Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

19: The First Round: 1926-1950

The Unbearable Pressure

“From the beginning of November the pressure of the Higher Power began to become unbearable,” ¹ notes a dis­ciple. How right he was! It was weighing on their heads. Perhaps it was starting to weigh on the head of the earth. It was in 1926. And suddenly, on the 24th of November, around 5 p.m., Mother had all the disciples called in. They were rounded up from everywhere—from the seaside bou­levard to the soccer field. By 6 p.m., everyone was there. On the spacious upstairs veranda, behind Sri Aurobindo’s chair, hung a black silk tapestry embroidered with three golden dragons—Chinese dragons—biting each other’s tail. Sri Aurobindo never liked staging, but there may be times when there is a stage on the earth, after all. I believe that Mother was the one who brought back that tapestry from her Chinese stopover. In any case, the dragons had a signifi¬cance: a Chinese prophecy predicted that the Truth would manifest upon earth when the three dragons—the dragon of the earth (earth=body), the dragon of the mind and the dragon of heaven—would meet. That day may well have been the first moment of meeting between Matter and “heaven”—that “something” weighing on their heads. Once again, China had stuck its head right into Sri Aurobindo’s room and was present, as it were, for the event. It may have been mere chance, but there would be no end to such “chances.” Who knows whether China does not represent the dragon of the Mind?... The Chinese are the most intelligent people in the world—they give us the shivers. At 6 p.m., Sri Aurobindo came out of his room, followed by Mother—there was always that tranquil slowness in his movements. He had already changed a great deal (physi­cally changed); some time earlier, an old disciple who had come back to see him had exclaimed, “But what has hap­pened to you?" And Sri Aurobindo, eluding the question, had mischievously replied, “And what has happened to you?" Then He had simply added: When the Higher Con­sciousness, after descending to the mental level, comes down to the vital and even below the vital, then a great transforma­tion takes place in the nervous and even in the physical being.² Sri Aurobindo’s complexion had taken on a different color. He who had a rather dark skin, “like that of an ordi­nary Bengali,” Purani, that old disciple, remarks, “I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink color and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light."³ A “great” change. But that was nothing: we shall never know or see what Sri Aurobindo was between 1926 and 1950, when that creamy light turned to gold, as if permeating his whole body, visible to all, that stature that had shed its ascetic angles of the 1920’s to be filled with that solid stillness, as if one suddenly were entering the Himalayas, but such very soft, vast and crystalline Himalayas that one could melt into them as if into eternity, and it was eternity, living, solid, right there— Oh, to have had the privilege to enter there, to gaze or rather to be gazed at by those eyes, which had somehow changed from the glowing ember black of a warrior of Kali to a golden brown and then into that melted infinity which one no longer knew if it were blue like the sky or even if it had any color at all, because one went far, far away, as if adrift, toward a great Country of Forever where one was forever at ease, forever at home, forever true and pure. That was it, and that was all. We will never know, never see again that softness of infinity trapped in a few cells. He never let himself be photographed, except the last year, in 1950, when He had already decided to leave—and this was already a Sri Aurobindo from the other side, his matter left behind—but even that photograph we will never have in its purity, as a photographic halo was added to it for those who do not know how to see. Such is the way of the world. They give you a post-mortem halo, but when the halo is there, alive, it is rather “unbearable” ... except for those who know how to melt. And how soft it was to melt there, to forget the small human pygmy there, to remember there the only Memory that is alive in a man. I saw Him only once, but once is like a lifetime. Afterward, one knows what to love means.

At six p.m., He came out of his room, followed by Mother, very small and slender—this Mother, She was very small, with such a fragile air, and yet She was lightning and thun­der and you felt physically exceeded on all sides, as if She were very tall. But that is another story (without “as if”), a long story we want to be absolutely true—and which will be true. No haloes: the pure truth is more marvelous than all our saintly niches. He sat down and She sat at his right on a tiny stool. The meditation beneath the three dragons lasted about forty-five minutes. There were twenty-four of them. “Every one present felt a kind of pressure above his head. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with some electrical energy.... It was certain that a Higher Consciousness had descended on earth,”⁴ wrote Purani. And that was all.

All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour ... Rigid, stone-like, fixed like a hill or statue,

Vast my body feels and upbears the world’s weight; Dire the large descent of the Godhead enters Limbs that are mortal....

All the world is changed to a single oneness.⁵

That is all a poem written on that day alludes to. It was the beginning of the cells’ opening. As for Sri Aurobindo, He simply said: I called you to tell you that from today, I am withdrawing for my sadhana and the Mother will take charge of everyone; it is She to whom you should address your­selves, She who will represent me, She who will do all the work. This was the Ashram’s official founding. From then on, they would see Him no more than three times a year (later four) on darshan days, when each one would file silently past Him to receive that Look. For twenty-four years He would remain in his room, to work things out,⁶ as He said in his untranslatable language, so full of euphe­misms : to work things out, until the day he was brought beneath the huge copper-pod tree with yellow flowers in the Ashram courtyard that Mother called the “Service" tree:

Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change ⁷

When I read this line from Savitri to Mother, She added, even death—that’s why Sri Aurobindo left his body.⁸

Did He really have to die to change death? What does changing death mean? There remain so many mysteries to solve in those two lives that we are before these lines as in prayer.

