On The Mother

CHAPTER 48

Supramental World

I

While the Playground talks were part of the very oxygen of life in the Ashram during the nineteen-fifties, there were other events that claimed the attention of sadhaks and visitors alike. From the visible to the inward, from the men, women and children who lived in the Ashram and the sadhaks running the services to the spirit within that moved them all; and above all, from the Mother's spoken words (instructive and enlightening as they were) to the intervening silences and the invisible vibrations from the Light and Force and Consciousness - one always wanted to be thus led from the visible to the invisible, from objective 'realities' to subjective 'essence', from the heard vibrations of speech intimating seer-wisdoms to the deeper silences with their plenitudes of Grace. But Sri Aurobindo's Yoga asked for an integral - not a partial - realisation, which meant that the outer and the inner, the objective and the subjective, the words of wisdom and the trances of silence had to fuse as creative thrusts into the Next Future. Indeed, there could be no real exclusions in the Ashram way of life, for all had to be taken in one's yogic stride.

On 21 February 1957, the Mother's seventy-ninth birthday, there was at the Library an exhibition of her writings, with specimens of her handwriting in various languages. Sadhaks and devotees now looked forward to her eightieth birthday a year hence, and began making plans to celebrate it on a fitting scale. Also, as the Ashram expanded more and more and the Ashram departments as well, sadhaks and even students were entrusted with work that was previously done by hired labour. Yoga was "skill in works", and Yoga was joy in works, and Yoga was the delight of fulfilment.

On 22 February, Vaidya Kesarimal's Ayurvedic Dispensary was inaugurated in the Ashram by the Mother with the message:

In this new activity the knowledge of the past must be illumined by the revelation of today.¹

Vaidya Kesarimal had paid his first visit as early as 1932 and offered Sudarshan Choorna to the Mother. His visits had been repeated several times, and the Mother's grace flowed into him abundantly. The special accent in the Ayurvedic Dispensary was to be the doubling of the old knowledge with the insights of Integral Yoga so as to produce the best results in the shortest possible time. "Truth cures" became the motto of the Dispensary, for, as Sri Aurobindo had declared, "The spirit within us

is the only all-efficient doctor and submission of the body to it the true panacea."

The April and August 1957 Darshan days evoked the usual excitement and subdued exhilaration. On 24 November, there was a dance representation of the Mother's story "The Virtues" and of Sri Aurobindo's poem, "The Descent of Ahana". For the Mother, of course, one day was like another, and the minutiae of the work of the Ashram engaged her constant attention. When she visited the different departments she went straight to the "neglected spots"; and questioned how it happened that way, she said that "the moment she stepped in, those things kept pell-mell called her, saying, 'Look, how we have been kept, look at us,' and she had perforce to go there."² She would ask everyone to put forth his full consciousness when doing anything whatsoever, even if it were only the winding of a wall-clock, without allowing the attention to wander, and without indifference or lassitude:

Things respond to your trust and consideration.... They link you up with quite another order of creation and help your consciousness to expand and spread itself far and wide.

And they too speak, they communicate their feelings of joy, of sorrow.³

The Mother believed and knew for a fact of experience that material objects were also conscious. Even matter at its depths secreted the supermind, and the so-called inanimate things were not insensitive to the vibrations of love, indifference or contempt. On 23 October, when the Mother began reading the last six chapters of The Life Divine, she fastened upon Sri Aurobindo's reference to the veil of Inconscience, the veil of insensibility, that hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within Matter, and on this text she built her own sermon on the Reality at the heart of Matter:

When you pick up a stone and look at it with your ordinary eyes and consciousness, you say, "It has no life, no consciousness." For one who knows how to see behind appearances, there is, hidden at the centre of this Matter - at the centre of each atom of this matter - there is, hidden, the Supreme Divine Reality working from within, gradually, through the millennia, to change this inert Matter into something that is expressive enough to be able to reveal the Spirit within.⁴

If one looks with an awakened, not a tamasic, consciousness, even a table, clock, walking-stick or wayside stone may respond with love and understanding. Knock, and it will open; speak, and it will answer.

