On The Mother

CHAPTER 56

Year of Wonders

I

It was to be a year of wonders, 1968, and the Mother's New Year message was a radiant exhortation:

Remain young, never stop striving towards perfection.

In her message for her ninetieth birthday on 21 February, she elaborated her idea of 'youth' and 'age':

It is not the number of years you have lived that makes you grow old. You become old when you stop progressing. ...

...When you feel that what you have done is just the starting-point of what remains to be done, when you see the future like an attractive sun shining with the innumerable possibilities yet to be achieved, then you are young... young and rich with all the realisations of tomorrow.¹

The Future - the joy of youth and of perpetual buoyancy - and the movement towards Truth and Perfection were always in the Mother's consciousness. We have seen how in one of her plays, Towards the Future, there is a clairvoyant leap into coming possibilities in human relationships; how in another, The Great Secret, seven men in a boat, miraculously saved when they are adrift on the sea, resolve to live integrally the new secret revealed to them; and how in a third, The Ascent to the Truth, a group of pilgrims go up a mountain till only the Aspirants reach the summit ready to live the New Life. Again, when asked to identify the central aim of the Ashram journal, Mother India, she had said: "Why and How to live for the Future, in the Future." The entire Auroville conception itself was a stupendous offering to the Future, and her letters and talks during 1967 often revealed her profound concern for the Future. Of Auroville she said that it would be a place where at last one would be able to think of the future only. Again: "Auroville is the shelter built for all those who want to hasten towards a future of Knowledge, Peace and Unity."² Of Sri Aurobindo the Mother said that he had come "to show the way to overpass the past and to open concretely the route towards an imminent

and inevitable future".³ Among other pronouncements of 1967 were these in particular:

To be young is to live in the future.

To be young is to be always ready to give up what we are in order to become what we must be.

To be young is never to accept the irreparable.⁴

Page 758

From the moment you are satisfied and aspire no longer, you begin to die. Life is movement, life is effort; it is marching forward, climbing towards future revelations and realisations.⁵

Unless we break with the habits and beliefs of the past, there is little hope of advancing rapidly towards the future.⁶

For the Government of India, one thing is to be known - does it want to live for the future, or does it desperately stick to the past?⁷

The Mother's New Year messages were cast, as we have seen, in the form of prayer, encouragement or exhortation; but each message was also often an announcement. The Mother once referred to her wartime New Year messages as approximating to the forecasts of victories. And even after the conclusion of the Second World War, the struggle in the occult worlds between the forces of the Darkness and the Light, of Falsehood and Truth, of stagnation and progress, continued with an even greater ruthlessness. The words of the Mother were accordingly more than mere words; they were carriers of potent occult forces. Thus one could visualise a sustained struggle between Past and Future, backward and forward, old and new, disintegration and transformation, extinction and manifestation, ego's dominion and Divine efflorescence, the tinsel semblance and the authentic Real, rioting stupidities and poised seer-wisdoms, rank hypocrisy and crystal sincerity, multi-coloured Falsehood and Truth ineffable, words words words and fulfilment in action, loud professions and abiding realisations, disunity and unity, pain and delight, crucified body and glorified body. In 1968, what was going to be witnessed was the birth of Auroville, the City of Dawn; Auroville where the world's choicest youth could find a safe harbourage; Auroville where humanity could take bold steps to march towards Perfection. Since so much was at stake, awakened humanity should feel young enough to embark upon this massive adventure into the Future. Tamas, inertia, defeatism, lack of faith, failure of nerve would be fatal to the adventure. Hence the Mother's pressing call: Remain young, never stop striving towards perfection.

II

On 21 February, the Mother's ninetieth birthday, there was a phenomenal rush of visitors to the Ashram, and the meditation around Sri Aurobindo's Samadhi in the morning and the Darshan in the evening were memorable experiences for the sadhaks and disciples. There was also a record attendance at the march past in the Playground. When she was requested by the AIR to record her reminiscences, the Mother spoke with an all-sufficing and marvellous brevity:

Page 759

The reminiscences will be short.

