On The Mother

CHAPTER 2

The Realms Invisible

I

And so Mirra was in the world, an observer and the observed, apparently no more than a little shining speck in the giddy whirl of Parisian life, yet she was not altogether of it, she held herself apart, she prized her privacy. Her steady schooling in the outside world of Man and Nature was not, however, quite as important as the sadhana in the infinitudes of the inner realms of the Spirit:

A shore less sweep was lent to the mortal's acts,

And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;

Nature and soul vied in nobility ....

Leaving earth's safety daring wings of Mind

Bore her above the trodden fields of thought

Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond

To live on eagle heights near to the Sun ....

Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,

A mystic acolyte trained in Nature's school,

Aware of the marvel of created things

She laid the secrecies of her heart's deep muse

Upon the altar of the Wonderful;

Her hours were ritual in a timeless fane;

Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit Into communion with its comrade gods. 1

Between her eighteenth and twentieth years, Mirra was able to achieve "a conscious and constant union with the divine Presence"\ and for effecting this communion she had neither Guru nor Book to guide her. In other words, with unerring intuition and a compulsive psychic movement Mirra had been able to reach the heart of the great mystery: her own secret Self which was at once the best Shastra and the sanctuary of the ultimate Guru. While describing the instruments of Yoga-Siddhi, Sri Aurobindo says in The Synthesis of Yoga:

The supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every thinking and living being ....

As the supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every man, so its supreme Guide and Teacher is the inner

Page 14

Guide, the World-Teacher, jagad-guru, secret within us. It is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of his knowledge .... He discloses progressively in us his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal being.3

But of course, ordinarily the written or received Shastra, "the Word from without, representative of the Divine," does help the psychic efflorescence. Where the self-unfolding has already taken place, as with Mirra in the first flash of her flowering womanhood, subsequent access to a received Shastra or an external Guru could be, "as it were, a concession of the omnipotent and omniscient Divine to the generality of a law that governs Nature".⁴ This was how Mirra began reading Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga and later, more important still, poring over the Bhagavad Gita. She found Vivekananda's lectures illuminating, and it seemed a marvel that somebody could explain something to her so clearly. Then an Indian* introduced her to the Bhagavad Gita and said, "Read the Gita, and take Krishna as the symbol of the immanent God, the inner Godhead." And in one month, even though she had access only to a poor French translation, she was able to enter into its spirit and find the immanent Divine, the God within.5

The Gita thus came to Mirra in her Parisian days at the time of a great spiritual self-awakening. When she first read it and meditated on its central message, or when she presently delved into what the commentators had to say, she was of course fascinated, but she was a little disconcerted as well. The Sankhyan Purusha-Prakriti theory seemed to offer both an explanation of phenomenal life and a clue to Liberation, but this didn't quite satisfy her. The reason was this: it was not a mere escape from the endless toil and tribulation and frustration of everyday life - an escape into an utter stillness of being - that Mirra aspired for, but rather a wrestling with the crowd of evils around her, their subjugation, their conversion and their ultimate transformation. The difficulty with the Purusha-Prakriti theory was that it was only too apt to encourage people to plead that their own . prakriti being what it was, they were unable to change it; they could only suffer it! Or, by a supreme effort, they could try to get out of it into the inviolable realm of the Purusha. Recalling those days, she said in 1956:

It's very convenient. I saw this in France, in Paris, before coming to India, and I saw how very practical it was. First, it allows you to grasp a very profound and extremely useful truth ... and then it shields you from all necessity of changing your outer nature.

It's so convenient, isn't it? You say, "I am like that, what can I do about it? I separate myself from Nature, I let her do whatever she likes, I am not

*Jnanendranath Chakravarty, later Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University. His wife Monika Devi took up sannyasa, adopting the name Yashoda Ma, and founded an Ashram near A1mora. She was to initiate Ronald Nixon, naming. him Sri Krishnaprem.

