The Aspiration and the Work
"When I was a child—about the age of thirteen and for about a year—every night as soon as I was in bed, it seemed to me that ,I came out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the town, very high. I saw myself then clad in a magnificent golden robe, longer than myself; and as I rose, that robe lengthened, spreading in a circle around me, to form, as it were, an immense roof over the town. Then I would see coming out from all sides men, women, children, old men, sick men, unhappy men; they 'fathered under the outspread robe, imploring help, recounting their miseries, their sufferings, their pains. In reply, the robe, supple and living, stretched out to them individually, and as soon as they touched it, they were consoled or healed, and entered back into their body happier and stronger than they had ever been before coming out of it. Nothing appeared to me more beautiful, nothing made me more happy; and all the activities of the day seemed to me dull and colourless, without real life, in comparison with this activity of the night which was for me the true life. Often as I thus rose, I would see on my left an old man, silent and immobile, who looked at me with a benevolent affection and encouraged me by his presence. This old man, dressed in a long robe of sombre violet, was the personification—I knew him later—of him who is called the Man of Sorrows.
Now the profound experience, the almost ineffable reality is translated in my brain by other notions which I can define thus:
Many a time during the day and in the night it seems to me that I,—that is to say, my consciousness is wholly concentrated in my heart, which is no longer an organ, not even a feeling, but the divine Love, impersonal, eternal; being this Love, I feel myself living in the centre of everything upon the whole earth, and at the same time it seems to me that I am stretching out immense, infinite arms and enveloping with a limitless tenderness all beings clasped, grouped, nestled upon my breast, vaster than the universe...
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Words are poor and clumsy, O divine Master, and mental translations are always childish... But my aspiration for Thee is constant, and, to tell the truth, it is very often Thyself and Thou alone who livest in this body, an imperfect means of Thy manifestation
May all beings be happy in the peace of Thy illumination.
THIS is one of the earliest—it does not seem to be the very first—spiritual experiences of the Mother. It signalizes the beginning of a great mission and is eloquently prophetic of the Mother's future. Four things stand out in it arresting out attention and compelling our wonder :
(1) the Mother's ascent high up into the sky,
(2) her putting on of a golden robe,
(3) the lengthening and stretching out of the golden robe to all those who had gathered under it, imploring help and consolation, and
(4) the Mother's delight in this experience.
We have here, in this experience of the Mother when she was a mere child of thirteen, practically all the basic elements that constitute her life and work in the world—a sort of epitome of the greatness and grandeur of her future creative self-expression. The vision is remarkable—I should have said, unique - in the history of spiritual lives. For about one whole year, day in and day out, the Mother used to have it at the same hour and in the same invariable way. This persistence of the vision with its details unchanged and its full realization in the Mother's subsequent life, challenges the complacent theories of psycho- analysis and proves that the vision was not a conditioned reflex of the individual Unconscious, but a prophetic revelation of that which was preparing in the Superconscious. Looking at the Mother's present activities, one would say that this childhood experience was the blue print of her later work on earth. The experience is remarkable for another reason : the sequence of its details is flawlessly perfect, it corresponds exactly to that of the spiritual experiences on the path of Sri Aurobindo's integral Yoga, as promulgated years afterwards.
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother — February 22, 1914.
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The first movement in the Mother's experience is one of ascent. "I came out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the town, very high.” It signifies, I suppose, first, transcendence of the body-consciousness, then of the habitual environmental consciousness and, last, of the universal human consciousness. This transcendence of all human formulæ and ascent "very high" gives the Mother a secure station in the superconscience. But by transcendence we do not mean exclusion, nor do we imply a suspension of the physical consciousness, an act of abstraction and a rocket-flight into the empyrean of the Spirit. The Spirit's skies are, of course, attained; the Mother does stand in their serene, shoreless infinity; but not as a naked soul or an unvestured mind. Her experience is much too concrete, much too physically real and definite to permit of such an interpretation. The truth and tenor of her whole spiritual life have been consistently characterized by an unfailing, downright practicality. Her ascent is an ascent of her whole integrated being, including the subtle physical— it is only the outer physical body that remains below; and the lengthening of her robe and the touching of it by those who implored her help and consolation—as we shall see presently - are as real, as vivid, as distinctive and decisive an experience as any we get by means of our physical senses. The Mother does not regard any realization as complete so long as it is not rendered into the terms of the physical consciousness and possessed by it as a hard, solid, indubitable fact.
