Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 17

Arya : A God's Labour

I

It was mentioned in the previous chapter (16.III) that, soon after Sri Aurobindo's arrival in 1910, he was met by M. Paul Richard who was on a visit to Pondicherry. They had two fruitful meetings, and Richard afterwards said to a Japanese audience:

The hour is coming of great things, of great events, and also of great men, the divine men of Asia. All my life I have sought for them across the world, for all my life I have felt they must exist somewhere in the world, that this world would die if they did not live. For they are its light, its heat, its life. It is in Asia that I found the greatest among them - the leader, the hero of tomorrow. He is a Hindu. His name is Aurobindo Ghose.¹

Another French visitor who met Sri Aurobindo not long after his coming to Pondicherry was Madame Alexandra David-Neel, who was in India lured by the wisdom and the mysteries of the Orient. Recalling that meeting of long, long ago, Madame David-Neel is reported to have said recently:

His perfect familiarity with the philosophies of India and the West wasn't what drew my attention: what was of a greater importance to me was the special magnetism that flew out of his presence, and the occult hold he had over those who surrounded him.

She met him in a room with a large window which, being left open, was "filled with that greenish sky of India, a fit background indeed for a Master, a Guru of his dimension". Four young men - probably Bejoy, Moni, Nolini and Saurin - "stood near one corner of the table: they were tall, stout, immobile, with eyes fixed on the Master's face, much like four marble statues". At one stage she wished they would leave the room so that she might ask Sri Aurobindo a few questions of a confidential nature. As if he had read her thought and had communicated it instantaneously to the young men, they "walked out of the room, stiff, silent, like four robots drawn out of sight, pulled by an invisible string".²

M. Richard had in the meantime told Madame Mirra Richard about his own meetings and how Sri Aurobindo had explained the symbolism of the lotus as the mystic opening of the bud of consciousness to the warmth of the Divine Sun. Born on 21 February 1878 in Paris, from her early years Mirra had been a child apart, given to silent self-absorption. As a young girl, she used to take walks in the woods of Fontainebleau, and she would often sit at the foot of an ancient tree, communing With Nature for hours. From about the age of twelve, she began nurturing great aspirations, dreaming dreams and seeing visions. Night after night she felt the World's burden of pain pressing upon her, but at her healing touch that burden was exorcised away. She studied occultism in Algeria under the guidance of a master, M. Théon, and her progress was rapid.   

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Back in Paris, her house on Rue du Val de Grace became the centre of a group of ardent young seekers, one of them being Alexandra David (David-Neel after her marriage). They felt that the evils of ignorance, oppression and violence must be fought and overthrown, and transformed into knowledge, freedom and peace. In 1912, Mirra Richard recorded:

The general aim to be attained is the advent of a progressing universal harmony.

The means for attaining this aim, in regard to the earth, is the realisation of human unity through the awakening in all and the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity which is One.

In other words, - to create unity by founding the Kingdom of God which is within us all.³

For some time, she had encountered in her dreams several teachers, some of whom she afterwards met in real life. But the face - which she was led to call 'Krishna' - that appeared again and again, this face she was not to meet till some years later. On Paul Richard reporting to her about his conversations with Sri Aurobindo - especially about his explanation of the lotus symbolism - Mirra felt a responsive chord and was most eager to meet him. She started keeping a Diary too, recording her thoughts daily after meditation at five in the morning, sitting near a window with a shawl wrapped round her. The jottings were really transcripts of her conversations with the Divine! On 1 February 1914 she wrote;

...identified with Thy divine love, I contemplate the earth and its creatures, this mass of substance put into forms perpetually destroyed and renewed, this swarming mass of aggregates which are dissolved as soon as constituted, of beings who imagine that they are conscient and permanent individualities and who are as ephemeral as a breath, always alike or almost the same, in their diversity, repeating indefinitely the same desires, the same tendencies, the same appetites, the same ignorant errors.*

That is the general rule. But periodically the Divine Light "shines in a being and radiates through him over the world"; such are the Sanatanas, the Saviours, the Messiahs who have leavened our existence in the past. Yet more is needed now:

But how much greater a splendour than all that have gone before, how marvellous a glory and light would be needed to draw these beings out of the horrible aberration in which they are plunged by the life of cities and so-called civilisations! What a formidable and, at the same time, divinely sweet puissance would be needed to turn aside all these wills from the bitter struggle for their selfish, mean and foolish satisfactions, to snatch them from this vortex which hides death behind its treacherous glitter, and turn them towards Thy conquering harmony!

* Prayers and Meditations (1979) p. 63. (The original is in French, Prières et Méditations de la Mère, but the quotations are all from the English version in the Collected Works of the Mother — Centenary Edition, published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.)  

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Her prayer and aspiration on 2 February was equally significant:

O Lord, I would like to be so ardent a love that all lonelinesses may be filled up by it and all sorrows soothed.

O Lord, I cry unto Thee: Make me a burning brazier which consumes all suffering and transforms it into joyous light irradiating the hearts of all!...⁴

A "greater splendour than the Lights of the past was needed to meet the crisis created by massive technology and maddening urbanisation, and - wasn't she hoping that Sri Aurobindo might prove to be such a Splendour? As for herself she was ready to be transformed into a burning brazier of "pure love and boundless compassion".

By the beginning of March 1914, she was getting ready for the intended journey to the East. As she turned to the future, she wished it might be "the beginning of a new inner period".⁵ On board the Kaga Maru she wrote on 8 March:

In front of this calm sunrise which turned all within me into silence and peace, at the moment when I grew conscious of Thee and Thou alone wast living in me, O Lord, it seemed to me that I adopted all the inhabitants of this ship, and enveloped them in an equal love.... Not often had I felt so strongly Thy divine power....⁶

The boat itself seemed to her "a marvellous abode of peace, a temple sailing in Thy honour".⁷ Day followed day, and realisation was piled on realisation, as if she were indeed voyaging towards His Divine Presence. In the solitude of the desert and during the silent pure nights, she felt His majestic Presence, she experienced His bountiful Love. On 23 March she recorded that, in her view, the ideal state is to be constantly conscious with the Divine Consciousness, so that we know "at every moment, spontaneously, without any reflection being necessary, exactly what should be done to best express" the Divine Law.⁸ And the very next day she wrote that such perfect identification with the Divine Consciousness was one of the things she expected from her journey to India. We may rightly surmise that she had learned to look on India as her true spiritual home.

