On The Mother

EPILOGUE

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CHAPTER 61

The Saga of Transformation

"Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep

Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time

For the magnificent soul of man on earth.

Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy."

"Thy oneness. Lord, in many approaching hearts,

My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls."

"Thy energy. Lord, to seize on woman and man,

To take all things and creatures in their grief

And gather them into a mother's arms."

"Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,

Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,

Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,

Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men."¹

I

On the eve of Sri Aurobindo's birth centenary, the Mother gave the assurance that although he had left his body "he is still with us, alive and active".²Sri Aurobindo was no mythic figure of the past, a portrait hung in the vestibule of history, but a prophet and a moulder and a maker of the future. His 'message', again, was no banal exhortation, no transient will-o'-the wisp fluttering vainly in the constant night of human ignorance, but "an immortal sunlight radiating over the future".³

The Master and his Ministry, Sri Aurobindo and his Action: how shall we properly take their measure? A life-giving nectarean immortal Sunlight, indeed: for, as the Mother declared:

What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world's history is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme.⁴

Obviously the Mother illustrates Sri Aurobindo at his highest pitch of being. She does not negate the presence of what can be termed "teaching" and, more accurately, "revelation" in Sri Aurobindo's world-work. There was a teaching, certainly, a supramental manifesto setting forth a plan of action for initiating and sustaining an evolutionary process of transformation of man and the earth culminating in the emergence of the superman and the realisation of the Life Divine. There was the revelation too, the visionary projection of the terrestrial-cum-cosmic drama of love

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and death and transcendence, of conflict and conquest and transformation, generally in all Sri Aurobindo's writing of sheer sight, and climactically in his great symbolistic epic, Savitri, which is no mere romantic narrative but a pre-potent Ray that continually acts upon us and brings about a change in us. Sri Aurobindo's own reading of the symbol behind the legend offers the necessary clue to the right understanding of the poem:

Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save.... Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.⁵

What was presented in persuasive terms in the wide and shining spaces of The Life Divine and its companion treatises as the sheerly probable shape of things to come under the accelerating pressure of the evolutionary thrust is now shown in Savitri, with its visionary sweeps and epiphanic intensities, as a reality actually unfolding before us, and also intimately involving us in the momentous drama.

But Sri Aurobindo was rather more than the Arya sequences, and more even than the Savitri power-house of the Spirit. The Force that once moved the poet, patriot and revolutionary, the mystic, philosopher and prophet of the Next Future, that Force is active still, generating through willing and ready instruments world-wide 'action' in numberless, if as yet little perceived, ways. Sri Aurobindo, as the Mother assured us, was a Force emanating direct from the Supreme, a Power issuing in definitive 'action' aiming at effecting in those responsive to it a revolutionary change in their way of thinking and being, and creating conditions for bringing about the gradual transformation of man and society and the world.

II

But Sri Aurobindo's Action is also the Mother's Action. An arc is concave seen from one side, convex from another, and it is the same arc all the time. "The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms," said Sri Aurobindo writing to a disciple in 1933. To the question Is there or would there be any difference in the force or effectivity in your working and the Mother's? the succinct answer was, "No, it is a single Power." And he declared again, as if qualifying the above: "There is one force only, the Mother's force - or, if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo's Force."⁶

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On the other hand, it needs perhaps some tapasya of aspiration and realisation to behold

...in their mighty union's poise

The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,

A single being in two bodies clasped,

A diarchy of two united souls,...

A dual Power at being's occult poles

...nameless and invisible: ...⁷

But although this mystic Two-in-One relationship is difficult to grasp for the mere mind, it is not beyond the range of a seasoned sadhak's experiential knowledge, and this is also borne out by the history of Sri Aurobindo Ashram since its beginnings in the twenties to the present day.