Page 15

this Nature, I am the Purusha. Ah! let her go her own way; after all, I can't change her." This is extremely convenient. And that is why people adopt it; for they imagine they are in the Purusha, but at the least scratch they fall right back into Prakriti .... 6

Mirra once heard someone who had truly returned to the poise of the silent Purusha and hence exuded "a very remarkable atmosphere", but the result was he branded as "dangerous revolutionaries all those who wanted to change something in the earth-Nature".⁷ Prakriti had best be left alone! He couldn't countenance the feasibility of change - of evolution - in terrestrial Nature.8 But need suffering be always the badge of the human tribe? Couldn't suffering - couldn't even the necessity for death - be annulled? Couldn't there be a constant and luminous progress towards goals of perfection? A tame and unquestioning acceptance of Prakriti seemed to Mirra a slavery beyond description and a perpetual mortgaging of the future.

However, Mirra's clarion call even in her school essay "The Path of Later On" had been: Wake to the Future! And this absorbing preoccupation with the future was to continue throughout her life. The flawed present - and because it was flawed - had to be changed and transformed into a future nearer one's heart's desire. The contours and the very constitution of life, of earth-existence, must change, evolve and move towards new horizons, culminating in the worsting of evil, the defeat of disease, the death of death itself. For one like Mirra fired with this uncompromising idealism, the near fatalistic acceptance of "things as they are" appeared no more than a slothful philosophy of convenience.

Again, the return to the Purusha could be, not necessarily of a static but also of a dynamic kind, and then all that Mirra wanted would be capable of accomplishment. And so, even though Mirra profited by reading and pondering on the Lord's Song, she wouldn't wholly accept the current elucidations and interpretations, but held her own counsel. A work of revealed scripture was doubtless a pearl beyond price, but more precious still was the eternal scripture secreted in the recesses of her soul's mystic cavern:

A boundless knowledge greater than man's thought,

A happiness too high for heart and sense

Locked in the world and yearning for release

She felt in her; waiting as yet for form,

It 'asked for objects around which to grow

And natures strong to bear without recoil

The splendour of her native royalty,

Her greatness and her sweetness and her bliss,

Her might to possess and her vast power to love: ... ⁹

Page 16

II

Mirra's was certainly a life apart, but it was also a life of communion with the universals. Her unpredictable intimations and experiences opened her to the infinitudes of the Spirit, and she was one with everything and one with the All. But her outer life seemed to pursue a conventional course, though even there one saw something distinctive about her, as if she was rather more than what she seemed to be.

It was about this time that Mirra cultivated a kind of uncanny movement of consciousness, a precision, a sort of sleight-of-hand infallibility:

There are things in a box and one says to the hand, "Take twelve"; (without counting, like that), the hand picks up the twelve and gives them to you. That is an experience that I had long long ago. At the age of twenty I started having experiences like that.10

Again, her sense of adventure encouraged her to join excursions with friends. For example, once she joined three others on a week-long walking tour across the mountains of France. Each was to carry a bag slung across the back, for one would need things on the way. But when they asked themselves what the indispensable items were, these were really very few; "everything was reduced to so little".¹¹ And yet the joys of the excursion were in no way diminished!

Her major side-interest, however, was occultism. Mirra had in fact become involved in occultism when she was only twelve years old. A path at once seductive and perilous, occultism asked for Truth as well as courage, and purity most of all. Sri Aurobindo has listed religion, occultism, spiritual thought and inner spiritual realisation as the "four main lines which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the inner being".¹² But, then, they have their mutual filiations, and also experiment with varieties of association and accommodation:

Occultism has sometimes put forward a spiritual aim as its goal, and . followed occult knowledge and experience as an approach to it, formulated some kind of mystic philosophy: but more often it has confined itself to occult knowledge and practice without any spiritual vistas; it has turned to thaumaturgy or mere magic or even deviated into diabolism.13

Religion has had a mass base always, and thus anybody almost can take to religion; but occultism demands a preparatory stage of inner development. On the other hand, although in its actual practice occultism may have often deviated into aberrations and perversions in the East no less than in the West, "the highest occultism is that which discovers the secret movements and dynamic supernormal possibilities of Mind and Life and Spirit and uses them in their native force or by an applied process for the greater

Page 17

effectivity of our mental, vital and spiritual being. "¹⁴

In so far as occultism is a means of acquiring power to act upon men, affairs or things, it is but magic; real occultism, on the contrary, is "a direct and conscious perception of the forces behind appearances and the play of these forces". ¹⁵ Occultism may in fact be described as dynamic spirituality; for what it attempts is to discover and bring to the material life the potencies and puissances of the Spirit through the agency of the subtler forces of the Mind, the Vital and the Physical. And Sri Aurobindo clinches the whole issue in the following passage:

Its most important aim must be the discovery of the hidden truths and powers of the mind-force and the life-power and the greater forces of the concealed spirit. Occult science is, essentially, the science of the subliminal, the subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-nature ... and the use of it as part of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation of that knowledge. ¹⁶

III

At first Mirra seems to have merely stumbled into occultism, even as spiritual experiences too had come to her, as good as unbidden. "I feared nothing," she said later. "One goes out of one's body, but is tied by something resembling an almost imperceptible thread; if the thread is cut, it is all over. Life also is ended. "¹⁷ In her maturer years, she once had a good dinner and then went to a conference hall. There were many people, and standing there with them she felt uneasy, for it was very hot, and she said, "I must go out immediately." And so she was out in Trocadero Square, and inadvertently she left her body too - and it slumped, as though she had suddenly fainted. And from outside as it seemed, she saw her body lying flat on the ground. She found it so ridiculous that she rushed into it and "gave it a good scolding, saying, 'You must not play such tricks with me!' "¹⁸ In the singular labyrinth of the occult, then, one may roam as far as one pleases, but the paramount condition is that one must hold on to the slender saving thread of the clue, which alone can ensure the return to the body.

This going out of the body and returning to it, although it sounds like such a simple and commonplace affair, is a very serious and tricky business really. Something goes out - but exactly what? Not the psychic being, since "one would not be aware of it, the more so as most of the time it is not within you!... What goes out is sometimes the subtle physical.... But usually it is the vital which goes out and still more often, the mental being."¹⁹ The more important problem, however, is for the temporarily vacated body to be insulated from outside interference till the wandering

Page 18

entity - be it the subtle physical, the vital or the mental being - returns to its tenement:

It is dangerous if you sleep surrounded by people who may come and shake you up, believing that something has happened to you. But if you are alone and sleep quietly, there is no danger. ²⁰

The more serious danger is for some evil being of the vital world that doesn't have a body, seeing a vacant body, to rush in and occupy it. But an occultist stationed in Truth and assured of Grace will not be overtaken by this kind of usurpation of identity.

As for the nature of the occult discipline, one has to learn "to go out of one's body consciously and to enter into another more subtle body; to use one's will to go where one wants to go, never to fear and sometimes to face unexpected and even terrible things; to remain calm, to develop the mind's visual sense .... "²¹ Again, the occult is not one but a whole congeries of worlds:

... a gradation of regions ... of more and more ethereal or subtle regions, anyway, those farther and farther removed in their nature from the physical materiality we ordinarily see. And each one of these domains is a world in itself, having its forms and inhabited by beings with a density ... analogous to that of the domain in which they live ....

In these invisible worlds there are also regions which are the result of human mental formations .... There are hells, there are paradises, there are purgatories .... 22

Such being the nature of the interlinked occult worlds ­

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law

Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,

Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind

And rich with life's adventure and delight

And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and hues

Climbed back from Time into undying Self, ²³

- one should venture into them only after "a complete preparation of self­ purification and widening of the consciousness". ²⁴

It will also be wrong to equate all occultism with mere magic, black or even white:

In true occultism, one must have the quality, the ability, the inner gift in order to use it, and that is the safeguard ... it is not magic at all, it is a spiritual power which must be acquired by a long discipline; and finally, it is given to you only by a divine grace.

This means that as soon as one draws near the Truth, one is safe from

Page 19

all charlatanism, all pretension and falsehood .... And so someone who has the true occult power possesses at the same time, by the strength of this inner truth, the power to undo any magic, white or black or whatever colour they may be, simply by applying a drop of that truth .... ²⁵

IV

As for Mirra, there was never any doubt - even when she was no more than a child - regarding her total commitment to Truth, the utter purity of her nature, and her integral consecration to the Divine. There was thus no possibility of her being derailed by her occult preoccupations. When she started making her nights conscious, she saw that the various worlds and planes of consciousness climb like a ladder from the most material to the most ethereal region but between each of them there is a gap where one may drop into unconsciousness. She realised that it was necessary "to create in oneself the many steps which enable the consciousness not to forget what it has experienced up there".²⁶ Thus she began to practise a discipline of recapitulating and retaining every moment of her dream­ experiences, so that there might not be even a moment of unconsciousness during her body's sleep.

