On The Mother

CHAPTER 40

Sacerdocy

I

The School, now grown into the University Centre, on the one hand and the Ashram on the other were not wholly separate or separable institutions. The Mother was the common inspiration behind them both, their heart and soul and means of sustenance and growth; and the teachers were also sadhaks engaged in founding the Life Divine. When she was asked to spell out the nature of the Divine, the Mother wrote in a letter of 30 June 1952:

The Divine is everywhere and in everything, the Divine is everything; true - in His essence and Supreme Reality. But in the world of progressive material manifestation, we must identify with the Divine, not as He is, but as He will be.¹

Again, on 7 September:

This is what we mean by "Divine": all the knowledge we have to acquire, all the power we have to obtain, all the love we have to become, all the perfection we have to achieve, all the harmonious and progressive poise we must make manifest in light and joy, all the unknown and new splendours that are to be realised.²

The Divine was the Ideal, the Divine was the integral Perfection to be attained in the end, and the University Centre and the Ashram were the mystic workshop where this alchemic search, this evolutionary progress, was to be initiated and sustained. The main accent was on Karmayoga or work, but such work was worship or service of the Divine. As the Mother explained in a message on 1 October 1952:

Here, for each work given, the full strength and Grace are always given at the same time to do the work as it has to be done. If you do not feel the strength and the Grace, it proves that there is some mistake in your attitude. The faith is lacking or you have fallen back on old tracks and old creeds and thus you lose all receptivity.³

A proper physical framework was a basic necessity for the academic studies, games and athletics, and for the motions of Karmayoga, and since the channelling of financial support to the Centre was slow at the beginning, the Mother gave away all her jewellery which was sold by auction in the last week of December 1952.

In retrospect, the two years since Sri Aurobindo's passing had been a time of difficulty and trial on the outside, but also of spectacular expansion. All apprehensions had been falsified, and the accession of strength

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was more than encouraging. The sadhaks numbered 800 in 1952, and there were the children besides, and the steady stream of visitors. The University Centre was no dream or project merely, but was taking shape on the terra-firma powered by faith and sincerity and ardour and receiving constant inspiration from the Mother. There were the scoffers and critics of course and there were the adverse forces erupting all the time and throwing up a variety of false and enervating suggestions, questioning the very basis of the Ashram and discounting the possibility of the supramental descent. But the Ashram community held together and the pupils at the Centre seemed to go about like "the sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn". The Mother too was well aware of the environing atmosphere of scepticism and hostility as also of the deeper potentialities for steady progress. It was thus hardly surprising that, when 1953 came, she gave a pointed New Year message:

Lord, Thou hast told us: Do not give way, hold tight. It is when everything seems lost that all is saved.

With its sense of crisis as well as its reserve of hope, this almost harked back to the prayer for 1947 on the eve of Indian independence. At the darkest extremity, it was necessary to make a supreme act of faith so that the Grace could effectively come into play. The hours before the dawn are always the darkest, and the eternal flame of hope ever burns in the human heart shutting out the invasion of tartarean despair. Now six years later, when it was not the future of India alone, but all future was at stake, the Mother gave mankind a prayer for survival, a prayer of hope. Britain had exploded her first atomic device off North West Australia on 3 October 1952, and on 1 November the U.S. had likewise exploded the far deadlier hydrogen bomb in mid-Pacific. Russia was already a nuclear power, and there was threat of further imminent nuclear proliferation. Whither mankind? Was civilisation doomed indeed? But no! it was fatally unwise to give way to despair. For there was the Mother's exhortation: "Do not give way, hold tight."

In the meantime they came, the seekers, still came the men and women caught in unease and in search of a sanctuary, the sick bruised in body and soul eager for a cure, the people tortured by chronic restlessness hoping for purposeful quietude, all, all, almost from the ends of the world, made a beeline to Pondicherry. "Home is where the Mother is" - thought many after their arrival in the Ashram. One of the newcomers, Jay Holmes Smith, thought that the Mother, as she stood on the Balcony, was truly "ageless", and he found in the Ashram "a rare combination of an exhilarating freedom with a delightful and powerful harmony".⁴ The sadhaks were, for him, a rare brotherhood, reflecting in some measure the beauty of the Divine, and enjoying the singular privilege of receiving "a constant Grace":

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Every sadhak knows that the conquest of the ego is a spiritual Everest more demanding of discipline and endurance than the physical summit and infinitely more rewarding.