The second movement is the assumption of the Supernature or the supramental nature as represented by the putting on of "a magnificent golden robe". "I saw myself then", says the Mother, "clad in a magnificent golden robe." The word "then" in the sentence is very important, as it emphasises the true order of the movements—first, ascent and then the assumption of the golden robe. It is a commonplace of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga that there can be no assumption of the Supernature or Para Prakriti without ascent.
The third movement is the lengthening and stretching out if the golden robe, "supple and living", to each individual
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of the crowd that had gathered under it. The lengthening and stretching are the movement of descent consequent upon the ascent. An important thing to be noted here is that it is not the Mother descending, but only her golden robe which symbolizes the Supernature. The central consciousness of man, once it has travelled beyond the borders of even the spiritual mind, finds a stable base above in the Transcendent, and a tranquil, luminous poise in it, and never spirals back — na punarāvartate — into the whirl of the lower energies. It is the divine nature assumed after the ascent that descends as a vehicle of the divine Grace to help and heal humanity. This movement illustrates the Mother's rôle, so well indicated in many of her later Prayers, of the Mediatrix between the supreme Transcendent above and the material world below. The stretching out of the golden robe is a significant gesture of the divine Grace leaniing down to succour suffering humanity. It is interesting to note again that the "men, women, children, old men, sick men, unhappy men" gathered under the robe after it had lengthened, spreading in a circle around the Mother "to form, as it were, an immense roof over the town." It is always, indeed, the Grace that acts first, the divine Love that leans down first and exerts a secret, silent pressure from above, and the human aspiration and appeal are but a reflex action from below.
The fourth movement — it is not really the fourth in succession, but a constant accompaniment of the others—is the Mother's delight in the experience. "Nothing appeared to me more beautiful, nothing made me more happy; and all the activities of the day seemed to me dull and colourless, without real life, in comparison with the activity of the night which was for me the true life." The later "Prayers" of the Mother—they are prayers in a special sense—are literally soaked in an ineffable delight.
"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
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breath."¹
To be a plastic and powerful instrument of the Divine for the progressive elimination of ignorance and suffering from the life of humanity has been the acme of the Mother's delight. She has even foregone, for a period, the absorbed bliss of the transcendent union for the sake of descending into the darkness of Matter and calling upon the Divine from below as the representative of the earth to illumine and transform her. The joy of selfless service, the unutterable rapture of God-willed and God-impelled impersonal work is regarded by the Mother as the very highest happiness of her life.
"Let me be like an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, penetrating all hearts, murmuring to every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace.”
This experience is the prophetic dawn of the Mother's life whose blazing noontide is revealed in the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother. Here it is only a foreshadowing, but what a marvellously precise foreshadowing !
We now propose to proceed very humbly to understand—it is foolhardy to presume to interpret such high spiritual experiences— (1) the constant seeking of the Mother's soul, (2) the means of fulfilling that seeking, and (3) the nature and significance of her work on earth.
The constant seeking of the Mother's being has been the Divine. With a consuming passion and unblemished sincerity each fibre of her being has sought Him and nothing but Him. This intensity of aspiration has found a most moving expression in many of her Prayers.
"Beyond all human conceptions, even the most marvellous, beyond all human feelings, even the most sublime, beyond the most magnificent aspiration and the purest élans, beyond Love, Knowledge and the Unity of the Being, I would enter into a constant
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—March 31,1917.
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communion with Thee, O Lord. Free from all trammels, I shall be Thyself; it will be Thou seeing the world through this body; it will be Thou acting in the world through this instrument.
In me is the calm serenity of perfect certitude.”
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RADHA'S PRAYER
"O Thou whom at first sight I knew for the Lord of my being, and my God, receive my offering.
Thine are all my thoughts, all my emotions, all the sentiments of my heart, all my sensations, all the movements of my life, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood. I am absolutely and altogether Thine, Thine without reserve. What Thou wilt of me, that I shall be. Whether Thou choosest for me life or death, happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes to me from Thee will be welcome. Each one of Thy gifts will be always for me a gift divine bringing with it the supreme felicity.”
