On The Mother

CHAPTER 9

Divine Man-Making

A couple of issues of the Arya had come out by mid-September 1914, but the War in Europe only raged the more furiously. Mirra was of Course busy with a hundred details relating to the new Society, the Arya (the English and French) and her own great sadhana for the earth. Her early morning meditations, the musings of her soul, and her dialogues with the Divine continued without a break, and the deeper poise and purpose of her being prevailed over the surface shadows and disturbances.

On 30 September 1914, Mirra records an uplifting experience with Vedic as well as futurist intimations. "The realisation has appeared in all its amplitude," and Mirra can see that the Divine inhabits us from the depths to the surfaces in the divers aspects of Agni (Life, works), Indra (Mind, knowledge) and Soma(Soul, love). But the call is for an integral union of all these powers for effecting the desired change:

And in all these domains Agni assures us of the help of his purifying flame, destroying all obstacles, kindling the energies, stimulating the will, so that the realisation may be hastened. Indra is with us for the perfection of the illumination in our knowledge; and the divine Soma has transformed us in his infinite, sovereign, marvellous love, bringer of the supreme beatitudes. ¹

Nay more: beyond these too - beyond Agni, Indra, Soma - to the still unknown Power, the visioned splendour of the Supermind:

And Thou, OLord, who art all this made one and much more, O sovereign Master, extreme limit of our thought, who standest for us at the threshold of the Unknown, make rise from that Unthinkable some new splendour, some possibility of a loftier and more integral realisation, that Thy work may be accomplished and the universe take one step farther towards the sublime Identity, the supreme Manifestation.²

A few days later, on 5 October, Mirra as paraclete pleads that she may be the meeting-point between the swell of human cries for divine help and the ready and adequate response from above:

Many seek Thee at this hour in anguish and incertitude. May I be their mediator with Thee that Thy light may illumine them, that Thy peace may appease . . ³

Again, in some of the later entries:

... let me be the representative of all the earth, so that, united with my consciousness, it may give itself unreservedly to Thee. (10 October)

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All the earth is in our arms like a sick child who must be cured and for whom one has a special affection because of his very weakness. (14 October)

Let all earthly desires come together in me, O Lord, so that Thou mayst consider them, and Thy will be able to work precisely, clearly, definitively upon the smallest detail as upon the whole. (22 December)

On 7 October, Mirra starts with the sad observation that most people are only concerned with the material life, "Heavy, inert, conservative, obscure"; there are also people with an awakened mental life, but they too are "restless, tormented, agitated, arbitrary, despotic", and alas! "Caught altogether in the whirl of the renewals and transformations of which they dream, they are ready to destroy everything without knowledge of any foundation on which to construct, and with their light made only of blinding flashes" confusion is but worse confounded, not happily resolved.⁴ To what end, then, this human drama? Mirra implores that, "under cover of the present turmoil, in the very heart of this extreme confusion", a revolution in human life and thought may be brought about, and humanity "at last awakened" to the Divine consciousness.

The next day, she returns to the old issue between the active and the contemplative life. The conditions may alternate or, better still, as with Mirra herself, they may co-exist. Explaining this particular diary-entry many years later, she told a group of disciples in 1947:

In the ideal condition, at the depth of the consciousness there is contemplation and absolute silence while outwardly the nature is busy with all sorts of activities and enjoys work. Generally, you begin with one - either the action or the meditation. But if you are plastic you can get the two together. ⁵

The aim of meditation is to open up the lines of communication with the psychic being, or the soul; once this has been done, all action will be the more effective for having such a psychic base.

A few days later, on 12 October the pain of the world becomes also her own body's pain, and Mirra asks: "When will ignorance dissolve? When will pain cease?" Isn't it because of the divorce from the Divine that pain and ignorance have thrived? "Without Thee all is false!" declared Guru Nanak. Every atom of the universe should thus grow conscious of its Divine origins and Divine substance, and by this means redeem and transform itself.