The Microscopic Discipline

He had said, “She will do all the work," but this is not what Mother said! He had supposedly passed on the respon­sibility to me, but he was standing behind. HE was actually doing everything. I was active, but with absolutely no respon­sibility!⁹ She was tremendously active. She created a whole life from scratch—from the bakery (these people had indeed to be fed), the gardens, the laundry, the mechanical workshop and shoe repair store to the acquisition of build­ings, their repair and maintenance—all scattered about the town (from the very beginning, even before the Ashram was founded, in 1920, Sri Aurobindo had clearly said, My own idea was for our system to grow up in the society, not out of it)¹⁰ with all the problems arising from this sticky mixing with so-called “ordinary” life. It was really a question of taking everybody’s life, at the crudest level, with both men and women together, and trying to make something else out of it without seeming to, in the very conditions of the world. There was no question of an Ashram enclosed within four walls; nothing was more unlike an ashram than that Ashram—hence the difficulty, both in people and in circumstances. Nothing is easier than to be an ascetic who all at once embraces the “spiritual life” and casts off the coat to concentrate on his virtues; you know what to expect—a bowl of rice, pure and simple, rags to wear, a straw mat on the floor (or no mat), and it is marvelous, you cut off everything and enthusiastically discover the joys of freedom. But the moment you are handed everyone’s plate­ful of food, everyone’s clothes, a bit of a house with its garden, like everyone, and even a servant, you begin finding that the food is not salted enough, the clothes are badly pressed, the garden is full of weeds and the servant a head­ache and a liar: it grates and grates on every side. It grates microscopically, meticulously, relentlessly, from morning till night, in every detail. Matter begins to suffocate you. Sri Aurobindo and Mother knew very well what They were doing. Oh, it is quite easy to be a hero! But heroism at the level of ordinary matter, step after step, is unimaginably difficult—everything comes out, spurts up and springs out of every nook and cranny of the subconscient: old heredi­tary, familial, culinary and even patriotic habits—nothing escapes; at every second, at the slightest pretext, there it is, stark naked, ridiculous, petty, obstinate, all its bristles up. It is exhausting. It is endless. At every turn you catch your­self not being what you should be. At every instant you realize that you never do things in the true way. The old reactions seethe and swarm, as does the old way of looking, the old harping routine of the mind, the old vital vibra­tions ; it growls in the depths, it rebels in the depths, not at all happy—it is all of Matter groaning and refusing the Pressure of the Light, or even just the faint mental pressure to do things in a less automatic, unconscious and obscure way. To take a razor and shave while remaining conscious of each gesture is an odious task—it refuses, it sticks, it resists, it does not give a damn. And there you are, push­ing against walls on every side, in all you do, all you think, all you say! It is petty, it is sordid. It is an obtusely rebellious Matter—thousands of years of matter and hundreds of grandfathers clinging to the slightest of gestures.... A Matter conscious at every minute, clear at every minute, exact at every minute? No, it is not at all easy. It is the very characteristic of this physical world to demand an unflagging vigilance, She said in a letter to her son, as early as 1924. The conquest of the material realm allows no lapse, even of short duration; and the weakness of a single instant almost always results in disastrous consequences which seem out of proportion to the sheer importance and duration of this weakness.¹¹ As if one grain of false Matter or a false mate­rial reaction contained the very seed of destruction and death. In the mind, we make speeches; but in Matter, every second pulsates either toward life or toward death. On this level, the choice is very simple and very drastic. Once our eyes open to these microscopic little things, we will be touching a chain of events that range from a false step on the sidewalk to the greatest catastrophes. We will touch the overwhelming complicity of Matter, which makes no dis­tinction between great or small: there is simply life or death, on any scale and all perfectly continuous. It is one or the other. There is no approximation. The evolutionary laboratory was undergoing a severe, microscopic and invisible discipline. But how could Matter ever change, if it were never touched?

She went from one person to another, seeing to every­thing down to each nook and cranny: the quality of the flour, the wall to be repaired, the semicolon, the bowl badly washed, this one’s scratch, that one’s revolt, these quarrels or those stupidities. She repaired, rectified, silently encour­aged or directed Her pure light onto each point, smiled and flooded hearts with a sparkle of mischief or sweetness, or that sudden Vastness opening up like the azure in the depths of Her eyes and driving out everything, sweeping everything away in a cataract of triumphant joy, or this torrential energy which topples obstacles and makes everything brand new—as if, with Her, life could begin again at every second. Mother was constant re-creation. In a flash, you could become like a child again, new, virgin, even if all the old stupidities caught up with you two minutes later; but She began again as tirelessly as you tirelessly began again. All my realisations ... would have remained theoretical, as it were, said Sri Aurobindo. It is the Mother who showed the way to a practical form.¹² Yes, Mother was the bridge to universal Matter. The Shakti in motion. And the laboratory grew and developed. In a letter of 1930 to her son, She wrote, We are at our twenty-first house; the salaried staff of the Ashram (workers and domestic servants) has reached 60 or 65 people, and the number of Ashram members (Sri Aurobindo’s disciples living in Pondicherry) ranges between 85 and 100—5 automobiles, 12 bicycles, 4 sewing machines, a dozen typewriters, many garages, automobile workshops, electrical and building services, tailoring workshops (with European and Indian tailors, embroiderers, etc.), a library and reading room containing several thousand volumes, a photographic service and general stores holding the most varied articles, all imported from France, large flower, veg­etable and fruit gardens, a dairy, a bakery, etc. ...As you can see, it is no small affair. And as I supervise all of it, I can rightfully say that I am busy.¹³ In 1950, there would already be 741 of them. A young French Polytechnician had joined them (the Polytechnique was decidedly pursuing Mother) coming from the Mongolian lamaseries where he had gone in search of the Truth, after leaving everything. He would become one of the most efficient, clearest (and rare) assistants in this laboratory. Sri Aurobindo called him Pavitra, “the Pure one.”¹⁰⁰ He was also an eminent chemist, and it seems that in 1923, in the laboratories of Japan, where he had arrived just after Mother's departure, he discovered an astonishing way to release the atomic energy of most common metals (especially copper and aluminum), which would have made the atomic bomb available to any purse and any madman. He destroyed his notes and left for the Mongolian lamaseries. Through him, science was symboli­cally being converted to its own tomorrow. All the same, he grumbled like the others and did not understand very well, either, the process of this strange yoga in reverse in which you were prevented from reaching “liberation”! Just as he was about to cross the barrier and get out of his body into the expanses above, Mother would pull him back in: "Instead of helping me go beyond, it seems She brought me back into the physical consciousness!” he exclaimed in a conversation with Sri Aurobindo. And Mother replied, Yes. The question is to link both consciousnesses, which means to bring the higher consciousness down into the physical body. Everything must be present, here, in the natural con­sciousness. ¹⁴ We do not know the extent of the profound revolution Sri Aurobindo and Mother have brought to the world.... And in her quietly mischievous way, She added, Every time you try to escape, you will be brought back this way. It was categorical, but Mother also knew how to be perfectly categorical and without approximation. He would be Mother’s right-hand man.

