On The Mother

CHAPTER 24

Surrender and Grace

I

At long last, after a month's suspense, anxiety and longing, on the morning of 24 November 1931 the Mother came down, although still convalescing, to accept Pranam and prepare the disciples for the afternoon's Darshan. It was a blissful occasion for the sadhaks. Speaking for the Ashram community as a whole, Sahana Devi thus recalls the occasion:

All this while we were very heavy of heart. When we again met her at Pranam what a joyful day it was! The intensity of our feelings was as thrilling as when we had the occasion of Sri Aurobindo's Darshan. It is quite impossible to express in words the feelings of joy, a joy that is of a quite different quality - as if it was descending from heaven.¹

While this relief, this joy, was universal, there was also the remembrance of things past and comparison with the altered conditions now. One of the sadhaks, Mrityunjoy, while feeling grateful for the Mother's gracious coming, could also see how the form of the Pranam was very much changed:

It was no longer in the room where one could approach Her in privacy, but in the open verandah in the Meditation House, downstairs in front of Amrita's room, where we all sat together and looked at each person approaching the Mother, instead of concentrating on how to stand in Her Presence. No longer different flowers to every person this time; She gave the same flower and only one to each.²

But these minor regrets didn't diminish in any way the delighted relief at the Mother's renewal of her visible ministry. The Mother was graciously mingling in the sadhaks' life-ways again, and they were happy.

II

"In 1932-33 Pranam used to start at 6.30 in the morning," writes Narayan Prasad in Life in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. "From 6 a.m. the sadhaks would pour into the Ashram. When the Meditation Hall got filled with the fumes of resin, incense and sandalwood powder, it would appear as if the concentrated aspiration of the sadhaks was rising high in order to bring about more and more the descent of peace charging the whole atmosphere of the place."³

In the evening, the sadhaks used to gather in the Meditation Hall, and

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the Mother would come down almost to the foot of the staircase, and after the collective meditation, the sadhaks would file up to her and receive her blessings. While giving a flower, the Mother might unpredictably go into a trance which could extend, though only rarely, to almost an hour - which meant that the "blessing hour" would have to be prolonged till midnight or past.

During Pranam following the evening meditation, the sadhaks were not supposed to ask questions or raise any personal problems. The action of the Mother in the meditation was "at once collective and individual"; and her aim was to try "to bring down the right consciousness in the atmosphere of the Ashram". The evening meditation was a "brief period in which all is concentrated in the sole force of the descending Power", and the sadhaks were to feel that they were there "only to concentrate, only to receive, only to be open to the Mother". ⁴It was also an experience of sadhaks that, at the time the Mother came down and gave the meditation, the atmosphere of the Hall extended to the Ashram houses as well. This was hardly surprising because, as Sri Aurobindo explained, when the Mother "concentrated on the inner work," she spontaneously "spread her consciousness over the whole Ashram"⁵ As regards Pranam, it had an individual orientation. "The object of the Pranam," Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple, "is not that Sadhaks should offer a formal or ritual daily homage to the Mother, but that the Sadhaks may receive along with the Mother's blessings whatever spiritual help or influence they are in a condition to receive or assimilate."⁶ The main condition of course was to preserve a quiet and collected atmosphere without the intrusion of questions, doubts and discussions.

Besides these morning and evening opportunities for darshan, pranam, meditation and benediction, the sadhaks were on special occasions granted interviews as well. During the 1932-38 period, many wrote to the Mother or Sri Aurobindo about their personal and yogic problems, and received the necessary guidance in writing. The exceptional interviews, however, were on a different footing altogether. The sadhaks could, if they liked, pour their hearts out, expose their wounded sensibilities and detail their anxieties; and the patient compassionate all-seeing Mother gave a hearing and applied, whenever necessary, the soothing balm of love to the wounds.

But these interviews, being exclusive and private, are shut out from our scrutiny. It was, perhaps, not so much what precisely the sadhak said and what the Mother said that is important, but the fact of the meeting, the exchange and the communion. It was a periodical reaffirmation of the Mother-child spiritual relationship, and on the sadhak's side (and on the Mother's too) it had a basic value. Indeed, what was it for the sadhak except a tryst with the Divine? And for the Mother, wasn't it a gathering of the child in her protective arms, to wipe away the salt tears streaming down its cheeks?

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III

While it may be impossible to reconstruct the whole scene, the charged atmosphere, the mystic-dynamism of the Mother-child relationship, yet the diary-notes of some of the sadhaks help us to infer the kind of problem or situation that usually brought about such meetings. The diary-notes were not meant to be read by others, and one has therefore to approach them with humility, with imagination, with love. Wounds and sensitive spots are to be touched, if at all, only with love. Here, for example, are two entries in K. S. Yenkataraman's diary:

July 23, 1933

Long interview with the Mother. When I asked about my progress, she said: "Cease this asking about progress - feel the Divine everywhere and in everything - first feel it within yourself. .. that you are an integral part of the Divine - strengthen your consecration to the Divine and perfect it and there will be no need for concerning yourself about progress, Establish equanimity and don't feel insulted, for who can insult the Divine?"

