On The Mother

CHAPTER 52

Readiness is All

I

To all outward appearances the Mother's health - judged by merely human standards, and also as compared with her remarkably active outer life before 9 December 1958 - was far from satisfactory. She was eighty-four on 21 February 1962, and the weight of her cumulative responsibilities for the Ashram was not a whit less onerous than ever before; if anything, it but grew heavier every day with the steady proliferation of the Ashram's activities. While her movements were confined to the first and second floors of the main Ashram building, the calls on her time and energies were still unconscionably heavy. On l8 March 1962, after Balcony darshan in the morning, she went to her rooms on the second floor, and having taken ill, she did not come down again. On the following days there was no Balcony darshan, and on the night of 3 April 1962, she had a very serious physical breakdown. Vasudha was called up, and remained with the Mother day and night ministering to her needs. The Mother's was both a human body and the vehicle of a divine manifestation, and our ordinary notions of illness and breakdown do not quite apply to such a personality and such a realising power of consciousness. It was nevertheless natural that her numberless disciples and children in the Ashram and outside should feel concerned about the condition of her health during those long anxious days and weeks.

While after 18 March 1962, because of the illness, the Mother's movements had to be severely curtailed, one yet wondered whether it wasn't really an opportunity for enacting a supramental immobility with infinite new possibilities of self-expression in media other than the purely physical. The work of the Ashram was going on as smoothly as before, and there was no diminution in its power to attract fresh seekers, inquirers and students. The number of inmates alone was over 1200, and visitors were intrigued by the phenomenon that was the Mother, and her handiwork, the Ashram.

As for the Mother herself, she was now guiding the heads of the departments or services without actually going through the labour of detailed discussions and instructions. Hers was a multi-channelled force, and when she willed it so, it acted where it should in the precise manner she wanted. There was also an increased receptivity on the part of the sadhaks, and the complicated life of the Ashram and the Centre of Education, the work at the farms and factories, seemed to go on without the slightest hitch. Physically the Mother was confined to her rooms, but the deeper occult truth was that she was everywhere, she was with everyone; and she was both the force behind the work and the guarantee of its successful completion.

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II

Strange as it may appear, it was nevertheless during these months and years of the curtailment of her outer or physical activity that, as if compensating for this loss, the Mother's inspiration flowed in certain other directions in redoubled force. 'She had been doing Yoga since her childhood, and with her - as with ;Sri Aurobindo - all life was Yoga. If she cultivated music and painting, they too were but channels of her yogic experience and realisation. A reference was made earlier to the effect the Mother's organ music had on Sunil Kumar Bhattacharya when he heard it for the first time, and he has attributed any success that he may have had to the abundant flow of her Grace:

My music is my labour and aspiration for the Divine and what I try to convey through it are the voices of my inner experience.

My grateful thoughts are with her, who has been my Guide, Guru Mentor and Mother. One day it was her Light that sparked my heart, it is her Light that has sustained its glow, it is her Light that I seek through my music.¹

The Mother had begun to take drawing lessons at the age of eight, and at ten lessons for oil and other painting techniques. By the age of twelve she was doing portraits. In 1892 her charcoal paintings were exhibited at the International "Blanc and Noir" Exhibition in Paris. And the next year she joined the Academic Julian, am organisation with several studios founded by Rodolphe Julian.² No wonder she proved a source of inspiration and the perfect guide to every aspiring artist in the Ashram. In the early years at Pondicherry she used to do sketches of some of the sadhaks in the mornings, and she made, besides, many psychically revealing self-portraits, as well as studies of Sri Aurobindco.³ When Champaklal, then a young man, started painting flowers, she gave him all encouragement from the very beginning, and for a time he drew a flower every day, and she gave it a name in her own handwriting. Once, on 6 January 1933, he wrote to her enclosing a picture: "I have" done this picture without anybody's help. How is it? Will I be able to learn?" The Mother wrote in reply:

To learn means months and months of study before any picture can be done; studies from nature, drawing first for a long time, painting only after.

If you are ready to study hard and regularly, then you can begin....⁴

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When he was in two minds whether to continue to draw flowers or not, Sri Aurobindo asked him to carry on without worrying, merely allowing the inspiration to come spontaneously. Champaklal had thus appreciation and advice from both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the earlier years of his practice of the art, and he maintained a reasonably steady progress. Once early in 1935, the Mother specially asked him to draw a rose in the corner of a card; on another occasion she wrote: "Your flowers are very pretty. Surely I hope you will do some more." There was no end, indeed, to Champaklal's versatility with flowers, and at last he wished to draw a pair of lotuses, a white one and a red one. It took him a few days, and completing the work at last, he offered the painting to the Mother on his thirty-seventh birthday (2 February 1940). She was pleased, and took it to Sri Aurobindo who wrote on the top of the white lotus "Aditi: The Divine Mother", and the Mother wrote on the top of the red lotus "The Avatar: Sri Aurobindo", and they both inscribed their blessings to Champaklal.⁵ Thus auspiciously started on his sadhana of painting, his talent prospered under the fostering care of the Master and the Mother during the following decades, and an exhibition of his paintings was held in the Ashram on the Mother's eighty-fourth birthday (21 February 1962). With Champaklal, colours were the native language of his soul, and he splashed them with glorious abandon on the canvases so as to reveal the stupendous exuberance behind the Divine's phenomenal play. Was his painting classical? Was it futuristic? Was it symbolical? He painted so often and with such freedom as well as with such self-absorption that his art was his own, the fall-out of his sadhana of service to the Divine, and his colour-offerings were there for all who wished to establish an electric contact with the inapprehensible.

