On The Mother

CHAPTER 39

International Centre

I

In the Ashram's collective adventure of moving towards a New Life, a divine life, the Mother assigned (as we have seen) a central role almost to education. A school had been founded for children on 2 December 1943, but in the course of the seven years they had grown up in age and abilities and spread and depth of consciousness, and were now ripe for higher education. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had definite views about the future, and about the role of education in hastening that future. The Mother accordingly felt that the time was opportune for calling a Sri Aurobindo Memorial Convention, which met in the Ashram Tennis Ground on 24 and 25 April 1951.

Appropriately enough, on the 24th morning, the school-children and sadhaks in their uniform for physical education classes lined up in their respective group formations on the street outside the Mother's balcony, and as she appeared at seven, they gave the salute to her and then marched into the Ashram and formed a square around the Samadhi. The Mother too joined them, and the children gave their salute to her and Sri Aurobindo "in a complete and enthralling silence".¹

The Convention itself was a representative and distinguished gathering of intellectuals and educationists of India who felt concerned about the future. In her inaugural message, the Mother said:

Sri Aurobindo is present in our midst", and with all the power of his creative genius he presides over the formation of the University Centre which for years he considered as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life.²

In the course of his presidential address. Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee remarked that Indians had lost track of their real culture and seem to have opted for "a base hedonistic view of life". In that bleak situation, the establishment of a university "where the eternal verities of life will be taught and re-taught to a stricken people" was of paramount relevance. "I am sure," he concluded, "the proposed University will symbolise the world's urge for a new spiritual rebirth; it will stand out as an oasis amidst the barren tracts that breed jealousies, suspicions and petty conflicts." The question had been posed earlier when the idea of the Convention was mooted whether, after all, a memorial to Sri Aurobindo should not take the form of a Yoga Institute "carried on under the guidance of great

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Indian Yogis" instead of a modern University. But clearly Sri Aurobindo himself had discussed the university idea with the Mother, and had also once told Surendra Mohan Ghose that it was intended to develop the School and the Ashram into a university that was as large as life, and comprehended the past, present and the future. Where else except in an Ashram of the Vedic type could boys and girls receive the blessings of an integral education? And such an Ashram being already there in Pondicherry - a sanctified spot with its roots supposedly in the Vedic past - that was also the right place for the location of the proposed university. Another speaker, Somnath Maitra, affirmed:

The new university will be informed by the spirit of our great Master, the spirit of the Life Divine. It will not only arrange for the study and propagation of his teachings and take steps to bring humanity nearer to the realisation of his supreme ideal of the perfectly integrated life, but it will also be invisibly fashioned and moulded at every turn by a sense of his deathless Presence.

Dr. Kalidas Nag, after reviewing the different phases of Sri Aurobindo's career devoted respectively to the political liberation of Asia, the intellectual liberation of his epoch and the spiritual liberation of the world, concluded his brilliant address with the peroration:

Thus, Sri Aurobindo is the University pointing to a radically new conception of the term. It should not be a mere copy of any of the universities of India or abroad. Sri Aurobindo University should aspire to provide the training ground for youths who would build up a new personality in a new universe.

The Convention concluded on 25 April. The consensus was that the emphasis in the proposed university should be on quality, not quantity in terms of size and numbers; that, of the two kinds of knowledge - that obtained by an approach from the outside through the intellect and that obtained from within by spiritual realisation - the proposed university should restore to the latter its rightful place and help the pupils to receive integral rather than piecemeal education; and, finally, that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - their thought, their personality, their influence, their yogic direction - should give the needed dynamism and creative unity to the forthcoming university. As if anticipating this consensus, Salvador de Madariaga had said in his message to the Convention:

The analytical age is coming to its close.... The age of synthesis is about to begin. And how could it begin if no high centre of perspective were provided for all the parts to fall in into harmony?

And Nolini Kanta Gupta, Secretary of the Ashram, laid the right stress when he said that the ideal before the sponsors of the University would

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The Mother at the Centre of Education

be "nothing less than the founding of a new mankind upon earth - with a new life and a new consciousness".³

It may be added that there was no reference to the proposed University in the Mother's talks in the Playground. It was as though she had convened the Memorial Conference more as a concession to the traditional way of doing such things than because she expected spectacular results from the meeting or the resolutions. Unless institutions were built from within, and reared on the foundations of the Spirit, they would be pitiful edifices indeed. Besides, even as not walls but men make a city, so too not buildings nor brave speeches make a university but boys and girls and their teachers. And the Mother found the nucleus of her vision of a university in her evening Playground audiences, and she was content.

