On The Mother

CHAPTER 10

Return to France

I

After a modest celebration of her birthday (she had completed thirty-seven years) on 21 February 1915, Mirra left for France the next day. She boarded the Japanese boat, the Kamo Maru, at Colombo, and the voyage was attended with all the uncertainties and dangers of the global War. Was she happy? was she sad? - she did not know. The surface mind was a blank for the nonce, it was as though she had been projected into a dark tunnel. Pondicherry and what that sanctified spot contained were left behind; but was all Pondicherry blotted out? Impossible! Where was she being carried - what clouds were they - what hideous obscurity loomed ahead of her? On 3 March 1915, she finds the apt words to describe her anguished and uncertain mental state:

Solitude, a harsh, intense solitude, and always this strong impression of having been flung headlong into a hell of darkness!. .. Sometimes ... I cannot prevent my total submission from taking on a hue of melancholy, and the calm and mute converse with the Master within is transformed for a moment into an invocation that almost supplicates, "O Lord, what have I done that Thou hast thrown me thus into the sombre Night?" But immediately the aspiration rises, still more ardent, "Spare this being all weakness; suffer it to be the docile and clear-eyed instrument of Thy work, whatever that work may be."

For the moment the clear-sightedness is lacking; never was the future more veiled.¹

Again, she writes on the next day:

Always the same harsh solitude ....

Each turn of the propeller upon the deep ocean seems to drag me farther away from my true destiny, the one best expressing the divine Will; each passing hour seems to plunge me again deeper into that past with which I had broken, sure of being called to new and vaster realisations; everything appears to draw me back to a state of things totally contrary to the life of my soul which reigns uncontested over outer activities.²

Does it mean she feared that the return to France might prove to be a relapse into her pre-1914 life with its particular schedule of activities and settled arcs of association? Was she apprehensive that the marvellous gains of her Yoga at Pondicherry might suffer some attenuation or lack of lustre in France? And what exactly was her "true destiny"? Did she run any danger of missing it altogether? Why had she entered that desert of

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negation? Was it the discipline of the Dark Night of the Soul? Why must she experience that feeling of spiritual destitution - all that emptiness, the pang, the lethargy of her whole being?

But no! For one thing, Mirra has no doubt that, appearances notwithstanding, love is not banished from the earth, for even "the darkest shadows become almost translucent to let its streams flow through and the intensest pain is transformed into potent bliss". Secondly, although "tomorrow lies dark and unreadable", and although the Divine seems hardly to be visible anywhere, the reality is quite different. It is as though Mirra is inly so perfectly charged with Light and Love that she can now descend to the depths of darkness, and carry there the Light and Love of the Invisible and Sovereign Witness:

Thou dost plunge me, O Lord, into the thickest darkness; this means that Thou hast established Thy light so firmly in me that Thou knowest it will stand this perilous ordeal. Otherwise wouldst Thou have chosen me for the descent into the vortex of this hell as Thy torch-bearer?³

Mirra knows that she is the one chosen to scour the depths, and hers is the "God's Labour" to track evil to its source, and although she is a little diffident, she also knows that it is the Divine that is using her, and the Divine will see her through. She has only to surrender to the Divine with the total trust of a child as it runs to the arms of its mother.

The bleakness, the diffidence and the sense of precipitate retreat into the past are but a temporary phase; and, besides, Mirra enacts the plight of all mankind and all Nature, their gesture of desperation and cry of agony, only to sting Him promptly into the right response.

For two or three more days the sovereign self-luminous will is seemingly in abeyance. The mind seems restless, and instead of the old "sweet mental silence", there is the active mind indulging in its pastimes of analysis, classification, appraisal, choice and constant reaction. "I am exiled from every spiritual happiness," but Mirra will not wholly acquiesce in this predicament. Nor will she lose herself in the illimitable Permanent within, for that way of escape is not for her. She prepares rather to wait on God with patience and humility:

No flight out of the world! The burden of its darkness and ugliness must be borne to the end even if all divine succour seems to be withdrawn. I must remain in the bosom of the Night and walk on without compass, without beacon-light, without inner guide.⁴

Come what may, she will face it out; she will wade through Hell if need be, but always relying on the Lord - for has she, in fact, any existence except in relation to the Divine?

Next morning (8 March), there is a perceptible change of mood. Superficially Mirra seems to move from a state of the Everlasting Nay to

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that of the Centre of Indifference: "For the most part the condition is one of calm and profound indifference; the being feels neither desire nor repulsion, neither enthusiasm nor depression, neither joy nor sorrow," The pull, "from time to time", is still towards sorrow, anguished isolation spiritual destitution, an identification with "the despairing appeal of Earth abandoned by the Divine". But there is a lurch in the opposite direction as well, for at the heart of the negation there is "an infinite sweetness in which suffering and felicity are closely wedded". Fare forward, voyager! There is nothing to fear.