Born in two different continents (Asia, Europe), they made their separate journeyings till they met at last in Pondicherry on 29 March 1914, and after a further five-year period of seeming separation, they came together again in 1920 to collaborate on a great work. First Sri Aurobindo withdrew on 24 November 1926 to seclusion even within the Ashram, then - twenty-four years later- to a deeper retirement on 5 December 1950. The Mother herself, after a golden period of sustained outer activity, acquiesced in a partial withdrawal in 1958 and a fuller one in 1962, and a still completer retreat into herself in May 1973. After a season of cessation of all outer activity, a half-year of suspense and suffering and preparation and silent bridge-building linking up the present with the hereafter, she ended her Yoga-Nidra and left her body on 17 November 1973. And yet, even after their physical withdrawal, the same Two-in-One divine Power is still active - invisibly, imperiously, irresistibly, - and is steadily knocking at and breaking the obstacles on the way, and inexorably - even if now and then zigzaggingly - moving towards the beckoning goal of man-transformation and world-transformation. Verily, Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's is a Yoga of revolutionary change defying the known limits and daring the Unknown and confidently pressing towards the supramental world of the Next Future.

III

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - the incarnate Lord and the divine Shakti - were nevertheless, when seen from our human end, willing actors in the terrestrial drama, generally veiling their divinity but at the same time also permitting its progressive manifestation. What is this mystery of incarnation, of avatarhood? "The Avatar is necessary," says Sri Aurobindo, "when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evolution."⁸ Again, with particular reference to his own and the Mother's work:

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What is being done is meant to prepare the manifestation of the Supermind on the earth consciousness down to Matter itself....⁹

The particular crisis in the evolutionary march that compelled the incarnation brought about the destined breakthrough from Mind to Supermind, and this had to be done in an apparently human way and right in the midst of humanity. Such is the paradox of the Divine - which of course is by very definition without a beginning and an end, and beyond birth and change and passing - taking birth as Aurobindo or Mirra and submitting to the vicissitudes of the 'human bondage', and in the process mastering and exceeding them and also taking the evolution to a farther stage.

Mirra the child of Nature and the Parisian votary of Beauty - Mirra the student of Occultism - Mirra the mind and heart of the 'Idea' group centred in her house - Mirra the wanderer in the realms of the Spirit in search of the Ideal Future and the key to its realisation - Mirra the pilgrim in Pondicherry enacting the ātmasamarpana of "Radha's Prayer" - Mirra in wartime France and among Japan's lights and silences and humane graces - and after her second coming to Pondicherry, Mirra the Mother in the role of Aditi, perfect in her ministry and the builder of Karmayogins - this multi-faceted Mirra was at once the Transcendent Infinite, the universal Shakti, and the finite divine-human being who had her birth on 21 February 1878 and withdrew on 17 November 1973. The Infinite had taken a finite form, the transcendent and the universal had for the nonce become the temporal and the particular. There are two sides to the arc of Reality: the poise of the Infinite Being, and the rhythm - the stir, the flux, the movement - of the phenomenal play of Becoming. There is the unstruck melody, anāhata nāda, and there are the heard melodies, the splendid concord of sweet sounds, or the exquisitely counterpointed diapason. In her terrestrial history, the Mother too (like Sri Aurobindo himself), although issuing out of the Infinite and the Transcendent, fused human limitations with divine potentialities. Caught as we are in the trap of time and chronology, we cannot avoid following the Mother's history in terms of childhood, girlhood and womanhood, or in relation to persons, places and situations, or yet in the context of the various experiments with living, knowing and growing. After all, a 95-year stretch is, by human reckoning, a long expanse of time, and is ordinarily marked by shifts and turns and defeats and swerves and advances. And while superficially the Mother's life-history has all the characteristics of such a significantly human story, they have yet to be seen in the wider perspectives of her divine ministry keyed to giving the crucial decisive push to the leap of evolution from the mental to the supramental dispensation. It is permissible, perhaps it is even necessary, to move with time and chronology (as we have done in the preceding sixty chapters), and take note of the moves and set-backs and new starts and big leaps and triumphant arrivals, for these have lessons

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for average humanity, but it is wiser still to remember the Ground and the underground living streams and the circumambient Presence.

IV

Looking out, sitting in her small armchair, Mirra the child saw things steadily, saw through them and beyond them, and felt the flow of Prakriti's currents, the unfailing protective aura of a beneficent Power, and the ineffable thrill of the Rasa of world-existence:

An invisible sunlight ran within her veins

And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances

That woke a wider sight than earth could know.