The Mother's body has participated as much as her soul in this constant aspiration for and surrender to the Divine. It would even seem, reading some characteristic Prayers, that the immediate aspiration of her body and, in fact, of her whole physical consciousness has been even greater than that of her soul. And this is not surprising, for, on the basis of the Prayers it can very well be asserted that she had already realized a complete and constant inner union with the Divine very early in life and that her subsequent aspiration and endeavour have been to realize an equally complete and constant union in her physical consciousness and outer life. In the Prayer of Nov 19,1912—this is the year with which the "Prayers and Meditations" begins—she says : "I said yesterday to that English man who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire, that I had definitively found Thee, that the Union was constant.” But this is not the union to satisfy the Mother's whole being. She starts with this union as the base, but for the immense spiritual structure she has to rear upon it, much greater conquests have to be made, a more integral union has to be attained. So, not
content with this union, she says, "Yet I know that this state of union is poor and precarious compared with that which it will become possible for me to realize tomorrow.” Again, in the Prayer of May 16, 1914, the Mother says, "Now I clearly understand that union with Thee is not an end to be pursued, so far as this present individuality is concerned; it is a fact accomplished long since. And that is why Thou seemest to tell me always: 'Do not revel in the ecstatic contemplation of this union, fulfil the mission I have confided to thee on the earth’ "
This is a point of capital importance inasmuch as it affords the right perspective to the tremendous significance of the Mother's life-work. Not union only in the depths of her being, which is the common objective of all mystics, but union even in the outermost nature, and a complete possession and government of the whole being by the divine Love, so that the divine Will, realized by the Mother in her union with the Eternal, may fulfil itself in her terrestrial existence. But what is this divine Will in regard to the Mother ? "To be the Life in all material forms, the Thought organizing and using this Life in all .forms, the Love enlarging, enlightening, intensifying, uniting all the divers elements of this Thought, and thus by a total identification with the manifested world, to be able to intervene with all power in its transformation. On the other hand, by a perfect surrender to the Supreme Principle, to become conscious of the Truth and the eternal Will which manifests it. By this identification, becoming the faithful servant and sure intermediary of the divine Will, and uniting this conscious identification of the Principle with the conscious identification of the becoming, to mould and model consciously the love, mind and life of the becoming according to the Law of Truth of the Principle. It is thus that the individual being can be the conscious intermediary between the absolute Truth and the manifested universe, and intervene in the slow and uncertain advance of the Yoga of Nature in order to give it the swift, intense and sure character of the divine Yoga.”¹
A colossal work, well-nigh staggering to our timid and tethered intelligence ! Our imagination faints before the vastness
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother — May 24, 1915.
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and complexity of its conception, and yet something in us, awed and attracted, pledges to it its eternal adhesion and loyalty.
This, then, has been the sole aspiration of the Mother's whole being : to realize an integral union with the Integral Divine and become the conscious intermediary between Him and the material world, so that His unflawed manifestation may be possible in transformed human nature. Divine manifestation can, therefore, be said to be the core of her mission in this life.
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We turn now to the means the Mother adopts and advocates for the fulfilment of this matchless aspiration. The first means —in fact, the means par excellence,— is Love. But this Love is the dynamic and creative divine Love which is instinct with the supreme Knowledge and the supreme Power.
"O Lord, Thou of whom I would be constantly conscious and whom I would realize in the smallest cells of my being, Thou whom I would know as myself and see manifested in all things, Thou who art the sole reality, the sole reason and the sole aim of existence, grant that my love for Thee may go on increasing incessantly, so that I may become all love, Thy very love, and that being Thy love, I may unite integrally with Thee. May this love become more and more intense, complex, luminous, powerful may this love be an irresistible élan towards Thee, an invincible means to manifest Thee. May all in this being become pure love profound, disinterested, divine, from the unfathomable depths to the outermost substance. May the God in form who is manifesting this aggregate be wholly moulded of Thy complete and sublime love, that love which is at once the source and the realization of all knowledge; may the thought be clarified, classified, enlightened, transformed by Thy love; may all the forces of my life, solely penetrated and moulded by Thy love, become irresistible purity and constant energy, power and rectitude...and may this body, becoming a burning brazier, radiate Thy divine, impersonal,
sublime and calm love through all its pores...may the brain be reconstituted by Thy love. Finally, may Thy love overflow, inundate, transfigure, regenerate, animate everything with the power, splendour, sweetness and force which are its very nature. In Thy love is peace, in Thy love is joy, in Thy love is the sovereign lever of work for Thy servitor.
Thy love is vaster than the universe and more enduring than the ages; it is infinite and eternal, it is Thyself. And it is Thyself that I would be and that I am, since such is Thy law and such Thy Will.”¹
This love, as I have already said, is not a static but a supremely dynamic love, and the union it leads to is not a union. in trance, but a perfect union in action...Action, then, has to be performed, action of every kind and at every instant. A life of ascetic inaction and flight from the world is a life of spiritual defeat and frustration, whatever may be its other-worldly value. If God is evolving in man, then the world is the field of His evolution and eventual self-revelation, and action is one of the indispensable means by which alone both the evolution and the revelation can be fully effected.
