On The Mother

CHAPTER 8

Launching the Arya

I

The decision to launch the Arya and its French counterpart, was taken by Sri Aurobindo and the Richards probably on 1 June 1914, and the prospectus (with specimen pages) was ready by mid-June to facilitate the enrolment of subscribers. It was decided that the first issue should come out on Sri Aurobindo's forty-second birthday, 15 August. All the three names - Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Paul and Mirra Richard - were to appear on the cover-page as Editors, and the journals were to be published from 41, Rue François Martin, Pondicherry. Writing to Motilal Roy in July, Sri Aurobindo expressed the fear that, if pronounced revolutionaries should be found among the formal list of subscribers, that "will give the police a handle for connecting politics and the Review and thus frightening the public".¹ A way should be found, wrote Sri Aurobindo, not to deny even the strongly politically oriented people the enlightenment the Arya might bring them without, however, compromising the Review itself. In a subsequent letter, Sri Aurobindo asked Motilal to enlist some subscribers, and added with a touch of wry humour: "Subscribers' book is nearly as blank as it was at the time of our purchasing it."²

The ground floor of Sri Aurobindo's residence in Rue François Martin housed the editorial office of the two journals. Likewise the ground floor of the Richards' place in Rue Dupleix was used as a stack room. While Sri Aurobindo held himself responsible for the main contributions to the Arya, Mirra helped Paul to translate them into French, and also turn Paul's French into English. Besides, Mirra took over the managerial side of the journals, kept lists of subscribers in her own hand, and maintained the accounts. She was, in fact, the chief engineer of its success in its early formative period.

The Arya, as outlined in the prospectus, placed before itself a twofold object:

1. A systematic study of the highest problems of existence;

2. The formation of a vast Synthesis of knowledge, harmonising the diverse religious traditions of humanity occidental as well as oriental. Its method will be that of a realism, at once rational and transcendental, - a realism consisting in the unification of intellectual and scientific discipline with those of intuitive experience.

The journal also promised its readers studies in speculative Philosophy, translations of ancient texts and commentaries on them, in Comparative Religion, and "practical methods of inner culture and self-development".

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As indicated by the subtitle of its French edition, Revue de Grande Synthèse Philosophique, the Arya aimed at projecting a "great synthesis" of all the knowledge of the old world and the new, the East and the West.

Now, what was the Synthesis needed at the time the Arya was launched? Answering this question, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the very first issue:

Undoubtedly, that of man himself. The harmony of his faculties is the condition of his peace, their mutual understanding and helpfulness the means of his perfection.

The ailment at the heart of civilisation was the rift between reason and faith, the logical mind and the intuitive heart. But only a higher and reconciling truth could dissipate their mutual misunderstandings and lead mankind to its integral self-development.

The synthesis then of religious aspiration and scientific faculty, as a beginning; and in the resultant progress an integrality also of the inner existence. Love and knowledge, the delight of the Bhakta and the divine science of the knower of Brahman, have to effect their unity; and both have to recover the fullness of Life which they tend to banish from them in the austerity of their search or the rapture of their ecstasy.

... The integral divine harmony within, but as its result a changed earth and a nobler and happier humanity.³

And in the section on "The Spirit of Synthesis" in The Eternal Wisdom, Paul Richard cited some revealing affirmations:

Wouldst thou penetrate the infinite? Advance, then, on all sides of the finite. (Goethe)

There is one height of truth and there are those who approach from all sides, as many sides as there are radii in a circle, that is to say, by routes of an infinite variety. Let us work, then, with all our strength to arrive at this light of Truth which unites us all. (Tolstoi)⁴

The name Arya, however, although charged with the undertones of received suggestion, asked for a more precise explication. The word figured on the cover page in big Devanagari characters, and non-Indian readers might have mistaken it for a hieroglyph. Even Indians had lost track of its original sense, and many European philologists had reduced it to a racial term. Sri Aurobindo was therefore to take some pains to bring out its native and ancient and true significance in the September 1914 issue in his article "The Question of the Month":

Intrinsically, in its most fundamental sense, Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance.

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Self-conquest is the first law of his nature .... For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom.

Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers he does not destroy, but ennobles and fulfils. He knows ... that the Highest is something which is no nullity in the world, but increasingly expresses itself here, - a divine Will, Consciousness, Love, Beatitude .... Of that he is the servant, lover and seeker. When it is attained, he pours it forth in work, love, joy and knowledge upon mankind. For always the Aryan is a worker and warrior. He spares himself no labour of mind or body whether to seek the Highest or to serve it. He avoids no difficulty, he accepts no cessation from fatigue. Always he fights for the coming of that kingdom within himself and in the world.⁶

Man is no puny ineffectual creature, - not in essence; he is indeed heir to the three worlds, he can spiral upwards from the separative to the universal, and even escape into the transcendent. It would be the aim of the Arya to school its readers in the twin disciplines of self-conquest and self-perfection so that they could "elevate the lower into the higher, receive the higher into the lower", and become in the end identified in all parts of their being with the puissance and splendour and ananda of the "triple and triune Brahman". ⁷

II

July and early August 1914 were the months of the birth-pangs of the Arya and its French edition, subtitled Revue de Grande Synthèse Philosophique. Getting ready the articles and the translations, obtaining paper of the requisite size, quality and quantity, the choice of the Modern Press at Pondicherry to do the printing, the enrolment of subscribers and the fixing up of agencies - these were the activities on the surface. But, by a strange quirk of fate, all this was to synchronise with momentous happenings on the European and world stage. On 28 June 1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir-apparent of the Hapsburg Empire, and his consort were assassinated by a twenty-year old Serbian youth. July 1914 was a hectic month for the chancellories of Europe, and the issue of peace versus war was debated with mounting anxiety but diminishing hope. Austria declared war against Serbia on 28 July, Germany declared war against Russia on 1 August, and against France on 3 August; and, on 4 August, Great Britain declared war against Germany. The First World War had begun. Germany and Austria on the one side, and on the other, Russia, France and Britain were engaged from almost the very outset, with Japan to come in on 23 August on the side of the latter. And, as if in a counterblast to the entire sanguinary holocaust itself, from obscure Pondicherry, was launched on 15 August the Arya.

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It is surely one of the supreme paradoxes of history that, barely a fortnight after the outbreak of the World War, the Arya should appear in Pondicherry with its load of luminous contents. Thus the opening paragraph of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, which also opened the journal:

The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,- God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.⁸

The same issue carried the first instalments of The Secret of the Veda, Isha Upanishad and The Synthesis of Yoga, as also Paul Richard's The Eternal Wisdom and The Wherefore of the Worlds. "The world to-day presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast," said Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga with an obvious reference to the current world situation, while in The Eternal Wisdom, Paul Richard brought together "in a homogeneous continuity" the finest thoughts from the sages of all times grouped under "The Song of Wisdom" and "Wisdom and the Religions" - a veritable universal congress of the world's seers, saints and savants like Asoka, Carlyle, Porphyry, Seneca, Emerson, Socrates, Plato, Heraclitus, Voltaire, Tseu-Tse, Confucius, Minamoto Sanetomo, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Epictetus, Lao-Tse, Leibnitz, Hermes, Schopenhauer, Sadi, Asvaghosha, Rumi, Spinoza, Bahaaullah, Omar Khayyam, Pythagoras, Kant, Firdausi, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Pasteur, Giordano Bruno and Antoine the Healer. It is a fascinating mosaic of the choicest quotations meant to inform, instruct and inspire at once.

All the time the agitated chancellories and war machines were desperately hoping for peace or frantically preparing for war, all the time "Willy", "Nicky" and "Georgie" - the Emperors of Germany, Russia and Britain respectively - were exchanging cables pleading the cause of peace, all the time (at Pondicherry) the opening chapter of The Life Divine and the other contributions were being set up and the proofs were being read, all the time Mirra continued her inner odyssey, her morning musings, and her mystic recordations. Thus on 1 July:

We bow down before Thee, we unite with Thee, O Lord, in a love that is limitless and full of an inexpressible beatitude.

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Then a week later:

O divine Force, supreme Illuminator, hearken to our prayer, move not away from us, do not withdraw, help us to fight the good fight, make firm our strength for the struggle, give us the force to conquer!⁹

Another week passes, and she writes on 15 July:

Thou hast placed in my heart a peace so total that it seems to be almost indifference and in an immensity of calm serenity it says:

Just as Thou wilt, just as Thou wilt.¹⁰

On 21 July, Mirra has a blissful unitive experience. Perhaps something of that kind is pictured by Dante in the Paradiso:

As sudden lightning throws in disarray

The visual spirits, so that the eye is reft

Of power to grasp even things that strongest stay,

The living light in such a radiant weft

Enwound me and with such glory overcame,

That in it all was burnt and nothing left.¹¹

Or described by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey:

That serene and blessed mood,

In which ... the breath of this corporeal frame,

And even the motion of our human blood,

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul.