She did not spare herself for a second. “Her body was frail,” one of the Ashram doctors remarked, “food and sleep were medically quite inadequate to cope with her super-abundant vitality.”¹⁵ But Mother and Sri Aurobindo had always been unmedical, needless to say, along with fostering a number of other illegalities. I am an atheist of medicine! She exclaimed, laughing. It was really a kind of "churning” of Matter, as She put it, twenty-two hours out of twenty-four (She slept only two hours a night), continu­ously, day after day, down to the most microscopic details, for thirty-six years, until that day in 1962 when She with­drew ... to do what Sri Aurobindo had been doing. It is in action, in effort, in the advance forward that one must find rest,¹⁶ She would say. It is indeed the very characteristic of the Supermind to unite the opposites: rest and movement, etc. There lies an extraordinary, practical formula for life. There is a certain way of letting the Shakti flow through the cells without friction. Friction is what creates wear and tear, weariness and finally death. There is a clear little cell to create which will be an infinitely more powerful source of energy than all our atomic bombs: an inexhaustible energy, She said. Around one o'clock in the morning, She went to Sri Aurobindo's room for the last time. It was her haven. The rest of the time, She was literally pursued by the disciples and barely found time to breathe or have a few minutes’ rest except... in her bathroom, where at least no one dared to disturb her. What was going on between these two beings?—silence and a gaze. We were in marvel­ous accord, in an identical vibration.... Whenever there was a special force descending, or an opening, or a supramental manifestation, we would know it at the same time, in the same manner. And we didn’t even need to talk about it; we would sometimes exchange a word or two concerning the consequences, the practical effects on the work, but that’s all.

I never had this with anyone except Sri Aurobindo.¹⁷

And life thus went on limpidly until that fateful day in 1949 when Sri Aurobindo told her, One of us must go. In his tranquil, neutral tone, just as one asks what time it is.

What had happened?

Why? How many times since then I have asked myself that question!¹⁸ She was still asking it in 1969, twenty years later. Of course, reasons can be found, can always be given, Mother herself gave some, but ... We have a rather awe­some “but” to delve into, for the answer would perhaps tell us the very fate of the world. A failure? ... Something else? He didn’t succumb, She said. It was truly his choice—he chose to do the work in another way, a way he felt would bring much more rapid results. So we can't say that he “suc­cumbed.” “Succumbed" gives the idea that it was against his will, that it just happened, that it was an accident—it cannot be “succumbed."¹⁹

So what is it?

“Why? How many times I have asked myself that question!”

We can’t both remain upon earth—was one of them needed on the other side? But She, too, went to the other side, so? Where is the other side? What is the “other side”?... Has this side changed? Or is it the other side that has changed?... Unless it is no longer on the "other side”?—an incredible junction?... Something.... A mystery like that of the next earth. We must find the mystery, because to find it may well be to make it exist. Someone who will be able to say “there it is,” and there it will be. The curtain will be pulled open. We will have realized that it was open. But what? How?... We have to see. We have to find it. It must be here, right in front of our eyes, but we do not see it. We are not used to seeing. There is a certain habit to be found, a way to be found.

There is something to be found.

At one o’clock in the morning, her work over, She was at His feet at last, in peace. A sense of total, total security—for thirty years ... Nothing, nothing unfortunate could happen, for he was there.²⁰

Then She would return to her room and find all the flowers that had been brought from the gardens on big trays, and She would sort them, cut them, put the roses in vases according to their colors until two in the morning, and “sleep” until four o’clock—the flowers She would use the next morning to say to the disciples, tirelessly: "Aspiration,” “Flame,” “Transparency,” “Opening,” “Purity,” “Simplicity”....

Flame, flame! So much flame was needed for the Work to succeed—has it succeeded?

Has it succeeded?

It would be necessary to see. It would be necessary to know how to see.

A flame is perhaps what is necessary.

Or else all is lost. But it cannot be lost, for He said, My faith and will are for the NOW. ...I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world ... which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster.²¹ This was in 1946, after the war.

One more disaster?

Or the flame within, the flame that hastens time.

The Perpendicular Section

And what was He doing behind the curtain?

