On The Mother

CHAPTER 49

Mother is Eighty

I

The Mother's 80th birth anniversary celebrations were spread over 20 and 21 February 1958. On the 20th, she went to the Ashram Theatre where she first read out a message for the All India Radio, and went round the grand flower show that had been organised in the large courtyard. There were thousands of pots with ferns and flowers in a variety of colours, and there was also a tank of white lotuses, emblazoning the Mother's symbol. Then she attended a programme of dance recitals representing the Bharat Natyam, Kathak, Manipuri and Kathakali styles. On the 21st, there was a march past in the same courtyard, and a presentation of the dance-drama, Devī Māhātmyam, and a Garba dance by the Ashram artistes. After the dance performances, there was a fifteen minutes meditation with the Mother seated on the stage, and a large projection of Sri Aurobindo's portrait dominating the background. The atmosphere of the place, the dance-recitals, the Mother's presence and benedictions, the collective meditation, all added up to an elevating and rewarding experience.¹

In commemoration of the Mother's 80th birthday, the Calcutta Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir brought out their Golden Book of the Mother, a magnificently produced volume bound in white, with her symbol embossed in gold. It was a book worthy of the subject and the occasion. The selections from her writings and talks had been judiciously made, and arranged in such a way that it was like following the magisterial progress of her unique ministry. There was the piece "The Path of Later On" written by her in 1893 in her fifteenth year, and there were the plays The Great Secret and The Ascent to the Truth written over sixty years later, and there were selections from the Prayers and Meditations as well.

While the birthday was celebrated at all Sri Aurobindo Study Centres, the Pathamandir at Calcutta, besides sponsoring the Golden Book, also organised a seminar, the proceedings of which were published as Loving Homage in August 1958. The volume includes the speeches of R.R. Diwakar, Himangshu Niyogi and others, as also a variety of contributions throwing light on the life-work and the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. C.F. Baron, the former Governor of Pondicherry, thus recapitulated his first meeting with the Mother:

At last comes a day, a day of fervent self-giving when, in the course of a meditation at the feet of the Mother, a drop of light falls on the dazzled soul, and it is a moment of joy so vibrant that it will reverberate all through life....

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Whatever may happen after that, life has found its true meaning, thought its real direction, heart its only love.

And his homage concluded with these words:

On this anniversary day of the Mother, an old litany dedicated to Virgin Mary comes back to my mind -

Mother of wisdom

Mystic Rose

Star of the Morning

Cause of our joy.²

"The Mother was eighty on 21 February 1958"! In a sense it was like saying "Infinity is so many kilometres" or "Eternity is so many years". The Mother was more than their mother to tens of thousands and was also the Mother divine who even in her transcendence didn't fail to meet her children on the human plane. And for the children themselves, who were but flawed human beings inhabiting a Euclidean world, the Mother's completion of eighty terrestrial years was an occasion for rejoicing and thanksgiving.

The Mother had lived a 'human' life to all outward appearance, and had made the passage from childhood to girlhood, and then to womanhood and motherhood; and she had dreamt dreams, and seen mystic visions. She had read and talked and meditated, she had cultivated music and painting and letters, but it was the inner Flame that had always lighted her path, and guided her in her travels in Europe and Africa and Asia. On 29 March 1914 she had found at last what she had been seeking, and Sri Aurobindo was indeed the Lord of her being and her life. In Japan between 1916 and 1920 she had completed her 'education', and the Japanese feeling for colour and form, their passion for precision and detail, had fused with her French intellect with its clarity and sharpness and lucidity and her own feminine temperament with its impulse towards beauty and protectiveness and compassionate understanding, and in the result her poise of purpose and radiant personality had glowed like distant Mount Fuji on a warm bright day. She had returned to Pondicherry on 24 April 1920, now ready to shoulder the tremendous task of setting up a pilot project for the promotion of the Life Divine and the transformation of the earth nature.

The Ashram at Pondicherry had slowly begun to take a definite shape, and while Sri Aurobindo was the creator-spirit, the soul, the law, the Mother was the architect, the executrix, of the new unfoldment. Together the divine collaborators had set all doubts at rest, cleared whole jungles of mental resistance, harnessed the tides of human emotion and energy to good purpose, and trained a community of sadhaks ready to aspire, to labour, to receive, to surrender - to be kneaded and made 'new'. After Sri Aurobindo's passing,

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it had been the Mother's role all the more to force the pace, and carry the work forward. With the slow march of the years, the circumference of the Ashram's activities had been widening more and more, but always drawing prime sustenance from the centre, from the Mother herself. The Ashram was a human microcosm receiving the healing and transforming touch of the Mother, and responding too, at once agreeably and purposively. But the real work had only begun, and the Mother at eighty was like a divine child at the threshold of an endless creative Play. She seemed to bring to her task all the wisdom of the ages and all the energy concealed in Nature. At eighty, her children still thought that she was ageless and yet young, that she was distant yet close to their hearts. On her eightieth birthday, the children were content to gather around her in limitless love and gratitude.

