On The Mother

CHAPTER 3

Encounters and Explorations

I

The Woman I behold, whose vision seek

All eyes and know not; t'ward whom climb

The steps o' the world, and beats all wing of rhyme,

And knows not; 'twixt the sun and moon

Her inexpressible front enstarred

Tempers the wrangling spheres to tune;

Their divergent harmonies

Concluded in the concord of her eyes,

And vestal dances of her glad regard.

FRANCIS THOMPSON

A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;

As in a golden vase's poignant line

They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss

Of earth's mute adoration towards heaven

Released in beauty's cry of living form

Towards the perfection of eternal things. 1

SRI AUROBINDO

The child of thirteen who had dreamt extraordinary dreams, the child who had felt the burden of the world's pain and would have annihilated it with her healing touch, the child who had suffered uncomplainingly the companionship of the Man of Sorrows, the child who could negotiate a passage across the mysterious occult worlds, the child who had been quarried out of the Divine and who offered herself to the Divine - the child is now grown into a young woman. When she was in her twentieth year, she married Henri Morisset on 13 October 1897, and they had a son, André . Motherhood became Mirra, and she was the Madonna with the Child. Whenever André as a child fell ill, she didn't call any doctor but herself cured the ailments.² And she used to tell him, even when André was but a little boy, how she had come to the world with a special mission.³ It must have been wonderful, to be that mother's child.

II

While motherhood had its claims and satisfactions, Mirra didn't forget her dreams, her precise visions, her sublime preoccupations. A small group of

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spiritual seekers (the group was named the "Idea") began meeting from 1906 onwards at her house, first on Rue Lemercier, then, after she separated from Henri Morisset in 1908, on Rue de Levis, and finally from May 1911 on Rue du Val de Grâce. The members were intrigued by the Invisible. they freely exchanged their inmost thoughts, they posed problems of philosophy and ethics, and they explored the dynamics of purposive action. Mirra was the life and soul of the group, and It was she who imparted to them the needed cohesion and sense of direction. A friend of hers, Mme. Alexandra David-Neel, was to nostalgically recall more than sixty years later, the temper and atmosphere of those Parisian meetings:

We spent marvellous evenings together with friends, believing in a great future. At times we went to the Bois de Boulogne gardens, and watched the grasshopper-like early aeroplanes take off.

I remember her [Mirra's] elegance, her accomplishments, her intellect endowed with mystical tendencies.

In spite of her great love and sweetness, in spite even of her inherent ease in making herself forgotten after achieving some noble deed, she couldn't manage to hide very well the tremendous force she bore within herself.⁴

Visiting the scene of those meetings on 11 November 1966, Prithwindra Mukherjee found the house number 9, very near the Church of the Val de Grâce, black with moss and age:

A gust of perfume - dank soil, grass, falling leaves, moist tree-trunks and something else, something indefinable - greeted us. A picturesque square rimmed by tall houses ... the eyes rested marvelling, at the end of the square, on a tiny one-and-a-half storeyed building neatly standing out unique in that surrounding.⁵

A couple of low stairs led up to the greenish door, and Prithwin felt that the doorway still remembered Mirra's delicate footsteps of more than half a century ago! It was a small house with but one room upstairs, and the rest was the ground floor and there were also steps leading to the garden. wasn't this the house that was invoked in Mirra's prayer of 7 October 1913?

The whole atmosphere of the house is charged with a religious solemnity; one immediately goes down into the depths; the meditations here are more in-gathered and serious; dispersion vanishes to give place to concentration; and I feel the concentration literally descending from my head and entering into my heart; and the heart seems to attain a depth more profound than the head.⁶

Reminiscing about those distant days, she said in 1951:

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We used to have small meetings every week - quite a small number of friends, three or four, who discussed philosophy, spiritual experiences, etc.7

One of the young men who attended those meetings of spiritual exploration was a fine musician, and "all of a sudden, he had the experience of the infinite in the finite." Although it was an "absolutely true experience" - the finite individual being suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of the infinite - "this upset the boy so much that he could make nothing at all of it! He could not even play his music any longer. The experience had to be stopped because it was too powerful for him."⁸ The trouble with the young musician was that, although he had a genuine talent for music, his brain was inadequate to accommodate the idea of the infinite in the finite. The experience itself was authentic enough, yet he couldn't live with it - it had had a shattering effect on him:

So the mind must be a little wide, a little supple and quiet, and instead of feeling immediately that everything you were thinking of is now escaping you, you wait very quietly for something in your head to begin to understand the content of the experience.9