II

The proposed International University Centre was visualised from the very beginning as an extension, a heightening and a deepening, of the Ashram School itself; an organic growth, in fact, and the soul's progressive self-finding in the fullness of time. The athletics and sports of July-August were followed by the eighth anniversary of the School which began on 1 December 1951, and the celebrations included recitations of Sri Aurobindo's Hymn to Durga and from the Mother's Prayers, as also a dance-rendering of her "Radha's Prayer". Then came the 5th December, and the interim from 5th to 9th, recalling the time of Sri Aurobindo's body lying in state a year earlier and the mahasamadhi. His Presence, for all that it was unseen, was a felt beneficent power. Sadhaks, children, visitors - the Mother herself'- enacted their paean of gratitude to the Master who had "willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all" for present and future humanity. Around the Samadhi under the Service Tree, the unceasing procession of devotees seemed to affirm unconsciously the sentiments in J. Vijayatunga's apostrophe wrung from him soon after the Master's passing on 5 December 1950:

Are we sad today? Is the earth dark without light?

Nay, Master, Thou didst not live in vain,

Thy life sublime and austere was not spent

For nought... Holding to the hem

Of Thy garment we shall raise ourselves

To High Heaven, by Thy Grace....

For the New Year, 1952, the Mother distributed an apposite message:

O Lord, Thou hast decided to test the quality of our faith and to pass our sincerity on Thy touchstone. Grant that we come out greater and purer from the ordeal.⁴

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Faith, sincerity - without these nothing great, nothing noble, could be attempted or attained. The Mother had issued the call for support to the International University idea, but the response from the outside world was pitifully lukewarm. People still weighed the Mother's idea in the balance of mentalised categories, and found it wanting. While she was for a bold leap into the future, the timid majority were slaves of the present and the past. This adventure into the infinitudes of the future was certainly going to be difficult, but with faith and sincerity, the pioneers - the barrier-breakers — could safely come through, whatever the intervening trials and ordeals.

The Mother accordingly lost no time and inaugurated the International University Centre on 6 January 1952. On that day the pupils were given a prayer that was also an inspired definition of the true goal of education:

Make of us the hero warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully the great battle of the future that is to be born, against the past that seeks to endure; so that the new things may manifest and we be ready to receive them.⁵

In other words, perfect the human instrument into a harmony of structure, aim and function; win the battle of the future so that the New may manifest without hindrance, and so that the children of today may prove to be the pioneers and pathfinders of the future. It is not simply a question of acquiring a skill or qualifying for a degree or a diploma; it is rather an adventure to be undertaken, a battle to be fought, so that the future may be won. For the hero warriors, however, it will be both an outer struggle with the protagonists of the past and an inner battle of knowledge to win the new consciousness and achieve self-transformation. Everyone has to wrestle, late or soon, with the ego's propensity to separativity, selfishness, narrowness, stupidity and fear, put the miserable ego in its place, and bring into the forefront the now behind-the-scenes psychic being which alone is touched with the elemental power of the Spirit. It is thus that the psychic being should be awakened and invoked and installed as "the leader of the march set in our front".

III

Not long after the inauguration of the University Centre, K. M. Munshi paid his second visit to the Ashram on 12 March 1952. He had seen and conversed with the Mother during his earlier visit in July 1950, but at that time he was rather more engrossed with the sublime Master. Now he came closer to the Mother, and watched her with reverent attention, and also conversed freely with her. As he wrote later, recalling his impressions:

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A tennis-playing, silk-garmented lady of seventy-five, carrying a tenuous veil and saluting the Ashramites at the march past day after day was not exactly a symbol of spirituality to the normal Indian mind. Was she a miracle-worker or just an artist? Was she carrying forward the Master's work? Was this how it should be carried on?⁶

At the Playground, where she sat on a high-backed chair, her feet resting on a footstool, Munshi found her eyes "transparent, almost clear as crystal". Of particular significance was the Spiritual Map of India, done in bas-relief in green on the wall of the Playground, with the Mother's symbol at the centre. Transcending the political divisions, the geographical contours of the map - comprising undivided India, Nepal, Burma and Ceylon - boldly projected the spiritual entity that was - and is - and will always be the real India with her divine role. As the Mother sat with this map for a backdrop, her very presence was an inspiration. And what if she played tennis and received the salute at the march past? The right answer came to him at last:

We ourselves put on silks, eat machine-ground flour, play tennis; but for our spiritual uplift we want only ways considered acceptable five thousand years ago....

