On The Mother

Preface to the Second Edition

Soon after the publication of the first edition of my biography of Sri Aurobindo in February 1945, friends began asking me: "Why don't you now give us a companion 'Life of the Mother'?" It was only a suggestion ­ a request and perhaps a challenge as well. But wouldn't it be, I thought, like attempting a history of Infinity or a biography of Eternity? A 'Life' of the Mother! What did one know about her except that she was the Mother?

And yet why not? A child might very well stretch forth its delicate arms and declare: "Infinity is as big as this!" That would be part of the Truth. Divers roads lead to the mountain-peak of identity through understanding: there is the steep way of Knowledge, there is the sure way of Works, and there is the sovereign way of Surrender. Or one might read Savitri, and find one's way through its rasadhwani to its matridhwani. But I knew that a simple canter to the Everest of Truth was not for me. I had slowly, laboriously, hopefully to scale the slippery steps up the steep arduous climb, feeling the firm rocky ground, gazing with wide-eyed wonderment at the cloud-capped mountain-heights, the will bravely battling against distraction, fatigue, impatience, dizziness, doubt ....

From a human standpoint, then, it was permissible to write about Sri Aurobindo, and about the Mother. On the other hand, I felt it would be unwise merely to pile up the so-called dates, facts and outer circumstances, to cram the narrative with pseudo-realistic detail or gossipy biographical odds and ends, and to traffick all the time with the weights and measures of a strictly Euclidean world. Sri Aurobindo had once written to Dilip:

Neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all about my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see.

The Mother too has said:

Do not ask questions about the details of the material existence of this body; they are in themselves of no interest and must not attract attention.

The point of these warnings is that the biographer should not surrender to an obsessive interest in the outer details so as to divert the readers' attention from the all-important inner history, the unfolding of the Divine Manifestation and the saga of the Divine Ministry. The familiar categories of birth, growth, maturity, of childhood, girlhood, womanhood, of heredity, environment, upbringing, have little relevance indeed to the life in the Spirit. The Soul transcends Space and Time, it has neither growth nor decay, it is neither European nor Hindu, it is not even specifically masculine or feminine! The Soul but is, eternally has been, and eternally will be. "Throughout all this life," the Mother has said, "knowingly or unknowingly, I have been what the Lord wanted me to be,

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I have done what the Lord wanted me to do. That alone matters."

Siddhartha, Jesus, Mahomed, Nanak, Ramakrishna; Andal, Teresa, Juliana, Rabia, Mira these were men and women no doubt, and yet a divinity hedged them round, they surpassed our familiar categories of thought and feeling, and ceasing to be merely human they became emanations of Infinity, ambassadors of the Absolute, pilgrims of Eternity. Even a Siddhartha was "born", he "grew" from year to year through sun and shower, he loved and he married, he knew suffering, and success, and disappointment. Yet how inconsequential, how almost stupidly obtrusive, are these so-called facts of his terrestrial life in the total context of his great redeemer-role? With such a phenomenon as the Buddha or Sri Aurobindo, what matters is rather the reality of the spiritual history behind the distracting multiplicity of detail in the external story, although the latter may also have its place in our memories and affections.

Even so with the Mother. She is Mother only when we approach her from the human end. "The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood," said Sri Aurobindo once, and her history was verily the "manifestation of a growing Divine consciousness, not human turning into divine." Winningly and radiantly human in appearance, the Mother was beginningless Love, she was eternal Light and infallible Wisdom. Nevertheless the human approach to her, the childlike spontaneous attitude of trust and affection, reverence and awe, had its validity too.

It was in that frame of mind that I completed my little book, On the Mother, in mid-1950, a few months after the publication of the second edition of my biography of Sri Aurobindo. Something like a rough first outline of the inner life a quick graph connecting certain significant pins of light in that multi-dimensional world was all that I could attempt relying mainly on the Mother's writings, notably her Prayers and Meditations. Although generally approved by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as my late friend Shankargauda intimated to me at the time, the publication had to be delayed for over a year, and the book came out only in August 1952. Some years later, it appeared also in a Hindi translation.

Twenty years after the publication of the second edition of my biography of Sri Aurobindo, I took up at last the formidable task of a large-scale revision of the work. During the intervening two decades, a considerable mass of Sri Aurobindo's writings poetry as well as prose had been posthumously published, and a great deal of valuable fresh material had come to light. The revision thus became a rewriting and a radical expansion, and the third edition came out in two volumes in August 1972, just before the Birth Centenary celebrations.

It was natural that I should now seriously think of revising my other book too, On the Mother. I knew it was going to be an even more taxing venture than the work on Sri Aurobindo. The mystique of her divine manifestation and the splendour of her divine ministry were such marvels

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that, while one might feel a surge of joy and measureless gratitude, any attempt to pluck the heart of the mystery or probe the nature of the ministry must prove very much of a frustrating experience. On the other hand, with Grace assisting, what might not be attempted, what might not be achieved? Unworthy vessel though I knew I was, I still felt that right aspiration would elicit the needed response, and I would be filled with a sense of purpose and charge of energy strong enough to carry this great work through to a reasonably successful conclusion. Since the first publication of On the Mother in 1952, so much had happened, the Ashram and the Centre of Education had put forth vast wings of meaningful expansion, and Auroville, the "City of Dawn", had been launched as a symboltownship heralding a revolutionary "Next Future". The Mother's letters, messages and conversations were being regularly published serially in journals like Mother India and the Bulletin, as also separately in book-form and there appeared to be no limit to the range of her experiences and realisations or to the ramifications of her ministry. How was that Infinity that eternal Sunlight to be gathered and contained within the pages of a book?

I visited the Ashram yet once again in February 1973, and had an ambrosial darshan of the Mother. Then, towards the end of March, I wrote seeking tl)e Mother's permission and blessings for my projected new biography. A few days later, Nolini-da replied to me on 6 April that the Mother had been informed of my new undertaking, and that she had blessed it. "I am sure this work will be as successful as the book on Sri Aurobindo," Nolini-da wrote. "It is more difficult, to be sure; but with the Mother's Grace, you will come out of it brilliantly." This was god speed indeed, and it was as though Grace had already taken the matter in hand.

The Mother had in the meantime withdrawn into a deeper retirement in May 1973, and although she gave her last Balcony Darshan on 15 August to the thousands assembled below (and I was one of that rapt congregation too), she presently withdrew again, and on the evening of 17 November she chose to leave her body. It was a testing time for her children near and far, and I tried to give feeble expression to my feelings in the halting verse of Tryst with the Divine, published in August 1974.

When I began the work at last, there was doubtless excitement and dedication, but there was also some residual fear and trembling. My vision suffered sudden impairment in September 1974 on account of retinal thrombosis, and later of haemorrhage, but I could still read with my right eye though I was also advised not to strain myself too much. There were other difficulties too, for the 'hostile forces' were ever on the prowl, and any chink in the armour would do! But I persevered, gathered the available materials and organised them, read and re-read the seminal writings and conversations of the Mother, had long sessions with Savitri (which is verily the Mother's quintessential history), and I commenced the actual

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writing of the book on 21 February 1976. For about a year, day after day my limping narrative followed the Mother's life-history Paris, Tlemcen, Pondicherry, Paris again, Tokyo, Kyoto, Pondicherry again I saw her as Mirra and as Mother and as Aditi "perfect in her ministry" and the whole typescript was ready by 21 February 1977. I was now able, on 3 April 1977, to make my offering, and send it to Nolini-da through Jayantilal Parekh.

The present work has expanded to over ten times the bulk of the first edition of 1952. But basically my approach hasn't changed, for it had the sanction of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; and so the stress is on the inner history, on the progressive efflorescence of the Manifestation, and on the far-ranging character of the Mother's ministry for man and the earth.

While I was writing the book, it became increasingly clear to me that, not only was the Mother's life-history closely interwoven with Sri Aurobindo's and both with the history of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the lives of its growing number of inmates, but there were also invisible links, correlations and creepers of causal relationship between the Mother's ministry and the evolutionary destiny of man spanning two World Wars and overflowing into the present, and even pointing towards the far horizons of the Next Future. Like Sri Aurobindo's, the Mother's story also is intrinsically the spiritual history of humanity, and it is this silken thread of continuity and movement that holds together the seeming shifts in scene, the startling transitions, the forced marches, the sudden set-backs, the definitive advances and conquests.

It was Grace indeed that I was enabled, notwithstanding the constraints and impediments incidental to a formidable undertaking of this nature, to complete the book in time. The two main sources were of course the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's writings and conversations, but I have also often presented the Mother as others had seen her from time to time. A unique 95-year human chronicle, a spacious temporal history scooped out of Eternity, an inspiring drama of the flowering of the Divine in the human, a nectarean promise and process and spectacle of the dialectic of integral change and transformation, a decisive evolutionary movement from the brilliant past dawns to the supramental noons of the Future all this is involved in the recital of the Mother's wonder-story. And the story is yet to be concluded.

I have drawn freely upon the work of earlier writers, and my debt is indicated, generally in the Select Bibliography, and more pointedly in the footnotes. My debt to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust is immense for readily permitting me to quote from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and from other books and journals copyrighted by the Trust. My daughter, Prema Nandakumar, and my wife, Padmasani, were my first eager readers; and I am thankful to Dr. Kishor H. Gandhi for going through the typescript and offering valuable suggestions towards the rectification of slips and errors. For various acts of assistance and sustenance,

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I owe a great deal to the love and unfailing understanding of Sri Surendra Nath Jauhar, who like a true friend and elder brother has kept watch over the progress of the book. It is also a pleasure and a duty to thank the Manager and Staff of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry, for the devotion and despatch with which they have produced this book, checking the quotations and references in the footnotes, often drawing my attention to mistakes in the copy, and effectively minimising for me the frightening labour of proof-reading. They had, as always, undertaken the work in the true spirit of Karma Yoga aiming at nothing short of perfection. Finally I am happy that, like my earlier book on Sri Aurobindo, this Homage to the Mother too is being published under the aegis of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, and, opportunely, at the time of the Mother's Birth Centenary celebrations.

K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

'Matri Bhavan'

Mylapore, Madras

February 1978

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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

There was a time-lag of twenty-five years between the handy first edition of On the Mother, published on 15 August 1952, and the greatly expanded second edition in two volumes that appeared just in time for the world wide celebrations during the Mother's birth centenary year, 1978-79. On the Mother was also selected for the 1980 Sahitya Akademi annual award, and the citation referred to the book's "deep and sensitive insight into a great life, its authenticity, artistic vision and evocative creative language". And the two birth centenaries, Sri Aurobindo's in 1972 andJhe Mother's six years after, have generated during the last two decades a growing almost an escalating interest and involvement in their life and work, their Agenda for the Future, their Ashram in Pondicherry, and their world redeeming and world transforming Integral Yoga.

I have also separately touched upon some aspects of the Mother's life and ministry in my survey of "The Mother's Birth Centenary" (Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1978, pp. 69-92), in my essay "Words on the Mother's Words" (Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1991, pp.66-91), and in my two Shri Navajata Memorial Lectures on "Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: Their Teaching, Self-revelation and Yogic Action" (Pondicherry University, 1988).

The second edition of On the Mother has been out of print for some years, and the desire has been widespread that a new edition should be brought out as a companion volume to the fourth edition of my Sri Aurobindo: A Biography and a History that came out in 1985. It was also felt that apart from making the necessary verbal and factual corrections, the time had come to make some revisions and additions in the light of new knowledge that had become available during the last fifteen years. In the process, a few footnotes have been added, the references updated and the bibliography enlarged. A new Chronology of the Mother's physical life, compiled by the Sri Aurobindo Archives & Research Library, appears here for the first time.

The present one-volume edition owes a great deal to the collabora. tion between Sri Jayantilal Parekh's experienced editorial staff at Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research Library, and Sri A.R. Ganguli and his seasoned and dedicated staff at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

I have known Shri Jayantilal since 1970 when the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary celebrations brought us together, and he helped to see through the press the earlier editions of my Sri Aurobindo and On the Mother, and he has also taken a friendly interest in my Sitayana and Satisaptakam.

My grateful thanks are due to my long-standing friend Shri K.D. Sethna whose generosity of understanding has been among the choicest blessings of my life. It was only under his active guidance uninterrupted by his long hospitalisation due to a multiple fracture of his right femur that the editing work could be undertaken. My thanks are also due to

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Sunjoy Bhatt, Ganapati Pattegar, Aloka Ghosh, Robert Zwicker, Richard Hartz and Patricia Frick of the Archives and Research, and S. Ravi of the Centre of Education, who together made the final 'copy' as flawless as humanly possible. Sunjoy of course was not a little responsible for the clean text of the fourth edition of my biography of Sri Aurobindo, and now On the Mother too owes a lot to his and his associates' taste and tact and finesse in finalising the 'copy'.

It is a rare pleasure, finally, to record once again my thanks to Kumari Parubai Patil, Registrar of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry, for her decision to bring out this new edition of On the Mother to meet the steady demand for the book.

K.R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

6 October 1992

'Sydney House'

277-B, J.J. Road, Alwarpet, Madras - 600 018

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PART ONE

MIRRA

Do not ask questions about the details of the material existence of this body; they are in themselves of no interest and must not attract attention.

Throughout all this life, knowingly or unknowingly, I have been what the Lord wanted me to be, I have done what the Lord wanted me to do. That alone matter.*

THE MOTHER

*The Mother's message of 22 June 1958 to Flame of White Light by T. V. Kapali Sastry (1960). See also MO 13: 45.

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CHAPTER 1

Childhood and Girlhood

I

Since the beginning of the earth, wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of Consciousness, I was there.¹

THE MOTHER

In this high signal moment of the gods

Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss

A greatness from our other countries came ....

A mediating ray has touched the earth

Bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's; ...

A spirit of its celestial source aware

Descended into earth's imperfect mould

And wept not fallen to mortality,

But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.²

SRI AUROBINDO

SHE was born of affluent parents in Paris on Thursday, 21 February 1878 at 10:15 a.m., and was named Mirra. Her parents had come from Egypt to France only a year earlier. Her mother, Mathilde Alfassa, née Mathilde Ismalun, who was born in an Egyptian banker's family and her father, Maurice Alfassa, a Turkish banker and businessman, were both positivists and rationalists. Her mother's antecedents were aristocratic, perhaps with hoary connections with the House of the Pharaohs. In the course of a talk in 1956, she was to refer to a vision of hers which seemed to imply that in far distant times she had been an Egyptian princess:

About two years ago, I had a vision ... of ancient Egypt ... I was someone' there, the great priestess or somebody .... I was in a wonderful building, immense! so high! but quite bare ... except a place where there were magnificent paintings .... There was a sort of gutter running all round the base of the walls .... And then I saw the child, who was half naked, playing in it. And I was quite shocked, I said, "What! this is disgusting!" ... There was the tutor who came .... I spoke to him, told him, "How can you let the child play in there?" And he answered me - and I woke up with his reply­ saying - I did not hear the first words, but in my thought it was ­ "Amenhotep likes it." ... Then I knew the child was Amenhotep. . ..

And I know I was his mother; at that moment I knew who I was .... ³

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It would be enlightening to know who this Amenhotep and who his mother were, but what impresses us in general is the antiquity of Mirra's antecedents: From other hints or pointers given by her, we may say that her origins go back to remote history and even prehistory and no particular race or country can have exclusive claim on her.

In her early childhood, Mirra was rather unlike others of her age. She was not forward, she was not unduly talkative. And she was averse to being fed forcibly. Her mother often felt annoyed because Mirra wouldn't readily eat certain kinds of supposedly nutritious food. Mirra herself felt no resentment against her mother on account of the periodic exercises in forced feeding! As she used to tell people in later years, normally children know what they need, and it is accordingly unwise to force them to eat a specified kind or quantity of food squaring with our own notions of what is good for them.

Already at the age of five or six, Mirra was a child apart:

The child remembering inly a far home

Lived guarded in her spirit's luminous cell, ...

Even in her childish movements could be felt

The nearness of a light still kept from earth,

Feelings that only eternity could share,

Thoughts natural and native to the gods.⁴

She used to sit quiet in a tiny upholstered armchair specially made for her, and as she meditated she would experience the descent of a great brilliant Light upon her head producing a turmoil inside her brain. She had the feeling that the Light was continually growing, and she wished it would possess her completely. Her propensity to such sessions of solitariness, her moods of taut intensity and edged concern, were a source of worry and anxiety to her rationalist mother. Once, while Mathilde was scolding her, young Mirra suddenly "felt all the human misery and all this human­ falsehood" and tears welled out of her eyes. When Mathilde asked the reason, Mirra calmly replied that her tears were because of the world's miseries, for she indeed felt their weight pressing upon her. A world distressed and crying, crying, as if seeking her protection. In this context of the world's pain, the child Mirra couldn't accept the popular notion of an omnipotent God, "one and all alone". As she was to recall over eighty years later:

That is the thing which had made me completely atheist, if one might say so, in my childhood; I did not accept a being who declared himself to be unique and all-powerful, whoever he might be. Even if he was unique and all-powerful .. he must not have the right to proclaim it! It was like this in my mind.⁵

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In France, at the age of seven

She has also acknowledged how the sorrows of others could strangely and powerfully affect her:

At that time I was not yet doing conscious yoga ... I observed it very, very clearly. I told myself, "Surely it is their sorrow I am feeling, for I have no reason to be specially affected by this person's death"; and all of a sudden, tears came to my eyes, I felt as though a lump were in my throat and I wanted to cry, as though I were in great sorrow - I was a small child - and immediately I understood, "Oh! it is their sorrow which has come inside me."⁶

II

Mirra, thus, seems to have learned to live in a world of her own, with its own laws and correspondences and exhilarations. An analogue, perhaps, to the Parrots' Isle into which Gaffer periodically escapes in Tagore's The Post Office: a land of wonders, of hills and waterfalls, of birds flying and singing! As she was to recollect on 18 April 1956, while talking of her own childhood experiences :

There is a world in which you are the supreme maker of forms: that is your own particular vital world. You are the supreme fashioner and you can make a marvel of your world if you know how to use it. If you have an artistic or poetic consciousness, if you love harmony, beauty, you will build there something marvellous which will tend to spring up into the material manifestation.

When I was small I used to call this "telling stories to oneself'. It is not at all a telling with words, in one's head: it is a going away to this place which is fresh and pure, and ... building up a wonderful story there. And if you know how to tell yourself a story in this way ... this story will be realised in your life ....

The dreams of childhood are the realities of mature age.⁷

When Mirra was five, she began experiencing a Consciousness which' she felt as a Light and a Force around her head, and its brilliance never faded. Even when past ninety, she could testify: "Ever since that time when I was five - during the last eighty-six years of my life on earth - I have always seen that, conducted my life with reference to that; that has been my guiding Light."⁸

And so the child Mirra dreamt, and had visions; she wandered in far-off eternities, she structured forms of beauty and love, and felt more at home in these dream-kingdoms than in the prosaic and rather sordid actualities of everyday life. The Child whom Wordsworth apostrophised in his "Immortality Ode" might be Mirra herself:

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Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy Soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher ...

Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest!

When she was between five and seven years of age, Mirra formed the habit of projecting herself - her own willings and those that came from outside - upon a screen as in a cinema, observing herself moving on it, also arranging and organising them in such a way that she at last became conscious of the true direction of her life. The whole experience seemed terribly interesting to her, "the most interesting thing in the world". It was not surprising, therefore, that when her father once wanted her to go with him to a circus, she firmly declined telling him, "No, I am doing something much more interesting than going to the circus!" This was her reaction too to her friends who invited her to go to a meeting where they were to play together: "No, I enjoy here much more!" she would say, and Mirra was quite sincere.⁹

III

Busy as she thus was with her inner worlds where she was "telling stories" to herself - where she was "the supreme maker of forms" - Mirra did not attend to her formal education. The whole family, as the Mother said in a talk of 25 July 1962, had been fretting about it and looking upon her as a retarded child. She didn't even know the alphabet, and the mild shock of recognition of her own ignorance in this regard occurred only around the age of seven. Her brother, who was just a year and half older, used to bring home from school big pictures with captions below them. One day he gave her one of them and she asked him what was written on it. When he told her to read for herself, she asked him to teach her how to do it and he brought her a primer. And, "on the third day I started reading. That's how I learned ... in about a week I knew what should have taken me years to learn."

Around the age of ten she went to a private school, and advanced rapidly enough to be at the head of her class. She had made up for lost time, and there was to be no looking back. Mirra was generally at the top of her class, and won prizes in several subjects. If she started formal school education a little later than other children of her age, she was quite ahead of them in the purity and maturity of her consciousness and sensibility.

She also learned drawing and painting and the piano. And in due course, she grew into an accomplished and rather original artist. About artistic development, she once remarked in later years: "It is impossible to learn the piano or to do painting unless the consciousness enters into the

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hand and the hands become conscious independently of the head." It was an experience that she had long ago.¹⁰

Like her scholastic studies, Mirra's involvement in sports was also unconventional. "I remember having learnt to play tennis when I was eight," she recalled later; it was a "passion" with her, but she seldom played with people of her own age. "I always went to the best players," she confessed, and although they at times looked surprised, they played with her in the end. Of course she never won, but she learnt much.¹¹

Another dimension to her education: once, when as a girl of twelve or thirteen, she was at her grandmother's place, Mirra saw two relatives - a boy and a girl- kissing each other oblivious of the world. It was at first no more than a scene of something new to her. For Mirra "did not know anything about this love". But she could see that they were blissfully happy. Suddenly, however, as though an electric current had passed through her, Mirra too experienced the same joy "even more intensely than them, without the act".¹² Shall we say it was the love that is at the heart of creation and rules the universe? Was it thus she first gained an inkling into one of the familiar manifestations of the sheer Delight of Existence?

Earnest and serious as she was as a rule, on those rare occasions when she complained about food or any such small matter, her mother would tell Mirra to forget about trifles and concentrate on her studies or her work. "You are born to realise the highest Ideal," she would say and send her packing.¹³ Undoubtedly this strictness of her mother did a great favour to little Mirra, and taught her the true discipline of life.

Young and taciturn as she generally was, there was still no question of anybody slighting her or just taking her for granted. Once when a bully, a thirteen-year old boy, started teasing her and other girls, a tremendous wrath suddenly surged up in Mirra, and she seized and lifted him up and threw him down with a thud. It was a lesson the bully would never forget!¹⁴

When she was about fifteen years old, Mirra began taking formal lessons in painting in the Academie Jufian, a noted art school in Paris, and she was the youngest of the pupils in her class. But she was so poised and mature in her behaviour that the other art students called her the Sphinx, and often brought their problems to her. In her quiet way she exuded so much authority that, in a time of crisis, it was the force of her persuasion and the power of her commanding eyes that helped to reinstate a monitress who had been unjustly dismissed from service by the Head of the School.¹⁵

Another interesting facet of Mirra's character was that, even in her childhood and early girlhood days, she wouldn't fuss about ailments and illnesses, nor grow panicky about developing or contracting them. She avoided medication as a matter of principle and sound practical sense. When she had pimples on her throat, she cured herself by rubbing them out! On the use of will-power in this treatment she commented that "it

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was very interesting to see how it worked physiologically". There were "some kind of white cells" charged with the duty of fighting the inroads of diseases, and such cells were apt to increase when a strong will was exerted. In that connection an eminent French physician had told her that it needed a strong will to cure human diseases. ¹⁶

IV

The ardours of formal education, the initiation into the Fine Arts, the discipline of sports, the natural qualities of leadership, the journeys into the inner realms with the compulsion to tell 'stories' to herself and to structure ideal forms, the identification with the world's load of pain ­ these, in their totality, were exacting enough. And she sorrowed with those she saw sorrowing, and death could deeply affect her. Why should death in somebody's house - quite a stranger's too - and the charged atmosphere of bereavement there involve so many others also in its ever-widening ambit?^l7 Perhaps, the apparent separativity and assumed autonomy of 'individual man' didn't really correspond to the inner reality! One should mark the movements of one's consciousness, the vibrations of the vital world, and then one might stumble upon this seminal Truth:

There's nothing separate or independent; there is only one Substance, one Force, one Consciousness, one Will, which moves in countless ways of being .

.. .if one steps back and follows the movement, no matter which line of movement, one can see very clearly that the vibrations propagate them­ selves, one following another, one following another, and that in fact there is only one unity - unity of Substance, unity of Consciousness, unity of Will. And that is the only reality. ¹⁸

It would thus appear that from the age of seven or eight onwards, Mirra was having intimations and experiences whose full import she could gauge only much later. In other words, she was already doing Yoga, though as yet unconsciously; but the insights and inscapes of the time were certainly not of the kind that girls of her age ordinarily had. Mirra vaguely sensed a Presence, a Power, a Love, a marvellous Benevolence, an ineffable Delight - and she was also, with the passage of the months and years, trying to hew pathways across the disconcerting jungles of illusive Appearance to the sanctuary of the Real, the Absolute, the Perfect, the splendorous Divine:

An invisible sunlight ran within her veins

And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliancies

That woke a wider sight than earth could know. ...

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All objects were to her shapes of living selves ...

Each was a symbol power, a vivid flash

In the circuit of infinities half-known;

Nothing was alien or inanimate,

Nothing without its meaning or its call.

For with a greater Nature she was one.¹⁹

V

When she was about twelve, Mirra used to go for solitary walks in the woods at Fontainebleau, and she would often sit for hours at the foot of a tree losing herself in communion with Nature. It was a singular concatenation, the ardent young girl self-absorbed in the infinitudes, and the silent ageless tree with the imperious woods around: quite an equation of the mathematics of the Spirit! The very birds and squirrels made friends with her, and would often perch on her, or crawl lovingly over her. And, indeed, Mirra felt perfectly at peace there in the bosom of Nature, and experienced a sense of identity. Some of the trees at Fontainebleau were supposed to be quite ancient - perhaps two thousand years old or more ­ and it was as though Mirra had captivated the heart of primordial Nature. The trees almost seemed to understand her, and whisper in a familiar language to her. The spirit of a tree had once become aware of the talk of cutting it down, and when Mirra went to sit under it began soliciting her to somehow save it from the threatened destruction. In later life she intervened in several cases and succeeded in staying the murderous axe.²⁰ Her companionship with Nature was thus no pose, no mere figure of speech, but a deep commitment flowing from a sense of spiritual oneness with all life, all Nature.

On one occasion, however, as Mirra was climbing a hill in the Fontainebleau woods, her foot slipped, and she started falling down. Would she hit the flint stones below? She was unafraid all the same, and she felt as though Somebody was supporting her during her seemingly precipitate fall, and she safely reached the ground as though nothing had happened, as though she had but leisurely walked down the hill.²¹

From the age of twelve, Mirra started doing what we might term Yoga, and her deep interest in occultism also sprouted at about the same time. Doing Yoga meant aspiring steadily for union with the Divine, and this led to the recurrence of certain dreams, visions, and even realisations. She read, and she pondered, and she had long meditative sessions. It was during this period that the faces of certain saintly personages began to appear in her dreams and visions, and almost invariably she would meet these same persons in real life not long after. As she recalled these experiences decades later in 1920:

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Between 11 and 13 a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man's possibility of uniting with Him, of realising Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon earth in a life divine. This, along with a practical discipline for its fulfilment, was given to me during my body's sleep by several teachers ....

Later on, as the interior and exterior development proceeded, the spiritual and psychic relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent.. .. ²²

This auspicious being who generated so special a psychic and spiritual relationship, but whom she wasn't soon to encounter on the physical plane, she was led to call 'Krishna', the Bhagawan of the Gita, although at that time she knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions. But the being appeared with such persistence, such regularity, such clarity of outline and aura of divinity, that she knew it was only a question of time and that she would one day be led up to him and enabled to collaborate with him in the divine work to be done for the world.

VI

Around the age of thirteen, Mirra had a unique experience which returned night after night, and lasted for about a year:

As soon as I had gone to bed it seemed to me that I went out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the city, very high above. Then I used to see myself clad in a magnificent golden robe, much longer than myself; and as I rose higher, the robe would stretch, spreading out in a circle around me to form a kind of immense roof over the city. Then I would see men, women, children, old men, the sick, the unfortunate coming out from every side; they would gather under the outspread robe, begging for help, telling of their miseries, their suffering, their hardships. In reply, the robe, supple and alive, would extend towards each one of them individually, and as soon as they had touched it, they were comforted or healed, and went back into their bodies happier and stronger than they had come out of them. Nothing seemed more beautiful to me, nothing could make me happier; and all the activities of the day seemed dull and colourless and without any real life, beside this activity of the night which was the true life for me. Often while I was rising up in this way, I used to see at my left an old man, silent and still, who looked at me with kindly affection and encouraged me by his presence. This old man, dressed in a long dark purple robe, was the personification - as I came to know later­ of him who is called the Man of Sorrows.²³

The Man of Sorrows was also to figure in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and introduce himself to the heroine in these agonised terms:

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I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he

Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;

To enjoy my agony God built the earth,

My passion he has made his drama's theme ....

Hell tortures me with the edges of my thought,

Heaven tortures me with the splendour of my dreams.²⁴

Mirra knew even at the age of thirteen that she would dedicate herself to the service of humanity, and she wished too that all the world's ills were really concentrated in her so that with one swift determined move she might take their sting away! These night-long vigils spread over a whole year were characteristic of this truly exceptional child, for even the Himalayas of Pain couldn't altogether crush her spirit. An indrawn movement of her immaculate expansive robe, and instantly the healing would begin, and the pain exorcised away.

A school essay written by Mirra in 1893 when she was fifteen has been luckily preserved, and it throws abundant light on the high seriousness of her life and thought. The essay on a subject set by the teacher is entitled "The Path of Later On", and the whole point of the parable is given in the epigraph: ''The path of later-on and the road of tomorrow lead only to the castle of nothing-at-all. "²⁵ A young student, daunted by the homework he has to do, decides he would do it later on, and prefers to go to sleep hoping that a night's rest might tone him up. He begins dreaming, and finds himself at a crossroads where he takes the primrose path that is terribly captivating: "Ah! how pleasant it is to breathe the scented breeze, while the sun warms the air with its fiery rays!" He hears, though he doesn't heed, the voices that warn him not to be misled by the soft and the easy: " ... do not fall asleep in the present; come to the future." It is significant that Mirra should have stumbled upon what was to be one of the cardinal exhortations of her whole life. In the fable, the young traveller perseveres in his folly. He is carried farther and farther on the crest of a wave of compelling ease, but the worm of uneasiness gnaws within: "Where am I? Where am I going? .. What does it matter? Why think, why act? Let us drift along this endless road; let us walk on, 1 shall think tomorrow." He is lured insensibly to a ravine, it becomes deeper and deeper, there are pale human figures rolling in the ravines, wallowing in their wretchedness, owls, crows and bats hiss in his ears, he is indeed lost in Death's ghost­ kingdom, and he has reached at last a deformed enormous castle peopled by "the terrible phantoms who bear the names of Desolation, Despair, Disgust with life". He now finds himself remorselessly pushed to the edge of the abyss, and when he feels that he is about to succumb, he falls from his bed and wakes up with a start. The hideous nightmare is over, and he opens wide his blinking eyes. He has learnt his lesson, and he will never again "put off until tomorrow what he could do today". It was all so simple:

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the path he had followed was "later-on", the road was "tomorrow", and what he would reach was a mere dream-edifice, the castle of "nothing-at-all"! It is but a school essay, yet it is touched with authenticity and elemental force. "Every word is in its right place," says Samir Kanta Gupta, "and the words invariably are the right ones, and the ensemble gives vividly the concrete picture of a terrible conflict in the conscience of the young traveller."²⁶

VII

By the time Mirra had moved from girlhood to young womanhood, the Light had grown in her day by day and her face took on a new glow:

A lovelier light assumed her spirit brow

And sweet and solemn grew her musing gaze;

Celestial-human deep warm slumbrous fires

Woke in the long fringed glory of her eyes

Like altar-burnings in a mysteried shrine.

Out of those crystal windows gleamed a will

That brought a large significance to life.²⁷

While deep within her being there reigned a supernal calm, there were not wanting squalls and cacophonies without, there were maladjustments and mighty falsities enough, and there were upheavals and cruel admonitions; and Mirra felt quite ill at ease with them all. For example, when she was seventeen or eighteen, she heard of a 'Charity Bazaar' in Paris. Although the sponsors of a charity bazaar usually thought of the whole thing more as an outlet for amusement than as an exercise in charity, still as a result of the publicity and the sales some residual money was ultimately siphoned off for ameliorative purposes. But on this particular occasion something unimaginably frightful happened:

All the elegance, all the refinement of high society was gathered there .. Now, the bazaar was very beautiful but not solidly built, because it was to last only for three or four days. The roof was of painted tarpaulin which had been suspended. Everything was lighted by electricity .... There was a short-circuit, everything began to blaze up; the roof caught fire and suddenly collapsed upon the people ... all the elite of the society were there - for them, from the human point of view, it was a frightful catastrophe.²⁸

Naturally enough there was a scuffle, and a stampede, and a frantic attempt to escape from the fast enveloping conflagration. Those well­ mannered people - they were really from the cream of Parisian society ­ were of a sudden transformed by fear into entrapped animals desperately seeking a way. of escape. Afterwards, there were loud lamentations in society, big funerals and many stories.

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But what stung the sensitive Mirra was that the catastrophe, far from inducing introspection and humility, only provoked a Dominican to declaim in the course of his funeral oration that the disaster had served the people right: the victims had not lived according to the law of God, and no wonder He had punished the transgressors with death by fire! Mirra felt repelled by this ridiculous notion of sin and punishment, "a Christian idea, which falsifies our idea of the Divine".²⁹ This notion of a God who could be vindictive enough to inflict the extreme penalty on so-called 'sinners' was wholly repugnant to Mirra; and she felt that, if philosophy tried to squeeze the universe into the petty size of the human mind, theology did cruder things still.

But the question remained: Was there a causal connection between upheavals like earthquakes, floods and outbreaks of fire on the one hand, and the tally of human transgressions and misfortunes on the other? Mirra felt with her whole being that it was wrong to forge any such logical relationship. What, then, was the truth about the matter? In her later years, she was to explain the correct position as follows:

Perhaps the truth is rather that it is one and the same movement of consciousness that expresses itself in a Nature ridden with calamities and catastrophes and in a disharmonious humanity. The two things are not cause and effect, but stand on the same level. Above them there is a consciousness which is seeking for manifestation and embodiment upon earth, and in its descent towards matter it meets everywhere the same resistance, in man and in physical Nature.³⁰

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CHAPTER 2

The Realms Invisible

I

And so Mirra was in the world, an observer and the observed, apparently no more than a little shining speck in the giddy whirl of Parisian life, yet she was not altogether of it, she held herself apart, she prized her privacy. Her steady schooling in the outside world of Man and Nature was not, however, quite as important as the sadhana in the infinitudes of the inner realms of the Spirit:

A shore less sweep was lent to the mortal's acts,

And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;

Nature and soul vied in nobility ....

Leaving earth's safety daring wings of Mind

Bore her above the trodden fields of thought

Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond

To live on eagle heights near to the Sun ....

Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,

A mystic acolyte trained in Nature's school,

Aware of the marvel of created things

She laid the secrecies of her heart's deep muse

Upon the altar of the Wonderful;

Her hours were ritual in a timeless fane;

Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit Into communion with its comrade gods. 1

Between her eighteenth and twentieth years, Mirra was able to achieve "a conscious and constant union with the divine Presence"\ and for effecting this communion she had neither Guru nor Book to guide her. In other words, with unerring intuition and a compulsive psychic movement Mirra had been able to reach the heart of the great mystery: her own secret Self which was at once the best Shastra and the sanctuary of the ultimate Guru. While describing the instruments of Yoga-Siddhi, Sri Aurobindo says in The Synthesis of Yoga:

The supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every thinking and living being ....

As the supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every man, so its supreme Guide and Teacher is the inner

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Guide, the World-Teacher, jagad-guru, secret within us. It is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of his knowledge .... He discloses progressively in us his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal being.3

But of course, ordinarily the written or received Shastra, "the Word from without, representative of the Divine," does help the psychic efflorescence. Where the self-unfolding has already taken place, as with Mirra in the first flash of her flowering womanhood, subsequent access to a received Shastra or an external Guru could be, "as it were, a concession of the omnipotent and omniscient Divine to the generality of a law that governs Nature".⁴ This was how Mirra began reading Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga and later, more important still, poring over the Bhagavad Gita. She found Vivekananda's lectures illuminating, and it seemed a marvel that somebody could explain something to her so clearly. Then an Indian* introduced her to the Bhagavad Gita and said, "Read the Gita, and take Krishna as the symbol of the immanent God, the inner Godhead." And in one month, even though she had access only to a poor French translation, she was able to enter into its spirit and find the immanent Divine, the God within.5

The Gita thus came to Mirra in her Parisian days at the time of a great spiritual self-awakening. When she first read it and meditated on its central message, or when she presently delved into what the commentators had to say, she was of course fascinated, but she was a little disconcerted as well. The Sankhyan Purusha-Prakriti theory seemed to offer both an explanation of phenomenal life and a clue to Liberation, but this didn't quite satisfy her. The reason was this: it was not a mere escape from the endless toil and tribulation and frustration of everyday life - an escape into an utter stillness of being - that Mirra aspired for, but rather a wrestling with the crowd of evils around her, their subjugation, their conversion and their ultimate transformation. The difficulty with the Purusha-Prakriti theory was that it was only too apt to encourage people to plead that their own . prakriti being what it was, they were unable to change it; they could only suffer it! Or, by a supreme effort, they could try to get out of it into the inviolable realm of the Purusha. Recalling those days, she said in 1956:

It's very convenient. I saw this in France, in Paris, before coming to India, and I saw how very practical it was. First, it allows you to grasp a very profound and extremely useful truth ... and then it shields you from all necessity of changing your outer nature.

It's so convenient, isn't it? You say, "I am like that, what can I do about it? I separate myself from Nature, I let her do whatever she likes, I am not

*Jnanendranath Chakravarty, later Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University. His wife Monika Devi took up sannyasa, adopting the name Yashoda Ma, and founded an Ashram near A1mora. She was to initiate Ronald Nixon, naming. him Sri Krishnaprem.

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this Nature, I am the Purusha. Ah! let her go her own way; after all, I can't change her." This is extremely convenient. And that is why people adopt it; for they imagine they are in the Purusha, but at the least scratch they fall right back into Prakriti .... 6

Mirra once heard someone who had truly returned to the poise of the silent Purusha and hence exuded "a very remarkable atmosphere", but the result was he branded as "dangerous revolutionaries all those who wanted to change something in the earth-Nature".⁷ Prakriti had best be left alone! He couldn't countenance the feasibility of change - of evolution - in terrestrial Nature.8 But need suffering be always the badge of the human tribe? Couldn't suffering - couldn't even the necessity for death - be annulled? Couldn't there be a constant and luminous progress towards goals of perfection? A tame and unquestioning acceptance of Prakriti seemed to Mirra a slavery beyond description and a perpetual mortgaging of the future.

However, Mirra's clarion call even in her school essay "The Path of Later On" had been: Wake to the Future! And this absorbing preoccupation with the future was to continue throughout her life. The flawed present - and because it was flawed - had to be changed and transformed into a future nearer one's heart's desire. The contours and the very constitution of life, of earth-existence, must change, evolve and move towards new horizons, culminating in the worsting of evil, the defeat of disease, the death of death itself. For one like Mirra fired with this uncompromising idealism, the near fatalistic acceptance of "things as they are" appeared no more than a slothful philosophy of convenience.

Again, the return to the Purusha could be, not necessarily of a static but also of a dynamic kind, and then all that Mirra wanted would be capable of accomplishment. And so, even though Mirra profited by reading and pondering on the Lord's Song, she wouldn't wholly accept the current elucidations and interpretations, but held her own counsel. A work of revealed scripture was doubtless a pearl beyond price, but more precious still was the eternal scripture secreted in the recesses of her soul's mystic cavern:

A boundless knowledge greater than man's thought,

A happiness too high for heart and sense

Locked in the world and yearning for release

She felt in her; waiting as yet for form,

It 'asked for objects around which to grow

And natures strong to bear without recoil

The splendour of her native royalty,

Her greatness and her sweetness and her bliss,

Her might to possess and her vast power to love: ... ⁹

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II

Mirra's was certainly a life apart, but it was also a life of communion with the universals. Her unpredictable intimations and experiences opened her to the infinitudes of the Spirit, and she was one with everything and one with the All. But her outer life seemed to pursue a conventional course, though even there one saw something distinctive about her, as if she was rather more than what she seemed to be.

It was about this time that Mirra cultivated a kind of uncanny movement of consciousness, a precision, a sort of sleight-of-hand infallibility:

There are things in a box and one says to the hand, "Take twelve"; (without counting, like that), the hand picks up the twelve and gives them to you. That is an experience that I had long long ago. At the age of twenty I started having experiences like that.10

Again, her sense of adventure encouraged her to join excursions with friends. For example, once she joined three others on a week-long walking tour across the mountains of France. Each was to carry a bag slung across the back, for one would need things on the way. But when they asked themselves what the indispensable items were, these were really very few; "everything was reduced to so little".¹¹ And yet the joys of the excursion were in no way diminished!

Her major side-interest, however, was occultism. Mirra had in fact become involved in occultism when she was only twelve years old. A path at once seductive and perilous, occultism asked for Truth as well as courage, and purity most of all. Sri Aurobindo has listed religion, occultism, spiritual thought and inner spiritual realisation as the "four main lines which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the inner being".¹² But, then, they have their mutual filiations, and also experiment with varieties of association and accommodation:

Occultism has sometimes put forward a spiritual aim as its goal, and . followed occult knowledge and experience as an approach to it, formulated some kind of mystic philosophy: but more often it has confined itself to occult knowledge and practice without any spiritual vistas; it has turned to thaumaturgy or mere magic or even deviated into diabolism.13

Religion has had a mass base always, and thus anybody almost can take to religion; but occultism demands a preparatory stage of inner development. On the other hand, although in its actual practice occultism may have often deviated into aberrations and perversions in the East no less than in the West, "the highest occultism is that which discovers the secret movements and dynamic supernormal possibilities of Mind and Life and Spirit and uses them in their native force or by an applied process for the greater

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effectivity of our mental, vital and spiritual being. "¹⁴

In so far as occultism is a means of acquiring power to act upon men, affairs or things, it is but magic; real occultism, on the contrary, is "a direct and conscious perception of the forces behind appearances and the play of these forces". ¹⁵ Occultism may in fact be described as dynamic spirituality; for what it attempts is to discover and bring to the material life the potencies and puissances of the Spirit through the agency of the subtler forces of the Mind, the Vital and the Physical. And Sri Aurobindo clinches the whole issue in the following passage:

Its most important aim must be the discovery of the hidden truths and powers of the mind-force and the life-power and the greater forces of the concealed spirit. Occult science is, essentially, the science of the subliminal, the subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-nature ... and the use of it as part of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation of that knowledge. ¹⁶

III

At first Mirra seems to have merely stumbled into occultism, even as spiritual experiences too had come to her, as good as unbidden. "I feared nothing," she said later. "One goes out of one's body, but is tied by something resembling an almost imperceptible thread; if the thread is cut, it is all over. Life also is ended. "¹⁷ In her maturer years, she once had a good dinner and then went to a conference hall. There were many people, and standing there with them she felt uneasy, for it was very hot, and she said, "I must go out immediately." And so she was out in Trocadero Square, and inadvertently she left her body too - and it slumped, as though she had suddenly fainted. And from outside as it seemed, she saw her body lying flat on the ground. She found it so ridiculous that she rushed into it and "gave it a good scolding, saying, 'You must not play such tricks with me!' "¹⁸ In the singular labyrinth of the occult, then, one may roam as far as one pleases, but the paramount condition is that one must hold on to the slender saving thread of the clue, which alone can ensure the return to the body.

This going out of the body and returning to it, although it sounds like such a simple and commonplace affair, is a very serious and tricky business really. Something goes out - but exactly what? Not the psychic being, since "one would not be aware of it, the more so as most of the time it is not within you!... What goes out is sometimes the subtle physical.... But usually it is the vital which goes out and still more often, the mental being."¹⁹ The more important problem, however, is for the temporarily vacated body to be insulated from outside interference till the wandering

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entity - be it the subtle physical, the vital or the mental being - returns to its tenement:

It is dangerous if you sleep surrounded by people who may come and shake you up, believing that something has happened to you. But if you are alone and sleep quietly, there is no danger. ²⁰

The more serious danger is for some evil being of the vital world that doesn't have a body, seeing a vacant body, to rush in and occupy it. But an occultist stationed in Truth and assured of Grace will not be overtaken by this kind of usurpation of identity.

As for the nature of the occult discipline, one has to learn "to go out of one's body consciously and to enter into another more subtle body; to use one's will to go where one wants to go, never to fear and sometimes to face unexpected and even terrible things; to remain calm, to develop the mind's visual sense .... "²¹ Again, the occult is not one but a whole congeries of worlds:

... a gradation of regions ... of more and more ethereal or subtle regions, anyway, those farther and farther removed in their nature from the physical materiality we ordinarily see. And each one of these domains is a world in itself, having its forms and inhabited by beings with a density ... analogous to that of the domain in which they live ....

In these invisible worlds there are also regions which are the result of human mental formations .... There are hells, there are paradises, there are purgatories .... 22

Such being the nature of the interlinked occult worlds ­

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law

Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,

Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind

And rich with life's adventure and delight

And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and hues

Climbed back from Time into undying Self, ²³

- one should venture into them only after "a complete preparation of self­ purification and widening of the consciousness". ²⁴

It will also be wrong to equate all occultism with mere magic, black or even white:

In true occultism, one must have the quality, the ability, the inner gift in order to use it, and that is the safeguard ... it is not magic at all, it is a spiritual power which must be acquired by a long discipline; and finally, it is given to you only by a divine grace.

This means that as soon as one draws near the Truth, one is safe from

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all charlatanism, all pretension and falsehood .... And so someone who has the true occult power possesses at the same time, by the strength of this inner truth, the power to undo any magic, white or black or whatever colour they may be, simply by applying a drop of that truth .... ²⁵

IV

As for Mirra, there was never any doubt - even when she was no more than a child - regarding her total commitment to Truth, the utter purity of her nature, and her integral consecration to the Divine. There was thus no possibility of her being derailed by her occult preoccupations. When she started making her nights conscious, she saw that the various worlds and planes of consciousness climb like a ladder from the most material to the most ethereal region but between each of them there is a gap where one may drop into unconsciousness. She realised that it was necessary "to create in oneself the many steps which enable the consciousness not to forget what it has experienced up there".²⁶ Thus she began to practise a discipline of recapitulating and retaining every moment of her dream­ experiences, so that there might not be even a moment of unconsciousness during her body's sleep.

For more than a year I applied myself to this kind of self-discipline. I noted down everything - a few words, just a little thing, an Impression - and I tried to pass from one memory to another. At first it was not very fruitful, but at the end of about fourteen months I could follow, beginning from the end, all the movements, all the dreams right up to the beginning of the night. That puts you in such a conscious, continuously conscious state that finally I was not sleeping at all. My body lay stretched, deeply asleep, but there was no rest in the consciousness. ²⁷

Thus by the time Mirra was in her late teens she bad become fully conscious of the different phases of her sleep and was free to have experiences along the whole ladder of consciousness up to the frontier of all form. But in her own being she became aware that

there was between the subtle-physical and the most material vital a small region, very small, which was not sufficiently developed to serve as a conscious link between the two activities. So what took place in the consciousness of the most material vital did not get translated exactly in the consciousness of the most subtle physical. Some of it got lost on the way because it was like a - not positively a void but something only half­ conscious, not sufficiently developed.28

She spent long months on the problem of connecting these two layers of consciousness but to no avail. In 1904, when she had decided to perfect her occultism, she heard from a friend of her brother of the "Groupe

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Cosmique", whose members were instructed by the adept, Max Théon.29 She associated herself with the Paris chapter of this group for almost three years. It was during this period that she began to develop that small region between those two parts of her being, but there was still no result after six months. Then she left Paris for

the countryside, quite a small place on the seashore, to stay with some friends who had a garden. Now, in that garden there was a lawn ... there were flowers and around it some trees. It was a fine place, very quiet, very silent. *· I lay on the grass, like this, flat on my stomach, my elbows in the grass, and then suddenly all the life of that Nature, all the life of that region between the subtle-physical and the most material vital, which is very living in plants and in Nature, all that region became all at once, suddenly, without any transition, absolutely living, intense, conscious, marvellous .... ³⁰

The link had been established at last, and there was no danger of it snapping or the experiences of the higher planes being lost on return to the material consciousness.

Max Théon, a Polish Jew, and his wife Alma, an Englishwoman, an even greater occultist, lived at Tlemcen in Algeria. In 1906, leaving the continent for the first time in her life, Mirra spent a few months with them. Together they provided Mirra with the direct guidance she had sought and she made phenomenal progress in occultism. She was able with easy freedom to put her physical body into a trance, and awake in one after another of her various subtle sheaths, visit the supra-physical planes, in one or another of her subtle bodies. Once she left her body in Tlemcen, reached Paris and made her presence felt by a group of friends by picking up a pencil, writing a few words, signing her name and even shifting an object.31 On another occasion she was able to move, in her vital being, up and down a train, and she saw everything without herself being seen.32

But Mirra didn't attach any special importance to such occult adventures. She knew well enough that occultism was at best only a halfway house on the road to spiritual realisation, and there was no point in lingering there for an unconscionable length of time. As an aspirant to the full splendour of spiritual life, she was properly aware that she had to be on her guard against any promiscuous display of occultism with all its fascinating but side-tracking "miracles" of materialisation and the like, and her vision and her far aims never suffered the least obscuration. Like academic studies, sports and the arts of painting and music, Mirra took occultism too in her easy stride; she made them all serve the cardinal aim of her life, but she didn't lose herself in them.

*Years later, commenting on Emile Zola's description of a garden in La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, the Mother remarked, "I have not read such a description anywhere else: so much wealth of splendour, harmony with Nature. When I went to the south of France, I saw such a garden." (Nirodbaran, Memorable Contacts with the Mother, 2nd ed., 1991, p.S1)

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V

During the time she spent at Tlemcen, which is on the borders of the Sahara, Mirra used to sit under the sun for hours, as she had earlier sat under an ancient tree in the woods of Fontainebleau. Sunlight was like a tonic to her, and she didn't feel either the heat or the glare. Once, however, when she was sitting under a tree by the side of a pool and meditating in utter self-absorption, she suddenly grew aware of an adverse presence and of a hissing sound. On slowly opening her eyes, she saw a huge cobra in front of her, and with its raised outspread hood and menacing attitude it continued to hiss. Mirra, however, didn't lose her poise and presence of mind, but calmly fixed a friendly look on the cobra and put her power of will into her look. Was she perhaps sitting at a wrong place and hiding the cobra's hole and place of retreat at the foot of the tree? Very gently, almost imperceptibly, Mirra withdrew her legs with her gaze still fixed on its hood, and she was about to move her body itself - but the cobra unpredictably retreated and vanished into the pool. Later, on being told of this occurrence, M. Théon explained that the cobra had indeed its snug dwelling under the tree, and had probably gone to bathe in the pool. When, on its return, it found its homeward passage blocked, it took up that aggressive stance and menacingly hissed at her. But when it found that she meant no harm, it felt reassured and returned to the pool.

Mirra never felt perturbed in the presence of snakes and reptiles of any kind. For example, she was once walking in file up a mountain-path in France, with a few children:

I was walking in front when suddenly I saw, with other eyes than these ­ although I was watching my steps carefully - I saw a snake, there, on the rock, waiting on the other side. Then I took one step, gently, and indeed on the other side there was a snake. That spared me the shock of surprise, because I had seen and I was advancing cautiously; and as there was no shock of surprise, I was able to tell the children without giving them a shock, "Stop, keep quiet, don't stir." If there had been a shock, something might have happened.³³

At Pondicherry in later years, while walking along a path near the Ariankuppam fishing village, just at the place where the river flows into the sea, she sensed the presence of a cobra before she actually put her foot down. "It was dark - the night had fallen very quickly. We were walking along the road and just as I was about to put my foot down - I had already lifted my foot and I was going to put it down - I distinctly heard a voice in my ear: 'Be careful!' And yet nobody had spoken. So I looked and saw, just as my foot was about to touch the ground, an enormous black cobra, which I would have comfortably stepped on .... He streaked away and across the water. ...

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His hood open, head erect above the water, he went across like a king."³⁴

Mirra had had other interesting experiences also at Tlemcen, and at least one of these is worth recording. As she had access to a piano, she used to play from time to time. Once, however, she heard an unusual sound "Poff" while she was playing, and on turning round she saw that the sound had come from a big toad sitting there and listening to her music. When Mirra stopped playing, the toad repeated "Poff", as if asking her to continue, "Go on! don't stop! play again!" And henceforth, every time Mirra played on the piano, the toad was there too, an attentive and appreciative listener.

VI

As a result of her stay at Tlemcen and apprenticeship to M. Théon, Mirra was not only able to consolidate her own earlier gains in occultism but also to take her mastery of the science to new significant goals, and in July 1907, she paid a second visit. On her return journey M. Théon also accompanied her to make a European tour. In the course of the sea voyage, the ship was caught in a storm, and the passengers were visibly distraught; and the Captain himself was uneasy as to what might happen next. Théon thought that the situation asked for some decisive occult intervention, and accordingly told Mirra: "Go and stop it." She at once rose and retired to her cabin, lay down on her bed, left her body and went out over the disturbed waters only to discover that numberless, if formless, creatures were the culprits that were causing all that commotion in the sea. Humbly and sweetly Mirra appealed to them to stop that senseless mischief. What had they to gain from the discomfiture and fright of so many innocent passengers? Finally, as a result of her earnest pleadings for practically thirty minutes, they acceded to her request and withdrew from the scene. The sea was calm once more, and Mirra too was promptly back in her body in the cabin, and presently on the deck to find everybody relieved and happy. ³⁵

Reminiscing about Mme. Théon, in the course of a talk in 1957 to the Ashram children at Pondicherry, the Mother said:

Her powers were quite exceptional; she had received an extremely complete and rigorous training and she could exteriorise herself, that is, bring out of her material body a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do it twelve times in succession. That is, she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, and then again put that subtler body into trance, exteriorise herself from it, and so on twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of forms ....

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She was almost always in trance and she had trained her body so well that even when she was in trance, that is, when one or more parts of her being were exteriorised, the body had a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to some small material occupations .... ³⁶

One evening, one of the prosperous Arab merchants who visited the Théons from time to time, was inclined to ask all kinds of questions to show himself off. It was time, Mme. Théon decided, that some sense was knocked into him to ruffle his vast self-importance. And this was the drama that was enacted:

In the verandah of the house there was a big dining-table, a very large table, like that, quite wide, with eight legs, four on each side. It was really massive, and heavy. Chairs had been arranged to receive this man, at a little distance from the table. He was at one end, Mme. Théon at the other; I was seated on one side, M. Théon also .... Nobody was near the table, all of us were at a distance from it. And so, he was asking questions, as I said rather ludicrous ones, on the powers one could have and what could be done with what he called "magic" .... She looked at me and said nothing but sat very still. Suddenly I heard a cry, a cry of terror. The table started moving and with an almost heroic gesture went to attack the poor man seated at the other end! It went and bumped against him .... Mme. Théon had not touched it, nobody had touched it. She had only concentrated on the table and by her vital power had made it move. At first the table had wobbled a little, then had started moving slowly, then suddenly, as in one bound, it flung itself on that man, who went away and never came back!³⁷

Again, whenever Mirra returned to her locked room after an evening walk with M. Théon, she used to find a garland of flowers (Belles de Nuit) on her pillow. Obviously, it was Mme. Théon who had gathered them in her garden, and managed to convey them to Mirra's bed without, however, actually entering the room.38

Mme. Théon died in early September 1908, and a moving tribute to her was published in the November 1908 issue of the Revue Cosmique.

VII

By now - in her late twenties - Mirra was herself an adept in occultism. Her personal effort and experiments in her earlier years to explore the inner countries of the invisible and familiarise herself with their physiognomy and functioning had provided the base. Her association with M. Théon and her friendship with Mme. Théon had helped her to pursue all the possibilities and also to grow aware of the limitations - all the traps and dangers - of occultism. Mirra had her own pupils too, though not many, for she had to be careful!

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There was one, for example, who used to come to her every evening hoping to be shown some unknown region and taken for a jaunt in the vital or mental world:

I showed him how to go out of the body, how to get back into it, how to keep the consciousness, etc., I showed him many places telling him "There you must take this precaution, here you must do such and such a thing." And this continued for a long time.39

There was a Danish painter who saw Mirra in Paris during the First World War, and wanted her to teach him occultism. She taught him how to come out of the body and to maintain control, and especially she advised him not to succumb to fear under any circumstances. Once, when he was out of his body, he saw moving menacingly towards him a huge and formidable tiger. He remembered that he shouldn't surrender to fear, and so he fixed on the ferocious animal a steady and unflinching stare. As he kept on gazing, the tiger seemed to diminish in size, shrinking more and more, and faster and faster, till at last it dwindled into a tiny innocuous cat!⁴⁰ When he reported this experience to Mirra, she told him that the tiger was but the objectification of some bad thought or impulse during the previous day trying a boomerang action, but his fearlessness and the cloak of her protection had saved him.

While occultism may have its perils for the unwary, the ambitious and the calculating, it was nevertheless Mirra's conviction backed by her own experience that, for one who was stationed in Truth, there was nothing really to worry about. This is illustrated by what once happened to her in Paris. She had already decided that she would "achieve union with the psychic Presence, the inner Divine", and she was exclusively engrossed in the prospect. It was then this happened, as later related by her:

I was crossing the Boulevard Saint Michel.. .. I lived near the Luxembourg Gardens and every evening I used to walk there - but always deeply absorbed within. There is a kind of intersection there, and it is not a place to cross when one is deeply absorbed within; it was not very sensible .... J. suddenly received a shock, as if I had received a blow, as if something had hit me, and I jumped back instinctively. And as soon as I had jumped back, a tram went past - it was the tram that I had felt at a little more than arm's length. It had touched the aura, the aura of protection ... that had literally thrown me backwards .... 41

The Presence had thrown an invisible but also invincible cloak of protection around her and averted what might have otherwise been a catastrophe.

She has also given the instance of a gentleman in a hotel who dreamt in the morning that the lift-boy had asked him to get into his own bier! Waking up and coming down, he saw the same boy asking him to enter the lift.

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The startling coincidence warned the gentleman, and he preferred to walk down the stairs. Actually the lift crashed, and all the people in it were killed. Who, then, had warned the gentleman? Quite obviously, an entity­ an intelligence, a consciousness, in the image of the groom - had forewarned him, and he had wisely taken note of the warning.42 An event had already been rehearsed in the subtle-physical, but the timely occult warning, and the man's ready and right response to it, had averted the prepared tragedy.

There was another instance too of a coincidence forged by occult forces. Mirra knew a young man in her Parisian days: he was a poet and an artist, and a Sanskritist as well, and was specially interested in Buddhism. He had given his photograph to Mirra, who fixed it on a wall above a high desk. It was the time of the First World War, and he had gone to the front. One day when she entered her room, the photograph fell down for apparently no reason and the glass broke to pieces. Mirra felt that surely something must have gone wrong, and two or three days later, when she opened the entrance door, a huge and magnificent light grey cat rushed in and flung itself upon her and mewed miserably. And the cat had the eyes of the young man! The next day the papers announced that he had died three days earlier, and his body had been found between the trenches. There was such an intimate occult connection between him and his photograph that, even as he fell, his framed portrait too crashed to the ground. And the cat was the emissary through whom he communicated to Mirra the news of his tragic end.43

As for the danger of trusting too blindly to luck, or to a run of good luck, engineered by certain invisible entities, there is the story of the gambler at Monte Carlo. He had put himself in contact with a vital entity through the use of the planchette. This sinister being gave the gambler precise indications as to how to play at roulette at Monte Carlo, and it also helped him to speculate at the Stock Exchange. Thus was he led on along the primrose path of easy success, and he began worshipping this unseen, seemingly omniscient spirit and dark counsellor, till at last, one day at Monte Carlo, it told him peremptorily: "Stake everything, everything you have upon this." He obediently did so, and lost everything. Then it told him, dazed as he was, to shoot himself - and that he did too! The entity had thus waited long, but had driven its victim to perdition in the end.44

The debit and credit sides of occultism were thus well within the range of Mirra's knowledge and experience. Occultism is certainly liable to be abused, but anything - chemistry, for example, or even language - may be abused. Only, if occultism is to be done, one should remember the precautions and the correctives. Once, while on board the Kaga Maru on her way to India in March 1914, Mirra observed some people absorbed in a game of cards. But one was steadily losing, and his friends appealed to Mirra to take a hand in the game and retrieve the loser's fortunes.

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"I warn you," she said, "that if I play I will take all your money." This only raised a guffaw, and Mirra took the hapless loser's seat, and within a short time won all the money. "I could see all their cards as if they had been transparent," she explained while recalling the event many years later; and this uncanniness on her part was so frightening to the other players that they begged her to terminate the game. Although this was technically an instance of cheating, Mirra did it, not for gain nor for the fun or excitement of it, but only to teach the gamesters a lesson that they badly needed.⁴⁵

While mastery of the occult science may thus lead to a precise, even an infallible, knowledge of things and powers and the ability to manipulate them, unless it is all sustained by a spiritual base and is properly subordinated to Truth, the science may recoil on the practitioner himself. "Cling to Truth" should hence be hung at the doorway of every occultist and that might also scare away the devious and dubious denizens of the worlds invisible. As for Mirra, at the beginning, and all along, she was but a votary of Truth, a seeker of harmony and unity, and occultism was never anything more for her than a handmaiden in the service of the Divine. She has herself acknowledged how (probably in 1904) when she went to paint in the room of a comrade, he began talking of the occult (his own brother had also been M. Théon's disciple), and this suddenly released certain springs in her and she was able "to know all her past births" and realise how "she had descended into this world for bringing down a Higher Light" .⁴⁶

But aside from occultism and the insights and powers it gave her, simply as a young woman Mirra exemplified a self-possession, self-mastery and steely resoluteness that was truly exceptional. With her, to want to do a thing was verily to do it - no hiatus at all between the impulse and the act! As she reminisced later on:

I remember, a long time ago, having been among some young people, and they remarked that when I decided to get up I used to get up with a jump, without any difficulty. They asked me, "How do you do it? We, when we want to get up, have to make an effort of will to be able to do it." They were so surprised! and I was surprised by the opposite. I used to tell myself, "How does it happen? When one has decided to get up, one gets up. "⁴⁷

It was as easy as that with Mirra. Laziness, indecision, physical tamas, emotional instability, all were quite foreign to her nature from the very beginning. Marvellously as her life-work was to unfold into a truly multi­splendoured saga of fulfilment, all was ultimately reared on a sound physical base with no falsity, no tamas, no vestige of a flaw, no pockets of irredeemable inconscience.

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CHAPTER 3

Encounters and Explorations

I

The Woman I behold, whose vision seek

All eyes and know not; t'ward whom climb

The steps o' the world, and beats all wing of rhyme,

And knows not; 'twixt the sun and moon

Her inexpressible front enstarred

Tempers the wrangling spheres to tune;

Their divergent harmonies

Concluded in the concord of her eyes,

And vestal dances of her glad regard.

FRANCIS THOMPSON

A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;

As in a golden vase's poignant line

They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss

Of earth's mute adoration towards heaven

Released in beauty's cry of living form

Towards the perfection of eternal things. 1

SRI AUROBINDO

The child of thirteen who had dreamt extraordinary dreams, the child who had felt the burden of the world's pain and would have annihilated it with her healing touch, the child who had suffered uncomplainingly the companionship of the Man of Sorrows, the child who could negotiate a passage across the mysterious occult worlds, the child who had been quarried out of the Divine and who offered herself to the Divine - the child is now grown into a young woman. When she was in her twentieth year, she married Henri Morisset on 13 October 1897, and they had a son, André . Motherhood became Mirra, and she was the Madonna with the Child. Whenever André as a child fell ill, she didn't call any doctor but herself cured the ailments.² And she used to tell him, even when André was but a little boy, how she had come to the world with a special mission.³ It must have been wonderful, to be that mother's child.

II

While motherhood had its claims and satisfactions, Mirra didn't forget her dreams, her precise visions, her sublime preoccupations. A small group of

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spiritual seekers (the group was named the "Idea") began meeting from 1906 onwards at her house, first on Rue Lemercier, then, after she separated from Henri Morisset in 1908, on Rue de Levis, and finally from May 1911 on Rue du Val de Grâce. The members were intrigued by the Invisible. they freely exchanged their inmost thoughts, they posed problems of philosophy and ethics, and they explored the dynamics of purposive action. Mirra was the life and soul of the group, and It was she who imparted to them the needed cohesion and sense of direction. A friend of hers, Mme. Alexandra David-Neel, was to nostalgically recall more than sixty years later, the temper and atmosphere of those Parisian meetings:

We spent marvellous evenings together with friends, believing in a great future. At times we went to the Bois de Boulogne gardens, and watched the grasshopper-like early aeroplanes take off.

I remember her [Mirra's] elegance, her accomplishments, her intellect endowed with mystical tendencies.

In spite of her great love and sweetness, in spite even of her inherent ease in making herself forgotten after achieving some noble deed, she couldn't manage to hide very well the tremendous force she bore within herself.⁴

Visiting the scene of those meetings on 11 November 1966, Prithwindra Mukherjee found the house number 9, very near the Church of the Val de Grâce, black with moss and age:

A gust of perfume - dank soil, grass, falling leaves, moist tree-trunks and something else, something indefinable - greeted us. A picturesque square rimmed by tall houses ... the eyes rested marvelling, at the end of the square, on a tiny one-and-a-half storeyed building neatly standing out unique in that surrounding.⁵

A couple of low stairs led up to the greenish door, and Prithwin felt that the doorway still remembered Mirra's delicate footsteps of more than half a century ago! It was a small house with but one room upstairs, and the rest was the ground floor and there were also steps leading to the garden. wasn't this the house that was invoked in Mirra's prayer of 7 October 1913?

The whole atmosphere of the house is charged with a religious solemnity; one immediately goes down into the depths; the meditations here are more in-gathered and serious; dispersion vanishes to give place to concentration; and I feel the concentration literally descending from my head and entering into my heart; and the heart seems to attain a depth more profound than the head.⁶

Reminiscing about those distant days, she said in 1951:

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We used to have small meetings every week - quite a small number of friends, three or four, who discussed philosophy, spiritual experiences, etc.7

One of the young men who attended those meetings of spiritual exploration was a fine musician, and "all of a sudden, he had the experience of the infinite in the finite." Although it was an "absolutely true experience" - the finite individual being suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of the infinite - "this upset the boy so much that he could make nothing at all of it! He could not even play his music any longer. The experience had to be stopped because it was too powerful for him."⁸ The trouble with the young musician was that, although he had a genuine talent for music, his brain was inadequate to accommodate the idea of the infinite in the finite. The experience itself was authentic enough, yet he couldn't live with it - it had had a shattering effect on him:

So the mind must be a little wide, a little supple and quiet, and instead of feeling immediately that everything you were thinking of is now escaping you, you wait very quietly for something in your head to begin to understand the content of the experience.9

One may be overtaken as it were by a tremendous experience, but the ādhāra - the human tenement with its body, vital and mind - must be ready too, ready to assimilate it and let it do the work of change and integral transformation:

One must have a solid well-balanced body, a well-controlled vital and a mind organised, supple, logical; then, if you are in a state of aspiration and you receive an answer, all your being will feel enriched, enlarged, splendid, and you will be perfectly happy and you will not spill your cup because it is too full, like a clumsy fellow who does not know how to hold a full tumbler. ¹⁰

Among the aspirants who regularly attended the weekly meetings was a young poet, a student in Paris, intelligent though light-hearted. One evening he didn't turn up, although he had said a few days earlier that he would come. Why hadn't he come, then?

We waited quite a long time, the meeting was over and at the time of leaving I opened the door to let people out. ... I opened the door and there before it sat a big dark grey cat which rushed into the room like mad and jumped upon me ... mewing desperately. I looked into its eyes and told myself, "Well, these are so-and-so's eyes" (the one who was to come). I said, "Surely something has happened to him." And the next day we learnt that he had been assassinated that night; the next morning he had been found lying strangled on his bed.¹¹

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III

It was in October 1906 that Mirra wrote the remarkable tale entitled "A Sapphire Tale"¹², and it is probable she read it to her weekly group.

There was in the Far East a little country long ago — so begins the story — and everything was orderly and prosperous there. Farmers, workers, scientists, philosophers, artists, all played their respective roles to perfection. The country was ruled by a wise old king, and realising it was time to retire he asked his young and accomplished son, Meotha, to marry a girl of his choice and agree to take over the burden of kingship. Meotha answered that he had not found his soul's mate, and would therefore like to travel over the earth for a year in the hope he would find somewhere his destined partner. And so Meotha set out on his journey and in course of time he came to a little island in the ocean of the West.

On this island lived Liane, an orphan, all alone in life. Her "great beauty and rare intelligence" attracted many suitors, but she rejected them all because in a dream she had seen a man who seemed, judging from his garments, to be coming from a distant country. Her heart went out to him, and she hoped and she waited. And one bright summer day, when she was walking through the woods, all Nature began to "speak to her of the One" whom she awaited. And gently Meotha swam into Liane's sight:

Oh, wonder of wonders! He is there, he, he in truth as she has seen him in her dream ....

With a look they have recognised each other; with a look they have told each other of the long waiting and the supreme joy of rediscovery; for they have known each other in a distant past, now they are sure of it.

They linked their hands "in a silence filled with thoughts exchanged" and went through the woods and reached the boat which took them to the waiting vessel. While the great ship started moving away, and only then, Liane told her companion:

I was waiting for you, and now that you have come I have followed you without question. We are made for each other ....

And Meotha answered: "I have sought you throughout the world, and ... in your eyes I saw that you expected me." Now she was going with him, he said, to his kingdom to be his queen: "The only land on earth that is in harmony, the only nation that is worthy of her."

This is an exceptional story, almost the Savitri-Satyavan story in reverse. Mirra had repeatedly seen in her dreams a wondrous being whom she was led to call "Krishna". Thus, in this story, it was herself she idealised in the character of Liane. Mirra was married already, and lived, not alone in a forest, but in the heart of Paris. But, in another sense, her soul was like an unaccompanied star and dwelt apart. Some day circumstances

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would surely bring about the meeting with her soul's Lord, the Krishna of her dreams. "A Sapphire Tale" is thus almost a prophetic piece, a parable of her own life.

IV

No detailed record of the attendance or discussions at the weekly meetings in Mirra's house seems to have been maintained. It was probably a floating group, with a hard-core membership of only three or four, with others coming in as it suited them. Mirra had already engaged herself in the study and translation of the Gita, some of the Upanishads, the Bhakti Sutras of Narada, and other ancient texts. From the essays in Words of Long Ago, as also from some of her casual remarks of a later period, it is now possible to piece out an impression of the kind of discussions initiated at the weekly meetings, of the range of interests of the members, and of the high intellectual quality, spiritual flavour and sustained seriousness of the proceedings. These essays and discussions, along with her translations of the Indian scriptures, may have circulated privately among a select European audience forging firm links between her spiritual group in Paris and similar groups elsewhere.

One day, in January 1907, a stranger from Russia sought out this group in Paris; it was shortly after the bloody suppression of the Russian revolutionary upsurge. The visitor had the look of "a hunted animal". He had come from Kiev, he said:

Yes, in Kiev there is a group of students who are deeply interested in great philosophical ideas. Your books have fallen into our hands, and we were happy to find at last a synthetical teaching which does not limit itself to theory, but encourages action. So my comrades, my friends, told me, "Go and seek their advice on what is preoccupying us." And I have come. ¹³

As he sat in the drawing-room amidst "the luxury of this bourgeois apartment", he seemed ill at ease, his face was "pallid with long vigil or seclusion far from air and sun; ravaged by suffering, lined by anxiety, and yet all shining with a fine intellectual light" . When asked what work he did in his own country, he viewed the group in silence, and said with some deliberation: "I work for the revolution."

The Revolutionist is at bay - there is always a time when the Bazarovs of this world are at bay - and he begins to wonder whether at the very heart of his philosophy and action there isn't a darkness, an inbuilt futility. The way of violence, the technique of retaliation and revenge, they lead but to a cul-de-sac. The violence of desperation may have a logic and grandeur of its own, but in the final analysis it is rather foolish and futile.

When Mirra asked him how exactly her group could help him, he felt somewhat reassured, and he frankly placed his cards on the table.

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At the centre of the revolutionary movement in Russia was a small group of idealists of whom he was one. In their ardour to see Justice, Liberty and Love triumph, they had decided to meet sword by sword, but for a physician and a healer like him this was a hard thing to do, his soul rebelled against It:

I who feel in my soul a wealth of tenderness and pity that seeks to relieve the miseries of mankind, I who became a doctor with the sole aim of fighting its ills and alleviating its sufferings, being forced by painful circumstances to take the bloodiest decisions.

Although he had allowed himself to be pushed into the path of violence, he had suffered too, and he had often felt that there should be a better way of dealing with human ills; and the recent collapse of the movement seemed to justify his worst fears. This, this was the time, perhaps, to rethink their ends and means, and in fact he had already done some fresh thinking along those lines:

We must develop our intelligence to understand better the deeper laws of Nature, and to learn better how to act in an orderly way, to co-ordinate our efforts....

.. .for a nation to win its freedom, it must first of all deserve it, make itself worthy of it, prepare itself to be able to enjoy it. This is not the case in Russia, and we shall have much to do to educate the masses and pull them out of their torpor ....

His friends had agreed with him, and sent him to learn how the ideas of the Paris group could be adapted to the pressing needs in Russia, and to prepare a pamphlet embodying their "beautiful thoughts of solidarity, harmony, freedom and justice". On the other hand, he couldn't help wondering whether his "philosophical dream" wasn't really utopian, dictated by cowardice, and whether the manlier thing wouldn't be to meet violence with violence, destruction with destruction, carnage with carnage. When, at this point, Mirra gently interposed: "How can you hope to win justice with injustice, harmony with hatred?" he answered simply:

I know. This opinion is shared by nearly all of us. As for me, I have a very particular aversion to bloody actions; they horrify me. Each time we immolated a new victim, I felt a pang of regret, as if by that very act we were moving away from our goal.

But what are we to do when we are driven by events .... Though we may perish to the last man, we shall not falter in the sacred task that has fallen to us....

A noble mysticism gave a glow to his countenance; and even desperation, when it was expressed in such terms, sounded beautiful and inspiring.

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But to die was not enough; to live and ultimately to conquer was the better way! Hence Mirra's motherly and wise advice:

... you should renounce it [your open struggle] for a time, fade into the shadows, prepare yourselves in silence, gather your strength, form yourselves into groups, become more and more united, so as to conquer on the auspicious day, helped by the organising intelligence, the all-powerful lever which, unlike violence, can never be defeated.

Put no more weapons in the hands of your adversaries, be irreproachable before them, set them an example of courageous patience, of uprightness and justice; then your triumph will be near at hand, for right will be on your side, integral right, in the means as in the goal.

The visitor felt moved, and felt persuaded as well; he was happy that a woman like Mirra was taking a lead in such matters, hastening the advent of better days. In fact, when overstrained by his secret work he had become half-blind, it was a woman who had, out of pity for him, come to his help, reading to him, writing to his dictation, following him to Paris. Alas! even in France, the citadel of liberty, they were spied upon and made to feel insecure. Mirra, however, asked him to come to her group again and discuss his projects and his pamphlet in progress. The visitor was indeed overwhelmed, "his kind, sad eyes looked at us full of confidence and hope", and his parting words were:

It is good to meet people one can trust, people who have the same ideal of justice as we have, and do not look upon us as criminals or lunatics because we want to realise it. Good-bye.

And that is the end of the brief history of "this gentle, just man", a revolutionary leader, who was perhaps a martyr as well. He had come to Mirra in his agony and perplexity, his idealism and desperation, and her healing touch had calmed and cured him, closed the fissure in his soul, and saved him in time. But nobody knew what happened to him when he returned to his country: perhaps only a tragic end awaited him there.

V

The weekly meetings continued, and while the group had its centre in Mirra's residence in Paris, it was to register a widening circumference of beneficent influence. There were discussions, talks, plans. Experience mingled with logic, the heart wrestled with the mind; and so the spiritual seekers groped towards an integral aim in life and integral means to achieve it. In the discussion with the young Russian revolutionary leader, the emerging ideas were the need to awaken a new "intelligence", to affirm an "integral right", and to accept the identity of ends and means

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forged on the anvil of Purity and Truth, And of course all this had a wider application than only to Russia, for Mirra and her group were really concerned with the global human condition - how mankind might transcend its current limitations and lacerations, and deserve a new deal, a life of harmony and integral realisation.

Earlier there were evenings when the discussion wound its way to a spiritual focus; at other times the discussions were more general. Some time in 1904 she wrote a remarkable parable entitled "The Virtues", ¹⁴ but it is not known whether it was read at any of the weekly meetings.

In the Hall of Intelligence - the vestibule of the Palace of Truth situated on a very high cloud - a festival is held for the higher beings, who on earth are known as Virtues. They arrive one after another, and presently gather into congenial groups "full of joy to find themselves for once at least together, for they are usually so widely scattered throughout the world and the worlds, so isolated amid so many alien beings".

Sincerity presides over the festival, dressed in a transparent robe, and holds in her hand a cube of the purest crystal wherein things are reflected without the slightest deformation. Humility and Courage are her two faithful guards. Prudence, a woman wholly veiled, stands close to Courage.