We really know so little about it; whenever the disciples insistently asked Him to explain "his” Supermind (with an indefinable little touch of doubt, mixed with faith and a taste for the miraculous, along with the deep-rooted, secret mistrust of Matter wondering what was going to fall on its head), Sri Aurobindo patiently answered: What's the use? How much would anybody understand? Besides, the present business is to bring down and establish the Supermind, not to explain it. If it establishes itself, it WILL explain itself— if it does not, there is no use explaining it. I have said some things about it in past writings, but without success in en­lightening anybody. So why repeat the endeavour?²² The supermind will explain itself ... As a matter of fact, we do believe that it is irresistibly explaining itself, like a bull­dozer, in every recess of consciousness and every corner of the world—what escaped the disciples in those days has become virtually visible to everyone. A floodgate has been thrown open. We can even understand why Sri Aurobindo was hardly concerned with his written teaching—not until 1939, more than twenty years after he wrote it, did He publish The Life Divine in book form, and only because a publisher from Calcutta had asked Him to do so. “What abnegation!” we might think with our very human con­sciousness, and we wonder whether many geniuses would dispassionately leave their masterpieces unseen for twenty years in a drawer.... But Sri Aurobindo saw so much far­ther, deeper, beyond his own person; that Supermind had to be established: The descent of the supramental means only that the power will be there in the earth-consciousness as a living force just as the thinking mental and higher men­tal are already there.²³ The disciples protested, saying: Who can follow you? Not everyone is capable of doing the yoga and making the necessary effort of purification (sigh). And Sri Aurobindo answered: It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden ... it is for them I am putting forth all my efforts to bring down the supramental Force within a measurable time.²⁴ It was not taking place in small books, or even in big ones, neat and gilt-edged; it had to, He wanted it to enter universal Matter and tomorrow’s man to breathe it as naturally as today we breathe (badly) the Mind. But instead of a new idea to be caught in midair, it is a new vibration in matter —what vibration, what is it? Perhaps (surely) it will explain itself, but if we could only catch a few glimpses of the mechanism, in spite of Sri Aurobindo’s "discretion,” that would perhaps hasten the time—for time is running short. Though this is probably our misinterpretation and every­thing proceeds exactly as it should do. Let us just say that we could have the privilege of assisting consciously in the evolutionary transition instead of jumping like a marmoset from one cracking branch to another without understand­ing anything. The details or method of the later stages of the Yoga which go into little known or untrodden regions, I have not made public and I do not at present intend to do so.²⁵ This was in 1935. He never did. He left without telling us what He was doing,²⁶ Mother noted.

There was a reason. But this is for later on.

We can, however, go off in search of Sri Aurobindo’s mystery and gather a few clues in the manner of Arthur Conan Doyle's "dear Watson.” When we come to Mother, it will no longer be Arthur Conan Doyle, but an enterprise akin to deciphering hieroglyphics, mapping a forest, with biology and a dash of Rudyard Kipling and Wells in it, and also a little Mowgli who will never again recover from his rapture ... and something else, which perhaps partakes of love and divination, to wrest out the secret.

We need the secret.

The first clear clue to the mechanism is given to us in a conversation of 1923, when Sri Aurobindo had not yet “withdrawn.” “May we know something about the present state of your Sadhana?” asked Purani, that charming old disciple now no longer with us, to whom we owe the record­ing of these "Evening Talks." In a distinct but low voice, Sri Aurobindo answered: I cannot call it a state, or a condition. It is, rather, a complex movement. I am at present engaged in bringing the Supermind into the physical consciousness, down even to the sub-material. The physical is by nature inert and does not want to be rendered conscient. It offers much greater resistance as it is unwilling to change. One feels as if “digging the earth,” as the Veda says. It is literally digging from Supermind above to Supermind below. The being has become conscious and there is a constant move­ment up and down. The Veda calls it “the two ends"—the head and the tail of the dragon completing and encompass­ing the consciousness. I find that so long as Matter is not Supramentalised, the mental and the vital also cannot be fully Supramentalised. The physical is therefore to be accepted and transformed. ...I am trying to bring the highest layer of the Supermind into the physical consciousness.²⁷ This up and down movement is what is most perceptible to all those who have ever tried their hand at it. Freed from its mental coating and its various fixations, inferior and utili­tarian to varying degrees, the consciousness becomes like a beam of force (Consciousness-Force, said Sri Aurobindo) moving freely through the body, rather like a current with varying intensities and densities. It is like a mass of force in motion. It ascends, descends, directs itself outwards or inwards, on people or events, or inner difficulties to be resolved, rather like cobalt bombs—there are small “bombs” and big “bombs," it all depends on the degree of evolution. But the general tendency, when both of your feet are stuck in this terribly thick and suffocating Matter, is to go up “above,” like a drowning man in search of a little oxygen, into the clearer strata of consciousness, easier to breathe— in other words, the transparent top of the curtain. And you go back and forth, up and down, each time bringing back a little thread of light, so fragile that it keeps breaking, right down to the level of your two feet in Matter. It is rather like blowing oxygen bubbles in the mud. But gradually the thread becomes established, grows stronger and no longer breaks as often. The bridge is built. At first, it is no more than a tiny rent of light across geological layers, whose cross-section resembles what you might see if you followed a very special ray of light thrown across the ocean surface (or a fishbowl), then darker and darker liquid depths (in the Mind), then the first bottom sediments (the Vital), then increasingly thick and heavy mud, down to the bedrock. The deeper you “dig,” as Sri Aurobindo or the Veda says, the purer or more powerful the ray must be. Ultimately, you do not dig into one little body, you dig into the body of the earth. And the rent of light widens, gains ground, sinks inch by inch into deeper layers—“just like that," while you pace back and forth, climb the stairs or clean your tooth glass. It takes place everywhere and all the time, unassumingly. There is nothing more unassuming. But the deeper it reaches, the more it hurts, the more it all begins swarming everywhere like a knot of serpents or the teem­ing of larvae caught in a ray of light. It is the world that swarms. It is the whole world swarming all over and starting little revolutions right and left, without knowing why. It is the little dasyus, as the Vedas call them, thrashing about: the cave dwellers of the depths. They do not like oxygen at all, they do not like the ray of light: they like their mud, and that is that. And everything trying to intrude is a merciless slayer and a dangerous enemy of the public mud’s safety.