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II

Nearly two weeks pass, and Mirra once more makes a perfect offering of herself to the Lord: "My aspiration to Thee, O Lord, has taken the form of a beautiful rose, harmonious, full in bloom, rich in fragrance." And she stretches it out to the Lord in a gesture of articulating this prayer in the name and on behalf of the whole earth:

If my understanding is limited, widen it; if my knowledge is obscure enlighten it; if my heart is empty of ardour, set it aflame; if my love is insignificant, make it intense; if my feelings are ignorant and egoistic, give them the full consciousness in the Truth: ⁶

Then, for a week, although her pen is silent, Mirra has hours of "unforgettable illumination" which cleanse and greaten the entire stair of consciousness from the heights to the depths, and the effect on her everyday life is unmistakable:

In all work, constantly, there is the perception of Thy invariable presence in Thy dual form of Non-Being and Being ... the physical body is glorified, supple, vigorous. energetic; the mind is superbly active in its calm lucidity, guiding and transmitting the forces of Thy divine Will; and all the being exults in an endless beatitude, a boundless love, a sovereign power, a perfect knowledge, an infinite consciousness ....

Thus the solid foundations of Thy terrestrial work are prepared, the substructure of the immense edifice built ... and in the hour of realisations the earth, thus prepared, will be ready to receive the sublime temple of Thy new and more complete manifestation. ⁷

And while night follows day, superficially life is the same tale told by an idiot, but to Mirra's occult vision as "new dawns unweariedly succeed to past dawns ... there mounts the scented flame that no storm-wind can force to vacillate" ⁸, and even the last closed vault shall open one day. And yet­ "the formidable fight, the onslaught of the adverse forces"! But there is no occasion to feel disspirited, for the "purer forces" of the Divine will manifest:

What opposes is just that upon which it is the mission of these forces to act; it is the darkest hatred which must be touched and transformed into luminous peace. ⁹

All difficulty is an opportunity, all resistance is also an incentive; and the mental faculty itself, long prone to error, carries within it the propensity to progress. Hearkening to the Voice, Mirra receives the capital assurance:

This dividing intellect, which makes him [man] stand apart from me, also enables him to scale rapidly the heights he must climb, without letting his

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progress be enchained and delayed by the totality of the universe, which, in its immensity and complexity, cannot effect so swift an ascent.¹⁰

On 20 November, Mirra aspires to be like "an absolutely blank page, so that Thy will may be written in me without any difficulty, any mixture". The weight of the past is a terrible drag, the pull of the past is a way of retreat. "O Lord," she pleads, "break the old frames of thought, abolish past experiences, dissolve the conscious synthesis if Thou thinkest it necessary .... " To obliterate the dead past is to end all hatred and rancour "as the sea effaces an imprint upon the sands" and to make peace take the place of vengeance in our hearts "as it enters into the soul of a child rocked by its mother".¹¹

There is a break of almost two weeks when Mirra was "entirely occupied by outer work", and now the musings unfold themselves again. Mirra feels that the Lord has emancipated her from her slavery to mere habits, thought-forms, and mental constructions. Nearly a week passes, and on 10 December a highly charged prayer rises in her heart, although it is not deliberately articulated. Is it not a folly, this reign of egoism: my idea, my scheme, my institution, my work? Wrong, wrong, all wrong, for Truth transcends all limitations. What is necessary is to embody the Truth in life - our life and the life around us - yet also be detached from it, and be ahead of it. This circumambient world: is it real? is it false? Since our world-view will condition our actions, we should arrive at or stumble upon and hold the right view - not simply dismiss this world as illusion. Even the most altruistic action runs the risk of personal adhesion, the rust of egoism; one must therefore resolutely guard against this and find one's right frame of reference - which is also the All, the Ground of everything.

In the meditation of 12 December, Mirra affirms that if one wants true renewal,

We must know at each moment how to lose everything that we may gain everything; we must be able to shed the past like a dead body that we may be reborn into a greater plenitude. ¹²

The steps of the sadhana are aspiration, progressive realisation, and total transformation. The climactic change will be the movement from separativity to union, from being "Thy servant" to becoming "Thyself':

O divine Master, with what an ardent love I serve Thee! With what a pure, still and infinite joy I am Thyself in all that is and beyond all existence in form.

And the two consciousnesses unite in an unequalled plenitude.¹³

Three days later, on 15 December, Mirra records simply that the Lord has given her "peace in power, serenity in action, immutable happiness in the heart of all circumstances". It was, as it were, the fitting conclusion of a yearlong immaculate sadhana in the service of the Divine and on behalf of the Earth and Man.

