On The Mother

CHAPTER 26

The Golden Bridge

I

The seven-year stretch from November 1931 to November 1938 was a period of great inner and outer development in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The sadhaks steadily increased in number, the Kitchen and the Dining Hall were shifted in 1934 to a far more commodious place in front of the Park, and the several departments were beehives of dedicated work. After the Mother's serious illness of October-November 1931, she had to curtail the time devoted to meeting the disciples individually for pranam and interviews. views. And since early 1938, there was the daily Balcony darshan, and the evening meditation followed by Pranam. The externals of the Ashram life were thus easy enough to observe, and they seemed to add up to something - the Ashram was certainly a 'going concern', it was a 'modem' Ashram too, reproducing in the twentieth-century context the fullness and richness of the Ashrams of the Vedic Rishis. There was, besides, visible quantitative 'growth', and the inmates moved about in the Ashram and outside with the poise of natural self-assurance. But how about the inner growth, ­ how about the progress of the sadhana?

A visitor to the Ashram in 1935-36, the French writer Maurice Magre, wrote in a book published in 1936 in Paris:

In the order that reigns in the Ashram one feels admiration for the divine work. The work portioned out to each, the glances filled with quietude, the form of the shadow projected by the tree [the Service Tree in the Ashram courtyard], everything proclaims obedience to law. Happy the one who can find the divine law beautiful.. .. ¹

Although it is not easy to get entry into the world invisible yet omnipresent of the Spirit, his new-found faith was such that he apostrophised the Mother in a rhapsody:

O Mother ...

It is part of the attributes of your power to help the men who appeal to you at the beneficent hour of death ....

O Mother, when this hour comes for me, may my breath have strength enough to pronounce the syllables of your name; may my memory be lively enough to build up your exact image within the shadows of remembrance!

May you keep by my side like a seraph of pity and dispel before me the ensnaring people of the shadows! May you lead me, stripped of fear and pride, towards the abode where the pure ones go, where all is love and beauty! ²

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And Maurice Magre's words "shot with a psychic vision" ³ wrung from the depths were by no means untypical of the response of sensitive visitors to Sri Aurobindo Ashram during the nineteen-thirties.

The sadhaks were drawn from all over India, though Bengal and Gujarat were rather more heavily represented than other regions; and there was a sprinkling from abroad as well. Not all the sadhaks were intellectuals who could benefit by a careful study of Sri Aurobindo's writings - notably The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga - as in the seven Arya volumes. The first English edition of the Mother's Prayers and Meditations hadn't yet been published, and her Conversations of 1929 circulated only in typescript. For the non-intellectuals, indeed, the Yoga was a simple thing: "Remember and offer." They asked for and received appropriate work, and their work was the body of their Yoga - and their inner consecration was the soul. They felt close to the Mother - to Sri Aurobindo - to the Divine! Some few were pseudo-intellectuals and were disinclined to do hard work, and they had no creative vocation either - be it poetry, music or painting. They belonged to the group about which the Mother once wrote:

It is not that there is a dearth of people without work in the Ashram; but those who are without work are certainly so because they do not like to work; and for that disease it is very difficult to find a remedy - it is called laziness. ⁴

But some of the intellectuals had their problems too, for they were apt to veer between the extremes of either wanting to suppress the Beast of Intellectualism or expecting intellectual activity by itself to row them across the seas of Doubt to the shores of Faith and Realisation beyond. They were sincere, earnest and self-inquisitorial; they sometimes asked for Euclidean demonstrations; they expected quick results; and because they failed to arrive promptly, they bombarded the Mother and Sri Aurobindo with letters, - and of course they lapsed into seasonal sessions of frustration, more often self-induced than real. But they revived after a letter from Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, and once more started on the quest, and engaged in the intestine struggle, or commenced the weary climb.

Our period (1931-38) was the Golden Age of yogic correspondence in the Ashram, and several thousand letters were written by a comparatively small section of the disciples to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. At the beginning, almost every sadhak wrote a letter or two, and Sri Aurobindo had to sit most of the night to clear the correspondence. The Mother had at last to intervene, and she laid down that only a select few could write with previous special permission. When Dilip asked in 1935 how many were such privileged sadhaks, Sri Aurobindo answered:

The number openly accepted is two by habit and understanding, two by express notice and two by self-given permission. ⁵

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The hard core of the sadhak-correspondents was perhaps not more than half a dozen, certainly not more than a dozen out of a total of about one hundred and fifty at this time.

