On The Mother

CHAPTER 55

Sadhana of the Body

I

The Mother was to all appearance confined to her rooms on the second floor of the Ashram, her movements were severely restricted, and the little she ate consisted mainly of fruits and vegetables mashed and made semi-liquid. And yet never had her consciousness been more wide-ranging or exercised more effective power than at this time. In 1965 she had tackled the virulence and violence of the anti-Hindi agitators when they turned against the Ashram on the night of 11 February; she had launched the stupendous Auroville project for invoking and safeguarding the Next Future; she had given the guidelines and provided the main inspiration for the Memorandum submitted to the Education Commission; she had kept in constant touch with the several Services of the Ashram, its industrial and other establishments, the Centre of Education and the Department of Physical Education, and indeed with the global ramifications of her sadhana and ministry. She continued to receive day after day streams of sadhaks, children and visitors, accepting their pranam, and resolving their difficulties. She wrote in her own hand her letters of encouragement, admonition or exhortation to her correspondents. And all the time, day and night, she maintained an extraordinary vigil over her body and the body of the world, and pursued her sadhana for the earth and man. No wonder the Hon. Mrs. Monica Parish, after a visit to the Ashram, said in the course of an address at Durham on her return:

The Mother is the Ashram. The Mother is Sri Aurobindo. Her importance is in everything. Her consciousness is everywhere.... She is an experience: experience of her is peace, beauty, silence, love. The New Age will be the age of Love, but we have not yet learnt how to participate in it or how to express it or how to communicate it.... She is the past, present, the future, the Ashram and ourselves.¹

II

The New Year message for 1966 - "Let us serve the Truth" - was almost complementary to the previous year's "Salute to the Advent of the Truth." It was the same refrain: Truth, Truth - invoke the Advent of the Truth - salute it - serve it - cling to it! We are reminded of the Sanskrit invocation Āyāhi Satya Āvirbhava - "O Truth, come, manifest!"² And this "essential Truth" was also the "truth of essential Love". And the Truth the Mother invoked and saluted was not any partial or intellectualised truth but the supramental Truth-Consciousness itself which was also supreme Power at

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the same time. But people understood - or misunderstood - things to the measure of their range of consciousness or their dialectical limitations. Salute the Truth! Serve the Truth! Did it mean that Truth had already come to the earth? Where did it dwell? And in what way should people serve the Truth? The Mother answered:

The Truth is present upon earth and dwells wherever there is a receptivity or a consciousness ready to manifest it.

Whoever is sincere in his resolution to serve the Truth will know, or rather [be] made to know, at each moment what he or she must do to serve the Truth for there are many ways of serving It.³

And directly related to the New Year message was the subject (approved by the Mother) for the seventh seminar of the New Age Association held on 20 February: How to serve the Truth? "To serve the Truth," said Kishor Gandhi in his introductory speech, "we must obey unconditionally the one Divine Will alone in all our being and life." This meant a total self-surrender to the Supreme:

Love is the key to perfect surrender. Therefore, to love the Lord and obey His Will in all sincerity is the most perfect way to serve the Truth.⁴

In another seminar held on 27 November, the theme was What is true love and how to find it? A fortnight earlier the Mother had said:

Do you know what is true love?

There is only one true love, the love from the Divine, which, in human beings, turns into love/or the Divine.

Shall we say that the nature of the Divine is Love.⁵

To serve the Truth, then, to serve the supreme Truth, the best course was the way of love, the way of surrender, the way of offering all thoughts, all joys, all actions in consecration to the Supreme.

For the Mother herself, it was becoming increasingly difficult to convey the whole extent and power of her meaning through customary language for every effort at utterance was an attenuation - if not a perversion - of the original meaning. Although silence was a better, perhaps even an infallible, medium of communication, the time had not come when the use of language could be wholly dispensed with. The Mother lived simultaneously in the dual eternities within and without - a seeming duality that was integrally one - and the quality or range of her explorations and experiences was, not only incommensurable, but in large measure incommunicable as well. But through her conversations she threw out hints and illuminations, and these are invaluable.

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III

Like the vision of 24 November (referred to in the previous chapter) the Mother had another on 22 January 1966 for about two hours. At first her body had an intense aspiration for harmony, light and peace, and the experience that followed was clearly an answer to that aspiration:

...it was quite a spontaneous and natural perception that the life upon earth, and the life in other worlds, and all kinds of life upon earth and all kinds of life in other worlds are simply a question of choice: you have chosen to be like that and you choose constantly to be like this or to be like that, or whether it happens like this or it happens like that; and you choose also to believe that you are submitted to fatality or to a necessity or to a law which compels you - everything is a question of choice. And there was a feeling of lightness, of freedom, and then a smile for everything. At the same time it gives you a tremendous power. All feeling of compulsion, of necessity - of fatality still more - had disappeared completely. All the illnesses, all the happenings, all the dramas, all that: disappeared. And this concrete and so brutal reality of the physical life: gone completely.

