On The Mother

CHAPTER 13

Tea, Flowers and Flu

I

Once in the course of her stay in Japan, Mirra had an illness, extremely painful at first, though it didn't fail to provide some rich compensations as well. It was in January 1919 in Tokyo when the terrible influenza epidemic was raging all over Japan. After the attack, the patient usually died on the third day; if luckily he didn't, at the end of seven days he was completely cured, though exhausted and enfeebled. People succumbed to the epidemic in such large numbers that they couldn't be individually cremated . There was panic everywhere, and people were gripped by a fear of vast proportions, no wonder - because the epidemic was claiming many lives. In Tokyo alone, every day "there were hundreds and hundreds of cases". They said the microbes were responsible, the microbes were wildly careering in the atmosphere! And people took desperate measures to escape the dreaded contagion. Yet, if the trouble was with the atmosphere itself, how was one to escape it? How was one to avoid movement altogether? As for Mirra, she simply covered herself with her force, giving no thought to the raging epidemic. But she had a companion at the time who was constantly afraid and curious. Then, one day, Mirra had to go to the other end of the city in a tram, and for all her habitual calm and self­possession, she became curious, and this provided an opening:

I was in the tram and seeing these people with masks on their noses, and then there was in the atmosphere this constant fear, and so there came a suggestion to me; I began to ask myself: "Truly, what is this illness? .. " I came to the house [of a friend], I passed an hour there and I returned. And I returned with a terrible fever". I had caught it.¹

But of course she declined to take any medicine, and so there was the grapple within, an intestine struggle between 'the genius and the mortal instruments' :

I remained in my bed .... At the end of the second day, as I was lying all alone, I saw clearly a being, with a part of the head cut off, in a military uniform ... approaching me and suddenly flinging himself upon my chest, with that half a head to suck my force ... " He was drawing all my life out .... Then I called on my occult power, I gave a big fight and I succeeded in turning him back .... And I woke Up.²

The three clear gains of this pretty agonising experience were, firstly, she saw that microbes were produced by the disintegration of vital beings, and with their ravenous appetites, they were themselves forces of further

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disintegration; secondly, having decisively thrown back the vicious being with its "half a head", Mirra quickly regained her normal health; and thirdly, having by occult means tackled the evil and vanquished it, Mirra as good as put an end to the epidemic itself. She learnt presently that there as were no new cases, and those that were ill were cured in due course. There were even articles in the papers about the mystery of the sudden decline and end of the epidemic. It was all clearly much more than a bizarre coincidence.

II

In her talks at Pondicherry, she was to return again and again to the theme of the causal nexus between fear and illness. She considered that "some disharmony in the being, from a lack of receptivity to the divine forces" was the primary reason for the onset of an illness.³ The disharmony thus precipitated fear, and such fear opened the gates inviting the invasion:

If there is one mental disorder which can bring about all illnesses, it is fear.⁴

Again, on 19 June 1957:

From the ordinary point of view, in most cases, it is usually fear - fear, which may be mental fear, vital fear, but which is almost always physical fear, a fear in the cells - it is fear which opens the door to all contagion.⁵

How is this physical fear - the trepidation of the very cells of the body - to be overcome? "A veritable yoga is necessary ... the control of a conscious will is necessary."⁶ Some months earlier, on 13 February, the question had come up in a wider perspective, the whole evil complex of illness and pain and suffering. Yoga of course was the cure-all, the infallible panacea. But what was the innermost secret of this yoga? How was it to be done? What might one hope for by doing it? The Mother gave a categorical answer:

The secret is to emerge from the ego, get out of its prison, unite ourselves with the Divine, merge into Him, not to allow anything to separate us from Him. Then, once one has discovered this secret and realises it in one's being, pain loses its justification and suffering disappears. It is an all­powerful remedy, not only in the deeper parts of the being, in the soul, in the spiritual consciousness, but also in life and in the body.

There is no illness, no disorder which can resist the discovery of this secret and the putting of it into practice, not only in the higher parts of the being but in the cell of the body ....

