On The Mother

CHAPTER 38

Readings and Discourses

I

For the New Year (1951), the Mother's message took the form of a simple and solemn affirmation of adhesion to the work which Sri Aurobindo had looked upon as his mission on the earth:

Lord, we are upon earth to accomplish Thy work of transformation. It is our sole will, our sole preoccupation. Grant that it may be also our sole occupation and that all our actions may help us towards this single goal.

The whole thrust was towards Transformation, not evasion, elimination or destruction. From imperfection to Perfection, from darkness to Light, from the human to the Divine!

The months immediately following the Master's passing were a period of anxiety for some well-wishers of the Ashram. Even some of those closely associated with the Ashram were apt to ask in bewilderment: "What will happen to us? What will happen to the Ashram?" Notwithstanding the Mother's radiant assurances and affirmations, there was some lingering doubt in their minds about the future of the Ashram.

But the fears were, after all, to prove ill-founded. The Mother herself had always poised herself, not on fear, doubt or anxiety, but courage and faith and self-confidence. Week after week, her talks to the children in the Playground breathed a new buoyancy, a disarming omniscience as well as an implied irresistible puissance. She warned them against all dispersal of effort and pleaded for concentrated work and complete rejection of depression:

...if you slip into depression, you cut every source of energy - from above, from below, from everywhere. That is the best way of falling into inertia....

Depression is always the sign of an acute egoism.¹

Like depression, anxiety was another debilitating illness that could cause unseemly distortions in one's work: "What deforms and falsifies is the anxiety for the consequences." One should engage in a course of action because it had to be done, and what might happen while doing the action or afterwards was simply not one's concern!

II

And so the Mother smiled, and told stories, and laughed, and took the children - as if in her arms or on her shoulders - up the slopes of ascent.

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But if progress was an ascent, perfection was a harmony, an equilibrium. And people young or old should cultivate moral generosity: in other words, learn to be modest and recognise worth and superiority in others. In all education, of course, the truth that was to be driven home was that every child had in the psychic spark in him, the Divine Presence itself. As she said on 15 January 1951:

If you organise everything - your feelings, your thoughts, your impulses, etc. - around the psychic centre which is the inner light, you will see that all inner disorder will change into a luminous order.²

She read out her essay on "The Science of Living", and elaborated some of the points only succinctly stated there. Or she read the piece on "Dreams" from Words of Long Ago or one of the Conversations of 1929, and there were fresh elucidations, qualifications or amplifications. Always her warning was against words, words, words, although she too had unavoidably to use language. The trouble with words was that they deceptively sounded too categorical. Coming from the outer physical or mental experience, words carried an element of native falsity. But the Mother did not think with words, as most people did; in fact, she did not 'think' at all. From the home of Truth within there were radiations, vibrations, emanations - and with her these took the shape of words. But it needed a power of concentration on the part of the listeners to understand, really to understand, what she wished to convey.

It was being oft repeated, almost like a catchword, that "all Life was Yoga". But what did it mean? What did an intense "aspiration for the Divine" mean? Although her audience consisted in the main of young school-children, the Mother nevertheless relied on their psychic centre to record her meaning, and she had faith in their innate feeling for adventure. The words tumbled from the Mother's mouth as if effortlessly, freely, fully, like leaping water from a high mountain spring. If there were qualifications, these too had a purpose, for they only aimed at the needed amplitude of statement, at the intended complexity of precision. For an example:

The first movement of aspiration is this: you have a kind of vague sensation that behind the universe there is something which is worth knowing, which is probably (for you do not yet know it) the only thing worth living for, which can connect you with the Truth; something on which the universe depends but which does not depend upon the universe, something which still escapes your comprehension but which seems to you to be behind all things.... I have said here much more than the majority of people feel about the thing, but this is the beginning of the first aspiration - to know that, not to live in this perpetual falsehood where things are so perverted and artificial, this would be something pleasant; to find something that is worth living for.³

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There is no doubt that some of the native energy - a good deal of the original force perhaps - is lost even in what appears to be so luminous a discourse. The Mother's was the silent speech of the soul, which to a certain extent was necessarily distorted by formal language. She spoke in lively immaculate French, and whether her discourses were taken down in shorthand or (from 1953 onwards) tape-recorded, again something was lost - the timbre of the voice, the rhythmic modulations, the charged spiritual intensities. Finally, when the French was translated into English, there was a further dilution or devaluation. Thus passages like the above in an English rendering (however carefully done) are, so to say, twice removed from the reality of the original inspiration. What is therefore extraordinary is that so much relevance and so much force and so much significance are still retained, and the Mother does really seem to speak to us so intimately and so purposively.