Travelling by train from Dhanushkoti, she reached Pondicherry on 29 March. At 3.30 the same afternoon, she met Sri Aurobindo in the upstairs of his house in Rue Francois Martin. At the very first sight, recognition came like a flash of lightning: Sri Aurobindo was verily the 'Krishna' she had met so often in her dreams. There was no need for speech, she Sat at Sri Aurobindo's feet and closed her eyes, only her mind was open to him. A great silence now encompassed her and flooded her soul. There was a breaking of past intellectual moulds, a dissolution of arduous mental constructions, followed by a new crystallisation in the image of total identification with the incarnate Divine. When she took up her pen after the usual meditation next morning, this was the entry she made:

Gradually the horizon becomes distinct, the path grows clear, and we move towards a greater and greater certitude.

It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to

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prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.

O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with joy and gratitude....⁹

Again, on 1 April 1914:

A great joy, a deep peace reign in me, and yet all my inner constructions have vanished like a vain dream and I find myself now, before Thy immensity, without a frame or system... a new stage has begun.¹⁰

In their subsequent meetings and conversations, each found in the other a kindred soul and a spiritual comrade. Although separated by thousands of miles, they had independently worked broadly on the same lines, aspired and hoped and striven for the same ends. She had one monumental doubt, however; hadn't all efforts in the past to redeem the human condition and to found an Earthly Paradise failed invariably? But Sri Aurobindo assured her that this time there should be - there would be - no failure because of his discovery of the principle and power of the Supermind. For Madame Mirra this was Assurance enough, and there would henceforth be no room for uncertainty or doubt. She realised that the new period that was opening before her was "a period of expansion rather than of concentration"." The divinisation of Man, the transformation of Nature, that was still the cardinal aim; but the force within had to be perfected first before it could be turned to the tasks of changing the external world. A total and absolute surrender to the Supreme would be the means of uniting the motion and the act, the essence and the descent. And so the final plunge of ātma-samarpana - an unfreezing of all barriers - and a melting and a merging in the waters of Felicity; and she wrote in her Diary on 10 April:

Suddenly the veil was rent, the horizon was disclosed - and before the clear vision my whole being threw itself at Thy feet in a great outburst of gratitude....

I seem to have no more limits; there is no longer the perception of the body, no sensations, no feelings, no thoughts - a clear, pure, tranquil immensity penetrated with love and light, filled with an unspeakable beatitude is all that is there and that alone seems now to be myself....¹²

In the strength of this perfect certitude, in the beauty of this calm serenity, she dedicated herself anew to the relief of the giant agony of the world and its transformation and ultimate divinisation.

II

One result of the meetings of the Richards with Sri Aurobindo and discussion between them was the decision to launch a philosophical magazine, Arya that should give to the world a grand synthesis of knowledge and Yogic experience, and project with all the lineaments of logical exposition Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Future.  

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The decision was taken on 1 June, but the first monthly issue was to come out only on Sri Aurobindo's forty-second birthday, 15 August 1914. Although Alexandra David-Neel received the impression that Sri Aurobindo had a "perfect familiarity with the philosophies of India and the West', he himself disclaimed any such deep intimacy. As he once wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy:

And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never was a philosopher - although I have written philosophy.... I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the yoga and came to Pondicherry; I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher! How I managed to do it and why? First, because Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review and as my theory was that a yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything I could not very well refuse: and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, because I had to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising yoga daily, and philosophy was there automatically....¹³

It was also decided that the Arya should have a French counterpart. Revue de la Grande Synthèse, consisting mainly of translations from the English journal. The assured collaboration of the Richards made such a double venture well within the realm of practical realisation. The journals were to be published from the Richards' house in Rue Dupleix, but it was understood from the beginning that the main inspiration behind the venture would be Sri Aurobindo and almost the whole brunt of the burden too was to fall upon him after the first few months.

On Bepin Pal's persuasion, Sri Aurobindo had become de facto editor of the Bande Mataram in 1906, and he was also the directing force behind its revolutionary Bengali counterpart, Yugantar. After his acquittal in 1909, he had started on his own the Karmayogin and the Dharma, with a marked shift in emphasis from politics to politics cum Sanatana Dharma. And now, five years after, he was to launch the Arya and the Revue, philosophical journals both, with far horizons and a global and integral outlook. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga had already been spread over twelve years, and he had assimilated and overpassed his own and the world's past, and had reached the stage when it was incumbent on him to lay the foundations of the future. The Arya would now give him an opportunity to share with others - in the language of philosophy - the results of his deepest probings into the structure of Existence and his farthest telescopings into a probable and possible future.

Paul Richard himself was enthusiastic enough, and Mirra was filled with a sense of vast expectancy. There were the details of planning to attend to - and the splendid executrix in her took complete charge of the situation. On 3 June, she wrote in her Diary:

Now that the whole being is more and more deeply plunged into material activity, into the physical realisation which includes such a multitude of details to be thought of and regulated, I call to Thee, 0 Lord, so that my consciousness, turned thus outwards, may constantly keep this communion with Thee....¹⁴  

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On 4 June, she recorded that the two supreme obstacles to realisation, the two impediments to the action of the Divine Law, were "the darkness of ignorance and the black smoke of egoistic ill-will".¹⁵ People were ignorant: and people were selfish and perverse, which was even worse. The light of knowledge and the warmth of love were the only cure for "the inertia of a heavy ignorance or the resistance of an uncomprehending ill-will". She accordingly spelt out the entire justification for the projected launching of the two journals, but warned at the same time, that while knowledge was necessary, one had to go beyond it too:

First of all, knowledge must be conquered, that is, one must learn to know Thee, to be united with Thee, and all means are good and may be used to attain this goal. But it would be a great mistake to believe that all is done when this goal is attained....