The agelong dual negations - the ascetic's and the materialist's - equally distressed the Mother, and the human tendency to self-abasement and perversion of one's potentialities greatly pained her. When a visitor once told her that without smoking and drinking it was not worthwhile living,

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the Mother sharply remarked: "If you are still at that stage, it is no use saying anything more."⁵ She thought that instinct in animals was more 'reasonable' than in men, who are capable of all kinds of perversion:

Perversion is a human disease, it occurs only very rarely in animals....

...Perversion begins with humanity. It is a distortion of the progress of Nature which mental consciousness represents. And, therefore, the first thing which should be taught to every human being as soon as he is able to think, is that he should obey reason which is a super-instinct of the species....

The reign of reason must come to an end only with the advent of the psychic law which manifests the divine Will.⁶

The aim of the Yoga was indeed to get beyond the mental, and reach overhead levels of consciousness, including the highest, the supramental. But it would be the sheerest folly to give up the reign of reason before gaining mastery of something higher; and it would be fatal to surrender to the insidious promptings of the lower instincts and irrational impulses, and ignore the warnings of reason. The aim of the Yoga was to exceed the mould of human limitations and move towards the Divine, and not to turn one's back on progress and lapse into animality again.

II

The Mother's contacts with her children old and young were maintained through the daily Balcony darshan, the talks in the Playground, the occasional interviews, the vitaminised doses of correspondence, and above all by occult means that defied understanding. With every sadhak, with everyone of her tens of thousands of children, in the Ashram and the outside world, she had a particular and unique and intimate relationship which was there even when it seemed to lack visible expression. Some she met daily, or almost daily. "If the Mother asked for surrender without reserve," says Champaklal, "on her side she was giving herself entirely without reserve. She lost no opportunity to shower her love and grace, no occasion to express her identification and solicitude."⁷ Year after year, she gave birthday messages to many sadhaks and disciples, and there was often a personal touch and the stamp of the Divine. Thus on 2 February 1957 to Champaklal:

Bonne fete!

To my dear child.

You have continued and this time the progress is much more concrete and complete. I have the strong feeling that I can rely upon you and this is very comfortable.

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Let this progress spread to the body now and give you good health steadily.

With my love and blessings.⁸

To Pranab Bhattacharya she wrote on 18 October:

To my beloved child and faithful companion in the building up of the New World.

With my love, my trust and my blessings for ever.⁹

To Huta, the Mother wrote every few days, and they were words of comfort or courage, of admonition or appreciation, of hope or benediction:

Jealousy is a deadly poison that is fatal to the soul.

Behind the sorrow and the loneliness, behind the emptiness and the feeling of incapacity, there is the golden light of the Divine Presence shining soft and warm.

Courage! hope! faith! at the end of the tunnel there is the Light, at the end of the ordeal there is the Victory.¹⁰

The messages, although brief, were pins of light and were potent enough to dispel the invasions of darkness; and they remain lighted candles still.

III

The Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram was inaugurated, as related earlier, on 12 February 1956, and the Mother's School on 23 April. Twenty months after, in December 1957, Sri Aurobindo's relics were installed in a marble edifice raised in the Delhi Ashram gardens. The relics were chosen by the Mother and placed in a series of four caskets (gold, silver, sandalwood and rosewood) one within the other. Brought to Delhi by Indra Sen on 4 December, on the 5th morning the relics were installed by C.D. Deshmukh before a vast concourse of devotees and admirers. Seven years earlier Sri Aurobindo had left his body; now he had come to Delhi, the heart of India, not like the military conquerors of old, but as a conqueror of spiritual realms, as the master-builder of the coming supramental age. The gods themselves seemed to welcome him to Delhi, for although it was a bleak winter morning, there was a brisk shower following the installation, and then, as the AIR commentator, Melville de Mello described it, "the sun broke through to make the marble shrine and its flower decorations glisten and flash their inimitable message." One of those present, Naresh Bahadur, has celebrated the event with a piece of richly evocative verse:

Sheath within magic sheath,

O missioned relics breathe

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And to ailing earth bequeath

Heaven-bearing potency...

From the vault of thy retreat

In this old imperial seat:

New-chosen paraclete

To the spirit's empire free.