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III

The year 1914 was in truth a momentous interim for Mirra and for her sadhana of manifestation of the Divine and ministry for the Earth. The year had begun with her preparations for the visit to India - she met Sri Aurobindo on 29 March at his residence in Pondicherry and instantaneously recognised in him "the Lord of my being and my God", she helped actively in the organisation of L'Idée Nouvelle Society and the launching of the Arya, she made phenomenal progress in her sadhana achieving the most revolutionary results in an incredibly short time, she identified herself as the mother of the sorrowing earth now torn by an intestine war, and she played the role of mediatrix with the Divine, and, receiving the abundant strength of Grace, she played also the roles of collaboratrix and creatrix laying the first obscure foundations of a new Heaven and a new Earth. In the Centenary Edition of Prayers and Meditations, although the entries begin in 1912 and go on till 1937 (a period in all of a quarter of a century), the entries for 1914 comprise 282 pages, three-fourths of the total. Even as 1914 was, in its outward circumstances, a fateful crossroads of human history, it was even more significantly a year of destiny for the future of the human race. For it was Mirra's meeting with Sri Aurobindo that led to the launching of the Arya and, twelve years later, to the establishment of the Ashram at Pondicherry, with him and her as the preordained hub or "divine Centre" of the chariot wheel of the future human evolution from a mental to a supramental race. As early as 1914, then, Mirra and Sri Aurobindo were indeed the "first-born of a new supernal race", and it was perhaps decreed even then -

The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door,

Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.

The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demi-god

Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

Revealing the secret deity in the cave. ¹⁴

IV

As the War prolonged itself as if it might never end, as the Western Front enacted its weird stabilisation, and as the War proliferated in divers directions and grew new dimensions of diabolical ferocity, it became clear that the Richards would have to return to France, for Paul had his

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obligations to the Reserve Army. This meant the discontinuance of the French edition of the Arya, after its seventh issue in February 1915. Even so, the publication of the two editions during the first months of the War was no ordinary editorial and managerial feat. "Without the divine Will which knows best what to use and what to throw aside," Sri Aurobindo wrote editorially in the July 1915 issue, "no human work can come to the completion hoped for by our limited vision."¹⁵ When it was decided to stop the French edition, its subscribers were indulgent enough to consent to receive future the English edition instead. The unavoidable withdrawal of Paul Richard meant the termination also of his sequence entitled, The Wherefore of the Worlds. But, as Sri Aurobindo commented:

Happily, we have been able to bring it to a point where the writer's central idea appears, the new creation of our world by redeeming Love, - a fitting point for the faith and reason of man to pause upon at the moment of the terrible ordeal which that world is now undergoing.¹⁶

The soul of the universe was not the soul of power but the soul of Love. Love was the true divinity, the naked new-born child in the heart of man. Although crucified often, Love had always redeemed and glorified itself, and only Love could ultimately transfigure the world.

Strangely enough, during the short period of its existence the French edition of the Arya - the hard core of which consisted of Mirra's French translations of Sri Aurobindo's contributions to it - had succeeded in making an impact on intellectual circles in wartime France, while the English edition was received without much enthusiasm in Bengal. Commenting on this paradoxical phenomenon, Sri Aurobindo wrote rather outspokenly to Motilal Roy:

The intellect of Bengal has been so much fed on chemical tablets of thought and hot-spiced foods that anything strong and substantial is indigestible to it...

The Arya presents a new philosophy and a new method of Yoga and everything that is new takes time to get a hearing .... In France it has been very much appreciated by those who are seeking the truth. because these peole are not shut up in old and received ideas, they are on the look-out for something which will change the inner and outer life.¹⁷

What, then, was the whole aim of the Arya's educative endeavour? Sri Aurobindo was not engaged in just "man-making", but rather in "divine man-making", a far more revolutionary adventure but well within the scope of the Earth's evolutionary purpose. Sri Aurobindo couldn't, he admitted, "speak plainly yet my whole message", but in its broad outlines his message should be clear enough:

My present teaching is that the world is preparing for a new progress, a new evolution. Whatever race, whatever country seizes on the lines of that new

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evolution and fulfils it, will be the leader of humanity. In the Arya I state the thought upon which this new evolution will be based as I see it, and the method of Yoga by which it can be accomplished. ¹⁸

The opportunity before Man - especially in India - was to respond adequately to the challenge of the new philosophy ("in reality it is only the old brought back again, but so old that it has been forgotten"), and carry out in the fulness of time a radical three-part programme:

(1) for each man as an individual to change himself into the future type of divine humanity, the men of the new Satyayuga which is striving to be born; (2) to evolve a race of such men to lead humanity, and (3) to call an humanity to the path under the lead of these pioneers and this chosen race.