If the spirit has to permeate and transform life, it must be through life as we live it; and that is perhaps the Ashram's speciality.⁷

In the course of their conversation, when the talk turned on Sri Aurobindo's vision of India's role in the future, the Mother said with strident emphasis:

Sri Aurobindo is still alive, as living as ever and will continue to live.... We are determined - he and I - to complete the work he lived for... India must maintain the spiritual leadership of the world. If she does not, she will collapse, and with her will go the whole world.

Everything he saw, everything he heard, duly impressed him, and he found the Ashram "a unique experiment... which enabled people to live a self-contained community life", and he seems to have told a friend, Charupada: "If the world were to be drowned in a flood again, you needn't have a Noah's Ark, if the Ashram is saved. It would be sufficient to set up the world again."⁸

As regards the University Centre, the Mother confided to Munshi that she was building up "slowly, step by step, but firmly". For one thing, the entire adventure of education from Kindergarten to the Higher Courses was a single spectrum; and the whole arc, from physical to spiritual, was in integral whole. If in May 1951, she had opened the Sports Ground, now on 24 April 1952, she opened a section of the University Centre which was to house the temporary library and music and dance room and some additional classrooms.

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Then she opened the weight-lifting and body-building sections of the gymnasium at the Playground.⁹ The divers limbs of the new International Centre thus started taking their significant shapes and performing their allotted functions. The Mother herself had at no time any doubt whatsoever regarding the crucial role the International Centre was expected to play in the fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future man. As she wrote a year hence to Surendra Nath Jauhar:

I am perfectly sure, I am quite confident, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind, that this University, which is being established here, will be the greatest seat of knowledge upon earth.

It may take fifty years, it may take a hundred years, and you may doubt about my being there; I may be there or not, but these children of mine will be there to carry out my work.

And those who collaborate in this divine work today will have the joy and pride of having participated in such an exceptional achievement.¹⁰

A new seed, the seed of integral knowledge, was being sown; and the time of sprouting and foliage and flowering would come, and the harvesting too — in good time — of the New Life, the supramental manifestation upon the earth and the transfiguration of humanity.

IV

Having inaugurated the International University Centre on 6 January 1952, the Mother set forth in the Bulletin in some detail her idea of what the Centre was. expected to do to realise Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future.¹¹ In the first of these articles on the Centre, the Mother straightaway touched the heart of the problem:

The conditions in which men live on earth are the result of their state of consciousness. To seek to change these conditions without changing the consciousness is a vain chimera... collective progress and individual progress are interdependent.... A way must therefore be found so that these two types of progress may proceed side by side. ...

All impulsions of rivalry, all struggle for precedence and domination must disappear and give way to a will for harmonious organisation, for clear-sighted and effective collaboration.

These are general considerations, but the problem still was how they were to be translated into practice. The Mother was emphatic that the new institution should be truly 'international' and also visibly so - which meant the organisation of some sort of permanent world exhibition and the establishment of an international lodging house (or hostel) for pupils

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and teachers of all nationalities to live together in a spirit of global brotherhood.

In a second article, the Mother explained how each nation would occupy its own place and fulfill its own unique role in the world concert. A nation too, like an individual, had its own psychic being, which alone was its true self and moulded its destiny from behind. The Mother didn't think it odd to talk of a nation's soul; and certainly the idea was not foreign to the people of India:

The thinking elite in India even identifies her with one of the aspects of the universal Mother, as the following extract from the Hymn to Durga illustrates:

"Mother Durga! Rider on the lion, giver of all strength,... we, born from thy parts of Power, we the youth of India, are seated here in thy temple. Listen, O Mother, descend upon earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India. ...