I came to India to meet Sri Aurobindo. I remained in India to live with Sri Aurobindo. When he left his body, I continued to live here in order to do his work which is, by serving the Truth and enlightening mankind, to hasten the rule of the Divine's Love upon the earth.⁸

On the same day, the AIR also presented the play "The Lotus and the Star" on the life and ministry of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in commemoration of the Mother's ninetieth birthday, souvenirs and special numbers of the Ashram journals came out; and there was also the volume of essays, The Flame of Truth, brought out by the Institute of Human Study, Hyderabad, and Loving Homage by the Pathamandir, Calcutta.

III

The inauguration of Auroville took place in the forenoon of 28 February 1968, a week after the Mother's birthday. Almost every Nation, big or small, and all the States of the Indian Union were represented. The inspiring idea behind the dedication ceremony was that children from the different Nations and States should bring a handful of earth from their respective region and deposit it in the lotus-shaped urn at the centre of the Auroville site, to mix there and mingle with the others so as to symbolise the unity, solidarity and common destiny of the earth and its inhabitants. The Government of Pondicherry declared a public holiday to enable its citizens to participate in the unique festive ceremony of the birth of the City of Dawn. For several days previously, the Ashram and Pondicherry had become the centre of attraction, and thousands had come to witness the historic occasion. A newly made road led to the amphitheatre in the heart of Auroville where the vast concourse of humanity gathered on the 28th morning in exemplary silence in a mood of prayerful expectancy.

The dedication ceremony itself was memorably distinctive in its grand simplicity and symbolic sufficiency. There were no speeches, there was no visible presiding dignitary. But many were conscious of an invisible Presence that brooded with outspread protective wings over the mass of humanity as if nurturing their hope for the future. At last, at 10.30, the words of the Mother's message of welcome came with resonant vibration, transmitted from her room in the Ashram six miles away:

Greetings from Auroville to all men of good will.

Are invited to Auroville all those who thirst for progress and aspire to a higher and truer life.⁹

Then as the Mother read the French version of the Auroville charter, two children of the Ashram, one carrying the Mother's flag, the other some

Page 760

earth from the Samadhi (the Mother had herself given them this sacred soil in a bowl) along with the charter in a stainless steel container, placed them at the bottom of the tall urn shaped like a lotus-bud. Following them, other children in groups of two, one holding the flag of the respective Nation or State blazoning its name, walked up to the urn carrying bowlfulls of the consecrated earth of their homelands, and deposited them likewise in the urn. As the children were advancing to the urn, the charter was read out in sixteen other languages: Tamil first, then Sanskrit, then English, followed by thirteen languages of the world in their alphabetical order: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Tibetan. It was really the same song of human aspiration though coming in different notes, and the reiteration in the languages of the world was but the ringing peal of the coming global symphony. Here is the English text of the charter, a simple statement of the aims and hopes of Tomorrow's World:

(1) Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.

But to live in Auroville one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.

(2) Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.

(3) Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future.

Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.

(4) Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.¹⁰

Throughout the ceremony, which took about seventy-five minutes, the words of the charter rumbled in the rhythms of one language or another along the unseen corridors of the collective consciousness of the silently participating congregation comprising tens of thousands of aspiring humanity. In all, 124 Nations of the world and 23 States of the Indian Union - comprising the big and the small, the far and the near, the affluent and the underdeveloped - took part in the dedication ceremony, and the all-important common denominator was the universal human concern and aspiration for the future. After the accredited children from these Nations and States had fulfilled their appointed roles, some of the soil of Auroville also was added to the mingled earth, and Nolini Kanta Gupta went up last and sealed the urn, thereby bringing the ceremony of inauguration to an auspicious close.