Outlined in the sincerity of that ray

Her springing childlike thoughts were richly turned

Into luminous patterns of her soul's deep truth,

And from her eyes she cast another look

On all around her than man's ignorant view.¹⁰

And in her tender years, Mirra was already in tune with the rhythm of Nature, establishing a friendly relationship with trees and flowers and deer and squirrels and birds and the movement of the hours and the vicissitudes of the seasons:

Again there was renewed, again revealed

The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,

The secret contact broken off in Time,

A consanguinity of earth and heaven,

Between the human portion toiling here

And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.¹¹

The world without, the world within, the sensory and the supraphysical worlds, the vivid waking hours and the even vivider hours of dreaming - there was often an overlapping of experience, there was sometimes a confusion of the dual categories, and often one didn't know which was which, for all was part of the cosmic phantasmagoria.

Mirra had soon to grow out of this elected and rather sheltered childhood, and she had to seem to acquiesce in the miscellaneous ways of the world. Her elder brother Matteo, her parents Maurice and Mathilde, her maternal grandmother Mira, her teachers and classmates, her slowly widening circle of acquaintances and friends, the expanding horizons offered by science, mathematics, tennis, music, painting - everything, everybody, was an invitation or a challenge or an opportunity for growth. Distinction came to her as a matter of course, and always quite became her; and she was the observed of all observers wherever she found herself

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to be, and even when she was among elders. Scholastic proficiency, success in tennis, in music, in painting, the inner poise and the awakening sense of infallible leadership, these were important no doubt, and when added to the felt "consanguinity of earth and heaven", it all amounted to something - and yet there was the indwelling spirit urging her to seek new worlds and to explore new continents of experience.

There was the world of Art, for instance, and Paris in her time was the cynosure of this world within our world. It was the threshold of the modern Age, and the impressionists - many of them now legendary names almost: Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Moreau, Matisse, Roualt, Degas, Renoir Manet - as also the composer Franck and the sculptor Rodin, explored the infinitudes of form and colour, and went in tireless pursuit of Truth in its incarnation as Beauty with its diverse formulations, the pure, the ornate, even the bizarre and the grotesque. Allied to this was impressionism in music as exemplified in Debussy, Roussel, Dukas, and presently the spurt of post-impressionist painting in the work of Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin Signac and the rest. Liberation was in the air, and liberation on the canvas; and the human spirit thrilled opening on the foam of elusive immensities. Mirra was half-allured by the moment and the men and the movement¹², and she felt especially drawn to one of the painters, Henri Morisset¹³. She married him in her nineteenth year, and their son, Andre, was born the next year, on 22 August 1898. But she was soon to realise that, while the profession of Beauty and the pursuit of significant form and articulate colour in Matter was certainly an exciting adventure, by itself Beauty wasn't enough! Where was the bliss of union she had dreamt about, the "great love shared, free from all animal activity,... the great love that is at the origin of the worlds"? Mere domesticity and motherhood wasn't enough! There were in Mirra reaches and ranges of consciousness - soarings to the dizziest summits, plumbings to the utmost depths, heady leaps to the outermost circumference - that were quite beyond the ken of Morisset and his artistic friends. She was with the laureates of Beauty and the princes of modern Art, but that didn't suffice. Beauty, yes, but beyond Beauty too! She would seize Infinity in the palm of her hand, she would embrace Eternity, she would explore the Kingdoms of the Invisible.

V

Enter Max Théon, the adept in occultism.

But already Mirra had had her taste of the graded occult worlds. Beyond Matter and Form and Colour, beyond their façade of Beauty wasn't there the stairway of the worlds invisible, the vital worlds of the little life, the sinuous creatures of the subtle-vital, the teasing and fascinating dream-worlds, the frightening and fearful nightmare-hells, the soothing