The second means, therefore, that the Mother advocates is an ungrudging, unreserved and loving surrender to the Divine through action. A long and arduous discipline of selfless and surrendered action alone—and this is Yogic action—can purify and impersonalize the numberless elements of our dynamic personality and prepare them for participation in the integral union. I quote below a Prayer² which is a brilliant exposition of Yogic action as understood by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo:
"The outer life, the activity of each day and each instant, is it not the indispensable complement of our hours of meditation and contemplation ? And is not the proportion of time given to each the exact image of the proportion which exists between the amount
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—March 23, 1914.
² ibid.,—November 28, 1912.
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of effort to be made for the preparation and the realization ? For, meditation, contemplation, Union is the result obtained—the flower that blooms; the daily activity is the anvil on which all the elements must pass and repass in order to be purified., refined, made supple and ripe for the illumination which contemplation gives to them. All these elements must be thus passed one after the other through the crucible before outer activity becomes needless for the integral development. Then is this activity turned into the means to manifest Thee so as to awaken the other centres of consciousness to the same dual work of the forge and the illumination. Therefore are pride and satisfaction with oneself the worst of all obstacles. Very modestly we must take advantage of all the minute opportunities offered to knead and purify some of the innumerable elements, to make them supple, to make them impersonal, to teach them forgetfulness of self and abnegation and devotion and kindness and gentleness, and when all these modes of being have become habitual to them, then are they ready to participate in the Contemplation, and to identify themselves with Thee in the supreme Concentration..."
The Mother, therefore, rightly insists in many of her Prayers on the unwearied performance of Yogic action, so that the whole of our life, which has been up till now under the sway of the forces of Ignorance and Falsehood, may be conquered for the Divine and rendered a radiant scene of His rapturous self-manifestation.
The Manifestation of God in Matter
We have seen what the constant seeking of the Mother's soul is and the means of its fulfilment in the material world. Let us now try to understand the nature and significance of her work upon earth. If we take a synoptic view of all her experiences and teachings, we cannot resist the conclusion that it is not her personal salvation that she has ever sought, not even, as we have already seen, an ecstatic union with the Divine in the depths or on the heights of her being, for, she seems to have
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been in constant possession and enjoyment of it as her birthright; but what she has steadfastly yearned for and willed is the manifestation of God in Matter through the liberated and transformed nature of man. It was the reconciliation of Spirit and Matter, the long-dreamed-of marriage of Earth and Heaven that was the problem the Mother set before herself early in life, and her work has been a progressive solution of it.
"Do not revel in the ecstatic contemplation of this union, fulfil the mission I have confided to thee on the earth.”¹
"One day thou wilt be my head, but for the moment turn thy look towards the earth.”²
Such has been the invariable and insistent command of the Divine to the Mother. The earth, the tortured, convulsed, agonized earth, has to be redeemed, illumined and rendered "the home of the Wonderful." Darkness and death, sorrow and suffering have to be blotted out from her face, and a superior race of men must people her, revealing the divine Presence in her transfigured heart.
"It is a veritable work of creation we have to do : to create new activities and new modes of being, so that this Force, unknown to the earth till now, may manifest in its plenitude. It is to this work of a bringing to birth that I have consecrated myself, O Lord, because it is this that Thou demandest from me.”³
"All that has been conceived and realized up to now is mediocre, commonplace, insufficient compared with what has to be. The perfections of the past have no longer any force at present. A new puissance is needed to transform the new powers and make them submit to Thy divine Will.—'Ask and it shall be’, such is Thy constant reply...Let all these elements perish, so that from their
¹ prayer and Meditations of the Mother—May 16, 1914.
² ibid,- May 27, 1914.
³ ibid, - June 14, 1914.
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ashes may emerge new elements adapted to the new manifestation”¹
This new manifestation is the Will of the Divine and the mission of the Mother upon earth, and because it is the Will of the Divine, it will be accomplished by His Force alone, and not by any thought and plan of man. But for His Force to act freely—it never acts arbitrarily—man has to have an infinite faith in it.
