On The Mother

CHAPTER 12

Like Mount Fuji

I

During the Richards' four-year stay in Japan, - first in Tokyo and later in Kyoto, with short visits to other places, - they were naturally drawn towards people with a spiritual outlook on life. But the Japanese, for all their elegance and culture, and the general atmosphere of friendliness exuded by them, were rather allergic to spirituality. They had their religions, of course - Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity, with their many sectarian divisions - and they had their picturesque ceremonies, religious and secular, and their elaborate codes of behaviour; but somehow the Japanese as a general rule shied away from spirituality, that adventurous and perilous and all-absorbing pursuit of ultimate Reality. Fascinating Japan, the country made up of four principal islands; the captivating variety of coastline, valleys, rivers, lakes, rocks; the cycle of seasons and the rhythm of the hours of the day; the Emperor with his divine right; the eight million gods of the Shinto religion; Mount Fuji with its magnificence and the lesser mountains; the landscapes, gardens, spas; the architecture of the pagodas big and small; the supernal calm on the face of the statues of the Buddha; the grace of the Japanese woman in her kimono; the Kabuki, the Noh and puppet theatres; the sophistication and grace of the Tea Ceremony; the singular charm of the art of Flower Arrangement; the gaunt and uncompromising Samurai code; the marvels in miniature, the Haiku and the Tanka mini-lyrics, the ceramics and lacquer work; these and many other facets of Japanese life in their particularity had such a hold on their sensibility that anything that tended to minimise their individual or unique autonomy, anything that claimed a vaster, or even an absolute, sovereignty was bound to upset their equanimity, their sense of security and their peculiar existential flavour. The Mother once recalled the story (already told in the previous chapter) of the young Japanese aspirant whom she had helped to look within and contact his soul; and the only result was the man was scared; no, no, he didn't want the soul, the mystical tremendum of the Infinite, if that was going to prove more powerful than his country and his Emperor, and affect his allegiance to them!

That being the background, it was inevitable that, while the Richards had many acquaintances, they had but few friends. In the War and immediate post-war years (1916-20), Japan was still on the rising tide of her prosperity and influence. Japan was an ally of Great Britain, and fought on the side of the Allies against Germany and Austria. There was a visible British presence in Japan during the War, and after the Allied victory, Japan was one of the Big Five of the world. The Japanese

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Emperor - the Mikado - was still a sacred and inviolable personage, and mystical awe and aura surrounded his movements. On the other hand, their fanatic loyalty to their Emperor apart, the Japanese people were a talented. industrious and artistic race, radiating buoyancy and infectious self-confidence in public, but also a certain moodiness and self-introspection in private.

During their one-year stay in Tokyo, the Richards shared a house with Dr. S.Okhawa and his wife. and they became very good friends. Dr. Okhawa was a professor who taught at a university in Tokyo. One of the courses that he gave was on the History of the British Colonies. Among his books was a monograph on the Soul of Japan. At the beginning of the First World War, he had given help and asylum to Indian revolutionaries like Rash Behari Bose. This was to make Dr.Okhawa a persona non grata with the British, and perhaps even the Japanese Government wasn't very happy. But Dr. and Madame Okhawa evidently liked Rash Behari Bose, who taught his hostess the rudiments of Indian cookery. The Richards' earlier contacts with Pondicherry and India. the Okhawas' sympathy for the cause of Indian independence, their common aversion to Western materialism and capitalism, and their united faith in the resurgence of Asia brought them close, and they were to remain life-long friends.

II

Forty years later, on the evening of 1September 1957, when Professor V.K. Gokak and I were in Japan to attend the P.E.N. International Congress, we were happy to call upon the Okhawas at their country residence in Nakatsu. One of Dr. Okhawa's former pupils, Katoh, took us partly by train and partly by bus to Nakatsu, and we were received graciously by the septuagenarian professor and his generous-hearted wife. All along the way -whether in the train, at the tea-shop waiting for the bus, or on the bus­ we were buoyed up by anticipation. We raced through the Japanese countryside, a seemingly endless expanse of greenness and elegance and evening glow, and we passed paddy fields, as also mulberry plants and tea shrubs; the bus laboured uphill, and we saw bamboo groves and cherry trees, and at last Nakatsu appeared in sight, situated on one side of a deep gorge with a river flowing below. We had to walk a couple of furlongs to reach Dr. Okhawa's ancient house that seemed perfectly to merge with the sylvan surroundings. Dr. Okhawa was spectacled, and almost wholly blind, and was lying propped up on his bed, but there was a mellow lustre on his face and he rather struck me (I don't know why) as a venerable Lama. He was in his early seventies, and Madame, although not much younger, was very active and attentive to the needs of her husband. Here at last we were face to face with the real heart and soul of authentic Japan.

