On The Mother

CHAPTER 50

Wings of Expansion

I

Of the Mother's invisible ministry for the earth and man from the occult and spiritual planes, we know nothing - or hardly anything - whatsoever. The playground classes were on a different footing: people could see her, hear her, meditate with her, receive her blessings and even feel the force of her occasional ineluctable silences. Some daily went up to her to report and to receive instructions, most had their daily Balcony darshan in the morning, and there were also the four special Darshans during the year. There were her rare outings too, like the visits to the Island at Ariyankuppam wooded with casuarina trees or to her property on the banks of the Oosteri lake, and these too received her attention.

The Ashram itself continued to attract sadhaks and visitors from all over the world. Mr. Josef Szarka, a dedicated Austrian seeker came for good in August 1957, Since he was also a holder of the Black Belt in Judo, the Japanese art of wrestling, the Department of Physical Education was able, in February 1958, to introduce classes in Judo and Jiu-Jitsu under his competent guidance. And, at the Department's request to the Government of Germany, a highly qualified physical instructor, Mr. Werner Haubrich, arrived on 1 September 1958. He conducted a three-month course in Athletics and Swimming, and lectured on physical education.

On 5 December, the Mother gave the last of her talks in the play ground, though perhaps the next day she visited the Playground as usual. On 7 December, however, she could' not come on account of indisposition, and on the 9th she was taken ill and had to be confined to her bed. In the earlier years, Datta and Chinmayi used to give the Mother the needed personal services. Later Vasudha took their place. When the Mother took ill on 9 December, it was thus Vasudha who was sent for, and she remained with her attending to all her needs. There were to be' no more playground classes by the Mother, and no more games of tennis either. There was now a drastic change in the Mother" s daily programme of activities. But her quintessential ministry continued without the slightest slackening:

Her spirit opened to the Spirit in all,

Her nature felt all Nature as its own.

Apart, living within, all lives she bore;

Aloof, she carried in herself the world: ...¹

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II

The Mother's New Year message for 1959 had a ringing and reverberating quality:

At the very bottom of the inconscience most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world.

Like many other New Year messages, this too had a history of its own. On 5 November 1958, at the time of the meditation in the Playground, the Mother had had the experience of going down into the mental atmosphere of the people around her, to look for the steady small light that should be somewhere in all that mass and would respond to her call; but she was only dragged literally into a sort of deep hole or pit. As against the common notion that the inconscience is something "amorphous, inert, formless, neutral and grey", now what actually confronted her was something hard, rigid, coagulated, resistant; it was a mental inconscience, obstinate and impenetrable. The Mother was in fact confronting the solidity of the organised mental inconscience of mankind making a last-ditch desperate stand against penetration and conquest by the supramental force and light:

Now it is an inconscience organised in its refusal to change! So I wrote, "most hard and rigid and narrow" - the idea is of something which presses you, presses you - "most stifling".

But so mysterious, so paradoxical, is the constitution of the universe that extremes meet and co-exist all the time, as it were in hyperbolic-asymptotic fashion. If at the very centre of Delight 'veiled Melancholy hath her sovran shrine' (according to Keats), so too at the very centre of the inconscience there is the shrine of eternal Light. This is how the Mother, refusing to be turned away by the massive lid of hard and rigid resistance, struck deep and came upon an "almighty spring":

...in the deepest depths of the inconscient, there is a supreme spring that enables us to touch the Supreme.... This is the "almighty spring".

It is always the same idea that the highest height touches the deepest depth. The universe is like a circle; it is represented by a serpent that bites its own tail.

Then, as she struck that deep spring of supramental light and force, there was the terrific gushing forth of New Life into the vast spaces of the future:

This experience does not correspond to a return to the supreme origin of all. I had altogether the impression that I was projected into the origin of the supramental creation....

There was in fact this entire impression of power, of warmth and of gold.... And each of these things... was like living gold, a powdery mist

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of warm gold.... One could say that they touched my eyes, my face... and with a tremendous force!...