"Thou art the sovereign power of transformation, why shouldst Thou not act upon all those who are put in relation with Thee through us as intermediaries ? We lack faith in Thy power. We always think that for this integral transformation to take place, men must will in their conscious thought; we forget that it is Thou who willest in them and that Thou canst will in such a way that all their being may be illumined....”²
But the mind of man is beset by doubts which impede the working of the divine Will. Man judges by his very limited and often misleading experiences of life and Nature and by the puny standards he has erected in his half-lit mind. By a fraction of the past and the present which is all that he has at his command, he presumes to judge the infinite and incalculable potentialities of the future. But, the Mother says, "It is always wrong to try to judge of the future or even to foresee it in the light of the idea that we have of it, for this idea is the present, it is, in the very measure of its impersonality, a translation of the present inter-relations which inevitably are not the future inter-relations of all the elements of the terrestrial problem. To deduce the future from the present circumstances is a mental activity of the order of reasoning, even if the deduction takes place in the subconscient and is translated in the being under the form of intuition; and reason is a human, that is to say, an individual faculty; the inspirations of the reason do not come from the infinite, the unlimited, the Divine.
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—June 17, 1914.
² ibid.,—June 23, 1914.
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It is only in the All-Knowledge, it is only when we are at once That which knows, that which is to be known and the power of knowing that we can become conscious of all relations past, present and future; but in this state there is no longer any past, present and future, all eternally is.” ¹ To the tranquil eye of faith "the formidable omnipotence of Thy Force is there; ready for manifestation waiting, it is building the propitious hour, the favourable opportunity ; it is there; the incomparable splendour of Thy victorious sovereignty.
The Force is there. Rejoice, you who wait and hope; the new manifestation is sure; the new manifestation is near.” ²
We have already had a glimpse of the Mother's rôle in this new manifestation. But in order to have a clear and indubitable idea of what it implies, let us listen to what the Divine Himself says to her—"/ have chosen thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth, not in an invisible way, but in a way apparent to the eyes of all men. And what thou wert created to be, thou shalt be.”³ Again, "By renouncing everything, even wisdom and, consciousness, thou wert able to prepare thy heart for the rôle which was assigned to it : apparently the most thankless rôle, that of the fountain which always lets its waters flow abundantly for all, but towards which no stream can ever remount; it draws its inexhaustible force from the depths and has nothing to expect from outside. But thou feelest already beforehand what sublime felicity accompanies this inexhaustible expansion of love; for, love is sufficient unto itself and has no need of any reciprocity. This is true even of individual love, how much more true, then, of divine love which so nobly reflects the infinite.
"Be this love in everything and everywhere, ever more widely, ever more intensely, and the whole world will become at once thy work and thy estate, thy field of action and thy conquest. Strive with persistence to throw down the last limits which are but frail barriers before the expansion of the being, to conquer the last obscurities which the illumining power is already lighting up.
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—June 24, 1914.
² ibid,—July 6, 1914.
³ ibid.,—December 8, 1916.
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Fight that thou mayst conquer and triumph; struggle to surmount all that has been up to this day, to make the new light emerge, the new example which the world needs. Fight stubbornly against all, obstacles, outer or inner. This is the pearl without price which is proposed for thee to realized "¹
"Thou wilt lead them all towards their supreme destiny.”²
We have been able to contemplate from a respectable and respectful distance and through the unavoidable haze of our mental preferences and preconceptions only a few aspects of the Mother's multi-dimensional spiritual career. As we follow the course of her spiritual achievements, a point of profound interest and significance to the future of humanity strikes us with an increasing force and clarity : it is the representative character of her Yoga. Not only has she aspired for the elimination of ignorance and suffering from the earth and the revelation of the Spirit in her transfigured substance, but, identified with the earth, she has constituted herself her sole representative, and practised the Yoga for the earth's liberation and transformation. Her Yoga has, therefore, been a collective rather than an individual Yoga; and many of the Prayers are not so much prayers of her soul or her heart for any personal boon or gain, as prayers for the earth and of the earth herself and of humanity through the Mother for a descent of the Light and Force, Peace and Harmony of the Divine. The Mother gave all herself to the Divine, so that, through her as an intermediary, He might act directly upon the earth and her children. She gave all herself in a supreme holocaust, so that the Divine might "reign over all the earth" with His "sovereign Love", and the consciousness of men might be full of the "Light of His serenity". This representative character of her Yoga is luminously brought out in her following utterances:—
"O Thou whom I cannot name but whose will I perceive in the
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—Dec, 25, 1916.
² ibid.,—March 27, 1917.
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supreme silence and in a total surrender, let me be the representative of the whole earth, so that, united with my consciousness, she may give herself to Thee without reserve.” ¹
"It was their pain and suffering that my physical being was feeling, O Lord.”²
The Mother's role of an intermediary presupposes, on the one hand, a complete identification of her whole being with the integral Divine, who is at once transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic, and, on the other hand, an equally complete identification with the whole earth for which she invokes and canalizes the Love and Light of the Divine. And this double identification has been either graphically expressed or cryptically indicated in many a Prayer of surpassing beauty and sublimity.