III

There was, then, the Polish sadhika Janina who responded to the marvellous insights and illuminations in the Mother's Prayers and Meditations and Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, and rendered them in formulations and depths of colour that revealed an uncanny force and vivacity.

And of particular significance was Huta's first volume of paintings, Meditations on Savitri, which was released on 15 August 1962. Since her taking permanent residence in the Ashram in 1955, Huta had been struggling to judge from her correspondence with the Mother - within herself to find her true vocation. On 7 February 1961, Mother wrote to Huta:

You ask me what you must do. It would be better to ask what you must be, because the circumstances and activities in life have not much importance. What is important is our way of reacting to them.

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Human nature is such that when you concentrate on your body you fall ill, when you concentrate on your heart and feelings you become unhappy, when you concentrate on the mind you get bewildered. ...⁶

How to get out of this "precarious condition"? The way of the strong is a severe and continuous tapasya. The other is to divert one's attention from the "small personal self" by dedication to a big ideal or absorption in art or science, or social or political life etc. All would depend on one's sincerity, endurance, effort, struggle - and the sheer will to victory. Huta had awakened to the splendours in the firmament of Savitri on the night in July 1954 when "cataracts of divine light and peace" overpowered her and swept her towards a new goal in life. Then, after she had settled in the Ashram, she had "a concrete experience" in her sleep that the Mother was reciting Savitri to her: "I heard distinctly her melodious voice and experienced intensely the soothing warmth of her Presence."' And the Mother confirmed it: "Yes, indeed, I recited Savitri to you and it was passages from Book Eleven - The Book of Everlasting Day - the conversation between the Supreme Lord and Savitri."⁷It was natural that she should now want to render some of the seminal lines and passages in Savitri in divinations of line and colour. On 26 September 1960 she mentioned it to the Mother who revealed that she herself "had a great wish to express through paintings the visions I had seen in 1906, but I had no time", and after a deep contemplation added, "I will help you constantly. I will take you to higher worlds and show you the Truth. You must remember the Truth and express it through painting." The next day the Mother gave some preliminary instructions and assured her, "I will put my Force into you so there will be a link between [the] two consciousnesses. Go ahead." But when Huta insisted that her skill and experience in drawing, perspective and landscape were inadequate the Mother said,

...the Epic is full of visions and they can be expressed by giving only an impression. The most important thing is that in painting you must bring vibrations, feelings, liveliness and consciousness.⁸

And so the great work of visual interpretation and symbolic projection started and continued in a series of meditative sessions. As the Mother has explained in her prefatory note to Meditations on Savitri:

Savitri, this prophetic vision of the world's history, including the announcement of the earth's future - Who can ever dare to put it in picture?...

We simply meditate together on the lines chosen, and when the image becomes clear, I describe it with the help of a few strokes, then Huta goes to her studio and brushes the painting.

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The first volume of Meditations included 23 paintings covering the opening canto ("The Symbol Dawn") of Savitri. Subsequent volumes were to appear in August 1963, February 1965 and August 1966 respectively - the four volumes together, with their 110 paintings, illustrating the whole of book I of Savitri. It was Lessing who first drew a meaningful distinction between fluid poetic description and the static art of sculpture, but painting can combine the fluidity of poetic suggestiveness with the explicit vividness of a visual art. The very title Meditations hints at the fact that here art is but the handmaiden of sadhana. Which means that the rasika too should approach this work as part of his sadhana, and not merely as a student or connoisseur of painting. "It is in a meditative mood," says the Mother, "that the Meditations must be looked at," for otherwise we might just fasten upon the appearance and miss the reality. It is not at the intellectual but at a high "overhead" - intuitive or overmental - level that the meaning has been seized and new-created in line and colour, and a like effort of seeing and experiencing is demanded of the rasika. This stupendous body of work spread out in the Meditations volumes is perhaps a striving towards the future overhead painting, and what these paintings attempt is the revelation of unusual psychic, occult and spiritual phenomena, through audacities of form, line and colour. The lines in Savitri with their arresting quanta of thought and measured tread of sound first strike the ear, but that is only the beginning. There is presently a reverberation through the inner corridors of sense and sensibility towards the still depths of the soul.