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and seductive life-heavens? Having met Théon in Paris in 1905 and been impressed by his immediately striking personality and undoubted occult powers, next year she visited his place in Tlemcen in Algeria, and again in 1907. She met there the fascinating Alma Théon too, an even more accomplished occultist than her husband, and a woman of rare human qualities. These sojourns in the Théons' exotic habitat among the sloping gardens near Tlemcen fringing the Atlas mountains were to provide a needed discipline to Mirra and prove a timely warning as well. For, while these visits certainly facilitated fresh experiences and considerably advanced her occult knowledge - but, then, Théon perhaps gained as much or more from her native adaptability to occult experiments! - the association was also to cause her a profound disquiet, almost a shattering disenchantment. Occultism could, on one's first exposure to it, make one exclaim with Hamlet:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Something or other is materialised as it were from nowhere; things move and lurch inexplicably; stones fall mysteriously; sudden cures are effected; one changes rungs in the occult stair as one changes buses or aeroplanes; one moves from one state of being to another as one shifts from one flat or hotel-room to another; one canters across spaces, and leaps back again; and one has whole regiments of vital beings at one's beck and call -

Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,

Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,

And genii fairer but unsouled and poor

And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,

And errant divinities trapped in Time's dust.

Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power,

Half-animal, half-god their mood, their shape.¹⁴

All this no doubt impresses at first, this defiance of everyday experience, this willed derailment from the familiar track, this slap in the face of common sense. And yet - to what end? Is it anything more than what modern ingenious gadgetry accomplishes? Evidently there are non-Euclidean transactions that, for the man-in-the-street, are miracles even as the doings of sophisticated electronic devices seem to be. No, Mirra wasn't overwhelmed by Théon's feats of occult engineering, or his attempts to 'assume the god, affect the nod, and seem to shake the spheres'. Mirra had affection and admiration for Alma, she was grateful to Théon but she wouldn't be overawed by him. Although she learnt a good deal from him, she also saw that he drew his powers, not from the supramental summits, from the pristine founts of spirituality, but rather from the marshy ravines and the brackish pools of the vitalistic underworlds. This drop

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from consciousness to consciousness was rather easier, more frequents than the soar from consciousness to higher and still higher altitudes of consciousness. Théon's was by no means an inconsiderable concentration of power, but being flawed at the source, and lacking the links with the Home of Truth, his Napoleonic adventure aiming at the conquest of the vital worlds was, after all, foredoomed to failure. Well within the rigid governance of Truth, occultism had its uses, but misuses and abuses were fatally easy. By itself, then, occultism too just wasn't enough, even as Beauty wasn't enough when not wholly in tune with the Spirit. And so, having learned what was to be learned and having also outgrown that learning and entertaining no illusions whatsoever about it, Mirra returned to Paris with the firm intention of progressively going beyond Théon's influence and giving occultism no more than a peripheral and strictly subordinate place in the total scheme of her life.

VI

If Beauty, or the exploration of form and significance in Matter, wasn't by itself enough, if occultism, or the exploration of the worlds invisible and the mastery and the manipulation of the beings of the vital worlds, wasn't enough either, what, then, remained? It was almost like a Euclidean demonstration or proof by exhaustion, or the location of the Truth by eliminating, one after another, all other contending possibilities. How about the Mind and its mountains and sweeps and crevices and shooting lights and perennial springs? Wasn't Man basically a 'rational animal'? Wasn't reason the one dependable lamp to guide one through the gloom encircling and the deceptive interstices of life's labyrinth? In 1906, Mirra organised the "Idea", her little group of fellow-seekers, and there were papers and discussions. Some of the papers may have achieved a fairly wide private circulation all over Europe, and people in search of light often came to her. The discussions ranged from practical and ethical problems to the sheerly spiritual, and Mirra's causeries hid profundities of meaning beneath their deceptive simplicity. In Liane of "The Sapphire Story", written in October 1906, Mirra seems to have sketched her own self-portrait, and in her causerie on "Thought" she could see already that mere thinking wasn't enough, unless it was in alliance with Silence, unless it knew how to integrate the totality of one's experience into eternal Wisdom. But she knew too, right from the beginning, that while Reason could be helpful, Reason couldn't unseal the doors of Reality. She read with close attention dependable translations of the Dhammapada, the Gita and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, as also Swami Vivekandanda's lectures on Raja Yoga. Surely new horizons were opening before her, and she was avid forknowledge, and it was as though she was daily straining at the limits.