One may be overtaken as it were by a tremendous experience, but the ādhāra - the human tenement with its body, vital and mind - must be ready too, ready to assimilate it and let it do the work of change and integral transformation:

One must have a solid well-balanced body, a well-controlled vital and a mind organised, supple, logical; then, if you are in a state of aspiration and you receive an answer, all your being will feel enriched, enlarged, splendid, and you will be perfectly happy and you will not spill your cup because it is too full, like a clumsy fellow who does not know how to hold a full tumbler. ¹⁰

Among the aspirants who regularly attended the weekly meetings was a young poet, a student in Paris, intelligent though light-hearted. One evening he didn't turn up, although he had said a few days earlier that he would come. Why hadn't he come, then?

We waited quite a long time, the meeting was over and at the time of leaving I opened the door to let people out. ... I opened the door and there before it sat a big dark grey cat which rushed into the room like mad and jumped upon me ... mewing desperately. I looked into its eyes and told myself, "Well, these are so-and-so's eyes" (the one who was to come). I said, "Surely something has happened to him." And the next day we learnt that he had been assassinated that night; the next morning he had been found lying strangled on his bed.¹¹

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III

It was in October 1906 that Mirra wrote the remarkable tale entitled "A Sapphire Tale"¹², and it is probable she read it to her weekly group.

There was in the Far East a little country long ago — so begins the story — and everything was orderly and prosperous there. Farmers, workers, scientists, philosophers, artists, all played their respective roles to perfection. The country was ruled by a wise old king, and realising it was time to retire he asked his young and accomplished son, Meotha, to marry a girl of his choice and agree to take over the burden of kingship. Meotha answered that he had not found his soul's mate, and would therefore like to travel over the earth for a year in the hope he would find somewhere his destined partner. And so Meotha set out on his journey and in course of time he came to a little island in the ocean of the West.

On this island lived Liane, an orphan, all alone in life. Her "great beauty and rare intelligence" attracted many suitors, but she rejected them all because in a dream she had seen a man who seemed, judging from his garments, to be coming from a distant country. Her heart went out to him, and she hoped and she waited. And one bright summer day, when she was walking through the woods, all Nature began to "speak to her of the One" whom she awaited. And gently Meotha swam into Liane's sight:

Oh, wonder of wonders! He is there, he, he in truth as she has seen him in her dream ....

With a look they have recognised each other; with a look they have told each other of the long waiting and the supreme joy of rediscovery; for they have known each other in a distant past, now they are sure of it.

They linked their hands "in a silence filled with thoughts exchanged" and went through the woods and reached the boat which took them to the waiting vessel. While the great ship started moving away, and only then, Liane told her companion:

I was waiting for you, and now that you have come I have followed you without question. We are made for each other ....

And Meotha answered: "I have sought you throughout the world, and ... in your eyes I saw that you expected me." Now she was going with him, he said, to his kingdom to be his queen: "The only land on earth that is in harmony, the only nation that is worthy of her."

This is an exceptional story, almost the Savitri-Satyavan story in reverse. Mirra had repeatedly seen in her dreams a wondrous being whom she was led to call "Krishna". Thus, in this story, it was herself she idealised in the character of Liane. Mirra was married already, and lived, not alone in a forest, but in the heart of Paris. But, in another sense, her soul was like an unaccompanied star and dwelt apart. Some day circumstances

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would surely bring about the meeting with her soul's Lord, the Krishna of her dreams. "A Sapphire Tale" is thus almost a prophetic piece, a parable of her own life.

IV

No detailed record of the attendance or discussions at the weekly meetings in Mirra's house seems to have been maintained. It was probably a floating group, with a hard-core membership of only three or four, with others coming in as it suited them. Mirra had already engaged herself in the study and translation of the Gita, some of the Upanishads, the Bhakti Sutras of Narada, and other ancient texts. From the essays in Words of Long Ago, as also from some of her casual remarks of a later period, it is now possible to piece out an impression of the kind of discussions initiated at the weekly meetings, of the range of interests of the members, and of the high intellectual quality, spiritual flavour and sustained seriousness of the proceedings. These essays and discussions, along with her translations of the Indian scriptures, may have circulated privately among a select European audience forging firm links between her spiritual group in Paris and similar groups elsewhere.