IV

On 23 October 1957, readings from The Life Divine provided the starting-points for the Mother's Wednesday evening talks. If the first passage she chose explained "the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence", the next one she read (on 30 October) dealt with the double movement employed by Nature: "With each new form that it produces, Nature makes a form capable of expressing more completely the spirit which this form contains," but within the individual, contained in each form, "there is an organisation of consciousness which is closer to and more directly under the influence of the inner divine Presence". Then, addressing a child, the Mother summed it up in practical terms:

This means that in your outer body you belong to the animal species - in the course of becoming a supramental species you are not that yet! but within you there's a psychic being which has already lived in many, many, countless species before and carries an experience of' thousands of years within you, and which will continue while your human body remains human and finally decomposes.¹¹

This was to be amplified later in another talk:

Earthly life is the place of progress. It is here, on earth, that progress is possible, during the period of earthly existence. And it is the psychic which carries the progress over from one life to another, by organising its own evolution and development itself.¹²

These are succinct accounts of what Sri Aurobindo calls tie "invisible process of soul evolution", the Odyssey of the stages of the Spirit. In the next talk, the Mother mentions the mastery of fire, the power of articulate speech and the faculty of writing as the three marks of man', superiority over the animal species.

It was on 27 November that the Mother came out with a brilliant and convincing defence of Sri Aurobindo's style of writing ('global' as it has been rightly called), with its many repetitions and involution? that create the impression of imprecision in thought and expression. But he Mother as always, goes to the heart of the matter:

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I have heard people who read in a rather superficial way and perhaps also don't read continuously enough... who have told me, "But Sri Aurobindo repeats himself all the time in this book! He tells us the same thing again almost in every paragraph." (Mother laughs) For he presents all other points of view, then gives his own, the conclusion; then once again he presents every point of view, gives all the problems, and ends up by proving the truth of what he wants to teach us so he "repeats himself!

...And what is exceedingly interesting is that his conclusion is always a synthesis: all the other points of view find their place....¹³

Again, a week later:

It is as though Sri Aurobindo were putting himself at the centre of a kind of sphere, at the centre of a wheel the spokes of which end in a circumference. And he always goes back to his starting-point and goes all the way out to the surface, and so on, which gives the impression that he repeats the same thing several times, but it is simply the exposition of the thought so that one can follow it. One must have a very clear memory for ideas to really understand what he says.¹⁴

Here is a defence, as picturesque as it is vigorous and compellingly persuasive, of Sri Aurobindo's prose style, the Arya style, which at its evocative best is seen in the vast spaces of The Life Divine.

The last of the Playground classes for 1957 was held on 18 December. After reading a paragraph from The Life Divine, the Mother refers to the modern scientists' view that things are not what they seem to be - that the world is almost an illusion! The Mother adds: "One step more and they will enter into the Truth." Individual spiritual seekers too have had experience of the illusoriness of the world. But, then, one has to take "the one step more" too, and get beyond Appearance and Illusion both, and attain the supramental Reality. Perhaps the supramental will first manifest itself openly to people in its aspect of Power, rather than in the aspect of Truth or Joy. What is needed is perfect balance resulting from a total absence of egoism, a perfect surrender to the Supreme and the true purity, which is an identification with the Supreme.¹⁵

V

O Nature, Material Mother, thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate, and there can be no limit to the splendour of this collaboration.

This was the Mother's New Year message for 1958, that she distributed on its eve; and on the 1st morning she played entrancing music on the organ as if confirming the meaning of the message in the language of the soul.

