On The Mother

CHAPTER 44

Ministry of Words

I

As the activities of the Ashram increased, there was a corresponding need for finance; and although the Mother was, as Nayana had visioned her, verily Sakambari herself and Plenty was her native gift, occasions were not wanting when the pinch was felt sharply and necessary expenses had to be stinted. In the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, there was no rejection of life but only a determination to accept it and live it wisely and in the process to try to transform it; and no ascetic rejection of money either, but rather its acceptance with a view to utilising it in the service of the Divine. In one of his Evening Talks in 1926, Sri Aurobindo had referred to two movements of the money force (which is basically a vital force): a lower, controlled by Mammon or the Asura, and a higher movement inspired by Mahalakshmi (or the Divine). The people who follow the lower movement are the amassers of wealth by fair means or foul, and such are either misers, or they use money for self-gratification or for evil purposes. The Lakshmi movement, on the other hand, gathers money with a large hand and throws it out in the right order and harmony, and for the right purposes.¹ There is also a whole section in The Mother in which Sri Aurobindo returns to this theme:

Money is the visible sign of a universal force.... In its origin and its true action it belongs to the Divine.

But it has been usurped and is being misused by the Asuric forces:

To reconquer it for the Divine to whom it belongs and use it divinely for the divine life is the supramental way for the Sadhaka.

You must neither turn with an ascetic shrinking from the money power, the means it gives and the objects it brings, nor cherish a rajasic attachment to them or a spirit of enslaving self-indulgence in their gratifications. Regard wealth simply as a power to be won back for the Mother and placed at her service.²

In one of her 1929 Conversations, the Mother too had said:

The power of money is at present under the influence or in the hands of the forces and beings of the vital world.... Always it [money] goes astray, because it is in the clutch of the hostile forces....

...In those who are slaves of vital beings, the desire for truth and light and spiritual achievement, even if it at all touches them, cannot balance the desire for money. To win money from their hands for the Divine means

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to fight the devil out of them; you have first to conquer or convert the vital being whom they serve, and it is not an easy task.³

And now, in the course of a message on 6 January 1955, the Mother declared that a day would come when all the wealth of this world, freed at last from its current enslavement to Mammon and the Asuric forces, would offer itself "spontaneously and fully to the service of the Divine's Work upon earth". In 1954, the "Honesty Society" had been set up under the Mother's inspiration and direction by her disciples to demonstrate how money could be earned and spent honestly in the name and in the service of the Divine. Industries like "The New Horizon Sugar Mills" were soon to be established under the Mother's guidance to show how honest people could do honest business and serve the Divine.

Nevertheless, as the Mother was to explain two years later in one of her evening talks, money and politics are the principal sources of resistance to the triumph of the new dispensation. Politics is dominated by the Lord of Falsehood, the Lord of the Nations, and money is monopolised by Mammon the Asura. How is global unity to be promoted and established if currency restrictions congeal the arteries of finance:

It has become almost impossible to have the least relation with other countries, and that much-vaunted means of exchange which should have been a simplification has become such a complication that we shall soon reach a deadlock....

...we are becoming more and more the prisoners of the place where we are born, while all the scientific trends are towards such a great proximity between countries that we could easily belong to the universe or, at any rate, to the whole world.

...It [the situation] has grown considerably worse since the last war; it grows worse year by year....⁴

Politics, too, was taking up - thanks to the Cold War - extremely rigid attitudes, as if the whole thing was manipulated indeed by the Lord of Anti-Life or Death. The Mother had of course no interest in politics but she could not close her eyes either to its dubious ways or to its almost ubiquitous presence:

In principle we have said that we have nothing to do with politics... as it is practised at present. But it is quite obvious that if politics is taken in its true spirit, that is, as the organisation of human masses and all the details of government and regulation of the collective life, and relations with other collectivities - that is, with other nations, other countries - it must necessarily enter into the supramental transformation....⁵

The Mother had taken, as we saw earlier, a crucial part in promoting the merger of Pondicherry with India, but when she found that some of the

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leaders of the former French India wanted to pursue the politics of division and discord rather than that of cooperation and harmony, she wrote to one of her disciples on 31 January 1955:

It is important and urgent that the people of your Unity Party should rise to a higher level of consciousness and stop all attacks of a petty political character on persons. They must learn to fight/or the Truth and the Divine Realisation and not against any political party. From the Divine's point of view there is truth behind all sincere convictions. It is in the mental and practical application to life and action that the falsehood appears and disfigures everything. The time has come when all those who are more or less connected with the Ashram and wish to base their action on Sri Aurobindo's or my teaching must abstain from all these low movements of political polemic and remain on the higher levels of the spirit.⁶