Everything fascinated the newcomer who had become a sadhak - the Ashram industries, the spiritual and social antennae of the place, the Mother's ministry of flowers. At the Playground, after the displays, the Concentration, the marchers "are drawn up in a hollow square facing the Mother who stands before the large green relief map of greater India. From her relaxed figure a great Peace descends upon us all."⁵

Jay Smith became a sadhak himself, and thought of Sri Aurobindo - who had declared the inevitability of the supramental descent - as "this Copernicus of the spiritual world". As for the Ashram, it was the Mother's "laboratory for the Great Transformation, her seed-plot for the new Divine Order", her 'colony of heaven' on this as yet flawed and unredeemed earth.⁶

II

The Mother's question-and-answer sessions that commenced in December 1950 continued till June 1951, and references to some of her answers, obiter dicta and reminiscential interventions have already been made in an earlier chapter. Between June 1951 and March 1953, there were no such sessions, but instead the Mother gave renderings in French from some of Sri Aurobindo's writings like The Ideal of Human Unity, The Human Cycle, the last six chapters of The Life Divine and parts of The Synthesis of Yoga. There was of course some conversational give-and-take with the children, but that went unrecorded. The Mother was nevertheless present in the Playground every evening, and watched with interest the training given to the captains of the Department of Physical Education. While she watched, some of the children crowded round her and even conversed with her. One of them, Parul Chakraborty (then in her early teens), relates how in such circumstances started what later became the Mother's celebrated Wednesday classes:

On my birthday, 9 January 1951, the Divine Mother presented me with her Prières et Méditations de la Mère. She spoke to me in French and said that I should read this book and whatever I did not understand I should not ask anyone for explanations but to seek Her help and explanation (an advice I've always followed with all Her and Sri Aurobindo's writings)... I was overjoyed and went to Her upstairs now and then during the day with my questions....

One day when I went to Her upstairs. She was too busy and told me to bring my questions to Her in the Playground. She would answer while

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She sat and watched Pranab-da teaching the Captains' group. I would sit in front of her and She would answer my questions. Naturally those who attended on her then also took interest....

Presently, the Mother selected a group of six other girls to join Parul and gave them too copies of her Prières et Meditations. This class - which began on 6 June 1951, a Wednesday evening - was held in the Guest House. As more and more children as well as sadhaks began to attend, the venue was shifted to the open space in the Playground, and they sat facing her with the spiritual map of India as the backdrop behind her. Soon loudspeakers had to be fitted so that all could hear the Mother's words.⁷

The Mother's published writings, her recorded conversations, her letters to the sadhaks, her music and her portraits and her paintings, these are our imperishable heritage, and through it we are still able to come within the ambience of her loving personality. But those who lived in the Ashram in close proximity to her and received her blessings while they made pranam, those who sat near her and heard her speak, those who sent out calls to her in their moments of distress and registered the instantaneous response of Grace, - these sadhaks, these children of the Mother, these were the chosen, the advance guard, the apostles almost. Each of these sadhaks was both himself and a prototype, in K. D. Sethna's words, "representative of all who have ventured forth on the delightfully difficult path of the integral Yoga". And a reading of the old conversations, correspondence, diary-entries in which the Guru-Sishya drama is set forth can be a lesson in sadhana to latter-day neophytes as well.

In his diary-notes for March 1953,⁸ Sethna lifts the veil over part of the mystique of the relationship between the Mother who was the visible Divine for her disciples and the disciples themselves. On the evening of 4 March, Sethna attended the Playground, and with her permission went to her class. She read the last pages of her Prayers and Meditations (in the original French), and commented a little on what she had read. He thought "it was an exquisitely deep half-hour". Another evening he saw with his own eyes an example of the Mother's infinite compassion and her infallible healing touch:

Before she distributed the sweets, a small girl was brought to her. She had a little fever. Mother caressed her hair with a soft but significant pressure. Then she passed her hand right to the back of the head and down the spine. This she did again and again, most affectionately but with an effectivity beyond mere affection. She was acting upon the fever-force. For a long time she went on and at last bent her own head and lightly kissed the girl on the forehead. Oh it was so wonderful to watch the whole thing.

Then, on 8 March, the psychic contact between him and the Mother clicked suddenly and yielded striking results::

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Felt myself to be at my wits end. Never in all these days was the morning so filled with a sense of hopelessness.....

Then, when everything seemed lost, something happened. I went and sat in the Pranam Hall, waiting for Mother to come down. She came and slowly my heart began to open. It started flowing with love and blessedness. I got up to do my pranam and, after doing it, went to my precious place near Mother's chair. She had placed [the flower signifying] "Divine Solicitude" in my left hand and a red rose in my right. More and more the heart widened and took Mother in and I threw my being towards her. It seemed the beginning of what I had asked for all these days. The flow and the consecration continued right through the pranam and persisted when I went up the staircase and met Mother again. She appeared to recognise the change and stood gazing into my eyes. The change accompanied me to Sri Aurobindo's room... the heart and the mind kept open and lived in the Mother's marvellous presence and Sri Aurobindo's exalted aura. The harbour seemed within sight of this wave-tossed wind-vexed mariner at last.

And other experiences too crowded upon Sethna day after day, and the Mother told him one day that she wished to shift the journal, Mother India, to Pondicherry from Bombay, to be printed at the Ashram Press - and this of course meant that he should permanently shift his residence too. Attending the Mother's class in the evening, he heard her discourse on the various centres of the being and on the awakening of the Kundalini. "One felt that she was not just stating things," was Sethna's comment; "every phrase of the description was as if lived through by her or attempted to be evoked by her in us."