One day, in January 1907, a stranger from Russia sought out this group in Paris; it was shortly after the bloody suppression of the Russian revolutionary upsurge. The visitor had the look of "a hunted animal". He had come from Kiev, he said:

Yes, in Kiev there is a group of students who are deeply interested in great philosophical ideas. Your books have fallen into our hands, and we were happy to find at last a synthetical teaching which does not limit itself to theory, but encourages action. So my comrades, my friends, told me, "Go and seek their advice on what is preoccupying us." And I have come. ¹³

As he sat in the drawing-room amidst "the luxury of this bourgeois apartment", he seemed ill at ease, his face was "pallid with long vigil or seclusion far from air and sun; ravaged by suffering, lined by anxiety, and yet all shining with a fine intellectual light" . When asked what work he did in his own country, he viewed the group in silence, and said with some deliberation: "I work for the revolution."

The Revolutionist is at bay - there is always a time when the Bazarovs of this world are at bay - and he begins to wonder whether at the very heart of his philosophy and action there isn't a darkness, an inbuilt futility. The way of violence, the technique of retaliation and revenge, they lead but to a cul-de-sac. The violence of desperation may have a logic and grandeur of its own, but in the final analysis it is rather foolish and futile.

When Mirra asked him how exactly her group could help him, he felt somewhat reassured, and he frankly placed his cards on the table.

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At the centre of the revolutionary movement in Russia was a small group of idealists of whom he was one. In their ardour to see Justice, Liberty and Love triumph, they had decided to meet sword by sword, but for a physician and a healer like him this was a hard thing to do, his soul rebelled against It:

I who feel in my soul a wealth of tenderness and pity that seeks to relieve the miseries of mankind, I who became a doctor with the sole aim of fighting its ills and alleviating its sufferings, being forced by painful circumstances to take the bloodiest decisions.

Although he had allowed himself to be pushed into the path of violence, he had suffered too, and he had often felt that there should be a better way of dealing with human ills; and the recent collapse of the movement seemed to justify his worst fears. This, this was the time, perhaps, to rethink their ends and means, and in fact he had already done some fresh thinking along those lines:

We must develop our intelligence to understand better the deeper laws of Nature, and to learn better how to act in an orderly way, to co-ordinate our efforts....

.. .for a nation to win its freedom, it must first of all deserve it, make itself worthy of it, prepare itself to be able to enjoy it. This is not the case in Russia, and we shall have much to do to educate the masses and pull them out of their torpor ....

His friends had agreed with him, and sent him to learn how the ideas of the Paris group could be adapted to the pressing needs in Russia, and to prepare a pamphlet embodying their "beautiful thoughts of solidarity, harmony, freedom and justice". On the other hand, he couldn't help wondering whether his "philosophical dream" wasn't really utopian, dictated by cowardice, and whether the manlier thing wouldn't be to meet violence with violence, destruction with destruction, carnage with carnage. When, at this point, Mirra gently interposed: "How can you hope to win justice with injustice, harmony with hatred?" he answered simply:

I know. This opinion is shared by nearly all of us. As for me, I have a very particular aversion to bloody actions; they horrify me. Each time we immolated a new victim, I felt a pang of regret, as if by that very act we were moving away from our goal.

But what are we to do when we are driven by events .... Though we may perish to the last man, we shall not falter in the sacred task that has fallen to us....

A noble mysticism gave a glow to his countenance; and even desperation, when it was expressed in such terms, sounded beautiful and inspiring.

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But to die was not enough; to live and ultimately to conquer was the better way! Hence Mirra's motherly and wise advice:

... you should renounce it [your open struggle] for a time, fade into the shadows, prepare yourselves in silence, gather your strength, form yourselves into groups, become more and more united, so as to conquer on the auspicious day, helped by the organising intelligence, the all-powerful lever which, unlike violence, can never be defeated.

Put no more weapons in the hands of your adversaries, be irreproachable before them, set them an example of courageous patience, of uprightness and justice; then your triumph will be near at hand, for right will be on your side, integral right, in the means as in the goal.

The visitor felt moved, and felt persuaded as well; he was happy that a woman like Mirra was taking a lead in such matters, hastening the advent of better days. In fact, when overstrained by his secret work he had become half-blind, it was a woman who had, out of pity for him, come to his help, reading to him, writing to his dictation, following him to Paris. Alas! even in France, the citadel of liberty, they were spied upon and made to feel insecure. Mirra, however, asked him to come to her group again and discuss his projects and his pamphlet in progress. The visitor was indeed overwhelmed, "his kind, sad eyes looked at us full of confidence and hope", and his parting words were:

It is good to meet people one can trust, people who have the same ideal of justice as we have, and do not look upon us as criminals or lunatics because we want to realise it. Good-bye.

