On The Mother 924 pages 1994 Edition
English
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ABOUT

The chronicle of a manifestation & ministry - 'deep and sensitive insight into a great life, its authenticity, artistic vision & evocative creative language'

On The Mother

The chronicle of a manifestation and ministry

  The Mother : Biography

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar
K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar

On the Mother was selected for the 1980 Sahitya Akademi annual award, and the citation referred to the book's 'deep and sensitive insight into a great life, its authenticity, artistic vision and evocative creative language'.

On The Mother 924 pages 1994 Edition
English
 PDF     The Mother : Biography

CHAPTER 43

"I want only You"

I

The year 1954 was a time of all-round progress in the history of the Ashram. The de facto merger of Pondicherry with India on 1 November and the freer two-way traffic resulting therefrom were but the outer recognition of an inner aspiration and of a progressive deeper reality. Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's writings went round the world and, encountering the elect in unpredictable places, effected remarkable conversions. Thus, from 1 February, Savita Hindocha, who was later to acquire the Ashram name of "Huta", began writing down in her mother tongue Gujarati, her intense prayers to the Divine Mother with single-pointed devotion, feeling irresistibly drawn as iron is by the magnet.1 In 1981, in a preface to her autobiography, she wrote:

A few disciples of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo had come to our house in Miwani (Kenya), East Africa [on 25 July 1954]. We had all gathered together and started prayer, meditation and reading. What was read was Savitri, Sri Aurobindo's spiritual epic. I was fascinated and felt within me that the Mother herself was reading it to me and making me understand.

On all sides cataracts of divine light and peace seemed to fall and in this wonderful atmosphere it was as if my soul had come out of its body and begun floating. ...

[On that very night] I determined to relinquish the ordinary life and embrace the Divine Life.2

"You have given me life;" she wrote again on 19 August 1954:

Now I have understood what value life has....

You alone have given me the inspiration that in the remaining years of my life I should commence such a work that I may do good to all - myself as well as others. Making me Your musical instrument, give it to the world, so that the world may find joy and peace through the melody of that instrument.3

Again, on 12 September, and afterwards in quick succession every few days:

O Mother, I wonder when shall I embrace You with all my love, and the burning eagerness of my body and soul find rest?... Be gracious, O Mother. Your child is pining for You. ...

Now I am most impatient to meet You, because You alone are my support and refuge. You are All in All; I have the trust and the faith that now You will never desert me. ...

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Do call me to You soon. For, more and more my heart is drawn to You. And I cannot now dissuade my heart. You can hear my heart's cry.4

In prayer after prayer, she tells the Mother how eager she is to place her whole being at the disposal of the Divine. Sacrificing one's deeper interests one can no doubt reap worldly success, but the wiser thing will be to sacrifice one's life to the Lord and become "God-dedicated and love-luminous". Huta is clear in her mind that divine peace and happiness cannot come from money, family, children, pleasure, prosperity. She will rather offer all she possesses in the world - as well as the immortal love of her soul - to the divine Mother; but will it be accepted?

It was accepted indeed, and Huta came to the Ashram for a short visit and had her first darshan of the Mother. It was the 1st of November and, in the Meditation Hall, the Mother was distributing her message on the occasion of Pondicherry's merger.

With slow footsteps I approached her. My heart started beating a shade faster. Comforting vibrations came like waves and swept over my whole being. While I was receiving the message a powerful spark from her divine touch left me completely lost in her luminosity, peace and joy - I forgot to look at her!

That afternoon she joined the queue of Ashramites going up to the Prosperity Room where the Mother was distributing the monthly requirements to the sadhaks. And to all who came upstairs she gave some fragrant leaves of Sweet Marjoram to which she had assigned the significance: "New Birth - Birth to the true consciousness, that of the Divine Presence in us."

This time I looked at the Mother and our eyes met in utter silence, and it was as if our souls had embraced.... Then my heart whispered: "Yes, this is the Truth and the Love I have been seeking and aspiring for."