Such is the picture, "in cross-section,” as it were.

There comes a moment, however, when “the supramen­tal below,” at the very bottom of the hole, is reached: the same Light as above, the same Power as above, the same transparency, the great Exactitude. It is “the well of honey covered by the rock” the Vedas speak of (II.24.4). The tre­mendous task of opening up the physical cells to the Divine Light,²⁸ as Sri Aurobindo said even before withdrawing in 1926. This is the supremely dangerous moment: things either break or hold out. Will the body hold out? Will the earth hold out?... That is the question. Will it just burst under the “unbearable pressure” or open up to the infiltra­tion and the fresh air—will it adapt? This is what Sri Aurobindo called a concentrated evolution.²⁹

The Resistance

Yes, He was “working things out.”

The other clues will be found in the reactions of the labo­ratory itself and a few fragments let dropped from Sri Aurobindo’s pen.

The laboratory did not so well withstand the manipula­tion, or rather the "pressure.” At first, it is the bigger fish that show up; they are easy to spot and even their long teeth are not that awesome: you know they are teeth. Then all the sticky, flat fry of the deep come bursting to the sur­face, half-asphyxiated and struggling wildly. They keep coming up again and again.... And a strange phenomenon takes place when you come down to that level instead of gazing at the world from the height of your cosmic trapeze: the asphyxiation of the fry is felt like your own asphyxia­tion, you are that, and you struggle with it as if evil could not really be cured except by swallowing it up. It is quite hard, and foul; you are suddenly filled with very unpleas­ant odors and reduced to the size of a dwarf, which makes you think, “What! Is this yoga? Is this me...? ” It is excru­ciating. “Look, I set out seeking cosmic consciousness, not these stinking trifles! ” Yes, but sorrow, the great sorrow of the world is made of a million trifles—sharks are charm­ing, that is not where death is: it lies in those countless “trifles" which fill our daily lives, invisible beneath our pretty words and puffed-up ideals. And the wearisome voice of the Vedic Asuras—titans and demons—keeps droning in your ears: “You won’t succeed, it’s a hopeless endeavor, it's doomed to failure, you’re wasting your time.... Go on, soar into the cosmic consciousness!” On and on, day after day, tirelessly, and night after night without respite, it is there all the time: it is either you or me. Which one will win? Sometimes, you feel like Mr. Seguin's goat,¹⁰⁵ which is doomed to be eaten at dawn, and the horde of malicious devils keeps on whispering in your ear, "You’re going to be devoured, you’re going to ..." It is a hideous and sticky battle, we must admit. We can understand the sages and saints who all scampered off like rabbits into the heaven of consciousness. This is the Subconscious, what Sri Aurobindo calls the “subconscient” (nothing to do with our surface psychologies); in other words, the whole sub-human evolutionary past, all the layers, not only human but ani­mal and vegetal, that have settled at the very bottom of our cells. It is a Herculean labour, Sri Aurobindo notes, for, when one enters there, it is a sort of an unexplored continent. Previous Yogis came down to the vital. If I had been made to see it before, probably I would have been less enthusiastic.³⁰

The disciples were hardly so; after the first wave of enthu­siasm, one focuses on microscopic irritations that keep grating and grating—everything is microscopic. Yet the work was being done for them, that is, they did not need to fight themselves (it was Sri Aurobindo who was doing battle), but only to follow, to adhere, to open themselves. To open oneself means to undergo the experiment, to allow the battle to take place. All the progress Sri Aurobindo made, I made automatically,³¹ Mother remarked. This is the auto­matic law of the Supermind, but for it to work, one must, to some extent, allow the progress to enter—side with the Ray, not with the swarming. It seems they spent their time putting up walls—oh, not up above 1 Above was the pretty consciousness, poeticizing, spiritualizing and making speeches, and full of veneration for the Master. But down below is quite a different matter. A commonplace “matter” you skip over, do not want to see, for you are "above” all that—though not always. So you ask for "experiences”— after all, you have come to the yoga to have “illuminations,” poetry at the tip of your pen, articles for your periodical, inspiration for your book, or stretches of light... for sleep­ing. Thousands and thousands of complaining letters to the Master. And patiently, imperturbably, He answered each one. He tried to make them understand: The pressure, the call is to change in that part of the nature which depends directly on the Inconscient [when the yoga had already gone one degree deeper, from the Subconscient to the Inconscient], the fixed habits, the automatic movements, the mechanical repetitions of the nature, the involuntary reactions to life, all that seems to belong to the fixed character of a man. ...As for experiences, they are all right but the trouble is that they do not seem to change the nature. They only enrich the consciousness.³² This was not easy to accept, even when one had quite understood in the higher parts of one's conscious­ness. Below, it was grumbling, taking offense, clinging to a thousand daily details: no one wanted to let go of his little fry, and might even assert one’s right to darkness and suf­fering. Reading that fabulous correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and his disciples a bit closely, we feel our hearts tighten when realizing all that He must have endured and swallowed, day after day, in terms of trifling questions, hair-splitting pettiness, quarrels, threats of suicide, hunger strikes, illnesses of resistance—everything resisted. And if someone happened to die, they would express surprise that this deceitful Supermind had not immunized them against death. If I want to divinise the human consciousness, wrote Sri Aurobindo to one of his disciples, to bring down the Supramental, the Truth-Consciousness, the Light, the Force into the physical to transform it... the response is repulsion or fear or unwillingness—or a doubt whether it is possible. On one side there is a claim that illness and the rest should be impossible, on the other a violent rejection of the only con­dition under which these things can become impossible.³³ The contradiction of the “only condition” would prevail right to the end. The “automatic law” worked in reverse: Sri Aurobindo automatically received all the obscurity of his disciples. And Mother remarked, with perhaps a touch of sadness, though sadness had always been foreign to her nature: Here, even among the best, among those who would not hesitate to offer their lives unreservedly on a great occa­sion, there is hardly anyone who would be ready to give up his little habits, little preferences, little comforts so the final victory might be won more quickly. Such is the score. Small occasions are very difficult. And we would be very mis­taken to think that the disciples were particularly “bad”— we must even say they were angels compared to those who would follow, when Mother assumed the burden in turn— they were perfectly good and perfectly bad, like everyone else: they were everyone. It was not “disciples” who were there, it was the earth. It was the resistance of the earth, the bad will of the earth, the difficulty of the earth. A per­fectly “representative” group. Not one of the noble lights that can be found elsewhere would have withstood the test without falling into the same stupidity. It is the stupidity of the earth. It is the misery of the earth.