But utterly incomparable is the luminous infinitude of Mirra's ecstasy:

There was no longer any body, no longer any sensation; only a column of light was there, rising from where the base of the body normally is to where usually is the head, to form there a disk of light like that of the moon; then from there the column continued to rise very far above the head, opening out into an immense sun, dazzling and multi-coloured, whence a rain of golden light fell covering all the earth.

Then slowly the column of light came down again forming an oval of living light, awakening and setting into movement - each one in a special way, according to a particular vibratory mode - the centres above the head, in the head, the throat, the heart, in the middle of the stomach, at the base of the spine and still farther down. At the level of the knees, the ascending and the descending currents joined and the circulation thus went on uninterruptedly, enveloping the whole being in an immense oval of living light.

Then slowly the consciousness came down again, stage by stage, halting in each world, until the body-consciousness returned. The recovery of the

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body-consciousness was, if the memory is correct. the ninth stage. At that moment the body was still quite stiff and immobile.¹²

"All things I then forgot. ... All ceased, and I was not," says St. John of the Cross narrating his unitive experience; but Mirra's recapitulation of her own essentially ineffable experience is far more vivid and precise. Like Sri Aurobindo in poems like "Trance of Waiting" and "Descent", Mirra too is able to turn the experience of illumination into creative communion. She had leapt out of the body-consciousness, and there were stages of the ascent of consciousness, and corresponding stages of descent, and a general circulation and diffusion of the new light "enveloping the whole being in an immense oval of living light".

III

From the plenitude of that realisation, Mirra is able to face the outside world with a divine equanimity. As though she had the European crisis in mind, she writes on 22 July:

O divine Master, let Thy light fall into this chaos and bring forth from it a new world.¹³

Then the very next day:

Do not abandon us to impotence and darkness; break every limit, shatter every chain, dispel every illusion.

On 31 July, she refers to certain experiences of hers - always unique, "these milestones which mark the infinite ascent are never alike" - and wonders whether a time will come when the Divine will make her "capable of synthetising all these countless experiences, so as to draw from them a new realisation, more complete and more beautiful than all achieved so far". On 2 August, she feels that the world is on the threshold of unpredictable happenings: new modes of manifestation.

... all these mental powers, all these vital energies, and all these material elements, what are they if not Thyself in Thy outermost form, Thy ultimate modes of expression, of realisation, O Thou whom we adore devotedly and who escapest us on every side even while penetrating, animating and guiding us, Thou whom we cannot understand or define or name, Thou whom we cannot seize or embrace or conceive, and who art yet realised in our smallest acts ....

In the immensity of Thy effective Presence all things blossom!

Even on 3 August, she is at the centre of her being only filled with a mute adoration, and her soul is filled with "the immensity of Thy love".

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But by now the dogs of global war have been unleashed in Europe. and on 4 August, these words are wrung from her heart:

O Lord, O eternal Master!

Men, driven by the conflict of forces, are performing a sublime sacrifice, they are offering their lives in a bloodstained holocaust. ...

O Lord, O eternal Master, grant that all this may not be in vain, grant that the inexhaustible torrents of Thy divine Force may spread over the earth and penetrate its troubled atmosphere, the struggling energies, the violent chaos of battling elements; grant that the pure light of Thy Knowledge and the inexhaustible love of Thy benediction may fill men's hearts, penetrate their souls, illumine their consciousness and, out of this obscurity, out of this sombre, terrible and potent darkness, bring forth the splendour of Thy majestic Presence!

The next day she humbly invokes, "Thy luminous love upon the earth amongst our ignorant and sorrowful human brothers". On 6 August again: "O Lord, we know that it is an hour of great gravity for the earth." And two days later:

Monstrous forces have swooped down upon the earth like a hurricane, forces dark and violent and powerful and blind. Give us strength, O Lord, to illumine them. Thy splendour must break out everywhere in them and transfigure their action: their devastating passage must leave behind it a divine sowing.