II

There is a gap of six weeks in the published version of Mirra's spiritual diary - from 8 March written on board the Kamo Maru to 19 April written at Lunel. She had reached France already, and not desiring to stay in war­ embattled Paris - with all the ominous 'quiet on the western front' and the hell-hole trenches not many miles away - Mirra retired to more peaceful Lunel, in the south of France. The agonies and anxieties during the voyage, the experience of wartime actualities in France that far exceeded all anticipation and hearsay, the peremptory dislocation of civilian life, the poisonous creepers of the war psychosis, the rake's progress of scarcity, and the unending roll-call of casualties, all made a concerted attack on Mirra's health, and she had a serious breakdown. According to Nirodbaran, "Her nerves had been shattered .... Her condition had become very critical; she just managed to write a few lines to Sri Aurobindo, but though the letter did not reach him, she was cured by him. It took several months to build up the lost health.⁵ But notwithstanding the enforced inactivity of the body, the compensating resilience of her nature only redoubled her occult intervention near and far. In 1947 she gave some talks apropos of her Prayers and Meditations. According to A. B. Purani's notes of these talks, the Mother said, explaining her prayer of 19 April 1915:

The prayer refers to an experience I had when I was not physically well and was in fact narrowly saved from death. I had an inflammation of the nerves.

I was lying in an easy-chair, in front of a garden. I saw that the spiritual power was still active in me: I could go on with occult experiments in spite of the illness. I used to concentrate on things and persons and circum­ stances and wanted to see if the power worked. It worked very well on the mental and vital planes. Then I broadened the field of activity. I could go on doing my work in various parts of France and America and other places. I could clearly see the faces of the persons worked upon. They could be made to do what they by themselves could not. These were controlled experiments.

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I could see that nothing could stop the work: even without my body the work could go on.

Wherever the call was, I could attend. People often appeal to a higher force. The appeals sometimes come to me. During the Second World War many appeals came and there was always a helping answer.⁶

What is clear is that despite the near-paralysis of her body, Mirra was able with infinite freedom to influence men and events all the world over through occult means.

"All external circumstances have changed," she wrote in her diary on 19th April, which makes it impossible for work on the physical plane to be done as ardently desired. What has happened? The physical being, far from accomplishing the transformation, is only seized with dull impassivity, The constructing mind has recognised its mistake and surrendered to the Divine Will. The vital is both contained and contented. In the result, on the one hand there is an inner flooding of light, love and peace; on the other hand, the impression that outer facts are a falsehood persists and the body "despite its indisputable goodwill, is so profoundly shaken that it cannot manage to regain its equilibrium and health".

Has all the past life any relevance for the present? Has the phantasmagoria of the outer existence any true validity? Isn't it all a shadow-play of inconsequence, no more than the stuff that dreams are made of? Deep at the core of her being, she enjoys a puissance and amplitude of freedom and an infinite benevolence of understanding:

But this earth itself is strange to it, and as it is not aware of anything else except the Eternal Silence, all life that has form appears remote and almost unreal to it.⁷

Mirra's problem is that she is both physically imprisoned and ineffective and psychically wide-ranging and all-powerful. Which is the Reality? And which is the illusive Appearance? Her own comment in this context is very suggestive:

All this gives the feeling of a sort of a void full of light, peace, immensity, eluding all form and all definition. It is the Nought, but a Nought which is real and can last eternally .... ⁸

And the result of it all is that, divorced or withdrawn from the body as it were, Mirra's individual consciousness has merged with the universal or cosmic consciousness, making nonsense of the fret and fever and hectic movements of the phenomenal world.

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III

The meditation for 24 May 1915, although coming more than a month later, is actually linked up with earlier entries. Only now Mirra is able fully to size up the earlier paradoxical experiences of utter physical helplessness and glorious occult effectivity. With her body as if chained to a chair, she had nevertheless travelled widely in the occult countries and from there influenced men and events on the earth, in all this of course acting solely as the instrument of the Divine Will. Before this happened at the time of her illness, she would be either lost in the Infinite or she could direct only the activities of her own body which she thought was "a sort of bondage within too narrow a frame". But the tremendous change had unpredictably overtaken her:

Suddenly Thou didst put an end to this disorder; Thou didst liberate the mind from its last fetters; Thou didst teach it to be freely active through all forms and no longer exclusively through those it considered till then as its own .... ⁹

Earlier, it had been easier to act in a wide-ranging way upon the vital of other persons but her mental had resisted the Divine intervention, and had not "yet learnt how to animate, organise and illuminate consciously all lives without distinction". But now, since Lunel, the old barriers had been removed. And this plenitude of experience had continued day after day till "the new conquest" became a settled fact. The object of this development was simply to make Mirra able to pour herself into the life, thought and love of the earth and its inhabitants, "and thus, through a total identification with the manifested world, to be able to intervene with full power in its transformations".