It is “A God’s Labour”:

I have been digging deep and long Mid a horror of filth and mire A bed for the golden river's song, A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite Are my meed since the world began.... My gaping wounds are a thousand and one And the Titan kings assail ...

A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!

Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate...."
[I] plunged through the body’s alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.

I have delved through the dumb Earth’s dreadful heart
And heard her black mass’ bell.

I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.³⁴

The Whole Earth

In the West, dark rumblings were rising from the blind depths of Earth. Even before a certain house-painter became Chancellor of the Reich, Sri Aurobindo saw the danger. Throughout his letters can be felt His growing concern. He clearly saw where this mud rose from; it was perceptible in his own flesh, even in Mother's flesh as early as 1925 (was it also mere chance?) when She sustained a nasty attack of phlebitis, complicated by a generalized inflammation: Twice in one night my heart wanted to resign,³⁵ She wrote to her son. 1925 was the year the Nazi Party was formed. The legs are the center of the Subconscient. It was rising up: a perfidious, muddy inflammation. Sri Auro­bindo took so much pain to make his disciples understand the danger of this howling tribe;³⁶ the disciples, in their unyielding hate for the English Invader, naively reasoned that the enemy of our enemy is our friend—even Gandhi would later send an open letter to the Members of the Brit­ish Parliament exhorting them not to take up arms against Hitler and to practice nonviolence...¹⁰² And Sri Aurobindo wrote over and over again: The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.³⁷ And He categorically added: this would mean the destruction of my work.³⁸ In 1938, when shown a photograph of Chamberlain and Hitler in Munich, He said that Chamberlain looked like a fly before a spider, on the point of being caught.³⁹ The struggle was slowly getting closer, more merciless, in that silent room upstairs. "So, when will this supramental descent take place?" they all kept asking—this descent akin to a myth they reluctantly believed in and whose slowness disconcerted them. “When will it take place? Is it for now? Is it possible?" Yet the first clues are clear, already in 1925, as if the whole picture were before Him: I would not attempt it if it were not possible.... It all depends upon things outside myself, He answered. It is to be seen whether the physical plane is ready to receive the Light....⁴⁰ Of course, it is one and the same plane! How could Sri Aurobindo bring that Ray "down” into his own body without bringing it down into the whole body? The harder He tried to bring it down into Himself, the more everything thrashed about and struggled everywhere, in the disciples as it did east of the Rhine: I find, He went on, that the more the Light and Power are coming down the greater is the resistance. You yourself [He was addressing a dis­ciple] can see that there is something pressing down. You can also see that there is the tremendous resistance.⁴¹ "Does this mean,” asked the disciple, “that the atmosphere necessary for the Supermind to descend into the physical plane has to be created?” That is the whole attempt. You OUGHT TO HELP IN IT BY CREATING THE NECESSARY CONDITION, if you want it to be done this time.⁴²