On 11 August, she not only prays for Divine intervention, but also sees herself as an angel of mercy:

O my sweet Master, enter into all these confused thoughts, all these anguished hearts; kindle there the fire of Thy divine Presence. The shadow of the earth has fallen back upon it, it has been completely shaken by it ... wilt Thou not once again move upon the chaos and speak Thy will: "Let there be Light"? ...

I am the powerful arms of Thy mercy.

I am the vast bosom of Thy boundless love .... My arms have enfolded the sorrowful earth and press it tenderly to my generous heart; and slowly a kiss of supreme benediction is laid upon this struggling atom: the kiss of the Mother which soothes and heals.¹⁴

Here Mirra, in a sudden accession of infinite knowledge, power and love, sees herself in the avatar role of the Mother Divine, the Mother of Sorrows who is retriever, consoler and healer at once.

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IV

And so, as the tentacles of the European war extended on all sides with escalating ferocity, as the German army's sweep towards the West went On relentlessly, as the fall-out of the war was felt in far-off India and even in Pondicherry, Mirra could hardly abstract herself from that world in turmoil, her morning meditations explored divers layers of consciousness, adopted divers mental stances (anxiety, hope, doubt, anguish , dismay), contacted divers Powers and Influences, and she played by turns her several roles of bystander, supplicant, medium, mediator, collaborator and initiator:

The being stands before Thee, with arms lifted, palms open, in an ardent aspiration ....

... may the regenerating streams roll over the earth in beneficent waves. Transfigure and illumine. Work this supreme miracle so long awaited, and break all ignorant egoisms; awaken Thy sublime flame in every heart. ¹⁵

O my sweet Master, why hast Thou told me to leave the blessed place in Thy heart and return to earth to attempt a realisation which everything seems to prove impossible? ... What dost Thou expect of me that Thou hast ... plunged me again into this dark, struggling universe?¹⁶

All errors, all prejudices, all misunderstandings must vanish in this whirlwind of destruction that is carrying away the past.¹⁷

I feel as if I have gone down very deep into an unfathomable abyss of doubt and darkness, as if I am exiled from Thy eternal splendour; but I know that in this descent is the possibility of a higher ascent .... ¹⁸

A fervent prayer surges in her heart on 21 August:

O Lord, Lord, the whole earth is in an upheaval; it groans and suffers, it is in agony ... all this suffering that has descended upon it must not be in vain; grant that all this bloodshed may produce a swifter germination of the seeds of beauty and light and love .... Out of the depths of this abysm of darkness the whole being of the earth cries to Thee that Thou mayest give it air and light; it is stifling, wilt Thou not come to its aid?¹⁹

The same poignant cry - half agony, half prayer - is forced out of her again and again, and the cry is indeed the representative moan of humanity on trial, undergoing an almost termless tribulation:

Thy grace is with us, Lord, and it never leaves us, even when appearances are dark; night is sometimes necessary to prepare more perfect dawns .... ²⁰

O Lord, the earth groans and suffers; chaos has made this world its abode.

The darkness is so deep that Thou alone canst dispel it. Come, manifest Thyself, that Thy work may be accomplished.²¹

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On 29 August, Mirra sees Man as an intermediary being between earth and heaven, animality and divinity:

Man is the link between What must be and what is; he is the footbridge thrown across the abyss, he is the great cross-shaped X, the quaternary connecting link. His true domicile, the effective seat of this consciousness should be in the intermediary world at the meeting-point of the four arms of the cross, just where all the infinitude of the Unthinkable comes to take a precise form so that it may be projected into the innumerable manifestation ....

That centre is a place of supreme love, of perfect consciousness, of pure and total knowledge.²²

Perhaps, Mirra was casting herself for this role, anticipating Sri Aurobindo's words in Savitri:

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,

A power of silence in the depths of God;

She is the Force, the inevitable Word, ...

All Nature dumbly calls to her alone

To heal with her feet the aching throb of life

And break the seals on the dim soul of man

And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things. ²³

V

Mirra's prayers and meditations were but the stray ripples from the ocean infinite of her inner life, and at different moments they strike us differently: now seemingly austere and resigned when the sky is overcast with threatening clouds, now radiant in their rainbow magnificence when the Sun shines gloriously. The diary-entries are rather like pointer-readings, and help to give us a sense of the rhythm, the richness and the complexity of her inner life. Even at the grimmest moments when a bleak appraisal of the human situation seems unavoidable, even then the insinuating and insistent voice of encouragement and hope is heard, faintly at first, but presently with the assurance of faith and the certainty of ultimate victory. Thus, on 31 August 1914, the last day of the first month of the War, Mirra records:

In this formidable disorder and terrible destruction can be seen a great working, a necessary toil preparing the earth for a new sowing which will rise in marvellous spikes of grain and give to the world the shining harvest of a new race .... The vision is clear and precise .... ²⁴

The very next day, however, Mirra records another marvellous experience.