Readers of Savitri - especially those who launch themselves on "The Symbol Dawn" - are apt to encounter wall after wall of resistance, for image is piled upon image, and there is an apparent density of meaning that seems to defy penetration by the mind. While one is no doubt gripped by the splendour of the articulation and the vast visionary vistas of spirit-scape, one also feels baffled. What is one to make of these images, these symbol-actions, these occult situations:

A fathomless zero occupied the world. ...

Something...

Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance. ...

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god. ...

On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood

And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve. ...

Her passion-flower of love and doom she gave.

All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom, ...⁹

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The mantric vibrations impinge on the doors of consciousness, there is a call or summons, and there is some response from the innermost countries. But Huta's paintings, which are but a transcription of her and the Mother's joint meditations, have yet to be re-enacted in the rasika's theatre of stillness and awakening psychic dawn. It is, in short, a sadhana - or nothing.

That the "Dawn Goddess" should appear in the opening canto is natural enough. But Savitri is a goddess too, the prophetess of the coming supramental Dawn, the "Greater Dawn" to be. And for Huta herself - as for many - the Mother was also "a parable of Dawn", a Savitri-power. Dawn, Savitri, the Mother - they are of course different powers and divinities. But they have also their striking affiliations, and Huta was made to seize the truth, and in her paintings the Dawn-Goddess evoked in lines like "On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood" and the Savitri of "The calm delight that weds one soul to all" and "Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword" merge into one another, and also with the Mother - a golden three-in-one. And this is verily to reach the mystic heart of "The Symbol Dawn".

There are other paintings also that, with their epiphanic stances, suddenly make clear what had remained obscure when the poem was merely read, or project with a stunning vividness what had seemed a mere metaphor. Thus Plate II transcribes with haunting suggestiveness the idea of the lines:

Repeating for ever the unconscious act,

Prolonging for ever the unseeing will, ...

And Plate XVI is the very image - picturesque and powerful - of "Man lifted up the burden of his fate". This might be a Samson carrying a colossal weight, or even Krishna holding up the Govardhan Hill, - there is such controlled energy, such determined purpose, such intensity of effect in the painting. And the last Plate is magnificent:

Immobile in herself, she gathered force.

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

Savitri exudes the immobility of infinite strength, and Satyavan-"the soul of the world called Satyavan"¹⁰ - lies stretched before her, glorious in his beauty and the victim of immitigable Doom. The battle is joined-the battle that is to be waged and won in the occult infinitudes of Eternal Night, the Double Twilight and Everlasting Day.

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Blessings on Durga Puja Day

IV

After 18 March 1962 and throughout the year, the Mother could not come to the Balcony in the mornings, and there were no Darshans on 24 April, 15 August and 24 November. The breakdown in her health as the result of a 'heart attack' on the night of 3 April had been - from the human point of view - a pretty serious development, but the Mother rallied by and by and was able to receive people though on a severely restricted basis. Her face flashed a new brilliance of light, her consciousness ranged over the triple worlds, and her compassionate understanding knew no limits. Still she held in her firm grip the threads of the administration of the wide-ranging Ashram and the subtler threads of her global spiritual empire. Little had really changed, though much had changed in appearance. Inspiration from her was unfailing, intimations from her were unmistakable; and her Grace flooded the tablelands of the children's - the sadhaks' - hearts. This was a new phase in the history of the Ashram, in the epic march of its collective sadhana.

On 2 December, the anniversary of the School, there was the usual physical demonstration at the Ashram Sports Ground. Physical education in the Ashram aimed, not at producing champions or providing recreational activities, but rather at training and perfecting the physical instrument so that the Truth Force might manifest itself through the body. The goal of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was integral transformation, and the body being the base claimed particular attention. Through resilient efficiency and harmony of perfect functioning, the body was to be a House Beautiful for the indwelling Divine. The Department of Physical Education had started around 1945 with but fourteen boys, no equipment, and no regular playground. During the next seventeen years, it grew wings of purposive and planned development and in 1962-63 counted 677 members¹¹ divided into twelve groups determined by age and other considerations. While the programme was the same for the boys and the girls, there was some latitude on considerations of age and capacity. Health, strength, endurance and skill are the quadruple marks of physical fitness, and to help its members to attain these was the aim of the Department. At the annual physical demonstration, it was possible for the members, the other Ashramites and the visitors to have a synoptic vision of the work of the Department and to infer the filiations between such activities and the Yoga of the transformation of human life into the life divine.

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V

For the Mother herself, the set-back in her health during 1962 was not of much importance. The fight against the inconscience was still on, and her forces were properly mobilised and in excellent trim. Was it not significant that it was during 1962 that Meditations on Savitri, comprising "The Symbol Dawn", had made its triumphant appearance?

The universal Mother's love was hers.

Against the evil at life's afflicted roots, ...

Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.

A solitary mind, a world-wide heart,

To the lone Immortal's unshared work she rose.¹²

The fateful hour in human and terrestrial history was about to unfold indeed, and so the Mother solemnly declared as the message for the New Year (1963):

Let us prepare for the Hour of God.