On 10 February 1955, she returned to the Ashram, and stayed on; and on the 17th the Mother gave her the name "Huta" (The Offered One).5

Like Huta, others too - men and women following different professions, men and women of the old world and the new, men and women of various races and climes - heard the call from Pondicherry, found it irresistible, and felt compelled to make their way to the Ashram and the protective presence of the Mother. And perhaps most of them, had they been asked why they were in the Ashram, would have said without a moment's hesitation:

After coming to the Ashram... it was my inmost soul, my psychic being, which felt this to be my true home. Where else could I go, where else could I live after that, leaving my true home and my divine Mother?6

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And Jay Holmes Smith, who had first come upon Sri Aurobindo's writings in the New York Public Library - even as Miss Margaret Wilson had earlier read there his Essays on the Gita - also found his true home in Pondicherry, and spoke thus for himself and others like him:

Hundreds of us in the Ashram are far from home, ten thousand miles away in some cases. But somehow we are not homesick, for after all "home is where the Mother is".7

II

For the hundreds of sadhaks in the Ashram, for the children in the University Centre, for the tens of thousands of disciples scattered in all the continents, the Mother was another 'mother', the Mother of the deeper self within or the psychic being, and the Ashram was the real 'home'. Faith, aspiration and the cumulative testimony of numerous experiences built up a personality of the Mother and inferred her amazing powers, but for all this there could be no rational explanation. "I am with you," the Mother had once said, and certainly, seen with the eyes of faith, she was always with her children - old or young - she was with them everywhere in all their trials. In the Ashram, of course, her influence was evidently more immediate, people could breathe her very consciousness, or lie nestled in her protective love. But even at a distance, even across the continents, one had only to call, one had but to send forth an S.O.S., and there indeed she was, ministering to her ailing or frightened child. As she confided to her children:

I am with you... because I am with you on all levels, on all planes, from the supreme consciousness down to the most physical....

But that apart, there is a special personal tie between you and me, between all who have turned to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and myself... distance does not count here... you may be at the other end of the world or in Pondicherry, this tie is always true and living. And each time there comes a call, each time there is a need for me... a sort of message comes to me all of a sudden and I do the needful....

With those whom I have accepted as disciples, to whom I have said Yes, there is more than a tie, there is an emanation of me. This emanation warns me whenever it is necessary and tells me what is happening.8

But how is it possible, it might be asked, and the answer would be that with the Mother it was possible; and it was experiential knowledge for the sadhaks. Hadn't Sri Aurobindo written in 1927, that the Mother was "one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence"? And he had warned again:

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If you follow your mind, it will not recognise the Mother even when She is manifest before you. Follow your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps at appearances; trust the Divine Power and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of Divine Nature.9

The Mother had no doubt put on the cloak of humanity, but that was only to facilitate her leading others gently on. She did many things that others did, she breathed and walked and bathed and talked and smiled - and even played tennis! But one had to pierce through the appearance - one had to see the Mother behind the gracious woman - one had to open one's inner eye and see how divinely human - how truly divine - she was. Thus K.D. Sethna on her tennis:

She seems but playing tennis -

The whole world is in that game!...

In scoring the play's progress,

The result of minds that move,

One word in constant usage

Is the mystic syllable "Love".

And the one high act repeated

Over and over again

By either side is "Service",

And it never is done in vain.

For, whether defeat or triumph

Is the end, each movement goes

Soulward: through this short pastime

Eternity comes more close!10

And so with her other activities, - music, painting, conversing, receiving pranam, giving flowers and blessings, looking into accounts, discussing building plans, watching the sports and athletics, keeping track of occult happenings, - and as the Appearance melted into the Reality, suddenly the incarnation threw the veil aside. To borrow Nirodbaran's words:

The beauty of thy face changing from hour to hour

Reveals a miracle of God;

Each delineation speaks of an inscrutable power

Locked in thy bodily abode.

It shapes our life in the light of thy apocalypt moods;

Each fugitive expression leaves

A lightning mark upon the mind's closed solitudes....11

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III

All this, however, was from the disciples' end. But the Mother had her own sadhana too, which was part of her total ministry for Earth and Man. She had first to will and achieve the desired transformation in herself, and then make it an example — a Grand Trunk Road almost — for others to follow. Would union with the Divine Consciousness lead at once to Transformation? Answering this question on 21 April 1954, the Mother says that it was not all that easy, it must take time:

Only if the Divine descends into the physical consciousness - or rather... if the physical consciousness is totally receptive to the Divine - naturally transformation ensues. But transformation does not come about by waving a magic wand....

