On The Mother

CHAPTER 41

New Horizons

I

For Sri Aurobindo and the Mother alike, the earth was a theatre of conflict, a veritable Kurukshetra, between the Asuric and the Divine forces; it was also a field of unfolding possibilities. On the one hand, the supramental change was decreed and inevitable, and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had direct evidence that the revolutionary power of the Supermind was well on its way to manifestation on the earth. On the other hand, this assured possibility was itself the provocation for the massing up of the undivine or Asuric forces to make their last-ditch stand. Aside from its political and economic implications, the First World War (not to mention the Second) was portentous because it meant such a fresh mobilisation of the Asuric forces. As the Mother explains in the course of her talk on 7 October 1953:

The First World War was the result of a tremendous descent of the forces of the vital world (hostile forces of the vital world) into the material world. Even those who were conscious of this descent and consequently armed to defend themselves against it, suffered from its consequences. The world, the whole earth suffered from its consequences. There was a general deterioration from the vital point of view.... Naturally, men do not know what happened to them; all that they have said is that everything had become worse since the war.... For example, the moral level went down very much. It was simply the result of a formidable descent of the vital world: forces of disorder, forces of corruption... forces of violence, forces of cruelty.¹

But why that descent? The Mother answers: "Perhaps it was a reaction, for there was another Force coming down which wanted to do its work." Once it came down definitively, the Asuric forces would have either to fold up and go, or to fight back and be destroyed. The mobilisation of the Asuric forces during the War was rather like the action of "a government which fears that it will be thrown out and so intervenes violently in order to [stay] in power". It was perhaps a desperate throw on the part of the anti-divine powers, but the Divine -must prevail in the end however long and protracted the struggle.

If one takes a long view, there is this dialectic of the evolutionary process. It is not a straight line, not a sudden canter to the summit of supramental change. But there is here the sustained push of aspiration from below, and there is also the ready response from above: when the meeting is creative, something is gained, a forward step is taken.

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In a moment of divination, the Mother reads the Hanuman-Rama story as a symbolic projection of this evolutionary drive:

...when one speaks of Hanuman, this represents the evolutionary man, and Rama is the involutionary being, the one who comes from above... a being of the Overmind plane or from elsewhere.²

On 28 October, when a child asks the Mother why today's painters are not as good as those of the days of Leonardo da Vinci, she answers: "Because human evolution goes in spirals." And, she explains further, that evolution

...is a constant progress. But if you made it in a straight line, you would cover only a single part - the world is a globe, it is not a line....

There is even a considerable number of spirals intersecting and giving the impression of contradiction. If one could follow in its totality the movement of universal progress, one would see that there is such a great number of spirals which intersect, that finally one does not know at all whether one is advancing or going back... it is an extremely complex criss-crossing, in all possible directions, of a spiraling ascent.³

These apparent ambiguities admitted, the Mother had still no doubt at all that the supramental descent was imminent; it was not a question of something happening in the distant future, but an event decreed to happen in the present age. She felt too that mankind was living in one of those segments of Time's ceaseless march that Sri Aurobindo would have called the Hour of God - a point of intersection of the spirals of evolution when a bold new thrust forward might be confidently expected. As she wrote in the Bulletin of November 1953, addressing pupils young and old alike:

Certain beings who, I might say, are in the secret of the gods, are aware of the importance of this moment in the life of the world, and they have taken birth upon earth to play their part in whatever way they can. A great luminous consciousness broods over the earth, creating a kind of stir in its atmosphere. All who are open receive a ripple from this eddy, a ray of this light and seek to give form to it, each according to his capacity.

We have here the unique privilege of being at the very centre of this radiating light, at the fount of this force of transformation.⁴

Sri Aurobindo had incarnated the will to bring down the New Consciousness and the New Life, and his abiding Presence still radiated his light and his force. It was for the students young and old - and for others too - to open themselves to this Force and hasten its manifestation in our midst.

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II

In February 1953, the Mother had opened at the International Centre a two-day exhibition on "Evolution" comprising paintings by the Ashram children. Likewise, in November she opened an exhibition of "Flowers in Yoga" in the University Centre Library. Everywhere flowers charm with their native poetry and cast a fascination with their colour, beauty of form and varieties of fragrance. But in the Ashram, flowers speak an occult language too and carry a mystic power, and hence they have a role to play in the sadhana and the Mother's yogic action. In the way the exhibition was organised, the flowers became an adventure of consciousness and an invitation to ananda.