And, of course, "to do in the right way what Germany thought of doing in the wrong way"! Then came the note of caution, with which the letter concluded:

While the war continues, nothing great can be done, we are fettered on every side. Afterwards things will change and we must wait for the development.¹⁹

V

The coming of the New Year meant immediately no great change in the schedule of Mirra's daily activities. The calm within was matched by the quiet but unceasing work without. There was the Arya to see through the press and despatch to the subscribers and the agencies after obtaining the necessary visas; there were the meetings of the New Idea, and there were sessions of readings with Amrita and others; and there were, above all, the evening meetings at Sri Aurobindo's place, and the Sunday evening meetings at hers. The news of the War - now terribly disturbing, now guardedly reassuring - filtered to her deeper consciousness compelling, now a prayer for help, now a word of thanksgiving. She knew that she would soon have to return to France notwithstanding her commitment to the cause of L'Idée Nouvelle and the Arya, and surely some Divinity was shaping her ends. In the meantime, she could only surrender to the Lord in unquestioning trustfulness and total readiness to accept whatever might come to her.

On the morning of 2 January 1915, Mirra speculates on the variability of the New Year "according to the latitude, the climate, the customs", which makes it no more than a happy convention. Even so, the phenomenon of cyclical recurrence may have a meaning of its own with its attendant results. Then why not "profit by it to will with renewed ardour that this symbol should become a reality and the deplorable things of the

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past give place to things which must exist in all glory?" ²⁰ In particular, why should not people make it an occasion for renewed and redoubled efforts to outgrow their native limitations - to minimise the wrong tendencies, to maximise the right ones - and march towards perfection in thought, speech, feeling and action? To be mediator, collaborator and creator were indeed Mirra's sovereign roles, but then anybody - everybody - has to play those roles in one way or another, however humble his situation and 'however obscure his motivations and actions. It is the function of Yoga to clarify the understanding, to perfect the instrument, to tighten up the self­discipline, and thereby to hasten the realisation; and it is the mission of the Yogin-seer to give clear direction to the movement of evolution, to methodise Nature as it were, and to accelerate the progress towards the goal. In such Yogin-seers the Eternal consents to the compulsions of terrestrial life, and as they are at once with us and yet beyond us, they are enabled to fulfil their part in the marvellous drama of divine evolution ­ "divine man-making" - from earth-nature to supernature.

Mirra was such a Yogin-seer and creative mediatrix, and willingly and readily she had responded to the Eternal's call and transformed herself from a passive and contemplative to an executive and realising agent. The popular fallacy that mystics are unpractical dreamers has been refuted time and again by the impressive life-careers of many of the mystics themselves. As Dr. Inge has. pointed out,

all the great mystics have been energetic and influential, and their business capacity is specially noted in a curiously large number of cases. For instance, Plotinus was often in request as a guardian and trustee; St. Bernard showed great gifts as an organiser; St. Teresa, as a founder of convents and administrator, gave evidence of extraordinary practical ability .... The mystic is not as a rule ambitious, but I do not think he often shows incapacity for practical life, if he consents to mingle in it. ²¹

It is not in the least surprising therefore that Mirra should have decided energetically to meet the challenge of the phoenix-hour in the spirit of joyous combat and valiant self-confidence. As she noted in the course of her entry for 11 January:

O Lord, cutting me off from all religious joy and all spiritual ecstasy, depriving me of all freedom to concentrate exclusively upon Thee, Thou saidst to me, "Work like an ordinary man in the midst of ordinary people; learn to be nothing more than they in everything that manifests; participate in all their ways of life; for beyond all that they know, all that they are, thou carriest. within thee the torch of the eternal splendour which does not flicker, and by associating with them this is what thou wilt bring in their midst. Dost thou need to enjoy this light, so long as it radiates to all from thee? Is it necessary for thee to feel my love vibrating in thee, so long as

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thou givest it? Must thou taste fully the bliss of my presence, so long as thou canst serve as its intermediary to all?" ²²

It was but a beginning, a great beginning, and it .might start a chain of divinely ordained activities whose full scope she herself couldn't quite foresee. As she wrote down on 17 January:

Now, Lord, things have changed. The time of rest and preparation is over. ...