The Pressure grew, the Resistance grew, and so did the number of disciples: there were 172 of them in 1938. And Sri Aurobindo fully understood the problem; not once did He protest against the aberrations of this one or that one— He kept on writing tirelessly and patiently to help them understand, to send the force or dissolve the difficulty. He worked on each one as on a plot of earth, and could one plot of earth be cut out on the pretext that it was not very pleasant? It is the whole earth that would have to be cut out! "Why not 'dismiss' the whole staff and get it done quickly?" a disciple innocently asked him, since the “staff" resisted. I am not Hitler, Sri Aurobindo wrote back. Things cannot be done like that. You might just as well ask the Mother and myself to isolate ourselves in the Himalayas. ...⁴³ He took in all, understood all, only saying discreetly, "You ought to help. ...’’I believe in a certain amount of freedom, freedom to find out things for oneself in one’s own way, free­dom to commit blunders even. Nature leads us through various errors and eccentricities. When Nature created the human being with all its possibilities for good or ill, she knew very well what she was about.⁴⁴ We can understand noth­ing about Sri Aurobindo s immensity unless we understand this totality of vision He had in which nothing was omitted, neglected or condemned; everything was part of the work, the “evil” as well as the “good,” and ultimately nothing was good and nothing was ill—it was something else that had to be instilled into this substance wrapped in a false good and a false evil. To Him, all the disciples were good, the whole earth was good; it was his field of work, that is all. At the risk of sounding paradoxical, we might say that they helped through their difficulties. There were also those who quietly washed dishes in a corner. Those were really the "Ashram.” “But why don’t you and Mother, at first, live fully in this Supramental—for you its very easy; afterwards it could radiate throughout the world?” They did not grasp the problem, they could not see it in its totality, and Sri Aurobindo kept on trying to explain so clearly: If we had lived physically in the Supermind from the beginning nobody could have been able to approach us nor could any Sadhana have been done. There could have been no hope of contact between ourselves and the earth and men. Even as it is, Mother has to come down towards the lower consciousness j of the Sadhaks [disciples] instead of keeping always in her i own, otherwise they begin to say, “How far away, how severe j you were; you do not love me ... etc. ”⁴⁵ Already, with a few ; drops of that Ray, they found the Pressure “unbearable.” So j what about the whole cataract? Already the earth was grat- j ing. What would have been the point of being radiant and divine, all alone in an upstairs room? All that mud had ; indeed to be taken in. The whole earth had to be taken in. ! This is the whole problem; and it would be Mother's j problem. If you are not patient enough to wait for the rest, 1 you lose contact and become completely “unbearable.” 3 Some lights are blinding for the little fry, some forces are 3 unbearable for the uncleansed human substance—they J dissolve it. Mother and Sri Aurobindo were not about to dissolve the world at one radiant Supramental stroke. My Sadhana was not done for myself but for the earth­-consciousness. ⁴⁶

They went on digging and digging, purifying.

And the Pressure went on growing.

An Honest Work

You do not realise that I have to spend 12 hours over the ordinary correspondence, numerous reports, etc. I work 3 hours in the afternoon and the whole night up to 6 in the morning over this.⁴⁷ This was in 1933. Tens of thousands of letters. An inconceivable labor. And each one posed the same questions again and again, their little problems, their big problems, their unique problem. Sri Aurobindo tire­lessly answered through this massive silence that let the Force flow; He pushed nothing aside, nothing was too small or too silly. Through each person and each letter, He worked on a human type, a category of consciousness, a particular specimen of difficulty or resistance. The cells of his body absorbed a certain type of obscurity and “worked things out.” And if by chance He did not reply quickly enough, they became impatient: "What has happened to my typescript? Hibernating?" Because He also had to take care of the disciples’ poetry, the disciples' literature, and Goodness knows what. Even their colds. My dear sir, Sri Aurobindo replied, if you saw me nowadays with my nose to paper from afternoon to morning, deciphering, deciphering, writing, writing, writing, even the rocky heart of a disciple would be touched and you would not talk about typescripts and hibernation. I have given up (for the present at least) the attempt to minimise the cataract of correspondence.⁴⁸ This was in 1936. When people write four letters a day in small hand—running to some 10 pages without a gap anywhere and one gets 20 letters in the afternoon and forty at night (of course not all are like that, but still!) it becomes a little too too.⁴⁹ But it would go on ... until He became blind. And even after that, He would go on dictating and dictating....

And they would reproach him for living “up there” in his supramental dream while the poor humans had to face the "hard realities of life”: But what strange ideas again! He patiently replied, that I was born with a supramental tem­perament and that I know nothing of hard realities! Good God! My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from hardships, starvation in England and constant dangers and fierce difficulties [during the revolution] to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle: the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means ... makes no differ­ence. But, of course, as we have not been shouting about these things, it is natural, I suppose, for others to think that I am living in an august, glamourous, lotus-eating dream­land where no hard facts of life or Nature present themselves. But what an illusion all the same!⁵⁰ Or else they would reproach him for being an "Avatar," some god clothed in a body who “pretends” to suffer like humans but knows nothing of their woes—“sham,” one of them would literally say. You think then that in me (I don’t bring in the Mother) there was never any doubt or despair, no attacks of that kind. I have borne every attack which human beings have borne, otherwise I would be unable to assure anybody “This too can be conquered. ” I had to work on each problem and on each conscious plane to solve or to transform and in each I had to take the blessed conditions as they were and do honest work without resorting to miracles.⁵¹

Then, one day in 1942, when He was not yet completely blind, He let a letter slip out (perhaps) in which He tried to apologize for having momentarily interrupted the cor­respondence because of the war and the work on the war: / had to establish the rule [of not writing] not out of personal preference or likes or dislikes, but because the correspon­dence occupied the greater part of my time and energies and there was a danger of my REAL WORK remaining neglected or undone if I did not change my course and devote myself to it, while the actual results of the outer activity [i.e., the cor­respondence] were very small—it cannot be said that it resulted in the Ashram making a great spiritual progress.... This, too, is a reckoning. Those mountains of correspon­dence—what for? And He added, with that touch of serene tenderness: All the same I have broken my rule, and broken it for you alone: I do not see how that can be interpreted as a want of love and a hard granite indifference.⁵² This was in 1942. Surrounded by maps, reports from all the war fronts, day and night, He was in the thick of his battle against Nazism. Then He would let himself be overwhelmed again by the correspondence, until He remarked once more to the one who took the dictation: “My work remains undone.” This was in 1945. “He only made the remark,” his secretary notes, "and continued until... 1949.”⁵³ Seventeen years of correspondence.

His real work ...

But could He reject a single one of those letters without rejecting something of the earth? We might say, “At least the disciples could have...." But it is not a question of disciples! Could the earth have been otherwise? Sri Auro­bindo assumed “the blessed conditions as they were” and He worked on them ... “honestly.” But just one letter less, one little letter spared.... Who ever thought of it?