When she returned from that liberating experience to ordinary life, she had only a smile for life's useless complications. She realised that, if everything was the result of a choice, it was also "the Lord's choice, but in us, not [up] there... here. And we do not know, it is quite within the heart of ourselves."

It all came to this, then: the individualised egoistic functioning was a myth, for the Lord was in everything and everybody, and He made the choice; but unaware of this reality, people had delusions of autonomy, now felt unduly elated, now miserable as the sheerest thistle-downs of fate. But once the truth were known, in the place of such bondage and feeling of helplessness, all would be "light blue, light rose, all luminous and limpid and light". The Mother also added that, so infinitely varied was the play of existence, that in her own life she never twice had the same experience: something higher and vaster might follow, but never a mimicking repetition -

I am all the while, all the while (gesture forward), all the while on the march. Yes, the work of transformation of the consciousness is so rapid, must be done so quickly that there is no time to enjoy or dwell upon an experience or get some satisfaction in it for any length of time - it is impossible.

Perhaps it became "much longer and much more difficult" because the cellular aggregate that was the Mother's body was being constantly bombarded by all kinds of vibrations (e.g. from people who came to her). But how else would they "have the occasion to touch the transforming Force"?

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Indeed her body was "placed in the best of conditions" and had "the maximum possibilities for action".⁶

Early in March when the Mother was commenting upon two of Sri Aurobindo's Aphorisms, she recalled what an occultist had told her once: there had been six universal creations and dissolutions (pralayas) before, but the present creation - the seventh - would be able to "transform itself without being reabsorbed". People suffered because they felt cabined in Time, but if they had the sense of Eternity, nothing would ruffle them. There was the All, the whole Consciousness; and there were the limited points of consciousnesses - such as the human consciousness and the earth consciousness, each distinctive - and the Mother was struck by "this inexpressible phenomenon that each point of consciousness - a point that does not occupy any space - each point of consciousness is capable of all experiences". The limits no doubt tried to restrict and perhaps even pervert the play of consciousness, but once one burst out of the limits - "at any point in the manifestation" - there was then only "the Consciousness".⁷ The soul unhorizoned commanded the eternities.

The disciple now wanted to know how the material world struck one who was 'dead'. "Yesterday or the day before," the Mother answered, "throughout the day, from morning till night, something [in me] was saying, T am - I am or I have the consciousness of the dead on earth.' " She had begun to see the world from above and outside it, just watching and evaluating everything but in non-mentalised terms. In that condition:

I see through and by the consciousness. As regards hearing, I hear in a very different way... for some things one can only hear a continuous hum and others are crystal-clear; others are vague, scarcely audible. With sight... everything is behind a luminous mist... there is no precision - and then, suddenly... an extraordinarily precise vision of detail.

The Mother's body had reached a condition when it was ready for anything as may be decided by the Supreme Presence - "no choice, no preference, not even aspiration, a total, total surrender". Ah! she felt like "a dead person living on earth" and perceived "the very great difference between this way of living and that of other people... another way of living". Even if it be something merely transitionary, what a tremendous gain, for all bondage to external things was gone! And the body had the feeling of living "only because the supreme Lord wants it to live".

What this meant was that the Lord was master of the body, and the body saw, heard and did what the Lord wanted it to do. Accordingly, sometimes the Mother's vision was more precise than ever before, and she was able to have direct perception of the inner reality of people - not what they appeared to be or believed or claimed to be - even when it was only a photograph that she saw. Others might pity her body, its seeming

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debility and helplessness, but for herself it was the "true condition" one of complete dependence on the Lord: "Only the Supreme keeps it alive"⁸

IV

On 18 May 1966,⁹ the Mother spoke about the use of drugs like LSD which resulted in people being "thrust without the least defence into the lowest vital"; whatever images - good or evil - that were earlier registered in the subconscious were objectified as a result of the drug-action. Nearly a year later, in April 1967, a disciple studying the subject was to prepare and submit a study for Mother's comments, including details of the report by Dr. Albert Hofman who had a personal experience of the drug's effects But even before the Mother could find time to read the treatise she had a similar eerie experience:

Early one morning I felt something so heavy in my head and weight in the chest.;.. I had never felt this before. All sensation became a kind of violence. I closed my eyes and - along came an avalanche, a cavalcade of forms, of sounds, of colours, even odours, imposing themselves with such reality, such intensity!

...I said to myself, "This is a fine way to go mad!"... I saw the faculty of sensation magnified... because the equilibrium of all the faculties of the being had been ruptured.¹⁰

Later, when she read the disciple's treatise, she saw that Hofman had but described what happened to her even without LSD, simply because her consciousness had felt concerned about it! The LSD enthusiasts were clearly wrong: the drug didn't develop the human consciousness and open it to unknown horizons; it only caused a dislocation of balance in the being, thus adding one more falsehood to the rest. To call these drug-methods "occultism made quick and easy for the masses" was fraught with unimaginable danger.