Charity, "at once vigilant and calm, active and yet discreet", is at the still centre that is everywhere; and affiliated to her is her twin sister, Justice. When she moves unobtrusively in the Hall, Charity leaves a trail of "white and soft light" which suffuses the entire atmosphere. Kindness, Patience, Gentleness and Solicitude are in the background, pressing round Charity.

All are assembled - or so, indeed, they imagine - but now there appears another on the threshold, an utter stranger to the rest, "very young and slight, the white dress which she wore was very simple, almost poor". She is timid and hesitant in her steps, she feels dazzled by the brilliant company, and is almost rooted to the spot. It is Prudence who advances towards the new arrival and politely asks her name. "Alas!" she answers with a sigh, "I am not surprised that I appear to be a stranger in this palace, for I am so rarely invited anywhere. My name is Gratitude."

It is significant that, of the Virtues, it is Sincerity who presides in the Hall of Intelligence of the Palace of Truth; she accordingly takes precedence over all others. And Gratitude is hardly known, and it is with difficulty that she gets admission to the Hall, and she has actually to introduce herself. In a talk on 25 January 1956, the Mother was to stress again the importance of these two particular Virtues, as also of Faith (or Trust in the Divine), Courage or Aspiration, and Endurance or Perseverance. In all combinations of Virtues, Sincerity must take the first place, "For if there is no sincerity, one cannot advance even by half a step. "¹⁵ Hypocrisy, on the contrary, is the very negation of sincerity, and assumes

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the shape of cloud behind cloud, screen behind screen, opaqueness behind opaqueness; but "transparency" is the crystalline lucidity of the mind and soul. In a later talk, she was to present sincerity as a progressive or evolutionary virtue:

As the being progresses and develops, as the universe unfolds in the becoming, sincerity too must go on perfecting itself endlessly. Every halt in that development necessarily changes the sincerity of yesterday into the insincerity of tomorrow.16

If one did not deceive oneself, if one were determined to advance and not to stagnate, then "sincerity is the safeguard, the protection, the guide, and finally the transforming power".

Again, gratitude isn't simply a dull if necessary virtue; gratitude can be a pure joy in its own right, with close affiliations with the virtue of Devotion:

There is nothing which gives you a joy equal to that of gratitude. One hears a bird sing, sees a lovely flower, looks at a little child, observes an act of generosity, reads a beautiful sentence, looks at the setting sun, no matter what, suddenly this comes upon you, this kind of emotion - indeed so deep, so intense - that the world manifests the Divine, that there is something behind the world which is the Divine.

So I find that devotion without gratitude is quite incomplete, gratitude must come with devotion. ¹⁷

The love and adoration of the Divine - and the Divine behind things, beings and actions - must also induce the feeling of pure joy and gratitude as well.

VI

There are causeries, too - "On Thought", "On Dreams", "To Know How to Suffer", "The Supreme Discovery". They were read between 1910 and 1912 to small groups with which Mirra was associated in Paris. There is nothing merely 'clever' in the causeries. They are earnest, meditative, illuminating compositions; they are both the creepers of aspiration and the first flowers of realisation. Like the parables, these causeries also are addressed to spiritual seekers.

"On Thought" was a causerie, a thinking-aloud, in a Women's Association, L'Union de Pensée Féminine, which Mirra had started in 1911. "Thought ... is a very vast subject"; thoughts are sometimes the fruits of our sensations, and sometimes they clearly come from outside. Random, wayward, promiscuous thought is apt to defeat the very purpose of thinking, to pervert its aim and to render misshapen its numerous progeny.

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If we leave thought to riot unfettered, we will surely be exposed to a hideous siege of contraries, and we will then. inhabit a chaos of our own creation. The prime need, then, is tranquillity; according1y, "if we want to be able to truly think, that is, to receive, formulate and form valid and viable thoughts, we- must first of all empty our brain of all this vague and unruly mental agitation."¹⁸ This could be facilitated by meditation- in other words, reflection, concentration, self-observation in solitude and silence" , and a close and sever analysis and rejection of the "multitude of insignificant little thoughts which constantly assail us."

During the preliminary activity of rejection or concentration, it would become clear to us that we are often purblind enough to tolerate, if not glorify our own quiddities and eccentricities and errors of nature. Self-analysis should be rather more objective and ruthless, for only then could we eject the false, and change and transform ourselves:

We lack confidence in what we can become through effort, we have no faith in the integral and profound transformation which will be the work of our true self, of the eternal, the divine who is in all beings, if we surrender like children to its supremely luminous and far-seeing guidance.¹⁹

Secondly, even as we have to play the role of censor in respect of what we complacently look upon as our "own" thoughts, so too we should keep a critical and discriminating eye on the endless waves of thoughts coming from outside as opinion, dogma, popular fallacy, and so on. If thought is to be truly and sovereignly ours, it shouldn't be just accepted second-hand; rather "it would have to form part of a logical synthesis you had elaborated in the course of your existence, either by observation, experience and deduction, or by deep abstract meditation and contemplation".

While tranquillity, objectivity, concentration, meditative analysis are all both difficult and necessary, what is even more needed is integral sincerity or unity of thought and action. Alas, we are slaves of the past, and worse slaves of the passing moment, "the blind and arbitrary will of our contemporaries"; and the challenge therefore is that we should know ourselves, and dare to be ourselves; that we should prepare for the future, and bravely fare forward:

Life is in perpetual evolution; if we want to have a living mentality, we must progress unceasingly.

But even when we have emancipated ourselves from the dead past and the deceptive present, even when we are poised for a leap forward, there is need for the "true thought, which brings us into relation with the infinite source of knowledge". Here, too, many-tiered meditation alone offers the key, as illustrated by an old Indian text. In that tale, the king's progress is marked, first by the rejection of thoughts of covetousness, ill-will and hate; then the rejection of passion and false sentiment. The king attains a series

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of dhāmas, conditions of ease and joy, and comfort and mastery, produced successively by solitude and reflection, by quietude and elevation of spirit, by poise and equality, and by pure serenity. The great king is now able to regard the whole world with its four quarters with a heart full of love, with a compassion without cessation, with a sympathy that is incommensurable, and with an abiding and abounding serenity. When thought is thus purified in the waters of tranquillity and tempered on the anvil of meditation, it acquires a new glow, a puissant force, and it sheds its self-division and barrenness, and becomes verily a chain of linked self-evident truths that embraces the whole universe. The mist disappears; light floods the tablelands of the mind; and as St. Teresa remarked, "in a room into which the sunlight enters strongly, not a cobweb can be hid".²⁰ Mirra neatly concludes her discourse with what is almost like an amplification of the celebrated Gayatri and anticipates the Gayatri as new-formulated by Sri Aurobindo:

I would like us to make the resolution to raise ourselves each day, in all sincerity and goodwill, in an ardent aspiration towards the Sun of Truth, towards the Supreme Light, the source and intellectual life of the universe, so that it may pervade us entirely and illumine with its great brilliance our minds and hearts, all our thoughts and our actions.²¹

VII

Like the causerie "On Thought", the companion piece "On Dreams" has also a wide sweep of comprehension, evidently the crystallisation of many sessions of intellectual and psychic exploration. "To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub": thus Hamlet. Are dreams mere mental frippery? - perhaps no more than a sign of indigestion? Are dreams but lies, vain hopes and practical jokes? Samuel Daniel has no use for dreams:

Cease dreams, th'Images of thy desires,

To model forth the passions of the morrow:

Never let rising Sun approve you liars,

To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.

But how about Mirra's own dreams as a child of thirteen? Aren't dreams, then, - at least sometimes, - media of supernatural intimations?

The problem may indeed seem to admit of a wide solution. Are dreams only excrescences to be eliminated from our life, or are they rather the ambiguous expression of a sixth sense to be reverently fostered and perfected? Part of the truth is that, when one is asleep, one's real nature finds free play in the dreams. As the Mother explained in the Course of a talk in 1951:

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Dreams are of great use because this movement of repression exists no longer, the conscious will not being there ... and the desire repressed below leaps up and manifests itself in the form of dreams, so much so that you come to know a good many things about your own nature. ²²

But dreams are not all of a piece, for the quality of sleep - and of dreams as well - changes "according to the hours of the night or according to how long you have slept", and it may very well mean that in the course of a single night, one has a variety of dreams comprehending the extreme limits of consciousness. The Mother also added that, since one quickly forgets what happens in the dreams, "quite a discipline is needed to create in oneself the many steps which enable the consciousness not to forget what it has experienced up there". ²³

It would be far better to confront our real nature, its quirks and curves and crookednesses, face them and throw them out by an act of will, than to allow them to continue their subterranean empire, to erupt as they please and take us wholly unawares. But for this we should keep a watch over the hours of the night, and maintain a careful inventory of the dreams in all their variety and multiplicity and tantalising succession:

No one knows himself well who does not know the unconfined activities of his nights, and no man can call himself his own master unless he has the perfect consciousness and mastery of the numerous actions he performs during his physical sleep.²⁴

Also, as Sri Aurobindo says in The Life Divine:

If we develop our inner being, live more inwardly than most men do, then the balance is changed and a larger dream-consciousness opens before us; our dreams can take on a subliminal and no longer a subconscious character and can assume a reality and significance. ²⁵

It may then often happen that what had seemed puzzling or insoluble in the evening resolves itself in the morning as the result of a dream. But, then, any facile generalisation about the interpretation of dreams would be out of place, for there can be no universal directory of dreams as a guide to human behaviour at all times and in all places. Each individual will have to formulate his own code on the basis of his careful objective study or recapitulation of his dream-life:

The same discipline of concentration which enables man not to remain a stranger to the inner activities of the waking state also provides him with a way to escape from his ignorance of the even richer activities of the various states of sleep.²⁶

How, then, is this discipline of dream-consciousness to be pursued with advantage? Firstly, one has to place one's attention "on the vague

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impressions which the dream may have left behind it and in this way follow its indistinct trace as far as possible". Secondly, one should "extend the participation of the consciousness to a greater number of activities in the sleeping state". One may then hope that, so disciplined and nurtured, dreams will "take on the nature of precise visions and sometimes of revelations, and useful knowledge of a whole important order of things will be gained". ²⁷

With most people, consciousness is below par in the dream-state. On the other hand, the dream-world includes obscure and unfamiliar tracts which impinge adversely on our consciousness; and this inferior dream­stuff must disappear gradually as we gain increasing mastery of the Truth in the waking state. The way will then be made clear for the purer dreams that give us intimations of the secrets of our nature and of other-nature. In one of his letters, Sri Aurobindo makes reference to the recent medical theory of different phases of sleep culminating in about ten minutes of absolute rest and silence, and points out how it corroborates the Mother's own occult-spiritual knowledge and experience:

According to the Mother's experience and knowledge one passes from waking through a succession of states of sleep consciousness which are in fact an entry and passage into so many worlds and arrives at a pure Sachchidananda state of complete rest, light and silence, - afterwards one retraces one's way till one reaches the waking physical state. It is this Sachchidananda period that gives sleep all its restorative value.28

This brief interim of pure golden sleep, when one transcends waking and dreaming alike, is verily the condition of svapna-samādhi, the momentary consummation devoutly to be wished for to ensure life's fulfilment and renewal. ²⁹

VIII

Mirra's short essay "To Know How to Suffer" has this arresting confessional recordation:

My heart has suffered and lamented, almost breaking beneath a sorrow too heavy, almost sinking beneath a pain too strong .... But I have called to thee, O divine comforter, I have prayed ardently to thee, and the splendour of thy dazzling light has appeared to me and revived me.30

In these words of Mirra's we have a miniature description of the progress of the soul from the dark night of sorrow to the bright ambrosial dawn of new light and life. This sequence of spiritual phenomena is as real as Nature's physical laws, and concerns us as intimately.

In 1911 Mirra first met Abdul Baha31, the son and successor of Baha Ullah founder of the Bahai religion.

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Abdul Baha had spent 40 years, from the age of 24 to 64, confined in and around the 'prison city' of Akko (Acre) in palestine.³² He informed Mirra that when the early followers of the faith were persecuted, they went to their death with intense joy, and a sense of the divine Presence; and in particular there was a poet who, when he was taken away for torture and death, went with joy, and even told Abdul Baha who tried to offer words of comfort: "Suffer! It is one of the most beautiful hours of my life .... " If such be the inner attitude to suffering and sacrifice, one may very well ask: Suffering, where is thy sting? But all depends on the reason behind the suffering, and the nature of the sacrificial offering; and the people who so suffer or die for a religion or a great cause "have always felt a kind of divine grace helping them and keeping them from suffering". ³³

But from time to time the question returns: Why do we suffer? Why must we suffer? Is it because Nature is blind, giving hurt without plan or reason? Why is there no clear causal relation between virtue and reward, between blemish and pain? The poet G. M. Hopkins asked:

Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Can it be that what we call defeat, pain, sorrow has also a particular role to play in promoting life's fulfilment? Thus Hopkins again:

With an anvil-ding

And with fire in him forge thy will

Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring

Through him, melt him but master him still.

And thus St. John of the Cross:

O burn that burns to heal,

O more than pleasant wound .. ³⁴

But, then, it is unnecessary - it is even foolish and perverse - to subscribe to all the enormities of the ascetic denial. "Suffering is not something inevitable," writes Mirra, "or even desirable, but when it comes to us, how helpful it can be!"³⁵ To indulge in promiscuous sorrow - to inflict on the flesh or the mind wanton suffering - is as much ridiculous sentimentalism as it is to surrender to an excess of any other emotional state. What is needed, in the face of success or failure, joy or sorrow, is self-mastery rather than self-indulgence, and all deep feeling should thus be characterised by a sustained self-control and a purifying restraint and the reign of measure and quietude.

If suffering needn't be courted, neither need it be feared. If it comes, it comes with a far aim, and we should neither waver in our faith nor rest from the incessant toil of self-discovery. Nay, more: sorrow's extremity

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could be the sure prelude to the self-opening that leads us to the threshold of Truth. There is at the heart of the cosmos this tremendous paradox: even as with the hyperbolic asymptotes we shift instantaneously from minus infinity to plus infinity at the other extreme, in life too it could happen that from the nadir of sorrow might spring up a fountain of joy:

Each time we feel that our heart is breaking, a deeper door opens within us, revealing new horizons ....

And when, by these successive descents, we reach the veil that reveals thee as it is lifted, O Lord, who can describe the intensity of Life that penetrates the whole being, the radiance of the Light that floods it, the sublimity of the Love that transforms it for ever!³⁶

There is a peculiar poignancy about this essay (written sometime in 1910), as if wrung out of the depths at a time of acute personal suffering, or a period of crisis in her life. But she had only to seek deep within the "light, a living and conscious portion of a universal godhead", and there surely was the light that redeemed, the helper who was infallible.

Shock is often a necessary element in our lives - shock that makes us suddenly sit up and open our eyes, shock that ends the session of lethargy both of the body and of the mind, shock that sends us on a voyage of exploration and discovery. Siddhartha needed quite a few shocks before he would start on his long, long journey to the sanctuary at the foot of the Bodhi Tree. Ordinarily, the spiritual coma in which most people live keeps them ignorant of their quintessential nature, insensitive to the glory within and without, and indifferent to their true destiny. The shock of sudden sorrow sometimes effects the decisive turn, and the process of regeneration begins at last.

The theme of the following piece "The Supreme Discovery"* - by far the most seminal of the essays included in Words of Long Ago - is the dynamic of integral progress. Written in 1912, after she had heard of Sri Aurobindo, it seems to carry an echo of his spiritual vision. We have to begin with "a strong and pure mental synthesis" centred within the identity of the individual "I" with the universal "I", and the interpenetration of everything and every being with all things and all beings:

When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and

*On 24 April 1937, in a letter to her son, the Mother wrote: "A small booklet is being published in Geneva, containing a talk I gave in 1912, I think. It is a bit out-of-date, but I did not want to dampen their enthusiasm. I had entitled it The Central Thought, but they found it a little too philosophical, so it has been changed to The Supreme Discovery. Rather pompous for my taste, but ..." [MO 16:9]

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suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God."³⁷

In the light of this central thought, a veritable sun illumining our whole life, all else — all interests, passions, feelings, ideas, speculations, disputes indignations. prejudices - should dwindle into insignificance or disappear like mist. How can we really hate another when we know that in him too there is the "indwelling God" who is in all others as well? Only true Love can awaken this veiled Divine to flower into manifestation:

For the inner Godhead never imposes herself, she neither demands nor threatens; she offers and gives herself ... she is the mother whose love bears fruit and nourishes, guards and protects, counsels and consoles; because she understands everything, she can endure everything; bearing everything within herself, she owns nothing that does not belong to all, and because she reigns over all, she is the servant of all; that is why all, great and small, who want to be kings with her and gods in her, become, like her, not despots but servitors among their brethren.38

Once the "supreme discovery" of the indwelling Divine has been made, once the missing link with the Divine source has been restored, once one has apprehended the unity of spirit and matter in the universe, then all ills and rages must be annulled, and a radiant new light and joy must manifest itself. The essay concludes with words that carry a vast power of conviction, prophecy and divine assurance:

You who are weary, downcast and bruised ... hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows ....

But he tells you: Courage! Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message of solace .

... there is no mist that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild ... nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring ....

Hear again: no state was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at the very centre of his being ....

That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he!

In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory!³⁹

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IX

The meetings in her room at No.9, Rue du Val de Grace, the encounters with poets, artists, idealists and revolutionaries, the intimate discussions on thought, on dreams, on women, on suffering, on the divine omnipresence, the explorations in the realms of ends and means - these were but a very small fraction of Mirra's life. Her life within comprised the imponderable infinitudes, her outside life was one of ceaseless striving, and a seamless web of purposive action; and there was also an equation between the two hemispheres of her existence, the life within and the life without. She was so uncannily practical, and she was also an ocean inly seething with a definitive aspiration for the earth's - for humanity's - future. The people with her, around her, saw but part of the visible tip of the iceberg, hardly moving, hardly floating; but the invisible vast bore itself along towards a destination not as yet consciously determined. Mirra was unlike the multitude (although she identified herself with it), she was the solitarily sovereign and immaculate She:

Her mind sat high pouring its golden beams,

Her heart was a crowded temple of delight.

A single lamp lit in perfection's house,

A bright pure image in a priestless shrine,

Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,

Apart in herself....40

There were not wanting, however, experiences rather out of the ordinary. For example, once she was walking in a street in Paris - a street overflowing with noise as usual, and with confusion and hectic and bewildering activity. Yet even amidst it all she never forgot that if we are observant we can learn at every moment, that anywhere, at any time, something can happen enabling us to make some progress. Suddenly she had "a kind of illumination, because there was a woman walking in front of me and truly she knew how to walk. How lovely it was! Her movement was magnificent!" And Mirra was reminded of the splendours of ancient Greece.41 Wasn't it one of the archetypes of Beauty materialised below? A vestige of the Divine incarnated in a woman? A fresh affirmation of the Divine omnipresence? It was as though Mirra had been surprised by Beauty inapprehensible, as though she had been overtaken by a Bliss ineffable! Look, look! - and isn't the Divine before you, walking with a nymph's gait, as if floating with an angel's wings, as if smiling with a cherub's face? The world is indeed charged with the glory of God, with his Beauty and Joy, but one must have eyes to see, one must stumble upon the auspicious moments!

In the autumn of 1901, while Mirra was on a visit to Northern Italy, she happened to enter a silent church, and on an impulse she started playing on

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the organ. She was all alone, and forgot herself, and the strains of music were wafted to the high heavens of harmony and ānanda. Her eyes were closed, she was in a rapture of improvisation establishing bridgeheads between Here and Eternity, the Darkness and the Light, the Unreal and the Real. When she had finished, she was agreeably surprised by a loud applause. On opening her eyes, she found that an appreciative crowd had gathered, and was enjoying her music in a trance of attention.42 This was doubtless a tribute to the ready spontaneity of the Italians' love of music, but even more was it an irresistible tribute offered to the liberating soul­ quality of Mirra's organ music which carried intimations of the Divine beyond the physical ear's comprehension.

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CHAPTER 4

Agenda for the Future

I

Mirra met Paul Richard while they were fellow-seekers in the Cosmic Movement, in 1907. They were married on May 5,1911 and went to live at 9, Rue du Val de Grâce. As Mirra Richard, her outer existence had apparently entered a new phase, but deep in her being there reigned a calm that nothing could ruffle. In her daily life she still radiated the same sweetness and light as before, and those who came within its charmed sphere of influence thought it had surely a mystic origin. For, she had brought into her human form —

The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy. ¹

Friends and fellow-seekers continued to meet in her apartment, everything there wore a beauty and poise, and the very air was vibrant with a rare expectancy and hope incommensurable.

Richard was a man widely read in the philosophical and religious literature of the West and the East. In March 1910 he departed for India on an electioneering mission on behalf of Paul Bluysen, one of the candidates from French India to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. Hoping that during his stay there he would meet some realised yogis or saints, he thought of finding out, if possible, the inner significance of the Jewish emblem known as the Star of David or the Seal of Solomon. This was also the mystic symbol of Théon's Cosmic Movement and appeared on the front page of its organ, Revue Cosmique. Théon's symbol was a sort of Yogachakra - a "six-pointed star containing a lotus in its centre" which evoked "among other things the union of the active and passive principles and doubtless also the Wisdom of Chaldea, of Egypt and of Hindu India". The lotus within the square formed by the intersecting triangles was drawn free-hand and with shading. It is believed that it was the Mother who gave Richard some questions related to this symbol and "the symbolic character of the lotus", which were to be solved by some spiritual person in India. But when this belief was brought to the Mother's notice she clearly denied it, stating, "I never gave him any questions to be solved." However, it is true that as a member of Théon's group and one who was for some time connected with editing the journal, the Mother was already familiar with the symbol we know as Sri Aurobindo's.²

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II

Paul Richard arrived in Pondicherry in mid-April 1910. He was of course busy with politics - for that was the ostensible reason for his coming - but be also kept in the forefront his inner quest, and in fact he was more at home with intellectuals and students of spiritual philosophy than with politicians and electioneering strategists. Soon after his arrival, Richard made inquiries: was there any great spiritual adept at Pondicherry? People shook their heads at first, for in those days Pondicherry was little more than "a dead city .... It was like a backwater of the sea, a stagnant pool by the shore"; it was even akin to a "cemetery ... infested by ghosts and Goblins".³ An adept, a realised saint, a yogi - at Pondicherry? Knowing people raised their eyebrows, but at last one of Richard's friends suddenly remembered. Quite recently, a yogi from North India - a yogi doubled with a fiery patriot - had taken political asylum there, and perhaps he would serve M. Richard's purpose! Accordingly, Zir Naidu agreed to fix up an appointment, and thus it was that Paul Richard met Sri Aurobindo, who had as yet no home of his own and was staying as a guest in Calve Shankar Chetty's house. He was in near total seclusion too, and few strangers were permitted to see him. Richard was one of the rare exceptions, and this game of Destiny was fraught with consequences which nobody could foresee at the time.

Their talks ranged over a wide spectrum, from French-Indian politics to the probable future of mankind, and Sri Aurobindo learnt about Mirra, of her small group of seekers who met weekly in her room, of her occult and spiritual experiences, and of her dedicated ministry in the service of the Future. It was believed, we have said, that Mirra had given Richard several questions to be solved, including the significance of the symbol of the Cosmic Movement. What is especially significant is that the same symbol, with certain geometric modifications and the lotus drawn in outline diagrammatically, was to become Sri Aurobindo's own symbol of mystic knowledge and yogic action. The Mother's explanation of this symbol is:

The descending triangle represents Sat-Chit-Ananda.

The ascending triangle represents the aspiring answer from matter under the form of life, light and love.

The junction of both - the central square - is the perfect manifestation having at its centre the Avatar of the Supreme - the lotus.

The water - inside the square - represents the Multiplicity, the Creation.4

We may also conceive the lotus as standing for the opening of the human Consciousness to the Divine: the bud of aspiration receives the warmth of the rays of the Sun, and there is the splendour of efflorescence petal by petal, the pointed aspiration from below being met by the answering response from above. Indeed, all the mystique and marvel of Yoga

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Sadhana and Siddhi are embodied in the lotus symbol.

That Sri Aurobindo had made an overwhelming impression on Richard may be inferred from subsequent happenings. Wherever he went, he spoke in superlative terms of the Indian Yogi. Writing of "The Sons of Heaven", Richard said that they were of all religions, and indeed they transcended religions:

The religions are the paths below, but they are on the summit; on the summit where all the paths join, where all religions are accomplished, where Heaven becomes one with the earth.

Richard had traversed the earth looking for these "Sons of Heaven", and found them too, especially one "greater than all, a solitary, the Chosen of the future".⁵ An even less veiled reference to Sri Aurobindo occurred in the course of a speech he made to a Japanese audience:

The hour is coming of great things, of great events, and also of great men, the divine men of Asia. All my life I have sought for them across the world, for all my life I have felt they must exist somewhere in the world, that this world would die if they did not live. For they are its light, its heat, its life. It is in Asia that I found the greatest among them - the leader, the hero of tomorrow. He is a Hindu. His name is Aurobindo Ghose.6

There are no qualifications here, and many years later, when Dilip Kumar Roy met him in France and opened up a conversation on Sri Aurobindo, Richard spoke again with the same conviction and vigour of phrasing, and with a more detailed particularity:

I have not met his peer in the whole world. To me he is the Lord Shiva incarnate.... If Aurobindo came out of his seclusion today he would overtop all others as a king of kings. But he has chosen to decline his country's invitation to resume his leadership - a renunciation I look upon as the most convincing proof of his spiritual royalty ....

Sri Aurobindo would have risen to the top in any walk of life - as a philosopher, poet, statesman or leader of thought. But he spurned these lures - why? Only because his vocation was to be an instrument of God missioned to fulfil a human destiny which no other master-builder could have achieved.7

To the question "What exactly is Sri Aurobindo's ideal?", Richard gave the answer:

It is that Man must not rest content with his humanity, however brilliant or many-splendored. He has to win through to a new vision and follow it up to reach a peak his predecessors never dared to assault. Nietzsche had indeed heard the call- the call to transcend humanity .... But the mistake he made, as Aurobindo has pointed out, is that one who is going to fulfil humanity is

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not the superman of power but the Superman of Love who expresses his love through power. Love is necessary because when it is absent Man becomes not a god but a titan. But power is also necessary because without its support he can't help but fail to translate his ideal of Love into a real f1ower-fulfillment in the wilderness of life. This is the Call Aurobindo has heard - a call that once heard can be unheard no more. But you cannot hear such a fateful Call till you are chosen by the One on high who leads us on. It is He who has coronated Aurobindo as His Messiah. So march on he must, for harking to His Call has transformed him into what he is today - a herald of the Power that never came down to earth, though it was destined.8

III

Sri Aurobindo too, on his side, was impressed by Richard's background and personality, and his genuine sympathy for India and admiration for Indian culture. In the months that followed, he maintained a correspondence both with Richard and Mirra. Sri Aurobindo told the young men then living with him at the time about this "French lady from Paris who was a great initiate" and "was desirous of establishing personal contact with him at Pondicherry".⁹ Again, writing to Motilal Roy in April 1914, Sri Aurobindo said:

Richard is not only a personal friend of mine and a brother in the Yoga, but he wishes like myself, and in his own way works for a general renovation of the world by which the present European civilisatio!1 shall be replaced by a spiritual civilisation .... He and Madame Richard are rare examples of European Yogins who have not been led away by Theosophical and other aberrations. I have been in material and spiritual correspondence with them for the last four years.¹⁰

In the same letter Sri Aurobindo described Richard as "practically an Indian in belief, in personal culture, in sympathies and aspirations, one of the Nivedita type". In a later letter, Sri Aurobindo authorised Motilal Roy to make it known that "Richard is a Hindu in faith, a Hindu in heart and a man whose whole life is devoted to the ideal of lifting up humanity and specially Asia and India and supporting the oppressed against the strong, the cause of the future which is our cause against all that hampers and resists it."¹¹

The 1910 meeting between Sri Aurobindo and Richard had considerable significance in the context of future happenings which are part of the theme of the present biography. Principally, it paved the way for Richard's second visit to Pondicherry four years later in 1914, this time accompanied by Mirra. The contacts at the occult level between Sri Aurobindo and

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Mirra had first acquired a more formal basis as a result of the correspondence between them during 1910-14, and were now to lead at last to the destined meeting on the physical plane.

IV

Between 1911 and 1913, Mirra was associated with several related groups of seekers in Paris, including the Bahaist.¹² For some years already, Mirra's residence had served as the meeting place for some of the most ardent Truth-seekers and would-be Future-builders of the time. The effect of the meetings and discussions cannot be measured either by the smallness of the group that assembled ("small group of about twelve people") or even by the kind of consensus reached by them. The surviving few essays (now included in Words of Long Ago), most of which were really Mirra's keynote causeries, give us no doubt some idea of the tone of the meetings and the scope of the explorations, but their real impact must have been much wider and deeper. Like energy rays from a centre, thought-radiations too travel with unbelievable speed. A sensitive visitor's impressions, a book or pamphlet conveyed to inaccessible outposts, a fateful exchange of letters could be the means of encompassing a global diffusion of seminal ideas. A series of chance encounters, a series of closed-door discussions, a series of idealistic enunciations - such was the appearance. But the reality was quite different, and went much deeper.

A new dimension to these group meetings was added in the later months of 1910, when Paul Richard returned after meeting Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry. What he told her about Sri Aurobindo - about the great range of his spiritual experiences and realisations, and his dynamic future­ oriented world-view - intensified Mirra's aspirations and made her re­ double her efforts to formulate an integral view and work towards an integral realisation of man's place and role in the universe.

One of the results of this development was the activisation of the group which now met regularly every week, usually on Wednesday evenings in Mirra's house on Rue du Val de Grâce. The attendance was about twelve, and the large aim of the members was to know themselves, to become master of themselves and seek new pathways to the future. Even more consciously than before, the seekers wished to give their discussions a purposive edge to think out means of bridging the gulf between aspiration and realisation, to achieve an integration of inner and outer life, and to set the individual securely in the wider social frame and engineer the movement of both towards a new future. As the Mother recapitulated in 1953, this was how the meetings were conducted:

A subject was given; an answer was to be prepared for the following week.

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Each one brought along his little work. Generally, I too used to prepare a short paper and, at the end, I read it out.¹³

The subject set for the first meeting was: What is the aim to be achieved, the work to be done? What are the means of achievement? Mirra's own answer was read out on 7 May 1912, and most of it was published in 1940 as Foreword to Words of the Mother. Mirra's vision peered steadily into the future of man's destiny, and also projected the role of man in hastening that destiny:

The general aim to be attained is the advent of a progressing universal harmony.

The means for attaining this aim, in regard to the earth, is the realisation of human unity through the awakening in all and the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity which is One.

In other words, - to create unity by founding the Kingdom of God which is within us all,¹⁴

The original draft had amplified the objectives by adding: "To become the perfect representatives on earth of the first manifestation of the Unthinkable in his three modes, his seven attributes and twelve qualities." In 1953, she explained what she meant by the three modes, the seven attributes and the twelve qualities.¹⁵ The three modes are life, light and love, which correspond to Sachchidananda. The seven attributes refer to the seven creations mentioned in occult traditions, wherein the present, the seventh, is the "creation of Equilibrium" and is the last one, i.e. there will now be a perpetual progress and no pralaya taking the world back into the Origin. As to the twelve qualities, they are the means by which the world "must realise a perfect equilibrium of all its elements". It is worth noting that life, light and love, the three modes, form the ascending triangle in Sri Aurobindo's symbol, and the twelve outer petals in the Mother's symbol represent her twelve essential qualities.

V

At the time Mirra made her draft of a master plan for humanity's progress, she had not met Sri Aurobindo, but Paul Richard had and he may have given her some idea of the Indian seer's thinking on the subject. Possibly this influenced the phrasing here and there, but basically the 1912 document only set down Mirra's own dreams and visions of the future.

A great change - a supreme transformation - is to be effected, both on !he individual and the social (or collective) planes, and these are to be integrated into a harmonious and creative whole. In Sri Aurobindo's

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poem, The Rishi, (written in 1907 and revised in 1911), the Arctic seer exhorts the King:

Seek Him upon the earth. For thee He set

In the huge press

Of many worlds to build a mighty state

For man's success,

Who seeks his goal. Perfect thy human might,

Perfect the race.

For thou art He, O King. Only the night

Is on thy soul

By thy own will. Remove it and recover

The serene whole

Thou art indeed, then raise up man the lover

To God the goal.¹⁶

The individual acts upon the aggregate, and the aggregate upon the individual, and it is the inner or veiled Divinity that should flower in both, and engender the desired transformation. While the individual's inner development will be proportionate to the measure of his progressive union with the Divine, this should not mean an escape from life into the Transcendent, a divorce from the social aggregate and the general environment. Perfect thy human might, Perfect the race.

If, then, the goal be a "progressing universal harmony", the means for achieving it on earth is the realisation of human unity through awakening and manifesting "the inner Divinity which is One" in individual and collectivity alike. More specifically, the task before us is fourfold: firstly, for each individual to realise in himself the one Divine Presence; secondly, individualising "the states of being that were never till now conscious in man and, by that, to put the earth in connection with one or more of the fountains of universal force that are still sealed to it"; thirdly, "to speak again to the world the eternal word under a new form adapted to its present mentality"; and, fourthly, "collectively, to establish an ideal society in a propitious spot for the flowering of the new race, the race of the Sons of God". The "states of being" and "fountains of universal force", so far foreign to the earth or human consciousness, are what Sri Aurobindo saw in general, when he was an undertrial prisoner in the Alipur Jail in 1908 as the overhead or above-mind states or powers which he was later to name as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, and Intuition, leading on to Overmind and Supermind. Making a reference to her 1912 statement in a conversation on 11 November 1953, the Mother said:

There are superposed states of consciousness, and there are new regions which have never yet been manifested on earth, and which Sri Aurobindo

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called supramental .. One must get identified with them, then bring them into the outer consciousness, and manifest them in action.17

As regards giving to the world again "the eternal word under a new form" , 't was to be "the synthesis of all human knowledge". The Word, Logos, the source of all knowledge is the same, it is eternal; but age after age there is need for a new reading, a new formulation, of the eternal Word in the collective experience and intelligible idiom of the present time. When Richard saw Sri Aurobindo in 1910 and they shared ~heir experiences, speculations and their hope for the future, there was doubtless some talk of the possibility of working towards a vast conspectus of knowledge. Reminiscing in January 1939, Sri Aurobindo said about the origin of the Arya in 1914:

Richard came and said: "Let us have a synthesis of knowledge." I said: "All right. Let us synthesise."¹⁸

Mirra's 1912 reference to the establishment of "an ideal society in a propitious spot" was a piece of pure divination. She had certainly no idea then that an Ashram was going to take root and flourish at Pondicherry. As she remarked in 1953 in response to a question, "Where did you decide to found the Ashram?"

I never decided anything at all! I had simply said that it had to be done. I did not have the least idea, except that I had a great desire to come to India. But still, I did not even know if it corresponded to something. I had decided nothing at all. Simply, I had seen that state, what had to be done.19

Nevertheless, with our hindsight we may surmise that some foreshadow of the Ashram that was to come into existence in 1926 was caught by her practically fourteen years earlier! She would herself have preferred, it seems, to locate the Ashram among the mountains, but Sri Aurobindo liked the sea; and so it was Pondicherry that came to be the "propitious spot" .²⁰

In the second part of Mirra's manifesto, there is perhaps a slight shift in emphasis: from the human to the terrestrial. There is to be a "terrestrial transformation and harmonisation" comprising both individual and social change, with the two movements favourably reacting upon each other; and to initiate this integral process of change and transformation, a group ­ "hierarchised, if possible" - should come into existence. The members of the group should first perfect themselves; second, by the force of their words and the greater power of their own lives, they should attract others to this way of life; and so finally "found a typic society or reorganise those that already exist". We thus return to the early Aurobindonian exhortation: Perfect thy human might, Perfect the race.

So many seminal ideas are prodigally scattered in the 1912 statement that all Sri Aurobindo's writings and the entire story of Mirra's life and of

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her manifestation and ministry may have to be cited to bring out its full implications. The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - the Ashram to be and its vast and intricate network of activities - Auroville, the City of Dawn, to be founded fifty-six years after: all can be seen in the manifesto, even if only as the tiny seed that contains the proliferations of the massive banyan tree.

Begin with the individual, even one individual; and ultimately alchemise the race, the earth itself! The individual has to awaken to the divine light within, he has to seek and find his soul; only then will he be in rapport with the soul of humanity, the soul of the world, which are also of the divine substance and essence. In his external action, the individual has to find his right place in the "hierarchy", not the hierarchy of money, status or power, but the true spiritual hierarchy. Ordinarily, the term "hierarchy" raises considerations of superiority and inferiority, but for Mirra it was only "the organisation of functions and the manifestation in action of the particular nature of each person".²¹ There is doubtless a perfect harmony and a total hierarchy beyond Space and Time, and this is to be one day realised on the earth:

Perhaps this will be one of the results of the supramental transformation: the world will be ready for a perfect, spontaneous, essentially true hierarchical manifestation - and without any kind of coercion - where everyone will become aware of his own perfection.22

It is thus the spiritual, not the ordinary, hierarchy that Mirra had in mind when she spoke of the formation, if possible, of a hierarchised group. Even as there are numberless aspects of the Divine, there are also as many roads to the Divine; one may follow one road or another, seize and manifest one aspect or another. Such contact or identification, however partial, could still be perfect in its own right. But one may also make an integral approach to the Divine, become integrally united with the Divine, and integrally manifest the Divine: and that alone will be a complete or total union:

And this capacity for contact is perhaps what constitutes the true hierarchy of beings ....

... the point at which you are identified with the Divine is perfect in itself, that is to say, your identification is perfect in itself, at this point, but the number of points at which you are identified differs immensely ... ,

... And so he who is able to identify himself in his totality with the Divine is necessarily, from the point of view of the universal realisation, on a much higher level of the hierarchy than one who could realise Him only at a single point.

And that is the true meaning of the spiritual hierarchy .... ²³

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VI

Mirra's manifesto for the future, a matter of hardly three pages, and originally given in two instalments, although rather too analytical in appearance and even repetitive in part, is nevertheless a remarkably comprehensive enunciation of the ends and means before modern man "who needs must choose between the abyss of imminent destruction and the steep and narrow golden path of endless possibility. Early in her life, certain dreams and visions had come to her with a persistent frequency, certain avenues had seemed to open up, whose materialisation or fulfilment was to be promoted during the wide expanse of her later life. She had already come across several people with a high aspiration and a keen urge to move towards new horizons, but the tiresome struggle for existence was wearing them down. Although very young at the time, Mirra had wanted to create a little sheltered world where such sincere aspirants would be freed from the exhausting preoccupations of earning and spending, but assured of the material necessities of life - food, clothing, shelter - so that they could turn towards the higher life. And in her middle age she was actually to be in a position to organise such a community life for a large group of spiritual aspirants. Thus, in the wider background 'of the inspiring epic of her divine ministry and manifestation, this 1912 manifesto has a key place, like the corner-stone of a magnificent edifice.

VII

After her elected group had accepted Mirra's manifesto as their own - as mankind's own - credo of ends and means, the subsequent weekly meetings from 14 May to 2 July 1912 were to concentrate on some of the minutiae of the programme. Questions of a more or less precise and practical nature were posed, and detailed answers to them were formulated. The members read out the answers they had prepared in the course of the week, and Mirra's own formulations concluded the proceedings. All these eight essays by Mirra are included in Words of Long Ago.

The answer to the first question - What is my place in the universal Work? - was almost a corollary to Mirra's concept of spiritual hierarchy. Everyone has a role uniquely his own, which he alone can play to perfection when he is in tune with the Infinite within himself. No doubt most people, forgetting this, are apt to run on false trails, injure them­ selves and feel frustrated. But then it is not all that easy to know what exactly is one's true vocation. In this world, work cannot be avoided, work indeed is essential; but what is the particular work we shall seek to do - in what spirit shall we do it? Conventional thinking brands some kinds of work as inferior, and others as respectable or superior; and different

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grades of emoluments are attached to these several kinds of work. Not unnaturally, then, men seek less strenuous, less degrading, but more lucrative, more respectable, kinds of work. Hence the mad scramble and suicidal competition and rat race in the present-day world. There are the fierce pulls of the ego, of the family, and of the ruling fashions of society and the market-place. In this distracting situation, what we can do is to follow with honesty and goodwill a provisional occupation that will engage our talents and energies, hoping that sooner or later the mist will clear and we will discover - or stumble upon - our true vocation. And the decisive turn comes when, not the feeding of the ravenous ego, but love of the earth and men, is the real motive force behind our actions. Self-knowledge and self-control are necessary, and even more needed is the capacity for self­ effacement:

We should never tell ourselves, openly or indirectly, "I want to be great, what vocation can I find for myself in order to become great?"

On the contrary, we should tell ourselves, "There must certainly be something I can do better than anyone else, since each one of us is a special mode of manifestation of the divine power which, in its essence, is one in all. However humble and modest it may be, this is precisely the thing to which I should devote myself, and in order to find it, I shall observe and analyse my tastes, tendencies and preferences, and I shall do it without pride or excessive humility, whatever others may think I shall do it just as I breathe, just as the flower smells sweet, quite simply, quite naturally, because I cannot do otherwise. "²⁴

The second question - What is the greatest obstacle in ourselves to our consecration to impersonal work? - goes to the heart of the matter. The question is relevant because, while the uniqueness of the individual is a fact of our everyday life, it is nevertheless fatal to clothe it with the lurid robes of arrogance and conceit. The paradox of the human situation is that the soul within, which is of the Divine essence, being lodged in the physical or material body, partakes of its density, obscurity and intractability. Because of this imperfection of matter, we cherish the illusion of egoistic separativity, think always in terms of attracting things to ourselves and putting ourselves in opposition to the rest of the world. Also, our imprisonment in the density of matter forces a heavy conservatism upon us that bars the way to a radical change and transformation of ourselves. The existence of variety needn't mean actual division and fragmentation. As in Indra's net of pearls, each pearl reflects all the rest, so too different individuals needn't mean so many jarring notes but should fuse into a symphony:

If we consider ourselves as cells of an immense living organism, we shall immediately understand that a cell, which is dependent for its own life on the life of the whole and can separate itself from it only at the risk of destruction, does in fact have its own special part to play in the whole.

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But this role is precisely what is most profoundly spontaneous in our being ... the more fully we give ourselves to an impersonal action, the more this role will gain in strength and clarity within us ... since it is our special way of manifesting the Divine Essence, which is one in everything and in all.²⁵

The third question - What is the psychological difficulty which I can best study by experience? - provokes Mirra to undertake a most penetrating analysis of everyday human psychology, followed by a radical solution. It is true different people have their respective vicious moles of nature that condition their everyday behaviour. Perhaps the most common difficulty, however, is "excessive sensitiveness". This arises, partly because of our tendency to personalise everything, seeing everything only in close relation to ourselves, and discovering all sorts of reasons for grovelling in the grooves of sadness and frustration; and partly because of a kind of ready sensibility that dwells all too promiscuously on the spectacle of human suffering, weakening ourselves in the process. We witness, often enough, people succumbing to the desire for cheap martyrdom. "Service" and "sacrifice", like Siamese twins, figure in populist pronouncements. Is such sentimental suffering necessary? Is it wise? Sympathetic martyrdoms, like sympathetic strikes, lead us nowhere. What actually happens is that, "consciously or not, instead of sacrificing yourself for the good of others, you sacrifice yourself for the pleasure of it, which is perfectly absurd and of no benefit to anyone". ²⁶ Such morbid or infantile sensitiveness is a "supra­nervous" phenomenon, and does not even square always with genuine sincerity of feeling. It does not of course mean that one should be just insensitive, crude or callous, but a spendthrift extravagance of sensibility does no good to the man who suffers or the object that inspires the suffering. The right attitude, then, should be to rise above suffering in all circumstances:

Indeed, the expression of a true psychic life in the being is peace, a joyful serenity.

Any suffering is therefore a precious indication to us of our weak point, of the point which demands a greater spiritual effort from us ....

...the only way to come to the help of men is to oppose to their suffering an immutable and smiling serenity which will be the highest human expression of Impersonal Love.27

VIII

The next three topics - What improvement can we bring to our meetings? How can one become master of one's thought? The Power of Words - are

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strictly functional. While work is basic to human life, a great deal of it has to be done through groups or organisations, and thought and word are the sinews of work and they play their own part in making groups and organisations function usefully, smoothly and effectively. An excessive formalism or rigidity is the enemy of all organisations, which should really learn to function with the freedom and force of Nature's secret processes; and if the individual links are strong, the chain - the group or the organisation - will also be cumulatively strong. When the members meet, they should create "a contemplative atmosphere" of calm inwardness; "an atmosphere of spirituality is sometimes a far greater help than an exchange of words". And whether it be an individual or a group, real strength comes only from an identification with the Divine:

If we enlighten and illumine our intellectual faculties, our group will manifest the light. If we allow impersonal love to permeate our whole being, our group will radiate love ....

In short, let us become the living cells of the organism we want to bring forth .... ²⁸

As for mastery of thought, we should cultivate self-scrutiny, discrimination and thought-control till we are able to "seek in ourselves the idea which seems to be the highest, the noblest, the purest and most disinterested and, until the day we find a more beautiful idea to replace it, to make it the pivot around which a mental synthesis will be built up". ²⁹ From time to time it would be prudent to give rest to the mind, and let it wait in patience for the dawn of new thought. Above all, we should know "how to rely with childlike trust on the Great Supreme Force, the Divine Force that is One in all beings and things". Right discipline is certainly needed to achieve mastery of thought; but equally necessary is the attitude of unqualified surrender to the Divine, so that we may be moulded like pliant clay at the hands of the Supreme.

With the mastery of thought, mastery of word will come too, but first there is the caveat entered against the senseless waste of words - a very pertinent warning! Words by themselves are as valueless as uncharged batteries. The charging is done by the power of the personality that utters the words. There is a primordial identity between thought and spoken word, and often words get loaded connotatively over a period of time through long association. There are also words of mantric potency - AUM, for example, or the Chinese TAO - that at once evoke feelings of peace, serenity and timelessness. And occasionally the charged word - say, a mantric benediction - can become "endowed with the power of transmitting true gifts, for example, the gift of healing" . ³⁰

What is the most useful idea to spread and what is the best example to set? Quite obviously, the idea that should gain currency is that man carries within him the seeds of perfect power, wisdom and knowledge; and these

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are also at the heart or centre of all beings, since the world, the universe, is quintessentially of the same divine substance. And whoever will "live integrally this thought of the One God in all" sets the best example. More particularly, people should know that Man has yet to evolve from his current obscurities to what he is potentially:

True progressive evolution, an evolution which can lead man to his rightful happiness, does not lie in any external means, material improvement or social change. Only a deep and inner process of individual self-perfection can make for real progress and completely transform the present state of things, and change suffering and misery into a serene and lasting contentment.31

As Rainer Maria Rilke remarks:

Nowhere, beloved, can world exist but within.

Life passes in transformation. And ever diminishing

Vanishes what's outside.32

Light beckons to light, and the divine light lit at the heart of living creatures and at the core even of matter and all material things is the same, "whence follow as a result the essential unity of all and their solidarity and fraternity". If the battle is won for the individual, it will then be possible to bring together a sufficient number of spiritually emancipated and illumined men and women, and thereby create conditions for the flowering of a new race of supermen or "Sons of God".

IX

The last of the questions - Which minds are nearest to me and what is my ideal work among them? - has a practical cast, but with spiritual implications. If inner illumination, integral transformation, is the main aim of individual life, this is to be sought, not as a self-sufficient end, but as a means to a further end - the transformation of the environment through radiation from these illumined centres of realisation. It is not man as he is, this bundle of ego-stuff and of ironies of circumstance, this wailing heir to desire, death and incapacity, but man as he might be - man who has recovered the veiled divinity within - who will then contact other men who have been likewise emancipated, and strive to achieve a perfect and integral understanding with them. Since there are four principal avenues of consciousness - physical, vital, mental, psychic - we may try to establish contact with other people (friends, the family, the neighbourhood) at one or more levels, but the psychic contact, which is the most important, is established through "converging spiritual aspirations". In such a world of

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spiritually liberated men and women, the medium of understanding will be the spirit's wideness and universality:

When we become one with the inner Godhead, we become one in depth with all, and it is through Her and by Her that we must come into contact with all beings. Then, free from all attraction and repulsion, all likes and dislikes, we are close to what is close to Her and far from what is far Her.

Thus we learn that in the midst of others we should become always and more and more a divine example of integral activity both intellectual and spiritual, an opportunity which is offered to them to understand and enter upon the path of divine life.³³

This, then, is the conclusion of the matter: there shall be no running away from - no betrayal of - earth-life, even with all its present limitations. Karma is not to be avoided, either when we are engaged in inner development, or when the development is complete. Even the Buddha must become the 'Bodhisattva', give up his hard-won 'Arhatship', and return to the fellowship of other human beings, not only those who a Bodhisattvas like him, but also those who are yet blindly chained to the revolving wheel of terrestrial life.

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CHAPTER 5

Approaches to the Divine

I

On the threshold of a vast inner change and development, - a revolution and transformation in terms of the Spirit, - Mirra now sought other means than group discussions, more highly sensitised and delicate means than essays in persuasion, to prepare for the imminent inner change, to accelerate the spiritual growth and development. These new engines of Mirra's sadhana - new only in the sense that they were now more frequently and fully brought into play - were prayer and meditation. With the spiritual seeker, prayer is no vulgar mendicancy for a material gift or advantage, say, success in an election or examination, business prosperity, or even mere release from physical distress or pain. Prayer has more fundamental aims, other resplendent potencies, and the true spiritual aspirant, conscious of these far aims, mobilises by the power of prayer these supernal forces. Prayer is indeed a kind of ineffable music played in three octaves - Adoration, Communion, Cooperation - and these waves of prayerful ecstasy comprehend, in Evelyn Underhill's words,

first all our personal access to, and contemplation of, the Supernatural Reality of God. Next, because of this possible access, all our chances of ourselves becoming supernatural personalities, useful to God. Last, and because of this, all our capacity for exerting supernatural action on other souls. For the state of adoration opens the soul's gates to the Supernal; and that Supernal, invading and controlling more and more of its will and love, enters into a loving communion with it which issues in an ever closer cooperation, limitless in its energising power. Hence prayer, in a soul which is completely patient of the supernatural, is literally without ceasing, because the whole of its action is supernaturalised.¹

When Coleridge writes ­

Like a youthful hermitress,

Beauteous in a wilderness,

Who, praying always, prays in sleep -

he but describes this condition of constant relationship with God through prayer. The problem that faces the spiritual aspirant is constantly to extend the area and depth of the prayer, to turn what begins as an occasional, intermittent, imperfect surge of the heart into a permanent, steady and all­ embracing quality of the soul that subtly influences and transforms all thoughts, feelings, joys and all the multitudinous motions of the body, heart and mind.

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There is, however, a singular interlinking between the individual who prays and the ineffable object of his prayer. "He who chooses the Infinite," says Sri Aurobindo, "has been chosen by the Infinite."² Dr. Inge quotes this relevant passage from the Revelations of Juliana of Norwich, the fourteenth-century English mystic:

But our Lord said to me, "I am the ground of thy beseechings: first, it is My will that thou have it; and then I make thee to wish for it; and then I make thee to beseech it, and thou beseechest it. How then should it be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?" ... For all things that our good Lord maketh us to beseech, Himself hath ordained them to us from [times] without beginning.³

We raise our hands in prayer, apparently of our own volition; yet "it is in truth this all-penetrating God who by His secret humble pressure stirs man to make this first movement of will and love".⁴ The spontaneity is real enough, yet not utterly or altogether so; we raise our hands in prayer, we offer these flowers to Him - but have our hands and these flowers an existence apart from Him? St. Teresa, developing a familiar simile beloved of mystics, says that our soul is like a garden, untilled and barren, overgrown with weeds; God plucks out the weeds, and the plants and flowers have to be watered by our prayer. And this prayer, this spiritual nourishment, is of four kinds: you may draw water from a deep well; you may use a water-wheel hung round with buckets; you may make a stream flow through the garden; or you may invoke the rains from Above. The sensible gardener will spurn none of these means, for all have their place; but the shower from Heaven is what makes all the others possible, and hence it is the most efficacious and nectarean of all.

Meditation, although its controlling principle is different, is closely affiliated to prayer; and being complementary in their aims and functions, they together contribute to the divinisation of man and the humanisation of God, twin processes culminating in the intimate fellowship of man and God. There is accordingly established a concordat between the devotee and the Divine, a perfectly attuned and resonantly fruitful camaraderie:

It is here, in this humble yet intimate, ardent yet little understood communion of the small human self with a present and infinite Companion - an 'immanent Ultimate' within the compass of man's heart, but beyond the span of his conceiving mind - that the transforming power exercised by prayer on human personality is most clearly seen.⁵

Prayer is thus not inaptly described as the premium that insures the possibility - certainty - of such a real meditative intimacy with the Infinite, such a life of unity with the Divine. We needn't, however, be too absurdly dogmatic regarding the causal relationship between 'prayer' and 'meditation'.

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What is important to remember is that they are both vitally related to in the Spirit.

II

Mirra had already reached an advanced stage of occult knowledge and inner development when she commenced the new spiritual adventure of regular meditation. and prayer, and their faithful transcription day. after day. This was an individual opening out to the Unknown, an intimate dialogue with the Divine. Every day she sat at dawn near the window of her room in No. 9, Rue du Val de Grâce, with a Kashmiri shawl wrapped closely about her. After a brief session of intense meditation, she set down on paper her ruminations, feelings, hopes, aspirations, anxieties, visions and experiences. Being a private and a spontaneous recordation, she kept this spiritual diary scrupulously under lock and key; it was, after all, a secret between the Divine and herself.

These diary-jottings, these articulate approaches to the Infinite, these pointer-readings of Mirra's mystical life began "several weeks" before the keynote entry on 2 November 1912, and were to continue for a few years with a more or less sustained regularity; then the entries were to become fewer and far between, and at last stop altogether in 1931. In all they were to fill five stout notebooks, but it was only afterwards that their contents were to be revealed even to Sri Aurobindo who advised the publication of a selection. This was how they appeared in 1932 in the original French as Prieres et Méditations de la Mère. By a supreme act of self-abnegation, the Mother was later to consign to the flames in a boiler in the Ashram the rest of the work, perhaps the greater part.

The selected work as published in French has been described by the French poet and mystic, Maurice Magre, as "the highest perfection in style of which French is capable", an opinion shared by many who are entitled to speak with authority about French writing. In 1941 English translations of 61 of the prayers were published under the title Prayers and Meditations. There are manuscripts in Sri Aurobindo's hand of several of them. For the rest, there are manuscripts written by a disciple and extensively revised by So Aurobindo. A fuller edition was published in 1948. Like the French, the English version is a classic in its own right. As Rishabhchand puts it:

These Prayers are no glistening gossamer of imaginative idealism nor an Imposing fabric of theological speculation, but undeniable facts of spiritual realisation, - truths seen, words heard, forms touched, at least as concretely as the objects of our senses, but all in a world or worlds of light, sealed to the sense-bound consciousness of man.⁶

The English renderings perhaps miss here and there the simple beauty, the

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radiant native force, the inevitable glow of phrasing, the compellingly insinuating rhythms of the French original. But the work of translation too has been very sensitively carried out, and it is the general feeling that much of the fervour, the mystic élan and the poetic flavour of the original has been retained in the English version as well. There is no doubt that the work, whether in French or in English, is a superb embodiment of the lyra mystica, and a spiritual testament for all time.

III

The last of the weekly 'essays', now included in Words of Long Ago, was read to the Idea group on 2 July 1912. Mirra seems to have begun writing down her prayers and meditations not long afterwards, at first not quite clear in her mind as to the exact purpose of the daily exercise. But by 2 November 1912, she was able to see things clearly:

It has taken me several weeks to learn that the reason for this written meditation, its justification, lies in the very fact of addressing it daily to Thee. In this way I shall put into material shape each day a little of the conversation I have so often with Thee.⁷

At its most rewarding, meditation becomes a sheer waiting on God, all distracting and disturbing thought-impulses and thought-currents being rejected or turned back, and the mind's interior realms cleansed and becalmed and sanctified. Expectantly waiting on God, a prayer might rise from the heart's sanctuary for an opening of the gateway to the Divine. All prayer is supplication, making a request, articulating a hope, all in the immediacy of God; approaching God, waiting on Him, storming one's way past the gateway to the Sanctuary - almost engaging in a secret conversation with God! The whole point of the meditation, of the prayer, is that the Divine can be approached, the Divine can be spoken to and the Divine can be experientially known. And when approached or appealed to, He too will speak to us, and meet us more than halfway. One prays, and one listens too - one meditates in expectancy - one constantly thinks of oneself and the Divine (the "I" and the "Thou"), till at last there is a bridging of the distance, there is a melting, a meeting, a fusion, an identity. The whole object of the meditation and prayer is to cleanse oneself, get near to the Divine, obliterate all diffidence and difference, and expose oneself to and commune with the Power and the Glory of His Divine Grâce.

The Prayers and Meditations frequently speaks of "I", signifying Mirra the writer, who is herself a portion of the Divine essence, and "Thou", or the Divine, the Master, the Supreme Lord. Mirra is potentially the Divine, she aspires to be one with Him inseparably, - and, in later years, she was to be known and loved and adored as the Mother, the Mother Divine. Now,

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in Prayers and Meditations, who is addressing whom? How are we to understand these communications from the Divine to the Divine? When this question was posed to Sri Aurobindo in 1936, he offered an explanation or interpretation. which will help us to get into the spirit of these extraordinary outpourings and recordations:

The Prayers are mostly written in an identification with the earth-conscious­ ness. It is the Mother in the lower nature addressing the Mother in the higher nature, the Mother herself carrying on the Sadhana of the earth­ consciousness for the transformation praying to herself above from whom the forces of transformation come. This continues till the identification of the earth-consciousness and the higher consciousness is effected .... It is the Divine who is always referred to as Divine Maitre and Seigneur. There is the Mother who is carrying on the sadhana and the Divine Mother, both being one but in different poises, and both turn to the Seigneur or Divine Master.⁸

That is of course an over-view, a master-key; but how any individual entry is to be understood would depend on the context, and also on the reader's own background of readiness to rise to the level of the particular "dialogue with the Divine".

The first of the diary-entries seems to offer a clue to the entire series of marvellous lyrics in prose. It is a key-beginning as it were, a cardinal announcement:

Although my whole being is in theory consecrated to Thee, O Sublime Master, who art the life, the light and the love in all things, I still find it hard to carry out this consecration in detail.. .. I shall make my confession to Thee as well as it may be; not because I think I can tell Thee any thing­ for Thou art Thyself everything .... Still by turning towards Thee, by immersing myself in Thy light at the moment when I consider these things, little by little I shall see them more like what they really are, - until the day when, having made myself one in identity with Thee, I shall no more have anything to say to Thee, for then I shall be Thou. This is the goal that I would reach; towards this victory all my efforts will tend more and more. I aspire for the day when I can no longer say "I", for I shall be Thou.⁹

Always the problem is to promote a progressive diminution and the ultimate annulment of the deceptive feeling of separativity that divides the "I" from the "Thou", for this really is the source of all error, uneasiness and pain. The cure for the error and the pang is to lose oneself in the Other, and experience "the universal unity determining an absolute interdependence of all actions": in other words, to live the integral unity and harmony of the One in the manifoldness of the phenomenal play.

In the entry of the next day (3 November), there is a reference to the Divine response to the human aspiration, for in spiritual life one of the

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basic laws is that Aspiration (or ascent) and Response (or descent) are equal and opposite, and result in a meeting, a synthesis, a creative leap forward. Mirra too experiences the descent of the Light and Love Divine; the union is consecrated; it only remains that the Divine should be installed as Master of the Works as well.

IV

The dynamic basis of the daily companionship being thus securely established, there surges henceforth with effortless ease and force a radiant fountain of aspiration, adoration, communion and spiritual action - an astonishing spurt of the spirit's inexhaustible riches. Similes garnered from the quarries of the awakened soul, crowds of marvellous apprehensions, chains of chastened and purified ratiocination, deep draughts from the vats of ecstasy, sparks from the anvil where Spirit acts on spirit to temper and transform - these are the alphabet of the daily prayers and meditations. They are a diary, a record, of Mirra's pleadings, strivings, fleeting visions, partial realisations, renewed visions, fresh realisations; and, as we follow the golden sequence of the Prayers and Meditations, we too cannot help partaking something of the widening and heightening, something too of the transcendent light and life of this other-existence which is as yet so inherently this-existence, however coiled and veiled within.

A fortnight later, on 19 November, there is an ambrosial affirmation:

I said yesterday to that young Englishman who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire, that I had definitively found Thee, that the Union was constant. Such is indeed the state of which I am conscious. All my thoughts go towards Thee, all my acts are consecrated to Thee; Thy Presence is for me an absolute, immutable, invariable fact, and Thy Peace dwells constantly in my heart.¹⁰

Yet, although there is "union", the realisation of utter "identity" is still to come. Mirra's thoughts and acts flow towards the Divine; His Presence and Peace fill her whole being. This is union, but still it is only a union reared on the I-Thou duality, which is indispensable at this stage. The further move has to be from the I-Thou union in duality to the I-Thou union in ineffable identity, and this too will come about in due course, for Mirra's faith is unflagging, and so she reaffirms it over and over again:

Everywhere and in everything around me Thou revealest Thyself and in me Thy Will and Consciousness express themselves always more and more clearly even to the point of my having almost entirely lost the gross illusion of "me" and "mine". If a few shadows, a few flaws can be seen in the great

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Light which manifests Thee, how shall they bear for long the marvellous brightness of Thy resplendent Love?

While the cosmic Consciousness and Will gather up "me" and "mine" into a unity that passeth understanding, the illusive shadows of ignorance and suffering flit restlessly now and then till they disappear in the sunrise of His Knowledge and the splendour of His Love. This Consciousness that fashions her being could be described as a great diamond ... in its cohesion, firmness, pure limpidity, transparency ... a brilliant and radiant flame in its ... ", but it is much more, for in its experience "nearly all sensation inner and outer" is exceeded, leaving only "Thou everywhere and always; nothing but Thou in the essence and in the manifestation."¹¹

Two days later, Mirra meditates on the interconnection between outer and inner life. Meditation, contemplation; outer effort, achievement ­ these are complementary activities, one stimulating the other. Through the forge of "works" to illumination; and through inner enlightenment to better and more purposeful work! But pride and complacency are to be kept away: "The work [of transformation] must be long and slow even for the best... none can escape the need of innumerable experiences of every kind and every instant" .¹²

When one is involved thus in a variety of experiences, inner and outer, one will come to know that, unless the intimate sense of the Divine prevails always, thinking may only invite the darkness of ignorance, and feeling and doing may precipitate disorder. On 3 December, Mirra records:

Last night I had the experience of the effectivity of confident surrender to Thy guidance ... the more passive the mind to Thy illumination, the clearer and the more adequate is its expression.

I listened to Thee as Thou spokest in me .... No more fear, no more uneasiness, no more anguish; nothing but a perfect Serenity, an absolute Confidence, a supreme unwavering Peace.¹³

The key to success and happiness is confident unquestioning surrender to the Divine. There is no need even to record the words of the Divine, or to desire a continuation of the dialogue. The best will be done, for His benevolence and puissance are without limits.

Again, two days later:

In Peace and Silence the Eternal manifests; allow nothing to disturb you and the Eternal will manifest; have perfect equality in face of all.... No haste, no inquietude, no tension, Thou, nothing but Thou, without any analysis or any objectivising, and Thou art there without a possible doubt, for all becomes a Holy Peace and a Sacred Silence.¹⁴

This sense of peace and silence and serene fulfillment persists for some more days, and the diary-entries are accordingly charged with a distinctive iridescence of fervour:

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Like a flame that bums in silence, like a perfume that rises straight upward without wavering, my love goes to Thee; and like the child who does not reason and has no care, I trust myself to Thee that Thy Will may be done, that Thy Light may manifest, Thy Peace radiate, Thy Love cover the world.¹⁵

Thy Light was manifested through my mouth yesterday and it met no resistance in me; the instrument was willing, supple, keen of edge.

It is Thou who art the doer in each thing and each being, and he who is near enough to Thee to see Thee in all actions without exception, will know how to transform each act into a benediction.¹⁶

I await, without haste, without inquietude, the tearing of another veil, the Union made more complete ... nothing exists save Thy Will....

Already there is heard from behind the veil the wordless symphony of gladness that reveals Thy sublime Presence.¹⁷

Aspiration, faith, surrender, union: expectancy, ardour, the uplifting realisation of the Divine omnipresence, the deeper listening to the wordless symphony - these are the rhythmic beats in the dynamics of the divine play.

V

There is a prolonged break of nearly two months, from 11 December 1912 to 5 February 1913. Mirra now transcribes the words, as heard by her, of the "melodious chant" addressed by the Divine to the Earth:

Poor sorrowful Earth, remember that I am present in thee and lose not hope; each effort, each grief, each joy and each pang, each call of thy heart, each aspiration of thy soul, each renewal of thy seasons, all, all without exception, what seems to thee sorrowful and what seems to thee joyous, what seems to thee ugly and what seems to thee beautiful, all infallibly lead thee towards me, who am endless Peace, shadow less Light, perfect Harmony, Certitude, Rest and Supreme Blessedness.¹⁸

Earth-nature must one day become supernature, and there is thus no cause, whatever the current discontents, for anything like despair. There­ fore, in a gratitude beyond measure and a ceaseless worship she prostrates before the Divine, and' 'that worship goes up from my heart and my mind towards Thee like the pure smoke of the incense of the perfumes of India" ¹⁹

It seems to her that it is wiser to await Him in trust and serenity than to seek Him with vitalistic ardour or unseemly impatience, for whenever

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there is a real need He will surely be there. In the ripening consciousness of Will and progressive identification with It lie true liberty and strength, also the possibility of total transformation. The efflorescence of Divine consciousness must come about with the simplicity and naturalness of a opening into a flower. Any sheerly vitalistic attempt to force the pace, down the power and achieve quick spectacular results will only prove a and a danger on the path of the work. But since faith and surrender the law of her own being, Mirra's apprehensions of Reality crowd upon bet readily and impart to her tongue a golden utterance, such as for example, on 11 May:

O Lord, Lord, a boundless joy fills my heart, songs of gladness surge through my head in marvellous waves, and in the full confidence of Thy certain triumph I find a sovereign Peace and an invincible Power. Thou fillest my being, Thou animatest it, Thou settest in motion its hidden springs, Thou illuminest its understanding, Thou intensifiest its life, Thou increasest tenfold its love; and I no longer know whether the universe is I or I the universe, whether Thou art in me or I in Thee; Thou alone art and all is Thou; and the streams of Thy infinite grace fill and overflow the world.²⁰

This process of identification between "I" and "Thou" - and the direction of the movement of consciousness - finds expression again in the entry for 23 July:

I do not know whether this chant goes from me to Thee or comes from Thee to me or whether Thou and I and the entire universe are this marvellous chant of which I have just become conscious .... ²¹

Thus as the days pass, as the meditative poise becomes more and more a natural and permanent condition of Mirra's life, there is experienced a rending of the veil of separativity, and an opening up of the reservoirs of unity, harmony and peace. But Mirra was never for an escape into the Transcendent as a cure for the density, obscurity and impurity of terrestrial life, for that would be merely refusing cowardlike to accomplish the mission - "the redemption and purification Matter":

To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with this purity, to be identified with it, can be useful only if this knowledge is later used to hasten the transfiguration of the earth, to accomplish Thy sublime work.²²

Neither selective adhesion to the pockets of purity in the world of phenomena nor a decisive escape into the realm beyond the phenomenal can satisfy her. The work to be accomplished is the cleansing of the impurities here, the transfiguration of the phenomenal world itself. Mirra is the incarnate evolutionary earth-consciousness, and with the progress of

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her sadhana, there is no "I" and no "Thou"; and neither is there any difference between her personality and the personality of the whole earth. While she finds rich fulfilment in these forged identities, she is pained to see that other men "flee from these boons as though they fear them" - so abysmal is their ignorance! Yet it is not impossible to dispel the mist of avidya, and listen to the still music that comes "like a crystalline murmur that imparts a note of harmony to a discordant concert". ²³ Only, one needs patient perseverance, and one needs faith.

VI

Early in August 1913, Mirra hears an inner voice telling her that worrying about external circumstances or showing an obsessive concern for doing 'good' things, as distinct from 'bad', was most unwise:

Why strive and strain so to realise thy own conception of Truth? Be more supple, more trusting. The only duty is not to let oneself be troubled by anything. To torment oneself about doing the right thing causes as much harm as a bad will. Only in a calm as of deep waters can be found the possibility of True Service.²⁴

A few days later, she records: "All is to me beautiful, harmonious, silent, despite the outer turmoil. And in this silence it is Thou, O Lord, whom I see."²⁵ And, on 15 August:

In this even-fall, Thy Peace deepens and becomes more sweet and Thy: Voice more clear and distinct in the silence that fills my being.²⁶

And the next day:

O Love, Divine Love, Thou fillest my whole being and overflowest on every side. I am Thyself even as Thou art I, and I see Thee in each being, each thing, from the soft breath of the passing breeze to the glorious sun which gives us light and is a symbol of Thee.

O Thou whom I cannot understand, in the silence of the purest devotion I adore Thee.

There is, however, the recurrent uneasiness because of the body, its claims, and the need for its preservation. If only one could be relieved of all these "terrible and puerile" obsessions! The reassuring Truth, however, returns again and again:

Without Thee the dust constituting this body that strives to manifest Thee, would disperse amorphous and inconscient; without Thee this sensibility which makes possible a relation with all other centres of manifestation, would vanish into a dark inertia; without Thee this thought that animates

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and illumines the whole being, would be vague, vacant, unrealised; without Thee the sublime love which vivifies, coordinates, animates and gives .".warmth to all things would be a yet unawakened possibility.²⁷

All talk of body, senses, thoughts, emotions is meaningless - for unless the Divine informs them and wills their respective functional activities, "all is inert, brute or inconscient". But what a wonderful thing it is to "soar above the contingencies of material life" towards the Divine, yet with power "to return as Thy messengers to the earth to announce the glorious tidings of Thy approaching Advent?"

At other moments, it is rather the limitations of the earth, the purblindness and joylessness of men, that press themselves upon her consciousness, and then she gently moans the regret that Earth and Man still perversely grovel in self-structured infelicity:

Grant, a Lord, that I may be like a fire that illumines and gives warmth, like a spring of water that quenches thirst, like a tree that shelters and protects .... Men are so unhappy and ignorant and have so great a need of help.²⁸

They need to be helped, and they usually decline to be helped; hence the call for patience. But while the fret and fever of impatience is no solution, how difficult it is to be patient! As Hopkins confessed:

Patience, hard thing! ...

... Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks

Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks

Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.

Although Patience is hard, Mirra would need it when she strives - be the Ordeal long or short - to dissipate the darkness, to heal the wounds. Why, then, surrender to enervating impatience? She will not be cast down, she will not feel defeated; she will be resilient, she will be anchored in hope ad the certainty of victory.

VII

After a break of nearly two months, returning to her house in Rue du Val 'de Grâce, she records on 7 October 1913, two enriching experiences:

This return ... to the house which is consecrated to Thee, O Lord, has been the occasion of two experiences. The first is that in my outer being, my surface consciousness, I no longer have the least feeling of being in my own home and the owner of anything there .... I am a visitor here as elsewhere, as everywhere, Thy messenger and Thy servant upon earth, a stranger among men, and yet the very soul of their life, the love of their heart ....

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Secondly, the whole atmosphere of the house is charged with a religious solemnity; one immediately goes down into the depths .... It is as though for three months I had been loving with my head and that now I were beginning to love with my heart ....

A new door has opened in my being and an immensity has appeared before me ....

All is changed, all is new; the old wrappings have fallen off and the new­ born child half-opens its eyes to the shining dawn.²⁹

The whole piece is suffused with a double-meaning: the physical return to the house and the newly-lit inner Presence and transfiguration.

In her meditation of 22 November, it comes to her that a few minutes passed in silence before the Lord are worth centuries of felicity, for in such surrender could all shadows and impurities be dispelled or expelled, the ego dissolve and disappear in the constancy and serenity of faithful servitude to Him, and thirdly, one may emerge as a pure crystal, reflecting the many-faceted Divine.

All is thus changed, serenity has arrived and taken root, - yet whiffs of chance disturbance cannot be ruled out categorically. "It is only when we silence our active thought," writes Mirra, "that we see this multitude of little subconscious notations surging up from every side and often drowning us under their overwhelming flood." But how may this subtle serpent be rendered powerless, or even destroyed? When we have silenced the surface mind by an act of will, we find that thousands of these valueless nullities crawl out, as insects do when a rock is shifted. Through certain ascetic disciplines, perhaps, and the insulation from eternal influences, it is possible to keep the subconscient in check. But this is a precarious remedy, and a temporary one, for "it leaves the ascetic at the mercy of the first surprise attack". Buddhist self-introspection and a systematic analysis (Freudian or otherwise) of one's dreams may be a remedy too, but not an infallible one. Isn't there something more "rapidly effective"? But for this one must listen to the Guide hidden at the core of one's being, the Guide who has a mother's love and a teacher's patience.

On 28 November, in the "calm concentration which comes before day­ break", Mirra finds that an opening to a fuller consecration to His Will- a more complete self-giving to His Work - a more total forgetfulness of self, a greater illumination, a purer love, and a communion with the Divine ever deeper and more constant - such an integral action removes from us all egoism and mean pride, all covetousness and obscurity, and registers the serenity of a perfect surrender. Many years later, the Mother was to write to one of her disciples:

There are two ways of uniting with the Divine. One is to concentrate in the heart and go deep enough to find there His Presence; the other is to fling oneself in His arms, to nestle there as a child nestles in its mother's arms,

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with a complete surrender; and of the two the latter seems to me the easier.³⁰

VIII

The inertia of inconscience, the frustrations and defeats caused by the false trails of ignorance, the pulls of egoistic perversion, these continue to cloud earth-life and clog its evolutionary movement towards its appointed goal. Mirra is deeply pained by all this inertia, this defeat and frustration and perversion, and she makes this entry on 29 November 1913:

Why all this noise, all this movement, this vain and futile agitation; why this whirlwind carrying men away like a swarm of flies caught in a storm? How sad is the sight of all that wasted energy, all those useless efforts! When will they stop dancing like puppets on a string, pulled they know not by whom or what? When will they find time to sit quietly and go within, to recollect themselves and open that inner door which screens from them Thy priceless treasures, Thy infinite boons?³¹

'Waste' is verily the code-word of our criminal incompetence and folly. Nature's gifts are wasted, our own powers are wasted, beauty is wasted, and above all Grâce is wasted - for, like the 'base Indian', perverse man still throws away the Pearl richer than all his tribe'. On this November morning, from her window Mirra watches the shadows play, she sees the pp widen between the marvellous possibility and the stark reality, but she has also a clear idea as to how the gap can narrow and cease, the shadows fly, and the light and the delight of union repossess the present world of inconscience and division:

One single spark of Thy sublime light, one single drop of Thy divine love, can transform this suffering into an ocean of delight.

While the path of Knowledge has its sure rewards, for it can lead at least to a true conception of Reality if not to its actual experience, the path of love alone is pure and disinterested, and "opens all doors, penetrates every wall, clears every obstacle", and this Love is the "infallible healer, the supreme consoler; it is the victor, the sovereign teacher".³²

Towards the end of the year, Mirra articulates the hope that the "whole lot of bonds and attachments, illusions and weaknesses" of the past will be shaken off like falling dust; that the old errors will be repaired; that the old 19norances, obscurities and ego isms will be left behind; and that the year 1914 will see a flight "towards wider horizons and an intenser light, a more prefect compassion, a more disinterested love ... towards Thee".³³

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IX

As the fateful 1914 dawns over Paris, Mirra greets the New Year with a canticle of consecration:

To Thee, supreme Dispenser of all boons, to Thee who givest life its justification, by making it pure, beautiful and good, to Thee, Master of Our destinies and goal of all our aspirations, was consecrated the first minute of this new year. . ..

In Thee are life and light and joy.

In Thee is supreme Peace.³⁴

In her meditation of 5 January, she experiences the consciousness of personal insignificance ("I am a veritable zero in the world") while the state a day earlier was an unquestioning surrender:

I do not struggle; and like a child in its mother's arms, like a fervent disciple at the feet of his master, I trust myself to Thee and surrender to Thy guidance, sure of Thy victory.

And, as if she has a strong premonition of a danger enveloping the earth in the course of the year, Mirra identifies herself with the earth and its hapless inhabitants in her prayer of 7 January, interceding with and imploring the Lord:

Give them all, O Lord, Thy peace and light, open their blinded eyes and their darkened understanding; calm their futile worries and their vain anxieties ....

Oh! let all tears be wiped away, all suffering relieved, all anguish dispelled, and let calm serenity dwell in every heart and powerful certitude strengthen every mind. ³⁵

Three days later, she prays again that "the peace of Thy reign may spread throughout the earth". Again, on 1 February:

I turn towards Thee and salute Thee, O liberator of the worlds, and, identified with Thy divine love, I contemplate the earth and its creatures, this mass of substance put into forms perpetually destroyed and renewed, this swarming mass of aggregates which are dissolved as soon as constituted, of beings who imagine that they are conscient and permanent individualities and who are as ephemeral as a breath, always alike or almost the same, in their diversity, repeating indefinitely the same desires, the same tendencies, the same appetites, the same ignorant errors.³⁶

While this may be the general rule, the Divine Light incarnates in a being periodically, and that radiance fills the world. Such are the Messiahs, Saviours, Sanatanas, God-men and Mahapurushas who have leavened and

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brightened human life in the past. But in the altered circumstances of our something even more potent seems to be needed:

But how much greater a splendour than all that have gone before, how marvellous a glory and light would be needed to draw these beings out of the horrible aberration in which they are plunged by the life of cities and so-called civilisations! What a formidable and, at the same time, divinely sweet puissance would be needed to turn aside all these wills from the bitter struggle for their selfish, mean and foolish satisfactions, to snatch them from this vortex which hides death behind its treacherous glitter, and turn them towards Thy conquering harmony!³⁷

Civilisation and urbanisation have confirmed humanity in a monstrous aberration made up of treacherous delights and foolish satisfactions and criminal extravagances. When will true enlightenment turn men's minds away from such lunacy? If only Mirra could become "a burning brazier" that consumes all suffering and transforms it into joy!