"Mother Durga! Extend wide the power of Yoga. We are thy Aryan children, develop in us again the lost teaching, character, strength of intelligence, faith and devotion, force of austerity, power of chastity and true knowledge, bestow all that upon the world. To help mankind, appear, O Mother of the world, dispel all ills.

"Mother Durga! Slay the enemy within, then root out all obstacles abroad.... Make thyself manifest."

After quoting the entire hymn, the Mother added: "One would like to see in all countries the same veneration for the national soul, the same aspiration to become fit instruments for the manifestation of its highest ideal...."

In her third article, the Mother spoke about the beginnings of the University Centre, the plans for the permanent buildings, and the high hopes and vast expectations of the pupils and teachers who eagerly came to the place. Some wanted to do Yoga, while others wished to dedicate themselves to the service of the Divine. One and all came, at any rate initially, "with the psychic in front". But when the freshness of the new experience faded away,

...the old person comes back to the surface with all its habits, preferences, small manias, shortcomings and misunderstandings; the peace is replaced by restlessness, the joy vanishes, the understanding is blinded.

The situation was most distressing, a veritable ladders-and-snakes operation: a little rise, and a sudden stumble, and a steep fall. People alas were caught in a vicious circle, and were cut off from the psychic. The crux of the problem, therefore, was not to allow the psychic to recede into the background, but rather to bring it into the open and make it "the leader of the march" and give it the control of the rest of the human faculties.

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The cardinal problem of education was thus to keep the psychic awake, endow it with effective sovereignty, and leave it to reorganise one's life. This, then, would be "the culmination of studies in the International University Centre".

V

Continuing her series, the Mother devoted three articles to what she called "The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations". These first appeared in the Bulletin during 1953, and were issued as a booklet next year. It would not be wrong if this trilogy of essays was viewed as an extension of her earlier pieces on "The Science of Living" and on the several phases of education.

Towards the close of her essay on "The Science of Living", the Mother had said that the different aspects of education didn't exclude one another; they could and indeed should be pursued at the same time. She had added further that, as we rose higher, we would see that the Truth that we sought comprised the four major aspects of Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty, realisable respectively through the psychic, the mind, the vital and the body. In the present series of essays, we start from this text, and further ascents follow. While education may have different ends in view, where the ultimate aim (as in the Ashram) is supramental, the educational effort has to become "a fourfold austerity and also a fourfold liberation". Thus discipline, austerity, liberation form a linked series, a three-step movement of educational and yogic progress that, in the end, must lead to the desired change and transformation.

The Mother is at pains at the very outset to explain what austerity is not: it is not the traditional mortification or refusal of the ascetic. Practices that inflict on the body privations, distortions, lacerations, flagellations, mutilations are but a perversion of the spiritual discipline:

The sadhu's recourse to the bed of nails or the Christian anchorite's resort to the whip and the hair-shirt are the result of a more or less veiled sadistic tendency, unavowed and unavowable; it is an unhealthy seeking or a subconscious need for violent sensations. In reality, these things are very far removed from all spiritual life, for they are ugly and base, and dark and diseased.... They are invented and extolled by a sort of mental and vital cruelty towards the body. But cruelty, even with regard to one's own body, is nonetheless cruelty, and all cruelty is a sign of great unconsciousness.¹²

Violent denials and deprivations are easier, more exciting, more flattering to the vanity of the ego than calm and sober acceptance, moderate and detached enjoyment, and the poise and delight in existence born of an awakened and luminous consciousness. Such austerity is the true

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tapasya, and this can take the fourfold forms of Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. The gradation is from Love above to Beauty below, and accordingly we may look upon the ascent from Beauty - through Power and Knowledge - to Love as the progress from the root, through the plant's foliage and flowers, to the fruit as the culminating fulfilment. On the other hand, the Mother warns us that the grading doesn't mean that one austerity is superior to another; in an integral Yoga, there can be no such trite differentiation.