For the sadhaks and the others who had assembled to hear her, it was a blissful moment that wafted them to the heavens of high aspiration.¹⁶

But what exactly did the message mean? The question was asked in the Playground the same evening, and she explained the context in which the words of the message had suddenly come to her. On 30 October 1957 she had referred to Nature's limitless abundance, her propensity to mix, separate, compound, shape, disintegrate the numberless elements or constituents in her possession as if all that was "just a pastime", and also her readiness to promote any number of fantastic experiments:

It is a huge cauldron: you stir it, and something comes out; it's no good, you throw it back in and take something else. Imagine the dimension... thousands and thousands and thousands of [forms]; and... eternity before you!¹⁷

That very evening the Mother had identified herself totally with Nature, participating in her processes and winning a new intimacy with her. Nature too responded with an equal implicit trust, and on 8 November, Mother had what amounted to a mystic experience. Suddenly Nature understood that the new Consciousness - the supramental - which the Mother was trying to embody wasn't Nature's enemy but only her collaborator. Nothing of Nature was to be denied, but readily accepted and integrated into the movements of the new Consciousness to achieve a new crown of fulfilment. When Nature was thus in a receptive mood, she received a direction from the supreme Reality to wake up and collaborate with the new Consciousness, and Nature too made an instantaneous response, rushing forward in "a great surge of joy" accepting the role of collaboration. Immediately "there came a calm, an absolute tranquility" so that the Mother's "bodily vessel could receive and contain, without breaking, without losing anything, the mighty flood of this Joy of Nature". It was an incandescently transfiguring moment for the Mother:

And suddenly I heard, as if they came from all the corners of the earth, those great notes one sometimes hears in the subtle physical, a little like those of Beethoven's Concerto in D-major, which come in moments of great progress, as though fifty orchestras had burst forth all in unison, without a single false note, to express the joy of this new communion between Nature and Spirit, the meeting of old friends who come together again after having been separated for so long.

Then these words came, "O Nature, Material Mother, thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate and there is no limit to the splendour of this collaboration."

And the radiant felicity of this splendour was sensed in perfect peace.

That is how the message for the new year was bom.¹⁸

There was thus established a new concordat of collaboration between Nature and the Spirit (or the newly manifested Power of Consciousness, the Supermind), but the Mother also asked her audience of 1 January 1958 not to jump to conclusions and expect a spate of miraculism on the physical plane:

It is something much deeper: Nature, in her play of forces, has accepted the new Force which has manifested and included it in her movements It is an inner, psychological possibility which has come into the world rather than a spectacular change in earthly events. ...

The miracles... are visible only to a very deep vision of things....

One must already be capable of following the methods and ways of the Grace in order to recognise its action. One must already be capable of not being blinded by appearances in order to see the deeper truth of things.

As always, the Mother's plea was for inner development culminating in integral change, and not for spectacular miraculist demonstrations.

VI

In the subsequent weeks. The Life Divine continued to provide the texts for the evening discourses in the Playground. The Mother cautions her hearers that Sri Aurobindo should be read, not in brief patches, but at some considerable stretch covering an argument in its full amplitude; and, again, he should be read, not in a hurry, but with close and sustained attention. There is intricate interior stitching in the writing, and one should not mistake what is said for Sri Aurobindo's opinion when, as a matter of fact, he is only presenting the opinion of some school or other as a necessary preliminary to forging his own conclusion. The Mother even goes to the extent of saying:

In reality, you should take this reading as an opportunity to develop the philosophical mind in yourself and the capacity to arrange ideas in a logical order and establish an argument on a sound basis. You must take this like dumb-bell exercises for developing muscles: these are dumb-bell exercises for the mind to develop one's brain. And you must not jump to hasty conclusions.¹⁹

The synthesis, the shower of harmonised illumination, will come at the end if one waits patiently, and in the meantime there is the massing of differing points of view, the regimen of discipline for the mind, and the mastery of the dialectical process:

All theories, all principles, all methods are more or less good according to their capacity to express that Truth [the living and real Truth seeking

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to express itself in an objective universe]; and as one goes forward on this path, if one goes beyond all the limits of the Ignorance, one becomes aware that the totality of this manifestation, its wholeness, its integrality is necessary for the expression of that Truth, that nothing can be left out, and perhaps that there is nothing more important or less important. The one thing that seems necessary is a harmonisation of everything which puts each thing in its place, in its true relation with all the rest, so that the total Unity may manifest harmoniously.²⁰

VII

In the course of his life, Sri Aurobindo had a series of spiritual experiences and realisations, each apparently at variance with the others. There was the experience of Nirvana in Baroda in January 1908, - that of Narayana's omnipresence in the Alipur jail later in the year, and of the levels of overhead consciousness under Vivekananda's guidance. During his first years at Pondicherry he saw these diverse experiences in their symphonic unity, and when he formulated his philosophy in the Arya²¹ he presented the universe as "the evolutionary fulfilment of the truth of the universal Being".²²

