Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 28

Sri Aurobindo's Action

I

Admirers of Sri Aurobindo the world over, when they had got over the first shock of the news broadcast on 5 December 1950, could hardly avoid asking the two inter-related questions: "Now what will happen to us? And what will happen to the Ashram?" Voicing the feelings of tens of thousands, A.R. Ponnuswami Iyer wrote of Sri Aurobindo:

His departure has left a void in the hearts of thousands, a wide gaping void in their life. He was the light on their path, their infallible guide and unfailing protector. His mission on earth, unlike Sankara's, was not to teach a doctrine, unlike Sri Ramana Maharshi's, not to give a mere direction, but to lead and carry humanity to its goal.¹

It followed that Sri Aurobindo, albeit screened from their view, must still be "ready with his help, guidance and protection". Wasn't there the samādhi  in the Ashram compound? People flocked to it, pressed their heads to it with the deepest abandonment of reverence, or sat for hours close by in silent meditation. What did they gain? What did they hope for? The samādhi , of course, is much more than a tomb containing the "mortal remains". In Madhav Pandit's words (spoken years later):

The samādhi is the physical concentration of the consciousness that Sri Aurobindo embodied in his material body.... It is a living reservoir of spiritual consciousness and force, emanating its vibrations incessantly.... Whatever the seeking the sanction goes forth.²

To sadhaks and admirers with the eyes and ears of faith, the Master seemed to say, "I am here, I am here", not in the vicinity of the samādhi  alone, but elsewhere in the Ashram too, and indeed wherever the need was urgently felt, or the heart beat furiously for the Divine response. When the call or cry went forth, there was the unmistakable instantaneous answer and presence as well.

Again, in the Sunday Times of 17 December 1950, there appeared the report of a conversation between a visitor (Kumar) and a senior sadhak (T.V. Kapali Sastry). When the former asked, "With the passing of Sri Aurobindo, what will be the future of the Ashram, of the sadhana...", he was checked by Sastry with a twitching of his eyebrows:

Passing, passing... who passed away and where?.... The Master of Integral Yoga is here, as intensely and concretely as ever.... Yes, those that have been looking up to him for guidance and aid in Yoga have not felt him gone, have not felt themselves orphaned, have not felt a void, though, of course, the physical pangs of separation are there.... The Ashram will go on as before and so also the sadhana.

But doubting Thomas still wondered whether, in the physical absence of Sri Aurobindo,

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the Mother could command that amount of loyalty and devotion that Sri Aurobindo had attracted. After some minutes of silence, Kapali Sastry said:

The Master and the Mother are not different and separate.... She is the manifested, dynamic part of his soul... it is the Mother who has been acting, not only as the executive head of the Ashram, but also as the unfailing and ever-watchful guide, drawing all the power and light from Sri Aurobindo and passing them on to hundreds of sadhaks in hundreds of ways, all according to each one's needs.

Nor was Kapali Sastry's by any means a sudden affirmation; it had grown over a period of years as an article of faith among the sadhaks. There is, after all, but one Consciousness - the Divine Consciousness. And two such divine collaborators like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - the collaboration began in 1914, entered a new active phase in 1920, and a still closer creative phase in 1926 - could operate effectively only if their consciousness-force were intimately grounded in the Divine so as to be practically indistinguishable. There was, no doubt, the only too human tendency on the part of some to differentiate, compare or contrast the two by applying absurdly mental criteria, but Sri Aurobindo repeatedly warned "his disciples against such inane or facile exercises. For example, he wrote to a disciple on 10 September 1931:

There is no difference between the Mother's path and mine; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.³

Again, on 13 November 1934:

The opposition between the Mother's consciousness and my consciousness was an invention of the old days.... The Mother's consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. Nothing, can be done without her knowledge and force, without her consciousness - if anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers.

Two years later he wrote: "Whatever one gets from the Mother, comes from myself also - there is no difference."⁴ It was natural at the beginning to view persons - even two such as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - in terms of sharp separativity. It was partly Sri Aurobindo's declaration, but even more the sadhaks' own experience and realisation, that gradually laid the foundations of the faith on which the edifice of the Ashram - with its multiple mansions - came to be reared. Soon after his complete withdrawal on 24 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo had written his great little book. The Mother, and while describing the Divine Shakti's four chief powers and personalities, he had incidentally also brought out the Mother's own marvellous and many-sided ministry. It was, perhaps, the inspired portraiture of Mahasaraswati - a prose-poem charged with mantric power - that came nearest to the sadhaks' daily and progressive understanding of the Mother's movements and ministrations:

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Mahasaraswati is the Mother's Power of work and her spirit of perfection and order. The youngest of the Four, she is the most skilful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical Nature. Maheshwari lays down the large lines of the world-forces, Mahakali drives their energy and impetus, Mahalakshmi discovers their rhythms and measures, but Mahasaraswati presides over their detail of organisation and execution, relation of parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude of result and fulfilment. The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasaraswati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker. This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation and new-building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless. For the will in her works is scrupulous, unsleeping, indefatigable.... Nothing is too small or apparently trivial for her attention; nothing however impalpable or disguised or latent can escape her. Moulding and remoulding she labours each part till it has attained its true form, is put in its exact place... and fulfils its precise purpose. In her constant and diligent arrangement and rearrangement of things her eye is on all needs at once and the way to meet them and her intuition knows what is to be chosen and what rejected and successfully determines the right instrument, the right time, the right conditions and the right process. Carelessness and negligence and indolence she abhors; all scamped and hasty and shuffling work, all clumsiness and à peu prés and misfire, all false adaptation and misuse of instruments and faculties and leaving of things undone or half done is offensive and foreign to her temper.... Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her creation. Therefore of all the Mother's powers she is the most long-suffering with man and his thousand imperfections. Kind, smiling, close and helpful, not easily turned away or discouraged, insistent even after repeated failure, her hand sustains our every step on condition that we are single in our will and straightforward and sincere; for a double mind she will not tolerate and her revealing irony is merciless to drama and histrionics and self-deceit and pretence. A mother to our wants, a friend in our difficulties, a persistent and tranquil counsellor and mentor, chasing away with her radiant smile the clouds of gloom and fretfulness and depression, reminding always of the ever-present help, pointing to the eternal sunshine, she is firm, quiet and persevering in the deep and continuous urge that drives us towards the integrality of the higher nature. All the work of the other Powers leans on her for its completeness; for she assures the material foundation, elaborates the stuff of detail and erects and rivets the armour of the structure.⁵

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This is not mere description, this is not imaginative portraiture; this is seeing and saying, this is utterance of Being and the naming and thanking of the Holy (as Heidegger might have put it), and the sadhaks too were profoundly involved in the experience. In fact, most of those who were drawn to the Ashram after Sri Aurobindo's retirement in 1926, happened to have darshan of the Mother first and surrendered to her, and had darshan of Sri Aurobindo only later on the four annual darśan days. For example, the Delhi businessman, Surendranath Jauhar, went first to the Ashram in December 1939, had darśan  of the Mother during meditation, and the effect on him was immediate and definitive:

While she stood there statue-like, I felt as if she was suddenly soaring above. ...Her departure was as blissful and mysterious as her advent. ... I could clearly see that my destiny had been decided and that the die had been cast. ... This was then the supreme discovery of my life, the miracle of Pondicherry where I lost my heart and won the real life.⁶

Certainly, the passing of Sri Aurobindo when it happened was a terrible wrench, but at least after the miracle of the supramental sustenance of the body in a new splendour of illumination for over four days, most of the sadhaks felt reconciled to the event, and indeed accepted it as a necessary step in the collective sadhana of the Ashram.

But suppose - Fear and Anxiety wondered - suppose the Mother chose to return to France! Or - suppose she too decided to leave the body! But she assured Dr. Sanyal: "I have no intention of leaving my body for the present"; and she told Surendranath Jauhar, "I intend to stay with you all". As for Sri Aurobindo's passing, she said again on 29 December 1950:

Our Lord has sacrificed himself totally for us.... He was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond the reach of human mentality.... And when one cannot understand, the only thing is to keep a respectful silence.

And so the pulses of Ashram life began to beat again, and although all seemed to have changed on 5 December, now little seemed actually to have changed. It was not difficult for the sadhaks - and even for the visitors - to infer from the physical absence of the Master a more effective presence, and even omnipresence. It was verily a resurrection exceeding all human expectations and calculations.

Revisiting the Ashram in 1951 after the passage of twelve years. Tan Yunshan of Cheena-Bhavana, Visvabharati, recorded:

The Ashram has now grown up.... It is a growing, not of the nature of an ordinary society or organisation. It is a growing towards a divine life.... It is indeed a divine home for all.... I would say: "If there is a divine home in the world, it is this, it is this... ."⁷

In March 1952, K.M. Munshi - then Governor of Uttar Pradesh - paid a second visit to the Ashram. Five months after his first visit, the news of Sri Aurobindo's passing had made his mind a blank for two hours - the news had stunned him even more than Gandhiji's death, the agony of which Munshi had personally experienced.

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Now as he approached the samādhi , he felt deeply moved:

Enclosed within this stone monument were the remains of the man who, for sixty years, had lived and taught the true message of India; who, for forty years, had stormed the fortress of the Unknowable in order that the world's life might be broadened into Divine Consciousness.⁸

As for the Mother, although "a tennis-playing, silk-garmented lady of seventy-five, carrying a tenuous veil and blessing the Ashramites at the march past day after day was not exactly a symbol of spirituality to the normal Indian mind", Munshi himself felt no insurmountable mental barriers of that kind. As he put it simply:

I believe that a God-realised person like Sri Aurobindo can do nothing for self-interested ends or as a result of some delusion. If Sri Aurobindo is what I acknowledge him to be, then I must logically grant that the Mother cannot be anything other than what he tells us she is... ⁹

And so the sadhaks and the outside world survived the shock of Sri Aurobindo's passing, and the Ashram too more than survived the crisis. There was actually a new spurt of expansion, a new sense of dedication, a new marvel of collective sadhana and realisation. The sadhaks increased in number, the School grew new wings of aspiration and, achievement, and the Services and Departments proliferated purposively.

In the meantime, Sri Aurobindo's writings were gaining for him a world audience. Already in 1947, Judith Tyberg had come to the Ashram (via Benaras), received the name 'Jyotipriya' from Sri Aurobindo, and found her true vocation; and in 1953 she organised the East-West Cultural Centre to help others in their spiritual difficulties and thereby to find a solution of her own. Pitrim A. Sorokia of Harvard had found Sri Aurobindo's works "a sound antidote to the pseudoscientific psychology, psychiatry and educational art of the West". Sri Aurobindo's five major works - The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity had appeared in a popular American edition in 1950, and interest in his thought and his life-work was being stimulated in circles that counted. Frederic Spiegelberg of Stanford University had felt "knocked over" when he read The Life Divine in 1947, and after visiting the Ashram in 1947 expressed the conviction that Sri Aurobindo would ere long be known as "a vast power of illumination" and his teachings recognised as "the greatest spiritual voice from India". Presently Spiegelberg was able, with the assistance of Haridas Chaudhuri, to give a key place to Sri Aurobindo in the Department of Asian Studies in the Stanford University. Writing of American students' reactions to Sri Aurobindo, Spiegelberg remarks:

Every time when in the course of the lectures I arrive at the point where Sri Aurobindo can be introduced, I notice a strange hush falling over the audience; the students forget to write notes, forget to joke with each other, forget practically themselves and their appearance, and listen intently in complete absorption.... they all feel that now something relevant is going to be introduced

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into their lives for which they have been waiting for a long, long time. The very first quotations from Sri Aurobindo's writings have each time this transforming effect on the audience.¹⁰

In England, G.H. Langley's appreciative monograph on Sri Aurobindo had been sponsored by the Royal Society of India and Pakistan, with a Foreword by the Marquess of Zetland. Writing in the World Review (October 1949), the Rev. E.F.F. Hill declared, hardly mincing words:

Aurobindo is the greatest contemporary philosopher and great in the company of the greatest mystics of all time.... Aurobindo's psychological insight is so sharp and clear, and the universe it explores is so vast that, in comparison, Western psychology, even the work of Freud, when one allows in full the measure of its greatness, is like the groping of a child in the dark. The work of Aurobindo compels, not comparison, but concordance with the Fourth Gospel... 'ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make thee free' is one common aspect of their message... he has created a synthesis between her past spiritual achievement and modem European thought, so that the future spiritual destiny of India and the future destiny of Europe are inescapably the same destiny....