If money and politics have become by and large the preserve of the Lords of Falsehood and of Death, what then is the duty of those who have the knowledge given by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother? It is obvious that the answer to Falsehood is Truth, the answer to Death is Life, the Life Eternal, the Life Divine. The fight against falsehood and death must therefore start with the utmost intensity of aspiration and purity and determination. This is how the counter-movement has to start and save what must be saved and conquer what can be conquered:

...even if, outside, things are deteriorating completely and the catastrophe cannot possibly be avoided, there remains for us, I mean those for whom the supramental life is not a vain dream... there remains for them the possibility of intensifying their aspiration, their will, their effort, to gather their energies together and shorten the time for the realisation. There remains for them the possibility of working this miracle... that the storm may pass over the world without being able to destroy this great hope of the near future....

...In a very small way, this was already done during the last war, when Sri Aurobindo was here. It can be done again.⁷

Of the four cardinal Emanations (Light or Consciousness, Love or Bliss, Truth, Life) from the Supreme which suffered distortion and obscuration and became Darkness or Inconscience, Hatred or Suffering, Falsehood and Death, there has been some return of the first two, a progressive flowering of consciousness and at least fleeting experiences of Love and Joy (though falling short of divine Ananda); but the other two - Falsehood and Death — seem to hold the field still. Hence the pressing need to cooperate with the Divine Mother who with her supramental Yoga will bring down "into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda".⁸

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II

Politics, money - these were major issues with a global proliferation. They had also to be tackled at that level. But aside from these elemental issues, there was the routine life in the Ashram and the larger community that was Pondicherry. When the French Institute was established in consonance with the Indo-French accord on 4 April 1955, the Mother sent her message of inauguration:

France meant generosity of sentiment, newness and boldness of ideas and chivalry in action. It was that France which commanded the respect and admiration of all....

This is what the children of today must be made to know.⁹

And in the Ashram School and in the University Centre, French has always been given an important place in the scheme of studies alongside of English, Sanskrit and the modern Indian languages.

The Mother also contributed to the April 1955 number of the Bulletin a brief article on "The Problem of Woman"¹⁰. The most womanly of women, the incarnate Blessed Feminine indeed, the Mother was also the embodiment of Shakti, the divine Strength and Power. At all times she had a wholesome distrust, if not detestation, of attempts to divide humanity as male and female, introducing notions of strong and weak. We have seen how she didn't like the male-female implications of the Purusha-Prakriti concept, and how she was against providing different courses of physical education for boys and girls. Reality is one, the human race is one, for the indwelling Divine makes no difference between man and woman, and hence all these forged discriminations and sedulously cultivated attitudes were at once mischievous and foolish:

...until this notion of superiority and inferiority is eliminated, nothing and no one can put an end to the misunderstanding that divides the human species into two opposite camps, and the problem will not be solved.

What, after all, is the current position? Both men and women have become slaves of received notions and appetites and conventions:

Yes, slaves; for so long as one has desires, preferences and attachments, one is a slave of these things and of the people on whom one is dependant for their satisfaction.

Nature revolves and thrives between the two poles of infinite outer variety and radiant inner unity, and it would be wise to avoid regimentation on the one hand and a false sidetracking dualism on the other:

...the best that can be done... is to treat both sexes on a footing of perfect equality, to give them the same education and training and to teach them

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to find, through a constant contact with a Divine Reality that is above all sexual differentiation, the source of all possibilities and harmonies.