A certain number of years must pass before we can speak with knowledge of how this is going to happen, but all that I can tell you is that it has begun.

To aspire, and at the same time to be receptive; this double active-passive attitude best promotes Transformation:

Well, the two can be simultaneous without the one disturbing the other, or can alternate so closely that they can hardly be distinguished. But one can be like that, like a great flame rising in aspiration, and at the same time as though this flame formed a vase, a large vase, opening and receiving all that comes down.12

Returning to the theme of the talk, the Mother contributed two essays - "Some Experiences of the Body Consciousness" and "New Experiences of the Body Consciousness" - to the Bulletin of April and August 1954 respectively. Surely, the Divine had come down in various incarnations in the past, always with the intention of "transforming the earth and creating a new world". What is the balance-sheet of these divine endeavours?

But till today, he has always had to give up his body without completing his work. And it has always been said that the earth was not ready and that man had not fulfilled the conditions necessary for the work to be achieved.13

Must it always be so? Would an earthly paradise prove for ever an Utopian dream? The Mother, however, feels that with the imminent descent of the Supermind into the earth-consciousness there may be far better prospects for the earth and its inhabitant, man. Occult science and spiritual discipline should henceforth purposefully go together "to complement each other for the perfection of self-development and integral action". It is only occult science that can concretely objectify the truths of the spirit in the world of forms, even as spiritual discipline alone can reach the ultimate psychological truths:

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Occult knowledge without spiritual discipline is a dangerous instrument, for one who uses it as for others, if it falls into impure hands. Spiritual knowledge without the occult science lacks precision and certainty in its objective results; it is all-powerful only in the subjective world.14

Again, it is characteristic of a time of change that one can experience two contraries (thesis and antithesis) simultaneously (or in quick succession), thereby paving the way for the synthesis, integration or transformation. As the Mother writes in the August 1954 Bulletin:

From one end I would say:

"Lord, to be truly near Thee, to be truly worthy of Thee, one must drink to the dregs the cup of humiliation and yet not feel humiliated. The contempt of man makes one truly free and ready to belong to Thee alone."

And from the other end I would say:

"Lord, to be truly near Thee, to be truly worthy of Thee, one must be lifted to the peak of human appreciation and yet not feel glorified. It is when men call one divine that one knows one's inadequacy and the need to be truly and totally identified with Thee."

The two experiences are simultaneous: the one does not blot out the other; on the contrary, they seem to complete each other....15

All contraries, all play of opposites, have ultimately a unitary source and lead at long last to a unitary destination. But the Mother isn't particularly happy with the introduction of a male-female antinomy or distinction into an essentially spiritual concept:

I have had very clearly the experience of a witness looking at things, completely detached from everything, who knows all and does not move, who allows everything to be done... I have also had the experience of a will which decides. Naturally, everybody has the experience of a moving force - the force in Nature, in its obscurity....

...what I object to is the male element and female element. Well, I find that it is not true, and I shall always say: IT IS NOT TRUE.... When one descends from above, well, right up there one has no idea of masculine and feminine and all that nonsense... this is a conception which has come from below, that is, has come out of man's brain which cannot think otherwise than of MAN and WOMAN - because he is still an animal.16

Nothing can be more forthright than this, and nothing can demonstrate better how the Mother was ready to knock out all nonsense however respectable its ancestry.

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IV

On 16 June 1954, the Mother recalls to the children the old tradition that there were six successive creations (or exteriorisations of the universe), and each of them had to be withdrawn on account of some irremediable defect in its constitution itself or in its actual functioning. The present is the seventh creation and, being based on the principle of "a progressive equilibrium", it will prevail and evolve and perfect itself. The four original emanations from the Supreme - Consciousness, Bliss, Truth, Life - lost contact with their origins and became Inconscience, Suffering, Falsehood and Death. There is now played on the terrestrial scene the drama of redemption of these perverted and lost emanations: in other words, the alchemic drama of reversal, reconversion, restoration, transformation. Of the initial emanations that turned themselves into their opposites, the first two are converted again into Consciousness and Bliss. But Falsehood, especially its pernicious emanation, "the Lord of the Nations", and Death - which is as stark as ever and as apparently immitigable - have so far defied re-conversion into their native splendour of Truth and Life. And not until these two Asuras too - Falsehood and Death - are converted or dissolved or reclaimed into the Transcendent, can it be said that the way is finally clear for the integral transformation of Earth and Man. The Lord of Falsehood had lately got hold of certain human bodies - Hitler's, for example - and "played a big role in the recent history of the earth". Even now, in league with Death, he is very influential, and "catches you with a contagion as strong as that of contagious diseases".