If reliance on drug-action was a trap and a danger, an excessive dependence on the Overmental Gods of the religions also stands in the way of man's further evolution. As she had said in her conversation of 18 May 1966:

As long as man stands dazzled, lost in admiration of the power, beauty, accomplishments of these divine beings, he is their slave. But when these become for him different ways of being of the Supreme and nothing more and himself yet another way of being of the Supreme, which he must become, then the relation changes and he is no longer their slave - he is not their slave.

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Thus the only, the ultimate objectivity is the Supreme - and as for the rest, one might waver between the līlā theory and the may a theory, but the Mother herself found the former rather more comforting!

The problem of physical 'suffering' came up for discussion on 28 September. In the Mother's experience, it was the only kind of vibration that could pull matter out of its inertia or tamas. It is worth noting that in Savitri Sri Aurobindo had described Pain as "the hammer of the Gods" to break the "dead resistance" in man's "slow inertia".¹¹ As the Mother explained it, when the supreme Peace and Calm were deformed and disfigured into the inertia and tamas of Matter which would like to persist in that State, an impressed force was necessary to compel a change, and physical suffering was often the needed force. While vital, mental and emotional suffering were forms of falsehood, physical suffering was the means of awakening cellular ignorance and tamas into experience, knowledge, transformation, ānanda. Slackness, somnolence, insensitivity were normal, and so disorder or pain erupted to compel a fresh aspiration of the cells for peace and. plasticity: pain was "the smack of a whip" that set the body on the road back to aspiration, cure, ānanda. The aspiration evoked the response of Divine Love, the intervention of Grace, and the return of health and sweetness, for "an evil always carries its own remedy.... The three things - suffering as a means of progress, progress and the cure of suffering are coexistent, simultaneous." The Mother thought that a proper appreciation of the role of suffering as a means of progress would unravel the "content" of Ananda.¹²

V

Two days later, the Mother discussed one of Sri Aurobindo's letters on the subject of physical transformation.¹³ Her view was that in the movement from animal to man, the formal change was little. As yet one couldn't conceive of a human body without the bone-structure and the circulation of blood. If this was to come about, it would perhaps be done "through a large number of new creations... intermediaries". The Mother could conceive of some spiritual power, the power of the inner being, absorbing the energy for renewal from the atmosphere, thereby not requiring food any more. Yet - how to change the structure itself? Up to a point, life might be replaced by a force: "that is to say, one can create a kind of immortality, and the wear and tear can also disappear". But there were uncertainties still. The Mother's own cellular organisation, with its vast experience and uncanny consciousness, was ready to do whatever the Lord wished - without effort, waste, or fatigue, but with a sense of harmony and fullness:

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...only it is still open to all the influences from outside and the body is obliged to do things that are not directly the expression of the supreme Impulsion; from there come the fatigue, the friction....

She didn't want to be an unearthly supramental body, for that sort of solitary splendour would cause much confusion. While some human beings might seek a relation of devotion and attachment, others would turn hostile. First of all would come, as Sri Aurobindo had said the power to prolong life at will. And that power belonged to a state of consciousness - now in the process of being established in her body - in which there would be a "constant, established contact with the supreme Lord" abolishing wear and tear and the gaining of the accession of "an extraordinary flexibility, an extraordinary plasticity". But the state of "spontaneous immortality" was not possible in the near future, because it required a body with a wholly new physical structure. There would be numerous intermediate stages, and that would take a long time. Besides,

...one must change one's sense of time if one is to be in the state of consciousness where wearing out does not exist; one enters into a state where time no longer has the same reality....

The integral realisation will come about only when one can be divine spontaneously. Oh! to be divine spontaneously, without turning to see that one is so, having passed beyond the stage where one wants to be so.

VI

The Auroville project that was initiated by the Mother in 1965 took certain decisive steps during 1966. Roger Anger, the principal architect, arrived on 7 March with plans and photographs, and started working with his team of associates, duly taking note of the Mother's vision, the proposed terrain, and the local circumstances. The Mother continued to advise, guide and inspire Navajata and Sri Aurobindo Society in their endeavours to campaign for Auroville and win global approbation and support for the great futuristic adventure. Now and then she also issued statements throwing light on the Auroville idea.¹⁴ In January 1966, the Mother said.

Auroville is going well and is becoming more and more real, but its realisation does not proceed in the usual human way and it is more visible to the inner consciousness than to the outer eye.

Mankind was on the march, evolution was active; and Auroville was to keep before it the vision of a new species. "For those who are satisfied with the world as it is," the Mother said in August 1966, "Auroville obviously has no reason to exist." Begging was not to be permitted in Auroville, and those found begging would be rehabilitated as under:

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Children to school, the old to a home, the sick to the hospital, the healthy to work.

There were two more important declarations by the Mother, both dated 20 September 1966:

Auroville should be at the service of Truth, beyond all social, political and religious conventions.

Auroville is the effort towards peace in sincerity and Truth.

Auroville is an attempt towards world peace, friendship, fraternity, unity.

