The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

CHAPTER VI

The Mother in her Triple Poise

SRI Râmakrishna expressed one of the cardinal truths of the integral spiritual realisation when he said that it is the Mother who holds the key to the abode of Brahman, and unless She delivered it as a Grace, none could see Brahman face to face. Sri Râmakrishna's own self-consecration to the Mother was unimpeachable and inviolate to the last day of his life, in spite of his Vedantic initiation and the definitive Vedântic experience of the supreme status of the undifferentiated Absolute. Vaishnava, Tântrie, Vedântic, Christian, Moslem, all in one, he remained. the Mother's child, divinely free in his unquestioning reliance upon Her guidance, and, therefore, intuitively impeccable in all his movements. It was this fact of the absolute reliance of such a spiritual stalwart on the Grace and guidance of the Mother, which startled, baffled, and at last conquered the orthodox Vedântin, Totâpuri,, who, in the inflexible pride of his exclusive monism, had dared to deny and even deride the great Mother. Besides his child-like dependence on the Mother, Sri Râmakrishna's idolatry, his worship of her clay image, not only as a preliminary means to spiritual progress, but even as an indispensable element of the crowning expression of his God-drunk state and highest illumination, flashes a

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mysterious hint, a bare but very significant suggestion, of a certain truth which will be apparent to us as we proceed in our consideration of the objectification and individualisation of the Mother's Presence for a radical transformation of our active nature.

The Mother, whom Sri Râmakrishna adored and called Kâli, is the supreme Shakti, at once transcendent and universal, who, as the Consciousness-Force of Brahman, creates, constitutes and upholds the worlds by the illimitable might of Her Will and Power, and guides them through various phases of inevitable construction and destruction towards the goal of perfection which She, in Her infinite Love and Knowledge, has decreed for them. She was worshipped by the Vedic seers as Aditi, by the Tântrics as Adyâshakti and Mahâshakti, and traces of her worship are found in the fading memories of the Babylonian, Egyptian,. Assyrian and Chinese traditions of the Mother-cult, or the creative feminine principle. Sri Râmakrishna's combination of the Vedânta and the Tantra was a prophetic achievement of supreme importance,—it, was, in truth, a combination of the Absolute and the cosmic manifestation, of Heaven and Earth, of Spirit and Matter.

Is this transcendent and universal Shakti the Mother to whom we are called upon to surrender? Is She the sole pilot of the Integral Yoga? Were it only so, our Yoga would be identical with the Tântric Yoga, and robbed °f much of its integrality and characteristic potentiality For physical transformation and divine manifestation;

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for, the transcendent and universal Mother, as envisaged by Tantra, can release the soul from the bonds of the lower nature and bestow upon it either the status of a , masterful universality or of a featureless infinity in the Transcendent; but a divine fulfilment in the terrestrial existence by the transfiguration of even the surface physical being of man, and a conquest and conversion of Matter itself is a consummation which demands something more than these two clear-cut poises of the Mother—- another and more directly and concretely dynamic poise and power in which She can canalise her victorious Force into the material world and compel and quicken the irresistible germination of a divine race in humanity. It is a poise in the dissolving darkness of the world for the planting of Her highest regenerative and trans- formative Light, the poise of a special Power for a new creation and a renovation and remoulding of the entire being of man. Unless She assumes upon Herself the discords and disabilities of the material life, and descends into the blind abyss of its inconscient origin. Her divine Light cannot grow and glow in this dim waste of terrestrial existence. If the transcendent and universal poises could effect all decisive changes and revolutionary departures in the life of humanity, there would be no need of the Avatar; but that is not how the Mother deals with the evolutionary life of Her children. As the transcendent Shakti, She bears the fiat of the Absolute, as the universal Mahâshakti She ploughs and prepares the ground for the working out of the fiat, and by a direct descent and

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embodiment, She puts on a divine individuality and becomes the focal point of the fructifying fiat, so that the inital step of the intended departure may be securely and irrevocably taken, and a definite direction and lead given to the Godward Odyssey of mankind. Her individual noise in the material world is an imperative demand of the logic of physical transformation and divine life. Besides, the aim of the Integral Yoga being the supra- mental fulfilment of the Divine in man, the infusion of the supramental principle into Matter and the eventual conversion of the material life into the supramental life, are a work of such immense and intricate difficulties that even the most mighty and daring human effort, though aided and fortified by the universal and transcendent Mother, is powerless to achieve it. The transcendent and universal Mother must come down into the darkness of the material existence, assume a human form, identify Herself with the earth and her children, and, slowly but steadily, leaven them with Her supramental Light and Force. The inauguration of the reign of the Supermind in Matter cannot be done by the mental man, however high his soul may have soared in the realms of Spirit. It is the incarnate individuality of the Supreme Mother that alone can "tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda."¹