To know Thee first and before all else, yes; but once Thy knowledge is acquired there remains all the work of Thy manifestation; and then there intervene the quality, force, complexity and perfection of this manifestation....

Before the immensity of this programme, the entire being exults and sings a hymn of gladness to Thee.¹⁶

And, the very next day: "It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being so that this Force, unknown to the earth till today, may manifest in its plenitude."¹⁷

But soon the rumblings of war were heard in Europe, and throughout July 1914 the diplomatic moves and counter-moves in the great chancellories of the world kept everybody guessing. And when war broke out at last and the German armies swept through Belgium and began overrunning France reaching almost the outskirts of Paris, the Richards felt shaken. They were on a visit to French India ostensibly on an electioneering mission, though the real purpose - at least as far as Mirra Richard was concerned - was to meet Sri Aurobindo. The war was a severe shock to them, and Sri Aurobindo too, with his profound understanding of French history and insight into the French genius and character, had his anxieties and forebodings. Notwithstanding the war, however, the first issue of the Arya came out as originally planned. But an inkling into her mind and sensibility is provided by some of the Diary entries of this period, and in these she seems to be speaking, not for herself alone, but for Sri Aurobindo as well. Thus on 4 August 1914:

Men, driven by the conflict of forces, are performing a sublime sacrifice, they are offering their lives in a bloodstained holocaust....¹⁸

Later entries are equally moving:

O Lord, we know that it is an hour of great gravity for the earth: those who can be Thy intermediaries to it to make a greater harmony arise from the conflict and from its dark ugliness a diviner beauty, must be ready for the work....¹⁹

Monstrous forces have swooped down upon the earth like a hurricane, forces dark and violent and powerful and blind. Give us strength, O Lord, to illumine them....²⁰   

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All errors, all prejudices, all misunderstandings must vanish in this whirl-wind of destruction that is carrying away the past....²¹

O Lord, Lord, the whole earth is in an upheaval; it groans and suffers, it is in agony... all this suffering that has descended upon it must not be in vain; grant that all this bloodshed may produce a swifter germination of the seeds of beauty and light and love which must blossom and cover the earth with their rich harvest....²²

O Lord, the earth groans and suffers; chaos has made this world its abode. The darkness is so deep that Thou alone canst dispel it. Come, manifest Thyself that Thy work may be accomplished.²³

It is the voice of humanity wrung from the depths, it is the conscience of humanity speaking out, it is the still sad music of humanity invoking the Divine's effective intervention. Despair wars with hope, terror is exceeded by pity, and yet beyond the poisoned present a redeemed future is resolutely inferred. The entry for 31 August is most significant:

In this formidable disorder and terrible destruction can be seen a great working, a necessary toil preparing the earth for a new sowing which will rise in marvellous spikes of grain and give to the world the shining harvest of a new race.... The vision is clear and precise, the plan of Thy divine law so plainly traced that peace has come back and installed itself in the hearts of the workers.²⁴

There is another invasion of doubt and darkness a few days later:

Darkness has descended upon the earth, thick, violent, victorious... All is sadness, terror, destruction in the physical world, and the splendour of Thy light of love seems darkened by a veil of mourning....

Time presses: the divine powers must come, O Lord, to the help of the agonised earth.²⁵

The Divine's answer was: "Face the danger!.... Look the danger straight in the face and it will vanish before the Power."26 The ruling motto had to be: "Conquer at any price". Then, on 25 September, the ambrosial recordation:

Thou hast accepted us as fit intermediaries between the unthinkable realities and the relativities of the physical world, and Thy constant presence in our midst is a token of Thy active collaboration.

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute:

A new Light shall break upon the earth. A new world shall be born,

And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.²⁷

While the outer gloom cast by the war was to continue for some years, the inner mist raised by the invasion of doubt wholly cleared, and gave place to the sovereign light of assurance that ultimate victory was sure and that the rebuilding of the House of Humanity would not long be delayed.  

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III

The Arya placed before itself a twofold object: firstly, "a systematic study of the highest problems of existence"; and, secondly, "the formation of a vast synthesis of knowledge, harmonising the divers religious traditions of humanity, occidental as well as oriental". The journal would pursue the safe sane method of realism - not simply restrictive naturalism but a realism that was rational as well as transcendental, running purposefully together the intellectual and scientific disciplines on the one hand and, on the other, the lights and lightning revelations of intuitive experience. The journal would give, not merely studies in speculative philosophy, but also translations of ancient texts and commentaries on them, essays in comparative religion, and practical suggestions regarding "inner culture and self-development".

In choosing the name Arya for his journal, Sri Aurobindo couldn't of course have wanted to convey any suggestions of racial superiority. "Aryan" was for Sri Aurobindo a concept, an ideal, and not - what it became for Hitler later on - the name of the Blonde Beast of the Nordic race, the chosen race. Explaining the significance of the name in an early issue of the journal, Sri Aurobindo said:

...the word in its original use expressed not a difference of race, but a difference of culture. For in the Veda the Aryan peoples are those who had accepted a particular type of self-culture, of inward and outward practice, of ideality, of aspiration....

In later times, the word Arya expressed a particular ethical and social ideal, an ideal of well-governed life, candour, courtesy, nobility, straight dealing, courage, gentleness, purity, humanity, compassion, protection of the weak, liberality, observance of social duty, eagerness for knowledge, respect for the wise and learned... the combined ideal of the Brahmana and the Kshatriya....