We are at the turning-point in the spiritual history of man.... Because Aurobindo is in this world, the world is becoming able to express progressively Unity and Diversity instead of Division. Love instead of Hatred, Truth-Consciousness instead of Falsehood, Freedom instead of Tyranny, Immortality instead of Death.

And writing in 1950 in the Modern Churchman on 'Sri Aurobindo: Mystic, Metaphysician and Poet', Sir Robert Bristow remarked:

...reading The Life Divine is like the turning of the Globe wherein, rightly understood, is all there is to know and no part is greater or less than another, and all is one.... Both he and Jesus the Christ became God-conscious through mystical communion; both perceived that God Is, and that He is Infinite Divine Personality.¹¹

Like Haridas Chaudhuri in America, Arabinda Basu did much to spread the Aurobindonian message in England during the years (1953-68) he served as Spalding Lecturer at the University of Durham. And so centre after centre in U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, England, France, Germany, Israel and other countries received and cherished and benefited by the Light from Pondicherry. A war-weary, fear-tormented, terror-haunted world, with pockets of plenty few and far between, a world of wasteful endeavours and violent egotisms looked up for Light and found it neither in the votaries of Demos nor in the Commissars on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Religion had become religionism, science had ceased to be free inquiry being now mortgaged to the armour-plated Defence Establishments, and industry, commerce, even art, literature and education seemed to be helplessly tied to the chariot-wheels of the new soulless despotisms of the world. "The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed." No wonder sensitive spirits looked for a

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ray of light in the prevailing darkness, a sure antidote to the poison whether of penury or permissiveness. And some few were fortunate enough to stumble upon the right clue and find their way to Pondicherry.

One of them. Jay Smith, as given this account of his making a bee-line to the Ashram:

What brought me here? The sovereign Call of the Divine through the Master's writings. As I read in the New York Public Library his supremely evocative words, "the Word" sounded in the depths of me. His replies to others' questions spoke straight to my heart, a fresh and compelling Revelation.... It seemed that I was being exhilaratingly liberated from an essentially man-centred cosmos by this Copernicus of the spiritual world.¹²

Writing earlier as "an American Newcomer", he had made the disarming remark : "Hundreds of us in the Ashram are far away from home, ten thousand miles away in some cases. But somehow we are not homesick, for after all 'home is where the Mother is'. "¹³ Another, A. Baudisch, an Austrian-German, had long been puzzled by the hiatus created by modem technology between man and his ultimate source of origins:

Modern applied science, technocracy based on it, 'sport', at least its mise-enscène, I cannot integrate with my general outlook on life. The writers I consulted rather affirm me in my view...

In this conflict I came across the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo.... I felt: Here speaks one who wholeheartedly recognizes applied physical science and techniques, but has not lost the communication with the supra-physical world.¹⁴

From Miwani, Africa, the girl 'Huta' wrote on 19 August 1954 to the Mother:

You have given me life. Now I have understood what value life has....

You alone have given me the inspiration that in the remaining years of my life I should commence such a work that I may do good to all - myself as well as others. Make me your musical instrument, give it to the world, so that the world may find joy and peace through the melody of that instrument.

And, indeed, she was soon to find an arbourage in the Ashram and blossom in due course into the painter of the Savitri "meditations". "This is how all sincere aspirations are fulfilled", the Mother commented nine years later.

So, even so, they hearkened to the Flute of Krishna - men, women, children found the call irresistible, and they felt compelled to find their way to the Ashram in Pondicherry, try to come to terms with their ego, and become the Mother's instruments for advancing "Sri Aurobindo's Action". And most of them, were they asked why they were in the Ashram, would have said like Ira without a moment's thought:

Where else could I go, where else could I live after that [i.e. the realisation that for my inmost soul the Ashram was my true home], leaving my true home and my divine Mother?¹⁵

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II

The Ashram had always eschewed politics, and even when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother espoused the Allied cause during the war, or when Sri Aurobindo advised the Indian leaders to accept the Cripps Proposals in 1942, they were only acting from the higher spiritual - not the political or national - level. The issue as they saw it was between the Divine and Asuric forces, and they had to side with the former and try to persuade others also to do so. After independence and partition on 15 August 1947, there still remained the Portuguese and French possessions in India, and Sri Aurobindo naturally felt particularly concerned about the latter. At about this time, the leader of the French Cultural Commission, Maurice Schumann, met Sri Aurobindo with the French Indian Governor, M. Baron, to explore the possibility of opening an Institute in Pondicherry for the study of Indian and European culture. Sri Aurobindo's suggestion to the Indian and French Governments was that, while Pondicherry and the other French areas should certainly merge with India immediately, they should also have the right to retain their cultural (as distinct from political) contacts with France. The Indian Government wouldn't agree to this at the time, but after Sri Aurobindo's passing, when the unhappy stalemate continued, Surendra Mohan Ghose was asked by C. Rajagopalachari, then Chief Minister of Madras, to meet the Mother and request her to use her good influence to bring about a settlement. According to Surendra Mohan's testimony:

This time I had to tell the Mother and she replied, "You know I don't take interest in politics." I said, "That is true; but now it is not my politics or the Government of India's politics: it is Sri Aurobindo's! He wanted this to be done and in our stupidity we didn't understand then. Now these people [meaning, the Government of India] want to do something on those lines, for which I can expect your blessings." The Mother kept quiet for some time and told me, "All right, go back. If you receive a telegram from me, come again."... After about a month I received a telegram. I came, saw her here [the Ashram]. Then she asked me, "Between certain dates - when will you be able to come to Pondicherry? Somebody will come from France; he wants to have a talk with you." Then I told Rajagopalachari that I wanted for some delicate matter a responsible man for consultation and I asked him to tell me when he would be available and fix up a date and note it in his diary too; so that I could come on that day. I informed the Mother of this and went back and soon afterwards came again. And the whole integration of the French possessions with India was finalised here.*

Because it was Sri Aurobindo's work, it became the Mother's work too, and the de facto merger took place without bitterness on 1 November 1954. It was on that day that the Mother made the declaration regarding her desire to become an Indian

* From the report of his speech at Pondicherry (Mother India, February 1971, p. 31). Earlier, in a private talk at Delhi, Surendra Mohan told me the story in almost exactly the same words.

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citizen without renouncing her French citizenship:

From the first time I came to India - in 1914- I felt that India is my true country, the country of my soul and spirit. I had decided to realise this wish as soon as India would be free. ...

But in accordance with Sri Aurobindo's ideal, my purpose is to show that truth lies in union rather than in division. To reject one nationality in order to obtain another is not an ideal solution. ...

I am French by birth and early education, I am Indian by choice and predilection. In my consciousness there is no antagonism between the two... my only aim in life is to give a concrete form to Sri Aurobindo's great teaching and in his teaching he reveals that all the nations are essentially one and meant to express the Divine Unity upon earth through an organised and harmonious diversity.

Whatever the legal difficulties, this concept of double citizenship was a challenge to the reign of national egoisms, and was to lead, with the launching of the "World Union" movement with its headquarters in the Ashram, to the imaginative concept of world citizenship as well.

It was also on 1 November 1954 that the Mother distributed the "Spiritual Flag of India", projecting the vision of a "free and united India" - including all the India of the pre-partition days, and Burma and Ceylon besides. This flag had been originally designed for the J.S.A.S.A. (Jeunesse Sportive de 1'Ashram de Sri Aurobindo) with the Master's approval, but was found to express equally the spiritual mission of India in that moment of agony and triumph, 15 August 1947. Current disabilities and discontents notwithstanding, the flag was still a symbol and a dream and a hope and an aspiration, and gave an outer image to an inwardly perfecting reality. There is a unity transcending the political, a unity that is the solvent of all political and economic differences, a unity that makes mock of our regional, communal, casteist, linguistic and other separatist passions. Salt, sugar and several other 'solid' substances lose their sharp identity when they come into contact with water and get dissolved in it. In the white (or colourless) rays of the sun are lost the divers distinct colours of the rainbow:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly.

Like the etheric field, there is the emotional and intellectual field that makes possible the communication of feelings and thoughts. There is likewise a spiritual field that sustains the manifoldness and seeming contradictoriness of the phenomenal play. There is a Truth, Power, Love that sustains the Unity of India, the unity of India's history which is a five thousand year old reality transcending the political vicissitudes that have shown up on the surface of our national life. The Spiritual Flag of India was meant to symbolise this essential - this unconquerable - Unity of India.

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Increasingly after 24 November 1926, it had been brought home to the sadhaks that, as the sadhana had entered the subconscient and even inconscient regions, there were bound to be mounting difficulties because of the intractability of physical determinism. But the aim of the integral Yoga was to replace the physical determinism that seemed to be so irresistible by a new freedom and puissance resulting from the infusion into the very cells of the body by the Supramental force. It was perhaps easier to make boys and girls growing up in the Ashram atmosphere open themselves to the possibility of such an infusion, and a consequent inner awakening, than it would be for older people with set habits of body and mind, with rigidities of instinctive behaviour too difficult to melt, with angularities of preference and prejudice too sharp to smoothen. And yet the Mother saw at the same time that essential "youth" was not a question of age alone.*As she said in her article on "Youth":

Youth does not depend on the fewness of the years one has lived, but on the capacity to grow and to progress: to grow - that is to increase one's potentialities, one's capacities; to progress - that is to perfect without halting the capacities that one already possesses. Old age does not come with a great number of years, but with the incapacity or refusal to continue to grow and to progress.¹⁶

But whether old or young, the problem was the same: to carry the work of transformation to the physical level, and to awaken in the dark inconscient the light of consciousness. It is there already, as fire in the flint; what is needed is the sharp flick that kindles, the right switch that calls forth the light. In an editorial article in the Advent (April 1947), the writer cited these lines from the first Canto of Savitri -

A guardian of the unconsoled abyss

Inheriting the long agony of the globe,

A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain

Stared into space with fixed regardless eyes

That saw grief's timeless depths but not life's soul.

Afflicted by his harsh divinity,

Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased

The daily oblation of her unwept tears

and commented as follows:

...the submerged being is not merely dead matter, but a concentrated, a solidified flame, as it were, a suppressed aspiration that burns inwardly, all the more violent because it is not articulate and in the open. The aboriginal is that which harbours in the womb the original being. That is the Inconscient Godhead, the Divinity in pain - Mater Dolorosa - the Divine Being who lost himself totally when transmuted into Matter.