¹ The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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THE TRANSCENDENT POISE

In the supreme Purusha the Mother is, as Chit or Parâsamvit,¹ wrapt in an indistinguishable union with Her eternal Consort. Holding infinite potentialities in Herself, she is plunged in the ineffable bliss of Her undifferentiated existence. There is no creation there, not the slightest ripple or vibration of any self-expanding Force;—all is in-gathered, mute, still. Even to speak of Her as the Mother is to speak in terms of a later development, to apply an anticipatory epithet. The Mother's highest poise, as we can conceive it, is where She stands, in the timeless silence of the unitary existence, as the luminous link between the unmanifest Absolute and the multitudinous manifestation. She is there as the original, infinite Consciousness-Force, Chit-shakti, bearing in Herself the Supreme Divine as the eternal Sachchidânanda, and bringing out of Him, in an impeccable harmony of descending hierarchies, the Powers and Principles that sway the varying rhythms and patterns of manifestation and creation. Majestic and august She stands, above Time and Space, above all unity and multiplicity, above the Gods and their orchestral movements, releasing out of the unfathomable abyss of the ultimate Being the infinite possibilities of His self-formulation and self-expression. She is the Matrix and Mother of all that exists in the universe and beyond it, decreeing all that takes place here and elsewhere.

¹ Transcendent Consciousness

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THE UNIVERSAL POISE

The universal Mother, Mahâshakti, stands over the worlds, which She projects out of Herself, and dominates- and directs all their complex play of manifesting forces. She is concerned with the perfect working out of whatever is transmitted to Her by Her transcendent consciousness from the Absolute. With the assistance of Her emanations that prepare or preside over the large lines of the universal action. She governs the multitudinous movements of the world by the rigour and rectitude of Her Laws. The mechanical Nature with which we are all familiar, the aspect of Prakriti, is only the lower executive form of this cosmic Mahâshakti. Above the nature of the three gunas or essential modes of terrestrial existence. She moves in the freedom of Her spiritual infinitudes and creates and destroys in the steps of an unfaltering knowledge. Constituting yet transcending Prakriti, She determines and over-rules all her operations, all the involved interminglings of her gunas. Her unlimited vision embraces in its sweep at once the ultimate objectives of creation and the minute details of the working of every force and energy, every rule or rhythm; and Her unsleeping Power keeps the cosmic play in a perpetual progressive motion, and prevents it from tumbling into disintegrating chaos.

'But there are many planes of Her creation, many steps of the Divine Shakti. At the summit of this manifestation of which we are a part, there are worlds of infinite

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existence, consciousness, force and bliss over which the Mother stands as the unveiled eternal Power. All beings there live and move in an ineffable completeness and unalterable oneness, because She carries them safe in Her arms for ever. Nearer to us are the worlds of a perfect :supramental creation in which the Mother is the supra- .mental Mahâshakti, a Power of divine omniscient Will and omnipotent Knowledge always apparent in its un- failing works and spontaneously perfect in every process. There all movements are the steps of the Truth; there all beings are souls and powers and bodies of the divine Light; there all experiences are seas and floods and waves of an intense and absolute Ananda."¹

The supramental Mahâshakti has manifested four of Her great aspects in Her governance and guidance of our terrestrial existence: one is Her aspect of Maheshwari, another of Mahâkali, the third of Mahâlaksmi and the fourth of Mahâsaraswati.² They correspond more or less approximately to the four aspects of Nârâyana as described in the Vaishnava Pancharâtra—Vâsudeva, Shankarshan, Pradyumna and Aniruddha—and can be said to be the primal differentiating terms of the four Varnas or four basic types of human temperament. Brâhmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra. It is a harmonious establishment of these four aspects of the Supramental Mother in a human .being that constitutes the integral perfection, and is an

¹ The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

² For further details refer to The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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essential condition of the divine life in the material world. Maheshwari with her all-illumining and all-commanding splendour of knowledge, Mahâkâli with her thunders and lightnings of force, Mahâlakshmi with her enthralling and exalting grace and harmony, and Mahâsaraswati with her perfection of organisation and execution and her faultless mastery of the science and craft and technique of things, found in man the creative fulness of the divine Mature. There are other and higher aspects of the cosmic Mahâshakti, but they have not yet stood out and manifested themselves in the terrestrial play, only when the above four have installed themselves in the transformed human nature can they manifest and become dynamic here.