And so on the 16th, Mirra records:

...I aspire to be conscious of only Thee, to be only Thyself. This incessant whirl of unreal personalities, this multiplicity, this complexity, this excessive inextricable confusion of conflicting thoughts, struggling tendencies, battling desires, seems to me more and more frightful. I must emerge from this raging sea, land on Thy serene and peaceful shore .... O Lord, ignorance must be vanquished, illusion dispelled, this sorrowful universe must come out of its hideous nightmare, end its terrible dream, and awaken at last to the consciousness of Thy sole Reality.³⁸

We must emerge out of this sea in fury! Yes; but exactly how? Oppose silence to noise, calm to agitation, serene joy to hopeless pain; begin with the individual, and the aggregates will look after themselves. And all reformation - the true reformation - must start within, because it is in oneself that there are all the obstacles, all the difficulties, all the darkness and ignorance. But all potentiality too is lodged within! In Sri Aurobindo's words,

The lotus of eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite.³⁹

Hence, in order to "emerge from this raging sea" and land on the "serene and peaceful shore" of the sole Reality, one has to listen with the inward ear to be able to hear the great immutable silence that swallows up futile noise, vain agitation, useless dispersion of energies. All carry this

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constant silence - the Voice of the Eternal - within themselves, though they are not aware, or aware to an equal extent, of this incommensurable inner strength. And, besides,

this silence is itself progressive, and whatever be the perfection of the union we have realised, as long as we belong by our body to the world of relativity, this Union with Thee can always grow more perfect.⁴⁰

To be able to perfect the race, Mirra would first perfect herself, make visible the divine manifestation. Hence the poignantly repeated, oft repeated, word of aspiration:

If we had a truly living faith, if we had the absolute certitude of Thy omnipotence and Thy sole reality, Thy manifestation could at each moment become so evident that the whole universe would be transformed by it.⁴¹

On this world of illusion, this sombre nightmare, Thou hast bestowed Thy divine reality, and each atom of matter contains something of Thy Absolute.⁴²

I am like a timid bird not yet sure of its wings and hesitating to take its flight; let me soar to reach definitive identity with Thee.⁴³

O Lord, I would like to be so ardent a love that all loneliness may be filled up by it and all sorrows soothed ....

Grant my prayer: Transform me into a brazier of pure love and boundless compassion."⁴⁴

Mirra, then, in the early weeks of 1914, is not only acutely conscious of the weary weight of this unregenerate world, but also conscious of her own destiny to lighten the load of ignorance or inconscience, and if possible to annul it altogether. She shares with "the Man of Sorrows" the giant agony of the world, but she is also the Lord's "clairvoyant collaboratrix" who strives ceaselessly for the return of life, light and love. These twin movements of Mirra's life may be inferred from this memorable passage:

Many a time in the day and night it seems to me that I am, or rather my consciousness is, concentrated entirely in my heart which is no longer an organ, not even a feeling, but the divine Love, impersonal, eternal; and being this Love I feel myself living at the centre of each thing upon the entire earth, and at the same time I seem to stretch out immense, infinite arms and envelop with a boundless tenderness all beings, clasped, gathered, nestled on my breast that is vaster than the universe .... Words are poor and clumsy, O divine Master, and mental transcriptions are always childish .... ⁴⁵

Indeed, such Visions as these, such intimations and waking truths, must for ever defy the power of mere language. As Giles Fletcher said long ago -

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Impotent words, weak side, that strive in vain,

In vain, alas, to tell so heav'nly sight ....

This world of the dualities and relativities must go, - it is going; and as the mist disappear, a new effulgence - as yet unseizable and unwordable - will arrive, "and the earth, conscious of Thy new and eternal Presence, understand at last its true purpose, and live in the harmony and peace of Thy sovereign realisation".⁴⁶

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CHAPTER 6

The Meeting

I

On 3 March 1914, Mirra wrote: "As the day of departure draws near, I enter into a kind of self-communion."¹ A "thousand little nothings" had surrounded her all those years, and she had grown among them, basking in their companionship and friendship; and now that she was shortly to go On a voyage and would not be able to write "at this table in this calm room all charged with Thy Presence", she wondered whether those trifles around her would receive from other occupants of the house the same care and solicitude, the same loving kindness, she had given them so long. Even material things are not just to be taken for granted! Much later, she was to admonish her disciples against insensitiveness towards material things:

Not to take care of material things which one uses is a sign of inconscience and ignorance.

You have no right to use any material object whatsoever if you do not take care of it.

You must take care of it not because you are attached to it, but because it manifests something of the Divine Consciousness.²

Nolini Kanta Gupta too has testified how she

taught us to use our things with care .... She uses things not merely with care but with love and affection. For, to her, material things are not simply inanimate objects, not mere lifeless implements. They are endowed with a life of their own, even a consciousness of their own, and each thing has its Own individuality and character.³

There is a hint of all this in the prayer of 3 March 1914. For Mirra, material things are created by divine Love from the dark inconscience of chaos, and hence deserving of gentle and affectionate handling.

The next day Mirra will be leaving her quiet and sanctified room, parting from her circle of friends and fellow-seekers, leaving Paris itself for a few days in Geneva, before departing for India. As for the future, she faces it with equanimity, "My only wish is that this may be for us the beginning of a new inner period .... " In the pages of the past what's writ is writ and beyond recall; the pages of the future are blank but rich with promise. Four years earlier, Paul Richard had returned from a visit to India and told her of his meetings with Sri Aurobindo Ghose at Pondicherry. But between Sri Aurobindo and her there had already been established occult links of deep understanding regarding their future mission on the earth. Paul Richard had decided that he would himself

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contest one of the seats from French India for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies in Paris. Mirra was to accompany him, and they decided that irrespective of the result of the ensuing election, they would stay on m Pondicherry for about two years. In fact, they had to sell about one-fourth of Mina's modest private fortune to enable them to make the journey and to provide for a two-year stay.⁴ Richard's political and humanitarian mission and Mirra's pilgrimage of the Spirit were to coalesce in their momentous passage to India, with results that perhaps even they could not have anticipated. But a Divinity does shape our ends, however little we may be aware of this; and in 1920, Mirra recalled in the course of a contribution to a Chandernagore paper:

In the year 1910 my husband came alone to Pondicherry where, under very interesting and peculiar circumstances, he made the acquaintance of Sri Aurobindo. Since then we both strongly wished to return to India - the country which I had always cherished as my true mother-country. And in 1914 this joy was granted to us.⁵

II

The separation from friends and colleagues proves a distressing experience. Such suffering, if it isn't to be courted, cannot be avoided either. When people are used to meeting on the physical plane, separation affects one deeply at first. But there are profounder levels of consciousness where suffering may be transcended:

We must not run away from suffering, we must not love and cultivate it either, we must learn how to go deep down into it sufficiently to turn it into a lever powerful enough for us to force, open the doors of the eternal consciousness and enter the serenity of Thy Oneness.

... And precisely because of that, is not the suffering that separation brings one of the most effective means of transcending this outer consciousness, of replacing this superficial attachment by the integral realisation of Thy eternal Oneness?⁶

Reconciled thus to the event, the Richards leave Geneva; and, the next day, at Marseilles they board the Japanese boat Kaga Maru. There seems to have been some commotion on the way, but as if by miraculous intervention in answer to her prayer, calm is restored, and all is well:

Violence was answered by calm, brutality by the strength of sweetness; and where an irreparable disaster would have occurred, Thy power was glorified.⁷

There is now a sense of unutterable relief, a consciousness of His Presence and Protection;

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and Mirra's prayer rises to Him, now as always, invoking universal well-being. What Mirra herself would most like to do is "to have the power to heal life, to relieve suffering, to generate peace and calm confidence, to efface anguish and replace it by the sense of the one true happiness, the happiness that is founded in Thee and never fades".⁸ Finding herself a member of a community of crew and passengers on the boat, Mirra's heart goes out to them all in a gesture of protective embrace:

O Lord, it seemed to me that I adopted all the inhabitants of this ship, and enveloped them in an equallove.⁹

On 9 March she records that the boat seems "a marvellous abode of peace, a temple sailing in Thy honour over the waves of the subconscient passivity which we have to conquer and awaken to the consciousness of Thy divine Presence". The next day, a great realisation is vouchsafed to her and she recapitulates this in a supremely evocative and beautiful meditation:

In the silence of the night Thy Peace reigned over all things, in the silence of my heart Thy Peace reigns always; and when these two silences were united, Thy Peace was so powerful that no disturbance of any kind could resist it. Then I thought of all those who were watching over the boat to safeguard and protect our course, and in gratefulness I wanted to make Thy Peace spring up and live in their hearts; then I thought of all those who, confident and free from care, slept the sleep of inconscience, and with solicitude for their miseries, pity for their latent suffering which would arise in them when they awoke, I wanted that a little of Thy Peace might live in their hearts and awaken in them the life of the spirit, the light that dispels ignorance. Then I thought of all the inhabitants of this vast sea, both visible and invisible, and I willed that Thy Peace might spread over them. Then I thought of those we had left far behind and whose affection goes with us, and with a great tenderness I wanted Thy conscious and lasting Peace for them, the plenitude of Thy Peace as far as they could receive it. Then I thought of all those towards whom we are going, who are troubled by childish preoccupations and fight in ignorance and egoism for petty rivalries of interest; and ardently, in a great aspiration, I asked for them the full light of Thy Peace. Then I thought of all those we know, all those we do not know, all the life in the making, all that has changed its form, all that is not yet in form, and for all these, even as for all that I cannot think about, for all that is present to my memory and for all that I forget, in a deep contemplation and mute adoration I implored Thy Peace. ¹⁰

Peace ... Peace ... Peace ... : the 'flame-Word rune' is repeated like a caress, like an incantation, like a benediction. "Piecemeal peace is poor peace," says the poet Hopkins, and hence only universal everlasting Peace can comprehend and solve the gigantic problem of earth's evil and imperfection

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and pain. Mirra's aspiration and meditation decree by an act of will the Peace that is one day to arrive and prevail over the forces of division and disorder. The Divine's "clairvoyant collaboratrix", she will not be ,daunted by "outer circumstances", however unpromising, however depressing; she will rather direct her efforts towards their inner reality. It will be her aim through such cultivation of the inner countries to find "supreme Peace, perfect serenity, true contentment".¹¹

III

The pure and silent nights on the sea continue, the feeling of felicity is retained, an air of nameless puissance is what she feeds on, and a suggestion of termless power seems to envelop her and give a new glow to her every movement. With utter freedom she travels in the occult regions of the world-stair, and is fascinated by all their richness, complexity and variety, their knotted contrasts and their transcendent unity. Securely stationed in what may be called the perfectly awakened Divine Consciousness, Mirra has access to "infinite grades of consciousness, going right down to complete darkness, the veritable inconscience".¹² It is like Aswapathy's exploration of the world-stair described in Savitri:

In this drop from consciousness to consciousness

Each leaned on the occult Inconscient's power,

The fountain of its needed Ignorance,

Archmason of the limits by which it lives.

In this soar from consciousness to consciousness

Each lifted tops to That from which it came,

Origin of all that it had ever been

And home of all that it could still become.¹³

When one is identified with the Divine, one is omniscient for the nonce, one can be "conscious in everything and everywhere", and one's surge of love can "penetrate all things, embrace all life, illumine and regenerate all thought, purify all feeling, awaken in every being the consciousness of Thy marvellous Presence".¹⁴ On the other hand, Mirra feels that the difficulties of physical unease are greatly overestimated, and what tires one most is anticipation, the anxiety, the exaggerated fear. "The body is a marvellous tool," she writes on 17 March, "it is our mind that does not know how to use it and, instead of fostering its suppleness, its plasticity, it brings a certain fixity into it which comes from preconceived ideas and unfavourable suggestions." Nor should one worry about "future circumstances or the turn events take"¹⁵; with serenity and confidence and faith, all can be faced and mastered. And so like a silent canticle, like a mute adoration, like a steady flame, her aspiration rises towards Him and coaxes His divine Love to come down and illuminate her heart:

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Thou art the wonderful magician, he who transfigures all things, from ugliness brings forth beauty, from darkness light, from the mud clear water, from ignorance knowledge and from egoism goodness.¹⁶

Mirra would gladly submit to this wonder-worker and learn to wield the subtle instruments of such a divine transformation. The marvels of modern science and technology are nowhere compared to the "supreme science" which is nothing less than "to unite with Thee, to trust in Thee, to live in Thee, to be Thyself; and then nothing is any longer impossible to a man who manifests Thy omnipotence"¹⁷ Such perfect identification with the Divine is, however, by no means easy, for human actions at present are usually flawed, being infected with disorder and darkness. Mirra knows that "the ideal state is that in which, constantly conscious with Thy Consciousness, one knows at every moment, spontaneously, without any reflection being necessary, exactly what should be done to best express Thy law".¹⁸ Mirra has doubtless sessions of such sublime realisation and the power ensuing from them, - but how is one to make the condition perfect and permanent? "This is one of the things," she writes on 24 March, "I expect from the journey to India."

IV

Mirra had been preparing herself for years - conditioning her mind and sensibility, attuning her soul, integrally shaping herself - in anticipation of this voyage to India. Sri Aurobindo himself had described the Richards as "rare examples of European Yogins", and he had been in spiritual as well as material correspondence with Mirra since 1910.¹⁹ She had already read and pondered over the Gita and the Dhammapada, the Yoga and the Bhakti Sutras, and had felt increasingly drawn to India. The myths and legends of India were known to her, and she was held in fascination by several of them. Forty years later, she was to recall a story of India that had made a tremendous impression upon her ever since her girlhood. This was about a very poor woman in a miserable hut who had received a mango as a gift. She ate half of it, and put the rest aside, hoping to eat it next day. Now a mendicant came and asked for alms and shelter. The hapless old woman said: "I have no fire to warm you, I have no blanket to cover you, and I have half a mango left, that is all I have, if you want it; I have eaten half of it." Actually, the mendicant was Shiva in disguise, and the old woman "was filled with an inner glory, for she had made a perfect gift of herself and all she had".²⁰ This was the perfect and complete offering, ­ and a land where such myths were current was crowned in Mirra's eyes with unfading spiritual glory.

While thus Mirra's indrawn self was revelling in the splendours of the blissful Infinite, she could still hardly detach herself completely from her

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immediate surroundings. In the course of the voyage, among the passengers she found two Englishmen, who were Protestant clergymen of different sects. Sunday came, and while both wanted a Christian religious ceremony, they couldn't agree as to who should conduct it. One of them, perhaps the Anglican, withdrew at last, and the Presbyterian was left in possession of the field. The ceremony took place in the lounge of the ship, and quite a number gathered there. As the Mother recapitulated the event later:

And that day, all the men had put on their jackets - it was hot, I think we were in the Red Sea - they put on their jackets, stiff collars, leather shoes; neckties well set, hats on their heads, and they went with a book under their arm, almost in a procession from the deck to the lounge. The ladies wore their hats, some carried even a parasol, and they too had their book under the arm, a prayer-book.

They all heard the sermon given by the clergyman, and when it was over, they were at once back at the bar drinking or at the table playing cards, and the preacher and the sermon were alike quite forgotten. "They had done their duty, it was over, there was nothing more to be said about it."

But the Richards had kept themselves aloof from the religious ceremony. Having made a note of this, the Presbyterian approached Mirra afterwards, and an interesting conversation took place between them. Why hadn't Madame attended the sermon? "I am sorry," she answered, "but I don't believe in religion." What, was she a materialist? "No, not at all." Why, then, had she avoided the ceremony? Pressed for an answer, Mirra couldn't avoid plain-speaking:

I don't feel that you are sincere, neither you nor your flock. You all went there to fulfil a social duty and a social custom, but not at all because you really wanted to enter into communion with God.

The ideal of truly entering into communion with God took the clergyman's breath away. Oh! that was not possible! And, indeed, it could never have occurred to him to attempt any such fantastic thing. In the subsequent discussion, Mirra entered a pointed caveat against the half-baked Western missionary (like the Presbyterian himself) trying to take religion to the Orient:

Listen, even before your religion was born - not even two thousand years ago - the Chinese had a very high philosophy and knew a path leading them to the Divine; and when they think of Westerners, they think of them as barbarians. And so you are going there to convert those who know more about it than you? What are you going to teach them? To be insincere, to perform hollow ceremonies instead of following a profound philosophy and a detachment from life which lead them to a more spiritual consciousness?

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The clergyman was of course confused and even scandalised by this frontal attack, and unable to argue, and unwilling to acquiesce, he beat a hasty retreat.²¹

V

But such encounters - however depressing in the immediate context _ didn't deflect Mina from her deeper aims, nor ruffle her inner equanimity. If she could hardly make a dent in the Presbyterian clergyman's self­ protective armour of Philistinism, Mirra was rather more successful, perhaps, with some of the other fellow-travellers. For example, she recorded on 25 March:

Silent and unseen as always, but all-powerful, Thy action has made itself felt and, in these souls that seemed to be so closed, a perception of Thy divine light is awakened ....

O Lord, an ardent thanksgiving mounts from me towards Thee expressing the gratitude of this sorrowing humanity which Thou illuminest, transformest and glorifiest .... ²²

With this sense of fulfilment and deep thankfulness, on 27 March the Richards disembarked at Colombo. That day they remained in Ceylon, spending part of their time with a noted Buddhist monk named Dharmapal.²³ Crossing the straits at Talaimannar and reaching Dhanushkodi, the Richards boarded the Boat Mail (as it used to be called) on 28 March.

Mirra had known throughout the long voyage the Lord's divine solicitude and protection, she had seen the writ of His law everywhere, and of course she had tried wholly to identify herself with His law and to embody it effortlessly and spontaneously. It is not surprising that Mirra was in a condition of serene acceptance and luminous understanding:

From the time we started and every day more and more, in ail things we can see Thy divine intervention, everywhere Thy law is expressed .... ²⁴

On 29 March, after a change at Villupuram, the train speeded towards Pondicherry. And long before she actually met Sri Aurobindo she may well have felt his aura, just as she was to experience it six years later when her boat was nearing Pondicherry.²⁵ And once there what possibilities lay hidden, what vast horizons stretched ahead of her! In the full conscious­ ness of His sovereign Presence, she turned towards the future with an undimmed vision and with unwavering faith. A passage by Sri Aurobindo about Savitri may be apt here:

Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe,

She seemed burning towards the eternal realms

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A bright moved torch of incense and of flame

That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth

A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.²⁶

VI

Since 1910 Sri Aurobindo had completely surrendered himself to Yoga. He bad "already realised in full two of the four great realisations on which his Yoga and his spiritual philosophy are founded".²⁷ In Pondicherry he had received a "programme" for his own Yoga which he described as Sapta­Chatushtaya.²⁸ But self-realisation was not the only aim: "A distinct and central object of his Yoga was a change of life and existence." And by the time Mirra joined him in 1914, four years of "silent Yoga" had enabled him to evolve a new instrument of spiritual discipline - Puma Yoga or Integral Yoga - comprehending and harmonising the two extreme categories of experience, Matter and Spirit, and the three classical paths, Knowledge (1nana), Works (Karma) and Devotion (Bhakti). He had also been working towards the Yoga of the Future, Supramental Yoga. He had with him at Pondicherry a few young men, fellow-exiles from British India, all living in rather straitened circumstances. In October 1913, Sri Aurobindo moved from the small Mission Street residence to a far more spacious house - No. 41(now 33), Rue François Martin. Describing the house as it looked at the time Sri Aurobindo moved into it, Amrita writes:

In the interior of the house, at one end of the verandah there was a wide staircase leading to the first floor ... the house was big but it looked desolate.

The upper storey held spacious rooms and a spacious verandah .... On the west, at the corner there was a wide room, adjoining which was another room and then the open terrace .... The big room, the front room and the terrace - the three together being considered the best part of the house ­ were set apart for Sri Aurobindo.²⁹

In December 1913, attempts were made to make the place more habitable. The weeds were pulled out, electric lights were installed, some &ticks of furniture were inducted; and "the house put on almost a gay appearance because of these much-needed changes" ³⁰

It was .rumoured, continues Amrita, that' 'two Europeans had accepted Aurobindo as Guru ... two persons from the topmost cultural circle of France were coming to Sri Aurobindo for practising yoga". There was understandable excitement among the young disciples as also the revolutionaries (Subramania Bharati, V.V.S. Aiyar, Srinivasachariar, and others) who too had found political asylum in Pondicherry.

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VII

On 29 March 1914, the very day they arrived in Pondicherry from France Mirra and Paul Richard met Sri Aurobindo in the afternoon at 3.30. They were received at the top of the stairs that led up to the upstairs verandah. The moment Mirra had so ardently looked forward to had arrived at last, and there was a blaze of instantaneous recognition. Sri Aurobindo was clearly the Master of her occult life, the "Krishna" she had met so often in her dream-experiences. Their first meeting and the current of feelings that may have gone through them are echoed in these lines of Savitri:

Here first she met on the uncertain earth

The one for whom her heart had come so far.

Attracted as in heaven star by star,

They wondered at each other and rejoiced

And wove affinity in a silent gaze.

A moment passed that was eternity's ray,

An hour began, the matrix of new Time.³¹

There was hardly any conversation between them; indeed, there was no need. In K.D. Sethna's words:

Before meeting Sri Aurobindo she used to find for her various spiritual experiences and realisations a poise for life-work by giving them a mould with the enlightened mind. All kinds of powerful ideas she had for world­upliftment - ideas artistic, social, religious. At the sight of Sri Aurobindo she aspired to a total cessation of all mental moulds. She did not speak a word nor did he: she just sat at his feet and closed her eyes, keeping her mind open to him. After a while there came, from above, an infinite silence that settled in her mind. Everything was gone, all those fine and great ideas vanished and there was only a vacant imperturbable waiting for what was beyond mind.³²

There is also the report by Nolini Kanta Gupta about the Mother:

The first time Sri Aurobindo happened to describe her qualities, he said he had never seen anywhere a self-surrender so absolute and unreserved. He had added a comment that perhaps it was only women who were capable of giving themselves so entirely and with such sovereign ease. This implies a complete obliteration of the past, erasing it with its virtues and faults .... When she came here, she gave herself up to the Lord, Sri Aurobindo, with the candid simplicity of a child, after erasing from herself all her past, all her spiritual attainments, all the riches of her consciousness. Like a new­ born babe, she felt she possessed nothing, she was to learn everything right from the start, as if she had known or heard about nothing.³³

Her own recollection of the meeting, sixteen years after, was significant:

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When I first met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, I was in deep concentration, seeing things in the Supermind, things that were to be but which were somehow not manifesting. I told Sri Aurobindo what I had seen and asked him if they would manifest. He simply said, "Yes." And immediately I saw that the Supramental had touched the earth and was beginning to be realised! This was the first time I had witnessed the power to make real what is true.³⁴

It is probable that it was at one of the early meetings that Mirra asked her question about Samadhi', to which she was to refer forty years later:

When I came here, one of my first questions to Sri Aurobindo was: "What do you think of samadhi, that state of trance one does not remember? One enters into a condition which seems blissful, but when one comes out of it, one does not know at all what has happened." Then he looked at me, saw what I meant and told me, "It is unconsciousness." I asked him for an explanation .... He told me, "Yes, you enter into what is called samadhi when you go out of your conscious being and enter a part of your being which is completely unconscious, or rather a domain where you have no corresponding consciousness... a region where you are no longer conscious ... that is why, naturally, you remember nothing .... " So this reassured me and I said, "Well, this has never happened to me." He replied, "Nor to me"³⁵

VIII

It may be presumed, then, that when Sri Aurobindo and Mirra met on 29 March 1914, what passed between them was rather more of a wordless communion than any formal or detailed conversation. Writing with the available hindsight, K.D. Sethna comments on it as follows:

The meeting of the two represents the coming together of the necessary creative powers by whom a new age would be born. And it is to be noted that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had been pursuing the inner life on essentially identical lines which would unite Spirit and Matter. So their joining of forces was the most natural thing. And it was not only a doubling of strengths but also a linking of complementaries. Sri Aurobindo's main movement of consciousness may be said to have been an immense Knowledge-Power from above the mind, though whatever was necessary for an integral spirituality was also there in one form or another. The Mother's chief movement may be said to have been an intense Love-Power from behind the heart, even if all else needed for an all-round Yoga was present as a ready accessory. When she and Sri Aurobindo met, they completed each other, brought fully into play the spiritual energies in both and started the work of total earth-transformation from high above and deep within.³⁶

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If Sri Aurobindo was an embodiment of the East-West synthesis and contained within himself "the multi-dimensional spiritual consciousness of India", Mirra was the finest flower of European culture with deep spiritual filiations with India and the East as also with Africa, and she incarnated "a practical genius of a rare order, with powers of wide yet precise organisation". Little wonder that they completed, when they met at last as if by divine dispensation, "the entire circle of the higher human activities" and were "supremely fitted to bring the East and the West together and, blending them, lead to a common all-consummating goal".³⁷ But all this marvellous possibility was only for the yet hidden future. In the immediate context, however, the one supreme gain was the mere fact of the coming together of two rare spiritual powers and personalities, each feeling vastly strengthened by the other. The Richards returned to their hotel in a condition of calm fulfilment and with a hope of exciting new possibilities. Mirra could withdraw into herself, assess the new turn in her life, and re dedicate herself to the Divine. Her deep-felt feelings found memorable expression in her diary-entry for 30 March 1914:

Gradually the horizon becomes distinct, the path grows clear, and we move towards a greater and greater certitude.

It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance, He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.

O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with joy and gratitude when I think of it, and my hope has no bounds.

My adoration is beyond all words, my reverence is silent.³⁸

She had found in Sri Aurobindo a being who had "attained the perfect consciousness" and become integrally one of "Thy servitors", and it had seemed to her that she was "still far, very far from what I yearn to realise". But she was happy that a new Dawn in her life had arrived, and would now take her to the beckoning Noon. She recorded on 1 April:

A great joy, a deep peace reign in me, and yet all my inner constructions have vanished like a vain dream and I find myself now, before Thy immensity, without a frame or system, like a being not yet individualised. All the past in its external form seems ridiculously arbitrary to me, and yet I know it was useful in its own time.

But now all is changed: a new stage has begun.³⁹

The stress is on the new - the new bearings - the new orientations - the new alignment of forces in the service of the Divine. The old is not altogether annulled or annihilated; like organic filaments, they are but to be melted and moulded into the new instruments. The day has ended, the day has begun. In my beginning is my end; in my end is my beginning!

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Thus Mirra in her meditation on the morning of 2 April:

Every day, when I want to write, I am interrupted, as though the new period opening now before us were a period of expansion rather than of concentration.

And on the next day:

It seems to me that I am being born to a new life and all the methods, the habits of the past can no longer be of any use. It seems to me that what I thought were results is nothing more than a preparation .... It is as though I were stripped of my entire past, of its errors as well as its conquests, as though all that has vanished and made room for a new-born child whose whole existence is yet to be lived ....

An immense gratitude rises from my heart, it seems to m that I have at last reached the threshold I sought so much.⁴⁰

These diary-entries only corroborate Nolini's and Sethna's remarks quoted earlier: Mirra's absolute and unreserved surrender really meant "a complete obliteration of the past", ,and instead "an infinite silence settled in her mind".

IX

While such were Mirra's profoundest feelings, which amounted to a firm conviction of a climactic change in her life's direction, Richard was involved in the electioneering excitement. Early in April, Sri Aurobindo sent Richard's electoral declaration to Motilal Roy of Chandernagore asking for his support. Richard, said Sri Aurobindo, was a friend and a Yogin, and a believer in the resurrection of the Asiatic races, and his success in the election would be a very good thing. Sri Aurobindo added:

If Richard were to become deputy for French India, that would practically mean the same thing as myself being deputy for French India,⁴¹

This time, among Richard's opponents was Paul Bluysen on whose behalf he had campaigned four years earlier! With his clear vision, Sri Aurobindo knew also that "humanly speaking" there was no chance of Richard succeeding, for he had entered the field too late. His principal merit was that, if successful, he would be replacing "the old parochial and rotten politics of French India" by a "politics of principle."⁴²

In a subsequent letter, also to Motilal Roy, Sri Aurobindo referred to Richard's disabilities: "He has neither agent, nor committee, nor the backing of a single influential man." On the other hand, he had the sympathy and good wishes of the Hindus and Mahomedans of Pondicherry and Karikal. Even so it was patent that Richard was fighting against odds.

On 5 May Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal again. The election, as

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expected, went against Richard. Richard's votes in Pondicherry and Karikal were got rid of "by the simple process of reading Paul Bluysen wherever Paul Richard was printed"!⁴³ Sri Aurobindo described the many corrupt practices that had led to that debacle, but added that, notwithstanding the rebuff, Richard had decided to stay on for two years and work for the people:

He is trying to start an Association of the young men of Pondicherry and Karikal as a sort of training ground from which men can be chosen for the Vedantic Yoga.⁴⁴

Thus, within a matter of five weeks, the political decks had been cleared, and the way was opened for collaboration between Sri Aurobindo and Mirra and Paul Richard on the basis of "Vedantic Yoga".

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CHAPTER 7

Consecration

I

After the elections, from sometime in June, the Richards lived at 7, Rue Dupleix (now 3, Jawaharlal Nehru Street), a north-facing house not far from Sri Aurobindo's in Rue François Martin. In course of time there seems to have developed a certain rhythm in their meetings. Mirra would come to Sri Aurobindo daily in the afternoon between 4 and 4.30, bringing sweet-meats prepared from coconut; she would make cocoa too. Mirra and Sri Aurobindo would compare notes, as it were, regarding their occult and spiritual adventures. They had their hopes and dreams about the future, and in the early months Mirra started learning Sanskrit and Bengali from Sri Aurobindo and made fair progress. The young men who were now living with Sri Aurobindo - Nolini, Moni (Suresh Chakravarty) and Bejoy Nag - would go out at about 5 to play football, and return an hour later. On Sundays, however, Sri Aurobindo walked up at 4.30 in the evening to the Richards' place, and stayed on for dinner, where Nolini and the others would join him. The talks would sometimes go on till late at night, and then Sri Aurobindo would return to his rooms.

A few of the young men with Sri Aurobindo - like Nolini, for example - had been revolutionaries who followed him to Pondicherry, and perhaps they still hoped that he would one day return to Bengal to lead a new movement. There were also boys like Aravamudachari (to whom Sri Aurobindo later gave the name Amrita) who were irresistibly attracted to Sri Aurobindo the Yogi, the master-spirit of the New Age. The coming of Mirra was a phenomenon that at first intrigued the young men, but soon it filled them with a strange rapture of fascination and excitement. Amrita was then a pupil in Calve College, Pondicherry, and along with other school children, though only in small groups, he began to visit Mirra. One day, on Amrita's request, Bejoy introduced him to Mirra, and now a marvellous association began. On Sundays and Thursdays, at 10 a.m., Mirra and Amrita read Yogic Sadhan together, "seated on chairs, facing each other, almost as equals".¹ And in the coming weeks, Amrita began to feel little by little the full force of Mirra's personality:

An image of immeasurable power - that was how I felt the Mother to be whenever I approached her. She, however, held that power in herself without allowing the least display of it. On some occasions the great power would shine forth irresistibly. Our inner sense would perceive this inner radiation if it was awake.

Not only myself but some of my friends of those days ... would approach

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the Mother with our contradictory ideas and doubts and after a talk with her each one of us would be filled with an unaccountable purity and joy and self-oblivious we would come back home talking merrily like people living in a happy world.

On her part, reminiscing about her first impressions in India Mirra used to say in later years how she thought that not only the young men who approached her but even the lowly and the poor and the uncultured were nearer Divinity in their inner essential nature, than those of the same class in Europe. One of her early experiences in Pondicherry was that, as she was walking in meditation, "suddenly through a cut piece of blue cloth, stuck on the walls, she actually saw the Himalayas with all its greenness and grandeur, nay, experienced even its coolness".² Her wings of glory brooded everywhere and all the time, and she saw, heard and experienced things that were shut out to the ordinary mentality. She looked always into the innermost truth of things, and it was not surprising that she could see marvels that were but a sealed book to most others.

II

The 29 March meeting between Sri Aurobindo and Mirra became a fresh start for both of them, although in a truer sense it was but a new phase of their preordained spiritual odyssey on the earth. Sri Aurobindo had realised, as he told Dilip Kumar Roy in 1924, that the transformation of a single individual was not enough; humanity had to ripen too, and be ready for the desired radical change: "For the crux of the difficulty is that even when the Light is ready to descend it cannot come to stay until the lower plane is also ready to bear the pressure of the Descent."³ No modern Rishi Vishvamitra would attempt, by a mere audacious flourish of his yogic wand, the creation of an entire new world. A self-poised and puissant new world, a new heaven and a new earth, were indeed the unfading aim of Sri Aurobindo's massive yogic endeavour; but such a world could not be brought into existence in a hurry or to somebody's order. The way was long, the process difficult; but there surely, at the far end, was the destined goal; and this ought to reassure the spiritual aspirant. It was in this state, facing the problem of self-change and world-change, that the coming of Mirra provided the necessary element of dynamism.

Mirra too as may be inferred from her first meditations during her stay in Pondicherry, for all her fresh-found peace and surge of immeasurable joy, felt suddenly unburdened of the past, felt supernally free and happy like one wholly surrendered to the Master. The past aims are by no means annulled, but they have undergone a cleansing and gained a glowing new definition. The divinisation of Man, the transformation of Nature - this

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was the ultimate aim no doubt; but she must first perfect the force within before she could turn to the mastery and transmutation of the external world. And so the final plunge of absolute ātma-samarpana was achieved, as may be seen thus imaged in her celebrated Radha's Prayer of 13 January 1932:

O Thou whom at first sight I knew for the Lord of my being and my God, receive my offering.

Thine are all my thoughts, all my emotions, all the sentiments of my heart, all my sensations, all the movements of my life, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood. I am absolutely and altogether Thine, Thine without reserve. What Thou wilt of me, that I shall be. Whether Thou choosest for me life or death, happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes to me from Thee will be welcome. Each one of Thy gifts will be always for me a gift divine bringing with it the supreme Felicity.⁴

There was a storming and dissolution of all barriers, and even the last obstreperous dam dividing her from the Goal had been breached and broken through; and now only felicity was her allotted portion. As she wrote on 10 April 1914:

Suddenly the veil was rent, the horizon was disclosed - and before the clear vision my whole being threw itself at Thy feet in a great outburst of gratitude ....

I seem to have no more limits; there is no longer the perception of the body, no sensations, no feelings, no thoughts - a clear, pure, tranquil immensity penetrated with love and light, filled with an unspeakable beatitude is all that is there and that alone seems now to be myself .... ⁵

This is rather reminiscent of St. Catherine of Siena's description of the unitive state: "The body loses its feeling, so that seeing eyes see not, and hearing ears hear not, and the tongue does not speak .... " Like the wax in the fire, like the ice in the stream, like the scent dissolved in the air, even so separative identity ceases, and only infinite puissance remains:

Thou hast taken my life and made it Thine; Thou hast taken my will and hast united it to Thine; Thou hast taken my love and identified it with Thine; Thou hast taken my thought and replaced it by Thy absolute consciousness.⁶

III

Soon after her arrival in Pondicherry, Mirra paid a visit to Karikal. This visit to a backward spot enabled Mirra to see life in India in the raw - the squalor, the poverty, the misery, the helplessness, the hopelessness of it

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all. She had to stay in a dingy, dirty and dilapidated room infested with white ants. It was as though, as in Sri Aurobindo's "A God's Labour":

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."⁷

But Mirra wasn't put out by "these circumstances so complex and unstable", for she saw everything through the eye of the storm, the inner eye of divine calm. Her diary-entry for "Karikal, April 13," reads surprisingly enough:

All is beautiful, harmonious and calm, all is full of Thee. Thou shinest in the dazzling sun, Thou art felt in the gentle passing breeze, Thou dost manifest Thyself in all hearts and live in all beings. There is not an animal, a plant that does not speak to me of Thee and Thy name is written Upon everything I see ....

Oh, may all know Thee, love Thee, serve Thee; may all receive the supreme consecration!

O Love, divine Love, spread abroad in the world, regenerate life, enlighten the intelligence, break the barriers of egoism, scatter the obstacles of ignorance, shine resplendent as sovereign Master of the earth.⁸

Later, in Pondicherry, Mirra meditates on the morning of 17 April on the meaning of the individual human personality, and the need to see it always in integral relation to the Divine. We may call this her own form of viśistādvaita, her qualified non-dualism! In a manifested universe, the sense of "I" must play its part, for to weaken it would be to strike at the root of the manifestation. But to invest the "I" with any notion of autonomy or independence would be the sheerest folly and illusion: "At no moment, in no circumstances must we forget that our 'I' has no reality outside Thee." The same day she has the feeling that "the last veil was almost rent", and she understands the meaning of true impersonal service. But external actions have still the power to precipitate the illusions and soon "the veil closed again" and seemed to her "darker than ever". And so she cries out: "Why this fall into the inconscience of night after so great a light?"⁹ Next morning, 19 April, she makes a distinction between an imperfect and a total identification with the Divine:

There is a great difference between being in the midst of active work, of external action, while keeping one's thought constantly fixed on Thee, and entering into that perfect union with Thee which leads to what I have called "absolute Consciousness, true Omniscience, Knowledge". When one acts, though with the thought fixed on Thee, one is like a blind man walking on the road with a sense of direction, but knowing nothing about the path he is

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following and how, precisely, one must walk so as to neglect nothing. In the other case, on the contrary, there is the clear vision in full light, the utilisation of the least occasion, the plenitude of action, the maximum result.¹⁰

The first stance, then, could only be a preparation for the second. Mirra continues to be a prey to attacks of "inconscience" in her external activity, but she has also learnt "to look at everything with a smile and a tranquil heart". In the strength of her inner faith, in the beauty of her calm serenity, she wakes up to the consciousness of a new freedom, an uncanny if apparently undirected power of movement and action:

All rules have vanished, the regularity of the discipline is gone, all effort has ceased ....

... never before were my mind and heart in so complete a repose. What will come out of that, I do not know. But I trust in Thee, O Lord; Thou knowest the best way of using and developing Thy instrument. ... ¹¹

IV

Early in May, Mirra's health suddenly broke down: " ... my physical organism suffered a defeat such as it had not known for several years and during a few days all the forces of my body failed me. "¹² This seemed to her an indication that "my spiritual energy had weakened, my vision of the omnipotent Oneness had been clouded .... " This point of view was to be elaborated in one of her Conversations of a later period:

The possibilities of illness are always there in your body and around you; you carry within you or there swarm about you the microbes and germs of every disease. How is it that all of a sudden you succumb to an illness which you did not have for years? You will say it is due to a "depression of the vital force". But from where does the depression come? It comes from Some disharmony in the being, from a lack of receptivity to the divine forces. When you cut yourself off from the energy and light that sustain you, then there is this depression, there is created what medical science calls a "favourable ground" and something takes advantage of it. It is doubt, gloominess, lack of confidence, a selfish turning back upon yourself that cuts you off from the light and divine energy and gives the attack this advantage.¹³

At the Core of her being - that is, quintessentially - Mirra was doubtless the changeless un ailing Infinite beyond joy and sorrow, beyond health and disease, beyond faith and doubt, and beyond all such mentally constructed categories; but she was also - that is, representatively - humanity in miniature, a part of all she met, a sharer of all joy and agony. And so her

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prayers and meditations too strike, now one note, now another; now they hymn the halleluiahs of fulfilment, now gently retail the corroding failures and unavailing spasms of ignorant groping humanity. This explains the validity of aspirations and prayers like the one on 9 May:

Let me be a vast mantle of love enveloping all the earth, entering all hearts murmuring in every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace. ...

Break, break these chains .... I want to understand and I want to be. That is to say, this "I" must be Thy "I" and there must be only one single "I" in the world.¹⁴

The prayer is granted, for, writing on 12 May, Mirra records this experience:

This morning passing by a rapid experience from depth to depth, I was able, once again, as always, to identify my consciousness with Thine and to live no longer in aught but Thee; - indeed, it was Thou alone that wast living, but immediately Thy will pulled my consciousness towards the exterior, towards the work to be done, and Thou saidst to me, "Be the instrument of which I have need." And is not this the last renunciation, to renounce identification with Thee .... ¹⁵

Didn't the Buddha, the Bodhisattva, deliberately renounce Nirvana to be able to return to this sullied earth and save the souls of his fellow human beings? Like Buddha, Mirra too, by her firm renunciation only illustrates what Evelyn Underhill calls "that whole movement of Spirit creative and complete toward spirit created and incomplete, that willing self-revelation of the spaceless God in space and time". ¹⁶ Inhabiting by resolved self­ limitation this "intermediate domain between Thy Unity and the manifested world", Mirra would be able to forge closer the links between them, bring His infinitude to the phenomenal world and raise it to receive the rays of His effective Power. The renunciation asked for is all the more readily acquiesced in because Mirra has secured His clear direction as well as loving assurance:

Do not delight in the ecstatic contemplation of this union; accomplish the mission I have entrusted to thee upon earth.¹⁷

One day thou wilt be my head but for the moment turn thy gaze towards the earth.¹⁸

Three days later, Mirra wakes up to the realisation of the unity of Matter and Spirit in the universe as well as in individual man, and to the ladder­ like structure of the interlinked worlds of the single Consciousness:

Thou alone livest, in different worlds, in different forms but with an identical life, immutable and eternal. ...

O my sweet Master, Thou hast caused a new veil to be rent, another veil

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of my ignorance and, without leaving my blissful place in Thy eternal heart, at the same time In the Imperceptible but infinite heart of each of the constituting my body.

Strengthen this complete and perfect consciousness. Make me enter into the details of its perfection and grant that, without leaving Thee for a single moment, I may constantly move up and down this infinite ladder, according to the necessity of the work Thou hast prescribed for me.¹⁹

This early description of the "perfect consciousness" as a ladder has an affinity to what the .Mother. was to say in the course of one of her Conversations of 1931 In Pondicherry:

The consciousness is like a ladder: at each great epoch there has been one great being capable of adding one more step to the ladder and reaching a place where the ordinary consciousness had never been. It is possible to attain a high level and get completely out of the material consciousness; but then one does not retain the ladder .... To go up and down and join the top to the bottom is the whole secret of realisation, and that is the work of the Avatar. Each time he adds one more step to the ladder there is a new creation upon earth .... The step which is being added now Sri Aurobindo has called the Supramental. .. and the chief spirit or force, the Shakti active at present is Mahasaraswati, the Goddess of perfect organisation.

... Once, however, the connection is made, it must have its effect in the outward world in the form of a new creation, beginning with a model town and ending with a perfect world.²⁰

It is significant that Mirra had intuitively lighted upon the key ideas and programmes of her sublime future ministry: the Yoga of divine works, the transformation of the atoms, the very cells of the human body, the collective Yoga of a big Ashram community, the bringing to birth of Auroville, the City of Dawn, and the sending forth of tendrils of aspiration and effort meant to usher in a new world - a new Heaven and a new Earth. Again and again, the diary-entries for the latter half of May reiterate this tremendous equation of Spirit and Matter, the need to coax a descent of the Spirit from the sunlit heights of Sachchidananda to the lowest rungs of the ladder of consciousness, the abysm of the Inconscient, so as to compel an ascent from the darkness and the fathomless zero below to the light and beatitude above, and above all the role of man to enact in his life the alchemic drama of transformation from the human to the Divine. Mirra sees the Divine in the "radiant particles" of her being; each atom of the aggregate that is herself will "be awakened to receive Thy sublime influence":

My whole being down to its smallest atom aspires for the perfect knowledge of Thy presence and a complete union with it ....

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Thy divine love floods my being; Thy supreme light is shining in every cell .... ²¹

May the God with form who manifests in this aggregate be entirely moulded from Thy complete and sublime love .... ²²

Thou hast Thyself accepted to be thus submerged in Matter so as to awaken it gradually to consciousness .... ²³

... matter has to be vigorously churned if it is to become capable of manifesting entirely the divine Iight.²⁴

In each of the domains of the being, the consciousness must be awakened to the perfect existence, knowledge and bliss .... But what is very important, as well as very difficult, is to awaken the being to this triple divine consciousness in the most material world .... ²⁵

Thou settest in motion, Thou stirrest and churnest the innumerable elements of this world, so that, from their primal darkness, their primeval chaos, they may awaken to consciousness and the full light of knowledge .... ²⁶

I penetrate all things; living within the heart of each atom I kindle therein the fire which purifies and transfigures .... ²⁷

These reiterated words of divination seem to embody in seed-form the whole Ashwattha-tree of the future Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

V

Between May and June 1914, Mirra identifies herself with the Earth (25 May), becomes Earth's mouthpiece (31 May), receives the Lord's assurance (9 June) and wins the role of executrix of the Divine dispensation (14 June). In the first of the four diary-entries, Mirra explains that the "I" of the prayer is the whole Earth:

All the hearts of men beat within my heart, all their thoughts vibrate in my thought, the slightest aspiration of a docile animal or a modest plant unites with my formidable aspiration, and all this rises towards Thee, for the conquest of Thy love and light, scaling the summits of Being to attain Thee, ravish Thee from Thy motionless beatitude and make Thee penetrate the darkness of suffering to transform it into divine Joy, into sovereign Peace.²⁸

In the second, Mirra describes her experience of being at the same time the Earth and the Divine:

When the sun set in the indrawn contemplation of the calm twilight, all my

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being prostrated itself before Thee, O Lord, in mute adoration and complete self-giving. Then I was the whole earth and the whole earth prostrated itself before Thee, imploring the benediction of Thy illumination, the beatitude of Thy love. Oh, the kneeling earth that supplicates to Thee, then is ingathered in the silence of the night, waiting in both patience and anxiety for the illumination so ardently desired. If there is a sweetness in being Thy divine love at work in the world, there is as great a sweetness in being the infinite aspiration which rises towards that infinite love. And to be able to change thus, to be successively, almost simultaneously, what receives and what gives, what transfigures and what is transfigured, to be identified with the painful darkness as with the all-powerful splendour and, in this double identification, to discover the secret of Thy sovereign unity, is this not a way of expressing, of accomplishing Thy supreme will?²⁹

In the third of the earth-prayers Mirra as medium receives a benediction which she communicates to the world:

O beloved children, unhappy and ignorant, O thou, rebellious and violent Nature, open your hearts, calm your forces, for here comes the sweet omnipotence of Love, here is the pure radiance of the light that penetrates you. This human hour, this earthly hour is beautiful over all other hours. Let each and all know it and rejoice in the plenitude that is given.

O sorrowful hearts and careworn brows, foolish obscurity and ignorant ill-will, let your anguish be calmed and effaced.

Lo, the splendour of the new word arrives: "Here am I. "³⁰

The individual, the universal, the Transcendent - Mirra is now this, now that, and anon the other; these prayers and meditations too thus come to us, now from one plane, now from another; and, of course, even as Mirra is somehow triumphantly all three at the same time (the individual aspirant, the universal earth-mother, and also the Mother beyond all human comprehension), these exhalations and inhalations of her soul, of the spirit that is in her and that is her, also preserve in their sum their unique integrality and unity. When she meditates, mankind prays by proxy; when she prays, she prays for mankind, she prays that mankind may be saved. Her dreams and visions, her waking nights and plans, are filled with the needs, aspirations and hopes of hungry Man, hungry for perfect, existence, knowledge and beatitude. She would be the link, the intercessor, the Paraclete between the hungry obscure phenomenal world and the pure blissful resplendent Lord. If Mirra, identifying herself with the earth, bends her knees and raises her hands in supplication and prayer, no less does she bring down from above, for present solace and ultimate redemption, those nectarean intimations, boons, benedictions, which, as Wordsworth would say:

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... be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence; truths that wake,

To perish never.

She is able with her inner ear to hearken to the Infinite and register the assurance "Here am I." She is thus clairvoyant collaboratrix and mighty mediatrix in one: and all the time she is also Mirra, supplicant and mystic and mother.

Nay more - for the mediatrix and collaboratrix is also the creatrix. While knowledge is necessary, knowledge by itself is not enough. There remains the work of manifestation, of transformation - a stupendous programme! Accordingly, in the fourth of the earth-prayers, Mirra turns to her tasks as the creatrix of the new Age that is to witness the divinisation of Man and the transfiguration of the world. The very idea thrills her whole being, and the vow of self-consecration is articulated anew, and acquires the accents of predestination:

It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being so that this Force, unknown to the earth till today, may manifest in its plenitude. To this travail I am consecrated, O Lord, for this is what Thou wantest of me. But since Thou hast appointed me for this work, Thou must give me the means, that is, the knowledge necessary for its realisation. We shall unite our efforts .... Thou hast made a promise, Thou hast sent into these worlds those who can and that which can fulfil this promise ....

In us must take place the union of the two wills and two currents, so that from their contact may spring forth the illuminating spark.

And since this must be done, this will be done. ³¹

VI

"It is a veritable work of creation we have to do," thus Mirra, on 14 June 1914. "And since this must be done, this will be done." The words thrill with a definitive ring, they seem to be charged with a radiant urgency, they have the sharp tone of finality. What were the shaping events behind the scenes which this wonderful prayer unmistakably reflects?

As early as 5 May 1914 Sri Aurobindo had written to Motilal Roy intimating that Paul Richard, although unsuccessful in the election, was trying to start an association of the young men of Pondicherry and Karikal "as a sort of training ground from which men can be chosen for the

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Vedantic Yoga". In a letter written about a month later, Sri Aurobindo informed him that they were starting a monthly philosophical Review giving the foundations of "my theory of the ideal life towards which humanity must move"³², and in close connection with this intellectual work thesis, they had started in Pondicherry a society called L'Idée Nouvelle, the New Idea, with the object of spreading Vedantic Yoga.

As explained by Sri Aurobindo, the object of L'Idée Nouvelle was "to group in a com on intellectual life .and fraternity of sentiment those who accept the spiritual tendency and Idea It represents and who aspire to realise it in their own individual and social action". ³³ Mirra of course took an active interest in the work of the society. The young men who joined it were expected to transcend the inhibiting notions of race, religion, creed, caste and dogmatic opinion, and seek unity in the solidarity of the spirit. Members were required to devote some time every day to meditation and self-culture, and also to seek opportunities of service to others. The society had its headquarters at Pondicherry, with a reading-room and a library, and had a branch at Karikal.

Possibly on 1 June, it was decided to launch the monthly philosophical view, Review, Arya, under the joint editorship of Sri Aurobindo, and Mirra and Paul Richard. The idea was set forth in some detail in Sri Aurobindo's letter to Motilal Roy, to which a reference has already been made. The Arya was to be in English with a simultaneous French edition. "In this 'Review," Sri Aurobindo wrote,

my new theory of the Veda will appear as also translation and explanation of the Upanishads, a series of essays giving my system of Yoga and a book of Vedantic philosophy (not Shankara's but Vedic Vedanta) giving the Upanishadic foundations of my theory of the ideal life towards which humanity must move. You will see so far as my share is concerned, it will be the intellectual side of my work for the world.³⁴

In a single sentence Sri Aurobindo was giving an atomic glimpse of the massive Arya sequences to be - notably, The Secret of the Veda, the Isha and the Kena in translation and commentary, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. The Review was also to serialise Paul Richard's The Eternal Wisdom, a collection of "the central sayings of great sages of all times". It was proposed that the annual subscription of this 64-page monthly journal should be Rupees six. As Sri Aurobindo and his collaborator hoped to achieve 850 regular subscribers for the English and about 250 for the French edition, it was thought that the journals would, not only pay their way, but also leave a modest surplus to help the editors to maintain themselves on a reasonable basis.

Sri Aurobindo's letter to Motilal Roy referred to one other important matter as well: the relationship between Vedantic Yoga (or the Yoga of knowledge) and Tantra Yoga (which meant, in this context, the Yoga of Action).

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Since his plunge into politics about a decade earlier, Sri Aurobindo had successfully combined Vedantic Yoga and nationalist - and even revolutionary - political action. But after the Muzzaferpore bomb tragedy involving the death of two innocent European ladies and his own yearlong "ashram-vas" in the Alipur Jail (where he had experienced the omnipresent Divine or Vasudeva, and had also glimpsed the "overhead" or above-mind states of consciousness), Sri Aurobindo had done some rethinking about the ends and means of his political work. There was the brief but glorious period of editorship of the Karmayogin and the Dharma during 1909-10, but he had withdrawn deliberately, in obedience to an inner command, from Calcutta, his scene of action, first to Chandernagore in mid-February 1910 and in April, to Pondicherry. The four years of "silent Yoga" there had led to a reassessment of values, and a realignment of forces. Sri Aurobindo now felt that action, political or other, however high-minded, was fraught with disastrous failure, unless such action was properly backed by infallible knowledge. In other words, without an adequate grounding in "Vedantic Yoga", Karmic or "Tantric Yoga" might prove to be no more than a trap and a danger. Hence the importance he would now give to the new journal, Arya, and the society L'Idée Nouvelle. As he explained to Motilal Roy:

Remember that Tantra is not like Vedanta, it is a Yoga for material gains, that has always been its nature. Only now not for personal gains, but for effectivity in certain directions of the general Yoga of mankind.

The earlier decadent stage of Tantra, he added, exists now "only in a scattered way ineffectual for any great aid of humanity". The second stage, "our new Tantra [which in this context meant the revolutionary activities in Bengal] succeeded at first because it was comparatively pure ... but since then two things have happened. It has tried to extend itself with the result of bringing in undesirable elements ... [and] tried to attempt larger results from a basis which was no longer sufficient. ... " The need had arisen therefore to refashion the goals and the instruments:

A third stage is now necessary, that of a preparation in full knowledge no longer resting on a blind faith in God's power and will, but receiving consciously that will, the illumination that guides its workings and the power that determines its results. If the thing is to be done it must be done no longer as by a troop stumbling on courageously in the dark and losing its best strength by failures and the results of unhappy blunders, but with the full divine power working out its will in its instruments.³⁵

In Sri Aurobindo's view, the desiderata for such effective action were (1) that "the divine knowledge and power should manifest perfectly in at least one man in India", and (2) that "others should receive the same power and light". Supposing that Sri Aurobindo, as the consummation of his sadhana,

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should be able to fulfil the first condition, the people coming under his influence would also "increase and prosper provided always they do not separate themselves from me by the Ahankara":

The power that I am developing[.) if it reaches consummation, will be able accomplish its effects automatically by any method chosen.³⁶

We now know that what Sri Aurobindo had in mind was "supramental knowledge and power", which he was to describe with such persuasive and prophetic eloquence in The Life Divine. Mirra too had been thinking along the same lines, e.g., of "the clear vision in full light, the utilisation of the least occasion, the plenitude of action, the maximum result"³⁷. They expected, partly through the intellectual offensive of the Arya, and partly through the working of the New Idea groups, to create favourable circumstances for the fulfilment of the second condition, namely the accession of the light and power to a sufficiently strong or 'critical' group. The journals and the society were thus to discharge complementary tasks:

The spread of the idea is not sufficient, you must have real Yogins, not merely men moved intellectually and emotionally by one or two of the central ideas of the Yoga. Spreading of the idea is the second necessity, for that the Review at present offers itself among other means. The other means is to form brotherhoods, not formal but real .. for the practice of the Vedantic yoga .... ³⁸

To sum up, as Sri Aurobindo worked it out, one man at least should first be able to stand forth as the repository of the Knowledge and the Power; then, he should have means of propagating this Thought to the world; and finally, the select people who have been converted to the new Thought should form themselves into brotherhoods, or cohesive groups, ready and able to function as worthy vessels or the new Knowledge and Power.

VII

Read, then, in the light of Sri Aurobindo's letters to Motilal Roy, Mirra's solemn affirmation on 14 June 1914-

It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being so that this Force, unknown to the earth till today, may manifest in its plenitude -

receives the necessary clarification. The "work of creation" meant the new society, the new journals and the new brotherhoods, and particularly the invocation of the new Force (the Supermind), "unknown to the earth till today". For the redemption of the Earth and Man from the giant evils of ignorance, egotism and mortality, this new Light (the Supramental) that

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was at the same time immaculate irresistible Power had to be made to "manifest in its plenitude". "And since this must be done, this will be done. "

Such being the background, it is not difficult to grasp the implications of Mirra's meditations and prayers of this time:

Now that the whole being is more and more deeply plunged into material activity, into the physical realisation which includes such a multitude of details .... ³⁹

If the hour has come, as Thou lettest me know, for the new forms of Thy realisation, these forms will inevitably be born.⁴⁰

On 16 June she mentions a descent, a radiation and a receptivity. The Splendour descends, and the elements below that are pure and plastic group themselves to receive it in order "to reconstitute as perfectly as possible in this world of division the divine Centre which has to be manifested". On 17 June, Mirra as good as dismisses the entire past - for the best is yet to be! Out of the dead past will rise a great future, or "new elements adapted to the new manifestation" -

Give us the Thought, give us the Word, give us the Force. Enter the arena of the world, O new-born Unknown One!

This might be Mirra's greetings to the unravelling Supernatural Dawn.

After her meeting with Sri Aurobindo on 29 March, there is often some ambiguity in the Prayers and Meditations whether, when she says "Master", "Lord", "Thou" or "Thee", she has the Divine in general in mind or Sri Aurobindo himself. Perhaps she didn't pause to make any academic differentiation. Rather, it was spontaneous, sometimes the general, sometimes the embodied, Divine:

O Lord, my adoration rises ardently to Thee, all my being is an aspiration, a flame consecrated to Thee. (4 April)

O Lord, Lord, grant that Thy sovereign Power may manifest; grant that Thy work may be accomplished and Thy servitor be consecrated solely to Thy service. (3 May)

Before the immensity of this programme, the entire being exults and sings a hymn of gladness to Thee. (13 June)

O sweet Master, sovereign Transfigurator, put an end to all negligence, all lazy indolence, gather together all our energies, make them into an indomitable, irresistible will. (12 July)

O my sweet Master, Thou art the sovereign Ruler of our destinies; Thou art the omnipotent Master of Thy own manifestation. (19 July)

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What matters is only the crystalline purity and sincerity of the utterances. recorded on 21 June:

To be at once a passive and perfectly pure mirror, turned simultaneously without and within, to the results of the manifestation and the sources of this manifestation, so that the consequences may be placed before the guiding will, and to be also the realising activity of that will, this, more or less is what a human being ought to be .... To combine these two attitudes, of passive receptivity and realising activity is precisely the most difficult of all things. And that is what Thou expectest of us, O Lord, and as Thou dost expect it of us, there is no doubt that Thou wilt give us the means of realising it.

Mediatrix, collaboratrix, creatrix - the roles mingle and merge. "What has :be will be, what has to be done will be done,"⁴¹ but there are obscure resistances that have to be met, and one must especially guard against the temptation to see the future in the images of the past or present:

It is always wrong to want to evaluate the future or even to foresee it by the thought we have about it, for this thought is the present ... a mental activity of the nature of reasoning .... ⁴²

What we need is the capacity to work without attachment, and "to develop the capacities of individual manifestation without living in the illusion of personality".⁴³ Even as Mirra had stressed in her 1912 manifesto (referred to in chapter 2) that the "typic society" of the future should be "hierarchised, if possible", on 24 June she affirms that, "from the point of view of the manifestation, the work to be carried forward upon earth, a hierarchy is needed"; and she explains "hierarchy" thus on 30 June:

Each activity in its own field accomplishing its particular mission, without disorder, without confusion, one enveloping the other, and all graded hierarchically around a single centre: Thy will ... -

which is really "the divine Centre" of the entry for 16 June. There is here the lightning-flash illuminating the future, visualising both Sri Aurobindo Ashram (as it was to grow from 1926 onwards) as also Auroville in 1968 and after, with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the "divine Centre". It is necessary to add, too, and this has been emphasised already, that the "hierarchy" Mirra had in mind was of the spiritual, not of the bureaucratic or financial realm. It would be more like the felly, the spokes, and the hub of a revolving wheel- in other words, a dynamic, variegated, yet integral unity and harmony.

When we are rid of all sense of superiority and inferiority, the feeling of paralysing and purblind incompetence, and the all-too-human error of aggressive egotism - "a global error repeated in millions and millions of

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forms"⁴⁴- when the whole individual being has cleansed itself of widespread taint and forged union with the All, then indeed the propitious hour for the descent of omnipotence and the transformation of our earth nature will arrive at last, and bring with it the splendour of the new puissance and sovereignty. No wistful dream this, this coming splendour; it will surely come. The Divine and the Earth, the Divine and Man, are now fully and solemnly committed to this stupendous change and transformation. While there is the reiterated assurance to aspirant earth:

What has to be done will be done. The necessary instruments will be prepared. Strive in the calm of certitude.⁴⁵

The Force is here. Rejoice, O you who are waiting and hoping: the new manifestation is sure, the new manifestation is at hand.⁴⁶

... the Force is there ... already at work in the higher worlds beyond thought as the power of sovereign transfiguration, and also in the inconscient depths of Matter as the Irresistible Healer. ⁴⁷

Mirra affirms at the same time her own (and the earth's) readiness to respond in full measure:

Do not spare me, act with Thy sovereign omnipotence; for in me Thou hast put the will to an entire transfiguration.⁴⁸

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CHAPTER 8

Launching the Arya

I

The decision to launch the Arya and its French counterpart, was taken by Sri Aurobindo and the Richards probably on 1 June 1914, and the prospectus (with specimen pages) was ready by mid-June to facilitate the enrolment of subscribers. It was decided that the first issue should come out on Sri Aurobindo's forty-second birthday, 15 August. All the three names - Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Paul and Mirra Richard - were to appear on the cover-page as Editors, and the journals were to be published from 41, Rue François Martin, Pondicherry. Writing to Motilal Roy in July, Sri Aurobindo expressed the fear that, if pronounced revolutionaries should be found among the formal list of subscribers, that "will give the police a handle for connecting politics and the Review and thus frightening the public".¹ A way should be found, wrote Sri Aurobindo, not to deny even the strongly politically oriented people the enlightenment the Arya might bring them without, however, compromising the Review itself. In a subsequent letter, Sri Aurobindo asked Motilal to enlist some subscribers, and added with a touch of wry humour: "Subscribers' book is nearly as blank as it was at the time of our purchasing it."²

The ground floor of Sri Aurobindo's residence in Rue François Martin housed the editorial office of the two journals. Likewise the ground floor of the Richards' place in Rue Dupleix was used as a stack room. While Sri Aurobindo held himself responsible for the main contributions to the Arya, Mirra helped Paul to translate them into French, and also turn Paul's French into English. Besides, Mirra took over the managerial side of the journals, kept lists of subscribers in her own hand, and maintained the accounts. She was, in fact, the chief engineer of its success in its early formative period.

The Arya, as outlined in the prospectus, placed before itself a twofold object:

1. A systematic study of the highest problems of existence;

2. The formation of a vast Synthesis of knowledge, harmonising the diverse religious traditions of humanity occidental as well as oriental. Its method will be that of a realism, at once rational and transcendental, - a realism consisting in the unification of intellectual and scientific discipline with those of intuitive experience.

The journal also promised its readers studies in speculative Philosophy, translations of ancient texts and commentaries on them, in Comparative Religion, and "practical methods of inner culture and self-development".

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As indicated by the subtitle of its French edition, Revue de Grande Synthèse Philosophique, the Arya aimed at projecting a "great synthesis" of all the knowledge of the old world and the new, the East and the West.

Now, what was the Synthesis needed at the time the Arya was launched? Answering this question, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the very first issue:

Undoubtedly, that of man himself. The harmony of his faculties is the condition of his peace, their mutual understanding and helpfulness the means of his perfection.

The ailment at the heart of civilisation was the rift between reason and faith, the logical mind and the intuitive heart. But only a higher and reconciling truth could dissipate their mutual misunderstandings and lead mankind to its integral self-development.

The synthesis then of religious aspiration and scientific faculty, as a beginning; and in the resultant progress an integrality also of the inner existence. Love and knowledge, the delight of the Bhakta and the divine science of the knower of Brahman, have to effect their unity; and both have to recover the fullness of Life which they tend to banish from them in the austerity of their search or the rapture of their ecstasy.

... The integral divine harmony within, but as its result a changed earth and a nobler and happier humanity.³

And in the section on "The Spirit of Synthesis" in The Eternal Wisdom, Paul Richard cited some revealing affirmations:

Wouldst thou penetrate the infinite? Advance, then, on all sides of the finite. (Goethe)

There is one height of truth and there are those who approach from all sides, as many sides as there are radii in a circle, that is to say, by routes of an infinite variety. Let us work, then, with all our strength to arrive at this light of Truth which unites us all. (Tolstoi)⁴

The name Arya, however, although charged with the undertones of received suggestion, asked for a more precise explication. The word figured on the cover page in big Devanagari characters, and non-Indian readers might have mistaken it for a hieroglyph. Even Indians had lost track of its original sense, and many European philologists had reduced it to a racial term. Sri Aurobindo was therefore to take some pains to bring out its native and ancient and true significance in the September 1914 issue in his article "The Question of the Month":

Intrinsically, in its most fundamental sense, Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance.

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Self-conquest is the first law of his nature .... For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom.

Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers he does not destroy, but ennobles and fulfils. He knows ... that the Highest is something which is no nullity in the world, but increasingly expresses itself here, - a divine Will, Consciousness, Love, Beatitude .... Of that he is the servant, lover and seeker. When it is attained, he pours it forth in work, love, joy and knowledge upon mankind. For always the Aryan is a worker and warrior. He spares himself no labour of mind or body whether to seek the Highest or to serve it. He avoids no difficulty, he accepts no cessation from fatigue. Always he fights for the coming of that kingdom within himself and in the world.⁶

Man is no puny ineffectual creature, - not in essence; he is indeed heir to the three worlds, he can spiral upwards from the separative to the universal, and even escape into the transcendent. It would be the aim of the Arya to school its readers in the twin disciplines of self-conquest and self-perfection so that they could "elevate the lower into the higher, receive the higher into the lower", and become in the end identified in all parts of their being with the puissance and splendour and ananda of the "triple and triune Brahman". ⁷

II

July and early August 1914 were the months of the birth-pangs of the Arya and its French edition, subtitled Revue de Grande Synthèse Philosophique. Getting ready the articles and the translations, obtaining paper of the requisite size, quality and quantity, the choice of the Modern Press at Pondicherry to do the printing, the enrolment of subscribers and the fixing up of agencies - these were the activities on the surface. But, by a strange quirk of fate, all this was to synchronise with momentous happenings on the European and world stage. On 28 June 1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir-apparent of the Hapsburg Empire, and his consort were assassinated by a twenty-year old Serbian youth. July 1914 was a hectic month for the chancellories of Europe, and the issue of peace versus war was debated with mounting anxiety but diminishing hope. Austria declared war against Serbia on 28 July, Germany declared war against Russia on 1 August, and against France on 3 August; and, on 4 August, Great Britain declared war against Germany. The First World War had begun. Germany and Austria on the one side, and on the other, Russia, France and Britain were engaged from almost the very outset, with Japan to come in on 23 August on the side of the latter. And, as if in a counterblast to the entire sanguinary holocaust itself, from obscure Pondicherry, was launched on 15 August the Arya.

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It is surely one of the supreme paradoxes of history that, barely a fortnight after the outbreak of the World War, the Arya should appear in Pondicherry with its load of luminous contents. Thus the opening paragraph of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, which also opened the journal:

The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,- God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.⁸

The same issue carried the first instalments of The Secret of the Veda, Isha Upanishad and The Synthesis of Yoga, as also Paul Richard's The Eternal Wisdom and The Wherefore of the Worlds. "The world to-day presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast," said Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga with an obvious reference to the current world situation, while in The Eternal Wisdom, Paul Richard brought together "in a homogeneous continuity" the finest thoughts from the sages of all times grouped under "The Song of Wisdom" and "Wisdom and the Religions" - a veritable universal congress of the world's seers, saints and savants like Asoka, Carlyle, Porphyry, Seneca, Emerson, Socrates, Plato, Heraclitus, Voltaire, Tseu-Tse, Confucius, Minamoto Sanetomo, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Epictetus, Lao-Tse, Leibnitz, Hermes, Schopenhauer, Sadi, Asvaghosha, Rumi, Spinoza, Bahaaullah, Omar Khayyam, Pythagoras, Kant, Firdausi, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Pasteur, Giordano Bruno and Antoine the Healer. It is a fascinating mosaic of the choicest quotations meant to inform, instruct and inspire at once.

All the time the agitated chancellories and war machines were desperately hoping for peace or frantically preparing for war, all the time "Willy", "Nicky" and "Georgie" - the Emperors of Germany, Russia and Britain respectively - were exchanging cables pleading the cause of peace, all the time (at Pondicherry) the opening chapter of The Life Divine and the other contributions were being set up and the proofs were being read, all the time Mirra continued her inner odyssey, her morning musings, and her mystic recordations. Thus on 1 July:

We bow down before Thee, we unite with Thee, O Lord, in a love that is limitless and full of an inexpressible beatitude.

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Then a week later:

O divine Force, supreme Illuminator, hearken to our prayer, move not away from us, do not withdraw, help us to fight the good fight, make firm our strength for the struggle, give us the force to conquer!⁹

Another week passes, and she writes on 15 July:

Thou hast placed in my heart a peace so total that it seems to be almost indifference and in an immensity of calm serenity it says:

Just as Thou wilt, just as Thou wilt.¹⁰

On 21 July, Mirra has a blissful unitive experience. Perhaps something of that kind is pictured by Dante in the Paradiso:

As sudden lightning throws in disarray

The visual spirits, so that the eye is reft

Of power to grasp even things that strongest stay,

The living light in such a radiant weft

Enwound me and with such glory overcame,

That in it all was burnt and nothing left.¹¹

Or described by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey:

That serene and blessed mood,

In which ... the breath of this corporeal frame,

And even the motion of our human blood,

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul.

But utterly incomparable is the luminous infinitude of Mirra's ecstasy:

There was no longer any body, no longer any sensation; only a column of light was there, rising from where the base of the body normally is to where usually is the head, to form there a disk of light like that of the moon; then from there the column continued to rise very far above the head, opening out into an immense sun, dazzling and multi-coloured, whence a rain of golden light fell covering all the earth.

Then slowly the column of light came down again forming an oval of living light, awakening and setting into movement - each one in a special way, according to a particular vibratory mode - the centres above the head, in the head, the throat, the heart, in the middle of the stomach, at the base of the spine and still farther down. At the level of the knees, the ascending and the descending currents joined and the circulation thus went on uninterruptedly, enveloping the whole being in an immense oval of living light.

Then slowly the consciousness came down again, stage by stage, halting in each world, until the body-consciousness returned. The recovery of the

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body-consciousness was, if the memory is correct. the ninth stage. At that moment the body was still quite stiff and immobile.¹²

"All things I then forgot. ... All ceased, and I was not," says St. John of the Cross narrating his unitive experience; but Mirra's recapitulation of her own essentially ineffable experience is far more vivid and precise. Like Sri Aurobindo in poems like "Trance of Waiting" and "Descent", Mirra too is able to turn the experience of illumination into creative communion. She had leapt out of the body-consciousness, and there were stages of the ascent of consciousness, and corresponding stages of descent, and a general circulation and diffusion of the new light "enveloping the whole being in an immense oval of living light".

III

From the plenitude of that realisation, Mirra is able to face the outside world with a divine equanimity. As though she had the European crisis in mind, she writes on 22 July:

O divine Master, let Thy light fall into this chaos and bring forth from it a new world.¹³

Then the very next day:

Do not abandon us to impotence and darkness; break every limit, shatter every chain, dispel every illusion.

On 31 July, she refers to certain experiences of hers - always unique, "these milestones which mark the infinite ascent are never alike" - and wonders whether a time will come when the Divine will make her "capable of synthetising all these countless experiences, so as to draw from them a new realisation, more complete and more beautiful than all achieved so far". On 2 August, she feels that the world is on the threshold of unpredictable happenings: new modes of manifestation.

... all these mental powers, all these vital energies, and all these material elements, what are they if not Thyself in Thy outermost form, Thy ultimate modes of expression, of realisation, O Thou whom we adore devotedly and who escapest us on every side even while penetrating, animating and guiding us, Thou whom we cannot understand or define or name, Thou whom we cannot seize or embrace or conceive, and who art yet realised in our smallest acts ....

In the immensity of Thy effective Presence all things blossom!

Even on 3 August, she is at the centre of her being only filled with a mute adoration, and her soul is filled with "the immensity of Thy love".

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But by now the dogs of global war have been unleashed in Europe. and on 4 August, these words are wrung from her heart:

O Lord, O eternal Master!

Men, driven by the conflict of forces, are performing a sublime sacrifice, they are offering their lives in a bloodstained holocaust. ...

O Lord, O eternal Master, grant that all this may not be in vain, grant that the inexhaustible torrents of Thy divine Force may spread over the earth and penetrate its troubled atmosphere, the struggling energies, the violent chaos of battling elements; grant that the pure light of Thy Knowledge and the inexhaustible love of Thy benediction may fill men's hearts, penetrate their souls, illumine their consciousness and, out of this obscurity, out of this sombre, terrible and potent darkness, bring forth the splendour of Thy majestic Presence!

The next day she humbly invokes, "Thy luminous love upon the earth amongst our ignorant and sorrowful human brothers". On 6 August again: "O Lord, we know that it is an hour of great gravity for the earth." And two days later:

Monstrous forces have swooped down upon the earth like a hurricane, forces dark and violent and powerful and blind. Give us strength, O Lord, to illumine them. Thy splendour must break out everywhere in them and transfigure their action: their devastating passage must leave behind it a divine sowing.

On 11 August, she not only prays for Divine intervention, but also sees herself as an angel of mercy:

O my sweet Master, enter into all these confused thoughts, all these anguished hearts; kindle there the fire of Thy divine Presence. The shadow of the earth has fallen back upon it, it has been completely shaken by it ... wilt Thou not once again move upon the chaos and speak Thy will: "Let there be Light"? ...

I am the powerful arms of Thy mercy.

I am the vast bosom of Thy boundless love .... My arms have enfolded the sorrowful earth and press it tenderly to my generous heart; and slowly a kiss of supreme benediction is laid upon this struggling atom: the kiss of the Mother which soothes and heals.¹⁴

Here Mirra, in a sudden accession of infinite knowledge, power and love, sees herself in the avatar role of the Mother Divine, the Mother of Sorrows who is retriever, consoler and healer at once.

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IV

And so, as the tentacles of the European war extended on all sides with escalating ferocity, as the German army's sweep towards the West went On relentlessly, as the fall-out of the war was felt in far-off India and even in Pondicherry, Mirra could hardly abstract herself from that world in turmoil, her morning meditations explored divers layers of consciousness, adopted divers mental stances (anxiety, hope, doubt, anguish , dismay), contacted divers Powers and Influences, and she played by turns her several roles of bystander, supplicant, medium, mediator, collaborator and initiator:

The being stands before Thee, with arms lifted, palms open, in an ardent aspiration ....

... may the regenerating streams roll over the earth in beneficent waves. Transfigure and illumine. Work this supreme miracle so long awaited, and break all ignorant egoisms; awaken Thy sublime flame in every heart. ¹⁵

O my sweet Master, why hast Thou told me to leave the blessed place in Thy heart and return to earth to attempt a realisation which everything seems to prove impossible? ... What dost Thou expect of me that Thou hast ... plunged me again into this dark, struggling universe?¹⁶

All errors, all prejudices, all misunderstandings must vanish in this whirlwind of destruction that is carrying away the past.¹⁷

I feel as if I have gone down very deep into an unfathomable abyss of doubt and darkness, as if I am exiled from Thy eternal splendour; but I know that in this descent is the possibility of a higher ascent .... ¹⁸

A fervent prayer surges in her heart on 21 August:

O Lord, Lord, the whole earth is in an upheaval; it groans and suffers, it is in agony ... all this suffering that has descended upon it must not be in vain; grant that all this bloodshed may produce a swifter germination of the seeds of beauty and light and love .... Out of the depths of this abysm of darkness the whole being of the earth cries to Thee that Thou mayest give it air and light; it is stifling, wilt Thou not come to its aid?¹⁹

The same poignant cry - half agony, half prayer - is forced out of her again and again, and the cry is indeed the representative moan of humanity on trial, undergoing an almost termless tribulation:

Thy grace is with us, Lord, and it never leaves us, even when appearances are dark; night is sometimes necessary to prepare more perfect dawns .... ²⁰

O Lord, the earth groans and suffers; chaos has made this world its abode.

The darkness is so deep that Thou alone canst dispel it. Come, manifest Thyself, that Thy work may be accomplished.²¹

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On 29 August, Mirra sees Man as an intermediary being between earth and heaven, animality and divinity:

Man is the link between What must be and what is; he is the footbridge thrown across the abyss, he is the great cross-shaped X, the quaternary connecting link. His true domicile, the effective seat of this consciousness should be in the intermediary world at the meeting-point of the four arms of the cross, just where all the infinitude of the Unthinkable comes to take a precise form so that it may be projected into the innumerable manifestation ....

That centre is a place of supreme love, of perfect consciousness, of pure and total knowledge.²²

Perhaps, Mirra was casting herself for this role, anticipating Sri Aurobindo's words in Savitri:

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,

A power of silence in the depths of God;

She is the Force, the inevitable Word, ...