III

In the Ashram itself, and at the University Centre, the Mother did her best to obliterate all sense of superiority and inferiority between sadhak and sadhak, pupil and pupil, pupil and teacher, male and female, and, manager and subordinate. They were all children of the Mother and dedicated servitors of the Divine as also vessels of the immortal Spirit. But in their day-to-day work or in the pursuit of their sadhana, they encountered the Mother in a hundred different ways, and her force sustained them in their moments of trial or difficulty and saw them through. Nevertheless they often reacted humanly to their encounters with the Mother, and felt sometimes elated and sometimes disappointed. It was part of their sadhana to meet the Mother from time to time and offer pranam and receive her blessings. For each sadhak, and every time, it was a moment apart, an elected moment detached from the monotonous tread of time. While what the sadhaks, children or visitors felt during those moments of psychic contact was known only to them, and not even to them always, the consequences were incommensurable. The spiritual gains were secret, not to be blurted out or advertised. Like a seed, the moment abstracted from the flow of time drove roots in the ready soil of the sadhak's sensibility, and there appeared foliage and flowers and fruit which, in their turn, were to be offered again at the feet of the Divine. The chosen moments as they recurred made a rhythm of their own, and the sadhana had an epic spread covering a whole lifetime. But very occasionally a sadhak might set down his reactions in a diary, in a letter or a poem, and these could be pointer-readings that indicated the climate of his inner life. Even an apparent disappointment could inspire a genuine poet-sadhak to revealing utterance. Thus Amal Kiran, on finding himself ignored by the Mother when he awaited her coming on 11 May 1955, read in the refusal itself an act of grace:

This too is her love - that with unseeing gaze

She goes as if I were but empty space.

Not my poor soul's ill-carven presence now

But all the dreamed perfection, the pure brow

And falterless feet of the God unborn in me,

The white Absence of my mortality

Her eyes are fixed on, calling into time

The Eternal Truth whose gold my days begrime

And teaching me the time-transfigurant art

To make her alchemy's crucible my heart.

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When self-submerged in her vision's depth, I cease

To my own thought and grow a nameless peace,

Then all that's crude will fade to an apocalypt flare

And ever her eyes will rest on the light laid bare

By my dense clay she treats now like thin air.¹¹

In her talk of 23 September 1953, the Mother had spoken of the physical world as simply an image, "but in the true consciousness, all that happens behind or before is the true thing and what one sees externally is only an image, that is to say, a projection on a screen, of something which exists altogether independently".¹² Didn't the Mother see with her true yogic consciousness all past, present and future at once, and hence apparently ignored the transient image on the screen before her?

In a sadhak's life, indeed, such passing moments of defeat and gloom could be made the spring-boards for further leaps forward. More often than not, what seemed like the Mother's slights and frowns were only the eruptions from the sadhak's fevered mentalised consciousness, but even so they could compel the necessary self-introspection. The adverse forces were always on the prowl feeding the mind and the vital with the worms of doubt and discontent and the intimations of failure and disaster. Sometimes such moments of perplexity and inner agony could be sufficient justification for writing to the Mother - for unburdening oneself - but the replies might come unexpectedly charged with a wider application like a shower of universal grace. Thus, when Huta writes to the Mother in a moment of depression of spirits, she answers on 6 November 1955;

No child of mine can be a zero; in fact each one of my children has his or her place and special mission to fulfill. I love them all equally and do for each one what is truly needed for his or her welfare and progress, without any preference or partiality.¹³

Here is another of the Mother's charters, a guarantee of her grace abounding to all who are her children.

Again, is the world of our everyday experience a thing of ambiguities and irrelevances? Are the generality of mankind surrendered to the follies, frivolities, crudities, cruelties, stupidities of vitalistic pulls and mental distortions? But there is also another world, the world imperishable and immaculate, with its doors held wide open and ready to admit sincere aspirants. And so the Mother writes to Huta on 17 December:

The world is as it is - full of smallness and obscurity. The Divine alone is Light and Vastness, Truth and Compassion. So take refuge in the Divine and do not care for the smallness of the world, do not let it disturb you.

Keep only the Divine Presence in you with its peace and quietness.

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While the Mother was thus endlessly engaged in reassuring, admonishing, encouraging, enlightening or exhorting the sadhaks, amidst all these and other anxieties and preoccupations she found time besides to direct the programme for 1 December on the spiritual destiny of the earth from the beginnings of creation up to Sri Aurobindo. It was a gorgeous piece of unrolling tapestry, at once informative and edifying; and the scenes illustrative of the past epochs were played with the appropriate decor or, more often, were brought to life by slides projected on a screen at the back of the stage.¹⁴ It was as though the Mother was preparing the human consciousness for the tasks ahead as she was to formulate them for Sri Aurobindo's birth centenary celebrations beginning on 15 August 1971:

Sri Aurobindo belongs to the future; he is the messenger of the future. He still shows us the way to follow in order to hasten the realisation of a glorious future fashioned by the Divine Will.

All those who want to collaborate for the progress of humanity and for India's luminous destiny must unite in a clairvoyant aspiration and in an illumined work.¹⁵

IV

The Mother's New Year message for 1956 was a warning doubled with a promise:

The greatest victories are the least noisy.