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She had completely identified herself with the Divine Mother, so much so the "we" became a single power:

Then in the silence of our mute ecstasy a voice from yet profounder depths arose and the voice said, "Turn towards those who have need of thy love." All the grades of consciousness appeared, all the successive worlds. Some were splendid and luminous, well ordered and clear .... Then the worlds darkened in a multiplicity more and more chaotic, the Energy became violent and the material world obscure and sorrowful. And when in Our infinite love we perceived in its entirety the hideous suffering of the world of misery and ignorance, when we saw our children locked in a sombre struggle, flung upon each other by energies that had deviated from their true aim, we willed ardently that the light of Divine Love should be made manifest, a transfiguring force at the centre of these distracted elements. Then, that the will might be yet more powerful and effective, we turned towards Thee, O unthinkable Supreme, and we implored Thy aid. And from the unsounded depths of the Unknown a reply came sublime and formidable and we knew that the earth was saved.²⁵

In the meantime, the progress of the War in Europe was anything but encouraging from the Allies' point of view. The Germans, having already taken Namur and Louvain, stormed Amiens in France on 1 September, and sacked Dinant in Belgium on 3 September, and steadily advanced into the Allied lines. It is not surprising therefore that Mirra's entry for 4 September is most agonising:

Darkness has descended upon the earth, thick, violent, victorious .... All is sadness, terror, destruction in the physical world, and the splendour of Thy light of love seems darkened by a veil of mourning ....

Time presses: the divine powers must come, O Lord, to the help of the agonised earth.²⁶

It was about this time that Mirra had a very unusual experience. From the terrace of her house in Dupleix Street, she could see the terrace in front of Sri Aurobindo's rooms in Rue François Martin, and it was her custom to sit and meditate every morning, facing Sri Aurobindo's rooms. Then one morning, in "the early days of the War", this incredible thing happened:

That day I was in my room, but looking at Sri Aurobindo's room through a small window. I was in meditation but my eyes were open. I saw this Kali entering through my door; I asked her, "What do you want?" And she was dancing, a truly savage dance. She told me, "Paris is taken, Paris will be destroyed." ... I turned towards her and told her, "No, Paris will not be taken, Paris will be saved", quietly, just like this, but with a certain force. She made a face and went away. And the next day, we received the "dispatch" ... that the Germans had been marching upon Paris .... But when they saw that the road was clear, that there was nobody to oppose them,

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they felt convinced that it was an ambush .... So they turned round and went back! And when the French armies saw that, naturally they gave chase and caught them, and there was a battle. It was the decisive battle ... ²⁷

Appropriately enough, on 5 September, Mirra hears the rallying call from Above:

"Face the danger!. .. Look the danger straight in the face and it will vanish before the Power." ...

"Conquer at any price" should be the present motto ....

And in an infinite love for the world ... let us fight!²⁸

There may even be an inner meaning behind the sanguinary world conflict, for it may very well be the means of triumphing over both moral stagnation and blind destruction; it may be the Purgatory on the way to distant Paradise! The only thing to do is to fight and fear not, to fight and conquer.

VI

By and by, out of the clouds of confusion, discomfiture and desperation, there emerges slowly the sun of clear understanding and steady wisdom. Man but partly is, yet wholly hopes to be. Each individual is - or ought to be - a revelation in space and time of the Reality that lies beyond them, an essay in illusive appearance bodying forth the Reality behind all appearances. Man is no doubt deeply entangled in "the relativities of the physical world", the dualities and dichotomies of terrestrial existence; but he is in essence the inheritor of Reality also, and hence he is a fit intermediary between the self-puissant spiritual and the self-divided material worlds. And Mirra herself would like to be the mediatrix in excelsis, and that is how her words comprehend all the agonies and aspirations of humanity; and when she articulates a prayer, it may be taken that the entire earth unconsciously repeats the words and participates in the ardent sincerity of the supplication:

Envelop this sorrowful earth with the strong arms of Thy mercy, permeate it with the beneficent outpourings of Thy infinite love. ²⁹

A mighty canticle of fervent love and exultation arises to Thee, O Lord, all the earth in an inexpressible ecstasy unites with Thee. ³⁰

And yet the War on the western front in Europe continued in undiminished fury; there were furious engagements on land and sea in almost every theatre of war. The Germans had taken the cathedral town 'of Rheims on 5 September, and Paris was still exposed to danger; and the German cruiser, Emden, even found its way to the Bay of Bengal and

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shelled Madras! It asked for immense faith, an occult foresight and a spiritual poise of certainty to infer, amid all that enveloping gloom, the flickering lights of the coming Dawn. Doubtless the Richards and Sri Aurobindo met every day and often discussed the situation, till Paul had to leave for France to join his class of the Reserve Army. The complexion of the events as the papers were permitted to record them and the direction of development as it seemed to unfold itself in Mirra's or Sri Aurobindo's mystic visions had to be correlated to arrive at some approximation to the probable shape of things to come. It is thus not very surprising that, at the very moment the outlook seemed to be bleak and unpromising in the extreme, Mirra could still record in her diary on 25 September:

O Divine and adorable Mother, with Thy help what is there that is impossible? The hour of realisation is near and Thou hast assured us of Thy aid that we may perform integrally the supreme Will.

Thou hast accepted us as fit intermediaries between the unthinkable realities and the relativities of the physical world, and Thy constant presence in our midst is a token of Thy active collaboration.

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute:

A new Light shall break upon the earth.

A new world shall be born,

And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled. ³¹

VII

While Mirra's reactions to the outbreak of the War and its rake's progress in several directions found expression - after a process of dissolution and crystallisation in the still waters of meditation and prayer - in the series of musings, supplications and outpourings of the soul, Sri Aurobindo's views found clear formulation in his letter of 29 August 1914 to Motilal Roy. When Britain entered the War, India was inevitably dragged into it too, and Britain wanted India's active cooperation in the war effort. There were many (including Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, with his South African experiences of passive resistance to tyranny) who were for loyalism and unconditional support to Britain, while others thought that Britain's difficulty was India's opportunity to wrest her freedom from the alien bureaucracy. Sri Aurobindo, however, did not agree with either view. He wouldn't compromise on the question of eventual independence; he was, as always, for "a masculine courage in speech and action"; and while there could be no cooperation without control, there should be "readiness to accept real concessions and pay their just price, but no more". Under the conditions of the War, immediate independence was obviously impracticable; but he also added significantly, "We are ready to defend the British rule against any foreign nation, for that means defending our own future

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independence. ³² He also discussed in detail various courses the War might take. and the appropriate action to be taken in each of those eventualities. The cardinal principle, however, was "continuance of British rule and cooperation until we are strong enough to stand by ourselves". Were ,Britain even to lose the War, India should take care and see that she did not "pass from one foreign domination to a worse".³³

Such were his considered views, although they were communicated only under cover of secrecy. But, then, as one of the editors of the Arya, he had also to make an open reference to the War, and this note appeared in the September 1914 issue. The Arya, being a review of pure Philosophy, had no "direct concern with political passions and interests and their results". On the other hand, it couldn't altogether ignore "the enormous convulsion" in progress, when men were "dying in thousands daily, the existence of empires was threatened and the fate of the world hanging in the balance". Sri Aurobindo thought that the War had its aspects "of supreme importance to a synthetic Philosophy", but, he added, "Now is not the hour, now in this moment of supreme tension and widespread agony."³⁴ What a singular coincidence, one might say, that the sanguinary holocaust that was the First World War and the launching of the philosophical Review, the Arya, should have taken place more or less simultaneously. Was it no more than an instance of cosmic irony? Or was it a providential corrective, or insurance, for the future? The War was to go on with an increasing ruthlessness and destructive frenzy till November 1918, and the unreal and inhuman war atmosphere was to overflow and prevail till the signing of the Peace Treaties in 1920. The Arya too was to run its serene course for a little over six years. In the providential scheme of things, was there no causal connection between the two - the War and the Word? "Hardly a month had passed since the declaration of the Great War," says Amrita recalling those distant days, "when I heard elderly people, rich in knowledge, affirm that the World War was but the unhealed sore in the human consciousness and the appearance of the Arya was destined to heal the sore. "³⁵