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It was in 1907 that she met Paul Richard, a fellow seeker in Théon's Cosmic Movement.¹⁵ Richard was a scholar with a wide-ranging knowledge of the spiritual, religious and ethical classics of the Occident and the Orient, a lawyer and an intellectual with a passion for human progress and perfection, a humanist with a missionary zeal for the upliftment of the backward and exploited Asiatic peoples. There was now an intellectual ferment within, for it was Mirra's nature not to do anything by halves; she wrestled - no doubt with encouragement from Richard - with the philosophers and system-makers, the schools of meditation and inner culture. Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, Taoism, Zen, Shintoism, Bahaism... all was grist that came to the mill. Yet there was no real breakthrough, no storming of the Gates of Reality.

Richard was in politics too, and partly a political mission and partly his quest for human goodness and godliness took him in 1910 to Pondicherry where he met Sri Aurobindo who had recently made it his "Cave of Tapasya". Richard was instantly struck by the aura of realisation surrounding Sri Aurobindo who seemed to loom immense as the Leader of Tomorrow. Four years later, Mirra met him in Pondicherry and recognised in him the glorified and beatific figure she had often encountered in her dreams between the ages of 11 and 13. It was the very same face, the face of her "Krishna"!¹⁶ Here, then, was her journey's end at last, the terminus of her quest for certainty; here was the Lord of her being and her God; here was Krishna, the refuge of Radha and the friend and charioteer of Arjuna. Beyond all thinkings and imaginings, all arguments and affirmations, Sri Aurobindo's mere glance seemed to comprehend all the planes and all the beings of the occult world-stair, and now Mirra had only to accomplish, as it were even without volition, her definitive act of ātmasamarpana. She was herself nothing at all, being now dissolved in the living nectar of his Grace; and therefore she was everything! Beyonding Beauty, beyonding the worlds of the vital beings, beyonding the Kingdoms of the Little and the Greater Mind, beyonding her own past and all her tally of realisation through her intense sessions of prayers and meditations of the immediately preceding years when she had sought the Divine in her heart's purity and loneliness, beyonding all human reason and prudence and calculation, beyonding all mental constructions and metaphysical speculations, Mira was suddenly halted in a trance of recognition, and she surrendered and lost herself in the Illimitable Permanent, in the all-sufficing spiritual marvel that was Sri Aurobindo.

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VII

But once the Divine, even the omnipotent Divine, chooses to submit to the 'human bondage', the laws of the terrestrial Play cannot be wished away or set aside. The Avatar's life is a paradigm for common (or even uncommon) humanity, and the Avatar will not be playing the Game if he (or she) took a short-cut and by-passed all the side-tracking, distracting or deceptive possibilities. These have each to be honestly tested before they are found and shown wanting. In the Avatar's deeper poise of being in tune with the Transcendent, all the steps in the terrestrial dance are but stages in the manifestation, a series of lessons meant to help humanity to work out with diligence and faith its own self-change and move towards transformation. It is thus necessary at every stage to distinguish between the poise of the incarnated Divine Shakti and the seeming surface jolts and veerings and changes in direction that, however, leave unaffected the incandescent purity and power of the poise within.

While the launching of the Arya in August 1914 was the momentous first result of the meeting of Sri Aurobindo and the Richards, the outbreak of the First World War introduced certain complications. Richard had to go back anyhow because of the war, and Mirra decided she too would go with him. Her year's stay in France, however, was punctuated with illnesses - and unexpected realisations - and then, with a sudden turn of the kaleidoscope, there was a preordained change of scene, and she went to Japan with Richard. Four years there, and as we saw, four years of warm friendships and enriching new experiences - the Okhawas, Tagore, the Kobayashis, Dorothy, Zen, 'still-sitting', flowers, tea, flu! But her place was with Sri Aurobindo alone, and so she left for India, and reached Pondicherry on 24 April 1920. The past with all its tentative adhesions and all its budget of experiments and experiences had been annulled - she found herself seraphically free and fit to join forces with the Lord of her being and her God, Sri Aurobindo, and commence her appointed task of "divine man-making" and integral transformation.