There were of course two sides to the picture. On the one hand, a clear statement of one's experiences, doubts and difficulties was a help to the Guru, for he could then know what exactly was happening, and give the necessary guidance and help. Thus Sri Aurobindo told Sahana Devi: "It is absolutely necessary to write everything and write daily." ⁶ On the other hand, if people wrote merely because it was the fashion to write even when they had nothing to write about, if the overwhelming question was whether one should bathe or not when suffering from cold or whether one should walk putting the right foot first or the left, that merely increased the load of work (reading the letters and discussing them with the Mother when necessary and finally answering them), but without any counterbalancing advantage. No doubt, more often than not, the replies from the Mother or Sri Aurobindo were pointedly brief, and the questions and answers just filled the pages of exercise books, much as words are exchanged in quick conversation. But there were also longer communications (especially from Sri Aurobindo), extending in a few cases to ten or more pages, and since the questions were wide-ranging covering the whole gamut from the trivial and the personal to the sublime and the universal, the answers had likewise to achieve a cumulative encyclopaedic range. And this went on day after day, night after night, for seven or eight unbelievable years.

II

Whatever the circumstances under which Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's letters were written, in retrospect they are of capital importance today, partly for the light they throw on the theory and practice of Integral Yoga, partly for their revealing hints on Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to bring the supramental consciousness into the everyday experience of man and the earth, and partly as readings in the yogic case-histories of several of the disciples. To no small extent, these issues were interlinked, for there was the Yoga - there were the two Gurus (who were really one in consciousness) - and there were the many disciples; and since the yogic battle was being waged on the individual as well as collective fronts, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were as much concerned with the disciples' sadhana as with their own, and some of the disciples felt perpetually intrigued by what was happening to the Supermind, whether at all - or exactly when - it would be coming down, and what would happen when it did at long last. It has to be remembered, however, that while the letters tell part of the story, the complete history is hidden from view. It may be thought that, for a proper understanding of the letters, we need the entire

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contextual framework: the background, of the sadhak who asks the question, the actual question and date, and the complete answer. On the other hand, any such deep involvement in the personal histories of the sadhak-correspondents may prove confusing and side-tracking to the earnest spiritual aspirant. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were hence definitely against such wholesale publication of the two-way correspondence. There is clearly the touch of universality in Sri Aurobindo's numberless letters on Yoga, even the most apparently casual, and when there is a judicious selection and piecing together, these could constitute an invaluable Guide to Sadhana in its multitudinous aspects. It is this editorial feat that has been accomplished, with Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's full approbation, in the published volumes of Letters on Yoga. Even so, the need for caution remains. Sri Aurobindo himself once warned that it was not wise to apply to oneself a mental rule formulated on the basis of what had been written for the benefit of another in a very different context. Nature abhors repetition, and each sadhak has his own unique psychological make-up. Sri Aurobindo wrote on another occasion:

People often catch hold of something written by me or said by the Mother, give it an interpretation quite other than or far beyond its true meaning and deduce from it a suddenly extreme and logical conclusion which is quite contrary to our knowledge and experience. ⁷

Sri Aurobindo thought that such deviations and derailments were part of the stock-in-trade of the hostile forces, and one had to guard against them. There was the further difficulty that, although Sri Aurobindo was apparently answering his correspondents at the mental level, the replies really came from the infinite reserves of the "higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge", ⁸ The comments, the admonitions, the instructions were offered by a Guru to a disciple, and were meant to be treasured as such and implicitly acted upon, and not to be bruited about promiscuously, torn out of the context and made the subject of a pseudo­ logical debate. Thus one has to read the consolidated volumes of excerpts from the letters that have been arranged under different subjects but without indication of the identity of the correspondents - one has to read these volumes with becoming humility and due circumspection. We are certainly on a different ground when we read the letters to the same correspondent - Nirodbaran, perhaps, or Pavitra, Sethna, or Dilip ­ especially when the questions are given too and the letters and replies are chronologically arranged. It is, perhaps, also necessary to mention the smaller collections like Lights on Yoga (1935) and Bases of Yoga (1936), whose selection and arrangement had been approved by Sri Aurobindo After all, while a reply may be provoked by a particular sadhak's statement his personal problems, universalist elements also must get into the answer, all the more so because the response is really from the level of the

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higher spiritual consciousness. This should explain why the excerpts from Aurobindo's letters put together in a book like Bases of Yoga have made it a minor Aurobindonian classic and popular guide to Yoga.