Many years later, the Mother gave on 1st January as the Message for 1956 a declaration that was somewhat puzzling at the time:

The greatest victories are the least noisy.

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The manifestation of a new world is not proclaimed by beat of drum.

On 29 February 1956, a conversation took place between the Mother and the Ashram children. A passage from The Synthesis of Yoga was under discussion:

The law of sacrifice is the common divine action that was thrown out into the world in its beginning as a symbol of the solidarity of the universe. It is by the attraction of this law that a divinising, a saving power descends to limit and correct and gradually to eliminate the errors of an egoistic and self-divided creation. This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them, is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance. ... The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination and service.

Towards the end of the discussion, the Mother said:

It is the Divine in the inconscient who aspires to the Divine in the consciousness. That is to say, without the Divine there would be no aspiration; without the consciousness hidden in the inconscient, there would be no possibility of changing the inconscience to consciousness. But because at the very heart of the inconscient there is the divine Consciousness, you aspire, and... the sacrifice is made.¹⁷

And this is the force behind the prophecy or divine decree in Savitri: "Even the body shall remember God".¹⁸ It was during the meditation that followed the discussion - or exposition - that the Mother had the singular mystic experience of the descent of the Supramental Light and Force, and she recorded in her diary:

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.

As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that "the time has come", and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.

Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.

This was the "Golden Day", the Day of the Lord. But the actual announcement came only on the next Darshan Day, 24 April 1956:

The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.

It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.

Again, under the dates "29 February - 29 March", the following appeared in the Bulletin of 24 April 1956:

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Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:

A new light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.

What had been but a promise on 25 September 1914 - "shall break" ... "shall be born" ... "shall be fulfilled" - now became in Mother's consciousness, an accomplished reality. But, of course, it was not equally obvious to others. After all, great must be the chasm between "the unthinkable realities and the relativities of the physical world", and any happenings, emergents or even revolutions in the realms of consciousness were unlikely to prove easily amenable to physical perception or measurement. When the children asked her about it, the Mother said:

Like knows like, it is only the Supramental Consciousness in an individual that can perceive the Supermind which is acting in the terrestrial atmosphere.¹⁹

And the gates having been forced open, the rushing of the Light upon the earth was more like a "force that spreads itself. It was there — it was there all right - though it might take some time for everybody to grow aware of it and participate in its sovereign action. That has always been so with regard to new things. The Force has to spread and filter down slowly. Two years later, after her eightieth birthday, the Mother said that the diffusion of the new Light and Force was progressively taking place over the earth's atmosphere, and the "superman" too, who would be a species of transition to the Supramental race, was already in the making.²⁰

All the time the Ashram was expanding its activities in many directions. From the ends of the world-America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, China, Tibet - the seekers came, and being accepted by the Mother remained in the Ashram. The Mother gave them all "work" - work that would bring to objective perfection what was inside them. The inner psychological perfection aimed at was a five-fold efflorescence of sincerity, aspiration, faith, devotion and surrender. The Mother invariably looked into the eyes for transparency - the gateway to the soul within. But when she looked and found only a mist, a cloud, a film, a screen, a wall, or something black, of what use could such a person be? Nevertheless she gave a chance to most, and many benefited by the Grace of her Giving. Freedom has always been the basic law of Ashram life, as of Nature's flowering:

The origin of creation is freedom: it is a free choice in the consciousness that has projected itself as the objective world.... Creation means a play of growth: it is a journey, a movement in time and space through graded steps....

And yet there is compulsion. It is the secret pressure of one's own nature that drives it forward through all vicissitudes back again to its original source.... The Grace works and incarnates in and through a body of willing and conscious co-operators: these become themselves part and parcel of the Force that works.²¹

To judge by results, it was a fine climate for growth, - one might add, for integral growth. In school or playground, in farm or workshop, in bakery or kitchen, in

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studio or audition room, in meditation or march past, everywhere, all the time, the spiritual climate was catalytic for growth in consciousness, for a steady movement towards the beckoning heights of the Life Divine. Thus the Master's power (through his writings and by means of his occult presence), the Mother's Grace and the readiness and extent of the sadhaks' response, these together conditioned the quality of life in the Ashram and determined its effectivity for world-action.

Such spectacular expansion of activities notwithstanding, the first impression of many - even of some sadhaks - was that it was a rather haphazard growth, involving a decline in the intensity of individual and collective sadhana. While in solitariness and selectivity there is concentrated strength, the bigger the group the greater must be the chances of the general or the average level falling lower and lower. On the other hand, in the larger interests of humanity as a whole and because of the need to invoke a general manifestation of the Divine or a general descent of the Divine consciousness, there is the call to organise as a fit receptacle of the manifestation a "critical mass" of aspiring humanity. As the Mother explained in the course of a conversation on 1 February 1956:

That is precisely the problem which faced both Sri Aurobindo here and me in France: is it necessary to limit one's road and reach the goal first, and later take all the rest in hand and begin the work of integral transformation; or is it necessary to go step by step, not leaving anything aside, not eliminating anything on the path, taking in all the possibilities at the same time and progressing at all points at the same time?...

One can understand that things get done by stages: one goes forward, travels a certain distance, and so, as a consequence, takes all the rest forward; and then at the same time, with a simultaneous movement, one travels another stage and again takes others forward - and so on.

This gives the impression that one doesn't advance. But everything is on the move in this way.²²

Even so, at first and for many years, the Ashram had been only a collection of aspiring individuals, with a salutary sense of community of course, but without a formal organisation. After Sri Aurobindo's passing, the Mother visualised a collectivity "that would not be necessarily limited to the Ashram but would embrace all who have declared themselves... to be disciples of Sri Aurobindo and have tried to live his teaching". The manifestation of the Supramental consciousness in 1956 made it all the more necessary that a collective individuality should be striven for, centrally in the Ashram at Pondicherry, but also sending out creepers of influence and vibrations of spirituality so as to comprise the ever widening Ashram outside the Ashram. The Sri Aurobindo Society thus became - with its branches at various centres - the instrument of enveloping action hastening the advent of a "progressive universal harmony". Besides, there was the Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir at Calcutta, with its continuing record of meritorious work; there was the Sri Aurobindo Library at Madras and there was the Sri Aurobindo Circle at Bombay; and by 1956, there were about 150 Sri Aurobindo Study Centres in

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India and some fifteen abroad. The desire for Light was growing, indeed, and in response the Light too was spreading. And yet the opening of a Centre wasn't enough; what it did - the spirit in which it was done - was far more important. The Mother set the keynote in her message to one of the Centres:

To open a Centre is not sufficient in itself. It must be the pure hearth of a perfect sincerity in a total consecration to the Divine. Let the flame of this sincerity rise high above the falsehoods and the deceptions of the world.²³

And while talking to Jay Smith in connection with the working of these Centres, the Mother made the important distinction between work for the Divine and the Divine's work. It wouldn't be enough to offer our work to the Divine in a spirit of niskāma karma; it would be equally necessary to participate consciously in the Divine's work, yet without one's ego interfering and messing up things.

In Delhi, India's capital city through the ages, a Centre had functioned since 1943, first in an upstairs hall in the Sunderson Company in Connaught Circus, and later at Surendranath Jauhar's spacious building on Mehrauli Road (now Sri Aurobindo Marg). What Surendranath wanted to know how best the property could be put to use in the service of the Mother, she said simply: "But why? This place will house the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi Branch, and there certainly will be a Shrine, for which I have been keeping Sri Aurobindo's precious relics."²⁴ She also said that there was no need for a special Constitution; the Delhi Branch would be part of the Ashram at Pondicherry. In her message of benediction and consecration on 12 February 1956 she said: "Let this place be worthy of its name and manifest the true spirit of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and message to the world." Two months later, on 23 April 1956, she inaugurated from Pondicherry the Mother's School at the Delhi Branch of the Ashram: "A new Light has appeared upon earth. Let this new School opened today be guided by it." The Supramental manifestation had already taken place on 29 February, and Delhi was exhorted to be ready to receive and exemplify it. Then, on 5 December 1957, Sri Aurobindo's relics, which Indira Sen had brought in a casket from Pondicherry, were installed in the marble shrine in the Delhi Ashram compound by Dr. C.D. Deshmukh. And there, as Melville de Mello said in his AIR broadcast, in a "grey marble edifice, and in full view of the world-famous Qutub Minar, but shielded as it were by chant and flower, far from the bustle and noise of the town", there reposed the sacred relics, sanctifying the surroundings and the great historic city itself. Writing on Sri Aurobindo and on the enshrinement of the relics at the Delhi Ashram, Professor Jean Herbert of the University of Geneva wrote:

Even those most allergic to anything that smells of mysticism... must acknowledge Sri Aurobindo as one of the greatest men, not only of our age, but of all ages. His all-embracing, crystal clear and profound philosophy is assuredly a contribution to human thought, vision and progress which ranks with that of Plato, Kant, Bergson or Goethe... the findings of Sri Aurobindo which we have no means of verifying at our level of experience actually supply all the consistency which strikes us in the explanation given by Sri Aurobindo

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for facts which we do know, an all-embracing consistency, the equivalent of which does not seem to have been attained by any other known thinker....

Now thousands who had Sri Aurobindo's darśan  could not help believing that they were face to face with a great saint and sage.... His look very clearly had in it something superhuman, which might be said to put it as far above the human look as the latter is above the look of a dog or a cat... the present position of New Delhi in India and in the world at large certainly makes it a very important and convenient place from which to radiate spirituality. Let us hope that the presence of those relics being installed in the Shrine at the Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram will have an uplifting influence both on those who live nearby and on a large portion of mankind.²⁵

Sri Aurobindo had left British India in April 1910, and he had at last returned to free India's Capital, there to abide and by his eternal immanence to guide and redeem and change the world. He had come to Delhi indeed, to New Delhi, not like the military conquerors of old trailing rivers of blood, but as a conqueror of spiritual realms, as the architect of the Life Divine in the coming Supramental Age. And the gods themselves seemed to welcome him to Delhi, for although it was a bleak winter morning, "a brisk shower of rain followed the installation, and then the sun broke through to make the marble Shrine and its flower decorations (a mass of rose petals and marigolds and sunflowers) glisten and flash their inimitable message".²⁶ And Naresh Bahadur has celebrated the event with a piece of richly evocative verse:

O beauty crystalline,

The Master's hallowed shrine,

O quiescent form divine,

We pray and bow to thee...

Sheath within magic sheath,

O missioned relics breathe

And to ailing earth bequeath

Heaven-bearing potency...

From the vault of thy retreat

In this old imperial seat:

New-chosen paraclete

To the Spirit's empire free...