But this was only one side of the story. Mirra was also "by a perfect surrender to the Supreme Principle, to become aware of the Truth and the eternal Will that manifests it". She was thus at once one with the Principle of Being and with the Process of Becoming; in other words, she was the perfect link, the perfect intermediary, the perfect paraclete:

This is how the individual being can be the conscious mediator between the absolute Truth and the manifested universe and intervene in the slow, uncertain march of the Yoga of Nature in order to give it the swiftness, intensity and sureness of the divine Yoga.

This is how in certain periods the entire terrestrial life seems to cross miraculously over stages which at other times would require thousands of years to traverse. ¹⁰

Mirra adds that, on an objective review, her identification with the Supreme Principle was complete and final, whereas her conscious identification with the multiplicity of the manifested world was as yet "intermittent

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though growing more and more frequent and lasting".¹¹ And whenever the two-way traffic of identification was equally balanced and effective, it was in such moments "that the present work begins to be accomplished" .

As we saw in chapter 2, section iv, around 1905 Mirra had a profound experience when she was in the countryside near the sea. There was the garden with a lawn, "a fine place, very quiet, very silent". There she used to relax, lying silently on the grass flat on her stomach, with her elbows on the ground. One day, all on a sudden, she had an incandescent experience:

...all the life of that Nature, all the life of that region between the subtle-physical and the most material vital, which is very living in plants and in Nature, all that region became all at once, suddenly, without any transition. absolutely living, intense, conscious, marvellous .... ¹²

There was an obliteration of the distinction between life and not-life, and indeed it was a blaze of life everywhere, and the entire spectrum of Nature was a splendour and an interwoven unity.

In a unitary universe that plays at plurality, what holds all together ­ preventing their falling apart, scattering and disintegrating - is the Principle or Power or Grace at the heart of everything. It follows that in such a universe - which is more like Indra's network of pearls - the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere; any single pearl in the network contains or reflects all the other; any of the constituent elements could, with the right concentration of force, become the transforming chamber of the rest. Such is the law of change and transformation in a universe built on the bootstrap model. But in actual practice, however, it is given to only a very few - call them the 'elect', the 'avatars', if you like - to actuate such change through their own exertions. Mirra was certainly one of those elect, one such avatar, even as Sri Aurobindo was another.

IV

Mirra and Sri Aurobindo had of course their respective burdens, worries and fulfilments, and there was, besides, the background of strong spiritual affiliations and occult communications. The same divine ministry was being done, with one end of the axis at Pondicherry, and the other end in France. Soon after her arrival in France, she may have written to him something about the prevailing conditions in the world. The War had been gaining in horror: the Germans used poison gas on the Western Front; the sinking of Leon Gambetta by submarine action meant the loss of 700 lives, and of the Lusitania, 1500 lives. Presumably, there was also a suggestion from Mirra that instead of constantly having to counter British-engineered moves to have him arrested or extradited to British India, Sri Aurobindo

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with his close associates should shift his residence to a place which the long arm of the British couldn't easily reach; a harbourage in Africa, for example, or America? It seems to be in reply to such a letter that Sri Aurobindo wrote to her on 6 May 1915:

All is always for the best, but it is sometimes from the external point of view an awkward best. ...

The whole earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations and I am sceptical of finding any place where the clash of the struggle will not pursue us. In any case, an effective retirement does not seem to be my destiny. I must remain in touch with the world until I have either mastered adverse circumstances or succumbed or carried on the struggle between the spiritual and physical so far as I am destined to carry it on ....

One needs to have a calm heart, a settled will, entire self-abnegation and the eyes constantly fixed on the beyond to live undiscouraged in times like these which are truly a period of universal decomposition. For myself, I follow the Voice and look neither to right nor to left of me. The result is not mine and hardly at all now even the labour. ¹³

Sri Aurobindo may have heard soon afterwards from Mirra, making a reference to her Lunel experiences; either she sent a copy of her meditation or a letter giving its gist. At Lunel her health had broken down, and while she still enjoyed inner felicity and fulfilment, her body could not partake of it, and "this earth itself is strange to it". It was probably this that elicited from Sri Aurobindo on 20 May a cryptic reply presenting in atomic form the entire dynamics of Integral Yoga:

Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the Yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, "Heaven and Earth equal and one".¹⁴

Mirra's diary-entry on 31 July was obviously written after the receipt of Sri Aurobindo's letter, for the words find an echo in the meditation:

The heavens are definitely conquered, and nothing and nobody could have the power of wresting them from me. But the conquest of the earth is still to be made; it is being carried on in the very heart of the turmoil; and even when achieved, it will still be only a relative one; the victories in this world are but stages leading progressively to still more glorious victories.... ¹⁵

Mirra had said in her earlier meditation that the Yoga in the world of manifestation, the world of an infinity of material forms, was but "intermittent though growing more and more frequent and lasting". Not until the joy of the earth becomes equal and one with the joy of heaven, the bliss of Brahman, not until then can the Yoga be said to have completely fulfilled itself.