In April 1966, the Auroville project received the approval of the Government of India, and its representative, Pouchepa Dass, moved a resolution during the October-November session of UNESCO, describing the proposed international township, where people of different countries were to live together in harmony as one community and engage in cultural, educational, scientific and other pursuits, as "an endeavour, unique in the world, to reconcile the highest spiritual life with the exigencies of our industrial civilisation". Auroville would have pavilions representing the cultures of the world, not only intellectually but also artistically, finding room for the different schools of architecture, painting, sculpture, music and dance as a way of living. Auroville was truly quite a "unique and exceptional project - in some ways unprecedented"; and Pouchepa Dass sought for the project, in the name of the Government of India, the moral support of UNESCO on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. The project received general and generous acclaim, and a resolution was unanimously passed expressing appreciation of the aim of Auroville "to bring together in close juxtaposition the values and ideals of different civilisations and cultures" and commending the project to all those interested

in international understanding and the promotion of global concord and peace.

VII

The Mother's New Year message for 1967 had a peremptory urgency:

Men, countries, continents!

The choice is imperative:

Truth or the abyss.¹⁵

Why was the Choice imperative? This was the subject of the New Age Association seminar held on 19 February, and the Mother's answer was - "Because we are at one of the 'hours of God' as Sri Aurobindo puts it - and the transforming evolution of the world has taken a hastened and intensified movement."¹⁶ The Mother evidently saw the coming year as a time pregnant with change, offering extreme but contradictory possibilities.

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It was a time of great tension, and the bigger Powers had taken positions as if to start a new war; fear, general distrust, extreme self-interest, these three lowest passions of humanity could together conspire to precipitate a world crisis exploding in a catastrophe; or, hopefully, the crisis might be resolved and a truthful world order might emerge. Was it to be world-destruction - or world-redemption? Whether it was to be the one or the other - world union and human harmony and the triumph of the Spirit, or human discord and nuclear war and the triumph of the Lord of Death - must depend upon our choice, whether as individuals, nations or continents. Was 1967 to be the year of the Grace of God, or the year of humanity's doom? The descent into the Abyss was a path clearly macadamised by the alliance between ruthless technological power and rabid national consciousness engineered by the Lord of the Nations, the Lord of Falsehood. The nuclear missiles in their silos were poised, ready on either side of the Iron Curtain, to play their part in the unleashing of sharp escalation and of the awesome unpredictable consequences. The turn towards sincere co-existence and the establishment of a global polity and lasting global harmony was the other alternative. Man could still exceed himself, and having glimpsed the yawning Abyss, he could retrieve the situation and rise to the heights of Truth and Harmony and Love.

Certainly, it was the fateful crossroads of human and earth history. If people continued to yoke their old schizophrenic mind and heart, their flawed imperfect consciousness, to a world made smaller, a tempo of life made quicker, a future with its tempting vistas of limitless materialism, the whole machinery of human civilisation must sooner or later grind to a frustrating halt or end in a terrible crash. But if people could rise to the height of their potentialities, if modern science and technology could be matched by a new flowering of consciousness, a sovereign Truth-Consciousness future-oriented although with its roots in the living past, there was every hope that the Abyss would be avoided and a new world established, the world of the Next Future.

In one of his letters, Sri Aurobindo had announced many years earlier: "The supramental consciousness will enter into a phase of realising power in 1967." When the Mother was reminded about this and related predictions, she said on 15 May: "Since a few months the children born, amongst our people mostly, are of a very special kind."¹⁷ Thus, if one looked for evidence, there was plenty either way. But everything pointed to a decisive change of pace in earth-history and human history. "For the first time in history," Buckminster Fuller has remarked, "we are all now faced with world responsibility. We are all involved, and our personal disciplines are important." Was mankind wise enough, brave and resolute enough to make the right choice, avoid the perilous road to the end of

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history itself but opt for the path of radical change and the victory of the Truth?

As the Mother had foreseen, it was a time of crisis for individuals, collectivities, and all humanity. In India, for example, there were to be general elections, generating the usual commotions and uncertainties. The Naxalite movement was in the air. Big Power rivalry, aggressive national postures, the piling up of nuclear armaments - there seemed to be no end to the Rake's progress. In their limited spheres of action, individuals too felt the siege of oppositions. In their moments of agony and perplexity, where could her children go except rush to the Mother? Thus, on 11 May, Surendra Nath Jauhar, who was doing her work at the Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and managing the Mother's School there, poured out his sufferings and problems before her. Having taken a measure of his difficulties, the Mother said:

The whole world is in a condition of strife, conflict, between the forces of truth and light wanting to manifest and the opposition of all that does not want to change.... Naturally, each individual feels his own difficulties....

There is only one way for you. It is a total, complete and unconditional surrender....

...It's the only remedy, for everybody without exception.... All suffering is the sign that the surrender is not total. Then, when you feel in you a "bang" like that, instead of saying, "Oh, this is bad" or "This circumstance is difficult," you say, "My surrender is not perfect." Then it's all right. And .then you feel the Grace that helps you and leads you, and you go on. And one day you emerge into that peace that nothing can trouble. You answer to all the contrary forces, the contrary movements, the attacks, the misunderstandings, the bad wills, with the same smile that comes from full confidence in the Divine Grace. And that is the only way out....