From the last transcendent height

Hail the new Life, Love, Light,

As miracles of thy might, A

And to man thy legacy.*

^{* 'Sheath within magic sheath' is a reference to the four caskets: the gold which contained the relics, pleased successively in the silver, sandalwood and rosewood. Baskets.}

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We have seen how, with the coming of children to the Ashram during the war, there arose the necessity to open a school, which was inaugurated on 2 December 1943. Then, on account of the Calcutta killings and other sanguinary riots during 1946-7, the Mother introduced physical education for adults as well. But behind these developments there were other germinating ideas too. Surendra Mohan Ghose has reported that Sri Aurobindo once told him (probably in 1939):

The Mother is trying to develop this Ashram into a university, but not according to the common conception of a university.... Everybody will be taught to work, not with any profit motive, but with a spirit of service.²⁷

Already as a Professor at the Baroda College in the eighteen-nineties, Sri Aurobindo had felt keenly the inadequacies of the ruling system of education (a half-hearted transplantation of the British system which had its detractors even in its native habitat), and thought of an alternative system more in consonance with India's native traditions and also her peculiar present needs. His educational idealism stretched towards new dimensions during his brief spell of Principalship of the National College at Calcutta, and later during the years of silent Yoga at Pondicherry. Thus, from the very beginning, there was no question of the Ashram School mechanically adopting the norms of the outside schools. It was not a question of doing a little better what was being done elsewhere. "What we want," the Mother said, "is precisely to bring into the world something which is not there." The Ashram School developed a character of its own, and between 1943 and 1950 it grew more and more conscious of its destiny and moved in directions of its own deliberate choice. Different subjects were no doubt "taught", but in the preoccupation with the branches and leaves, the trunk and the roots of the Tree of Knowledge were not forgotten. The Mother gave special importance to the annual sports and cultural programmes, for they gave synoptic unity to the past year's aspirations and projected the new year's; and among the items on 1 December 1948 were 'Hymns to the Mother', 'The Sleeping Beauty' and 'Rose of God', and on 1 December 1949, the Mother's play Vers I'Avenir, recitations from Savitri and from Prayers and Meditations. In the enrollment of pupils and the choice of teachers, in the organisation of studies, sports and community life, the School remembered its close Ashram affiliations - it was not merely a School located in the Ashram, it was the Ashram School - and the Mother was the effective Head of the School and Ashram both.

Almost the first development after Sri Aurobindo's passing was the summoning of the Sri Aurobindo Memorial Convention to Pondicherry. The meeting, attended by a representative and distinguished gathering of leaders, intellectuals and educationalists from all over India, was held on 24 April 1951 at the Tennis Ground of the Ashram, and concluded its deliberations the next day. In her inaugural message the Mother said:

Sri Aurobindo is present in our midst, and with all the power of his creative

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genius he presides over the formation of the university centre which for years he considered as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life.

In his presidential address. Dr. Shyamaprasad Mukherjee pointed out that, since we had "lost track of our real culture" and opted for "a base hedonistic view of life", the establishment of a university "where the eternal verities of life will be taught and re-taught to a stricken people" was of supreme relevance. "I am sure," he concluded, "the proposed University will symbolise the world's urge for a new spiritual rebirth; it will stand out as an oasis amidst the barren tracts that breed jealousies, suspicions and petty conflicts."²⁸

Even before the Convention met, it was known that Barindra Kumar Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's younger brother, was opposed to the idea of an international university at Pondicherry in Sri Aurobindo's name, partly because Pondicherry was still a French possession, and partly because, in Barindra's opinion, the right memorial to Sri Aurobindo should be, not a university, but a Yogic Centre "carried on under the guidance of great Indian Yogis". One of the participants in the Convention, Hemendra Prasad Ghose, referred to the issues raised by Barindra and convincingly answered them. After all, Sri Aurobindo had told Surendra Mohan that the idea was to develop the Ashram into a university. Where else except in an Ashram - an Ashram of the Vedic type presided over by modern Rishis - could boys and girls receive the blessings of an "integral education"? And the Ashram being already in Pondicherry - a sanctified spot with its roots in the Vedic past - where else was the proposed university centre to be located? Another speaker, Somnath Mitra, affirmed:

The new university will be informed by the spirit of our great Master, the spirit of the Life Divine.... it will also be invisibly fashioned and moulded at every turn by a sense of his deathless Presence.

Dr. Kalidas Nag referred to the different phases of Sri Aurobindo's career devoted respectively to the political liberation of Asia, the intellectual liberation of his epoch and the spiritual liberation of mankind, and concluded with the words:

Thus, Sri Aurobindo is the University pointing to a radically new conception of the term. It should not be a mere copy of any of the universities of India or abroad. Sri Aurobindo University should aspire to provide the training ground for youths who would build up a new personality in a new universe.

Nolini Kanta Gupta too explained the ideal as "nothing less than the founding of a new mankind upon earth - with a new life and a new consciousness". The sense of the Convention was that the emphasis in the proposed university should be on quality, not quantity in terms of size and numbers: that, of the two kinds of knowledge - that 'obtained by an approach from the outside through the intellect and that obtained from within by spiritual realisation - the proposed university should restore to the latter its rightful place and help the pupils to receive "integral" rather than piecemeal education: and, finally, that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - their

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thought, their personality or influence, their Yogic direction - should give creative unity to the University and the Ashram.

Since there was already the nucleus of a University Centre in the Ashram School, which in the course of seven or eight years had gathered a band of dedicated teachers and gained valuable experience in dealing with Ashram children in an Ashram atmosphere, the Mother lost no time in inaugurating the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre on 6 January 1952, and the pupils were given a Prayer that is also an inspired definition of the true goal of education:

Make of us the hero warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully the great battle of the future that is to be born, against the past that seeks to endure; so that the new things may manifest and we be ready to receive them.

Support to the idea of a university at the Ashram - a university nurtured in the ambience of the Spirit - had come from near and far; for example, Salvador de Madariaga had said in his message to the Convention:

The analytical age is coming to its close. ...The age of synthesis is about to begin. And how could it begin if no high centre of perspective were provided for all the parts to fall in into harmony?

But the channelling of financial support was slow and inadequate. Nevertheless the Mother herself gave away all her jewellery to the University Centre, and so that they might realise their full value, they were sold by auction in the last week of December 1952.²⁹ And the Mother was by no means impatient, for she had told K. M. Munshi in March 1952: "I am building up slowly, step by step, but firmly."³⁰ For one thing, from kindergarten to the higher courses, it was one continuous spectrum; and again, from physical to spiritual - covering on the way vital, mental and psychic education - was viewed as one integral whole. That from the very beginning the Mother herself saw the University playing a seminal role in the fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's mission may be inferred from the categorical affirmations in her letter of 28 May 1953 to Surendranath Jauhar:

I am perfectly sure, I am quite confident, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind, that this University, which is being established here, will be the greatest seat of knowledge upon earth.

It may take fifty years, it may take a hundred years, and you may doubt about my being there; I may be there or not, but these children of mine will be there to carry out my work.

And those who collaborate in this divine work today will have the joy and pride of having participated in such an exceptional achievement.

A new seed, the seed of integral knowledge, was being sown; and the time of sprouting and foliage and flowering would come, and the harvesting too of the New Life, the supramental manifestation upon earth.

There was a steady - though not spectacular - growth from year to year, and in 1959 the University Centre was re-named as the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, avoiding the word "university" with its restrictive and hence

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inhibiting associations. In due course the Centre organized the four basic Faculties (Arts, Science, Engineering Technology and Physical Education), several Residential Homes, and the necessary facilities for study, practical work, athletics, ' sports, recreation, medical care, painting, music, dance and drama. By 1970, there were about 750 pupils (most of them in residence), and the teaching and tutorial staff (whole-time and part-time) numbered over 200, all of them sadhaks of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And the links between the Ashram and the Centre of Education were intimate, purposive and creative.

The practical basis of the Centre of Education is the firm conviction that the answer to the current speed of cyberneticisation resulting in man's increasing alienation and dehumanisation is not a return to primitivism abandoning the fruits of civilization and culture and all the gains of science and technology, but rather a centering of all aspiration, all thoughts, all activities in the Spirit - with the soul, first awakening to its true nature, then trying to achieve rapport with all humanity, all Nature, and the universe itself. In his essay 'A System of National Education', published as long as 1907, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

Every one has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it and use it. The chief aim of education should be to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble use.³¹

The key to knowledge is within, for it is the awakened soul within that observes, records, sorts out, omits, unites, transmutes, and turns facts and information into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom into the dynamo of right aspiration and action. The spark is indeed within, albeit often obscured by the thick fog of the egoistic prison-house. It is the true task of education to provide the atmosphere, the friendly help or guidance, the leverage that will release the spark and make it flame forth into a blaze of consciousness characterised by an ever increasing intensity and wideness. The physical, the vital, the mental, all will be drafted into this adventure of consciousness, but still the soul will be the rider of the chariot that is the body, with the vital and the mind as the twin horses of the race. Sri Aurobindo has defined Yoga as "a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being, and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence". In its far aims as also in its essential processes, education coalesces with Yoga, and it is thus no mystery at all that the Centre of Education is an inseparable part of the Yogashram at Pondicherry.*

Since education is viewed essentially as a field conducive to soul-awakening and soul-growth, the Centre has no use for the artificial distinction between education

* For a fuller account of the Centre of Education, the reader is referred to my article "The Ashram and the Centre of Education' in Sri Aurobindo Circle, 26th Number (WO), pp. 30-47.

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for boys and education for girls. The Centre of Education accordingly provides the same programme - including physical education - for boys and girls. There is still room for plenty of choice, but the options are made by the inner preference and not by the mere fact of sex and the compulsion of traditional taboos. Again, what brings pupils and teachers together in the general run of educational institutions is a system of market-place attitudes and monetary objectives. At the Centre of Education, on the contrary, pupils pay no fees - once admitted, the education is free. As for the teachers, although fully qualified for the work they have to do, they are only maintained by the Ashram like the other sadhaks and receive no salaries or other monetary awards. This elimination of the rancour of the market-place and the lure of mere monetary incentives makes for better pupils and better teachers who are brought together, not as buyers or sellers of knowledge, but as fellow-seekers and pilgrims on the march owing an unswerving allegiance to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the embodiments of Truth and Love. Academic and hierarchic differentiations have a functional use only, and are not meant to invade the deeper unity that derives from the common spirit of dedication and self-consecration. The Centre of Education is a community, almost a single consciousness, that is trying to realise to the full its evolutionary possibility.

But while the Centre of Education has no use for artificial distinctions - distinctions that become barriers to mutual understanding - neither does it believe in exclusiveness or any imposed uniformity or regimentation. It is demonstrably an international Centre covering all the details of existence. Knowledge, after all, knows no national barriers, and all that man has aspired and laboured for, all the milestones he has passed, all the knowledge he has garnered - all art, science, sport, handicraft, entertainment - are the common heritage of mankind. Among the languages studied or in use are Sanskrit, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The main media of instruction are English and French, and pupils usually know four or five languages. The Sri Aurobindo Library with its accession of over 60,000 books in about 25 languages attempts to make a global coverage, and the Ashram Press has published already about 1000 titles in some fifteen languages, including twelve in Chinese! Once centred in the Spirit, all outer variations can only enrich the play of life, and at the Centre of Education as in the Ashram there grows a truly international community preparing for the future "One World".

"Be firm and strong and full of faith," the Mother once exhorted the children; "fight in order to win, as you say, the great victory." Any imposition of a rigid discipline from without must smack of tyranny, and children especially - like flowers - wither all too soon and lose the native hue of freshness under the glare of such "discipline". On the other hand, there is an inner law, an innermost truth of things, which prescribes the norms of behaviour, and the problem of education is to help this law, this truth, to come out to the forefront of its own accord, and suffer no obscuration or perversion. Pupils and teachers are both heirs to limitless

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liberty, but to follow this path one needs to have a consciousness of the Divine Presence in oneself and know too that the Divine is present in all others as well. "Freedom" is indeed the very oxygen of the whole scheme of things at the Centre of Education, but it is held in leash by the paramountcy of Truth, by the Law at the heart of all existence. The academic courses are not stereotyped, the training is not cheaply utilitarian nor solely through specialist grooves, the pupils are not specifically equipped to take their place in the rat-race of the outside world. The aim really is to usher in a new race, ready to face and shape the future, and leave the past far, far behind.