There were, then, the two interlinked problems that pressed for solution - or a positive movement towards a solution - in the 1930s in what was little less than the invisible spiritual battle-ground of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. First: How did the sadhaks, individually and collectively, respond to the challenge for a change of consciousness (from the human to the divine) posed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother? Second: How far did they, as the two "Leaders of the Way", succeed in their great aim of bringing down the overhead powers of consciousness, including the Supermind, into the earth-atmosphere, and into man himself, even down to the physical, thereby promoting the great work of building the 'golden bridge' between Here and Eternity, the Human and the Divine? These are of course extremely difficult things to discuss, as Sri Aurobindo was never tired of reiterating. The mind has to try to comprehend what is really beyond the mind, and we are prone to make material formulations to comprehend something that is really beyond the physical and even the mental categories. The problems can be neither tritely solved, nor honestly shirked. The letters are important sources of information in this regard, but alike in reading and interpreting them one should adopt an attitude of humility and inner silence of attention and receptivity.

As regards the response of the sadhaks to the challenge for a change of consciousness, the very fact of the organisation of the Ashram and its growth and superlatively efficient functioning during the thirties was part of the answer to the question. The fame and the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the personality of the Mother attracted some of the finest talents, some of the most ardent spirits, to the Ashram after 1926, and its spectacular growth during the next ten or fifteen years was quite astonishing. Human bricks became marble, raw adolescents became seasoned sadhaks, hard-headed intellectuals struck unsuspected artistic veins in themselves, and the atmosphere of the Ashram quickened the flowering of the consciousness of most of the inmates. All this clearly showed that, generally speaking, the collective sadhana of the Ashram was not failing to show results that were by no means unimpressive.

III

Since the very beginning, indeed, there has reigned an atmosphere in the Ashram which is quite distinctive, - the Ashram meaning, not the main complex in the Rue de la Marine alone, but also the wider cluster of Ashram buildings generally. The Mother has remarked that, "The area we call 'the Ashram' has a condensation of force which is not at all the same as

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that of the town, and sill less that of the countryside." ⁹ When a young sadhak expressed the wish to go out to pursue higher studies in a foreign university, the Mother, while leaving the decision to him, also uttered a timely warning:

No doubt from the exterior point of view, you will find in England all that you want for learning what human beings generally call knowledge, but from the point of view of Truth and Consciousness, you can find nowhere the atmosphere in which you are living here. Elsewhere you can meet with a religious or a philosophic spirit, but true spirituality, direct contact with the Divine, constant aspiration to realise Him in life, mind and action are in the world realised only by scattered individuals and not as a living fact behind any university teaching however advanced it may be. ¹⁰

The Mother has also testified how once, when she had gone in a car beyond the lake, she felt a sudden change in the atmosphere: "where there had been plenitude, energy, light and force," there was a sudden failure of every thing. ¹¹ If one kind of atmosphere could be elevating, inspiring, another could likewise prove depressing and enervating. So too visitors with sensitive spiritual antennae had been known to register the general atmosphere of the Ashram deriving from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the sadhaks open to him and advancing their mission and, on the other hand, the scattered isolated pockets of doubt, dissidence, darkness, negation and even revolt in which the hostile forces found a favourable soil for their anti-divine work. Writing on 15 March 1937, Sri Aurobindo made a reference to this dichotomy:

When people with a little perceptiveness come from outside, they are struck by the deep calm and peace in the atmosphere and it is only when they mix much with the Sadhaks that this perception and influence fade away. The other atmosphere of dullness and unrest is created by the Sadhaks themselves - if they were open to the Mother as they should be, they would live in the calm and peace and not in unrest and dullness. ¹²

While being fully aware of such stray pockets of falsehood in the Ashram itself, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were nevertheless extremely tolerant, and would not peremptorily throw them out. Champaklal has recorded that once, when he spoke to the Mother of a particular sadhika who had earlier been very close to her but later suddenly turned hostile, the Mother but cited Sri Aurobindo's words:

You know well it is not a question of this person or that person. Sending away one person won't help us in any way. We are fighting with the hostile force - not with the person. If you send away one person, it will catch hold of another. ¹³

On a similar occasion, Sri Aurobindo wrote about another sadhika,

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perhaps an even greater source of disturbance and disharmony:

People are here to change what is wrong in their nature so that they may do an effective sadhana. If they refuse to do that or even to try, they are not real sadhaks or disciples and can expect nothing from myself or from the Mother.