All Nature dumbly calls to her alone

To heal with her feet the aching throb of life

And break the seals on the dim soul of man

And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things. ²³

V

Mirra's prayers and meditations were but the stray ripples from the ocean infinite of her inner life, and at different moments they strike us differently: now seemingly austere and resigned when the sky is overcast with threatening clouds, now radiant in their rainbow magnificence when the Sun shines gloriously. The diary-entries are rather like pointer-readings, and help to give us a sense of the rhythm, the richness and the complexity of her inner life. Even at the grimmest moments when a bleak appraisal of the human situation seems unavoidable, even then the insinuating and insistent voice of encouragement and hope is heard, faintly at first, but presently with the assurance of faith and the certainty of ultimate victory. Thus, on 31 August 1914, the last day of the first month of the War, Mirra records:

In this formidable disorder and terrible destruction can be seen a great working, a necessary toil preparing the earth for a new sowing which will rise in marvellous spikes of grain and give to the world the shining harvest of a new race .... The vision is clear and precise .... ²⁴

The very next day, however, Mirra records another marvellous experience.

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She had completely identified herself with the Divine Mother, so much so the "we" became a single power:

Then in the silence of our mute ecstasy a voice from yet profounder depths arose and the voice said, "Turn towards those who have need of thy love." All the grades of consciousness appeared, all the successive worlds. Some were splendid and luminous, well ordered and clear .... Then the worlds darkened in a multiplicity more and more chaotic, the Energy became violent and the material world obscure and sorrowful. And when in Our infinite love we perceived in its entirety the hideous suffering of the world of misery and ignorance, when we saw our children locked in a sombre struggle, flung upon each other by energies that had deviated from their true aim, we willed ardently that the light of Divine Love should be made manifest, a transfiguring force at the centre of these distracted elements. Then, that the will might be yet more powerful and effective, we turned towards Thee, O unthinkable Supreme, and we implored Thy aid. And from the unsounded depths of the Unknown a reply came sublime and formidable and we knew that the earth was saved.²⁵

In the meantime, the progress of the War in Europe was anything but encouraging from the Allies' point of view. The Germans, having already taken Namur and Louvain, stormed Amiens in France on 1 September, and sacked Dinant in Belgium on 3 September, and steadily advanced into the Allied lines. It is not surprising therefore that Mirra's entry for 4 September is most agonising:

Darkness has descended upon the earth, thick, violent, victorious .... All is sadness, terror, destruction in the physical world, and the splendour of Thy light of love seems darkened by a veil of mourning ....

Time presses: the divine powers must come, O Lord, to the help of the agonised earth.²⁶

It was about this time that Mirra had a very unusual experience. From the terrace of her house in Dupleix Street, she could see the terrace in front of Sri Aurobindo's rooms in Rue François Martin, and it was her custom to sit and meditate every morning, facing Sri Aurobindo's rooms. Then one morning, in "the early days of the War", this incredible thing happened:

That day I was in my room, but looking at Sri Aurobindo's room through a small window. I was in meditation but my eyes were open. I saw this Kali entering through my door; I asked her, "What do you want?" And she was dancing, a truly savage dance. She told me, "Paris is taken, Paris will be destroyed." ... I turned towards her and told her, "No, Paris will not be taken, Paris will be saved", quietly, just like this, but with a certain force. She made a face and went away. And the next day, we received the "dispatch" ... that the Germans had been marching upon Paris .... But when they saw that the road was clear, that there was nobody to oppose them,

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they felt convinced that it was an ambush .... So they turned round and went back! And when the French armies saw that, naturally they gave chase and caught them, and there was a battle. It was the decisive battle ... ²⁷

Appropriately enough, on 5 September, Mirra hears the rallying call from Above:

"Face the danger!. .. Look the danger straight in the face and it will vanish before the Power." ...

"Conquer at any price" should be the present motto ....

And in an infinite love for the world ... let us fight!²⁸

There may even be an inner meaning behind the sanguinary world conflict, for it may very well be the means of triumphing over both moral stagnation and blind destruction; it may be the Purgatory on the way to distant Paradise! The only thing to do is to fight and fear not, to fight and conquer.

VI

By and by, out of the clouds of confusion, discomfiture and desperation, there emerges slowly the sun of clear understanding and steady wisdom. Man but partly is, yet wholly hopes to be. Each individual is - or ought to be - a revelation in space and time of the Reality that lies beyond them, an essay in illusive appearance bodying forth the Reality behind all appearances. Man is no doubt deeply entangled in "the relativities of the physical world", the dualities and dichotomies of terrestrial existence; but he is in essence the inheritor of Reality also, and hence he is a fit intermediary between the self-puissant spiritual and the self-divided material worlds. And Mirra herself would like to be the mediatrix in excelsis, and that is how her words comprehend all the agonies and aspirations of humanity; and when she articulates a prayer, it may be taken that the entire earth unconsciously repeats the words and participates in the ardent sincerity of the supplication:

Envelop this sorrowful earth with the strong arms of Thy mercy, permeate it with the beneficent outpourings of Thy infinite love. ²⁹

A mighty canticle of fervent love and exultation arises to Thee, O Lord, all the earth in an inexpressible ecstasy unites with Thee. ³⁰

And yet the War on the western front in Europe continued in undiminished fury; there were furious engagements on land and sea in almost every theatre of war. The Germans had taken the cathedral town 'of Rheims on 5 September, and Paris was still exposed to danger; and the German cruiser, Emden, even found its way to the Bay of Bengal and

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shelled Madras! It asked for immense faith, an occult foresight and a spiritual poise of certainty to infer, amid all that enveloping gloom, the flickering lights of the coming Dawn. Doubtless the Richards and Sri Aurobindo met every day and often discussed the situation, till Paul had to leave for France to join his class of the Reserve Army. The complexion of the events as the papers were permitted to record them and the direction of development as it seemed to unfold itself in Mirra's or Sri Aurobindo's mystic visions had to be correlated to arrive at some approximation to the probable shape of things to come. It is thus not very surprising that, at the very moment the outlook seemed to be bleak and unpromising in the extreme, Mirra could still record in her diary on 25 September:

O Divine and adorable Mother, with Thy help what is there that is impossible? The hour of realisation is near and Thou hast assured us of Thy aid that we may perform integrally the supreme Will.

Thou hast accepted us as fit intermediaries between the unthinkable realities and the relativities of the physical world, and Thy constant presence in our midst is a token of Thy active collaboration.

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute:

A new Light shall break upon the earth.

A new world shall be born,

And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled. ³¹

VII

While Mirra's reactions to the outbreak of the War and its rake's progress in several directions found expression - after a process of dissolution and crystallisation in the still waters of meditation and prayer - in the series of musings, supplications and outpourings of the soul, Sri Aurobindo's views found clear formulation in his letter of 29 August 1914 to Motilal Roy. When Britain entered the War, India was inevitably dragged into it too, and Britain wanted India's active cooperation in the war effort. There were many (including Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, with his South African experiences of passive resistance to tyranny) who were for loyalism and unconditional support to Britain, while others thought that Britain's difficulty was India's opportunity to wrest her freedom from the alien bureaucracy. Sri Aurobindo, however, did not agree with either view. He wouldn't compromise on the question of eventual independence; he was, as always, for "a masculine courage in speech and action"; and while there could be no cooperation without control, there should be "readiness to accept real concessions and pay their just price, but no more". Under the conditions of the War, immediate independence was obviously impracticable; but he also added significantly, "We are ready to defend the British rule against any foreign nation, for that means defending our own future

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independence. ³² He also discussed in detail various courses the War might take. and the appropriate action to be taken in each of those eventualities. The cardinal principle, however, was "continuance of British rule and cooperation until we are strong enough to stand by ourselves". Were ,Britain even to lose the War, India should take care and see that she did not "pass from one foreign domination to a worse".³³

Such were his considered views, although they were communicated only under cover of secrecy. But, then, as one of the editors of the Arya, he had also to make an open reference to the War, and this note appeared in the September 1914 issue. The Arya, being a review of pure Philosophy, had no "direct concern with political passions and interests and their results". On the other hand, it couldn't altogether ignore "the enormous convulsion" in progress, when men were "dying in thousands daily, the existence of empires was threatened and the fate of the world hanging in the balance". Sri Aurobindo thought that the War had its aspects "of supreme importance to a synthetic Philosophy", but, he added, "Now is not the hour, now in this moment of supreme tension and widespread agony."³⁴ What a singular coincidence, one might say, that the sanguinary holocaust that was the First World War and the launching of the philosophical Review, the Arya, should have taken place more or less simultaneously. Was it no more than an instance of cosmic irony? Or was it a providential corrective, or insurance, for the future? The War was to go on with an increasing ruthlessness and destructive frenzy till November 1918, and the unreal and inhuman war atmosphere was to overflow and prevail till the signing of the Peace Treaties in 1920. The Arya too was to run its serene course for a little over six years. In the providential scheme of things, was there no causal connection between the two - the War and the Word? "Hardly a month had passed since the declaration of the Great War," says Amrita recalling those distant days, "when I heard elderly people, rich in knowledge, affirm that the World War was but the unhealed sore in the human consciousness and the appearance of the Arya was destined to heal the sore. "³⁵

VIII

The Arya, as indicated earlier, gave pride of place to Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, and among his other numerous contributions during the first year were the two massive treatises, The Secret of the Veda and The Synthesis of Yoga. Paul Richard's The Eternal Wisdom was a garner of the choicest thoughts of the great religions and philosophies of the world, the memorable utterances of the world's great thinkers, all arranged under Suitable headings like "The Divine Essence", "The Divine Becoming" and "The Way of Love" in a naturally effective sequence. The central idea

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behind the collection was provided by Angelus Silesius: "Eternal Wisdom builds: I shall be her palace when she finds repose in me and I in her."³⁶ Paul's other serious work, The Wherefore of the Worlds, was an ambitious attempt to survey the past and the present with reference to human development, and to infer the probable direction of the future. The Arya also carried reviews, translations and editorial comments.

The original intention had been to approach the problem of synthesis "from the starting-point of the two lines of culture which divide human thought and are now meeting at its apex, the knowledge of the West and the knowledge of the East".³⁷ Because of the War, however, Paul had to return to France with Mirra, leaving unfinished his superb exercise in synthesis The Wherefore of the Worlds, but he had at least brought his argument to the climactic point where he described the redeeming and creative power of Love. Richard called the birth of Love "the second Genesis":

After having built up out of the cosmic dust the harmonious forms of the worlds and coordinated in the infinitesimal universe of the atoms, as in the infinite atom which is the universe, all the conflicting forces and chaotic energies, after having perfected life and its forms, the forms by the progress of life, life by the progress of forms, this Love is now at work in the human being. After having drawn him forth out of the divine possibilities of Nature, it would now draw out of his nature the possibilities of the Divine.

This supreme aspiration of Love explains and justifies the universal desire and transfigures it; therein the being discovers the secret of his goal shedding light on the mystery of his beginning. ³⁸

Although The Wherefore of the Worlds series came to a stop here, The Eternal Wisdom garners continued to appear throughout the life of the Arya, constituting in their totality a vast treasure-house of human knowledge and wisdom.

It is a curious circumstance that The Life Divine, whose first appearance in a serial form in the Arya synchronised with the First World War, was to achieve definitive book publication in 1939-40, the opening years of the Second World War, which also provoked T. S. Eliot to indite poems like "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942) - "as exciting to many of us," said John Lehmann, "as news of a great victory". Didn't the Gita itself owe its origin to the frightening spectacle of the rival armies - the Kaurava and the Pandava - glaring at each other on the field of Kurukshetra? The Word of the Arya, charged as it was with the infinite power of the spirit, was indeed the fittest answer to the unleashing of the Asuric forces of the War. The boil of the accumulated poisons of the past - of selfishness and greed, of nationalist rivalry and colonialist exploitation, of political chicanery and militarist ambitions - burst in the form of the global War. The recovery, the healing,

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the permanent cure would be a long process, for the Lord of Falsehood or the Lord of the Nations would not easily yield ground or suffer obscuration. Human effort would be necessary on an unprecedented scale, but Grace would be needed too. Tapahprabhāvāddevaprasādācca!³⁹Such too was the nectarean Word spoken by the Arya.

IX

It is only to be expected that, on its first appearance, the prophetic appeal of the Arya (notably of The Life Divine) should be drowned in the sound and fury of the War news and scares and the endless irrelevances of the political speculations. But at least the Review had the expected optimum Dumber of subscribers, and scattered seed-plots were thus being laid in the desert-wastes of the contemporary human-inhuman situation. Amrita was then only a teenager preparing for the Matriculation examination, but when he chanced upon the "first sublime article in the Arya" - the magnificent exordium to The Life Divine - he started reading it half aloud to himself:

I read it over and over again. Great thoughts clothed in great words - I could not at all comprehend! However, it was sweet to read and re-read it. It was as if someone else in me was comprehending all that was read!⁴⁰

Sri Aurobindo surprised Amrita in the act of reading when the latter sheepishly remarked that "the reading was delightful but nothing could be grasped". Sri Aurobindo's reply was: "It is not necessary to understand it all at once. Go on reading. If you find a joy in reading, you need not stop it." After all, that is the way of the mantra, or of all writing charged with a mantric potency, for its meaning somehow irresistibly filters to the profundities of the soul:

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self

Are seized unalterably and he endures

An ecstasy and an immortal change; ... ⁴¹

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CHAPTER 9

Divine Man-Making

A couple of issues of the Arya had come out by mid-September 1914, but the War in Europe only raged the more furiously. Mirra was of Course busy with a hundred details relating to the new Society, the Arya (the English and French) and her own great sadhana for the earth. Her early morning meditations, the musings of her soul, and her dialogues with the Divine continued without a break, and the deeper poise and purpose of her being prevailed over the surface shadows and disturbances.

On 30 September 1914, Mirra records an uplifting experience with Vedic as well as futurist intimations. "The realisation has appeared in all its amplitude," and Mirra can see that the Divine inhabits us from the depths to the surfaces in the divers aspects of Agni (Life, works), Indra (Mind, knowledge) and Soma(Soul, love). But the call is for an integral union of all these powers for effecting the desired change:

And in all these domains Agni assures us of the help of his purifying flame, destroying all obstacles, kindling the energies, stimulating the will, so that the realisation may be hastened. Indra is with us for the perfection of the illumination in our knowledge; and the divine Soma has transformed us in his infinite, sovereign, marvellous love, bringer of the supreme beatitudes. ¹

Nay more: beyond these too - beyond Agni, Indra, Soma - to the still unknown Power, the visioned splendour of the Supermind:

And Thou, OLord, who art all this made one and much more, O sovereign Master, extreme limit of our thought, who standest for us at the threshold of the Unknown, make rise from that Unthinkable some new splendour, some possibility of a loftier and more integral realisation, that Thy work may be accomplished and the universe take one step farther towards the sublime Identity, the supreme Manifestation.²

A few days later, on 5 October, Mirra as paraclete pleads that she may be the meeting-point between the swell of human cries for divine help and the ready and adequate response from above:

Many seek Thee at this hour in anguish and incertitude. May I be their mediator with Thee that Thy light may illumine them, that Thy peace may appease . . ³

Again, in some of the later entries:

... let me be the representative of all the earth, so that, united with my consciousness, it may give itself unreservedly to Thee. (10 October)

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All the earth is in our arms like a sick child who must be cured and for whom one has a special affection because of his very weakness. (14 October)

Let all earthly desires come together in me, O Lord, so that Thou mayst consider them, and Thy will be able to work precisely, clearly, definitively upon the smallest detail as upon the whole. (22 December)

On 7 October, Mirra starts with the sad observation that most people are only concerned with the material life, "Heavy, inert, conservative, obscure"; there are also people with an awakened mental life, but they too are "restless, tormented, agitated, arbitrary, despotic", and alas! "Caught altogether in the whirl of the renewals and transformations of which they dream, they are ready to destroy everything without knowledge of any foundation on which to construct, and with their light made only of blinding flashes" confusion is but worse confounded, not happily resolved.⁴ To what end, then, this human drama? Mirra implores that, "under cover of the present turmoil, in the very heart of this extreme confusion", a revolution in human life and thought may be brought about, and humanity "at last awakened" to the Divine consciousness.

The next day, she returns to the old issue between the active and the contemplative life. The conditions may alternate or, better still, as with Mirra herself, they may co-exist. Explaining this particular diary-entry many years later, she told a group of disciples in 1947:

In the ideal condition, at the depth of the consciousness there is contemplation and absolute silence while outwardly the nature is busy with all sorts of activities and enjoys work. Generally, you begin with one - either the action or the meditation. But if you are plastic you can get the two together. ⁵

The aim of meditation is to open up the lines of communication with the psychic being, or the soul; once this has been done, all action will be the more effective for having such a psychic base.

A few days later, on 12 October the pain of the world becomes also her own body's pain, and Mirra asks: "When will ignorance dissolve? When will pain cease?" Isn't it because of the divorce from the Divine that pain and ignorance have thrived? "Without Thee all is false!" declared Guru Nanak. Every atom of the universe should thus grow conscious of its Divine origins and Divine substance, and by this means redeem and transform itself.

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II

Nearly two weeks pass, and Mirra once more makes a perfect offering of herself to the Lord: "My aspiration to Thee, O Lord, has taken the form of a beautiful rose, harmonious, full in bloom, rich in fragrance." And she stretches it out to the Lord in a gesture of articulating this prayer in the name and on behalf of the whole earth:

If my understanding is limited, widen it; if my knowledge is obscure enlighten it; if my heart is empty of ardour, set it aflame; if my love is insignificant, make it intense; if my feelings are ignorant and egoistic, give them the full consciousness in the Truth: ⁶

Then, for a week, although her pen is silent, Mirra has hours of "unforgettable illumination" which cleanse and greaten the entire stair of consciousness from the heights to the depths, and the effect on her everyday life is unmistakable:

In all work, constantly, there is the perception of Thy invariable presence in Thy dual form of Non-Being and Being ... the physical body is glorified, supple, vigorous. energetic; the mind is superbly active in its calm lucidity, guiding and transmitting the forces of Thy divine Will; and all the being exults in an endless beatitude, a boundless love, a sovereign power, a perfect knowledge, an infinite consciousness ....

Thus the solid foundations of Thy terrestrial work are prepared, the substructure of the immense edifice built ... and in the hour of realisations the earth, thus prepared, will be ready to receive the sublime temple of Thy new and more complete manifestation. ⁷

And while night follows day, superficially life is the same tale told by an idiot, but to Mirra's occult vision as "new dawns unweariedly succeed to past dawns ... there mounts the scented flame that no storm-wind can force to vacillate" ⁸, and even the last closed vault shall open one day. And yet­ "the formidable fight, the onslaught of the adverse forces"! But there is no occasion to feel disspirited, for the "purer forces" of the Divine will manifest:

What opposes is just that upon which it is the mission of these forces to act; it is the darkest hatred which must be touched and transformed into luminous peace. ⁹

All difficulty is an opportunity, all resistance is also an incentive; and the mental faculty itself, long prone to error, carries within it the propensity to progress. Hearkening to the Voice, Mirra receives the capital assurance:

This dividing intellect, which makes him [man] stand apart from me, also enables him to scale rapidly the heights he must climb, without letting his

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progress be enchained and delayed by the totality of the universe, which, in its immensity and complexity, cannot effect so swift an ascent.¹⁰

On 20 November, Mirra aspires to be like "an absolutely blank page, so that Thy will may be written in me without any difficulty, any mixture". The weight of the past is a terrible drag, the pull of the past is a way of retreat. "O Lord," she pleads, "break the old frames of thought, abolish past experiences, dissolve the conscious synthesis if Thou thinkest it necessary .... " To obliterate the dead past is to end all hatred and rancour "as the sea effaces an imprint upon the sands" and to make peace take the place of vengeance in our hearts "as it enters into the soul of a child rocked by its mother".¹¹

There is a break of almost two weeks when Mirra was "entirely occupied by outer work", and now the musings unfold themselves again. Mirra feels that the Lord has emancipated her from her slavery to mere habits, thought-forms, and mental constructions. Nearly a week passes, and on 10 December a highly charged prayer rises in her heart, although it is not deliberately articulated. Is it not a folly, this reign of egoism: my idea, my scheme, my institution, my work? Wrong, wrong, all wrong, for Truth transcends all limitations. What is necessary is to embody the Truth in life - our life and the life around us - yet also be detached from it, and be ahead of it. This circumambient world: is it real? is it false? Since our world-view will condition our actions, we should arrive at or stumble upon and hold the right view - not simply dismiss this world as illusion. Even the most altruistic action runs the risk of personal adhesion, the rust of egoism; one must therefore resolutely guard against this and find one's right frame of reference - which is also the All, the Ground of everything.

In the meditation of 12 December, Mirra affirms that if one wants true renewal,

We must know at each moment how to lose everything that we may gain everything; we must be able to shed the past like a dead body that we may be reborn into a greater plenitude. ¹²

The steps of the sadhana are aspiration, progressive realisation, and total transformation. The climactic change will be the movement from separativity to union, from being "Thy servant" to becoming "Thyself':

O divine Master, with what an ardent love I serve Thee! With what a pure, still and infinite joy I am Thyself in all that is and beyond all existence in form.

And the two consciousnesses unite in an unequalled plenitude.¹³

Three days later, on 15 December, Mirra records simply that the Lord has given her "peace in power, serenity in action, immutable happiness in the heart of all circumstances". It was, as it were, the fitting conclusion of a yearlong immaculate sadhana in the service of the Divine and on behalf of the Earth and Man.

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III

The year 1914 was in truth a momentous interim for Mirra and for her sadhana of manifestation of the Divine and ministry for the Earth. The year had begun with her preparations for the visit to India - she met Sri Aurobindo on 29 March at his residence in Pondicherry and instantaneously recognised in him "the Lord of my being and my God", she helped actively in the organisation of L'Idée Nouvelle Society and the launching of the Arya, she made phenomenal progress in her sadhana achieving the most revolutionary results in an incredibly short time, she identified herself as the mother of the sorrowing earth now torn by an intestine war, and she played the role of mediatrix with the Divine, and, receiving the abundant strength of Grace, she played also the roles of collaboratrix and creatrix laying the first obscure foundations of a new Heaven and a new Earth. In the Centenary Edition of Prayers and Meditations, although the entries begin in 1912 and go on till 1937 (a period in all of a quarter of a century), the entries for 1914 comprise 282 pages, three-fourths of the total. Even as 1914 was, in its outward circumstances, a fateful crossroads of human history, it was even more significantly a year of destiny for the future of the human race. For it was Mirra's meeting with Sri Aurobindo that led to the launching of the Arya and, twelve years later, to the establishment of the Ashram at Pondicherry, with him and her as the preordained hub or "divine Centre" of the chariot wheel of the future human evolution from a mental to a supramental race. As early as 1914, then, Mirra and Sri Aurobindo were indeed the "first-born of a new supernal race", and it was perhaps decreed even then -

The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door,

Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.

The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demi-god

Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

Revealing the secret deity in the cave. ¹⁴

IV

As the War prolonged itself as if it might never end, as the Western Front enacted its weird stabilisation, and as the War proliferated in divers directions and grew new dimensions of diabolical ferocity, it became clear that the Richards would have to return to France, for Paul had his

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obligations to the Reserve Army. This meant the discontinuance of the French edition of the Arya, after its seventh issue in February 1915. Even so, the publication of the two editions during the first months of the War was no ordinary editorial and managerial feat. "Without the divine Will which knows best what to use and what to throw aside," Sri Aurobindo wrote editorially in the July 1915 issue, "no human work can come to the completion hoped for by our limited vision."¹⁵ When it was decided to stop the French edition, its subscribers were indulgent enough to consent to receive future the English edition instead. The unavoidable withdrawal of Paul Richard meant the termination also of his sequence entitled, The Wherefore of the Worlds. But, as Sri Aurobindo commented:

Happily, we have been able to bring it to a point where the writer's central idea appears, the new creation of our world by redeeming Love, - a fitting point for the faith and reason of man to pause upon at the moment of the terrible ordeal which that world is now undergoing.¹⁶

The soul of the universe was not the soul of power but the soul of Love. Love was the true divinity, the naked new-born child in the heart of man. Although crucified often, Love had always redeemed and glorified itself, and only Love could ultimately transfigure the world.

Strangely enough, during the short period of its existence the French edition of the Arya - the hard core of which consisted of Mirra's French translations of Sri Aurobindo's contributions to it - had succeeded in making an impact on intellectual circles in wartime France, while the English edition was received without much enthusiasm in Bengal. Commenting on this paradoxical phenomenon, Sri Aurobindo wrote rather outspokenly to Motilal Roy:

The intellect of Bengal has been so much fed on chemical tablets of thought and hot-spiced foods that anything strong and substantial is indigestible to it...

The Arya presents a new philosophy and a new method of Yoga and everything that is new takes time to get a hearing .... In France it has been very much appreciated by those who are seeking the truth. because these peole are not shut up in old and received ideas, they are on the look-out for something which will change the inner and outer life.¹⁷

What, then, was the whole aim of the Arya's educative endeavour? Sri Aurobindo was not engaged in just "man-making", but rather in "divine man-making", a far more revolutionary adventure but well within the scope of the Earth's evolutionary purpose. Sri Aurobindo couldn't, he admitted, "speak plainly yet my whole message", but in its broad outlines his message should be clear enough:

My present teaching is that the world is preparing for a new progress, a new evolution. Whatever race, whatever country seizes on the lines of that new

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evolution and fulfils it, will be the leader of humanity. In the Arya I state the thought upon which this new evolution will be based as I see it, and the method of Yoga by which it can be accomplished. ¹⁸

The opportunity before Man - especially in India - was to respond adequately to the challenge of the new philosophy ("in reality it is only the old brought back again, but so old that it has been forgotten"), and carry out in the fulness of time a radical three-part programme:

(1) for each man as an individual to change himself into the future type of divine humanity, the men of the new Satyayuga which is striving to be born; (2) to evolve a race of such men to lead humanity, and (3) to call an humanity to the path under the lead of these pioneers and this chosen race.

And, of course, "to do in the right way what Germany thought of doing in the wrong way"! Then came the note of caution, with which the letter concluded:

While the war continues, nothing great can be done, we are fettered on every side. Afterwards things will change and we must wait for the development.¹⁹

V

The coming of the New Year meant immediately no great change in the schedule of Mirra's daily activities. The calm within was matched by the quiet but unceasing work without. There was the Arya to see through the press and despatch to the subscribers and the agencies after obtaining the necessary visas; there were the meetings of the New Idea, and there were sessions of readings with Amrita and others; and there were, above all, the evening meetings at Sri Aurobindo's place, and the Sunday evening meetings at hers. The news of the War - now terribly disturbing, now guardedly reassuring - filtered to her deeper consciousness compelling, now a prayer for help, now a word of thanksgiving. She knew that she would soon have to return to France notwithstanding her commitment to the cause of L'Idée Nouvelle and the Arya, and surely some Divinity was shaping her ends. In the meantime, she could only surrender to the Lord in unquestioning trustfulness and total readiness to accept whatever might come to her.

On the morning of 2 January 1915, Mirra speculates on the variability of the New Year "according to the latitude, the climate, the customs", which makes it no more than a happy convention. Even so, the phenomenon of cyclical recurrence may have a meaning of its own with its attendant results. Then why not "profit by it to will with renewed ardour that this symbol should become a reality and the deplorable things of the

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past give place to things which must exist in all glory?" ²⁰ In particular, why should not people make it an occasion for renewed and redoubled efforts to outgrow their native limitations - to minimise the wrong tendencies, to maximise the right ones - and march towards perfection in thought, speech, feeling and action? To be mediator, collaborator and creator were indeed Mirra's sovereign roles, but then anybody - everybody - has to play those roles in one way or another, however humble his situation and 'however obscure his motivations and actions. It is the function of Yoga to clarify the understanding, to perfect the instrument, to tighten up the self­discipline, and thereby to hasten the realisation; and it is the mission of the Yogin-seer to give clear direction to the movement of evolution, to methodise Nature as it were, and to accelerate the progress towards the goal. In such Yogin-seers the Eternal consents to the compulsions of terrestrial life, and as they are at once with us and yet beyond us, they are enabled to fulfil their part in the marvellous drama of divine evolution ­ "divine man-making" - from earth-nature to supernature.

Mirra was such a Yogin-seer and creative mediatrix, and willingly and readily she had responded to the Eternal's call and transformed herself from a passive and contemplative to an executive and realising agent. The popular fallacy that mystics are unpractical dreamers has been refuted time and again by the impressive life-careers of many of the mystics themselves. As Dr. Inge has. pointed out,

all the great mystics have been energetic and influential, and their business capacity is specially noted in a curiously large number of cases. For instance, Plotinus was often in request as a guardian and trustee; St. Bernard showed great gifts as an organiser; St. Teresa, as a founder of convents and administrator, gave evidence of extraordinary practical ability .... The mystic is not as a rule ambitious, but I do not think he often shows incapacity for practical life, if he consents to mingle in it. ²¹

It is not in the least surprising therefore that Mirra should have decided energetically to meet the challenge of the phoenix-hour in the spirit of joyous combat and valiant self-confidence. As she noted in the course of her entry for 11 January:

O Lord, cutting me off from all religious joy and all spiritual ecstasy, depriving me of all freedom to concentrate exclusively upon Thee, Thou saidst to me, "Work like an ordinary man in the midst of ordinary people; learn to be nothing more than they in everything that manifests; participate in all their ways of life; for beyond all that they know, all that they are, thou carriest. within thee the torch of the eternal splendour which does not flicker, and by associating with them this is what thou wilt bring in their midst. Dost thou need to enjoy this light, so long as it radiates to all from thee? Is it necessary for thee to feel my love vibrating in thee, so long as

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thou givest it? Must thou taste fully the bliss of my presence, so long as thou canst serve as its intermediary to all?" ²²

It was but a beginning, a great beginning, and it .might start a chain of divinely ordained activities whose full scope she herself couldn't quite foresee. As she wrote down on 17 January:

Now, Lord, things have changed. The time of rest and preparation is over. ...

In a partial and limited battle, but one that is representative of the great terrestrial struggle, Thou dost put my strength, determination and courage to the test to see if I can truly be Thy servitor. If the result of the battle shows that I am worthy of being the mediator of Thy regenerating action, Thou wilt extend the field of action. And if I always live up to what Thou expectest of me, a day will come, O Lord, when Thou wilt be upon earth, and the whole earth will rise against Thee. But Thou wilt take the earth in Thy arms and the earth will be transformed. ²³

From apparently small beginnings - a study. group, a Review, a modest programme of action - a snowballing movement could be generated, there could result the needed transvaluation of values, the definitive courage to take the quantum leap into the future - when, suddenly, all the prejudices of the past, all the darkness of the vested interests, all the tamas of somnolent humanity would make a last-minute desperate stand. But that would also be the time for the cracking of the 'cosmic egg' and the triumphant emergence of the New Life, a transformed Life fondled and blessed by the Divine.

The next day, 18 January, Mirra indicates the configuration of her hopes in somewhat more precise terms:

In this immense heroic struggle, in this sublime struggle of love against hatred, of justice against injustice, of obedience to Thy supreme law against revolt, may I gradually be able to make humanity worthy of a still sublimer peace in which, all internal dissensions having ceased, the whole effort of man may be united for the attainment of a more and more perfect and integral realisation of Thy divine Will and Thy progressive ideal.²⁴

The integral Yogin will refuse to be slavishly bound by mere mental formulas, rigid conventions, mechanical forms and stratified codes. "Truth is eternally beyond all we can think or say of it", and the highest concepts, the subtlest ideas, the noblest exhortations, when they are but mechanically repeated, are apt to "lose their freshness after a time" and become valueless. The integral Yogin will therefore mark his advance by cantering across the wreckage of the past habits and deadening conventions. He will be for a sterling dynamism that rides rough-shod over all forms of resistance and inertia, heading straight to the goal, neither wave

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resting on the way, but pressing on till the gates of felicity have been stormed and entered. On 24 January, about three weeks before her departure for France, Mirra receives the clear direction yet once more: "Turn thy look towards the earth," and on 15 February she has the experience of a total spring-cleaning of her instruments of body, vital and mind, and she can hear the Lord's benediction: &quote of all that is dust." ²⁵ Mirra has gone through the ordeal of the primordial Agni, or the Fire of Truth, and she has emerged pure and "resplendent with a dazzling light", ready to face all eventualities.

It is evident therefore that Mirra's coming to Pondicherry and close association with Sri Aurobindo were to lead to several fruitful results in the Yoga of "divine man-making" and earth-transformation. The Arya had been launched on 15 August 1914, partly because Sri Aurobindo had already won his way to certain spiritual realisations that could sustain a new world-view, and partly because the Richards had wanted him to share his visions of future possibility with thinking people all over the world. But Richard had to go, and Mirra, freeing herself however reluctantly from her editorial and managerial cares, had also to go, leaving Sri Aurobindo to carry the whole burden alone. Years later, Sri Aurobindo was to write to Dilip:

And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher - although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. ... How I managed to do it and why? First, because Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review - and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, because I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher ²⁶

VI

Ever since Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in 1910 , the British Government in India had tried by any means whatsoever to get him back into their clutches. Kidnapping was tried, and failed - mainly because 'Mony, Bejoy, Nolini and the other young men were always an armour of protection to Sri Aurobindo. Pressure was put upon the French authorities at Pondicherry to invoke a law that required a guarantee by five prominent local citizens certifying to the character of the refugees. This was checkmated when "the five noble men" (Rassendran. Zir Naidu, Le Beau, Murugesa Chettiar and Shankar Chettiar) readily furnished the guarantee,

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enabling Sri Aurobindo, Subramania Bharati, V. V. S. Aiyar and the rest to remain undisturbed in Pondicherry.²⁷ Again, there was a move to get the French Government to agree to an exchange of Pondicherry for some British possession in India or elsewhere. This was foiled too, and the new French President, M. Poincaré, was firm on this issue. There was, then, the British attempt to get a warrant of extradition against Rashbehari Bose, a revolutionary who was supposed to be hiding in Chandernagore Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy immediately and asked him to take steps to defeat the British move, lest it should become a precedent for similar warrants of extradition against the political exiles in Pondicherry:

This concerns me and my friends, because it is an attack on the security of our position. If this kind of thing is allowed to go unchallenged then any of us may at any moment be extradited on a trumped-up charge by the British police. ²⁸

Thus both before 1914 and during the War years, Sri Aurobindo's harbourage in Pondicherry was a very precarious affair, and needed timely attention or intervention from various quarters. And it was in this context too that Mirra's coming to Pondicherry was to prove a help and an insurance. There was in particular Mirra's own brother, Matteo Alfassa, whose help Sri Aurobindo was to acknowledge openly in 1939 before a group of his disciples:

The Mother's brother, after retiring from Governorship in Africa, has been doing a lot of things .... He did a great deal in Africa, but other people got the benefit. It is men like him who built up France and also made it possible for the Ashram to continue here. Otherwise I might have had to go to France, or else to America ....

When the Mother came here and I met her, her brother got interested. These things look like accidents, but they are not. There is a guidance behind these events. ²⁹

The coming of Richard in 1910 , and of Mirra also in 1914, thus opened up avenues of sympathetic communication with influential quarters in France as an effective counterweight to the untiring and unscrupulous British moves against Sri Aurobindo. And so he was able to remain undisturbed in Pondicherry, and the Arya was able to come out regularly throughout the War and after, even when the Richards had returned to France; also, a

* Poincaré, Raymond (1860 -1934), a conservative nationalist statesman who held numerous cabinet posts from 1890 to 1906. Premier and foreign minister in 1912, he was elected the 9th President of France (1913-20). When Premier again (1922-24 and 1926-29), he foresaw and sought to prevent the rebirth of German militarism. It is now known that in 1912 and 1913 Sri Aurobindo had put the force of his spiritual will, Aishwarya, to support Poincaré in his election. (See also Sri Aurobindo: Archives & Research, December 1986, p.124 and April 1987, pp. 89,90)

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solid base came to be established at the very spot where the ancient seat of learning and spirituality, Vedapuri, was believed to have flourished with legendary association going back to sage Agastya himself.

VII

Sri Aurobindo had cut his connection with active politics when he left for Chandernagore in February 1910 , and this had been further confirmed when he arrived at Pondicherry in April 1910 . As he wrote to the Hindu of Madras on 7 November 1910 : "I had purposely retired here in order to pursue my Yogic sadhana undisturbed by political action and pursuit .... I have since lived here as a religious recluse." ³⁰ In a subsequent letter (20 July 1911) to the Hindu, Sri Aurobindo had to reply to certain slanderous accusations against him in the Madras Times, and affirm that he was but "a simple householder practising Yoga without Sannyas", and not a dangerous revolutionary "masquerading ... as an ascetic". ³¹While he was thus removed from the old scenes of hectic political action as also from his former colleagues, his profound interest in India's liberation from foreign rule had remained, albeit quiescent most of the time. Any time this might have led to a deeper involvement with predictable consequences. There is, for example, the letter to Motilal Roy of April 1914, in which Sri Aurobindo seems to say that, in a certain eventuality, " ... if God wills, I will take the field. " ³²Sri Aurobindo would henceforth direct all his time and energy only to the Yoga of the Life Divine for the Earth and Man. And by shifting to France, Mirra would be in a position to safeguard the interests of Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry so that his work - the Arya, the 'Yoga of "divine man-making" - could continue without the chronic threats of dislocation or suppression. With his little group of dedicated young men, Sri Aurobindo would be enabled to prepare at Pondicherry the granite foundation of the future edifice of "the divine Centre" which must become manifest one day and enact man's divinisation and the earth's transfiguration and progressively realise the apocalyptic vision:

The intimacy of God was everywhere,

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

Distance could not divide, Time could not change.

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,

The throb of one adoration's single bliss

In a rapt ether of undying love. ³³

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CHAPTER 10

Return to France

I

After a modest celebration of her birthday (she had completed thirty-seven years) on 21 February 1915, Mirra left for France the next day. She boarded the Japanese boat, the Kamo Maru, at Colombo, and the voyage was attended with all the uncertainties and dangers of the global War. Was she happy? was she sad? - she did not know. The surface mind was a blank for the nonce, it was as though she had been projected into a dark tunnel. Pondicherry and what that sanctified spot contained were left behind; but was all Pondicherry blotted out? Impossible! Where was she being carried - what clouds were they - what hideous obscurity loomed ahead of her? On 3 March 1915, she finds the apt words to describe her anguished and uncertain mental state:

Solitude, a harsh, intense solitude, and always this strong impression of having been flung headlong into a hell of darkness!. .. Sometimes ... I cannot prevent my total submission from taking on a hue of melancholy, and the calm and mute converse with the Master within is transformed for a moment into an invocation that almost supplicates, "O Lord, what have I done that Thou hast thrown me thus into the sombre Night?" But immediately the aspiration rises, still more ardent, "Spare this being all weakness; suffer it to be the docile and clear-eyed instrument of Thy work, whatever that work may be."

For the moment the clear-sightedness is lacking; never was the future more veiled.¹

Again, she writes on the next day:

Always the same harsh solitude ....

Each turn of the propeller upon the deep ocean seems to drag me farther away from my true destiny, the one best expressing the divine Will; each passing hour seems to plunge me again deeper into that past with which I had broken, sure of being called to new and vaster realisations; everything appears to draw me back to a state of things totally contrary to the life of my soul which reigns uncontested over outer activities.²

Does it mean she feared that the return to France might prove to be a relapse into her pre-1914 life with its particular schedule of activities and settled arcs of association? Was she apprehensive that the marvellous gains of her Yoga at Pondicherry might suffer some attenuation or lack of lustre in France? And what exactly was her "true destiny"? Did she run any danger of missing it altogether? Why had she entered that desert of

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negation? Was it the discipline of the Dark Night of the Soul? Why must she experience that feeling of spiritual destitution - all that emptiness, the pang, the lethargy of her whole being?

But no! For one thing, Mirra has no doubt that, appearances notwithstanding, love is not banished from the earth, for even "the darkest shadows become almost translucent to let its streams flow through and the intensest pain is transformed into potent bliss". Secondly, although "tomorrow lies dark and unreadable", and although the Divine seems hardly to be visible anywhere, the reality is quite different. It is as though Mirra is inly so perfectly charged with Light and Love that she can now descend to the depths of darkness, and carry there the Light and Love of the Invisible and Sovereign Witness:

Thou dost plunge me, O Lord, into the thickest darkness; this means that Thou hast established Thy light so firmly in me that Thou knowest it will stand this perilous ordeal. Otherwise wouldst Thou have chosen me for the descent into the vortex of this hell as Thy torch-bearer?³

Mirra knows that she is the one chosen to scour the depths, and hers is the "God's Labour" to track evil to its source, and although she is a little diffident, she also knows that it is the Divine that is using her, and the Divine will see her through. She has only to surrender to the Divine with the total trust of a child as it runs to the arms of its mother.

The bleakness, the diffidence and the sense of precipitate retreat into the past are but a temporary phase; and, besides, Mirra enacts the plight of all mankind and all Nature, their gesture of desperation and cry of agony, only to sting Him promptly into the right response.

For two or three more days the sovereign self-luminous will is seemingly in abeyance. The mind seems restless, and instead of the old "sweet mental silence", there is the active mind indulging in its pastimes of analysis, classification, appraisal, choice and constant reaction. "I am exiled from every spiritual happiness," but Mirra will not wholly acquiesce in this predicament. Nor will she lose herself in the illimitable Permanent within, for that way of escape is not for her. She prepares rather to wait on God with patience and humility:

No flight out of the world! The burden of its darkness and ugliness must be borne to the end even if all divine succour seems to be withdrawn. I must remain in the bosom of the Night and walk on without compass, without beacon-light, without inner guide.⁴

Come what may, she will face it out; she will wade through Hell if need be, but always relying on the Lord - for has she, in fact, any existence except in relation to the Divine?

Next morning (8 March), there is a perceptible change of mood. Superficially Mirra seems to move from a state of the Everlasting Nay to

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that of the Centre of Indifference: "For the most part the condition is one of calm and profound indifference; the being feels neither desire nor repulsion, neither enthusiasm nor depression, neither joy nor sorrow," The pull, "from time to time", is still towards sorrow, anguished isolation spiritual destitution, an identification with "the despairing appeal of Earth abandoned by the Divine". But there is a lurch in the opposite direction as well, for at the heart of the negation there is "an infinite sweetness in which suffering and felicity are closely wedded". Fare forward, voyager! There is nothing to fear.

II

There is a gap of six weeks in the published version of Mirra's spiritual diary - from 8 March written on board the Kamo Maru to 19 April written at Lunel. She had reached France already, and not desiring to stay in war­ embattled Paris - with all the ominous 'quiet on the western front' and the hell-hole trenches not many miles away - Mirra retired to more peaceful Lunel, in the south of France. The agonies and anxieties during the voyage, the experience of wartime actualities in France that far exceeded all anticipation and hearsay, the peremptory dislocation of civilian life, the poisonous creepers of the war psychosis, the rake's progress of scarcity, and the unending roll-call of casualties, all made a concerted attack on Mirra's health, and she had a serious breakdown. According to Nirodbaran, "Her nerves had been shattered .... Her condition had become very critical; she just managed to write a few lines to Sri Aurobindo, but though the letter did not reach him, she was cured by him. It took several months to build up the lost health.⁵ But notwithstanding the enforced inactivity of the body, the compensating resilience of her nature only redoubled her occult intervention near and far. In 1947 she gave some talks apropos of her Prayers and Meditations. According to A. B. Purani's notes of these talks, the Mother said, explaining her prayer of 19 April 1915:

The prayer refers to an experience I had when I was not physically well and was in fact narrowly saved from death. I had an inflammation of the nerves.

I was lying in an easy-chair, in front of a garden. I saw that the spiritual power was still active in me: I could go on with occult experiments in spite of the illness. I used to concentrate on things and persons and circum­ stances and wanted to see if the power worked. It worked very well on the mental and vital planes. Then I broadened the field of activity. I could go on doing my work in various parts of France and America and other places. I could clearly see the faces of the persons worked upon. They could be made to do what they by themselves could not. These were controlled experiments.

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I could see that nothing could stop the work: even without my body the work could go on.

Wherever the call was, I could attend. People often appeal to a higher force. The appeals sometimes come to me. During the Second World War many appeals came and there was always a helping answer.⁶

What is clear is that despite the near-paralysis of her body, Mirra was able with infinite freedom to influence men and events all the world over through occult means.

"All external circumstances have changed," she wrote in her diary on 19th April, which makes it impossible for work on the physical plane to be done as ardently desired. What has happened? The physical being, far from accomplishing the transformation, is only seized with dull impassivity, The constructing mind has recognised its mistake and surrendered to the Divine Will. The vital is both contained and contented. In the result, on the one hand there is an inner flooding of light, love and peace; on the other hand, the impression that outer facts are a falsehood persists and the body "despite its indisputable goodwill, is so profoundly shaken that it cannot manage to regain its equilibrium and health".

Has all the past life any relevance for the present? Has the phantasmagoria of the outer existence any true validity? Isn't it all a shadow-play of inconsequence, no more than the stuff that dreams are made of? Deep at the core of her being, she enjoys a puissance and amplitude of freedom and an infinite benevolence of understanding:

But this earth itself is strange to it, and as it is not aware of anything else except the Eternal Silence, all life that has form appears remote and almost unreal to it.⁷

Mirra's problem is that she is both physically imprisoned and ineffective and psychically wide-ranging and all-powerful. Which is the Reality? And which is the illusive Appearance? Her own comment in this context is very suggestive:

All this gives the feeling of a sort of a void full of light, peace, immensity, eluding all form and all definition. It is the Nought, but a Nought which is real and can last eternally .... ⁸

And the result of it all is that, divorced or withdrawn from the body as it were, Mirra's individual consciousness has merged with the universal or cosmic consciousness, making nonsense of the fret and fever and hectic movements of the phenomenal world.

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III

The meditation for 24 May 1915, although coming more than a month later, is actually linked up with earlier entries. Only now Mirra is able fully to size up the earlier paradoxical experiences of utter physical helplessness and glorious occult effectivity. With her body as if chained to a chair, she had nevertheless travelled widely in the occult countries and from there influenced men and events on the earth, in all this of course acting solely as the instrument of the Divine Will. Before this happened at the time of her illness, she would be either lost in the Infinite or she could direct only the activities of her own body which she thought was "a sort of bondage within too narrow a frame". But the tremendous change had unpredictably overtaken her:

Suddenly Thou didst put an end to this disorder; Thou didst liberate the mind from its last fetters; Thou didst teach it to be freely active through all forms and no longer exclusively through those it considered till then as its own .... ⁹

Earlier, it had been easier to act in a wide-ranging way upon the vital of other persons but her mental had resisted the Divine intervention, and had not "yet learnt how to animate, organise and illuminate consciously all lives without distinction". But now, since Lunel, the old barriers had been removed. And this plenitude of experience had continued day after day till "the new conquest" became a settled fact. The object of this development was simply to make Mirra able to pour herself into the life, thought and love of the earth and its inhabitants, "and thus, through a total identification with the manifested world, to be able to intervene with full power in its transformations".

But this was only one side of the story. Mirra was also "by a perfect surrender to the Supreme Principle, to become aware of the Truth and the eternal Will that manifests it". She was thus at once one with the Principle of Being and with the Process of Becoming; in other words, she was the perfect link, the perfect intermediary, the perfect paraclete:

This is how the individual being can be the conscious mediator between the absolute Truth and the manifested universe and intervene in the slow, uncertain march of the Yoga of Nature in order to give it the swiftness, intensity and sureness of the divine Yoga.

This is how in certain periods the entire terrestrial life seems to cross miraculously over stages which at other times would require thousands of years to traverse. ¹⁰

Mirra adds that, on an objective review, her identification with the Supreme Principle was complete and final, whereas her conscious identification with the multiplicity of the manifested world was as yet "intermittent

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though growing more and more frequent and lasting".¹¹ And whenever the two-way traffic of identification was equally balanced and effective, it was in such moments "that the present work begins to be accomplished" .

As we saw in chapter 2, section iv, around 1905 Mirra had a profound experience when she was in the countryside near the sea. There was the garden with a lawn, "a fine place, very quiet, very silent". There she used to relax, lying silently on the grass flat on her stomach, with her elbows on the ground. One day, all on a sudden, she had an incandescent experience:

...all the life of that Nature, all the life of that region between the subtle-physical and the most material vital, which is very living in plants and in Nature, all that region became all at once, suddenly, without any transition. absolutely living, intense, conscious, marvellous .... ¹²

There was an obliteration of the distinction between life and not-life, and indeed it was a blaze of life everywhere, and the entire spectrum of Nature was a splendour and an interwoven unity.

In a unitary universe that plays at plurality, what holds all together ­ preventing their falling apart, scattering and disintegrating - is the Principle or Power or Grace at the heart of everything. It follows that in such a universe - which is more like Indra's network of pearls - the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere; any single pearl in the network contains or reflects all the other; any of the constituent elements could, with the right concentration of force, become the transforming chamber of the rest. Such is the law of change and transformation in a universe built on the bootstrap model. But in actual practice, however, it is given to only a very few - call them the 'elect', the 'avatars', if you like - to actuate such change through their own exertions. Mirra was certainly one of those elect, one such avatar, even as Sri Aurobindo was another.

IV

Mirra and Sri Aurobindo had of course their respective burdens, worries and fulfilments, and there was, besides, the background of strong spiritual affiliations and occult communications. The same divine ministry was being done, with one end of the axis at Pondicherry, and the other end in France. Soon after her arrival in France, she may have written to him something about the prevailing conditions in the world. The War had been gaining in horror: the Germans used poison gas on the Western Front; the sinking of Leon Gambetta by submarine action meant the loss of 700 lives, and of the Lusitania, 1500 lives. Presumably, there was also a suggestion from Mirra that instead of constantly having to counter British-engineered moves to have him arrested or extradited to British India, Sri Aurobindo

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with his close associates should shift his residence to a place which the long arm of the British couldn't easily reach; a harbourage in Africa, for example, or America? It seems to be in reply to such a letter that Sri Aurobindo wrote to her on 6 May 1915:

All is always for the best, but it is sometimes from the external point of view an awkward best. ...

The whole earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations and I am sceptical of finding any place where the clash of the struggle will not pursue us. In any case, an effective retirement does not seem to be my destiny. I must remain in touch with the world until I have either mastered adverse circumstances or succumbed or carried on the struggle between the spiritual and physical so far as I am destined to carry it on ....

One needs to have a calm heart, a settled will, entire self-abnegation and the eyes constantly fixed on the beyond to live undiscouraged in times like these which are truly a period of universal decomposition. For myself, I follow the Voice and look neither to right nor to left of me. The result is not mine and hardly at all now even the labour. ¹³

Sri Aurobindo may have heard soon afterwards from Mirra, making a reference to her Lunel experiences; either she sent a copy of her meditation or a letter giving its gist. At Lunel her health had broken down, and while she still enjoyed inner felicity and fulfilment, her body could not partake of it, and "this earth itself is strange to it". It was probably this that elicited from Sri Aurobindo on 20 May a cryptic reply presenting in atomic form the entire dynamics of Integral Yoga:

Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the Yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, "Heaven and Earth equal and one".¹⁴

Mirra's diary-entry on 31 July was obviously written after the receipt of Sri Aurobindo's letter, for the words find an echo in the meditation:

The heavens are definitely conquered, and nothing and nobody could have the power of wresting them from me. But the conquest of the earth is still to be made; it is being carried on in the very heart of the turmoil; and even when achieved, it will still be only a relative one; the victories in this world are but stages leading progressively to still more glorious victories.... ¹⁵

Mirra had said in her earlier meditation that the Yoga in the world of manifestation, the world of an infinity of material forms, was but "intermittent though growing more and more frequent and lasting". Not until the joy of the earth becomes equal and one with the joy of heaven, the bliss of Brahman, not until then can the Yoga be said to have completely fulfilled itself.

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But this earth, alas, is full of ugliness, inertia, darkness, perversity, misery. Mend this earth how one may, it but seems to get worse and worse; a revolution, a breakthrough, is necessary. The old world must die, so that a new world may be born:

Thou hast said that the earth would die, and it will die to its old ignorance.

Thou hast said that the earth would live, and it will live in the renewal of Thy power. ¹⁶

V

A death, - and then a rebirth. The wartime world - the whole world - was engaged in enacting the drama of Winter preceding the dawn of Spring. It was an intestine struggle, it was an embrace of death. The birth of a new world. like the birth of a child, is attended with pain, uncertainty, almost a death! But there are the joys of parturition as well, the anticipation of motherhood, the leap of a new life-adventure. It is in this context very striking that Sri Aurobindo should have written to Mirra on 28 July, three days before her own diary-entry:

Everything internal is ripe or ripening, but there is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make a very appreciable advance (somewhat like the trench warfare in Europe), the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world, that resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks .... And if there were not the strength and Ananda within, it would be harassing and disgusting work; but the eye of knowledge looks beyond and sees that it is only a protracted episode. ¹⁷

Mirra's meditation of 31 July, praying for the hour of the death of the old order and the emergence of the new may have reached Sri Aurobindo by the beginning of September. The eager expectancy of the simultaneity of death and new life, the high hope that the new forces would drown "in their sovereign floods all that persists" with their adhesion to the past, the clear anticipation of the Next Future with its splendour of divine manifestation, all this asked for a response from Sri Aurobindo. But perhaps his vision was too baffled and obscured by opposing possibilities, for in his letter of 16 September he doesn't seem to be very categorical:

Nothing seems able to disturb the immobility of things and all that is active outside our own selves is a sort of welter of dark and sombre confusion from which nothing formed or luminous can emerge. It is a singular condition of the world, the very definition of chaos with the superficial form of the old world resting apparently intact on the surface. But a chaos of long disintegration or of some early new birth? It is the thing that is

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being fought out from day to day, but as yet without any approach to a decision.¹⁸

So far as the War was concerned, this was certainly true; more and more nations were being drawn into its insane operations, and the tentacles of the War were to leave no spot on the earth quite unaffected. Trench warfare had created a maddening situation of abnormal normalcy. The Allies and the Central Powers were at grips with one another in numerous theatres of war, and on land, sea and ultimately even in the air. America too was to be drawn into the War, the Russian front was to collapse, Lenin was to lead the October 1917 Revolution during 'the ten days that shook the world', - and thus war, civil war, revolution, reaction were all to scream 'Havoc!' and unleash the hounds of confusion. In describing the world of 1915 and after as "the very definition of chaos", Sri Aurobindo was at once excruciatingly accurate and astonishingly prophetic.

But, then, the outer struggle has its prototype in the invisible occult worlds, where really things are first decreed to be later manifested on the earth. Like Mirra, Sri Aurobindo too could take a close view of the War in the occult regions: rival embodied ambitions, rival vitalistic forces, criss­crossing rival ideations, the regiments of Asuric sparks pitted against the column of divine Fire, the squadrons of negation giving battle to the formations of the future - and no doubt there was a Divinity shaping our ends, but as yet, in all the blaze and roar and dust and mist of the fleeting moments, even Sri Aurobindo couldn't as yet firmly predict the exact configuration of the immediate future.

VI

For over three months after 31 July, there is no entry in the Prayers and Meditations. It seems likely, however, there were some belonging to this period among those destroyed later, after the selection had been made by Sri Aurobindo with a view to publication. Before the next entry dated 2 November, Mirra had shifted her residence, this time to Paris; and there is heard a new note of buoyancy. A quick review of her past life, an objective assessment of the rhythm of past happenings, leaves her on the whole satisfied and happy: "Intense, complex, crowded, the past lived again in a flash, having lost nothing of its savour, its richness." Underneath the variety and complexity of the experiences there had run a single thread: the integral seeking of the Divine. What though there had been such a tally of struggle, turmoil and effort? They were but "jewels of price" offered at the altar of her heart "as a living holocaust":

Errors have become stepping-stones, the blind gropings conquests. Thy glory transforms defeats into victories of eternity, and all the shadows have

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fled before Thy radiant light.

It is Thou who wert the motive and the goal; Thou art the worker and work.¹⁹

Her comment on this prayer on 7 October 1947, partly by way of explication, has thus been recorded by Purani:

The True Consciousness had already been reached. It was only the physical consciousness that now reached the complete identification with the Divine. It happened in Paris.

Now all the sense-experiences were offered to the Divine - all the movements of life - in a single gesture, and not like the ordinary consciousness giving up one thing after another. It was a total holocaust ­ the offering not of this or that movement of life but Life itself! Then I found that everything had undergone a change.

When there is no separate individuality, the world appears quite different. It is the little ego that does not allow one to know things truly.²⁰

The same mood prevailed during the days following, but it was wartime Paris all the same: unreal city, caught in the coils of an unknown fatality. And behind the scenes there was also the 'locked struggle' between the steady pressure of the spiritual and the dogged resistance of the material:

For the last two days the earth seems to have been going through a decisive crisis; it seems that the great formidable contest between material resistances and spiritual powers is nearing its conclusion .... ²¹

The papers no doubt talked of exciting happenings, of offensives and counter-offensives, of withdrawals and forced marches, of pinchbeck men of destiny and latter-day Napoleon Bonaparte's - but these 'men of the moment' were but so many pathetic thistle downs at the mercy of every random gust of wind. But the people's sufferings in the mass were a whole Himalaya of pain, and yet instinct with a "sovereign beauty ... in the depth of this outer anguish". Perhaps this is the needed cracking of the 'human egg' for new life to step forth into the light of day. And so Mirra raises her voice in prayer in the name and on behalf of dear sorrowing earth awaiting the new Dawn:

This sorrowful world kneels before Thee, O Lord, in mute supplication; Matter, tortured, takes shelter at Thy feet, its last and only refuge; and imploring Thee thus, it adores Thee, Thee whom it neither knows nor understands! Its prayer rises like the cry of one in a last agony; what is disappearing feels vaguely the possibility of living once again in Thee; the earth awaits Thy decree in a grandiose prostration. Listen, listen: its voice implores and supplicates Thee ....

Death has passed, vast and solemn, and all was hushed in a religious silence while it was passing by.

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A superhuman beauty has appeared upon earth.²²

This was no naturalistic reportage; it needed more than the naked human eyes to face the Sun of the unfolding Future and take the right measure of the rare gift of vision. But it meant for Mirra-- especially in those days outwardly so dreary and denuded of all hope - a shot in the arm of her faith, and a fresh incentive for her divine ministry.

VII

About twenty days after, on 26 November 1915, Mirra had yet another experience of integral and total identification with the earth-consciousness. "In this experience the mind did not participate," she told a group of disciples on 8 October 1947, and added:

I was in a house in Paris It was an atelier, a pavilion with a big garden. The time was evening In my mind there was no preconception .... I became completely identified with the earth consciousness .... I had no idea of the symbols before the experience.²³

Suddenly the adamantine doors of separativity flew open, the congealed glaciers of isolation cracked and melted, the massed clouds of Unknowing sprang apart. It was the phoenix hour of the Sunrise of realisation:

The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity.

Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew in greatness progressively, methodically, breaking down every barrier, shattering every obstacle, that it might contain and manifest a force and a power which increased ceaselessly in immensity and intensity. It was as a progressive dilatation of the cells until there was a complete identification with the earth: the body of the awakened consciousness was the terrestrial globe moving harmoniously in ethereal space. And the consciousness knew that its global body was thus moving in the arms of the universal Being, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to It in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe and one with it: the consciousness became the consciousness of the universe, immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity. The consciousness of the universe sprang towards the Divine in an ardent aspiration, a perfect surrender, and it saw in the splendour of the immaculate Light the radiant Being standing on a many-headed serpent whose body coiled infinitely around the universe. The Being in an eternal gesture of triumph mastered and created at one and the same time the serpent and the universe that

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issued from him; erect on the serpent he dominated it with all his victorious might, and the same gesture that crushed the hydra enveloping the universe gave it eternal birth. Then the consciousness became this Being and perceived that its form was changing once more; it was absorbed into something which was no longer a form and yet contained all forms, something which, immutable, sees, - the Eye, the Witness. And what It sees, is. Then this last vestige of form disappeared and the consciousness itself was absorbed into the Unutterable, the Ineffable.

The return towards the consciousness of the individual body took place very slowly in a constant and invariable splendour of Light and Power and Felicity and Adoration, by successive gradations, but directly, without passing again through the universal and terrestrial forms. And it was as if the modest corporeal form had become the direct and immediate vesture, without any intermediary, of the supreme and eternal Witness.²⁴

It was on receipt of this vivid recordation of her mystic experience that Sri Aurobindo wrote to her on 31 December:

The experience you have described is Vedic in the real sense, though not one which would easily be recognised by the modern systems of Yoga which call themselves Vedic. It is the union of the "Earth" of the Veda and Purana with the divine Principle, an earth which is said to be above our earth, that is to say, the physical being and consciousness of which the world and the body are only images. But the modern Yogas hardly recognise the possibility of a material union with the Divine.²⁵

What was remarkable and distinctive about the experience was that her consciousness, having merged in the Divine, came back directly to the body. As she told her disciples on 8 October 1947, Sri Aurobindo also explained to her that the experience was "a very high one because the consciousness came back to the body directly - that is, the individual being",

By its very nature, a profound mystic experience defies description in material categories. A mystic experience is a leap beyond everyday actuality, and it is a seeing, hearing, living, not in the way of our humdrum existence, but in another order of intensity altogether. The attempt to recall the contours of such an experience seldom succeeds to any appreciable extent. The mind is baffled, the words fail. All attempts to evaluate or analyse a genuine mystical experience like Mirra's are bound to be a good deal frustrating and perhaps even misleading. At least, one should approach the task with proper humility.

Basically, Mirra's experience of 26 November 1915 was an adventure of consciousness. First, her whole being felt the joy of immersion in "a supreme and vast felicity", then there came "a sacred trembling" in the different parts of her body, and the body as a whole: she experienced a

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progressive and methodical transcendence of all personal limits, an all­shattering surge of glory, a freedom and puissance incommensurable. There was "a progressive dilatation" of the very cells, as though the; comprehended and were identified with all the cells of the entire earth. It was as if the body had filled, and fused with, the earth, and was orbiting in ethereal space. Second, her consciousness knew that, already united with the great globe itself, she was now rocked in the arms of the universal Being "in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss", Third, in a further leap of expansion and fusion, she now felt herself to be one with the universe itself: "the consciousness became the consciousness of the universe immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity.': Fourth, in yet another race for extension, she with the body of the universe as her tenement reached for the Divine "in a perfect surrender", and saw "the radiant Being" who stands on the hood of a many-headed serpent whose coils encircle the universe. Fifth, her consciousness became this Being whose form changed once more into something which contains all forms and is also beyond Form. Finally "this last vestige of form disappeared and the consciousness itself was absorbed in the Unutterable, the Ineffable". The return journey from the Transcendent to "the consciousness of the individual body" was effected - as if by a chord line - without pausing at the intermediate steps of the universal and the terrestrial. It was as though the Transcendent and the Cosmic had established direct 'hot lines' with the individualised and human Mirra, now an accredited vessel of "the supreme and eternal Witness".

VIII

It is not of course to be expected that what was experienced as the apotheosis of a mystic movement of consciousness should be the final fullness of her spiritual realisation. What she had won on 26 November was apparently the result of her own effort, her adventurous journey towards the Alone, the All. And now, in some of the subsequent meditations, Mirra calls upon the Alone, the All, the Real, the Divine, to come down to her and set right her limitations, and to cleanse the rusts that may have gathered, and to fill her once more with the power, the peace and the glory.

In the entry for 15 January 1916, Mirra affirms her desire to be entirely "identified" with God, who is really "the personal form of the Transcendent Eternal, Cause, Source and Reality of my individual being". Through the centuries and millenniums, she has been "slowly and subtly kneaded" to befit ultimate total identification with - or absorption in - the Divine. There has been astonishing progress, yet it is still short of the desired stable perfection. What is the difference between Mirra the aspiring individual

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and the Divine who is the goal of her aspirations? One may say, they are the same, except that one is the flawed reflection below of the other, the immaculate splendour above, rather like the two birds mentioned in the Rig Veda, beautiful of wing, friends and comrades, clinging to a common tree but while "one eats the sweet fruit, the other regards him and eats not.²⁶ But they are the same bird really, and the flawed bird below could still become the golden bird above, and the two merge in a final identity. Even so Mirra addresses the Lord:

Thou art myself divested of all error and limitation. Have I become integrally this true self in all the atoms of my being? Wilt Thou bring about an overwhelming transformation, or will it still be a slow action in which cell after cell must be wrested from its darkness and its limits?²⁷

A week later, she feels that the desired transformation within is going on:

Thou hast taken entire possession of this miserable instrument .... Thou art at work in each one of its cells to knead it and make it supple and enlighten it, and in the whole being, to arrange, organise and harmonise it.²⁸

The very next day, she again pleads for a hastening of the process of purification and transformation. When she refers to her body and her being as "this gross form ... a mass of limitations ... full of obscurities ... ignorant impurities", she is mainly speaking as one who has identified herself with all earth and its imperfect inhabitants. Her burdens and impurities are those that she herself has taken up to be able to lead earth and mankind to the goal of transformation and divinisation. Since the cardinal sin of human nature is "egoistic separativity", for it is this that starts the multi-pronged movement of division, confusion and disintegration, the radical need is to replace this egoistic separativity by crystalline integrality:

Lord, O Lord, take possession of Thy kingdom, illumine it with Thy eternal Presence, put an end to the cruel error in which it lives, believing itself separate from Thee, while in its reality and essence it is Thyself.

Break, break down the last resistances, consume the last impurities, blast this being if need be, but let it be transfigured²⁹

Thunder was heard indeed over the battlefields of France and Russia and Salonica and Gallipoli: there was also witnessed the cracking and the melting of the former rigid moulds of habit and convention. And, perhaps, all that violence was the needed prelude to the happier dispensation to come.

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IX

The diary-entries for 19 April and 24 May 1915, which were discussed earlier, show that although Mirra was in poor health and practically confined to an easy-chair, her consciousness, which was "freely active through all forms", influenced human beings near and far. As she later explained to a group of disciples at Pondicherry, she "could clearly see the faces of the persons worked upon" - that such "controlled experiments" were indeed feasible even when she had an inflammation of the nerves at the time. As indicated in an earlier chapter, Mirra had had occult leanings and propensities since her early years, and her tutelage under the Théons in Algeria had informed, disciplined and given clear direction to her occult inclinations and activities. Presently her arduous spiritual practices _ reverent study, meditation, prayer - had given an edge to the occult side of her life and also kept it under firm control.

The close association and collaboration with Sri Aurobindo since 29 March 1914, the sharing of dreams, aspirations and experiences, and the launching of the New Idea society, and of the Arya, must have pushed her occult preoccupations into the background, while projecting forward the all-absorbing tasks of initiating an integral change of consciousness, growing the overhead powers of consciousness up to the supramental, and bringing the Supermind to the earth-nature with a view to transforming it. Occult knowledge and occult means were to be drawn upon only when absolutely necessary.

As she notes on 24 May 1915, when her consciousness is identified with the Supreme Principle, she becomes "the faithful servant and sure intermediary of the divine Will, and uniting this conscious identification with the Principle to the conscious identification with its becoming, to mould and model consciously the love, mind and life of the becoming in accordance with the Law of Truth of the Principle".³⁰ But these beginnings of her action upon other people without anything happening to her own body - without its becoming inert, so to say, as under ordinary conditions of going out of the body - was a new adventure of consciousness, a new experiment, if a controlled one. This was not just an experience in the negative sense of a general attunement to the immense reservoir of terrestrial or cosmic consciousness, but rather in the dynamic sense of being able to move about, establish contact with and activate individuals irrespective of intervening distances.

X

It would be interesting in this connection to look into Sri Aurobindo's own "controlled experiments" during his early years at Pondicherry.

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His intention in seeking a place of refuge in what was then French India was to be able to complete his Yoga undisturbed by the attentions of the British bureaucracy, and also to "build up other souls" around him. Writing to Motilal Roy more than a year after arriving at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo made a guarded statement regarding his far aims and the limited achievements till then:

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane, and I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind. This I can do with great swiftness and completeness with those who are near me, but I have also succeeded with men hundreds of miles away.³¹

Among the other powers being developed by him, as yet only with partial or indifferent success, were reading men's characters and even their thoughts, "the power of guiding action by the mere exercise of will", and "communication with the other world"*. He wrote again, two months later, in September 1911 that the "experiments" on which he had been engaged may, if all went well, yield results "sufficient to establish beyond dispute the theory and system of Yoga which I have formed ... not only to me, but to the young men who are with me". ³² To another correspondent he wrote, perhaps in June 1912, about the fourfold Siddhi (moral, mental, physical and practical) he was trying to accomplish. The moral aspect had been completed and the mental too "for the present purpose", but the physical siddhi was still only on its way to full fruition. Certain "practical" siddhis, however, were the real cause of the delay in accomplishing the Siddhi in his Yoga:

I have had first to prove to myself their existence and utility, secondly to develop them in myself so as to be working forces, thirdly to make them actually effective for life and impart them to others.³³

He expected to register mastery in this regard not long afterwards, but added that "the application to life and the formation of my helpers will take some time". A few months later, after his birthday on 15 August 1912, Sri Aurobindo wrote again to Motilal Roy outlining the entire programme of the future work. This was to include a revaluation of Sanatana Dharma in the idiom of the modern age, a restatement of India's philosophia perennis, a formulation of the mechanics of a new Yoga, an enunciation of the principles of a new sociology and a new global polity, and a revitalisation of India to enable her to take her proper place in the world. In short, a preview of what Sri Aurobindo was to accomplish in the Arya during 1914-21. As for the practical side this was to "consist in

*For further information, refer to "Sapta Chatushtaya" and "Record of Yoga" in Sri Aurobindo: Archives & Research, April 1986 (Vol 10, no.l) onwards.

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making men for the new age by imparting whatever Siddhi I get to those who are chosen". The little colony around him in Pondicherry was "a so of seed plot, a laboratory". ³⁴

Writing again to Motilal Roy, probably January 1913, Sri Aurobindo was rather more specific with regard to his aims and developing powers:

The crowning movement of my Sadhana - viz. the attempt to apply knowledge and power to the events and happenings of the world without the necessary instrumentality of physical action. What I am attempting is to establish the normal working of the siddhis in life i.e. the perception of thoughts, feelings and happenings of other beings and in other places throughout the world without any use of information by speech or any other data; 2nd, the communication of the ideas and feelings I select to others (individuals, groups, actions) by mere transmission of will-Power; 3rd, the silent compulsion on them to act according to these communicated ideas and feelings; 4th, the determining of events, actions and results of action throughout the world by pure silent will-power. ³⁵

Since coming to Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo had been developing these powers and attempting their general application on men and events, and although at first he was "getting badly beaten", there was current improvement regarding the 1st, 2nd and 3rd, though in the 4th he was still meeting with "a serious resistance":

I can produce single results with perfect accuracy, I can produce general results with difficulty and after a more or less prolonged struggle, but I can neither be sure of producing the final decisive result I am aiming at nor of securing that orderly arrangement of events which prevents the results from being isolated and only partially effective.³⁶

XI

Suddenly things began to move. As though it was all preordained, in the early months of 1914, Mirra and Paul Richard arrived in Pondicherry, L'Idée Nouvelle was established on 1 June, and the Arya was launched on 15 August - all this against overwhelming odds like financial scarcity, police surveillance and the extremely difficult conditions created by the eruption of the War in Europe. Presently, Sri Aurobindo informed Motilal Roy categorically that the aim was not the older type of sannyas or asceticism; not the renunciation of life but making all life - individual. national or global - meaningful and God-oriented would be the aim of the new endeavour. The only - the crucial - renunciation asked for would be the rejection of the ego, be it of the individual, group or national variety. And Sri Aurobindo ended the letter with a cautionary postscript:

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The work we wish to do cannot produce its effects on the objective world until my Ashtasiddhi is strong enough to work upon that world organically and as a whole, and it has not yet reached that point.³⁷

During her year-long stay in Pondicherry, Mirra and Sri Aurobindo must, have often compared notes regarding the success or failure of their several attempts to contact by force of their occult or yogic power other people, and work on them for their good or for the good of the world, and discussed also the probable reasons for such failures as had attended their efforts, or even for the qualified successes. Quite obviously, the instruments they were using were not perfect or infallible enough; and, equally obviously, the persons chosen for the "controlled experiments" were not also - or not always - the right people. In their different ways, then, Sri Aurobindo and Mirra had concluded that, unless a new spiritual power ­which Sri Aurobindo called the Supermind - came down into the earth­atmosphere and impregnated human effort with its own utter Truth­Consciousness or All-Knowledge wedded to Executive Infallibility, such failures or feeble successes were bound to continue.

In earlier years, when Sri Aurobindo led the revolutionary movement in Bengal from behind the scenes, for all the sterling idealism and noble courage and readiness for sacrifice on the part of the young men, there had been mistakes and defeats leading to violent reprisals. Ascribing the cause of these failures to "the unpardonable blunders we have all been making in our Yogic Kriya", Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy early in 1914:

The root of the whole evil is that we have been attempting an extension of Tantric Kriya without any sufficient Vedantic basis .... Going on in the old way is out of the question. That path can only lead to the pit. I speak strongly because I see clearly .... ³⁸

Uncoded these words meant that, without a proper grounding in knowledge, discipline, inner purification (all comprised in 'Vedantic Yoga'), any adventurous action in the practical sphere (political or social) must be weakened at the source and might lead to catastrophic results. After calmly reviewing the situation, Sri Aurobindo cautioned the revolutionaries through Motilal Roy and as good as advised them to suspend such ('Tantric') activities. On 5 May 1914 he wrote: "Tantra for us is discontinued until further notice which can be only in the far future. "³⁹

As he was to explain to Ambalal Purani in December 1918 why he declined to permit a renewal of revolutionary activity:

Because I have done the work and I know its difficulties. Young men come forward to join the movement driven by idealism and enthusiasm. But these elements do not last long. It becomes very difficult to observe and extract discipline. Small groups begin to form within the organisation, rivalries grow between groups and even between individuals. There is competition for leadership.

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The agents of the Government generally manage to join these organisations from the very beginning .⁴⁰

If there was to be group action, it was essential that the members should be able to stand the strictest test of knowledge, purity and discipline. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal,

A collective Yoga is not like a solitary one, it is not free from collective influences; it has a collective soul which cannot afford to be in some parts either raw or rotten."⁴¹

It should be clear from all this why Sri Aurobindo gave primacy to the promulgation of his comprehensive supramental manifesto in the various Arya sequences (notably The Life Divine), and in the meantime further sensitised and perfected his own ādhāra in the matter of invoking the supramental power to take root here on the earth. Mirra too, with her own background of occult odysseys and explorations, understood that they were no substitute for the spiritual power of the Supermind. The suspension or virtual abandonment of political and revolutionary activity on Sri Aurobindo's part and the relegation of occult adventures to a strictly subordinate place by Mirra, and both concentrating on spirituality and on the terrestrialisation of the Supermind, were the cardinal results of the first year or two of their association. She had once asked Sri Aurobindo soon after her arrival in Pondicherry: Suppose their attempt to establish the Life Divine on the earth should fail, as all such attempts had apparently failed in the past, what then? He had looked at Mirra with serene certainty and assured her: "This time it will not be so. "⁴² This certitude and this solid basis of identity of ends and means were reinforced by the exchange of communications, "formal as wel1 as spiritual", between them during all the time Mirra was away from Pondicherry.

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CHAPTER 11

A Passage to Japan

I

The scene shifts from war-torn France to comparatively peaceful Japan. During their year of stay in beleaguered France, Mirra and Richard had their separate roles to play although they also kept in touch with Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry. Mirra had especially her sadhana to do for ailing and tortured earth, and she made quite a few explorations into the Unknown, and spiritual conquests as well, and these were duly recorded in her prayers and meditations.

Richard had now to visit Japan on an assignment, but even as in 1910 and 1914, he had combined politics and electioneering with a serious spiritual quest when he visited Pondicherry, now also he hoped and planned to continue his inquiries. The Orient had always fascinated the Richards: India certainly, but also China and Japan. Was Richard interested in observing Zen Buddhism at close quarters? Was he intrigued by the 'still-sitting' movement? For Mirra too, this was an invitation to new horizons. And so they boarded the Kamo Maru at London on 14 March and arrived in Yokohama on 18 May 1916.

Shortly before leaving for Japan, Mirra had arranged for some funds to be placed at the disposal of Saurin Bose for an 'Aryan Stores' to be started in Pondicherry. Saurin, a cousin of Mrinalini, Sri Aurobindo's wife, was at the time living with him along with Nolini and others. The object of the Aryan Stores was to give Saurin and his friends a taste for honest and efficient business, and also to provide a modest income for Sri Aurobindo's household. The Aryan Stores was duly opened in September 1916, and Sri Aurobindo was present at the time and wished it godspeed.¹

II

There is a gap of four months in Mirra's spiritual diary, as now published, but the entry "Tokio, June 7, 1916" begins thus on a note of new fulfilment:

Long months have gone by in which nothing could be said, for it was a period of transition, of passing from one equilibrium to another, vaster and more complete. The outer circumstances were manifold and new, as if the being needed to accumulate many perceptions and observations in order to give a more extensive and complex base to its experience ....