III

When the Mother's enlarged classes began on 18 March 1953 and continued week after week, the Playground wore on Wednesday evenings the look of an academy in excelsis. Sethna's friend had felt that "Mother appeared in her real divinity there". During 1953, the sentences or passages read for comment and discussion - for question and answer - were mostly from the Mother's 1929 Conversations (later published as Words of the Mother). But often the cited passages offered no more than a cue, provided no more than a starting-point, for the unfolding of an unpredictably illuminating discourse. The hour, the place, the audience, the text, and the Mother herself acted upon one another to make every Wednesday evening a step in the progress of the collective sadhana of the Ashram.

In the very first class, the Mother makes a sharp distinction between our surface movements, reactions, thoughts, feelings, sensations, actions,

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which are really of little consequence, and the occasional "flash of the higher consciousness through the psychic" which alone has relevance to our essential destiny. The surface effervescence may seem important, but it is "repeated in millions and millions of copies". One must therefore dig for the crystalline essence: "You must enter deeper, try to see within yourself if you want to find something which is not insignificant."⁹ In the next class, the Mother enters a caveat against "insincerities by the hundred" that creep and intrude and climb into our being and try to scuttle the ship:

I tell you: If you are sincere in all the elements of your being, to the very cells of your body and if your whole being integrally wants the Divine, you are sure of victory but for nothing less than that. That is what I call being sincere.¹⁰

Not only insinceritiess, but one's dual or multiple personalities can also cause havoc and turn one's inner life into a chaos following an insurrection. The body is "like a bag with pebbles and pearls all mixed up" - a canker could be hidden somewhere in the deceptively alluring fruit - and the false doubles and alternate personalities lie in wait patiently to seize control of the ship in order to sink it. One must therefore be wary, watchful and utterly sincere till at last the psychic is able to impose order and homogeneity and integral unity in one's life-movements.

The discussion had centred on ambition on two successive Wednesday evenings. It was about this time that the Mother saw at the Playground the film Julius Caesar. She told Champaklal:

The play is very interesting. In future, some may say about me that I was very ambitious.

Many years later, Champaklal found among her chit-papers this entry, which is an amplification of her earlier remark::

It will be said of me: "She was ambitious, she wanted to transform the world." But the world does not want to be transformed except by a very long and slow process....

I find that Nature delays and wastes. But she finds that I am too much in a hurry and too troublesome and exacting.¹¹

On 8 April, the Mother came out strongly against the only too popular notion of "service to humanity" which is lapped up by do-gooders and philanthropists. In fact, such people almost develop a vested interest in human misery, for if such misery were abolished altogether, wouldn't the philanthropists find their occupation gone? She recalled how, in a film Monsieur Vincent, the philanthropist "found out that when he fed ten poor men, a thousand came along"! Wasn't he really creating the poor ones by feeding them? It is not that the Mother was against help to the ignorant, the sick, the needy; she was rather against the attitudes of

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egoistic superiority, the spur of ambition to do something spectacular, the bloated ignorance of the self that passed for wisdom:

Before being capable of doing good, one must go deep within oneself and make a very important discovery. It is that one does not exist. There is one thing which exists, that is the Divine, and so long as you have not made that discovery, you cannot advance on the path.¹²

Once the discovery has been made, and as a consequence one's ego learns to lose itself in the Divine, all ambitions and programmes and strategies for social service would become, not service of humanity, but an offering to the Divine. We are reminded of Mother Teresa who has said that in her epic ministrations to the sick, the miserable, the destitute and the dying at Calcutta and elsewhere, she is not engaging in social service, but only in God's service..

Writing in the Bulletin of November 1954 under the caption "Helping Humanity"¹³ , the Mother says that "for those who practise the Integral Yoga, the welfare of humanity can be only a consequence and a result, it cannot be the aim." She gives two notable examples of people who received the same psychic shock in their contact with human misery, and reacted in two different ways. One was Prince Siddhartha, for whom suffering was the result of life itself, and hence the way out was a release into Nirvana. The other was Saint Vincent de Paul, the result of whose apostleship was the creation of "an appreciable sense of charity in the mentality of a certain section of the well-to-do", but by and large the wretched and the poor of the earth have remained what they were. Alas, "the work was truly more useful to those who were giving charity than to those who were the object of this charity." The Mother's conclusion is that, for a lasting solution to the problem of human misery, "a change in the human consciousness is absolutely indispensable... a new consciousness must manifest on earth and in man" at the same time.

When the Mother denounces ambition in others - the egoistic ambition of philanthropists, for example - but confesses to nurturing ambition herself ("she wanted to transform the world!"), she has no doubt two kinds of ambition in her mind. With most, good deeds proceed from self- satisfaction, a sense of superiority, a veiled desire to shine as benefactors. But with the Mother, the cause of unease is the current condition of the human consciousness. She would change herself, and from that leverage she would change the world. She would lose herself in the Divine, and she would strive to establish here a new Heaven and a new Earth inhabited and governed by the supramental Truth-Consciousness. But she knows too that so radical - so revolutionary - a change in the human mentality or the earth-consciousness is not easy to accomplish. There is being waged a bitter struggle between the inertia of Nature and man and her own impetuous desire for change and transformation. It is the Mother Divine

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in her that is spearheading the Yoga of transformation, and she knows that nothing can really stand against the Divine intention and decree.