And that is the end of the brief history of "this gentle, just man", a revolutionary leader, who was perhaps a martyr as well. He had come to Mirra in his agony and perplexity, his idealism and desperation, and her healing touch had calmed and cured him, closed the fissure in his soul, and saved him in time. But nobody knew what happened to him when he returned to his country: perhaps only a tragic end awaited him there.

V

The weekly meetings continued, and while the group had its centre in Mirra's residence in Paris, it was to register a widening circumference of beneficent influence. There were discussions, talks, plans. Experience mingled with logic, the heart wrestled with the mind; and so the spiritual seekers groped towards an integral aim in life and integral means to achieve it. In the discussion with the young Russian revolutionary leader, the emerging ideas were the need to awaken a new "intelligence", to affirm an "integral right", and to accept the identity of ends and means

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forged on the anvil of Purity and Truth, And of course all this had a wider application than only to Russia, for Mirra and her group were really concerned with the global human condition - how mankind might transcend its current limitations and lacerations, and deserve a new deal, a life of harmony and integral realisation.

Earlier there were evenings when the discussion wound its way to a spiritual focus; at other times the discussions were more general. Some time in 1904 she wrote a remarkable parable entitled "The Virtues", ¹⁴ but it is not known whether it was read at any of the weekly meetings.

In the Hall of Intelligence - the vestibule of the Palace of Truth situated on a very high cloud - a festival is held for the higher beings, who on earth are known as Virtues. They arrive one after another, and presently gather into congenial groups "full of joy to find themselves for once at least together, for they are usually so widely scattered throughout the world and the worlds, so isolated amid so many alien beings".

Sincerity presides over the festival, dressed in a transparent robe, and holds in her hand a cube of the purest crystal wherein things are reflected without the slightest deformation. Humility and Courage are her two faithful guards. Prudence, a woman wholly veiled, stands close to Courage.

Charity, "at once vigilant and calm, active and yet discreet", is at the still centre that is everywhere; and affiliated to her is her twin sister, Justice. When she moves unobtrusively in the Hall, Charity leaves a trail of "white and soft light" which suffuses the entire atmosphere. Kindness, Patience, Gentleness and Solicitude are in the background, pressing round Charity.

All are assembled - or so, indeed, they imagine - but now there appears another on the threshold, an utter stranger to the rest, "very young and slight, the white dress which she wore was very simple, almost poor". She is timid and hesitant in her steps, she feels dazzled by the brilliant company, and is almost rooted to the spot. It is Prudence who advances towards the new arrival and politely asks her name. "Alas!" she answers with a sigh, "I am not surprised that I appear to be a stranger in this palace, for I am so rarely invited anywhere. My name is Gratitude."

It is significant that, of the Virtues, it is Sincerity who presides in the Hall of Intelligence of the Palace of Truth; she accordingly takes precedence over all others. And Gratitude is hardly known, and it is with difficulty that she gets admission to the Hall, and she has actually to introduce herself. In a talk on 25 January 1956, the Mother was to stress again the importance of these two particular Virtues, as also of Faith (or Trust in the Divine), Courage or Aspiration, and Endurance or Perseverance. In all combinations of Virtues, Sincerity must take the first place, "For if there is no sincerity, one cannot advance even by half a step. "¹⁵ Hypocrisy, on the contrary, is the very negation of sincerity, and assumes

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the shape of cloud behind cloud, screen behind screen, opaqueness behind opaqueness; but "transparency" is the crystalline lucidity of the mind and soul. In a later talk, she was to present sincerity as a progressive or evolutionary virtue:

As the being progresses and develops, as the universe unfolds in the becoming, sincerity too must go on perfecting itself endlessly. Every halt in that development necessarily changes the sincerity of yesterday into the insincerity of tomorrow.16

If one did not deceive oneself, if one were determined to advance and not to stagnate, then "sincerity is the safeguard, the protection, the guide, and finally the transforming power".

Again, gratitude isn't simply a dull if necessary virtue; gratitude can be a pure joy in its own right, with close affiliations with the virtue of Devotion:

There is nothing which gives you a joy equal to that of gratitude. One hears a bird sing, sees a lovely flower, looks at a little child, observes an act of generosity, reads a beautiful sentence, looks at the setting sun, no matter what, suddenly this comes upon you, this kind of emotion - indeed so deep, so intense - that the world manifests the Divine, that there is something behind the world which is the Divine.

