On The Mother

CHAPTER 19

Powers and Personalities

I

Ever since the coming of Mirra, first on 29 March 1914 and after the absence of a few years on 24 April 1920, and all along the way of her gradual assumption of more and more responsibilities with regard to the welfare of the inmates in Sri Aurobindo's household, the question as to her true identity - her real personality - had been intriguing disciples and visitors alike. Was she but an aspirant Westerner seeking the Light in faraway Pondicherry? Was she a spiritual adept in her own right? Was she but one of Sri Aurobindo's disciples; or did she have a special status? It was of course obvious that she had organisational and managerial qualities quite out of the ordinary, clearly an illustration of yogah karmasu kauśalam. But wasn't there something else too? When Anilbaran Roy returned from Bengal in December 1926, Sri Aurobindo told him that he must "now make a full surrender to Mirra Devi who has taken up the work of new creation", and that he must take all his instructions from her.¹ Why did Sri Aurobindo put her in complete charge of his disciples? What was her role in the Yoga? As the Mother, did her relationship with Sri Aurobindo's other disciples undergo a sudden sea-change? And what exactly was the Mother behind the veil of the human appearance, what were her powers and personalities?

One thing was clear: the Mother was now raised to the position of Guru on a level with the Master, she was in fact the visible Guru, since Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn into seclusion. Already, over a period of several months, many disciples had learned to see in her rather more than just a fellow-disciple; they had often meditated with her, they had found it beneficial to look up to her. They had found in her a union of the constructive energy of the West and the complete self-giving of the Orient. All that had now happened was that her natural leadership was formalised, as it were, and she was installed on the Guru's pedestal.

II

It was about a year after the Siddhi day that Sri Aurobindo composed the greater part of the testament now known as The Mother, first published: as a little book in 1928 and since reprinted frequently. When Sri Aurobindo was asked by a disciple ten years later whether he did not refer to "our Mother" in his book The Mother, he gave the supremely succinct answer, "Yes." She was verily the 'individual' divine Mother who embodied the

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power of the two vaster ways (universal and transcendent) of her existence; and she had descended here amongst us into this 'too too sullied' world of error and falsehood and darkness and death only out of her deep and abiding love for us.²

The Mother, then, is not merely the crest-jewel among Sri Aurobindo's inspired prose writings; it is also the golden key to the flaming doors of the Mother's manifold epiphanies, and a key to the mystic machinery of her ministry on the earth. It is in the sixth and last section of the book that four of her great "Powers and Personalities" (Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati) are invoked with a mantra-shakti - the sheer verbal élan - for which there are no exact parallels even in Sri Aurobindo's writings. He is certainly not doing an exercise in elaborate description; on the contrary, he is seeing and saying at once, he is simultaneously accomplishing the utterance of Being and the naming and thanking of the Holy (as Heidegger might have put it). Sri Aurobindo sees the Mother as she is poised between the higher supramental world and our lower phenomenal world:

The Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world of the Ignorance stands in an intermediate plane between the supramental Light, the Truth life, the Truth creation which has to be brought down here and this mounting and descending hierarchy of planes of consciousness that like a double ladder lapse into the nescience of Matter and climb back again through the flowering of life and soul and mind into the infinity of the Spirit.³

This same mediator-role was to be described in terms of poetic iridescence in Savitri:

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,

A power of silence in the depths of God;

She is the Force, the inevitable Word,

The magnet of our difficult ascent,

The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,

The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,

The joy that beckons from the impossible,

The Might of all that never yet came down.⁴

Besides governing all from above, the Mother also "descends into this lesser triple universe" (made up of matter-life-mind), and she thus stoops here into the darkness, error, pain and death only that she may thereby lead the world to the Light, Truth, godlike Life and pure Ananda. As for he four great Aspects of the Mother that have stood in front in her dealings with the earth and men:

One is her personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and

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tranquil benignity and inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty an all-ruling greatness. Another embodies her power of splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force. A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace. The fourth is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things. Wisdom, Strength, Harmony Perfection are their several attributes. and it is these powers that they bring with them into the world, manifest in a human disguise m their Vibhutis and shall found in the divine degree of their ascension in those who can open their earthly nature to the direct and living influence of the Mother. To the four we give the four great names, Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasarawati.⁵