The sheer power of the language apart and the inspiration and urgency behind it, what made the discourses memorable, what made them a form of alchemic action even more than streams of thought-laden cadenced speech, was the personality of the Mother, her heart of compassion, her mother-might and her mind of Light. Like a neutron bombarding a uranium atom and starting the nuclear chain-reaction, the Mother's words, charged as they were with Love and Light and Truth and Ananda, penetrated to the psychic centre, released the soul and started it on its adventure of consciousness. The outside world was ignorant of all this, and even the participants in the drama hardly knew what was obscurely but definitively happening to them. But the Ashram, after all, was a spiritual power-house, and the School a reactor for generating dynamic change; and although the pessimists hemmed and hawed, the Mother herself was determinedly engineering the transformation of the human personality from the egoistic to the Divine.

The Mother always thought that an educational institution was a power-house, and that teaching was a vocation. On 10 February 1951, arising out of one of the 1929 Conversations, the discussion turned to education, and the Mother spoke in memorable accents:

Education is a sacerdocy, teaching is a sacerdocy, and to be at the head of a State is a sacerdocy. Then, if the person who fulfils this role aspires to fulfill it in the highest and the most true way, the general condition of the world can become much better.... That was my very first basis in forming the Ashram: that the work done here be an offering to the Divine.

Instead of letting oneself go in the stream of one's nature, of one's mood, one must constantly keep in mind this kind of feeling that one is a representative of the Supreme Knowledge, the Supreme Truth, the Supreme Law, and that one must apply it in the most honest, the most sincere way one can....⁴

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Education was neither a trade nor a profession with its own expertise; it was a sacerdocy, a spiritual vocation!

III

Week after week the talks continued; not a niche in the Temple of Knowledge was left unexplored, and many an ambiguity in mental construction was cleansed of its contradictions, and many a difficulty in the theory and practice of Integral Yoga was squarely faced and solved. And it was always instruction without tears, instruction that went home. Did it matter that it was a mixed audience, made up of children young and not so young, sadhaks seasoned and not so seasoned, even visitors committed or not yet quite committed to the Aurobindonian way of life? The truth of the matter was that it was a congregation of children of the Mother ready to lap up the milk of divine knowledge. The outer physical form, the vitalistic range of impulses, the store of life's experience, the cycle of emotive responses, the temper and tone of the mind, these indeed differed from person to person; but there was a psychic nucleus in one and all, there was the ambience of the Spirit holding the congregation together, and when the Mother spoke, it was this etheric atmosphere, it was the collectivity of the hundreds of individually awakening or awakened soul-atoms that received the charge of her words, the mantric rhythms of her speech, the marvellous emanations from her eyes. Evening after evening, this bombardment of souls by the soul continued, and there was in the result a widening, deepening and heightening of the consciousness of the congregation as well as of its individual members. Where was the academic testing technique that could register the success attained from time to time? On the other hand, of the eager-eyed children who hearkened to the Mother's words and basked in her golden Presence evening after evening, it might indeed be said:

A few shall see what none yet understands;

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.⁵

What was so wonderful about the Mother as a teacher, as a counselor, was that she had no use for cant and hypocrisy in everyday life, and especially in spiritual life, or for the kind of poses, professions and protestations that, almost as a general rule, have often passed for Yoga practice. It was easy to lose oneself in metaphors and declare that one opted for the baby-cat's attitude (the way of passive trust) in preference to the baby-monkey's (the way of personal effort)! But for a human being who wasn't quite a cat, was that attitude of complete surrender all that easy? The elements that went to make a man were so many, and it was not

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possible for all of them suddenly to achieve utter passivity in the baby-cat fashion, and hence sustained personal effort would be always necessary "till the moment of identification", till the difference between the disciple and the Divine could be finally annulled.⁶ But mere metaphor-mongering or wishful-thinking was not the key to progress or success in spiritual life.