It was the divine Generalissimo's order of the day asking her "sun-eyed children" to be ready to fight to a finish the definitive battle against the Inconscience.

Nearly sixty years earlier, on the eve of the explosion of Indian nationalism and the countrywide reverberations of the cry of "Bande Mataram", Sri Aurobindo indited the manifesto, Bhavani Mandir and the mantric hymn, Durga Stotra, and later, at Pondicherry (in all likelihood in 1918), the clarion call "The Hour of God", but their triune power of evocation was not limited by place and time. The Mother felt that the Ashram. India and the world would be confronting another "Hour of God" in 1963 and after, and should therefore get ready to face and master it, for it would be a time of tremendous opportunity and a supreme ordeal as well. It would be the phoenix hour of the Grace of God, unless people - all mankind - turned it in their folly and perversity and vainglory into the fateful hour of the Hammer of God. Sri Aurobindo's exhortation was timely, and also carried a vast urgency;

In the hour of God cleanse thy soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy and vain self-flattering that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it.¹³

Before the world could change, man must change; before the world could be saved, man must cleanse and save himself. Self-deceit was deceiving oneself; hypocrisy was deceiving others; together these two movements - one inward and the other outward - moulded a false image of oneself and made it a piece of mere vanity. Unless such falsity - the stain on one's soul - was cleansed, one could not look straight into the spirit and hear

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that which summoned it. One could neither see the image of Truth nor hear its voice. To be guided in one's actions by anything other than the Truth was only to invite the Hour of the Hammer of God. Let it rather be the Hour of the Grace of God, the Hour of Blissful Victory. Also, proportionate to the ardour of the aspiration and the purity and intensity of the effort would be the answering response from the Divine Mother.

But when the hour of the Divine draws near

The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time

And God be born into the human clay

In forms made ready by your human lives.

Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men: ...¹⁴

The Mother's New Year message for 1963 recalled also another of Sri Aurobindo's inspiring utterances on "Man A Transitional Being":

Man's greatness is not in what he is, but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour in which supermanhood is being made ready by a divine Craftsman. But he is admitted too to a yet greater greatness... he is partly an artisan of this divine change; his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him. His aspiration is earth's call to the supramental creator.

If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation.¹⁵

The hour can be even now - the Hour of God! the Hour of the Supramental Transformation!

VI

For some years past, it had become the custom to issue calendars every year emblazoning the Mother's New Year message as well as one of her portraits. The portrait on the 1963 calendar was called "Realisation". But this was meant to be seen as the climax and fulfilment of a series - "Aspiration", "Trust", "Certitude" and "Perception "-taken in February 1960. It could also be seen alongside of the 1959 portrait of her sitting on her window sill. Framed against a background of the fringing foliage of the Service Tree, and the infinite expanse of the sky, the Mother seems in the 1959 portrait to be looking expectantly for the Dawn of the Next Future, the Dawn when the Gods awake. "Who can look at this picture," asks Madhav Pandit, "and yet escape a feeling of Newness?" The later series of portraits visually presents the whole dynamics of the Yoga from Aspiration and Trust, through Certitude and Perception, on to the finality of Realisation. It is the same Mother, in the same attire, sitting

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in the same place, but the changes on the countenance are significant, and "Realisation" is the plenitude itself. "I should regard this picture." says Madhav Pandit, "as the most vivid capture of her Role as the sole-sufficing Link between the world of men and the Realm of the Divine Truth above. Her eyes seize and hold the Link which is firmly established on Earth by the Power that exudes from her glorious body."¹⁶ What is here exemplified is no more than this marvellous mystic phenomenon:

Spiritual beauty illumining human sight

Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's, mask

And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.¹⁷

On her eighty-fifth birthday (21 February 1963), the Mother gave Darshan in the evening at 6.15 from the new 'balcony' on the Terrace adjoining her apartments in the second floor of the Meditation House, the north-east section of the main Ashram building. A large number of disciples and admirers had gathered! in the street below, and they had their long-awaited Darshan of the Mother and her benedictions. For almost thirteen months there had been no Darshan, and hence this was truly an uncommon event. Fair and frail in appearance yet visibly divine, the Mother stood in her simple attire, and surveyed and blessed the mass of humanity looking up to her in love and adoration. There was the union of poise and slow rhythmic movement in her sustained semicircular sweep of compassionate comprehension, and everyone of the rapt and packed congregation thought the Mother had eyes for him or her alone, and everyone's face lighted up with the mystic glow of ineffable fulfilment. For everyone the Darshan was a milestone in the sadhana, though not perhaps the same milestone for everyone; but for everyone it was certainly a stage in the forward march, and for the Ashram aggregate also. The atmosphere of the Darshan. the singular divine rapport between the Mother and the children, the meeting of the burning brazier of Aspiration from below and the steady spray of Grace form above are all very well recaptured in Romen's poem written on 22 February 1963:

A throbless sea was in front of her dream.

A measureless crystal sky around her limbs.

She stood alone

Above the dumb flame-washed Hearts.