And this almighty spring was a perfect image of what happens, is bound to happen and will happen for everybody: all at once you shoot up into the vast.²

The New Year message was thus meant to be, not merely a shining record of what the Mother had done and what had happened to her on 5 November 1958, but also a promise of what could - and would - happen to all her children in the unfolding future. However bleak the present moment, there was no need for despair; the darkest night precedes the dawn; and the rockiest inconscience holds within it the springs of superconscient light and force.

III

On 1 January 1959, Sri Aurobindo International University Centre was renamed by the Mother as "Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education" in order to give a wider scope and meaning to the training given there. The Bulletin of Physical Education was likewise renamed the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. The Ashram School, established on 2 December 1943, had grown into the University on 6 January 1952, and was now the International Centre with 363 pupils and 160 teachers, most of them sadhaks.³ Kireet Joshi, who as we saw earlier had resigned from the Indian Administrative Service to become a sadhak, was the young and energetic Registrar, and among the senior teachers were Noren Das Gupta, Ambalal Purani, Sisir Kumar Mitra, Indra Sen, K.D. Sethna, Nirodbaran and Kishor Gandhi.

The Centre of Education was guided by the seminal thoughts in the writings or utterances of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. From time to time, the fear was expressed that the Centre of Education was being compelled - partly by the expectations of the pupils, partly by the teachers' own inhibitions that were the result of the older system of education, and of course partly because of institutional inertia - to follow the line of least resistance and to conform to the conventions of education that prevailed outside. The Mother was fully aware of these dangers and apprehensions, and was ready with the needed correctives from time to time. In any case, till December 1958, there 'was the unique feature of her weekly or bi-weekly classes in the Playground that were an education for young and old alike, and an education that was intellectual as well as spiritual. Although these Questions and Answers sessions had now to be discontinued for reasons of her health, still the memories were fresh, the transcripts of the earlier conversations of 1929' and 1931 were available, and there was still her invisible but potent influence in the classrooms, playgrounds and dormitories.

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The Mother remained the major inspiration and sustenance of the Centre of Education.

The general principle and strategy of education at the International centre was to regard the child as a soul with a body, life-energy and mind to strive to develop all three harmoniously and integrally in an atmosphere of freedom. The normal teacher-pupil relationship at the Centre of Education has been well brought out in this piece of verse by one of its teachers:

I sat before the children's class

And gazed at their lovely liquid eyes,

That were eloquent with love for me

And silently spoke of golden ties.

Each face reflected a living soul

That had to be handled with utmost care,

Each being was a little living plant

Aspiring to grow and fill the air. ...⁴

At the root was the conviction that the child was a soul unfolding, a soul struggling to come forward and take charge of the body, life-forces and the mind. In working out this principle, there was, in the first place, the Department of Physical Education geared up in dedicated efficiency to promote the fullest possible development of the physique of the pupils. There was, in the second place, the canalisation of the life-energies of the pupils in pursuits that contributed to the healthy efflorescence of personality during the difficult passage from boyhood and girlhood to adolescence and maturity. There was, in the third place, the provision of opportunities in the healthy spiritual Ashram atmosphere for the spontaneous evolution of leadership and responsibility among the pupils. In the fourth place, there were the well-organised Faculties of Arts and Science, and the many academic departments where the pupils received an intellectual training aimed at integrality and wholeness rather than mere specialisation. And, in the fifth place, every help was sought to be given to encourage the soul to come forward and become the leader of the march, the Divine Charioteer guiding the human microcosm through the embattled ways of

the world. Here, of course, the atmosphere of the Ashram was the main factor, and the presence, the example and the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were assets of immeasurable value. As one of the teachers, Manoj Das Gupta. has testified:

I solemnly believe that what is unique in our Centre of Education is not so much its academic structure, although there too it is developing certain special features, but the presence of the Divine Mother, the vibrant atmosphere, which, at one stage or the other, awakens the individual here,