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In the Course of our conversation we gathered that Dr. Okhawa had read during the early months of the First World War a translation in a Japanese paper of an article by Sri Aurobindo, but he couldn't learn much about the author himself; and what he could get from Rash Behari Bose was only an account of the political side of Sri Aurobindo's career. When, in 1916, the Richards came to Tokyo and they all lived in the same house, Dr. Okhawa knew of the spiritual side of Sri Aurobindo's life as well. The Richards were several years older than the Okhawas, but they all did Yoga together - at least, spiritual concentration. Even after the Richards left for; Kyoto in 1917, their friendship continued on a firm footing. Dr. Okhawa added, in a deep and firm voice, that Sri Aurobindo had remained his Guru for over forty-five years, spanning both the World Wars.

Dr. Okhawa spoke English without difficulty, but the speaking Was disturbed by asthmatic coughs. Madame Okhawa knew no English, but with young Katoh's help as interpreter, there was no difficulty of communication. She was all kindliness and consideration, and ready at the slightest gesture to rush to the assistance of her husband. Dr. Okhawa gradually warmed up and spoke with great enthusiasm about the Richards and of the time they had all lived together. Those days forty years earlier, when they had shared their ideals and experiences, were a time of dreaming and a time of hoping for a better Asia and a better world. Reminiscing about his earlier years, Dr. Okhawa told us that, as a student, he had studied Indian philosophy at the Imperial University, Tokyo, and was later impressed when Paul Richard in the Course of a speech he delivered in Japan referred to Sri Aurobindo as the greatest of the divine men of the world, "the leader, the hero of tomorrow".

In answer to a pointed question as to how Mirra had struck the Okhawas when they knew her, whether they had seen then any indications of her vast spiritual reserves and her future divine ministry at Pondicherry. Dr. Okhawa paused a little, and spoke slowly, as if carefully weighing his words:

No...no ... we were too near her, we all lived in the same house for about a year we were too intimate ....

You know Mount Fuji ... you can't appreciate it in full when you are very near, when you are too close ... some distance is needed ... from a distance, ah! it is grand, it is breath-taking, it is sublime!

She was like Mount Fuji, Mirra was ....

After a significant pause, Dr. Okhawa added slowly:

But even then, even forty years ago, I could see that Mirra was deeply mystical, she was often withdrawn, with a faraway look, a look sometimes of infinite anxiety, sometimes of ecstatic happiness ....

And also - at the same time - Mirra was thoroughly scientific,

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thoroughly practical. That was an extraordinary combination ....

I can see that Pondicherry is a great spiritual centre today. I am not surprised ... I am happy!

That was a marvellously sincere and marvellously accurate assessment. Dr. Okhawa seemed to be a little exhausted, and he quietly listened when Gokakand I described the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of ,Education that was coming up under the aegis of the Ashram and the direct inspiration and guidance of the Mother.

We had then cakes and tea, and gratefully partook of Madame Okhawa's charming hospitality. We shook hands with Dr. Okhawa and took leave of him, but Madame insisted on accompanying us to the bus­stop. We saw on the way cows with enormous udders lowing sweetly, and Madame waited till we got into the bus along with Katoh, and she waved us all an affectionate good-bye.'"

III

In July 1917, the Richards went to Akakura Spa, 2500 feet above the sea level, a rare beauty spot and a place for quiet and relaxation. Four years earlier, Kakuzo Okakura, one of the leaders of the Japanese renaissance and preservers of her cultural heritage, had died at Akakura. He had visited India, and won the friendship of Tagore. Mirra felt at ease at Akakura, a deep waking dream of unfathomable peace, melting into an immensity vast and calm, losing even the remotest traces of the obtrusive consciousness of separative individuality. And the views of Nature! Mirra 'experiences an ineffable throb of fulfilment:

And these great mountains with their serene contours which I see from my 'window, range after majestic range up to the very horizon, are in perfect ;harmony with the rhythm of this being, filled with an infinite peace.^I

The Richards presently shifted to Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan and the centre of her millennial culture and civilisation. Rich in historical, religious and cultural associations, Kyoto with its old-world charm, unspoilt freshness and residuary richness of native grandeur, its hoary heart-uplifting temples, enchanting parks and gardens, the quiet and homliness and easy naturalness and unfailing courtesy of the citizens even in out-of-the-way bylanes and footpaths, all fascinated and feasted the visitors. Mirra and Paul had been in correspondence with Dr. Okhata, the leader of the Still-Sitting Movement and his close associates, the Kobayashis,

*The above record is based, partly on my notes at the time of my Japanese visit, and partly on Professor V.K. Gokak's "Interviews in Japan", published in Loving Homage, 1958, pp.227ff. See also his "Three Prose Poems" in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, 1958.