The "free progress system" now in force at the Centre of Education expects the pupil to follow Satyakama Jabala's example and rely on his soul rather than on habits, conventions or preconceived ideas. The whole aim is to make the educational process spontaneous, flexible and evolutionary and not artificial, rigid and static. Education thus becomes a joyous adventure in self-discovery, and not a tyrannical infliction from without. And what the Centre of Education itself provides is an atmosphere of protection and affection in which the child's impulse to joyous self-discovery finds the necessary warmth for full flowering and fruition. For any success to attend this experiment, not only would much depend on the children themselves, but an equal responsibility would lie on the teachers also. The Mother has said that, to be a good teacher, one has to be a hero, a saint and a yogi, and this is by no means easy of realisation; but even to be conscious of the ideal is something surely gained. The pupils too aim to become "hero warriors" ready to wage the war and win the battle of the future, - a real future and not a mere continuation of the present. But becoming "hero warriors" would not incapacitate them from being also good managers and technicians, expert scientists and economists, or accomplished artists and poets. The mark of the "hero warrior" would be a function of the awakened soul in contact with the eternal Spirit, and - since he would have received training in particular disciplines or skills too — he would also be able to execute perfectly the tasks that might come his way. Used to self-reliance in education, he would be self-reliant in all situations, drawing the needed strength from the reservoir of the Spirit. In other words, an integral education that has helped the full flowering of love, knowledge, power and beauty will also ensure a compete efficiency in meeting all the demands of the future. Beyond such integral education, the Mother visualises a further development still in consonance with Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future:

From beyond the frontiers of form a new force can be evoked, a power of consciousness... which, by its emergence, will be able to change the course of things and give birth to a new world. ... And so will begin a new education which can be called the supramental education; it will, by its all-powerful action, work not only upon the consciousness of individual beings, but upon the very substance of which they are built and upon the environment in which they live.

.. .the supramental education will result no longer in a progressive formation

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of human nature and an increasing development of its latent faculties, but in a transformation of the nature itself, a transfiguration of the being in its entirety, a new ascent of the species above and beyond man towards superman, leading in the end to the appearance of a divine race upon earth.³²

That is, however, a consummation of the remote future, but the roots of the future are in the present and the burden is upon us not to allow the roots to be gathered with the ashes of the past.

Education - all education - is nothing if not dynamic, and education in its wideness must embrace all life, and knowledge must continually test and extend itself through 'research'. The Centre of Education is thus also a Centre of Research, and the Ashram in its entirety is a laboratory for research into the problems of ends and means covering the whole field of life. It may be interjected: "But research means controlled experimentation, recordation, processing data and interpreting them, testing, and periodical assessment"! This is no doubt true, and in a broad sense the results of Yoga also are under observation and assessment. Sri Aurobindo himself once wrote to a disciple:

...although we have faith... we do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives... more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.

The records of Sri Aurobindo's or of the Mother's experiences may seem impossibly distant to average humanity, but even lesser men and women can ask themselves how - and to what extent - they have been able at times to work effortlessly, efficiently, with no sense of struggle or tension, as if the steering had been done by an infallible inner power of consciousness. The sadhak knows that, if there has been failure, or imperfect execution, it can only mean a defective inner consecration, an egoistic withdrawal from the Divine. Likewise, several individuals working together can know when - without any conscious regimentation - they are all able to work as a team, as if a single infallible power of consciousness is active in them all, the same power but functioning from many centres of action. If there is a jolt or a temporary breakdown, it can only mean that the inner link that connected them all and put them in contact with the Divine has snapped somewhere. The awareness of an awakened inner power that makes action effortless as it were, efficient, and a sheer joy must also be duly reflected in the whole manner of life and send out vibrations of peace, goodwill and happiness. Wherever the sadhak may be - alone or in company, working or relaxing - he is a witness spirit prefiguring in some measure the coming man, the man who will never be overwhelmed by a sense of crisis. A channel for the Divine's work, he will always be master of himself yet wholly free from the taint of egoism. The whole system of financial incentives, the desire for position, status and so-called "security", the scramble for power, the itch for "beggaring one's neighbour", the ambition to achieve personal "magnificence" and lord it over others, all these stupidities of the outside world are utterly irrelevant in the Ashram where the only thing that

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should matter is one's dialogue or relationship with the Divine. The inner calm, the feeling of fulfilment, the sense of communion with the environment, the consciousness of the Divine Presence everywhere and at all times, these are the values, these are the incentives and energies that make the sadhak work long - unaffected by doubt and fatigue - and also with a deep sense of joy.

The Ashram, itself a chosen and sheltered field, bears a special relationship to the Centre of Education, like a mother carrying in her womb the child of tomorrow. When children embark on the adventure of consciousness (for that is what education should mean), they bring to the regimen the freshness of innocence, the buoyancy of the unfolding bud and the fervour of excitement. The eager child (or youth) has sometimes to be held in leash by the teacher, and then it becomes difficult to say whether the teacher leads the pupil - or is only led by him. Childhood, boyhood, girlhood are a wonderfully plastic stage of human development, and much may be achieved with apparently little effort and in a short time. Children can play at variety with a seeming recklessness and still retain the basis of unity. All is permissible in the Ashram - be it music, or mathematics, or athletics, or making the model of a lunar space-ship, or meditation - and such outer variety spanning out from the still centre within makes for the integral development of the divers instruments of body, mind and soul.

Man partly is and wholly hopes to be, and the evolutionary spiral is a drama that is played by Eternity but against the background of Time, by Infinity but in the controlled theatre of the earth. Truth eternal and infinite rings changes and beckons to man, and man awakens to his destiny and forges forward. The whole mystique and technique of the evolutionary movement has thus been described by Sri Aurobindo:

Man's... glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour in which supermanhood is being made ready by a divine Craftsman... he is partly an artisan of this divine change; his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him.

Every man is God's "secret workshop", and any man could be the alchemist-artisan engaged in trying to accomplish the destined "divine change". Is it any wonder, then, that every sadhak, every pupil, in the Ashram is something of a researcher as well, an alchemist-artisan; that his body is his "secret workshop" or divine laboratory; that his whole sadhana - "his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation" - is the mechanics of the "divine change"?

IV

The next great landmark in the progressive realisation of the world-vision of Sri Aurobindo was the inauguration of the futurist township, 'Auroville', City of Dawn, City of Human Unity, on the outskirts of Pondicherry, on 28 February

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1968.* Seven days earlier, several thousands of the Mother's disciples had congregated in the Ashram to celebrate her 90th birthday on 21 February. The Auroville inauguration was the Mother's great leap into the future in Sri Aurobindo's name, and blessed were the tens of thousands who witnessed the event, and blessed too were the millions who later watched the extraordinary proceedings on the screen.

As early as 1912 - and before she had met Sri Aurobindo, before there was any such formal institution as Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and before the first world war - the Mother, then Mirra Richard, had jotted down certain notes prefiguring the lines of ideal development for man in a world that shall have banished war and fear and want and ignorance. "The general aim to be attained," she wrote, "is the advent of a progressing universal harmony." First, human unity is to be realised by awakening and manifesting the God in one and all. The Kingdom of God is within everybody; one has only to find one's way to it. Man has to grow in consciousness, and link himself with "one or more of the fountains of universal force". Knowledge has been expanding and exploding in divers directions; but man needs a clue to the synthesis of all this wealth of knowledge, for only such integrated knowledge can serve him truly. Man the individual and 'collective man', or the human aggregate, have no reason to pull in different directions. The aim should rather be to establish "an ideal society in a propitious spot for the flowering of a new race, the race of the Sons of God". The Son of Man must strive to outgrow his limitations and become the Son of God, and human beings should learn to enact the collective life of a Divine Society. A double attempt at self-perfection is thus called for: individual transformation and social transformation, or the perfection of the individual and the perfection of the race. Before the entire race can be perfected, we may have to start with experimental groups that strive in their individual and collective life towards perfection. The members of such a group will (i) strain towards self-perfection; (ii) exemplify such striving to others; and (iii) found a "typic society". Along with the discipline of inner development and growth in spiritual or Divine consciousness, there should also be an external action depending on one's "capacities and personal preferences" which best brings out his potentialities and enables him to play his own unique note in the "terrestrial symphony".³³

Two years later, having met Sri Aurobindo for the first time, she wrote: "Gradually the horizon becomes distinct, the path grows clear, and we move towards a greater and greater certitude."³⁴ Then began the collaboration on the Arya, but as the Mother left for France in 1915, it was left to Sri Aurobindo to elaborate in all its splendorous particularity their world-vision of the Future. A double change and an integrated change and a total transformation: an inner or individual change

* The problems of the modern city and the way 'Auroville' hopes to solve them and fare forward into the future are the general theme of the first eight talks in my A Big Change: Talks on the Spiritual Revolution and the Future Man (WO).  

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or integration, a social or collective change and global human integration, and a total transformation of man and society and humanity - these were the "goals" towards which man and the human aggregate were urged to fare forward: caraiveti! caraiveti!

Homo Sapiens is caught in an evolutionary crisis, which is also a psychological crisis: man has to break the egoistic mould within, release the imprisoned soul, and let it grow the wings of a new consciousness that will mean also a great accession of power. In all the major Arya sequences, Sri Aurobindo wove together the twin strands of individual and collective transformation, though the proportion or emphasis varied from argument to argument. The formula "Perfect the man, perfect the race" doesn't, however, mean a rigid categorical sequence, for there are degrees of perfection, and even as the pioneer can give a push to the society, a reasonably well-ordered society can also prove catalytic for spurts of advance in selected individuals. If in The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga the concern is more with the individual - his choice in the evolutionary crisis, his likely curve of development, his summits of possible ascent - in The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, the concern is more with the human aggregate, its awakening soul, its evolving destiny, its purposive thrust towards the future. As with a human body - which is an aggregate of numberless cells and tissues - sometimes the mind decides and the body obeys, and sometimes the body's instinctive impulse is presently sought to be rationalised and rendered operative by the mind, so too the pioneer spirits and the body of society (or humanity) act and react upon one another, and achieve the periodic lurches towards the future. As Sri Aurobindo wrote towards the end of The Psychology of Social Development ('The Human Cycle') in the Arya of June 1918:

The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds into form in the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race. For the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first or, if consciously, then in a confused chaotic manner: it is only through the individual mind that the mass can arrive at a clear knowledge and creation of the thing it held in its subconscient self.³⁵

If the society of the future is to be a spiritual society, in the place of the collective ego there has to emerge a collective soul, and such group souls have "like the individual to grow according to their own nature and by that growth to help each other, to help the whole race in the one common work of humanity. And that work would be to find the divine Self in the individual and the collectivity and to realise spiritually, mentally, vitally, materially its greatest, largest, richest and deepest possibilities in the inner life of all and their outer action and nature".³⁶

In such a future spiritualised humanity there could be no room for racism or white-coloured tensions or West-East confrontations. The life within and the life without would be complementary and make one arc of creative living:

The thing to be done is as large as human life, and therefore the individuals

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who lead the way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers will consider nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope. For every part of human life has to be taken up by the spiritual, - not only the intellectual, the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the vital, the physical; therefore for none of these things or the activities that spring from them will they have contempt or aversion, however they may insist on a change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form. ...knowing that the Divine is concealed in all, they will hold that all can be made the spirit's means of self-finding and all can be converted into its instruments of divine living.³⁷

Individuals enacting coherence and harmony in a society would lead ultimately to societies enacting unity and creative peace on a global scale, but such an experiment must start first as a pilot project in a propitious atmosphere. The ideal was enunciated by Sri Aurobindo in the last chapter of The Ideal of Human Unity, which appeared at the same time (July 1918) as the last chapter of The Human Cycle:

A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. ... [it] means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one.... By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of co-operation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life.³⁸

Sri Aurobindo saw very clearly what was happening obscurely behind the phenomenal play, and he saw too that man had it in him to advance or retard this evolutionary movement. This was the reason why he put so much urgency into his exhortation that in the Hour of God it was not for man to hesitate or calculate but to go forth and conquer the future.