Every atom, He said.

All the same, the disciples quite resembled a pack of devouring wolves.

His real work ... He did it while walking for hours after his correspondence, until He could no longer walk, either. He pounded Matter with his footsteps—while repeating what silent Word, what open sesame? The first time his faithful bodyguard came to the Guest House, he noted a strange groove running across the veranda and the rooms, “a quarter of an inch” deep: they were the footprints of Sri Aurobindo. Never again shall we see those footprints either, in the corridor leading to his Ashram room—this high- ceilinged corridor with ultramarine tiles, where one hears something akin to the vibration of Luxor—one day, they brought a pot of black glue and laid a superb linoleum over them. Oh, we could get indignant or sad, but who among us does not have his own barbaric hinterlands—only it is another kind of barbarism which we fail to see because it is not like our neighbor’s. Indeed, this complicity with Barbarism is what should be pounded on and on in every detail—Barbarism is microscopic! It is there every minute. And when He could no longer pound with his footsteps, He remained sitting in that big, rather faded green armchair, His eyes wide open, or half-closed, for hours and hours, gazing at the wall in front of Him.... until those eyes, too, closed, one 5th of December, 1950.

A wall.

The Landmarks

Of his real work, we have a few sparse clues, unearthed here and there between two falls of the cataract: a mixture of advance and retreat, cries of victory followed by a slow underground labor—the whole story of the earth is there, simple, stark, in a few lines, laconically poignant:

March 1924

The earth-law has to be changed and a new atmos­phere has to be created. The question is not merely to have knowledge, power etc., but to bring it down; the whole difficulty is to make it flow down.⁵⁴

August 1925

I find that the more the Light and Power are coming down, the greater is the resistance.⁵⁵

August 1932

I know that the supramental Descent is inevi­table—I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later stage.... But even if I knew it to be for a later time, I would not swerve from my path or be dis­couraged or flag in my labour. Formerly I might have been, but not NOW—after all the path I have traversed.... It is now, in this life, that I insist on it and not in another or in the hereafter.⁵⁶

Nov. 1933

No, the supramental has not descended into my body or into Matter—it is only at the point where such a descent has become not only possible but inevitable.⁵⁷

Sept. 1934

The supramental Force is descending, but it has not yet taken possession of the body or of matter.⁵⁸

Feb.1935

Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption,—I go on till I conquer or perish.⁵⁹

April 1935

I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only.... My supramentalisation is only a key for opening the gates of the supramental to the earth-consciousness.⁶⁰

May 1935

(Disciple): It seems another victory has been won by you. Some people saw red-crimson lights around the Mother... (Sri Aurobindo): But after­wards all the mud arose and it stopped.... As it is, there is the Revolt of the Subconscient.⁶¹

August 1935

Now I have got the hang of the whole hanged thing—like a very Einstein I have got the math­ematical formula of the whole affair (unintelli­gible as in his own case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure.⁶²

August 1935

As for people (the disciples), no! They are not floating in the supramental—some are floating in the higher mind, others, rushing up into it and flopping down into the subconscient alterna­tively, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infini­tum, some are sticking fast contentedly or discon­tentedly in the mud, some are sitting in the mud and dreaming dreams and seeing visions, some have their legs in the mud and their head in the heavens etc., etc., an infinity of combinations, while many are simply nowhere.⁶³

Nov. 1935

The tail of the Supermind is descending, descen­ding. ... It is only the tail at present, but where the tail can pass, the rest will follow.... My formula is working out rapidly.... It is my private and particular descent.... The attempt to bring a great general descent having only produced a great ascent of subconscient mud, I had given up that.⁶⁴

Sept. 1938

Munich

Nov. 24, 1938

Sri Aurobindo seriously breaks his right leg above the knee.

Dec. 1938

(Disciple): When will it descend?
(Sri Aurobindo): How can it descend? The nearer it comes, the greater becomes the resistance to it.
(Disciple): Have you realised the Supermind?
(Sri Aurobindo): I know what the Supermind is. And the physical being has flashes and glimpses of it.... I am not satisfied with only a part of the Super­mind in the physical consciousness. I want to bring down the whole mass of it, pure, and that is an extremely difficult business.⁶⁵

January 1939

Everything looked all right and it appeared as if I were going on well with the work, then the accident came [the fracture]. It indicated that it is when the subconscient is changed that the power of Truth can be embodied; then it can be spread in wave after wave in humanity.⁶⁶

Sept. 1939

The war.

August 1945

I am ... personally, near the goal.⁶⁷

April 9, 1947

... The lightening of the heavy resistance of the Inconscient.⁶⁸

Aug. 15, 1947

Independence of India.

July 1948

Things are bad, are growing worse and may, at any time grow worst or worse than the worst if that is possible—and anything ... seems possible in the present perturbed world.... All that was necessary because certain possibilities had to emerge and be got rid of if a new and better world was at all to come into being; it would not have done to postpone them for a later time.... The new world whose coming we envisage is not made of the same texture as the old and different only in pattern.... It must come by other means—from within and not from without.⁶⁹

1949

First Russian atomic explosion.

Mao Tse-Tung proclaims the People’s Republic of China.

August 1949

(A note by Sri Aurobindo's secretary): Practically all the correspondence came to an abrupt halt, only the work on Savitri proceeded steadily. I wonder if he had taken the decision to leave the body and was therefore in a hurry to finish his epic in time.⁷⁰

Undated

It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear.⁷¹