For more than a year I applied myself to this kind of self-discipline. I noted down everything - a few words, just a little thing, an Impression - and I tried to pass from one memory to another. At first it was not very fruitful, but at the end of about fourteen months I could follow, beginning from the end, all the movements, all the dreams right up to the beginning of the night. That puts you in such a conscious, continuously conscious state that finally I was not sleeping at all. My body lay stretched, deeply asleep, but there was no rest in the consciousness. ²⁷

Thus by the time Mirra was in her late teens she bad become fully conscious of the different phases of her sleep and was free to have experiences along the whole ladder of consciousness up to the frontier of all form. But in her own being she became aware that

there was between the subtle-physical and the most material vital a small region, very small, which was not sufficiently developed to serve as a conscious link between the two activities. So what took place in the consciousness of the most material vital did not get translated exactly in the consciousness of the most subtle physical. Some of it got lost on the way because it was like a - not positively a void but something only half­ conscious, not sufficiently developed.28

She spent long months on the problem of connecting these two layers of consciousness but to no avail. In 1904, when she had decided to perfect her occultism, she heard from a friend of her brother of the "Groupe

Page 20

Cosmique", whose members were instructed by the adept, Max Théon.29 She associated herself with the Paris chapter of this group for almost three years. It was during this period that she began to develop that small region between those two parts of her being, but there was still no result after six months. Then she left Paris for

the countryside, quite a small place on the seashore, to stay with some friends who had a garden. Now, in that garden there was a lawn ... there were flowers and around it some trees. It was a fine place, very quiet, very silent. *· I lay on the grass, like this, flat on my stomach, my elbows in the grass, and then suddenly all the life of that Nature, all the life of that region between the subtle-physical and the most material vital, which is very living in plants and in Nature, all that region became all at once, suddenly, without any transition, absolutely living, intense, conscious, marvellous .... ³⁰

The link had been established at last, and there was no danger of it snapping or the experiences of the higher planes being lost on return to the material consciousness.

Max Théon, a Polish Jew, and his wife Alma, an Englishwoman, an even greater occultist, lived at Tlemcen in Algeria. In 1906, leaving the continent for the first time in her life, Mirra spent a few months with them. Together they provided Mirra with the direct guidance she had sought and she made phenomenal progress in occultism. She was able with easy freedom to put her physical body into a trance, and awake in one after another of her various subtle sheaths, visit the supra-physical planes, in one or another of her subtle bodies. Once she left her body in Tlemcen, reached Paris and made her presence felt by a group of friends by picking up a pencil, writing a few words, signing her name and even shifting an object.31 On another occasion she was able to move, in her vital being, up and down a train, and she saw everything without herself being seen.32

But Mirra didn't attach any special importance to such occult adventures. She knew well enough that occultism was at best only a halfway house on the road to spiritual realisation, and there was no point in lingering there for an unconscionable length of time. As an aspirant to the full splendour of spiritual life, she was properly aware that she had to be on her guard against any promiscuous display of occultism with all its fascinating but side-tracking "miracles" of materialisation and the like, and her vision and her far aims never suffered the least obscuration. Like academic studies, sports and the arts of painting and music, Mirra took occultism too in her easy stride; she made them all serve the cardinal aim of her life, but she didn't lose herself in them.

*Years later, commenting on Emile Zola's description of a garden in La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, the Mother remarked, "I have not read such a description anywhere else: so much wealth of splendour, harmony with Nature. When I went to the south of France, I saw such a garden." (Nirodbaran, Memorable Contacts with the Mother, 2nd ed., 1991, p.S1)

Page 21

V

During the time she spent at Tlemcen, which is on the borders of the Sahara, Mirra used to sit under the sun for hours, as she had earlier sat under an ancient tree in the woods of Fontainebleau. Sunlight was like a tonic to her, and she didn't feel either the heat or the glare. Once, however, when she was sitting under a tree by the side of a pool and meditating in utter self-absorption, she suddenly grew aware of an adverse presence and of a hissing sound. On slowly opening her eyes, she saw a huge cobra in front of her, and with its raised outspread hood and menacing attitude it continued to hiss. Mirra, however, didn't lose her poise and presence of mind, but calmly fixed a friendly look on the cobra and put her power of will into her look. Was she perhaps sitting at a wrong place and hiding the cobra's hole and place of retreat at the foot of the tree? Very gently, almost imperceptibly, Mirra withdrew her legs with her gaze still fixed on its hood, and she was about to move her body itself - but the cobra unpredictably retreated and vanished into the pool. Later, on being told of this occurrence, M. Théon explained that the cobra had indeed its snug dwelling under the tree, and had probably gone to bathe in the pool. When, on its return, it found its homeward passage blocked, it took up that aggressive stance and menacingly hissed at her. But when it found that she meant no harm, it felt reassured and returned to the pool.