On 3 February, the Mother herself had a rare dream-experience between 2 and 3 in the afternoon, comparable to her dream of the hotel on 2 July 1957 or her dialogue with Nature on 8 November, 1957.²³ For sometime - ever since the supramental manifestation, in fact - she had been feeling that the distance in communication and understanding between the inhabitants of the supramental world and mere human beings was greater than that between the latter and the animal species. How much do animals understand men? Do they assess why we turn them into beasts of burden? Or why we torture them in the laboratories? "We are a constant enigma to them. Only a very tiny part of their consciousness has a link with us. And it is the same thing for us when we try to look at the supramental world."²⁴

As if to reinforce her tentative conclusions, on the 3rd afternoon the Mother walked into the supramental world, "a world that exists in itself, and her action was like building a bridge between the two worlds. Although it was only a dream, it had a concreteness of its own, and she found that the supramental world was a permanent reality, and her presence there in a supramental body was also an actuality. She had an existence, outwardly as a human being, on this bank, and she had a supramental existence on that bank; what had been lacking was a bridge, an intermediate zone. It was this zone "both in the individual consciousness and the objective world" - that had to be built, and was in fact being built. Of her experience of the 3rd February afternoon, the

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Mother reminisces as follows:

I was on a huge boat which was a symbolic representation of the place where this work is going on. This boat, as large as a city, is fully organised.... It is the place where people who are destined for the supramental life are trained. These people - or at least a part of their being - had already undergone a supramental transformation, for the boat itself and everything on board... was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance which is closest to the physical world, the first to manifest.... The general impression was of a world without shadows; there were shades but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order....

When this immense ship had reached the other side, there were several very tall beings who had been delegated from above at the wharf to check who from the ship should be permitted to land in the supramental world. She herself stood at the head of the gangway sending her groups one by one, and she saw that some were allowed to land while others were turned back for more training on the ship. As she stood observing the people and the landing operation, she saw that their dresses were a part of their bodies:

There was one single substance in everything; it changed the quality of its vibration according to need and use.

She recognised all the people aboard the ship, some of whom were from the Ashram. They were mostly young - the few children were between fourteen and fifteen and very few were very old - but the majority of those that were permitted to land were middle-aged people. As she did not remain until the end "the picture was not absolutely clear or complete".

For just when the Mother was straining her faculties to observe everything, she had the feeling that she was being pulled back; she resisted the pull for a time, but when the clock in her room in the Ashram struck three loudly, she was brought back violently, and she had "the sensation of suddenly falling" into her body:

I came back with a shock... but with all my memory. I remained quiet, without moving, until I could recollect the whole experience and keep it. ...

...I had the impression - an impression which remained for quite a long time, almost a whole day - that the relation between this world and the other completely changed the standpoint from which things should be evaluated or appraised.... What is very obvious is that our appraisal of what is divine or undivine is not right. I even laughed to see certain things.... Our usual feeling of what is anti-divine seems artificial, seems based on something that's not true, not living.... In people too I saw

that what helps them to become supramental or hinders them from it, is very different from what our usual moral notions imagine. I felt how... ridiculous we are.²⁵

VIII

Sri Aurobindo had often warned his disciples against picturing the supermind and supramental conditions in mental categories. In detailing her dream of the supramental world - of the intermediate zone or connecting bridge symbolised by the boat, and of the kind of people who seemed to qualify for the supramental world - the Mother also warned people against visualising the perfected world, the Next Future, as a mere extension of the present world with no more than a few superficial alterations. People who had such erroneous assumptions, such facile presupposing, were little short of ridiculous, too readily taking the false for true and the true for false, and forging deceptive differentiations:

But our ideas of good and evil are so ridiculous! So ridiculously is our notion of what is close to the Divine or far from the Divine! The experience I had... on the third of February, was for me revelatory, I came out of it completely changed. I suddenly understood very many things from the past, actions, parts of my life which had remained inexplicable...

