On The Mother

CHAPTER 22

Integral Sadhana

I

Some of the Mother's evening talks during 1930-31 in the Prosperity Room were recorded by Amal Kiran, and were published twenty years after as Words of the Mother, Third Series. Reminiscing about them, the Mother said on 14 May 1951, "We were a small group of twelve to sixteen, gathering regularly." She had often given them "the peace", but the sadhaks couldn't retain that blissful experience for long.¹ And yet the experiment of replenishment had gone on time and again!

There are twenty-five short talks, followed by a bunch of short writings culled from the Mother's answers to some disciples. The main exhortation in the talks is a call to the sadhaks to be open always, not to the physical, the lower vital, the emotional or the higher vital, or the double-edged mental, but to the psychic or the soul: "To dwell in the psychic is to be lifted above all greed."²To be thus poised in the psychic is to have the lines of communication with the Divine open, open always and in all things and persons; and there can be no upsets then, no regrets, no revolts:

The psychic is a steady flame that burns in you, soaring towards the Divine and carrying with it a sense of strength which breaks down all oppositions. When you are identified with it you have the feeling of the divine truth.³

The normal ego or individuality is really an abnormal siege of confusions and distractions, a closed and murky space only occasionally illumined by reflected flashes from within. This erratic and self-defeating ordinary life should first be exceeded by the discovery of the psychic or the true soul within: that will be the beginning of one's divine life on the earth.

To seek and find one's true self and to offer it wholeheartedly to the Divine is the whole secret of the sadhana. "Surrender," says the Mother, "is the decision taken to hand over the responsibility of your life to the Divine." For this surrender to be total and effective, all one's actions should be unified around the psychic will:

Patiently you have to go round your whole being, exploring each nook and corner, facing all those anarchic elements in you which are waiting for their psychological moment to come up. And it is only when you have made the entire round of your mental, vital and physical nature, persuaded everything to give itself to the Divine and thus achieved an absolute unified consecration that you put an end to your difficulties. ⁴

The whole push to Yoga commences because there is deep disgust with things as they are: the weariness, the fever, the fret, the sordidness, the

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ignorance; and one hankers after something infinitely better, the New Dawn. In this situation there is nothing to renounce, for nothing in the existing order is in any way attractive or worth keeping. A clean sweep of it all - and, then, the Next Future!

II

In one of her talks, the Mother showed the flower - Aspiration in the Physical for the Divine's Love - and explained that such aspiration should exclude all the lower forms of love. In itself, physical nature is but a darkness, and without the light of the psychic its education cannot start. The Mother's clear guideline is that the sadhak should first tackle this native darkness of the physical:

Illumine the darkness of your physical consciousness with the intuition and aspiration of your more refined parts and keep on doing so till it realises how futile and unsatisfactory is its hunger for the low ordinary things, and turns spontaneously towards the truth.⁵

The whole thrust of the Mother's argument in these talks is not for suppression, which will be merely negative, but rather for elevation and transformation, a far more difficult as also creative achievement. There are elemental forces in the universe that are also at play within ourselves. To indulge their every caprice is bad, and to suppress them altogether is equally bad. What then? -

What you should do is to throw the doors of your being wide open to the Divine. The moment you conceal something, you step straight into Falsehood. The least suppression on your part pulls you immediately down into unconsciousness.⁶

The crux of the problem is to rise from the lower human (or still lower bestial) to the higher divine consciousness. But how exactly is one to know that one has in fact risen to the higher consciousness? Doubtless it will be an exhilarating but ineffable state of poise and peace and power, but it is not possible for the mere mind, to measure or formulate its nature. And yet the experience will be unmistakable:

The true test is the direct experience of the Divine Consciousness in whatever you do. It is an unmistakable test, because it changes your being completely ....The whole universe will wear a new face and you yourself as well as your perception and vision of things will be metamorphosed. ⁷

In the Ashram itself, the simple test would be whether the sadhak could act, instinctively as it were, in accordance with the Mother's intentions.8 For the rest, one must do one's best to contain and reduce one's ego progressively and tune in to the Divine Will:

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The energy in you which is deformed into vital desire but which is originally the urge towards realisation must unite with the Divine Will, so that allyour power of volition mingles with it as a drop of water with the sea.⁹

III

In another talk, the Mother refers to two of the chronic maladies of the vital: the failure of stamina, and the itch for praise and flattery. Given to too much love of ease, comfort and quick results, the vital lacks endurance and perseverance; but unless one can endure - unless one can persevere fight on and last out-- one is hopelessly lost:

Kick your vital the moment it complains, because there is no other way of getting out of the petty consciousness which attaches so much importance to creature comforts and social amenities instead of asking for the Light and the Truth.¹⁰

The gluttony for endless praise is another symptom of vitalistic sickness. Why should one bother about what a so-called V.I.P. or some self-styled critic or censor or adjudicator says about one's work which is verily one's precious life-blood itself offered to the Supreme? Acceptance by the Divine, and the approbation of men and women of Truth, - these alone should matter. Once the pure Agni of aspiration burns steadily within, one develops "a loathing for the cheap praise which formerly used to gratify"; and with this conversion of the vital under Agni's influence, one is also able to face one's difficulties and ordeals - "you simply chase away depression with a smile. "¹¹

The vital or the life-force is in itself not a thing to be decried, for without it there would be no impulse whatsoever to change: "The body would be inert, just like a stone, without the force infused into it by the vital. "12 But the vital must shed its native diffidence, or tendency towards inertia, as well as its insatiable hunger for praise, and raise itself on the new foundation of Faith in the Aurobindonian vision of integral change and transformation:

Never for an instant does it [the converted vital] vacillate in its belief that the mighty work of Change taken up by Sri Aurobindo is going to culminate in success. For that indeed is a fact; there is not a shadow of doubt as to the issue of the work we have in hand. It is no mere experiment but an inevitable manifestation of the Supramental. The converted vital has prescience of the victory .... ¹³

One imperative reason advanced by the Mother (in another talk on the subject)

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for the conversion of the vital in this life itself is that otherwise, death, "the different personalities" in the individual "fall apart rushing hither and thither to seek their own suitable environments"; but the converted vital, integrated with the whole personality, could preserve continuity even after death:

The artist, the philosopher and other developed persons who have organised, individualised and to a certain extent converted their vital being can be said to survive, because they have brought into their exterior consciousness some shadow of the psychic entity which is immortal by its very nature and whose aim is to progressively build up the being around the central Divine Will."¹⁴

IV

In her brief talk on "Resurrection", the Mother gives the word an Aurobindonian connotation. Resurrection is not just a new lease of life after the holocaust of death. It is really the rise of the Greater Dawn after the plunge into the inconscience of the Night: "the Divine Consciousness awakes from the unconsciousness into which it has gone down and lost itself".¹⁵Even in the utmost depths of darkness, the supreme Light lies hidden, and Resurrection is merely the reawakening and the resurgence of that Light and Consciousness. In the opening canto of Savitri, there is an impressionistic description of the hour before the Dawn:

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.......

A fathomless zero occupied the world.¹⁶

Presently there is the first stir of returning consciousness, and soon it gathers momentum, and the movement towards another dawn is initiated with a magisterial sureness and rhythm:

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;

A nameless movement, an unthought Idea

Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,

Something that wished but knew not how to be,

Teased the Inconscience to wake Ignorance ....

An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change ....

One lucent corner windowing hidden things

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.

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Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame!¹⁷

The idea is the same, but the crystalline clarity of the Mother's simple prose is here translated into sublime symbolistic poetry.

V

In yet another talk, the Mother draws a distinction between the "psychic presence", a universal phenomenon, and the "psychic being", which is developed in Homo sapiens alone. What is a veiled presence at first becomes individualised as a psychic being, and there are other likely developments still. For, as the Mother said in the course of one of her talks many years later:

The centre of organisation and transformation is always the presence of the psychic in the body ....