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of Kyoto. After Dr. Okhata's death in 1921and Kobayashi's in 1926 the leadership of the movement fell to the charge of Madame Kobayashi. Dr. Kobayashi was a surgeon by profession, and a Yogi as well following the Amitabha Buddha School of Sadhana. He found from experience that an inner process facilitated the cure of his patients. In one of Sri Aurobindo's evening talks (of 19 September 1926), he referred to Dr. Kobayashi's work, having evidently heard about it from Mirra:

He makes the patients sit in meditation with him and asks them to concentrate on the navel and to aspire that the Light may come down and set right the affected organ. By now he has cured thousands of patients; of course, his personal influence is indispensable in bringing down the Light.

... His theory is that the disease is due to a passive congestion in the affected part. That is to say, the nerves there get congested and the vital force is not able to reach that part. What the Light does is that it brings about a subtle and quick vibration in the affected part, thereby restoring normal circulation ... this is a method of curing diseases by pure, subtle force. Something from the occult plane comes down and removes the obstacle from the physical plane.²

This was for curing existing ailments, but Dr. Okhata and the Kobayashis used their still-sitting meditation more widely for prophylactic purposes also -
in fact, for promoting the all-round well-being of the body, vital and mind.

During their two years' stay at Kyoto, Mirra struck a deep friendship with Madame Kobayashi, and took interest in the still-sitting movement. Finding the Indian Yoga system too complicated, Dr. Okhata and his associates had devised the still-sitting method of concentration to initiate the integral development of man. The discipline consists in sitting on one's heels in the Japanese fashion with the back held straight. The left palm rests on the abdomen and the right hand holds the left wrist. Now the aspirant imagines that his consciousness is rising above the head, touching the very roof, and he steadily concentrates on his navel. It may seem difficult at first, but practice should perfect the instruments and induce utter stillness and silence. In still-sitting groups, a thousand - or even five thousand - may sit in meditation in one place, yet there is a seraphic stillness and peace. Although such still-sitting with sustained concentration is not the same thing as Hatha Yoga or Raja Yoga, it has its own merits all the same and helps the individual as well as the aggregate to achieve outer and inner poise - no small gains at the earlier stages of spiritual sadhana.

IV

Even as Professor Gokak and I were privileged to meet the Okhawas on 1 September 1957, a week later, on the evening of 8 September, we were

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able to meet Madame Kobayashi at her place in Kyoto. Although Madame Kobayashi had sent a map, we had some difficulty in locating her place, for Kyoto is full of criss-crossing lanes. We reached her place at last, and she warmly received us and took us to her drawing room, furnished with such impeccable taste. Her adopted daughter, her son-in-law and their baby also joined us in due course. Madame Kobayashi was about seventy, but looked much younger; she was indeed a lively, energetic and most friendly person. In Gokak's words, "Free from sentimental prolixity or emotional excess of any kind, her talk yet proceeded from the very depths of her heart, like a little mountain stream."³ She put us at our ease at once, and showed us photographs of the annual gatherings of her still-sitting group, and also copies of the monthly journal she was editing. There were besides a couple of photographs of herself with Mirra and Paul Richard. While in Kyoto, Mirra had done a sketch of Madame Kobayashi in colour, and this we saw too, an excellent likeness that seemed to bring out "the eager inquiry, the innocence, the candour, the cheerfulness and good humour", indeed the very soul of Madame Kobayashi.⁴ The Mother had sent to her old friend a few Ashram photographs including one of herself taken in the Golconde along with some Japanese visitors, and a Savitri diary. All these Madame Kobayashi showed us with evident happiness.

As for the old days almost forty years earlier, she had obviously admired and looked up to Mirra as to a senior in years and a spiritual adept. Still-sitting no doubt promoted physical well-being and inner tranquillity, but Madame Kobayashi could see that Mirra had had other realisations of a far profounder kind. And she had been so good, so helpful, often so self-absorbed with an abstracted air, and always communicating so much love to one and all, always charging the very atmosphere with the power of her beauty and compassionate understanding. We asked Madame Kobayashi about the place where Mirra had lived while in Kyoto. We were informed that the house had since been converted into a Tea House, a characteristic Japanese institution. If we were lucky, Mirra's old rooms might be unoccupied for the nonce facilitating our visit. We decided to take our chance, and Madame Kobayashi and her daughter too accompanied us in the taxi. We were happy to find that the rooms were, in fact, unoccupied, and on Madame Kobayashi's request the ladies running the Tea House permitted us to enter the house and see the rooms. We stepped in and went up the stairs and reached the small room on the second floor where Mirra used to meditate, often in Madame Kobayashi's company. While the rest of the house had suffered alterations during the intervening years, the meditation room - the sanctuary - had remained the same. It was a pretty and cosy room, and we sat for a while, and meditated. Recalling those blissful minutes, Gokak has recorded:

It was, for me, a sacred room, as sacred as the innermost shrine of a

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temple. I sent out a prayer to the Mother from Kyoto to Pondicherry expressing my gratitude to her for having vouchsafed it to me to spend few minutes in what might be caned the laboratory in which her mission was shaped before she came to India to make India her permanent home. ⁵

The veils were suddenly torn from that inconspicuous room with frayed rush-mattresses and a low table, the mind raced back across the long mediating decades when the tea-room was transformed into the favoured haunt of the Divine. How many hours hadn't Mirra, sitting in tapas, in that room of little space, communed with the Divine? How often hadn't she invoked the Divine Presence to consecrate that room; what far regions of consciousness hadn't she coaxed into that obscure room to enlarge it into the amplitudes of the World-Stair; what spiritual energies hadn't she mobilised in that veritable Power House for channelling illumination to the confused, the half-lost and the wholly lost; what roles of medium, mediatrix and creatrix hadn't she rehearsed in that greenroom annex to the bigger theatre to be at Pondicherry! It was for us a singular session of deep humility and measureless gratitude. Our hearts full, we thanked the ladies of the Tea House, dropped the Kobayashis at their residence, and waved an affectionate farewell.

V

During the later part of her stay in Japan, Mirra was asked to speak to a group of women, and this talk in English, happily preserved, was published fifty years later in 1967 as "Talk to the Women of Japan". * Mirra's theme was the bringing up of children, and her audience was made up of mothers, or potential mothers. By a law of nature as it were, children are to women, and not least to Japanese women, their dearest and sacredest possession and preoccupation. Indeed, children are investments on faith, an insurance for the future. In Mirra's view, motherhood is woman's priceless privilege and quintessential role, and involves the tasks of bearing, training, humanising and spiritualising the coming generation. But children should come, not just biologically as rabbits come into the world, but as radiances, psychic entities, soul-sparks encased in human bodies:

True maternity begins with the conscious creation of a being, with the willed shaping of a soul coming to develop and utilise a new body. The true domain of women is the spiritual.⁶

*Mirra's essay on "Women and the War", first published on 7 July 1916 in the Japanese journal Fujoshimbun is an eloquent plea for the recognition of the fundamental spiritual equality of men and women, and for making this "the focus of action and new life, around which will be constructed the future temple of Humanity".

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There is the pure dream of motherhood, and there is the unfolding reality; and from the moment of conception in the womb (or even earlier), the child's future destiny is determined largely by the thoughts, feelings, hopes and aspirations of the mother, her diet and. discipline, her daily routine and commerce in life. Constantly to live amidst beauty, to think great and noble thoughts, to avoid fret and fatigue and agitation and worry, to expose herself to the currents of aspiration and idealism - this would be the best means of moulding the child growing within. Mirra referred in her talk to a mother who had often gazed with absorption and love at a painting of two children by Reynolds, hoping in her heart that her own children might wear angelic faces like those in the picture, and indeed that was how her twins looked when they were born, so unlike their father and mother. If the strength of aspiration could have so decisive an effect even on the physical plane, surely the right aspiration would mould the child's mind and sensibility and entire character as well. Mirra felt that the intensity of the mother's aspiration could actually prove stronger than the compulsions of heredity about which the geneticists waxed so eloquently:

Why accept the obscure bonds of heredity and atavism - which are nothing else than subconscious preferences for our own trend of character - when we can, by concentration and win, can into being a type constructed according to the highest ideal we are able to conceive? With this effort, maternity becomes truly precious and sacred; indeed with this, we enter the glorious work of the Spirit, and womanhood rises above animality and its ordinary instincts, towards real humanity and its powers.

This leads Mirra to the heart of the evolutionary thesis which had first come to her as a flash of intuition, but had later found corroboration when she met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry in 1914. Animals reproduce themselves and perpetuate their several species, but it is given to human beings alone to aspire higher and higher, and bring children into the world with the glow of a new beauty in their limbs and the light of a new knowledge in their eyes. Mirra told her audience that mankind was then in its phoenix-hour when much that was of the past had to perish and something new was to be born. It was almost the mid-point of the First World War, and the papers spoke of only trench-warfare, submarine actions, mounting casualties, uncertainties and inhumanities. But that time of darkest night was also the time for a desperate and compelling hope for the future. With a marked clarity of vision, Mirra peered beyond the dark, and saw the glimmerings of light at the end of the tunnel:

May not this darkness, then, be the sign of an approaching dawn? And as never was night so complete, so terrifying, maybe never win dawn have been so bright, so pure, so illuminating as the coming one .... After the bad dreams of the night the world win awaken to a new consciousness.