... When the physical disorder comes, one must not be afraid; one must not run away from it, must face it with courage, calmness, confidence, with the certitude that illness is a falsehood and that if one turns entirely, in full

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confidence, with a complete quietude to the divine Grace, It will settle in these cells as It is established in the depths of the being, and the cells themselves will share in the eternal Truth and Delight.⁷

III

The four years Mirra spent in Japan were an oasis in time, and a singular Tea Room of reserve, contemplation and preparation for the future. In her childhood and girlhood days, Mirra's interests and her sensibilities and her warm heart's movements had pulled her in different directions - self­ introspection, solitary communion with Nature, stray rambles in the uncharted occult regions, involvement in music and painting, dream­ visions and musings - and she had grown into a young woman unparalleled silent and self-absorbed, conscious of both the world's burden of pain and its need for love, and peering into the Future with the eyes of hope and faith. She had presently won her way to the secrets of occultism, under M. Théon's guidance in Algeria, and in Paris she had pursued the way of enlightened reason in the weekly meetings of "Idea", and she had plunged into the ocean of spirituality at Pondicherry with Sri Aurobindo keeping guard as it were and giving a helping hand when necessary. The War had then intervened, and the work of reconstruction of a world decadent and disintegrating had to be done now on firm new foundations. The Arya was spelling out, month after month, the minutiae of the supramental manifesto, the programme for the unfoldment of the Next Future. But, then, the supramental manifesto was also Mirra's manifesto, for it was, in a sense, only the symphonic enunciation and detailed elaboration of her own vision of "the flowering of the new race, the race of the sons of God" as set forth in her prolegomenon and given at her meeting of 7 May 1912. While during the war years the Arya was imperiously unrolling the magnificent tapestry of the Future, the Richards left Pondicherry for France, and then France for Japan, and stayed there till after the Peace of Versailles had been signed. What was Japan's role in the epic of Mirra's manifestation and ministry? What did she hope for? What was the nature of her experiences in Japan? What were the real gains of the visit?

IV

Ever since her years of 'discretion', one thing had appeared so amusing, so tragi-comic, in human affairs: the readiness of people to identify themselves with the country or religion of their birth, cry up its superiority ('My country!' 'My religion!' 'My prophet!' 'My language!'), and hold in

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contempt all other countries, religions, or peoples. In times past, it was not easy to move from one part of the world to another, people lived walled up as it were in particular political, economic, social, religious or ethical systems, and such collectivist egoisms were apt to feed upon themselves and thrive just as individual egoisms did. Mirra thought that, in the twentieth century, the world had gone past that sort of stupid parochialism. With the advance of science and technology, with the advance in historical knowledge, especially knowledge of comparative civilisation culture and religion, there was surely no room for the old dogmatism. In our time, humanity is caught in a process of convergence towards the Future, and all past thought, all yesterday's ideologies and experiences, have to mingle in the crucible of current tribulations and aspirations and expectations, and open up towards the beckoning Future.

Her own ancestry went back to ancient Egypt; she was born and brought up in France; she completed her occult education in Algeria; she grew to high intellectual maturity in Paris; she sought the true Light in the scriptures of the Orient, the Gita, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, the Yogasutras; she found a master of spiritual illumination in Pondicherry. And now, in Japan, she sought the clues to an orderly and artistic way of life, the graces of the 'realm between' linking the ascetics' bare heavens and the materialists' sickening excesses. Mirra was still thinking of her future "typic society", how it should be constituted, what elements should go into it, what ambience should pervade it. She knew that her "typic society" should be grounded on the Spirit; that it should enact a spiritual hierarchy; that it should be a marriage of heaven and earth, heaven descended on an equal footing to a changed and transformed earth. But there might be other useful ingredients too, and perhaps she would light upon them during her Japanese sojourn!

It was also necessary to look for herself how what passed for 'national identity', 'national character', 'national soul', while they had certainly a validity within limits, were not as absolute as people took them to be. 'Human' is the generic term; the rest were but adhesions and expendable qualifications. As she said about a decade after her Japanese visit:

If we go a little way within ourselves, we shall discover that there is in each of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the ages and manifesting in a multitude of forms. Each of us has been born in many different countries, belonged to many different nations, followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as the best? The experiences gathered by us in all these many lives in different countries and varying religions, are stored up in that inner continuity of our consciousness which persists through all births .... There are people who have been born into one country, although the leading elements of their consciousness obviously belong to another. I have met some born in Europe who were