Suddenly on the fifth of June the veil was rent, and there was light in my consciousness.²

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On one side, the general unsettled conditions in Europe, and on the other the manifold and novel external circumstances in Japan - the rattle and movement of the intervening long and perilous passage, the excitement and exhilaration of the first kaleidoscopic Japanese experiences - they added up to make the period of transition, and it was understandable that some little time was needed before Mina could get back her customary poise or "equilibrium". On the other hand, even before she reached Japan, even while she was still in France, she had seen - not imagined, but seen, not in photographs, but as visions - the distinctive beauty of the Japanese landscapes. As she explained in the course of a conversation in 1951:

... those landscapes of Japan; well, almost all- the most beautiful, the most striking ones - I had seen in vision in France; and yet I had not seen any pictures or photographs of Japan, I knew nothing of Japan. And I had seen these landscapes without human beings, nothing but the landscape, quite pure, like that, and it had seemed to me they were visions of a world other than the physical; they seemed to me too beautiful for the physical world, too perfectly beautiful. Particularly I used to see very often those stairs rising straight up into the sky; in my vision there was the impression of climbing straight up, straight up, and as though one could go on climbing, climbing, climbing ... the first time I saw this in Nature down there, I understood that I had already seen it in France before having known anything about Japan.³

The beauty of the landscapes, the orderliness of the people, their correctly polite manners and the general atmosphere of friendliness quickly made the Richards feel at home in Tokyo. The relapse into "old habits and methods" had been happily avoided, and Mina was now "accustomed to find harmony in the in tensest action" as earlier she had found it in "passive surrender". With the establishment of this harmony, on 5 June "there was light again in all the parts of the being, and the consciousness of what had happened became complete". The time of "a passivity that was receptive and harmonious" being left behind, she would now like her whole being to be used "for action" so that she could the more integrally manifest the Divine.

III

In a letter of Sri Aurobindo dated 26 June 1916⁴, addressed to the Richards, he speaks of difficulties in the course of sadhana which are common to all; spiritual progress is, after all, a zigzag operation attended with recoils alternating with new advances on a firmer basis. Any marked spiritual progress exposes itself to attack by adverse forces, "for the

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complete victory of a single one of us would mean a general downfall among them". The remedy is to come. "into a more and more universal communion with the Highest". Let set-backs come If they must, yet one falls but to rise again, fortified with fresh spiritual gains. The basic "requirements of the sadhana are "an absolute equality of the mind and heart and a clear purity and calm strength in all the members of the being" so that one can steadily perceive the One behind the bewildering multiplicity of the phenomenal world. No doubt the shift from the passive to the active mode is not easy, but without it the Yoga is incomplete:

When the Unity has been well founded, the static half of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power, - Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Master using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which I call myself only as a centre of his universal existence and responding to its workings as a soul to the Soul, taking upon itself his image until there is nothing left but Krishna and Kali. This is the stage I have reached in spite of all set-backs and recoils, imperfectly indeed in the secureness and intensity of the state, but well enough in the general type.⁵

This is a remarkable analysis, as also a memorable description of the status­dynamis attained by himself. From cosmic consciousness or the consciousness of Unity (which, although it may lead to personal felicity, will really be "an escape instead of a victory"), the next stage will be to see the Unity as a creative duality of Two-in-One: Pure Existence and Power of ,Consciousness, Purusha and Prakriti, Krishna and Kali. The true Yogi turns himself into a pure engine of Power; to be used for His purposes by Krishna. What, then, happens to the individual self? In itself it is nothing; but the more the Yogi becomes a power-house of the Supreme and a centre of the universal Existence, the more his ego will race towards Zero:

When that has been done, then we may hope to found securely the play in us of his divine Knowledge governing the action of his divine Power. The rest is the full opening up of the different planes of his world-play and the subjection of Matter and the body and the material world to the law of the higher heavens of the Truth:⁶

The main object of the Power which moves him, of course, is to "possess securely the Light and the Force of the supramental being"; but progress in that direction is sometimes delayed by the gheraoing "old habits of intellectual thought and mental will" that "crowd round the mind and pour in their suggestions whenever it tries to remain open only to the supramental Light and the higher Command, so that the Knowledge and the Will reach the mind in a confused, distorted and often misleading form.

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It is, however, only a question of time," Sri Aurobindo concluded, "the siege will diminish in force and be finally dispelled."

To recapitulate the argument: from an absolute equality of the mind and heart and a clear purity and calm strength in all the members of the being to the settled perception of the One behind the manifold, and also to the rapture of such unitive experience; then, from that position to the active self, from Krishna to Kali, the total elimination of the ego and the total sovereignty of Krishna and Kali, divine Knowledge coupled with divine Power; and then, the opening up of the higher planes of consciousness up to and including the supramental, and the subjection of mind, life and matter to these powers; finally, the possession of the supramental Light and Force, and through it the supramentalisation of earth-existence - this was the master-plan for the terrestrial transformation, and the determined sadhak was destined to fare forward and storm the gates of Victory. Such was the assurance Mirra received, - Mirra the great collaborator in Sri Aurobindo's work, Mirra the Shakti, the Kali, the Mother-to-be of his integral supramental Yoga and of his great Yogashram at Pondicherry.

IV

The Richards spent about four years in Japan, mainly in Tokyo (1916-17) and Kyoto (1917-20). They made friends with Japanese intellectuals as also with the leaders of certain New Life movements (the 'still-sitting' movement in Kyoto, for example). They met Rabindranath Tagore too, during his triumphant tour of Japan, and he was impressed by them both. Mirra's mystic aura and intense sincerity and spiritual poise coupled with her capacity to deal expertly with outer things struck him at once. He even invited her to take charge of the cultural activity he was engaged in organising.

For Mirra, these years in Japan were an opportunity to learn the ways of perfection in elegance, and orderliness and propriety in personal and communal life. With her own composite and integral culture fusing the finest in the East and the West, the old and the new, she could be in rapport with the genuine anywhere; and with her occult vision, she could always enter into the behind-the-surface truth of things. Outwardly she learnt to live the Japanese way of life, wore the kimono, mastered their art of flower-arrangement, and for the nonce embodied the mind and heart of the Japanese culture. But Mirra was not the person to be altogether swept off her feet by the outer manifestations alone, and while she could be generous, she certainly would not close her eyes to the deeper insufficiencies of the Japanese way of life.

However. the Japanese landscape, the unfailing beauty of Nature, the

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contrived luxuriance of park and garden, made an immediate conquest of Mirra, and after about a year's experience of the country. she could rhapsodise thus on 1 April 1917:

Thou hast shown to my mute and expectant soul all the splendour of fairy landscapes: trees at festival and lonely paths that seem to scale the sky ....

Once more, everywhere I see cherry trees; Thou hast put a magical power in these flowers: they seem to speak of Thy sole Presence; they bring with them the smile of the Divine.

My body is at rest and my soul blossoms in light: what kind of a charm hast Thou put into these trees in flower?

O Japan. it is thy festive adorning, expression of thy goodwill. it is thy purest offering, the pledge of thy fidelity; it is thy way of saying that thou dost mirror the sky. ⁷

And. in the course of a contribution to the Modern Review of Calcutta. Mirra set down some of her impressions:

The country is so wonderful, picturesque, many-sided, unexpected. charming, wild or sweet; it is in its appearance so much a synthesis of all the other countries. of the world. from the tropical to the arctic. that no artistic eye can remain indifferent to it.

She found Japan a nation of tremendous vitality, and everywhere and in everyone she found that vitality and energy:

With their perfect love for nature and beauty, this accumulated strength is, perhaps, the most distinctive and widely spread characteristic of the Japanese.⁸

V

Many years later, on 12 April 1951, she reminisced aloud before the children and sadhaks of Sri Aurobindo Ashram on her four years in Japan. "I had everything to learn in Japan," she said. "For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder."⁹ What immediately struck her was the fact that Japanese art, like Japanese life, was extremely mentalised. "It expresses in detail quite precise mental formations." The Japanese people - not the artists and the connoisseurs alone, but the common people also, the working men and the peasants, and even school­ children - had a spontaneous feeling for beauty in the physical. Their eyes intuitively sought beauty in nature or art, their nerves felt soothed at the sight of beautiful views, their minds felt reassured perceiving beautiful forms. They liked to eat or sip a cup of tea admiring the landscape also at the same time. Besides, they had an uncanny sense of place and marvellous

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sense of colour: each season its own site, its own colour! Red leaves in autumn; maple trees so arranged near a temple on a hill that the entire place seemed a splash of red; and stone stairways, as if labouring towards the sky, bathed in the most magnificent colours. Likewise, spring had its special sites, and so had the other seasons. Thus of a garden quite close to Tokyo:

... a garden with very tiny rivulets, and along the rivulets, irises - irises of all possible colours - and it is arranged according to colour, organised in such a way that on entering one is dazzled, there is a blaze of colour from all these flowers standing upright. ... At another time, just at the beginning of spring ... there are the first cherry-trees. These cherry-trees never give fruit, they are grown only for the flowers. They range from white to ... a rather vivid pink .... There are entire mountains covered with these cherry-trees, and on the little rivulets bridges have been built which too are all red: you see these bridges of red lacquer among all these pink flowers and, below, a great river flowing and a mountain which seems to scale the sky .... For each season there are flowers and for each flower there are gardens.¹⁰

Nature's largesse was doubtless there, but equally in evidence was artful human contrivance, the result of mental activity in the miniature. The daintiness, the doll-like clarity and cleanliness, the surface perfection, the infallible artistic sense, the neat exquisite finish:

True art is a whole and an ensemble; it is one and of one piece with life .... A Japanese house is a wonderful artistic whole; always the right thing is there in the right place, nothing wrongly set, nothing too much, nothing too little. Everything is just as it needed to be, and the house itself blends marvellously with the surrounding nature ....

... the strict sense of beauty and art is a natural possession of the Japanese, they did not allow it to degenerate into something of lesser significance and smaller purpose. ¹¹

This was spoken in 1929 to a small group of sadhaks, and shows how the Japanese experience had left an indelible impression upon her.

But that was not all, for the Japanese carried their gardening art to the point where they made trees and houses grow into an artifice of harmony, and they tried to bend nature to their own whims and fantasies:

When they have a garden or a park, they plant trees, and they plant them just at the place where when the tree has grown it will create a landscape, will fit into a landscape. And as they want the tree to have a particular shape, they trim it, cut it, they manage to give it all the shapes they want. You have trees with fantastic forms .... Then you come to a place and you see a house which seems to be altogether a part of the landscape .... ¹²

And even in an apparently crowded city like Tokyo, most private houses

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had gardens - "there are always one or two trees which are quite lovely". Going for a walk quite at random, as Mirra often did, it was most likely one would stumble into "a kind of paradise", unexpectedly un-urban; and yet, if on another day one wanted to return to the same place, one would find it difficult - for the ways were labyrinthine - and it was as though "it had disappeared" .

Mirra herself had a fairly large garden in Tokyo, and she grew many vegetables. And as she went for a walk every morning, or watered the plants, she would look for the vegetables to be taken for eating during the day. Some of the vegetables used almost to whisper to her, "Take me, take take me me!", while others apparently cried, "No, no, no, no, no." She had had similar experiences in the south of France where too she had a garden of peas, radishes and carrots. Some of the vegetables had been happy to be taken, while others had grumbled - either because they were sour or because they were unripe - "No, no, no, don't touch me, don't touch me!" Such was her extraordinary closeness of understanding with the plant world, as with all creation. It was in Japan, even more than in France, that Mirra's sensibilities were fully awakened, and she could grasp the language of flora and fauna alike, even as she could look deep into the hearts of human beings. ¹³

As with their life, so also the literature of the Japanese was full of fairy­lore, and Mirra found that everything in Japan, from beginning to end, gave her "the impression of impermanence, of the unexpected, the exceptional".¹⁴ After a year's stay in Japan and observation of the people at close quarters, Mirra saw that whereas the Westernised Japanese - the politicians, the money-makers, the men-about-town - were no different from their Western counterparts, the authentic Japanese were those who had retained the old Samurai tradition, and such were truly unique; and so she wrote in the Modern Review:

They know how to remain silent; and though they are possessed of the most acute sensitiveness, they are, among the people I have met, those who express it the least. A friend here can give his life with the greatest simplicity to save yours, though he never told you before he loved you in such a profound and unselfish way ....

... The true Japanese ... are perhaps the least selfish .... For here religion is not a rite or a cult, it is a daily life of abnegation, obedience, self­sacrifice. ¹⁵

In the traditional Japanese homes, the children were taught that life was a duty and not an opportunity for pleasure-seeking, with the result that there was "a very remarkable self-constraint" in the life of the whole country.

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VI

But, then. there was also another side to the shield. While there was a soap-bubble elegance and brilliance everywhere, it was often wedded, alas, to a soap-bubble fragility as well. There were no firm axes of reference, there was no solid ground to stand on:

I ought to say, to complete my picture, that the four years I was there I found a dearth of spirituality as entire as could be.¹⁶

The Japanese sense of morality was "wonderful", their Samurai code Was compellingly and comprehensively strict, their minutiae of social behaviour were precise and exacting, but they could go no deeper:

... not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. And what energy they have! their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged.

Again, Mirra found in Japan "an atmosphere of tension and effort, of mental and nervous strain, not of spiritual peace" of the kind she had felt in India. She found no doubt "exterior calm, rest and silence ... but not that blissful sense of the infinite which comes from a living nearness to the Unique".¹⁷And to illustrate how disturbed the average Japanese feels when inducted into the mystical tremendum of spiritual sublimities, she has told the story of a young man she used to know:

He was in the countryside with us and I had put him in touch with his psychic being; he had the experience, a revelation, the contact, the dazzling inner contact. And the next morning, he was no longer there, he had taken flight!

When she met him in town after the holidays and asked him why he had left so suddenly, he answered as if to disarm her:

Oh! you understand, I discovered my soul and saw that my soul was more powerful than my faith in the country and the Mikado; I would have had to obey my soul and I would no longer have been a faithful subject of my emperor. I had to go away.¹⁸

There is the classic compromise that one should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. But the spiritual world admits of no such compromises!

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VII

For several months after her arrival in Japan, Mirra was absorbing new impressions, sifting the permanent from the transient, but few new recordings in her spiritual diary have come down to us. Then, from 28 November 1916, the entries are found with a regularity reminiscent of 1914. On that day, she first re-reads some of her earlier musings and meditations - "awkward attempts at expression" - and feels that she remains at heart a child of the Divine. Really, she has had no new experiences, no strikingly new ideas; only the old ideas and experiences return, but perhaps with a new freshness. How is she to view this drying up of the the unexpected, this reign of monotony? The words are at last wrung from her:

Poverty, poverty! Thou hast placed me in an arid and bare desert and yet this desert is sweet to me as everything that comes from Thee, O Lord. In this dull and wan greyness, in this dim ashen light, I taste the savour of the infinite spaces: the pure breeze of the open seas, the powerful breath of the free heights constantly fill my heart and penetrate my life; all barriers have fallen, within and around me, and I feel like a bird opening its wings for an unrestrained flight... awaiting, in order to soar upwards, the coming of something it expects without knowing what it is. As it no longer has any chains to check its flight, it no longer dreams of flying away. Conscious of its freedom, it does not enjoy it. ... ¹⁹

From 4 December, the entries follow almost day after day. "O Lord, I have once again begun to come to Thee daily," Mirra writes, "freeing myself for a few brief moments from an activity of which I know the complete relativity, even while I am engaged in it." She has returned to action and the ordinary consciousness, but the ladder is not withdrawn; she is free to make the ascent back to "the immutable Silence and the eternal Consciousness". What seems a descent into the obscurity and the ignorance was a necessity without which the being would not "grow wider and richer". The next day, she loses herself - mind, consciousness, all - in the depths of a divine ecstasy of immutable identification. How little we really know when we think that, to look for the Divine, we should turn towards the far inaccessible heavens! Rather let us turn towards the earth, and see if God is not before us. Mirra presently records such a resplendent experience:

It was a Japanese street brilliantly illuminated by gay lanterns picturesquely adorned with vivid colours. And as gradually what was conscious moved on down the street, the Divine appeared, visible in everyone and everything. One of the lightly-built houses became transparent, revealing a woman seated on a tatami [smooth, thick straw mat] in a sumptuous violet kimono

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embroidered with gold and bright colours. The woman was beautiful and must have been between thirty-five and forty. She was playing a golden samisen [guitar-like instrument]. At her feet lay a little child. And in the woman too the Divine was visible.²⁰

The vision of the Divine in a Japanese street is paralleled by Sri Aurobindo's Narayana Darshan in 1908 in the Alipur Jail during the early weeks of his ash ram vas within its precincts. Recalling that experience he said later at Uttarpara:

I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me .... I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets ... and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover .... I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies.²¹

As it was for Sri Aurobindo in the Alipur Jail, it was for Mirra in a Japanese street eight years after; and then and ever after, for thly from the indwelling God who is also the Lord of the manifestation and the supreme Reality.

VIII

On 7 December, Mirra experiences a mood of perfect immobility and tranquillity. Outwardly she seems commonplace - but inwardly? She has beyonded the dualities and dichotomies; she has no more questionings, no more tainted layers of personality. She has reached a condition of total joy in total poise:

It is an immobility moving in the domain of external life, yet without belonging to it or seeking to escape from it. I hope for nothing, expect nothing, desire nothing, aspire for nothing and, above all, I am nothing; and yet happiness, a calm, unmixed happiness ... has come to dwell in the house of this body. ²²

The next day (8 December), Mirra has a serious dialogue vital being, and next the mind, respond to the call. But the mind observes that while there seems to be no limit to the range of movement of man's vital or his mind, his field of physical action alone is so constricted and petty. We may wonder why great ambitions, great ideas, the more they are sought to be

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translated into physical realities, the more are they apt to become mockeries and absurdities:

Whether he be the founder of a religion or a political reformer, he who acts becomes a petty little stone in the general edifice, a grain of sand in the immense dune of human activities.

If that's the case, where is the point in wasting one's energies in action, in some "lamentable adventure" unworthy of an instrument of the Divine? Why act at all, if all action is foredoomed to pettiness and puerility? "Fear nothing," comes the solemn assurance:

The vital being will not be allowed to set itself in motion, it will not be asked of thee to contribute all the effort of thy organising faculties, except when the action proposed is vast and complete enough to fully and usefully employ all the qualities of the being. What exactly this action will be, thou wilt know when it comes to thee .... I also warn both thee and the vital being that the time for the small, quiet, uniform and peaceful life will be over. There will be effort, danger, the unforeseen, insecurity, but also intensity. Thou wert made for this role.²³

The vital being is all alert for the fray, but the mind has its doubts still regarding its own competence for the great and supreme task that is to come. But once again the soothing answer comes from Above:

It is to prepare thee for this that I am working at the moment; this is why thou art undergoing a discipline of plasticity and enrichment. Do not worry about anything: power comes with the need .... I have appointed thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth, not only invisibly, in a hidden way, but also openly before the eyes of all men. And what thou weft created to be, thou wilt be.²⁴

IX

"Thou wert made for this role .... I have appointed thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth .... " The accents are unmistakable, and carry plenary authority. Mirra, the universal, revealed in the particular, Mirra who is Eternity descended into Time, Mirra the matrix of the unfolding future, Mirra has been tempered in all parts of her being for carrying out the great task in the evolutionary process which the Divine has assigned to her. At one moment she effects a purposeful dispersal of her energy at several points of action, at another she concentrates at a focal point; and it occurs to her that even an apparent imperfection or failure may be the means of initiating and ultimately

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accomplishing the needed terrestrial action. Mirra is of the Divine, she is the Divine; and she is also visibly a human being, with a sense O imperfection and her moments of distress. Can the Divine tolerate such imperfection, or be susceptible to suffering? For a satisfying answer We should turn to Sri Aurobindo's letter of 7 March 1935 to Nirodbaran:

The Divine does not need to suffer or struggle for himself; if he takes on these things it is in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if the sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real. A sham or falsehood cannot help. They must be as real as the struggles and sufferings of men themselves - the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them. Otherwise his assumption of human nature has no meaning and no utility and no value ....

... The manifestation of the Divinity in the Avatar is of help to man because it helps him to discover his own divinity, find the way to realise it. ²⁵

Even as a little match strikes fire, and sets other sticks on fire, so too the descended Divine, although seemingly human, emblazons the Divine and brings out the Divine in others.

X

On 12 December 1916, Mirra finds that though her mind experiences the Divine in everything, in the vastest and the noblest as also in the least, the most futile things and activities, it cannot help wondering, why the latter prevail over the former. But when it turns to the Divine for answer there comes always a comforting smile but no "precise answer", and so everything for it is "a constantly renewed cause for wonder"; a situation where the Indian mind would ask: Is it all divine māyā? Is it predestination?

Then, on 20 December, Mirra meditates on Shakyamuni, the Buddha, in the evening, and there follows a conversation. She has the feeling that she is both actor and Witness (like the two Vedic birds sitting on one tree), and she is still overtaken by a sense of her imperfection. In answer to her prayer, Shakyamuni tells her that he sees in her heart a diamond bathed in a golden light but, "The outermost covering is of a deep lustreless blue, a real mantle of darkness.²⁶ Why is she afraid of revealing her secret splendour? He exhorts her to "learn to radiate" and not "fear the storm". What if she were misunderstood? The generality of men would never 'understand' the Divine! The Shakyamuni too had hesitated in his time to come out with the whole arc of his 'supreme discovery', but had made the plunge after all:

Listen, I too hesitated for days, for I could foresee both my preaching and

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its results: the imperfection of expression and the still greater imperfection of understanding. And yet I turned to the earth and men and brought them my message. Turn to the earth and men - isn't this the command thou always hearest in thy heart? in thy heart, for it is that which carries a blessed message for those who are athirst for compassion.²⁷

He too in his time had reached up to the last rung of the ladder, almost plunged into the yawning Nihil - the ineffable Nirvana - stretching yonder ... yet he had finally turned back to bear the burden of terrestrial nature and "tread the dolorous way". She cannot do otherwise, and her . .diamond heart can withstand the harsh realities of the world:

It is unassailable in its perfect constitution and the soft radiance that flashes from it can change many things in the hearts of men. Thou doubtest thy power and fearest thy ignorance? It is precisely this that wraps up thy strength in that dark mantle of starless night. .. now the mystery of the manifestation seems to thee more terrible and unfathomable than that of the Eternal Cause .... And also to thy eyes I have shown thy heart so that thou canst thus see what the supreme Truth had willed for it, so that thou mayst discover in it the law of thy being.

Mirra had always heard in her heart the command to "turn to the earth and men". And in Sri Aurobindo's great epic, when Savitri is in the ultimate realm of Everlasting Day, the Un knowable offers her the quadruple boons of Peace, Oneness, Power and Bliss; but she answers every time that she will receive the boons only "for earth and men". ²⁸Again, in later years, on 11 May 1967, when one of her disciples, Surendra Nath Jauhar, complained that his work for the Divine was misunderstood by people, and even by some of the members of his own family, the Mother said:

... unless people are true yogis, out of the ego, completely surrendered to the Supreme, they can't understand. How could they? They see [all with] the exterior eyes and knowledge; they see exterior things and appearances. They don't see the inside.²⁹

Even so, in 1916, Shakyamuni's exhortation to Mirra was that, just as he had revealed his "precious secret" in spite of the imperfections in the means of expression so far developed by man and the greater imperfections in his faculties of understanding, she too should resolutely "turn to the earth and men" and not expect people to understand or appreciate her work.

While, in Mirra's waking hours, the problems of the earth and men often daunt and half-frighten her and make her doubt her ability to set it all aright, or even to make serious efforts towards that goal, in her hours of sleep and dreaming, and more especially in her moments of deep meditation, she is able to invoke the Divine Presence - or the presence of a

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Divine plenipotentiary like the Buddha - that alternately admonishes, inspires and reassures her. Mirra is firmly told that she cannot escape her destined role of consoler and redeemer of Man, her evolutionary role of assisting in the preordained process of terrestrial transformation.

The meditation of the next day refers again to the Buddha's message, but the rusts of the old diffidence will not be wholly wiped out. She hasa feeling of puzzlement too: love, love is the supreme truth, - "the first and highest manifestation" of the Divine's eternal Truth, - and Mirra has reached a stage when all seems bathed in love, and the old dichotomies seem irrelevant. But if there is nothing that isn't love, there's nothing that "may specially be called love" either! It only means that the rich hidden reservoir of universal love is yet to be canalised effectively and made to flow towards a thousand needed destinations "absolutely independent of circumstances and persons". Some residue of ignorance and some doubts and hesitations still remain, but Mirra hopes that Mitra, "who so perfectly symbolises" the Lord's truth of Love, will not fail to hear her prayer.

Three days later, without her mind being aware of It, a rising flood of universal Love began to pour into her heart which

overflowed under the pressure of the powers of love ... and the whole being began to love ... nothing and everything at the same time, what it knows and does not know, what it sees and has never seen; and gradually this potential love became effective love, ready to pour itself out upon all and everything, in beneficent waves, in an effective effulgence .... This was a beginning, a very weak beginning. ³⁰

And, in the silence of the evening, she hears a voice speaking to her in clear terms. Mirra has renounced everything - even wisdom and consciousness - for the sake of Love. Hers is the role of the spring "which always lets its waters flow abundantly for all, but towards which no waters can ever run back". A sublime felicity always "accompanies this inexhaustible expansion of love; for love is sufficient unto itself and needs no reciprocity". And the voice concludes:

Be this love in all things and everywhere, ever more widely, ever more intensely, and the whole world will become at the same time thy work and thy wealth, thy field of action and thy conquest. Fight with persistence to break down the last limits .... Fight in order to conquer and triumph; fight to overcome everything that was till today, to make the new Light spring forth, the new Example the world needs. Fight stubbornly against all obstacles, inner or outer. It is the pearl of great price which is offered for thy Realisation.³¹

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XI

More clearly, then, Mirra is made to become conscious of her special destiny, her unique burden of responsibility, a burden that is also an existential delight. In herself she is "small, weak and ordinary", yet the Grace of the Lord is hers, and invests her with joy.³² "Torment not thyself at all" says the Lord to her, "be confident like a child: art thou not myself crystallised for my work?" Mirra has only to love the Divine "in all things, everywhere and in all beings"³³. She will become the finished beautiful crystal, in her the Mother of Sorrows will be turned into the Mother of Light and the Madonna of Love, and be ready for the work of realising on the earth the Life Divine.

On the other hand, as Sri Aurobindo had warned her in his letter of 26 June, the unpredictable intervention of relapses and 'dark nights' can never be ruled out. And so on 30 December, Mirra has a poignant meditation: "Why, O Lord," she cries, "does my heart seem to me to be so cold and dry?" Her soul is alive within and one with the Universal and the outer being too is conscious; her mind knows and never forgets the one Reality, and the purified vital has acquired equality, calm and joy. Only the heart's action is inadequate, not on a par with the rest. Is it because the heart, being weak, is too easily tired? Is it because, being bruised, it is ineffective? The heart has all along been receiving and clasping the manifold gifts of Nature; but how about the return movement? It wants tries to pour out the true wine of life to all human beings; but it still loves in its human way, even if with "strength, constancy and purity", while the Divine wants it to love in a boundless unfolding of His sovereign power. And so Mirra asks, "Who will open these closed flood-gates ?"³⁴

With the birth of the New Year (1917), there is again a change of mood. Mirra is conscious of the generous gifts showered on her by the Divine. These boons - mental, psychical and even material - mean an invasion of Abundance, even as earlier she had been overwhelmed by Poverty - but, then, one is not more welcome than the other! She nowsees, on a consideration of the role of Love in the play of universal forces, that it is the great, the supreme, unifying Force.

As for action, between selfish and unselfish action, between action for personal advancement and action offered as a sacrifice to the Lord, there lay the wasteland of half measures and compromises, and selfish action was always self-stultifying action in the long run. Only that action which had as its motive "the radiating of Thy Grace" had any chance of easy accomplishment. Also, the law of action needn't exclude the play of beauty and the radiance of joy, for the Supreme is not only Truth, but Beauty and Ananda as well.

On 14 January, a prayer rises in Mirra's heart: "May all who are unhappy become happy, may the wicked become good, may the sick

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become healthy!" - which is rather like a child's demand to its father "with the certitude that it will be granted". Aspiration for beauty and joy - and love too, the source of all - and she wants this love, not for herself alone but for everybody. Hence her prayer of 23 January: '

Grant that this love, this beauty and joy which flood all my being that is hardly strong enough to bear their intensity, may also flood the conscious_ ness of all those I have seen, all those I have thought of and all those also whom I have never thought of or seen ....

O my sweet Lord, fill their hearts with joy, love and beauty.³⁵

But, then, if all is indeed the Divine, who is the giver, who is the receiver? Doesn't the Lord immanent everywhere both give and receive Himself "being sovereignly active and receptive, at once in all things, in eve being"?³⁶

Like Truth, like Love, which are laws of universal Nature, Beauty is another universal law:

In the world of forms a violation of Beauty is as great a fault as a violation of Truth in the world of ideas. For Beauty is the worship Nature offers to the supreme Master of the universe; Beauty is the divine language in forms.

And yet true Beauty - like any expression of the Divine - is difficult to discover; without "impersonality and renunciation of egoism" one may miss the soul of Beauty. In the unlikeliest places Beauty may lie imprisoned, and it needs the eye of understanding and the heart of compassion to release the Beauty in the Beast.

XII

On 27 March 1917, Mirra participates during her meditation in a sublime dialogue with the Divine. The Aspirant and the Divine stand face to face, the mists suddenly disperse, the sky clears, the Sun shines gloriously, and the Word of prophecy wafts its music across the expectant air. The Voice tells her that there is "the living form" and there are "the three inanimate images". The living form can penetrate the other three "in the calm of silence", and "unite them in order to transform them into a living and acting vesture". It seems that by "the three inanimate images" are meant the body, vital and mind that have to fuse electrically into a habitation for the soul.

The Voice tells her that it is not enough to be surrendered to the Lord and adhere to His gifts alone, she should awaken all that is latent in her. Illumination too is necessary for "in the limpid mirror of the mind will be reflected what thou shouldst know". This done, Mirra asks, "What dost Thou want to say to me that I must understand?" And then the Voice:

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Thy silence is not yet deep enough; something stirs within thy mind ....

The fire of the soul must be seen through the veils of the manifestation; but these veils must be clear and distinct like words traced upon a luminous screen. And all this should be preserved in the purity of thy heart, as the sown meadow is shrouded and protected under the snow.

Now that thou hast sown the seeds in the field and traced the signs on the screen, thou mayst return to thy calm silence, thou mayst go back to thy retreat to renew thy strength in a deeper and truer consciousness. Thou canst forget thy own person and find again the charm of the universal.

Taking "the veils of manifestation" to refer to "the three inanimate images" mentioned above, we might infer that the triple cages of body, vital and mind have to be surpassed in order for one to be sharer in the bliss of the Universal. Thereupon the Voice pronounces these benedictions om Mirra:

Thou wilt smile yet at thy destiny which speaks to thee.

Thy heart will use the returning strength.

Thou shalt be the woodcutter who ties the bundle of firewood.

Thou shalt be the great swan with outspread wings which purifies the sight with its pearly whiteness and warms all hearts with its white down.

Thou wilt lead them all to their supreme destiny. ³⁷

These fivefold functions seem to be an astonishing anticipation of those of Mahakali, Mahasaraswati, Mahalakshmi, Maheshwari and, as Sri Aurobindo describes it, "that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda ... that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter". Then follow cautions and warnings and admonitions and revelations, all flaming forth in the language of prophecy:

Thou hast seen the hearth and seen the child. One attracted the other: both were happy; one because it burned, the other because it was warm.

Thou seest it in thy heart, this triumphant hearth; thou alone canst carry it without its being destructive. If others touched it, they would be consumed. Do not let them come too near it. The child should know that it must not touch the dazzling flame which attracts it so much. From far it warms it and illumines its heart; too close, it would reduce it to ashes.

One alone may dwell fearlessly within this heart; for he is the ray that has indeed kindled it. He is the salamander ever reborn in the fire.

Another is above, unafraid of being burnt: he is the immaculate phoenix, the bird come from the sky who knows how to return to it.

The first is the Power of realisation.

The other is the Light.

And the third the sovereign Consciousness. ³⁸

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The whole meditation has a mystic cast, made up of symbols and insights that seem to aim at conveying by flashes (not describing) the whole dialectic of aspiration, divine response and the resultant integration and transformation. By an amazing coincidence there is a close parallelism between the imagery of this meditation and that of Sri Aurobindo's poem "The Bird of Fire", written sixteen years later. "The Bird of Fire" is "the living vehicle of the gold fire of the Divine Light and the white fire of the Divine Tapas and the crimson fire of the Divine Love - and everything else of the Divine Consciousness".³⁹ We may perhaps equate these three aspects with Mirra's categories of Light, Power of Realisation and Sovereign Consciousness.

XIII

Three days later, on 30 March, Mirra presents forcefully the case for "taking no thought for oneself". To hanker after things is to court misery and enact folly. All the riches of the universe are within our reach provided we can break out of the cages of our "egoistic limits". In a universe ruled by a regal Benevolence, where is the room for bridges and barricades and human contrivances? The entry for 31 March is a paean of gratitude on behalf of the earth:

... an atom of Thy joy is sufficient to efface so much darkness, so many sorrows ....

At these blessed hours all earth sings a hymn of gladness, the grasses shudder with pleasure, the air is vibrant with light, the trees lift towards heaven their most ardent prayer, the chant of the birds becomes a canticle, the waves of the sea billow with love, the smile of children tells of the infinite and the souls of men appear in their eyes.⁴⁰

Serenity and happiness are hers, hers are the hours of rest before the reveille, hers the rich apparel of goodwill that friendly Japan and the courteous Japanese have offered her. In a mood of self-absorbed concentration - a mood that has now become second nature to her - Mirra comprehends Infinity in a grain of sand, and gathers Eternity in the thimble of the moment. Thus, for example, she records on 7 April:

A deep concentration seized on me, and I perceived that I was identifying myself with a single cherry-blossom, then through it with all cherry­blossoms, and, as I descended deeper in the consciousness, following a stream of bluish force, I became suddenly the cherry-tree itself, stretching towards the sky like so many arms its innumerable branches laden with their sacrifice of flowers ....

... What difference is there between the human body and the body of a

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tree? In truth, there is none: the consciousness which animates them is identically the same.⁴²

This readiness to identify herself with a cherry-blossom, or a cherry-tree, the sharing of its pulse-beats and the mingling in its flowing sap, all this is but symptomatic of Mirra's expansion of consciousness defying all change, exceeding all limits, careering up to the Silence, and returning at will too from it - for Consciousness is a ladder! On 28 April, Mirra has a vision of the divine Master again, and she receives gifts of Grace from the Eternal Mother:

Lo! here are flowers and benedictions! here is the smile of divine Love! It is without preferences and without repulsions. It streams out towards all in a generous flow and never takes back its marvellous gifts!⁴³

And thus, in Mirra's vision, the Eternal Mother, "her arms outstretched in a gesture of ecstasy... pours upon the world the unceasing dew of Her purest love".

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CHAPTER 12

Like Mount Fuji

I

During the Richards' four-year stay in Japan, - first in Tokyo and later in Kyoto, with short visits to other places, - they were naturally drawn towards people with a spiritual outlook on life. But the Japanese, for all their elegance and culture, and the general atmosphere of friendliness exuded by them, were rather allergic to spirituality. They had their religions, of course - Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity, with their many sectarian divisions - and they had their picturesque ceremonies, religious and secular, and their elaborate codes of behaviour; but somehow the Japanese as a general rule shied away from spirituality, that adventurous and perilous and all-absorbing pursuit of ultimate Reality. Fascinating Japan, the country made up of four principal islands; the captivating variety of coastline, valleys, rivers, lakes, rocks; the cycle of seasons and the rhythm of the hours of the day; the Emperor with his divine right; the eight million gods of the Shinto religion; Mount Fuji with its magnificence and the lesser mountains; the landscapes, gardens, spas; the architecture of the pagodas big and small; the supernal calm on the face of the statues of the Buddha; the grace of the Japanese woman in her kimono; the Kabuki, the Noh and puppet theatres; the sophistication and grace of the Tea Ceremony; the singular charm of the art of Flower Arrangement; the gaunt and uncompromising Samurai code; the marvels in miniature, the Haiku and the Tanka mini-lyrics, the ceramics and lacquer work; these and many other facets of Japanese life in their particularity had such a hold on their sensibility that anything that tended to minimise their individual or unique autonomy, anything that claimed a vaster, or even an absolute, sovereignty was bound to upset their equanimity, their sense of security and their peculiar existential flavour. The Mother once recalled the story (already told in the previous chapter) of the young Japanese aspirant whom she had helped to look within and contact his soul; and the only result was the man was scared; no, no, he didn't want the soul, the mystical tremendum of the Infinite, if that was going to prove more powerful than his country and his Emperor, and affect his allegiance to them!

That being the background, it was inevitable that, while the Richards had many acquaintances, they had but few friends. In the War and immediate post-war years (1916-20), Japan was still on the rising tide of her prosperity and influence. Japan was an ally of Great Britain, and fought on the side of the Allies against Germany and Austria. There was a visible British presence in Japan during the War, and after the Allied victory, Japan was one of the Big Five of the world. The Japanese

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Emperor - the Mikado - was still a sacred and inviolable personage, and mystical awe and aura surrounded his movements. On the other hand, their fanatic loyalty to their Emperor apart, the Japanese people were a talented. industrious and artistic race, radiating buoyancy and infectious self-confidence in public, but also a certain moodiness and self-introspection in private.

During their one-year stay in Tokyo, the Richards shared a house with Dr. S.Okhawa and his wife. and they became very good friends. Dr. Okhawa was a professor who taught at a university in Tokyo. One of the courses that he gave was on the History of the British Colonies. Among his books was a monograph on the Soul of Japan. At the beginning of the First World War, he had given help and asylum to Indian revolutionaries like Rash Behari Bose. This was to make Dr.Okhawa a persona non grata with the British, and perhaps even the Japanese Government wasn't very happy. But Dr. and Madame Okhawa evidently liked Rash Behari Bose, who taught his hostess the rudiments of Indian cookery. The Richards' earlier contacts with Pondicherry and India. the Okhawas' sympathy for the cause of Indian independence, their common aversion to Western materialism and capitalism, and their united faith in the resurgence of Asia brought them close, and they were to remain life-long friends.

II

Forty years later, on the evening of 1September 1957, when Professor V.K. Gokak and I were in Japan to attend the P.E.N. International Congress, we were happy to call upon the Okhawas at their country residence in Nakatsu. One of Dr. Okhawa's former pupils, Katoh, took us partly by train and partly by bus to Nakatsu, and we were received graciously by the septuagenarian professor and his generous-hearted wife. All along the way -whether in the train, at the tea-shop waiting for the bus, or on the bus­ we were buoyed up by anticipation. We raced through the Japanese countryside, a seemingly endless expanse of greenness and elegance and evening glow, and we passed paddy fields, as also mulberry plants and tea shrubs; the bus laboured uphill, and we saw bamboo groves and cherry trees, and at last Nakatsu appeared in sight, situated on one side of a deep gorge with a river flowing below. We had to walk a couple of furlongs to reach Dr. Okhawa's ancient house that seemed perfectly to merge with the sylvan surroundings. Dr. Okhawa was spectacled, and almost wholly blind, and was lying propped up on his bed, but there was a mellow lustre on his face and he rather struck me (I don't know why) as a venerable Lama. He was in his early seventies, and Madame, although not much younger, was very active and attentive to the needs of her husband. Here at last we were face to face with the real heart and soul of authentic Japan.

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In the Course of our conversation we gathered that Dr. Okhawa had read during the early months of the First World War a translation in a Japanese paper of an article by Sri Aurobindo, but he couldn't learn much about the author himself; and what he could get from Rash Behari Bose was only an account of the political side of Sri Aurobindo's career. When, in 1916, the Richards came to Tokyo and they all lived in the same house, Dr. Okhawa knew of the spiritual side of Sri Aurobindo's life as well. The Richards were several years older than the Okhawas, but they all did Yoga together - at least, spiritual concentration. Even after the Richards left for; Kyoto in 1917, their friendship continued on a firm footing. Dr. Okhawa added, in a deep and firm voice, that Sri Aurobindo had remained his Guru for over forty-five years, spanning both the World Wars.

Dr. Okhawa spoke English without difficulty, but the speaking Was disturbed by asthmatic coughs. Madame Okhawa knew no English, but with young Katoh's help as interpreter, there was no difficulty of communication. She was all kindliness and consideration, and ready at the slightest gesture to rush to the assistance of her husband. Dr. Okhawa gradually warmed up and spoke with great enthusiasm about the Richards and of the time they had all lived together. Those days forty years earlier, when they had shared their ideals and experiences, were a time of dreaming and a time of hoping for a better Asia and a better world. Reminiscing about his earlier years, Dr. Okhawa told us that, as a student, he had studied Indian philosophy at the Imperial University, Tokyo, and was later impressed when Paul Richard in the Course of a speech he delivered in Japan referred to Sri Aurobindo as the greatest of the divine men of the world, "the leader, the hero of tomorrow".

In answer to a pointed question as to how Mirra had struck the Okhawas when they knew her, whether they had seen then any indications of her vast spiritual reserves and her future divine ministry at Pondicherry. Dr. Okhawa paused a little, and spoke slowly, as if carefully weighing his words:

No...no ... we were too near her, we all lived in the same house for about a year we were too intimate ....

You know Mount Fuji ... you can't appreciate it in full when you are very near, when you are too close ... some distance is needed ... from a distance, ah! it is grand, it is breath-taking, it is sublime!

She was like Mount Fuji, Mirra was ....

After a significant pause, Dr. Okhawa added slowly:

But even then, even forty years ago, I could see that Mirra was deeply mystical, she was often withdrawn, with a faraway look, a look sometimes of infinite anxiety, sometimes of ecstatic happiness ....

And also - at the same time - Mirra was thoroughly scientific,

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thoroughly practical. That was an extraordinary combination ....

I can see that Pondicherry is a great spiritual centre today. I am not surprised ... I am happy!

That was a marvellously sincere and marvellously accurate assessment. Dr. Okhawa seemed to be a little exhausted, and he quietly listened when Gokakand I described the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of ,Education that was coming up under the aegis of the Ashram and the direct inspiration and guidance of the Mother.

We had then cakes and tea, and gratefully partook of Madame Okhawa's charming hospitality. We shook hands with Dr. Okhawa and took leave of him, but Madame insisted on accompanying us to the bus­stop. We saw on the way cows with enormous udders lowing sweetly, and Madame waited till we got into the bus along with Katoh, and she waved us all an affectionate good-bye.'"

III

In July 1917, the Richards went to Akakura Spa, 2500 feet above the sea level, a rare beauty spot and a place for quiet and relaxation. Four years earlier, Kakuzo Okakura, one of the leaders of the Japanese renaissance and preservers of her cultural heritage, had died at Akakura. He had visited India, and won the friendship of Tagore. Mirra felt at ease at Akakura, a deep waking dream of unfathomable peace, melting into an immensity vast and calm, losing even the remotest traces of the obtrusive consciousness of separative individuality. And the views of Nature! Mirra 'experiences an ineffable throb of fulfilment:

And these great mountains with their serene contours which I see from my 'window, range after majestic range up to the very horizon, are in perfect ;harmony with the rhythm of this being, filled with an infinite peace.^I

The Richards presently shifted to Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan and the centre of her millennial culture and civilisation. Rich in historical, religious and cultural associations, Kyoto with its old-world charm, unspoilt freshness and residuary richness of native grandeur, its hoary heart-uplifting temples, enchanting parks and gardens, the quiet and homliness and easy naturalness and unfailing courtesy of the citizens even in out-of-the-way bylanes and footpaths, all fascinated and feasted the visitors. Mirra and Paul had been in correspondence with Dr. Okhata, the leader of the Still-Sitting Movement and his close associates, the Kobayashis,

*The above record is based, partly on my notes at the time of my Japanese visit, and partly on Professor V.K. Gokak's "Interviews in Japan", published in Loving Homage, 1958, pp.227ff. See also his "Three Prose Poems" in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, 1958.

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of Kyoto. After Dr. Okhata's death in 1921and Kobayashi's in 1926 the leadership of the movement fell to the charge of Madame Kobayashi. Dr. Kobayashi was a surgeon by profession, and a Yogi as well following the Amitabha Buddha School of Sadhana. He found from experience that an inner process facilitated the cure of his patients. In one of Sri Aurobindo's evening talks (of 19 September 1926), he referred to Dr. Kobayashi's work, having evidently heard about it from Mirra:

He makes the patients sit in meditation with him and asks them to concentrate on the navel and to aspire that the Light may come down and set right the affected organ. By now he has cured thousands of patients; of course, his personal influence is indispensable in bringing down the Light.

... His theory is that the disease is due to a passive congestion in the affected part. That is to say, the nerves there get congested and the vital force is not able to reach that part. What the Light does is that it brings about a subtle and quick vibration in the affected part, thereby restoring normal circulation ... this is a method of curing diseases by pure, subtle force. Something from the occult plane comes down and removes the obstacle from the physical plane.²

This was for curing existing ailments, but Dr. Okhata and the Kobayashis used their still-sitting meditation more widely for prophylactic purposes also -
in fact, for promoting the all-round well-being of the body, vital and mind.

During their two years' stay at Kyoto, Mirra struck a deep friendship with Madame Kobayashi, and took interest in the still-sitting movement. Finding the Indian Yoga system too complicated, Dr. Okhata and his associates had devised the still-sitting method of concentration to initiate the integral development of man. The discipline consists in sitting on one's heels in the Japanese fashion with the back held straight. The left palm rests on the abdomen and the right hand holds the left wrist. Now the aspirant imagines that his consciousness is rising above the head, touching the very roof, and he steadily concentrates on his navel. It may seem difficult at first, but practice should perfect the instruments and induce utter stillness and silence. In still-sitting groups, a thousand - or even five thousand - may sit in meditation in one place, yet there is a seraphic stillness and peace. Although such still-sitting with sustained concentration is not the same thing as Hatha Yoga or Raja Yoga, it has its own merits all the same and helps the individual as well as the aggregate to achieve outer and inner poise - no small gains at the earlier stages of spiritual sadhana.

IV

Even as Professor Gokak and I were privileged to meet the Okhawas on 1 September 1957, a week later, on the evening of 8 September, we were

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able to meet Madame Kobayashi at her place in Kyoto. Although Madame Kobayashi had sent a map, we had some difficulty in locating her place, for Kyoto is full of criss-crossing lanes. We reached her place at last, and she warmly received us and took us to her drawing room, furnished with such impeccable taste. Her adopted daughter, her son-in-law and their baby also joined us in due course. Madame Kobayashi was about seventy, but looked much younger; she was indeed a lively, energetic and most friendly person. In Gokak's words, "Free from sentimental prolixity or emotional excess of any kind, her talk yet proceeded from the very depths of her heart, like a little mountain stream."³ She put us at our ease at once, and showed us photographs of the annual gatherings of her still-sitting group, and also copies of the monthly journal she was editing. There were besides a couple of photographs of herself with Mirra and Paul Richard. While in Kyoto, Mirra had done a sketch of Madame Kobayashi in colour, and this we saw too, an excellent likeness that seemed to bring out "the eager inquiry, the innocence, the candour, the cheerfulness and good humour", indeed the very soul of Madame Kobayashi.⁴ The Mother had sent to her old friend a few Ashram photographs including one of herself taken in the Golconde along with some Japanese visitors, and a Savitri diary. All these Madame Kobayashi showed us with evident happiness.

As for the old days almost forty years earlier, she had obviously admired and looked up to Mirra as to a senior in years and a spiritual adept. Still-sitting no doubt promoted physical well-being and inner tranquillity, but Madame Kobayashi could see that Mirra had had other realisations of a far profounder kind. And she had been so good, so helpful, often so self-absorbed with an abstracted air, and always communicating so much love to one and all, always charging the very atmosphere with the power of her beauty and compassionate understanding. We asked Madame Kobayashi about the place where Mirra had lived while in Kyoto. We were informed that the house had since been converted into a Tea House, a characteristic Japanese institution. If we were lucky, Mirra's old rooms might be unoccupied for the nonce facilitating our visit. We decided to take our chance, and Madame Kobayashi and her daughter too accompanied us in the taxi. We were happy to find that the rooms were, in fact, unoccupied, and on Madame Kobayashi's request the ladies running the Tea House permitted us to enter the house and see the rooms. We stepped in and went up the stairs and reached the small room on the second floor where Mirra used to meditate, often in Madame Kobayashi's company. While the rest of the house had suffered alterations during the intervening years, the meditation room - the sanctuary - had remained the same. It was a pretty and cosy room, and we sat for a while, and meditated. Recalling those blissful minutes, Gokak has recorded:

It was, for me, a sacred room, as sacred as the innermost shrine of a

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temple. I sent out a prayer to the Mother from Kyoto to Pondicherry expressing my gratitude to her for having vouchsafed it to me to spend few minutes in what might be caned the laboratory in which her mission was shaped before she came to India to make India her permanent home. ⁵

The veils were suddenly torn from that inconspicuous room with frayed rush-mattresses and a low table, the mind raced back across the long mediating decades when the tea-room was transformed into the favoured haunt of the Divine. How many hours hadn't Mirra, sitting in tapas, in that room of little space, communed with the Divine? How often hadn't she invoked the Divine Presence to consecrate that room; what far regions of consciousness hadn't she coaxed into that obscure room to enlarge it into the amplitudes of the World-Stair; what spiritual energies hadn't she mobilised in that veritable Power House for channelling illumination to the confused, the half-lost and the wholly lost; what roles of medium, mediatrix and creatrix hadn't she rehearsed in that greenroom annex to the bigger theatre to be at Pondicherry! It was for us a singular session of deep humility and measureless gratitude. Our hearts full, we thanked the ladies of the Tea House, dropped the Kobayashis at their residence, and waved an affectionate farewell.

V

During the later part of her stay in Japan, Mirra was asked to speak to a group of women, and this talk in English, happily preserved, was published fifty years later in 1967 as "Talk to the Women of Japan". * Mirra's theme was the bringing up of children, and her audience was made up of mothers, or potential mothers. By a law of nature as it were, children are to women, and not least to Japanese women, their dearest and sacredest possession and preoccupation. Indeed, children are investments on faith, an insurance for the future. In Mirra's view, motherhood is woman's priceless privilege and quintessential role, and involves the tasks of bearing, training, humanising and spiritualising the coming generation. But children should come, not just biologically as rabbits come into the world, but as radiances, psychic entities, soul-sparks encased in human bodies:

True maternity begins with the conscious creation of a being, with the willed shaping of a soul coming to develop and utilise a new body. The true domain of women is the spiritual.⁶

*Mirra's essay on "Women and the War", first published on 7 July 1916 in the Japanese journal Fujoshimbun is an eloquent plea for the recognition of the fundamental spiritual equality of men and women, and for making this "the focus of action and new life, around which will be constructed the future temple of Humanity".

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There is the pure dream of motherhood, and there is the unfolding reality; and from the moment of conception in the womb (or even earlier), the child's future destiny is determined largely by the thoughts, feelings, hopes and aspirations of the mother, her diet and. discipline, her daily routine and commerce in life. Constantly to live amidst beauty, to think great and noble thoughts, to avoid fret and fatigue and agitation and worry, to expose herself to the currents of aspiration and idealism - this would be the best means of moulding the child growing within. Mirra referred in her talk to a mother who had often gazed with absorption and love at a painting of two children by Reynolds, hoping in her heart that her own children might wear angelic faces like those in the picture, and indeed that was how her twins looked when they were born, so unlike their father and mother. If the strength of aspiration could have so decisive an effect even on the physical plane, surely the right aspiration would mould the child's mind and sensibility and entire character as well. Mirra felt that the intensity of the mother's aspiration could actually prove stronger than the compulsions of heredity about which the geneticists waxed so eloquently:

Why accept the obscure bonds of heredity and atavism - which are nothing else than subconscious preferences for our own trend of character - when we can, by concentration and win, can into being a type constructed according to the highest ideal we are able to conceive? With this effort, maternity becomes truly precious and sacred; indeed with this, we enter the glorious work of the Spirit, and womanhood rises above animality and its ordinary instincts, towards real humanity and its powers.

This leads Mirra to the heart of the evolutionary thesis which had first come to her as a flash of intuition, but had later found corroboration when she met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry in 1914. Animals reproduce themselves and perpetuate their several species, but it is given to human beings alone to aspire higher and higher, and bring children into the world with the glow of a new beauty in their limbs and the light of a new knowledge in their eyes. Mirra told her audience that mankind was then in its phoenix-hour when much that was of the past had to perish and something new was to be born. It was almost the mid-point of the First World War, and the papers spoke of only trench-warfare, submarine actions, mounting casualties, uncertainties and inhumanities. But that time of darkest night was also the time for a desperate and compelling hope for the future. With a marked clarity of vision, Mirra peered beyond the dark, and saw the glimmerings of light at the end of the tunnel:

May not this darkness, then, be the sign of an approaching dawn? And as never was night so complete, so terrifying, maybe never win dawn have been so bright, so pure, so illuminating as the coming one .... After the bad dreams of the night the world win awaken to a new consciousness.

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The civilisation which is ending now in such a dramatic way was based on the power of mind, mind dealing with matter and life .... But a new reign is coming, that of the Spirit: after the human, the divine.⁷

In that context of the breaking of the worlds and the dissolution of the old loyalties, it was obvious that man should learn progressively to deepen heighten and widen his consciousness so as to be able to look beneath the appearances, to gaze at the ascending possibilities, and to see far ahead of one's own constricted spheres of person, family, locality, country, and learn rather to identify the Divine presence everywhere and in all things. Without such a decisive emancipation from the prison-cell of the ego, or of the various concentric prison-like ego-formations, no real freedom, Or felicity, or fulfilment was to be expected.

But, then, only too often (Mirra reminded her audience) had the male of the species tried to relegate woman to subservience, inconsequence and futility, and especially was this so in a time of crisis. Mirra felt that this calculated ignoration of woman shouldn't continue any longer. "The true relation of the two sexes," she declared, "is an equal footing of mutual help and close collaboration." Woman's was, after all, the destiny to be the mother of the race, and she would be the mother of the future race of supermen as well. This accordingly placed a great, a supreme, responsibility on woman, for only she could properly envision the future, wait prayerfully upon the ripening event, and hasten the advent of the coming race. Our present difficulties were doubling themselves with each new crisis in human affairs, and thereby proving more and more intractable at the level of customary mental formulations, and so there had to be a new spiritual influx, a climactic transcendence of the mental faculty, - in other words, the bursting of "a new spiritual light, a manifestation upon earth of some divine force unknown until now, a Thought of God, new for us, descending into this world and taking a new form here".

A Thought of God, a new form: something that is different from and exceeds all past images of man: something that could be acclaimed as the New Man, or Greater Man, or Superman. Hitherto women in their inspired moments and dreams may have wished to bear children akin to the great heroes and heroines of history, epic and legend. But these archetypal figures of the past were all cast in the physical, vital and mental moulds of beauty and strength, valour and endurance, intellectual subtlety and moral grandeur. The avatars and prophets of old - Rama, Sita. Krishna, Moses, Mahavira, Siddhartha, Christ, Muhammad, Sankara, Ramanuja, Nanak - punctuated the march of the human consciousness by precept and example. There were also heroic figures like Arjuna and Achilles and Alexander and Napoleon, and there were the great poets and artists, the great scientists and inventors, and the great statesmen and nation-builders, but now there is need for the invocation, or eruption, of

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an altogether new power of consciousness as different from the mental that has been the badge of humanity for millennia, as the mental was different from the mere animal consciousness of man's remote simian ancestors. The emergence of 'mind', of intellect, of reason, if it made possible the development of the arts and sciences, and the sagas of peace and war, also meant a diminution of the old animal cunning and sheer physical agility and endurance. So, too, the emergence of the New Man might involve a radical self-limitation of mental processes and a much greater reliance on the 'overhead' or higher-than-the-mind powers of consciousness like intuition, overmind and supermind. The nineteenth-century German thinker, Nietzsche, had also speculated about the 'superman', but that was only the Asuric man, "a man aggrandised, magnified, in whom Force has become super-dominant, crushing under its weight all the other attributes of man". In the popular imagination of the time, the Kaiser and his .warlords approximated to the Nietzschean Asuric ideal, and certainly Hitler and his Nazi hordes ("The Children of Wotan", as Sri Aurobindo calls them in his poem) were to prove total perversions of the anticipated Nordic Superman. Fully alive to these dangerous possibilities of vulgarisation and distortion of the superman concept, Mirra explained with lucid clarity her own ideal of the Divine Superman. He would be no vitalistic or mentalised exaggeration of current actualities, but a wholly different sort of creation altogether. Indeed, current human experience is wholly inadequate even to visualise the figure and being of this new evolutionary emanation, and only in the utter stillness of the mind can one hope to receive occasional glimpses of the power and the glory of this Future Man:

When the mind is perfectly silent, pure like a well-polished mirror, immobile as a pond on a breezeless day, then, from above, as the light of the stars drops in the motionless waters, so the light of the supermind, of the Truth within, shines in the quieted mind and gives birth to intuition. Those who are accustomed to listen to this voice out of the Silence, take it more and more as the instigating motive of their actions; and where others, the average men, wander along the intricate paths of reasoning, they go straight their way, guided through the windings of life by intuition, this superior instinct, as by a strong and unfailing hand.

This faculty which is exceptional, almost abnormal now, will certainly be quite common and natural for the new race, the man of tomOITow.⁸

In the past, sundry men and women - mystics, saints, ecstatics, poets, artists, even scientists - have known and exercised fitfully this infallible faculty of intuition. But such choice spirits were but few and far between, while the generality of mankind was content to look upon them merely as odd creatures outside the mainstream of life. On the other hand, the recent riot of analytical reason and the heady pace of science have shown that the intellect is not enough; that careering technology and the worship of force

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can only lead to 'the crimes of the strong and the ruin of continents'; and the time has therefore come for a breakthrough in human consciousness that will create conditions for a general forward movement in human affairs. Let women, then, boldly and imaginatively enact the role of the dreamers and redeemers of the race; let them ponder over the limitations of the mental dispensation; let them pray, let them invoke, let them create the Next Future; let them usher in the race of the Superman. When that happens, when the mental man is superseded by the intuitive man and the superman, the rages of the ages will be extinguished, and man and man's works will wear a new poise of purpose and a new cloak of beauty:

Thus, man's road to superman hood will be open when he declares boldly that all he has yet developed, including the intellect of which he is so rightly and yet so vainly proud, is now no longer sufficient for him, and that to uncase, discover, set free this greater power within, shall be henceforward his great preoccupation. Then will his philosophy, art, science, ethics, social existence, vital pursuits be no longer an exercise of mind and life for themselves, in a circle, but a means for the discovery of a greater Truth behind mind and life and the bringing of its power into our human existence.⁹*

This "Talk to the Women of Japan", although cast in the form of a friendly and familiar discourse, is seen on closer scrutiny to be a seminal pronouncement embodying the essential yogic insights of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What Sri Aurobindo was trying at the time - during the war years - to project month after month through the pages of the Arya, at once with an adamantine tightness of argument and also a tropical richness of elaboration, in the massive sequences entitled The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Psychology of Social Development, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry, all their total content is here brought in ever so disarmingly, suggestively, persuasively, and with such crystalline sincerity and candour. There is also the added charm and intensity, because it is an appeal to the women of Japan, and through them to women everywhere. For, after all, who can redeem errant mankind except the mothers of the race? Decades have elapsed since the talk was given, but it still retains its spiritual potency and its fiery contemporaneous relevance.

VI

Life in Japan, then, if it was not outwardly hectic and exciting for Mirra,

*This passage in the talk is a quotation from Sri Aurobindo's The Psychology of Social Development, Chapter XXII, published in the May 1918 issue of the Arya. Some more quotations from other works of Sri Aurobindo published in the Arya are also included in the later part of this talk.

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neither was it without its notable compensations. The Okhawas in Tokyo, .the Kobayashis and Dr. Okhata at Kyoto, were the foci of Mirra's orbit of human relationships In Japan, and what she gave them or received from them cannot be put into words, for it was more of a fellowship in spiritual faith. With some of the Indians in Japan, like Rash Behari Bose, there grew an acquaintanceship; and when Rabindranath Tagore visited Japan and was widely welcomed as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize, the Richards came to know him, as related earlier, and were photographed with him. Showing this portrait to Sri Aurobindo on 18 December 1941 , the Mother was to say wistfully pointing to herself, "This one is Mahalakshmi - sweet, lovable, tender, docile; beauty, harmony ... I like to see this woman, like to meet her again. I like to see this creature again. "^I0 There was another friend too, Miss Dorothy Hodgson, an Englishwoman, who had known Mirra in France, and had come with her to Japan as one inseparable from her friend and mentor. She had suffered a serious bereavement when young, for her fiance had died before they could marry; and so she decided she wouldn't marry at all, and preferred to practise Yoga, having found in Mirra a tremendous support and a ready counsellor and Guru. Dorothy, however, continued to wear a locket round her neck containing a miniature portrait of her fiance. It was from Mirra that Dorothy had learnt about Sri Aurobindo and his yogic life at Pondicherry, as also of the Arya.

These friendships, and the not less important thousand and one casual encounters with Nature and Man in their moments of self-revealing inner splendour when the Divine spoke through them, as also a seasoned occasional talk like the one to the women of Japan, these were but one aspect - the visible outer aspect - of Mirra's life. The other - the invisible inner - aspect of her life was rather like the underground river, flowing steadily, flowing richly, flowing ambrosially, without being in trammels to the urban eruptions, the marshy stretches, the gorgeous mountains, the dreary sandy deserts and the sheltering grottos on the surface of the earth. Her life of intensities was lived within, part dreaming and part seeing, a mixture of meditation and musing, prayer and dialogue; and the outer life was but an attempt - not always successful because of the density of terrestrial life - to translate the aspirations, dreams and visions into everyday actuality. In His confrontation of Mirra, in His dialogues with her, the Divine takes different forms, and it was but natural that in Japan the Divine should sometimes materialise as Shakyamuni before her and speak in. his voice. But behind the veils of the divers descriptive Names, the Reality is the same; Lord, Master, Mother, Friend, Agni, Indra, Eternal Teacher, Sublime Presence, Supreme Dispenser, Sovereign Force, Marvellous Unknowable, Invisible and Sovereign Witness, Mitra, Shakyamuni are but the many verbal approximations to the one only Infinite, the Real, the Perfect. The Divine alone is Mirra's daily diet of meditation, the daily

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ground of habituation, the daily means of subsistence; the desperate separative linguistic formulations are as immediately evocative as they are illusory; her identity with the Divine is the sole reality.

On 24 September 1917, Mirra records yet another dialogue with the Divine, the Lord Infinite and Omnipotent, and reiterates once more both the need for and the difficulty of terrestrial transformation:

Thou hast subjected me to a hard discipline; rung after rung, I have climbed the ladder which leads to Thee and, at the summit of the ascent Thou hast made me taste the perfect joy of identity with Thee. Then obedient to Thy command, rung after rung, I have descended to outer; activities and external states of consciousness, re-entering into contact with these worlds that I left to discover Thee. And now that I have come back to the bottom of the ladder, all is so dull, so mediocre, so neutral, in me and around me, that I understand no more.

The situation here is distantly paralleled by the plight in which King Aswapathy finds himself at the end of his long journey to the Divine Mother. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, Aswapathy's Yoga makes him a traveller in the several regions of the World-Stair, from Night below to Superlight above. With all this knowledge, Aswapathy finds it impossible to return to the old world without an assurance of its eventual transformation. He therefore makes this passionate plea to the Divine Mother:

How shall I rest content with mortal days

And the dull measure of terrestrial things,

I who have seen behind the cosmic mask

The glory and the beauty of thy face?

Hard is the doom to which thou bindest thy sons!

How long shall our spirits battle with the Night

And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,

We who are vessels of a deathless Force

And builders of the godhead of the race?¹¹

Mirra too wonders if it makes no difference at all whether one attains the summit or not, since apparently earth-nature is irremediable and unredeemable! And then, like Aswapathy himself, Mirra asks:

What is it then that Thou awaitest from me, and to what use that slow long preparation, if all is to end in a result to which the majority of human beings attain without being subjected to any discipline?

How is it possible that having seen all that I have seen, experienced all that I have experienced, after I have been led up even to the most sacred sanctuary of Thy knowledge and communion with Thee, Thou hast made of me so utterly common an instrument in such ordinary circumstances?¹²

In Savitri, Aswapathy asks for a divine descent in the form of an avatar

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-to effect the transfiguration of the earth:

One moment fill with thy eternity,

Let thy infinity in one body live,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

All-Love throb single in one human heart ... ,

Pack with the eternal might one human hour

And with one gesture change all future time. ¹³

Here, with Mirra, the problem is somewhat different. She knows, as a result of repeated realisations, that she is herself of the Divine substance; she has reached up to the divine Felicity, she has won her way to the Power and the Glory there. But why is she unable to mobilise all that here at the level of the ordinary earth-consciousness, and bring about the desired transformation? What is wanting still? The consenting Voice of Supreme Grace? The chiming of the instrumentation of Time? The uncompleted explosion of the Supramental consciousness?

Mirra writes again, after a few days: "Spare me this calvary of earthly consciousness; let me merge in Thy supreme unity." Well, if she cannot change the Earth and Man, she might at least return to the Peace and the Felicity, although leaving the work here unaccomplished! Her despairing cry is answered, and she is asked to submit to the cross of terrestrial life, so that in the "crucible of the world" she may be "melted anew and purified". And on 25 November 1917, Mirra records:

O Lord, because in an hour of cruel distress I said in the sincerity of my faith: "Thy Will be done", Thou camest garbed in Thy raiment of glory. At Thy feet I prostrated myself, on Thy breast I found my refuge .... Since Thou art there, all has become clear. Agni is rekindled in my fortified heart, and his splendour shines out and sets aglow the atmosphere and purifies it ....

Thou hast said to me: "I have returned to leave thee no more." ¹⁴

After this definitive reunion of the Devotee and the Divine, several months pass before the next entry in Mirra's spiritual diary:

Suddenly, before Thee, all my pride fell. I understood how futile it was in Thy Presence to wish to surmount oneself, and I wept, wept abundantly and without constraint the sweetest tears of my life .... Was it not like a child in its father's arms? But what a Father! What sublimity, what magnificence, what immensity of comprehension! And what a power and plenitude in the response! Yes, my tears were like holy dew. Was it because it was not for my own sorrow that I wept?...

And now, although I weep no longer, I feel so near, so near to Thee that my whole being quivers with joy.

Let me stammer out my homage: ...

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"Thou hast made me know the supreme, the sublime joy of a perfect confidence, an absolute serenity, a surrender total and without reserve Or colouring, free from effort or constraint. "¹⁵

And three months after, the same trust, the peace, the happiness, the experience of oneness, the sense of divine Vocation, the consciousness of utter plasticity, the all-sufficing feeling of unqualified gratitude, these remain, and Mirra is able to record:

My father has smiled and taken me in his powerful arms. What could I fear? I have melted into Him and it is He who acts and lives in this body which He Himself has formed for His manifestation. ¹⁶

The classical categories, illuminative, purgative and unitive, are not quite relevant to Mirra's mystical life, for most of Mirra's meditations were in a representative - representing earth's tribulations and aspirations - rather than in her own individual capacity. But divers mystical strains certainly mingle in her prayers and meditations, and the total recordation is a spiritual symphony of incomparable authenticity of inspiration and melting power of articulation.

VII

One of the amusing things that happened during Mirra's stay in Japan was a meeting in Tokyo with one of Tolstoy's sons, who was then on a world tour preaching human unity. Mirra was of course passionately devoted to the cause of unity, the outlawry of war and violence, and the establishment of global concord and peace. Like Sri Aurobindo, she too thought that, while all sensible means should be tried (they might prove palliatives at least), a lasting solution could be reared only on firm spiritual foundations, as the result of an inner revolution bringing about the effective containment, if not the total annihilation, of the human ego. During the latter part of his life, the great Tolstoy, who had been a soldier himself when young and was the author of the epic novel, War and Peace, became (like Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi) a pacifist, an apologist of non-violence, and an advocate of civil disobedience. Evidently his son had inherited this passion for human unity, and the First World War had only deepened his convictions. He accordingly went from country to country propagating his ideal with the zeal of a missionary. But his ideas as to how human unity was to be ushered in were rather naive. "Oh! it is very simple - " he told Mina; "if everybody spoke the same language, if everybody dressed in the same way, if everybody lived in the same fashion, the whole world would be united!" One had only to go from land to land advocating a universal Esperanto language, an Esperanto mode of dress, and a set of Esperanto

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habits "Everybody would be happy, all would understand one another, nobody would quarrel if everyone did the same thing." In reply, Mirra could only say: ''That would be a poor world not worth living in." Of course she couldn't get him to understand the entire absurdity of his postulates and reasomng.¹⁷

The universe, the earth and mankind itself thrive by variety and diversity. There are millions and millions of human beings, yet no two thumb impressions are a complete mimicry of each other. No two leaves of even the same branch of the same tree are utter copies of each other. Out of the billions - trillions - of cast-off sea-shells, no two are wholly identical in shape, colour and intricate tracery. The Divine fathers forth this multiplicity, this variety - though He is Himself past all change. To locate unity except on the ground of the Spirit, to fabricate external means (like gorge, language dress, food) to forge human unity, to devise cast-iron constitutional or economic patterns, to impose a single religion, a single political ideology, a single economic dogma, a single code of behaviour or body of ritual, or to gather everybody into a single vast net of global military hegemony - these be the roads to dead uniformity, cheerless conformity, or naked tyranny. Human unity, certainly; but it should be founded on the shared experience of the Divine, and reinforced by the categorical imperatives­ of the Spirit.

In later years, Mirra was often to return to the question of human unity and the means of founding it even here in our imperfect world. In the course of a conversation in the late twenties, she was to say:

The spiritual life reveals the one essence in all, but reveals too its infinite diversity; it works for diversity in oneness and for perfection in that diversity.¹⁸

Commenting on this seminal statement, the Mother said in 1951:

This is the very motive of the creation of the universe, that is to say, all are one, all is one in its origin, but each thing, each element, each being has as its mission the revealing of one part of this unity to itself, and it is this particularity which must be developed in everyone, while awakening at the same time the sense of the original unity. ¹⁹

Five years later (8 February 1956), she said that the secret was to grow conscious of the unity of Force, of Consciousness, of Will behind all things, all phenomena; and once this was done, one would "no longer have the Education perception which makes you quite separate from others". ²⁰ Again, after three weeks, more emphatically still:

In fact, this is what we have said more than fifty thousand times: that all is the Divine and that consequently all is One; that it is only your consciousness which is separated and in a state of unconsciousness because it is

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separated; but that if you remove this unconsciousness and this sense of separation, you become divine.²¹

Returning to the theme next year, the Mother once said: "Indeed the source was One ... and creation had to be manifold. "²² But unity, notwithstanding the teeming, tantalising and exasperating surface variety can be attained certainly through a return to the cosmic force, consciousness and will, but more simply, more infallibly, unity can be enacted through love, "for it is indeed love which leads to Unity". But for anything like a lasting unity, unity doubled with sovereign puissance, knowledge and love, but still without the destruction of the fascinating manifoldness and variegated richness of phenomenal life, the spiritual - even the supramental - revolution must take place:

In the supramental creation there will no longer be any religions. The whole life will be the expression, the flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world.²³

It was hardly surprising that Tolstoy's son, with his stereotyped mind, found it difficult to understand Mirra's vision of "unity in the diversity" in future divinised world.

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CHAPTER 13

Tea, Flowers and Flu

I

Once in the course of her stay in Japan, Mirra had an illness, extremely painful at first, though it didn't fail to provide some rich compensations as well. It was in January 1919 in Tokyo when the terrible influenza epidemic was raging all over Japan. After the attack, the patient usually died on the third day; if luckily he didn't, at the end of seven days he was completely cured, though exhausted and enfeebled. People succumbed to the epidemic in such large numbers that they couldn't be individually cremated . There was panic everywhere, and people were gripped by a fear of vast proportions, no wonder - because the epidemic was claiming many lives. In Tokyo alone, every day "there were hundreds and hundreds of cases". They said the microbes were responsible, the microbes were wildly careering in the atmosphere! And people took desperate measures to escape the dreaded contagion. Yet, if the trouble was with the atmosphere itself, how was one to escape it? How was one to avoid movement altogether? As for Mirra, she simply covered herself with her force, giving no thought to the raging epidemic. But she had a companion at the time who was constantly afraid and curious. Then, one day, Mirra had to go to the other end of the city in a tram, and for all her habitual calm and self­possession, she became curious, and this provided an opening:

I was in the tram and seeing these people with masks on their noses, and then there was in the atmosphere this constant fear, and so there came a suggestion to me; I began to ask myself: "Truly, what is this illness? .. " I came to the house [of a friend], I passed an hour there and I returned. And I returned with a terrible fever". I had caught it.¹

But of course she declined to take any medicine, and so there was the grapple within, an intestine struggle between 'the genius and the mortal instruments' :

I remained in my bed .... At the end of the second day, as I was lying all alone, I saw clearly a being, with a part of the head cut off, in a military uniform ... approaching me and suddenly flinging himself upon my chest, with that half a head to suck my force ... " He was drawing all my life out .... Then I called on my occult power, I gave a big fight and I succeeded in turning him back .... And I woke Up.²

The three clear gains of this pretty agonising experience were, firstly, she saw that microbes were produced by the disintegration of vital beings, and with their ravenous appetites, they were themselves forces of further

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disintegration; secondly, having decisively thrown back the vicious being with its "half a head", Mirra quickly regained her normal health; and thirdly, having by occult means tackled the evil and vanquished it, Mirra as good as put an end to the epidemic itself. She learnt presently that there as were no new cases, and those that were ill were cured in due course. There were even articles in the papers about the mystery of the sudden decline and end of the epidemic. It was all clearly much more than a bizarre coincidence.

II

In her talks at Pondicherry, she was to return again and again to the theme of the causal nexus between fear and illness. She considered that "some disharmony in the being, from a lack of receptivity to the divine forces" was the primary reason for the onset of an illness.³ The disharmony thus precipitated fear, and such fear opened the gates inviting the invasion:

If there is one mental disorder which can bring about all illnesses, it is fear.⁴

Again, on 19 June 1957:

From the ordinary point of view, in most cases, it is usually fear - fear, which may be mental fear, vital fear, but which is almost always physical fear, a fear in the cells - it is fear which opens the door to all contagion.⁵

How is this physical fear - the trepidation of the very cells of the body - to be overcome? "A veritable yoga is necessary ... the control of a conscious will is necessary."⁶ Some months earlier, on 13 February, the question had come up in a wider perspective, the whole evil complex of illness and pain and suffering. Yoga of course was the cure-all, the infallible panacea. But what was the innermost secret of this yoga? How was it to be done? What might one hope for by doing it? The Mother gave a categorical answer:

The secret is to emerge from the ego, get out of its prison, unite ourselves with the Divine, merge into Him, not to allow anything to separate us from Him. Then, once one has discovered this secret and realises it in one's being, pain loses its justification and suffering disappears. It is an all­powerful remedy, not only in the deeper parts of the being, in the soul, in the spiritual consciousness, but also in life and in the body.

There is no illness, no disorder which can resist the discovery of this secret and the putting of it into practice, not only in the higher parts of the being but in the cell of the body ....

... When the physical disorder comes, one must not be afraid; one must not run away from it, must face it with courage, calmness, confidence, with the certitude that illness is a falsehood and that if one turns entirely, in full

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confidence, with a complete quietude to the divine Grace, It will settle in these cells as It is established in the depths of the being, and the cells themselves will share in the eternal Truth and Delight.⁷

III

The four years Mirra spent in Japan were an oasis in time, and a singular Tea Room of reserve, contemplation and preparation for the future. In her childhood and girlhood days, Mirra's interests and her sensibilities and her warm heart's movements had pulled her in different directions - self­ introspection, solitary communion with Nature, stray rambles in the uncharted occult regions, involvement in music and painting, dream­ visions and musings - and she had grown into a young woman unparalleled silent and self-absorbed, conscious of both the world's burden of pain and its need for love, and peering into the Future with the eyes of hope and faith. She had presently won her way to the secrets of occultism, under M. Théon's guidance in Algeria, and in Paris she had pursued the way of enlightened reason in the weekly meetings of "Idea", and she had plunged into the ocean of spirituality at Pondicherry with Sri Aurobindo keeping guard as it were and giving a helping hand when necessary. The War had then intervened, and the work of reconstruction of a world decadent and disintegrating had to be done now on firm new foundations. The Arya was spelling out, month after month, the minutiae of the supramental manifesto, the programme for the unfoldment of the Next Future. But, then, the supramental manifesto was also Mirra's manifesto, for it was, in a sense, only the symphonic enunciation and detailed elaboration of her own vision of "the flowering of the new race, the race of the sons of God" as set forth in her prolegomenon and given at her meeting of 7 May 1912. While during the war years the Arya was imperiously unrolling the magnificent tapestry of the Future, the Richards left Pondicherry for France, and then France for Japan, and stayed there till after the Peace of Versailles had been signed. What was Japan's role in the epic of Mirra's manifestation and ministry? What did she hope for? What was the nature of her experiences in Japan? What were the real gains of the visit?

IV

Ever since her years of 'discretion', one thing had appeared so amusing, so tragi-comic, in human affairs: the readiness of people to identify themselves with the country or religion of their birth, cry up its superiority ('My country!' 'My religion!' 'My prophet!' 'My language!'), and hold in

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contempt all other countries, religions, or peoples. In times past, it was not easy to move from one part of the world to another, people lived walled up as it were in particular political, economic, social, religious or ethical systems, and such collectivist egoisms were apt to feed upon themselves and thrive just as individual egoisms did. Mirra thought that, in the twentieth century, the world had gone past that sort of stupid parochialism. With the advance of science and technology, with the advance in historical knowledge, especially knowledge of comparative civilisation culture and religion, there was surely no room for the old dogmatism. In our time, humanity is caught in a process of convergence towards the Future, and all past thought, all yesterday's ideologies and experiences, have to mingle in the crucible of current tribulations and aspirations and expectations, and open up towards the beckoning Future.