II

For the Mother herself, her age was of little consequence, and the responsibilities of her manifestation and ministry engaged all her time and consumed all her energies. In about a week's time after 21 February, the pressure of the visitors thinned considerably. She was in the Playground every evening; and on Wednesdays there were the readings from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, and later from his Thoughts and Aphorisms; on other days she distributed groundnuts or sweets, enabling all those assembled to go to her and receive her blessings. In the Friday classes, a sentence or a group of sentences from the Dhammapada was read, and the children were asked to meditate for a while. What was the purpose of the brief meditation? A sentence was but a mental formation, and wouldn't meditation on a sentence degenerate into a cerebral exercise? When the question was asked in the Wednesday class on 27 August, the Mother said that, ordinarily, one could try to understand a sentence intellectually and ponder over its meaning. But there was another - "more direct and deep" - method too: to concentrate on the thought behind the words, the idea behind the thought, and the luminous force behind the idea itself:

If you are able to go deep enough, you find the Principle and the Force behind the idea, and that gives you the power of realisation. This is how those who take meditation as a means of spiritual development are able to unite with the Principle which is behind things and obtain the power to act on these things from above.

But even if this whole arc of meditation were not within everybody's grasp, any movement of consciousness whatsoever in the right direction - from the words to the thought, from the thought to the idea, and so on - must yield salutary results. At the very least, a sentence that was the occasion for

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a short meditation and became the provocation for a question-and-answer session could serve this useful purpose:

When I give you a thought it is simply to help you to concentrate....

And this I am going to do with a very precise, very definite purpose: to bring you out of your mental somnolence and compel you to reflect and try to understand what I tell you.³

III

The Wednesday readings from The Life Divine, of course, went into the heart of the Aurobindonian testament. The sentences were long, the issues raised were apparently most complicated, and there was the whole background of the supramental dialectic behind the particular passage read out for the evening. But the Mother's discourses invariably seized upon the essentials and presented them in a way intelligible enough to most of those attending her classes.

The central thrust in the passage she discusses on 5 March is the need for "a reversal or turnover of the consciousness, a reaching to a new height and a looking down from it at the lower stages": in other words, the need to attain ultimately the supramental height, and for looking down from it to gather up and greaten the present mental consciousness. For example, words by themselves are but sounds or noise-emissions, "unless through a special grace they put you into contact with the Thing".⁴ When one talks to another, it is basically a confrontation of two consciousnesses, and unless the words used convey with precision the intended vibrations from one to the other, "you may pour out miles of words without making yourself understood in the least". But if one has a clear vision of things and feels truly and sincerely, the right words will come; and irrespective of the particular words used, the vibrations of his vision, understanding and experience of things will be carried to his hearers, even though they maynot understand him word by word. And this power to communicate primarily through vibrations - and only secondarily through words - is seasoned mental power, and needn't have any supramental dimension.

While this principle of reversal of consciousness had operated in a veiled manner all through the past processes of evolution - from matter to life-force, and from life-force to mind - it is only now, at the present stage of development from mind to supermind, that the principle of reversal or transformation is seen to be consciously active:

So... the phenomenon which is taking place now is absolutely unique in the history of the earth, and probably - almost certainly - when we have followed the process of this transformation to the very end, we shall have the key to all the former transformations.

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Then comes the Mother's exhortation:

Open the eyes of the subtle intelligence, and without prejudice or preference, without egoism and without attachment, look at what is happening day by day.⁵

In a talk given over seven months later (on 22 October), the Mother remarks that without a reversal of consciousness, the spiritual life will not be possible. The ordinary human consciousness is a movement turned or spread outwards. Then suddenly something happens, and the consciousness is turned inwards and from within upwards towards the Infinite the Eternal:

When the reversal of the being has taken place... One no longer seeks, one sees. One no longer deduces, one knows. One no longer gropes, one walks straight to the goal. And when one has gone farther... one knows, feels, lives the supreme truth that the Supreme Truth alone acts, the Supreme Lord alone wills, knows and does through human beings. How could there be any possibility of error there?⁶

Nevertheless, as Sri Aurobindo has written in The Life Divine, human progress

has not indeed carried the race beyond itself, into a self-exceeding, a transformation of the mental being. But that was not to be expected; for the action of evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that constitutes a new stage in the evolution.