In a partial and limited battle, but one that is representative of the great terrestrial struggle, Thou dost put my strength, determination and courage to the test to see if I can truly be Thy servitor. If the result of the battle shows that I am worthy of being the mediator of Thy regenerating action, Thou wilt extend the field of action. And if I always live up to what Thou expectest of me, a day will come, O Lord, when Thou wilt be upon earth, and the whole earth will rise against Thee. But Thou wilt take the earth in Thy arms and the earth will be transformed. ²³

From apparently small beginnings - a study. group, a Review, a modest programme of action - a snowballing movement could be generated, there could result the needed transvaluation of values, the definitive courage to take the quantum leap into the future - when, suddenly, all the prejudices of the past, all the darkness of the vested interests, all the tamas of somnolent humanity would make a last-minute desperate stand. But that would also be the time for the cracking of the 'cosmic egg' and the triumphant emergence of the New Life, a transformed Life fondled and blessed by the Divine.

The next day, 18 January, Mirra indicates the configuration of her hopes in somewhat more precise terms:

In this immense heroic struggle, in this sublime struggle of love against hatred, of justice against injustice, of obedience to Thy supreme law against revolt, may I gradually be able to make humanity worthy of a still sublimer peace in which, all internal dissensions having ceased, the whole effort of man may be united for the attainment of a more and more perfect and integral realisation of Thy divine Will and Thy progressive ideal.²⁴

The integral Yogin will refuse to be slavishly bound by mere mental formulas, rigid conventions, mechanical forms and stratified codes. "Truth is eternally beyond all we can think or say of it", and the highest concepts, the subtlest ideas, the noblest exhortations, when they are but mechanically repeated, are apt to "lose their freshness after a time" and become valueless. The integral Yogin will therefore mark his advance by cantering across the wreckage of the past habits and deadening conventions. He will be for a sterling dynamism that rides rough-shod over all forms of resistance and inertia, heading straight to the goal, neither wave

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resting on the way, but pressing on till the gates of felicity have been stormed and entered. On 24 January, about three weeks before her departure for France, Mirra receives the clear direction yet once more: "Turn thy look towards the earth," and on 15 February she has the experience of a total spring-cleaning of her instruments of body, vital and mind, and she can hear the Lord's benediction: &quote of all that is dust." ²⁵ Mirra has gone through the ordeal of the primordial Agni, or the Fire of Truth, and she has emerged pure and "resplendent with a dazzling light", ready to face all eventualities.

It is evident therefore that Mirra's coming to Pondicherry and close association with Sri Aurobindo were to lead to several fruitful results in the Yoga of "divine man-making" and earth-transformation. The Arya had been launched on 15 August 1914, partly because Sri Aurobindo had already won his way to certain spiritual realisations that could sustain a new world-view, and partly because the Richards had wanted him to share his visions of future possibility with thinking people all over the world. But Richard had to go, and Mirra, freeing herself however reluctantly from her editorial and managerial cares, had also to go, leaving Sri Aurobindo to carry the whole burden alone. Years later, Sri Aurobindo was to write to Dilip:

And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher - although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. ... How I managed to do it and why? First, because Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review - and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, because I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher ²⁶

VI

Ever since Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in 1910 , the British Government in India had tried by any means whatsoever to get him back into their clutches. Kidnapping was tried, and failed - mainly because 'Mony, Bejoy, Nolini and the other young men were always an armour of protection to Sri Aurobindo. Pressure was put upon the French authorities at Pondicherry to invoke a law that required a guarantee by five prominent local citizens certifying to the character of the refugees. This was checkmated when "the five noble men" (Rassendran. Zir Naidu, Le Beau, Murugesa Chettiar and Shankar Chettiar) readily furnished the guarantee,