It was also during 1953 that a disciple offered to construct a new room for the Mother above the first floor of the Meditation House. Soli Albless, another disciple, was one of the architects entrusted with the task of designing and building the room overlooking Sri Aurobindo's Samadhi. The spacious room was completed and properly furnished by the first week of December and was ready for occupation.

On the evening of 9 December, the Mother's talk⁵ centred upon a number of subjects - spiritual ego, Radha's Prayer, suffering and bliss, incarnations, Savitri - and the Mother had much spiritual food to give her children. The age-old question of pain and joy, their relativity, almost their interchangeability, the attitudes that make it one or the other, come up for elucidation once again, and the Mother says with her native poise of patience and glow of persuasive sweetness:

...all is in the Divine and all is divine. And necessarily, if one changes the state of consciousness and is identified with the Divine, that changes the very nature of things. For example, what seemed pain or sorrow or misery - one becomes aware quite on the contrary that it is an opportunity for the Divine's growing closer to you....

The same thing, exactly the same vibration, according to the way in which it is received and responded to, brings either an intense joy or considerable despair, exactly the same, according to the state of consciousness one is in. So there is nothing of which it could be said: it is a misfortune.... All that is necessary is to change one's state of consciousness.

It is also an advantage, even an insurance, to think always of good and auspicious and happy things, instead of giving way to all kinds of irrational fears and dire possibilities. And there is an occult reason too for this, as the Mother reminds the children:

We said at the beginning: one is surrounded by what one thinks about. You understand quite well what this means? (Turning to a child) Every time you think of something, it is as though you had a magnet in your

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hand and were attracting that thing towards yourself.... Once your head begins to run, let it run on all the good things that can happen.

It is largely in our own hands to cover ourselves and those near us with a protective envelope simply by developing the right consciousness and placing total trust in the Divine.

As regards the avatar, for example Savitri who is the incarnation of the Divine Mother since she has come to partake of human nature, she - even she - needs must seem to accept her full share of human sorrow and pain:

If she remained in her supreme consciousness where there is no suffering... she could not have any contact with human beings.... Only, she does not forget: she has adopted their consciousness but she remains in relation with her own real, supreme consciousness.... By taking the human body, one is obliged to take on human nature, partially. Only, instead of losing one's consciousness and losing contact with the Truth, one keeps this consciousness and this Truth, and it is by joining the two that one can create exactly this kind of alchemy of transformation.

And it was after this lucid exposition of the avatar's role and the avatar's difficulties and the avatar's readiness to face them that the Mother returned to the Ashram from the Playground on 9 December 1953, and late at night took her residence in her new room on the top floor of the Meditation House.

III

As we have seen in the preceding chapters; following Sri Aurobindo's passing, the Ashram under the Mother's resolute and imaginative leadership had spectacularly expanded its activities, increased its membership and raised its School to an International University Centre. The Mother too had, as it were, extended herself out, and had become accessible in the Ashram and in the Playground. She was now bringing into play undreamt-of energies of the body and the spirit. There were times when her days and nights merged into a continuum of sustained work. The staircase pranam, stopped after 1950 for a time, was started again, and was to continue till August 1954.⁶ Although pranam for all had to be abandoned in view of the numbers involved, people still went up to her for pranam and blessings on their birthdays. But of course the Playground in the evenings was the grand meeting place for Mother, children, sadhaks, disciples and visitors, and she distributed on some days baked groundnuts and on other days Ashram-made toffees. And the talks, and the ambience of the Mother's presence! They were the daily feasts of her divine sensibility and the flow of the perennial Ganga of her spirituality.

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Naturally enough, the old doubt and uncertainty had been replaced by a new trust and a steely self-confidence, and more and more people started visiting the Ashram to know at first hand what was going on. They went round the Samadhi and the Meditation Hall, and then to the other 'nerve centres' of the Ashram like the University Centre, the main library, the printing press, the dairy and the bakery, the dining hall, the Harpagon Workshop, the agricultural farms, the handmade paper factory, the embroidery departments. They were duly impressed and they asked questions and sought clarifications. How was it all organised so as to run with such smooth efficiency? How was it all financed? How was the interlinked problem of authority and responsibility solved in the organisation of the Ashram? It was but common sense that too much should not be claimed where all was the work of Grace. It would be advisable to let the inquisitive visitors see the work for themselves instead of making them listen to elaborate claims or instant elucidations. This was the context in which the Mother gave her New Year message for 1954:

My Lord, here is Thy advice to all, for this year:

"Never boast about anything, let your acts speak for you."