The sadhaks no doubt had glimpses - at some time or other - of the Mahalakshmi, the Maheshwari and even the Mahakali in the Mother, and yet it was the Mahasaraswati of Sri Aurobindo's inspired portraiture that came nearest to their daily, hourly, minutely observance of the Mother and of their progressive understanding of her movements and ministrations:

Mahasaraswati is the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order. The youngest of the Four, she is the most skilful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical Nature. Maheshwari lays down the large lines of the world-forces, Mahakali drives their energy and impetus, Mahalakshmi discovers their rhythms and measures, but Mahasaraswati presides over their detail of organisation and execution, relation of parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude of result and fulfilment. The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasaraswati's province .... When she takes up the transformation and new-building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless. For the will in her works is scrupulous, unsleeping, indefatigable; leaning over us she notes and touches every little detail, finds out every minute defect, gap, twist or incompleteness, considers and weighs accurately all that has been done and all that remains still to be done hereafter .... In her constant and diligent arrangement and rearrangement of things her eye is on all needs at once and the way to meet them and her intuition knows what is to be chosen and what rejected and successfully determines the right instrument, the right time, the right conditions and the right process. Carelessness and negligence and indolence she abhors .... When her work is finished, nothing has been forgotten, no part has been misplaced or omitted or left in a faulty condition; all is solid, accurate, complete, admirable. Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is

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ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her creation. Therefore of all the Mother's powers she is the most long­suffering with man and his thousand imperfections. Kind, smiling, close and helpful, not easily turned away or discouraged, insistent even after repeated failure, her hand sustains our every step on condition that we are single in our will and straightforward and sincere; for a double mind she will not tolerate and her revealing irony is merciless to drama and histrionics and self-deceit and pretence. A mother to our wants, a friend in our difficulties, a persistent and tranquil counsellor and mentor, chasing away with her radiant smile the clouds of gloom and fretfulness and depression, reminding always of the ever-present help, pointing to the eternal sunshine, she is firm, quiet and persevering in the deep and continuous urge that drives us towards the integrality of the higher nature. All the work of the other Powers leans on her for its completeness; for she assures the material foundation, elaborates the stuff of detail and erects and rivets the armour of the structure.⁶

This was the Mother the sadhaks knew and admired most unreservedly: the Mother with her uncanny eye for detail, the Mother with her unwearying vigilance, the Mother with her unending patience, the Mother with her genius for hard work, the Mother with her passion for all-round ion perfection.

III

As for the Mother's role in the alchemy of transformation from the human to the divine, the dialectic was simplicity itself:

There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.⁷

On his part, what the sadhak had to do was "a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender". Out of the meeting of the rising aspiration and the descent of Grace would ensue the desired transformation, and in this the Mother's role would be crucial:

The Supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother. The Mother's power and not

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any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and 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

The visioning of the Divine Mother - the interpretation of her role in the evolutionary earth-play - the differentiation between her diverse Powers and Personalities - the clear enunciation of the dialectic of transformation: The Mother memorably projects all this on the inner film of our awakening consciousness. No wonder this little book is cherished as an Aurobindonian scripture par excellence. In some of his later letters, Sri Aurobindo was to discuss the implications of some of the terms used in the book and to elucidate some of its seminal ideas.

IV

Sri Aurobindo's very clear, categorical, often apocalyptical description of the Mother, of her Powers and Personalities, and of her avatar-role in the terrestrial play certainly helped to clear the Ashram atmosphere of the vapours of misunderstanding and doubt, and create conditions for the energetic pursuit of the Integral Yoga of Perfection and Transformation. It may be recalled that following the Siddhi day, there was the "brilliant period" of the Ashram which had to be brought to an end towards the middle of 1927. Partly because the Power at work was not the full Supermind and would by its wonder-working have ultimately stood in the way of it, and partly also on account of some untoward results it produced.