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enabling Sri Aurobindo, Subramania Bharati, V. V. S. Aiyar and the rest to remain undisturbed in Pondicherry.²⁷ Again, there was a move to get the French Government to agree to an exchange of Pondicherry for some British possession in India or elsewhere. This was foiled too, and the new French President, M. Poincaré, was firm on this issue. There was, then, the British attempt to get a warrant of extradition against Rashbehari Bose, a revolutionary who was supposed to be hiding in Chandernagore Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy immediately and asked him to take steps to defeat the British move, lest it should become a precedent for similar warrants of extradition against the political exiles in Pondicherry:

This concerns me and my friends, because it is an attack on the security of our position. If this kind of thing is allowed to go unchallenged then any of us may at any moment be extradited on a trumped-up charge by the British police. ²⁸

Thus both before 1914 and during the War years, Sri Aurobindo's harbourage in Pondicherry was a very precarious affair, and needed timely attention or intervention from various quarters. And it was in this context too that Mirra's coming to Pondicherry was to prove a help and an insurance. There was in particular Mirra's own brother, Matteo Alfassa, whose help Sri Aurobindo was to acknowledge openly in 1939 before a group of his disciples:

The Mother's brother, after retiring from Governorship in Africa, has been doing a lot of things .... He did a great deal in Africa, but other people got the benefit. It is men like him who built up France and also made it possible for the Ashram to continue here. Otherwise I might have had to go to France, or else to America ....

When the Mother came here and I met her, her brother got interested. These things look like accidents, but they are not. There is a guidance behind these events. ²⁹

The coming of Richard in 1910 , and of Mirra also in 1914, thus opened up avenues of sympathetic communication with influential quarters in France as an effective counterweight to the untiring and unscrupulous British moves against Sri Aurobindo. And so he was able to remain undisturbed in Pondicherry, and the Arya was able to come out regularly throughout the War and after, even when the Richards had returned to France; also, a

* Poincaré, Raymond (1860 -1934), a conservative nationalist statesman who held numerous cabinet posts from 1890 to 1906. Premier and foreign minister in 1912, he was elected the 9th President of France (1913-20). When Premier again (1922-24 and 1926-29), he foresaw and sought to prevent the rebirth of German militarism. It is now known that in 1912 and 1913 Sri Aurobindo had put the force of his spiritual will, Aishwarya, to support Poincaré in his election. (See also Sri Aurobindo: Archives & Research, December 1986, p.124 and April 1987, pp. 89,90)

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solid base came to be established at the very spot where the ancient seat of learning and spirituality, Vedapuri, was believed to have flourished with legendary association going back to sage Agastya himself.

VII

Sri Aurobindo had cut his connection with active politics when he left for Chandernagore in February 1910 , and this had been further confirmed when he arrived at Pondicherry in April 1910 . As he wrote to the Hindu of Madras on 7 November 1910 : "I had purposely retired here in order to pursue my Yogic sadhana undisturbed by political action and pursuit .... I have since lived here as a religious recluse." ³⁰ In a subsequent letter (20 July 1911) to the Hindu, Sri Aurobindo had to reply to certain slanderous accusations against him in the Madras Times, and affirm that he was but "a simple householder practising Yoga without Sannyas", and not a dangerous revolutionary "masquerading ... as an ascetic". ³¹While he was thus removed from the old scenes of hectic political action as also from his former colleagues, his profound interest in India's liberation from foreign rule had remained, albeit quiescent most of the time. Any time this might have led to a deeper involvement with predictable consequences. There is, for example, the letter to Motilal Roy of April 1914, in which Sri Aurobindo seems to say that, in a certain eventuality, " ... if God wills, I will take the field. " ³²Sri Aurobindo would henceforth direct all his time and energy only to the Yoga of the Life Divine for the Earth and Man. And by shifting to France, Mirra would be in a position to safeguard the interests of Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry so that his work - the Arya, the 'Yoga of "divine man-making" - could continue without the chronic threats of dislocation or suppression. With his little group of dedicated young men, Sri Aurobindo would be enabled to prepare at Pondicherry the granite foundation of the future edifice of "the divine Centre" which must become manifest one day and enact man's divinisation and the earth's transfiguration and progressively realise the apocalyptic vision:

The intimacy of God was everywhere,

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

Distance could not divide, Time could not change.

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,

The throb of one adoration's single bliss

In a rapt ether of undying love. ³³

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