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The civilisation which is ending now in such a dramatic way was based on the power of mind, mind dealing with matter and life .... But a new reign is coming, that of the Spirit: after the human, the divine.⁷

In that context of the breaking of the worlds and the dissolution of the old loyalties, it was obvious that man should learn progressively to deepen heighten and widen his consciousness so as to be able to look beneath the appearances, to gaze at the ascending possibilities, and to see far ahead of one's own constricted spheres of person, family, locality, country, and learn rather to identify the Divine presence everywhere and in all things. Without such a decisive emancipation from the prison-cell of the ego, or of the various concentric prison-like ego-formations, no real freedom, Or felicity, or fulfilment was to be expected.

But, then, only too often (Mirra reminded her audience) had the male of the species tried to relegate woman to subservience, inconsequence and futility, and especially was this so in a time of crisis. Mirra felt that this calculated ignoration of woman shouldn't continue any longer. "The true relation of the two sexes," she declared, "is an equal footing of mutual help and close collaboration." Woman's was, after all, the destiny to be the mother of the race, and she would be the mother of the future race of supermen as well. This accordingly placed a great, a supreme, responsibility on woman, for only she could properly envision the future, wait prayerfully upon the ripening event, and hasten the advent of the coming race. Our present difficulties were doubling themselves with each new crisis in human affairs, and thereby proving more and more intractable at the level of customary mental formulations, and so there had to be a new spiritual influx, a climactic transcendence of the mental faculty, - in other words, the bursting of "a new spiritual light, a manifestation upon earth of some divine force unknown until now, a Thought of God, new for us, descending into this world and taking a new form here".

A Thought of God, a new form: something that is different from and exceeds all past images of man: something that could be acclaimed as the New Man, or Greater Man, or Superman. Hitherto women in their inspired moments and dreams may have wished to bear children akin to the great heroes and heroines of history, epic and legend. But these archetypal figures of the past were all cast in the physical, vital and mental moulds of beauty and strength, valour and endurance, intellectual subtlety and moral grandeur. The avatars and prophets of old - Rama, Sita. Krishna, Moses, Mahavira, Siddhartha, Christ, Muhammad, Sankara, Ramanuja, Nanak - punctuated the march of the human consciousness by precept and example. There were also heroic figures like Arjuna and Achilles and Alexander and Napoleon, and there were the great poets and artists, the great scientists and inventors, and the great statesmen and nation-builders, but now there is need for the invocation, or eruption, of

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an altogether new power of consciousness as different from the mental that has been the badge of humanity for millennia, as the mental was different from the mere animal consciousness of man's remote simian ancestors. The emergence of 'mind', of intellect, of reason, if it made possible the development of the arts and sciences, and the sagas of peace and war, also meant a diminution of the old animal cunning and sheer physical agility and endurance. So, too, the emergence of the New Man might involve a radical self-limitation of mental processes and a much greater reliance on the 'overhead' or higher-than-the-mind powers of consciousness like intuition, overmind and supermind. The nineteenth-century German thinker, Nietzsche, had also speculated about the 'superman', but that was only the Asuric man, "a man aggrandised, magnified, in whom Force has become super-dominant, crushing under its weight all the other attributes of man". In the popular imagination of the time, the Kaiser and his .warlords approximated to the Nietzschean Asuric ideal, and certainly Hitler and his Nazi hordes ("The Children of Wotan", as Sri Aurobindo calls them in his poem) were to prove total perversions of the anticipated Nordic Superman. Fully alive to these dangerous possibilities of vulgarisation and distortion of the superman concept, Mirra explained with lucid clarity her own ideal of the Divine Superman. He would be no vitalistic or mentalised exaggeration of current actualities, but a wholly different sort of creation altogether. Indeed, current human experience is wholly inadequate even to visualise the figure and being of this new evolutionary emanation, and only in the utter stillness of the mind can one hope to receive occasional glimpses of the power and the glory of this Future Man:

When the mind is perfectly silent, pure like a well-polished mirror, immobile as a pond on a breezeless day, then, from above, as the light of the stars drops in the motionless waters, so the light of the supermind, of the Truth within, shines in the quieted mind and gives birth to intuition. Those who are accustomed to listen to this voice out of the Silence, take it more and more as the instigating motive of their actions; and where others, the average men, wander along the intricate paths of reasoning, they go straight their way, guided through the windings of life by intuition, this superior instinct, as by a strong and unfailing hand.