Commenting on this, the Mother had said on 19 March⁷ that the whole mass of mankind seems now to have come to a point where it must either break through the resistance and emerge into a new consciousness or else fall back into an abyss of darkness and inertia". We are living in one of those crucial periods of terrestrial history when either there is accomplished a leap forward or there must be a disastrous retreat into the past. It would appear that there is already joined an intestine struggle between the constructive and the destructive forces:

...it is a kind of race or struggle as to which will reach the goal first. It would seem that all the adverse, anti-divine forces, the forces of the vital world, have descended on the earth... and that at the same time a new, higher, more powerful spiritual force has also descended on earth to bring it a new life.

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No wonder the struggle is acute, violent and open, but since this tempo seems also more definitive... we can hope to reach an early solution".

IV

Today the intervention of the mind - of mental processes - in every department of life has thrown up all kinds of cruelties, extravagances, frivolities, perversities and deformations, with the result that what passes for human life today is worse in many respects than animal life with its simplicity and natural spontaneity and harmony:

Suffering in animals is never so miserable and sordid as it is in an entire section of humanity which has been perverted by the use of a mentality exclusively at the service of egoistic needs.⁸

Incidentally, the Mother refers to a recent experience others: a fat affluent woman had come to the Playground, and while bending down for receiving blessings had accidentally exposed her enormous belly, the very sight of which was revolting. As the Mother reminisced rather frankly:

There are corpulent people who have nothing repugnant about them, but I suddenly saw the perversion, the rottenness that this belly concealed, it was like a huge abscess, expressing greed, vice, depraved taste, sordid desire, which finds its satisfaction as no animal would, in grossness and especially in perversity. I saw the perversion of a depraved mind at the service of the lowest appetites. Then, all of a sudden, something sprang up from me, a prayer, like a Veda: "O Lord, this is what must disappear!"⁹

Economic and social inequalities and imbalances may be set right in course of time, but mental perversions and vital abominations are the 'original sin' that must be destroyed once and for all.

In subsequent weeks too there is a return to the question of man's self-transcendence through aspiration, effort and Grace into a higher form of consciousness, the supramental. "The flame of the soul, the psychic kindling" should become potent in the mind and heart, and there is needed also the readiness of Nature to undergo change. But since Sri Aurobindo wrote The Life Divine, there had been some progress - the realisation of the Mind of Light in the Mother, for instance - and, after the supramental manifestation of February 1956, things started moving indeed. As the Mother confided two years later on 16 April 1958:

This new realisation is proceeding with what one might call a lightning speed.¹⁰

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It was generally thought that Sri Aurobindo's prophecy that "the supramental consciousness will enter a phase of realising power in 1967" might be fulfilled, after all.

On 14 May, the Mother testified that the supramental substance that was spreading and acting in the world had "a warmth, a power, a joy so intense that all intellectual activity seems cold and dry beside it"; also that when this power invaded the cells of the body and seized them by identity the experience was "so total, so imperative, so living, concrete, tangible real that everything else seems a vain dream". Only the Mother, having had the experience, could give this testimony; and as for the others, it was still a hope, a dream, a promise. As the Mother said in her talk on 4 June:

I may tell you that by the very fact that you live on earth at this time - whether you are conscious of it or not, even whether you want it or not - you are absorbing with the air you breathe this new supramental substance which is now spreading in the earth atmosphere. And it is preparing things in you which will manifest very suddenly, as soon as you have taken the decisive step.

What is this decisive step? Quite simply this: the true contact with one's psychic. For it is,

...a new state which makes a decisive break... a true reversal which can never be undone again....

...after this new birth you can look at the ego with a smile and say to it, "My friend, I don't need you any more."¹¹

To rid oneself of the cramping influence of the ego is verily to gain one's spiritual freedom - and be in a condition of readiness to receive the supramental substance that will transfigure one's whole life. When this happens indeed, there will be no more 'insoluble' questions.