So I find that devotion without gratitude is quite incomplete, gratitude must come with devotion. ¹⁷

The love and adoration of the Divine - and the Divine behind things, beings and actions - must also induce the feeling of pure joy and gratitude as well.

VI

There are causeries, too - "On Thought", "On Dreams", "To Know How to Suffer", "The Supreme Discovery". They were read between 1910 and 1912 to small groups with which Mirra was associated in Paris. There is nothing merely 'clever' in the causeries. They are earnest, meditative, illuminating compositions; they are both the creepers of aspiration and the first flowers of realisation. Like the parables, these causeries also are addressed to spiritual seekers.

"On Thought" was a causerie, a thinking-aloud, in a Women's Association, L'Union de Pensée Féminine, which Mirra had started in 1911. "Thought ... is a very vast subject"; thoughts are sometimes the fruits of our sensations, and sometimes they clearly come from outside. Random, wayward, promiscuous thought is apt to defeat the very purpose of thinking, to pervert its aim and to render misshapen its numerous progeny.

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If we leave thought to riot unfettered, we will surely be exposed to a hideous siege of contraries, and we will then. inhabit a chaos of our own creation. The prime need, then, is tranquillity; according1y, "if we want to be able to truly think, that is, to receive, formulate and form valid and viable thoughts, we- must first of all empty our brain of all this vague and unruly mental agitation."¹⁸ This could be facilitated by meditation- in other words, reflection, concentration, self-observation in solitude and silence" , and a close and sever analysis and rejection of the "multitude of insignificant little thoughts which constantly assail us."

During the preliminary activity of rejection or concentration, it would become clear to us that we are often purblind enough to tolerate, if not glorify our own quiddities and eccentricities and errors of nature. Self-analysis should be rather more objective and ruthless, for only then could we eject the false, and change and transform ourselves:

We lack confidence in what we can become through effort, we have no faith in the integral and profound transformation which will be the work of our true self, of the eternal, the divine who is in all beings, if we surrender like children to its supremely luminous and far-seeing guidance.¹⁹

Secondly, even as we have to play the role of censor in respect of what we complacently look upon as our "own" thoughts, so too we should keep a critical and discriminating eye on the endless waves of thoughts coming from outside as opinion, dogma, popular fallacy, and so on. If thought is to be truly and sovereignly ours, it shouldn't be just accepted second-hand; rather "it would have to form part of a logical synthesis you had elaborated in the course of your existence, either by observation, experience and deduction, or by deep abstract meditation and contemplation".

While tranquillity, objectivity, concentration, meditative analysis are all both difficult and necessary, what is even more needed is integral sincerity or unity of thought and action. Alas, we are slaves of the past, and worse slaves of the passing moment, "the blind and arbitrary will of our contemporaries"; and the challenge therefore is that we should know ourselves, and dare to be ourselves; that we should prepare for the future, and bravely fare forward:

Life is in perpetual evolution; if we want to have a living mentality, we must progress unceasingly.

But even when we have emancipated ourselves from the dead past and the deceptive present, even when we are poised for a leap forward, there is need for the "true thought, which brings us into relation with the infinite source of knowledge". Here, too, many-tiered meditation alone offers the key, as illustrated by an old Indian text. In that tale, the king's progress is marked, first by the rejection of thoughts of covetousness, ill-will and hate; then the rejection of passion and false sentiment. The king attains a series

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of dhāmas, conditions of ease and joy, and comfort and mastery, produced successively by solitude and reflection, by quietude and elevation of spirit, by poise and equality, and by pure serenity. The great king is now able to regard the whole world with its four quarters with a heart full of love, with a compassion without cessation, with a sympathy that is incommensurable, and with an abiding and abounding serenity. When thought is thus purified in the waters of tranquillity and tempered on the anvil of meditation, it acquires a new glow, a puissant force, and it sheds its self-division and barrenness, and becomes verily a chain of linked self-evident truths that embraces the whole universe. The mist disappears; light floods the tablelands of the mind; and as St. Teresa remarked, "in a room into which the sunlight enters strongly, not a cobweb can be hid".²⁰ Mirra neatly concludes her discourse with what is almost like an amplification of the celebrated Gayatri and anticipates the Gayatri as new-formulated by Sri Aurobindo:

I would like us to make the resolution to raise ourselves each day, in all sincerity and goodwill, in an ardent aspiration towards the Sun of Truth, towards the Supreme Light, the source and intellectual life of the universe, so that it may pervade us entirely and illumine with its great brilliance our minds and hearts, all our thoughts and our actions.²¹

VII

Like the causerie "On Thought", the companion piece "On Dreams" has also a wide sweep of comprehension, evidently the crystallisation of many sessions of intellectual and psychic exploration. "To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub": thus Hamlet. Are dreams mere mental frippery? - perhaps no more than a sign of indigestion? Are dreams but lies, vain hopes and practical jokes? Samuel Daniel has no use for dreams:

Cease dreams, th'Images of thy desires,

To model forth the passions of the morrow:

Never let rising Sun approve you liars,

To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.