What was worse, she seemed prepared to be the instrument of an alien force, acting against the Mother, claiming victories against her, trying to lower her in the eyes of the sadhaks, asserting itself and its ways, traducing the Ashram and impairing the respect due to Mother and spoiling my work as much as possible. It cannot really succeed in this, but it can give trouble, and I do not see why I should tolerate it. ¹⁴

From all this it should be obvious that it would be both a risky and a deceptive exercise to generalise about the Ashram, the sadhaks or the sadhana in any facile manner. The stray discordances, apaswaras or false notes more easily strike the ear, while the great bass, the sruti, is apt to be ignored or merely taken for granted; and the wordless music of the sadhana of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga needed almost a new sense for its right understanding or assessment.

IV

Some idea of the sort of relationship that prevailed between a sadhak and the Mother - not wholly untypical of such relationships in the Ashram ­ may be formed by a careful study of the brief letters she wrote to one of her dear children, and published in 1964 as Some Answers from the Mother. The very first entry nearly clinches the issue.

Sadhak: I hope and believe Your work does not depend upon human beings.

Mother: No, it does not depend at all upon human beings. What has to be done will be done despite all possible resistances. ¹⁵

Hasn't Sri Aurobindo said in The Mother "The supramental is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness"? The human aspiration and opening from below may, perhaps, hasten the change, but human stupidity or resistance cannot close "the path of the divine Event" ¹⁶ . Being in tune with the Divine Will, the Mother knew that it must triumph ultimately. The next step in the evolution of the earth­consciousness would be really more of a revolution, though a revolution wiith a difference; the Mother wrote that, whereas the bloody revolutions of the past "quite uselessly" tore up countries but left men "as false, as ignorant, as egoistic as before", the change she and Sri Aurobindo were

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initiating would be "the most marvellous change ever seen". ¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo had written in his Arya days:

The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretations of present happenings and forecast of man's future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity. ¹⁸

In starting the Ashram, the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's aim was verily to engineer this spiritual revolution, or this integral transformation of earth­life. If people did not meet it half-way and cooperate with it, even so it would come all the same, engulf all resistances or sweep them away.

Having been told about the divine decree (the inevitability of the terrestrial transformation), the sadhak wants to know "What does the Divine want of me?" The Mother's answer is threefold: (i) find your true self or psychic being; (ii) master and govern your lower nature; and (iii) with this preparation, take your proper place in the Divine Work. ¹⁹ The regimen is not easy to follow, but the awareness of the Divine presence everywhere can be a help. But the disciple feels an inner unease and turmoil, and asks the Mother why. Her answer is a classic diagnosis of a recurrent and universal disease. There is a conflict within, between the sadhak's sattwic nature aspiring towards the Light and his tamasic which pulls him downward to the Night; in Shakespeare's words:

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council, and the state of man,

Like to a little kingdom suffers then

The nature of an insurrection. ²⁰

The sadhak has first to know what is at stake, and learn to turn to the Light alone. If he opens his heart "yet wider, yet better", the distance between him and the Mother will lessen progressively and disappear at last. The Mother herself will be with her child always:

I am in every thought, every aspiration which you turn towards me; for if you were not always present in my consciousness you would not be able to think of me. ²¹

V

The crux of the problem: How to find, how to unite with the divine Presence which is "always and everywhere"? Either go within, and find the Divine in your heart; or look out, and find the visible Divine in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother through love and self-giving. ²²

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The way doesn't matter; what is necessary is to find the Divine, and learn to see Him "in all things and everywhere". In a similar vein is Sri Aurobindo's letter to Nirod:

The two feelings are both of them right - they indicate the two necessities of the sadhana. One is to go inward and open fully the connection between the psychic being and the outer nature. The other is to open upward to the Divine Peace, Force, Light, Ananda above .... The best way is to aspire for both and let the Mother's Force work it out according to the need and turn of the nature. ²³

One day, in a fit of gloom or moment of excessive self-dramatisation, another sadhak writes to the Mother wanting to leave his body so that he may get closer to her. The Mother calls this "sheer stupidity" and "a big mistake". After death, the change of body may prove to be a change for the worse:

We have not to busy ourselves with the next life, but with this one which offers us, till our very last breath, all its possibilities ... so long as one is alive, nothing is impossible. ²⁴

In a parallel situation, Sri Aurobindo wrote to K. S. Venkataraman:

When one throws away the present life in that [violent] way instead of facing its difficulties one not only gets into blacker difficulties after death but in the next life all becomes not better but worse .... Instead of indulging such feelings ... turn to the Mother's Grace which has not failed and which is not going to fail you for strength and succour. ²⁵

If one looked closely into the inner lives of spiritual seekers, one would thus light upon similar SOS calls, similar screams of desperation, and similar admonitions followed by the same reviving shower of Grace.