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But this earth, alas, is full of ugliness, inertia, darkness, perversity, misery. Mend this earth how one may, it but seems to get worse and worse; a revolution, a breakthrough, is necessary. The old world must die, so that a new world may be born:

Thou hast said that the earth would die, and it will die to its old ignorance.

Thou hast said that the earth would live, and it will live in the renewal of Thy power. ¹⁶

V

A death, - and then a rebirth. The wartime world - the whole world - was engaged in enacting the drama of Winter preceding the dawn of Spring. It was an intestine struggle, it was an embrace of death. The birth of a new world. like the birth of a child, is attended with pain, uncertainty, almost a death! But there are the joys of parturition as well, the anticipation of motherhood, the leap of a new life-adventure. It is in this context very striking that Sri Aurobindo should have written to Mirra on 28 July, three days before her own diary-entry:

Everything internal is ripe or ripening, but there is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make a very appreciable advance (somewhat like the trench warfare in Europe), the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world, that resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks .... And if there were not the strength and Ananda within, it would be harassing and disgusting work; but the eye of knowledge looks beyond and sees that it is only a protracted episode. ¹⁷

Mirra's meditation of 31 July, praying for the hour of the death of the old order and the emergence of the new may have reached Sri Aurobindo by the beginning of September. The eager expectancy of the simultaneity of death and new life, the high hope that the new forces would drown "in their sovereign floods all that persists" with their adhesion to the past, the clear anticipation of the Next Future with its splendour of divine manifestation, all this asked for a response from Sri Aurobindo. But perhaps his vision was too baffled and obscured by opposing possibilities, for in his letter of 16 September he doesn't seem to be very categorical:

Nothing seems able to disturb the immobility of things and all that is active outside our own selves is a sort of welter of dark and sombre confusion from which nothing formed or luminous can emerge. It is a singular condition of the world, the very definition of chaos with the superficial form of the old world resting apparently intact on the surface. But a chaos of long disintegration or of some early new birth? It is the thing that is

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being fought out from day to day, but as yet without any approach to a decision.¹⁸

So far as the War was concerned, this was certainly true; more and more nations were being drawn into its insane operations, and the tentacles of the War were to leave no spot on the earth quite unaffected. Trench warfare had created a maddening situation of abnormal normalcy. The Allies and the Central Powers were at grips with one another in numerous theatres of war, and on land, sea and ultimately even in the air. America too was to be drawn into the War, the Russian front was to collapse, Lenin was to lead the October 1917 Revolution during 'the ten days that shook the world', - and thus war, civil war, revolution, reaction were all to scream 'Havoc!' and unleash the hounds of confusion. In describing the world of 1915 and after as "the very definition of chaos", Sri Aurobindo was at once excruciatingly accurate and astonishingly prophetic.

But, then, the outer struggle has its prototype in the invisible occult worlds, where really things are first decreed to be later manifested on the earth. Like Mirra, Sri Aurobindo too could take a close view of the War in the occult regions: rival embodied ambitions, rival vitalistic forces, criss­crossing rival ideations, the regiments of Asuric sparks pitted against the column of divine Fire, the squadrons of negation giving battle to the formations of the future - and no doubt there was a Divinity shaping our ends, but as yet, in all the blaze and roar and dust and mist of the fleeting moments, even Sri Aurobindo couldn't as yet firmly predict the exact configuration of the immediate future.

VI

For over three months after 31 July, there is no entry in the Prayers and Meditations. It seems likely, however, there were some belonging to this period among those destroyed later, after the selection had been made by Sri Aurobindo with a view to publication. Before the next entry dated 2 November, Mirra had shifted her residence, this time to Paris; and there is heard a new note of buoyancy. A quick review of her past life, an objective assessment of the rhythm of past happenings, leaves her on the whole satisfied and happy: "Intense, complex, crowded, the past lived again in a flash, having lost nothing of its savour, its richness." Underneath the variety and complexity of the experiences there had run a single thread: the integral seeking of the Divine. What though there had been such a tally of struggle, turmoil and effort? They were but "jewels of price" offered at the altar of her heart "as a living holocaust":

Errors have become stepping-stones, the blind gropings conquests. Thy glory transforms defeats into victories of eternity, and all the shadows have

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fled before Thy radiant light.

It is Thou who wert the motive and the goal; Thou art the worker and work.¹⁹

Her comment on this prayer on 7 October 1947, partly by way of explication, has thus been recorded by Purani:

The True Consciousness had already been reached. It was only the physical consciousness that now reached the complete identification with the Divine. It happened in Paris.

Now all the sense-experiences were offered to the Divine - all the movements of life - in a single gesture, and not like the ordinary consciousness giving up one thing after another. It was a total holocaust ­ the offering not of this or that movement of life but Life itself! Then I found that everything had undergone a change.