All work has to be done as an offering to the Divine, and not in expectation of human appreciation and even in defiance of misunderstanding or criticism, one has to persevere on one's chosen path relying on the inner strength, the Divine presence within:

The Divine Presence is in you. It is in you. You look for it outside; look inside.... You want the appreciation of others to get strength - you will never get it. The strength is in you. If you want, you can aspire for what seems to you the supreme goal, supreme light, supreme knowledge, supreme love. But it is in you - otherwise you would never be able to contact it. If you go deep enough inside you, you will find it there like a flame that is always burning straight up.

Irrespective of the world's frowns and smiles, the yogi has to go on with his consecrated work, relying on the Divine alone:

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When we have stopped expecting appreciation from the outside, that is from human beings, we have no reason to complain. They appreciate, so much the better for them. They don't appreciate, it doesn't matter. It's their own look-out. We do things not to please them, we do things because we feel that that is to be done.¹⁸

For the Karmayogin, the cardinal need is perfect equanimity and the ability to rise above disappointments and sufferings. This was the way to the true and total liberation. And this could be the beginning of a new birth!

VIII

The Mother's New Year message, with its sense of urgency and call to action, was an indication that, although her physical movements were confined to her rooms in the Ashram, she was nevertheless fully aware of the exact configuration of world affairs, the maladies afflicting mankind, and the ominous prospect that lay ahead. Even as she thus brooded over the imminent awesome alternative possibilities ("Truth or the abyss"), her many children old and young, wise and not so wise, continued to claim the right to meet her, prod her with questions, and display before her their largely self-wrought perplexities. On 11 January 1967, she was asked why she permitted people thus to take up so much of her time with questions often useless, with the result she had less and less time to devote to the more essential things. The 'Mother answered blandly:

It has to be like that, since it is like that.

It is perhaps a lesson (it is an indication), but it has a purpose.

The Mother too was learning the lesson of patience - and such patience! Her impatience had become "absolutely zero"; in her native and true condition of compassion, she could suffer revolts, insults, everything, and sometimes it was all even amusing. And, however stupid the questions, she learnt something! "Yes," interjected the disciple, "but the trouble is that the others do not learn their lesson," and the Mother was apparently "invaded, engulfed". The Mother, however, replied that she was too big to be so engulfed; and, besides, as she said disarmingly:

I have noticed that if I resist, it becomes bad.... One must learn how to be... the perfect unity. To correct, to straighten, is still resistance. So what will happen if the invasion, as you say, continues? It will be amusing, let us see! (Mother laughs.) As others are not in the same state, perhaps they will be vexed, but I am helpless! (Mother laughs.)

One must always laugh, always. The Lord laughs, and He laughs, and His laugh is so nice, so nice, so full of love. It is a laugh that envelops you with an extraordinary, sweetness.

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This too men have deformed - they have deformed everything. (Mother laughs.)¹⁹

On 21 January, the Mother said that, while normally the body performs its functions automatically, she had a feeling of late that the cells were becoming conscious, that they sometimes stood back, observing, questioning how and why, and entertaining aspirations for the divine way of being and functioning. Although still rather undefinable, there was in that quest a constant perception of dotted multiple colours. She had met some Tantriks two years earlier, and perhaps she was now seeing in the Tantrik way. Like waves retreating and returning, when the old habits tried to return, the body took a firm attitude: " 'Well, if it is dissolution, it is dissolution' - but it accepts whatever will be."

A few weeks later, on 4 March, the Mother summed up, on the basis of her experiences, three approaches to the problem of transformation:

(1) the 'spiritual': contact with the supreme Love-Consciousness-Power, identification with it, to enable the cells to receive and express That;

(2) the 'occult': making the intermediary worlds (including those of the Overmental Gods: Shiva, Krishna, all the aspects of the Mother) intervene;

(3) the 'higher intellectual': transcending the merely scientific which seizes the problem from below.

The three approaches could be combined - the first clothed with the second and third - and then transformation might go faster.

The Mother returned to the question on 24 June, and remarked that the desired change was from a habit thousands of years old, "the automatism of the material consciousness which is, yes, dramatic, almost catastrophic", to the automatism generated in the "cellular mind" by its being "constantly conscious of... the divine Presence and Consciousness". But in all attempts at elucidation words were apt to deform everything:

From time to time... all of a sudden: the concrete experience, like a lightning flash - the experience of the Presence, the identification. But that lasts a few seconds and then it begins again as it was before.

It cannot be expressed.²⁰

Obviously, the new man couldn't just drop from the sky; he had to grow out of present man, just as man came out of the animal. But the stages, the links? Perhaps, in forming the future child, transformation might be attempted, but it wouldn't be one step but several - 4, 10, 20 or many intermediate stages. When it was suggested that it was for the Mother herself to do it "in this life and in this body", she answered:

I am trying to do it - not by an arbitrary will... simply there is "Something" or Someone or a Consciousness or anything (I do not want to speak of it) which is using this (Mother's body) and trying to make something of it.