IV

In her class on 29 April the Mother speaks of the need for humility in people who have acquired some knowledge. One must go on learning more and more "until one comes to the point where one sees that one knows nothing".¹⁴ Religions generally make do with stratified knowledge, and when a great Master of spiritual knowledge leaves the scene, "what happens is that the knowledge he gave is changed into a religion", and a dogmatic religion is verily "a door shut upon all progress". The sadhaks in the Ashram were privileged, on the other hand, to slake their spiritual thirst, not in the brackish pools of dogma, but in the living waters of the Mother's round-the-clock sacerdocy and her evening discourses in the playground. Sri Aurobindo too was for many a living Presence and a guiding power. The Mother herself wrote to a sadhak on 5 May:

...Sri Aurobindo whom I know and with whom I lived physically for thirty years... has not left me, not for a moment - for He is still with me, day and night, thinking through my brain, writing through my pen, speaking through my mouth and acting through my organising power.¹⁵

Sri Aurobindo had often said that he and the Mother had a single consciousness functioning as an apparent duality only for the sake of convenience. The filiations between their terrestrial histories had been infinite and intimate, and whenever she spoke, she was conveying the Aurobindonian message as well: the message of the inevitability of the coming supramental change.

On 6 May, the talk turned on the possibility of memories being carried from life to life. The Mother is on the whole sceptical about the whole business. Except in extremely rare individuals what continues after death is "just the tiny psychic formation at the centre of the being" and not any definite person. One must have developed into a being

wholly identified with the psychic, one that has organised its whole existence around it, unified its whole being - all the tiniest parts, all the elements, all the movements of the being around the psychic centre - that has made of itself a single being, solely turned towards the Divine; then, if the body falls off, that remains. It is only a completely formed conscious being that can remember exactly in another life all that has happened before. It can pass consciously from one life to another without losing anything of its consciousness.¹⁶

Psychic memory, the Mother was to write to a disciple years later,

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is a decanted memory of events. For example, in past lives there have been moments when, for some reason or other, the psychic was present and participated....

...I had had psychic memories.... It was as if one had, one cannot exactly say an emotion, but a certain emotional vibration of a circumstance; and that is what is solid, what remains, what lasts. And so with that, one has a perception - a little vague, a little blurred - of the people who were there, of the circumstances, of the events....¹⁷

But psychic memories are beyond the ken of the vital entities that respond during sessions of spirit-communication or automatic writing. And since these entities "are in a domain from where it is easy to read human thought, they tell you very well what you have in your head. They respond to what you expect."¹⁸

The talk (of 6 May 1953) now takes a swerve, and the Mother weaves with the magic of her words a marvellous tapestry of the dream-condition: how one kind of dream follows another and yet another - first the mind's fantasies, then the vital's adventures, then the subtle physical's wanderings. Within a few hours - within an hour perhaps - how many occult worlds haven't been traversed! But the connections between them are not easy to build. No wonder no two dreams are ever altogether alike:

Because all things are different. No two minutes are alike in the universe and it will be so till the end of the universe, no two minutes will ever be alike. And men obstinately want to make rules!

It is thus that the Mother's talks traverse the worlds with easy assurance, and build bridgeheads too to help the less experienced travellers of the occult worlds..

The next talk — on meditation - is frank and forthright, and surprises with its unexpected sallies and also satisfies with its profound insights. The Mother doesn't like meditation for meditation's sake, or meditation that is flaunted as something of a status-symbol by certain sorts of people. Aside from the few who know how to meditate, create a condition of utter silence of the mind and establish communion with the Divine, the vast majority of people who try or pretend to meditate merely "enter into a kind of half sleepy and, in any case, very tamasic state. They become some kind of inert thing.... They can remain like that for hours, for there is nothing more durable than inertia!" Far better would it be to be active, to do what has to be done, but while doing it to remember the Divine always and offer to Him all of oneself and one's work:

It is not by running away from the world that you will change it. It is by working there, modestly, humbly but with a fire in the heart, something that burns like an offering.¹⁹

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Speaking about herself, the Mother was to write to Huta on 26 November 1967:

Never I sit in meditation, there is no time and no necessity for it. Because it is not through meditation that one gives oneself to the Divine, it is through consecration and surrender - and it is through all activities of life that consecration and surrender are to be made.²⁰

No doubt, in the earlier part of her life, she had her own sessions of meditation, the best fruits of which are garnered in her Prayers and Meditations. But now all her life had become an extended meditation under the surface of her dynamic sacerdocy. But with many people, only too often is the meditative pose no more than an expression of the "weed called vanity", and the Mother feels that unless this weed is thrown out and replaced by true humility, spiritual progress must remain a chimera. The Mother dismisses being humble before others as the wrong way and states categorically:

True humility is humility before the Divine, that is, a precise, exact, living sense that one is nothing, one can do nothing, understand nothing without the Divine, that even if one is exceptionally intelligent and capable, this is nothing in comparison with the divine Consciousness.²¹

A tamasic kind of humility will avoid all personal effort, imagining that the Divine will do everything. "But the Divine does not do things this way." One must put forth one's best efforts, but one must also be in communion with the Divine, "not in a passive way, not with a passive surrender... [but] with an active surrender, a dynamic will"..