When there is no separate individuality, the world appears quite different. It is the little ego that does not allow one to know things truly.²⁰

The same mood prevailed during the days following, but it was wartime Paris all the same: unreal city, caught in the coils of an unknown fatality. And behind the scenes there was also the 'locked struggle' between the steady pressure of the spiritual and the dogged resistance of the material:

For the last two days the earth seems to have been going through a decisive crisis; it seems that the great formidable contest between material resistances and spiritual powers is nearing its conclusion .... ²¹

The papers no doubt talked of exciting happenings, of offensives and counter-offensives, of withdrawals and forced marches, of pinchbeck men of destiny and latter-day Napoleon Bonaparte's - but these 'men of the moment' were but so many pathetic thistle downs at the mercy of every random gust of wind. But the people's sufferings in the mass were a whole Himalaya of pain, and yet instinct with a "sovereign beauty ... in the depth of this outer anguish". Perhaps this is the needed cracking of the 'human egg' for new life to step forth into the light of day. And so Mirra raises her voice in prayer in the name and on behalf of dear sorrowing earth awaiting the new Dawn:

This sorrowful world kneels before Thee, O Lord, in mute supplication; Matter, tortured, takes shelter at Thy feet, its last and only refuge; and imploring Thee thus, it adores Thee, Thee whom it neither knows nor understands! Its prayer rises like the cry of one in a last agony; what is disappearing feels vaguely the possibility of living once again in Thee; the earth awaits Thy decree in a grandiose prostration. Listen, listen: its voice implores and supplicates Thee ....

Death has passed, vast and solemn, and all was hushed in a religious silence while it was passing by.

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A superhuman beauty has appeared upon earth.²²

This was no naturalistic reportage; it needed more than the naked human eyes to face the Sun of the unfolding Future and take the right measure of the rare gift of vision. But it meant for Mirra-- especially in those days outwardly so dreary and denuded of all hope - a shot in the arm of her faith, and a fresh incentive for her divine ministry.

VII

About twenty days after, on 26 November 1915, Mirra had yet another experience of integral and total identification with the earth-consciousness. "In this experience the mind did not participate," she told a group of disciples on 8 October 1947, and added:

I was in a house in Paris It was an atelier, a pavilion with a big garden. The time was evening In my mind there was no preconception .... I became completely identified with the earth consciousness .... I had no idea of the symbols before the experience.²³

Suddenly the adamantine doors of separativity flew open, the congealed glaciers of isolation cracked and melted, the massed clouds of Unknowing sprang apart. It was the phoenix hour of the Sunrise of realisation:

The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity.

Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew in greatness progressively, methodically, breaking down every barrier, shattering every obstacle, that it might contain and manifest a force and a power which increased ceaselessly in immensity and intensity. It was as a progressive dilatation of the cells until there was a complete identification with the earth: the body of the awakened consciousness was the terrestrial globe moving harmoniously in ethereal space. And the consciousness knew that its global body was thus moving in the arms of the universal Being, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to It in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe and one with it: the consciousness became the consciousness of the universe, immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity. The consciousness of the universe sprang towards the Divine in an ardent aspiration, a perfect surrender, and it saw in the splendour of the immaculate Light the radiant Being standing on a many-headed serpent whose body coiled infinitely around the universe. The Being in an eternal gesture of triumph mastered and created at one and the same time the serpent and the universe that

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issued from him; erect on the serpent he dominated it with all his victorious might, and the same gesture that crushed the hydra enveloping the universe gave it eternal birth. Then the consciousness became this Being and perceived that its form was changing once more; it was absorbed into something which was no longer a form and yet contained all forms, something which, immutable, sees, - the Eye, the Witness. And what It sees, is. Then this last vestige of form disappeared and the consciousness itself was absorbed into the Unutterable, the Ineffable.

The return towards the consciousness of the individual body took place very slowly in a constant and invariable splendour of Light and Power and Felicity and Adoration, by successive gradations, but directly, without passing again through the universal and terrestrial forms. And it was as if the modest corporeal form had become the direct and immediate vesture, without any intermediary, of the supreme and eternal Witness.²⁴

It was on receipt of this vivid recordation of her mystic experience that Sri Aurobindo wrote to her on 31 December:

The experience you have described is Vedic in the real sense, though not one which would easily be recognised by the modern systems of Yoga which call themselves Vedic. It is the union of the "Earth" of the Veda and Purana with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas hardly recognise the possibility of a material union with the Divine.²⁵

What was remarkable and distinctive about the experience was that her consciousness, having merged in the Divine, came back directly to the body. As she told her disciples on 8 October 1947, Sri Aurobindo also explained to her that the experience was "a very high one because the consciousness came back to the body directly - that is, the individual being",

By its very nature, a profound mystic experience defies description in material categories. A mystic experience is a leap beyond everyday actuality, and it is a seeing, hearing, living, not in the way of our humdrum existence, but in another order of intensity altogether. The attempt to recall the contours of such an experience seldom succeeds to any appreciable extent. The mind is baffled, the words fail. All attempts to evaluate or analyse a genuine mystical experience like Mirra's are bound to be a good deal frustrating and perhaps even misleading. At least, one should approach the task with proper humility.