Mirra never felt perturbed in the presence of snakes and reptiles of any kind. For example, she was once walking in file up a mountain-path in France, with a few children:

I was walking in front when suddenly I saw, with other eyes than these ­ although I was watching my steps carefully - I saw a snake, there, on the rock, waiting on the other side. Then I took one step, gently, and indeed on the other side there was a snake. That spared me the shock of surprise, because I had seen and I was advancing cautiously; and as there was no shock of surprise, I was able to tell the children without giving them a shock, "Stop, keep quiet, don't stir." If there had been a shock, something might have happened.³³

At Pondicherry in later years, while walking along a path near the Ariankuppam fishing village, just at the place where the river flows into the sea, she sensed the presence of a cobra before she actually put her foot down. "It was dark - the night had fallen very quickly. We were walking along the road and just as I was about to put my foot down - I had already lifted my foot and I was going to put it down - I distinctly heard a voice in my ear: 'Be careful!' And yet nobody had spoken. So I looked and saw, just as my foot was about to touch the ground, an enormous black cobra, which I would have comfortably stepped on .... He streaked away and across the water. ...

Page 22

His hood open, head erect above the water, he went across like a king."³⁴

Mirra had had other interesting experiences also at Tlemcen, and at least one of these is worth recording. As she had access to a piano, she used to play from time to time. Once, however, she heard an unusual sound "Poff" while she was playing, and on turning round she saw that the sound had come from a big toad sitting there and listening to her music. When Mirra stopped playing, the toad repeated "Poff", as if asking her to continue, "Go on! don't stop! play again!" And henceforth, every time Mirra played on the piano, the toad was there too, an attentive and appreciative listener.

VI

As a result of her stay at Tlemcen and apprenticeship to M. Théon, Mirra was not only able to consolidate her own earlier gains in occultism but also to take her mastery of the science to new significant goals, and in July 1907, she paid a second visit. On her return journey M. Théon also accompanied her to make a European tour. In the course of the sea voyage, the ship was caught in a storm, and the passengers were visibly distraught; and the Captain himself was uneasy as to what might happen next. Théon thought that the situation asked for some decisive occult intervention, and accordingly told Mirra: "Go and stop it." She at once rose and retired to her cabin, lay down on her bed, left her body and went out over the disturbed waters only to discover that numberless, if formless, creatures were the culprits that were causing all that commotion in the sea. Humbly and sweetly Mirra appealed to them to stop that senseless mischief. What had they to gain from the discomfiture and fright of so many innocent passengers? Finally, as a result of her earnest pleadings for practically thirty minutes, they acceded to her request and withdrew from the scene. The sea was calm once more, and Mirra too was promptly back in her body in the cabin, and presently on the deck to find everybody relieved and happy. ³⁵

Reminiscing about Mme. Théon, in the course of a talk in 1957 to the Ashram children at Pondicherry, the Mother said:

Her powers were quite exceptional; she had received an extremely complete and rigorous training and she could exteriorise herself, that is, bring out of her material body a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do it twelve times in succession. That is, she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, and then again put that subtler body into trance, exteriorise herself from it, and so on twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of forms ....