VIII

After 24 November 1926 (Sri Aurobindo's Siddhi Day), the Mother's life and ministry was to become the history of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and even of the inner progress of the globally far-flung community of her spiritual children who had chosen to follow the Aurobindonian Light. There were the important landmarks, of course, indicative of the development of the Ashram and the changes in the contours of its physiognomy; but the invisible milestones marking the progress of the supramental manifestation were of deeper consequence still. The coming of the disciples, first a trickle, then almost a flood;

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the organisation of the Ashram Services; the physical growth of the Ashram, measured by the acquisition of new buildings; the variety of roles the Mother had to play (as super-specialist in medicine, gardening, engineering and the several other Ashram Services) guiding the sadhaks always by the infallible light of her uncanny intuitive intelligence; the Soup ceremony and the Flower Game; the rhythm of the Darshans and pranams; the portentous accident to Sri Aurobindo's leg in 1938; the unleashing of the Second World War by Hitler; the occult divine action from the Ashram trying to counteract at crucial moments the ferocity of the Nazi onslaught in the European theatres of war; the coming of the children and the opening of the Ashram School; the publication of "The Symbol Dawn", the key-opening and announcement of Savitri; the hardly perceived descent of the Ananda power of the Mother -

A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,

Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;

Love in her was wider than the universe,

The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.¹⁷

- the coming of India's Independence on Sri Aurobindo's seventy-fifth birthday on 15 August 1947; the passing of the Master on 5 December 1950; the inauguration of the Sri Aurobindo International University (later, the International Centre of Education); the steady and purposeful proliferation of the Ashram activities; the unnoticed supramental descent and manifestation in February 1956; the incorporation of ancillary organisations like Sri Aurobindo Society and World Union with their progressive outgrowth in scattered branches all over the subcontinent and beyond; the Mother's acceptance of 'illness' of one or another kind as a concession to the human condition, and her phased withdrawal from her multitudinous outer activities; her tapasya of identifying her body with the world, and experiencing all the pain and agony of the world's inhabitants; the paradox of such severe visible self-limitation and the amazingly accelerated expansion of the Ashram; her patiently suffered lacerations and the divine Light and Ananda radiating from her and going out to her children near and far; the audacious futurist thrust on 28 February 1968 when Auroville, the City of Dawn, was inaugurated on the outskirts of Pondicherry and not far from the Ashram; the coming of the Superman Consciousness on 1 January 1969; the laying of the foundation stone of Matrimandir on 21 February 1971; the splendour of world-wide participation in Sri Aurobindo's birth centenary celebrations; and all along, all through the last twenty years but with increasing intensity with each succeeding year, the Mother's elemental, invisible, intestine, excruciating, exhausting, ecstatic, inexpressible Sadhana of the Body; the locked struggle to establish the reign of the Divine in the very bones, blood-streams, tissues and cells of the body; the unbelievably heroic effort to transform the body material

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and chemical into the body transfigured and divine; the terrible imperative unescapable need to re-enact in her body the pain and passion of the earth and of its billions and billions of living creatures; the methodical forging of the occult communication-links between this our flawed life resisting all change and the immaculate supramental life to be; the firmer and fuller retirement of May 1973 and the following months of behind-the-scenes struggle in the realms of Eternal Night and the Double Twilight; the climactic withdrawal from her sanctified and glorified yogic body on the evening of 17 November 1973 - these and the many other flagstaffs and lighthouses that mark the mystery and marvel of the Mother's progressive manifestation and divine ministry and saga of integral transformation have already been described in some detail in the spacious body of this book. And while, in the clouded eyes of the world, the Mother's long journey had peacefully drawn to a close, the inner eye of Faith could only read the event in the light of the radiant words spoken to Savitri by the supreme Godhead:

O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light

And bring down God into the lives of men;

Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,

My garden of life to plant a seed divine.

When all thy work in human time is done,

The mind of earth shall be a home of light,

The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,

The body of earth a tabernacle of God. ...