It will have become clear from the above consideration that Sri Aurobindo's conception of the universal Mahâshakti and Her principal dynamic aspects and their descent and revelation in man, is characterised by a limpid definiteness, which replaces the usual vagueness and con- fusion attaching to them, and turns them into distinct tangible realities, indispensable to the perfection of the Integral Yoga. Each aspect represents an essential truth of our being, a potential truth of our seeking, and a concrete truth of our ultimate becoming, and all have to be seized and harmonised in an ascending and descending experience, which culminates in the transmutation of the lower nature (Apara Prakriti) into the higher (Para. Prakriti). This transmutation is the crux of the whole process of the Integral Yoga and the very pivot of its final

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aim; and the significance of the absolute surrender to the Mother in Her triple poise comes out clearly as we follow the steps of this radical transmutation. For, who else except the Divine Mother can effect tins change of the lower into the higher nature, bestowing upon man the double freedom of self-expression—the freedom of the soul and the freedom of the converted and divinised .nature?

THE INDIVIDUAL POISE

The most immediately effective and mysteriously transfiguring poise of the Mother is in Her incarnate individuality. In Her universal poise. She acts according to the cosmic Law of Her own creation;—She lays down the lines, marshals Her energies, develops the stages, and leads all things and beings according to their natures to their destined goals; but the exceptional departures, the new original possibilities proceed from the Transcendent, and it is the individual poise of the Mother which, representing the Transcendent, becomes the sole channel of those possibilities as well as of the Will and Grace realising them here. But for this individual embodiment, the transcendent Will could hardly find a direct means of completely fulfilling itself in the material world. The embodied physical action of the individual poise of the Mother is a constant opportunity to our embodied being to approach and contact the divine Grace, and accelerate the pace of our evolution into our dynamic divinity.

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The individual divine Mother, at once transcendent and universal in Her consciousness, brings down the transcendent Will to new creation, and infuses it into those individual units of humanity who open and surrender to Her in an unquenchable aspiration for becoming Her instruments upon earth.

In the age in which we live, the Will of the Transcendent is, as Sri Aurobindo assures us, the manifestation of the supramental Divine in the material world. The individuality of the Mother, though in full possession of Her transcendence and universality, is the living medium of the supramental Force and Light put out in front for the supramental creation and fulfilment in man- kind. The key to the highest spiritual achievement of the modem age is, therefore, in the hands of the Mother, and to be able to receive Her Grace is to qualify for a share in the glory of that consummation.

This brings us to the question of the Avatarhood of God. Each epoch of a crucial turning in the life of humanity is graced by a definite Presence and Power of the Divine, which represents, so to say, the pith and peak of the aim to be realised, the work to be accomplished. That which decrees the specific achievement—and it is always the Will of the Transcendent that does it—descends here into a mortal tenement to initiate the work, to furrow the virgin field and sow the golden seed, so that a new era may be ushered in and new possibilities may press towards realisation. Each incarnation has a particular mission to pioneer, and though all incarnations are identical in

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their origin and essence,—for they are the Transcendent in individual human forms and conscious of their diving Self,—each demands an absolute allegiance and loyalty of his contemporaries for the fulfilment of his particular work in the world.¹ It will not do to be exclusively attached to Rama in the age of Krishna, for, though Rama and Krishna are the same in essence, each represents a definite specific work. God's own work, which can be accomplished only if the mind and heart of his age turn devotedly to him and his ideal. This does not mean a scrapping of the other Avatars, but a whole-hearted surrender to the present one, along with a general adoration of all. Of course, if the aim is to escape out of the world of ignorance and suffering into some beatific Beyond, or unite with the Divine in His supracosmic transcendence, the worship of any Avatar is as effective as that of any other; but if the aim is to fulfil the special Will of the Divine in the age to which one belongs, an ungrudging dynamic surrender to the Avatar of that age is the best way to help God's work and further that of all Avatars into the bargain. If there were no truth in the particularity of the Avatar's mission, the very fact of Avatarhood would lose all significance, or one Avatar would be enough for all ages to come.

