanity, it made the task of her personal transformation very difficult, and even seemingly interminable! As she wrote to Huta on 28 July 1964,

But the whole world is One and interdependent and this creates a situation that the Supreme Lord alone can alter.⁴

II

The New Year message for 1965 was the all-sufficing declaration: "Salute to the Advent of the Truth." Something of an amplifiction is provided by the Mother's letter of 1st January to Huta: "This year we salute the Advent of the Truth and aspire for the manifestation of the Eternal Love." And on 11 January:

Yes, the. true aim of life is to unite with one's soul and to merge in the Supreme. So this will be done.⁵

Truth, Truth - but what is Truth? Doesn't falsehood often cloak itself as Truth, and even seem to be the truer Truth? Without viveka, without the power of right discrimination, the purblind race of miserable men must continue to take the false for true and the true for false, and forge whole odysseys of defeat for themselves. In another letter to Huta, dated 22 January, the Mother spells out this rule for sorting out Truth from all varieties of falsehood that may mask themselves:

...at the beginning, one can take as a guiding rule that all that brings with it or creates peace, faith, joy, harmony, wideness, unity and ascending growth comes from the Truth; while all that carries with it restlessness, doubt, scepticism, sorrow, discord, selfishness, narrowness, inertia, discouragement and despair comes straight from the falsehood.⁶

There is also the linking up of Truth and Love. This Eternal Love is not sex, nor vital attraction and interchange, nor yet the heart's hunger for affection; rather is Love "a mighty vibration coming straight from the One, and only the very pure and very strong are capable of receiving and manifesting it".⁷ Out of the plant that is Truth must sprout the rose that is Beauty, Love and Ananda: and to bring down the Truth and the Beauty and the Love and the Ananda is verily the whole aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. But when Truth comes, can the rest be far behind? Truth -

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the supramental Truth-Consciousness - is already here, it has been here for years. And so - "Salute to the Advent of the Truth."

III

During her conversation on 12 January 1965, the Mother said that there had been for some time past (especially since the year began) "a kind of bombardment of adverse forces - a fury". At such times one had to be immobile, and "when physically you have been shaken, you must not ask too much of the body, you must give it a good deal of tranquillity". But when there was some precise action to be done, "the great Power" came rushing like lightning, did its work and went away.

It is as though the Mother had a premonition of violence, a sudden bombardment by a blind fury, and was in poised readiness for the event. And a fury burst indeed on the night of 11 February. For some days previously there was a sanguinary anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu with its inevitable overflow into adjoining Pondicherry. The inflammable students took a prominent part in the agitation. The goonda elements, ready and eager to exploit any situation, joined the ranks of the agitating .students, the language fanatics and local dissidents of all kinds, and there were acts of violence and incendiarism. It was declared that there would be a general hartal on 12 February, but the attack on the Ashram was mounted with venomous fury even on the 11th evening at about 7.30 when it was dark already and most of the Ashram inmates were in meditation at the Playground. The mob of miscreants came armed with sticks and rickshaws piled with stones. The Honesty Society - a general store which had served the people of Pondicherry with exemplary fairness and efficiency for over a decade - was looted and burnt and almost everything was destroyed with infernal despatch. The kerosene from the store was appropriated for further acts of incendiarism on other Ashram properties, industrial establishments and welfare institutions. Hardly anything was spared. The Handmade Paper Factory, the Aerated Water Factory, the Cottage Industries, the Nursing Home, the Dispensary, the Ashram Post Office, the houses of the sadhaks, a hostel for children, - all became victims of the insensate and bestial fury of the mob. Beds and furniture were thrown on the street and set on fire, and cycles and other articles were smashed or burnt. The attackers vented their fury on the main Ashram building, threw stones with venomous fury some of which smashed the windows of the Master's Room and the Darshan Room. A stone hit the Mother's room on the second floor.

While the mob was thus in a frenzy of wanton destruction over a wide area, the Police were nowhere, the public was indifferent (or was cowed down), and most of the Ashram property remained largely undefended.

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But presently an active defence was launched by the Ashramites - especially by the younger men - and whether in defending the premises and the property, salvaging what was burning, or in punishing and pursuing the attackers, the sadhaks enacted heroism on an impressive scale. Among the defenders and counter-attackers on the night of 11 February was Togo, grandson of the almost legendary Bagha Jatin, revolutionary and freedom-fighter, and his brave deeds were thus commemorated in verse by Robi Gupta:

Ferocity incarnate, danger housed in human frames,,

Freely they plundered, rained stones, none to stay their march.

"I will give them their due if God has given me the chance."

An icon of youth and courage he shot out to oppose them and made them retreat.

A few reeled, a few fell flat on the ground.

Most ran helter-skelter for life.

Yet quite a band surrounded him and he fought his hardest.