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without any outward compulsion whatsoever, to the necessity of an inner discipline, an inner perfection.⁵

There were other aspects of the educational landscape of the Centre of Education which, as the years passed, were to come more and more prominently into view. First among these was what Pavitra, one of the principal executants of the Mother's educational policies, has called the homogeneity of the scholar population. This simply meant that the pupils were mainly - if not exclusively - drawn from the homes of sadhaks or disciples, and were thus initially conditioned to some extent at least to the Ashram ideals and the Ashram way of life. The second feature highlighted by Pavitra was continuity of education, meaning that children usually spent ten to fifteen years continuously at the Centre of Education, a period long enough, one could say, for the accomplishment of the best results in physical culture, academic excellence, and psychic opening. The third feature was that the Centre of Education was both in the Ashram in a physical sense and it was of the Ashram too:

The life of the children is intimately interwoven with the Ashram life... they live in a community which is a big family.... Young and old mix freely, without any complex of superiority or inferiority.

The fourth feature was the truly international character of the Centre of Education. It was not simply the cosmopolitan composition of the community of students and teachers at the Centre, though this was obvious enough and not unimportant; but there was also the whole philosophy of harmony in diversity underlying and energising the functioning of the Centre of Education. Several of the languages of India and the world were taught, and likewise the different regional and national cultures too were "made accessible, intellectually in ideas, principles and languages, but also vitally in habits and customs, in art under all forms - painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture and decoration - and physically in dress, games and sports".⁶ And, of course, what gave unity and clarity and shining purpose to the Centre of Education - as, indeed, to the Ashram as a whole - was the dual spiritual power of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, their vision of future possibility, and their involvement in the destinies of their disciples individually and as an evolving spiritual community.

IV

The Ashram was a growing community, and by 1959 the inmates and the children numbered about one thousand and two hundred. The responsibility of housing and feeding them and providing them all with modern amenities in reasonable measure was truly a stupendous one, but the

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Mother was equal to it, and she had successfully met these challenges by further expansion or new orientation of the community. It was her conviction that not to move forward vas verily to stagnate or to race backwards.

While the circumstance of a set-back. in her health since 9 December 1958 (she was then in her eighty-first year) meant a diminution of her outer activities, her real work - partly occult and spiritual, partly managerial - had only increased, and she had hardly any respite. All important questions were still referred to her by the departmental heads, and she took the decisions and gave the necessary instructions. She met an endless stream of people too, and each brought his own burden of ignorance and inconscience. Besides, she had sheaves of letters daily which she had to answer however briefly, and she had birthday messages to give to inmates and devotees. Thus, for example, to Champaklal on his birthday on 2 February:

My dear child,

This year, the Grace has arranged circumstances in such a way that you are closer to me than you have ever been - and all through you have proved most reliable and effective, always ready, always there when you are needed, always doing what needs to be done. I am happy to tell you that on your birthday.⁷

And thus, on 10 March, to Huta:

Do not be discouraged because of difficulties. Whenever one wants to achieve something in life difficulties come. Take them as a discipline (tapasya) to make you strong and you will more easily overcome them.⁸

From her children of all ages, whether within or outside the Ashram, with their different loads of problems and perplexities, and appeals came, even SOS signals, and the Mother was ever ready with the right word, the needed help, and the unfailing protective arm of Grace. As T.V. Kapali Sastry had once remarked, confidence in the Mother's protection itself is "an expression of the deep-rooted faith in action; and protection is always possible because of the ever-watchful Presence".⁹

We saw in an earlier chapter¹⁰ how Sri Aurobindo's sacred relics were for the first time sent out of the Ashram at Pondicherry and installed in the Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram on 5 December 1957. On 21 February 1959, with the Mother's benedictions Sri Aurobindo's relics were installed at "Bangavani" in Navadwip, West Bengal. Bangavani had been growing as an educational institution with an Aurobindonian orientation, and the installation of the relics in a shrine in historic Navadwip was the beginning of Sri Aurobindo's return to the Bengal he had loved so much and served so well. At Pondicherry, the Mother's birthday was celebrated with a quiet flowering of gratitude and happiness, and the children staged

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with imagination doubled with industry the Mother's vision of "The City of Gold".¹¹ Likewise, towards the end of the year, at the time of the 16th anniversary of the Ashram School (now the Centre of Education), the children presented scenes from Sri Aurobindo's Ilion and received general acclamation.

