Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

20: He and She

This Time?

We would very much have liked to decipher this “math­ematical formula”.... Now a lot of things have become more comprehensible in the “body's alleys blind.” All the same, there remains a Secret. Sometimes it feels almost palpable, it is so simple, almost transparent, unexpected ... and then it eludes us like a breeze. The world’s future depends on a mere trifle. The more transparent it is, the more mysterious. That Secret is to be found.

“Personally,” He was near the goal. I saw him supramental on his bed, Mother said. Meanwhile, they read the newspa­pers in His room and played “pranks" behind his back¹— until the day Mother had the piles of newspapers removed. He was near the goal, but what about the others, the rest? What good is it to be supramental all alone? The others were busy rebuilding their petty world, creating U.N.'s and making plans: the nightmare was over—not for Them. They knew. They saw all that was still to emerge: Certain possibilities had to emerge and be got rid of, if a new and better world was at all to come into being.² This was in 1948. The long, slow riddance, the slow upsurge from the depths into every corner, every country, every consciousness, the difficult catharsis of the Subconscient before the Power-of- Truth can spread “wave after wave.” It was all before Him, as He sat in that pale green armchair with little white arabesques, his eyes half-closed or wide open, while they played. He gazed at the wall. There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed that a black yoke of the Asura [the Devil] would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nuremberg have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history.... But Sri Aurobindo added: Other black­nesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind.... This was in 1946—after Hitler! And yet always this far- reaching, serene and unshaken vision: but they too will end as that nightmare has ended.³ Would He hold on till then? The fracture of his right leg was already like a knell. And they kept on playing, sending letters upon letters, and He dictated on and on.... He “lightened the Inconscient.” She too saw, and with that marvelous, crystalline simplicity— like a pure mountain spring—She said to the children: We got rid of Hitler because he had a whole nation and a physi­cal power behind him, and had he succeeded, it would have been disastrous for humanity; but we had no illusions.... The death of one or the other [Stalin or Hitler] does not matter, it does not make much difference—the thing goes off elsewhere. It is just a form. It is as if you did something very bad while wearing a certain shirt, then you throw your shirt away and say, "Now I won’t do anything bad anymore”—you just continue with another shirt on!⁴ It continues with an­other shirt. Death is not a solution! How clearly They saw the invisible transmigration of the mortal disease—until it is struck at the very root. The terrestrial root. He gazed at that in his armchair, pushing against the Wall, pushing until his last breath.

A blank dark wall, And behind it

Heaven.⁵

Something has to be uprooted from the terrestrial con­sciousness, some sinister mystery has to be “worked out,’ and how childish we are, there outside, with our little panaceas and diplomatic miracles ... like those children playing around His armchair. What will it take for us to understand that our part of mystery is right here, within our body, as is our part of the victory or the defeat? Death is so tiny, death is at every moment. The miracle of the earth may well be in our hands. He looked, kept on digging and digging, and the deeper He dug, the more the mud surged up. You ought to help....

Till the day He saw—what? One of us must go, we can’t both remain upon earth. She reacted violently, like a wounded lioness. I remember clearly, so clearly—I still see the room and everything, how He was, how He told me, “We can’t both remain upon earth.” That's all.⁶ Not one word more. This was in 1949, perhaps at the beginning of the year, a little less than two years before his departure. I reacted violently, I concentrated all my power to prevent him from going, and it made him suffer greatly, because He WANTED to go, He had decided—“He": the Supreme Lord had decided that He would go.⁷ Why? How many times since then have I asked myself that question? “I am ready, I’ll go,⁸ and She had her son come, made arrangements. “No, it can’t be you, because you alone can do the material thing." And that was all. He said nothing more. He forbade me to leave my body, that’s all. “It's absolutely forbidden, he said, you can’t, you must remain.” She insisted, fought—who knows Mother’s hurricane?— but Sri Aurobindo was stronger than hurricanes, He swal­lowed all the hurricanes into his infinity: No, you can’t go, your body is better than mine, you can undergo the transfor­mation better than I can do.⁹ To undergo.... to endure all the little wars within one’s body, day after day, all the little Vietnams that do not want to die and grow back right and left, because we do not want to go and uproot them in the minuscule death on our own doorstep while we gape at the moon and let twenty thoughts gallop through us—there are minuscule Mongol hordes carrying out their little devasta­tion, their sly, mortal invasion day after day, and "it is not important” and we pass by them—we live completely beside the Mystery ... yet we are in the midst of the Mystery. Your body is indispensable for the work. Without your body, the Work cannot be done. And nothing more was said, the hur­ricane had passed, life seemed to go on as if nothing had happened; Mother did not believe it was possible, She did not want to believe it.