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evidently Indians; I have met others born in Indian bodies who were as evidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were Indian, others who were European.⁸

The accident of birth should neither make for slavery to something local, tmporal or transient, nor prevent a conscious choice on the basis of a new inner freedom won through a psychic or spiritual opening. Neither blind acceptance nor blind rejection is the way of wisdom. Coming to Japan, Mira found a good deal to admire in their way of life - especially their elegance, sense of order and habitual poise. But she was also quick to mark their allergy to the things of the spirit. During her stay, not only did Mirra gain an acquaintance with the Japanese language, and acquire a smattering of Chinese⁹, she forged several deep life-loyalties, while with people like the Okhawas and the Kobayashis, she felt a profound affinity that transcended country, class and religion. The dogmas and the rituals of the Shintoists and the Buddhists, as of the divers Christian sects, left her rather cold, because they seemed to have lost their original spiritual orientations. But the meditative intensities of the Zen Buddhists, their enlightened this­ 'worldliness, the collectivist discipline of the still-sitting groups, the sub-dued rhythm of the Tea Ceremony with its aesthetic and religious undertones, and the psychology and philosophy behind the Japanese :mystique of flower arrangement - all this could not fail to make a deep ,impression upon Mirra's sensitised and wide-awake consciousness.

V

After the first few months in Japan, Mirra realised that it was really a country of sensations. The people were, as a general rule, individualists in their feelings, thoughts and actions. They lived as it were through their eyes, and form and even rhythm meant a great deal to them. They saw 'behind behind the externals of form deeper truths, harmonies, significances:

Each form, each act is symbolical, from the arrangement of the gardens and the houses to the famous tea ceremony.... Beauty rules over her [Japan] as an uncontested master; and all her atmosphere incites to mental and vital activity, study, observation, progress, effort, not to silent and blissful contemplation. But behind this activity stands a high aspiration .... ¹⁰

As early as 1906, in his celebrated classic The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura had said:

A special contribution of Zen to Eastern thought was its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual. It held that in the great relation of things there was no distinction of small and great, an atom possessing equal possibilities with the universe. The seeker for perfection

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must discover in his own life the reflection of the inner light.

Further, in a Zen monastery, almost every member was assigned some important work; "such services formed a part of the Zen discipline, and every least action must be done absolutely perfectly". The Book of Tea was known to Mirra, and may have given her a pointer to her complicated, but superlatively efficient organisation of Sri Aurobindo Ashram in later years, with its hundreds of sadhaks making a world within a world, a "typic society" serving as the matrix within the outer human agglomeration in Pondicherry, or India.

The Zen meditative practices ("Look carefully within, and there you will find the Buddha!") and the still-sitting discipline of the Okhata-Kobayashi groups at Kyoto had also their own merits. A still-sitting group of 5000 would be unbelievably silent, and even their breathing couldn't be heard. This impressive discipline had the aim of promoting physical as well as mental well-being, and perhaps of throwing open the windows to reveal the panorama of the Spirit's landscapes. But neither Zen nor still-sitting quite gave the answer to what Mirra was seeking, even if she may have remembered these when, after her second coming to Pondicherry, she explained the roles of individual, group and collective sadhana within the larger perspective of Integral Yoga.

There was, then, the Japanese Tea Ceremony that, on a first view, merely tantalised the outsider. Why should so much leisureliness and formalism surround what was, perhaps, no more than an everyday social affair? Actually, the mystique of the tea ceremony has grown over a period of one thousand years - in its present form, at least since the time of Rikiu four hundred years ago. The traditional arrangement with the portico . (where the five guests foregather), .the garden path which leads the guests through a low door (the arch of humility), to the sanctuary itself, in other words, the small tea room ten-feet square (with its own anteroom for the utensils), would indicate the symbolic passage from the imperfect world without to the elected aspirations and realisations of the world within. The five guests and the Tea Master making and drinking tea out of the same bowl would likewise imply the mystery of inter-communication and fulfilled communion.

Quite obviously, the Tea Room had slowly evolved out of the Zen monastic tradition. In Okakura's words:

.. .it was the ritual instituted by the Zen monks of successively drinking tea out of a bowl before the image of Bodhi Dharma, which laid the foundations of the tea ceremony.

