Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

5

The Eternal Birth

"Surely for the earth-consciousness the very fact that the Divine manifests himself is the greatest of all splendours. Consider the obscurity here and what it would be if the Divine did not directly intervene and the Light of Light did not break out of the obscurity —for that is the meaning of the manifestation." That was Sri Aurobindo.

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15 August 1872.

"To the hill-tops of silence from over the infinite sea, Golden he came, Armed with the flame, Looked on the world that his greatness and passion must free."

Mid-August. The heavens penetrate Earth's atmosphere in spectacular fiery showers of falling meteors —the Perseids — which appear from the constellation Perseus. Like Jupiter penetrating Danaë's brazen tower in a shower of gold, for the birth of Perseus. The slayer of Medusa. The deliverer of Andromeda.

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Calcutta.

Twenty-four minutes before sunrise.¹

A new dawn.

From many homes hymns were rising to the Lord of Light, for it was the Brāhma-muhūrta (the period of forty-eight minutes before sunrise). It is the time when the Brahmins silently recite the sacred Gayatri mantra. Gayatri is considered to be the mother of the Vedas.

From the ladies' quarters at 4 Theatre Road came the sound of the blowing of a conch. Its deep resonance filled the morning air, announcing a new birth. To Swarnalata and Krishna Dhan Ghose was born their third son.

It was a Thursday. The day named after Jupiter or Thor, the wielder of the thunderbolt.

Chance? Coincidence? or planned? I'll opt for the last, because had not the well-born come to "awake heaven's lightning from its slumber's lair"?

Six years later Mirra too was born on a Thursday.

In India, Thursday is considered to be the day of Brihaspati, the Guru of the Gods. The psychological power he brings is 'Wisdom (Word and Knowledge).' In the Rig-Veda he is designated as 'the shining' and 'the gold-coloured.' He is the Master of the Creative Word. He is the Soul-Force.

It was strange that' the father, Dr. Krishna Dhan, chose for

1. The exact time of Sri Aurobindo's birth is not known. The time given above is probably based on a recollection of a member of Sri Aurobindo's family that he was born one danda (= twenty-four minutes) before sunrise. The local time would be 5:16 A.M.; or 4:52 A.M. Indian Standard Time.

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his third son the name AUROBINDO. In fact, Bengalis had never heard of anybody with that name before. We wonder what invisible force whispered the name in the father's ear: AUROBINDO.

In Sanskrit, aravinda means a lotus. Constantly keeping its face turned towards the sun, the lotus spreads out its hundred petals to a hundred sides.

Sri Aurobindo's advent in the Indian political field inspired a Bengali revolutionary, B. B. Upadhyay (we shall meet him later) who waxed eloquent: "Have you seen the pure-white Aurobindo? The 'hundred-petalled' has blossomed in the inner lake of India.... This Aurobindo of ours is a rarity in the world. The heavenly grace of goodness is snowy-white. He is vast and great.... Such a full man and genuine — fire-wombed as the thunderbolt, yet with the charming softness of a lotus petal, a man so rich in knowledge, a man self-lost in meditation —you will never find such a man in the entire universe."¹

Aurobindo has a second meaning: a red lotus. Red is the colour of revolt. And the colour of Divine Love.

A third meaning: a blue lotus. The blue colour is associated with Sri Krishna — Krishna and his delight. "Pale blue light is my light," Sri Aurobindo was to say one day.

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1. With my apology to the author for this poor translation. The original Bengali is so beautiful that it is well nigh impossible to render it into another language without losing a great deal of its beauty. This feeble attempt is just to give the reader unversed in Bengali a faint idea of the original.

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It was left to Mother to explain the real significance of Sri Aurobindo's birth, which, she said, was "eternal in the history of the universe."

Dilating upon it, she said:

"The sentence can be understood in four different ways on four ascending planes of consciousness:

1)Physically, the consequences of the birth will be of eternal importance in the world.

2)Mentally, it is a birth that will be eternally remembered in the universal history.

3)Psychically, a birth that recurs for ever from age to age upon earth.

4)Spiritually, the birth of the Eternal upon earth."

The "birth of the Eternal upon earth" is known in India as the descent of the Avatar.

In the Gita, Sri Krishna the Teacher speaks of the nature and purpose of Avatar hood. "Many are my lives that are past.... Whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the Right I am born from age to age."

But the upholding of Law is not an all-sufficient object in itself. The Avatar comes to change the old Law.

"The Avatar," wrote Sri Aurobindo, "is necessary when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evolution."

Elaborating, he said, "Avatar hood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution." Sri Aurobindo, like Theon, was wholly pro-evolution.

Sri Aurobindo took "the Puranic list of Avatars and interpreted it as a parable of evolution, so as to show that the

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idea of evolution is implicit behind the theory of Avatar hood."

Here is Sri Aurobindo's interpretation. "The Hindu procession of the Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal [Tortoise] between land and water, then the land animal [Boar], then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf [Vamana], small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic [Parasurama], sattwic [Rama], nirguna Avatars, leading the human development. . . . Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development — Krishna opens the possibility of over mind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura force. The progression is striking and unmistakable."

The ancient Hindu "envisages this progression as an enormous movement covering more ages than we can easily count. He believes that Nature has repeated it over and over again, resuming briefly and in sum at each start what she had previously accomplished in detail, slowly and with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth for us in the symbols of the Puranas."

The Fish Avatar rescued the Veda from the waters of the Flood. Sri Aurobindo rescued the Veda from the waters of obscurity into which it had fallen.

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