VIII

The Arya, as indicated earlier, gave pride of place to Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, and among his other numerous contributions during the first year were the two massive treatises, The Secret of the Veda and The Synthesis of Yoga. Paul Richard's The Eternal Wisdom was a garner of the choicest thoughts of the great religions and philosophies of the world, the memorable utterances of the world's great thinkers, all arranged under Suitable headings like "The Divine Essence", "The Divine Becoming" and "The Way of Love" in a naturally effective sequence. The central idea

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behind the collection was provided by Angelus Silesius: "Eternal Wisdom builds: I shall be her palace when she finds repose in me and I in her."³⁶ Paul's other serious work, The Wherefore of the Worlds, was an ambitious attempt to survey the past and the present with reference to human development, and to infer the probable direction of the future. The Arya also carried reviews, translations and editorial comments.

The original intention had been to approach the problem of synthesis "from the starting-point of the two lines of culture which divide human thought and are now meeting at its apex, the knowledge of the West and the knowledge of the East".³⁷ Because of the War, however, Paul had to return to France with Mirra, leaving unfinished his superb exercise in synthesis The Wherefore of the Worlds, but he had at least brought his argument to the climactic point where he described the redeeming and creative power of Love. Richard called the birth of Love "the second Genesis":

After having built up out of the cosmic dust the harmonious forms of the worlds and coordinated in the infinitesimal universe of the atoms, as in the infinite atom which is the universe, all the conflicting forces and chaotic energies, after having perfected life and its forms, the forms by the progress of life, life by the progress of forms, this Love is now at work in the human being. After having drawn him forth out of the divine possibilities of Nature, it would now draw out of his nature the possibilities of the Divine.

This supreme aspiration of Love explains and justifies the universal desire and transfigures it; therein the being discovers the secret of his goal shedding light on the mystery of his beginning. ³⁸

Although The Wherefore of the Worlds series came to a stop here, The Eternal Wisdom garners continued to appear throughout the life of the Arya, constituting in their totality a vast treasure-house of human knowledge and wisdom.

It is a curious circumstance that The Life Divine, whose first appearance in a serial form in the Arya synchronised with the First World War, was to achieve definitive book publication in 1939-40, the opening years of the Second World War, which also provoked T. S. Eliot to indite poems like "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942) - "as exciting to many of us," said John Lehmann, "as news of a great victory". Didn't the Gita itself owe its origin to the frightening spectacle of the rival armies - the Kaurava and the Pandava - glaring at each other on the field of Kurukshetra? The Word of the Arya, charged as it was with the infinite power of the spirit, was indeed the fittest answer to the unleashing of the Asuric forces of the War. The boil of the accumulated poisons of the past - of selfishness and greed, of nationalist rivalry and colonialist exploitation, of political chicanery and militarist ambitions - burst in the form of the global War. The recovery, the healing,

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the permanent cure would be a long process, for the Lord of Falsehood or the Lord of the Nations would not easily yield ground or suffer obscuration. Human effort would be necessary on an unprecedented scale, but Grace would be needed too. Tapahprabhāvāddevaprasādācca!³⁹Such too was the nectarean Word spoken by the Arya.

IX

It is only to be expected that, on its first appearance, the prophetic appeal of the Arya (notably of The Life Divine) should be drowned in the sound and fury of the War news and scares and the endless irrelevances of the political speculations. But at least the Review had the expected optimum Dumber of subscribers, and scattered seed-plots were thus being laid in the desert-wastes of the contemporary human-inhuman situation. Amrita was then only a teenager preparing for the Matriculation examination, but when he chanced upon the "first sublime article in the Arya" - the magnificent exordium to The Life Divine - he started reading it half aloud to himself:

I read it over and over again. Great thoughts clothed in great words - I could not at all comprehend! However, it was sweet to read and re-read it. It was as if someone else in me was comprehending all that was read!⁴⁰

Sri Aurobindo surprised Amrita in the act of reading when the latter sheepishly remarked that "the reading was delightful but nothing could be grasped". Sri Aurobindo's reply was: "It is not necessary to understand it all at once. Go on reading. If you find a joy in reading, you need not stop it." After all, that is the way of the mantra, or of all writing charged with a mantric potency, for its meaning somehow irresistibly filters to the profundities of the soul:

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self

Are seized unalterably and he endures

An ecstasy and an immortal change; ... ⁴¹

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