After the Mother's return to Pondicherry in 1920, she found in the small group around Sri Aurobindo the beginnings of the "ideal" or "typic" society she had dreamt about, and after the Ashram began to grow from 24 November 1926 under her direct charge, she once said in the course of a conversation that when the Supramental presence became an accomplished fact a "model town" could be ushered into being as the harbinger of the perfect world of the future. Sri Aurobindo had written on 7 April 1920 (less than three weeks before the Mother's second coming) that with "a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God", he would be able to wake up the sleeping godhead and create conditions facilitating the advent of the Life Divine. After the Mother's coming and her taking full charge of the Ashram, the move towards "the complete men" grew apace and there were 100 strivers by 1930, and 350 by 1942, and twice as many by 1950. The second world war was a matter of life or death for the soul of the world, and such a struggle between the Divine and Asuric forces didn't wholly cease even after the war. The Ashram, however, kept up its growth, and the expansion continued uninterrupted after the withdrawal of the Master on 5 December 1950. The Ashram School became the University Centre and presently

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changed its name to Centre of Education, and in other ways too the Ashram - while retaining is identity as a Yogashram - continued to force newer and newer lines of development.

On 10 July 1954, the Mother in a Message to the Employees of the Ashram said:

My aim is to create a big family in which it will be possible for every one to fully develop his capacities and express them.... my idea is to build a kind of city accommodating at the outset about 2000 persons. It will be built according to the most modern plans, meeting all up-to-date requirements of hygiene and public health.... Nothing necessary for life will be forgotten.... Every one can choose the kind of activity that is most suitable to his nature and will receive the required training... .for admission to live in this ideal place the conditions that need to be fulfilled are good character, good conduct, honest, regular and efficient work, and a general goodwill.³⁹

It was also in 1954 that the Mother shared with others her great "Dream" of the Life Divine being actually lived upon the earth:

There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of good will who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment. ...

The earth is certainly not ready to realise such an ideal, for mankind does not yet possess sufficient knowledge to understand and adopt it nor the conscious force that is indispensable in order to execute it...

And yet this dream is in the course of becoming a reality; that is what we are striving for in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, on a very small scale. .. .little by little we are advancing towards our goal which we hope we may one day be able to present to the world as a practical and effective way to emerge from the present chaos, to be born into a new life that is more harmonious and true.

But presently things began to happen with unexpected rapidity. On 29 February 1956 there was the descent of the Supramental Light and Force, and in 1958 the Mother testified to the Supramental substance spreading everywhere in the earth's atmosphere.

In the outside world too there were sensational happenings. The "Space Age" began on 4 October 1957, when Russia put the first Sputnik into space to orbit round the earth. Then began the US-USSR space-race, which was to culminate in the first landing on the moon by the American astronauts on 21 July 1969, and the second on 25 November. From so far, far away, they could see the earth as a single lovable entity; and walking on the bare lifeless lunar surface, they could appreciate

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what a wonderful place of green and gold and life and variety and infinite possibility the earth was, and it was even reported that Conrad saw on 26 November to the south of Burma and towards East India "a steady light".*

Certainly the world was ready for a change. But neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother had ever thought of a flight to another world or another planet. On 13 January 1934, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple:

Our attention must be fixed on the earth, because our work is here. Besides, the earth is a concentration of all the other worlds and one can touch them by touching something corresponding in the earth-atmosphere.

The Mother too had said that "in the whole creation the earth has a place of distinction, because unlike any other planet it is evolutionary with a psychic entity as its centre"; and India, in particular, "is a divinely chosen country". As India today sums up the problems, difficulties and sufferings of global humanity, it is up to India to work out solutions that shall redeem her and the whole world as well. And in contemporary India, there is not another centre like the Ashram at Pondicherry with a greater concentration of sadhaks and record of siddhi. It was therefore appropriate that the first great experiment in extending the principles and processes of the Ashram life to a larger collectivity - to a city - a city pointing to the future - should be sought to be unfolded in a hallowed spot close to Pondicherry, in creative collaboration with Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and receiving essential inspiration and support from the Mother herself.

The time had come, the Mother felt, for her "Dream" to have a chance of realisation, for the ideal or mythic society to get started on its career. But the Mother was very clear that the proposed universal town should be above all creeds, all politics, all nationalities; the sole purpose of the township would be to try to realise human unity. The idea was quickly taken up by the Ashram, feelers went out and contacts were made, and at last the Indian delegate, Poushpa Dass, moved the resolution during the October-November 1966 general session of UNESCO, recommending the 'Auroville' Project to all the member-nations of the world:

It is an endeavour, unique in the world, to reconcile the highest spiritual life with the exigencies of our industrial civilisation....

Now this extraordinary institution [Sri Aurobindo Ashram], unique in the world by its natural progression, seeks on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of our organisation [UNESCO] .. .to enlarge its action and to radiate still further. It wants a vaster centre, a real town where people of the entire world will be ready to live according to the ideal of Sri Aurobindo's thought.... The Government of India wish that the General Conference... give to this unique and exceptional project - in some respects unprecedented - its moral support and its confidence.

* Sisirkumar Mitra's comment on this is interesting: "Whether they [the astronauts] saw this 'unexplained light' with their physical eye, or in any occult vision opened to them by the spiritual force or by the impact of the infinite space, is not definitely known. Whatever it was, its implication coupled with the region in which it was seen cannot be overlooked." (The Liberator, 1970, p. 284.)

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The resolution was warmly applauded and unanimously passed by UNESCO, and it became the responsibility of Sri Aurobindo Society and its Secretary-Treasurer, Navajata, to take steps to get the project started mobilising the necessary support. On 19 June 1967, the foundation-stone of the advanced Guest House, Promesse, was laid on the edge of the proposed site of Auroville. The French architect, Roger Anger, soon transformed the abandoned toll-collectors' barracks into comfortable flats. He was also entrusted by the Mother with the responsibility for the lay-out of Auroville and the architecture of its main buildings. There was a stir of anticipation everywhere, work commenced briskly in many directions, and the Mother was always ready with her counsel and put all her spiritual force behind the stupendous adventure of new creation.

The inauguration or 'dedication' ceremony took place on the forenoon of the appointed day, a week after the Mother's 90th birthday. Almost every nation, big or small, and all the States of the Indian Union were represented. The idea was that children from the different States and nations should bring handfuls of earth from their respective regions, and deposit them in the lotus-shaped urn at the Auroville site, there to mix and mingle so as to symbolise the unity of the earth. The Government of Pondicherry declared a public holiday, and men and women gathered from the ends of the world almost. Before that vast expectant gathering, the "dedication" began at 10:30 with the Mother's message of welcome and reading of the Auroville Charter:

Greetings from Auroville to all men of goodwill.

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

Then the Mother read (from her room in the Ashram) the French version of the Charter, while others read, one after another, the versions in sixteen other languages - Tamil, Sanskrit, English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Tibetan. The English version was as follows:

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.

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

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 toward future realisations.

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

Although read in several languages, it was really the same song of aspiration in many notes, a bracing prelude to the coming symphony. First, two children of the Ashram placed the Charter and some earth from the sacred Ashram soil in the urn. Then children in batches of two from each nation and each State walked up to the

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urn - itself in the shape of a lotus bud - and deposited the earth they had brought. After the soil of Auroville too had been added, Nolini Kanta Gupta sealed the um and the inauguration - which had taken 75 minutes in all - concluded in an atmosphere charged with the fervour and hope of a battered world looking forward to the birth of a new world of human unity and collective realisation. Representative children from 124 nations and 23 Indian States - 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 that is to rise in splendorous fulfilment in close proximity to Sri Aurobindo Ashram. "We do not belong to the past dawns," Sri Aurobindo had said, "but to the noons of the future." The Aurovillian dawn too would in the fullness of time reveal the glory of the noonday Sun when the mists and marsh vapours of the present time would surely disappear, and human unity would cease to be a dream and become a fact. If Marx gave the portentous call, "Proletariat of all nations, unite!", the Aurovillian call is, "Children of all nations, unite! You have nothing to lose except fear, insecurity and waste. And you have everything to gain!"

The dedication ceremony was widely commented upon, and seemed to raise hopes in a world that had half-reconciled itself to an imminent nuclear holocaust and the end of civilisation. The Indian Express wrote that it was "the chance of many life-times to be present at the birth of a city, and of a city, too, that will be in tune with the noblest ideals of India and the world". The Amrita Bazar Patrika said that Auroville was "going to be a laboratory of the evolving world city". Angelo Moretta wrote in Giornale d'ltalia that Auroville would "serve to translate into reality the teachings of the Plato of modern India, Aurobindo Ghosh". The Times of India described the simple ceremony as "history in the making, with all countries of the world participating in the first attempt ever to provide mankind with a place where all human beings of good will, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world". And other papers described Auroville variously as "City of Hope", "City of Youth", and "a Town named Friendship"!

But the dedication ceremony was no more than the beginning of beginnings. From a hundred sources came streams of significant suggestions. Anxious or curious people visited the 15 square mile site - located partly in Tamil Nadu State, partly in the State of Pondicherry - fringing the Bay of Bengal, and looked for the sudden flowering of the Lotus City, and some went away disappointed, while others thought that the reality might prove to be better even than what had been fondly imagined. Auroville wasn't, after all, just a sum of blue-print and publicity and statistics; it was not even the case-histories of a few adventurous spirits blazing their independent trails on the as yet largely barren site. Everything would hinge upon the experiment of coaxing the "group soul" to emerge out of the fumblings of communal living by the pioneers. If success long eluded their efforts, disillusion might erupt easily, and dissolution might follow. The advanced Colony accordingly got going with some trepidation, but also with hope and strength of purpose. As Gene put it, the whole Auroville adventure was to be viewed as "an

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opportunity to accomplish in a condensed act that which Sri Aurobindo detailed as his Ideal of Human Unity"; and -

Not since the first beginnings... have we had available both halves of the necessary conditions for success. An international group prepared to live and work together. This blending is at hand. Call it advance colony or let it happen without being titled, it is the privilege and opportunity to participate in the working out of Sri Aurobindo's ideal and will.⁴⁰

Then, in the early hours of the new year (1969), the Mother - and some others too - had experience of the descent of a consciousness of light, buoyancy, power, joy and peace into the earth atmosphere. And the Mother's new year message was "No words - acts". It was a time for action, for realisation, not vacillation or disputation or procrastination. On the first anniversary of the inauguration of Auroville, in the course of an interview broadcast by AIR, Dr. Malcolm Adiseshiah, Deputy Director-General of UNESCO, said in answer to the question "What gives you hope that Auroville will be a site for material and spiritual researches and of endless progress as its Charter declares?":

Well, I think it is the Aurovillians whom I met that are the basis of my hope. They remind me of the Astronauts and the Cosmonauts who, as you know, spend years training themselves for the tremendous task that they have to undertake. The Aurovillians are the Cosmonauts and Astronauts of this new international city of hope, of development, of prosperity and of charity. And it is their spirit which I have seen for myself, the training which they are undergoing, and the concrete pilot-work which they are doing now in actually digging the foundations of this great city that are for me the basis of what you call my hope for Auroville.⁴¹

Some months later, on 8 October 1969, the Mother in her replies to certain questions on Auroville, insinuated how it would be foolish to be too dogmatic about the unrolling future. Would there be "family life", "religion", "atheism", or "social life" in Auroville? Yes, alas - "if one has not gone beyond that"! Nothing would be compulsory! The city-planners and the city-makers, the first Aurovillians and the would-be Aurovillians, always looked for sustenance and guidance to the seminal writings of the Master and the felt presence and active guidance of the Mother, and her periodic affirmations, benedictions and clear directions were pointers to the healthy growth of the dream-city, the city of Divine Manifestation.