This faculty which is exceptional, almost abnormal now, will certainly be quite common and natural for the new race, the man of tomOITow.⁸

In the past, sundry men and women - mystics, saints, ecstatics, poets, artists, even scientists - have known and exercised fitfully this infallible faculty of intuition. But such choice spirits were but few and far between, while the generality of mankind was content to look upon them merely as odd creatures outside the mainstream of life. On the other hand, the recent riot of analytical reason and the heady pace of science have shown that the intellect is not enough; that careering technology and the worship of force

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can only lead to 'the crimes of the strong and the ruin of continents'; and the time has therefore come for a breakthrough in human consciousness that will create conditions for a general forward movement in human affairs. Let women, then, boldly and imaginatively enact the role of the dreamers and redeemers of the race; let them ponder over the limitations of the mental dispensation; let them pray, let them invoke, let them create the Next Future; let them usher in the race of the Superman. When that happens, when the mental man is superseded by the intuitive man and the superman, the rages of the ages will be extinguished, and man and man's works will wear a new poise of purpose and a new cloak of beauty:

Thus, man's road to superman hood will be open when he declares boldly that all he has yet developed, including the intellect of which he is so rightly and yet so vainly proud, is now no longer sufficient for him, and that to uncase, discover, set free this greater power within, shall be henceforward his great preoccupation. Then will his philosophy, art, science, ethics, social existence, vital pursuits be no longer an exercise of mind and life for themselves, in a circle, but a means for the discovery of a greater Truth behind mind and life and the bringing of its power into our human existence.⁹*

This "Talk to the Women of Japan", although cast in the form of a friendly and familiar discourse, is seen on closer scrutiny to be a seminal pronouncement embodying the essential yogic insights of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What Sri Aurobindo was trying at the time - during the war years - to project month after month through the pages of the Arya, at once with an adamantine tightness of argument and also a tropical richness of elaboration, in the massive sequences entitled The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Psychology of Social Development, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry, all their total content is here brought in ever so disarmingly, suggestively, persuasively, and with such crystalline sincerity and candour. There is also the added charm and intensity, because it is an appeal to the women of Japan, and through them to women everywhere. For, after all, who can redeem errant mankind except the mothers of the race? Decades have elapsed since the talk was given, but it still retains its spiritual potency and its fiery contemporaneous relevance.

VI

Life in Japan, then, if it was not outwardly hectic and exciting for Mirra,

*This passage in the talk is a quotation from Sri Aurobindo's The Psychology of Social Development, Chapter XXII, published in the May 1918 issue of the Arya. Some more quotations from other works of Sri Aurobindo published in the Arya are also included in the later part of this talk.

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neither was it without its notable compensations. The Okhawas in Tokyo, .the Kobayashis and Dr. Okhata at Kyoto, were the foci of Mirra's orbit of human relationships In Japan, and what she gave them or received from them cannot be put into words, for it was more of a fellowship in spiritual faith. With some of the Indians in Japan, like Rash Behari Bose, there grew an acquaintanceship; and when Rabindranath Tagore visited Japan and was widely welcomed as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize, the Richards came to know him, as related earlier, and were photographed with him. Showing this portrait to Sri Aurobindo on 18 December 1941 , the Mother was to say wistfully pointing to herself, "This one is Mahalakshmi - sweet, lovable, tender, docile; beauty, harmony ... I like to see this woman, like to meet her again. I like to see this creature again. "^I0 There was another friend too, Miss Dorothy Hodgson, an Englishwoman, who had known Mirra in France, and had come with her to Japan as one inseparable from her friend and mentor. She had suffered a serious bereavement when young, for her fiance had died before they could marry; and so she decided she wouldn't marry at all, and preferred to practise Yoga, having found in Mirra a tremendous support and a ready counsellor and Guru. Dorothy, however, continued to wear a locket round her neck containing a miniature portrait of her fiance. It was from Mirra that Dorothy had learnt about Sri Aurobindo and his yogic life at Pondicherry, as also of the Arya.

These friendships, and the not less important thousand and one casual encounters with Nature and Man in their moments of self-revealing inner splendour when the Divine spoke through them, as also a seasoned occasional talk like the one to the women of Japan, these were but one aspect - the visible outer aspect - of Mirra's life. The other - the invisible inner - aspect of her life was rather like the underground river, flowing steadily, flowing richly, flowing ambrosially, without being in trammels to the urban eruptions, the marshy stretches, the gorgeous mountains, the dreary sandy deserts and the sheltering grottos on the surface of the earth. Her life of intensities was lived within, part dreaming and part seeing, a mixture of meditation and musing, prayer and dialogue; and the outer life was but an attempt - not always successful because of the density of terrestrial life - to translate the aspirations, dreams and visions into everyday actuality. In His confrontation of Mirra, in His dialogues with her, the Divine takes different forms, and it was but natural that in Japan the Divine should sometimes materialise as Shakyamuni before her and speak in. his voice. But behind the veils of the divers descriptive Names, the Reality is the same; Lord, Master, Mother, Friend, Agni, Indra, Eternal Teacher, Sublime Presence, Supreme Dispenser, Sovereign Force, Marvellous Unknowable, Invisible and Sovereign Witness, Mitra, Shakyamuni are but the many verbal approximations to the one only Infinite, the Real, the Perfect. The Divine alone is Mirra's daily diet of meditation, the daily

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ground of habituation, the daily means of subsistence; the desperate separative linguistic formulations are as immediately evocative as they are illusory; her identity with the Divine is the sole reality.

