In the Mother's Light

The Brazier of Love

WHAT is the central truth and essence of the Mother's life and the secret of her spiritual achievement ? What is the key to the synthesis of her vast and complex personality, her irresistible magnetism and the unlimited sway she holds over the hearts of thousands of God-seekers ? What has created the divine beauty of her form, imparted the divine rhythm to her movements and the divine fire to her will ?

Those who know her or have only read her Prayers and Meditations will at once reply in a chorus : Love is the truth and essence of the Mother's life and love the nuclear force of her personality. In the Chandi (a portion of the Markendya Purana), the Divine Mother has been hymned under her diverse aspects of Consciousness, Intelligence, Power, Peace, Beauty, Forgive- ness, Kindness, etc., but the most primal and puissant, the most graceful and rapturous aspect of love—one wonders why —has been left unmentioned. Love is the first, highest and completest expression of the divine Truth in the world, and the supreme Force that can lead the world back to the Divine. It includes all the other aspects and principles and is the eternal fount of the most ineffable ecstasy and sweetness that flow out of the union of the human with the Divine. And it is this love that is literally incarnate in the Mother—in her presence, in her carriage, in her words, in her gestures, and in all her ways and dealings with men; so much so that the word Mother has come to mean Love, and to be near her is to feel that we are in the physical presence of the divine Love itself, which is instinct with infinite Wisdom and vibrant with omni- potent Force. Human faculties are much too limited to fathom the mystery of this Love; they can only stand overpowered, thrilled, illuminated and influenced by it. It floods our being with its light and joy, and, healing us of all our ills and ailments and breaking asunder all our bonds, liberates us into our essential purity and perfection.

As we contemplate this living Love, this blazing Force

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of dynamic divine Grace and Beatitude, She reveals herself to us under three arresting aspects : first, the aspect of her love for the Divine,—a white psychic flame burning in unabated intensity, second, the aspect of the Divine's Love in her,—the dazzling sun-fire, clothed in flesh, and, third, the two fires combined, the psychic love and the divine, pouring out upon the world, upon all mankind, in an unceasing flood of regenerating and transforming force. The three aspects, like the three strands of a string, are intertwined; and though our intellectual mind, in its penchant for analysis, may feel tempted to analyse them, they are really unanalysable and indistinguishable —they are one essence and movement.

In this essay I shall try to contemplate the third aspect of this Love which we call the Mother, its aspect of delivering and transforming beneficence, its aspect of Grace. But to obviate a possible misunderstanding, I must make it clear at the very outset that this Grace or beneficence is not the act of a transcendent divine being stretching out its hands, like the Amitabha Buddha, across the ocean of life, to those afflicted souls who pant and thirst for the Beyond. It is the Grace that has assumed a human form, come down to our shores, the shores of Time, from its unthinkable eternity, consented to bear the cross of human life and labour in the darkness of the material world, so that even here, on these very shores, in the very midst of the darkness, the divine Light may be lit and shine undimmed, and a divine humanity manifest the glory of God. It is the Grace that has invaded Gethsemane, so that Gethsemane itself may be transformed into Heaven. It is the Grace that has come down not only to liberate, but to rehabilitate man, to reinstate him in his divine heritage of luminous freedom and immortal, creative bliss, even here, even in this world of ignorance and suffering. If we overlook or forget this unique aspect of the divine Love as embodied in the Mother, we shall miss all the significance of her sacrifice, the secret of her transforming power and the surpassing beauty and sweetness of her radiant presence in our midst. We shall then either concentrate exclusively on her transcendent divinity and ignore or misjudge her humanity, or

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dote only upon her sweet humanity and ignore her trans- figuring divinity—the divine mystery of the union of the two, the unspeakable embrace of God and man in a single being, will elude us.

The constant aspiration of the Mother's early life was to be transformed into divine Love. This aspiration finds a vibrant expression in the Prayer of the 27th August, 1914:

"To be the divine love, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being—it is for this I cry to Thee, O Lord. Let me be consumed with this love divine, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being ! Transmute me into that burning brazier so that all the atmosphere of the earth may be purified with its game.

"O, to be Thy Love infinitely.”

It is apparent from the above Prayer that it was not for the passive bliss of the divine Love or even for its transporting thrills that she wanted to be transmuted into it; she aspired to be the divine love, "in every activity, in all the worlds of being”, so that she might achieve what the supreme Love alone can achieve in the material world—the integral transformation of human nature. It is not possible for us to gauge this Love, nor conceive the exact nature and extent of the work it has been doing for humanity. One day when the Mother indicated to us, in passing, how she and Sri Aurobindo have been labouring in the Subconscient and the Inconscient to change the very elements and atoms that go to constitute the human body, how they have been conducting the supramental light into those dark bases of human existence, so that a new race of man may be born on the earth, it took our breath away. We wondered in what ignorance we live—in what woeful, colossal ignorance not only of our own true self and its incalculable possibilities, but also of the selfless labour of the greatest of our benefactors who, identified with the Divine, work out His Will in the silent majesty of their spiritual

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strength. The aim of their labour lies beyond our ken and the methods they employ are inscrutable to our mind. We, who go by material performance and surface results, acclaim a scientist or a social reformer, a statesman or a political thinker, a religious preacher or an ethical teacher, whose achievements we can more or less assess and appreciate, but for those who work in union with the Master of our existence and change the very texture of our nature and prepare a divine destiny for the human race, we have nothing better than a lofty indifference or a cynical disdain.