Intrinsically, in its most fundamental sense, Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature.... For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom....

Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers he does not destroy, but ennobles and fulfils.... always the Aryan is a worker and warrior. He spares himself no labour of mind or body whether to seek the Highest or to serve it. He avoids no difficulty, he accepts no cessation from fatigue. Always he fights for the coming of that kingdom within himself and in the world.²⁸

The word "Arya", then, connotes certain qualities of the mind and heart, certain aptitudes and aspirations, and has no reference whatever to "race". An austere and uncompromising aspiration and a sustained and determined endeavour alone mark the true Aryan; and when, after his trials and ascents, he reaches his goal at last, he becomes the perfected Aryan, the "Arhat", master of the three rungs of the ascending spiral of consciousness,  

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the individual, the cosmic-universal and the transcendent:

The perfect Arhat is he who is able to live simultaneously in all these three apparent states of existence, elevate the lower into the higher, receive the higher into the lower, so that he may represent perfectly in the symbols of the world that with which he is identified in all parts of his being, - the triple and triune Brahman.²⁹

From this it surely follows that the Arhat is potentialy lodged as much within an Asian as within a European, and no one indeed, whatever his race, colour, creed, caste or nationality, is denied the possibility of realising this potentiality and becoming a true Arhat, almost answering to the description of the "Jivanmukta":

Although consenting here to a mortal body,

He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not....³⁰

Simultaneously almost, Sri Aurobindo's collaborator was also setting down similar thoughts in her Diary. Humanity had to advance, from the average human to the pure Arhat ideal. Works, knowledge, love -Agni, Indra, Soma - were important, yet "some new splendour, some possibility of a loftier and more integral realisation" was needed if "one step farther" was to be taken towards the Divine manifestation on the earth.³¹ And in the entry for 5 October 1914, she explained the evolutionary process that would change man to greater man, superman:

In the calm silence of Thy contemplation, O Divine Master, Nature is fortified and tempered anew. All principle of individuality is overpassed, she is plunged in Thy infinity that allows oneness to be realised in all domains without confusion, without disorder. The combined harmony of that which persists, that which progresses and that which eternally is, is little by little accomplished in an always more complex, more extended and more lofty equilibrium. And this interchange of the three modes of life allows the plenitude of the manifestation.³²

The Arya was altogether a bold and unique adventure: it was much more than just an attempt to forge a new "synthesis" of knowledge, it was very different from an exercise in academic scholarship, it was not an elegant or ingenious variation or" one, or a mixture, of the traditional philosophies. The real aim of the journal was, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, "to feel out for the thought of the future, to help in shaping its foundations and to link it to the best and most vital thought of the past". This was audacious futurist research and reconstruction on the basis of intuitive thought and sustained tapasya. The human soul, caught in the process of evolution in the prison of matter and life, would nevertheless shape the prison itself into a field of experimentation, a place of sadhana, to bring about its transformation. The faculty of reason, instead of dissipating itself in self-defeating activities, must develop new goals, new powers, and prepare the human mind for a decisive new advance:

The problem of thought therefore is to find out the right idea and the right way of harmony;  

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to restate the ancient and eternal spiritual truth of the Self so that it shall re-embrace, permeate, dominate, transfigure the mental and physical life; to develop the most profound and vital methods of psychological self-discipline and self-development so that the mental and psychical life of man may express the spiritual life through the utmost possible expansion of its own richness, power and complexity; and to seek for the means and motives by which his external life, his society and his institutions may remould themselves progressively in the truth of the spirit and develop towards the utmost possible harmony of individual freedom and social unity.³³

Here in a nutshell Sri Aurobindo had stated "our ideal and our search"; it was an announcement as well as an anticipation of what the journal was going to attempt, and was ultimately to accomplish.

The principal contributor to the Arya was Sri Aurobindo, and without him, the Arya would have been an even completer blank than Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left out. But in the early issues, Paul Richard's Eternal Wisdom and The Wherefore of the Worlds also appeared serially, while Mirra did most of the translations for the Revue. When war came, Paul was called for military service, and the Richards had to leave for France, and so the Revue ceased publication after its seventh issue. The Arya however, was kept alive by Sri Aurobindo till January 1921 - alive till then, and now immortal.

The place of honour in the Arya was given to Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, since his basic preoccupation at the time was to lay amply and securely the philosophical foundations of the problem of establishing the integral divine harmony within, and as its result "a changed earth and a nobler and happier humanity". Next in importance was The Synthesis of Yoga, a detailed exposition of the classical Yogas and of the integral Yoga that was to include and exceed them all; and The Secret of the Veda, a new and original interpretation of the esoteric truths concealed in the Vedic universe of symbols that earlier commentators had missed altogether. The Life Divine was to be the "thought of the future". The Secret of the Veda was to link the thought of the future with the "best and most vital thought of the past", and The Synthesis of Yoga was to show how this seminal new thought was progressively to be translated into present and future reality. Essays on the Gita, another series like The Secret of the Veda, was started in August 1916; and the complementary sequences - The Ideal of Human Unity and The Psychology of Social Development (now known as 'The Human Cycle') - began appearing from September 1915 and August 1916 respectively. Even what first commenced as a mere book-review sometimes spanned out into a treatise on the instalment plan: for example. The Future Poetry, Heraclitus and A Defence of Indian Culture. Among the shorter works that first appeared in the journal were Ideals and Progress, The Superman, Evolution, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-Determination, and the commentaries on the Isha and Kena Upanishads. Translations, reviews, aphorisms and epigrams, miscellaneous essays, comments on the progress of the war or on the prospects of perpetual peace, discussions on  

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materialism, meditation, astrology and the universal consciousness, discourses on the reincarnating soul and the ascending unity, notices of books and journals, appreciative notes on poetry and art - these too were scattered in princely profusion in the garden of the Arya. Even as a business proposition, the Arya - notwithstanding its steady refusal to make easy concessions to its readers - seems to have paid its way, and left a small surplus besides!