Meditation, again, was a term of promiscuous misuse. On what basis was meditation to be quantified, and judged? There were different kinds of meditation, and a blanket description was hardly very helpful. In the late nineteen-twenties, the Mother used to give meditations to the sadhaks in the mornings, and during the thirties either in the morning or in the evening and sometimes both morning and evening. In the late forties and the fifties, the Mother gave concentrations in the Playground to children and sadhaks alike. What was the difference? Which was better? Was the evening concentration in the Playground a mere formal epilogue to the sports and athletics and the march past? The kingdoms of the little mind were often rocked by such trivial issues and futile controversies. The Mother herself had at last to explain the difference between the old meditation and the new concentration in her talk on 12 February 1951:

...when we had a morning or evening meditation, my work was to unify the consciousness of everyone and lift it as high as I could towards the Divine. Those who were able to feel the movement followed it. This was ordinary meditation with an aspiration and ascent towards the Divine. Here, at the Playground, the work is to unify all who are here, make them open and bring down the divine force into them. It is the opposite movement and that is why this concentration cannot replace the other, even as the other cannot replace this one.⁷

In the meditation, the -ascent towards the Divine was, you might say, commensurate with the individual sadhak's strength of aspiration; in the Playground concentration, on the other hand, the condition needed was a passive expectancy, a readiness for reception. Returning to the theme a few days later, the Mother said:

In the common meditation... it was a movement of ascent, of aspiration — whereas what we do here, in concentration, is a movement of descent. Instead of an aspiration which rises up, what is required is a receptivity which opens so that the Force may enter into you.... What is asked here is a receptive offering, not of the body or the mind or the vital, of a piece of your being, but of your entire being. No other thing is asked of you, only to open yourself, the rest of the work I undertake.⁸

Many years later, when in March 1964 the Mother was asked, "Now that you are no longer physically present at the Playground concentrations, what happens?" she answered: "I hope people have made some progress and do not need the physical presence to feel the Help and the Force." ⁹

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IV

In one of her talks, the Mother drew a tantalising comparison between the whole truth about the Past and the kind of recital that written History usually gave. If one cultivated the talent to enter the occult domain of the physical mind, one could find entry into its inner countries and read the entire past as from a printed book:

In the mental world... there is a domain of the physical mind which is related to physical things and keeps the memory of physical happenings upon earth... if you want to know something and if you are conscious, you look, and you see something like... a shining point... and you have only to concentrate there and... there is a sort of an unrolling of something like extremely subtle manuscripts, but if your concentration is sufficiently strong, you begin to read as though from a book. And you have the whole story in all its details.... But I must tell you that what you find is never what has been reported in history - histories are always planned out.¹⁰

Again, as a cure for defeatism, as an answer to pessimism, the Mother said two days later that there were within oneself the confronting opponents - Despair and Hope, Darkness and Light - and it was up to people to "use the one to realise the other". Then came the grand generalisation:

If the world was not essentially the opposite of what it has become, there would be no hope... it is because the world is very bad, very dark, very ugly, very unconscious, full of misery and suffering, that it can become the supreme Beauty, the supreme Light, the supreme Consciousness and supreme Felicity.¹¹

Another evening, the talk was about books, imaginative literature, and especially about the sort of books that evoked the ugly or terrible side of life; and the Mother pertinently asked:

Don't you think there are enough ugly things in the world without one's giving a picture of them in books?... life is so ugly, so full of mean, miserable, even at times repulsive things, what is the use of imagining yet worse things than are already there?... People who take pleasure in writing ugly things show a great poverty of mind.... It is infinitely more difficult to tell a story beautiful from beginning to end than to write a story ending with a sensational event or a catastrophe.

One of the reasons people became book-addicts - to fiction, for example - was the need for so-called relaxation. Many of those who worked in office, laboratory or factory at a high level of efficiency tried to "relax" when they came home or sought refuge in a club. Stories of violence, crime, detection, sex or suspense were supposed to help people to "relax", even like other predictable ways like drinking and gambling.

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But the Mother was definitely against this self-invited descent into the lower malebolges of perverted consciousness:

Everything comes from this "need" of relaxation; and what does that mean for most men? It means, always, coming down to a lower level. They do not know that for a true relaxation one must rise one degree higher, one must rise above oneself. If one goes down, it adds to one's fatigue and brings a stupefaction. Besides, each time one comes down, one increases the load of the subconscient... which is like fetters on the feet.¹²