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That is to say, at the same time, I am doing and I am witnessing, and the "I", I do not know where it is: it is not within there, it is not up there... There is "something" that is doing and it is witnessing at the same time, and at the same time it is the action that does it: the three.²¹

The body no doubt collaborated, but there was also the retardation by the age-long habits; and, besides, the body was not isolated but exposed to others in varying degrees of proximity; although the problem of mental and vital contagion was slowed, that of material contagion still remained. A hundred times a day, perhaps, she had the total sense of Identity - "Oh! yes, yes, it is true! So it is true..." - but the experience wouldn't last.

Speaking again on 30 August, the Mother said that for several nights past she had spent hours together in the subtle physical world "where the material life gets reorganised". It was a strange, yet coherent world; was it the creation of her memory of earthly forms, or was it "really like that"? For there were both correspondences and differences. Earlier, during her visits to the Overmind world of the Gods, she had felt similar uncertainties. The subtle physical was a curious place, she said. For example,

there are no doors, no windows, neither ceiling nor floor; all this exists in itself, it does not seem to obey the law of gravitation... and yet when one writes (Mother laughs) there seems to be a pen! and when one writes upon something, there seems to be a piece of paper.... One feels that the substance is not the same, but the appearance is very close....

But one wrote much more easily and quickly, and one noted down much more directly; in fact, these forms were rather the prototype or the principle of the earthly ones: "It is the essence or the principle of the thing that is translated in the memory by a similarity." And when it came to one's actions in the subtle physical world what was striking was that

one has not the sense of time, it is not the same sense - it is the content of the action that matters... and I am at many places at the same time!

And so there she met almost all her disciples, only most couldn't remember. And it is well that on waking up, the majority forget their experiences in the subtle world, else they would seem to have become mad! Just two days back she had an experience of being simultaneously in both the consciousnesses, i.e. one was superimposed on the other; and, she added, an exhaustive study of the phenomenon "taught me a great deal". For example, people taken as mad were often simply in this subtle consciousness, and so they said things irrelevant here though quite relevant there.

Returning to the problem of Transformation, the Mother added that while psychologically it seemed an easy thing, when one came to the realm

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of Matter (or the body), one could only pass through small discoveries. The big words, the big attitudes, the big experiences were very good up there (in the region of the mind), but here with Matter nothing spectacular could be done; everything had to be "very modest, very calm, very effaced.... And this is the condition for progress, the condition for transformation."²²

IX

Ten weeks later, on 15 November, the Mother spoke again about her excruciating - and exhilarating - sadhana of the body. How long would it take to divinise a body tied to the obscurity of a half inconscient matter? Centuries, maybe. Apart from the work of infusing Consciousness into the Inconscient and replacing the domination and rule of so-called 'Fate' or 'Destiny' or 'Nature', our bodies are surrounded by "illness and misery and disorder" which have nothing in common with the Divine. But there are periodic doses of the Divine Consciousness that manifest upon earth, and they make all the difference. Regarding her own body, the Mother said,

...if this instrument was made to observe, to explain, to describe, it could say wonderful things, but... [it] has been made to... to try to realise - to do the work, the obscure task... it is compelled at every minute to see... how much work still remains to be done....

The divine Consciousness and Truth manifested in her body "in a flash", as a "dazzling but short-lived" revelation bringing about "an imperceptible change" which sustained its courage and gave it "a kind of smiling peace". But it would be satisfied only "when truly there will be divine bodies, divine beings dealing with the world in a divine way"; but that would not happen immediately.

The deeper cause of the body's dissolution, was a subtle current of disorganisation which prevented "the cohesion necessary for the cells to constitute an individual body". When the central consciousness of her body perceived such a current, there arose an aspiration in the cells with a surrender as complete as possible, "Thy Will, Lord, Thy Will, Thy Will." What happened in response was felt as "a condensation of this current of disorganisation", and then "at first a peace, then a light, then the Harmony", and the disorder disappeared and "at once there is this feeling in the cells that they live the eternity, for the eternity." And such conquests occurred several times a day, "with all the intensity of concrete reality", but not being "resounding events" even those around her could only "perhaps notice a kind of cessation in the outward activity, a kind of concentration.... It is a work very obscure."

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The Mother then referred to her recent total vision relating to the movement of the earth itself towards transformation or divinisation:

It is a day or two now... there was, as it were, a total vision of this effort of the earth towards its divinisation, and it was as if someone were saying (it is not "someone", it is the witness consciousness... but it formulates itself in words; very often... in English and I have the feeling that it is Sri Aurobindo...) and it was something that said, "Yes, the time of proclamations, of revelations is gone - now to action." ...