In the early months of the Arya's existence, Mirra Richard was the chief executive, though the office was in Sri Aurobindo's house in Rue Francois Martin, with Saurin in charge. Later, Saurin also ran the "Aryan Stores", with financial help and advice from Mirra. Aside from the Arya venture, she brought together a few young men (including those living with Sri Aurobindo) and formed the society called L'Idée Nouvelle ("The New Idea"). The period of her first stay in Pondicherry - 29 March 1914 to 22 February 1915 - was thus a time of great new beginnings, and of new ties that were destined to endure. Some of the young men, Nolini, Moni and Saurin, paid a visit to Bengal early in 1914, but on the war breaking out, they returned to Pondicherry in September. When Bejoy too wished to pay a brief visit to Bengal, he was arrested at the border near Pondicherry as an ex-revolutionary and kept in jail for the duration of the war. Another inmate of Sri Aurobindo's house, the Tamil writer "Va Ra", also left Pondicherry in the course of 1914. Younger than all these, Amrita (Aravamudachari) who was yet a school-boy came under Sri Aurobindo's spell and had his first darshan on 15 August 1913 in the Mission Street house. After Bharati, V.V.S. Aiyar and Srinivasachariar had left having received Sri Aurobindo's birthday blessings, Amrita was called in to make his obeisance. Recalling the event, Amrita wrote many years later:

Sri Aurobindo's eyes, it seemed, burned brighter than the lamplight for me; as he looked at me, in a trice all gloom vanished from within me, and his image was as it were installed in the sanctum sanctorum of my being.... I felt within me that he had accepted me.³⁴

Another time when he had darshan and received Sri Aurobindo's touch, Amrita burst into sobs:

Whether I walked to him or took a leap to him, I do not know. What I remember is that a lamp was lit everywhere in me and I saw in a spontaneous and automatic movement in front of me an intense celestial beauty. My being unknowingly swam, as it were, in a sea of silence.... Bhakti is a divine acquisition, a thing of wonder; it cannot have its birth without divine grace... Immeasurable wonder drowned me....³⁵

He was drawn more and more into that enchanted inner circle, he read Yogic sadhan with Mirra (who seemed in his eyes "an image of immeasurable power"), and on reading 'The Life Divine' in the first issue of the Arya he felt transported although he couldn't understand it: "It was as if someone else in me was comprehending all that was read".36 Having surprised Amrita in the act of reading aloud, Sri Aurobindo gently assured him: "It is not necessary to understand it all at once. Go on reading. If you find a joy in reading, you need not stop it."  

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Its coming into existence having synchronised with the commencement of the world war, the feat of keeping itself alive was surely no mean achievement for the Arya and was also the work of Grace, Acknowledging this, Sri Aurobindo wrote in its twelfth issue (July 1915):

Without the divine Will...no human work can come to the completion hoped for by our limited vision. To that Will we entrust the continuance and the result of our labours, and we conclude the first year of the Arya with the aspiration that the second may see the speedy and fortunate issue of the world-convulsion which still pursues us, and that by the Power which brings always the greatest possible good out of apparent evil there may emerge from the disastrous but long-foreseen collapse of the old order a new arid better marked by the triumph of the higher principles of love, wisdom and unity and a sensible advance of the race towards our ultimate goal, - the conscious oneness of the Soul in humanity and the divinity of man.

This was but a solemn recapitulation and reiteration of the views expressed by Sri Aurobindo in the course of the interview he gave to a correspondent of the Hindu and published in that paper early in 1915. Sri Aurobindo had said then that Christmas-time conferences and congresses couldn't be expected to solve India's (or the world's) problems:

The old, petty forms and little, narrow, make-believe activities are getting out of date. The world is changing rapidly around us and preparing for more colossal changes in the future.... No, it is not in any of the old formal activities, but deeper down that I find signs of progress and hope.

A nation of 300 millions, a meeting-place in the past of great civilisations, a vast country full of rich material and unused capacities, should give up acting like "the inhabitants of an obscure and petty village". India had to go beyond the cribbing movements of little family ties and constant exercises in money-making, and march out into the broad life of the world. The time had come when India had to outgrow its earlier total preoccupation with national politics:

The new idea that should now lead us is the realisation of our nationhood, not separate from, but in the future scheme of humanity.... Not a spirit of aloofness or of jealous self-defence, but of generous emulation and brotherhood with all men and all nations, justified by a sense of conscious strength, a great destiny, a large place in the human future - this should be the Indian spirit.

If the Vedantic idea of the oneness of all men in God could be realised inwardly and outwardly - "increasingly even in social relations and the structure of society" - that surely must ensure the progress of the human race. In that respect, India if she chose could "guide the world"; but for this it was necessary that the spiritual life of India should issue out of the cave and the temple, adapt itself to new forms, and "lay its hand upon the world".*

* Reproduced from Bulletin (August 1970), pp. 144-8. In the January 1967 issue of Mother India. however, the views are given on p. 7 as "A message from the Past to the Future: What Sri Aurobindo said to Lala Lajpat Rai in early 1915". This was immediately after the Madras Congress of December 1914.  

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IV

The tasks connected with the Arya - maintaining the subscribers' list, keeping accounts, helping Paul with the Revue - occupied much of Mirra Richard's time. All her past occult knowledge, her intellectual and artistic accomplishments, her spiritual aspirations and realisations - were nothing. She had made an unreserved and total self-surrender to Sri Aurobindo on 29 March 1914 as to the Supreme, a divine humility was now the badge of her puissant renewal, and she had won back the sovereign simplicity of a "naked new-born babe". The splendour of this total ātma-samarpana may be seen thus imaged in the Mother's celebrated 'Radha's Prayer' of 13 January 1932:

O Thou whom at first sight I knew for the Lord of my being and my God, receive my offering.