VI

Austerity, then, is not just denial, or a deliberate act of omission or commission to punish oneself, but rather a process of regulation and control with a view to the maximisation of the faculties and the heightening of consciousness generally. Every austerity or tapasya will lead to the corresponding liberation or siddhi. Naturally enough, at the base of everything there is the austerity of the body, the tapasya of Beauty:

Its basic programme will be to build a body that is beautiful in form, harmonious in posture, supple and agile in its movements, powerful in its activities and robust in its health and organic functioning.¹³

The regimen will include the building up of "nerves of steel" and muscular power, and this will involve regularity and common sense in sleep, food, physical exercise, work, and all other activities. It is not quantification that is important but how it is done, be it sleep, food, games, work or relaxation. On this question human needs differ widely, and there can be no absolute general law. In sleep, for example, what is important is "to make the mind clear, to quieten the emotions and calm the effervescence of desires and the preoccupations which accompany them".

If the austerity of sleep is important, the austerity of the day is no less so, whether in the matter of physical culture, or in the commitment to work. Anything done in excess is a defeat, and in work the main flaw arises from egotistic attachment:

For one who wants to grow in self-perfection, there are no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress and self-mastery... whatever one does, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection.

One should also avoid slow poisons like tobacco and alcohol, and exercise complete control over the sex instinct. The Mother is explicit and categorical on this question, and asks for total abstinence, rather than mere continence, from those who wish to prepare for the supramental manifestation:

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A decisive choice has to be made between lending the body to Nature's ends in obedience to her demand to perpetuate the race as it is, and preparing this same body to become a step towards the creation of the new race. For it is not possible to do both at the same time; at every moment one has to decide whether one wants to remain part of the humanity of yesterday or to belong to the superhumanity of tomorrow.¹⁴

So far about the austerity of the body, the tapasya of Beauty. As for vital austerity or the tapasya of Power, the principle again is, not outright rejection, but judicious choice and utilisation with "wisdom and discernment". Even as sex energies are to be transmuted by "a kind of inner alchemy" into fuel for progress and integral transformation, so too the vital instruments, urges, enthusiasms, desires, passions have to be seized at the base and purified and sublimated. The vital draws its energies from various sources: either from the physical level below channeled by the sensations, or its own level in league with the universal vital forces, or from above in the form of a great aspiration for progress. And there is also, between individuals, the interchange of vital forces. While the vital world with its energies and irrationalities can be a danger and a trap for the unwary, and result in abuse, wastage and defeat, it also holds out other immense possibilities. Vital austerity therefore means the education of the vital through its enlightenment, strengthening and purification, and once this is done, the vital can be "as noble and heroic and disinterested as it is now spontaneously vulgar, egoistic, and perverted when it is left to itself without education". But here each individual will have to be his own teacher, his own rod of correction, his own candle of illumination. "It is enough," says the Mother, "for each one to know how to transform in himself the search for' pleasure into an aspiration for the supramental plenitude." And there will come a moment at last when "convinced of the greatness and beauty of the goal, the vital gives up petty and illusory sensorial satisfactions in order to win the divine delight".¹⁵

VII

Mental austerity¹⁶ or the tapasya of Knowledge claims particular attention from the Mother, not so much in its aspect of thought-control or meditation to the point of ineffable silence, as in the more familiar aspect of control of speech. It was Caliban who flared up before his own mentor, Prospero:

You taught me language!

And the profit on it is that I know

How to curse!

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It is said that, if speech is silvern, silence is golden; yet, says the Mother, "it is a far greater and far more fruitful austerity to control one's speech than to abolish it altogether". With some, speech is the idle rambling of an empty mind; with others, speech is a mannerism, or a way of hiding their real thoughts and motivations; and only with a few is speech the noble articulation of worthwhile ideas. The Mother prescribes varied doses of austerity to cover all possible situations. But the core of the matter is that one should be always sparing in speech:

If you are not alone and live with others, cultivate the habit of not externalising yourself constantly by speaking aloud, and you will notice that little by little an inner understanding is established between yourself and others.... This outer silence is most favourable to inner peace....

A veritable penance of the tongue is needed for "nothing is more contagious than the vibrations of sound" and ill-spoken thought acquires a concrete and effective reality:

That is why one must never speak ill of people or things or say things which go against the progress of the divine realisation in the world. This is an absolute general rule.

No doubt, one who "moves in the gnostic realms" and has knowledge in its utter plenitude, might intervene and criticise and set things right. For the majority, who are but guided by false lights and blurred lights, silence is the wiser course.