But how about Mirra's own dreams as a child of thirteen? Aren't dreams, then, - at least sometimes, - media of supernatural intimations?

The problem may indeed seem to admit of a wide solution. Are dreams only excrescences to be eliminated from our life, or are they rather the ambiguous expression of a sixth sense to be reverently fostered and perfected? Part of the truth is that, when one is asleep, one's real nature finds free play in the dreams. As the Mother explained in the Course of a talk in 1951:

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Dreams are of great use because this movement of repression exists no longer, the conscious will not being there ... and the desire repressed below leaps up and manifests itself in the form of dreams, so much so that you come to know a good many things about your own nature. ²²

But dreams are not all of a piece, for the quality of sleep - and of dreams as well - changes "according to the hours of the night or according to how long you have slept", and it may very well mean that in the course of a single night, one has a variety of dreams comprehending the extreme limits of consciousness. The Mother also added that, since one quickly forgets what happens in the dreams, "quite a discipline is needed to create in oneself the many steps which enable the consciousness not to forget what it has experienced up there". ²³

It would be far better to confront our real nature, its quirks and curves and crookednesses, face them and throw them out by an act of will, than to allow them to continue their subterranean empire, to erupt as they please and take us wholly unawares. But for this we should keep a watch over the hours of the night, and maintain a careful inventory of the dreams in all their variety and multiplicity and tantalising succession:

No one knows himself well who does not know the unconfined activities of his nights, and no man can call himself his own master unless he has the perfect consciousness and mastery of the numerous actions he performs during his physical sleep.²⁴

Also, as Sri Aurobindo says in The Life Divine:

If we develop our inner being, live more inwardly than most men do, then the balance is changed and a larger dream-consciousness opens before us; our dreams can take on a subliminal and no longer a subconscious character and can assume a reality and significance. ²⁵

It may then often happen that what had seemed puzzling or insoluble in the evening resolves itself in the morning as the result of a dream. But, then, any facile generalisation about the interpretation of dreams would be out of place, for there can be no universal directory of dreams as a guide to human behaviour at all times and in all places. Each individual will have to formulate his own code on the basis of his careful objective study or recapitulation of his dream-life:

The same discipline of concentration which enables man not to remain a stranger to the inner activities of the waking state also provides him with a way to escape from his ignorance of the even richer activities of the various states of sleep.²⁶

How, then, is this discipline of dream-consciousness to be pursued with advantage? Firstly, one has to place one's attention "on the vague

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impressions which the dream may have left behind it and in this way follow its indistinct trace as far as possible". Secondly, one should "extend the participation of the consciousness to a greater number of activities in the sleeping state". One may then hope that, so disciplined and nurtured, dreams will "take on the nature of precise visions and sometimes of revelations, and useful knowledge of a whole important order of things will be gained". ²⁷

With most people, consciousness is below par in the dream-state. On the other hand, the dream-world includes obscure and unfamiliar tracts which impinge adversely on our consciousness; and this inferior dream­stuff must disappear gradually as we gain increasing mastery of the Truth in the waking state. The way will then be made clear for the purer dreams that give us intimations of the secrets of our nature and of other-nature. In one of his letters, Sri Aurobindo makes reference to the recent medical theory of different phases of sleep culminating in about ten minutes of absolute rest and silence, and points out how it corroborates the Mother's own occult-spiritual knowledge and experience:

According to the Mother's experience and knowledge one passes from waking through a succession of states of sleep consciousness which are in fact an entry and passage into so many worlds and arrives at a pure Sachchidananda state of complete rest, light and silence, - afterwards one retraces one's way till one reaches the waking physical state. It is this Sachchidananda period that gives sleep all its restorative value.28

This brief interim of pure golden sleep, when one transcends waking and dreaming alike, is verily the condition of svapna-samādhi, the momentary consummation devoutly to be wished for to ensure life's fulfilment and renewal. ²⁹

VIII

Mirra's short essay "To Know How to Suffer" has this arresting confessional recordation:

My heart has suffered and lamented, almost breaking beneath a sorrow too heavy, almost sinking beneath a pain too strong .... But I have called to thee, O divine comforter, I have prayed ardently to thee, and the splendour of thy dazzling light has appeared to me and revived me.30

In these words of Mirra's we have a miniature description of the progress of the soul from the dark night of sorrow to the bright ambrosial dawn of new light and life. This sequence of spiritual phenomena is as real as Nature's physical laws, and concerns us as intimately.