Thine are all my thoughts, all my emotions....all the movements of my life, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood. I am absolutely and altogether Thine, Thine without reserve. What Thou wilt of me, that I shall be; Whether Thou choosest for me life or death, happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes to me from Thee will be welcome. Each one of Thy gifts will be always for me a gift divine bringing with it the supreme Felicity.

She began taking lessons in Sanskrit and Bengali from Sri Aurobindo, and in her turn she gave lavishly of her understanding affection to the small groups of students from the Calve College who came to see her from time to time. Every evening she met Sri Aurobindo with Paul and they had stimulating discussions; and every Sunday, Sri Aurobindo and his young men had dinner at the Richards' place in Rue Dupleix.

In the meantime, the war in Europe was going on with undiminished fury, and it was clear she would have to return to France. On 17 January 1915, she made this entry in her spiritual Diary:

...things have changed.... Thou hast willed that from the passive and contemplative servitor I was, I become an active and realising one; Thou hast willed that joyful acceptance be transformed into joyful battle.... In a partial and limited battle, but one that is representative of the great terrestrial struggle. Thou dost put my strength, determination and courage to the test....³⁷

Her birthday on 21 February was celebrated by the Arya group of friends and fellow-seekers, and on 22 February she left for France. On 3 March, on board the Kama Maru, she wrote in her Diary:

...this strong impression of having been flung headlong into a hell of darkness! Never at any moment of my life, in any circumstances, have I felt myself living in surroundings so entirely opposite to all that I am conscious of as true, so contrary to all that is the essence of my life....³⁸

The next entry (4 March) too breathes the same poignancy of regret at her having to tear herself away from her new-found peace and felicity:

Each turn of the propeller upon the deep ocean seems to drag me farther away from my true destiny, the one best expressing the divine Will; each passing  

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hour seems to plunge me again deeper into that past with which I had broken, sure of being called to new and vaster realisations....³⁹

And three days later: "I am exiled from every spiritual happiness, and of all ordeals this, O Lord, is surely the most painful that Thou canst impose".⁴⁰ And yet there could be no retreat:

Thou hast forbidden and still and always Thou forbidst it. No flight out of the world! The burden of its darkness and ugliness must be borne to the end.... I must remain in the bosom of the Night and walk on....⁴¹

Arrived at Lunel, she fell ill, seriously ill, and was narrowly saved from death, but she saw that the spiritual power was still fully active in her; from behind the scenes, she found it possible to exert an occult influence on men and events.⁴² There was now some correspondence between her and Sri Aurobindo, generally touching upon their common spiritual quest and role - the inevitable struggles and vicissitudes - and the hope or certainty of ultimate victory. Perhaps there was some suggestion that Sri Aurobindo should pursue his Yoga in a place less exposed to the peril of politics and publicity than Pondicherry; Lord Carmichael, Governor of Bengal, did in fact send out a feeler through Krishna Kumar Mitra in 1915 inquiring whether Sri Aurobindo would like the ban on him to be removed to facilitate his return to India and settling down in a quiet place like Darjeeling.⁴³ But he knew they were idle moves and childish baits, and in any case there was no question of his moving out of Pondicherry; and so he wrote to Mirra on 6 May 1915:

The whole earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations and I am sceptical of finding any place where the clash of the struggle will not pursue us. In any case, an effective retirement does not seem to be my destiny. I must remain in touch with the world until I have either mastered adverse circumstances or succumbed or carried on the struggle between the spiritual and physical so far as I am destined to carry it on.... One needs to have a calm heart, a settled will, entire self-abnegation and the eyes constantly fixed on the beyond to live undiscouraged in times like these which are truly a period of universal decomposition. For myself, I follow the Voice.... The result is not mine and hardly at all now even the labour....⁴⁴

He wrote again on 20 May:

Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the Yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, "Heaven and Earth equal and one".

There is a clear echo of this challenging thought in her Diary entry of 31 July written at Marsillargues:

The heavens are definitively conquered, and nothing and nobody could have the power of wresting them from me. But the conquest of the earth is still to be made; it is being carried on in the very heart of the turmoil....

Thou hast said that the earth would die, and it will die due to its old ignorance.

Thou hast said that the earth would live, and it will live in the renewal of Thy Power.⁴⁵  

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On 28 July, Sri Aurobindo wrote again, drawing a parallel between the spiritual Struggle within and the world conflict without:

Everything internal is ripe or ripening, but there is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make a very appreciable advance (somewhat like the trench warfare in Europe), the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world, that resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks.... And if there were not the strength and Ananda within, it would be harassing and disgusting work; but the eye of knowledge looks beyond and sees that it is only a protracted episode.

Again, on 16 September 1915:

It is a singular condition of the world, the very definition of chaos with the superficial form of the old world resting apparently intact on the surface. But a chaos of long disintegration or of some early new birth? It is the thing... yet without any approach to a decision.

On 26 November, she wrote to Sri Aurobindo, describing an experience she had had one evening in a garden-house in Paris. She had then become completely identified with the earth consciousness:

The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation.... And the consciousness knew that its global body was thus moving in the arms of the universal Being, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to It in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe and one with it; the consciousness became the consciousness of the universe, immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity....⁴⁶*

Commenting on this experience, Sri Aurobindo wrote in his letter of 31 December 1915:

The experience you have described is Vedic in the real sense, though not one which would easily be recognised by the modem systems of Yoga... It is the union of the 'Earth' of the Veda and Purana with the Divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas hardly recognise the possibility of a material union with the Divine.