Again, religious, credal and ideological disputations are rather like ignorant armies clashing at night in desert quicksand. All formulated thought being but partial truth, "this sense of the relativity of things is a powerful help in keeping one's balance and preserving a serene moderation in one's speech". As for light-hearted talk for purposes of relaxation, it will be prudent to avoid all grossness and vulgarity, and at its best relaxation can shape itself into an "inner silence, rest into contemplation and enjoyment into bliss". Finally, silence is the rule as regards one's own spiritual experiences; these are not for publicity, boasting or vainglory. The true role of speech is to convey Truth in its infinite shades of significance, and this can be achieved only if the speaker acquires, through the tapasya of Knowledge, the power of the Word:

Be silent in mind and remain unwavering in the true attitude of constant aspiration towards the All-Wisdom, the All-Knowledge, the All-Consciousness. Then, if your aspiration is sincere, if it is not a veil for your ambition to do well and to succeed, if it is pure, spontaneous and integral, you will then be able to speak very simply, to say the words that ought to be said, neither more nor less, and they will have a creative power.

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VIII

The most difficult - and the most needed - of all austerities is the austerity of feelings and emotions, for it is in the name of love that the worst crimes and the wildest follies have been committed. Not codes of conduct, nor legal prohibitions, but only the higher love can master the movements of the lower forms of this primordial, this irresistible power. In its elemental nature, love unites and harmonises; without it, chaos is come again! If Consciousness was the creator of the universe, Love is its saviour. Between the first flash of the joy of identity and the climactic bliss of union, there sprawl about all the vagaries and varieties of love's manifestation. Between the power of attraction on one side and the total self-giving on the other side, a thousand motions and diversions are possible. The universe we are told began with an explosion and a scattering, and the pieces severed and fragmented have to be brought together and united again: hence the supreme gravitational pull of love. And in the course of the evolutionary drive. Nature linked adroitly this mighty force with the obscure movement of procreation and the survival of the species. The family, clan, tribe, caste, class, nation, race - all these aggregates came along one after another asserting their egoistic separativities. But further extension has been somehow arrested, and most people seem to be satisfied with things more or less as they are - what many are inclined to call the 'natural order' - and disinclined to seek a truly radical change. But some few look farther, and ask for Divine Love alone:

These rare souls must reject all forms of love between human beings, for however beautiful and pure they may be, they cause a kind of short-circuit and cut off the direct connection with the Divine. ...

...it is a well-known fact that one grows into the likeness of what one loves. Therefore if you want to be like the Divine, love Him alone. Only one who has known the ecstasy of the exchange of love with the Divine can know how insipid and dull and feeble any other exchange is in comparison....

This is the marvellous state we want to realise on earth; it is this which will have the power to transform the world and make it a habitation worthy of the Divine Presence.¹⁷

The Mother was to return to this theme in one of her Playground conversations of 1956:

The best way when love comes, in whatever form it may be, is to try and pierce through its outer appearance and find the divine principle which is behind and which gives it existence.¹⁸

Once the Love Divine becomes the grand base of the emotional life, one's relation with fellow human beings - be they friends, kinsmen, be they even

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one's parents or children, or one's wife or husband - will be governed, not by egoistic possessiveness, but by "a total, unvarying, constant and egoless kindness and goodwill", and it will not "expect any reward or gratitude or even any recognition".¹⁹

IX

Such are the four austerities; and, as for the liberations, they must follow as a necessary consequence. The tapasya of Love must compel the elimination of suffering, that of Knowledge the eclipse of ignorance, that of Power the extinction of desire, and that of Beauty the arrest of bodily deformations. To put it all in positive terms, the four austerities must lead to the apprehension of supramental unity, the establishment of the gnostic consciousness, the identification with the Divine Will, and the liberation from "the law of material cause and effect... so that nothing is allowed to intervene in the course of one's life but the highest will, the truest knowledge, the supramental consciousness".²⁰

Having covered in On Education the whole gamut from the physical to the spiritual which would finally lead to the supramental, when the Mother wrote the three essays on "The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations", she clearly intended the children at the International Centre, not only to master the many-tiered discipline of education, but also to practise the four austerities and realise the four liberations. In other words, she wanted the children to shape themselves in the fullness of time into the "flaming pioneers" of Tomorrow's supramental world.

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