Her own ancestry went back to ancient Egypt; she was born and brought up in France; she completed her occult education in Algeria; she grew to high intellectual maturity in Paris; she sought the true Light in the scriptures of the Orient, the Gita, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, the Yogasutras; she found a master of spiritual illumination in Pondicherry. And now, in Japan, she sought the clues to an orderly and artistic way of life, the graces of the 'realm between' linking the ascetics' bare heavens and the materialists' sickening excesses. Mirra was still thinking of her future "typic society", how it should be constituted, what elements should go into it, what ambience should pervade it. She knew that her "typic society" should be grounded on the Spirit; that it should enact a spiritual hierarchy; that it should be a marriage of heaven and earth, heaven descended on an equal footing to a changed and transformed earth. But there might be other useful ingredients too, and perhaps she would light upon them during her Japanese sojourn!

It was also necessary to look for herself how what passed for 'national identity', 'national character', 'national soul', while they had certainly a validity within limits, were not as absolute as people took them to be. 'Human' is the generic term; the rest were but adhesions and expendable qualifications. As she said about a decade after her Japanese visit:

If we go a little way within ourselves, we shall discover that there is in each of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the ages and manifesting in a multitude of forms. Each of us has been born in many different countries, belonged to many different nations, followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as the best? The experiences gathered by us in all these many lives in different countries and varying religions, are stored up in that inner continuity of our consciousness which persists through all births .... There are people who have been born into one country, although the leading elements of their consciousness obviously belong to another. I have met some born in Europe who were

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evidently Indians; I have met others born in Indian bodies who were as evidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were Indian, others who were European.⁸

The accident of birth should neither make for slavery to something local, tmporal or transient, nor prevent a conscious choice on the basis of a new inner freedom won through a psychic or spiritual opening. Neither blind acceptance nor blind rejection is the way of wisdom. Coming to Japan, Mira found a good deal to admire in their way of life - especially their elegance, sense of order and habitual poise. But she was also quick to mark their allergy to the things of the spirit. During her stay, not only did Mirra gain an acquaintance with the Japanese language, and acquire a smattering of Chinese⁹, she forged several deep life-loyalties, while with people like the Okhawas and the Kobayashis, she felt a profound affinity that transcended country, class and religion. The dogmas and the rituals of the Shintoists and the Buddhists, as of the divers Christian sects, left her rather cold, because they seemed to have lost their original spiritual orientations. But the meditative intensities of the Zen Buddhists, their enlightened this­ 'worldliness, the collectivist discipline of the still-sitting groups, the sub-dued rhythm of the Tea Ceremony with its aesthetic and religious undertones, and the psychology and philosophy behind the Japanese :mystique of flower arrangement - all this could not fail to make a deep ,impression upon Mirra's sensitised and wide-awake consciousness.

V

After the first few months in Japan, Mirra realised that it was really a country of sensations. The people were, as a general rule, individualists in their feelings, thoughts and actions. They lived as it were through their eyes, and form and even rhythm meant a great deal to them. They saw 'behind behind the externals of form deeper truths, harmonies, significances:

Each form, each act is symbolical, from the arrangement of the gardens and the houses to the famous tea ceremony.... Beauty rules over her [Japan] as an uncontested master; and all her atmosphere incites to mental and vital activity, study, observation, progress, effort, not to silent and blissful contemplation. But behind this activity stands a high aspiration .... ¹⁰

As early as 1906, in his celebrated classic The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura had said:

A special contribution of Zen to Eastern thought was its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual. It held that in the great relation of things there was no distinction of small and great, an atom possessing equal possibilities with the universe. The seeker for perfection

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must discover in his own life the reflection of the inner light.

Further, in a Zen monastery, almost every member was assigned some important work; "such services formed a part of the Zen discipline, and every least action must be done absolutely perfectly". The Book of Tea was known to Mirra, and may have given her a pointer to her complicated, but superlatively efficient organisation of Sri Aurobindo Ashram in later years, with its hundreds of sadhaks making a world within a world, a "typic society" serving as the matrix within the outer human agglomeration in Pondicherry, or India.

The Zen meditative practices ("Look carefully within, and there you will find the Buddha!") and the still-sitting discipline of the Okhata-Kobayashi groups at Kyoto had also their own merits. A still-sitting group of 5000 would be unbelievably silent, and even their breathing couldn't be heard. This impressive discipline had the aim of promoting physical as well as mental well-being, and perhaps of throwing open the windows to reveal the panorama of the Spirit's landscapes. But neither Zen nor still-sitting quite gave the answer to what Mirra was seeking, even if she may have remembered these when, after her second coming to Pondicherry, she explained the roles of individual, group and collective sadhana within the larger perspective of Integral Yoga.

There was, then, the Japanese Tea Ceremony that, on a first view, merely tantalised the outsider. Why should so much leisureliness and formalism surround what was, perhaps, no more than an everyday social affair? Actually, the mystique of the tea ceremony has grown over a period of one thousand years - in its present form, at least since the time of Rikiu four hundred years ago. The traditional arrangement with the portico . (where the five guests foregather), .the garden path which leads the guests through a low door (the arch of humility), to the sanctuary itself, in other words, the small tea room ten-feet square (with its own anteroom for the utensils), would indicate the symbolic passage from the imperfect world without to the elected aspirations and realisations of the world within. The five guests and the Tea Master making and drinking tea out of the same bowl would likewise imply the mystery of inter-communication and fulfilled communion.

Quite obviously, the Tea Room had slowly evolved out of the Zen monastic tradition. In Okakura's words:

.. .it was the ritual instituted by the Zen monks of successively drinking tea out of a bowl before the image of Bodhi Dharma, which laid the foundations of the tea ceremony.

Although muted in its articulation, the tea ceremony also aimed at inducing serenity and purity through the process of sharing. It is not

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In Japan, about 1918

unlikely that the muted charm and tested efficacy of the tea ceremony made a deep impression on Mirra, and a few of its features may have entered the far more spiritually profound Soup ceremony of the earlier years of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The dainty narrow mats and the small low tables of the Japanese Tea Room were likewise to provide a pattern for the arrangements in the Ashram dining hall.

VI

In Japan, the art or cult of Flower Arrangement first grew as part of the Tea Ceremony, and later gradually asserted its own autonomy. The early Buddhist saints, when they witnessed the scattering of flowers during a storm, gathered them and placed them in bowls of water; this was done out of compassion. In course of time, artistic flower arrangement - but always subdued and always with a purpose - became integral to the tea ceremony. Still later, since the middle of the seventeenth century, Flower Masters - as distinct from the Tea Masters - attained an importance of their own, and they have made the variegated art of flower arrangement something of a rather unique human achievement:

It now becomes independent of the Tea Room and knows no law save that the vase imposes on it. New conceptions and methods of execution now become possible.¹¹

There are said to be over 300 different schools of flower arrangement, grouped broadly under the Formalistic and the Naturalistic; and it is said that many a flower arrangement aims at insinuating the filiations between Heaven, Earth, and the intermediate principle, Man. While she was in Japan, Mirra was fascinated by the Japanese addiction to the cult of flowers and their marvellous talent for flower arrangement, and it is hardly a coincidence that in Sri Aurobindo Ashram too the cult of flowers was to reign with an unfading freshness and glow, and adding, and exploring, newer and newer avenues of significance.

VII

In the Prayers and Meditations, there is a single entry between 10 October 1918 and 22 June 1920. Perhaps it was a lean period for fresh spiritual harvests; may be, it was a period of quiet consolidation; or, what was equally likely, the experiences defied formal expression. But the opening sentence in the entry under "Oiwake, 3 September 1919" has a rather startling tone:

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Since the man refused the meal I had prepared with so much love and care, I invoked the God to take it. '

There is here a sharp unmistakable personal note. Granted the general impersonality of Prayers and Meditations - Mirra is speaking as a rule, not exactly or exclusively for herself but on behalf of and often in the name of the earth and its sorrowing inhabitants with their ardours, hopes, set­backs, despairs as also aspirations for a better world - still this particular entry seems to have leapt out, like a spark from the anvil, of some immediate rebuff or the sudden registering of a cumulative finality of rejection. Rebuffs of course are inbuilt in the system of human relationships. 'Nay' is almost endemic in the earth atmosphere. In life, karma cannot be avoided, and there is also joy in karma when there is no external compulsion. Something is done, and is offered to another - or others - with love. But average humanity is unworthy of such gifts or offerings. There is cold-shouldering, there is refusal, there is denigration. Instead of the smile of acceptance and appreciation, there is the blighting dead-sea fruit of frowning disapprobation. What then? Nishkama karma - desireless action - is therefore recommended. But' even that is too bloodless, too negative. Rather offer everything, not to the man, but to the God: not to the creature of ignorance and impermanence, but to the God within, the God omnipresent, the immutable Divine. Make an offering of all karma to the Divine! Offer it as a garland is offered, or as a burnt offering, or as one's heart's blood. Offer even one's set-backs and failures to the Divine. Invoke the Lord to take it, to take all the harvest of one's labours, to take the food prepared with so much love and care, the burnt offering of one's dedicated exertions; and on his part, He will certainly accept these gifts, these offerings, made by a mind opened to knowledge, a heart turned to Love, and a body resilient for accomplishing works.

Commenting on this crucial entry', Nolini Kanta Gupta - about whom Sri Aurobindo had once said, "If Nolini does not know my Yoga, who. does?" - has written:

What is this banquet that she prepared for man and which man refused? It is nothing else than the Life Divine here below .... Man refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his petty power, in his blind self-sufficiency. Furthermore, besides ignorance and arrogance there is an element of revolt in him, for in his half-wakefulness with his rudimentary consciousness, if he ever came in contact with something that is above and beyond him, if a shadow of another world happens to cross his threshold, he is not at peace, does not want to recognise but denies an even curses it. . ..

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If man finds no use for the gift She has brought down for him, naturally She will take it back and return it to Him to whom it belongs, for all things belong to the Supreme Lord, even She belongs to Him, as She is one with Him.¹²

.. .in the last analysis each and every movement comes from Him and we must always offer them to Him, return them to the parent-source from where they come; therein lies freedom, the divine detachment which the individual must possess always in order to be one with Him, feel one's identity with Him.¹²

VIII

It was about this time that Sri Aurobindo was publishing in the Arya, month after month, his Essays on the Gita. In November 1918, in the chapter "The Secret of Secrets", Sri Aurobindo wrote:

Nature is the worker and not ego, but Nature is only a power of the Being who is the sole master of all her works and energisms and of all the aeons of the cosmic sacrifice. Therefore, since his [man's] works are that Being's, he has to give up all his actions to. the Godhead in him and the world, by whom they are done in the divine mystery of Nature .... Thus only can we aspire through the offering of all our nature and being to a living union with the One who has become in Time and Space all that is .... All knowledge then becomes an adoration and aspiration, but all works too become an adoration and aspiration.¹³

Again, in July 1919, on "The Way of the Bhakta":

This then is the swiftest, largest and greatest way. On Me, says the Godhead to the soul of man, repose all thy mind and lodge all thy understanding in Me: I will lift them up bathed in the supernal blaze of the divine love and will and knowledge to Myself....

... The God-lover dear to God is a soul of wide equality .... And the crown of this equality is love founded on knowledge, fulfilled in instrumental action, extended to all things and beings, a vast absorbing and all­containing love for the divine Self who is Creator and Master of the universe, suhrdam sarvabhūtānām sarva-lokamaheśvaram.¹⁴

While there were the usual irritations of ignorant indifference or perverse negation, while there was heard the sullen reiteration of the graceless Nay, Mirra wasn't perturbed in the least, for periodically there came also the needed spiritual solace from Pondicherry - the Arya, and occasional letters too. Mirra knew well enough what she needs must do: offer everything ­ love, knowledge, works - not to the man but to the God! And the response was immediate:

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My God, Thou hast accepted my invitation, Thou hast come to sit at my table, and in exchange for my poor and humble offering Thou hast granted to me the last liberation.¹⁵

And it is an integral liberation involving the heart, head, body and soul.

My heart, even this morning so heavy with anguish and care, my head surcharged with responsibility, are delivered of their burden. Now are they light and joyful as my inner being has been for a long time past. My body smiles to Thee with happiness as before my soul smiled to Thee .... I have mounted the Calvary of successive disillusionments high enough to attain to the Resurrection. Nothing remains of the past but a potent love which gives me the pure heart of a child and the lightness and freedom of thought of a god. ¹⁵

Gone are all the heart's anguish, the head's burden of care, and perhaps also the body's strait-jacket of tamas; and now all are in a concert with the soul, in its rhapsody of love and adoration. This is verily the integral realisation. There will be no more taint of egoistic separativity, and no unbridgeable abyss between the human and the Divine. Mirra has won her way to the heart of a child and the lightness and freedom of thought of a god, and she is ready to act her role as the chosen instrument of the Lord for unleashing the spiritual revolution and the terrestrial transformation.

IX

In the meantime, Sri Aurobindo was turning out his monumental prose sequences - The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Psychology of Social Development, The Future Poetry, A Defence of Indian Culture - and, all by himself, publishing them serially, and more or less simultaneously, in the pages of the Arya. When the War came to an end at last, his apocalyptical "Uttarpara Speech" of 1909 and The Ideal of Human Unity were issued as books in 1919. Sri Aurobindo also commented with guarded enthusiasm on the success of the Russian Revolution. In fact, in one of his later Evening Talks (9 December 1925), he said that he had "worked for the success of the Russian Revolution", that his was "one of the influences that worked to make it a success".¹⁶ Further, writing under the title "1919" in the July 1919 issue of the Arya, Sri Aurobindo felt unhappy that the peace seemed to be "in part a prolongation" of the War, and that even the League of Nations looked like a mere makeshift. On the other hand, there were some hopeful strands as well: a move away "from plutocracy and middle-class democracy to some completeness of socialism and attempt at a broad and equal commonalty of social living, in the relations of the peoples away

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from aggressive nationalism and balances of power to some closer international comity". But they were as yet no more than the first indications, symptoms, not the actuality. And he concluded with these words:

Meanwhile much is gone that had to go, though relics and dregs of it remain for destruction, and the agony of a sanguinary struggle is ended, and for that there may well be rejoicing. But if something is ended, all has yet to be begun. The human spirit has still to find itself, its idea and its greater orientation. ¹⁷

The recluse at Pondicherry, then, was also a man of action, though with a difference! He was keenly watching the developing global political scene, and even intervening occasionally when quite necessary with a spiritual power; and he was in communication with Mirra, though few of the letters have actually survived.

There were other developments too. Sri Aurobindo's wife, Mrinalini, succumbed to the influenza epidemic in December 1918 at the very time she was making preparations to leave her parental home in Bengal for a prolonged stay at Pondicherry. Writing to his father-in-law on 19 February 1919, Sri Aurobindo said:

God has seen good to lay upon me the one sorrow that could still touch me to the centre. He knows better than ourselves what is best for each of us, and now that the first sense of the irreparable has passed, I can bow with submission to His divine purpose. ¹⁸

Strange enough, surpassing strange, that first Mrinalini in Bengal, and a month later Mirra in Japan, one after the other they should both suffer the dangerous attentions of the Flu epidemic; but while Mrinalini succumbed, Mirra managed by sheer force of her occult resourcefulness to throw back and immobilise the adversary. As narrated earlier, the epidemic itself was presently to subside in Japan.

There was, then, the attempt by Lokamanya Tilak and Joseph Baptista to get to get Sri Aurobindo back to public life as editor of a new political paper to be lunched at Bombay. But Sri Aurobindo, writing on 5 January 1920, politely and firmly declined the invitation:

Pondicherry is my place of retreat, my cave of tapasya, not of the ascetic kind, but of a brand of my own invention ....

.. .I do not at all look down on politics or political action ... my idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing secular, all human activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life ....

... But I have not as yet any clear and full idea of the practical lines; I have no formed programme. In a word, I am feeling my way in my mind and not ready for either propaganda or action. ¹⁹

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Months later, when an attempt was made by Dr. B.S. Moonje and others to get Sri Aurobindo to preside over the Nagpur special session of the Indian National Congress in December 192O, he promptly wired his refusal, and followed it up with a detailed letter dated 30 August, giving convincing political reasons as also a clinching personal explanation:

The central reason however is this that I am no longer first and foremost a politician, but have definitely commenced another kind of work with a spiritual basis, a work of spiritual, social, cultural and economic reconstruction of an almost revolutionary kind, and am even making or at least supervising a sort of practical or laboratory experiment in that sense which needs all the attention and energy that I can have to spare. It is impossible for me to combine political work of the current kind .... ²⁰

Sri Aurobindo was probably thinking of the Prabartak Sangha at Chandernagore when he mentioned the "practical or laboratory experiment but certainly there were other possibilities too, though not as yet structured into recognisable shapes.

On the other hand, in a letter of April 1920 to his brother Barindra Kumar Ghose, Sri Aurobindo was rather more communicative about his plans. There was of course no question of an immediate return to Bengal, for Pondicherry was "the appointed place" of his Yoga Siddhi. When he moved from Knowledge to Action, Bengal might be its centre, but the circumference would be "the whole of India and the whole world". He was doubtless planning to build the future, but he was determined to build only on strong foundations: "This work is not mine, it is God's." India had to work out her salvation with diligence, but in a manner that was in consonance with her own genius - not just a mimicry of Western social democracy. What Sri Aurobindo had in mind was a Deva Sangh, a working group oriented towards the Divine, that would begin as a pilot project somewhere, and then spread over the whole world. All human activity would come within the purview of the Deva Sangha, "but we must give them a new life, a new form". At the root of it all would be a feeling of delight in everything, in the body as much as in the spirit .... No one is a god, but each man has a god within him. To manifest him is the aim of divine life." Sri Aurobindo concluded by saying that "I too am tying up my bundle. But I believe this bundle is like the net of St.Peter, teeming with the catch of the Infinite."²¹ But he wouldn't be coaxed to open the bag except at the appropriate time.

And the appropriate time was not far!

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CHAPTER 14

Second Coming

I

It will be seen from what has been set forth in the earlier chapters that, on the one hand, Mirra was reaching the end of the Japanese interlude, having arrived at a new poise of purposive purity and serenity and puissance; and, on the other hand, Sri Aurobindo was approaching the end of the great Arya phase of his career, "tying up his bundle ... teeming with the catch of the Infinite", awaiting the right time to open it and call into existence his Deva Sangha. He had a few ardent young men with him, Nolini, Amrita, Moni, Bejoy Nag. But the Deva Sangha, the Ashram, was yet to be born. The Arya itself was magisterially drawing towards its preordained end. The major sequences had been concluded, and one or two were well on their way to a rounded close. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga had won phenomenal victories during the decade then ending, and the uplifting message of the Life Divine had been broadcast through the pages of the Arya. The Yoga was now poised for a new leap, for a new and decisive of phase action and manifold realisation. Everything was ready: the room, the lamp, the oil, the wick - and it only needed somebody divinely . appointed for the task to arrive upon the scene, strike the match, light the lamp and throw open the illumined chamber for the reception and initiation of the first of the new race, those that Mirra had described in 1912 as "the race of the sons of God" or the elect of Sri Aurobindo's Deva Sangha. That 'somebody' who came to Sri Aurobindo's aid was of course Mirra, the Mother. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1935, "the Sadhana and the work were waiting for the Mother's coming".¹ Anilbaran Roy has recorded . Sri Aurobindo telling a group of disciples in 1926:

When I came to Pondicherry, a programme was dictated to me from within for my sadhana. I followed it and progressed for myself but could not do much by way of helping others. Then came the Mother and with her help I found the necessary method.²

There is a divinity indeed that shapes our ends, and answering its veiled dictates, Mirra and Paul Richard as also Dorothy Hodgson finally decided to leave Japan for Pondicherry in the early months of 1920. For Mirra, the four years in Japan had on the whole been a period of quietude and sadhana, a time for perfection in minutiae, a season for the cultivation of the integral as well as the miniature; in a word, the Japanese interim had proved a sanctuary and phoenix-hour for the whole tapasya of a Mahasaraswati:

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The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasarawati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker. This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation and new-building of: the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flaw. less .... Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her creation.³

While in solitary confinement in the Alipur Jail in 1908, Sri Aurobindo had composed a poem of supreme defiance doubled with an appeal that was not to be resisted:

With wind and the weather beating round me

Up to the hill and the moorland I go.

Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?

Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow? ...

I sport with solitude here in my regions,

Of misadventure have made me a friend.

Who would live largely? Who would live freely?

Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.⁴

That call must haunt those who had heard it once, and Mirra of course had come to Pondicherry in 1914 even without that particular call, and instantaneously recognised in Sri Aurobindo "the Lord of my being and my God"; and now, after an absence of five years in France and Japan, she was coming back to Pondicherry. She was leaving behind in Japan her good friends - the Kobayashis, the Okhawas, and others - and Japan meant the kindliest memories. But the boat was carrying her towards the shores of India, and she was sublimely content. And on 24 April 1920, the boat approached the shores of Pondicherry. As she was to recall her experience thirty years later:

I was on the boat, at sea, not expecting anything (I was of course busy with the inner life, but I was living physically on the boat), when all of a sudden, abruptly, about two nautical miles from Pondicherry, the quality, I may even say the physical quality of the atmosphere, of the air, changed so much that I knew we were entering the aura of Sri Aurobindo. It was a physical experience. ⁵

Again, returning to the subject two days later:

.. .in the experience I was speaking about, what gave it all its value was that

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I was not expecting it at all, not at all. I knew very well, I had been for a very long time and continuously in "spiritual" contact, if I may say so, with the atmosphere of Sri Aurobindo, but I had never thought of the possibility of a modification in the physical air and I was not expecting it in the least, and it was this that gave the whole value to the experience, which came like that, quite suddenly, just as when one enters a place with another temperature or another altitude.⁶

And, perhaps on her part, expectant Bhaaratvarsha, our India, felt something like the promise of the Divine Mother, in Sri Aurobindo's epic, King Aswapathy, the father of Savitri:

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power. ...

And in her body as on his homing tree

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings ....

She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,

Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword

And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.⁷

II

Having landed in Pondicherry on 24 April 1920, the Richards and Miss Hodgson, as arranged beforehand, first stayed at Magry's Grand Hotel ,d'Europe at 12 (now 28), Rue Suffren; then, finding it inconvenient, moved to Subbu's Hotel at 12 (now 15), Rue St. Louis, and, finally, to a rented house known as the Bayoud House at 4 (now 5), Rue Saint Martin, opposite the Sri Aurobindo Library. As in 1914, Sri Aurobindo had his residence at 41 (now 33), Rue Francois Martin.

Presently the 1914-15 rhythm of relationships was renewed. The Arya , continued to appear month after month, and while the more important sequences (The Life Divine and its compeers) had been concluded already, The Future Poetry appeared till August 1920 and A Defence of Indian Culture throughout the year and overflowed into the next year. "The work of the Arya has fallen into arrears," Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy in May 1920, "and I have to spend just now the greater part of my energy in catching up, and the rest of my time, in the evening, is taken up by the daily visit of the Richards."⁸ There were at the time four or five young men (notably Nolini and Amrita) living with Sri Aurobindo, and there were the Richards and Dorothy at the Bayoud House. Not quite ten in all in the

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embryonic Deva Sangha! While Mirra and Paul visited Sri Aurobindo in the evenings and held talks day after day, Sri Aurobindo with his young men called on the Richards every Sunday evening and dined with them. The menu was decided upon by Mirra, and she personally supervised the cooking or prepared the dishes herself. Reminiscing about those days Nolini Kanta Gupta writes:

After dinner, we used to go up on the terrace overlooking the sea front. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother stood aside for a talk and we stood by ourselves. Sometimes we would request Sri Aurobindo for some automatic writing after dinner. The writings that came through his hand in those days were frightfully interesting. I remember somebody came and began to give an analysis of the character of each one of us.⁹

But, when it came to Mirra's turn, she said firmly: "No, nothing about me, please." And the hand abruptly stopped writing.

III

The months immediately following Mirra's return to Pondicherry were also the period when Sri Aurobindo, pressed on all sides by the "currents of the work and the world", was trying to collect himself for some new spring of action. As he wrote to Motilal Roy in May 1920:

There is now the beginning of a pressure from many sides inviting my spiritual attention to the future karma and this means the need of a greater outflowing of energy than when I had nothing to do but support a concentrated nucleus of the Shakti.¹⁰

In his letter of 2 September 1920, Sri Aurobindo spelt out a little more clearly what he intended to do:

Our first business is to establish our communal system on a firm spiritual, secondly on a firm economical foundation, and to spread it wide, but the complete social change can only come as a result of the other two. It must come first in spirit, afterwards in form. If a man enters into the commune by spiritual unity, if he gives to it his life and labour and considers all he has as belonging to all, the first necessity is secured. The next thing is to make the movement economically self-sufficient .... Thee two things are, the one a constant, the other an immediate necessity.¹¹

Sri Aurobindo didn't think in terms of a deliberate break with Hindu society, but of a revolutionary change from within; he had come, not to destroy, but to fulfil Sanatana Dharma - only, it should be really sanatana, eternal, and not the tinsel or the surface accretions pretending to be the genuine article.

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Ever since the time, early in 1910, when he harboured and helped Sri Aurobindo at Chandernagore, Motilal Roy had maintained a close relationship with his Guru at Pondicherry, receiving initiation and instruction in Yoga. During this period, Motilal not only sent periodical financial help to Sri Aurobindo, he was also the link between Sri Aurobindo and his friends and admirers in Bengal. During those difficult years, Motilal paid occasional visits to Pondicherry, and with Sri Aurobindo's approval started the Prabartak Sangha at Chandernagore. The watchwords of the Sangha were "Commune, Culture, Commerce", and besides, the Sangha published Prabartak in Bengali and later the English Weekly, the Standard Bearer. Sri Aurobindo had hoped that the Prabartak Sangha would grow into a centre of spiritual and economic awakening in Bengal, translating something of his vision of the Future into contemporary reality. But with the passage of time, Sri Aurobindo couldn't be blind to the fact that, although Motilal Roy had apparently cast himself for the practical or karma-aspect, while Sri Aurobindo was to stand for the knowledge or jnana-aspect, actually it was Motilal's egoistic vital pulls and pressures that had taken hold of the movement and were trying to give it a flamboyant but unspiritual turn, and so Sri Aurobindo felt compelled to terminate his connection with the Chandernagore centre. But as yet, in 1920, things had not come to that stage. Motilal still loved and venerated Sri Aurobindo, and the latter still trusted Motilal and hoped he would benefit by timely counsel and make good. In fact Motilal was on a visit to Pondicherry in August 1920, and had key discussions with the Master about the Prabartak Sangha and the Standard Bearer.

IV

Once, in a moment of startling divination, Mirra actually saw India free. She was to refer to it more than once in after-years, but the only time she dwelt on its date at length was in a Playground talk of 1953:¹²

I do not remember exactly when it happened; it must have been some time in the year 1920 probably (perhaps earlier, perhaps in 1914-1915, but I don't think so, it was some time in the year 1920). One day - every day I used to meditate with Sri Aurobindo: he used to sit on one side of a table and I on the other, on the veranda - and one day in this way, in meditation... I reached a place or a state of consciousness from which I told Sri Aurobindo just casually and quite simply: "India is free." It was in 1920.

But how, queried Sri Aurobindo, and Mirra' s answer was that there would be no fight, no battle, no violence, no revolution: "The English themselves will leave, for the condition of the world will be such that they won't be

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able to do anything else except go away." And, she further added,

It was done. I spoke in the future when he asked me the question, but there where I had seen I said, India is free, it was a fact. Now, India was not free at that time: it was 1920. Yet it was there, it had been done .... That is to say, from the external point of view I saw it twenty-seven years in advance. But it had been done.

Could she see Pakistan as well? "No, for the freedom could have come about without Pakistan." In 1956,¹³ she further clarified that she had not seen the precise details of the British withdrawal. "There must have been a possibility of its being otherwise, for, when Sri Aurobindo told them to do a certain thing, sent them his message, he knew very well that it was possible to avoid what happened later. ... Consequently, the division was not decreed. It is beyond question a human deformation."

In this connection, it is interesting to recollect that Sri Aurobindo, - who had prophesied India's independence as early as 1910,¹⁴ - had given a similar assurance to Ambalal Purani in 1918, though without any reference to the circumstances in which the independence would come. When, in the course of their talk, Purani insisted,

" ... I must do something for the freedom of India. I have been unable to sleep soundly for the last two years and a half .... "

Sri Aurobindo remained silent for two or three minutes. It was a long pause. Then he said: "Suppose an assurance is given to you that India will be free?"

"Who can give such an assurance?" ...

Again he remained silent for three or four minutes. Then he looked at me and added: "Suppose I give you the assurance?"

I paused for a moment ... and said: "If you give the assurance, I can accept it."

"Then I give you the assurance that India will be free," he said in a serious tone.¹⁵

If Mirra's vision of a free India - as a thing decreed and accomplished already there where these things are first settled - was to offer effective corroboration to Sri Aurobindo's own conviction on the subject and help him to concentrate exclusively on his Yoga, her second coming to Pondicherry and close association with him were to lead to momentous results in their work of "divine man-making" and earth-transformation.

*The Mother also mentioned this vision in 1947 (MIAug61:5), in 1953 (MDan79:9), in 1954 (MlMar54:2) and in 1956 (MO 8:30-2). In 1947, 1954 and 1956 she placed it in 1914 or 1915; and twice in 1953 in 1920. But only once (quoted on p. 205) did she closely scrutinise the date and arrived at 1920. Significantly, the topic she was discussing was predestination.

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V

After Mirra's second coming, the restoration of the 1914-15 rhythm of creative collaboration was rather more apparent than real. During the War and after, the differences between Mirra and Richard with regard to the direction, pace and means of their movements, which were endemic all the time, surfaced disagreeably during their last year 10 Japan, and began to acquire clearer definition after the return to Pondicherry. For Mirra, the return meant the climactic decision of her life: she was in Pondicherry for good, and Sri Aurobindo was the Lord of her being and her God. But Paul wasn't ready for the same act of ātmasamarpana or unquestioning self-surrender to the supramental avatar, the living God. More and more, his approaches were vitalistic and mental; and although he continued to swear by the resurgence of Asia, and the inevitability of the explosion of the New Life, there was also an emphasis on mere mental constructions, on attempts at a laborious synthesis of science, philosophy and religion, rather than on the outleap of spirituality informing and transforming the entire existential stairway from Matter to Mind.

But between Mirra and Sri Aurobindo, a plenary new understanding had welled up, and their very conversations now acquired a new quality: it was as if they could converse without speaking, or only with the minimum of pointer-words or seer-phrases. As she was to explain, about thirty years after:

When I used to speak with Sri Aurobindo, we never had the need to go through intermediary ideas; he said one thing and I saw the far off result; we used to talk always like that, and if a person had happened to be present at our conversations he would have said, "What are they talking about!" But for us ... it was as clear as a continuous sentence. You could call that a mental miracle - it was not a miracle, it was simply that Sri Aurobindo had the vision of the totality of mental phenomena and hence we had no need to waste a good deal of time in going through all the gradations.¹⁶

For the time being, the Richards and Sri Aurobindo still met in the evenings and talked, the Arya still made its monthly appearance, - but something was going on behind the facade of Appearance. And one day Mirra saw a vision. As Sri Aurobindo narrated it to his attendants on 7 January 1939:

I myself had suggestion after suggestion that it [this Yoga] wouldn't succeed. But I always remember the vision the Mother had. It was like this: The Mother, Richard and I were going somewhere. We saw Richard going down to a place from which rising was impossible. Then we found ourselves sitting in a carriage the driver of which was taking it up and down a hill a number of times. At last he stopped on the highest peak. Its significance was quite clear to us.¹⁷

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Read in the context in which Sri Aurobindo recalled this incident, it seems that what was happening to Paul Richard was a sustained attack by hostile forces, thrusting suggestion after suggestion that the whole adventure of Integral Yoga was perhaps going to misfire, and that he had better leave the arena while the going was good. As Sri Aurobindo put it:

This yoga is like a path cut through a jungle and once the path is made, it will be easy for those who come afterwards. But before that it is a long-drawn-out battle. The more you gain in your strength the more becomes the resistance of the hostile forces.¹⁸

The Chariot of Yoga in which Mirra and Sri Aurobindo were seated was taken up and down a good deal till the driver brought it to a stop at the highest peak. But, then, they hadn't yielded to the sly suggestions of failure put forward by the adverse forces; they hadn't succumbed to doubt; on the contrary, they had persevered in fair and foul weather alike. As for Paul Richard, the inevitable happened at last: unable to accept the proffered felicity in the sanctified circle around Sri Aurobindo, unable to detach Mirra from her firm anchorage in Faith, he left Pondicherry around November 1920.

On 20 May 1940, during the high tide of Hitler's fortunes in France, Sri Aurobindo said to his disciples that the Asuric Being with whom Hitler was in contact, the 'Lord of the Nations', was the same with whom Paul Richard too had established a communion much earlier, and under whose influence he had written the book, The Lord of the Nations:

... the plans and methods he has written of in the book are the same as those carried out now [by Hitler] .... He [Richard] said there that the present civilisation was to be destroyed, but really it is the destruction of the whole human civilisation that is aimed at, and already in Germany Hitler has done it .... ¹⁹

Again, in her talk to the children on 8 March 1951, the Mother said that it was occultism's 'Lord of Falsehood' who proclaimed himself the 'Lord of the Nations', and guided Hitler in his seemingly uncanny decisions.²⁰ On 10 June 1953, the Mother returned to this subject and referred to this Being and his spiritually destructive work. This particular Asura "wherever there is something going wrong", there he - or his representative - is active. Coming back to the question on 16 June 1954, the Mother said the first original emanations from the Supreme - Consciousness (Light), Bliss (Ananda, Love), Truth, Life - lost their contact with their Origin, and thereby became flawed and perverted as Unconsciousness, Suffering, Falsehood and Death. The redemption of the perverted and lost was the purpose of the intricate struggle going on in the world. Already there has been a large return to Consciousness, and a similar reassertion of Ananda, the joy of existence, the reign of Love. But the other two Asuras, although

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they too knew that their rule must also end one day, were resisting the conversion. Of these two, while Death is at present suffered as a necessary evil, Falsehood has grown vast new attractions:

He has taken up a very, very important position in the world, because people who don't know things call him "Lord of the Nations" ....

That Lord of Falsehood has truly a lot of influence. This is what catches you with a contagion as strong as that of contagious diseases.²¹

From all these references and cross-references, it is plain that Richard had been an instrument - or shall we say emanation? - of a Being fair in form but with an anti-divine motivation.

VI

As for Mirra, she had chosen, and had been chosen. Miss Hodgson was with her as before, and she was accepted too, and acquired from Sri Aurobindo the spiritual name of' 'Datta'²² (meaning 'Entirely Self-given'²³). When Mrinalini Chattopadhyaya (sister of the well-known Sarojini Naidu) visited Pondicherry in mid-1920 to see Sri Aurobindo, she also initiated Mirra into wearing the sari; and even as the kimono in Japan had fitted her as if to the culture born, now the Indian sari too seemed to suit her to perfection. Many years after, she was to wear the salwar and kameez, and with impeccable grace and easy naturalness.

The small group around Sri Aurobindo received an accession during the year with the arrival of his younger brother, Barindra (Barin), who had been released from the Andamans after the Amnesty. From Bengal, Barin had first written to Sri Aurobindo asking him for initiation into Yoga, and had been accepted but it would be Sri Aurobindo's own special way of Yoga, the Integral Yoga. Towards the end of his letter (written in Bengali, apparently in April 1920), Sri Aurobindo had given a clear outline of his Yoga, and a hint of his hope for the immediate future:

I do not wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base any longer. I want to make a vast and strong equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, which will be based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable ocean of power; over that an of power I want the radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get as instruments of God one hundred complete men free from petty egoism.²⁴

On reading the letter, Barin's soul was on fire, and the long and dreary years of tribulation in the Andamans were as nought. Sri Aurobindo, his

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brother and Guru, now exercised the same magnetic pull as of old, and Barin resolutely packed his bag and arrived in Pondicherry.

Then, suddenly, Nature took a hand in bringing all of them together under one roof. October-December is usually the season of cyclones and violent rains in Pondicherry, and thus on 24 November 1920, there raged tempestuous weather with pouring rain. Under those conditions seepage and leakage were common, and by evening it was known that the roof of a godown in Rue d'Orleans had come down. On making inquiries, Sri Aurobindo came to know that Bayoud House where Mirra and Datta were staying was also in a very precarious condition. He immediately sent word that they shouldn't expose themselves to any further risk, but move into his own place in Rue François Martin at once. The removal began late in the evening and was nearly complete by midnight. Mirra and Datta occupied a room on the first floor of what was later to be called the Guest House. "That is how," says Nolini reminiscentially, "the Mother came in our midst and stayed on for good .... You can see now how that last spell of stormy weather came as a benediction. Nature did in fact become a collaborator of the Divine Purpose."²⁵

VII

Mirra's change of residence on Sri Aurobindo's insistence from Bayoud House, to his own place on the night of the cyclone was, seen in retrospect, a preordained event, a seed-event for many significant future developments. But at the time it happened, it caused, understandably enough, a certain amount of uneasiness (if not resentment) among some of the young men living with Sri Aurobindo. They had been living in far from affluent circumstances, enacting a kind of spiritual bohemianism or even bolshevism, relying mainly on Sri Aurobindo's love to see them through their difficulties and perplexities. At one time they were compelled to share the same bath-towel, and good food was an exception rather than the rule. With his seasoned equality, samata, it was all the same to Sri Aurobindo whether the curry was salted or not, or even whether there was any curry at all. He could therefore brush aside their grouses with the admonition:

You should have no preference for food of a particular taste. There is no truth in such preferences and demands. You have a body, and you have to keep it in good condition. Lower quality or kind of food would be harmful to the health of the body, therefore you should take good food. But good food means food necessary for the body - not what the tongue likes.²⁶

But as for the young men themselves, taste and appetite weren't to be quite so easily transcended. Nevertheless, with their sunny disposition and profound faith in Sri Aurobindo, they had been carrying on gallantly for years.

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But this sudden 'invasion' by two European ladies - however unavoidable under the circumstances - was a jolt to the kind of unconventional camp-life they had been living so far. They were excited, they were also puzzled. What would the ladies think? There were hundreds of books - in English, Bengali, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, French - but there were no book-shelves in the house; and bamboo-strips had to serve the purpose. For the most part, mats had to do duty for furniture; and there was but a single servant to do the shopping-- among other things, daily three or four annas worth of fish! Cooking was done on a cooperative basis: Nolini did the rice, Moni the pulses (dal), and Bejoy the curry and the vegetables. There was a Pariah cook, perhaps, for part of the time, and what he prepared was not to their taste. And in such a situation, to have to feed two European ladies too! It was not surprising that uneasiness crept in in the wake of their coming. As Purani comments:

This [the Mother's joining the rest] had created a sense of dissatisfaction in the minds of most of the inmates. Man is so much governed by his social, religious and cultural conventions that he finds it difficult to throw them out. Besides, men imbued with strong nationalism would find it difficult to accept one who apparently is a foreigner as an inmate of the house.²⁷

While with some it was only a temporary uneasiness in the presence of the apparently exotic, with some others it was perhaps a half-admitted irrational suspicion about all that was foreign. But such misgivings were no more than the shadowy mists that prowl around for a little while, till they disappear with the rise of the Sun of all-revealing knowledge. Mirra's crystaline goodness of heart and unfailing understanding of men and affairs, Datta's amiable sweetness and kindness of disposition, their total self-consecration to Sri Aurobindo, and the striking sea-change their presence and unobtrusive ministry effected in the very atmosphere of the place, all dispelled the earlier annoyance and the uneasiness, and only trust and love and sunniness prevailed.

Mirra had merely to take a quick look around, and the fantastic chaos of the non-arrangements pleaded for instant attention. Unobtrusively she took the matter in hand, and day by day order began evolving out of the old chaos and insufficiency. It was a job for Mahasaraswati in close alliance with Mahalakshmi, and Mirra seemed to be equal to the task. Ambalal Purani, who had come earlier in 1918, visited again in 1921, and the changes he witnessed took his breath away. First the sight of Mirra standing near the staircase: "Such unearthly beauty I had never seen"; then, the transfiguration of the place itself:

The house had undergone a great change. There was a clean garden in the open courtyard, every room had simple and decent furniture, - a mat, a chair and a small table. There was an air of tidiness and order. This was, no

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doubt, the effect of the Mother's presence.²⁸

And Purani found an astonishing change in Sri Aurobindo's body:

During the interval of two years his body had undergone a transformation which could only be described as miraculous. In 1918 the colour of the body was like that of an ordinary Bengali - rather dark - though there was a lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating. On going upstairs to see him (in the same house), I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light....

Afterwards in the course of talk he explained to me that when the Higher Consciousness, after descending to the mental level, comes down to the vital and even below the vital, then a transformation takes place in the nervous and even in the physical being.²⁹

Likewise, T. V. Kapali Sastry too, who had first seen Sri Aurobindo in 1917, found a great change when he had darshan again in 1923: " ... he found Sri Aurobindo completely changed in his physical appearance; he had then a golden hue on his body which had become fair in complexion, whereas it was brownish-dark when he had seen him last. "³⁰

VIII

On an evening in Christmas week 1920, a new visitor, T. Kodandarama Rao, happening to see Mirra, found her at the very first sight a "serene, sweet and beautiful divine personality"; and after a stay of a few days in 1921, he concluded that she was verily "a personification of 'Grace' ", and whenever he approached her, he felt "purity, peace and sublimity".³¹ It was also in 1921 that Champaklal, then a boy of eighteen, first made an adventurous journey to Pondicherry from remote Gujarat, and having made pranam to Sri Aurobindo felt that he had "nothing more to do" in his life. He didn't see Mirra at that time, but catching a glimpse of him through the opened Venetian blinds, she recognised in him a born servitor and "told Sri Aurobindo then itself: This boy will help me in my work; he will be very useful." When Champaklal came for good early in 1923, he saw first one and then the other. He felt that Sri Aurobindo was incarnate Shiva, Mirra was the Mother Divine! He experienced "an extraordinary closeness to her and saw and felt in her an embodiment of Beauty".³²

These first months - the first year or two after Mirra's joining the establishment in Rue Francois Martin - saw some other important developments as well. The Arya was discontinued in January 1921, since its historic role had been completed. With the recent or new arrivals, there were about a dozen in all living together, and for a time the group concentrated on spiritual stocktaking, and on efficient management and

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consolidation, Motilal Roy and his wife, who had come from Chandernagore as mentioned earlier in this chapter), were not very happy with the changes they saw in Sri Aurobindo's house. Besides, the Prabartak Sangha wanted them back at Chandernagore, while Motilal himself was undecided whether to go or remain with Sri Aurobindo. On receipt of a peremptory telegram from Chandernagore, Motilal and his wife left Pondicherry in August 1921 and the attempt to close the rift didn't succeed. Not long after, Sri Aurobindo dissociated himself from Motilal and his Prabartak Sangha, and decided that he would henceforth try to build only on the surest foundations.

It was also around 1921 that the practice of collective meditation began. The inmates used to assemble in the evening at about four in the upstairs veranda, and Sri Aurobindo and Mirra would be with them. There was no formula, no macadamised process; but in the ambience generated by their presence, each of the others present stumbled on his or her own method, and all melted in communion in the elected silence of the hour.

IX

It was towards the end of 1921 that black magic invaded the precincts of 41, Rue Francois Martin to throw into temporary confusion its peaceful life. For some misconduct of his, Vathal, the Pariah cook, had been scolded by Datta, and then, on account of his insulting behaviour, he had to be dismissed. This bred in him an acute resentment and a desire for revenge, and he got into touch with a Muslim fakir well versed in black magic. Suddenly mysterious stones began to strike at Sri Aurobindo's house, and as he later described the episode to Dilip Kumar Roy:

The phenomenon began at the fall of dusk and continued at first for half an hour, but daily it increased in frequency, violence and the size of the stones, and the duration of the attack increased also ... and now it was no longer at the kitchen only but thrown in other places as well.... At first we took it for a human-made affair and sent for the police ... and when one of the stables in the verandah got a stone whizzing unaccountably between his legs, the police abandoned the case in a panic .... And so it went on till the missiles became murderous .... At last the semi-idiot boy servant who was the centre of the attack and was sheltered in Bejoy's room under his protection, began to be severely hit and was bleeding from a wound by stones materialising inside the closed room.³³

The whole thing was utterly fantastic, for the stones were coming even into the closed room; there was an uncanniness about it all. Mirra now went into meditation to find out who was hurling the stones. As she narrated later:

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I saw three little entities of the vital, those small entities which have no strength and just enough consciousness confined to one action ... but these entities are at the service of people who practise magic .... They replied "We are compelled, we are compelled .... It is not our fault, we have been ordered to do it .... "³⁴

Mirra's occult knowledge told her, however, that the whole process depended on "a nexus between the boy servant and the house", and so he was sent away to another house. The stone-throwing ceased at once, and peace reigned once again in Sri Aurobindo's place.

Subsequently, Vathal's wife seems to have come to Sri Aurobindo and thrown herself at his feet and craved for his mercy. The adverse forces unleashed by the fakir and turned back from their intended destination were after Vathal now, and he was desperately sick. Sri Aurobindo however, took pity on the woman, and forgave the culprit with the words "For this he need not die. "³⁵

X

In the course of 1921 Sri Aurobindo's link with the Prabartak Sangha at Chandernagore had become uncertain and tenuous. Long-distance control, as with the Sangha, hadn't proved feasible, and the men on the spot with their egoisms and vitalistic pulls could always give a comic or vicious twist to the initiating inspiration from Pondicherry. But the issue as to how the truths of The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga were to be realised in practice remained open still. The Integral Yoga was no mere exercise of the imagination, but had to be given a practical orientation and realised in foolproof organisational units. For Sri Aurobindo, it was a moment pregnant with possibilities. What next? and how soon? An air of expectancy reigned, waiting for the answers.

When Purani, at the end of his visit to Sri Aurobindo in 1921, put the overwhelming question to Sri Aurobindo, "What are you waiting for?", the answer came in measured accents:

It is true that the Divine Consciousness has descended but it has not yet descended into the physical being. So long as that work is not done the work cannot be said to be accomplished. ³⁶

Even this buoyed up Purani as he records:

I felt a great elation when I boarded the train: for, here was a guide who had already attained the Divine Consciousness, was conscious about it, and yet whose detachment and discrimination were so perfect, whose sincerity was so profound, that he knew what has yet to be attained and could go on unobtrusively doing his hard work for mankind.³⁷

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Indeed, Sri Aurobindo was giving serious thought at this time to the question of translating theory and hope into practice and achievement. But a base was needed with the requisite purity, strength and potentiality for growth. Having watched the transformation wrought by Mirra in the household, Sri Aurobindo asked her on I January 1922 to take full charge of its management. With the gradual increase in the number of inmates, it presently became necessary to find additional accommodation, and accordingly the fine house in Rue de la Marine - later known as the Library House - was rented, and Sri Aurobindo, Mirra, Datta and a few others moved into it in September 1922. The house in Rue François Martin was also retained, and henceforth came to be called the Guest House, for it was used to house visitors apart from the inmates.

And yet the main question - the question of questions - remained: How were the insights of the Arya sequences, how were Sri Aurobindo's and Mirra's visions of the future, to be realised in practice? A beginning had first to be made, and then the movement could spread out: but exactly how? when? Sri Aurobindo had spoken of a Deva Sangha in his letter of 1920 to his brother Barin: but how was it to be organised, how were the .members to be 'called'? While Pondicherry would be the headquarters of the movement (at least for the time being), should there be other centres too affiliated to the central seat of inspiration? Sri Aurobindo sent Barin to Bengal to explore the possibilities, to collect funds, and to create a favourable atmosphere; and in his letter of 18 November 1922, he set forth his objectives clearly:

I have been till now and shall be for some time longer withdrawn in the practice of a Yoga destined to be a basis not for withdrawal from life, but for the transformation of human life .... But the time is approaching ... when I shall have to take up a large external work proceeding from the spiritual basis of this Yoga.

It is, therefore, necessary to establish a number of centres small and few at first but enlarging and increasing in number as I go on, for training in the Sadhana, one under my direct supervision, others in immediate connection with me ... but for the present these centres will be not for external work but for spiritual training and Tapasya.

The first, which will be transferred to British India when I go there, already exists at Pondicherry .... The second I am founding through you in Bengal. I hope to establish another in Gujarat during the ensuing year.³⁸

XI

In the meantime, Mahatma Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, launched ostensibly on the twin issues of the Punjab massacre and the Khilafat

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injustice, had, after the initial excitement and enthusiasm, floundered in futility. Some leaders like C.R. Das were anxious to retrieve the position and to "give a more flexible and practically effective turn to the non-cooperation movement"³⁹ and they also wanted to enlist Sri Aurobindo's services to encompass the desired transformation of the political scene in India. But Sri Aurobindo had entirely other ideas, as may be seen from his letter of 18 November 1922 to C.R.Das, sent through Barin:

I think you know my present idea and the attitude towards life and work to which it has brought me. I have become confirmed in a perception which I had always, less clearly and dynamically then, but which has now become more and more evident to me, that the true basis of work and life is the spiritual, - that is to say, a new consciousness to be developed only by Yoga. I see more and more manifestly that man can never get out of the futile circle the race is always treading until he has raised himself on to the new foundation. I believe also that it is the mission of India to make this great victory for the world. But what precisely was the nature of the dynamic power of this greater consciousness? What was the condition of its effective truth? How could it be brought down, mobilised, organised, turned upon life? How could our present instruments, intellect, mind, life, body be made true and perfect channels for this great transformation? This was the problem I have been trying to work out in my own experience and I have now a sure basis, a wide knowledge and some mastery of the secret. Not yet its fulness and complete imperative presence ....

But still I have gone far enough to be able to undertake one work on a larger scale than before - the training of others to receive this Sadhana and prepare themselves as I have done .... ⁴⁰

It must be clear from the above that during 1922 Sri Aurobindo's mind was working in the direction of consolidating at Pondicherry and extending to a few carefully selected centres his own brand of Yoga as the necessary preparation for large-scale practical work. It was the Bhavani Mandir scheme* again, a scheme as old as 19O5, but now adjusted, in the light of the intervening experiences and victories in Yoga, to the imperatives of the new situation in India and the world, and the predicament of humanity in general all over the globe .

*See Sri Aurobindo's Bande Mataram Centenary Edition, pp.61ff. See also the chapter on "Bhavani Mandir" in my Sri Aurobindo: A Biography and a History, 1985. pp.169ff.

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CHAPTER 15

Descent of Krishna

I

Since her shifting on the night of the cyclone to Sri Aurobindo's residence, Mirra began gradually taking the reins of the management of the house­hold in her own hands, and with a mixture of gentleness and firmness, of patience and sweet reasonableness, of sustained hard work and infinite generosity of understanding, she brought order, tidiness and a measure of functional adequacy to the community life of the inmates. Still it was Sri Aurobindo who remained the Master of the Yoga; he presided over the collective meditation in the evenings; he received the important visitors, he conducted the essential correspondence, and he sent out the feelers for eliciting support to his scheme for training select aspirants in the Sadhana as a preparation for eventual practical work on a large scale.

Actually, some of the young men - Nolini, Moni, Bejoy - had lived with Sri Aurobindo for over a decade through all weathers, and Amrita's association too had begun in his boyhood days in Pondicherry. All of them instinctively loved and revered the Master, but also held him in some awe. But Mirra was on a different footing altogether. She had come from France to see Sri Aurobindo, and had recognised in him her Krishna, the Lord of her being and her God. Five years later she had returned, this time from Japan and bringing her friend Dorothy with her, and her feeling for Sri Aurobindo had only deepened if that was possible; and he was now more than ever the Divine Master of her Yoga. Thus the most significant result of her second coming, and of her joining Sri Aurobindo's household, was a change in the atmosphere, the spiritual dawn of the true Guru-shishya relationship between Sri Aurobindo and the people around him. In this regard we have Nolini's own testimony:

.. our mode of living, our life itself took a different turn with the arrival of the Mother. How and in what direction? It was like this. The Mother came andinstalled Sri Aurobindo on his high pedestal of Master and Lord of Yoga. We had hitherto known him as a dear friend and close companion, and although in our mind and heart he had the position of a Guru, in our outward relations we seemed to behave as if he were just like one of ourselves. He too had been averse to the use of the words "Guru" and "Ashram" in relation to himself.. .. Nevertheless, the Mother taught by her manner and speech, and showed us in actual practice, what was the meaning of disciple and master.... It was the Mother who opened our eyes ....¹

If this was the cardinal lesson in spiritual discipleship that Mirra taught

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the inmates (though more by personal example than by precept), there were other lessons in deportment too, which were of consequence in the daily art of living, in "elevating our life to a cleaner level". To quote Nolini again:

... the first and most important need is to put each thing in its place .... We do not always notice how very disorderly we are: our belongings and our household effects are in a mess, our actions are haphazard, and in our inner life we are as disorderly as in our outer life, or even more .... One of the things the Mother has been trying to teach us both by her word and example is this, namely, that to keep our outer life and its materials in proper order and neat and tidy is a very necessary element in our life upon earth .... The Mother taught us to use our things with care, but there was more to it than this. She uses things not merely with care but with love and affection. For, to her, material things are endowed with a life of their own, even a consciousness of their own ²

II

If material things - a mat, a chair, a door, a vase, a cooking utensil- have their own life, their own consciousness and their own personality and character, how about the world of trees, plants and flowers, and of animals such as cows and cats and the rest? It was part of Mirra's mystic apprehension of omnipresent Reality that spirit, mind, life and matter were involved in one another in the cosmic drama, and the way of wisdom would be to infer or actually see the One behind the multiplicity of the phenomenal world. Hence the capital interest Mirra took in trees, plants and flowers, and in the rest of the infinite and infinitely variegated forms of life.

There was, for example, her interest in cats. When a new visitor, Kanailal Ganguly, then 22, came in July 1923 to see Sri Aurobindo, at the time of his second interview he saw Mirra too:

It was the first time that I saw the Mother. She looked at me for a second. She was very beautiful, looked much younger than her age. There were two cats on her shoulders; I looked round and saw there were two or three more about her. One of the cats from her shoulder jumped on Sri Aurobindo's throne-chair. ³

And when Mirra called it back, it obeyed at once. And thereby hangs a tale.

When they were all still in the Rue François Martin house, once a wild-looking cat had come suddenly as if from nowhere, and stayed on, and kittened in due course. Sri Aurobindo named the first of the series Sundari

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on account of her beauty. One of Sundari's kittens was named Bushy, because of her luxuriant tail. Bushy in her turn kittened, and "She used to pick up with her teeth all her kittens one by one and drop them at the Mother's feet as soon as they were old enough to use their eyes - as if she offered them to the Mother and craved her blessings.⁴ Two of these third generation kittens were the belligerent brothers, Big Boy and Kiki, both great favourites with Mina, and Kiki is said to have joined the collective evening meditation, "and his body would shake and tremble while the eyes remained closed". In later years, the Mother was to speak feelingly of Kiki before the Ashram children - "a very sweet little cat, absolutely civilised, a marvellous cat". Once a huge scorpion stung Kiki when he was playing, and immediately he rushed to Mina and showed his swollen paw. She put him on a table and called Sri Aurobindo to tell him what had happened. Kiki stretched his neck and looked at Sri Aurobindo, who returned the look. Then gradually the cat recovered, and an hour later went away completely healed. The Mother also said that Kiki used to sit in a particular chair and go regularly into a trance; and sometimes it had visions; and this could go on for hours.⁵ Such was Mirra's special feeling for cats and understanding of them. Indeed, she seems to have once claimed that the King of Cats - the Super-Cat - who ruled the occult world of cats had established a special relationship with her. This partly explains why Mirra had a cover made for a well to prevent her cats from falling into it, and also made special arrangements for feeding them. It was Champaklal who made the cover, and besides he helped Mina to prepare food for the cats:

During those early days, Mother herself used to prepare a pudding. Of that pudding she would put aside a small quantity in a small dish; she would add a little milk to it and stir it with a spoon till it became liquid and consistent ....

And do you know for whom this part of the pudding was meant? For cats. Later on I learnt that they were not really cats but something more.⁶

Many years later, in the course of a conversation, the Mother spoke with greater feeling about the beauty of the instinctive behaviour of the animals, especially the cats:

In animals there is sometimes a very intense psychic truth ... in human beings I have rarely come across some of the virtues which I have seen in animals, very simple, unpretentious virtues. As in cats, for example: I have studied cats a lot; if one knows them well they are marvellous creatures .... People speak of maternal love with such admiration, as though it were purely a human privilege, but I have seen this love manifested by mother­cats to a degree far surpassing ordinary humanity. I have seen a mother-cat which would never touch her food until her babies had taken all they

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needed... and a cat which repeated more than fifty times the same movement to teach her young one how to Jump from a wall on to a window and I may add, with a care, an intelligence, a skill which many uneducated women do not have. And why is it thus? - because there was no mental intervention. It was altogether spontaneous instinct. But what is instinct? - it is the presence of the Divine in the genus of the species, and that, that is the psychic of animals; a collective, not an individual psychic.⁷

With all this background, it was hardly surprising that the worlds of plant and animal creation were not alienated from human beings in Mirra's scheme of things. And Sri Aurobindo too fed cats with fish with much solicitude, and once he was even inspired to write "Despair on the Staircase", a piece of poetry on Bushy with her majestic tail:

Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair, .. ,

Her tail is up like an unconquered flag,

Its dignity knows not the right to wag.

An animal creature wonderfully human,

A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,

Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,

Is now the problem I am wondering at^{. 8}

III

One important development during 1923 was the regular coming together of some of the inmates and other disciples in Sri Aurobindo's presence facilitating a free exchange of views on almost all matters, from the most trivial to the most profound. Even earlier, ever since his coming to Pondicherry, many an evening, friends like Subramania Bharati and Mandayam Srinivasachariar used to meet Sri Aurobindo and have talks with him. Such evening talks had continued in the upstairs veranda of the Guest House, and the Richards too had participated in them. After September 1922, the venue of the talks shifted to the upstairs veranda of the Library House. The mornings, usually between 9 and 11, after breakfast, were reserved for special interviews with the visitors, including intending disciples or old friends from the political period; but in evenings there was meditation at 4, and after 4.30 or 5, there was relaxation, some more joined, and in the talks that ensued the whole world "from China to Peru", from village uplift to Dattatreya Yoga, and from Einstein's Relativity Theory to the painstaking intelligence of the spider, was surveyed with easy freedom and assurance. .

At this period of his life (1920-26), Sri Aurobindo's place of residence wasn't known as an 'ashram'; actually he didn't like the word, for it seemed to convey (however erroneously) the idea of asceticism and flight from life.

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Mirra too was but a sadhika, a practitioner of the Yoga. The inmates were never a fixed number, but there was a continuing (as also growing) nucleus. There were in all about 12 in 1922-23, which rose to 15 or more next year. The morning interviews, the evening meditation followed by the talks, the nearness of the disciples to one another and also to Sri Aurobindo, all inducted the practice of gurukulavasa, living with the Teacher, and generated its distinctive atmosphere. In an attempt to recapture the moment, the mood and movement of the Evening Talks, Purani writes:

There was no doubt that the flower of Divinity had blossomed in him; and disciples, like bees seeking honey, came to him. It is no exaggeration to say that these Evening-Talks were to the small company of disciples what the Aranyakas were to the ancient seekers. Seeking the Light, they came to the dwelling place of their Guru ... and found it their spiritual home - the home of their parents, for the Mother, his companion in the great mission, had come. And these spiritual parents bestowed upon the disciples freely of their Light, their consciousness, their power and their grace.⁹

The disciples would be gathered first, and the minutes would pass in tense expectancy. Then Sri Aurobindo's soft footsteps would be heard, and he would be there:

He came dressed as usual in Dhoti, part of which was used by him to cover the upper part of his body .... At times for minutes he would be gazing at the sky from a small opening at the top of the grass-curtains that covered the verandah .... How much were these sittings dependent on him may be gathered from the fact that there were days when more than three-fourths of the time passed in complete silence without any outer suggestion from him or there was only an abrupt "Yes" or "No" to all attempts at drawing him out in conversation.¹⁰

Mirra herself seems to have participated in the talks but seldom, and indeed only on sundry occasions to have been present; but her unpredictable entrances and exits had their impact too. And here invisible Presence had also a significance of its own. Once Sri Aurobindo referred to the cures effected through the still sitting meditation by Dr. Kobayashi whom Mirra had known in Kyoto. On another occasion Sri Aurobindo said that one of Mirra's lady friends had been cured by the psychic power concentrated in a place like the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Or there was a reference to Mirra asking a workman why he drank, and being told that drinking gave him thoughts that he could never get when sober! And once Sri Aurobindo cited a conversation in which Mirra had corroborated his view - which is also the view of our palmists, sāmudriks - that the rekhās or lines on the palm do change.¹¹ Sri Aurobindo also once mentioned the experiment in which Mirra willed that a certain thing should

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make a particular sound half an hour later, and it happened exactly as she had willed. She hadn't created the force, for it was there already; she had but concentrated and engineered the necessary atmosphere which then became the conductor of that force.¹² Thus, although not physically present, there was her presence there all the same.

IV

It was in October 1923 that the Andhra publicist, G. V. Subbarao, had an interview with Sri Aurobindo in the Library House; and what he saw and heard evidently left an indelible impression upon him. Recalling the scene early in 1951, Subbarao said:

There was a small time-piece to indicate the progress of time, because everything here must be done according to precision and order. Sri Aurobindo was dazzling bright in colour - it was said that, in his earlier years, he was more dark than brown and had a long, rather thin beard ....

His voice was low, but quite audible, quick and musical to a point. He was fast in his flow of speech, clear like a crystal and analytical to a degree.... He was simple and courteous, outspoken and free in his interrogations. It seemed as though he could know a man by a sweep of his eyes .... He was kind throughout as to a child, but I could discern enough in his demeanour to conclude that he could be stern and imperious when required.

Talking about Mirra, Subbarao stated that she seemed "to be an extraordinary lady; and even in 1923, she was said to be the best of his disciples and was consulted by Sri Aurobindo on many affairs, including Yoga".¹³ Within less than two years of her moving into Sri Aurobindo's house, Mirra had brought about a sufficient transformation in the arrangements that things were now moving with an unhurried ease and commendable orderliness. The little time-piece in the room, for example, was Mirra's touch to remind the interviewer and Sri Aurobindo alike about the completion of the time allotted for the meeting.

It was also in 1923 that young Champaklal came for good, and was asked to work with Mirra. A bit of their conversation at the time throws light on the nature of the relationship between them. When Mirra asked whether she was very severe with him, Champaklal answered, "No, no, I feel it is my own home"; and she said: "Ah! then it is all right." ¹⁴ He did odd jobs, like helping with the water-filters, piecing together the fragments of a broken kettle, taking a hand in carpentry and masonry, and so on. Mirra's interests were manifold, and everywhere she brought a closeness of attention that bordered on identification; and people like Champaklal who

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were ready and eager to help in every way also learnt a good deal from her, as if it was a part of the sadhana - and so indeed it was!

V

During the first years of her stay in the Library House, as earlier in the Guest House, for all her quietly sustained energy of activity that made its mark on every aspect of the small community's life, Mirra nevertheless studiously kept herself in the background. Her advice was frequently sought by Sri Aurobindo, and they constantly compared notes; she had her points of contact with the several inmates whose work she had to coordinate for the smooth efficiency of organisational working; and of course she joined the daily evening meditation. Aside from her own private session of prayer and meditation, she found time to read the French paper Le Matin, to tend the banana garden at the back, and to resolve the one hundred and one minor problems that kept cropping up in the course of the day. In short, her very presence and her inner poise of strength helped her to make the household, not only run smoothly on a more or less shoe-string budget, but also make good and march valiantly forward.

Thus, what had earlier been for Sri Aurobindo's wards an instinctive or unconscious but unqualified admiration for him, now came to be channelised into a more conscious commitment to the Yoga and adoration of the Master of the Yoga. His birthdays came to be invested with a special spiritual significance; they became signposts, milestones, or inns for spiritual replenishment facilitating the disciples' progress towards the desired siddhi. Questions relating to the sadhana and the goal often came up for discussion in the Evening Talks, but Sri Aurobindo's pronouncements on 15 August, his birthday, were looked forward to with a heightened air of anticipation. What he said on his birthday in 1923, for example, was rather out of the common:

The Truth that is coming down is not mental, it is Supramental. In order that it may be able to work properly, all the lower instruments must be Supramentalised.

In the evening, in answer to a question on the current state of his sadhana, he explained:

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

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digging from Supermind above to Supermind below. The being has become conscious and there is constant movement up and down. The Veda calls it "the two ends" - the head and the tail of the dragon completing and compassing the consciousness. I find that so long as Matter is not Supramentalised the mental and the vital also cannot be fully Supramentalised.¹⁵

Sri Aurobindo also spoke of the three layers of the Supermind - the interpretative, the representative and the imperative. The first opens up divers lines of possibility, the second initiates a movement towards the desired change, and the third makes it effective.

VI

In the succeeding weeks and months, and as 1923 overflowed into 1924, although the number of inmates was hardly twenty, the power of the concentration was such that 'criticality' was in process. Mirra was imperceptibly getting drawn towards the centre of affairs, not of course formally or openly, but certainly in spirit. The new disciples, often awed by the Master, instinctively approached Mirra to gain her support and her confidence. When young Kanailal Ganguly asked Mirra what his relation with her would be, she said simply:

My dear child, it will be a relationship of a child with its mother. It will be a very sweet relation, constant.

Both Sri Aurobindo and Mirra took charge of Kanailal, but whenever he approached the Master for help or for counsel or for the removal of difficulties, the answer came that he would do it "through Mirra". Later, when in one of his moments of perplexity Kanailal approached Mirra and asked about the best way of doing Yoga, she said disarmingly:

You have to aspire, you have to reject; but the best is if you can keep me in your heart, if you love me, then you will have to do nothing. I shall do all for you.¹⁶

There was also Dr. Rajangam who, immediately on passing from the Medical College in Madras, had come and settled in Sri Aurobindo's house and was put in charge of purchases from the market and paying the house rent. Besides, he used to come in contact with the Mother in connection with "my work of fetching things from the Post Office, French Treasury etc." and her smile made him always happy. Once she seems to have told him that in a previous life he had been Marat, one of the characters in the French Revolution; and she it was who brought into Rajangam the godhead of Adoration. ¹⁷

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The fact is that at one and the same time the inmates found Mirra entrancingly youthful and beautiful belying her years, a Mahalakshmi come down to the earth, as also a Mother marvellously understanding and compassionate, a Mother whom they could implicitly trust and who would safely see them through the difficulties and perplexities of the sadhana. Her very presence, the mere knowledge of her presence in the house, seemed to give them a sense of security, and the inmates moved with assurance in the several orbits assigned to them, and together contributed to the total symphony of the collective or communal life.

VII

As Sri Aurobindo's 53rd birthday approached, there was the usual stir of expectancy and more than the usual exhilaration. It was the day of days in the year for the inmates now numbering about twenty, and every face was beaming with an accession of joy. There were decorations, flowers, garlands; there was in everyone a feeling of freshness, and an eager anticipation, for it was the day of special Darshan, the day of confronting the descended God, the visible Divine. As he appeared at 9 in the morning and sat in the royal chair in the veranda, the disciples felt a sudden rush of happiness and the elation of fulfilment. In the vivid description of Ambalal Purani:

He sits there - with pink and white lotus garlands. It is the small flower­ token of the offerings by the disciples. Hearts throb, prayers, requests, emotions pour forth - and a flood of blessings pours down carrying all of them away .... The look! - the enrapturing and captivating eyes! Who can "ever forget? .. If some transcendent Divinity is not here where else can he be?¹⁸

In the evening there is a repetition - a repetition with a difference - of the divine efflorescence. The inmates and permitted visitors assemble again in the veranda, and there is the same silence, the same surge of hope incommensurable. At 4.15 the door opens, and first Sri Aurobindo, then Mirra, come forward. He sits in his usual broad Japanese chair, and Mirra sits on his right side on a small stool. There follows supernal silence for about five minutes.

It had by now become customary for Sri Aurobindo to make a special speech on the occasion, besides participating in the Evening Talks. They were all in the Yoga together, he said, and hence they could mutually help or retard the progress. If the desired transformation of the being was to come about, they should all open themselves to the Higher Light and make a total surrender to it.

In the course of the discussion that followed the speech, Sri Aurobindo

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said that only one of three things could encompass 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 some thing shown to me which would, prove it is not possible this time.¹⁹ He added that the previous year had been a very hard year for his sadhana; he had had to counter an attack from the darkest physical forces; but now at last they were overcome.

The inmates being not too many, the household was a reasonably compact human aggregate in 1924, providing for sufficient variety as well as a background unity of aim and effort. During this year the stream of casual visitors continued, but notable among those who met Sri Aurobindo was Dilip Kumar Roy, who was finally told by the Master: "Yours is still a mental seeking: for my Yoga something more is needed."²⁰

VIII

With the coming of 1925, there were two important visitors, Lala Lajpat Rai and Purushottamdas Tandon, and they discussed the political situation in India with Sri Aurobindo in private.²¹

On 4 January Mirra suffered a knee-joint inflammation which caused more than a fortnight's anxiety to Sri Aurobindo and the inmates. An expert's diagnosis on the 16th was reassuring, and improvement was steadily maintained. On account of Mirra's ailment, Sri Aurobindo could not attend the evening sittings for a time, but from the 26th onwards there was a welcome restoration of the old rhythm of life. The Evening Talks moved as always in vast circles of comprehension.

Then came Sri Aurobindo's 54th birthday on 15 August. The Madras lawyer, S. Duraiswami Aiyar, a patriot and an ardent sadhaka, was there; and so were T.V. Kapali Sastry and Veluri Chandrasekharam, both seasoned sadhaks. Sri Aurobindo appeared in the morning as well as in the afternoon, and there were offerings, blessings, speeches, and the usual evening discussion. In the speech made in the afternoon, Sri Aurobindo referred to certain misconceptions about the Supramental Yoga, and added that the time had not come to say what would be the nature of the ultimate transformation of Man and the Earth. In the course of the discussion that followed, he made a few significant admissions and affirmations:

I have been feeling this very strongly for the last two days .... It is not a personal question, I am speaking of the general atmosphere. I find that the more the Light and Power are coming down the greater is the resistance. You yourself can see that there is something pressing down. You can also see that there is the tremendous resistance.²²

The question was asked how the universal conditions were more favourable

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now to the descent of the Supermind than they were before. After a pause, Sri Aurobindo answered:

Firstly, the knowledge of the physical world has increased so much that it is on the verge of breaking its own bounds.

Secondly, there is an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil between the outer and the inner mental, the outer and even the inner vital even the outer and the inner physical. Men are becoming more 'psychic".

Thirdly, the vital is trying to lay its hold on the physical as it never did before. It is always the sign that whenever the higher Truth is coming down, it throws up the hostile vital world on the surface, and you see all sorts of abnormal vital manifestations, such as increase in the number of visions persons who go mad, earth-quakes etc. Also, the world is becoming more united on account of the discoveries of modern science .... Such a union is the condition for the highest Truth coming down .... Fourthly, the rise of persons who wield tremendous vital influence over large numbers of men.

These are some of the signs to show that the universal condition may be more ready now. ²³

And he concluded by warning that, if one were serious about doing the Yoga, one shouldn't tamely surrender to the hostile forces that were always insinuating the notion of inevitable failure.

IX

On 17 December 1925, Philippe Barbier St.-Hilaire, a 31 year old French engineer of high intelligence and ardent aspiration arrived at Pondicherry. He was coming from a Mongolian lamasery where his spiritual search had driven him after a four-year stay in Japan.²⁴ He met Sri Aurobindo and narrated the story of his five-year-long quest. In the evening he met Mirra and retold the same story "perhaps a little more briefly". "I remember particularly Her eyes, Her eyes of light," he said many years later.²⁵ Sometimes after this first meeting, Mirra remarked to Champaklal: "I have told Aurobindo that he will do my work of foreign correspondence."²⁶ The next day, Sri Aurobindo told the young seeker:

For you to return to France just now would be a defeat .... You bring to your search a sincere heart and a mental capacity to learn (by reserving judgment) ....

A new consciousness is seeking expression in you ....

.. here it is a matter of remaining perfectly conscious.

This perfecting of the human being is difficult - very, very difficult; and it is the Work of a whole lifetime. One may fail, and waste his life. In fact it

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is so hard that I do not advise anyone to take this path. However, in you there is a powerful aspiration, and something that seeks to descend. SoI place this ideal before you. If you choose it, remain here among us and see what I can give you and what you can take from me before you go further.²⁷

St.-Hilaire never left Pondicherry; he lived for forty-four years in the service of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. "From that day on, for a full year, he had the privilege of going to Sri Aurobindo every day, talking to him and listening to his answers."²⁸ When he asked for a spiritual name Sri Aurobindo gave him the name "Pavitra" (Pure), and the bud of his aspiration was to open out gradually into a noble efflorescence, and he was to become one of the utterly and uncompromisingly faithful and genuine of the Aurobindonian apostles.

When Pavitra felt at an early stage some difficulties with his sadhana Sri Aurobindo asked Mirra to give a helping hand. Pavitra meditated with her for about thirty minutes on the evening of 14 September 1926. Later, after having heard what he had felt during the meditation, she told him:

At the beginning you had a very strong aspiration. Then something must have disturbed you .... You have a power of aspiration but it has been almost completely strangled by the mind.

The force which descended at first is a force of wisdom, of pure knowledge which descended to the level of the solar plexus ....

A force of calm, a silence, descended afterwards .... .. .

in that, in this calm, there was Ananda.

There was some response in the lower centre, but the response was feeble and mostly recorded by the subconscient.²⁹

Again, a fortnight later, on 3 October, Mirra told Pavitra:

Do not seek the truth with your mind!. .. All that you have done so far, all that you have learnt ought to be put aside. What holds you back is your education and your mental habits.

... Your inner being opened, put itself in a receptive attitude which allowed the descent. Instead of trying to reason, plunge into the experience itself. ³⁰

They had a meditation together on 12 October, and Mirra found Pavitra's receptivity good, and gave a close reading of the inner situation:

As soon as you are seated, the force descends and you receive it. What is missing is something in the consciousness. You do not get sufficiently absorbed in the inner experience. If that were so you would return with the full knowledge of what happened.

Between your head and chest a line of light is set up ....

... this white light comes from Maheshwari, it is a light of knowledge and purity. It is she who is the great preparer of the yoga. When that is ready

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generally an aspect of power (Mahakali) descends.... But the work of preparation was long .... At the same time a third ring separated you as though to cut you off from the world where you lived externally and also from your past. This force comes from Mahalakshmi.

The force of purification is always there now, preparing, regulating. I am always following you though I do not see you physically.³¹

It must be clear from the above that already Mirra had taken, on Sri Aurobindo's behalf, full responsibility for Pavitra's sadhana. She was always following him! Thus, on 16 October, Pavitra told Sri Aurobindo that what he got in his meditations with the Mother was "invaluable", and he realised that much more had been received than his surface consciousness was prepared to admit. Next day Pavitra had another session with the Mother:

Mother: I felt you very close all the day.

Pavitra: But this puts me to sleep.

Mother: There is nothing against that. During sleep, in you as in many others, there is no resistance left. Everything opens and the working is perfect. If you feel inclined to sleep don't resist it. ³²

There was a meditation again after two days:

Pavitra: Something deep must have happened ....

Mother: The force which descended is a force of transformation. It will act from the centre now .... ³³

Then, when he had an interview on 31 October, Mirra gave him this heartening assurance:

Something is being prepared for you .... It is as though the divine will had traced the goal, and the road; it is as though it had told you: "You will be like that." It was very clear. The Goal is known to us, but it is reserved for us two. To you it is rather the road that this indicated. And this road is very different from what you expected in your outer consciousness .... ³⁴

Here she speaks of "us two", of Sri Aurobindo and herself, as if it is a two­ in-one identity notwithstanding the seeming difference: they were a single consciousness participating in the play of difference!

Then about a fortnight later, she told Pavitra:

When you have overcome the difficulties of your outer being, you will pass through a progressive initiation. I shall show you, through the eyes, all that is there in the universe.. .. You will then see the exact place of all these things. ³⁵

Wasn't this the promise of the viśvarūpa, of the apocalyptic vision of -One-in-the-All and the All-in-the-One? Pavitra was to prove one of the

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finest sadhaks of the Yoga, and throughout the rest of his life (which he spent in Pondicherry) he was to be among those closest to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A long corridor connected his room with the Mother's quarters, and she would visit him at any hour of the day. He also drove the Mother's car, and she would trust nobody else. The poet Nishikanta, another sadhak, once saw in an occult vision that, "the car was being pulled by several pairs of spirited horses... with a sovereign galloping speed". "All of which means," remarks Nirodbaran, "that, to adapt a verse from Savitri, the Mother could move in Pavitra as in her natural home.³⁶

X

As with Pavitra, with others too and their sadhana, Sri Aurobindo often preferred to work through Mirra, and gradually it came to be realised that theirs was really one Consciousness, one Power. There was, for example, Daulatram Sharma who wrote about his problems to Sri Aurobindo. On 26 March 1926, Sri Aurobindo asked Amrita to reply as follows:

Your intuition that in your case the effective impulse can best come from Mina is perfectly correct.... All that is needed to receive a direct touch from her is to take the right relation to her, to be open and to enter her atmosphere. The most ordinary meeting or talk with her on the physical plane is quite enough for the purpose. Only the sadhak must be ready ....