Basically, Mirra's experience of 26 November 1915 was an adventure of consciousness. First, her whole being felt the joy of immersion in "a supreme and vast felicity", then there came "a sacred trembling" in the different parts of her body, and the body as a whole: she experienced a

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progressive and methodical transcendence of all personal limits, an all­shattering surge of glory, a freedom and puissance incommensurable. There was "a progressive dilatation" of the very cells, as though the; comprehended and were identified with all the cells of the entire earth. It was as if the body had filled, and fused with, the earth, and was orbiting in ethereal space. Second, her consciousness knew that, already united with the great globe itself, she was now rocked in the arms of the universal Being "in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss", Third, in a further leap of expansion and fusion, she now felt herself to be one with the universe itself: "the consciousness became the consciousness of the universe immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity.': Fourth, in yet another race for extension, she with the body of the universe as her tenement reached for the Divine "in a perfect surrender", and saw "the radiant Being" who stands on the hood of a many-headed serpent whose coils encircle the universe. Fifth, her consciousness became this Being whose form changed once more into something which contains all forms and is also beyond Form. Finally "this last vestige of form disappeared and the consciousness itself was absorbed in the Unutterable, the Ineffable". The return journey from the Transcendent to "the consciousness of the individual body" was effected - as if by a chord line - without pausing at the intermediate steps of the universal and the terrestrial. It was as though the Transcendent and the Cosmic had established direct 'hot lines' with the individualised and human Mirra, now an accredited vessel of "the supreme and eternal Witness".

VIII

It is not of course to be expected that what was experienced as the apotheosis of a mystic movement of consciousness should be the final fullness of her spiritual realisation. What she had won on 26 November was apparently the result of her own effort, her adventurous journey towards the Alone, the All. And now, in some of the subsequent meditations, Mirra calls upon the Alone, the All, the Real, the Divine, to come down to her and set right her limitations, and to cleanse the rusts that may have gathered, and to fill her once more with the power, the peace and the glory.

In the entry for 15 January 1916, Mirra affirms her desire to be entirely "identified" with God, who is really "the personal form of the Transcendent Eternal, Cause, Source and Reality of my individual being". Through the centuries and millenniums, she has been "slowly and subtly kneaded" to befit ultimate total identification with - or absorption in - the Divine. There has been astonishing progress, yet it is still short of the desired stable perfection. What is the difference between Mirra the aspiring individual

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and the Divine who is the goal of her aspirations? One may say, they are the same, except that one is the flawed reflection below of the other, the immaculate splendour above, rather like the two birds mentioned in the Rig Veda, beautiful of wing, friends and comrades, clinging to a common tree but while "one eats the sweet fruit, the other regards him and eats not.²⁶ But they are the same bird really, and the flawed bird below could still become the golden bird above, and the two merge in a final identity. Even so Mirra addresses the Lord:

Thou art myself divested of all error and limitation. Have I become integrally this true self in all the atoms of my being? Wilt Thou bring about an overwhelming transformation, or will it still be a slow action in which cell after cell must be wrested from its darkness and its limits?²⁷

A week later, she feels that the desired transformation within is going on:

Thou hast taken entire possession of this miserable instrument .... Thou art at work in each one of its cells to knead it and make it supple and enlighten it, and in the whole being, to arrange, organise and harmonise it.²⁸

The very next day, she again pleads for a hastening of the process of purification and transformation. When she refers to her body and her being as "this gross form ... a mass of limitations ... full of obscurities ... ignorant impurities", she is mainly speaking as one who has identified herself with all earth and its imperfect inhabitants. Her burdens and impurities are those that she herself has taken up to be able to lead earth and mankind to the goal of transformation and divinisation. Since the cardinal sin of human nature is "egoistic separativity", for it is this that starts the multi-pronged movement of division, confusion and disintegration, the radical need is to replace this egoistic separativity by crystalline integrality:

Lord, O Lord, take possession of Thy kingdom, illumine it with Thy eternal Presence, put an end to the cruel error in which it lives, believing itself separate from Thee, while in its reality and essence it is Thyself.

Break, break down the last resistances, consume the last impurities, blast this being if need be, but let it be transfigured²⁹

Thunder was heard indeed over the battlefields of France and Russia and Salonica and Gallipoli: there was also witnessed the cracking and the melting of the former rigid moulds of habit and convention. And, perhaps, all that violence was the needed prelude to the happier dispensation to come.

