Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Mother's Comments on the Correspondence

Here is what she said to the disciple:

Nirod is reading out to me his correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, and it contains all the things (it's amusing), the things I said long, long afterwards, and I didn't know that he had written them!—exactly the same thing. I was very much interested.

In this correspondence, he told Nirod in a letter¹ (he said it several times): "I may take a fancy to leave my body before the supramental realisation ..." He said that a few years before he died. He had felt it.

(Silence)

But he spoke of a transformation that would come before the advent of the first supramental being.² And that was what he told me. He told me that his body was not capable of bearing this transformation, that mine was more capable—he repeated it.

But it is difficult. I told you so the other day.

Food, especially, is ... it has become a labour.

January 19, 1972

Have you read the whole "Correspondence with Nirod"?

I am translating it as I go along, so I haven't read the whole thing.

There are extraordinary things in there. He seems to be joking all the time but ... it's extraordinary.

You see, I lived—how many years? Thirty years, I think, with Sri Aurobindo—thirty years from 1920 to 1950. I thought I knew him well, and then when I hear this, I realise that ... (Mother makes a gesture as if to indicate a breaking of bounds.)

February 16, 1972

According to what Nirod is reading out to me now of his correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, it seems to have been the same thing for Sri Aurobindo. Because, according to what he wrote (you will see when you read it), I am always the doer. He says: "Mother says, Mother does, Mother ..." You see, as far as the organisation of the Ashram is concerned (relations with people and all that), it would seem that, quite naturally, all the time, it is all done through me.

And you know, from the point of view of humour, I have never read anything more wonderful, oh! ... He had a way of looking at things ... it's incredible. Incredible. But it seems that for him, the outside world was something ... absurd, you know.

(...)

Oh! it's very strange. It's very strange. Since my childhood all my effort has been to (how can I put it?) achieve a total indifference—neither annoying nor pleasant. Since my childhood, I remember a consciousness which tried ... That was what Sri Aurobindo meant—an indifference. Oh! it's strange. Now I realise why he said that I was the one who could attempt to effect the transition between the human and the supramental consciousness. He said so. He told me, and he says it, it is, recorded in Nirod's thing. And I understand why ...

Ah! I understand.

Yes, I understand.

April 26, 1972

I am hearing—through Nirod—things that Sri Aurobindo said, and he himself says that he contradicted himself a considerable number of times ... (...) and that, of course, the two or three different ways are true.³ So we can be as ... as wide as he!

In fact his understanding was very flexible—very flexible. While listening to the things he said, I felt, that I had understood very little of what he meant. And now that I am more and more in touch with the supramental Consciousness, I can see that it is extremely flexible—flexible and complex—and that it is our narrow human consciousness that sees things ... (Mother draws little squares in the air) fixed and definite.

(...)

And I can see that when one goes above the mind, it becomes ... it is like waves on the sea.

February 14, 1973