Nothing fluttered save

The one universal mouth of prayer

And the sun-wondrous answering Divine ray.

These linked the worlds:

Her world of God's creative heights

And our world of groping fate.

The lid of golden grace was ajar

Above.

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A human cup of silence

Receives the aureate nectar below.

The sky was fulfilled,

The vasts poured themselves out

In one miraculous presence, ...¹⁸

VII

A few days later, on 5 March 1963, during an interview, a sadhak reminded the Mother of what she had said on 30 August 1945, presumably in the context of the bursting of the Atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 5 and 9 August respectively: "I cannot promise you that the Divine's will is to preserve the present human civilisation." It had been demonstrated that human ingenuity and technological destructive potential were such that a single bomb could destroy, in the course of a split second, almost an entire city. Thus the situation was very grim indeed when the Mother spoke in 1945. During the ensuing eighteen years the world had only witnessed a frenzied proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the Big Powers seemed to be hell-bent on enacting sooner or later the catastrophe of Nuclear Doomsday. So the Mother was asked in 1963: "Can you now say that the Divine has decided to preserve the present human civilisation?" On hearing the question, the Mother went into concentration for a while with closed eyes, and came out with the words: "It will be settled in 1967. Do not change my words: it will be settled in 1967." A four or five years respite, then, to help humanity to awaken into sanity in time, opt for survival and progress, and invoke Divine Grace!

Thus, although the Mother wasn't accessible in the old way almost as a matter of routine, sadhaks, children, disciples and sincere inquirers were still permitted to see her, offer pranam, and even ask questions. Her doctors, of course, recommended restrictions from time to. time in the interest of her health, but she ignored them when she wanted. Once, en Surendra Nath Jauhar went to see her, he was previously warned not to try to engage the Mother in talk as she was unwell. Surendra Nath went in and placed his head on the Mother's lap. The Mother gently said when he raised his head, "You know, now-a-days I am not talking to visitors. But do you want to say anything?" Surendra Nath was overwhelmed and couldn't open his lips. He was content to receive her blessings, and he tame away with tears in his eyes. What a Mother! truly the Mother Divine!

Like Surendra Nath, others too came to the Mother when they had need of her, poured out their feelings through smiles and tears, and went away rejuvenated and fulfilled. The children of the Centre of Education, especially, were always in her thoughts. She had periodic reports from the Director, the Registrar and the teachers; and she could also see what was happening,

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and sometimes she had to send a message of deep-reaching admonition like the following on 15 January 1963:

It is forbidden to fight at school, to fight in class, to fight in the playground, to fight in the street, to fight at home (whether at your parents' house or in a boarding).

Always and everywhere children are forbidden to fight among themselves, for each time that one gives a blow to another, one gives it to one's own soul.¹⁹

Added to her many preoccupations, there was also the unending correspondence. With each child or sadhak the Mother had a special relationship, and sometimes the exchanges of letters marked the steps or vicissitudes in the sadhana. The Mother's replies, long or short, were pregnant with meaning and instinct with the nuances of universality. To sadhaks who knew French, the Mother preferred to write in French, and to others in English; and always it was the Mother Divine essaying Truth, Love, Power, Ananda and new Life.

VIII

Ever since the Playground classes were given up in December 1958, one of the sadhikas, Tara Jauhar, kept up a correspondence with the Mother on Sri Aurobindo's Thoughts and Aphorisms ²⁰ The Mother's commentaries on this book had begun on 12 September 1958 in her Friday classes as oral answers to questions submitted beforehand. Tara's correspondence covered aphorisms 13 to 68 during 1960-61 and 125 to 541 during 1969-70. The Mother's oral comments on numbers 69 to 124 were recorded by Satprem in his conversations with her during 1962-66.²¹ Like the other Words of the Mother series, these commentaries too embraced the vistas within and without, and also forged the harmony between them.

Sri Aurobindo's Thoughts and Aphorisms, written between 1910 and 1915, were never revised by him and were first published only in 1958. The book is a jewelled casket of insights and illuminations, often terse, often paradoxical, often scintillating, and as a rule capable of releasing a continuum of reasoned comment and bursts of revelation. The aphorisms are grouped under Jnana, Karma and Bhakti - the classical paths of Yoga - and hence the little book is a "Synthesis of Yoga" again, though with a difference; it is now like the scattering of the central Light of the Sun, with each ray of Thought illuminating a particular patch of ground, and brightening the whole background as well. Speaking about the aphorisms, the Mother was able to reveal whole arcs of her own occult and spiritual experiences. For example, while she was commenting on Aphorism 69 -

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Sin and virtue are a game of resistance we play with God in His efforts to draw us towards perfection. The sense of virtue helps us to cherish our sins in secret-

the Mother gave an account of her own vision or experience (of 3 February 1958 ²²) of the great divine Becoming. Likewise, when commenting on the next Aphorism -

Examine thyself without pity, then thou wilt be more charitable and pitiful to others -

the Mother said that this exhortation was good for everybody, especially those who thought highly of themselves; and she added disarmingly:

...this is an experience which I have been having for some time....