V

For a number of weeks, from 3 February to 17 April 1951, the base (or starting-point) of the Mother's Playground talks was provided by a passage (or a sentence or two) taken from the 1929 Conversations, and the discussion might often take sudden turns and vast sweeps, make forays into the unknown, mingle reminiscence with elucidation, and cumulatively throw illumination over an infinite expanse. The discussion on 26 February, for example, started on the wisdom of reading ordinary books, and when somebody said that such books gave rest to the mind but otherwise had no effect on him, the Mother said that the subconscient recorded everything, and one could not escape the consequences of one's actions - even if it were only the reading of an ordinary book. On the contrary, if one were already in conscious union with the Divine, one could read anything, observe anything, find joy in anything, but that state of consciousness required long years of discipline "and it is a realisation which is not within everybody's reach". Then came the Mother's castigation of the literature of violence, ugliness and despair, to which reference has been made already. Then the discussion took another turn, and centred round the prevalence of diverse views and the need for agreement. Yes, indeed, there were many conflicting views, but agreement was the only way to sanity. But how was the right agreement to be forged? The Mother's view was that one's very consciousness had to change:

There is a state of consciousness which may be called "gnostic", in which you are able to see at the same time all the theories, all the beliefs, all the ideas men have expressed in their highest consciousness... and in that state, not only do you put each thing in its place, but everything appears to you marvellously true and quite indispensable in order to be able to understand anything at all about anything whatsoever.

It was only at the gnostic level that one could grasp knowledge in its totality, variety and integrality. This was no mere surmise or theoretical speculation, for the Mother had had this experience herself, and could therefore hold out the possibility of such knowledge to others as well:

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I am telling you this, this evening, because what is done, what has been realised by one can be realised by others.... You may consider it still very far off, but you can say, "Yes, the gnostic life is certain, because it has begun to be realised."¹³

On 5 December 1950, the Mind of Light had invaded and settled in her. Now, less than three months after Sri Aurobindo's passing, she was demonstrating in her own person the possibility of evolving towards the supramental Truth-Consciousness and the gnostic life. For the world too there is the charter: "Yes, the gnostic life is certain, because it has begun to be realised."

VI

By mid-April 1951, the readings from the Conversations of 1929 had been concluded, and the talks now revolved round passages chosen from Sri Aurobindo's writings like On Yoga, "The Divine Superman" and The Mother, or from her own works.¹⁴ On 19 April, the starting-point of the discussion was Sri Aurobindo's remark in one of his letters that his Yoga could be pursued successfully only by those who were prepared "to abolish their little human ego and its demands in order to find themselves in the Divine". The Yoga was not to be done in a spirit of levity or laxity, but in a condition of constant and intense aspiration and tapasya. It really meant a determination radically to change one's whole nature, inject even the cells of one's body with a new awareness and an infallible certitude. While the Master's words were categorical, the Mother's comments came with an infectious friendliness and fervour of encouragement:

This is not to discourage you, but to warn you.... Now, I may tell you that if you do it sincerely, with application and care, it is extremely interesting. Even those whose life is quite monotonous... even those people, if they begin to do this little work upon themselves, of control, of elimination, that is to say, if each element which comes with its ignorance, its unconsciousness, its egoism, is put before the will to change and one remains awake, compares, observes, studies and slowly acts, that becomes infinitely interesting, one makes marvellous and quite unexpected discoveries. One finds in oneself lots of small hidden folds, little things one had not seen at the beginning; one undertakes a sort of inner chase, goes hunting into small dark corners and tells oneself: "What, I was like that! this was there in me, I am harbouring this little thing!" - sometimes so sordid, so mean, so nasty. And once it has been discovered, how wonderful! one puts the light upon it and it disappears.... And it is extremely interesting. And to the extent one discovers this within oneself and says sincerely, "It must change", one finds that one acquires a sort of inner clear-sightedness.... Then, with the

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indulgence of knowledge, one smiles. One no longer judges severely, one offers the difficulty in oneself or in others, whatever may be its centre of manifestation, to the divine Consciousness, asking for its transformation.¹⁵

In this segment of her discourse, the Mother makes Yoga a truly fascinating adventure - a sort of sleuthing for hidden laggards and miscreants, locating them in their deceptive hideouts, confronting them, apprehending and correcting and transforming them, - or, if all else fails, seizing and offering them to the Lord for the infallible divine alchemy. When a transcript of this talk was shown to her fifteen years later, the Mother was to add in the light of her latter-day "yoga of the body":

...there is only one way, always the same: to offer. ...