"In a silent and inward quietude, in a mute adoration, uniting myself with all this dark and sorrowful substance, I salute Thee, O Lord, as the divine saviour, I bless Thy love as the supreme liberator, I thank it for its innumerable boons, and I surrender myself to Thee, so that Thou mayst complete Thy work of perfectionment. Then I identify myself with Thy love and I am nothing but Thy inexhaustible love; I penetrate everything, living in the heart of each atom I kindle in it the fire that purifies and transfigures, the fire that is never extinguished, the messenger flame of Thy beatitude which realizes all perfections.
Then this love itself silently draws inwards, and turning towards Thee, unknowable splendour, awaits with ecstasy Thy New Manifestation” ³
Within the limited scope of this essay it has not been possible to attempt a fuller treatment of the subject. We have, therefore, had to omit any consideration of the Mother's more deeply mystic experience : her descent into the frozen darkness of
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.
² ibid.,—October 12, 1914.
³ ibid.,—June 2 , 1914.
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Matter, her contact with "the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience,” inconscience," "the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity"; her intimate colloquies with the Eternal and the Divine Mother, and the help rendered to her in her terrestrial work by the supreme Gods. Perhaps they are a little too mystic and mysterious for the blear and blinkered human reason to understand and value. We have had also to omit pondering over some of her characteristic teachings, vibrant words of light, sprung from a plenary Wisdom, which prove that her thoughts are not confined to a narrow spirituality, but embrace all the manifoldness of life and the multiplicity of its vital issues; for, to her unhorizoned consciousness there is no division between the Light of the Supreme and the Life of the universe—they are different aspects of the same indivisible Reality,
But we cannot close this cursory survey without citing in extenso two of the Mother's outstanding experiences which seem to us to serve as a permanent background of her thoughts and her great terrestrial work. We wonder whether there is any thing in the whole range of mystical literature to compare with these two gems of spiritual realization.
"The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity.
Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made little by little, even in the most material sensation, all personal limits fall away. The being, progressively, methodically, grew in greatness, breaking down every barrier, shattering every obstacle, that it might contain and manifest a force and a power which increased ceaselessly in immensity and intensity. It was as if a progressive dilatation of the cells until there was a complete identification withthe earth; the body of the awakened consciousness was the terrestrial globe moving harmoniously in ethereal space. And the consciousness knew that its global body was thus moving in the arms of the universal Personality, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to Her in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe and one with it; the conscious
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ness became the consciousness of the universe, in its totality immobile, in its internal complexity moving infinitely. The consciousness of the universe sprang towards the Divine in an ardent aspiration, a perfect surrender, and it saw in the splendour of the immaculate Light the radiant Being standing on a many-headed serpent whose body coiled infinitely around the universe. The Being in an eternal gesture of triumph mastered and created at one and the same time the serpent and the universe that issued from it; erect on the serpent. He dominated it with all His victorious might, and the same gesture that crushed the hydra, enveloping the universe, gave it eternal birth. Then the consciousness became this Being and perceived that its form was changing once more; it was absorbed into something which was no longer a form and yet contained all forms, something which, immutable, sees—the Eye, the Witness, and what It sees, is. Then this last vestige of form disappeared and the consciousness itself was absorbed into the Unutterable, the Ineffable.
The return towards the consciousness of the individual body took place very slowly in a constant and invariable splendour of Light and power and Felicity and Adoration, by successive gradations, but directly, without passing again through the universal and terrestrial forms. And it was as if the modest corporeal form had become the direct and immediate vesture, without any intermediary, of the supreme and eternal Witness”¹
"My heart has fallen asleep, down to the very depths of my being.
The whole earth is in a stir and agitation of perpetual change; all life enjoys and suffers, endeavours, struggles, conquers, is destroyed and formed again.
My heart has fallen asleep, down to the very depths of my being.
In al1 these innumerable and manifold elements, I am the Will that moves, the Thought that acts, the Force that realizes, the matter that is put in motion.
¹Prayers a" Meditations of the Mother—November 26, 1915 .
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No more any personal limits, no more any individual action, no more any separatist concentration creating conflict; nothing, but a single and infinite Oneness.
My heart has fallen asleep, down to the very depths of my being."¹
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother - April 10, 1917
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