...I have an increasingly concrete vision of the role that the adverse forces play in the creation, of the almost absolute necessity for them.... It was the sudden vision of all the error, all the misunderstanding, all the ignorance and obscurity, and even worse, all the bad will in the terrestrial consciousness which felt responsible for the perpetuation of these adverse beings and forces and which offered them in a great aspiration - more than an aspiration, a kind of holocaust - so that the adverse forces might disappear and have no further reason to exist, so that they might no longer be there to point out everything that has to be changed.

It was for the Mother a "very intense experience", and took the form of a total offering of "all the faults I have committed" to the Supreme so that they might be wiped out, and the adverse forces might find their occupation gone! An exercise in self-correction was thus more important than censoriousness and the attempt to correct others:

As long as it is possible for a human consciousness to feel, act, think or be contrary to the great divine Becoming, it is impossible to blame anyone else for it; it is impossible to blame the adverse forces which are maintained in creation as the means of making you see and feel all the progress that has yet to be made.

It is no use thriving on a dichotomous division of world-existence into the Good and the Evil. One should boldly identify oneself with even the anti-divine, and then make an offering with a view to transforming it altogether in the mould of the Divine. The operation is difficult and even dangerous, but it may not be shirked. And so the Mother concludes:

Basically, this kind of will for purity, for good, in men - which expresses itself in the ordinary mentality as the need to be virtuous - is the great obstacle to true self-giving. This is the origin of Falsehood and even more the very source of hypocrisy - the refusal to accept to take upon oneself one's own share of the burden of difficulties. And in this aphorism Sri Aurobindo has gone straight to this point in a very simple way.

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Again, commenting on Aphorism 70 -

A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther -

the Mother said:

It [thought] is all right down here, on this plane, as long as one is the archer and hits only one point. But above it is not true - quite the contrary! All intelligence below is like that; it sees all kinds of things, and as it sees all kinds of things, it cannot choose in order to act....

It is only when one has a global, simultaneous perception of the whole in its oneness that one can possess the truth in its entirety.²³

IX

The Mother's comments and answers arising out of questions on Thoughts and Aphorisms were really sparks, sudden flashes and steady blazes inspired or provoked by Sri Aurobindo's seminal little book. The whole sequence is fascinating as well as instructive since one can see the identity of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's consciousness, and one can also appreciate their different ways of conveying the same insights and illuminations. But since the commentaries are spread over four periods clearly distinguishable according to date, character and form, there is bound to be a slight shift in the angle of vision and a corresponding difference in the tone of the utterance. Even so, what was in the first instance contextually intended for one person at a particular time, could come with the force of a revelation to others also because it was the Mother speaking with her cosmic consciousness. For example, Huta had collaborated with the Mother on Meditations on Savitri, and the collaboration was to continue for some years; but whenever the disciple had moments of doubt, perplexity or depression, she wrote to the Mother, and the answers, pertinent no doubt to Huta's problem or query, came also winged with universal relevance:

Do not indulge in your moodiness, it makes it much worse.

Do you think, you really think you are the only one upon earth to feel the falsehood and to suffer by it?²⁴

In answer to questions about Sri Aurobindo, the Mother wrote:

Sri Aurobindo is a permanent Avatar of the Lord - (as Krishna is). ...

Sri Aurobindo... has a permanent home in the subtle physical - (the region closest to the earth physical) where all those who wish to see Him can go and see Him.²⁵

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Another question from Huta elicited from the Mother the disarming answer:

You ask at what time I pray, in order to join in the prayer. But you see, I have not a time for prayer or meditation. This body lives constantly night and day, even when apparently it is busy with something else, in an invocation to the Supreme Lord, asking Him to manifest His supreme Truth in this world of falsehood, and His supreme Love in this world of disharmony. So at any time when you feel like praying, you can do so and your prayer is sure to join mine.²⁶

On 27 May 1963, the Mother wrote that if she did what Huta's ego wanted, she would be "a traitor to your soul and to my promise to deliver you from your ego".²⁷ Again, on 11 July, the Mother vouchsafed abhaya to her child:

With my name send the fear away. Fear is the worst thing. A child of mine must never fear.