Although muted in its articulation, the tea ceremony also aimed at inducing serenity and purity through the process of sharing. It is not

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In Japan, about 1918

unlikely that the muted charm and tested efficacy of the tea ceremony made a deep impression on Mirra, and a few of its features may have entered the far more spiritually profound Soup ceremony of the earlier years of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The dainty narrow mats and the small low tables of the Japanese Tea Room were likewise to provide a pattern for the arrangements in the Ashram dining hall.

VI

In Japan, the art or cult of Flower Arrangement first grew as part of the Tea Ceremony, and later gradually asserted its own autonomy. The early Buddhist saints, when they witnessed the scattering of flowers during a storm, gathered them and placed them in bowls of water; this was done out of compassion. In course of time, artistic flower arrangement - but always subdued and always with a purpose - became integral to the tea ceremony. Still later, since the middle of the seventeenth century, Flower Masters - as distinct from the Tea Masters - attained an importance of their own, and they have made the variegated art of flower arrangement something of a rather unique human achievement:

It now becomes independent of the Tea Room and knows no law save that the vase imposes on it. New conceptions and methods of execution now become possible.¹¹

There are said to be over 300 different schools of flower arrangement, grouped broadly under the Formalistic and the Naturalistic; and it is said that many a flower arrangement aims at insinuating the filiations between Heaven, Earth, and the intermediate principle, Man. While she was in Japan, Mirra was fascinated by the Japanese addiction to the cult of flowers and their marvellous talent for flower arrangement, and it is hardly a coincidence that in Sri Aurobindo Ashram too the cult of flowers was to reign with an unfading freshness and glow, and adding, and exploring, newer and newer avenues of significance.

VII

In the Prayers and Meditations, there is a single entry between 10 October 1918 and 22 June 1920. Perhaps it was a lean period for fresh spiritual harvests; may be, it was a period of quiet consolidation; or, what was equally likely, the experiences defied formal expression. But the opening sentence in the entry under "Oiwake, 3 September 1919" has a rather startling tone:

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Since the man refused the meal I had prepared with so much love and care, I invoked the God to take it. '

There is here a sharp unmistakable personal note. Granted the general impersonality of Prayers and Meditations - Mirra is speaking as a rule, not exactly or exclusively for herself but on behalf of and often in the name of the earth and its sorrowing inhabitants with their ardours, hopes, set­backs, despairs as also aspirations for a better world - still this particular entry seems to have leapt out, like a spark from the anvil, of some immediate rebuff or the sudden registering of a cumulative finality of rejection. Rebuffs of course are inbuilt in the system of human relationships. 'Nay' is almost endemic in the earth atmosphere. In life, karma cannot be avoided, and there is also joy in karma when there is no external compulsion. Something is done, and is offered to another - or others - with love. But average humanity is unworthy of such gifts or offerings. There is cold-shouldering, there is refusal, there is denigration. Instead of the smile of acceptance and appreciation, there is the blighting dead-sea fruit of frowning disapprobation. What then? Nishkama karma - desireless action - is therefore recommended. But' even that is too bloodless, too negative. Rather offer everything, not to the man, but to the God: not to the creature of ignorance and impermanence, but to the God within, the God omnipresent, the immutable Divine. Make an offering of all karma to the Divine! Offer it as a garland is offered, or as a burnt offering, or as one's heart's blood. Offer even one's set-backs and failures to the Divine. Invoke the Lord to take it, to take all the harvest of one's labours, to take the food prepared with so much love and care, the burnt offering of one's dedicated exertions; and on his part, He will certainly accept these gifts, these offerings, made by a mind opened to knowledge, a heart turned to Love, and a body resilient for accomplishing works.

Commenting on this crucial entry', Nolini Kanta Gupta - about whom Sri Aurobindo had once said, "If Nolini does not know my Yoga, who. does?" - has written:

What is this banquet that she prepared for man and which man refused? It is nothing else than the Life Divine here below .... Man refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his petty power, in his blind self-sufficiency. Furthermore, besides ignorance and arrogance there is an element of revolt in him, for in his half-wakefulness with his rudimentary consciousness, if he ever came in contact with something that is above and beyond him, if a shadow of another world happens to cross his threshold, he is not at peace, does not want to recognise but denies an even curses it. . ..