V

The Mother's message for 1960 had a diamond-edged simplicity, directness and force:

To know is good,

to live is better,

to be, that is perfect.

What knows, what does, what is - knowing, doing or living, being - these are interlinked stages of realisation. The Mother had scattered the seeds of supreme knowledge in her message for 1959: that at the very deepest depths of the inconscient there reigns the Supreme. The almighty spring of light and life is lodged at the heart of the darkness and inconscience. This was the apocalypse blazoned by the Mother's earlier message. Now, a year later, she tells her children - the sadhaks and disciples - that this burst of revelation has still to be fully assimilated and actually lived and experienced, and allowed to temper and transfigure the whole quality of their life. Since the day of the supramental manifestation on 29 February 1956, four years almost had elapsed already, and another 29 February was ahead. This, then, was the time for the Mother's children to intensify their aspirations and redouble their efforts to make themselves ready and worthy receptacles of the new Force and Light and Consciousness that were trying to penetrate and transform the texture and tenor of terrestrial life.

Since there was now no possibility of the Mother's attendance at the Playground, much less of her voice being heard as she read The Life Divine or answered the children's questions, now a new tradition began from January 1960: collective meditation in the Playground on two evenings every week, preceded by the tape-recorded playing of Sanskrit invocation or of the Mother's organ music or of her readings and talks. The scene was the same, the people were largely the same, except that the Mother was only invisibly present. But the atmosphere was as rich and vibrant as ever:

The cascade of supramental descent

cleansed and awakened the soul...

An ambience inexpressible filled

the arena's dimmed spaces.

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In the stillness profound, what avenues

of spiritscapes burst open!

VI

21 February 1960, her eighty-second birthday, the Mother distributed a card with a pair of golden swans heralding the supramental world, a reproduction of an inspired painting done in 1956 by Promode Kumar Chatterji. The Mother also distributed saris, handkerchiefs and frocks. It was a day of universal, if subdued, rejoicing and thanksgiving.

Eight days later, 29 February, was the first leap-year anniversary of the supramental realisation. On that day the Mother made public the details of what had happened during the Playground meditation on Wednesday, 29 February 1956; how that evening the Divine was present among the congregation, how she had herself the form of living gold bigger than the universe and faced a giant golden door separating the world from the Divine, how she had known and willed the moment of deliverance and struck a blow with a mighty gold hammer at the huge and massive door, and how the door had broken into fragments when the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness "rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow".¹²

1960: fifty years had elapsed since Sri Aurobindo landed in Pondicherry, and forty years since the Mother's second and final coming. They were divinely ordained moments in Earth's history.

29 February: the singular leap into the future that occurred in 1956 was henceforth to be known as the Golden Day, the Day of the Lord. It began in 1960 at 6.15 with the Balcony darshan, when the Mother greeted and blessed the thousands who had assembled in the street below. Then at 10 o'clock the Mother played music for about thirty minutes on a new Wurlitzer electronic organ recently offered by an American disciple. The Mother's music was the language of the soul and held people in a trance of self-transcendence. Of her music generally, one of the most sensitive artistes, Sunil Kumar Bhattacharya, wrote after having first heard her in the late forties:

In the beginning the music sounded strange to men was neither Indian nor Western, or shall I say that it sounded like both? The theme she was playing came very near to what we know as "Bhairon", the whole closely knit musical structure expanding melodiously. The" suddenly it started: notes came surging up in battalions, piled on top of another, deep, insistent, coming as if from a long way down and welling up inevitably: the magnificent body of sound formed and gathered volume till it burst into an illumination that made the music an experience.