As if commenting on this advice in advance, the Mother said on 30 December 1953 in the Playground:

Now we are becoming almost a thing of public interest, in the sense that there are lots of visitors coming and lots of people concerned about what we are doing here, and then they are taken round and told what we have supposedly done and what we are going to do and all that. And there was truly a great need to say: "I beg of you, don't speak so much about what we are doing: do it."...

It is always better to do than to speak, and in the least details also.

There is another meaning too, much deeper....⁷

The deeper meaning evidently concerned the Sadhana. If it was imprudent to talk or boast of external achievements, it was clearly unwise and even dangerous to speak of one's spiritual experiences and realisations, except to one's Guru; an infringement of the rule could mean the annulment of the hard-won gains of the Sadhana. As the Mother said in her second essay on "The Four Austerities", it was only the Guru who would be able "by his knowledge to use the elements of the experience for your own good, as steps towards new ascents".⁸

IV

Ever since the Ashram formally came into existence in November 1926, it was the settled policy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to eschew politics.

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With the Mother it was an absolute rule, but Sri Aurobindo could hardly sever his connection entirely from his former political associates and lieutenants. They sought his advice from time to time, and where he saw more clearly than they could from his spiritual height, he gave such guidance as seemed practicable. Also, when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother espoused the Allied cause during the Second World War, or when Sri Aurobindo advised the Indian leaders to accept the Cripps Proposals in 1942, they were acting from the higher spiritual - not the merely political or the narrowly nationalist - level. The issue as they saw it was clearly between the Divine and the Asuric forces, and it was therefore the duty of all who were on the side of survival and progress to range themselves against the Axis Powers. Sri Aurobindo's was a lone voice, for the Indian leaders preferred to wallow in the futilities and frustrations of the Partition cry and the "Quit India" movement rather than share responsibility for the Government of the country in those crucial times. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had the double satisfaction of witnessing, not only the victory of the Allies, but also the independence of India (although flawed by the Partition) on 15 August 1947. At about this time, the leader of the French Cultural Commission, Maurice Schumann, and the local French Governor, M. Baron, called on Sri Aurobindo to explore the possibility of opening an Institute at Pondicherry for the study of Indian and European culture. In the course of his talk, Sri Aurobindo told the French visitors that, next to India, he loved France most, and the proposed Institute might afford facilities to students from all over the world to study the Indian civilisation with its many elements in creative interactions.

On the political front, it was Sri Aurobindo's suggestion to the French and Indian Governments that, while Pondicherry and the other French areas should certainly merge with India "immediately, they should also be conceded the right to retain their cultural (as distinct from political) contacts with France, for this would be in the wider interests of both India and France. While the French Government was sympathetic to the proposal, it didn't find favour at New Delhi, and this resulted in a mild confrontation and an unsavoury stalemate. Years passed, and there was no perceivable thaw. In 1952, however, when C. Rajagopalachari became Chief Minister of Madras, he felt that a solution should be found, and he asked Surendra Mohan Ghose to request the Mother to bring about the desired thaw and promote a final peaceful settlement. But the Mother told Surendra Mohan: "You know I don't take interest in politics." Unwilling to be put off so easily, Surendra Mohan pleaded:

...but now it is not my politics or the Government of India's politics: it is Sri Aurobindo's! He wanted this to be done and in our stupidity we didn't understand then. Now these people [the Government of India] want to do something on those lines, for which I expect your blessings.⁹

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The Mother concentrated for a while, and then told Surendra Mohan that she would do what was necessary. The problem was to sound the French authorities whether they would be willing to reopen negotiations on the basis of the terms of the settlement suggested by Sri Aurobindo in 1947. But all went well this time, and she received the expected response, and a meeting was arranged between an envoy from Paris and an accredited representative of the Government of India. And the integration of the French Indian possessions with India was at last finalised much as Sri Aurobindo had wanted. Since it was his work, it became the Mother's work as well, and she was the destined catalytic agent whose role it was to give the decisive push towards the desired consummation.