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IX

The diary-entries for 19 April and 24 May 1915, which were discussed earlier, show that although Mirra was in poor health and practically confined to an easy-chair, her consciousness, which was "freely active through all forms", influenced human beings near and far. As she later explained to a group of disciples at Pondicherry, she "could clearly see the faces of the persons worked upon" - that such "controlled experiments" were indeed feasible even when she had an inflammation of the nerves at the time. As indicated in an earlier chapter, Mirra had had occult leanings and propensities since her early years, and her tutelage under the Théons in Algeria had informed, disciplined and given clear direction to her occult inclinations and activities. Presently her arduous spiritual practices _ reverent study, meditation, prayer - had given an edge to the occult side of her life and also kept it under firm control.

The close association and collaboration with Sri Aurobindo since 29 March 1914, the sharing of dreams, aspirations and experiences, and the launching of the New Idea society, and of the Arya, must have pushed her occult preoccupations into the background, while projecting forward the all-absorbing tasks of initiating an integral change of consciousness, growing the overhead powers of consciousness up to the supramental, and bringing the Supermind to the earth-nature with a view to transforming it. Occult knowledge and occult means were to be drawn upon only when absolutely necessary.

As she notes on 24 May 1915, when her consciousness is identified with the Supreme Principle, she becomes "the faithful servant and sure intermediary of the divine Will, and uniting this conscious identification with the Principle to the conscious identification with its becoming, to mould and model consciously the love, mind and life of the becoming in accordance with the Law of Truth of the Principle".³⁰ But these beginnings of her action upon other people without anything happening to her own body - without its becoming inert, so to say, as under ordinary conditions of going out of the body - was a new adventure of consciousness, a new experiment, if a controlled one. This was not just an experience in the negative sense of a general attunement to the immense reservoir of terrestrial or cosmic consciousness, but rather in the dynamic sense of being able to move about, establish contact with and activate individuals irrespective of intervening distances.

X

It would be interesting in this connection to look into Sri Aurobindo's own "controlled experiments" during his early years at Pondicherry.

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His intention in seeking a place of refuge in what was then French India was to be able to complete his Yoga undisturbed by the attentions of the British bureaucracy, and also to "build up other souls" around him. Writing to Motilal Roy more than a year after arriving at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo made a guarded statement regarding his far aims and the limited achievements till then:

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane, and I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind. This I can do with great swiftness and completeness with those who are near me, but I have also succeeded with men hundreds of miles away.³¹

Among the other powers being developed by him, as yet only with partial or indifferent success, were reading men's characters and even their thoughts, "the power of guiding action by the mere exercise of will", and "communication with the other world"*. He wrote again, two months later, in September 1911 that the "experiments" on which he had been engaged may, if all went well, yield results "sufficient to establish beyond dispute the theory and system of Yoga which I have formed ... not only to me, but to the young men who are with me". ³² To another correspondent he wrote, perhaps in June 1912, about the fourfold Siddhi (moral, mental, physical and practical) he was trying to accomplish. The moral aspect had been completed and the mental too "for the present purpose", but the physical siddhi was still only on its way to full fruition. Certain "practical" siddhis, however, were the real cause of the delay in accomplishing the Siddhi in his Yoga:

I have had first to prove to myself their existence and utility, secondly to develop them in myself so as to be working forces, thirdly to make them actually effective for life and impart them to others.³³

He expected to register mastery in this regard not long afterwards, but added that "the application to life and the formation of my helpers will take some time". A few months later, after his birthday on 15 August 1912, Sri Aurobindo wrote again to Motilal Roy outlining the entire programme of the future work. This was to include a revaluation of Sanatana Dharma in the idiom of the modern age, a restatement of India's philosophia perennis, a formulation of the mechanics of a new Yoga, an enunciation of the principles of a new sociology and a new global polity, and a revitalisation of India to enable her to take her proper place in the world. In short, a preview of what Sri Aurobindo was to accomplish in the Arya during 1914-21. As for the practical side this was to "consist in

*For further information, refer to "Sapta Chatushtaya" and "Record of Yoga" in Sri Aurobindo: Archives & Research, April 1986 (Vol 10, no.l) onwards.

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making men for the new age by imparting whatever Siddhi I get to those who are chosen". The little colony around him in Pondicherry was "a so of seed plot, a laboratory". ³⁴

Writing again to Motilal Roy, probably January 1913, Sri Aurobindo was rather more specific with regard to his aims and developing powers:

The crowning movement of my Sadhana - viz. the attempt to apply knowledge and power to the events and happenings of the world without the necessary instrumentality of physical action. What I am attempting is to establish the normal working of the siddhis in life i.e. the perception of thoughts, feelings and happenings of other beings and in other places throughout the world without any use of information by speech or any other data; 2nd, the communication of the ideas and feelings I select to others (individuals, groups, actions) by mere transmission of will-Power; 3rd, the silent compulsion on them to act according to these communicated ideas and feelings; 4th, the determining of events, actions and results of action throughout the world by pure silent will-power. ³⁵