Then, again, the usual grouse that one is not physically near enough to the Mother: that one is at her Feet for only a few seconds during Pranam: that one accordingly feels left out in the cold and the dark. This may be the sheerest folly, of course, and yet the Mother answers soothingly:

Go within into yourself, find your psychic being and you will find me at the same time, living in you, life of your life, ever present and ever near, quite concretely and tangibly. ²⁶

Or let him open his mind to the Guru's influence, withdraw deep into an inner silence, and call the Mother from the depths of that silence - and there she will be, standing at the centre of his being.

The exchange of letters continues, but it is' an exchange between penumbra and Light. Not all the Mother's sovereign assurances can quite set his mind at ease. Doubt wrangles with faith, fear with self-confidence.

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"I always wonder," the Mother writes, "that people imagine they can know the reasons for my actions! I act differently for each one, according to the needs of his particular case. " ²⁷ Let the sadhak shed all his burden of fear first and cultivate total frankness with the Mother, and immediately the distance between them will vanish.

No sooner than one mist is cleared then another fills its place. Doubts disperse, and new doubts appear. Wrong attachment - indifference - emptiness - dryness - moroseness: one thing or another interposes itself between the sadhak and the Divine. The Mother tells him that being sad or melancholy is no virtue. Sri Aurobindo too tells Nirod: "Cheerfulness is the salt of the sadhana. It is a thousand times better than gloominess." ²⁸ The Mother likewise tells the sadhak that "The Divine is not sad and to realise the Divine you must throw far from yourself all sadness and all sentimental weakness." He should also remember that "Psychic love is always peaceful and joyous; it is the vital which dramatises and makes itself unhappy without any reason." ²⁹

VI

It is at the vital level, alas, that jealousies and quarrels are rife, but psychic or divine love transcends all rivalry and struggle. True love eschews mere sentiment and tempestuous passion, and is silent in its very strength. At one point the Mother has to tell the sadhak sharply:

The Ashram is not a place for being in love with anyone. If you want to lapse into such a stupidity, you may do so elsewhere, not here. ³⁰

He should beware of the lure of the lower nature and avoid succumbing to "the great play, obscure and semi-conscious, of the forces of unillumined nature". The sadhak should also desist from thinking of himself too highly; let the Divine "determine our real worth". The sadhak's two prominent enemies are jealousy and vanity; let him therefore hold fast to this:

Only the Divine is the life of our life, consciousness of our consciousness, the Power and Capacity in us. It is to Him that we must entrust ourselves .... ³¹

With regard to the discipline of Yoga, the aim should be to avoid useless talk but concentrate on works: "No words - acts", as the Mother was to say in one of her later New Year messages. It is not so much the work itself but the attitude of consecration behind it that makes the true Yoga. A self­imposed discipline is the real physical foundation of the sadhana: "The great realisers have always been the great disciplined men. " ³² Wrong suggestions are scrupulously to be kept away, for they have a sinister way of actualising themselves; and one of the wrong suggestions is that some

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work is difficult; only, "the more difficult a thing is, the greater must be the will to carry it out successfully", ³³ Again:

Be calm, don't get disturbed, remember that the conditions of our life are not quite ordinary conditions, and keep your trust in the Divine Power to organise all and do all through the human instruments which are open to His influence. ³⁴

Once, when the sadhak frankly writes that he feels like succumbing to an attraction or temptation as the best way of overcoming it, the Mother calls the suggestion "a trap of the adverse forces". As well conquer the murderous instinct by actually committing a murder! To another sadhak, Mrityunjoy, the Mother wrote that he was in the Ashram for doing Yoga, to cultivate union with the Divine, and not to run after vitalistic human relationships:

Your consciousness will begin to get dulled, forces of the vital world will take advantage, and quite unawares you will be carried far into wrong tracks .... ³⁵

Among other suggestions of the hostile forces is the denial of the very possibility of physical immortality. But the Mother's reasoning against this 'orthodoxy' is unassailable:

It [the body] must become aware of the immortality of the elements constituting it (which is a scientifically recognised fact), then it must submit itself to the influence and the will of the psychic being which is immortal in its very nature. ³⁶

The Mother also advises the sadhak to read, not widely or desultorily, but selectively and deeply; and to seek in silence the source of the highest aspiration.