On 24 September 1917, Mirra records yet another dialogue with the Divine, the Lord Infinite and Omnipotent, and reiterates once more both the need for and the difficulty of terrestrial transformation:

Thou hast subjected me to a hard discipline; rung after rung, I have climbed the ladder which leads to Thee and, at the summit of the ascent Thou hast made me taste the perfect joy of identity with Thee. Then obedient to Thy command, rung after rung, I have descended to outer; activities and external states of consciousness, re-entering into contact with these worlds that I left to discover Thee. And now that I have come back to the bottom of the ladder, all is so dull, so mediocre, so neutral, in me and around me, that I understand no more.

The situation here is distantly paralleled by the plight in which King Aswapathy finds himself at the end of his long journey to the Divine Mother. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, Aswapathy's Yoga makes him a traveller in the several regions of the World-Stair, from Night below to Superlight above. With all this knowledge, Aswapathy finds it impossible to return to the old world without an assurance of its eventual transformation. He therefore makes this passionate plea to the Divine Mother:

How shall I rest content with mortal days

And the dull measure of terrestrial things,

I who have seen behind the cosmic mask

The glory and the beauty of thy face?

Hard is the doom to which thou bindest thy sons!

How long shall our spirits battle with the Night

And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,

We who are vessels of a deathless Force

And builders of the godhead of the race?¹¹

Mirra too wonders if it makes no difference at all whether one attains the summit or not, since apparently earth-nature is irremediable and unredeemable! And then, like Aswapathy himself, Mirra asks:

What is it then that Thou awaitest from me, and to what use that slow long preparation, if all is to end in a result to which the majority of human beings attain without being subjected to any discipline?

How is it possible that having seen all that I have seen, experienced all that I have experienced, after I have been led up even to the most sacred sanctuary of Thy knowledge and communion with Thee, Thou hast made of me so utterly common an instrument in such ordinary circumstances?¹²

In Savitri, Aswapathy asks for a divine descent in the form of an avatar

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-to effect the transfiguration of the earth:

One moment fill with thy eternity,

Let thy infinity in one body live,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

All-Love throb single in one human heart ... ,

Pack with the eternal might one human hour

And with one gesture change all future time. ¹³

Here, with Mirra, the problem is somewhat different. She knows, as a result of repeated realisations, that she is herself of the Divine substance; she has reached up to the divine Felicity, she has won her way to the Power and the Glory there. But why is she unable to mobilise all that here at the level of the ordinary earth-consciousness, and bring about the desired transformation? What is wanting still? The consenting Voice of Supreme Grace? The chiming of the instrumentation of Time? The uncompleted explosion of the Supramental consciousness?

Mirra writes again, after a few days: "Spare me this calvary of earthly consciousness; let me merge in Thy supreme unity." Well, if she cannot change the Earth and Man, she might at least return to the Peace and the Felicity, although leaving the work here unaccomplished! Her despairing cry is answered, and she is asked to submit to the cross of terrestrial life, so that in the "crucible of the world" she may be "melted anew and purified". And on 25 November 1917, Mirra records:

O Lord, because in an hour of cruel distress I said in the sincerity of my faith: "Thy Will be done", Thou camest garbed in Thy raiment of glory. At Thy feet I prostrated myself, on Thy breast I found my refuge .... Since Thou art there, all has become clear. Agni is rekindled in my fortified heart, and his splendour shines out and sets aglow the atmosphere and purifies it ....

Thou hast said to me: "I have returned to leave thee no more." ¹⁴

After this definitive reunion of the Devotee and the Divine, several months pass before the next entry in Mirra's spiritual diary:

Suddenly, before Thee, all my pride fell. I understood how futile it was in Thy Presence to wish to surmount oneself, and I wept, wept abundantly and without constraint the sweetest tears of my life .... Was it not like a child in its father's arms? But what a Father! What sublimity, what magnificence, what immensity of comprehension! And what a power and plenitude in the response! Yes, my tears were like holy dew. Was it because it was not for my own sorrow that I wept?...

And now, although I weep no longer, I feel so near, so near to Thee that my whole being quivers with joy.

Let me stammer out my homage: ...