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Thus She revealed to me the secret of a magic world of music where harmonies meet and blend to make melodies richer, wider, profounder and infinitely more powerful....¹³

On this Golden Day too, the Mother's music was magnificent, and it was though the strains of the music were compelling showers of dew from the ethereal regions above. The music was relayed by loudspeakers, and was heard in rapt and receptive silence by the thousands who had assembled in the Ashram courtyard as well as the Centre of Education campus across the street.

In the afternoon at four, the Mother distributed over 2500 golden medals, one side showing the square and the lotus of Sri Aurobindo's symbol (signifying the manifestation of the Avatar) at the centre of twelve radiating rays of the new creation and the other side showing the Mother's symbol with the dates 29.2.56 and 29.2.60 at the top and bottom respectively. All walked up to the Mother as she sat clad in a golden sari in the Meditation Hall and received the medallions from her hands, the ceremony of distribution lasting up to 5.30. Presently, when after the Darshan the Ashramites and visitors went to the Dining Hall, everyone received a plastic bowl with a golden lid, as also five ounces of fresh honey, symbolic of the new "supramental substance" that was now, like oxygen itself, a part of the atmosphere of the earth.¹⁴

VII

One of the visitors who had darshan of the Mother on 29 February was a nationalist leader from Maharashtra, Senapati Bapat*, who had translated The Life Divine into Marathi. When he received from the Mother's hands the gold insignia on the Day of the Lord (the Golden Day), Senapati Bapat broke out into Sanskrit verse, which V.S. Gharpurey, a scholar-sadhak of the Ashram rendered as follows in English:

Let us bow down and surrender ourselves to Sri Aurobindo of divine thought, divine word and divine act - the propounder of the philosophy of Life Divine. Victory to the Divine Mother, founder of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and its Director, the vehicle of Sri Aurobindo's grace.

Next day, on 1 March, he offered to the Mother the first volume of his Marathi translation of The Life Divine. ¹⁵

* Bapat was a member of Sri Aurobindo's revolutionary group. He escaped arrest in the Alipur Bomb Case. Later he "acquitted himself nobly in the roles of editor of Tilak's Maratha, leader of the Mulshi Satyagraha, an unostantatious participant in all the Congress movements, the leader of the Hyderabad Unarmed Resistance in 1938, the vanguard in the Goa struggle for liberation and so on.... till the completion of his 87th year of life in November 1967". (Ml Jul-68:412)

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Among other visitors during the year was the nonagenarian Vedic scholar. Pandit Sripad Damodar Satwalekar. He was in the Ashram for about three weeks in July-August and had his first interview with the Mother on 30 July, the day after his arrival. It was an exchange of silences and meditations rather than an interview, and the visitor saw in a vision several gates of different hues opening as he traversed the inner territories of his mind and soul. During the next few days he was taken round the Ashram, and he grew increasingly conscious of the Mother's presence and power everywhere, and found therein the real reason for the phenomenal success of the Ashram. Steeped in the Vedas, he had dreamt of those old-world ideas of wholeness and fullness and sex equality, and he felt that, for the first time perhaps after the Vedic age, the Mother had successfully translated its ideals into current living forms. As he enthusiastically declared:

The whole process of sadhana is based here on Vedic principles. My heart overflows with joy to see that all that is hinted at in the Vedas is trying to find its fulfilment here.... Here I see not a trace of casteism anywhere. What a change the Mother has brought about here!... It seems to me the Mother is trying to found a purely spiritual society... where relations would be as between soul and soul.... I see, today, that the Mother insists on prosperity, not austerity. She does not want to leave the world to its fate but to endow it with opulence governed by spirituality.¹⁶