...one feels that there is now only one thing which decides, the Supreme Will. There is no longer any support - any support, from the support of habit to the support of knowledge and of will, all the supports have vanished - there is only the Supreme.¹⁶

VII

Evening after evening, then, with the children, their eyes lighted up with love, gathered around her, and the sadhaks in a semi-trance of sustained attention, the Mother's talks went on, and the centre or the point of take-off could be anywhere, but the ramifications were beyond reckoning. On 23 April, for example, there was a reference to the role of adverse forces. In the total scheme, said the Mother, they were there only to test one's sincerity:

...you see, it is a tempering, it is the ordeal of fire, only that which can stand it remains absolutely pure; when everything has burnt down, there remains only the little ingot of pure gold... when something extremely unpleasant happens to you, you may tell yourself, "Well, this proves I am worth the trouble of being given this difficulty, this proves there is something in me which can resist this difficulty", and you will notice that instead of tormenting yourself, you rejoice....¹⁷

A few days later, arising out of a discussion on a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Mother, there is a sudden swerve in the talk and one is taken to the heart of Karmayoga:

If you want to do something well, whatever it may be, any kind of work, the least thing, play a game, write a book, do painting or music or run a race, anything at all, if you want to do it well, you must become what you are doing and not remain a small person looking at himself doing it; for if one looks at oneself acting, one is... one is still in complicity with the ego....

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Take someone who is writing a book, for instance. If he looks at himself writing the book, you can't imagine how dull the book will become; it smells immediately of the small human personality which is there and it loses all its value. When a painter... becomes the thing he wants to express, if the becomes the brushes, the painting, the canvas, the subject, the image, the colours, the value, the whole thing, and is entirely inside it and lives if, he'll make something magnificent.¹⁸

Again, on 3 May, the question is whether Yoga should necessarily be done in seclusion or whether it could be done as well even right in the market-place as it were. The Mother faces the issue without mincing matters:

It is the inner attitude which must be totally changed.... Now, it is true that if one does yoga in the world and in worldly circumstances, it is more difficult, but it is also more complete. Because, every minute one must face problems which do not present themselves to someone who has left everything and gone into solitude... it is much more difficult, but we are not here to do easy things - easy things we leave to those who do not think of transformation.¹⁹

Again, would it be possible to achieve individual mastery, leaving the environment, the collectivity, wholly unaffected - leaving them to stew in their own juice? "This does not seem possible to me," says the Mother; a comparative transformation, yes, but not a total transformation! Through complete inner detachment, or the annulment of the ego, a supramental consciousness may be won, which will then act upon the world, the collectivity and their undesirable vibrations so as to change and transform them, at least to some extent. Certainly, it will be a difficult undertaking; "but I repeat that we are not here to do easy things, we are here to do difficult ones".²⁰

VIII

Always the same watchword: invade the Invisible, dare the impossible, accomplish the unbelievable! The vitalistic preoccupation with so-called needs, desires, necessities should be exceeded by sovereign self-discipline: I will do without this, and this, and this; "it is a question of training, - educating oneself".²¹ With such self-discipline, one learns to avoid all surplusage, one sheds all cumbersome baggage, and one feels seraphically, electrically, free!

Life means for the most part action, but unless the action is rightly motivated, one must look for defeat in the end. But when is action rightly motivated? A purely mental approach can raise a false glittering edifice,

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which suddenly crumbles later on. An emotional approach is apt to land one in self-deception. The proper stance is the silent but spiritual poise that connotes immeasurable strength. While the mental approach is artificially argumentative and the vitalistic is purblindly impulsive and insistent, the stance of the spirit is unassertive, unambiguous and liberating. Try as one may, one cannot easily or wholly silence the intimations of this inner being, for they are the language of the hidden immaculate sublime which is Grace abounding, Grace abiding and Grace omnipotent:

In every circumstance, there is in the depth of every being, just this little... indication of the divine Grace, and sometimes to obey it requires a tremendous effort, for all the rest of the being opposes it violently, one part with the conviction that what it thinks is true, another with all the power, the strength of its desire.

One must trust in the Grace, even if what has happened is - as mentally construed or vitalistically experienced - a defeat, a humiliation, a disaster:

...one judges the divine Will by the results! all that succeeds has been willed by the Divine; all that doesn't, well, He has not willed it! This is yet again one of those stupidities big as a mountain.

But the best check on one's actions, of course, is always to ask oneself: "Would I do this before Mother... without something holding me back?" For one who is sincere, really sincere, this is an infallible test, and will "stop many people on the verge of folly".