The Mother's constant preoccupation is with the need to keep the consciousness at as high a level as possible, to raise it higher and higher if possible, but not suffer it to gravitate towards the depths of the Inconscience. People think that when they are seized with boredom they should seek some form of excitement. The result is they "descend a step lower, they become still worse than what they were, and they do all the stupid things that others do, go in for all the vulgarities". The cure for boredom is purposive work that will raise one's consciousness a step higher, and not so-called relaxation that means only a careering towards the pits of the Inconscience. Likewise, when something unexpected happens, when people receive a shock of disappointment, they generally seek oblivion for a while. But the Mother's prescription is quite different:

Do not become stupefied, do not seek forgetfulness, do not go down into the inconscience; you must go to the end and find the light that is behind, the truth, the force and the joy; and for that you must be strong and refuse to slide down.²²

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Better still, offer the set-back itself, the defeat, the unpleasantness, to the Divine: "Let Your will be done; if You have decided it that way, it will be that way." And, perhaps, one's own fault too — half-hidden somewhere - has had a hand in causing the discomfiture. Such faults arise because of a defective sincerity, an incomplete or a flawed offering. On the other hand, when the surrender is wholly sincere, when there is lit within the pure flame of aspiration, there can be a mysterious accession of sudden strength, as if a new force has entered one's being, as if one has grown new sinews, a new power of vision, a new facility for effective expression..

V

Part of the discussion on 20 May ²³ revolves round the question of Transformation. Identification with the Divine Consciousness is one thing, the transformation of the human body into a supramental one is a very different thing. In a moment of luminous transcendence, the flame of one's ardent aspiration may successfully lose itself in the Divine Flame. There can thus be the ineffable experience of the annulment of difference between the devotee and the Divine. As long as it lasts, it is a tremendous experience; and even when one returns to the state of ordinary consciousness, something of the blissful experience may remain for a long time. But transformation of the physical is still a remote goal. As the Mother tries to explain what is really, at the present state of our knowledge, beyond explanation or demonstration, transformation involves the replacement of the human body structured in more or less the animal way by an entirely new system of organisation:

...an arrangement of concentrations of force having certain types of different vibrations substituting each organ by a centre of conscious energy moved by a conscious will and directed by a movement coming from above, from higher regions. No stomach, no heart any longer, no circulation, no lungs, no... All this disappears. But it is replaced by a whole set of vibrations representing what those organs are symbolically.... The transformed body will then function through its real centres of energy and not any longer through their symbolic representatives such as were developed in the animal body.

The Mother then gives free rein to her prophetic imagination, and vividly pictures the kind of life - the untrammeled yet purposeful life - that the supramental being of the future may be expected to live:

As the expression of your face changes with your feelings, so the body will change (not the form but within the same form) in accordance with what you want to express with your body. It can become very concentrated,

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very developed, very luminous, very sane, with a perfect plasticity, with a perfect elasticity and a lightness as one wills... you go wherever you like, quite easily... you do not belong any longer to the system of gravitation, you escape it....

There is no end to imagination: to be luminous whenever one wants it, to be transparent whenever one wants it.

Citing Sri Aurobindo's view that at least three hundred years after attaining perfect identity with the Divine would be needed to effect this kind of radical physical transformation, the Mother doesn't think it too long to wait. In the meantime, the utmost that can be hoped for is to be able to prolong life at will, and "not to leave the body until one wants to".

In a talk on 27 May, the theme is music, the divers sources - psychic, higher vital, vital, physical - of its inspiration, the difference between Western and Indian music, and between melody and harmony. In all artistic creation, inspiration and execution have to match each other so as to produce something unique and imperishable:

The true value of one's creation depends on the origin of one's inspiration, on the level, the height where one finds it. But the value of the execution depends on the vital strength which expresses it. To complete the genius both must be there. This is very rare.

As for Western and Indian music:

This very high inspiration [as in certain passages of César Franck, Beethoven, Bach] comes only rarely in European music; rare also is a psychic origin, very rare. Either it comes from high above or it is vital.... Sometimes it is psychic, particularly in what has been religious music, but this is not very frequent..

Indian music, when there are good musicians, has almost always a psychic origin.... I have heard a great deal of Indian music, a great deal; I have rarely heard Indian music having vital strength, very rarely.²⁴

The talk on 10 June is about adverse forces again - how to locate and tackle them, how to keep out of their way, how to shake them off once and for all. The snag is an atomic falsity, lodged somewhere within which, like a sly fifth columnist, is ready to open the front gates for the entry of the kindred hostile forces from without. If one were alert and wise, the attack could be turned into an opportunity to identify this inner falsity and throw away the Quisling and the invader at once. However, whereas these adverse forces are but the denizens of the vital underworld, the human being with a soul of his own stands on a wholly different footing:

In a human being, there is the divine Presence and the psychic being - at the beginning embryonic, but in the end a being wholly formed, conscious, independent, individualised. That does not exist in the vital world.

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It is a special grace given to human beings dwelling in matter and upon earth. And because of this, there is no human being who cannot be converted, if he wants it.....