And the illness slowly manifested. In 1948, some signs of diabetes had appeared—within a few months, He had cleared it up, got rid of the illness. Sri Aurobindo could not be ill, nothing could enter that body which held cyclones at bay, it was too pure—the cell, there, was pure. As early as 1924 (and even more so twenty-five years later), He said that only three things could bring about his death: 1) Vio­lent surprise and accident. 2) Action of age. 3) My own choice, finding it not possible to do it this time, or by something shown to me which would prove it is not possible this time.¹⁰ Did He find that it was "not possible to do it this time?" No, nobody can believe that, for it would mean losing faith in the world’s future, and we have had enough of putting things off indefinitely—He himself so often said: this time ... this time.... hie et nunc. We have had enough of delayed heav­ens. What happened? Has the battle been lost? But He himself said that the "other blacknesses” would vanish like Hitler’s nightmare. And Mother stayed on. And Mother, too, left. And I am here struggling with this mystery as though something depended on the comprehension of one man. If we understood the mystery, it would be all done. One day, twelve years before She left, Mother abruptly stopped in the doorway, turned back toward me with those diamond eyes, and, as if She were staring into the eyes of Destiny, in an impassive and inflexible tone, with that Authority, as though She were speaking with the very voice of the Lord, She told me (we had been speaking of death), In any case, one thing: never forget that what we have to do, we shall do, and we shall do it together, because we have to do it together, That is all—like this, like that, in this way, in that way, it has no importance. But that is the true fact.¹¹ We shall do it together, we shall find the Secret together ... this way or that.

But now, it is “this way" and “in this manner.”

And the Secret remains unresolved.

Will we know it at the end?

We are entering this book as if traversing death.

The Infinitesimal Death

The symptoms reappeared in 1949. He simply said, Tell Mother. And He continued his work. He didn’t want us to know that He was doing it deliberately; he knew that if for a single moment I knew He was doing it deliberately, I would