Earthly life is the place of progress .... And it is the psychic which carries the progress over from one life to another, by organising its own evolution and development itself. ¹⁸

And this evolution can be carried to the point where an involutionary force or power meets the ascending one:

In man alone there is the possibility of the psychic being growing to its full stature even so far as to be able in the end to join and unite with a descending being, a godhead from above.¹⁹

This phenomenon is described more explicitly in the Mother's talk in the Playground on 16 September 1953:

The psychic being is the result of evolution, that is to say, evolution of the divine Consciousness which spread into Matter and slowly lifted up Matter, made it develop to return to the Divine. The psychic being was formed by this divine centre progressively through all the births. There comes a time when it reaches a kind of perfection .... Then, most often, as it has an aspiration for realisation, for a greater perfection to manifest yet better the Divine, it generally draws towards itself a being from the involution, that is to say, one of those entities belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls Overmind, who comes then to incarnate in this psychic being. It can be one of those entities men generally call gods.²⁰

It is no doubt true that one is not ordinarily aware of the psychic being, as one is aware of the body, the life-impulses or the mental processes. It is Faith that first makes one look for the psychic being or soul or true self

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behind the egoistic desire-self; but once started on the quest, Faith helps one to gate-crash into the psychic citadel and station oneself at the psychic centre. What happens next is little less than a veritable revolution:

This is an opening of the inner being to the divine Presence in the psychic centre, and there you know at every moment not only what must be done but why it should be done and how it should be done, and you have the vision of the truth of things behind their appearances ... you see things from within outwards, and the outer existence becomes an expression, more or less deformed, of what you see within .... Instead of being outside the world and seeing it as something outside you, you are inside the world and see outer forms expressing in a more or less clumsy fashion what is within, which for you is the Truth. ²¹

VI

Of exceptional importance is the talk on the "Power of Right Attitude". It is indeed a law of life that defeatism is father to the fact of defeat, even as nothing succeeds as the genuine will to succeed. What you aspire for you achieve in the end; what you fear may happen, does alas actually happen, rather sooner than later! Examining the implications of the law, the Mother offers this piece of pertinent advice:

If, in the presence of circumstances that are about to take place, you can take the highest attitude possible - that is, if you put your consciousness in contact with the highest consciousness within reach, you can be absolutely sure that in that case it is the best that can happen to you ....

... Always keep in touch with the divine presence, try to bring it down ­ and the very best will always take place.²²

In other words, if there is this constant and utter rapport with the Divine, what looks like miracles can happen; and still they will not be miracles ­ thwey will only be the law at that level of consciousness.

What is said above may be illustrated by a series of happenings towards the end of November 1930. Sahana Devi has recorded how the Mother came one day to visit a house on the sea-front in Pondicherry where Sahana's sister Amiya and her two sons were staying. On learning that they intended to sail shortly for Burma, the Mother looked at the disturbed sea from a window and suddenly said: "It is better not to be on the sea now." The voyage was postponed accordingly, and on the very day they were to have started there broke out a cyclone:

It was a catastrophic storm uprooting many trees and razing houses to the ground, many roofs of houses were blown away. We could hardly keep our

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doors and windows shut, the bolts being useless, such was the fury of the storm.²³

That very night, hearing the "tremendous noise and splash of rain all about the place", the Mother went to Sri Aurobindo's room with the intention of helping him to shut the windows - but this was what she saw:

I just opened his door and found him sitting quietly at his desk, writing. There was such a solid peace in the room that nobody would have dreamed that a cyclone was raging outside. All the windows were wide open, not a drop of rain was coming inside.²⁴

This was no miracle; this was only the law at Sri Aurobindo's own level of consciousness. He had to will nothing, do nothing; Nature adjusted its movements to his sovereign peace and poised activity.