Writing on 23 July, the Mother deprecated all impatience, and especially the intolerant desire to give up one's body:

...you speak of death as Nothingness; but this is quite untrue, it is a big falsehood.... To die does not solve the problem or overcome the difficulty.²⁸

"This world," the Mother told Huta, "cannot be changed all at a sudden by the swift stroke of a fairy's magic wand," and giving up one's body in order to escape its problems would be merely "a useless and harmful action". The proper thing to do would be to give up "the small, silly and selfish ego" - as one might say, commit not body-cide but ego-cide. For ill-health, the Mother's prescription was simple as always. "Do not forget to try to bring down the divine peace," wrote the Mother. "Because no illness can resist the Peace of the Lord, and even to remember and to try will give you some relief." Later, in December when Huta felt apparently overwhelmed by a sense of fatality induced by horoscopes and astrology, the Mother wrote with persuasive force:

Won't you let the Lord be stronger than the horoscope? For the supreme Lord there is no horoscope which is absolute. Have faith in the Lord's mercy and all can and will change.²⁹

It was perhaps quite natural that some of the sadhaks and disciples should exercise their minds and sensibilities with the intriguing question: whether the supramental manifestation of 29 February 1956 had in any way hastened the possibility of the transmutation of the present human body into the supramental divine body. Sri Aurobindo himself had said in a letter of 6 December 1949 that such a transformation could only be "the result

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of a distant evolution".³⁰ Was the position any different after 29 February 1956? The Mother's own view in 1963 was that, while the transmutation of the human body into the divine was perceptible in the subtle physical, it had not become concrete in the outer physical. There were thus two possibilities; either the gradual transmutation of the present human into the supramental divine body, or the outright new creation of the supramental body. In her conversation of 6 March with a disciple, the Mother was of the view that both might happen, for one did not exclude the other.³¹

X

The Mother's New Year message for 1964 was the peremptory question "Are you ready?" Presently, in a letter to a disciple, she clarified, "The question means: 'Are you ready for the Hour of God?' "³² Perhaps the question also had a link with her last message to Huta in the previous year:

O Lord,

with full faith, love and surrender

we are ready for Thy victory.

"Unhappy is the man or the nation," Sri Aurobindo had said, "which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call." Hence the imperative urgency of the Mother's question: Are you ready? The supramental Light, Force and Consciousness were now abroad, they were like a flood of opportunity, and their tides were eager to carry one onwards to the far goals of realisation, and one needed to heed Sri Aurobindo's warning:

But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.³³

The Mother wasn't going to waste words: there would be no elaborate exhortation, no admonitions, no revelations. This was a time for yogic action Are you ready? The mobilised strength, the wide-awake consciousness and the poise of readiness were the need of the hour.

On 21 February, the Mother's eighty-sixth birthday, and on 29 February, the second leap-year anniversary of the supramental manifestation, there was Terrace Darshan, and on both days nearly 4000 received the Mother's blessings. The Golden Day was a time of fulfilment for the sadhaks, children and visitors, and in the forenoon about 3000 gathered for meditation before Sri Aurobindo's Samadhi and participated in the silence and Grace of the immaculate hour.

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A month later, on 29 March, the fiftieth anniversary of the Mother's first meeting with Sri Aurobindo was celebrated in the Ashram, ending with a special Terrace Darshan in the evening. A few days earlier, on 25 March, the Mother had recalled one of her very recent experiences:

Two or three nights ago... there was this descent of Force, a descent of this Truth-Power with a special intensity.... Well, that is what is happening - happening everywhere, all the time.³⁴

But of course our mentalised notions of what is new, progressive and futurist do not exactly square with the developing realities. One has to learn to look at things with more than a conventional mind; one has to learn to pierce the appearance and touch the deeper truth of things. For example, there was the Hippie revolution in America and elsewhere. It was easy to dismiss it all as the explosion of juvenile nonconformity, as no more than excrescent exhibitionism. But the Mother read the phenomenon differently, and frankly expressed her views to a disciple on 7 October:

In America... the entire youth seems to have been taken up with a sort of curious brain-wave which would be disquieting for reasonable people, but which is certainly an indication that an unusual force is at work. It is the breaking up of all habits and all rules - it is good. For the moment, it is rather "strange", but it is necessary.³⁵

A stage was reached when mere conformity had deadened into a species of unconsciousness; forms had become the final arbiters; 'dead wood' had taken the place of 'life'; and lip-love rattled like skeletons' bones, words, words, words added up to abracadabra, and the sap and soul were nowhere. In such a situation, even a smashing up of the old lifeless moulds might prove to be the means of reopening the links with the great reservoir of life, light and consciousness. Mud and thorns and torn branches were doubtless mixed up in the river in spate, but it was life-giving water all the same - not the old dead desert sand of inconscience.

XI

During March-April 1964, among the visitors to the Ashram and the Centre of Education were Dr. D.S. Kothari, Chairman of the University Grants Commission, and a Visiting Committee consisting of A.B. Wadia, M.P., K.L. Joshi, R.K. Chhabra, C.P. Ramaswami Iyre and T.S. Sadasivam.³⁶ They apprised themselves of the creatively experimental features of the Centre of Education, and they had interviews with the Mother. They could see that the Ashram and the Centre of Education were in effect a movement towards the realisation of a new society, and a new education equal to the demands of that society of the future.