V

Five years earlier, on 15 July 1953, the Mother had suddenly announced in the Playground: "My children, in five years I shall take with you a study course of spiritual life. I give you five years to prepare yourselves."¹² On 13 August 1958, one of the audience reminded the Mother of that promise showing her the reported text of the earlier talk. Well, hadn't she been speaking about the spiritual life already, and about the difference between the popular notion of God and her own idea of the Divine? There had been readings from the Dhammapada, followed by meditations and discussions; wasn't all that about spiritual life? And she was always willing to answer specific queries. Now one of the children asked: "Why don't we profit as

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much as we should by our presence here in the Ashram?" The Mother's answer was that things were too easy in the Ashram, and so the children were apt to take the Ashram, the Guru and the teaching for granted and do nothing:

Most of you came here when you were very small, at an age when there can be no question of the spiritual life or spiritual teaching.... You have indeed lived in this atmosphere but without even being aware of it; you are accustomed to seeing me, hearing me; I speak to you as one does to all children, I have even played with you as one plays with children; you only have to come and sit here and you hear me speak, you only have to ask me a question and I answer you....

If I had made strict rules... then perhaps you might have made some effort, but that's not in keeping with my idea. I believe more in the power of the atmosphere and of example than of a rigorous teaching. I count more on something awakening in the being through contagion rather than by a methodical, (disciplined effort.

Perhaps, after all, something is being prepared and one day it will spring up to the surface.

There is infinite hope and love and understanding in these words, - and perhaps a little sadness too. One day the children will have their regrets that they hadn't put their days and opportunities in the Ashram to the best possible use. But, then, that will also be the time when the children will advance "with giant strides":

Perhaps you will feel suddenly an irresistible need not to live in unconsciousness, in ignorance, in that state in which you do things without knowing why, feel things without understanding why, have contradictory wills, understand nothing about anything, live only by habit, routine, reactions - you take life easy.

That day will come — perhaps has come. When one suddenly refuses to be a mere machine, to be a centre of opposing pulls, then one thirsts for Truth, the truth of one's life. Why? Why? Why is one gnawed by the worm of dissatisfaction? And when one puts the question in complete sincerity, one cannot fail to get the answer:

Because we don't want life such as it is any longer, because we don't want falsehood and ignorance any longer, because we don't want suffering and unconsciousness any longer, because we do not want disorder and bad will any longer, because Sri Aurobindo has come to tell us: It is not necessary to leave the earth to find the Truth, is not necessary to leave life to find one's soul, it is not necessary to give up the world or to have limited beliefs in order to enter into relation with the Divine. The Divine is everywhere, in everything, and if He is hidden... it is because we do not take the trouble to discover Him.

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With a single-pointed aspiration, people should aspire for the New, for the Truth, and for the end of the present Falsehood; then a sealed door will open, and a new Force and Light will change and transfigure every aspect of life, and give them "lasting joy, equilibrium, strength, life". ¹³

VI

On 16 April, the Mother had said that between the mental and the supramental being, there would certainly be an intermediate specimen, one who would still be man in his outer appearance but with a consciousness

sufficiently developed and transformed to constitute "a new race, a race of supermen".¹⁴ Six months later, in answer to a question, the Mother

said on 8 October, that there could be many intermediate stages between the mental man and the ultimate supramental being:

In reality, in this race to the Transformation, the question is to know which of the two will arrive first: the one who wants to transform his body in the image of the divine Truth, or the old habit of the body to go on disintegrating until it is so deformed that it can no longer continue to live in its outer integrality. It is a race between transformation and decay. For there are only two stopping-places, two things which can indicate to what extent one has succeeded: either success, that is to say, becoming a superman - then of course one can say, "Now I have reached the goal"... or else death. Till then, normally, one is "on the way".¹⁵

Such being the harsh alternatives, the Mother's exhortation is that one should not worry about the result at all; as long as one is "on the way one must move on, one must keep running; caraiveti!

One of the noticeable features of the Mother's Playground sessions was her habit of periodically and unpredictably going into a 'silence' before resuming her talk. This was of course different from the meditation which was a collective experience, which had an atmospheric intensity of its own as recaptured by Bibhas Jyoti Mutsuddi:

When the night presses close upon us

And the roar of the distant sea is dull,

The air astir with soft soothing draughts,

When the spaces teem with whispers of unknown longings -

And a thousand desires

Swish against the sealed doors of the Soul

And music tells of births long ago, worlds long forgotten -

Whatever their failings, whatever their strivings,

Whatever the fever of their cravings

To see people; sitting around the Mother's Chair -

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Calm, indrawn - asking, receiving -

Aspiring to outgrow their little self

Seems a sight more wonderful and intriguing

Than the sky and the moon and the stars

Although on them I gaze -

Dazed by these luminous reminders of evanescent eternities!¹⁶

But the Mother's 'silences' that interspersed her talks were as meaningful as the words that preceded or followed, and it was as though the 'silences' were integral to the total communication. Besides, the Mother was never tired of stressing the importance of silence in the sadhana, and even in everyday life. For example, on 5 November she said that to know how to be silent before what one didn't understand would itself be a good thing. This silence had to be both physical or external and the more important inner silence of the mind. Only such silence could coax Grace to act much sooner than inner agitation or the outer noise of words:

To learn to be quiet and silent.... When you have a problem to solve, instead of turning over in your head all the possibilities, all the consequences... if you remain quiet with an aspiration for goodwill... the solution comes very quickly. And as you are silent you are able to hear it.