VII

Of the remaining talks, each has its distinct enlightening message that is of direct relevance to the Integral Yoga. There is this question, for example: What is the reaction of consciousness when one is in the presence of the Sublime and the Beautiful? The Mother herself makes this disarming confession:

I remember occasions when I used to be moved to tears on seeing even children, even babies do something that was most divinely beautiful and simple. Feel that joy and you will be able to profit by the Divine's presence in your midst.²⁵

The Mother certainly didn't subscribe to the old ascetic view that beauty had no place in Yoga; she felt, on the contrary, that "in the physical world, of all things it is beauty which best expresses the Divine ... it is natural to speak of it as a 'priestess', who interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. "²⁶It may almost be said that there is a pristine sacerdocy in the Sublime and the Beautiful that lifts us above ourselves to something far higher, that takes us as it were to the very doorsteps of the Divine.

In another talk, the Mother advises us, when we are in trouble, "to learn to go deep within" or "to step back into yourself". ²⁷ In a later talk, scientific knowledge is differentiated from yogic (or spiritual) knowledge. Contrasting Shankara's rnāyāvāda with Sri Aurobindo's world-view, the Mother explains how the former had "a glimpse of the true consciousness", and hence declared the phenomenal world to be false or verily non­existing, an illusion; but Sri Aurobindo, while perceiving the falsehood, realised also "that it has to be replaced and not abandoned as an illusion".²⁸ In other words, far more important than the feat of finding God

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or the Ultimate in the life Beyond is the adventure of fulfilling and realising the Divine in this life. Returning to this question during one of her later Playground conversations, the Mother said on 1 February 1956:

There are those ... who consider life and the world an illusion, and think it necessary to leave them behind in order to find the Divine, whose nature, they say, is the opposite of that of existence. So Sri Aurobindo says that perhaps they will find God outside life but will not find the Divine in life. He contrasts the two things. In one case it is an extra-terrestrial and unmanifested Divine, and in the other it is the Divine who is manifested in life and whom one can find again through life.²⁹

And in a universe that is still evolving, it should surely be expected that the sent falsities would diminish more and more and the divine manifestation become increasingly a matter of daily experience.

There are other talks too: "Chance"; "Different Kinds of Space and 'Time - Fearlessness on the Vital Plane"; "Knowledge by Unity with the Divine - The Divine Will in the World"; "True Humility - Supramental Plasticity - Spiritual Rebirth"; and "The Supramental Realisation". "Chance", says the Mother, "can only be the opposite of order and harmony"; and when the Supramental Truth-Consciousness alone comes to prevail, chance will have no place at all. In our lower nature, the supreme Truth is obscured, and conflicting forces act at cross-purposes and precipitate what we call chances. But this flawed old world-order must change, and is changing, and we are witnessing the throes of the birth of a new world-order:

It is the struggle between the old and the new that forms the crux of the Yoga; but if you are bent on being faithful to the supreme Law and Order revealed to you, the parts of your being belonging to the domain of chance will, however slowly, be converted and divinised. ³⁰

In Yoga, it is a constant intestine struggle between the Old that will not die and the New that is as yet powerless to be born, between the entrenched layers of Darkness and the invading rays of Light, between the unyielding Asura and the uncompromising Divine. As the Mother said in her talk on "Knowledge by Unity with the Divine":

Life is a battlefield in which the Divine succeeds in detail only when the lower nature is receptive to its impulsions instead of siding with the hostile forces .... What you have to do is to give yourself up to the Grace of the Divine; for, it is under the form of Grace, of Love, that it has consented to uplift the universe after the first involution was established. ³¹

This brings us back to the cardinal Aurobindonian formula for yoga sadhana that opens his inspired little book, The Mother:

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There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.³²

Avatar after avatar has added rung upon rung to the Ladder of consciousness, and the step that is being added now is the Supramental. But the whole aim of the Integral Yoga is both to reach the Supramental and join this summit to the bottom, thereby bringing about a total change and transfiguration of human and terrestrial life.

The talks cover indeed the whole arc of the Aurobindonian integral sadhana. Responding to the mood of the moment, the Mother scours the ocean of spirituality and brings out pearls of great price as instruction, edification, exhortation and intimations of profound significance. There is much wisdom in little space, and even after several decades, the talks still retain their steady glow of light and sharpness of continued relevance.

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