VII

In a spiritual adventure, in the, battle for Light as against the reigning Darkness, in the see-saw between hope and despair, the average sadhak is understandably often confused, and in an extremity he needs must appeal to the Guru who is the living God. Read in cold print, the neophyte's questions - the enumeration of the difficulties - the naive formulation of perverse courses of action - may all seem rather silly, and it may even appear odd that the Mother or Sri Aurobindo should have taken such letters seriously enough to vouchsafe replies, long or short, in almost every instance. But as pathfinders, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had themselves often been through their own difficulties, and hence they did not dismiss the groanings and moanings of the disciples, but rather tried to

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help them face and solve their problems. Sri Aurobindo made no secret of the fact that such serious difficulties had indeed assailed the path of the Gurus themselves:

I have had my full share of these things and the Mother has had ten times her full share. But that was because the finders of the Way had to face these things in order to conquer. No difficulty that can come on the Sadhak but has faced us on the path; against many we have had to struggle hundreds of times (in fact, that is an understatement) before we could overcome .... It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden. It was with that object that the Mother once prayed to the Divine that whatever difficulties, dangers, sufferings were necessary for the path might be laid on her rather than on others .... ³⁷

As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside ... had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play of Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path. But it is not necessary nor tolerable that all should be repeated again to the full in the experience of others. It is because we have the complete experience that we can show a straighter and easier road to others - if they will only consent to take it. ³⁸

And the easier road, the sunlit path, was to effect the psychic opening and from there to reach for the golden bridge to the Divine, and in everything to entrust the sadhana to the Mother.

VIII

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo often made it clear that the sadhana, although done by them, was not for their own sake alone. "My Sadhana was not done for myself," he wrote in May 1933, "but for the earth­consciousness as a showing of the way towards the Light." ³⁹ As path­finders, they were engaged in forging means of inner growth, transformation of the lower into the higher nature, and the manifestation of new faculties; but all this was ultimately for humanity as a whole. The supreme aim of their sadhana was. of course, the bringing down of the Supermind and harnessing it for the work of transformation, but that was yet to be. On 14 November 1933, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple:

No, the supramental has not descended into the body or into Matter - it is

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only at the point where such a descent has become not only possible but inevitable .... ⁴⁰

What they were engaged In was not a feat of miraculism but "a rapid and concentrated evolution" with a pace and process of its own: "a supramental but not an irrational process". But, while the movement had 'certainly been set in motion, a definite date for the supramental transformation could not be given.

Some months later, on 14 September 1934, Sri Aurobindo reported steady progress:

It is true that there is an increasingly powerful descent of the Higher Force. Many now see the lights and colours around the Mother and her subtle luminous forms - it means that their vision is opening to supraphysical realities, it is not a phantasy. The colours or lights you see are forces from various planes and each colour indicates a special force.

The supramental Force is descending, but it has not yet taken possession of the body or of matter - there is still much resistance to that. It is supramentalised Overmind Force that has already touched, and this may at any time change into or give place to the supramental in its own native power. ⁴¹

Three months later, Sri Aurobindo expressed himself in rather non­committal terms. The world conditions were bad, and this might actually hasten the event but nothing could be positively asserted. He wrote again on 25 December 1934:

As to whether the Divine seriously means something to happen, I believe it is intended. I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how .... My faith and will are for the now. ⁴²

It was six days later that Sri Aurobindo composed the two complementary poems "Thought the Paraclete" and "Rose of God", the former describing the flight of consciousness from the material to the supramental, and the latter invoking in five stanzas - the fivefold intensity of the Divine Consciousness - to come down and permeate the earth-atmosphere. Thought was the mediator, the bridge-builder:

Past the long green crests of the seas of life,

Past the orange skies of the mystic mind

Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God ....