Altogether things were on the move, and more or less in the right direction. 'Auro-Garage', 'Auro-Food', 'Maternity Homes for the Children of God', 'Auro Orchard'... 'Hope'... 'Auro-Model'... 'Aspiration'... 'Auroville Beach', and 'Repos'... ;Forecomers' from Canada and the United States... students from France... "Auroson's Home"... all a bit confusing, perhaps, to the visitor, but exciting all the same, magic casements opening on the uncertain seas of the future to the haven of "knowledge, peace and unity". The Department of Art, too, was busy, and there were plans for a TV Programme. UNESCO had made a first contribution of 3,000 dollars to be used for a TV Project, and it as up to Auroville

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to make the most of it. William T. Netter, in his report published in Mother India (December 1969), made the point that in India art experience had always been: "seen in the light of a greater reality". If for the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung God is the mass of the (Chinese) people, if for Marshall Mcluhan (and the West) God is at the moment "science and the 'good life' ", the proper integral view would be to see God both in the great masses of the world's people and in science, the rockets to the moon, and in colour TV sets in every home.⁴² Television would be coming to India in a big way at the same time that the new consciousness would be making itself felt. As Netter said in his third report (March 1970):

When the communications satellite is put up over India in 1972, the greatest and most dynamic confrontation of the East and West in the history of the world will have begun. The peak of Western technology will be joined with the peak of Eastern spirituality....

In a Yoga which demands total transformation there is no question of becoming a guru in the traditional sense. The process of personal transformation is to go on steadily.... In the light of this living process, therefore, we should look at television as a means of our own transformation and as a means of a global offering of our share.... Total transformation implies communication, and if there is a new consciousness descending on the world, a new stage of evolution about to be reached, what else is there really worth communicating? With the confrontation of the East and the West so imminent, so crucial, and about to happen in such a dynamic way through television, it is up to India to lead the way in peaceful surrender... to the Will of the Divine.⁴³

Auroville will not reject any of the developments of modern technology but only try to bend them to the service of the Divine. Like Netter, there are others too engaged in the problem of rethinking the ends and means of human life in the coming Spiritual Age that will assimilate and carry forward the achievements of modern science and technology; and the speculations and first findings of this thinking have been appearing in Equals One ( = 1), the futuristic quarterly journal of Auroville, a journal revolutionary in content, illustrations, and even in format and binding!

On 14 December 1970, Dr. Adiseshiah was interviewed by the French TV, Paris, and he was more than ever enthusiastic about the Auroville adventure in which he saw "the possibilities of a high level of life which will produce a new civilisation". The foundation of Auroville is "a new kind of spirituality, a new consciousness which we lack today"; Auroville "will never cease to evolve":

...Sri Aurobindo has given us in his works a concrete illustration or a crystallisation of the new man with a new consciousness. In our world the great error of our thought has been to divide our life between spiritual life and material life. But the great dream of Auroville, based on Sri Aurobindo's life-work, is to unite the two. With this reunion or marriage between Spirit and Matter we shall have truly the possibility of a new world and a new man, a

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universal and integral man. Auroville is an attempt to realise Sri Aurobindo's philosophy on the terrestrial plane: the integration of a total man....

Well, I think, the true democracy does not yet exist anywhere. In Auroville, however, all the institutes, economic, social, cultural, based on the concept of the Integral Man with a new consciousness, will assure a new democracy, where each person will have a special role in the decisions and actions of the township. And thus we shall also have a new form of political life.

Dr. Adiseshiah also referred to the fact the UNESCO" had three times successively and unanimously declared that "the great project of Auroville is a profound expression of the spirit of UNESCO', and urged that all the 135 member-states - the Governments, the private societies, foundations, etc. - should "observe the Sri Aurobindo Centenary Year which commences on 15 August 1972, and help the Sri Aurobindo Society in the development of Auroville in every possible way".⁴⁴

On 15 December 1970, the Auroville School was inaugurated, and this future-oriented human laboratory will exemplify the principle of freedom and free progress in education with even greater daring than at the Ashram's Centre of Education. The architecture of the School too is tantalisingly futurist in a creative way, providing an environment worthy of the "children of God". The "Forecomers" have not only settled down but have been able to present a dramatic and dance sequence, based on Rod's poem 'The Artist before Dawn and the Dream of Victory', as part of the celebration of the second anniversary of the Auroville inauguration. After witnessing the sequence, K.D. Sethna wrote: "I saw colour and sound and gesture and movement mingling with the creative energy of the West with the rapt insight of India to make a new form of man's evolutionary unfolding." Another member of the audience, Jobst Muhling, recorded that "the audience was compelled to forget reality. Magically it felt itself drawn into a dream-world of perfect humanity".⁴⁵ The quality of the vision and voice of Rod's dramatic piece may be indicated by one or two passages:

The children float at dawn

towards the warm touch of reality

inside a magic dome

and the light grows within...

The future leapt into, view

like blossoms opening in a garden

and the ancients who cared for them

from the first, watched their children grow...

On the city rises round the rim

as night's armour clatters to the ground

and in the utter silence

men of light noisily launch their ships

to the sun...

O the kingdom rises round the rim.⁴⁶

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How Auroville will evolve further and further and solve the central human problem of reconciling the need for human unity and harmony with the claims of human diversity and multiplicity, the need for order and the need for freedom, the need for power and the need for Grace, the need for a solid material base and the need for the life, mind and Spirit dimensions, how Auroville will find the means of endless self-growth and self-realisation and fill the proposed four sectors (industrial, residential, cultural, international) with shining purpose derived from the central source of light and life - the Lake and the Matrimandir - how sunflower- like all thoughts, all actions, all delights, all aspirations, all realisations, all, all will turn towards the Divine and receive the light of Truth and the warmth of Love, much of all this is yet wrapped in the future. But the divine seed was at last cast on Auroville's sacred soil when at the chosen spot the foundation stone of Matrimandir was laid on 21 February 1971. As visualised by Roger Anger, the Matrimandir will appear as an unsupported golden globe suspended in space, light filtering from top to bottom, an architectural lyric, a materialised meditation, a brazier of Aspiration from below being met by the downpour of Grace from Above. In its finished form, Matrimandir is expected to suggest symbolistically the emergence of the "golden sphere of consciousness out of the earth crater", the whole story of life in its dynamic multifoliateness being reflected in the dance of movement on the golden discs exposed to the sun's rays. But Matrimandir will be no architectural marvel merely, something to gaze at and admire; it is to be verily a theatre of inner psychological exploration, self-discovery and self-realisation. Following one of the four pathways, the pilgrim will pass above the crater and make for the sun-world, reach the central dodecagon, and go beyond it to one of the four Halls of Meditation bathed in the sun's light. This will be the transforming chamber, the spiritual cyclotron; the Mind of Night hot-linked with the Mind of Light: one complete spectrum from the inconscient to the superconscient: the way up being also the way down, the whole secret of the cosmic play. The pilgrim, when he has charged and changed himself enough, enough for the day, can now go out to the Garden of Unity, the Banyan Tree and the mythic Lotus or lotus-shaped Vase. Matrimandir, whose construction is to be done in twelve stages spread over three or more years, will thus be structured into a symbol-dream in architecture, a marvel of beauty and harmony, the ensouled image of a mighty aspiration and its theatre of realisation. The whole complex of Matrimandir and its environs might very well strike the pilgrim as a three-dimensional recordation of the nectarean insights of The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and Savitri. But this very grandeur of conception, the daring, the hope abounding, the faith abiding, can cause a little dizziness, and make men wonder whether such a paradisal design can really be translated into actuality. "But get thee behind me. Doubt": the Great Adventure, which has the sanction and signature of the Supreme, cannot and must not fail:

for the future of poetry and the world depends now on the nature of something

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She is establishing here in Auroville...

but first the ploughing, the growing and the tending of the fields divine....

And one must hope that soon, the garden would grow "with an air on which may 'cling all love's responsible things".⁴⁷

V

Writing of Sri Aurobindo, the Mother has said with an all-sufficient succinctness:

What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world's history

is not a teaching,

not even a revelation;

it is a decisive action

direct from the Supreme.⁴⁸

The 'teaching' is there, in overwhelming elaboration and packed opulence of divination, in the stupendous Arya sequences; the 'revelation' is blazed forth in Savitri. Yet Sri Aurobindo exceeds the Arya volumes, and exceeds Savitri. The poet, patriot and High-Priest of Revolution, the mystic, philosopher and Prophet of the Life Divine - the Force that moved them all is active still. The Ashram, the Centre of Education, and now, - Auroville! What other outer proof is needed to substantiate the Mother's affirmation? She has gone, indeed, further and declared from her summit of Yogic vision:

Since the beginning of earth history, Sri Aurobindo has always presided over the great earthly transformations, under one form or another, one name or another.⁴⁹

It has ever been obvious to those closely associated with Sri Aurobindo or the Ashram that he is a Power, and not alone a Person, - and a Power issuing in Action. It is a power for self-transformation and, ultimately, for world-transformation. Although Sri Aurobindo has withdrawn from the material envelope that had been his body, his Power has been potently active in the earth-consciousness. To believe in the existence of this Power, to aspire to be a channel of its Manifestation, to realise this aspiration progressively: such could be our positive response to Sri Aurobindo.

There are those, however, for whom Sri Aurobindo is little more than the name and memory of a tremendous political force of sixty-five years ago, or the fabled name of a great Yogi who had taken his abode in South India at Pondicherry during the latter half of his terrestrial life. Even during his days of "retirement", people used to ask impatiently, "what is Sri Aurobindo doing?" - since, in the popular view. Yoga itself was not "action". The answer Aurobindonians used to give was that Sri Aurobindo had given the WORD, and the WORD was itself Power. The WORD was spread out in the six or seven volumes of the Arya magazine (1914-21), in hundreds of poems and sonnets, in thousands of letters, in the

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atomic "thoughts and aphorisms" and in the Surcharged Savitri. There was his PRESENCE too, which was incommensurable Power. On darśan  days and even on other days, that Presence was a felt reality of Power that ignited numberless clods of earth into burning braziers of aspiration and realisation. There was, above all, Sri Aurobindo's OCCULT INFLUENCE - unseen, unknown, but potent still, an immaculate Power that sent out its beneficent beams to the ends of the world, imparting sudden hope and courage to soldiers on the battlefield, prophetic gleams of understanding to statesmen overcome by perplexity, rescuing lights to sadhaks in their spiritual dark nights, or unexpected illuminations to artists in their moments of doubt and defeat. This occult influence could, on crucial occasions, sway the course of events from behind the scenes, or get involved in our affairs without our being even aware of it - an invisible but alchemic participation, a power for change and transmutation and transfiguration. That occult Power is there still, and it is more active than ever, and is a continuous source of inspiration and force of transformation.