...the power to make light spring forth in the place of darkness, beauty in the place of ugliness, goodness instead of evil, that power man possesses, the Asura does not. Therefore it is man who will do that work, it is he who will change, it is he who will transform his earth and it is he who will compel the Asura to flee into other worlds or to dissolve.²⁵

VI

There is, indeed, no end to the play of versatility, the weight of occult knowledge and the sap of spiritual wisdom in these weekly discourses. Seated among the children, with the sadhaks and visitors occupying the outer circumference, the Mother is at once teacher, comrade, mother, Guru, God. She talks without apparent effort, and oftentimes the talks go on till nine o'clock or after, occasionally till ten. The children are at home, the sadhaks (whether or not they follow the Mother's speech rhythms in French) are attentive and drinking her divine presence. She is the best of companions and the best of teachers at once. She can be dialectical, anecdotal, descriptive, Socratic, iconoclastic, prophetical - all in the course of the same evening. Once in a way there are quick exchanges, as for example on 30 September when the discussion turns on the Theory of Relativity:

What is the theory of relativity?

Pavitra! Will you please explain that to these children?

It means that the description of the universe varies with each observer - to

put it in one sentence.

Is that all! Why is there so much fuss over this discovery?

It is a revolution, Mother!

It is a revolution? That what one sees depends on who sees? Ah! Well...

What one measures depends upon the physical universe, from the point of

view of the physical sciences.

Physical sciences, yes. For measuring the universe, each one measures it

in his own way.

But, then, complementary to that, it has been found that behind there is

something independent of the observer.

Ah! they have "discovered" that? (laughter) A still greater revolution!...

(loud laughter) Good;²⁶

At other times, she fires a regular volley of questions, which nevertheless fails to elicit a response:

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You have never thought about it? You have never looked into yourself to see what effect you exercise upon yourself? Never thought over it? No? How do you feel?... Yes? No? How strange! Never sought to understand how, for example, decisions take place in you? From where do they come? What makes you decide one thing rather than another? And what is the relation between a decision of yours and your action? And to what extent do you have the freedom of choice between one thing and another?

Finding that her audience is unable to cope with her questions, she says disarmingly: "But, my children, I was preoccupied with that when I was a child of five!... So I thought you must have been preoccupied with it since a long time".²⁷ Such close self-examination, as if one were both witness and judge of the movements and skirmishes in the inner consciousness, can yield beneficial results. "I think," the Mother adds, "that is what the sages of the past meant when they said: 'Know thyself", and she clinches the whole discussion with the exhortation:

You must have a great deal of sincerity, a little courage and perseverance and then a sort of mental curiosity.....

...You can try. Try for five minutes every day - not more - looking at yourself, seeing what happens there, within. It is so interesting!²⁸

Self-knowledge certainly, but also knowledge of the world around: the world of fauna and flora where Nature's subtle alchemies are enacted all the time. One evening (17 June 1953) the Mother describes how, year after year, a palm tree (then more than 40 years old) in the Ashram courtyard puts forth a small brown ball, how it grows and grows and gradually turns to a little pale yellowish green and takes the form of the "bishop's cross", and over a period of days and weeks it unfolds-the miracle of life's renewal:

Then you see it multiplying and separating; it is yet a little brown, a little queer (almost like you), something like a caterpillar. And suddenly, it is as though it sprang out, it leaps forth. It is pale green; it is frail. It has a delightful colour. It lengthens out. This lasts for a day or two; and then on the following day there are leaves.... They remain very pale; they are exquisite. They are like a little child, with that something tender, pretty and graceful a child has.... The following morning... pluff! they are separated, they are bright green, they look wonderful with all the strength and force of youth, a magnificent brilliant green... every year, it repeats the same thing, passes through all the stages of beauty, charm, attractiveness.²⁹

The Mother had evidently been watching the plants and trees with the same fascinated interest and concern with which she had been observing the children grow day by day, or the sadhaks make progress in their Yoga. And she brings a scientist's - a botanist's - close observation and a poet's

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aesthetic involvement into her vivid description of the palm tree's annual rhythm of flowering and growth..

Another evening the Mother gives a dramatic account of the manner in which the mother cat protects and teaches her kittens:

I had a puss, the first time it had its kittens it did not want to move from there.... It remained there, stuck to her kittens, shielding them, feeding them.... And then, when they were bigger, the trouble it took to educate them - it was marvellous. And what patience! And how it taught them to jump from wall to wall, to catch their food; how, with what care, it repeated once, ten times, a hundred times if necessary.... An extraordinary education. It taught them how to skirt houses following the edge of walls, how to walk so as not to fall, what had to be done when there was much space between one wall and another, in order to cross over. The little ones were quite afraid when they saw the gap and refused to jump.... It jumped back and then gave them a speech, it gave them little blows with its paw and licked them.... I saw it do this for over half an hour. But after half an hour it found that they had learnt enough, so it went behind... the most capable, and gave it a hard knock with its head. Then the little one, instinctively, jumped. Once it had jumped, it jumped again and again and again....