have reacted with such a violence that He would not have been able to leave. And He did this. ...He bore it all as if it were some unconsciousness, an ordinary “illness, ” simply to keep us from knowing..., And He knew that I had the power to leave my body at will. So He didn’t say a thing—He didn’t say a thing right to the very last minute.¹² She did not want to believe it. Almost ferociously, She carried on her activi­ties which had grown heavier since the war with the arrival of the first children from Calcutta fleeing the Japanese bombs: the Ashram was opening up to the outside. 123 children in 1950. She had to reorganize everything, create a school, train teachers and physical-education instructors, check the wave of discontent among the old disciples who looked on this hardly “yogic” youth and all those frivolous gymnastic exercises with reproach or incomprehension.... She went through it all with a heavy heart, a mute, secret anguish, and whenever She could steal a minute, She flew to His room only to find Him always surrounded by people —the small, privileged troop that had formed around Him since the fracture of His leg and His slowly advancing blindness. There was always someone between us, She remarked years later with a touch of sadness, as though the wound were still there. Once, only once, did She sit at His table: 1 had no time to eat today.... Sri Aurobindo smiled. “This was the first and the last time we saw them taking food together,”¹³ notes the faithful Champaklal. It was in August 1950, three months before Sri Aurobindo's depar­ture. She would bring Him a glass of fruit juice, a bowl of soup, the rare food He could take ... comb His long, white hair like slightly golden silk. Sometimes, She even went out of Her body in the midst of a gesture, the comb in Her hand, while the others bantered behind Her: I have eyes in the back of my head.,¹⁴ She told them, simply. She was con­stantly late, stopped a thousand times on Her way by one or another, the countless microscopic difficulties that had to be disentangled one by one, patiently, in each little consciousness, each little detail of Matter—the countless traps of Matter that cause an accident, a revolt or a sudden devastation only because that little speck has been over­looked —the very same traps He was disentangling, tire­lessly clearing up, letter after letter. It was a sly, invasive, minuscule horde, like an onslaught of death disguised as a thousand little cockroaches. We do not know what death is; we believe in the great blows of Destiny, but we do not see the thousand little blows that are death. This infinitesi­mal death that He kept uprooting and uprooting, and which kept growing back again and again. Sometimes, He let a cry slip out: I feel a great longing that the Sadhaks should be free of all these strifes and doubts; for so long as the present state of things continues with fires of this kind raging all around and the atmosphere in a turmoil, the work I am trying to do will always remain under the stroke of jeopardy and I do not know how the descent I am labouring for is to fulfil itself In fact, the Mother and I have to give nine-tenths of our energy to smoothing down things, to keeping the Sadhaks tolerably contented etc.... One-tenth and in the Mother’s case not even that can go to the real work; it is not enough.¹⁵ This "real work” never done, constantly obstructed by their Lilliputian stupidities. This was in 1934, but it would be the same sixteen years later. We can put it this way: the world was not ready. But to tell the truth, it was the totality of things around him that was not ready. So when He saw this (I only understood this afterwards), He saw that it would go much faster if He were not there. And He was absolutely right—it was true.¹⁶ Sometimes, these words seem to make sense. The people around him, those little symbols of the world at large, would not have been able to withstand the “charge,” in the electrical sense. All the little cockroaches inside would have exploded, bringing about the “great” death outside. The minuscule, implacable under­ground horde had to emerge into the broad daylight of the world and swarm visibly everywhere, driven out of its com­fortable retreat, so the Current could spread wave after wave without breaking the very carriers of this swarming horde. Sri Aurobindo was the opposite of destruction— except as regards myths. He could not accelerate things without wreaking too much havoc around Him, so He left. He left to wreak the havoc underground.

On dim confines where Life and Matter meet ...a weird and pigmy world ...
Where this unhappy magic had its source.¹⁷

But that is another story, and perhaps it is not the whole story.

So they kept on reading their newspapers, chit-chatting, playing their innocent little pranks in corners, putting a thousand idle questions to Him whenever He emerged from His long, motionless hours of gazing at the Wall, or perhaps at those “dim confines” of Life and Matter. "All that was visible to our naked eyes,” His secretary notes, “was that he sat silently ... in the capacious armchair, with his eyes wide open just as any other person would. Only he passed hours and hours thus, changing his position at times and making himself comfortable; the eyes moving a little, and though usually gazing at the wall in front, never fixed ... at any particular point. Sometimes the face would beam with a bright smile without any apparent reason, much to our amusement, as a child smiles in sleep. Only it was a waking sleep, for as we passed across the room, there was a dim recognition of our shadow-like movements [Oh, how true!] Occasionally he would look towards the door ... when he heard some sound which might indicate the Mother’s coming”.... He was always waiting for Mother. No, this was not sleep or even a "waking sleep”—they had no idea of what it was, they understood nothing whatsoever. "When he wanted something, his voice seemed to come from a distant cave; rarely we would find him plunged within, with his eyes closed.”¹⁸ And He dictated His end­less letters, always tinged with those little touches of humor, like the only oxygen in that sticky morass. Sometimes, we think it a grace that He broke His leg, for it allowed Him to stop for a while the flood of correspondence and devote Himself to revising The Life Divine, which a publisher from Calcutta had asked for. It was the first time in twenty-five years that He had enough time to revise His work. Had He been given the time, He would also have corrected and completed the never-finished The Synthesis of Yoga, and we would certainly have found there some glimpses of his “mathematical formula,” but Sri Aurobindo’s correspon­dents decided otherwise—perhaps He considered it more important to deal with those little deaths than to write out His formula ... which will explain itself, as He said, if it is implemented. Nevertheless, He would dictate The Supra­mental Manifestation upon Earth because Mother had asked him for some articles for the Bulletin of Physical Education, which She intended for the Ashram children. Then, He would let himself be devoured again by the correspondence until that day in 1949 when He remarked for the fourth time: My real work remains undone (first in 1934, then 1942, then 1945)—and finally a fifth time, in October, 1950, two months before He left—after the correspondence and the other things had again sneaked through the doors (the disciples’ literary articles, poems, etc.). This time, He would categorically say: I am finding no time for my real work.... Take up SAVITRI, I want to finish it soon,¹⁹ to the great amaze­ment of His secretary, who had never seen Sri Aurobindo in a hurry. He did not understand. No one understood.