Since coming to Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo had been developing these powers and attempting their general application on men and events, and although at first he was "getting badly beaten", there was current improvement regarding the 1st, 2nd and 3rd, though in the 4th he was still meeting with "a serious resistance":

I can produce single results with perfect accuracy, I can produce general results with difficulty and after a more or less prolonged struggle, but I can neither be sure of producing the final decisive result I am aiming at nor of securing that orderly arrangement of events which prevents the results from being isolated and only partially effective.³⁶

XI

Suddenly things began to move. As though it was all preordained, in the early months of 1914, Mirra and Paul Richard arrived in Pondicherry, L'Idée Nouvelle was established on 1 June, and the Arya was launched on 15 August - all this against overwhelming odds like financial scarcity, police surveillance and the extremely difficult conditions created by the eruption of the War in Europe. Presently, Sri Aurobindo informed Motilal Roy categorically that the aim was not the older type of sannyas or asceticism; not the renunciation of life but making all life - individual. national or global - meaningful and God-oriented would be the aim of the new endeavour. The only - the crucial - renunciation asked for would be the rejection of the ego, be it of the individual, group or national variety. And Sri Aurobindo ended the letter with a cautionary postscript:

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The work we wish to do cannot produce its effects on the objective world until my Ashtasiddhi is strong enough to work upon that world organically and as a whole, and it has not yet reached that point.³⁷

During her year-long stay in Pondicherry, Mirra and Sri Aurobindo must, have often compared notes regarding the success or failure of their several attempts to contact by force of their occult or yogic power other people, and work on them for their good or for the good of the world, and discussed also the probable reasons for such failures as had attended their efforts, or even for the qualified successes. Quite obviously, the instruments they were using were not perfect or infallible enough; and, equally obviously, the persons chosen for the "controlled experiments" were not also - or not always - the right people. In their different ways, then, Sri Aurobindo and Mirra had concluded that, unless a new spiritual power ­which Sri Aurobindo called the Supermind - came down into the earth­atmosphere and impregnated human effort with its own utter Truth­Consciousness or All-Knowledge wedded to Executive Infallibility, such failures or feeble successes were bound to continue.

In earlier years, when Sri Aurobindo led the revolutionary movement in Bengal from behind the scenes, for all the sterling idealism and noble courage and readiness for sacrifice on the part of the young men, there had been mistakes and defeats leading to violent reprisals. Ascribing the cause of these failures to "the unpardonable blunders we have all been making in our Yogic Kriya", Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy early in 1914:

The root of the whole evil is that we have been attempting an extension of Tantric Kriya without any sufficient Vedantic basis .... Going on in the old way is out of the question. That path can only lead to the pit. I speak strongly because I see clearly .... ³⁸

Uncoded these words meant that, without a proper grounding in knowledge, discipline, inner purification (all comprised in 'Vedantic Yoga'), any adventurous action in the practical sphere (political or social) must be weakened at the source and might lead to catastrophic results. After calmly reviewing the situation, Sri Aurobindo cautioned the revolutionaries through Motilal Roy and as good as advised them to suspend such ('Tantric') activities. On 5 May 1914 he wrote: "Tantra for us is discontinued until further notice which can be only in the far future. "³⁹

As he was to explain to Ambalal Purani in December 1918 why he declined to permit a renewal of revolutionary activity:

Because I have done the work and I know its difficulties. Young men come forward to join the movement driven by idealism and enthusiasm. But these elements do not last long. It becomes very difficult to observe and extract discipline. Small groups begin to form within the organisation, rivalries grow between groups and even between individuals. There is competition for leadership.

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The agents of the Government generally manage to join these organisations from the very beginning .⁴⁰

If there was to be group action, it was essential that the members should be able to stand the strictest test of knowledge, purity and discipline. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal,

A collective Yoga is not like a solitary one, it is not free from collective influences; it has a collective soul which cannot afford to be in some parts either raw or rotten."⁴¹

It should be clear from all this why Sri Aurobindo gave primacy to the promulgation of his comprehensive supramental manifesto in the various Arya sequences (notably The Life Divine), and in the meantime further sensitised and perfected his own ādhāra in the matter of invoking the supramental power to take root here on the earth. Mirra too, with her own background of occult odysseys and explorations, understood that they were no substitute for the spiritual power of the Supermind. The suspension or virtual abandonment of political and revolutionary activity on Sri Aurobindo's part and the relegation of occult adventures to a strictly subordinate place by Mirra, and both concentrating on spirituality and on the terrestrialisation of the Supermind, were the cardinal results of the first year or two of their association. She had once asked Sri Aurobindo soon after her arrival in Pondicherry: Suppose their attempt to establish the Life Divine on the earth should fail, as all such attempts had apparently failed in the past, what then? He had looked at Mirra with serene certainty and assured her: "This time it will not be so. "⁴² This certitude and this solid basis of identity of ends and means were reinforced by the exchange of communications, "formal as wel1 as spiritual", between them during all the time Mirra was away from Pondicherry.

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