In 1911 Mirra first met Abdul Baha31, the son and successor of Baha Ullah founder of the Bahai religion.

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Abdul Baha had spent 40 years, from the age of 24 to 64, confined in and around the 'prison city' of Akko (Acre) in palestine.³² He informed Mirra that when the early followers of the faith were persecuted, they went to their death with intense joy, and a sense of the divine Presence; and in particular there was a poet who, when he was taken away for torture and death, went with joy, and even told Abdul Baha who tried to offer words of comfort: "Suffer! It is one of the most beautiful hours of my life .... " If such be the inner attitude to suffering and sacrifice, one may very well ask: Suffering, where is thy sting? But all depends on the reason behind the suffering, and the nature of the sacrificial offering; and the people who so suffer or die for a religion or a great cause "have always felt a kind of divine grace helping them and keeping them from suffering". ³³

But from time to time the question returns: Why do we suffer? Why must we suffer? Is it because Nature is blind, giving hurt without plan or reason? Why is there no clear causal relation between virtue and reward, between blemish and pain? The poet G. M. Hopkins asked:

Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Can it be that what we call defeat, pain, sorrow has also a particular role to play in promoting life's fulfilment? Thus Hopkins again:

With an anvil-ding

And with fire in him forge thy will

Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring

Through him, melt him but master him still.

And thus St. John of the Cross:

O burn that burns to heal,

O more than pleasant wound .. ³⁴

But, then, it is unnecessary - it is even foolish and perverse - to subscribe to all the enormities of the ascetic denial. "Suffering is not something inevitable," writes Mirra, "or even desirable, but when it comes to us, how helpful it can be!"³⁵ To indulge in promiscuous sorrow - to inflict on the flesh or the mind wanton suffering - is as much ridiculous sentimentalism as it is to surrender to an excess of any other emotional state. What is needed, in the face of success or failure, joy or sorrow, is self-mastery rather than self-indulgence, and all deep feeling should thus be characterised by a sustained self-control and a purifying restraint and the reign of measure and quietude.

If suffering needn't be courted, neither need it be feared. If it comes, it comes with a far aim, and we should neither waver in our faith nor rest from the incessant toil of self-discovery. Nay, more: sorrow's extremity

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could be the sure prelude to the self-opening that leads us to the threshold of Truth. There is at the heart of the cosmos this tremendous paradox: even as with the hyperbolic asymptotes we shift instantaneously from minus infinity to plus infinity at the other extreme, in life too it could happen that from the nadir of sorrow might spring up a fountain of joy:

Each time we feel that our heart is breaking, a deeper door opens within us, revealing new horizons ....

And when, by these successive descents, we reach the veil that reveals thee as it is lifted, O Lord, who can describe the intensity of Life that penetrates the whole being, the radiance of the Light that floods it, the sublimity of the Love that transforms it for ever!³⁶

There is a peculiar poignancy about this essay (written sometime in 1910), as if wrung out of the depths at a time of acute personal suffering, or a period of crisis in her life. But she had only to seek deep within the "light, a living and conscious portion of a universal godhead", and there surely was the light that redeemed, the helper who was infallible.

Shock is often a necessary element in our lives - shock that makes us suddenly sit up and open our eyes, shock that ends the session of lethargy both of the body and of the mind, shock that sends us on a voyage of exploration and discovery. Siddhartha needed quite a few shocks before he would start on his long, long journey to the sanctuary at the foot of the Bodhi Tree. Ordinarily, the spiritual coma in which most people live keeps them ignorant of their quintessential nature, insensitive to the glory within and without, and indifferent to their true destiny. The shock of sudden sorrow sometimes effects the decisive turn, and the process of regeneration begins at last.