Through the enemy array on the eastern front an Abhimanyu forged ahead...

To me Bagha Jatin is a legend.

But to-night I have watched, to my surprise, action that is bright with bravery.⁸

The Police arrived at last after midnight, and a little later C.R.P.F. reinforcements too were rushed to Pondicherry to help the Government really to govern. On the 12th morning, at about 11 a.m. an armed guard was posted around the Ashram, and peace prevailed once more.

In an assessment made soon after the event, Udar Pinto remarked that, while the attack on the 11th evening was mainly the work of "hooligan elements", it was also a planned attack and had "some direction and support". The students' anti-Hindi agitation was a cover for the onslaught, but probably not many students were actually involved in the violent happenings. The sad and tragic part of the whole affair was the Government's "impotence and inadequacy in the early and most furious stages of the attack" and the public's apathy and indifference towards the happenings, and at times even sympathy or admiration for the attackers.⁹

The Mother herself, in her Declaration of 16 February, while acknowledging that the cultured, intelligent and fair-minded elements in the population had always welcomed and supported the Ashram, identified four groups of people who had nursed a sullen antagonism towards the ideals and the functioning of the Ashram. These were the militant Catholics who were apt to look upon all non-Catholics as instruments of the Devil, the Communists with their rigid materialist ideology, the DMK with their bias against the pronounced North-Indian presence in the Ashram, and, above all, "a rather low category of the population who

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had succeeded in taking advantage of the French rule and are dead against all change and progress". But the Mother and the Ashram stood above all such narrowness, bigotry, parochialism and selfishness. And the Mother concluded with this grand affirmation:

Our position is clear.

We do not fight against any creed, any religion.

We do not fight against any form of government.

We do not fight against any social class.

We do not fight against any nation or civilisation.

We are fighting division, unconsciousness, ignorance, inertia and falsehood.

We are endeavouring to establish upon earth union, knowledge, consciousness, truth; and we fight whatever opposes the advent of this new creation of Light, Peace, Truth and Love.¹⁰

At the same time, it was necessary for the Ashram inmates to learn the lessons of the happenings of 11 February, and the Mother spelt them out on 10 March:

Behind all destructions, whether the immense destructions of Nature, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones, floods, etc., or the violent human destructions, wars, revolutions, revolts, I find the power of Kali, who is working in the earth-atmosphere to hasten the progress of transformation.

All that is not only divine in essence but also divine in realisation is by its very nature above these destructions and cannot be touched by them. Thus the extent of the disaster gives the measure of the imperfection.

The true way of preventing the repetition of these destructions is to learn their lesson and make the necessary progress.¹¹

Prominent members of the Ashram read in similar terms the lessons of the tragic disturbances of 11 February. Nolini Kanta Gupta felt confident that, even as the Ashram had survived trials and tribulations in the past, it would face current and future challenges as well. It was a fight between the Divine and the Asuric forces:

The nether forces can never divert or deflect the Divine Decree. That alone is carried out and fulfilled. And in His Will is our peace. ...

Through all contraries and adversities, through all that are broken and torn, through all that pass and disappear grows slowly and emerges irrevocably that which the Supreme wills towards the final consummation.¹²

And Norman Dowsett wrote:

There is little doubt... that the New Light, descending into the earth consciousness, is now pressing upon the lowest of the dark bastions off

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ignorance and that this upsurge of hate and violence is the manifestation of the divine Pressure.¹³

It was characteristic of the Ashramites that they should have taken the violence and destruction of 11 February as part of the Asuric forces' battle against the Divine, the ultimate issue of which could never be in doubt. The Aurobindonian Yoga was as large as life, and if some violence and hatred intruded into the picture, that too had to be faced, mastered and transformed in the fullness of time.

As early as 25 April 1954, and shortly before Pondicherry's merger with India, the Mother had declared that an important rule in the Ashram was that "one must abstain from all politics - not because Sri Aurobindo did not concern himself with the happenings of the world, but because politics, as it is practised, is a low and ugly thing, wholly dominated by falsehood, deceit, injustice, misuse of power and violence; because to succeed in politics one has to cultivate in oneself hypocrisy, duplicity and unscrupulous ambition". On the other hand, the indispensable basic requirements of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were "sincerity, honesty, unselfishness, disinterested consecration to the work to be done, nobility of character and straightforwardness". Sri Aurobindo had loved his Motherland deeply, but he had also "wished her to be great, noble, pure and worthy of her big mission in the world". And the Mother concluded with the words:

This is why, in full conformity to his will, we lift high the standard of truth, progress and transformation of mankind, without caring for those who, through ignorance, stupidity, envy or bad will, seek to soil it and drag it down into the mud. We carry it very high so that all who have a soul may see it and gather round it.¹⁴

It was as though the Mother was looking ahead - far ahead - viewing the dark happenings of 11 February 1965 and promulgating the Testament of the Ashram. When somebody asked her on 28 April 1965, -

Why is India, which has such a rich past and the promise of such a brilliant future, in such a miserable condition at present? When will she emerge from this pitiable condition and reaffirm her greatness? -

the Mother answered briefly: "When she renounces falsehood and lives in the Truth."¹⁵ Hence the emphasis on "the Advent of the Truth" in her New Year message.