In the earlier part of Sri Aurobindo's life, the supreme problem was fighting the colonial power of Britain and winning political freedom for India. From the beginning Sri Aurobindo knew that it was not political freedom nor economic sufficiency but the recovery of the nation's soul that was the heart of the problem. Born on 15 August 1872, Sri Aurobindo had the Vision of the Mother - India as the Mother, as Bhavani, as Durga, as Bharati - as early as 1905, if not earlier. During his brief but decisive intervention in national politics during 1906-10, Sri Aurobindo awakened the slumbering soul of the nation to an appreciation of its high destiny; he also organised a secret revolutionary movement, besides participating in open political activity as a Nationalist. When the broad lines of action necessary for political liberation had been firmly laid down, Sri Aurobindo withdrew to Pondicherry to address himself to the more fundamental task of the soul's liberation, for without it the rest - political and economic freedom - must prove mere dead-sea fruit.

After two world wars, Indian independence came on Sri Aurobindo's seventy-fifth birthday on 15 August 1947. Five years earlier, the Congress leaders had rejected Sri Aurobindo's advice regarding the Cripps Proposals, and so independence came coupled with the partition of the country, and the attendant blood-shed, the exodus of millions, and the immitigable misery. Sri Aurobindo could see clearly the dangers ahead, - dangers for India and the world. He saw the folly of the partition and the evil it might engender in the future: he saw the menacing aspects of Red China's emergence long before any statesman did: and he also had a clear vision of India's future, and of her future role as the Guru of the nations - after having, of course, first won by her own tapasyā and siddhi the right to such leadership.

Over twenty years after Sri Aurobindo's passing, the problem in India today is the supreme problem of survival in the face of internal weakness, disunity and disorder, and the possibility of massive aggression from without. Although during the years after independence, 

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India has made a gallant effort at economic regeneration, what is most unfortunate is that, in the process of central planning for development, she has shackled and weakened herself with debt, aid-strings, debilitating habits, regional pulls and humiliating postures. Kashmir and 'cold war' politics, the Chinese invasion of 1962, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the Bangla Desh explosion of March 1971, the sudden spate of refugees, the victorious lightning war in December, the unfriendly or menacing postures of some of the foreign Powers, the rise in expenditure, the increase in unemployment, the inflationary pressures, the cumulative strain on the economy, all have - one way or another - helped to create the current climate of anxiety and uncertainty in India; and the new generation that has come up since independence is angry, frustrated, intolerant, unconventional and uninhibited.

During the last many years there has been developing in India (and the world) a steadily worsening situation. After the 1967 General Elections especially, alarming symptoms of national ill-hearth have begun to appear - a catastrophic decline in standards of conduct, a frightening erosion of values and a sharp turn towards disorder. We have been witnessing the recrudescence of uncontrolled violence is thought, word and deed, the blatant display of sacrilege in many forms - the destruction of libraries, the disfigurement of statues, the vandalism in campuses, the molestation of beauty, the murder of innocence. The crash of all traditional loyalties, the quick spread of permissiveness, the easy diffusion of drug-peddling and drug-addiction, the itch to live fast and live dangerously, the refusal to mints of the future - any future whatsoever! Indeed, what is happening around us now seems to be in reckless defiance of the rules as we had known them in our green youth. Children brought up in affluent or sophisticated families turn hippies (or even naxalites), rejecting the easy comforts of the parental home, and preferring an "outsider" or "outlaw" status to a secure niche in the Establishment. The French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions saw the old order of relationships between the aristocracy and the commoners, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, crumble in an instant. Today the traditional order of relationships between parents and children, between employers and labour, and even between teachers and pupils, is seen to crumble - and the current epidemic of violence and the unseemly blaze of action and opinion seem to be quite as revolutionary as the slogans and attitudes of masses of men who once swore by a Danton, a Lenin or a Mao Tse-tung. No doubt, many of the current forms of protest and nonconformity seem mere aberration; no doubt much inconvenience is caused, a lot of destruction too, and a general sense of doom as well. Nor are Nature's moods more reassuring. A cyclone, a tidal wave - a hundred thousand people washed away; a Himalayan river in spate - and buses, cars, whole villages swept into the gaping ravine; an earthquake - a city razed to the ground; an epidemic, or air-poisoning, or river-poisoning, or food-poisoning - with numberless victims. The human mind, albeit infinite in its faculty for comprehension, suddenly quails before these abnormalities of life and Nature. At least, at least, these happenings should make us pause

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and think and cultivate a sense of crisis. The mere repetition of the abracadabra of past formulations will not do any longer. The outer mould built assiduously by human egoism is visibly disintegrating, and so we needs must learn the lesson intended, and grapple with the ego-shell within ourselves. The fight today has therefore to be waged, not against a colonial power, but against all that is false within ourselves. We have thus to change ourselves first before we can feel pure enough, or strong enough, to change others or change the environment. A civilisation in the process of breaking up could also be the raw material for a new civilisation in the making. One has to seize the moment of ripeness, one has to discover and know oneself, and then one may be able to look beyond the moment in a mood of faith and collaborate with the forces working obscurely - yet also irresistibly - for a radical, even a revolutionary, change in earth nature and of course human nature.

In its externals, "Sri Aurobindo's Action" is a movement generated from Sri Aurobindo Ashram since mid-1970, a Society With office-bearers, rules and subscriptions - even as a human being needs to have a physical body and a name and various adhesions and propensities. But just as a human being is quintessentially the indwelling soul, the informing Spirit, for without it the body is nothing, the mind is nothing, the passions, emotions and sensibilities are nothing, so too "Sri Aurobindo's Action" is a Force, a Force intent on effecting a revolutionary change in our way of thinking and living. Writing on the 'spiritual revolution', Sri Aurobindo said in Thoughts and Glimpses (1917):

The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention:

the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there.

Until it comes

the sense of the others cannot be understood

and till then

all interpretations of present happening

and forecast of man's future

are vain things.

For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity.

This 'spiritual revolution' implies verily a breakthrough in the province of mental life comparable to the revolutionary breakthroughs in atomic physics and molecular biology. Crack the mould of the ego, and the waters of consciousness will flow together; and all soul-division and all fragmentation and enfeeblement of society, nation and the human aggregate, all would be superseded by the godheads of harmony, strength, social well-being and human unity. To participate in the movement of "Sri Aurobindo's Action", one must be armed with the faith and conviction that there is indeed a great Force behind the "Action", that we should make ourselves channels of this Force, lose ourselves in it - not resist it, nor even

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be neutral or indifferent in our attitude, but actively advance it by becoming one with it.

The sense of crisis: an intuitive recognition of .the Force, the evolutionary Force, that is operating to bring out of the crisis itself a new dispensation: the sovereign faith, the limitless courage to meet the crisis through identification with (he Force: the participation in the spiritual revolution which is the only ultimate solvent for all the maladies that beset humanity: the emergence of the future man and the self-reliant self-poised society of the future. While all this might very well be the programme of action for effecting the difficult passage from the flawed excitements and chronic frustrations of ego-centric life to the fullness and felicity of the promised "Life Divine", yet in the immediate context, India and the world need to accomplish the bare feat of survival so that the higher possibilities could have a chance of realisation in the future. Hence, on an emergency footing as it were, "Sri Aurobindo's Action" is conceived in the first instance as a programme of spiritual rearmament and Karma Yoga, determined to set baffled and demoralised India again on her feet before Sri Aurobindo's birth centenary of 15 August 1972. In the wider background of evolution from the mental to the supramental stage, here in India - in India, because India sums up in herself the problems and possibilities of humanity - the first decisive battle for sanity and survival has to be fought and won. But of course the "action" - which is basically a spiritual and even a supramental action - would by no means exhaust itself or suddenly arrest its progress on a particular date. A first necessary step is not the final step as well; the winning of a crucial first battle is not victory in the war itself - the war against ignorance and incapacity and death. A significant milestone peremptorily beckons us, but only to facilitate the next leap forward, and further and farther drives onward. Sri Aurobindo's Action must thus continue till the whole alchemic process of transformation of consciousness is completed and the Life Divine in all its panoply and plenitude is securely set going upon earth.

Sri Aurobindo's Action! - "a decisive action direct from the Supreme"! At this time, in the inner theatre or Kurukshetra within every one of us: in India, this ancient consecrated land, ancient yet not a back-number, divided and weakened and apparently decadent, yet alive somehow and indeed holding the promise of the future for herself and for the world: in the multi-tiered theatre - individual, national, global - this momentous "action" is being waged, for the future, all our future, is at stake!*

A Force has certainly gone into action; the action has been there all along, only now openly recognised and named; and we call it Sri Aurobindo's Force because he first gave the clue to its nature, the nature of its dynamic functioning. But really the Force is inherent in the very structure of the cosmos, and is involved in its dynamics of evolution. For millions of years the earth has been in great

* The reader is also referred to my fuller article on "Sri Aurobindo's Action" in Sri Aurobindo Circle, 27th Number (1971), pp. 35-43.

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evolutionary travail. The blazing sphere cooled, water appeared, and the first primitive forms of life, and vegetation, and the rumblings of the animal world - and at last Homo Sapiens, the thinking, grumbling, blundering creature that is also pining and dreaming and aspiring Man. But the earth is much more than an orbiting sphere in space, and man is much more than an animal careering towards extinction. And there is today the same evolutionary push towards new horizons, the tearing of the mental lid to reach the higher godheads of consciousness.

Let there be no doubt about it: this Force would work us, if we won't work with it. It is a Force that has been there with us for a long time - quiescent for ages - but now it is coming out into the open, for the world crisis has made such an open intervention imperative, and the first phase of the Action has to be concluded, at least in large part, before Sri Aurobindo's birth centenary.

If in this crisis we are to prove worthy instruments of Sri Aurobindo's "action" - which is essentially a spiritual action - the need first is to cleanse ourselves, remembering the Master's stern admonition:

In the Hour of God

cleanse they soul

of all self-deceit and hypocrisy

and vain self-flattering

that thou mayst look straight

into thy spirit

and hear that

which summons it.⁵⁰

Next, the need is to invoke the Mighty Mother - Supreme Creatrix - Parashakti - to manifest herself, and make of us hero-warriors who will not flinch from the Battle of the Future:

MOTHER DURGA!

In the battle of life, in India's battle,

we are warriors commissioned by thee;

Mother, give to our heart and mind

a titan's strength, a titan's energy,

to our soul and intelligence

a God's character and knowledge...

MOTHER DURGA!

Enter our bodies in thy Yogic strength.

We shall become thy instruments,

thy sword slaying all evil,

thy lamp dispelling all ignorance...

Make thyself manifest.*

* Translated from the original Bengali by Nolini Kanta Gupta.

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Then, "in God's transforming hour", all things shall change -

The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time

And God be born into the human clay...

Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men.⁵¹

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