He had sixty more days to live.

Savitri

To this day, a sort of solid eternity seems to reign in that high-ceilinged room with stucco walls, as if the very walls, the big empty bed, even the faded carpet with its sea-blue flowers on a jade background had retained His silence. The clock is stopped at 1:26 a.m. There is also a big calendar stopped on December, 5. A drapery sways gently in the east wind between His room and the bathroom: two silver dragons on bluish silk. Everything is so perfectly still, so perfectly sure, as if it were the sure place in the world. One can stay there while the long centuries pass like a gentle breeze over wheatfields. There is a depth of sweetness behind this peace, like the depths in His half-closed, golden- brown eyes, with some imperceptible, somewhat tender smile in the left eye, if one looks behind the creases long enough. He is there. His two hands are resting on the arms of the green chair; His torso is bare, wide, bright, plump like a little child’s, sometimes half-covered with a white dhoti that He throws back over His left shoulder. His feet are bare on the carpet. He dictates while looking straight ahead, to what future? His voice is "low, measured, quiet”— almost neutral, with a clear English accent. The words flow regularly, like a long, smooth river opening into the ocean, “some 400 to 500 lines in succession.”¹⁰⁰ This is Savitri. Savitri, which He has been correcting, revising and expand­ing for more than fifty years. ¹⁰¹ His epic, his message. Some twenty-three thousand eight hundred and fourteen lines. The story of Satyavan, the son of King Dyumathsena, doomed by Fate to a premature death, and of Savitri, the Princess of the Sun, who goes down into death to reconquer her Lover. The passion of a single woman in its dreadful silence and strength pitted against Death,²⁰ He said in a letter to His brother. The Story of Mother and Sri Aurobindo. It is the legend of the Mahabharata, Orpheus and Eurydice reversed, but with all the knowledge of the invisible worlds and a fabulous geography of what people call “death.” He corrects The Book of Fate, the last He would revise. Twenty days later, He would be gone. And Mother would begin the slow conquest. Savitri is the epic of the victory over death, She said. He had to die, but why? His body is a little like millions of bodies that die—Satyavan is the soul of the earth bound to death—it is the earth dying again and again. Will someone go down into death to wrest the earth from its fate? Will someone find the key, the means to get there and come back, and bring Satyavan back to the light of an immortal day? Will the earth be freed from death?

There's EVERYTHING in it. The realism of it is astounding, She said. An exact description, step by step, paragraph by para­graph, page by page.... It’s a miraculous book.²¹ All the keys may be there, the "mathematical formula,” for those who know how to read. Tiny little keys at the corner of a para­graph. They must be sought out, they must be unearthed. It is not every day that the earth has the opportunity to learn its own secret. He dictated without a pause, imper­turbably, His eyes fixed on the stucco wall. He saw “the end of Death,"²² over there, the sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn²³ rising behind the ruins of the Iron Age.