Also it will be a mistake if you make too rigid a separation between A.G. (Aurobindo Ghose] and Mirra. Both influences are necessary for the complete development of the Sadhana. The work of the two together alone brings down the supramental Truth into the physical plane. A.G. acts directly on the mental and on the vital being through the illumined mind; he represents the Purusha element whose strength is predominantly in illumined knowledge and the power that acts in this knowledge, while the psychic being supports this action and helps to transform the physical and the vital plane. Mina acts directly on the psychic being and on the emotional vital and physical being through the illumined psychic consciousness, while the illumined intuitions of the supramental being give her the necessary knowledge to act on the right lines and at the right moment. Her force representing the Shakti element is directly psychic, vital, physical and her spiritual knowledge is predominantly practical in its nature.³⁷

Since the beginning of 1926 at any rate, if not indeed even earlier, there had been thus an increasingly direct action of spiritual guidance radiating from Mirra. She no doubt still kept herself rather in the background, but that didn't affect her magnetic power. Once a sadhika reported to Sri Aurobindo:

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Mirra once took me above the mind, but I did not know where I stood, I could only feel that I rose very high .... It required an effort to come down to the normal consciousness and in the coming down I saw a vision above the head, the form of a cup. Mina has a wonderful capacity of contacting another's consciousness and she accurately described my experience and vision.³⁸

There was, then, Veluri Chidanandam who, as a college student, had his darshan of Sri Aurobindo in 1920, and returned for a longer stay in 1926 with his elder brother, Chandrasekharam. When Chidanandam first saw Mirra, he was "struck by her frail but super-earthly and radiant form, her eyes that seemed to be like endless Ocean expanses, fathomless. "³⁹ This experience out of the ordinary was to inspire poetic recordation as well:

When first I saw Thee, Mother, so struck was I

And so dumbfounded, I only gazed and gazed

Into Thine eyes of inexpressible vasts

Fathomless, calm, one with the Vast beyond -

Beyond all oceans, the earth and the skies around.

Howw far I gazed, entering new heights and deeps!

How long, transfixed, I stood before Thee! Then

I saw Thy Form of Mystery turned to Grace,

Divine Dignity, from the Creator's Self

Plunged into blinded and expectant clay,

An Angel from afar descended here

To light the earth, the dim aspiring earth.⁴⁰

When, after a stay of about six months, he went to take leave of her and seek her guidance for the future, she said:

Concentrate in the heart. Aspire for force and peace in the heart, open yourself to us here .... There is no obstacle. Don't be anxious. Go ahead. Everything will be all right.⁴¹

And of Course, there was young Champaklal, who thought of Mirra from the very beginning as "Mother". Since his final coming in 1923, his relationship steadily grew closer to her, and he would rush to her, as to his mother, whenever in difficulty. Thus on 6 September 1926:

I made Pranam to Mother and wept and wept, placing my head on her lap.

Mother said: ... I have told you that after coming here you have to begin every thing anew. And all the past shall be dead. You are not to hear anyone except us. Have patience, have patience. You will get what you want.⁴²

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XI

Two developments during 1926 were, firstly, the perceptibly progressive role Mirra was required to play in the matter of advancing the inmates in their sadhana and, secondly, the sense of heightened urgency in the atmosphere, as could be inferred from Sri Aurobindo's speeches and interventions during the Evening Talks. On 15 August, his birthday, there was the usual elation, and the usual consecration. Speaking to those assembled, Sri Aurobindo said:

It is a day which ought to be a day of consecration, of self-examination and a preparation for future advance, if possible, for the reception of a special Power which would carry on the work of advance ....

First, remember that what are the objects of other yogas are for us only the first stages, or first conditions ....

The second thing we have to know and remember is that nothing is perfectly done unless all is perfectly done. It is not sufficient to open the mind and the vital being and leave the physical being to its obscurity.

... The third thing to remember is that if all is to be changed and done then there must be complete surrender. ...

... on one side no lack of resolution and zeal for the victory to be won, on the other no hasty impatience or depression, but the calm certainty for the Divine Will, the calm will that "it shall be done in us" and the aspiration that "it may be done for us so that it may be done for the world".⁴³

During the discussion that followed, in answer to a question about the condition to be fulfilled for the resistance of Matter to end, Sri Aurobindo said:

Well, the condition is that if man could open a direct connection with the world of the Gods, then only it would be possible ....

... as yet there is no decisive sign of any change; but as more and more Power is descending into the physical, I may say that I am morally sure that the material will yield.⁴⁴

The world of the Gods is the Overmind world just below the supermind, and Sri Aurobindo seemed to say that if the link could first be established with this overmental world of the Gods, the supramental descent would become a near certainty. As he said on 6 November 1926:

I spoke about the world of the Gods because not to speak of it would be dangerous. I spoke of it so that the mind may understand the thing if it comes down. I am trying to bring it down into the physical as it can no longer be delayed and then things may happen⁴⁵

This is quite explicit. At the time he spoke these words, Sri Aurobindo was

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trying to bring "the world of the Gods" - in other words, the Overmental principle and power of Cosmic Truth - into the physical because it could "no longer be delayed". Clearly the descent, as Sri Aurobindo saw it, was imminent; and when it did take place, then things did happen ....

XII

From various indications in the course of the preceding pages it should be clear that, between the night of the cyclone (24 November 1920) when Mirra moved into Sri Aurobindo's house and 1925-26, there was a gradual movement, first of acceptance of her and admiration for her as a fellow­sadhak,, then of recognition of her as an adept who could herself give spiritual guidance in the name and as a delegate of the Master. From the beginning of 1926, several of the women disciples started having their meditation with Mirra, as much by preference as for the sake of convenience. After August, some of the other disciples also joined these sessions with her permission. In those days, Mirra seldom went out of the compound of the Library House, and she used to sit for meditation in upper-storey room. About a dozen - including Bejoy Nag, Rani Nag, Rajani, Upen and Jaya Devi - used to sit with Mirra during those meditative sessions of aspiration and inner awakening. In Purani's words, "It was as if Sri Aurobindo was slowly withdrawing himself and the Mother was spontaneously coming out and taking up the great work of directing the sadhaks' inner sadhana and of the organisation of the outer life of the Ashram.^{" 46}

But, for the time being, she was still Mirra, even as Sri Aurobindo was A.G. However, with her increasing involvement in the management of the steadily growing household and even in the spiritual direction of several of the inmates, her role assumed new dimensions of responsibility and power, and more and more of the inmates began to look up to her as to a spiritual Mother, and sometimes called her so. Nolini Kanta Gupta himself writes how on the eve of his last annual trip to Bengal he wished to see her and take leave of her. A meeting was arranged through Sri Aurobindo, for she had not come out of her seclusion then:

I entered and waited in the Prosperity room .... The Mother came in from her room and stood near the door. I approached her and said, "I am going," and then Purely prostrate at her feet. That was my first Pranam to the Mother. She said, "Come back soon." This "come back soon" meant in the end, "come back for good." ⁴⁷

As yet she was not addressed as "Mother" or so addressed by most of the inmates. Sri Aurobindo himself usually referred to her as Mirra. When did

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the transcendence from "Mirra" to "Mother" take place? Again there is Nolini's evidence:

In the beginning, Sri Aurobindo would refer to the Mother quite distinctly as Mirra. For some time afterwards (this may have extended Over a period of years) we could notice that he stopped at the sound of M and uttered the full name as if after a slight hesitation. To us it looked rather queer at the time, but later we came to know the reason. Sri Aurobindo's lips were on the verge of saying "Mother"; but we had to get ready, so he ended with Mirra instead of saying Mother. No one knows for certain on which particular date at what auspicious moment, the word "Mother" was uttered by the lips of Sri Aurobindo. But that was a divine moment in unrecorded time, a moment of destiny in the history of man and earth; for it was at this supreme moment that the Mother was established on this material earth, in the external consciousness of man.⁴⁸

XIII

From the beginning of 1926, Mirra had assumed more and more of Sri Aurobindo's responsibility for the yogic guidance of the sadhaks, as if giving him the relief he needed to be able to concentrate on his work of making a further ascent in the ladder of Consciousness and coaxing a descent of the higher Lights into the lower levels and moulds, the lowest ­ the material, the inconscient - not excluded. An air of intensity began building up slowly, an air of unbelievable expectancy; and the sadhaks had the feeling that they were on the threshold of vast new developments. After Sri Aurobindo's birthday, the Evening Talks took on a new edge and a new flavour, and it was as though the light of a tremendous new Realisation was enhancing and transfiguring Sri Aurobindo's person into that of the Golden Purusha. In the evenings, the group sittings started later and later, not at 4.30 as before, but at 6 or 7 or 8, and once well past midnight! But the sadhaks, far from being put out, took it all as participation in a stupendous drama of change and transformation; and, in fact, many of them felt as though they were themselves being invaded by a prepotent new force - as though they were unbelievably caught in the throes of a spiritual rebirth. Some idea of the charged atmosphere may be formed from Jaya Devi's reminiscences of those days, as translated from the original Bengali by Sisir Kumar Ghose:

November came along. A strange feeling of joy took possession of all the sadhaks present. The whole of Pondicherry was fragrant with incense, a great delight seemed to be at play.... At the time of Sri Aurobindo's darshan I said, "Lord, for the last few days I have been filled with such a sense of peace and delight .... Why is it like this, Lord?"

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Smiling, he said, "You are able to feel this?"

"Not only I but all the sadhaks are able to feel this great wave of peace and delight. We are dancing with an inner joy. Why, O Lord?"

"Wait and see, there will be more delight to come," he said.⁴⁹

XIV

Then came the great day, 24 November 1926 - exactly six years after the day of the cyclone that had made Mirra move into Sri Aurobindo's house. But this time Nature smiled sweetly. As Mirra saw Sri Aurobindo emerge from his room in the evening, she knew that a momentous event, a vast descent of Light, had taken place, and she immediately sent word that all the sadhaks should assemble in the upper veranda of the Library House, the usual place of meditation. By six all were there, twenty-four in all, including Nolini, Amrita, Pavitra, Barin, Purani, Datta, Pujalal, Champaklal, Rajangam and Chandrasekharam. What next happened had best be described in Purani's words:

There was a deep silence in the atmosphere after the disciples had gathered there. Many saw an oceanic flood of Light rushing down from above. Everyone present felt a kind of pressure above his head. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with some electrical energy. In that silence ... the usual, yet on this day quite unusual, tick was heard behind the door of the entrance. Expectation rose in a flood. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could be seen through the half-opened door. The Mother with a gesture of her eyes requested Sri Aurobindo to step out first. Sri Aurobindo with a similar gesture suggested to her to do the same. With a slow dignified step the Mother came out first, followed by Sri Aurobindo with his majestic gait .. The Mother sat on a small stool to his right.

Silence absolute, living silence - not merely living but overflowing with divinity. The meditation lasted about forty-five minutes. After that one by one the disciples bowed to the Mother.

She and Sri Aurobindo gave blessings to them. Whenever a disciple bowed to the Mother, Sri Aurobindo's right hand came forward behind the Mother's as if blessing him through the Mother. After the blessings, in the same silence there was a short meditation.

In. the interval of silent meditation and blessings many had distinct experiences .... It was certain that a Higher Consciousness had descended on earth ....

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went inside. Immediately Datta was inspired. In that silence she spoke: ''The Lord has descended into the physical today."⁵⁰

Datta evidently spoke in a mood of ecstasy. But what she said has been

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recorded in different ways by some of those present. Thus Champaklal:

Krishna the Lord has come.

He has ended the hell of suffering.

He has conquered pain.

He has conquered death.

He has conquered all.

He has descended tonight

Bringing Immortality and Bliss.⁵¹

Rajangam's is a briefer version:

He has conquered Life.

He has conquered Death.

He has conquered All.

Krishna the Lord has descended!⁵²

And Jaya Devi records:

I was told: "Mahashakti, the Supreme Consciousness-Force, has descended into Sri Aurobindo." I could myself see light and glory bursting out of his body.

Next day when I was carrying with me two garlands of tulasi leaves, I heard that Sri Aurobindo would not come out again but stay in his room .... One chapter of our life was over .⁵³

But another chapter had begun!

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PART TWO

MOTHER

In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life.*

*Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, SABCL Vol. 25, pp. 24-25.

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CHAPTER 16

Founding the Ashram

I

It is difficult if not impossible, even for those who were the privileged participants in the divine drama, to explain what precisely happened on the evening of 24 November 1926, henceforth to be known as the Siddhi Day, the Day of Realisation, Some sweet tension, like a spring being wound up, was building up for days, even for weeks - in fact, from the time of Sri Aurobindo's birthday, 15 August, three months earlier. During the evening discussion on that day, Sri Aurobindo had made a reference to the possibility of opening up "a direct connection with the world of the Gods", On 6 November, he had said that he was "trying to bring it [the world of the Gods] down into the physical". As the days passed, Jaya Devi and other sadhaks had felt that all Pondicherry was "fragrant with incense", that a great delight seemed to be at play. And on Mahashtami day, when she was granted a special permission, Jaya Devi performed a private worship in Sri Aurobindo's room. That day, she saw Sri Aurobindo looking like a radiant and golden Shiva and Mirra like Durga, verily the Divine

With all this background, it would have been merely banal if something of seminal significance had not happened sooner or later. But what exactly did happen? The reports of the sadhaks - Purani, Rajangam, Champaklal, Jaya Devi and others - are unanimous that, when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had withdrawn after meditation, pranam and blessings, Datta spoke some words as if visioning something in a trance or a sudden apocalyptic flash. They had all seen that there was a new lustre, a luminous glory, on Sri Aurobindo - but what had brought about that change? Like a prophetess in a temple of old speaking in an inspired moment of sudden seeing and ecstasy, Datta found the appropriate words and spoke them. But the hearers too were in a dazed condition, and although they had heard the words - perhaps repeated as in an incantation - they could not recapture them later, and each remembered somewhat differently. In 1921, Sri Aurobindo had told Purani that, although the Divine Consciousness had descended, it had not yet penetrated the physical being;¹ it was precisely this that took place on 24 November 1926. In Sri Aurobindo's words:

It was the descent of Krishna into the physical.

Krishna is not the supramental Light. The descent of Krishna would mean the descent of the Overmind Godhead preparing, though not itself actually bringing, the descent of Supermind and Ananda. Krishna is the

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Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the Overmind leading it towards his Ananda.²

Equally significant was the fact that now the way stood open for the evocation and establishment of the Supramental Consciousness itself on the earth. To realise this possibility, it became necessary for Sri Aurobindo to withdraw into seclusion.

II

But Sri Aurobindo's retirement was not to mean a diminution of activity it meant the very reverse in fact. The community of sadhaks now placed under the Mother's care was to grow into a "spiritual collectivity" which Sri Aurobindo decided to put under a protective spiritual Name. It is said that he considered for three days³ - perhaps consulting the Mother before taking the final decision of naming the collective establishment "Sri Aurobindo Ashram", notwithstanding the ideas of austerity, asceticism and rejection popularly associated with an 'ashram'. But Sri Aurobindo thought of an ashram in the old Vedic sense: "The House of the Teacher where the students and disciples gather to draw inspiration from him, to learn how to find God."⁴ It was to be at once the House of the Spirit and the House of manifold but enlightened human activity. As he wrote to the Maharani of Baroda in 1930, "My aim is to create a centre of spiritual life which shall serve as a means of bringing down the higher consciousness and making it a power not merely for 'salvation' but for a divine life upon earth. It is with this object that I have withdrawn from public life and founded this Ashram .... "⁵

The founding of the Ashram was also a fulfilling moment in Mirra's life of high aspiration and sustained yogic effort. As she acknowledged in the course of a conversation in May 1956:

At the beginning of my present earthly existence I came into contact with many people who said that they had a great inner aspiration, an urge towards something deeper and truer, but that they were tied down. subjected, slaves to that brutal necessity of earning their living ... they felt imprisoned in a material necessity narrow and deadening.

I was very young at that time, and I always used to tell myself that if ever I could do it, I would try to create a little world - oh! quite a small one, but still ... a small world where people would be able to live without having to be preoccupied with food and lodging and clothing and the impetrative necessities of life, so as to see whether all the energies freed by this certainty of a secure material living would turn spontaneously towards the divine life and the inner realisation.

Well, towards the middle of my life ... the means was given to me and I could realise this, that is, create such conditions of life.⁶

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If the birth of the Ashram meant the realisation of one of Mirra's persistent early dreams, it also signified the materialisation of Sri Aurobindo's own hopes as expressed in his letters of 1920. In his letter to Barin, Sri Aurobindo had spoken of a Deva Sangha, and even one hundred dedicated members would, he thought, be able to form the necessary nucleus for future large-scale practical work in the field of social transformation. Writing to Motilal Roy on 2 September, Sri Aurobindo had wanted to establish "our communal system on a firm spiritual, secondly on a firm economical foundation". The Ashram that took shape under the Mother's fostering care, benefiting at once from her genius for organisation and her infinite reserves of the Spirit, was perhaps Sri Aurobindo's old Bhavani Mandir doubled with his later concept of Deva Sangha, as also her own "typic society", a self-poised self-sufficient community turning spontaneously to the divine life and inner realisation". When the time came, the atmosphere was propitious, the instruments ready, and the twin-horses - spirit-power and economic-power - were properly yoked to the great endeavour.

This needs a little explanation and recapitulation. In his Baroda days over twenty years earlier, Sri Aurobindo had thought of establishing a Bhavani Mandir for training a band of yogins to engage in national service. That didn't come about, but something remotely resembling it was organised by his brother, Barindra, in the Manicktolla Gardens at Calcutta in 1907-08. Being mixed up with revolutionary activity, the enterprise was vitiated from the beginning, and after the Muzzaferpore bomb incident, the Manicktolla group was rounded up and rendered innocuous. Barin and some of his co-workers were sent to the Andamans after the Alipur trial (1908-09), and Sri Aurobindo himself, about a year after his acquittal, retired to Pondicherry in April 1910. After 1926, under much better auspices and under the spiritual and general direction of the Mother, the earlier Bhavani Mandir - Deva Sangha idea began to take a viable shape as Sri Aurobindo Ashram. In Sanat K. Banerji's words:

The Ashram in Pondicherry is that temple of the living Bhawani, where her devotees, the men and Women who aspire to a new life on earth, offer Her worship, serve Her through their works, prepare themselves for receiving the new Light according to the best of their ability, so that the Light may spread and usher in a new world to take the place of the old.⁷

There was also a definite 'policy' decision. Two courses had been open to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: first, to wait till their own Yoga of supramental transformation was complete, and then take the people forward too; and second, with whatever gains of Yoga had already accrued to them (and they were momentous enough), to get a group together, and carry whole collectivity forward. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother opted for the latter course.

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Many years later, when the question was directly put to him "Why did you retire?", Sri Aurobindo answered that, if he had to do what the Mother was doing, he could hardly have found time for his own work of hastening the manifestation of the supramental consciousness. It was practically a division of labour, and the Mother herself explained that in 1926,

Sri Aurobindo had announced to the few people who were there that he was entrusting to me the work of helping and guiding them, that I would remain in contact with him, naturally, and that through me he would do the work.⁸

That the Mother's part in the collaborative adventure of running the Ashram was all-important may be seen from Sri Aurobindo's own ready admission on 10 December 1938:

All my realisations - Nirvana and others - would have remained theoretical, as it were, so far as the outer world was concerned. It is the Mother who showed the way to a practical form. Without her, no organised manifestation would have been possible.⁹

III

While the disciples could see that Sri Aurobindo's Siddhi on 24 November 1926 had a key importance to the Sadhana - individual and collective - and meant a decisive victory on the path generating a new fervour and ananda in the atmosphere, few of the inmates were quite prepared for what immediately followed. On the 27th morning, Jaya Devi went as usual with the tulasi garlands and returned disappointed, for she had been told that Sri Aurobindo would not come out for darshan. Having shown the previous evening for one immaculate interim the very rupa and charged splendour of the Delight of Existence, Sri Aurobindo had effected a sudden and determined withdrawal. No more daily darshan and pranam, no more J luminous discourses and scintillating Evening Talks! The Mother was accessible of course, and she was all-radiant purity and sovereign compassion .. And yet - was it the same thing as receiving benedictions from the Master himself? When somebody ventured to complain, Sri Aurobindo wrote to say that the sadhaks would henceforth receive his light and force from the Mother, and they should be guided by her in their sadhana. Even on the 24th evening, some recollected, Sri Aurobindo had blessed the disciples as it were through the Mother - the Mother being the intermediary, the interceder, the paraclete.

There were intermittent grumblings all the same. One line of argument was that, ranted that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were divine collaborators,

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still they were two persons weren't they? How, then, could the Mother entirely obliterate the Master, and put herself alone in the forefront? Sri Aurobindo was to make a pointed reference to this heresy in a letter to a disciple written in 1934:

The opposition between the Mother's consciousness and my consciousness was an invention of the old days ... and emerged in a time when the Mother was not fully recognised or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning. Even after they had recognised her they persisted in this meaningless opposition and did great harm to themselves and others. The Mother's consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. Nothing can be done without her knowledge and force, without her consciousness - if anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers. ¹⁰

It was true they first met only in 1914, and her second coming was in 1920, barely six years before the Siddhi. While they had been doing Yoga before they met or knew about each other, their respective lines of sadhana had followed the same course. And when they met, there resulted the fusion of their lines of sadhana, a mutual strengthening and consolidation which presently came to be known as Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. But it was the Mother's Yoga as much as Sri Aurobindo's, and he was always forthright in acknowledging his debt to the Mother's contribution. As he once said:

Before the Mother came all [the sadhaks] were living in the mind with only some mental realisations and experiences. The vital and everything else were unregenerated and the psychic behind the veil. I am not aware that anyone of them at that time entered the Cosmic Consciousness. At that time I was still seeking my way for the transformation and the passage to the Supramental. .. and acted very much on a principle of laissez faire with few Sadhaks who were there."¹¹

It was the Mother's coming and her eventual assumption of full responsibility that effected such a sea-change in the atmosphere.

IV

In the months following the Siddhi Day, there were two more or less parallel lines of development. On the one hand, there was a sudden efflorescence in the vital, and realisation after realisation seemed to come unbidden as it were. It was the "brilliant" period of the Ashram spread over five or six months, when the sadhana was largely confined to the vital. "Then everything was joy, peace, ananda," Sri Aurobindo recalled later. "And if We had stopped there, we could have started a big religion or a vast organisation.

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But the real work would have been left unattempted and unachieved. "¹² It was a period of "spectacular spiritual events", says K.D. Sethna. "All who were .present have testified that miracles were the order of the day .... Those which were common occurrences 10 those six* months were the most strikingly miraculous and, if they had continued, a new religion would have been established."¹³Another sadhak, Narayan Prasad who first visited the Ashram in February 1932, writes:

Between the end of 1926 and the middle of 1927, the Mother was trying to bring down the Overmind gods into our beings. But the ādhāras were not ready to bear them; on the contrary, there were violent reactions though some had very good experiences. There was a sadhak whose consciousness was so open that he could know what the Mother and the Master were talking about. One sadhak would get up while meditating and touch the centre of obstruction in someone else's body. There were others who thought that the Supermind had descended into them. One or two got mentally unbalanced because of inability to stand the pressure.¹⁴

Obviously it seems to have been a time of rich realisations and even richer possibilities; but also of delusions and wrong movements, resulting in the unleashing of adverse forces in the yet unvanquished lower nature. Like men a little intoxicated, and unable to stand it! Sri Aurobindo and the Mother accordingly decided that the Overmind-power was too upsetting in the immediate context, and would prove insufficient in the long run. Better resolutely opt for patience, first for the hard discipline of Yoga in the lower planes, and for the ultimate supramental descent and transformation. Recapitulating that time of sudden glory, the Mother too was to remark many years later in the course of a conversation:

Suddenly, immediately, things took a certain shape: a very brilliant creation was worked out in extraordinary detail, with marvellous experiences, contacts with divine beings, and all kinds of manifestations which are considered miraculous. Experiences followed one upon another, and, well, things were unfolding altogether brilliantly and ... I must say, in an extremely interesting way. ¹⁵†

At the crest as it were of these rising stairs of "bril1iant" experiences, the Mother herself came to possess the key to the creation of a fascinating new world, a world of the Gods. She related to Sri Aurobindo what had been happening:

*Sethna has advised the original "ten" be replaced by "six".

†One of the sadhaks had in a trance seen Anilbaran Roy as a white swan rising. and Anilbaran Roy himself saw a vision of Mother India seated on a lion "as we see in Jagaddhatri figure ... a crown on her head, a sceptre In her fight hand and a book In her left hand. which seemed to me to be the Vedas¹⁶

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Perhaps I showed a little enthusiasm in my account ... then Sri Aurobindo looked at me ... and said: "Yes, this is an Overmind creation. It is very interesting, very well done. You will perform miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn all events on earth '-topsy-turvy, indeed .... It will be a great success .... And it is not success that we want; we want to establish the Supermind on earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.''¹⁷

With her inner consciousness, the Mother at once saw that Sri Aurobindo was right. She returned to her room, concentrated for a few hours and willed the Great Renunciation; and so the new creation that was almost on brink of precipitation receded and dissolved and ceased to be.

With the sadhaks, on the other hand, the effects of the overmental descent were less predictable. Recalling the time, in a letter written on 18 October 1934, Sri Aurobindo called it "the brightest period in the history of the Ashram" when, using the power of the Overmind, the Mother was able to bring out the Divine Personalities and Powers into her body and physical being for several months:

In those days when the Mother was either receiving the Sadhaks for meditation or otherwise working and concentrating· all night and day without sleep and with very irregular food, there was no ill-health and no fatigue in her and things were proceeding with a lightning swiftness .... Afterwards, because the lower vital and the physical of the Sadhaks could not follow, the Mother had to push the Divine Personalities and Powers, through which she was doing the action, behind the veil and come down into the physical human level and act according to its conditions and that means difficulty, struggle, illness, ignorance and inertia.¹⁸

At any rate, that was the end of the early "brilliant" period in the Ashram's life. Of course the Sadhana would go on, but less spectacularly though not less intensively. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother thus decided to concentrate on bringing the psychic being to the fore and diminishing the drag of the Physical, the Subconscient and the Inconscient.

The whole adventure was a warning as well as a fresh opportunity for a properly motivated and directed sadhana. If the aim was integral change and supramental transformation, it was necessary to avoid the usual traps and dangers of the traditional Yogas. In a condition of trance or samadhi the body may be laid asleep, individuality may be transcended, and the feeling of separativity may be suspended; only the soul is awake, and feels ineffably one with omnipresent Reality. Likewise, in an elected moment of mental illumination, it is possible to infer the One without a second, having eliminated all false approximations and appearances. So too, at a time of the heart's ecstasy of devotion and surrender to the Lord, all the world

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may appear bathed in the glory of beauty and love. But when one strays lower - to the physical plane where pain and pleasure fight their own incendiary battles, or to the still lower subconscient region of nightmarish h horrors and fancies and the inconscient cellular mini-universes Where a Walpurgis-Night is perpetually being enacted - when the consciousness makes the exploratory descent towards these nether circles and pouches of perfidy, where the world's regiments of confusion and chaos are forever drawn up in battle array, how shall the human system or ādhāra, brittleas it is, bear the impact and the invasion of the Light and the Force from the power-charged world of the Gods? It was necessary, therefore, to lay the foundations properly through sadhana in the psychic being which is the hidden centre of the physical complex. Thus the physical nature itself could be made the conscious habitation of the spiritual, and even the supramental in course of time. Indeed, there could be no short-cut to the goal of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga of integral transformation.

V

The second line of development after the Siddhi Day was, not so much at the Yoga level, but at the personal. Even in 1920, there was some flutter of unease when Mirra was persuaded to shift to Sri Aurobindo's house on the night of the cyclone. Presently she was not only accepted but came also to be regarded as a rare aspirant, a quiet and efficient organiser, and a spiritual adept in her own right. But her status after 24 November 1926 as the spiritual head of the Ashram, the 'Mother', while this too was no sudden transformation but the logical end of a perceptible developing movement and although this received general approbation, caused some eyebrows to be raised. There was no question about her managerial ability, her unfailing friendliness and her personal spiritual eminence. And yet.. the Mother of the Ashram? ... with complete authority to direct its affairs and ordain the destinies of the inmates? After all, some of the sadhaks­ so they felt - had been doing quite well in their sadhana under the old dispensation. Why, then, this drastic change? Was it sanctified by Indian tradition? Would it work after all?

The new dispensation meant: first, an unquestioning acceptance of her as the Mother; second, a total surrender to her of one's whole life; and third, a ready and happy submission to the discipline laid down by her for the smooth and efficient functioning of the Ashram. All these posed problems and difficulties for several of the sadhaks, especially some of the old-timers who had been used to a larger uninhibited 'freedom'. While some were openly critical of the new order, some merely found themselves unequal to the demands made upon them by the changed situation. Of. course, people like Nolini, Amrita, Champaklal and Pavitra had already accepted unquestioningly whatever Sri Aurobindo proposed or approved.

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But it was otherwise with rebellious spirits like Sri Aurobindo's younger brother, Barin. He became more and more ill at ease, he grew increasingly restive, and on 25 December 1929 he left the Ashram - and Pondicherry - for good. But even Barin, while he felt he couldn't "remain caged" under the Ashram's "rigorous discipline", was willing to acknowledge the Mother's "subtle vision", her intellect, her capacity for rightly oriented action, and her rare inner faculty for maintaining discipline and harmony. In later years Barin was more forthright still, and writing in Khulnā-Vāsi on 21 February 1940, he said as much in contrition as in adoration:

To-day is the Mother's birthday. On this blessed day this is a tribute at her Feet from her erring child. Whatever my deviations into wrong paths, however grave my errors, my labyrinthine movements will at length lead me into the Temple of the Mother's Consciousness, for where else except in the Mother's lap can her son find the end of his journey?¹⁹

To return to the late nineteen-twenties: the number of inmates in the Ashram increased from 25 in 1926 to 30 by the end of 1927, and shot up to 80 next year. By August 1929, as the Mother later wrote, there were "seventeen houses inhabited by eighty-five or ninety people (the number varies as people come and go)". ²⁰ The Ashram Services had to be reorganised on a departmental footing, reasonable economies had to be imposed, work had to be assigned to the individual sadhaks, and departmental headships had to be instituted. There was room for rivalry, friction, misunderstanding, sulking, even insubordination. But more than all this, there was the question of the spiritual Motherhood itself, and its authority over the day-to-day functioning of the Ashram. There was rumbling discontent, and some wrote directly to Sri Aurobindo lodging protests or seeking clarifications.

It was in reply to one such letter that Sri Aurobindo wrote the sharply­worded lucidly explanatory letter of 23 October 1929. First, Sri Aurobindo points out, "the relation which exists between the Mother ... 10 and all who accept her is a psychic and spiritual motherhood. It is a far greater relation than that of the physical mother to her child; it gives all that human motherhood can give, but in a much higher way, and it contains in itself infinitely more." Second, the idea of 'spiritual motherhood' is not foreign to the West or to the Orient; it is "an idea known and understood everywhere". Third, the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo had no use for fanaticism, for "Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion." Fourth, people who thought that the Truth brought by Sri Aurobindo was too high for them were free to leave the Ashram and live in their own brand of half-truth or ignorance. Fifth, "I am here to establish the divine life and the divine consciousness in those who of themselves feel the call to come to me and cleave to it and in no others. "²¹

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VI

Writing to another sadhak, Sri Aurobindo observed that the central aim of the Yoga, the Sadhana, should be to grow "into a divine life in the Mother's consciousness". On the contrary, "To insist upon one's own mind and its ideas, to allow oneself to be governed by one's own vital feelings and reactions should not be the rule of life here." The Mother's being a greater or above-mind Consciousness, "at the very least a Yogic consciousness", it would be wrong to judge it by mental categories. As for understanding her and her actions one must first "become conscious with the true consciousness"; and for that "faith and surrender and fidelity and openness are conditions of some importance."²²

Sri Aurobindo also found that in some disciples the vital being seemed to have maintained a commercial attitude towards the Ashram, treating it as a sort of communal hotel or mess, and the Mother as the dignified hotel-keeper or mess-manager: "One gives some kind of commodity which he calls devotion or surrender and in return the Mother is under obligation to supply satisfaction for all demands and desires spiritual, mental, vital and physical...." In his letter of 11 April 1930, Sri Aurobindo repudiated this absurd notion, and affirmed that the only basis of stay for the sadhak of the Ashram should be spiritual:

One belongs to the Divine and all one has belongs to the Divine; in giving one gives not what is one's own but what already belongs to the Divine... The Mother is in sole charge and arranges things as best they can be arranged within the means at her disposal and the capacities of her instruments. She is under no obligation to act according to the mental standards or vital desires and claims of the Sadhaks; she is not obliged to use a democratic equality in her dealings with them. She is free to deal with each according to what she sees to be his true need or what is best for him in his spiritual progress.

Casual visitors might think of her as but a woman, although an extraordinarily accomplished one; for people who had opted to do Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, however, she was "the one who represents or embodies the Divine Truth", the focus of the sadhaks' aspiration and activity. The loving acceptance of her authority was thus "the plain common sense of the matter". If that was to be questioned, there could then be no sadhana and no sadhaks; "Each can go his own way and there is Ashram and no Yoga."²³

As for those who were not ready to be members of the Ashram or bear its discipline and were "still admitted to some place in the Yoga"

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Sri Aurobindo put them in a different category. They were free to remain apart, meeting their own expenses; for them there was no discipline on the material plane, except that they should conform to the rules of the place. And the Mother too had no material responsibility towards them.

VII

A constant source of misunderstanding was the relative time the Mother was able to give to the disciples, and the kind of work she assigned to them. Some she met rarely, some more frequently. She gave a smile to some at the time of darshan or pranam, she seemed to gaze with an intent concentration at others. As the sadhaks moved in a file, they had opportunities for observing all these externals, or comparing notes later on. Did the Mother's not smiling to one mean any particular displeasure? Did her giving long interviews to another signify a sort of divine favouritism? Again, some sadhaks were assigned what appeared to be mere menial work, while some others were elevated to headships of departments! Some were assigned duties that brought them to the Mother's notice constantly, while others were able to see her only rarely and briefly. Many of course accepted all this as part of the sadhana, but some few started grousing, and letters of remonstrance flew to Sri Aurobindo or the Mother or both. It was all symptomatic of the Divine struggle with the adverse forces that invariably made entry through the chinks in the psychological armour of the sadhaks. To infect faith with doubt, aspiration with tamasic negation, service to the Divine with rajasic impatience; to inject feelings of egoistic self-importance, jealousy, defeatism; to create the itch for questioning the very foundations of the Yoga and the Ashram - these were the stock-in­trade of the hostile forces. The sadhaks couldn't apparently help the plight they were in, and accordingly the Master (in consultation with the Mother) answered the letters with a mixture of persuasion and firmness, a show of both logic and Grace, and occasionally leavened with wit and humour as well

In a letter of 7 October 1931, Sri Aurobindo laid down the broad, discriminations necessary to follow the Yoga without misunderstandings, self-deceptions or self-flagellations. The organisation of the Ashram at Pondicherry, with the living Presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother generating the central Force for success in the pursuit of the sadhana, was but one aspect of the Truth. On the other hand, being a spiritual Force, the influence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was by no means confined to the Ashram, for "the psychic contact can exist at a distance". But to what extent it was felt, or became operative, would depend on the sincerity and intensity of the aspiration which must unfailingly call forth a proportionate response. Within everyone there is the psychic being albeit veiled and

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caged as it were, but its coming forward or release is easier in the chared atmosphere of the Ashram. A glance, a touch, a smile of the Mother, a few minutes' intense meditation in the Ashram courtyard, a sharing of theair, the silence, the peace, even a partaking of the food in the Ashram dining hall, can effect the decisive change. It is possible that the outside world with its adverse currents and cross-currents may later compel a set-back, and snap or render tenuous the psychic contact with the Mother:

It is therefore that the necessity exists and is often felt of a return to the place of the central influence in order to fortify or recover the contact or to restore or give a fresh forward impulse to the development.

Aside from this desirable periodic return to the Ashram to recharge one's. depleted psychic strength, some few - many are called, only a few are chosen! - may want, and be permitted, to join the Ashram permanently to participate at close quarters in the Aurobindonian Yoga of self-perfection and ultimate supramental transformation, and for them "the stay here in the atmosphere, the nearness are indispensable". ²⁴

In another letter of about the same time (1 August 1931), Sri Aurobindo contrasted the so-called 'love' of everyday existence with the true integral love for the Mother, for the. Divine. Physical love and vital love are all flawed at the source and in their movements, being made up of egoistic desire, and the building-up of tension, and the aftermath of satiety. On the other hand, with its source in the psychic, true love can effect an integral change in the whole motivation and action:

The true love for the Divine is self-giving, free of demand, full of submission and surrender; it makes no claim, imposes no condition, strikes no bargain, indulges in no violences of jealousy or pride or anger - for these things are not in its composition. In return the Divine Mother also gives herself, but freely - and this represents itself in an inner giving ­ her presence in 'your mind, your vital, your physical consciousness, her power re-creating you in the divine nature, taking up all the movements of your being and directing them towards perfection and fulfilment, her love enveloping you and carrying you in its arms Godwards.²⁵

The aberrations of jealousy, pride, anger, mean calculation, immature impatience will all be burnt away in the fire of integral self-giving to Divine and the answering response of Grace. Once the aspiration and surrender have evoked the descent of Grace, the very elements ­ the recalcitrant body, the 'turbulent vital and the knot of vipers that is the mind - these very elements that earlier barred the way to progress in the sadhana will now undergo an alchemic change and transformation and merge in the psychic flame. It may be added that love for the Divine, while it starts as psychic love, can presently infuse body, vital and mind also with its fire- pure quality, and this transformation will be facilitated when all action, all

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endeavour, all artistic or creative work is pursued, not for the sake of egoistic satisfaction, nor even in a spirit of niskāma karma(desireless service), but as the body's, heart's, mind's, soul's offering to the Divine. Hence the special importance of Karmayoga in the Ashram: accepting any assignment whatever from the Mother, and doing one's best and offering it as the expression of one's love and devotion. The instruments of body, vital, mind are not denied; they are not diminished or maimed; only, they are invaded and purified and transfigured by the descending light of the Spirit so as to become fit vehicles for rendering service to the Divine.

VIII

As regards the selection of the sadhaks, the work assigned to them and the system of arrangements for the smooth running of the Ashram, the principle governing these had little in common with the normal criteria of the outside world. "The moment one enters the life of the Ashram and takes up the yoga," the Mother wrote to a sadhak in January 1929, "he ceases to belong to any creed or caste or race; he is one of Sri Aurobindo's disciples and nothing else. "²⁶Many years later, Sri Aurobindo told Surendra Mohan Ghose that the Mother's choice of sadhaks was not exclusively governed by their spiritual advancement or intellectual brilliance: "She selects different types .... shi wants to observe how the Divine works in different types. "²⁷The Ashram was, after all, a laboratory for a spiritual and supramental Yoga, and in it humanity had to be represented in all its diversity. From the very beginning, the Ashram community had a cosmopolitan cast, and this only came to be emphasised more and more with the passage of time, for thus alone could the Ashram microcosm serve as the matrix of the future humanity.

Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it (at that time there were only two rented houses and a handful of disciples) all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created not by any artificial planning but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress. ²⁸

And Sri Aurobindo too had written much the same thing in the course of a letter to a disciple in 1939:

There has never been, at any time, a mental plan, a fixed programme or an organisation decided beforehand.

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The whole thing has taken birth, grown and developed as a living being by a movement of consciousness (Chit-Tapas) constantly maintained, increased and fortified. As the conscious Force descends in matter and radiates, it seeks for fit instruments to express and manifest it. It goes without saying that the more the instrument is open, receptive and plastic, the better are the results. ²⁹

The Ashram, organised not for the renunciation of the world nor for a life of meditative retirement, but for advancing the work of future-building on yogic consciousness and yoga-shakti, had to place the accent on Karma yoga which would both help the Ashram to thrive as a self-poised, self-sustained human aggregate and also advance the sadhaks' spiritual training. A few excerpts from Sri Aurobindo's letters to his disciples will make this clear:

The work here is not intended for showing one's capacity or having position or as a means of physical nearness to the Mother, but as a field and an opportunity for the Karmayoga part of the integral yoga, for learning to work in the true yogic way, dedication through service, practical selflessness, obedience, scrupulousness, discipline, setting the Divine and the Divine's work first and oneself last, harmony, patience, forbearance, etc.³⁰The work in the Ashram ... was meant as a service to the Divine and as a field for the inner opening to the Divine, surrender to the Divine alone, rejection of ego and all the ordinary vital movements and the training in a psychic elevation, selflessness, obedience, renunciation of all mental, vital or other self-assertion of the limited personality.³¹

Work is not only for work's sake, but as a field of Sadhana, for getting rid of the lower personality and its reactions and acquiring a full surrender to the Divine.³²

IX

Again, even as the selection of the sadhaks was governed by considerations other than the sheerly logical, not easily analysable by the mere intellect, the allocation of work to the inmates could also sometimes baffle the surface understanding. Why should a poet be asked to look after furniture? Why should an affluent businessman be asked to wash plates in the dining hall? Why should a trained physician be put in charge of nuts and screws? Why should a serious student of philosophy be asked to dust books in the library? Why should one trained for the legal profession be made to move food-carriers in a push-cart and distribute them to the different houses? On the other hand, the work - of whatever kind - attracted no wages as such. And although, as the Ashram grew and the work proliferated, there arose the necessity to have heads of the various departments that was only for

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convenience and despatch, and not to create masters and subordinates; all the work was still an offering to the Mother, to the Divine, and not to the departmental head. But even the grumblers had in the end to acknowledge that the work assigned, although apparently unsuitable and even uncongenial at first, had somehow grown into the sadhaks' life. Of course, things did not always work with complete precision and coordination, and this was because all the sadhaks were not equally, or at all times, ready and efficient channels of the Force and the Consciousness at work in the Ashram. In such cases, Sri Aurobindo or the Mother had to intervene, generally from behind, and set right the distortion. And sometimes the Mother made a trial of divers arrangements before deciding upon the best course.

This, then, was the difficult psychological hurdle that the sadhak had to cross silencing the insidious promptings of his 'reason' and 'common sense' : that, firstly, the work assigned to him was really the Divine's work, and must be done in the right attitude of consecration; and, secondly, that the work being the Mother's, the Divine's, if the application or dedication was truly sincere and free from all egoistic distortion, the Mother herself would give the strength and the expertise to the sadhak to see the work through. The first part was affirmed and clarified in several of Sri Aurobindo's letters:

Remind yourself always it is Mother's work you are doing and if you do it as well as you can remembering her, the Mother's Grace will be with you.³³Work should be done for the Mother and not for oneself, - that is how one encourages the growth of the psychic being and overcomes the ego. The test is to do the work given by the Mother without abhimāna or insistence or personal choice or prestige, - not getting hurt by anything that touches the pride, amour-propre or personal preference.

It is a high and great ideal that is put before the Sadhak through work it is not possible to realise it suddenly, but to grow steadily into it is possible .... ³⁴

As regards the second part, it was axiomatic that when one did the Divine's work, the Divine must lend a helping hand. This too was reiterated in Sri Aurobindo's letters:

If the mind and the vital get the habit of opening to the Mother's Force, they are then supported by the Force, and may even be fully filled with it - the Force does the work and the body feels no strain or fatigue before or after. ³⁵

The intellectual and poet, K.D. Sethna, was first asked to take charge of Ashram's stock of furniture. This brought him daily in contact with the Mother to take her signature on the requisition slips. "There was no other job, I suppose," he reminisced, "open at that time which could bring me in

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touch with her so much," and he added the revealing comment:

But I realised that the Mother, when she gives any work, gives two things also with it: first, the Ananda of the thing because without that joy you couldn't carry on at all, and, secondly, the capacity - to some extent at least!³⁶

More pointedly, the Mother once told Champaklal, and this was more than a month before the founding of the Ashram:

Do you think that you are working? No, your Mother is working.

Then, two days later:

You know, only one Purusha is working in the whole world.³⁷

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CHAPTER 17

Coming of the Disciples

I

It was mentioned earlier that the number of inmates in the Ashram increased from about 25 in 1926 to about 80 two years later. Prominent among the earlier sadhaks were Nolini, Amrita, Datta, Rajangam, Purani, Champaklal, Kanai, Barindra, Pujala1, Pavitra, Chandrasekharam and Anilbaran Roy. Not long after the Siddhi Day, there came - some for the first time, some for good - ardent spirits such as Dyuman, Janet and Vaun , McPheeters, Daulat and K. D. Sethna, Chandulal Shah and his sister Vasudha, Sahana Devi and Dilip Kumar Roy, J. A. Chadwick, Miss Maitland, Rishabhchand, and a host of others, most of whom were to make the Ashram their permanent home.

With regard to many of those who thus made a beeline for Pondicherry, the way the first call came, the early hesitations, the decisive turn and the first visit, the impact of the first darshan and pranam, the quick flowering of consciousness in the Ashram atmosphere, the adverse forces on the sly and the constant need for vigilance, the mounting of the offensive against the ego, the vicissitudes of the struggle, the sudden forced-marches and the unexpected set-backs, the whole adventure of the sadhana in fact, all this would make absorbing and enlightening case-histories. But we do not have all the facts, and we are not likely to be told; there are hints and guesses, of course, and these help us to body forth to some extent the nature of the call, the quest, the issue, the struggle and the victory.

For example, the noted Sanskrit scholar, T. V. Kapali Sastry, who saw Sri Aurobindo first in 1917, was to return again and again, and become an inmate in due course. When Sastriar met Sri Aurobindo in 1923, the basis of their future relationship was established, and the disciple made a note of the guidelines received from the Master:

Faith in the Supramental Truth;

Faith in yourself, in your capacity to achieve;

Faith in me (the Guru whose special help you would receive)

Peace, Power and Light are the threefold aim of the sadhana.¹

These and the other guidelines were a mini-handbook of the Integral Yoga, and Sastriar pursued with diligence the difficult sadhana while simultaneously following his profession of teaching. In 1927 he wanted to have an idea of the Mother's true nature and the gamut of her Powers and Personalities. In answer to his question Sri Aurobindo had him sent the manuscript copy of The Mother which he had just written. The rhapsodic description of the Mother's fourfold powers - Maheshwari, Mahakali,

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Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati - so profoundly moved the disciple that he had to turn the piece into Mātr Upanisad m inspired Sanskrit verse. And in his hymn Matr-mahimā, Sastriar sang thus in praise of the Mother:

SHE-

Who from the King of All Creation

takes and forms countless portions

and knows the process,

whose Thought is wakeful

in the mobile and the immobile,

who is the Primal Force, Shakti

holding the three worlds in her gaze,

She here as a separate Soul shines.

Mother Mira.²

Sastriar knew that 1927-28, his forty-second year, was the time predicted for a great change in his life, and some of his diary-jottings of this period are most revealing:

5.2.1928: Good dream: psychic. I was casting off the coverings; Mother was aside above to take me up ....

16.2.1928: Strong feeling of the Mother's influence ....

19.2.1928: Darshan of the Mother at the Library.

20.2.1928: Good experience at the feet of the Mother at the Library. Later, tendency to tears.

21.2.1928: The Mother's Day.

Between 10 and 11 a.m.: Pranam to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Tears before and after.

23.2.1928: Calm, waiting for heart's intuition.

Glimpse of the heart's poise ....

13.6.1928: The Mother was very smiling; gave her feet; meditated. All took nearly 30 minutes. Quite delightful, inspiring ....

27.12.1928: The great opening to the most external material nature between 4.30 and 6 a.m. and the śrutidarśana (like that of the Vedic sages) ....

1.1.1929: With the Mother, at Her feet. ...

4.1.1929: Throughout night, with the Mother in dream. She comes to some newly built house of mine .... Throughout, joy mingled with reverential awe.

5.1.1929: The Mother interviewed; meditated; then she said: "Sri Aurobindo says you may prepare to come." Then she said, "Yes, you may come for

February and March also .... "

6.1.1929: Offered parting Pranam in the verandah near the staircase and a rose. The Mother was full of smiles and nodded blessing on my taking leave of her

for the present ....

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3.5.1929: Mother said "Good", when I offered to do the quiet work of supervising the lime-mortar preparation which allows meditation.

4.5.1929: First day of work in the evenings. The Mother saw.

Mother gave me the work of preparing the daily wages of workmen, muster roll call etc .... ³

Having thus found his true home at last, Sastriar resigned on 31 May his job as Sanskrit teacher at the Muthialpet High School, Madras, and henceforth the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was all in all for him. Something of what was now happening to Sastriar may be inferred from this entry for 14 June 1929:

There was some strong sense of a liberated being or rather myself a silent being with an over-being which was universal watching and guiding me to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. ⁴

Summing up the nature of the spiritual relationship between the Mother and Sastriar, his own disciple M. P. Pandit writes:

He saw and recognised in Her a conscious embodiment of the whole Divine, a living Murti in whom are present all the Four Personalities of the Adya-Shakti spoken of by Sri Aurobindo as presiding over the course of the Earth's Evolution .... In Her he adored his Ista Devata, Sri Lalita Tripura Sundari, and surrendered his entire Sadhana to Her. ...

Pandit also refers to a fellow-disciple of Sastriar who couldn't accept the divinity of the Mother and was told by Sastriar: "You will realise one day. To me She is a Flame of White Light." Years later this person had an extraordinary experience at Padivedu among the mountains in the South:

Astride over two steep hills there stood in Her glory the towering Figure of the Mother clad in Her characteristic attire! He was overcome. There was a descent of deep Peace. Winging from Beyond reverberated in his ears the words: "To me She is a Flame of White Light."⁵¹

Padivedu was revered as the centre of manifestation of Devi Renuka, and now the Mother seemed to be identified with her, a pure white radiance of Peace!

II

Sastriar had a special spiritual relationship with his teacher, Vasistha Ganapati Muni, known also as "Nayana" (a Telegu word meaning "father"), author of the modern Sanskrit classic Uma Sahasram and a rare adept of Sri Vidya. Sastriar had also sat at the feet of Nayana's own Guru, Sri Ramana Maharishi of Tiruvannamalai. After Sastriar's contacts with

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Sri Aurobindo had thrown open to him new vistas of spiritual experience, it was natural enough that Ganapati Muni also should visit the Ashram sooner or later. When Sri Aurobindo received a copy of Uma Sahasram from Duraiswami Aiyar, the splendour of its diction and the authenticity of its vision made an immediate impression on the Master, and presently the Mother informed Aiyar: "If Ganapati Sastri is inclined to come for the August 15th Darshan he is welcome." When this was communicated to Nayana and he consulted the Maharishi, the latter remarked that it must be Daiva Sankalpam (Divine Will). Accordingly Nayana arrived in Pondicherry on 14 August 1928, and had darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the next day. Although he was not enthusiastic at first, the Darshan itself proved a marvellous experience to Nayana, and coming out he exclaimed "O divya murtulu!", an untranslatable phrase of course, but conveying with a singular brevity, beauty and finality his sudden apprehension of the twin-presences at once auspicious and glorious - "O, divine personalities!" The next day, Nayana saw the Mother for thirty minutes, and as they meditated together he felt as if invaded by spiritual currents from all directions. According to K.S. Venkataraman the Mother later told Duraiswami Aiyar: "He [Nayana] is the one man who immediately entered into my spiritual Consciousness and stuck to it to the end."⁶

In his second interview with the Mother on 19 August, which lasted over forty-five minutes, Ganapati Muni recognised in the Mother the goddess Sakambari, an exalted manifestation of the Supreme Shakti and himself as Ganapati who "was at her service to be utilised as her instrument for Divine Work". While Nayana was expatiating on Sakambari, the Mother went into a trance, and Nayana, who was closely observant, perceived "bright light emerging through her toe and there was a halo of light round her and the emerging current from all parts of her body was distinctly visible to the naked eye and for the time the entire room was surcharged with electricity". ⁷

Vasistha Ganapati Muni stayed on for about a fortnight. Overwhelmingly impressed though he was, he didn't become a regular disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He was one of the great 'outsiders' who nevertheless bore witness to the manifest generosity and golden benevolence of the Mother, and this intrepid and inspired Laureate of Uma the Goddess Supreme died at Kharagpur in 1936, still at the height of his powers. But the Guru-Sishya alchemic chain-relationship ensured a spiritual continuity, and the Ganapati Muni-Kapali Sastry-Madhav Pandit heritage was to flow into and enrich the silent tarn of spirituality at Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

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III

One of the elect among the post-1926 arrivals was the young Englishman, J.A.Chadwick, who quickly tired of India's Groves of Academe, and strayed into and found a haven in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. His training in Cambridge had been in mathematical philosophy, but he now sought the Truth that beyonded all formal and conceptual knowledge. Under the spiritual name of "Arjavananda" (the joy of straightforwardness), given to him by Sri Aurobindo he made quick progress in the sadhana, and became one of the brightest stars in the Ashram's poetic firmament. On one occasion, there was a confrontation with a visiting English journalist, and sparks flew, there was some crackle on one side, and the Light presently asserted itself:

Question: I know, Mr. Chadwick, that your Master has attracted a number of men and women of merit and mark. But that is just the reason why we expect them to do something.

Answer: But we are doing something .... Supposing I said: each of us here has come to grips with his ego?

Question: And when he wins?

Answer: The Kingdom of Heaven begins - for him, at all events.⁸

The visitor grumbles that, after all, the West is dynamic, and has achieved something, and is poised for more and more progress, whereas the Orient with its chronic quietism can only be a global drag. But Arjava asks whether Western civilisation isn't "falling on the downward", and whether it is really wise to rush about "doing something convincing when you are far from convinced yourselves about the rightness of your vision or the correctness of your method". And he concludes: "Yes, I do claim one has to win the right vision first before one can find a clue to the right action."

One astonishing outcome of Arjava's exposure to the Ashram atmosphere was the opening up of the hardly suspected springs of his poetic inspiration, and in less than ten years he composed - for as he lisped in numbers, they came as if effortlessly and unceasingly - a mass of lyric verse to make up a volume of nearly 400 pages. While Sri Krishnaprem found in the lyrics a "delicate dream-like beauty", what is equally to the point is their capacity to act 'open sesame' to the symbol-worlds of the Spirit. Poetry such as Arjava's is a demonstration of what Yoga can do, and what the Integral Yoga certainly did, to help a sadhak to find his authentic voice as a poet of spiritual sensibility. Thus, for example, "The Feet of the Divine Mother":

Be Her light footfall a token

Of a Stillness fraught with Grace;

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Keep the truthward prayer unspoken

Her sandals trace.

Not solely Heaven descended

But earth upflowers to God

Eachwhere Her heaven-attended

Silence trod.⁹

And the following addressed "To Mother" is more direct still, and movingly articulate:

On this dark spirit-main

Rise as a fun-orbed moon,

Transform the murk of pain

To a fleckless silver boon ....

Out from a planet's gloom

All aspects can to Thee, ­

Life in our stirless tomb,

Light on our darkened sea.¹⁰

It was a flaming spirit, Arjava's; and a "burning blade" still, he died at the age of forty, but he had certainly "arrived" in the vicinity of that goal which one of his greatest poems "Moksha" characterises as

Truth's abidingness

Self-Blissful and Alone.

IV

Dilip Kumar Roy first visited Pondicherry in 1924, but at that time Sri Aurobindo told him that his was mental seeking as yet, and Dilip should wait a little longer. Four years later the call was more insistent, and in November 1928 Dilip rushed to Pondicherry again; this time, as the Mother said, there had been "a sudden psychic opening". His interview with the Mother was most rewarding, and he recorded:

She was exceedingly kind to me and listened to me with great sympathy. I. was charmed by her personality at once effulgent and soothing. Her being was haloed with beauty, but it was not an earthly beauty. ¹¹

The Ashram community, writes Dilip, numbered no more than about eighty at this time, but there was variety, and there were men and women of talent and distinction. "Our Ashram courtyard," he recalls, "basked in a delectable silence. "¹²It was, however, galling to him that he couldn't see Sri Aurobindo except on the three Darshan days and although he was one of the few permitted to write as often as he liked to Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, that didn't quite mollify him.

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The Mother of course was all graciousness and generous understanding, and there was the bracing companionship of sadhaks like Arjava and Amal Kiran. Ordinarily, Dilip was absorbed in music or writing, but from time to time he fell to brooding, and he had his moods. Besides, the pronounced Karmayoga aspect of the Ashram's life didn't exactly appeal to Dilip with his addiction to the old Vaishnava tradition of Bhakti. Accordingly, he was occasionally subject to fits of doubt, restiveness and even rebellion. In March 1930, for example, when Mahatma Gandhi started his March to Dandi to launch his Salt Satyagraha, Dilip felt that Ashram life was a poor thing, and that he should escape its enervation and jump into the political fray. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo were genuinely concerned, for quite obviously this was the result of an insidious attack by an adverse Force that was on the prowl in the Ashram, like the Serpent in prelapsarian Eden. Sri Aurobindo accordingly wrote to Dilip in a tone of urgency and deep seriousness:

It is certainly the force hostile to Yoga and the divine realisation upon earth that is acting upon you at the present moment. It is the force ... which is here in the Ashram and has been going about from one to another. With some .. it has succeeded; others have cast it away from them .... Some are still struggling ....

That it is the same hostile force would be shown ... by the fact that the suggestions it makes to the minds of the victims are always the same. Its one master sign is always this impulse to get away from the Ashram, away from myself and the Mother, out of this atmosphere, and at once. For the force does not want to give time for reflection, for resistance, for the saving Power to be felt and act. Its other signs are doubt; tamasic depression; an exaggerated sense of impurity and unfitness; the idea that the Mother is remote, does not care for one ....

All that is needed is for your psychic being to come forward and open to the direct and real constant inner contact of myself and the Mother. ... You will then not feel the Mother remote or have any further doubt about the realisation; for the mind thinks and the vital craves but the soul feels and knows the Divine.¹³

The balloon of Dilip's cheerless discontents came down with a crash, and there were no more grouses for a time.

But two years later, the worm of unease stirred disagreeably again, and questioned the propriety of Sri Aurobindo's "staying thus in deep purdah". Apparently, the ready accessibility of the Mother wasn't enough! Dilip's was of course a cry from the Slough of Despond, and he asked his Guru to terminate the "sterile relationship". Sri Aurobindo wasn't offended, yet he declined to let Dilip go:

I had thought that the love and affection the Mother and I bear you had been made evident by us...

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Do not believe all you hear .... I have cherished you like a friend and a, son and have poured on you my force to develop your powers - to make an equal development in the Yoga. We claim the right to keep you as our own here with us.¹⁴

But what strange ideas again! - 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 to the far greater difficulties constantly cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal. My life has been a battle; the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character. ¹⁵

The urgency, the persuasive tone of sweet reasonableness, the transparent love and concern of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the striking description of the whole character of the Yoga as a battle and a struggle to be sustained till the final victory, the infectious friendliness and good humour and open-heartedness, all helped to reconcile Dilip to the actualities. He was happy to share his epistolary treasures with selected fellow-sadhaks, and he had his escape into the delectable realms of music and poesy. And he affirmed that there was no place in the world like the Ashram, and there were no Gurus like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother!

V

Like Dilip, Vasudha, Sahana Devi also - whose music used to send Rabindranath Tagore into the seventh heaven of rapture - arrived in Pondicherry in November 1928. At that time the women inmates - the sadhikas - numbered hardly a dozen. What immediately struck Vasudha, Sahana Devi when she came to the Ashram on the morning of 22 November was that the sadhaks moved about with a self-poised silent air of rare distinction. Evidently, as she thought, "This sadhana did not mean sitting down to meditate or following any set method for them but whatever they did, physical work or literary pursuits, individually or collectively, was all done in a spirit of sadhana. ¹⁶ As for the Ashram complex, it was of a piece with the inmates, variety wedded to a deeper unity of aspiration and effort, the revolving wheel of work contained by a silence immaculate and spontaneous:

No sooner than one crossed the portals one seemed to step into a silence so

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solid that a single word uttered loudly seemed a jarring discordant noise to one's own ears. It did not take one long to realise that the rhythms of life were quite other than the ordinary ....¹⁷

She was taken to her room in the Ladies' House, and Nolini and Amrita informed her that she could meet the Mother at 9.30. In her room "all arrangements were perfect even to a pitcher of drinking water and a glass". The meeting with the Mother was to take place in the first floor of the the Meditation House. This was Vasudha, Sahana Devi's day of destiny, and the sight of the Mother was a mystic moment when Time was transcended:

The Mother was seated on a couch with her feet tucked in and holding on one end of the sari covering her head. At the very first glance although .. hers was a human material body yet it became quite clear to me that hers was rather an incarnated divine form. I gazed at her spell-bound and remained standing with joined hands. As she bestowed her heavenly smile and looked at me I bent to place my head on her feet. The touch of her hand on my head seemed to melt the whole of my being in an inner ecstasy. As she removed her hand, I sat near her feet .... I saw the Mother looking deeply into me, into the remotest recesses of my being. She then asked me if I had anything to say. She listened attentively to all I had to tell her ­ about myself and my life. When I had finished she drew me into her arms and kissed my forehead .... Then she raised my face tilting it with her hand, gazing into my eyes with an expression of compassionate consolation. Thus she accepted me. My eyes became full with tears of joy. ¹⁸

Here the whole drama - half-human, half-divine - comprising the call, the seeking, the finding, the melting appeal and the splendour of the acceptance: the pranam, the touch of the Mother's hand, the cleansing tears, the golden smile: the whole drama of yogic initiation is completed with the naturalness of the strayed child finding its way back to the mother and , being seized by her in her protective and redemptive embrace.

Then came the Darshan of 24 November. Vasudha, Sahana found Sri Aurobindo "seated, on a sofa leaning back, still and majestic like the Himalayas, a perfect image of a glorious sublimity", and the Mother, as she blessed Sahana, "poured into me the nectar of her incomparable smile". In the weeks and .months that followed, Vasudha, Sahana Devi's talent for music, already pure and richly seasoned, grew new dimensions of intensity and spiritual fervour under the Mother's fostering care, and once a month or at times once in two months, along with Dilip, Vasudha, Sahana would give recitals in the Meditation Hall. "It was all a sort of votive offering to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo through music. ¹⁹ When she had presently, at Dilip's request, to provide notations to some of the pieces in his Geetashri, they seemed to come from some mysterious overhead source; Vasudha, Sahana no doubt did the actual writing, but some higher Force was doing the work! In thisconnection Sri Aurobindo wrote reassuringly to her:

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The Ananda of creation is not the pleasure of the ego in having personally done well .... The Ananda comes from the inrush of a greater power, the thrill of being possessed and used by it.

And about her singing he once commented:

You sing your best only when you forget yourself and let it come out from within without thinking of the need of excellence or the impression it may make.²⁰

Next Vasudha, Sahana wished to make a votive offering of her dance. She was no dancer, - "but why should the Mother not see the little I could do?" After a dance-recital of Tagore's "In the steps of the Dance", the Mother herself gave Vasudha, Sahana the idea of a dance on Radha, along the lines of her own Radha's Prayer. And so with the march of the years Vasudha, Sahana Devi made unfaltering progress in the sadhana, never halting, never taking things for granted, but ever with her eyes on the Vision yonder, ready and eager always to fare forward towards the Goal.

VI

Almost a year earlier, K. D. Sethna had come from Bombay. A brilliant Philosophy graduate, he had done desultory Yoga, and was researching on "The Philosophy of Art" for his M.A. In the meantime, having bought a new pair of shoes wrapped in an old newspaper, he returned home and saw an article on "The Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose" in that paper. His mind was suddenly made up: Pondicherry would be his place of sadhana - what he had bought must have served as the shoes of a pilgrim! He arrived in December 1927 and was received by Purani who had been the link in the correspondence between the Ashram and this newcomer. On entering the room of Purani (who was staying then in the Guest House, in the room once occupied by Sri Aurobindo), Sethna happened to look through the north-facing window and caught a glimpse of the Mother walking on the roof-terrace of the Meditation House, and he said to himself, "She is very beautiful!" A meeting with her was arranged, and he told her that, having seen everything of life, he now wanted nothing except God. The Mother was amused and said sweetly:

Oh, at 23 you have seen all of life? Don't be in such a hurry, you must take your time. Stay here, look about, see how things are, see if they suit you and then take a decision.

Although a bit disappointed, he agreed - but the Mother's eyes! what eyes! what radiance!-

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When I was talking with her I felt as if from her face and eyes some silver radiance were coming out... I could not make out how this was happening ­ nor could I doubt that this was happening. Apart from this impression of light, there was another - something out of the ancient Egypt....²¹

He stayed on for the Darshan of 21 February 1928, - and forgot about his M.A. dissertation. The Darshan strengthened his desire to do the Integral Yoga, and the Mother accepted him. There was of course no question of an interview with Sri Aurobindo, and like others in the same predicament, he too had to communicate through letters. "I went on writing to Sri Aurobindo," he acknowledges, "and all types of questions I used to put to him ... bombarding him with queries. Most of my questions were either philosophical or literary - because, though I had my own share of common difficulties, the real difficulty at the beginning was my , Westernised intellect."²² Sri Aurobindo replied promptly and sometimes at length, and these letters were an amalgam of information, instruction, elucidation and initiation, and they were to grow into gorgeous epistolary treasures and significantly enrich the Aurobindonian canon. From an early part of his stay, Sethna sported the spiritual name of "Amal Kiran" (Amal for short), which Sri Aurobindo had given him. The word meant "The Clear Ray", and fitted his ardent and flame-bright nature.

It was Amal's particular destiny to correspond at length with Sri Aurobindo on the great 'work in progress', the epic Savitri, and as good as coax the poem to come out into the open. After a good deal of astute strategy and clever tactics on Amal's part, his efforts were rewarded on 25 October 1936 - "one of the most important days, if not the most important, of my life here" -- for, in a letter written on that day, Sri Aurobindo gave 16 line from the exordium (Book One, canto I) beginning with the memorable

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

as an example of possible "overhead" poetry.²³ But Savitri was to be a carefully guarded secret for another ten years, and even in the Ashram itself very few knew anything authentic about it. There was some random speculation, of course, but that was about all till from the middle forties onwards the poem started appearing, first in fascicles, then in two volumes; and finally in 1954 the entire work came out in a single volume with Sri Aurobindo's letters to Amal on the poem printed at the end.

VII

Not long after Sethna, Vasudha came with her elder brother, Chandulal Shah, who was an engineer. Being only fourteen, she had been refused permission in November 1927, but by a happy quirk of circumstance, she

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was allowed to come in February 1928, although she hadn't applied this time. They reached Pondicherry on the afternoon of 19 February, and at first the girl wondered how she was going to spend the next fifteen days in the Ashram with (as she imagined) "people meditating with closed eyes and grim faces and nobody smiling, nobody laughing and talking". Could she not leave for Bombay (where she was schooling) Immediately after the

twenty- first?

In the evening of the 19th, she went in her brother's company, each carrying a rose garland, to see the Mother:

I remember I first saw Mother in the Prosperity Room standing somewhere in the middle of the hall. I naturally did just what my brother did... He gave one garland to Mother and did Pranam .... The garlands had been kept for a long time in a dish and the petals of some roses had fallen in it, so I collected them and put them all in Mother's hands and did Pranam again. She gave me a sweet smile. And I forgot all about my going away.

As she said forty-seven years later in the course of a talk to the students of the Centre of Education: "I don't know how the fifteen days passed a then fifteen years and many more years, but I am still here. "²⁴¹

A day or two after the Darshan, when Chandulal met the Mother, she told him simply: "Your little sister is very nice, Sri Aurobindo also was pleased." Then she added: "If she likes to stay here I shall keep her." Chandulal spoke about this to Vasudha, and she said at once: "Yes, I want to stay here, I don't want to marry." Charmed by the Mother's beautiful face, Vasudha had felt "very much enchanted" by the divine smile: where was the room for hesitation, then?

Academic laurels, the lure of marriage and motherhood and social life, the pull of the homestead, kith and kin - all were nothing, less than nothing. To be with the Mother Divine was everything! It was with such one-pointed, unwavering and almost unselfconscious consecrations that the Mother built the marvellous House of the Divine that is Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

It was now Vasudha's destiny to educate herself (for at first she had but small English and no French), to render whatever service was asked of her by the Mother, and by these and other means to advance in the Integral Yoga. If she was absurdly young, she was also unusually eager to serve the Mother. In the early stages she did odd jobs like making mats for the vases, embroidering the Mother's saris, and washing, mending and ironing her clothes. "I never asked for any work," she says remembering those distant days, "and never refused any."²⁵ Later, Vasudha had to attend to the Mother's personal work, always - as if by gravitational pull- getting closer and closer to her, and a time was to come when Vasudha would be like a part of the Mother. Also, in the thirties, Vasudha too started writing letters, to the Mother almost every day, and to Sri Aurobindo from time to time.

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The singular nature of this child-mother and disciple-Guru relationship - its life-sparks, illuminations, ministrations of love - can be illustrated by a few extracts. Thus, on the 1st of February 1934, the Mother wishes Vasudha "A happy, calm, an invariable peace, a luminous silence." Next day Vasudha writes:

Mother, I shall capture You in my heart. I don't need to think of peace and happiness. When You dwell in our hearts, these things are sure to be there.

The Mother answers immediately: "You will not have to go far to seize me, for I am already in your heart and as soon as your eyes are opened you will see me there .... "²⁶ Barely a few years have elapsed since her arrival in February 1928, and already Vasudha is mistress of herself and of the resources of language. She has progressed far in her sadhana indeed!

It is not, however, roses, roses, all the way. There are unpredictable its moments of depression, there are the attacks by the ubiquitous adverse forces, and life even in the Ashram, life even in the immediacy of the Mother, becomes inexplicably difficult, and Vasudha pours out her anxieties, uncertainties and agonies at the Mother's feet. And the Mother at once rushes to rescue and reassure her child:

Poor little one, I very gladly take you on my lap and cradle you to my heart to soothe this heavy sorrow which has no cause and to quell this great revolt which has no reason. Let me take you in my arms, bathe you in my love and wipe away even the memory of this unfortunate incident.²⁷

Evidently the cure is not complete, for Vasudha writes a few days later to Sri Aurobindo complaining of unease and restlessness, and of an inability to retain the Mother's presence all the time. In his reply Sri Aurobindo tells her that the disturbing fancies and forces are not really the emanations of her own mind but merely "foreign matter thrown on it from outside". She should train her mind to throw back these alien things, and if she keeps herself "inwardly confident and open", the Mother's and his own help will do what is needed to be done. Vasudha is by now "Little Smile" to the Mother, and is the recipient of unending Grace from both her and Sri Aurobindo. Perhaps, difficulties come to Vasudha (as to many other sadhaks) only to provoke the Grace to act in due measure. So long as life is not wholly supramentalised, it is too much to hope that an inner poise can be continually maintained. There is a rhythm in these things - the alternations of elation and moodiness, faith and doubt, self-confidence and enervating defeatism. When Vasudha asks what is it in her that is closed to the Mother - is it the heart? the mind? or something else? - and how she is to effect the opening, the answer readily comes:

My dear little smile,

I know of one way: to give oneself - a complete consecration to the Divine.

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The more one gives oneself, the more one opens; the more one opens, the more one receives; and in the intimacy of this self-giving one can become conscious of the inner Presence and the joy it brings. ²⁸

On 3 August 1936, when Vasudha sounds an SOS, a note of urgency and despair ("I find that I have lost everything: All that was good in me, all is lost."), the Mother tells her "dear little child" hat the possible reason for the bleak feeling was the "clouding of the consciousness" brought about bythe influx of visitors for the 15th August Darshan. "You must not let.this upset you too much, but simply aspire with calm and perseverance for the light to reappear. ²⁹

And so, these perilous hair-pin bends notwithstanding, Vasudha is set on her march towards the supramental summits, her aspiration constantly burnished anew, and her will to ultimate victory sustained by the sovereign Grace of the Mother.

VIII

Another who joined the Ashram when still very young was the nine-year old Romen Palit, who came with his father, Rajani Kanta, in November 1929. Although children were not then allowed into the Ashram, Romen was permitted to go for Darshan of the 24th, and even at that age he "felt a great vastness, a height in Sri Aurobindo ... as great as the Himalayas".³⁰ Romen very much wished to stay on, but when his father broached the subject with the Mother and also wrote to Sri Aurobindo, it was suggested that Romen could return later after learning some English first, so that it would be easy for him to talk to the Mother. Coming back in July 1930, Romen stayed on, looked after by somebody or other, and always under the Mother's enveloping care. Presently, he garnered knowledge from books, and friends and teachers, and tried to cultivate poetry as well as music and painting. Then, in 1934, something happened:

When I was fourteen, I had a definite and exceptional experience of the psychic being coming to forefront in spite of all my unsteady nature, my moods and my constant depressions. This experience became the basis of existence and has been the support and aid in all my trials and tribulations. This was the Mother's extended arm in my consciousness to rouse what was the most true, the most permanent in me. This altered all my life, my vision, and my valuation of things, persons, actions in general and my relation with the Mother in particular.³¹

But of course things are not settled quite so easily, for the hostile forces are always about, ready with their insinuations and sly intimations. Romen was thus only too apt to veer between "depression and happiness, discipline and erratic tamas".

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The Mother, however, was ever watchful, and her benevolent protective cover was strong and not easily to be pierced. Thus in spite of the zig-zag swaying between the poles, there was some decisive progress in the sadhana as also in poetry, music and painting. Once when Romen was playing to her, the Mother went into a deep concentration with a smile on her lips. Then, coming out of it, she said:

Do you know, child, what I saw? On the bank of a river, there was a platform and seated there, you were playing some instrument. So you see you are not a musician in this birth alone.³²

As for his poems, many of them received Sri Aurobindo's commendation. And yet, Romen continued to be subject to moods of discontent and icy depression. The Mother had at last to tell him that he was free to "go out the and see the ordinary life", but she warned him also of the possible consequence.

It was as the Mother had expected; the hunger for the outside world wouldn't be easily satiated, for the more it was fed, the more did it wax ravenous. But Romen had, after all, to make his own unfettered choice, and if in the process he injured himself a little, that couldn't be helped. The Mother was the Mother, at once divine in the plenitude of her prescience and human in her anxious and loving concern for her child. Must Romen play the purblind forward child and, while still unprepared, sully himself in the mire-sunk ways of the world? Would he not be her true child, her child of Light? ... But that was to happen too, in the fullness of time. He would then be a minstrel of Light, and limn the features of the apocalypse:

What deep, white unimaginable fire broods

Within her frail body's golden citadel!

What puissance sleeps in her sky-tranquil eyes!

What secrecy of God's apocalypse

Is hidden behind her lustrous limbs of peace!

What stupendous love's flame-red magnificence

Blazes within the monument of her soul!

And thus on "The Mother Bearing the Human Cross":

A night-heavy cross of human doom is Hers

Whose ancient weight no divinity could bear,

A poignant load no might or will could reverse; ...

Her mind is alone, inscrutable, sublime

On the grand vastnesses of His trance-wide seeing.

A poise and Power and Bliss of His infinite Light,

Her transcendent ray shall change this dying Night³³

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IX

Among those who first came in 1929 was also Mrityunjoy, who had already been doing Sri Aurobindo's yoga. It happened to be the transitory period in the history of the Ashram when some of Sri Aurobindo's older disciples had left, and there were sadhaks in the Ashram who, while they had "accepted" the Mother, had some mental reservations still.

In those days the Mother saw newcomers on the very day they arrived, and at ten in the morning Mrityunjoy had a satisfying interview with her in the darshan room in the Meditation House. But that afternoon he was told by a young sadhak that, while reading the Arya, meditation, painting, music and poetry were all right, the main accent in the Ashram was on work:

But if you really want to know what the Mother is, you must work. Only then will you physically feel Her shakti. Otherwise you will miss the chance however much you read and meditate.³⁴

At once Mrityunjoy decided to ask for some physical work in spite of his poor health. That evening the Mother assigned him some light work in the library, which he began from the next day. He was soon to discover the difference between the attitude of some of the "intellectuals" in the Ashram and the new batch of devoted workers, and opened more and more to the Mother's force until one day the Mother saw "a star at the centre of my heart emanating four rays, which had something to do with the four powers of the Mother". The next day when the same thing was repeated, the Mother sent Nolini to warn Mrityunjoy to "be careful in my daily movements so as not to disturb something that was growing in me".

He could not at first understand the meaning behind the Mother's warning and continued joining in the walks and gossip of some of the "senior" sadhaks, and also, on the sly, taking tea with them, reading Sri Aurobindo's letters and participating in the loose talk about other sadhaks. Caught in that atmosphere, Mrityunjoy's consciousness, after the initial lift, suffered a fall. Within a week he "began to feel dull when I approached the Mother" and realised that something had gone wrong. This was underlined when he sought the Mother one morning and made pranam:

I found it quite different from my arrival day's Pranam at Her feet. Now Her look penetrated my eyes as if She read through them my secret thoughts, feelings and actions, of which I had not yet become aware.³⁵

He realised that the Mother's giving of a flower after Pranam was her way of answering the needs, questions and aspirations taken by the sadhak to her. If one looked for the meaning with true sincerity, it verily stared one in the face, for each flower carried its own particular message.

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Now Mrityunjoy secured the work of spreading the narrow mats and arranging the diminutive Japanese-style tables in the dining room, then in the Ashram compound itself. Even so, his attitude of egoistic separativity remained, and this necessarily affected the progress of his sadhana. Soon he was shifted to another department, but there too he had to learn his lessons the hard way. The Mother pointed out to him that it was only by setting an example that one could succeed as a leader of fellow-workers, "otherwise they would have no true feeling and respect for me". It was with such interesting vicissitudes that Mrityunjoy learnt the secret of Karmayoga - work as an offering, work as worship and ananda, work as surest sadhana.