Hungering, large-souled to surprise the unconned

Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond,

Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,

Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned,

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Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete

Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune. ⁴³

This was the ascent of consciousness, a prelude to the great descent which alone could effect the transfiguration of the earth and man. "Rose of God" was the flower with five petals: Bliss, Light, Power, Life, Love; and Sri Aurobindo would have this Rose, this Divine Consciousness, come down and encompass the marvel of integral change and supramental transformation: "Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame," -"Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme; Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time." ⁴⁴

Two months later, Sri Aurobindo maintained that his Sadhana was not "a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and consciousness on earth. " ⁴⁵ It was merely the attempt to quicken and realise certain potentialities that were there in Nature already. If he could do it, if the Mother could do it, so should others be able to do it in course of time. Gradually and ultimately it would be a human power, a widely shared human faculty. The Yoga was indeed no Grand Trunk Road, Sri Aurobindo wrote in August 1935; there wasn't going to be an immediate mass-march of humanity to supermanhood. A lot of spadework had to be done still, and Sri Aurobindo was busy clearing up the jungle of the inconscient. But while he was trying to open up the jungle and lay the road, he was also meeting with much local resistance.

Next year there was a grimmer note. Writing on 30 May 1936, Sri Aurobindo candidly remarked:

No, it is not with the Empyrean that I am busy: I wish it were. It is rather with the opposite end of things; it is in the Abyss that I have to plunge to build a bridge between the two. ⁴⁶

It was this bitter and prolonged subterranean struggle that he described in "A God's Labour", finalised at about this time:

But the god is there in my mortal breast

Who wrestles with error and fate

And tramples a road through mire and waste

For the nameless Immaculate ....

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep

At the very root of things

Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep

On the Dragon's outspread wings.

I left the surface gods of mind

And life's unsatisfied seas

And plunged through the body's alleys blind

To the nether mysteries. ⁴⁷

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He had "delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart" and had "heard her black mass' bell", and he knew at last the whole horror that had to be mastered, changed and transformed. But he was not without hope, for he knew that the process of reclamation, reconciliation and alchemisation had already begun.

And not long after, at the time of the Darshan on 15 August 1936, Sri Aurobindo saw that "there was a very satisfactory crossing of a difficult border", which he thought augured well for the future.

IX

It was both a period of immediate if limited fulfilment and of great promise for the future. With this favourable tide in the sadhana, it was desirable it should be taken at the flood to be led on to the goal. On 23 October 1937 the Mother wrote the mantric piece, now the final entry in her published Prayers and Meditations, "A prayer for those who wish to serve the Divine":

Glory to Thee, O Lord, who triumphest over every obstacle.

Grant that nothing in us shall be an obstacle in Thy work.

Grant that nothing may retard Thy manifestation.

Grant that Thy will may be done in all things and at every moment.

We stand here before Thee that Thy will may be fulfilled in us, in every element, in every activity of our being, from our supreme heights to the smallest cells of the body.

Grant that we may be faithful to Thee utterly and for ever.

We would be completely under Thy influence to the exclusion of every other.

Grant that we may never forget to own towards Thee a deep, an intense gratitude.

Grant that we may never squander any of the marvellous things that are Thy gifts to us at every instant.

Grant that everything in us may collaborate in Thy work and all be ready for Thy realisation.

Glory to Thee, O Lord, Supreme Master of all realisation.

Give us a faith active and ardent, absolute and unshakable in Thy Victory. ⁴⁸

It is more than a coincidence that Sri Aurobindo should have indited the very next day, 24 October 1937, the sonnet "The Divine Hearing", which is almost complementary to the Mother's prayer:

All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice:

Music and thunder and the cry of birds,

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Life's babble of her sorrows and her joys,

Cadence of human speech and murmured words,

The laughter of the sea's enormous mirth,

The winged plane purring through the conquered air,

The auto's trumpet-song of speed to earth,

The machine's reluctant drone, the siren's blare

Blowing upon the windy horn of Space

A call of distance and of mystery,

Memories of sun-bright lands and ocean-ways, ­

All now are wonder-tones and themes of Thee.

A secret harmony steals through the blind heart

And all grows beautiful because Thou art. ⁴⁹

The sadhana for the change in the earth-consciousness, the sadhana of building the golden bridge between the Empyrean and the Abyss, thus seems to have reached a significant stage during 1937. And although the sadhana was spearheaded by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, "the Mother's victory", as he remarked in a letter of 12 November 1937, was "essentially a victory of each Sadhak over himself'. ⁵⁰

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