IV

And yet, it was in the course of 1965 that, not in the least daunted by the untoward happenings of 11 February, the Mother embarked upon the

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boldly imaginative scheme "Auroville" - the City of Dawn. Her thrilling and inspiring futuristic projection "A Dream"¹⁶ has already been referred to in chapter 41. The Mother had then dreamed of "a place which n nation could claim as its own... a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment" While the Mother thought that the earth wasn't ready yet to realise that ideal, she rightly claimed that the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo was the basic movement in that direction. At the time of the World Conference on Human Unity convened by Sri Aurobindo Society in August 1964, several delegates had expressed the desire to come to Pondicherry and live in the light of the ideals of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The Mother had then mentioned her vision of a new town not far from Pondicherry where such an experiment in communal life in the spirit could be launched. Now in 1965, eleven years after the publication of "A Dream", the Mother firmly decided - and in defiance of the prowling forces of falsehood and darkness and division and hatred - that the time had come to take further concrete steps towards an extension of the ideal adumbrated in that seminal declaration. She found in Navajata, Secretary of Sri Aurobindo Society, an intrepid evangelist, and so the Auroville idea, like a 'seed of grandeur', was cast on the consciousness of the world. As the Mother observed on 8 September 1965:

Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities..

The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity.¹⁷

It was intended that Auroville should come up in the vicinity of Pondicherry on a site of the area of fifteen square miles fringed by three lakes on one side and the Bay of Bengal on the other. It would have, when fully developed, an optimum population of 50,000. One day when the project was under discussion, the Mother took a piece of paper and in the course of two or three minutes drew a circular design with a small central area. Although a team of international architects headed by Roger H. Anger laboured long over the plans for several months on end, they were ultimately to give up the square pattern on which they had started, and to arrive, unwittingly and ultimately, as if by divine direction, at the Mother's circular design with four sectors and a centre as the most satisfying and richly significant to translate the Auroville idea into material reality. Auroville was to be divided into four sectors or zones - residential industrial, cultural, international - revolving as it were round the Park of Unity and Matrimandir (or the Sanctuary of Truth) at the centre. It was an expression of the Mother's "Dream", dreamed on divided humanity's behalf; it was the Mother's seed-idea cast on the soil of an awakening human consciousness,

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an opportunity for the Tree of Human Harmony to take root in God's tremendous hour of new-creation.

V

The New Age Association that had been started under happy auspices in the previous year organised four seminars in 1965. The first, held on 14 February, was on How to discriminate between Truth and falsehood in the impulses of action?¹⁸ The Mother's message to the seminar was the same as her letter to Huta on 22 January on the need to discriminate between Truth and Falsehood.¹⁹ In the seminar held on 25 April, the question posed was How to make one's studies a means of one's sadhana? Education is with some for success in life in terms of career and cash and status and power; with some, for intellectual training and cultural fulfilment; but the highest aim of education, as of all life's activities, could only be to realise the spirit - in other words, studies should be pursued as a means of sadhana.

For the third seminar, on 8 August, the theme was How to turn one's difficulties into opportunities for progress? On 21 November, two questions were posed: What is the best way of making humanity progress? and What is true freedom and how to attain it? The director of the seminars, Dr. Kishor Gandhi, pointed out that the spiritual way was the right way of man's future progress, and the action of the highest Truth of the Supermind would be crucial for effecting a radical transformation of human nature. He mentioned what the Mother had said: real freedom lay in complete subjection to the Divine. Only God is absolutely free. And all that wise people could do was to submit to the Divine in utter sincerity: Let Thy will be done!²⁰

These New Age seminars no doubt engaged but a dozen or fifteen participants, and some of the papers read were almost like academic exercises. And yet it meant a re-reading of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's writings and pondering over their meaning; and there was also the Mother's personal interest and involvement. The more important papers were duly published in Mother India so as to reach a wider audience and, in 1977, were published in book form as The New Age. The seminars were thus an aspect of life in the Ashram and they had their own role to play in the larger context of the sadhana of Integral Yoga aiming ultimately at man-transformation and earth-transformation. Taking a general view, the bleakness of the time and the invading darkness were real enough, but they were also superficial; and they mounted up a challenge too. And all the time there were the hidden reservoirs of Light, and there were the elect, the dedicated and the determined, to dare forward, fight the darkness and prepare for the New Dawn.

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