January 28, 1936

Interview with the Mother. The main advice she gave me was to use my tongue carefully, that is. not to be indiscreet. She finds my progress satisfactory - is not in favour of my practising Hatha Yoga which I was seriously attempting.⁷

And here are a few extracts from T. Y. Kapali Sastry's spiritual diary relating to this period:

2.3.1933: [Received the flower] SINCERITY*

Morning: pranam time: prayed for intense divine consciousness. Mother answered ....

13.5.1933: FAITH; PSYCHIC FIRE.

Saw the Mother today. Mother decided to give me room in Z. house so that I might go to the terrace in the evenings (to stay there as long as she was on the terrace).

Spoke about skambha.† (Atharva Veda X.7)‡

I had meditation at the Feet, conversation and music ....

*Significances of the flowers given by the Mother are put here in capitals,

†Sastriar used to wait on the roof of his house to watch this 'Moving Column of White ,Light' which always recalled to him the Skambha hymned by the ancient Rishis of the Veda, the Cosmic Pillar, the Spinal Column of the Universe, - the Skambha in which All is rooted.... that upholds and enters into and possesses all this universe. (Coll. Works of Sastriar, Vol. 2, P.180)

‡The Cosmic Pillar that upholds, enters into and possesses all. (ibid,)

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3.9.1934: Saw the Mother. She gave SURRENDER, PEACE IN THE CELLS.

With the Mother: 11.10 to 11.55 a.m.

She was looking into me; I too was quiet with open eyes at Her for a few minutes and then I closed my eyes. She went within (eyes closed). Then, She asked me, "How did you decide?" I said, "I prayed to the Mother 'Put the Resolution into me,' and She has granted it." Then I explained.

She said many interesting things about Death and referred to Amma.* "I love her much, she has been here; she is bound to come to me; of course since you are in the Force, you can be of help by calm, remaining peaceful and collected. That will go to help the soul.. .. "

3.9.1935: The Mother had me at Her feet for 50 minutes. Gave PROTECTION for Amma and SURRENDER for self, saying, "You will receive my help." The whole time was spent in conversation ....

21.3.1936: FIDELITY

Twenty minutes at the feet of the Mother. Two minutes' meditation. The Mother said:

1. The cross is the symbol of transformation. The circle represents the New World.

2. The Light of the Mother: it is not all that see it. Those in whom the inner sense is developed see it.. ..

3. The sense of wideness means that you get out of the ego into wider world. It is not a mental concept.

4. The symbolic forms have value, are significant; even if they are fixed mental formations, they have meaning.

5 .... Concentration must be free, not strained. That is the true way ....

27.4.1937: Mother saw me for 40 minutes, all conversation.

Topic: about the Nada, its utility and cure ....

3.9.1937: Birthday. Interview; 35 to 40 minutes.

The Mother gave AGNI. After meditation, She spoke of "conversion of consciousness", (pointing to me, She said, "It is there.") inner realisation of the Divine, transformation of the nature ....

25.6.1938: Saw the Mother for 35 minutes.

"Something enveloping, surrounding... is exact - the result of the descending light .... " said the Mother.

The meditation was given to remove "the vital deficiencies and give a deeper opening".

Amma is in a "blissful rest". (today her anniversary).⁸

*Sastriar's mother who was seriously ill at the time. The talk refers to the possibility of her death and what will happen afterwards.

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It is clear that Kapali Sastriar didn't jot down these notes for other than his own eyes to see. Nevertheless, they reveal to us some of the pointer­readings during the long years of his sadhana under the guidance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A word or two, and one is drawn into the occult regions regions. Once Sastriar notes: "There was a new twinkle - significant - at pranam from the Mother; so joyous." On one of his birthdays, after meditation, the Mother gives him the flowers Vital Offering, Transformation­ Surrender and Divine Solicitude, and plays a tune on the organ which Sastriar recognises as the raga Mohana! One may wonder what the Mother does exactly during the meditation, the pranam or the blessings. Sastriar's friend, A. R. Ponnuswami Aiyar, gives a clue: "To get into us, she removes the coverings of thoughts that hover around us. These thoughts may not be ours, may come upon us from others." The jottings in Sastriar's diary are a kind of shorthand, but now and then they suddenly leap to life. And one seeks the invisible links between the aspiration and the response, the flowers given by the Mother and the climate of Sastriar's receptivity. Also, behind the entries - many of them colourless - one sees Sastriar himself, earnest, sincere, surrendered, poised between Amma who is seriously ill and dying and presently dead, and the Mother who is compassionate and all-understanding, and is the home of all souls. Sastriar loves the mother who gave him his body and cared for him through his childhood and boyhood years, and he loves the Mother Divine to whom he has made ātmasamarpana, śaranāgati, and at the appointed time his mother joins the Mother, the river mingles with the Sea. Here, then, is a moving and inspiring recordation of the music of the true Guru-Shishya relationship, and so indeed were many of the sadhana case-histories in the Ashram. All aspirations, all loves, all strivings, all thoughts, all works, all scaled the Himalayas of the Sadhana from different starting-points on the plains, drew nearer and nearer to one another as the ascent proceeded, and were to meet at last on the sunlit summits.