The manifestation of a new world is not proclaimed by beat of drum.

Explaining its genesis to the children at the Playground on 4 January, the Mother said that when, towards the close of the previous year, she was asked for the usual New Year message, she looked at the coming year and glimpsed the varied speculations and imaginations of the people as also what had already been decreed; and she knew immediately that the best thing to do was not to say anything about the coming events. The sense of the message, then, was simply this:

It is better not to speak about it, don't make a lot of noise about it, because that doesn't help. Let things happen in accordance with a deeper law, without being bewildered like one who does not understand anything and just looks on.

The aim was really to deflate the romantic fancies of the enthusiasts. Nothing spectacular - nothing like "luminous apparitions" and so on - was likely to happen. That sort of thing "can't happen right now, it is farther off, for a much later time". It might even be that, when something actually happened, it wouldn't be noticed by most people:

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Indeed, it is quite logical enough to say that one must be conscious of the Spirit to be able to perceive the work of the Spirit. If you are not conscious of the Spirit, how will you be able to see it at work? Because the result of what the Spirit does is necessarily material in the material world; and as it is material, you find it quite natural. What do you know of what Nature does, and what do you know of what the Spirit does?...

The world will go on. Things will happen. And perhaps there will be a handful of men who will know how they were done. That's all.

It was not with the ordinary consciousness that mistook the image on the screen for the reality (without any awareness of the antecedents and consequences); it was with the true consciousness alone that one could scent and detect and assess new movements and phenomena engineered by the Spirit: "If one changes one's consciousness, well, the world itself changes for you." But this was too much to expect from the mass of mankind. And so, without more ado, the Mother concluded:

I am not a poet, I am content with doing. I would rather act than speak.¹⁶

V

The Mother's weekly Questions and Answers sessions in the Playground were to go on throughout 1956 and till November 1958, after which they had to be discontinued. Once on 3 October 1956, the Mother made a distinction between her different ways of talking or answering questions. In the first place, having entered into a certain state of consciousness and having had "what may usually be called an experience", she would transcribe that state of consciousness, that experience:

In that case what is said passes through the mind, making use of it only as a "storehouse of words"... the Force, the Consciousness which is expressing itself passes through the individual mind and attracts by a kind of affinity the words needed for its expression. That is the true teaching, something that one rarely finds in books - it may be in books, but one must be in that state of consciousness oneself to be able to discover it. But with the spoken word, the vibration of the sound transmits something at least of the experience, which, for all those who are sensitive, can become contagious.¹⁷

This covers the Mother's sudden revelations of occult phenomena or spiritual states, her description of the mysterious inscrutable ways of the Divine, her intimation or communication of the mysterium tremendum behind the facade of Appearance. Such revelations correspond almost to "overhead poetry", and it is not at the level of the mind, but at the deeper

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level of the soul, that these words of the Mother, coming fully charged with hieratic and prophetic power, are to be received and cherished.

In the second place, "the question asked or the subject chosen is conveyed by the mind to the higher Consciousness, then the mind receives a reply and transmits it again through the word." Although this method, in which the mind had necessarily to take the leading part, didn't interest the Mother very much, she had to do it more or less as a sort of duty. But when it seemed to her that silence would be better than an intellectual elucidation, she "abruptly passed on to meditation".

In the third place, there were questions of a practical nature, and if she found them promising, she tried to answer them in their wider perspectives.

But of course it was the Mother's presence that was the heart and soul of the Wednesday evening sessions, and her silences - like the silences in the Upanishads - were, in the particular contexts, as eloquent and significant as the spoken words. Her high poise of consciousness was the reservoir of direct knowledge from which flowed the stream of thoughts, insights or illuminations, and it found the needed words as it leapt over like a cataract or raced through the region of the mind. The very hesitations and qualifications, the repetitions and reiterations, are not the tricks of the sophisticated mentalised style of the practised teacher or preacher, but rather the native tremors and the primordial rhythms of the Spirit.