VIII

In 1953, as Dyuman recalls it, a Bombay firm which had a branch in Pondicherry wanted to close their shop here. The Mother took it with its entire stock, called Dahyabhai, a disciple in Bombay, to take charge of this shop and gave definite instructions about every detail of its working and management. That was the beginning of Honesty Society.¹⁷ In November-December 1960, a time of acute scarcity, the Honesty Society was among the dealers entrusted by the Government with the sale of rice at fair price, and rendered meritorious service to the town-community.¹⁸

It was the Mother's view that although, like politics, money too perversely resisted any influence that aimed at transforming its ends and means, both had sooner or later to be brought under supramental action. The power of money was in the hands or under the control of the forces and beings of the vital world that were using the power against the cause of the Truth and the interests of the Divine. Sri Aurobindo too had said that money was the visible sign of a universal force which, although it was being exploited and put to evil uses by the Asuric forces, must be reconquered for the Divine to whom alone it belonged and should be used "divinely for the divine life". Should there be a single victory for

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the Divine somewhere, it would have its reverberations elsewhere, and ultimately everywhere. The problem was to make a decisive start and that was what the Mother did in the Ashram itself and through some of her disciples. In such alliance with the Divine, money could achieve wonders, increase wealth, improve distribution, and bring about a general diffusion of prosperity and happiness. In explanation of her own business initiatives the' Mother said:

First of all, from the financial point of view, the principle on which our action is based is the following: money is not meant to make money This idea... is a falsehood and a perversion.

Money is meant to increase the wealth, the prosperity and the productiveness of a group, a country or, better, of the whole earth.... And like all forces and all powers, it is by movement and circulation that it grows and increases its power, not by accumulation and stagnation.

What wee are attempting here is to prove to the world, by giving it a concrete example, that by inner psychological realisation and outer organisation a world can be created where most of the causes of human misery will be abolished.¹⁹

On 15 September 1960, the Mother inaugurated the New Horizon Sugar Mills set up by Laljibhai Hindocha, a Gujarati businessman with large business holdings in East Africa who - like his sister "Huta" - had come under the Mother's influence since the mid-fifties. When he asked the Mother's permission for buying up the Savana Mills in Pondicherry, she replied, "No, start a sugar factory instead." And when he argued about it, she said:

Have faith in the Divine, and everything will be all right.... This will be my yoga in The material world and I want you to do it.²⁰

He had received the establishment license from the Government of India on 24 November 1956 and within six months, with the cooperation of the cane-growers, he brought 6,500 acres under cultivation. The construction of the factory was taken up in November 1959. The Mother christened the factory "The Sacrur Sugar Factory", deriving the name Sacrur from the Tamil word for sugar and combining it with Ariyur, the name of the village where the factory was situated.²¹

On 9 December 1960, the Mother opened the New Horizon Stainless Steel Factory. 'These and other industrial and commercial units, whether run by her disciples or by the Ashram itself, were meant to demonstrate that the spiritual could be infused into the material, that Yoga could purify business operations and make them efficient. Acknowledging the infinite gain accruing fn-on a total dependence on the Divine, Laljibhai is reported to have said,

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My feeling is that the Mother puts a force which does everything, breaking all obstacles. One must have faith - faith in the Divine's way of working, faith which draws a spontaneous flow of Grace.²²

This could be illustrated further by a reference to what happened, some years later, when Manibhai Patel, another of the Mother's disciples, wanted to install the factory for his "Aurofood Products" near Pondicherry. The machinery ordered arrived at Pondicherry port aboard a Greek ship. The cranes available at the port had each a capacity of only 3 tons whereas the biggest machine to be unloaded weighed 6 tons. In spite of the ship's captain being sceptical of its feasibility, Udar Pinto and Manibhai decided to use two cranes working in tandem. What happened next was thus recorded by Udar:

The cranes slowly lifted up the box till it came to the level of the quai-deck and then something happened and both the cranes tipped over. The cranesmen jumped out of the cranes and the whole box and the two cranes were falling into the sea. It would have been a major accident involving the loss of 20 boatmen, the boats, the machine and the two cranes. But, in falling over, the crane jibs swung inwards and the box came over the deck and landed on it as on a cushion. Both the cranes then came back upright again. At that time we came back from our lunch and found a great state of consternation and panic and then relief.²³

The Mother had said that the machinery could be landed at Pondicherry, rather than at Madras and then brought by road; and with implicit faith in her word further action had been taken - even in defiance of logic and common sense. Here was an instance of Faith really moving mountains!