But whatever the traps and quicksands of a situation in the apparent grip of the hostile forces, and especially of the Lords of Falsehood and Death and their minions, there is one infallible insurance, the Grace Divine. Once the egoistic calculations and contrivances are replaced by total reliance on the Divine, all genuine aspirations will find their fulfilment as a matter of course:

If you are in a state of conscious aspiration and very sincere, well, everything around you will be arranged in order to help in your aspiration, whether directly or indirectly, that is, either to make you progress, put you in touch with something new or to eliminate from your nature something that has to disappear. This is something quite remarkable. If you are truly in a state of intensity of aspiration, there is not a circumstance which does not come to help you to realise this aspiration. Everything comes, everything, as though there were a perfect and absolute consciousness organising around you all things, and you yourself in your outer ignorance may not recognise it.... And, you know, it is a will, a supreme goodwill which arranges all things around you....

...If you say to the Divine with conviction, "I want only You", the

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Divine will arrange all the circumstances in such a way as to compel you to be sincere.... Well, the Divine will come without showing Himself, without your seeing Him, without your having any inkling of it, and He will arrange all the circumstances in such a way that everything that prevents you from belonging solely to the Divine will be removed from your path, inevitably.... This is indeed a higher Grace.17

V

"I want only You!" This definitive declaration of choice, this total affirmation of love, this all-sufficing aspiration, is the talismanic mantra given by the Mother to her children, and it reverberates in the corridors of the weekly Questions and Answers, in the highways and byways of the children's studies and sports, and in the interlinked planes of the Ashram atmosphere. It underlines the deeper lesson of the Mother's two plays, The Great Secret and The Ascent to the Truth. And, for a consummation, it finds recordation in the New Year message for 1955:

No human will can prevail against the Divine's Will.

Let us put ourselves deliberately and exclusively on the side of the Divine, and the Victory is ultimately certain.

On the eve of the New Year the Mother had noted in a personal reflection:

...it is foreseen that next year will be a difficult year and there will be many inner struggles and even outer ones perhaps.... These difficulties may [extend to] perhaps fourteen months....

... it is essentially the conflict, of the adverse forces... trying to push back the divine Realisation... this conflict... has come to its crisis. It is their last chance... it is upon earth that the first victory has to be won - the decisive victory, a victory which will determine the course of the earth's future.18

It may be there are blandishments and solicitations enough, it may be the Lord of Falsehood plays his seductive tunes and spreads his invisible nets to trap the unwary, it may be the giant evils of death, desire and incapacity are still prowling about in the earth-atmosphere, it may be that the ego's gorgeous self-projections and self-hypnotisations create the illusion of easy success, it may be that the pathway to the Divine looks steep and slippery; but there is no occasion to be daunted, or deflected from the Path Divine. Simply and sincerely to say "I want only You" to the omnipresent Divine is at once to call into play forces entirely favourable to the fruition of one's deepest aspiration, and then "the victory is ultimately certain". Once the election "I want only You" has been made, neither Asura nor man, neither the sophistries and half-lights of Falsehood nor the follies and duplicities of man, nor whatever tendency towards insincerity may lurk in oneself,

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can stand up to the Divine Will. This is the Mother's charter of charters, the true Magna Carta.

VI

It was during 1955 that Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, paid two visits to the Ashram and met the Mother. The first visit was on 16 January, not long after the integration of Pondicherry with India on 1 November 1954. At 11 a.m. when he arrived at the Ashram gate, he was given a guard of honour by members of J.S.A.S.A.19 Nehru was received at the gate by Surendra Mohan Ghosh and Nolini Kanta Gupta, and taken to the Reception room where he was shown a plaster model of the State of Pondicherry conceived by the Mother and executed by Ashramites, and intended for display in the coming Republic Day parade at Delhi. Pondicherry was to be represented by a small country craft carrying a pavilion:

The four principal pillars of this pavilion are the four Continents of Asia, Europe, Africa and America. Asia is represented by the Buddha, Europe by Pallas Athene, Africa by Isis and America by the Statue of Liberty. The spiritual supports upbear the globe of the world on which the Dove of Peace descends from on high. On either side of the globe stand an Indian lady with a welcoming leaf of palm and a French lady with an auspicious olive branch. This amity between the Orient and the Occident augurs well for an enduring peace and concord among nations.