In spiritual life - even more, perhaps, than in our everyday external life - progress is seldom a steep straight line, but a zig-zagging, a spiralling, an alternation of forced marches and sudden setbacks, followed by fresh leaps forward. And this uncertainty, this unpredictability, this continual siege of contrarieties, must be all the more exasperating with an "integral Yoga" that aims at a many-faceted and total change and transformation of oneself and one's surroundings and the whole

* Speaking about this experience later, the Mother said on 8 October 1947 (as recorded by Purani): "In this experience the mind did not participate.... It was an atelier, a pavilion with a big garden. The time was evening.... I became completely identified with the earth consciousness. Sri Aurobindo explained this experience as a very high one because the consciousness came back to the body directly — that is, to the individual being."

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earth itself. Early in 1916, the Richards left France for Japan, and on Mirra writing about some of the difficulties in her sadhana, Sri Aurobindo replied on 26 June with one of the most detailed and practical expositions of this self-transforming and world-transforming Yoga. Spiritual progress always runs the risk of disturbances from adverse forces, "for the complete victory of a single one of us would mean a general downfall among them". The remedy is to try to come "into a more and more universal communion with the Highest". On the other hand, even setbacks may have their uses, for when the recovery is made at last, it is with fresh spiritual gains. Nothing is therefore gained by feeling dissatisfied or impatient. The basic requirements of the sadhana are "an absolute equality of the mind and heart and a clear purity and calm strength in all the members of the being" so that one may be able progressively to perceive the One behind the bewildering multiplicity of the phenomenal world. This experience of Unity and of pure joy in that experience must be the ground of the sadhana:

When the Unity has been well founded, the static half of our work is done but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power, - Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Maser using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which I call myself only as a centre of his universal existence and responding to its workings as a soul to the Soul, taking upon itself his image until there is nothing left but Krishna and Kali. This is the stage I have reached in spite of all set-backs and recoils....

This is a remarkable analysis and a momentous confession. From cosmic consciousness or the consciousness of Unity (which, although it may be all right for personal felicity, will be "an escape instead of a victory"), the next stage would be to see the Unity as a creative duality of Two-in-One: Pure Existence and Power of Consciousness, or Krishna and Kali. The true Yogi turns himself into a pure engine of Power, to be used for His purposes by Krishna. What, then, happens to the individual self? In itself it is nothing; the more the Yogi becomes a power-house of the Supreme and a centre of the universal Existence, the more his ego dwindles into zero. But there are further horizons still: the power-house has to be charged with Divine Knowledge and there has to be "the full opening up of the different planes... and the subjection of Matter and the body and the material world to the law of the higher heavens of the Truth". The ultimate aim, of course, was to "possess securely the Light and the Force of the supramental being", but progress was hampered by the gheraoing old habits of intellectual thought. But it was only a question of time, Sri Aurobindo concluded; the siege would "diminish in force and be finally dispelled". Such was the calm assurance he gave to the First of his disciples, the great Collaborator who was to become the marvellous executrix, the Shakti, the Kali, the Mother of Sri Aurobindo's supramental Yoga.

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V

The grounding on Unity, the turning of the whole being into an engine of Power to serve the ends of Purusha or Krishna, the mere ego being now eliminated: a progressive heightening of the power of consciousness through the influx of the higher knowledge till the mental becomes the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, the grand lever of change and transformation - such was the strategy of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. This was the real "work" on which he was engaged, but to the outside world he was the editor of the Arya, the friend, comrade, teacher, chief and Guru of the small group of young men who lived with him in the Rue Francois Martin house or who daily sought his company and stimulating discussion with him in the evenings. He read the Hindu in the mornings, met special visitors before lunch, wrote or typed out his articles for the Arya whenever he could find time, received Bharati, Srinivasachariar and V.V.S. Aiyar in the evenings, and had dinner usually at nine.* He seldom moved out of his house, but on special occasions - a marriage or baptism in a friend's house, the opening of the "Aryan Stores" - he made a brief outing. On a request from C.R. Das, Sri Aurobindo translated his Sagar-Sangit into English verse, as Songs of the Sea and received Rs. 1000 for the service, an amount that was welcome in his "impecunious" condition. His Baroda friend, Khasirao Jadhav, paid a visit in 1916. Notable among the others who were received by him were V. Chandrasekharam and A.B. Purani; they first came in 1918, and in course of time became sadhaks of his Yoga and interpreters of his philosophy. But meeting people, paying visits, even writing articles or rendering Bengali into English were no more than surface activities, like ripples or foam; they didn't really interfere with the profound "sea-change" going on in the depths.

But although Sri Aurobindo had eschewed political action, he continued to follow the course of events in India and the world. It was not as though, "as most people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India"; and as he has explained later:

It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness, but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness

* When Bharati, Aiyar and Srinivasachariar met Sri Aurobindo in the evenings, there would be no sense of time, for talk was free. "In Bharati's speech there was the aggressiveness of the smell of jasmine. Sri Aurobindo's had the beauty of the full-blown lotus. In the talk of both, new ideas and images appeared like dazzling fireworks. It was as though Bharati had caught the words as they flew in the sky; it was as if Sri Aurobindo had scoured earth's buried treasures and brought them to our gaze. And the speech of both was equally flavoured with poetry, and both could laugh without reservation". (Va Ra in Mahakavi Bharatiyar, p. 8). "In the Bharati-Aurobindo conversations, all the nine rasas had fall play. Poetry, history, philosophy, experience, fiction, humour, wit, repartee, exhilaration, all will continually dance in their conversations" (ibid., p. 40).

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and action and to base life on the Spirit and give it a spiritual meaning. In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action....⁴⁷

When B. Shiva Rao, then on the staff of the New India, edited by Annie Besant, visited Sri Aurobindo in 1917, he freely discussed the 'Home Rule' movement, the situation created by the internment of Arundale, B.P. Wadia and Mrs. Besant herself, and the new upsurgence in the country. Recalling the interview over forty years later, Shiva Rao wrote:

...there was an atmosphere of great peace and serenity about him which left on me a deep, enduring impression. He spoke softly, almost in whispers. He thought Mrs. Besant was absolutely right in preaching Home Rule for India, as well as in her unqualified support of the Allies in the first world war against Germany.⁴⁸

Later, on Annie Besant's particular request, Sri Aurobindo wrote an article for her paper on the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms as from "An Indian Nationalist", and described the scheme as a Chinese puzzle.