Page 23

She was almost always in trance and she had trained her body so well that even when she was in trance, that is, when one or more parts of her being were exteriorised, the body had a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to some small material occupations .... ³⁶

One evening, one of the prosperous Arab merchants who visited the Théons from time to time, was inclined to ask all kinds of questions to show himself off. It was time, Mme. Théon decided, that some sense was knocked into him to ruffle his vast self-importance. And this was the drama that was enacted:

In the verandah of the house there was a big dining-table, a very large table, like that, quite wide, with eight legs, four on each side. It was really massive, and heavy. Chairs had been arranged to receive this man, at a little distance from the table. He was at one end, Mme. Théon at the other; I was seated on one side, M. Théon also .... Nobody was near the table, all of us were at a distance from it. And so, he was asking questions, as I said rather ludicrous ones, on the powers one could have and what could be done with what he called "magic" .... She looked at me and said nothing but sat very still. Suddenly I heard a cry, a cry of terror. The table started moving and with an almost heroic gesture went to attack the poor man seated at the other end! It went and bumped against him .... Mme. Théon had not touched it, nobody had touched it. She had only concentrated on the table and by her vital power had made it move. At first the table had wobbled a little, then had started moving slowly, then suddenly, as in one bound, it flung itself on that man, who went away and never came back!³⁷

Again, whenever Mirra returned to her locked room after an evening walk with M. Théon, she used to find a garland of flowers (Belles de Nuit) on her pillow. Obviously, it was Mme. Théon who had gathered them in her garden, and managed to convey them to Mirra's bed without, however, actually entering the room.38

Mme. Théon died in early September 1908, and a moving tribute to her was published in the November 1908 issue of the Revue Cosmique.

VII

By now - in her late twenties - Mirra was herself an adept in occultism. Her personal effort and experiments in her earlier years to explore the inner countries of the invisible and familiarise herself with their physiognomy and functioning had provided the base. Her association with M. Théon and her friendship with Mme. Théon had helped her to pursue all the possibilities and also to grow aware of the limitations - all the traps and dangers - of occultism. Mirra had her own pupils too, though not many, for she had to be careful!

Page 24

There was one, for example, who used to come to her every evening hoping to be shown some unknown region and taken for a jaunt in the vital or mental world:

I showed him how to go out of the body, how to get back into it, how to keep the consciousness, etc., I showed him many places telling him "There you must take this precaution, here you must do such and such a thing." And this continued for a long time.39

There was a Danish painter who saw Mirra in Paris during the First World War, and wanted her to teach him occultism. She taught him how to come out of the body and to maintain control, and especially she advised him not to succumb to fear under any circumstances. Once, when he was out of his body, he saw moving menacingly towards him a huge and formidable tiger. He remembered that he shouldn't surrender to fear, and so he fixed on the ferocious animal a steady and unflinching stare. As he kept on gazing, the tiger seemed to diminish in size, shrinking more and more, and faster and faster, till at last it dwindled into a tiny innocuous cat!⁴⁰ When he reported this experience to Mirra, she told him that the tiger was but the objectification of some bad thought or impulse during the previous day trying a boomerang action, but his fearlessness and the cloak of her protection had saved him.

While occultism may have its perils for the unwary, the ambitious and the calculating, it was nevertheless Mirra's conviction backed by her own experience that, for one who was stationed in Truth, there was nothing really to worry about. This is illustrated by what once happened to her in Paris. She had already decided that she would "achieve union with the psychic Presence, the inner Divine", and she was exclusively engrossed in the prospect. It was then this happened, as later related by her:

I was crossing the Boulevard Saint Michel.. .. I lived near the Luxembourg Gardens and every evening I used to walk there - but always deeply absorbed within. There is a kind of intersection there, and it is not a place to cross when one is deeply absorbed within; it was not very sensible .... J. suddenly received a shock, as if I had received a blow, as if something had hit me, and I jumped back instinctively. And as soon as I had jumped back, a tram went past - it was the tram that I had felt at a little more than arm's length. It had touched the aura, the aura of protection ... that had literally thrown me backwards .... 41

The Presence had thrown an invisible but also invincible cloak of protection around her and averted what might have otherwise been a catastrophe.

She has also given the instance of a gentleman in a hotel who dreamt in the morning that the lift-boy had asked him to get into his own bier! Waking up and coming down, he saw the same boy asking him to enter the lift.

Page 25

The startling coincidence warned the gentleman, and he preferred to walk down the stairs. Actually the lift crashed, and all the people in it were killed. Who, then, had warned the gentleman? Quite obviously, an entity­ an intelligence, a consciousness, in the image of the groom - had forewarned him, and he had wisely taken note of the warning.42 An event had already been rehearsed in the subtle-physical, but the timely occult warning, and the man's ready and right response to it, had averted the prepared tragedy.