There are few mothers who have this patience.³⁰

Yet another evening, the Mother explains why cats seem to play with mice before eating them, or giving them to the kittens. She describes with clinical precision how a man of the jungle felt an intense love for the tiger that had caught him and was about to eat him; and how a rabbit in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris was, as it were, hypnotised to love the python that was about to eat it.³¹ The supposed wickedness of insects, cats, snakes, tigers should be viewed, according to the Mother, not as deliberate cruelties or perversities, but merely as something native to the different species. There is in all such explanations or descriptions of the Mother an unsentimental, nevertheless understanding, attitude towards Nature's infinitely variegated phenomena.

On the contrary, as the Mother saw it, it is man - man alone - who is capable of deliberate cruelty, which is also a form of stupidity as well. She considered the practice of sacrificing fellow human beings (or even animals) to Kali and other divinities "an extremely dark and ignorant affair". The question comes up for discussion on 4 November, and the Mother's answer is forthright:

There is not much difference between killing a goat and killing a man.... .. .It comes from a sort of unhealthy fear of a monstrous god who needs either blood or force or no matter what in order to be satisfied and not to do harm. And all this comes from a dread and a conception of the Divine

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which is a monstrosity. But even were it admitted, there would be only one tolerable sacrifice, the sacrifice of oneself. If one wants to sacrifice something to the Divine, I don't see by what right one can seek the life of another, be it human being or animal to offer it in one's stead.³²

Castigating such practices as "an intolerable tyranny", the Mother adds wryly that there is perhaps another reason also: "it is that men have a fine feast!"

VIII

If the Mother's talks often reveal her uncanny knowledge of occult, psychic and spiritual phenomena, and of her accurate powers of observation of the worlds without, she is at other times sharply dialectical, making the right differentiations between offering and surrender, work and realisation, idea and thought, harmony and melody, aspiration and prayer, freedom and fatality, science and art. Karma and Grace, vibrations and reactions, faith and trust, consciousness and memory, individual and collective progress, and so on. And yet, for all the lucid clarity with which the differentiations are made, the Mother is not speaking from the mental or conceptual level at all. There is no intellectual jargon, no heavy hair-splitting. The words seem to come from some higher realm of direct knowledge, and therefore carry conviction at once.

Her one supreme concern during 1953 was the need to shape the children of the Ashram into "the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers" and forerunners of the "divine multitude" visioned by Sri Aurobindo and described in Savitri. On 10 June, the Mother tells the children:

Don't you see, the present method of education is a kind of leveling; everyone must be at the same stage.... But those who want to know and who can know, those who must work, these should be given all possible means for working... must always be given new food. They are the hungry ones, they must be fed.... Ah! If I had the time I would take a class. That would interest me much, to show how it must be done. Only one cannot be everywhere at the same time!³³

Again, on 15 July, she announces something of a charter:

My children, in five years I shall take with you a study course of spiritual life. 1 give you five years to prepare yourselves; what I am telling you now is just a little of the kind, as one would light a small candle to give you an idea of what light is. But I want you all to see that we do not repeat and say over and over again indefinitely all that nonsense which is uttered every time one turns towards something other than ordinary life... one day I shall speak to you of the confusion made between what one calls God and what I call the Divine.³⁴

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This would be the true parā vidyā - the Higher Knowledge of Reality - and this would make the children the burnished hero-warriors of the future!

The Mother held the view that, in the ordering of the cosmos, a unique role had been assigned to diminutive earth, and among its inhabitants, to Homo sapiens. Answering a question on 23 September, the Mother said firmly:

...from the occult standpoint, earth (which is nothing from the astronomical standpoint...), but from the occult and spiritual point of view, earth is the concentrated symbol of the universe. For it is much more easy to work on one point than in a diluted vastness.... Well, for the convenience and necessity of work, the whole universe has been concentrated and condensed symbolically in a grain of sand which is called the earth. And therefore it is the symbol of all; all that is to be changed, all that is to be transformed, all that is to be converted is there.³⁵

She was to repeat this three years later, on 25 January 1956:

...our earth... a small insignificant planet in the midst of all the stars and all the worlds... has been formed to become the symbol of the universe and the point of concentration for the work of transformation, of divine transmutation..

And because of that, in this Matter which was perhaps the most obscure and most inconscient of all the Matter of the universes, there plunged and incarnated directly the Divine Consciousness... without going through any intermediate stages, directly. Consequently, the two extremes touch, the Supreme and the most inconscient, and the universal circle closes.³⁶

If out of the infinite spaces of the astronomical universe, the earth alone is the stage of the destined evolutionary experiment, so too, out of all the actors - the millions of species that inhabit the earth - the protagonist's role is assigned only to puny man. Addressing those gathered around her, the Mother said on 7 October 1953:

...each one - this totality of substance constituting your inner and outer body... is a field of work; it is as though one had gathered together carefully, accumulated a certain number of vibrations and put them at your disposal for you to work upon them fully. It is like a field of action constantly at your disposal: night and day, waking or asleep, all the time- nobody can take it away from you, it is wonderful!... people don't realise what an infinite grace it is that this universe is arranged in such a way that there is a collection of substance, from the most material to the highest spiritual, all that gathered together into what is called a small individual, but at the disposal of a central Will. And that is your, your field of work, nobody can take it away from you, it is your own property.

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And to the extent you can work upon it, you will be able to have an action upon the world..