All upsets in life, all miscalculations, all frustrations owe their origin to one's misconceived reliance on supports other than the Divine. Other powers hold promises to the ear only to break them to the heart. Hence "As Thou wiliest!" is the only right attitude. The Divine is indeed around all the time, and within too always; and hence to look for guidance and solace elsewhere is to invite false hopes and tragic disappointments. The Mother's advice is thus categorical:

Never seek a support elsewhere than in the Divine. Never seek satisfaction elsewhere than in the Divine.... All your needs can be satisfied only by the Divine. All your weaknesses can be borne and healed only by the Divine. He alone is capable of giving you what you need in everything, always, and if you try to find any satisfaction or support or help or joy... in anyone else, you will always fall on your nose one day, and that always hurts....²²

There is an occult hierarchy of powers corresponding to the hierarchy of the invisible worlds, and one should beware of false loyalties. One should therefore be careful to rely on the Divine alone, on the Divine Shakti, - not on the false or flawed lower manifestations. One should also refrain from using terms like individual, universal and transcendent as though they are mechanical formulas:

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We speak as though things had unfolded in time... but it is not quite like that!... if you enter into a certain state of consciousness, you can at any moment be in contact with the transcendent Shakti, and you can also, with another movement, be in contact with the universal Shakti, and be in contact with the individual Shakti, and all this simultaneously - that does not unfold itself in time, it is we who move in time as we speak, otherwise we cannot express ourselves.²³

The Powers described in Sri Aurobindo's The Mother - Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati - are in their original manifestation "quite close to the Supermind", though a series of descents in the lines of consciousness might lead, not only to the Overmind, but to the still lower and lower obscurations - "diminished, deformed, dwarfed, brought within the range of human consciousness", now almost a denial of the original beings!²⁴ While reading and discussing some of the inspired passages in Sri Aurobindo's The Mother on the four Powers and Personalities, new insights are revealed, new illuminations occur. Mahalakshmi, for example, does not come "where love and beauty are not or are reluctant to be born", for "all that is ugly and mean and base, all that is poor and sordid and squalid, all that is brutal and coarse repels her advent". But it is not a question of mere external opulence, luxury and splendour, for these are irrelevant. What really matters is the generosity of the heart:

An extremely rich man may be terribly poor from Mahalakshmi's point of view. And a very poor man may be very rich if his heart is generous....

A poor man is a man having no qualities, no force, no strength, no generosity. He is also a miserable, unhappy man.... It is those who are doubled up on themselves and who always want to draw things towards themselves, who see things and the world only through themselves - it is these who are unhappy. But when one gives oneself generously, without reckoning, one is never unhappy, never. It is he who wants to take that is unhappy; he who gives himself is never so.²⁵

As for Mahasaraswati, the last in the order of manifestation, "She likes young people, children, things in the making, which have a long way before them to be transformed and perfected."²⁶

IX

Even thus did the talks to the children - and the sadhaks - continue in an unpremeditated yet meaningful sequence that sent out creepers of suggestion comprehending the entire territory of human thought, feeling and behaviour. There was no knowing when one would be overwhelmed by a sudden cloudburst of revelation or when the Mother's heart of compassion and love would throw open apocalyptic vistas of supramental

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knowledge. The place, the time, the dramatis personae - the Mother, the children, the invisible presence of the Master - attained from time to time a sudden criticality of integral understanding, and the peace descended with its concomitants of grace and powers. It was education singularly free from the rusts and smuts that have battened upon it in the general run of our academies. It was the very quintessence of yogic education. For all their apparent casualness, their mingling of citations from old writings with sallies of fascinating anecdotage, their tone of ineluctable intimacy, the Playground conversations were certainly much more than routine school classes or mere exercises in relaxation after the strenuous academic sessions and the even more strenuous games and athletics. With the passage of time, the talks began to assume a role of their own, and the currents generated by them overflowed the Playground and diffused themselves in the wider spaces of the Ashram and the world. And what was the result? One answer would be Education, in the best sense of the term; and another answer would be Yoga, not in any narrow sense but in the sense of a push towards perfection - Yogic Education, in short. But of course the children - and even the sadhaks - hardly knew what was happening to them. Ah, they were with the Mother, listening to the Mother; they were the recipients of her measureless love and motherly concern; they were the beneficiaries of her knowledge and wisdom and occult love. And for the rest, - they didn't perhaps care, and wisely too!