IX

The year 1960 also saw the firm launching of two Ashram-based movements, "World Union" and "Sri Aurobindo Society", with the Mother as President of both and as the main inspiration behind them. In one of his Arya sequences, The Ideal of Human Unity, published during 1915-18, Sri Aurobindo had considered the problem in its historical, ideological and practical aspects; and in his Independence Day message on 15 August 1947, he had referred to one of his persistent aims and ideals conceived in his childhood and youth:

...the rise of a new, a greater, brighter and nobler life for mankind which for its entire realisation would rest outwardly on an international unification of the separate existence of the peoples, preserving and securing their national life but drawing them together into an overriding and consummating oneness.²⁴

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Again, in his "Postscript Chapter" to the book written in 1950, Sri Aurobindo had declared that, notwithstanding the "most disparaging features and dangerous possibilities" in the current situation, "the drive of Nature, the compulsion of circumstances and the present and future need of mankind" made inevitable "some kind of world union".²⁵ This was of course linked up with Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future marked by a global spread of India's spiritual knowledge and an evolutionary leap that would lift human consciousness to a new level of puissance and comprehension. Naturally enough, the thrust in the Ashram had been all along on the latter, but all aspects of life also came into the picture for in Integral Yoga a change anywhere must involve change everywhere sooner or later. It was, however, thought by a few in the Ashram in 1958 that, in the context of the continuing cold war and the threat to civilisation itself and human survival, some movement should be initiated to focus attention on this particular problem and canvass active support for the idea of an organisation called "World Union". After the necessary preliminary work, the first committee met in 1960 under the chairmanship of Surendra Mohan Ghose, and since then World Union has established numerous branches in India and abroad, and held several triennial world conferences. While the Mother as Founder-President was the soul of the World Union movement, the sustained drive was provided by the Secretary-General, A. B. Patel, a former Minister of the Government of Kenya in Africa and for many years an inmate of the Ashram.

The aim of "Sri Aurobindo Society", which was also launched in 1960, was to work for the fulfilment of the ideals of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother throughout the world by establishing its centres in as many places, and in as many countries, as possible. Membership was open to all those who were in full sympathy with Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's ideals, and were willing to advance their realisation. There were already, here and there, Sri Aurobindo Study Circles and similar local groups meeting periodically - generally once a week and on the four Darshan days - for meditation, readings, talks and discussions. It was felt that an organisation like Sri Aurobindo Society, could bring together individuals and groups already drawn towards the Master and the Mother, and infuse those aspirants with a new energy of purpose and help them in their efforts. The Mother was the President of the Society as well, and Navajata was the Secretary. Navajata was the name the Mother gave Keshav Dev Poddar, a prominent Bombay businessman, who had organised the "Sri Aurobindo Circle" at Bombay in 1943 and later launched the fortnightly Mother India with K.D. Sethna as editor. The Mother knew that Navajata was born for her work, and so she had permitted him to wind up his business interests and join the Ashram. Under his intrepid leadership, the Sri Aurobindo Society was to spread itself out with commendable dynamism and resourcefulness, and carry the message of Sri Aurobindo and the

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Mother to millions all over the world through the holding of regular meetings and periodic conferences, the sponsoring and wide distribution of journals and popular publications, and the opening of schools, libraries and cottage industries. It was all eventually to culminate in the stupendous adventure of Auroville - City of Dawn - eight years after.

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