That hour of dedication was also one of the Hours of God, and the ceremony was a solemn splendour of affirmation, a great gesture of beckoning that showed the way to the approaching Dawn and the future Noons of Fulfilment. In that year of the crossroads of human history, the Mother's

Page 761

supreme act of faith in launching Auroville into the uncertain Future was in some measure also a means of shaping that future towards the ultimate realisation of the noblest of human aspirations: the reign of "God, Light, Freedom, Immortality", and the "flowering of a new race, the race of the Sons of God". Indeed, the birth of Auroville was like the coming of a beam of shining light to an otherwise bleak and murky world.

It was a splendid beginning, indeed, under the happiest auspices. The children of the world, the soil of the earth in which all lands became one, the Mother's benedictions - the conjunction of these betokened the birth of Auroville, the Dawn City. If Marx once gave the strident call "Proletariat of all Nations, unite! . . .", the Aurovilian call may be phrased: "Children of all Nations, unite! You have nothing to lose except fear insecurity, inequality-and waste; and you have everything to gain!" Children the world over are endowed with the qualities of innocence, generosity, humour, plasticity, curiosity, adventurousness and mysticism - a Franciscan mysticism that burns away the dross of self-defeating egoism or ahankāra and soul-destroying hatred or dvesa. Didn't Christ say that one must be verily like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Certainly, one must be like a child to acquire and deserve the rights of citizenship in Auroville, the city that could one day house a planetary society governed and sustained by the True or Divine Consciousness.

IV

The dedication ceremony had attracted global attention, and many who had half-reconciled themselves to a not-distant Nuclear Doomsday and the end of civilisation now ventured to raise their eyes with a new hope for mankind's future. The Indian Express wrote that it was "the chance of many life-times to be present at the birth of a city... that will be in tune with the noblest ideals of India and the world". It also published a photograph in the left-hand corner of which appeared a face like the Mother's, and when shown the picture, the Mother is reported to have remarked, "I was present there."¹¹ The Statesman thought that Auroville might "well become the world's- first international city and provide a unique example in international living". Professor Angelo Morretta wrote in Giornale d'Italia that Auroville would serve to translate into reality the ideals of Sri Aurobindo, the Plato of modern India. A Sri Lanka paper, the Sun, described Auroville as "a Town named Friendship". And so in their enthusiasm, or the ardour of their hope and expectations, others referred to Auroville variously as "City of Joy", "City of Hope", "City of Youth", "a Laboratory of the evolving World City", and the City where "money would no more be sovereign lord".

How Auroville would grow - how this dream-city would shape itself

Page 762

into concrete reality and solve the central human problem of reconciling the need for human unity and harmony with the claims of human variety and teeming multiplicity, the need for order and the need for freedom, the need for Power with the need for Grace, and the need for a solid material base with the need for the life, mind and spirit dimensions - how Auroville was going to find the means of self-growth and self-realisation and to fill the proposed four sectors (industrial, residential, cultural, international) with glowing purpose derived from the central source of Light and Life - the Matrimandir - how sunflower-like all thoughts, all aspirations, all actions, all, all would turn towards the Divine and receive the Light of Divine Truth and the warmth of Divine Love, all this was wrapped up in the future, but that future had already begun to unfold itself out of the lotus-bud of the Inauguration on 28 February 1968. For millions and millions of years the earth had been in the great evolutionary travail, and the blazing sphere had cooled, water had appeared, and then the first primitive forms of life, and vegetation, and the obscure rumblings of the insect, bird and animal worlds - and, at last. Homo sapiens, thinking, thirsting, grumbling, blundering but also constantly aspiring man. But the earth was much more than an orbiting speck in illimitable space, and man was much more than an animal careering towards extinction. The earth was kin-soil to heaven, and man was potentially Divine. And the Auroville of the Mother's spiritual engineering had set to itself the task of the progressive realisation of the New Life, the New Race.

Several years later, after seeing at the Matrimandir Workers' Camp a film on the inauguration ceremony, the Aurovilian, Seyril Schochen, wrote to a friend in Alabama:

There we sat in the dark before an improvised screen.... Young people were coming in pairs to bring earth from their native lands, pouring or sprinkling it into the marble urn; before our eyes the lands became One Earth....