The merger actually took place on 1 November 1954*, and in celebration of the event, the Mother hoisted the Spiritual Flag of India in the Ashram at 6.20 a.m. Originally designed for the Ashram Sports Association (JSASA) with Sri Aurobindo's approval, it had been first unfurled on 15 August 1947 and had since then been saluted as the symbol of the undivided eternal Bharat, the Greater India that includes Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh. There is a Truth, Power, Knowledge, Love that sustains the unity of this real Bharat that transcends the truncated political India, and the Spiritual Flag was meant to project this essential unconquerable India in its splendorous unity and manifoldness. It was appropriate that it should be hoisted on the day of the formal union of Pondicherry with India.

But even earlier, on 15 August 1954, the Mother had made known her ardent desire to become an Indian citizen without, however, relinquishing her French citizenship:

I want to mark this day by the expression of a long cherished wish; that of becoming an Indian citizen. From the first time I came to India - in 1914

- I felt that India is my true country, the country of my soul and spirit... Now the time has come when I can declare myself.

But, in accordance with Sri Aurobindo's ideal, my purpose is to show that truth lies in union rather than in division. To reject one nationality in order to obtain another is not an ideal solution. So I hope I shall be allowed to adopt a double nationality, that is to say, to remain French while I become an Indian.

I am French by birth and early education, I am Indian by choice and predilection. In my consciousness there is no antagonism between the two, on the contrary, they combine very well and complete one another. I know also that I can be of service to both equally, for my only aim in life is to give a concrete form to Sri Aurobindo's great teaching and in his teaching

* The de jure merger was effected on 16 August 1962, and is since being celebrated by the Government of Pondicherry as the official Merger Day.

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he reveals that all the nations are essentially one and meant to express the Divine Unity upon earth through an organised and harmonious diversity.¹⁰

Commenting on the Mother's declaration, K. D. Sethna wrote: "Here is a flaming milestone in a mighty mission - the mission to incarnate the true spirit of this great land and by that incarnation bring forth again and carry to its climax the light of a more than human consciousness that India throughout her history has sought to manifest."¹¹

This concept of double citizenship was a challenge to the "Lord of the Nations", the Asuric being who receives the ready homage of all rabid 'national' egoisms. By expressing her wish for 'double citizenship', the Mother planted a potent seed in the human consciousness, and in the fullness of time mankind would want to shed its divers divisive nationalist labels and seek a 'world citizenship' in a world polity as visualised in Sri Aurobindo's seminal treatise. The Ideal of Human Unity. With this very end in view, the 'World Union' movement was to be launched by A. B. Patel, with its headquarters in the Ashram and the Mother as President.

V

The merger of Pondicherry with India was to forge still closer the links between the two adjacent territories, and open new channels of communication. All travel restrictions were removed, and Pondicherry was now quite in the mainstream of the national life of India without, however, losing its distinctive and almost unique individuality. In the course of 1954, the number of sadhaks rose to over 875, and there was a stir of new hope and expectancy in the air. With the increase in the number of sadhaks and the proliferation of Ashram services, there was a corresponding increase in the Ashram employees as well thereby giving rise, though perhaps only minimally, to labour problems. But the Mother's way of dealing with such problems was altogether her own, touched with divine understanding and power, In the first place, she consistently refused to be a party to the politicisation of issues, and she made the Ashram's position quite clear in a declaration she made on 25 April 1954. In the middle part of his life, Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from politics. He had also made it a rule that in his Ashram no one should engage in politics, because political practice was ordinarily "a low and ugly thing, wholly dominated by falsehood, deceit, injustice, misuse of power and violence". The Ashram had high aims and had to impose on its inmates difficult standards of behaviour: "Sincerity, honesty, unselfishness, disinterested consecration to the work to be done, nobility of character and straightforwardness." While Sri Aurobindo had profoundly loved his Motherland, he had also wanted her, not just to be free from foreign rule, but also to be "great, noble, pure and worthy of her big mission in the world". That is why, she concluded her declaration,

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in full conformity to his will, we lift high the standard of truth, progress and transformation of mankind, without caring for those who, through ignorance, stupidity, envy or bad will, seek to soil it and drag it down into the mud. We carry it very high so that all who have a soul may see it and gather round it.¹²

In the second place, the Mother in her message of 10 July took the employees (as distinct from the sadhaks) of the Ashram also into her protection by outlining her plans for the future and enlisting their cooperation:

But for the working out of the programme I am going to place before you, two essential conditions are necessary. First, I must have the financial means to execute my plan; secondly, you must show a minimum of sincerity, honesty and goodwill in your attitude towards me and towards your work....