Even should a hostile force cling to its reign And claim its right’s perpetual sovereignty And man refuse his high spiritual fate, Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail... And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face.²⁴

Was the "secret Truth in things” set in motion, that auto­matic supermind in Matter’s depths? Or was it to occur soon, through this plunge of conscious spirit into Matter's night?

He looked at coming Fate. He looked at Mother, always in a hurry, always late, assailed by the mob. She came to lay a garland of jasmine on His bed around one o'clock in the morning. They did not speak. Only that shared look. There was a cyclone of repressed pain within Her, a fierce refusal to accept. She looked at Him like a lioness, Her heart ablaze, She who, thirty-six years earlier, had said: “He whom we saw yesterday is on earth... ,”²⁵ “It is not enough to triumph in the inner worlds, we must triumph right down to the most material worlds....” ²⁶ Right down to death. “O Lord, ignorance must be vanquished, illusion must be dispelled; this sorrowful universe must emerge from its dreadful nightmare, cease its frightening dream... ”²⁷ She looked at the whole earth in that body. “How much greater a splendor than all that have gone before, how marvelous a glory and light would be needed to draw these beings out of the horrible aberration!...”²⁸ She had said that exactly one month before meeting Him—that light could not leave. Or what? “To be a vast mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, entering all hearts....”²⁹ She enveloped Him in her love, She enveloped this whole earth that keeps on dying and dying—She did not want death, for anyone in the world. Savitri is the greatest love poem—like Mother, like Sri Aurobindo—it is the refusal of death. Until Her ninety-fifth year, She would hew Her way through death, and what is She doing now? Will She bring back Satyavan? Or is the battle lost and the earth forever doomed to die?

What happened in 1973? What happened in 1950?

He added the last punctuation marks, attended to each detail to the very end—it was his way of instilling truth into Matter. If truth does not begin with a semicolon, where does it begin? If it would never enter Matter—where could it get in? “Every word must be the mot juste, every line perfect,” His secretary commented, “even every sign of punctuation flawless. One preposition was changed five times; to change a punctuation sign one had sometimes to read a whole section.”³⁰ Once the work was over, He walked a little while the tapestry with the silver dragons swayed gently in the breeze. It was quiet, powerful like Luxor, peaceful like Himalayas without end in the evenings soft­ness. No one will ever know what that Peace was. "Be it eating, drinking, walking or talking—He did it always in a slow and measured rhythm, giving the impression that every movement was conscious and consecrated."³¹ And sometimes He lay down on his bed, his arms crossed beneath his head, his gaze on the ceiling, and He smiled “like a child in sleep.” Until the day when The Book of Fate was completed at last: Ah, it is finished? He asked with a little glimmer of a smile in that left eye (it is strange how His right eye seemed as if fixed forever upon eternity). What remains now? “The Book of Death and The Epilogue, ” his secretary answered. Oh, that? We shall see about that later on....

Later on was at the door. It was November 10.

Twenty-five days left.

The Descent into Death

Then the “illness” began to gallop. Like Mother, He could have left his body by a simple act of will: draw the breath above and leave the garment. He wore it till the very end, with all the suffering and even the medical tortures, “with­out resorting to miracles”—honest work. “Won’t you use your force to cure yourself?” his secretary asked him. No, He replied in his quiet, neutral, indisputable voice. They could not believe their ears, they were dumbfounded. They repeated the question a second time: “But why?” Can’t explain, you won’t understand. Mother would tell me later, Each time I came in his room, I saw him pulling down the supramental light. She stood there, fierce, immobile, with­out a quiver of apparent emotion. And the others around them. “We were never alone.” He kept on pulling that Light down. What desperate connection with this rebellious earth, this earth He loved, was He attempting till the end,

He who said in Savitri:

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.³²

We do not really know what He was doing, perhaps we do not realize the enormity this accepted death represents in a body whose every cell, every atom was conscious—a conscious death. A conscious descent into a coffin. Con­scious—meaning that every cell, every atom, all that formed that majesty of Sri Aurobindo, entered death with eyes wide open. Who can know what this means?... One day, as a mere beginner, I had the living experience of entering there, while still linked to my body by a thread: entering there is unthinkable. There is no thought there. There is just an abyss of black basalt, like a formidable, asphyxiat­ing negation—the dreadful and naked NO in the depths of the world. The atrocious refusal strangling all that comes into contact with it. A kind of naked hatred of life. Some­thing that does not pardon Life for being, and that strives to annihilate everything within its stony blackness. A sti­fling, airless abyss of basalt. It is perhaps this No, this root, this "grim foundation stone” that He wanted to confront with all the light of his conscious cells. To enter there wholly, consciously. It is terrifying.