And there... presiding over the crescent new world of the future... was the Mother as she gave Darshan from the balcony of her Ashram quarters in 1968. Such an infinite tenderness radiated from the face and figure moving slowly along the balcony rail, gazing intently, profoundly into the eyes upturned to hers from the silent crowd massed below like one single still cry for the clasp of God... that one actually felt the enveloping love, the answering clasp.¹²

The day after the dedication of Auroville was the third leap-year anniversary of the Supramental Manifestation - the Golden Day, the Day of the Lord. "Truth alone," ran the Mother's message, "can give to the world the power of receiving and manifesting the Divine's Love."¹³ There was the distribution of symbols in the evening, and for the rest the programme was similar to that on the 90th birthday eight days earlier:

Page 763

meditation before Sri Aurobindo's Samadhi in the morning and Darshan from the Terrace in the evening. The entire period from 21 to 29 February was thus an extended festival for the Ashram, and the two Darshans were attended by over 5000 sadhaks, disciples and admirers. On 25 February, the New Age Association held a seminar on a subject given by the Mother: "What we expect from the Mother." For a start the Mother herself was asked a series of questions, and pat came the answers:

What is the right thing that we should expect from You?

Everything.

What have You been expecting from us and from humanity in general for the accomplishment of Your Work upon earth?

Nothing.

From Your long experience of over sixty years, have You found that Your expectation from us and from humanity has been sufficiently fulfilled?

As I am expecting nothing I cannot answer this question.

Does the success of Your Work for us and for humanity depend in any way upon the fulfilment of Your expectation from us and from humanity?

Happily not.

The real point of the questions and answers is that essentially the Mother symbolised Grace, and Grace could - and often did - act irrespective of our work, our aspiration, or even our cry for help. Grace is Grace, but Faith is important too; "faith is miracle, creator of miracles," said the Mother. And one's love for the Mother - for the Divine - should be pure of all selfish claims and desires for Grace to act without any interference or distortion.

V

Auroville's inauguration was over, the Golden Day had come and gone, and the normal routine had returned. There was the daily schedule of pranam for sadhaks and disciples on their birthdays, and there were special interviews as well. Was the Mother really ninety? perhaps she was. But it made no difference to her children. For 24 April, she gave for what one might term 'thought for the day' a sentence from Sri Aurobindo:

In the spiritual order of things, the higher we project our view and our aspiration, the greater the Truth that seeks to descend upon us, because it is already there within us and calls for its release from the covering that conceals it in manifested Nature.¹⁴

Page 764

And for the sadhaks, to meet the Mother was always to be drawn higher and higher into the spiritual order of things, and undergo a rebirth, a rejuvenation. Thus V. Chidanandam on his birthday:

Sweet Mother, this morning as I saw Thy Form,

Thy wondrous and immaculate Form, spell-bound

Was I. It was a shape of Light from some

Beyond. It was of brilliant living gold.

The Light was massed and packed and solid, yet

As softly radiant as the yellow rose.

Where now my seventy summers? By Thy Force

Transfigured to the freshness, riches, splendour

Of a thousand springs!...

I felt the waves of Light, of Love, of Peace

And Strength outflowing from the gracious Mother

To envelop all of me....¹⁵

And thus Minnie Canteenwalla, gratefully acknowledging the Mother's transfiguring touch and glance:

Oh Divine Alchemist who can bestow

A glorious future from a cruel present, ...

You, who can turn lead into gold,

Utter darkness into blessed Light -

Hopeless deserts into flowering Aspiration -

Crushed lowlands into a glorious Height!¹⁶

Aside from pranam and blessings, the Mother's advice was, as usual, sought on a variety of questions, and her answers were both admirably pointed to the occasion and had also a wider application. For example - How to act with servants? The Mother of course didn't believe in the use of servants, but if one must have them, this was the advice she gave on 2 July 1968:

Don't be indulgent, don't be severe.

They should know that you see everything, but you shouldn't scold them.¹⁷

And, as for beating children, she said bluntly: "Do not beat your children - It clouds your consciousness and spoils their character."