Again, although these were known as Questions and Answers sessions, they followed no rigid rules. A passage was read out from Sri Aurobindo's or the Mother's writings and commented on, and questions arising out of it were answered: this was the normal procedure. The passage read at the beginning usually served to highlight a particular issue and was "almost like a subject of meditation suggested for the silence which [followed] the reading". Further elucidation by the Mother was through a mixture of words and silences; for as she once remarked, for what she was trying to do, "action in silence [was] always much more important" as it gave the force that worked "an infinitely greater strength" to express itself "in each consciousness in accordance with its own particular mode". Whereas if the vibration were formulated in words, due to "the fixity of the words given to it" it lost "much of its strength and fullness of action because, first, the words are not always understood as they are said and then they are not always adapted to the understanding of each one". But she answered a question when it was "living", as it sprang from "an inner need for progress", and

...if by chance it answers an inner aspiration, a problem one is tackling and wants to solve, then... it can give rise to a vision, a perception on a higher plane, an experience in the consciousness which can make the formula new so that it carries a new power for realisation.¹⁸

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There were also occasional questions not arising out of the evening's reading. Like the one on the relevance of the New Year message, for example. And sometimes, after speaking, the Mother would invite questions. When the Mother spoke of some segment of her inner experience or of some contradictions of human behaviour, the children would feel overawed, or feel filled with a sudden light, or become overwhelmed - and they could ask no questions. Such silences often meant the end of the session. And yet, without questions, the sessions were likely to lose much of their basic attraction and utility. There were times, indeed, when silence was the best comment, and there were times when a little discussion was likely to prove profitable. The Mother complained thus on 13 June 1956:

I don't know, but you never have anything to ask me or it is so seldom. But that shows a terrible mental laziness!!

At times I tell you, "Don't question, try to find out by yourselves certain inner things"... but when I am here and tell you, "Haven't you any questions to ask?" - Silence.... So, that proves that you have no mental curiosity. And I don't ask you necessarily to put questions on what I have just read; I am always ready to answer any question whatsoever, asked by anyone....

So, one last attempt: Has anyone here a question to ask me?

(Silence)

Wonderful! (Mother laughs) Well, that's all, then.¹⁹

This mild shock-treatment had its effect in due course. Since the children were permitted to submit in advance written questions, the results were very satisfying. On 25 July, the Mother said:

Well, there was a time we had some difficulty in-finding questions; now we have gone to the other extreme! I have so many that they would keep us at least till midnight if they were all to be answered.²⁰

On 1 August the Mother announced that her file of questions was swelling, although not all were equally interesting. On 8 August, the Mother exhibited a packet of written questions and exclaimed: "My portfolio is getting fatter! More questions come to me than I can answer." Again, on 15 August: "I have a huge collection of questions here. I received yet one more today." And, on 3 October, she said with almost a touch of delighted exasperation: "I have a whole flood of questions here!"

Pupils young and old, neophytes in Yoga, seasoned sadhaks: the Playground in the evening in the post-gymnastics mood of relaxation: the ostensible aim, learning the French language, extracts from spiritual writings, unpredictable questions oral or written: and the Mother herself the synoptic centre - such was the layout, such were the ingredients, such the central illuminating spark. These evening sessions were unlike Sri Aurobindo's evening talks before 24 November 1926 or after 1938, and also unlike the

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Mother's Conversations of 1929 or 1931, in all of which the participants were few and the meetings were held within doors. But the Mother's Playground congregations were an open-air spiritual workshop like no other, an active power-house generating currents of creative thought and sensibility, a clinic without tears for self-observations, self-opening and psychic efflorescence. Between December 1950 and November 1958, there were about 400 of these evening sessions in all, and the Mother's was the radiant Presence, and hers the higher Voice of the congregation opening itself to unknown truths and intensities. How shall we describe this eight-year phenomenon without a parallel, this evolution of a new human group over a period of years through a constant exposure to the heavens of the Ideal, the alchemic rays from the divine Presence? How indeed are we to take the measure of that marvellous ministry of words, that dialectic of doubt and faith or of the present and the future, the human and divine? Prosaic assessment is out of place. Even the transcripts of the Questions and Answers - whether in the original French or in English translation - are but shadows. What, then, is the deeper truth about that golden ministry of words by the Mother who was herself the Rose of God? We can only ask the poet of Savitri to give us a clue to the heart of the matter:

The heavens of the ideal Mind were seen

In a blue lucency of dreaming Space

Like strips of brilliant sky clinging to the moon. ...

Above the spirit cased in mortal sense

Are superconscious realms of heavenly peace,

Below, the Inconscient's sullen dim abyss,

Between, behind our life, the deathless Rose.

Across the covert air the spirit breathes,

A body of the cosmic beauty and joy

Unseen, unguessed by the blind suffering world,

Climbing from Nature's deep surrendered heart

It blooms for ever at the feet of God,

Fed by life's sacrificial mysteries.²¹

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