In the heart of my creation's mystery

I will enact the drama of thy soul,

Inscribe the long romance of Thee and Me.¹⁸

IX

For her children, for the tens of thousands who had found in her their true Mother, the child-mother relationship was - and is - the solvent of all problems and perplexities. She was with her children "on all levels, in all planes"; and irrespective of the dividing distance, the tie was always "true and living"; and every time a cry of distress or call for help went forth, she hearkened at once and applied the healing touch. And this mystic relationship between the Mother and her children remains unchanged.

But these her children, and others too, have also felt drawn to her in a special way, identifying her with Bharat. She once declared: "From the first time I came to India - in 1914 - I felt that India is my true country, the country of my soul and spirit."¹⁹ And when Mountbatten publicly proposed the partition of India, the Mother declared the very next day, 3 June 1947: "In spite of all, India has a single soul and while

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we have to wait till we can speak of an India one and indivisible, our cry must be: 'Let the soul of India live forever!' "²⁰ With her faith in India and her vision of India's true destiny as the Guru of the Nations of the World, the Mother could see even at the time of the Partition the ensouled image of undivided India - Greater India - and she could also transmit that Vision and that Faith to Bharat's awakened children. Towards the end of 1950 some Ashramites made a map of Bharat-varsha with scented leaves and flowers on the wall outside her room in the Playground.²¹ A few days later she herself drew an outline of the map on the same place and declared it the Spiritual Map of India. Later it was set in plaster, in bas relief, and painted in green with her symbol in brass fixed in the centre.²² This Spiritual Map of India includes the present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

Again, in 1948, the Mother had a dance-drama in three scenes presented in the Ashram. The first scene recalled the India of the recent past, India in slavery and bondage, but at last waking up from her slumber and giving fight to the foreigner. The second scene portrayed the new India, liberated indeed from the night of slavery, but also a prey to corruption and moral decadence, and looking desperately for solutions in all conventional ways and feeling frustrated. And the third scene, located in the future, projected the success in India's endeavour to solve her problems through her soul's efflorescence, her dawning sense of unity and the consciousness of her mission to redeem herself and redeem the world. On evil days though apparently fallen, it was still Bharat's destiny to be the Guru of the World, and so the Mother articulated this prayer on 23 September 1967:

O India, land of light and spiritual knowledge! Wake up to your true mission in the world. Show the way to union and harmony!²³

It would not be wide off the mark, then, to say that the Mother, in one aspect of her life, symbolised the spiritual force of Bharat, and she saw clearly that, with a change in her consciousness and a bold redefinition of her ends and means, India was very likely to take the decisive quantum leap into the Future. Hence the paramount stress she laid on Education and Yoga. At first her field of experimentation was confined to the Ashram and the sadhaks, but when the children came, and the Ashram School duly became the Centre of Education, she embarked upon a bolder experiment. She advocated the four austerities (tapasyas) of the body, vital, mind and psyche leading to the four liberations (siddhis) of Beauty, Power, Knowledge and Love. At a still higher or supramental level, the siddhis could mean, on the physical plane a transcendence of the law of causation, on the vital plane a cracking of the ego-shell, on the mental plane a rise into the overhead gnostic consciousness, and on the psychic plane to the realisation of Poise and Power and Peace and Ananda.

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X

But of course Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's distinctive Avatar-role was to bring down the Supermind and ensure its manifestation even in the densest Matter. During the twenties and thirties, there were occasional hints of the opening up possibilities, and in 1938 the Mother saw the Supramental force emerging into the outermost physical of Sri Aurobindo but without getting fixed there.²⁴At the time Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body on 5 December 1950, there was the emergence and the force accumulated in his body passed into the Mother, thus what Sri Aurobindo called the "Mind of Light" became a realised part of her own consciousness.²⁵In the coming years, she took evening classes in the Playground, and on 29 February 1956, after she had read a passage from The Synthesis of Yoga and during the meditation that followed, the supramental descent and manifestation took place as firmly willed by her, and so she could declare two months later:

Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:

A new light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.²⁶

The work begun by Sri Aurobindo had now been brought to the point of fruition by the Mother. "The greatest thing that can ever be," she said on 20 October 1957, "the most marvellous thing since the beginning of creation, the miracle has happened.... A new world, yes, a completely new world, is born and is here."²⁷ And yet only a few, an elect few, could see what the many couldn't understand; and while there was the burst of the New Consciousness, the wise men only talked and slept.²⁸ The Mother, however, gave the guarantee that the time would come when "the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it".