The open spaces between the four pillars of the pavilion are covered by entwining creepers with alternating red and white lotuses. The red and the white lotuses represent the twin spiritual Consciousness guiding the terrestrial evolution.

At the four corners of the pavilion stand four guarding lions symbolising spiritual Powers.20

The Mother hoped that taking its cue from this global vision, Pondicherry would strive to become "a meeting place of all the cultures of the world with the full consciousness of the fundamental unity that binds the peoples of the world together". Perhaps we can apply to the Dove of Peace these lines from Sri Aurobindo's poem "The Blue Bird":

My pinions soar beyond Time and Space

Into unfading Light;

I bring the bliss of the Eternal's face

And the boon of the Spirit's sight.21

Nehru was all appreciation for the inspiration behind the model as well as its workmanship and finish. Then, after offering homage to Sri Aurobindo's Samadhi, he went up to the Mother and was with her for almost

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half an hour. From the Ashram he went to Golconde, which he admired for its beauty and its perfect functional adequacy, and then to the Library where he met the nationals of many countries. In the evening he came to the Playground. He was greeted by the strains of Bande Mataram sung by Ashram singers. Seated by the side of the Mother, Nehru followed with sustained interest the programme which included recitations, Swedish rhythmic ball drill by the girls, gymnastic marching, physical culture display, the whole programme concluding with Jana gana mana. This was a time of animated relaxation for the Prime Minister, and what he saw may have roused in him great expectations of what could be attempted outside the Ashram as well, provided the requisite idealism and leadership could be mobilised.

On 29 September 1955, when he came on an official visit to Pondicherry, Nehru paid an unscheduled visit to the Playground. This time, there were with him his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and Lal Bahadur Shastri, both future Prime Ministers, as also Kamaraj, then Chief Minister of Madras. Although Nehru himself could afford only a few minutes, his daughter spent a longer time with the Mother and the Ashramites.22

Early in November that year, the President of India, Rajendra Prasad, also visited the Ashram and was with the Mother a long time. Among other things, they discussed the disturbed international situation, and the Mother said: "India must rise to the height of her mission and proclaim the Truth to the world." Rajen Babu was profoundly impressed by the atmosphere of the place and by the Mother's radiant personality and poise of spiritual power. A group of children from the University Centre representing many nationalities were introduced to the President, and he was happy to meet them and posed for photographs with them.

Among other visitors during the year were R.R. Diwakar, Sri Prakasa and Dr. Karan Singh, all of whom felt a spiritual rapport with the place and a deep admiration for the Mother's personality and work. When Dr. Karan Singh had earlier asked for a photo of the Mother, three had been chosen and sent: the portrait with a veil taken in Algeria in the early years of the century, the photograph by Venkatesh entitled "Certitude of Victory", and Vidyavrata's photograph entitled "Durga". Looking at them before they were sent, the Mother mused and spoke softly to Champaklal:

Youngest and oldest: same look, same eyes; both eyes equal, same look, only the expression is different; same determination; but authority here is much more... much more... much more.

Fearless, powerful, dominating eyes.23

The Mother could be astonishingly objective in her assessment even when the subject was herself. And how precise and percipient were her comments on her own portraits! Talking about these generally, M.P. Pandit too makes the helpful comment:

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Each photograph has a different effect, each radiates a force of its own... She graciously explained that the photographs were taken at different periods, on different occasions, and the vibrations they emanate correspond to the state of consciousness she was in at the time. She also added that one could put oneself into contact with that consciousness through the' particular photograph by concentration.24

VII

In her evening conversation of 25 August 1954, the Mother made what amounted to a sensational statement, or rather a piece of heartwarming revelation. Writing on the Divine Mother and her Powers and Personalities in 1927, Sri Aurobindo had described Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati, and then added that there were other great Powers of the Mother too, but they were difficult to bring down; and yet, however difficult, "her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love," had to be brought down if the supramental realisation was ever to take place, for that power of Ananda alone could "heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter".25One of those present at the Playground asked the Mother whether this Power, unmanifest in 1927, had since come down or when exactly that might be expected to happen. The Mother answers, rather to the thrilled surprise of all:

She has come, bringing with her a splendour of Power and Love, an intensity of divine Joy that have been unknown to earth up to now.26

While as a result the physical atmosphere is now charged with undreamt-of new possibilities, what has been lacking is the required minimum receptivity, a group of human beings - even a single human being! - integrally pure and strong enough to experience the intensity of the new Ananda:

Up to the present she has not obtained what was needed. Men have obstinately remained men. They neither want nor have the ability to become supermen. They can receive and express only a love cut to their own measure - a human love! And the wonderful joy of the divine Ananda escapes their perception. Then sometimes she thinks of withdrawing herself, finding the world unprepared to receive her, and that would be a cruel loss. It is true that at the moment her Presence is more nominal than active since she has not the occasion to manifest herself. But even so she is a mighty help to the Work. For, of all the aspects of the Mother, it is she who has the most power of bodily transformation. Indeed the cells which can vibrate to the touch of the divine Joy and receive it and keep it are

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the regenerated cells on the way to becoming immortal. But the vibrations of the divine Joy and those of human pleasure cannot live together in the same vital and physical system.27

Humanity has known how to go in pursuit of sensual pleasures to the point of satiety and sickness, or to run away from life and lose itself in the rigours of ascetic denial. The common run of man has known only mediocre existence, with no possibility of any extraordinary vibration of consciousness. The raising of life and enjoyment to the level of divine Joy or Ananda has so far been beyond human capacity or experience. Hence the indifference that this descended Power has encountered from the mass of humanity. At first, when the descent actually took place in 1946 (almost ten years earlier), things had seemed propitious:

With her arrival, in two or three weeks the atmosphere not merely of the Ashram but of the entire earth was surcharged with such power - to be precise, with a divine Joy creating a power so marvellous - that all that had hitherto been difficult to accomplish could then be done almost in an instant!

But the Ashramites did not recognise that something exceptional had happened: everything - the vibrations of the new joy abounding, the heightened thrill of the developing expectancy - everything was more or less taken for granted. The time immediately after the Second World War, when one would have expected the Asuric forces to be in total rout, was also the time when they were entrenching themselves anew, and the Inconscient was then more resistant than ever to the coming Age of the Divine. That was the moment chosen for the descent of the Ananda power, so that the Inconscient might be converted, and a new peace and joy fill the earth. But the anticipated results didn't materialise, or not to any appreciable or decisive extent.

But, then, may not the future be different from all the flawed bundle of yesterdays? For in the Mother's experience,

...the whole world is created anew each minute. You can re-create your own world in that same minute, if you know how to do it: that is to say, if you have the capacity to change your nature! I have not said that the Ananda-Personality has gone away.

But nothing can be done without a determined change of consciousness, a sustained effort matching the great aspiration for transformation. It is merely tamasic to leave everything to the Mother: "Oh, never mind, Mother is there after all, she will manage everything for me!" Hasn't Sri Aurobindo himself said:

Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is bound to do everything for you at your demand... do even the surrender for you....

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Your surrender must be self-made and free; it must be the surrender of a living being, not of an inert automaton or mechanical tool.28

A tamasic pseudo-surrender, an escapist transfer of all responsibility to the Mother, can hardly be the basis of the desired great change and transformation. In her own life, even when young in years, she had known that the seeking and the finding of the Immanent Divine was the central purpose of her life, and she had through aspiration and effort "achieved a conscious and constant union with the Divine Presence". She had as it were hurled herself into the search "like a cyclone"! But here, in the Ashram, circumstances were infinitely far more propitious. It only remained for the children and the sadhaks to wake up and put forth "the ardour, the will that is victorious over all obstacles, the concentration that conquers everything".29

There is doubtless a feeling of sadness - perhaps even a touch of exasperation - in these outspoken words of the Mother that are clearly uttered more in love than in anger. Sri Aurobindo is reported to have once said, no doubt half-jocularly, that the only thing people surrendered easily on coming to the Ashram was their common sense!30 The Mother is also likewise said to have remarked that the sadhaks who had really and truly made complete surrender to her could be counted on the fingers of one's hand.

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