The theme of the following piece "The Supreme Discovery"* - by far the most seminal of the essays included in Words of Long Ago - is the dynamic of integral progress. Written in 1912, after she had heard of Sri Aurobindo, it seems to carry an echo of his spiritual vision. We have to begin with "a strong and pure mental synthesis" centred within the identity of the individual "I" with the universal "I", and the interpenetration of everything and every being with all things and all beings:

When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and

*On 24 April 1937, in a letter to her son, the Mother wrote: "A small booklet is being published in Geneva, containing a talk I gave in 1912, I think. It is a bit out-of-date, but I did not want to dampen their enthusiasm. I had entitled it The Central Thought, but they found it a little too philosophical, so it has been changed to The Supreme Discovery. Rather pompous for my taste, but ..." [MO 16:9]

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suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God."³⁷

In the light of this central thought, a veritable sun illumining our whole life, all else — all interests, passions, feelings, ideas, speculations, disputes indignations. prejudices - should dwindle into insignificance or disappear like mist. How can we really hate another when we know that in him too there is the "indwelling God" who is in all others as well? Only true Love can awaken this veiled Divine to flower into manifestation:

For the inner Godhead never imposes herself, she neither demands nor threatens; she offers and gives herself ... she is the mother whose love bears fruit and nourishes, guards and protects, counsels and consoles; because she understands everything, she can endure everything; bearing everything within herself, she owns nothing that does not belong to all, and because she reigns over all, she is the servant of all; that is why all, great and small, who want to be kings with her and gods in her, become, like her, not despots but servitors among their brethren.38

Once the "supreme discovery" of the indwelling Divine has been made, once the missing link with the Divine source has been restored, once one has apprehended the unity of spirit and matter in the universe, then all ills and rages must be annulled, and a radiant new light and joy must manifest itself. The essay concludes with words that carry a vast power of conviction, prophecy and divine assurance:

You who are weary, downcast and bruised ... hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows ....

But he tells you: Courage! Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message of solace .

... there is no mist that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild ... nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring ....

Hear again: no state was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at the very centre of his being ....

That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he!

In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory!³⁹

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IX

The meetings in her room at No.9, Rue du Val de Grace, the encounters with poets, artists, idealists and revolutionaries, the intimate discussions on thought, on dreams, on women, on suffering, on the divine omnipresence, the explorations in the realms of ends and means - these were but a very small fraction of Mirra's life. Her life within comprised the imponderable infinitudes, her outside life was one of ceaseless striving, and a seamless web of purposive action; and there was also an equation between the two hemispheres of her existence, the life within and the life without. She was so uncannily practical, and she was also an ocean inly seething with a definitive aspiration for the earth's - for humanity's - future. The people with her, around her, saw but part of the visible tip of the iceberg, hardly moving, hardly floating; but the invisible vast bore itself along towards a destination not as yet consciously determined. Mirra was unlike the multitude (although she identified herself with it), she was the solitarily sovereign and immaculate She:

Her mind sat high pouring its golden beams,

Her heart was a crowded temple of delight.

A single lamp lit in perfection's house,

A bright pure image in a priestless shrine,

Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,

Apart in herself....40

There were not wanting, however, experiences rather out of the ordinary. For example, once she was walking in a street in Paris - a street overflowing with noise as usual, and with confusion and hectic and bewildering activity. Yet even amidst it all she never forgot that if we are observant we can learn at every moment, that anywhere, at any time, something can happen enabling us to make some progress. Suddenly she had "a kind of illumination, because there was a woman walking in front of me and truly she knew how to walk. How lovely it was! Her movement was magnificent!" And Mirra was reminded of the splendours of ancient Greece.41 Wasn't it one of the archetypes of Beauty materialised below? A vestige of the Divine incarnated in a woman? A fresh affirmation of the Divine omnipresence? It was as though Mirra had been surprised by Beauty inapprehensible, as though she had been overtaken by a Bliss ineffable! Look, look! - and isn't the Divine before you, walking with a nymph's gait, as if floating with an angel's wings, as if smiling with a cherub's face? The world is indeed charged with the glory of God, with his Beauty and Joy, but one must have eyes to see, one must stumble upon the auspicious moments!

In the autumn of 1901, while Mirra was on a visit to Northern Italy, she happened to enter a silent church, and on an impulse she started playing on

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the organ. She was all alone, and forgot herself, and the strains of music were wafted to the high heavens of harmony and ānanda. Her eyes were closed, she was in a rapture of improvisation establishing bridgeheads between Here and Eternity, the Darkness and the Light, the Unreal and the Real. When she had finished, she was agreeably surprised by a loud applause. On opening her eyes, she found that an appreciative crowd had gathered, and was enjoying her music in a trance of attention.42 This was doubtless a tribute to the ready spontaneity of the Italians' love of music, but even more was it an irresistible tribute offered to the liberating soul­ quality of Mirra's organ music which carried intimations of the Divine beyond the physical ear's comprehension.

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