Years later, on 1 January 1969, the Superman Consciousness floated down slowly like a golden dawn, spraying a smiling benevolence on all and a peaceful delight as well. But be it the powerful supramental descent and manifestation of 1956 or the Superman Consciousness of 1969, it is a global possession now, offering a global opportunity for the evolutionary leap into the future; and it was given to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to hasten the advent of this New Consciousness, soften its impact, and create conditions for its general diffusion, interpenetration and activisation as the commanding ruling principle and power of human and terrestrial transformation.

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People may (and do) ask: "Ah, but where is this new Consciousness? We only see the disturbed opening scenes portending a possible world catastrophe!" During the last few decades, the heady technological advance with its increasing exteriorisation of human interests and human activity, the greed for things, the fantastic craze for growthmanship, and, as a reaction, the epidemic of unease, alienation and despair, the breakdown of family life, academic life, social life and civic life, all these seem to point to the possible end of the old order and - perhaps! - the emergence of a new dispensation. What we now witness is a surreal world of jet travel, moon-landings, hijackings, topsy-turvy education, anarchic sex life, careering environmental pollution, and a general loss of faith and an almost universal loss of nerve; and it may be that the first phase of the decreed change will be a world out of joint, as if the Cosmic Egg itself had begun to crack. Is this the nightmarish enactment of the end of history, or, hopefully, the first strident summons prefacing the morning serenade that is to greet the New World? It may be that we are now witnessing only the new Force and Light and Consciousness - these two viewed, as through a thick mist, in ambiguous distortions - but not the supramental Ananda. It is perhaps the compulsion of the revolutionary pace of change initiated by the descent and the widespread action of the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness that there should be certain unexpected defeats, disturbances and dismantlings defying understanding in the old conventional terms. The new Consciousness now sweeping over the earth clearly carries an elemental revolutionary thrust, as if it will carry all before it. On the contrary, the supramental is quintessentially a creative force, and its ultimate end-product can be no other than the transformation of our puerile and envenomed existence into the Life Divine. But one must hold on, one must cling to one's faith and persevere in one's self-determined but unselfish action undertaken as a sustained offer to the Divine.

The supreme test came when, after a period of complete retreat into herself, after that season of intolerable physical pain which was also a time of tapasya or the excruciating and perhaps also exhilarating Yoga of the Body, the Mother finally decided to withdraw from her sainted tenement on 17 November 1973. Did it mean the abrupt end of the unique adventure of consciousness begun by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, on behalf of the earth and humanity, almost sixty years earlier? A thousand times No! A spiritual power, a supramental Light and Force and Consciousness, cannot just become extinct. The stupendous Saga of Transformation, inner and outer, may seem unfinished as yet, but the movement hasn't been arrested; it goes on, with a redoubled charge of the Force which still abides in the Ashram and outside as potent as ever and reaches the highest heights and lowest depths of the Stair of Consciousness. Although still centred in the

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heart of the Ashram, it has truly global - and universal - ramifications. We have only to call, and the Grace responds at once. It is obvious that a veil seems to separate us from the Force, because the support of the Mother's physical body has been withdrawn, and the physical contact to which we had grown used has now apparently snapped. It is therefore the test of the ardour of our aspiration and the strength of our faith that we should be able to tear the veil and restore the contact with the Force and sustain the movement of change and transformation at all levels, and especially the still resisting physical. We have constantly to invoke her living Force and install her puissant Presence within our innermost consciousness so that she may take complete control over the movement and direction of our lives. The coming of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was thus not in vain, and their Presence and Power of Action are manifest still. And the Mother's birth centenary must mean a fresh mobilisation of supramental force and its effective action for taking mankind in a big leap towards this Next Future prophesied in Savitri:

"A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act

And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns

And every feeling a celestial thrill.

Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come

Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;

A sudden bliss shall run through every limb

And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.

Thus shall the earth open to divinity

And common natures feel the wide uplift,

Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray

And meet the deity in common things.

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine."²⁹

21 February 1978

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