Yes, it is on the way.²³

A week later, on being asked for a prayer for 2 December (to be recited by a chorus at the end of the annual demonstration of physical culture), the Mother wrote:

The prayer of the cells of the body

Now that, by the effect of the Grace, we are slowly emerging out of inconscience and waking to a conscious life, an ardent prayer rises in us for more light, more consciousness,

"O Supreme Lord of the universe, we implore Thee, give us the strength and the beauty, the harmonious perfection needed to be Thy divine instruments upon earth."²⁴

"It is almost a proclamation," said the Mother - first the sports demonstration, then the prayer, as if to announce that the function hadn't come to an end, that they were at the beginning of something even more important. The Mother was of the view that while she was engaged in the sadhana of the body, the yoga of the cells, she was initiating a universal possibility, and her children too may have felt some aspiration in their bodies:

...since it is happening in one body, it can happen in all bodies! I am not made of something different from the others. The difference is in consciousness, that is all....

[During the spring of 1962] when I was said to be ill, the mind was gone, the vital was gone, the body was left to itself - purposely... little by little the cells began to wake up to the consciousness.... That started with a burst of the Love from the highest summit... and then... little by little, it came down into the body.

Unlike earlier Yogis, Sri Aurobindo had said that the body could "even be the base for manifesting the Divine". Instead of the soul leaving the body to rise above, the cells of the body were to prepare themselves for the radical transformation, and there would be the descent into it of the Supreme Consciousness. The Mother recalled how she had become ill, and had to retire to her apartment upstairs. Actually her new life was "still more busy than the life downstairs". What had happened, then? She couldn't walk and she fainted when she tried to, and somebody held her lest she should fall.

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But her consciousness was clear and active; and cut off from the vital and mental, the body had to rebuild its consciousness:

Something has opened and developed within... then it was the direct contact, without any intermediary....

But once it is done (Sri Aurobindo has said this), once one body has done it, it has the capacity to pass it on to others: and I tell you, now... all of a sudden one or another experience occurs in people....

But the majority of those in whom such experience occurred lost it out of fear or carelessness and "years of preparation will be needed for this to happen again". Besides, her own cells would require a long time before they became cent percent conscious, in conscious contact with the Lord, and rejected forever the old habit of subjection to the method of Nature. And yet,

...there is a kind of suppleness, plasticity... it is learning to look for all its support, all its force, all its knowledge, all its light, all its will, all, all, like that (vertical gesture, turned to the Supreme), solely like that, in an extraordinary plasticity.

And then, the splendour of the Presence.²⁵

Two days after, on 24 November, the Mother gave Darshan in the evening, and many thought she looked different this time. Explaining the phenomenon to Satprem on 29 November, she confided that as she went to the Terrace for the Darshan she was conscious with "a rather eternal vision" of someone with great benevolence looking from a place of eternity, and her body was saying: "I must aspire, there must be an aspiration so that the Force may descend upon all these people." It was as though something - some Permanent Force - was making use of her body, and this Force was somewhere in a higher - perhaps in an asexual - world where there was neither Man nor Woman, and it was this Force that was inhabiting the Mother and making use of her body.²⁶

In her most recent experiences, the Mother felt that her body was learning to replace the mental regime of intelligence by the "spiritual government of consciousness". This was a revolutionary development, and her body, now released from the old rules and regulations, found itself possessed of incomparable possibility and flexibility:

...it follows the guidance, the urge of the Consciousness.... For example time has lost its value - its fixed value. Exactly the same thing can be done in a short time or a long time. Necessities have lost their authority....

It is like a progressive victory over all the imperatives.²⁷

The Mother could see that, as the process became more and more perfect "integral, total, leaving nothing behind", the mental notion of absolutes - regarding death for example - would disappear, and the power would

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be with the Supreme Consciousness, being transferred from Nature or Prakriti to the Purusha.

X

The Mother's sadhana of the body, however arduous and important was but one aspect of her work, for her attention was almost constantly engaged also by the day-to-day activities of the Ashram, and by the individual destinies of her numberless children near and far. On her eighty-ninth birthday (21 February 1967), an exhibition of 460 of Huta's paintings, all directly inspired by the Mother, was opened. One could observe side by side the Mother's original sketches and Huta's completed paintings, and see for oneself the closeness and the value of the collaboration. On 1 April, in her message for the annual sports competitions, the Mother said that spiritual life did not mean contempt for Matter but rather its divinisation. Physical education was one of the most directly effective means for promoting the desired transformation, and the two requisites were enthusiasm, which was essential for success, and discipline, which was the indispensable condition of order.²⁸ On 2 April, the Mother told the teachers:

Sri Aurobindo does not belong to the past nor to history.

Sri Aurobindo is the Future advancing towards its realisation.

Thus we must shelter the eternal youth required for a speedy advance, in order not to become laggards on the way.²⁹

From 18th to 20th June, Shri D.K. Hingorani, Dy. Educational Adviser, Ministry of Education of the Government of India paid an official visit to the Ashram. The purpose of the visit was to consider the question of recognising the Ashram as an All-India Institution of Research in Yoga.³⁰ The Mother's brief statement on this 'research' aspect of Ashram life is very illuminating:

Project: ...The Divinisation of human nature.