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If man finds no use for the gift She has brought down for him, naturally She will take it back and return it to Him to whom it belongs, for all things belong to the Supreme Lord, even She belongs to Him, as She is one with Him.¹²

.. .in the last analysis each and every movement comes from Him and we must always offer them to Him, return them to the parent-source from where they come; therein lies freedom, the divine detachment which the individual must possess always in order to be one with Him, feel one's identity with Him.¹²

VIII

It was about this time that Sri Aurobindo was publishing in the Arya, month after month, his Essays on the Gita. In November 1918, in the chapter "The Secret of Secrets", Sri Aurobindo wrote:

Nature is the worker and not ego, but Nature is only a power of the Being who is the sole master of all her works and energisms and of all the aeons of the cosmic sacrifice. Therefore, since his [man's] works are that Being's, he has to give up all his actions to. the Godhead in him and the world, by whom they are done in the divine mystery of Nature .... Thus only can we aspire through the offering of all our nature and being to a living union with the One who has become in Time and Space all that is .... All knowledge then becomes an adoration and aspiration, but all works too become an adoration and aspiration.¹³

Again, in July 1919, on "The Way of the Bhakta":

This then is the swiftest, largest and greatest way. On Me, says the Godhead to the soul of man, repose all thy mind and lodge all thy understanding in Me: I will lift them up bathed in the supernal blaze of the divine love and will and knowledge to Myself....

... The God-lover dear to God is a soul of wide equality .... And the crown of this equality is love founded on knowledge, fulfilled in instrumental action, extended to all things and beings, a vast absorbing and all­containing love for the divine Self who is Creator and Master of the universe, suhrdam sarvabhūtānām sarva-lokamaheśvaram.¹⁴

While there were the usual irritations of ignorant indifference or perverse negation, while there was heard the sullen reiteration of the graceless Nay, Mirra wasn't perturbed in the least, for periodically there came also the needed spiritual solace from Pondicherry - the Arya, and occasional letters too. Mirra knew well enough what she needs must do: offer everything ­ love, knowledge, works - not to the man but to the God! And the response was immediate:

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My God, Thou hast accepted my invitation, Thou hast come to sit at my table, and in exchange for my poor and humble offering Thou hast granted to me the last liberation.¹⁵

And it is an integral liberation involving the heart, head, body and soul.

My heart, even this morning so heavy with anguish and care, my head surcharged with responsibility, are delivered of their burden. Now are they light and joyful as my inner being has been for a long time past. My body smiles to Thee with happiness as before my soul smiled to Thee .... I have mounted the Calvary of successive disillusionments high enough to attain to the Resurrection. Nothing remains of the past but a potent love which gives me the pure heart of a child and the lightness and freedom of thought of a god. ¹⁵

Gone are all the heart's anguish, the head's burden of care, and perhaps also the body's strait-jacket of tamas; and now all are in a concert with the soul, in its rhapsody of love and adoration. This is verily the integral realisation. There will be no more taint of egoistic separativity, and no unbridgeable abyss between the human and the Divine. Mirra has won her way to the heart of a child and the lightness and freedom of thought of a god, and she is ready to act her role as the chosen instrument of the Lord for unleashing the spiritual revolution and the terrestrial transformation.

IX

In the meantime, Sri Aurobindo was turning out his monumental prose sequences - The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Psychology of Social Development, The Future Poetry, A Defence of Indian Culture - and, all by himself, publishing them serially, and more or less simultaneously, in the pages of the Arya. When the War came to an end at last, his apocalyptical "Uttarpara Speech" of 1909 and The Ideal of Human Unity were issued as books in 1919. Sri Aurobindo also commented with guarded enthusiasm on the success of the Russian Revolution. In fact, in one of his later Evening Talks (9 December 1925), he said that he had "worked for the success of the Russian Revolution", that his was "one of the influences that worked to make it a success".¹⁶ Further, writing under the title "1919" in the July 1919 issue of the Arya, Sri Aurobindo felt unhappy that the peace seemed to be "in part a prolongation" of the War, and that even the League of Nations looked like a mere makeshift. On the other hand, there were some hopeful strands as well: a move away "from plutocracy and middle-class democracy to some completeness of socialism and attempt at a broad and equal commonalty of social living, in the relations of the peoples away