The stubborn mute rejection in Life's depths, The ignorant No in the origin of things.³³

That great No hiding a thousand times behind all the little stumblings, the little sufferings, the little falsehoods in our gestures, our eyes or our bodies, the thousand roots of death that await the great Death as a final relief from this misery of being and living—that will for death in the depths because we have not found real life! Because we have not lived—life does not live, life is not yet life! It is only death moving about. Death in a hurry to be done with all this pain of being, of never being what one should be, never being what one is.... And behind—behind, at the bottom, beneath that rock, that falsehood, that rebellious no—there is something else biding its time. Yes, the "well of honey beneath the rock,” the Life that is yet to be. This is what the Supermind is: real life. The life that breathes without death. The life that really is, without a shadow. The Truth, simply —living. There, beneath that rock. There, beneath the thou­sand little no’s of a thousand footsteps that come and go, climb up and down, without knowing why, without even wanting Life. An automatism of pain. Something that clings to death. And if any pressure is applied to it, one feels as if wholly uprooted—three drops of that Ray, and all the little mud here and there begins to revolt and protest: tens of thousands of letters. What dark and desperate plunge was He about to take? And why this No, why all that? What suddenly went wrong in that Life?... Sri Aurobindo will never tell us his mystery; no one ever asked Him the real question. But She is there, fierce, standing beside him— She never accepts defeat. For another twenty-three years, She would use her every breath, each second of the day and night, to wrench that Mystery, that death out of her own body—to reconquer Satyavan step by step beneath the thousands of deaths and thousands of hideous little false­hoods that would plague Her, surround Her, weigh Her down, right up to the end—in each one She would recon­quer Satyavan. In each one She would confront death. We do not know, perhaps we will never know all She did, She too ... unless it all “explains itself” one day, and real life, freed from its negation, bursts in our face and sweeps away all our pygmies amid a great divine laughter.

One day I shall return, His hands in mine,
And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.³⁴

And we do believe that the great sweeping away of the pygmies has begun.

Perhaps Sri Aurobindo was going to trigger that great earthquake in the depths. Outside, the pygmies are raging, they have lost the game. The more they rage, the closer their death is: the death of death. We are each facing death, our death, or the possibility of real life. This is the time of choice for the earth. We do not realize how fateful this hour is in the whole history of evolution, as if the earth were about to be thoroughly reborn, or die in its black hole of negation. And victory lies in each one, defeat lies in each one: a microscopic little death to be uprooted in each of us. As if victory depended on a speck of dust: a tiny little adherence in the depths, a tiny yes we carry with us every­where, while going up and down the stairs, walking, eating, through everything, and in spite of everything, even our own mistakes—an imperturbable yes to that, which is the real life. And this real life will do its work automatically, pro­vided we side with it. We have to be on the right side—the right side of evolution.

We have to be true.