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When the sad news came on 27 May that India's Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had passed away, the Mother spontaneously issued this message:

Nehru leaves his body but his soul is one with the Soul of India that lives for Eternity.³⁷

Nehru had paid his third and last visit to the Ashram on 13 June 1953 accompanied by Kamaraj and C. Subramaniam; he saw the Mother too and spent some time in the Sports Ground in a mood of relaxation During his visits Nehru had found the Centre of Education an imaginative pilot project in education, and had expressed the wish and hope that the Government of India should support the project. The community of sadhaks and children in the Ashram, the varied services and industrial establishments, and the Centre of Education always struck Nehru as symbolic of the march of India towards the beckoning horizons of the future. And now, after his dedicated labours in the service of the nation spread over several decades, Nehru was with the ages; he was "one with the Soul of India that lives for Eternity".

In the middle of June, Dr. Kishor Gandhi, received an inspiration to form an association of the Higher Course students of the Centre of Education with the purpose of "giving an effective response to the Mother's repeated calls for collaboration with the working of the newly emergent forces released in the earth-atmosphere as a result of the manifestation of the supramental Truth in February 1956". The Mother's message for its inaugural session, held on 12 July, summed up the whole aim of The New Age Association:

Never believe that you know.

Always try to know better.

Under Dr. Gandhi's directorship, the movement planned to hold periodical seminars and conferences in order to promote "an intensive study of all problems of human thought and life in the light of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's vision of the New Age", facilitating, in the Mother's words, "a free talk where each one is able to express what he thinks or feels.³⁸

The first of the seminars was held on 9 August 1964, and the theme was - What is the best way of surmounting the ordinary mental activity? If the whole objective of the Yoga was to exceed the mental and penetrate the overhead levels of consciousness - ultimately even the supramental - the central problem, in education and sadhana alike, was to surmount the ordinary mental activity. Meditation was a help, but meditation posed difficulties of its own. It was recalled that, in 1935, when a sadhak had written that he was unable to meditate in the usual way and preferred to imagine himself "lying eternally on the Mother's lap," Sri Aurobindo had answered briefly: "That is the best possible kind of meditation."

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In other words, bhakti and surrender were easier and surer than dialectics and jñāna. And the Mother's own answer to the question posed in the seminar was, quite succinctly, "Keep silent!"

Another seminar was held on 22 November, and the subject given by the Mother was How to be steady and sincere in our aspiration for the Divine Life?³⁹ Again, the Mother cut the Gordian knot with her exhortation: "Consider the Divine Life as the most important thing to obtain." Or, as she had written to Huta in answer to a similar question:

To want it

and to want

only that ⁴⁰

It was so simple as that, for the ripeness, the readiness is all.

If the first seminar of the New Age Association was held on 9 August, the first World Conference of Sri Aurobindo Society met from 10 to 14 August 1964. The Mother's message - "The future of the earth depends on a change of consciousness" - set the tone for the deliberations of the Conference which was attended by about 400 delegates. A two-day seminar was held too, and four questions were posed, to which the Mother gave her own answers:

(1) How can humanity become one?

By becoming conscious of its origin.

(2) What is the way of making the consciousness of human unity grow in man?

Spiritual education... which gives more importance to the growth of the spirit than to any religious or moral teaching or to the material so-called knowledge.

(3) What is a change of consciousness?

...a new birth, a birth into a higher sphere of existence.

(4) How can a change of consciousness change the life upon earth?

[It] will make possible the manifestation upon earth of a higher Force, a

purer Light, a more total Truth.⁴¹

On 15 August, Sri Aurobindo's ninety-second birthday, the Government of India released a memorial stamp, and the first cancellation was made by the Mother in her rooms in the Ashram; and on that occasion, she gave the strident message: "He [Sri Aurobindo] has come to bid the earth to prepare for its luminous future." She gave Terrace Darshan in the evening, and a great Peace descended upon the concourse below. She gave another Darshan on 24 November, the Siddhi Day, and a week later, the 21st anniversary of the Ashram School was celebrated on 1st, 2nd and 3rd December. The presentation of "The Hour of God" on the first day in recitation, music and dance was a memorable event. Its inspired text had been taped as the Mother read it with feeling and resounding clarity,

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and was played at the time of the presentation. The accompanying music was based on a theme suggested by the Mother herself, and the piece was composed and orchestrated by Sunil Kumar Bhattacharya in a manner worthy of the theme and the occasion. "Are you ready?" the Mother had asked at the beginning of the year. The ripeness, the readiness was all - the Hour of God was the Hour of the Unexpected and, indeed, it was no time for fear, for sordid calculation, for worldly prudence:

But being pure cast aside all fear; for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest, a treading of the winepress of the wrath of God; but he who can stand up in it on the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand; even though he fall, he shall rise again; even though he seem to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return.⁴²

All the infinite energy and plenitude of purpose and strident articulation of "The Hour of God" came out in the music and the dance, and the audience felt thrilled and transfigured to the roots of their being. The whole meaning and message of Sri Aurobindo's Order of the Day for the Battle of the Future seemed to leap into life and find their way to the heart of the rapt assembly. Then, three weeks later, the Mother gave in her Christmas message the clue to the conquest of peace and unity:

If you want peace upon earth, first establish peace in your heart.

If you want union in the world, first unify the different parts of your being.⁴³

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