IV

In the Ashram, the sadhaks were not encouraged to develop friendships or other vital relationships of any kind, for the inevitable tendency of such extraneous relationships would be to interfere with the Divine-oriented sadhana and deflect it along undesirable or irrelevant channels. "The whole principle of this Yoga," said Sri Aurobindo, "is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody and nothing else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother-Power all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity, Truth-Consciousness and Ananda of the supramental Divine."⁹ From this it must follow that vital relations or interchanges with others could only pull down the soul to

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the lower consciousness. Even husband and wife, or parents and children, once accepted in the Ashram, were but individual disciples, and had no special status as a married couple or as a family. One and all had to seek union in the Mother, and also recognise one another in the Mother's consciousness alone. A pair may have first come as guardian and ward, but after acceptance, they became equal in the eyes of the Mother, for both were her children. When in the far future a true spiritual life becomes the law, personal relations will also undergo a transformation. Its very basis would be psychic and spiritual, not vital; it would derive from the higher Truth, and not be imprisoned in the lower Ignorance; and it would be seraphically free from the egoistic taint, but be charged with the radiance of the Spirit. Till that time of the Next Future, the only relationship considered legitimate was that of a child towards the mother, of a sadhak towards the Master of the Yoga. What prevailed in Sri Aurobindo Ashram was, in fact, a peculiar three-in-one relationship, child-Mother-Master, for the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's consciousness was axiomatically and experientially one and the same. Said Sri Aurobindo in 1935:

It is a very common experience, that of the identity between myself and the Mother. ...

There is one force only, the Mother's force - or if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo's Force.¹⁰

In a talk given on 24 February 1971, K. D. Sethna said that his theme was really a mixture of three ingredients:

One is the Ambrosia that is Sri Aurobindo, the second is the Nectar that is the Mother, and the third is rather a questionable one which can be best expressed perhaps in some lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: the taste was me.

So now you know the third ingredient. All the three form a kind of trinity­ in-unity.¹¹

The history of the Ashram is a collection of such innumerable mixtures, such spiritual case-histories. The Kapali Sastry story is but one of them, not untypical and yet not quite exhausting them. The inner history of every sadhak in the Ashram, and every disciple outside the Ashram, has followed its own zigzag course towards the summits, sometimes lost on the way among the thickets or the ravines, or seeking an arbour of pseudo­uietness, sometimes even retracing the steps a little, but generally persevering onward and upward towards the beckoning heights of Realisation. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother made no secret of the fact that their Yoga, while its aim could be stated in extreme simplicity, was very difficult indeed to practise. When Narayan Prasad wrote -

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The one thing that we all love and silently cherish is to sit at the Feet of the Mother, breathe her atmosphere, meditate with her, receive her inspiring touch and drink in her words^.12

he was obviously writing both for himself and other sadhaks and disciples. But always the emphasis had to be much more on the invisible undemonstrative inner than on the visible or outer relationship: in other words, on the psychic rapport and contact.

Sri Aurobindo made this explicit in letter after letter:

The relation with the Divine, the relation with the Mother must be one of love, faith, trust, confidence, surrender; any other relation of the vital ordinary kind brings reactions contrary to the Sadhana, - desire, egoistic abhimāna, demand, revolt and all the disturbance of ignorant rajasic human nature from which it is the object of the Sadhana to escape.¹³

The closeness to the Mother was not to be measured only by the physical closeness, or the frequency or duration of the pranams and interviews; of even greater importance was the soul's openness and sense of nearness to the Mother:

It is your soul in itself, your psychic being that must come in front, awaken entirely and make the fundamental change. The psychic being will not need the support of intellectual ideas or outer signs and helps. It is that alone that can give you the direct feeling of the Divine, the constant nearness, the inner support and aid. You will not then feel the Mother remote or have any further doubt about the realisation; for the mind thinks and the vital craves, but the soul feels and knows the Divine.¹⁴

The problem for the sadhaks, then, was to effect this transcendence of the ordinary physical, vital and mental attitudes to the soul-level, not simply their relegation or suppression, but rather their mastery and transformation, so that all thoughts, all emotions, all ambitions, all movements, all doings, all, all may grow this soul-dimension lit by the central Agni, and one's entire life may become a burning brazier of love and adoration of the "Divine.