...My aim is to create a big family in which it will be possible for each one to fully develop his capacities and express them....

...my idea is to build a kind of city accommodating at the outset about two thousand persons. It will be built according to the most modern plans, meeting all the most up-to-date requirements of hygiene and public health....

Nothing necessary for life will be forgotten....

Each one can choose the kind of activity that is most suitable to his nature and will receive the required training....

...for admission to live in this ideal place the essential conditions that need to be fulfilled are good character, good conduct, honest, regular and efficient work and a general goodwill.¹³

Even to the sadhaks, as the Mother had said two weeks earlier, she did not "give positions"; she gave them only "work", and gave them all "an equal opportunity".

Indeed, the Mother's prophetic vision was linking up eventualities, foreseeing developments, forging possibilities, and projecting her power of consciousness into the future. She was, in fact, thinking of an extended Ashram, an Ashram-city as it were, or a model community and city where work would be looked upon as worship and creative harmony as the law of life. All this received clearer definition and fuller formulation in her thinking aloud on her great Dream of the Life Divine being actually lived upon the earth:

There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and

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ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment....

The earth is certainly not ready to realise such an ideal, for mankind does not yet possess sufficient knowledge to understand and adopt it nor the conscious force that is indispensable in order to execute it....

And yet this dream is in the course of becoming a reality; that is what we are striving for in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, on a very small scale... little by little we are advancing towards our goal which we hope we may one day be able to present to the world as a practical and effective way to emerge from the present chaos, to be born into a new life that is more harmonious and true.

Over a period of nearly three decades, Sri Aurobindo Ashram had grown to impressive proportions and acquired a commendable self-poised strength, and was already the rough portrait in miniature of the ideal city to be. In its feeling for rhythm and its sense of harmony, its mellowed lights and its whispered seer-wisdoms, its enveloping peace and its contained puissances, the perceptive eye could discover the first faint beginnings of a New Life on the earth. After going round the Ashram and having had darshan of the Mother, Justice S. C. Mishra of the Patna High Court said in the course of a speech on 21 February 1954 that, even in Sri Aurobindo's long lifetime, "It was she who formed the nexus between the transcendent and immanent 'Parabrahma' and the material world which is a mere manifestation of that Supreme Spirit." He thought that Golconde was an architectural marvel housing the spirit. As for the Mother, with "the mystic vision of a Joan of Arc and the wisdom of a Maitreyi", she verily symbolised "the dawn of the new era when humanity in both hemispheres would respond in equal measure to the call of the Divine".¹⁴

On Darshan days in 1954, the tradition of organising educative exhibitions and having them opened by the Mother was continued and they evoked universal appreciation. The exhibition on "The Future Man" was thus opened on 21 February in the University Library; on 24 April, the exhibition on "Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia", and on 15 August, an exhibition on the significance of Indian culture. It was also on 15 August, Sri Aurobindo's eighty-second birthday, that the Ashram children constructed on their own small sand-pit, in sand and fossil, a three-dimensional representation of the Mother's painting "The Ascent to the Truth". Again, on 1 December, the sadhaks produced The Great Secret ("Le Grand Secret"), a play written by the Mother in collaboration with Nolini and others, and it was published in French as well as in English in the February 1955 issue of the Bulletin.

The Great Secret and The Ascent to the Truth (another play written

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by the Mother and staged on 1 December 1956) are much more than mere dramatic divertissements. The characters are recognisable types of humanity caught in the contemporary predicament of inescapable frustration. Is mankind doomed to go round and round the prickly pear of alternating giant exertion followed by abysmal defeat? Is there no way out? In these two experiments in the dramatic mode, the Mother not only pictures the contemporary human situation but also shows the way out. A more detailed study of these two plays is attempted in the following chapter.

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