VI

In the meantime, the Mother's sadhana of the body was following its own unpredictable course. The whole odyssey is not known, and will never be known, for we have only random samplings in the records of some of her conversations with a disciple.

Page 765

On 13 March 1968, the Mother had a very concrete experience of the cells and had a more and more concrete perception, "that there is nothing that does not contain the delight of being, because... without [it] there is no being"! The consciousness of her cells seemed to be getting beyond the dualities of good and bad, suffering and happiness into the true consciousness which is altogether different. But the concrete Thing or Truth had not yet been seized. If one had it, one would be truly "the omnipotent master". And this could be achieved "only when the entire world or a sufficient part of it will be ready for transformation".¹⁸

Three days later the Mother had an experience in the morning pointing to a "creation of equilibrium" in which all the dualities of fair-foul, pleasant-unpleasant, good-evil, white-black, day-night, all "have to be together". There may have been a Separation out of a primordial Unity, "but as soon as you seek to return to the Origin, the two tend to fuse into each other"; because in the perfect equilibrium "no division is possible any more". Her experience was in terms of the "extremely concrete sensations in the body" of suffering and Ananda, it was a movement "to stop all separation and realise the total consciousness in every part". And she concluded that it was the "identification of the two which makes the true consciousness... which is the supreme Power". The matter was further clinched by a question from the disciple, and the Mother's answer:

Is it the material equivalent of a psychological experience one has in which the perception of the evil disappears completely in the perception of an absolute Good, even in the evil?

Yes, that is it. One might say that instead of being just a mental conception, it is a concrete realisation of the fact.¹⁹

Talking again on 28 August, the Mother first referred to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and presently the recent insurrection in her own body: coughing, inability to speak, the pain, the failure of vision and hearing, sleeplessness! But on the night of the 26th to 27th, there had been a "powerful and prolonged penetration of supramental forces into the body, everywhere at the same time". Penetration by the current she had felt on many occasions, but that night it was as though there was nothing but a supramental atmosphere pressing to enter, from everywhere at the same time, and it continued for at least four or five hours, altogether consciously. Only, the head seemed "hardly penetrated".

We may compare it with her experience at the time of her 'breakdown' in 1962. Then as now, it was the vital and the mental that were swept away:

...the mental and vital have been the instruments for... grinding Matter... the vital by its sensations, the mind by its thoughts.... But they seem to me to be passing instruments that will be replaced by other states of consciousness....

Page 766

But this "perception of soul states", there were things... marvels!... There were moments... moments absolutely wonderful. But without thought, without thought.

And then for a whole day she saw images inexpressibly beautiful and constantly shifting like a kaleidoscope. They had been wonderful hours! And one night she saw temples and "living deities" (not images), and she also had a taste of the consciousness of Eternity. And the perception of the Presence had remained constant through all the varying states of consciousness.²⁰

A month later (25 September), the Mother observed that it was no use reproaching people for their actions, for after all they had only a limited consciousness and they blundered on this account. The aim should be to come out of one's flawed or limited consciousness and unite with the Supreme, but that would be possible only when there was a quantum change in one's nature:

...when the Supramental manifests, it will replace the mental precision... that diminishes - the precision that limits and therefore falsifies things in part - by a clarity of vision, another kind of vision that does not diminish.

Through limiting and separating the mind achieves its kind of precision; the supramental vision will achieve the higher precision of the relation of all things to one another without the need to separate them first.²¹

Two months later, the Mother referred to an experience of the night of 21 November when the whole room was filled with the Divine Presence - a dazzling Light, a Peace, a Power, a Sweetness - that stayed the whole night, and some of which overflowed on the succeeding days. How was it that other people didn't experience the Presence? For herself, there was no ambiguity, and the Mother grew ecstatic almost:

...all is That, That, there is nothing but That. You cannot breathe without breathing Him in; you move, it is within Him that you move; you are... everything, everything, the whole universe is within Him - but materially, physically, physically.