For the children at any rate - the promising pioneers of the future - school, and playground, and concentration, and Mother's classes, and dining, and sleep and dreaming, were a continuum of becoming and joy in living and ineffable fulfilment. Perhaps, the following lines from Savitri, about a supra-terrestrial plane, better describe the children's daily round of activities in the Ashram under the aegis of the Mother than any painstaking prose can hope to do:

Worlds were there of a happiness great and grave

And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought, ...

There work was play and play the only work,

The tasks of heaven a game of godlike might: ...

The nude god-children in their play-fields ran

Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed; ...

Ideas were luminous comrades of the soul;

Mind played with speech, cast javelins of thought,

But needed not these instruments' toil to know;

Knowledge was Nature's pastime like the rest. ...

There reigned a breath of high immune content,

A fortunate gait of days in tranquil air,

A flood of universal love and peace.²⁷

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The Mother's class in the Playground

X

Thus, while some in the outside world were speculating as to whether the Ashram would long survive the Master's withdrawal on 5 December 1950, and while even a few of the sadhaks felt worried, actually it was a tremendous seed-time for a sudden spring and a burst of gorgeous new flowering. Already changes were taking place in the outer landscape of The Ashram. The new Sports Ground with the swimming pool was getting into shape. The main feature of this complex was the fine, firm, yet springy 400 metre oval cinder running track that was to prove a sheer delight to the competitors. Set in very picturesque surroundings, with the coconut and the other palm trees for an attractive back-drop, the Sports Ground was an invitation to the adventure of physical culture and the attainment of the body, strong and beautiful. On 1 May 1951, the Mother opened the Sports Ground by cutting the ribbon across the winning posts, and inaugurated the annual athletic competitions. These went on till 21 August. On Darshan day, 15 August, the Mother distributed apples to all in the Playground, increased the wages of the Ashram labour by rupees four per month, and inaugurated a new era of all-round buoyancy and prosperity. On 1 September, she distributed prizes to the sportsmen of the School and the Ashram.

On 24 July, when the athletic competitions were still in progress, the Mother had given a message to the children of the Ashram, but it was really addressed to children the world over, children old and young, and children of all time. The four short paragraphs of the message form a musical quartet almost: first a statement about evolution, next a word about Sri Aurobindo who had divined its spiritual orientation and taught this evolutionary truth, next a reference to the Ashram with its climate for the quick flowering of the children's consciousness, and lastly an exhortation to the children to profit by their stay in the Ashram and set an example to the world. "There is an ascending evolution in nature," says the Mother, "which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man." In his physical nature, man is still largely an animal, though a thinking and speaking animal. Nature now tries to bring out a being "who will be to man what man is to the animal", endowed with a consciousness that will "rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance". It was Sri Aurobindo who had visioned this truth, and who saw man as but a "transitional being", but "with the possibility of acquiring" a higher consciousness. Sri Aurobindo had tried to establish in himself this supramental consciousness, and to "help those gathered around him to realise it".

The children of the Ashram, still plastic enough for being moulded into and shaped as the pioneers of the coming race, were exposed to a spiritual atmosphere and the influence of the right teaching and example so as to facilitate their growth towards a supramental future.

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But, on their part the children should develop a resolute will and an unswerving sincerity so as to be able to realise what was open before them:

If you have the will no more to belong to ordinary humanity, no more to be merely evolved animals; if your will is to become men of the new race realising Sri Aurobindo's supramental ideal, living a new and higher life upon a new earth, you will find here all the necessary help to achieve your purpose; you will profit fully by your stay in the Ashram and eventually become living examples for the world.²⁸

This was to become the manifesto - the prospectus - of the Ashram School. The great aim of the Ashram's educational endeavour was verily to advance the evolutionary movement, to manifest the new Consciousness, and to usher in the New Race.

It was not surprising that, revisiting the Ashram in 1951 after the passage of twelve years. Professor Tan Yun-shan, the founder-director of Sino-Indian Cultural Society (or the Cheena-Bhavan, Visvabharati, Shantiniketan),²⁹ recorded his impressions as follows:

The Ashram has now grown up into a big organisation than which I cannot think of a more perfect one.... It is a growing, not of the nature of an ordinary society or association. It is a growing towards a divine life.... It is indeed a divine home for all.... Of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram I would say: "If there is a divine home in the world, it is this, it is this."³⁰

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