From the vantage ground of Yogic strength and aloofness, Sri Aurobindo surveyed the developing world situation too with the steady wisdom of a Seer. The life of the Arya was almost exactly contemporaneous with the course of the first world war and its aftermath, and no wonder the War and the Peace were the subjects of some of Sri Aurobindo's most trenchant and most prophetic utterances. When, after four terribly sanguinary years of total warfare, the Armistice was signed at last, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Arya in December 1918 under the heading "The Unseen Power":

It is the wrath of Rudra that has swept over the earth and the track of his foot prints can be seen in these ruins. There has come as a result upon the race the sense of having lived in many falsehoods and the need of building according to an ideal. Therefore we have now to meet the question of the Master of Truth. Two great words of the divine Truth have forced themselves insistently on our minds through the crash of the ruin and the breath of the tempest and are now the leading words of the hoped for reconstruction, - freedom and unity.⁴⁹

The world was tired of total warfare, of any warfare, and men wanted the reign of peace, of perpetual peace; but there were insuperable obstacles in the way to the realisation of the ideal of human brotherhood. Without freedom - freedom for individual man and also for each nationality - healthy self-expression would be impossible; but without order and unity - a sense of self-discipline in individual man and in the corporate life of the nation - harmony would again be impossible. Freedom and Unity were indeed the two poles of our Existence. But we had to learn to preserve the delicate but necessary balance between them. Else we would be lured to one or the other with a fatal completeness, and thereby we would be destroying ourselves, either by indulging in an excess of freedom and enacting

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anarchy or by succumbing to the death-trap of total collectivism.

This was the crux of the problem for the "Big Four" of the Peace Conference at Versailles; but none of them - not even the idealistic President Woodrow Wilson - could effectively rise to the occasion. They were tired old men, either without vision or without vitality; and the world watched and waited - "humped in silence" - for the results of the Peace Conference. Sri Aurobindo, however, read the signs correctly and wrote on "1919", the fateful year of the Carthaginian Peace, in the July issue of the Arya:

This year too may be only the end of an acute phase of a first struggle, the commencement of a breathing-time, the year of a makeshift, the temporary halt of a flood in motion. That is so because it has not realised the deeper mind of humanity nor answered to the far-reaching intention of the Time-Spirit.⁵⁰

The "Big" Powers were but manoeuvring for position in the post-War world. The imposition of "reparations" on prostrate Germany was, as John Maynard Keynes was fast realising, a stupid business; the scramble for her former colonies was most unedifying; the inability of the major Allied Powers to achieve unanimity of opinion on the momentous issues of the day was truly portentous. The Allies had won the War, but they were certainly fast losing the Peace!

Moreover, for all the talk of "making the world safe for democracy" or making it a "place fit for heroes to live in", the War had not been fought on a clear-cut moral issue. It had been but "a very confused clash and catastrophe of the intertangled powers of the past, present and future. The result actually realised... is not the last result nor the end of the whole matter, but it represents the first sum of things that was ready for working out in the immediateness of the moment's potency. More was involved which will now press for its reign, but belongs to the future".⁵¹ In regard, then, to the central human problem of achieving a concord between the two poles of Freedom and Unity (or Security) on a world basis. World War I was almost worse than useless; one more chapter in the annals of human history had concluded - but all had yet to be begun, for the human spirit had "still to find itself, its idea and its greater orientation".⁵²

Indeed, Sri Aurobindo's worst fears had come true; and so a year later he wrote again in the Arya under the caption "After the War":

The war that was fought to end war has been only the parent of fresh armed conflict and civil discord and it is the exhaustion that followed it which alone prevents as yet another vast and sanguinary struggle. The new fair and peaceful world-order that was promised us has gone far away into the land of chimeras. The League of Nations that was to have embodied it hardly even exists or exists only as a mockery and a byword. It is an ornamental, a quite helpless and otiose appendage to the Supreme Council, at present only a lank promise dangled before the vague and futile idealism of those who are still faithful to its sterile formula, a League on paper and with little chance, even if it becomes more apparently active, of being anything more than a transparent cover  

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or a passive support for the domination of the earth by a close oligarchy of powerful governments or, it may be even, of two allied and imperialistic nations." ⁵³

This prophecy, uttered on his forty-eighth birthday (15 August 1920), was to unfold its tragic implications in the terrible miscalculations and mighty upheavals and disasters of the next half-century.

For six years and a half, the Arya gave its readers and the world at large the very munificence of Sri Aurobindo's thought in the several realms of knowledge: philosophy, literature. Yoga, scriptural exegesis, art and literary criticism, history and sociology, national and international politics. Paul Richard's collections of extracts from the world's outstanding thinkers, grouped suggestively under various headings, must also have appealed to many readers of the Arya; the wise men and women of all ages and climes figured in these anthologies and often reinforced, by implication, the more studied and systematic expositions in Sri Aurobindo's majestic sequences and multitudinous other contributions, which were verily the products of "a God's labour". What he had accomplished was little less than a digging into the depths of consciousness, a daring of the highest heights, a linking of the extremities, a raising up or bringing down of the strength of matter to the earth, the throb of life, the thrill of mind and the light of the Spirit, charging the WORD with POWER and turning Vision into unfolding Reality: a manifold as well as a unified Revelation. Well might he have said, on the completion of the Arya:

I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart

And heard her black mass' bell.

I have seen the source whence her agonies part

And the inner reason of hell...

On a desperate stair my feet have trod

Armoured with boundless peace,

Bringing the fires of the splendour of God

Into the human abyss...

A little more and the new life's doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and bright.⁵⁴  

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