There is, then, the issue between individual and collective progress. Each individual is, as explained above, an infinitely intricate but self-sufficient secret workshop where the divine alchemy is being processed. But equally, even as one swallow doesn't make the summer, one individual transformation may not matter very much in the cosmic, or even in the terrestrial, context. There is also this close nexus between the individual and the collectivity. As in Mach's Principle, you cannot really - really - change anything, unless everything else also is changed at the same time. Individual change may be the key to collective change, but without the latter, individual change too cannot be complete or final. Hence the Mother's affirmation:

It is certain (for this I know by experience), it is certain that there is a degree of individual perfection and transformation which cannot be realised without the whole of humanity having made a particular progress. And this happens by successive steps. There are things in Matter which cannot be transformed unless the whole of Matter has undergone transformation to a certain degree. One cannot isolate oneself completely.... There is the vast terrestrial atmosphere in which one is born, and there is a sort of spirit or genius of the human race; well, this genius must have reached a certain degree of perfection for anyone to be able to go farther.... Surely the individual will always be ahead of the mass, there's no doubt about that, but there will always be a proportion and a relation.³⁷

VIII

On 14 October 1953, one of the questions asked is about the fear of death and how this fear is to be conquered. The Mother's reply is seasoned and undogmatic and comprehensive, and covers different types of people and situations. A revised and slightly enlarged report of her reply appeared later under the title "The Fear of Death and the Four Methods of Conquering It" in the February 1954 issue of the Bulletin, and was reprinted in The Golden Book of the Mother published on her eightieth birthday (21 February 1958). The piece is a little classic in its own right, for it has wide ramifications and a relevance for all.

"The first and most important point is to know that life is One and immortal," declares the Mother, and adds: "Only the forms are countless, fleeting and brittle." Of course there is the odour of 'death' everywhere and at all times. How shall we master this nameless but omnipresent fear? The first method is dictated by reason and common sense: death is apparently an inevitable thing, for it happens to everyone. That being so, it

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is absurd to fear a thing that one cannot avoid. But this intellectualisation may not be successful with those who live more in their feelings. For them she suggests another method - the way of inner seeking.³⁸ "It lies in telling oneself: 'This body is not I', and in trying to find in oneself the part which is truly one's self, until one has found one's psychic being."³⁹ The Mother vividly describes this discovery:

Beyond all the emotions, in the silent and tranquil depths of our being, there is a light shining constantly, the light of the psychic consciousness. Go in search of this light, concentrate on it; it is within you... and as soon as you enter into it, you awake to the sense of immortality.40

The Mother herself thinks that this is "the best remedy", whereas the first method is akin to "the prisoner finding good reasons for accepting his prison. This one is like a man for whom there's no longer any prison."⁴¹

There is, then, the way of the mystics for whom the Divine is the best answer to the fear of death; they will snuggle in the Divine's arms or rest at His feet, and leave Him "entirely responsible for everything that happens, within, outside, everywhere - and immediately the fear disappears".

Finally, there is the warriors' way. They refuse to accept life as it is with its conclusion in immitigable death. They dare to think that death is only a bad habit which must be changed, and they seem to be born with a sense of mission to conquer and demolish death itself. This Battle of Life against Death has many fronts, and it will have to be successfully waged on all of them:

1) the mind's battle against the assertion of the inevitability of death;

2) the battle of feelings that bind one to home, relations, friends, and what is to be given up is the attachment to these things;

3) the battle of sensations - "the fight is pitiless and the adversaries formidable";

4) and the most deadly battle of all, fought in the body "without respite or truce", in which the force of transformation is pitted against the force of disintegration.

What is needed in this extraordinarily difficult endeavour once the consciousness is developed and "the fight becomes deliberate" is "a ceaseless effort, a constant concentration to call down the regenerating force and to increase the receptivity of the cells to this force, to fight step by step... to enlighten, purify, stabilise". It needs an absolutely 'intrepid hero', 'a first-rate warrior whom nothing frightens', to engage in this war against death in which every second is a battle. But the essential condition is to be able to hold on:

You must hold on, hold on at all costs, without a quiver of fear or a slackening of vigilance, keeping an unshakable faith in the mission to bee

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accomplished and in the help from above which inspires and sustains you. For the victory will go to the most enduring.

The Mother also mentions yet another method of conquering the fear of death, something like cutting the Gordian Knot:

It is to enter into the domain of death deliberately and consciously while one is still alive, and then to return from this region and re-enter the physical body, resuming the course of material existence with full knowledge.⁴²

However, the Mother adds guardedly: "But for that one must be an initiate." Perhaps the Mother had in mind Savitri, as described in Sri Aurobindo's epic, when she said this. After Satyavan's death as foretold by Rishi Narad, Savitri pursues Death to his Kingdom of Eternal Night, battles with him in the Realm of the Double Twilight, and at last vanquishes and annihilates his Darkness with her own charge of Light:

Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,

Light was a luminous torture in his heart,

Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;

His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze. ... His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.⁴³

After further adventures and trials, Savitri returns with Satyavan to the earth, and they re-inhabit their physical bodies and resume "the course of material existence with full knowledge".

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