The Prayer quoted above proves that the Mother aspired to be nothing short of the burning brazier of Love. She had nothing to ask for herself, nothing to acquire or achieve in the interest of her individual being; but she had to do—because it was the divine Will in her to do—all that was possible to root out for ever the ignorance and suffering of human life and make it a potent channel of the Light divine. Her love for the human soul, her solicitude for its release and harmonious perfection in the material world, and her compassion for its besetting miseries, are very movingly expressed in one of the sweetest of her Prayers :

"Each time that a heart leaps at the touch of Thy divine breath, a little more beauty seems to be born upon the earth, the air is embalmed with a sweet perfume, all becomes more friendly.

"How great is Thy power, O Lord of all existence, that an atom of Thy joy is sufficient to efface so much darkness, so many sorrows, and a single ray of Thy glory can light up thus the dullest pebble, illumine the blackest consciousness!

"Thou hast heaped Thy favours upon me. Thou hast unveiled to me many secrets. Thou hast made me taste many unexpected and unhoped-for joys, but no grace of Thine can be equal to this Thou grantest to me when a heart leaps at the touch of Thy divine breath.

"At these blessed hours all earth sings a hymn of gladness, the grasses shudder with pleasure, the air is vibrant with light, the trees lift towards heaven their most ardent prayer, the chant

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of the birds becomes a canticle, the waves of the sea billow with love, the smile of children tells of the Infinite and the souls of men appear in their eyes.

"Tell me, wilt Thou grant me the marvellous power to give birth to this dawn in expectant hearts, to awaken the consciousness of men to Thy sublime Presence, and in this base and sorrowful world awaken a little of Thy true Paradise ? What happiness, what riches, what terrestrial power can equal this wonderful gift ?

"O Lord, never have I implored Thee in vain, for that which speaks to Thee is Thyself in me...”¹

The Mother knew early in life that the divine Vibhutis, the divine Powers and Personalities of the spiritual-mental planes, even of the Overmind, would not be capable of conquering the resistance of Matter and dispelling the darkness of Inconscience. That was why she prayed: "...O Sweet Master, it is a Love more wonderful and formidable than any that has manifested up till this day, of which the earth has need; it is for this Love that she (the earth) implored...” And she felt and knew, though the knowledge was sometimes revealed to her and sometimes hidden, that she was that Love, the supreme Love, incarnate in human form. But the knowledge, rather than gratifying her heart, intensified a hundredfold its single, selfless aspiration.

"O my divine Master, my love aspires after Thee more intensely than ever; let me be Thy living Love in the world and nothing but that! ...May my consciousness be identified with Thy Conscious- ness so that Thou alone mayest be the will acting through this fragile and transient instrument.

"O my sweet Master, with what an ardour my love aspires for Thee.

"Grant that I may be only Thy divine Love, and that in every- thing this Love may awake powerful and victorious.

"Let me be like an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March 31, 1917,

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earth, penetrating all hearts, murmuring to every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace.”

The Mother's aspiration was fulfilled beyond measure : the divine Love prepared her whole being, part by part, hour by hour, till it became a pure flame of psychic love quivering in the embrace of the sempiternal fire of the Love Divine.

"My love for Thee, O Lord, it is Thyself, and yet my love bows down religiously before Thee ”

Once she became the divine Love, the real work of her life began. Love revealed itself as a victorious power of illumination and transformation, and it carried her into the obscure foundations of terrestrial life, the dark matrix of Matter, which it is the divine Will to chum, illumine and transfigure. Human mind is incapable of imagining the horrors and perils to which the Mother was exposed, the ordeals she had to pass through, and the battle she had to wage against the grim forces of Inconscience and Ignorance, Falsehood and Death. It was the greatest test of her love for the Divine, this "Calvary of the terrestrial consciousness,” this descent into "the unfathomable depths of matter,” this touching with her fingers "the horror of the false-hood and the inconscience,” "the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity.” Had not the Divine said to her, "If thou wouldst learn how to love truly, it is in this way that thou must love...in the darkness and the inconscience” ? Had He not created her, as He once confided to her, to be His exceptional representative on the earth ? She had nothing to complain of, for, she knew she was made for the most difficult work of material transformation, and she let herself be moved by the divine Will, which is one with divine Love. And yet something in her outer personality, something sweetly human—this plastic and receptive human element is indispensable to her work—had the modesty to find itself "poorly equipped" for such a tremendous task, and she asked the Divine with the utter candour and simplicity of a child, "Thou plungest me, O Lord, into the most opaque

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darkness; it must be then because Thou hast so firmly established Thy light in me that Thou knowest it will stand the perilous test. Hast Thou chosen me for descending into the vortex of this hell as Thy torch-bearer ? Hast Thou deemed my heart strong enough not to fail, my hand firm enough not to tremble ?” The heart was, indeed, strong with the strength of divine Love, and the hand was firm with the unshakable firmness of the divine Force, and she has been labouring since, in serene silence and endless patience, for the spiritual freedom and perfection of mankind.