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"Thou hast made me know the supreme, the sublime joy of a perfect confidence, an absolute serenity, a surrender total and without reserve Or colouring, free from effort or constraint. "¹⁵

And three months after, the same trust, the peace, the happiness, the experience of oneness, the sense of divine Vocation, the consciousness of utter plasticity, the all-sufficing feeling of unqualified gratitude, these remain, and Mirra is able to record:

My father has smiled and taken me in his powerful arms. What could I fear? I have melted into Him and it is He who acts and lives in this body which He Himself has formed for His manifestation. ¹⁶

The classical categories, illuminative, purgative and unitive, are not quite relevant to Mirra's mystical life, for most of Mirra's meditations were in a representative - representing earth's tribulations and aspirations - rather than in her own individual capacity. But divers mystical strains certainly mingle in her prayers and meditations, and the total recordation is a spiritual symphony of incomparable authenticity of inspiration and melting power of articulation.

VII

One of the amusing things that happened during Mirra's stay in Japan was a meeting in Tokyo with one of Tolstoy's sons, who was then on a world tour preaching human unity. Mirra was of course passionately devoted to the cause of unity, the outlawry of war and violence, and the establishment of global concord and peace. Like Sri Aurobindo, she too thought that, while all sensible means should be tried (they might prove palliatives at least), a lasting solution could be reared only on firm spiritual foundations, as the result of an inner revolution bringing about the effective containment, if not the total annihilation, of the human ego. During the latter part of his life, the great Tolstoy, who had been a soldier himself when young and was the author of the epic novel, War and Peace, became (like Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi) a pacifist, an apologist of non-violence, and an advocate of civil disobedience. Evidently his son had inherited this passion for human unity, and the First World War had only deepened his convictions. He accordingly went from country to country propagating his ideal with the zeal of a missionary. But his ideas as to how human unity was to be ushered in were rather naive. "Oh! it is very simple - " he told Mina; "if everybody spoke the same language, if everybody dressed in the same way, if everybody lived in the same fashion, the whole world would be united!" One had only to go from land to land advocating a universal Esperanto language, an Esperanto mode of dress, and a set of Esperanto

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habits "Everybody would be happy, all would understand one another, nobody would quarrel if everyone did the same thing." In reply, Mirra could only say: ''That would be a poor world not worth living in." Of course she couldn't get him to understand the entire absurdity of his postulates and reasomng.¹⁷

The universe, the earth and mankind itself thrive by variety and diversity. There are millions and millions of human beings, yet no two thumb impressions are a complete mimicry of each other. No two leaves of even the same branch of the same tree are utter copies of each other. Out of the billions - trillions - of cast-off sea-shells, no two are wholly identical in shape, colour and intricate tracery. The Divine fathers forth this multiplicity, this variety - though He is Himself past all change. To locate unity except on the ground of the Spirit, to fabricate external means (like gorge, language dress, food) to forge human unity, to devise cast-iron constitutional or economic patterns, to impose a single religion, a single political ideology, a single economic dogma, a single code of behaviour or body of ritual, or to gather everybody into a single vast net of global military hegemony - these be the roads to dead uniformity, cheerless conformity, or naked tyranny. Human unity, certainly; but it should be founded on the shared experience of the Divine, and reinforced by the categorical imperatives­ of the Spirit.

In later years, Mirra was often to return to the question of human unity and the means of founding it even here in our imperfect world. In the course of a conversation in the late twenties, she was to say:

The spiritual life reveals the one essence in all, but reveals too its infinite diversity; it works for diversity in oneness and for perfection in that diversity.¹⁸

Commenting on this seminal statement, the Mother said in 1951:

This is the very motive of the creation of the universe, that is to say, all are one, all is one in its origin, but each thing, each element, each being has as its mission the revealing of one part of this unity to itself, and it is this particularity which must be developed in everyone, while awakening at the same time the sense of the original unity. ¹⁹

Five years later (8 February 1956), she said that the secret was to grow conscious of the unity of Force, of Consciousness, of Will behind all things, all phenomena; and once this was done, one would "no longer have the Education perception which makes you quite separate from others". ²⁰ Again, after three weeks, more emphatically still:

In fact, this is what we have said more than fifty thousand times: that all is the Divine and that consequently all is One; that it is only your consciousness which is separated and in a state of unconsciousness because it is

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separated; but that if you remove this unconsciousness and this sense of separation, you become divine.²¹

Returning to the theme next year, the Mother once said: "Indeed the source was One ... and creation had to be manifold. "²² But unity, notwithstanding the teeming, tantalising and exasperating surface variety can be attained certainly through a return to the cosmic force, consciousness and will, but more simply, more infallibly, unity can be enacted through love, "for it is indeed love which leads to Unity". But for anything like a lasting unity, unity doubled with sovereign puissance, knowledge and love, but still without the destruction of the fascinating manifoldness and variegated richness of phenomenal life, the spiritual - even the supramental - revolution must take place:

In the supramental creation there will no longer be any religions. The whole life will be the expression, the flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world.²³

It was hardly surprising that Tolstoy's son, with his stereotyped mind, found it difficult to understand Mirra's vision of "unity in the diversity" in future divinised world.

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