Operation: A change of consciousness brought about by the descent of a New Force and the advent of a new race.

Methods: ...fully described in various writings of Sri Aurobindo.

Assessment: The criterion for assessment of the progress of the participants in the research work is as follows:

The more a person is quiet in front of all occurrences, equal in all circumstances, and keeps a perfect mastery of himself and remains peaceful in the presence of whatever happens, the more he has progressed towards the goal.³¹

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Education - all education - was nothing if not dynamic, and education in its wideness embraced all life, and knowledge had continually to test and extend itself through research. The Centre of Education was thus also a Centre of Research, and the Ashram in its entirety was a laboratory for research into the problem of ends and means covering the whole gamut of life. The inmates of the Ashram, in their different ways and in different degrees, were involved in the sadhana which really meant opening one's consciousness and filling it with the vibrations of the Truth emanating from the Mother. While the sadhaks pursued their yoga through right aspiration, rejection of all that was false, and the willing surrender of their whole beings (their thoughts, actions and the fruits of their actions) to the Divine, they were also engaged in some work or other as their part of Karmayoga. Teaching, painting, printing, proof-reading, book-binding, gate duty, music, manufacturing paper, perfumes, handicrafts and dolls, kitchen-service, dining-hall service, banking, accountancy, book-selling, photography, sports, athletics, dairy-management, bakery, farming, gardening, flower-arrangement, civil, mechanical, electrical and sanitary engineering, nursing, health service, architecture, furniture-making, Ayurvedic pharmacy, writing poetry, publishing journals... there was indeed no end to the variety of activities that went to make the complex life of the Ashram. The question was to what extent the quality of the inner development was reflected in the smooth efficiency of the outer activity and to what extent the absorption and competence in work helped to induce in the sadhaks an inner calm and poise, or a gradual heightening and broadening and deepening of consciousness. Sadhana issuing in efficient action, and action tempering, purifying and awakening the soul within - integral progress was the result of this zigzag reversible swing between inner life and outer activity. In other words, the outer material activity and the inner spiritual growth were but the two sides of the same arc of evolution, the inner progress promoting outer efficiency, and outer action in the true spirit of Karmayoga opening up the psychic within and charging it with the power of the Light and Love Divine. The whole Ashram, then, was a theatre of action with a push towards perfection; and the whole Ashram was also a laboratory of research in Yoga where the progressive gains of the sadhana were likewise visibly reflected in the multifoliate organisation and functioning of the Ashram and its many institutions and establishments.³²

From 12 to 16 August, a World Conference and Seminar was held under the auspices of World Union, and there were sections on the Philosophy of Education, Education for the Whole Man, Integration of Humanities and Science, and the Role of Parents and Teachers. The deliberations were inspired by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and sustained by the blessings of the Mother. On 26 August, the Mother commented

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on the classic question as to why sinners' ways prosper - or seem to, that had been recently articulated by one of her disciples. It was from the universal and spiritual point of view that Truth would have the last word. And yet, in the world as it is, "it is the supreme vision that is realising itself constantly, but its realisation in the mixed material world does not appear to the ignorant human sight as the triumph of good, what men call good and true." It is this wrong vision of things that gives "a deforming appearance to the divine Action". As to our ethical notions of good,

...no sage... has ever said: "Be good, and all will go well with you externally" - because it is a stupidity. In a world of disorder, in a world of falsehood, to hope for that is not reasonable. But you can have, if you are sufficiently sincere and whole and entire in your way of being, you can have the inner joy, the full satisfaction, whatever the circumstances, and that nobody and nothing has the power to touch.³³

When on 23 September the Pondicherry Station of All India Radio was opened, the Mother's soul-stirring message was -

O India, land of light and spiritual knowledge! Wake up to your true mission in the world, show the way to union and harmony.³⁴

XI

Throughout 1967, the Auroville movement was gathering momentum, and the imagination of a section of world youth was set aflame by the idea of a global community enacting in a corner of India the New Life without fetters of any kind and governed only by the inner Law Divine. An advance colony called "Promesse" was established in mid-1967 on the outskirts of Auroville. Promesse was really the old Customs House now remodeled by Roger Anger, and had individual apartments to house the architects, a post office, and a maternity home where the first Aurovilians were to be born. It was decided that the formal inauguration or dedication-ceremony of Auroville should take place on 28 February 1968, and vast preparations were afoot to make the function a success. Almost on the eve of the New Year, speaking about Auroville the Mother said on 30 December 1967:

Basically, it should be a city for study, for study and research into a way of life which is both simplified and in which the higher qualities will have more time to develop.

It is only a small beginning.

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As regards Auroville's ideas about the production and distribution of food, the Mother described them as "an improvement on the communist system, a more balanced organisation than sovietism." An, as if to clinch the matter, she added:

The problem finally comes down to this: to replace the mental government of the intelligence by the government of a spiritualised consciousness.³⁵

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