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from aggressive nationalism and balances of power to some closer international comity". But they were as yet no more than the first indications, symptoms, not the actuality. And he concluded with these words:

Meanwhile much is gone that had to go, though relics and dregs of it remain for destruction, and the agony of a sanguinary struggle is ended, and for that there may well be rejoicing. But if something is ended, all has yet to be begun. The human spirit has still to find itself, its idea and its greater orientation. ¹⁷

The recluse at Pondicherry, then, was also a man of action, though with a difference! He was keenly watching the developing global political scene, and even intervening occasionally when quite necessary with a spiritual power; and he was in communication with Mirra, though few of the letters have actually survived.

There were other developments too. Sri Aurobindo's wife, Mrinalini, succumbed to the influenza epidemic in December 1918 at the very time she was making preparations to leave her parental home in Bengal for a prolonged stay at Pondicherry. Writing to his father-in-law on 19 February 1919, Sri Aurobindo said:

God has seen good to lay upon me the one sorrow that could still touch me to the centre. He knows better than ourselves what is best for each of us, and now that the first sense of the irreparable has passed, I can bow with submission to His divine purpose. ¹⁸

Strange enough, surpassing strange, that first Mrinalini in Bengal, and a month later Mirra in Japan, one after the other they should both suffer the dangerous attentions of the Flu epidemic; but while Mrinalini succumbed, Mirra managed by sheer force of her occult resourcefulness to throw back and immobilise the adversary. As narrated earlier, the epidemic itself was presently to subside in Japan.

There was, then, the attempt by Lokamanya Tilak and Joseph Baptista to get to get Sri Aurobindo back to public life as editor of a new political paper to be lunched at Bombay. But Sri Aurobindo, writing on 5 January 1920, politely and firmly declined the invitation:

Pondicherry is my place of retreat, my cave of tapasya, not of the ascetic kind, but of a brand of my own invention ....

.. .I do not at all look down on politics or political action ... my idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing secular, all human activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life ....

... But I have not as yet any clear and full idea of the practical lines; I have no formed programme. In a word, I am feeling my way in my mind and not ready for either propaganda or action. ¹⁹

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Months later, when an attempt was made by Dr. B.S. Moonje and others to get Sri Aurobindo to preside over the Nagpur special session of the Indian National Congress in December 192O, he promptly wired his refusal, and followed it up with a detailed letter dated 30 August, giving convincing political reasons as also a clinching personal explanation:

The central reason however is this that I am no longer first and foremost a politician, but have definitely commenced another kind of work with a spiritual basis, a work of spiritual, social, cultural and economic reconstruction of an almost revolutionary kind, and am even making or at least supervising a sort of practical or laboratory experiment in that sense which needs all the attention and energy that I can have to spare. It is impossible for me to combine political work of the current kind .... ²⁰

Sri Aurobindo was probably thinking of the Prabartak Sangha at Chandernagore when he mentioned the "practical or laboratory experiment but certainly there were other possibilities too, though not as yet structured into recognisable shapes.

On the other hand, in a letter of April 1920 to his brother Barindra Kumar Ghose, Sri Aurobindo was rather more communicative about his plans. There was of course no question of an immediate return to Bengal, for Pondicherry was "the appointed place" of his Yoga Siddhi. When he moved from Knowledge to Action, Bengal might be its centre, but the circumference would be "the whole of India and the whole world". He was doubtless planning to build the future, but he was determined to build only on strong foundations: "This work is not mine, it is God's." India had to work out her salvation with diligence, but in a manner that was in consonance with her own genius - not just a mimicry of Western social democracy. What Sri Aurobindo had in mind was a Deva Sangh, a working group oriented towards the Divine, that would begin as a pilot project somewhere, and then spread over the whole world. All human activity would come within the purview of the Deva Sangha, "but we must give them a new life, a new form". At the root of it all would be a feeling of delight in everything, in the body as much as in the spirit .... No one is a god, but each man has a god within him. To manifest him is the aim of divine life." Sri Aurobindo concluded by saying that "I too am tying up my bundle. But I believe this bundle is like the net of St.Peter, teeming with the catch of the Infinite."²¹ But he wouldn't be coaxed to open the bag except at the appropriate time.

And the appropriate time was not far!

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