When you are caught in a difficulty... instead of becoming agitated, turning over all the ideas and actively seeking solutions, of worrying, fretting, running here and there inside your head... remain quiet. And according to your nature with ardour or peace, with intensity or widening or with all these together, implore the Light and wait for it to come.¹⁷

Likewise the Mother had said earlier that "the most precious gifts are given in silence"¹⁸, and that quietude was not simply the opposite of conflict but a very positive and creative state, "an active peace, contagious, powerful, which controls and calms, which puts everything in order, organises... a very great force, a very great strength".¹⁹ The mind has first to learn to be quiet before it can begin functioning in a new creative way. If the aim of the Integral Yoga is not merely to attain the Spirit but through its descent and fusion into the lower levels to effect a radical transformation of the nature, then our very processes of thinking must undergo a drastic change of functioning.

It is possible only when one has had the experience of complete silence in the mental region and when the spiritual force with its light and power descends through the mind and makes it act directly without its following its usual method of analysis, deduction, reasoning.²⁰

This would be yet another aspect of the reversal of consciousness (to which a reference has already been made in an earlier section), for even

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the mind's "power of organisation and impulse to action can be produced directly by the spiritual force which takes hold of the mental consciousness" ²¹

VII

In two of the Mother's Playground talks, on 12 and 26 November, the discussion was on Sri Aurobindo's statement in The Life Divine: "The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thence-forward be the leader of that Nature."²² In the first place, the spiritual awakening itself is not easy of accomplishment. When asked to explain the Mother said on the 26th: "It might be said that what is called 'spirit' is the atmosphere brought into the material world by the Grace so that it may awaken to the consciousness of its origin and aspire to return to it." But few people really want to get out of the human bondage and return to the larger freedoms of the spirit:

In fact, the vast majority of men are like prisoners with all the doors and windows closed, so they suffocate, which is quite natural. But they have with them the key that opens the doors and windows, and they do not use it.... They are afraid of being lost in that light and freedom.²³

But most often when an individual stumbles upon the discovery of his soul, he is so enchanted with the discovery that he is apt to think that he hasn't now to attend to anything else. And many "have even set up this experience as a principle of realisation" and have declared it the goal of life on earth! If the rest of the world stew in their own juice, well, it is their lookout! It is also possible that, in course of time, others too may get out of the suffocating prison-house and escape into the world invisible. Is this, after all, the only consummation devoutly to be aspired for?

But the Mother, drawing inspiration and sustenance from Sri Aurobindo's and her own vision of the supramental Future, poses the question and answers it too:

The whole creation, the whole universal manifestation appears at best like a very bad joke if it only comes to this. Why begin at all if it is only to get out of it! What is the use of having struggled so much, suffered so much, of having created something which, at least in its external appearance, is so tragic and dramatic, if it is simply to teach you how to get out of it.....

But if one goes to the very depth of things, if... one becomes capable of understanding the plan of the Lord, then one knows that it is not a bad joke, not a tortuous path by which you return, a little battered, to the starting-point; on the contrary, it is to teach the entire creation the delight of being, the beauty of being, the greatness of being, the majesty

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of a sublime life, and the perpetual growth, perpetually progressive, of that delight, that beauty, that greatness. Then everything has a meaning... and one plunges headlong into the realisation with the certitude of the goal and victory.²⁴

The whole point and purpose of the sadhana, then, is not only to find one's soul and attain the freedom and plenitude of the spirit, but to bring about a reversal of consciousness that would effect here on earth, in this imperfect human mould itself, a radical and integral transformation. This may seem a colossal - even an impossible - task. But one is not alone; one is attended by Grace. Hence the Mother's all-sufficing assurance:

If you have had even a second's contact with the Grace - that marvellous Grace which carries you along, speeds you on the path, even makes you forget that you have to hurry - if you have had only a second's contact with that, then you can strive not to forget. And with the candour of a child, the simplicity of a child for whom there are no complications, give yourself to that Grace and let it do everything.²⁵

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