There was another instance too of a coincidence forged by occult forces. Mirra knew a young man in her Parisian days: he was a poet and an artist, and a Sanskritist as well, and was specially interested in Buddhism. He had given his photograph to Mirra, who fixed it on a wall above a high desk. It was the time of the First World War, and he had gone to the front. One day when she entered her room, the photograph fell down for apparently no reason and the glass broke to pieces. Mirra felt that surely something must have gone wrong, and two or three days later, when she opened the entrance door, a huge and magnificent light grey cat rushed in and flung itself upon her and mewed miserably. And the cat had the eyes of the young man! The next day the papers announced that he had died three days earlier, and his body had been found between the trenches. There was such an intimate occult connection between him and his photograph that, even as he fell, his framed portrait too crashed to the ground. And the cat was the emissary through whom he communicated to Mirra the news of his tragic end.43

As for the danger of trusting too blindly to luck, or to a run of good luck, engineered by certain invisible entities, there is the story of the gambler at Monte Carlo. He had put himself in contact with a vital entity through the use of the planchette. This sinister being gave the gambler precise indications as to how to play at roulette at Monte Carlo, and it also helped him to speculate at the Stock Exchange. Thus was he led on along the primrose path of easy success, and he began worshipping this unseen, seemingly omniscient spirit and dark counsellor, till at last, one day at Monte Carlo, it told him peremptorily: "Stake everything, everything you have upon this." He obediently did so, and lost everything. Then it told him, dazed as he was, to shoot himself - and that he did too! The entity had thus waited long, but had driven its victim to perdition in the end.44

The debit and credit sides of occultism were thus well within the range of Mirra's knowledge and experience. Occultism is certainly liable to be abused, but anything - chemistry, for example, or even language - may be abused. Only, if occultism is to be done, one should remember the precautions and the correctives. Once, while on board the Kaga Maru on her way to India in March 1914, Mirra observed some people absorbed in a game of cards. But one was steadily losing, and his friends appealed to Mirra to take a hand in the game and retrieve the loser's fortunes.

Page 26

"I warn you," she said, "that if I play I will take all your money." This only raised a guffaw, and Mirra took the hapless loser's seat, and within a short time won all the money. "I could see all their cards as if they had been transparent," she explained while recalling the event many years later; and this uncanniness on her part was so frightening to the other players that they begged her to terminate the game. Although this was technically an instance of cheating, Mirra did it, not for gain nor for the fun or excitement of it, but only to teach the gamesters a lesson that they badly needed.⁴⁵

While mastery of the occult science may thus lead to a precise, even an infallible, knowledge of things and powers and the ability to manipulate them, unless it is all sustained by a spiritual base and is properly subordinated to Truth, the science may recoil on the practitioner himself. "Cling to Truth" should hence be hung at the doorway of every occultist and that might also scare away the devious and dubious denizens of the worlds invisible. As for Mirra, at the beginning, and all along, she was but a votary of Truth, a seeker of harmony and unity, and occultism was never anything more for her than a handmaiden in the service of the Divine. She has herself acknowledged how (probably in 1904) when she went to paint in the room of a comrade, he began talking of the occult (his own brother had also been M. Théon's disciple), and this suddenly released certain springs in her and she was able "to know all her past births" and realise how "she had descended into this world for bringing down a Higher Light" .⁴⁶

But aside from occultism and the insights and powers it gave her, simply as a young woman Mirra exemplified a self-possession, self-mastery and steely resoluteness that was truly exceptional. With her, to want to do a thing was verily to do it - no hiatus at all between the impulse and the act! As she reminisced later on:

I remember, a long time ago, having been among some young people, and they remarked that when I decided to get up I used to get up with a jump, without any difficulty. They asked me, "How do you do it? We, when we want to get up, have to make an effort of will to be able to do it." They were so surprised! and I was surprised by the opposite. I used to tell myself, "How does it happen? When one has decided to get up, one gets up. "⁴⁷

It was as easy as that with Mirra. Laziness, indecision, physical tamas, emotional instability, all were quite foreign to her nature from the very beginning. Marvellously as her life-work was to unfold into a truly multi­splendoured saga of fulfilment, all was ultimately reared on a sound physical base with no falsity, no tamas, no vestige of a flaw, no pockets of irredeemable inconscience.

Page 27