Among the historical mystics of India Mirabai stands apart as an exceptional example of the most passionate, the most consuming love for the Divine. With a matchless lyrical intensity she gave all herself to her beloved Master and turned her life into a constant hymn and a devoted worship. But it was a life of absorbed contemplation and rapturous exaltation, of rapt union and longing for re-union, of radiating purity and contagious sweetness; and not a life of dynamic union and divine action. The Mother's life affords a new vision of the Will of God in the material world and a new perspective to the goal of human existence. Union with the Divine, she holds, is the first objective in spiritual life, but the ultimate aim and the glorious consummation of human existence, the very meaning and purpose of human birth, is the manifestation of the Divine in man and the fulfilment of His Will in the world.

The legendary Radha is the very personification of an absolute and integral love for the Divine. From the physical to the spiritual, the whole gamut of her consciousness was completely at the disposal of the transcendent Flute Player. Indian tradition records no more unreserved and joyous self-giving, nor is there any parallel to it to be found in the spiritual traditions of the world. But it was a love that bore no cross except that of the Lover's playful self-hiding; it had not to burn, bright and steady, in the congealed darkness and bleak blasts of the Inconscient. It did not, besides, incarnate any specific Will of the Divine to a New Manifestation or a New Creation. It was not charged with a world-mission, or called upon to a supreme holocaust,

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The Mother's Radha’s Prayer reveals the same psychic texture, an identical integrality of self-offering, but with a remarkable difference. Her love is the supernal self-Force of the Divine, redemptive and creative, it bears in itself the world- transforming fiat of the Absolute.

The four aspects of the Mother¹ of which Sri Aurobindo speaks in his book. The Mother, "have stood in front in her guidance of this universe and in her dealings with the terrestrial play,” but they do not exhaust her;—her divinity, because it is the divinity of the Divine Himself, transcends them all. "There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother, but they were more difficult to bring down and have not stood out in front with so much prominence in the evolution of the earth-spirit. There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realisation,—most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental Spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divinest Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers of the universe.”

"Her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love” is, as we have already stated above, the highest aspect of the Mother, which we have to adore and approach with the utter love and self-giving of our whole being, if we aspire after the supramental realisation on earth. The highest power of transformation is with the supreme divine Love, which the Mother embodies in this life for the accomplishment of her great mission in the material world.

But the Mother transcends even this highest aspect of Love and Ananda. "Outside all manifestation, in the immutable silence of Eternity, I am in Thee, O Lord, an unmoving Beatitude.” She is one with the Unthinkable Absolute, the ineffable Unnamed. All the powers and splendours of creation are her powers and splendours, derived from her, constituted by her, directed by

¹ Maheshwari , Mahakali , Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati.

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her and offered to her own unmanifest, undifferentiated Eternity. What words will describe the mystery and marvel of that silent Unknowable ?

After all we have seen and known, felt and imagined of the Mother, she remains to us what she has always been, the same Divine-human Mother, closest to us even if she is transcendent, enfolding us in her liberating Love, protecting us with her Grace, transporting and transforming us with her irradiating smile, and infinitely forbearing and forgiving to our countless recurrent frailties. She remains our sole, sweet deliverer from the inflexible rigours of the Cosmic Law and the bestower of her own spiritual freedom and bliss. She remains for us the crystal fountain "which always lets its waters flow abundantly for all, but towards which no stream can ever remount”; the giver of all boons and the receiver of all our burdens. Has not the Divine said of her, "...art thou not myself crystallised for my work ?” And do we not love and adore the Divine Himself when we love and adore her, not in distant awe and amazement, but as her frail ignorant children, physically approaching her in freedom and confidence, and aspiring to be united with her to become deathless instruments of her great work upon earth ? What is that great work ? It is, as we have already noted, a "veritable work of creation...to create new activities and new modes of being, so that this Force, unknown to the earth till now, may manifest in its plenitude.”¹ And what is this Force that is going to manifest ? It is the authentic, invincible Force of the supreme divine Love; and the Mother is this Force, she who has descended into our darkness and mortality and constituted all herself the burning brazier of Love, so that the atmosphere of the earth may be purified with its flames and our animal humanity transfigured into the glory of a divine humanity.

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother

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