In the meantime there had been fresh accessions to the Ashram community: Vaun and Janet McPheeters from the U.S., Daulat and K. D. Sethna from Bombay, Sahana Devi and Dilip Kumar Roy from Bengal, Miss Maitland from the U.K. and others. Among the old-timers, Nolini was Secretary of the Ashram, silent and efficient as ever, and Amrita was its manager. Pavitra was in charge of the Workshop. The sadhaks old and new had now every opportunity to see the Mother in her myriad manifestations, and in particular as patient persevering perfectionist Mahasaraswati. While at certain times (like the morning meditation and an evening Soup) she was serious, a Maheshwari doubled with a Mahalakshmi, a marvellous concentration of divine force, at other times she seemed to relax, and move informally with the sadhaks as a worker among other workers. There were afternoon visits to the sadhaks' rooms, and there were the evening drives with those she chose from among them. The Ashram, however, was always the Theatre of the Unexpected. Deadening routine was foreign to the genius of the Ashram, and the bye-laws were stronger and more numerous than the laws! This is how with a native

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resilience and an infinite capacity for change and adaptation the Ashram has been forever evolving and growing since the now remote beginnings. When the living green trees became mere dead wood in course of time, that had only to be cast away, and new saplings were duly planted. A continuous experimentation, a ceaseless process of trial and error, an endless progress (even if it be a zig-zagging one) towards the far horizons!

V

In 1929. taking advantage of the Mother's willingness to visit sadhaks' rooms and talk informally, the stage was set to get the Mother to express her views on a wide variety of questions. A conversation session in English began to be held on Sundays. The meeting place was Dilip's house, and among those who attended were Nolini, Pavitra, Vaun and Janet McPheeters (Janet had been given the name "Shantimayi" by Sri Aurobindo), Sahana Devi, Duraiswami Aiyar, Miss Maitland, Kapali Sastry and of course Dilip. The procedure at these meetings was very simple:

At the commencement the Mother used to meditate with us; at times she asked us to meditate on a special subject asking each one of us at the end about the result of meditation on that particular subject. She asked if anyone had any questions to ask, if there were any she answered them .... Our minds on these occasions became submerged in wonder at the touch of the light emanating from her vast and fathomless knowledge.⁹

Nolini Kanta Gupta had written down fifteen of these talks based on his notes and later they were revised by Sri Aurobindo for publication. These fifteen talks, from 7 April to 4 August - the questions as well as the detailed answers by the Mother - were first published in 1931, under the title Conversations with the Mother for private circulation, and in 1940 for the public as the main part of the book Words of the Mother. In 1956 they were published separately, with a Foreword by the Mother, as Conversations . In the centenary edition of the Mother's Collected Works they are included in volume 3 under the title Questions and Answers 1929.

Again, during 1930 and 1931, the Mother used to come in the evening to the Prosperity Room on the first floor of the Library House, and a select number of disciples used to gather there. There was a brief meditation, followed by a talk by the Mother. Some of the talks, given in English, were noted down in abbreviated long-hand by K. D. Sethna and afterwards reconstructed. Several of these were first published with the Mother's approval in the monthly Mother India and in the annual Sri Aurobindo Circle of 1949. A larger collection, entitled Words of the Mother: Third Series, Was published in book-form in 1951 and 1966 In the centenary edition of the Mother's Collected Works they are included - along with an

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additional talk, "Difficulties in Yoga" - in volume 3 under the title Questions and Answers 1930·31. And much later, after the International University Centre had come into existence, the Mother's talks to the children and the sadhaks were to be a regular feature of the Ashram life, and were to be collected in several large volumes.

The early Parisian group, the "Idea", and the later groups in her house in Rue du Val de Grace, during the years immediately before the First World War, the "New Idea" group in Pondicherry in 1914-15, the meetings at Dilip's and the Prosperity room, an the Playground classes of the nineteen-fifties: the times and venues and audiences may have varied or differed, but there was a silken running continuity in them all, for they were all integral to the Mother's sacerdocy and divine ministry on the earth.

VI

The collections of the Mother's words relating to the different periods of her life are really an easy and persuasive introduction to the theory and practice of Yoga, the Integral Yoga of life-transformation and world-transformation. Unlike the entries in Prayers and Meditations, which were originally written in French, the conversations of 1929 and many of 1930 and 1931, were in English, and so did not need the sometimes diluting or distorting medium of a translation from the original French.