And his breathing grew shorter, more stifled. They wanted to "cure” him! They cannot help torturing you medically for the sake of the false life, they will not let your body leave in peace. “We insisted on dangerous remedies”³⁵ one of them admits. Mother refused, Sri Aurobindo refused— once. Then He stopped saying anything, He let it happen, for the disciples’ peace of mind—He bore the burden right to the end, honestly. A faithful disciple, a surgeon from Calcutta, arrived; “Sri Aurobindo was on his bed, eyes closed, like a statue of massive peace.” He opened his eyes: Trouble? Nothing troubles me. And suffering—one can be above it, and He asked for news about the Bengali refugees. Then He plunged back into a coma. He is losing interest in himself, Mother simply said. “She looked so grave and quiet,” the disciple notes.³⁶ Sometimes, He took a little fruit juice or water that Mother offered him, smiled, drank docilely, then plunged back again: “a very strange type of coma,” the surgeon remarked, “a body which for the moment is in agony, unresponsive, laboring hard for breath, suddenly becomes quiet; a consciousness enters the body, He is awake and normal. He finishes his drink, then, as the consciousness withdraws, the body lapses back into the grip of agony.” The uremia was gaining ground. It was December 4. He is withdrawing, Mother said. But Sri Auro­bindo got up again, sat down in the big pale-green arm­chair with little white arabesques, majestic, serene, staring straight ahead. “The Master seems cheerful again and tak­ing interest,” said the surgeon—Hmm ... was all Mother replied. Then He went back to bed, and the end came at a gallop. At eleven o’clock at night, She came back, gave him a little tomato juice which He drank, quietly emerging from his coma. Then, at midnight, She was there one last time. She stood very straight at the foot of his bed, with­out a gesture, without a quiver of movement: He opened his eyes. They looked at each other for a long time.... Then She went out.

At one o'clock in the morning, She came back for an instant: Call me when it is over.

Years later, with a burning intensity, as though it had just happened, she told me, I didn't want to believe it. And as long as I stayed in the room ...he couldn’t leave his body. And so there was a terrible tension in Him—on the one hand the inner will to depart, and then this thing holding him there in his body: the fact that I knew he was alive and could only be alive. He had to signal me to go to my room, supposedly to rest (I didn’t rest); and no sooner had I left his room than he was gone. They immediately called me back...³⁷

It was 1:26 a.m.

“I perceived a slight quiver in his body, almost impercep­tible,” the disciple notes. He drew up his arms and put them on his chest, one overlapping the other—then all stopped."

She remained standing at the foot of his bed, her hair unbound: “Her look was so fierce that I could not face those eyes," said the surgeon.

I was standing beside Him, and all the supramental force that was in Him passed quite concretely from his body into mine—so concretely that I thought it was visible. And I felt the friction of the forces passing through the pores of my skin.... Then people say, He’s “dead”....

As he left his body and entered into mine, He told me, “You will continue, you will go right to the end of the work. ”³⁸

The Moment

Now She has joined him beneath the big copper-pod tree with golden yellow flowers. They have both left. And what has been done?... What we must now decipher is the slow advance of the forces that one day create another Story. "Will the work be done this time?” the old Purani asked in 1924. So many times have prophets and enlighteners come, so many times have they left, but the earth continues its painful round. I can’t prophesy, Sri Aurobindo answered, I cannot say, “It will be done." But this I can say: "Something will be done this time. ”³⁹ Something will be done. Never did Sri Aurobindo utter a word in vain. And He did not care about being recognized, admired, or even read—He does not need worshippers! He does not need to be believed, so well did He know how people’s faith comes and goes, sinks and spins like a weathervane—but the work had to be done, an indestructible seed had to be planted there, in this rebellious soil, and it had to grow despite all our faith or non-faith, our worship or non-worship. Why do men want to worship! Mother exclaimed. It is much better to become than to worship. It’s out of a laziness to change that they worship.⁴⁰ Will something change this time, in spite of us? Will man decide to become 7 True, She said, The lack of the earth’s receptivity and the behavior of Sri Aurobindo's dis­ciples are largely responsible for what happened to his body.⁴¹ This is even truer of Mother’s disciples. And She left.

What happened? What is her secret?

From the large corridor that overlooks the Ashram court­yard, She watched until the very end as they carried Sri Aurobindo down beneath the yellow copper-pod tree. She was all dressed in white—pale and straight. Alone. She was seventy-two. She was thirty-six when She met him. Three weeks earlier, He had written:

A day may come when she must stand unhelped On a dangerous brink of the world’s doom and hers, Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast, Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.