V

The burning brazier of aspiration is the primary requisite as far as the sadhak is concerned, but even as under Newton's Law action and reaction are always equal and opposite, it is the spiritual law too that, invariably, the ardour of the aspiration summons an appropriate or equivalent response of the Divine. In the Ashram, the response came from the Mother or from Sri Aurobindo - theirs was the same Consciousness, which

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for the sadhaks was axiomatically the Divine Consciousness. But how exactly the Divine operates is impossible to explain or describe in wholly intellectual terms. The SOS goes forth at any time of the day or night and from anywhere, - and there is instantaneous response. And yet the sadhak may not be outwardly conscious of what has happened. Once Sri Aurobindo had to write to a disciple:

It is not true that you have never received Force from us: you have received it to any extent; it can only be said that you were not conscious of it, but that happens with many. ¹⁵

As for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother being conscious of the action of the Force upon sadhaks, Sri Aurobindo explained:

It is not necessary for us always to be physically conscious of the action, for it is often carried out when the mind is occupied with outward things or when we sleep. The Mother's sleep is not sleep but an inner consciousness in which she is in connection with people or working everywhere. At the time she is aware, but she does not carry all that always into her waking consciousness or in her memory. A call would come in the occupied waking mind as the thought of the person coming - in a more free or in a concentrated state as a communication from the person in question; in a deeper concentration or in sleep or trance she would see the person coming and speaking to her or she herself going there. Besides that, wherever the Force is working, the Presence is there. ¹⁶

It was a misunderstanding of the way the Mother's Force acted that led to many of the grumblings of the sadhaks, their readiness to evaluate progress in their yoga in terms of the hucksterings of the market-place, and their only too common weakness to lapse into evasions, side-trackings and self­lacerations. But if the right conditions of receptivity were established, if the lid of the psyche were pierced, if the act of surrender were spontaneous, the results could be different, and even decisive. Here, for example, is Sahana Devi's compelling description of the sudden flowering of one's consciousness in the Ashram and the way this charged one with an immaculate new power of action:

If one could place oneself in tune with the force of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo constantly at work on us, amazing things are apt to happen. One can discern one's life moving in another rhythm, one gets a state of entering into a world quite different. Once one can enter into the current one can see that one has nothing else to do. Whatsoever there is to be done, accepted or rejected, is done automatically. There is no effort, no questions, no feeling of pain in rejecting anything nor even any vain pleasure to become someone. One feels oneself to be someone quite different living in another world, watching all from another level. One can feel an endless ardour, a love for all, that comes from elsewhere.

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All this is the natural movement of the consciousness that grows in one and leads towards its own particular goal. The most remarkable thing felt is that one hardly comes across the "I" that before used to be so much in the front.¹⁷

And yet, as the Mother and Sri Aurobindo saw, the Force they employed was, not only not properly nor fully used by the sadhaks for progress in their yoga; the Force itself fell short of the supramental, and hence lacked the ultimate infallibility or invincibility. "It is only the supramental Force that works absolutely," Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1935, "because it creates its own conditions."¹⁸ But the Force the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were using in the thirties, while it was strong enough to act definitively if the response was adequate, had only a partial effect if there was no openness or even returned on account of the resistance encountered at the other end. This explains the great variety of accomplishment among the sadhaks and disciples, ranging from the highly evolved at one end to the wayside drop-outs at the other. While the defectors, slackers and comparative failures attract easy attention, the sadhaks who persevere and arrive are little known, and do not advertise themselves. In a letter of 19 May 1936 Sri Aurobindo told Nirodbaran that several in the Ashram had had the Vedantic realisation, as also the bhakti realisation: "If I were to publish the letters on sadhana experiences that have come to me, people would marvel and think that the Ashram was packed full of great Yogis!. .. Even the failures would have become Gurus, if I had allowed it, with circles of Shishyas!"¹⁹ Again, when Nirodbaran wrote to Sri Aurobindo on 12 July 1937 drawing attention to the view of some people that the sadhaks here would count for nothing in the outside world, the reply was categorical:

? The quality of the sadhaks is so low? I should say there is a considerable amount of ability and capacity in the Ashram. Only the standard demanded is higher than outside even in spiritual matters. There are half a dozen people here perhaps who live in the Brahman consciousness - outside they would make a big noise and be considered as great Yogis - here their condition is not known and in the Yoga it is regarded not as siddhi but only as a beginning.²⁰

What the Mother and Sri Aurobindo aimed at was, not just Brahman consciousness, but the triple transformation - psychic, spiritual and, finally, supramental - of one's whole nature. And it was this insistence on the highest possible aim that made the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo so exceedingly difficult, certainly not attainable by an easy canter to the goal.

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