Why seek Him up there, when He was here, here, all the time? But the Mother also cautioned against making this a new dogma, a new religion. As soon as one formulated an experience, made it elegant and imposing, it would be the end Human stupidity was such that men had made great efforts to separate themselves from the Divine, and had succeeded largely - thanks to their flawed consciousness. The Mother added that,

The experience came, perhaps, because for several days there was a very great concentration to find out... the fact of the separation.... I was assailed, assailed by various living memories of all kinds of experiences (all kinds: of books, pictures, cinemas, and life, people, things), memories of

Page 767

this body, all the memories that might be called "anti-divine", in which the body had the sensation of something that was repulsive or evil, like negations of the divine Presence... so much so that the body almost sank into despair.

Then, someone who had gone up to her that night spoke of the Divine as "something up there, so far away". Immediately everything "changed into the divine Presence", it pervaded her body and never left her, and "when something goes wrong in the body... quite naturally it is set right".²²

On 27 November, she spoke of her experiencing, as it were simultaneously, both the most acute suffering and the most perfect Ananda. Hadn't Sri Aurobindo said that suffering could be a preparation for Ananda, the disciple asked. "Yes," answered the Mother, "I must say that there are many things in Sri Aurobindo which I am now beginning to understand in a very different way."²³

On 21 December, illustrating the power of the reversal of consciousness that she had been experiencing those days "in all the details, in all the domains, as a demonstration through fact", the Mother spoke of how her body would suffer intensely for a few hours "and then all of a sudden, brrff! all gone!... The body apparently has remained the same... but in place of an inner disorder... there is a great peace, a great calm". The question was whether this sort of sudden reversal would also be experienced by bodies other than her own. To what extent her body could be transformed without the transformation of all? "This remains to be discovered." Her body felt as though imprisoned in a box, the complex of the so-called 'human' or 'natural' laws, and yet it did not lack the freedom to see through the prison-house and act in a limited way. But how to make the box - the prison - itself disappear? "To what extent can individual light act upon that?" That was a problem to which she yet had no answer. She perceived very clearly

the collective progress (our field of experience is the earth) that has taken place upon earth; but considering the past, it would seem that a formidable time is still needed for all to be ready to change.... And yet, it was almost a promise... that there is going to be a sudden change (which is translated in our consciousness as a 'descent', an action that 'happens', something that was not acting till now and which has begun to act...).

As to her own body, it had "a more and more precise experience at the same time of its fragility (extreme fragility: just a little movement could stop the present existence), and... simultaneously, the sense of eternity. It was she concluded, "truly a period of transition".²⁴

Page 768

VII

The Mother's conversations, of course, frequently digressed into regions other than her sadhana of the body. About the doctors' advice that she should not tire herself she had said, on 22 August, that what was useless alone tired her, but "to see sincere people to whom it does good is not tiring."²⁵ About the Ashram and Auroville, her view was that the former would keep its true role of pioneer, inspirer and guide and the latter would be an attempt at collective realisation. A year later she was to elaborate this further. There was really no fundamental difference in the attitude towards the future or towards service to the Divine, but while the Ashramites were sadhaks who had consecrated their life to Yoga, what was expected of the Aurovilians was only "simply the good will to make a collective experiment for the progress of humanity".²⁶ About the role of money in Auroville, she felt that its power should be severely contained even if it could not be wholly eliminated. The Auroville hierarchy would be a hierarchy, not of political or money power, but "based on each one's power of consciousness":

...the individual or individuals who are at the very summit necessarily have the least needs; their material needs become less as their capacity of material vision grows....

The man at the top should be a representative of the supreme Consciousness because an integral and pure power of consciousness alone is "capable of ordering material things in a way that is truer, happier and better for everyone" and its very contact brings a "power of conviction" and a "power for transformation". Failing such a representative, there could be a small number (between 4 and 8) "who have an intuitive intelligence". That would not be a privilege of birth "but an outcome of personal effort and development". That would be far better than so-called 'social democracy', the rule by many of the lowest calibre!²⁷

Page 769