Alone with death and close to extinction’s edge, Her single greatness in that last dire scene, She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny

Where all is won or all is lost for man.⁴²

These were the last lines He had dictated.

Twenty-three years later, I watched another coffin being carried beneath the yellow copper-pod tree, next to his, while the disciples' hearts, who had treated her so ruth­lessly to the dire end, lamented. And I look at all this with a heavy question, like the very question of the world. What has been done this time? The disciples are only represen­tative of the earth; Mother and Sri Aurobindo well knew that these were the conditions to be faced, fully, totally, honestly. Is it lost, is it won?... I have collected more than six thousand pages that She left secret, her “Agenda”: fifteen years of a terrible yoga of the body that She recounted to me step by step, in that clear childlike little voice, always full of laughter in the face of pain, more and more distant and breathless, as though She had to cross expanses of time to meet us, increasingly slower and gasping for breath as through layers of death—all the secrets are there. Are we capable of this Secret? Will we even know how to read it correctly? Will we know how to seize the lever? Simply to understand the “thing” would almost amount to doing it— or causing it to appear. “Other blacknesses threaten to over­shadow or even engulf mankind,” He said. He saw. She saw. Are we going to see? Are we going to seize the real lever, the magic leverage,⁴³ as He put it? Yes, something that turns everything upside down when everything seems hopeless and lost. There is a lever. There is a secret. There is a power. But we will not know till the end. Nevertheless, there is a choice to make for the earth to go to the right side. Each one has a choice to make, how crucial it would be to understand it! To understand is almost a life-or-death question. We do not know at what point—at what miracu­lous point we are. Or else?

One day in 1962, twelve years later, Mother suddenly stopped; She looked—looked at this whole earth before her—and a sort of cry burst out of her heart, almost a pain: And suddenly I said to myself, “How could it be? During all the time he was here, the time we were together, life, life on earth, lived such a wondrous divine possibility, so ... really so unique, something it had never lived to such an extent and in such a way, for thirty years, and it didn’t even notice!..." I wondered: “How could people have lived here, so near, how could human beings on earth who had an aspiration, who had their consciousness turned towards those things, have lived that possibility, have HAD that possibility at their finger­tips, without being able to take advantage of it! How could something so wonderful and unique have taken place here, and yet people had such a small and childish and superficial image of it!” Truly, I wondered, “Has the time really come? Is it possible?... Or will it once again be postponed? "⁴⁴

She, too, was brought down in her coffin, and we are before the same, even heavier question. All the little men of today can pass by, and they will pass, with their share of stupidities and misdeeds—but the great Stupidity is there in millions of humans—the same one, all of one piece. Are we going to seize that lever? Will a few under­stand, this time? Or what?... It is almost as though She were asking the question from the other side of the tomb— as if there were still a chance.

There are moments when things converge, and it is rare to have a MOMENT in this Story: it stretches over long, long, almost indefinite periods of time. So to get a MOMENT that becomes something actual in terrestrial life (here Mother drove her fist into the Earth) is very difficult. And if that moment is passed by, is missed.... But I always wonder ... because Sri Aurobindo left without revealing his secret. He said he was leaving DELIBERATELY—that much he told me. He told me what I needed to know. But he never said the moment hadn’t come, he never said if he’d seen that things were not sufficiently ready. He told me “the world is not ready, ” that much he did say. He told me he was going away deliberately because it was “necessary, ” and that I had to stay and continue the work, that I would continue. He said those three things. But he never told me whether or not I would succeed! He never told me whether or not I could bring the moment back.⁴⁵

At this minute, we feel that the Moment exists, that it is right here, and that we are fully in it. And that it depends on ... depends on what? Perhaps on our understanding. Something opening up in the consciousness of the earth, a tiny little cry, so that the Current can pass through. Perhaps there is no "big thing” to do. Sometimes, it seems as if the destiny of the world hangs on very little. A pure little drop amid a million daily gestures that only rush to the tomb.

Will a pure drop be found somewhere?

Nandanam May 15, 1975