And all the time the experience lasted... I was in a state of extraordinary joyfulness, almost in an intoxicated state.... When I came back what struck me first of all was the futility of life here; our little conceptions down here seem so laughable, so comical.²⁶

As the Mother sees it, ²⁷ everything here, everything outward, is artificial, misleading, false; '"none of the values of the ordinary physical life is based upon truth". Dress, food, speech, exertion, reward, all are governed by falsity and artificiality. The accidents of birth and circumstance largely determine earthly 'success'. Thus a man with the soul of a saint may have to labour like a galley slave on the external plane. While the worthless are in positions of power and prestige, the truly capable and gifted may be "toiling in an absolutely limited and inferior situation". As in a lightning flash, the whole phantasmagoric absurdity of the present world had come to her in her afternoon revelatory dream, and for some days she had been seized "with uncontrollable laughter... absolutely inexplicable except to myself, at the ridiculousness of things".

She had seen how, in the supramental world, spontaneous life was like "a springing forth of things from the action of the conscious will, a power over substance which makes it harmonise with what we decide should be". The will was enough to) move the boat - to transport oneself from place to

place - or to produce the formation of the wharf. Even the silence there was different from the silence here:

Here, when one wants silence, one must stop talking; silence is the opposite of sound. There the silence was vibrant, living, active and comprehensive, comprehensible.

The Mother's charge against the current dispensation is the reign of artificiality, the rule of falsehood, the enthronement of the absurd:

Any idiot at all has more power if he has more means to acquire the necessary artifices; whereas in the supramental world, the more conscious one is and the more in touch with the truth of things, the more authority does the will have over substance. The authority is a true authority.... No device is there to make up for the lack of power. Here, not once in a million times is authority an expression of something true. Everything is formidably stupid.

IX

Again, on the night of 14 February, after a vision of "what the supramental world would be like if the people were not sufficiently prepared", the Mother felt that the mere extension of power in human hands might mean only an even greater confusion than at present. "Just imagine," she wrote, "any strong will possessing the power to transform matter to its liking! If the sense of collective unity did not grow in proportion to the growth of the power, the resulting conflict would be yet more acute and chaotic than all our material conflicts."²⁸

One other experience that followed close upon the visions of 3 and 14 February was about what Sri Aurobindo had called the "Censors , whose function it is to "track down the most subtle hypocrisy and make you at every moment face your most secret vibrations". They are like an ideal Opposition in an ideal democratic parliamentary system of government: they are vigilant; nothing escapes them. The Censors are truly instruments of sincerity", but they are also, as it were, "the permanent delegates of the adverse forces", for they belittle everything, and try to infect us with defeatism:

But they always forget one thing, deliberately, something that they cast far behind as if it did not exist: the divine Grace. They forget prayer, that spontaneous prayer which suddenly springs up from the depths of the being like an intense call, and brings down the Grace and changes the course of things.

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When such suggestions of defeat are put forth by the Censors, the best way to deal with them would be to keep one's consciousness unclouded, and to face and conquer them.

After these experiences of 3 February and later, the Mother had come hack with "a definite force". She knew the need for a drastic revaluation of our old values in consonance with those of the supramental world, and she had the vision to see things in the right supramental perspective, and she had the force too to act at the right time and in the right manner. As she confided towards the end of the talk on 19 February:

There are people who come to me in despair, in tears, in what they call terrible psychological suffering; when I see them like this, I slightly shift the needle in my consciousness which contains you all, and when they go away they are completely comforted. It is just like a compass needle; one shifts the needle a little in the consciousness and it is all over.

It may be only a temporary cure, but even that is something. While this part of her ministry has become easier after the experience of 3 February and her intimacy with the workings of the supramental world,

the only thing in the world which still seems intolerable to me now, is all the physical deterioration, the physical suffering, the ugliness, the inability to express that capacity for beauty which is in every being. But that too will be conquered one day. There too the power will come one day to shift the needle a little. Only, we must rise higher in consciousness: the deeper one wants to go down into matter, the higher is it necessary to rise in consciousness.²⁹

For this to happen, however, it may take quite some time, perhaps a few centuries.

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