The shorter writings included in Part One of Words of the Mother (Third Edition, 1946) are a series of pointed affirmations, scintillating aphorisms, diamond-edged apophthegms. Illuminating flashes or bubbles of revelation like the following can still be made each a starting-point for a chain of ponderings or meditation that may in time comprehend a whole universe:

A smile acts upon difficulties as the sun upon clouds - it disperses them.

Happiness is not the aim of life.

The aim of ordinary life is to carry out one's duty, the aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine.

To work for the Divine is to pray with the body.

All was gold and gold and gold, a torrent of golden light pouring down in an uninterrupted flow and bringing with it the consciousness that the path of the gods is a sunlit path in which difficulties lose all reality.

Such is the path open before us if we choose to take it.

The mountain path leads always in two directions, upward and downward - all depends on what we put behind us.

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In order to be filled anew the vessel must get empty sometimes.

It is when we are preparing for greater receptivities that we feel empty.

To get over our ego is not an easy task.

Even after overcoming it in the material consciousness, we meet it once more - magnified - in the spiritual.

If we allow a falsehood, however small, to express itself through our mouth or our pen, how can we hope to become perfect messengers of Truth? A perfect servant of Truth should abstain even from the slightest inexactitude, exaggeration or deformation. ¹⁰

The following could have come out of the pages of Prayers and Meditations , for it has the same piercing fervour and clarity of utterance:

Lord, Thy Love is so great, so noble and so pure that it is beyond our comprehension. It is immeasurable and infinite: on bended knees we must receive it, and yet Thou hast made it so sweet that even the weakest among us, even a child, can approach Thee.¹¹

And in just a few words, the Mother clarifies the goal of the Aurobindonian Yoga:

The goal is not to lose oneself in the Divine Consciousness. The goal is to let the Divine Consciousness penetrate into Matter and transform it. ¹²

VII

The aphorisms included in Part One of Words of the Mother (1946), are in a category apart, for whatever their origin, they have now separated themselves like waterdrops capable of reflecting the splendours in the firmament of Time and Eternity, - thus in the centenary edition of the Mother's Collected Works, have been scattered by subject in volumes 14 and 15.

The other writings in the 1946 edition of Words of the Mother were rather more elaborate. In the first six, which were first published in 1939 in French in Quelques Paroles, Quelques Prières, the Mother seems to have discoursed on some of the basic issues of spiritual life. The secret of secrets is that only the deep can answer the deep. At the core of everybody and everything is the Divine, and hence "when you are one with the Divinity within, you are one with all things in their depths".¹³ Crack the ego, seek and find and become one with the Divine. Unless one can be so united with the Divine, one must be a prey to all kinds of false lures, adverse suggestions, seductive sophistries and sinister inducements from without. Many are the problems that seem to beset humanity - "Governments succeed governments, regimes follow regimes, centuries pass after centuries

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but human misery remains lamentably the same."¹⁴ What then? It is obvious that there can be no lasting solution of human problems unless man transcends the mental and attains the supramental consciousness.

In life, one has to learn to differentiate between the higher spiritual law which is eternal and the lower code of man-made moral and social laws that are the prisoners of transience and relativity. But to give up the ordinary human laws before one has securely anchored oneself to the spiritual law will be to cause and to court disaster. Like the lower human and the higher Divine law, there is the lower human justice ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"!), and there is the higher Divine Grace:

The Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. ¹⁵

And it is through the mediation of the Mother that each spurt of sincere aspiration on the disciple's part "calls down in response the intervention of' the Grace".

AI1 life is a perilous journey and an intestine struggle, and the unwary are likely to be tripped and forced into a fall, or to be lost in the relativities - unless one learns to rise above al1 this chaos and confusion into the above-mind Consciousness. Of the elements of human existence - physical, vital, mental, psychic - the last alone is the principle and power of continuity through a succession of births. And it is through the awakening of the psychic being - the soul within - that we can grow into the Divine consciousness, and it is only from that level of puissance and illumination that our problems can be truly understood and definitively solved:

A transformation, an illumination of the human consciousness alone can bring about a real amelioration in the condition of humanity. ¹⁶

Thus, in no more than a few pages, the cardinal issues are posed and answered, and the current human malady is both diagnosed and the radical cure prescribed. The key to change and transformation is a breakthrough in consciousness: from the mental to the supramental, from the human to the Divine.

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