The individual embodiment of the Mother is the face and front of the Transcendent walking the earth for its

¹ Compare the words of Jesus Christ, "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved."

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deliverance and transformation. It is an embodiment, instinct with the force and radiant with the glory of the Supreme, on the one hand, and stamped with the utmost sacrifice of a redeeming love and compassion, on the other. Who else could have entered, except the Mother, into the unplumbed depths of the Inconscient, touched with Her finger, "the horror of the falsehood", and consented to work in that "supreme obscurity", so that the divine Light might be kindled even there, and evolution proceed not from nescience, but from consciousness to greater consciousness, trailing joy and freedom and harmony to their highest perfection? "Thou plungest me, O Lord, into the most opaque 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?"¹ Such was the prayer the Mother sent up to the Divine from the "vortex of the hell" into which she had descended, and the reply of the Divine rang out clear and categoric: "I have chosen thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth, not in an invisible and hidden way, but in a way apparent to the eyes of all men. And what thou wert created to be, thou shalt be."² "Fight that thou mayst conquer and triumph; struggle to surmount all that has been up to this day, to make the new Light emerge,

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

² ibid.

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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 realise."¹ Even so far back as 1915, the Mother knew, not only in the depths of Her being, where She has been fully awake ever since Her early childhood, but in the outer physical being, that "Thy will is that from the heart of this heavy and obscure Matter I must let loose the volcano of Thy Love and Light. It is Thy will that, breaking all old conventions of language, there must arise the right Word to express Thee, the Word that never was heard before; it is Thy will that the integral union should be made between the smallest things below and the sublimest and most vast above; and that is why, O Lord, cutting me off from all religious joy and spiritual ecstasy, depriving me of all freedom to concentrate exclusively on Thee, Thou hast said to me, 'Work as an ordinary man in the midst of ordinary beings; learn to be nothing more than they are in all that is manifesting; associate with the integral way of their being; for, beyond all that they know, all that they are, thou carriest in thyself the torch of the integral splendour which does not waver, and by associating with them, it is this thou wilt carry into their midst."²

This is the work which the Divine Mother has to do upon earth in Her individual poise, a work of inconceivable

.

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

² ibid.

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labour and toil, carried on from day to day in the teeth of the direst opposition from the forces of darkness, and AC indifference or cold scepticism even of those for otiose liberation and perfection She toils. Those who have lived at Her feet know what it means for Her, an image of immaculate purity and eternal bliss, to live in the stinking cess-pool of human desires and lusts and passions, surrounded by suffering and obscurity and ugliness, pelted by perversity and stabbed by falsehood—to live in association with greed and treachery and ingratitude, so that little by little, by the irresistible power of Her transforming Love, She may turn the cess-pool into a crystal stream of heavenly waters, and, delivering man from the yoke of ignorance and cleansing him of all impurities, transfer him into the arms of the Divine. And yet those who know Her, know nothing of the work She has been doing, behind the veil, deep in the pit, far in the backwoods, where the aboriginal appetites of the animal man seethe and surge, and the stark inertia and insensibility of Matter hold an undisputed sway. None can measure the patience, the loving solicitude, the unwearied forbearance, and the calm, clairvoyant certitude with which She has been transmuting the subterranean bases of human existence and nature in order that one day man may grow unimpeded into his regal godhead and the face of the earth beam with the beauty and bliss of the Divine.

The supreme Mother in Her individual poise is closest and easiest of access to our physical being, whose transformation and conversion is the most important condition

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of supramental manifestation. In the Integral Yoga no spiritual experience counts for much unless it is translated into the terms of the physical being, and rivetted and revealed in the outer nature and action. The Mother's physical Presence and contact, surcharged with the supra. mental Light and Force, and Her constant control and guidance, elimination of evil and dispensation of Grace area guarantee of the ultimate victory of Spirit over Matter; for who can resist the Power of Her to whom the Divine has said, "Art thou not myself crystallised for my work?"¹ "The Divine has to put on humanity in order that the human being may rise to the Divine."²

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

² Letters on the Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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