The Yoga of Works, however, called for infinite understanding and an ... infinite patience. To feel superior, to wax censorious, to lose one's temper with one's associates or subordinates - these only betrayed one's own weakness, one's own flawed nature. As the Mother once admonished Mrityunjoy:

Whatever be the situation and whosoever the person, lack of harmony means lack of consciousness, and the one who is stronger yields. I do not mlean stronger physically, but stronger in consciousness. And by one's affection and love ... one yields to get back peace and harmony.³⁶

Mrityunjoy was not slow to learn the needed lesson, and the result was an accession of peace within, a better record of outer work, and a quicker pace of progress in the sadhana of Integral Yoga.

X

Like Vasudha and Romen, Shanti Doshi also was caught by the frenzy divine while still very young. He was only thirteen when he came to Pondicherry on 17 November 1930. His father had come two years earlier, but alone; and came again in 1930 - this time with Shanti. Having arrived in Pondicherry, Shanti saw the Mother the same evening:

The Mother was clad all in white - sari, blouse and crown. She was sitting on a high chair. When she saw me she was all smiles and a spontaneous recognition arose in my heart that she was my adhisthātrī. I told the Mother that I did not want to go back.³⁷

Then came 24 November:

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were seated on the sofa. As I approached them after my father, Sri Aurobindo smiled. He looked simply wonderful .... When I made pranam holding his feet, he bent down and blessed.

Being allowed to remain, Shanti started learning French, and was

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asked to take the meter readings in the several Ashram houses, and do other odds and ends of work. On 22 May 1932, his birthday, the Mother asked him what he wanted to become; he said he didn't know. Would he like t become big Yogi? Not quite understanding the implications of: the question, Shanti answered, Yes, Mother. But when she explained the that a big Yogi should have a "divine consciousness" and would be surrounded by a swarm of disciples, Shanti was properly alarmed and blurted out at once: "I don't want to be a Yogi, I want to be your child." The Mother then said, "Très bien!". ³⁸p

The boy grew up in the Ashram atmosphere, and put out the petals of his growing consciousness one by one, responding to the central radiance. He reported to the Mother daily, and received her or Sri Aurobindo's comments, directions, explanations, benedictions, admonitions. The singular nature of that mother-child relationship may be illustrated by a few extracts from their correspondence during the thirties:

Shanti: This evening I have seized you strongly and I shall never let you go. I will never leave you, never, never, never.

Mother: Very good, I am very happy you will not leave me. Come for Pranam a little more in silence and quietude, and you will see that you feel the force and love.³⁹

S: Will You explain why the joy and love in me get attacked by obscurity? I am not aware of having done anything, and it is not possible for the happiness and love to withdraw for no reason.

M: No, nothing withdraws; it is the physical being which is unable, by nature, to hold the joy and love for very long, unless it is completely governed by the psychic.⁴⁰

S: I have just heard that you are not well. What is it, my dear mama? Give, me your illness, I shall accept it with joy.

M: You are very nice, my dear child, but what you propose does not appear to me very practical.. .. ⁴¹

S: May I know, Mother, how many centuries ago You descended upon earth?

M: I have never left the earth since it was formed.⁴²

S: What You mean by "vital soul" is the vital being, I think. .

M: The vital soul is what the ancients called the "anima", that which animates, which gives life to the body. It is also sometimes called the etheric being.⁴³

S: Which path must I take then? And what is the right and true way of making the effort?

*"Very Good'"

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M: ....make your brain work by studying regularly and systematically; then during the hours when you are not studying, your brain, having worked enough, will be able to rest and it will be possible for you to concentrate in the depths of your heart and fid there the psychic source; with it you will become conscious both of gratitude and true happmess.⁴⁴

S: A fire is burning in me; it is tremendous ....

M: ....if you don't have fever, this fire business is a wrong imagination that should be rejected. There is a sacred fire that burns in the heart and envelops the whole being: it is Agni, who illumines and purifies all. I kindle that fire in you each time that you ask me for some progress; but it destroys nothing except falsehood and obscurity.⁴⁵

S: Today You gave me a flower meaning "Psychic flame", but I really didn't understand what you mean to tell me.

M: Agni is the will for progress, the flame of purification that burns up all obstacles and difficulties. By giving you the flower, I am encouraging you to let it burn in you.⁴⁶

Thus, in the course of two or three years (1933-36), a few hundred communications are exchanged covering almost the entire spectrum of the double - the mother-child human and the Guru-neophyte spiritual ­ relationship. Questioned as to whether her inner actions were of divine origin, the Mother said: "I may assure you that my action, whether inner or external, is always of divine origin." If Shanti felt any uneasiness, it was but the result of "want of plasticity and receptivity" in his mental, vital and physical. When Shanti asked whether there were many persons in the Ashram who didn't believe that she was the Divine incarnate, she answered with all-sufficient brevity and subdued humour: "I have made no enquiry into the subject. "^{47 2}On the other hand, when he writes to her offering all his imperfections, desires and difficulties, asking her to accept them, she answers at once: "My dear child, I accept your offering and use it to light in you the flame of progress."⁴⁸ The best of arrangements for progress in the Yoga!

XI

There was, then, Nirodbaran. Having completed his medical education in Edinburgh, he "arrived all on a sudden at Pondicherry" in the first week of January 1930, without having informed the Mother about his visit. While still in Europe he and his niece had met Dilip Kumar Roy, and "came to know from him something about the Mother, Sri Aurobindo and the Ashram". It was Dilip who took Nirod to the Mother.

I was dazzled by the sight. Was it a 'visionary gleam' or a reality? Nothing like it had I seen before ....

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She bathed me in the cascade of her smile and heart-melting look.⁴⁹²

His plan, he told her then, was to return to Bengal and practise in his home town, Chittagong. "It was an impromptu answer, for I had not made up my mind at all." For, as he later confessed,

I cared very little for God and had no faith. I started the sadhana without having any idea about it, as Stendhal's Fabrice joined the army in utter ignorance of what war was like.

He returned with his niece for the February Darshan and they stayed on for a few weeks, taking part in all the functions and observing the discipline of the Ashram, but he "was not at all ready for a spiritual life" and was still more or less a materialist. For three years he knocked about in search of a secure job and a very definite change came over him: "Though materially I had to face hardships, spiritually I seemed to have rediscovered my soul." And so in 1933 he returned to the Ashram a few days before the February Darshan. But when he asked to be allowed to stay permanently in the Ashram, he was told to wait till August. Nirod in the meantime did odd jobs (including work in a timber godown), and he wrote numerous letters. While they were addressed to the Mother, the replies usually came from Sri Aurobindo. "Should one write about everything?" Nirod once asked naively, and the reply was:

Only those who feel the need, write their experiences or condition daily to the Mother. Even so, they need not write the same things daily, but only what they feel the necessity to write.^50/font

Nirod wrote: "Do I profit, Mother, by simply looking at you or your photograph?" "Yes, very many do," was the truthful answer. In late March, he once complained of "a peculiar experience". Usually after pranam he used to "gaze at Sri Aurobindo's portrait for about fifteen minutes" in the Reception Room, then go to the nearby Reading Room, and "pass a few minutes over the newspapers". For the past few days, when he got up after these few minutes he had been getting so dizzy that he had to "at once sit down". Was this, he asked, connected with his sadhana? "After fifteen minutes' concentration," explained the Master, "to plunge into newspapers may not unnaturally lead to such a result."⁵²Could he take literary activity as part of his sadhana? The answer was categorical:

Any activity can be taken as part of the sadhana if it is offered to the Divine or done with the consciousness or faith that it is done by the Divine Power. ⁵

The six months till August passed quickly enough, and Nirod stayed on,

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and the bud of his psychic self blossomed in the steady warmth Grace of the Master and the Mother:

My intellectual preparation glided insensibly into creative activity. I wanted to be a poet. I had started writing in Bengali, then in English .... Sri Aurobindo said that in the Ashram atmosphere a creative force was in action.... Every day he not only sent me inspiration but corrected my poems, gave concrete suggestions, explained the meaning of the poems which I composed .... ⁵³

But the plaint, on the disciple's as well as the Guru's part, was that the progress in the sadhana was less pronounced than progress in poetic composition. Once Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The poet is born. What about the Yogi?" Of course there was some progress in the Yoga too, but with with his incorrigible scepticism he could never be too sure about it, and so he wrote on 4 August 1933:

Mother did not put her hand on my head during pranam. I hope it was not due to any wrong movement in me?

"No," ran the answer; "It was merely because Mother was in trance."⁵⁴ Then twenty days after, this stalely agonising question: "How to get rid of sexual thoughts?" elicited the answer: "To think too much of sex even for suppressing it, makes it worse. You have to open more to positive experience." But how does one open to positive experience? Prompt came the reply: "By remaining quiet and aspiring for it - knowing that it is waiting above. Also think more of the Mother and less of your vital impulses."⁵⁵

Nirod was also harassed by the visitations of defeatist thoughts - about the sadhaks who were defecting to the other side - and about the proliferation of the disease of depression. What was the explanation? The answer was the same that Sri Aurobindo gave to Dilip, though now couched in different words:

It is a formation of a hostile character that is wandering about the Ashram and taking hold of one after another telling them that they are not fit and won't be able to do the Yoga and had better die or better go away or at least better be desperate. The only sensible thing is to kick these suggestions out of you without any ceremony and tell them that you have come here to succeed and not to fail. ⁵⁶

On a subsequent occasion, in April 1937 , Nirod wrote that he felt "a kick, a shock, a heartquake" whenever somebody left the Ashram. But why bother? If 30-40 had left, 130-140 had come; and the Ashram "survives and grows"! ⁵⁷ Nor was the fact of a few defections an argument in favour of postponing the whole supramental adventure altogether. On the contrary, the recent apparently heightened activity of the adverse forces was itself an

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XII

indication of the progress of the Yoga pursued in the Ashram:

... wherever Yoga or Yajna is done, there the hostile forces gather together to stop it by any means. It is known that there is a lower nature and a higher spiritual nature - it is known that they pull different ways and the lower is strongest at first and the higher afterwards. ⁵⁸

The hostile forces exploit the lower nature and try to retard or destroy the Yoga. Didn't the Upanishad describe the Yogic path as sharp as the razor's edge? But with faith and sincerity and reliance on the Divine, one could always fight one's way through all difficulties and obstructions. Sri Aurobindo had referred to this recurrent problem in Yoga:

To have weaknesses of the lower nature is one thing - to call in the hostile forces is quite another. Whoever does the latter .. .is going towards the opposite camp - for the marks of the hostile Force are contempt of the Divine, revolt and hatred against the Mother, disbelief in the Yoga, assertion of ego against the Divine Being, preference of falsehood to Truth, seeking after false gods and rejection of the Eternal. ⁵⁹

The difficulties - the ups and downs - the attacks from the outside, notwithstanding all these, like his own "Lonely Tramp" of Heaven, Nirod too persevered on the steep and narrow path of Integral Yoga, and he could sincerely affirm:

My feet shall never rest nor tire

Until, my destined journey done,

I stand, led by the inscrutable fire,

Before the seat of the lonely One.⁶⁰

XII

Among others, there was Satyendra Thakore from Gujarat. He had seen Sri Aurobindo, along with other leaders, in a procession at the time of the Surat Congress of December 1907. Later, as a college student, he read some of Sri Aurobindo's smaller books, and later still, came in possession of a nearly complete set of the Arya rya volumes. After experimenting with Yoga for a few years, and gaining some valuable experiences, he arrived in Pondicherry at last in November 1934 and had darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the twenty-fourth. Satyendra felt "a surge of emotion" even from a distance, as if he had known Sri Aurobindo for ages. The interview with the Mother was fruitful. It was agreed that he should join the Ashram. On a subsequent occasion she told him that she saw "exceptional possibilities" in him, and in fact he had a singular experience within a few years of his final coming:

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A vast golden light with white masses in it descended and touched the crown of my head, then receded. At that moment of contact I became aware of its quality of peace, joy and freedom - each particle dancing with joy. ⁶¹

He was with the Master and the Mother, and he had a sense of security and peace. The rest was an and a in works, ananda in aspiration, ananda in surrender.

A sadhak's life, however, cannot be un clouded joy all the time. In such moments of doubt, or gloom, or anguished self-questioning, an appeal to the Mother means the answering spray of Grace. In 1937, Satyendra receives this Charter from the Mother:

I want you to ask freely what you need.⁶²

And when he feels it is "almost indecent" to go on "taking and taking", she says:

From your mother you can always take, it is quite natural, especially when things are given to you full-heartedly - and am I not your mother who loves you?⁶³

When he asks her how he can ever hope to rise to the heights of realisation when his human nature drags him mercilessly down, she says simply:

Let me carry you in my arms and the climbing will become easy.⁶⁴

Again:"Dear child, I am always with you and my love and blessings never you." When he wonders by what divine Mystery she makes grow in . increasing love and adoration for her, she replies:

The only mystery, the only spell is my love - my love which is spread over my children and calls down upon them the Divine's Grace to help and to protect.⁶⁵

Within a year he is convinced that there is no one in the whole world as as lovable as his "dear Mama" and receives in immediate response:

Love, love, love to my very dear child; all the joy, all the light, all the peace of the divine love and also my loving blessings.⁶⁶

Where could one find an arbour of security as restful and as beneficent and as perfectly secure as the Mother's love?

XIII

Rishabhchand was one of the tens of thousands of young men who suspended their college studies in response to Mahatma Gandhi's call for

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non-cooperation in the early nineteen-twenties. Subsequently he established his own firm, "The Indian Silk House", at Calcutta and prospered as businessman. But the lure of Yoga becoming irresistible, he shook himself free from the cares of his family and his firm, and made for Pondicherry in 1931. He was accepted by the Mother, and became a familiar figure in the Ashram. He was put in charge of the furniture department, and proved an efficient head. He also gave readings from Sri Aurobindo's poems, and The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga. He wrote authoritatively on the Yoga of the other and on the life of Sri Aurobindo. In his essay on "The Brazier of Love", Rishabhchand wondered why the Chandi (or Devi Mahatmyam), while it invokes the. Divine Mother in her different aspects of Consciousness, Intelligence, Power, Peace, Beauty, Forgiveness, Kindness, etc., doesn't refer to the cardinal aspect of Love:

Love is the first, highest and completest expression of the divine Truth in the world and the supreme Force that can lead the world back to the Divine. It includes all the other aspects and principles and is the eternal fount of the most ineffable ecstasy and sweetness that flow out of the union of the human with the Divine. And it is this love that is literally incarnate in the Mother - in her presence, in her carriage, in her words, in her gestures and in all her ways and dealings with men; so much so that the word Mother has come to mean Love; and to be near her is to feel that we are in the physical presence of divine Love itself.. ..⁶⁷

The feeling of utter consecration to the Mother blotted out all else from Rishabhchand's horizon of consciousness, and for forty years he was to live and move in the Ashram as the very embodiment of the phenomenon of surrender to the Divine.

XIV

Ganapatram, hailing from the Punjab, was already deep in spiritual sadhana when he first arrived for the Darshan on 15 August 1934, which he found "a great event". The Mother was "an embodiment of Love" , and he was "lost in her". He often saw a Light in the Ashram compound. He returned to the Punjab for a while to wind up his things, and on his final coming in January 1935, he was given the work "of cleaning things" in the library - a work which he did for fourteen years:

My day used to start at 4 a.m. and I am happy to record that some of the best spiritual experiences I have had were during these early hours.⁶⁸

Laurence Marshall Pinto⁶⁹ came to Pondicherry in the same year. But it was only on 15 August 1937 that he and his wife Mona, an Englishwoman

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whom he had married early that year, had their first darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. "I have seen majesty at last!" was his all­ennobling feeling on seeing Sri Aurobindo, and presently he turned to the Mother:

I saw there so much sweetness and love that I just ran up to Her and put my head into Her lap. Mona did the same ....

Then ... I took up courage to put my head in His lap and felt His love and sweetness that went with His majesty. Then I put my head between Them and both blessed me together. Such a marvellous experience.⁷⁰

"They decided to take up Yoga and have remained in the Ashram ever since, offering their unstinted services to the Divine. In April 1938, Sri Aurobindo gave Laurence the name "Udar" and wrote beside the name its meaning: "Noble, generous, upright and sincere." Soon Udar became a popular and dynamic figure in the Ashram, an engineer and organiser and actor and sadhak rolled into one, while Mona was specially chosen by the Mother to take charge of Golconde, a large modern dormitory for sadhaks built soon after their coming, a difficult task which she executes to this day with meticulous perfection.

There were others too, more and more of them with the steady march of the years: some were Karmayogis whose task it was to set the complicated wheels of the Ashram moving, at once infallibly and noiselessly. Others were darlings of the Muses, and cultivated poetry, philosophy, painting, music, history. Still others were priests and priestesses of adoration of the Lord and the Mother. But of course, wherever they may have started - Karma, Jnana, Bhakti - they covered the other two sectors too, and practised, even if unconsciously, the Integral Yoga. A certain inner poise, a light in their eyes, an unobtrusive but unambiguous ananda suffusing their whole personality, - these were the marks that characterised the generality of the inmates of the Ashram. They were so many sun-flowers turned always towards the central dual power of Light and Love: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And the sadhaks were also the limbs, sinews and blood-corpuscles of the living Body of Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

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CHAPTER 18

Karma Yoga

I

During the years immediately after she had taken full charge of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the Mother's resources - spiritual, human, material - had to be canalised simultaneously in multiple directions. With the steady increase in the number of sadhaks, there was the persistent need for renting more houses, reconditioning, fitting and furnishing them, and attending to their proper maintenance. From 25 inmates in 1926 the number rose to 150 in 1936, and was to reach 350 in 1942. There were, besides, the permitted visitors. There was also the special influx of visitors at the time of the Darshans of 21 February, 15 August and 24 November. The problem of accommodating and feeding them all admitted of no haphazard solution. Everything had to be done with a due sense of propriety, at once without extravagance and waste on the one hand, and without the imposition of needless constraints and denials on the other. While the Mother didn't believe in the extremes of austerity and asceticism, neither would she countenance conspicuous waste or enervating luxury.

All this meant the organisation of a number of services: the Building Service, under Chandulal the engineer; the Atelier (Workshop) under Pavitra; the Garden Service; the Bakery and the Dining Room; the Domestic Service, a sort of 'Home' department, to deal with the growing number of paid servants; the Prosperity, to arrange for the supply of everyday requirements of the sadhaks; the Furniture Service; and so on. Almost everything in the outside world had to be in the Ashram as well ­ but with a difference. The Ashram was verily a miniature world within the larger world that was Pondicherry, or India; it was also a world in a process of change and transformation. And it was the Mother's personal touch ­ her all-seeing eye - her unfailing Grace - that engineered the change.¹

II

The problem that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had to solve was something like trying to square the circle. For collective sadhana, the assembled aggregate had to be a miscellany of human types; and it had to be a growing and evolving community. Not many of the sadhaks, however, had been in a position to offer much to the Mother in material terms. Donations and offerings did come, but not yet on a scale sufficient to meet the mounting expenses. Writing on 2 June 1928 to a sadhak, Sri Aurobindo

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said that the monthly deficit at the time was Rs. 800, and any regular donation (like one of Rs. 500 per month offered by a well-wisher) was not to be rejected offhand as if in lofty disdain:

It is precisely help of this kind that we are feeling the most need of just now. For so long as this monthly deficit is not filled, we are obliged to spend on the monthly upkeep sums that ought to go for capital outlay and under such circumstances the very foundation of the Ashram from the pecuniary point of view remains insecure.²

Sri Aurobindo concluded by saying that the Mother didn't want to buy saris for herself; "in the present state of the finances" that was out of the question. "The income and the expenses must be balanced; money must be found for the work of building up the Ashram. All the rest comes after."

Accordingly, when the Mother organised the services and departments, she put sadhaks in charge of them with this double aim: to provide them opportunities of Karmayoga in the true spirit of consecration to the Divine, and also to initiate steps that would ultimately ensure the economic self-sufficiency of the Ashram. Even in 1914, the launching of the Arya was meant, certainly to broadcast the Supramental Manifesto in all its ramifications to the inquiring elite of global humanity, but incidentally to provide a modest surplus that would help to sustain the editors and those associated with them. Again, Sri Aurobindo had written on 2 September 1920 to Motilal Roy that any commune or Deva Sangha should be reared on twin foundations - spiritual and economic - and the highest idealism should be doubled with the most disciplined practicality. Now the Ashram was an attempt to translate the earlier visions of the Arya period into viable realities, and thus the emphasis was on self-sufficiency. It was rightly felt that no institution that needed to be propped up exclusively by outside charity could justify itself in the long run. After all, the true Yogin should be able to apply himself to any legitimate task whatsoever, and it should be possible for him to charge his work with an intensity of application allied with the spirit of worship. Far too long had people been divorcing work from spirituality, and grading different kinds of work in terms of respectability: hand-labour, clerical work, intellectual work, artistic work, and so on. The time had come to make a clean sweep of all this undesirable overgrowth of the past, and make all work equally an offering to the Divine. "The Mother was moulding our entire life for a God-oriented existence," says Sahana Devi, "a birth into a new consciousness, an inner life."³ And the best way this could be done was to entrust each sadhak with a piece of work - be it ever so seemingly insignificant or ever so crushingly responsible - that is relevant to the day­to-day life of the Ashram and that will at the same time bring out the best in him and ensure his progress in the Yoga.

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III

The secret of Karmayoga in the Ashram is that inevitably Karmayoga merges, in actual practice, with Jnanayoga and Bhaktiyoga, preparing the way for even higher possibilities. In Justice S. C. Mishra's words:

The disinterested and dedicated Ashram activities for meeting the material requirements of the inmates are the Karma Yoga, the calm inner movement towards spiritual illumination and wideness is Jnana Yoga, and the happy intense surrender to the Mother is Bhakti yoga .... The conquest of matter, the love of art and literature in their nobler aspects, all illustrate the additional element of Integral Yoga which does not seek an escape of any sort .... ⁴

The organisation and manning of the manifold services was facilitated also by the fact that, unlike the pre-1926 disciples who were in the main intellectuals, those that heard the call and were chosen after the Siddhi Day were more of a miscellany, rather approximating to a human microcosm. We have here the testimony of Dr. G. Monod-Herzen, a close observer of the Ashram and its inmates:

Almost all professions are represented there: cultivators, smiths, poets, mechanics, musicians and writers, artists and accountants ... and everyone, as in an ideal republic, pursues his activities with joy.

... everyone carries out an activity which corresponds to his true nature, to the law of his own being. It is not rare to see a newly arrived disciple change his calling .... These changes are never the result of tests, aptitude examinations, but always the fulfilment of an inner desire.⁵

The spiritual basis of the organisation of the services was that the Mother, not only assigned the work, but also put her force behind the sadhak, and in fact she was with him (or her) all the time. The sadhak who, yielding to false suggestions from an adverse force, doubted this only weakened himself and maimed the work assigned to him. When someone asked Sri Aurobindo what was meant by his or by the Mother sending a Force, he gave this reply:

The Mother or myself send a force. If there is no openness, the force may be thrown back or return ... as from an obstruction or resistance:. if there is some openness, the result may be partial or slow; if there is the full openness or receptivity, then the result may be immediate.⁶

This was written in the context of a sadhak combating an illness, but with regard to Karmayoga too the principle and the process are the same. Again, when he was asked by Nirod to spell out the significance of the exhortation: "Behave as if the Mother was looking at you, for indeed, she is always present," Sri Aurobindo wrote on 16 July 1935: "It is the

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emanation of the Mother that is with each sadhak all the time." Then, three days later, in response to a request for further elucidation:

The Emanation is not a deputy, but the Mother herself. She is not bound to her body, but can put herself out (emanate) in any way she likes. What emanates, suits itself to the nature of the personal relation she has with the sadhak which is different with each, but that does not prevent it from being herself. Its presence with the sadhak is not dependent on his consciousness of it.⁷

IV

The sadhaks, then, took to a form of work, not for egoistic or material gain, but as a means of self-expression, growth of consciousness and service to the Divine. The late twenties and the early thirties were the time when the sadhaks, being still comparatively few, were in a position daily to meet the Mother and to write to her about their problems. Whether one wrote to the Mother or to Sri Aurobindo, the answer usually came from the latter. There were exceptions, however, and sometimes the sadhaks' notebooks went up and down, with the queries from below and the answers from above in a continuum of instruction and illumination. The sadhaks would leave their letters or notebooks up to 11 o'clock at night in a tray that was kept near the top of the staircase in the meditation hall. Champaklal would take the tray to Sri Aurobindo's room, where Sri Aurobindo read and discussed with the Mother the replies to be given. Before morning the replies would be ready. The Mother would put the letters in artistically decorated envelopes and write on them the names of the respective sadhaks. Generally, it was Sri Aurobindo who wrote the replies, and occasionally the Mother might add a comment of her own or her blessings. It was understood that, whether Sri Aurobindo or the Mother wrote, the reply carried the sanction and Grace of both. In the morning, it was Nolini's responsibility to distribute the letters and notebooks to the sadhaks, and in Course of time he was to be known as the Divine's postman!

It is obvious that it must have taken Sri Aurobindo and the Mother a lot of time day after day and for years on end to read the masses of letters received in an unending stream, and to answer them individually. In the middle thirties, Sri Aurobindo had to devote daily several hours to his correspondence, his time-table being a fantasy almost:

4 to 6.30 p.m.: afternoon correspondence, meal, newspapers;

7 or 7.30-9 p.m.: evening correspondence;

9 to 10 p.m.: concentration;

10 to midnight: correspondence;

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midnight to 2.30 a.m.: bath, meal, rest;

2.30 to 5 or 6 a.m.: correspondence - "unless I am lucky".⁸

There were no dictaphones, no stenotypists; all was written down, either in the disciple's notebook itself or on the margin of his letters, and often on stray bits of paper. Eight to ten hours of the evening and night for these letters! This was commitment indeed to the Guru's vocation.

V

The question may be asked as to why Sri Aurobindo and the Mother permitted, if not encouraged, such unrestricted letter-writing by their disciples. After all, brief interviews might have claimed much less time than the scheduled eight or ten hours per day. Part of the answer is provided by one of Sri Aurobindo's own letters written in 1932:

It is an undoubted fact proved by hundreds of instances that for many the exact statement of their difficulties to us is the best and often, though not always, an immediate, even an instantaneous means of release .... Moreover, this method succeeds most when the writer can write as a witness of his own movements and state them with an exact and almost impartial precision, as a phenomenon of his nature or the movement of a force affecting him from which he seeks release.⁹

But a letter could also be the means of flogging up an incipient defect or discontent into feverish activity, like prodding a coiled snake to raise its hood. "If in writing," Sri Aurobindo adds, "the sadhak's vital gets seized by the thing he is writing of and takes up the pen for him, - expressing and often supporting doubt, revolt, depression, despair, it becomes a very different matter." Even then, the very writing may act "as a purge" and give some relief, but only to return later on with perhaps redoubled force, landing the sadhak "in the recurring decimal notation, an unending round of struggle".¹⁰ Unless the sadhak is really open to the Guru, and unless he writes in a proper frame of mind, that is, as a concerned witness rather than as a half-excited half-exultant engineer, writing to the Guru merely following the fashion wasn't likely to advance his yoga. Taking a total view, however, Sri Aurobindo felt that the writing of the letters and the answering guidance from the Guru had helped a large number of sadhaks "to awaken from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience"; others had been enabled to move "from a small round of experience to a flood of realisations"; and some who had been hopeless for years to experience a sudden conversion and make the passage "from darkness into an opening of light". As a matter of fact, a majority of those, who had sought instruction, illumination or solace through writing letters

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had really benefited and made "a real progress". Sri .Aurobindo further revealed that, just as an electron or a molecule had Its indispensable place in the building up of a world that contained also "mountains and sunsets and streamings of the aurora borealis", so also even so-called "trivial" leters of his have a role to play in the sadhana, for "All depends on the force behind these things and the purpose in their action."¹¹

Thus, while the thousands of letters written by the sadhaks had certainly a part to play in the progress of the collective sadhana of the Ashram (and of the sadhana of the individual inmates), the personal contacts were perhaps even more important. On the Darshan days, the sadhaks could see and receive the blessings of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And throughout the year, the Mother was accessible to the sadhaks. Here is the grateful acknowledgement of Sahana Devi, who had been a sadhika for over six decades:

The Mother... usually kept apart about four hours every day for such meetings. If the need was urgent and a meeting was asked for it was granted. She herself would send for some. There were a few who met her once or twice a week; there were others whom she met once a fortnight or even once a month. There were also some who met her daily at a particular hour of the day for her directions on matters of sadhana or work relating to the running of the Ashram. Quite often she would explain just by her look without a word being spoken. It has also been seen that anyone approaching the Mother for directions got them just by her meditating with the person and placing her hand on the head. Remarkable as it may seem, after the meditation the problem was no longer there, instead the whole being was suffused by her influence. To some she gave a written reply. Again, the aspirant may get the directions all by himself in going into an inner silence.¹²

VI

With such a complex, delicate and on the whole smooth and efficient system of relationships between the Mother and the sadhaks, the Ashram departments were to grow both in number and amplitude, fully engaging the faculties and energies of the inmates. Things were now done quicker, better and at less cost than when only outsiders had been entrusted with the jobs. Out of old dealwood boxes pieces of pretty furniture were made, and they were light to handle, dainty and durable, and functionally satisfying. Soon after the starting of the Bakery, Jotindranath was put in charge of it. Between spells of bread-making, he spent his time copying the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and like many another sadhak heading a service department, he too was perfect in consecration, a man

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the Mother could absolutely rely on.

At all times, the Dining Room was a model of elegance, cleanliness and godliness. In the early years of the Ashram, the kitchen and the dining hall were in the Ashram compound. Not more than fifteen could sit together at all one time, and the Mother herself used to come at meal-times and Mother inaugurate the service. Although this had to be discontinued after some time, the sadhaks were nevertheless encouraged to cultivate the idea that food was not just eaten to. satisfy an animal hunger,. but was tobe prayerfully offered to the Divine within. In the early thirties, it became clear that the hall was too small to accommodate even in shifts the growing: numbers of sadhaks and visitors, and hence in September 1933 the spacious "Aroumé House" facing the Municipal Park was taken on rent, and after the necessary repairs and reconditioning, it was opened by the Mother for use on 4 January 1934. There was now seating arrangement for more than a hundred at a time in the halls, with the same type of small low tables and narrow mats used in the previous place in the Ashram compound. At Darshan time, several hundreds could take their meals in the course of less than two hours. Modern in their superlatively efficient organisation as well as intimately Oriental in its spiritual atmosphere, the Ashram kitchen and dining halls were a tribute to the Mother's imagination and eye for detail as also the sadhaks' unstinted sadhana of service. By and by, the Mother's Dairy, Bakery, farms and vegetable gardens - all managed efficiently by the sadhaks - were to make the Ashram fairly self-sufficient in milk, bread, rice and vegetables. The channels of the various departments were fed from the central reservoir and perennial tarn of the Mother's inspiration and resourcefulness, and hence there were hardly any hitches, and scarcity and wastage were alike carefully eschewed.

VII

In the months immediately after the Siddhi Day, the Mother had to impose on herself a very strict regimen of work. She was no doubt mistress of herself, and was never a slave to dull or dead routine, but she generally got up for the day well before dawn at four:

And Savitri too awoke among these tribes

That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant ...

She had brought with her into the human form,

The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy. ¹³

By six she would be ready for a stroll on the terrace, with a few sadhaks accompanying her. Then she would come down, announced by Anilbaran Roy's conch, to the meditation hall and meet and bless the sadhaks.

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This was the time for pranam and meditation, to be followed by interviews to individual sadhaks. The pranam and meditation seem to have had an intensity and character of their own. The sadhaks were not too many, and there was no need to be very selective. The Mother was the heart and soul of the proceedings, and the rest were the beneficiaries. Here is an impressionistic picture of the Mother at the time of those meditations:

The Mother, wearing a sari, would sit cross-legged, looking radiantly beautiful. She was the picture of supreme repose, but a repose in which there was a great deal of held-in power, as if she had come and sat there after having gone on a journey through the centuries and finished her job of finding what she had wanted to find. All journeys seemed to come to an end in her, and when we went and knelt down at her feet all journeys of ours also seemed to end there. All our difficulties vanished.¹⁴

It was then the custom for the senior sadhaks ("old bandicoots" * , as they called themselves) to sit by turns at the Mother's feet doing pranam, while the rest, old and new, sat at a distance and joined the meditation. Later, a little past noon, the Mother would come to the dining hall in the Ashram courtyard, and taste the dishes before the meal was served. In the afternoon, she paid visits to the sadhaks' rooms by turns.

Sometimes she used to go for drives, and sometimes she took some of the disciples with her. Pavitra drove the Mother's car, with Duraiswami Aiyar by his side at times, and the rest would follow in another car. They would select a secluded spot, spread a cloth on the ground, and sit and relax. Reminiscing about the time, Vasudha says:

... once we had palm-fruits .... A local man climbed up a palm-tree and brought down some fruits, clove them with a big knife and brought out the kernels which Pavitra peeled and gave to each one of us. That was our picnic. ¹⁵

Sahana Devi also remembers those quite long evening drives, the walks and the relaxed sittings enjoying the scenery around: "How pleasant it was with the Mother!" The Mother used to carry sweets with her and give one to each of the company. At times there were questions as well, and answers by the Mother, and a brief meditation.

VIII

What came to be known as the Soup distribution seems to have been instituted by the Mother early in 1927, probably on the analogy of the Japanese Tea Ceremony to which a reference has been made earlier.

*Big Rats. Originally, says K. D. Sethna, they seem to have come from Indo-China in the boats of the French colonisers.

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Although these present-day Tea Ceremony is important mainly for its aesthetic, social and cultural nuances, in its Zen Buddhist origins it was a form of spiritual sharing between the Master and his disciples. But the Mother didn't like people taking tea or coffee, and once when Surendra Nath Jauhar wanted to know which was better, she said that they were both slow poisons anyway and hence it was difficult to answer him. Actually, in the Ashram dining hall she gave the sadhaks a form of cocoa Phoscao - in lieu of tea or coffee. Nevertheless, she had appreciated the significance behind the Tea Ceremony and the charged atmosphere of the Tea Room, and may have felt that something akin to it, but suited to Indian conditions, could be introduced in the Ashram. Explaining the spiritual purpose behind the distribution, Sri Aurobindo once said:

The soup was instituted in order to establish a means by which the Sadhak might receive something from the Mother by an interchange in the material consciousness. ¹⁶

Long years afterwards, some of the privileged participants have tried to recapture the meaning, message and the whole mystique of the Soup ceremony which had meant so much to them. The scene was first a terrace, then the Prosperity veranda where the Mother sat facing the staircase,¹⁷ and finally, what used to be called the Divine Communion Room and is now the Reception Room at the entrance of the Ashram. The time was evening, usually eight. The sadhaks assembled and sat on the mats spread out for them; then the Mother arrived and sat in a chair with her feet resting upon a low stool. There was but subdued light from a shaded lamp, and the cylindrical vessel containing the hot soup was placed before her and Champaklal removed the cover. The Mother went into meditation for a while with her hands stretched out over the container, invoking the Divine's Force. Thereafter Champaklal set the container to the Mother's right. Then, one by one the sadhaks went up to her, each with his own enamel cup. With a long spoon she filled the cups and gave them back to the sadhaks, who received them after kneeling down at her feet.

How the Soup affected some of the sadhaks may be inferred from diary-entries like the following made at the time by T.V. Kapali Sastry:

31.3.1928: The Mother gave me 10 minutes at soup time. She gave me soup. Spoke to her, expressed desire to have a word.

"Sincere faith and constant aspiration, gets the answer," was the Mother's utterance. ...

15.6.1928: Received before soup from the Mother's hands, Book and Photos with signature. Mother serious at soup time. Good experience. ...

17.10.1928: Night soup: the Mother was half-smiling and kept the floral garland on her lap ....

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28.12.1928: Night at Soup: our eyes opened - joy - the Mother was looking at us ....

18.3.1929: Mother delayed to receive cup and flower from me at Soup time: I had a half-lit wideness over and about me; there was an attempt on my part to give myself up to her.

19.3.1929: The Mother kept the Tulsi in her hand till I received the soup. This day also there was something good about me.

I felt myself a vessel and in the whole movement with so many vessels was simply afloat in the wide and all-encompassing Mother backed by the Supreme. Others also were vessels like me.¹⁸

Trying to recapture the atmosphere of the Soup ceremony, Sahana Devi writes forty years later:

The distribution of the soup took about an hour, and was accomplished in perfect silence; all were merged in a deep inner feeling in that dim light, a feeling of a different world, an impressive far-off existence pressed upon the consciousness of all and slowly spread all around the room surcharging the atmosphere as if a tangible influence was at work consolidating all that was external and inner in a seeming vagueness of one's personal existence .... How enchanting the Mother appeared then to our eyes! Also, it was at that hour that diverse divine expressions used to manifest from her .... Her smile was beyond comparison. Often she entered into trance with the cup in her hand, motionless as a statue. But as soon as she returned to her bodily consciousness the distribution went on as before ... utterly simple and natural as ever. ¹⁹

Another sadhak, Mrityunjoy, who had also participated in the communion, sharing and exchange, recalls thus his reactions:

The Mother explained to someone that when She brought down Her palms She invoked Sri Aurobindo on the soup, and when the soup, so blessed, entered the body it acted on the cells to help transform them. That was the central truth of it, but individual experiences varied. After pranam at Her feet I would raise my head up and look at Her with my hands stretched forward to receive the soup cup. Often She was in trance and Her eyes would suddenly open and with a wonderful smile on Her lips She would communicate much more than by explaining to me in mere words. Not things philosophical or some deep spiritual experience, but things we call practical, of day-to-day life, solutions to problems of the past day or of the next, what I should or should not do, all these and in the most minute detail, were received from Her in those few seconds. The whole body felt as if it was filled ... with the sense of a purified and raised consciousness.²⁰

There was of course an understandable variability in the experience day by day, and what the different sadhaks received was proportionate to their

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receptivity, and for those who were utterly sincere and open, the gain was immense.

Amal Kiran's reminiscences are no less evocative of the place, time and the singular flavour of the ceremony itself:

It was a very important function every evening. It impressed one like snatch of the Ancient Mysteries. The atmosphere was as in some secret temple of Egyptian or Greek times.

With reference to the Mother's stretching out her hands and holding them over the soup-cauldron, Amal writes:

For a minute they would remain there as if she was pouring something of her subtle-physical spirituality into the liquid. The idea must have been to give her own luminous subtle-physical substance and energy - a most concrete transference of spirituality into the physical stuff.²¹

And, as Nirodbaran recalls it, the Mother would spread her hands over the soup "by way of channeling Sri Aurobindo's power into the liquid .... Some people used to see Sri Aurobindo's hands spread over hers in response to her call to him."²²

IX

The Soup ceremony in its early period seems to have coincided with the "brilliant period" of the Ashram, the months of "minute-to-minute" miracles, the incredible phoenix-hour when the overmental Gods descended into the sadhaks' human tenements; and to have overflowed into the months following. But it was too wonderful to retain its native purity and intensity for long. As earlier recorded, the startling experiences of the "brilliant period" had a rather upsetting effect on some of the sadhaks. The ādhāra or the supporting physical, vital and mental instruments were as yet too inadequate to stand the pressure of the Overmental descent, and it became therefore necessary to put brakes on the pace of the change.

The morning pranam and meditation, the individual interviews with the Mother, the spate of correspondence with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the conversations with the Mother, the Soup ceremony, the whole tight schedule put a terrible strain on the Mother and, perhaps in a different way, some strain on the sadhaks as well. Minor modifications or drastic alterations in the day's programme thus became inevitable.

Every arrangement involving participation by flawed human beings, however spiritual in its main inspiration and however pure in its initial motivation, is apt in course of time to invite a certain coarsening of the attitude, an invasion of scepticism, a drying up of the green freshness of life into dead routine. It is reported that on one occasion, a sadhak - a so-called

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medical man - told the Mother that the soup, being allowed to boil for hours, had no food value at all, thereby implying that the whole exercise was but much ado about nothing.²³ Thus was the daily adventure in the conquest of consciousness reduced to the evaluation of the calorie and vitamin content of the Soup! The sublime was pulled down and dashed upon the ground of the practical inane. Incredulous, the Mother could only whisper in reply: "Do you think so?"

Such a mystery as the Soup symbolising the 'élan vital' or the soma juice or the elixir of spiritual rebirth could succeed for long only if everybody brought to it the right attitude of reverence and faith, and if there was a real exchange between the divine giver and the human taker: a decisive transfer by the Mother, and a total surrender by the sadhak. A partial or one-sided or half-hearted transaction, far from promoting the desired transformation, could only disturb the present balance of forces, 'precarious as it might be. And it was precisely this that had begun to happen. As a participant later explained:

The Soup Ceremony was a very solemn one; but I am afraid the fundamental thing that was required of us was not fulfilled: there was no exchange of energy between the Mother and us. When the Mother gives and gives we should not just gobble up her gifts: on our part we should make an offering too, because unless we give ourselves or whatever is in us, we cannot make room for what she gives: otherwise what she gives is ,grabbed as it were by some sort of spiritual greed. Not an unresponsive vacuity - an animal emptiness - but a receptive vacancy made by a self­purifying consecrated inner gesture is the need. Such a gesture doesn't appear to have been sufficiently made by us. Owing to the one-way traffic of the spiritual process, there was an enormous drain on the Mother and after some months of the Soup Ceremony she fell terribly ill and it was stopped. I can't quite vouch for the words but I have the impression that Sri Aurobindo's comment ran somewhat like: "These fellows are brutes." We did not realise what the Mother was doing: she was as if playing with her own life for our sake.²⁴

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CHAPTER 19

Powers and Personalities

I

Ever since the coming of Mirra, first on 29 March 1914 and after the absence of a few years on 24 April 1920, and all along the way of her gradual assumption of more and more responsibilities with regard to the welfare of the inmates in Sri Aurobindo's household, the question as to her true identity - her real personality - had been intriguing disciples and visitors alike. Was she but an aspirant Westerner seeking the Light in faraway Pondicherry? Was she a spiritual adept in her own right? Was she but one of Sri Aurobindo's disciples; or did she have a special status? It was of course obvious that she had organisational and managerial qualities quite out of the ordinary, clearly an illustration of yogah karmasu kauśalam. But wasn't there something else too? When Anilbaran Roy returned from Bengal in December 1926, Sri Aurobindo told him that he must "now make a full surrender to Mirra Devi who has taken up the work of new creation", and that he must take all his instructions from her.¹ Why did Sri Aurobindo put her in complete charge of his disciples? What was her role in the Yoga? As the Mother, did her relationship with Sri Aurobindo's other disciples undergo a sudden sea-change? And what exactly was the Mother behind the veil of the human appearance, what were her powers and personalities?

One thing was clear: the Mother was now raised to the position of Guru on a level with the Master, she was in fact the visible Guru, since Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn into seclusion. Already, over a period of several months, many disciples had learned to see in her rather more than just a fellow-disciple; they had often meditated with her, they had found it beneficial to look up to her. They had found in her a union of the constructive energy of the West and the complete self-giving of the Orient. All that had now happened was that her natural leadership was formalised, as it were, and she was installed on the Guru's pedestal.

II

It was about a year after the Siddhi day that Sri Aurobindo composed the greater part of the testament now known as The Mother, first published: as a little book in 1928 and since reprinted frequently. When Sri Aurobindo was asked by a disciple ten years later whether he did not refer to "our Mother" in his book The Mother, he gave the supremely succinct answer, "Yes." She was verily the 'individual' divine Mother who embodied the

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power of the two vaster ways (universal and transcendent) of her existence; and she had descended here amongst us into this 'too too sullied' world of error and falsehood and darkness and death only out of her deep and abiding love for us.²

The Mother, then, is not merely the crest-jewel among Sri Aurobindo's inspired prose writings; it is also the golden key to the flaming doors of the Mother's manifold epiphanies, and a key to the mystic machinery of her ministry on the earth. It is in the sixth and last section of the book that four of her great "Powers and Personalities" (Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati) are invoked with a mantra-shakti - the sheer verbal élan - for which there are no exact parallels even in Sri Aurobindo's writings. He is certainly not doing an exercise in elaborate description; on the contrary, he is seeing and saying at once, he is simultaneously accomplishing the utterance of Being and the naming and thanking of the Holy (as Heidegger might have put it). Sri Aurobindo sees the Mother as she is poised between the higher supramental world and our lower phenomenal world:

The Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world of the Ignorance stands in an intermediate plane between the supramental Light, the Truth life, the Truth creation which has to be brought down here and this mounting and descending hierarchy of planes of consciousness that like a double ladder lapse into the nescience of Matter and climb back again through the flowering of life and soul and mind into the infinity of the Spirit.³

This same mediator-role was to be described in terms of poetic iridescence in Savitri:

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,

A power of silence in the depths of God;

She is the Force, the inevitable Word,

The magnet of our difficult ascent,

The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,

The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,

The joy that beckons from the impossible,

The Might of all that never yet came down.⁴

Besides governing all from above, the Mother also "descends into this lesser triple universe" (made up of matter-life-mind), and she thus stoops here into the darkness, error, pain and death only that she may thereby lead the world to the Light, Truth, godlike Life and pure Ananda. As for he four great Aspects of the Mother that have stood in front in her dealings with the earth and men:

One is her personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and

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tranquil benignity and inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty an all-ruling greatness. Another embodies her power of splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force. A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace. The fourth is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things. Wisdom, Strength, Harmony Perfection are their several attributes. and it is these powers that they bring with them into the world, manifest in a human disguise m their Vibhutis and shall found in the divine degree of their ascension in those who can open their earthly nature to the direct and living influence of the Mother. To the four we give the four great names, Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasarawati.⁵

The sadhaks no doubt had glimpses - at some time or other - of the Mahalakshmi, the Maheshwari and even the Mahakali in the Mother, and yet it was the Mahasaraswati of Sri Aurobindo's inspired portraiture that came nearest to their daily, hourly, minutely observance of the Mother and of their progressive understanding of her movements and ministrations:

Mahasaraswati is the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order. The youngest of the Four, she is the most skilful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical Nature. Maheshwari lays down the large lines of the world-forces, Mahakali drives their energy and impetus, Mahalakshmi discovers their rhythms and measures, but Mahasaraswati presides over their detail of organisation and execution, relation of parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude of result and fulfilment. The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasaraswati's province .... When she takes up the transformation and new-building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless. For the will in her works is scrupulous, unsleeping, indefatigable; leaning over us she notes and touches every little detail, finds out every minute defect, gap, twist or incompleteness, considers and weighs accurately all that has been done and all that remains still to be done hereafter .... In her constant and diligent arrangement and rearrangement of things her eye is on all needs at once and the way to meet them and her intuition knows what is to be chosen and what rejected and successfully determines the right instrument, the right time, the right conditions and the right process. Carelessness and negligence and indolence she abhors .... When her work is finished, nothing has been forgotten, no part has been misplaced or omitted or left in a faulty condition; all is solid, accurate, complete, admirable. Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is

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ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her creation. Therefore of all the Mother's powers she is the most long­suffering with man and his thousand imperfections. Kind, smiling, close and helpful, not easily turned away or discouraged, insistent even after repeated failure, her hand sustains our every step on condition that we are single in our will and straightforward and sincere; for a double mind she will not tolerate and her revealing irony is merciless to drama and histrionics and self-deceit and pretence. A mother to our wants, a friend in our difficulties, a persistent and tranquil counsellor and mentor, chasing away with her radiant smile the clouds of gloom and fretfulness and depression, reminding always of the ever-present help, pointing to the eternal sunshine, she is firm, quiet and persevering in the deep and continuous urge that drives us towards the integrality of the higher nature. All the work of the other Powers leans on her for its completeness; for she assures the material foundation, elaborates the stuff of detail and erects and rivets the armour of the structure.⁶

This was the Mother the sadhaks knew and admired most unreservedly: the Mother with her uncanny eye for detail, the Mother with her unwearying vigilance, the Mother with her unending patience, the Mother with her genius for hard work, the Mother with her passion for all-round ion perfection.

III

As for the Mother's role in the alchemy of transformation from the human to the divine, the dialectic was simplicity itself:

There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.⁷

On his part, what the sadhak had to do was "a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender". Out of the meeting of the rising aspiration and the descent of Grace would ensue the desired transformation, and in this the Mother's role would be crucial:

The Supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother. The Mother's power and not

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any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda.⁸

The visioning of the Divine Mother - the interpretation of her role in the evolutionary earth-play - the differentiation between her diverse Powers and Personalities - the clear enunciation of the dialectic of transformation: The Mother memorably projects all this on the inner film of our awakening consciousness. No wonder this little book is cherished as an Aurobindonian scripture par excellence. In some of his later letters, Sri Aurobindo was to discuss the implications of some of the terms used in the book and to elucidate some of its seminal ideas.

IV

Sri Aurobindo's very clear, categorical, often apocalyptical description of the Mother, of her Powers and Personalities, and of her avatar-role in the terrestrial play certainly helped to clear the Ashram atmosphere of the vapours of misunderstanding and doubt, and create conditions for the energetic pursuit of the Integral Yoga of Perfection and Transformation. It may be recalled that following the Siddhi day, there was the "brilliant period" of the Ashram which had to be brought to an end towards the middle of 1927. Partly because the Power at work was not the full Supermind and would by its wonder-working have ultimately stood in the way of it, and partly also on account of some untoward results it produced.

In the meantime there had been fresh accessions to the Ashram community: Vaun and Janet McPheeters from the U.S., Daulat and K. D. Sethna from Bombay, Sahana Devi and Dilip Kumar Roy from Bengal, Miss Maitland from the U.K. and others. Among the old-timers, Nolini was Secretary of the Ashram, silent and efficient as ever, and Amrita was its manager. Pavitra was in charge of the Workshop. The sadhaks old and new had now every opportunity to see the Mother in her myriad manifestations, and in particular as patient persevering perfectionist Mahasaraswati. While at certain times (like the morning meditation and an evening Soup) she was serious, a Maheshwari doubled with a Mahalakshmi, a marvellous concentration of divine force, at other times she seemed to relax, and move informally with the sadhaks as a worker among other workers. There were afternoon visits to the sadhaks' rooms, and there were the evening drives with those she chose from among them. The Ashram, however, was always the Theatre of the Unexpected. Deadening routine was foreign to the genius of the Ashram, and the bye-laws were stronger and more numerous than the laws! This is how with a native

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resilience and an infinite capacity for change and adaptation the Ashram has been forever evolving and growing since the now remote beginnings. When the living green trees became mere dead wood in course of time, that had only to be cast away, and new saplings were duly planted. A continuous experimentation, a ceaseless process of trial and error, an endless progress (even if it be a zig-zagging one) towards the far horizons!

V

In 1929. taking advantage of the Mother's willingness to visit sadhaks' rooms and talk informally, the stage was set to get the Mother to express her views on a wide variety of questions. A conversation session in English began to be held on Sundays. The meeting place was Dilip's house, and among those who attended were Nolini, Pavitra, Vaun and Janet McPheeters (Janet had been given the name "Shantimayi" by Sri Aurobindo), Sahana Devi, Duraiswami Aiyar, Miss Maitland, Kapali Sastry and of course Dilip. The procedure at these meetings was very simple:

At the commencement the Mother used to meditate with us; at times she asked us to meditate on a special subject asking each one of us at the end about the result of meditation on that particular subject. She asked if anyone had any questions to ask, if there were any she answered them .... Our minds on these occasions became submerged in wonder at the touch of the light emanating from her vast and fathomless knowledge.⁹

Nolini Kanta Gupta had written down fifteen of these talks based on his notes and later they were revised by Sri Aurobindo for publication. These fifteen talks, from 7 April to 4 August - the questions as well as the detailed answers by the Mother - were first published in 1931, under the title Conversations with the Mother for private circulation, and in 1940 for the public as the main part of the book Words of the Mother. In 1956 they were published separately, with a Foreword by the Mother, as Conversations . In the centenary edition of the Mother's Collected Works they are included in volume 3 under the title Questions and Answers 1929.

Again, during 1930 and 1931, the Mother used to come in the evening to the Prosperity Room on the first floor of the Library House, and a select number of disciples used to gather there. There was a brief meditation, followed by a talk by the Mother. Some of the talks, given in English, were noted down in abbreviated long-hand by K. D. Sethna and afterwards reconstructed. Several of these were first published with the Mother's approval in the monthly Mother India and in the annual Sri Aurobindo Circle of 1949. A larger collection, entitled Words of the Mother: Third Series, Was published in book-form in 1951 and 1966 In the centenary edition of the Mother's Collected Works they are included - along with an

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additional talk, "Difficulties in Yoga" - in volume 3 under the title Questions and Answers 1930·31. And much later, after the International University Centre had come into existence, the Mother's talks to the children and the sadhaks were to be a regular feature of the Ashram life, and were to be collected in several large volumes.

The early Parisian group, the "Idea", and the later groups in her house in Rue du Val de Grace, during the years immediately before the First World War, the "New Idea" group in Pondicherry in 1914-15, the meetings at Dilip's and the Prosperity room, an the Playground classes of the nineteen-fifties: the times and venues and audiences may have varied or differed, but there was a silken running continuity in them all, for they were all integral to the Mother's sacerdocy and divine ministry on the earth.

VI

The collections of the Mother's words relating to the different periods of her life are really an easy and persuasive introduction to the theory and practice of Yoga, the Integral Yoga of life-transformation and world-transformation. Unlike the entries in Prayers and Meditations, which were originally written in French, the conversations of 1929 and many of 1930 and 1931, were in English, and so did not need the sometimes diluting or distorting medium of a translation from the original French.

The shorter writings included in Part One of Words of the Mother (Third Edition, 1946) are a series of pointed affirmations, scintillating aphorisms, diamond-edged apophthegms. Illuminating flashes or bubbles of revelation like the following can still be made each a starting-point for a chain of ponderings or meditation that may in time comprehend a whole universe:

A smile acts upon difficulties as the sun upon clouds - it disperses them.

Happiness is not the aim of life.

The aim of ordinary life is to carry out one's duty, the aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine.

To work for the Divine is to pray with the body.

All was gold and gold and gold, a torrent of golden light pouring down in an uninterrupted flow and bringing with it the consciousness that the path of the gods is a sunlit path in which difficulties lose all reality.

Such is the path open before us if we choose to take it.

The mountain path leads always in two directions, upward and downward - all depends on what we put behind us.

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In order to be filled anew the vessel must get empty sometimes.

It is when we are preparing for greater receptivities that we feel empty.

To get over our ego is not an easy task.

Even after overcoming it in the material consciousness, we meet it once more - magnified - in the spiritual.

If we allow a falsehood, however small, to express itself through our mouth or our pen, how can we hope to become perfect messengers of Truth? A perfect servant of Truth should abstain even from the slightest inexactitude, exaggeration or deformation. ¹⁰

The following could have come out of the pages of Prayers and Meditations , for it has the same piercing fervour and clarity of utterance:

Lord, Thy Love is so great, so noble and so pure that it is beyond our comprehension. It is immeasurable and infinite: on bended knees we must receive it, and yet Thou hast made it so sweet that even the weakest among us, even a child, can approach Thee.¹¹

And in just a few words, the Mother clarifies the goal of the Aurobindonian Yoga:

The goal is not to lose oneself in the Divine Consciousness. The goal is to let the Divine Consciousness penetrate into Matter and transform it. ¹²

VII

The aphorisms included in Part One of Words of the Mother (1946), are in a category apart, for whatever their origin, they have now separated themselves like waterdrops capable of reflecting the splendours in the firmament of Time and Eternity, - thus in the centenary edition of the Mother's Collected Works, have been scattered by subject in volumes 14 and 15.

The other writings in the 1946 edition of Words of the Mother were rather more elaborate. In the first six, which were first published in 1939 in French in Quelques Paroles, Quelques Prières, the Mother seems to have discoursed on some of the basic issues of spiritual life. The secret of secrets is that only the deep can answer the deep. At the core of everybody and everything is the Divine, and hence "when you are one with the Divinity within, you are one with all things in their depths".¹³ Crack the ego, seek and find and become one with the Divine. Unless one can be so united with the Divine, one must be a prey to all kinds of false lures, adverse suggestions, seductive sophistries and sinister inducements from without. Many are the problems that seem to beset humanity - "Governments succeed governments, regimes follow regimes, centuries pass after centuries

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but human misery remains lamentably the same."¹⁴ What then? It is obvious that there can be no lasting solution of human problems unless man transcends the mental and attains the supramental consciousness.

In life, one has to learn to differentiate between the higher spiritual law which is eternal and the lower code of man-made moral and social laws that are the prisoners of transience and relativity. But to give up the ordinary human laws before one has securely anchored oneself to the spiritual law will be to cause and to court disaster. Like the lower human and the higher Divine law, there is the lower human justice ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"!), and there is the higher Divine Grace:

The Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. ¹⁵

And it is through the mediation of the Mother that each spurt of sincere aspiration on the disciple's part "calls down in response the intervention of' the Grace".

AI1 life is a perilous journey and an intestine struggle, and the unwary are likely to be tripped and forced into a fall, or to be lost in the relativities - unless one learns to rise above al1 this chaos and confusion into the above-mind Consciousness. Of the elements of human existence - physical, vital, mental, psychic - the last alone is the principle and power of continuity through a succession of births. And it is through the awakening of the psychic being - the soul within - that we can grow into the Divine consciousness, and it is only from that level of puissance and illumination that our problems can be truly understood and definitively solved:

A transformation, an illumination of the human consciousness alone can bring about a real amelioration in the condition of humanity. ¹⁶

Thus, in no more than a few pages, the cardinal issues are posed and answered, and the current human malady is both diagnosed and the radical cure prescribed. The key to change and transformation is a breakthrough in consciousness: from the mental to the supramental, from the human to the Divine.

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CHAPTER 20

Words of the Mother

I

The series of fifteen Sunday morning Conversations beginning on 7 April 1929 constitutes the bulk of Words of the Mother (third edition, 1946) -178 out of its 214 pages.* The question-answer pattern gives the talks a homeliness and naturalness that is unfading, and involves the hearers (and the readers) in an intimacy of immediate action. One question leads to another, often in a collateral region, and the replies are full, frank and breathe an infinite freedom. In the result, the Conversations cover a wide expanse: what is Yoga for, and what is the needed preparation for Yoga; tapasyā and surrender (prapatti); union with the Divine, and service to humanity; equanimity, perfect calm and peace; visions true and false; visions and spirituality; Jeanne d'Arc's visions; meditation and surrender; freedom and karmic fatalism; what books to read, and how; function of the intellect; hostile forces; reason and faith; cause of natural disasters; vampires, what they are; money power, its true role and its current misuse; diseases, microbes and sanitary arrangements; universal will and individual initiative; love human and divine; the nature of religion; mental aberrations and physical ailments; Yogic consciousness; Yoga and Art; repulsion towards snakes and scorpions; surrender and sacrifice; and so on. Informative, friendly and revelatory, these intimate talks gently and irresistibly wind their meaning into our hearts and sensibilities - to rest there forever and inspire our action and behaviour. If the Mother's Prayers and Meditations is a guide to Jnana and Yoga, if it throws open the doors of the occult and the spiritual, if her periodic dialogues with the Divine give us tremors of mystic recognition and moments of ecstatic adoration, her Words of the Mother makes us a participant in the Divine's commerce with average humanity, and we are at once edified by her wisdom and experience, reassured by her motherly concern and consideration, and sustained and fulfilled by her all-understanding love. The Divine - the Mother as the mediatrix - aspirant Humanity: such is the sequence, such is the three-in-one mystic relationship. The Mother shows her human side to the Divine in Prayers and Meditations, and her Divine side to us in Words of the Mother. Together, these two spiritual classics make a double testament of lasting significance.

Like Prayers and Meditations, the Words too has been basic reading for the sadhaks of the Integral Yoga for the last several decades. When first printed as Conversations with the Mother in 1931, the book was not put up

*These fifteen Conversations are to be found in volume 3 of the Mother's Collected .1977, pp.l to 120.

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for sale but the Mother gave copies to such of the sadhaks and aspirants that she thought were likely to benefit by reading it. It was only when it. reappeared in 1940 with the title Words of the Mother that it became available for the general public. Twenty-five years after the talks were first given, some of the Mother's remarks used to come up for discussion with the children of the Centre of Education, and the Mother would offer further elucidations. For example, in the course of Conversation XI the Mother had said in 1929, concerning the origin of illnesses (here echoing e the convictions of Dr. Kobayashi, to which a reference has been made in an earlier chapter):

Each spot of the body is symbolical of an inner movement; there is there a world of subtle correspondences.... The particular place in the body affected by an illness is an index to the nature of the inner disharmony that has taken place.¹

This came up for discussion on 23 September 1953, and the Mother offered a long explication regarding the symbolical or imagist character of the human body. Why is each spot of the body "symbolical of an inner movement"? The Mother answers:

Because the whole physical world is the symbol of universal movements ....

.. .It is as though you viewed the whole universe as a movement of force and this movement of force were projected till it met a screen and on the screen it made an image, and this image on the screen is the physical world .... The physical world which everyone takes as the only reality is simply an image. It is the image of all that happens in what we call the invisible. It becomes visible to us because there is a screen which intervenes and stops the vibrations and that produces an image. If there were no such screen the vibrations would move on and nothing would be seen. And yet all the movements would exist ....

... So, our body represents a small fragment in this set of images that is projected and it is a fragment which expresses exactly all the vibrations of the inner state corresponding to this little point that is the body.²

As regards some local internal disharmony being the real cause of an illness, Dr. Kobayashi used the methods of concentration and 'still-Sitting' meditation to cure such diseases, and the Mother was well acquainted with his views and his work when she was in Japan.

II

In her Conversation XII, the Mother had said that "there is a plane in the mind where the memory of everything is stored and remains always in existence," and it is as though all earth-history is infallibly registered there:

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Thus, if you go deep into silence, you can reach a level of consciousness on which it is not impossible for you to receive answers to all your questions. And if there is one who is consciously open to the plenary truth of the supermind, in constant contact with it, he can certainly answer any question that is worth an answer from the supramental Light.³

When this passage came up for elucidation on 30 September 1953, the Mother elaborated the idea with a touch of the picturesque:

It is like a very big library with many many small compartments. So you find the compartment corresponding to the information you wish to have. You press a button and it opens. And inside it you find a scroll as it were, a mental formation which unrolls before you like a parchment, and then you read. then you make a note of what you have read and afterwards return quietly into your body with the new knowledge, and you may transcribe physically, if you can, what you have found, and then you get up and start your life as before. ⁴

But, then, to be able to dig out that infallible knowledge, "you must be able to completely silence the mind"; and one must not go with a plausible solution already in the head. "You must become absolutely like a blank paper, with nothing on it."⁵ But the Mother conceded that there were "very many conditions to fulfil: it is not so easy as taking a book in the library and reading it! This is within the reach of everybody. That is a little more difficult to accomplish,"⁶

Again, when a passage from Conversation XIII on the play of evil in the world in spite of its Divine origin⁷was read on 14 October 1953, the Mother explained the role of the complicating intermediaries, and concluded with the affirmation:

There is only one single solution to the problem - not to make any distinction between God and the universe at the origin. The universe is the Divine projected in space, and God is the universe at its origin. It is the same thing under one aspect or another. And you cannot divide them ... the fact is that when you succeed in uniting your consciousness with the divine consciousness, there is no problem left. Everything appears quite natural and simple and all right and exactly what it had to be. But when you cut yourself off from the origin and stand over against Him, then truly everything goes wrong, nothing can go right!⁸

Correct knowledge can come only through identification, not through separativity, division and false inquisition.

The filiations between Yoga and Art were first discussed in 1929 in Conversation XIV, and the main thrust of the Mother's exposition was that Art, in its fundamental truth, was nothing less than "the aspect of beauty

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of the Divine manifestation". The artist too is like a Yogi who goes within seeking the right inspiration:

A man like Leonardo da Vinci was a Yogi and nothing else ....

Music too is an essentially spiritual art and has always been associated with religious feeling and an inner life....

... Beethoven, when he composed the Ninth Symphony, had the vision of an opening into a higher world and of the descent of a higher world into this earthly plane ....

There is a domain far above the mind which we could call the world of Harmony ....

If by Yoga you are capable of reaching this source of all art, then you are master, if you will, of all the arts.⁹

When this subject came up for discussion again on 28 October 1953, the Mother made the point that, in India, the majority of artistic creations - the paintings in the caves, for example, and the statues in the temples ­ were not signed:

In those days the artist did what he had to do without caring whether his name would go down to posterity or not. All was done in a movement of aspiration to express a higher beauty, and above all with the idea of giving an appropriate abode to the godhead who was evoked.¹⁰

Similarly, the subject "Spirituality and Morality" discussed in Conversation XV was reopened on 4 November 1953. The Mother had said in 1929 that morality was not Divine or of the Divine; it was a human creation or fabrication, reared on the base of a more or less arbitrary division of things into the good and the bad. ¹¹In 1953, the Mother was even more forthright:

We have had frequent instances of people who used to lead a more than doubtful life and who had revelations .... If it happens that, just then, at that moment, there is a concurrence of events and perhaps an opening in the being, the Divine, who is always present, manifests himself. On the other hand, for the sage or the saint who is quite infatuated with his own importance and his own worth, and full of pride and vanity, there is not much chance that the Divine will manifest in him ....

... The greatest obstacle to the contact with the Divine is pride ....

... the one truly important thing is the intensity of the aspiration. And this intensity of aspiration comes in all kinds of circumstances. ¹²

The Divine is no moralist; it is man who dons the moralist's mantle and tries to legislate and decide in terms of black and white!

While there was an interval of about twenty-five years between her conversations of 1929 and her readings and elucidations in the Playground in 1953, what is remarkable is the embracing identity of opinion and even verbal expression; there are reiterations, elaborations, fresh affirmations.

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but there is no actual resilement from the earlier positions, no recantations of any kind. This gives the whole conspectus of the Mother's thought a rounded fullness and sufficiency, partaking of the character of overhead knowledge, a stream of illumination pouring from Above. Words of the Mother can thus still be read with profit, although more than half a century has elapsed since the words were spoken on Sunday mornings redolent of 'the holy hush of ancient sacrifice' before less than a dozen attentive listeners in a quiet room in remote Pondicherry. The Socratic dialogues in ancient Greece had a like seminal quality, but there the accent was on enlightened reason, whereas with the Mother the inspiration was spiritual. Again, at Pondicherry, it was a select but representative group comprising Indian, British, American and French, men as well as women, and divers backgrounds and aptitudes. And the Mother beyonded both Space and Time.

III

The fifteen Conversations, although they have a seeming casualness about them, and give a first impression of haphazard discontinuity, will be seen on closer scrutiny to bear a distinct organic interdependence and unity, making the whole series little less than a Handbook of Yoga, as necessary for the practising sadhak as Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga is to the more intellectual disciple. Was it mere chance that those few had met on a Sunday morning, and would be meeting again and again on the coming Sundays, to exchange thoughts on Yoga and other matters of concern? "We have all met in previous lives," the Mother assures her hearers; "we are of one family and have worked through ages for the victory of the Divine and its manifestation upon earth."¹³

First, then, about the motivation for doing Yoga. Not for any kind of self-interest nor even for service to humanity; for the Mother, the only valid aim is the Divine. Seeking and finding and serving the Divine, one may incidentally benefit humanity, or promote social service, but that is not the basic aim of the Yoga; the aim is the Divine, a steady aspiration, a sheer hunger, for the Divine. And the Divine is not so far off, after all:

Concentrate in the heart. Enter into it; go within and, deep and far, as far as you can. Gather all the strings of your consciousness that are spread abroad, roll them up and take a plunge and sink down.

A fire is burning there, in the deep quietude of the heart. It is the divinity in you - your true being. Hear its voice, follow its dictates.¹⁴

How easy it all sounds! But how exactly shall we do it? Again, the answer sounds easy: Be conscious! For it is our unconsciousness - or deceptive or flawed Consciousness - that "keeps us down to our unregenerate nature

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and prevents change and transformation in it". It is unconsciousness that permits the entry of the adverse forces into our domain, and winks at the processes of inner erosion and corruption. On the other hand, to grow conscious is to acquire right discrimination, or viveka as we might put it: to be able to sift things and know the true from the false, and avoid wrong constructions.

The second Conversation begins with a reference to the two classic paths to Realisation: the arduous way of tapasya (discipline) and the safe and sure way of prapatti (surrender), either like the baby monkey or the baby cat:

The baby monkey holds to its mother in order to be carried about and it must hold firm, otherwise if it loses its grip, it falls. On the other hand, the baby cat does not hold to its mother, but is held by the mother and has no fear nor responsibility; it has nothing to do but to let the mother hold it.¹⁵

But without true sincerity nothing can be done - nothing can even be begun in Yoga. Besides sincerity, the sadhak's needs are patience, perseverance and a sleepless vigilance. In the path of surrender, the normal mental control is withdrawn; but unless it is replaced by Divine control, all the irrational may erupt, the lusts may want to have a free hand, and one may be purblindly lured towards the undivine. But if one becomes verily like a child and gives oneself up to the Mother to be carried by her, all will be well. Surrender is indeed the key-word, the king-action, but while it is infallible, it is not all that easy to opt for. The baby monkey's hands may lose their grip in a sudden impulse to seize a fruit, the baby cat itself may momentarily struggle to escape from the security of the mother's grip, and of course the average human being is too much a slave to his own petty contrivances and calculations to follow unquestioningly either the baby monkey or the baby cat way of surrender. There are evasions, there are wrong attachments, there are fateful perversions. "The whole world is full of the poison," says the Mother. "You take it in with every breath." One has to be very wary, one has need of total trust in the security of the Mother's arms, and one has to wake up the psychic being, the divine witness and guide within, and make it the controlling and radiating centre of all faculties, all thoughts, all actions, all delights:

In the depths of your consciousness is the psychic being, the temple of the Divine within you. This is the centre round which should come about the unification of all these divergent parts, all these contradictory movements of your being .... Once you have turned to the Divine, saying, "I want to be yours", and the Divine has said, "Yes", the whole world cannot keep you from it. .. then it is as though a bridge has been built and little by little the crust becomes thinner and thinner until the two parts are wholly joined and the inner and the outer become one.¹⁶

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As the Mother said some years later:

The centre of the human being is the psychic which is the dwelling-place of the immanent Divine. Unification means organisation and harmonisation of all the parts of the being (mental, vital and physical) around this centre, so that all the activities of the being may be the correct expression of the will of the Divine Presence.¹⁷

But how are we to know that it is the psychic being, the Divine spark within, that speaks to us, and not some hostile force that has somehow made a surreptitious entry? The Mother gives an unmistakable clue:

You can easily know when a thing comes from the Divine. You feel free, you are at ease, you are in peace .... Equanimity is the essential condition of union and communion with the Divine.¹⁸

Anything that sparks off excitement, egoistic exultation or even a frenzy of Bacchus exhilaration, may be deemed to come, if not always from the undivine, at least from brazen vitalistic impulses.

IV

It is a fact of common experience that in sleep we are often as active as in the waking state. In that sleep of apparent inactivity what dreams do come! Also, in the waking state itself, one may at unpredictable moments be surprised by visions. What is the role of such dreams and visions in life, especially in spiritual life? The problem bristles with so much complexity that, in Conversation III, the Mother declines to give a rough and ready answer. Visions and dreams may occur in different planes, from the most material and physical to the highest spiritual. Some are clearly personal, some may have a local or a credal significance, and some few are universal. The problem is one of clear recapitulation and correct interpretation. Only far too often do visions and dreams fade away, and leave not a rack behind! Unless one can recall all the lineaments of the visions, all the details of a dream, how is one to understand them and infer their relevance to one's spiritual life?

The Mother's first exhortation is: "Be conscious of the night as well as of the day." Know your dreams! Let them not sweep the firmament of our sleeping hours like mere straws in the wayward wind. Let us first keep track of our dreams, - and then try to control them. Consciousness and control! Some dreams that are an overflow of the activities of the daytime not be very important, except that they at least signify a conservation, not a dissipation; our superficial as also the deeper parts have been fully engaged in the work in progress. But visions like Jeanne d'Arc's certainly come from the overmental Gods or "formateurs", form-makers, and one should learn to be sensitive to their communications and their implications.

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There is, however, the danger of mistaking false gods for the true, of misinterpreting the dreams and the visions, and of hugging false security (as, for example, literature's tragic heroes - a Macbeth, a Captain Ahab - do), and coming to grief.

But of course the few minutes of "dreamless sleep" during the night are much more restful and refreshing than hours of so-called sleep, for those minutes of absolute silence are the termless time of the Sachchidananda consciousness, when the soul bathes in the waters of immortality and ineffable bliss.

Just as visions and dreams as such are not necessarily a sign of spirituality, the hours spent in meditation and the external draperies of the exercise are also no proof of spiritual progress:

It is a proof of your progress when you no longer have to make an effort to meditate. Then you have rather to make an effort to stop meditating: it becomes difficult to stop meditation, difficult to stop thinking of the Divine, difficult to come down to the ordinary consciousness.¹⁹

Discipline too, while it is necessary, may be overdone and may lead to false notions of success. Mere body-control as in Hatha Yoga or mind-control as in Raja Yoga, or the two together, cannot be equated with spirituality, which alone is the aim of Integral Yoga. For this one has boldly to take the decisive plunge; and even this is but the beginning, for having taken the plunge one has to learn to live in the Divine.²⁰This sort of definitive call can come with irresistible force, even as it came to the Gopis, to Sri Chaitanya, or to Mirabai. There can indeed be no mistaking the authenticity of the call. First comes the awakening of the consciousness by a touch of the psychic being from behind. This is like the taste of a drop from the divine nectar of spirituality. Equally there is the growing allergy to the pressures - the false lures, the deceptive lights, the ugly compulsions - of the outside world. Between the call for the higher life and the repulsion for the lower or ordinary life is hatched the decision to take the plunge, the irrevocable plunge into the Divine:

Take the whole and entire plunge, and you will be free from this outer confusion and get the true experience of the spiritual life.²¹

V

The Yoga is for union with the Divine, and for this one has to plunge into the Divine, offer everything to the Divine. This means that one should constantly recognise the fact that, since everything - including our faculties, our aspirations, our doings, our triumphs and even our failures - since

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everything comes from the Divine, it is but natural that we should return or offer them back to the source with our love and gratitude:

Live constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this presence which moves you and is doing everything you do²²

Remember and offer is one of the Mother's mahāvākyas; in other words, remembering the Divine origin of everything, everything should be offered back to the Divine.

The personal problem ay be solved if through knowledge, works or love, a union is effected with the Divine, but the Integral Yoga alms at integral union or the divinisation of mind, vital and body as well. The ultimate goal is to grow in the perfection of consciousness that makes it impossible to act otherwise than as a pure instrument of the Divine. Once the egoistic mentalised consciousness is transcended and this Divine consciousness takes root, there will be experienced a new freedom, equality and puissance. The traditional dichotomies will disappear, and one will know that "there is nothing in the world which has not its ultimate truth and support in the Divine", and if one is in touch "with the Spirit, the Divine Soul in things", one will be able to pierce through the crust of the discordant and the painful, and reach the beauty and the delight. Nay more: one is also emancipated from the burden of the past, and even from the adamantine law of karmic predestination:

This precisely is the aim of Yoga, - to get out of the cycle of Karma into a divine movement. By Yoga you leave the mechanical round of Nature in which you are an ignorant slave, a helpless and miserable tool, and rise into another plane where you become a conscious participant and a dynamic agent in the working out of a Higher Destiny.²³

VI

In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, the aim is to exceed the mental consciousness and attain in the overhead levels up to the supramental. This does not mean that mind, reason, intellect are entirely useless, or necessarily inimical to Yoga. Everything in its own place, confining itself to its own proper function: there can be no objection to this. It is when anything - force, faculty or institution - opts for a wrong movement that difficulties arise. "Reason was the helper, reason is the bar": in other words, for conceptual analysis, for system-building and organisation, reason could be a marvellous helper, but for invading the Invisible, for exploring the mystical, for plunging into the Divine, reason can definitely be a hindrance. On 5 May, 1929, the Mother enunciated this simple criterion:

A power has the right movement when it is set into activity for the divine'spurpose;

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it has the wrong movement when it is set into activity for its own satisfaction.²⁴

The intellect isn't tabooed in Yoga, certainly not in the Integral Yoga; only, it has to be kept in its own proper place.

Now, how about the adverse forces? What are they? How does one identify them? Some years later, in the mid-thirties the Mother was to specify these marks of identification of an adverse force:

1st sign: One feels far away from Sri Aurobindo and me.

2nd: One loses confidence, begins to criticise, is not satisfied.

3rd: One revolts and sinks into falsehood.²⁵

Again, how are we to grapple with such adverse forces, and throw them out? Evil suggestions come to Macbeth from the Witches, then from Lady Macbeth, and finally in the form of a dagger:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? ...

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going.

The difference between the outside and the inside is obliterated; suggestion feeds the wish, and the wish is father to the thought, and the thought precipitates the action.

The evil suggestions from the adverse forces certainly come from without; but they could, if not decisively thrown out, colonise a place within and operate securely from there. Even the lower mind - or the physical mind which is in alliance with the lower vital consciousness and its movements - can be infected by the hostile forces and degraded to their level of perversity and evil. What is our armour against such forces and their cancerous insinuations? The Mother's advice is severely practical:

... keep as quiet and peaceful as possible. If the attack takes the form of adverse suggestions try quietly to push them away, as you would some material object. The quieter you are, the stronger you become. That firm basis of all spiritual power is equanimity. You must not allow anything to disturb your poise: you can then resist every kind of attack....

... A quiet call, a conviction that in this ascension towards the realisation. you are never walking all alone and a faith that whenever help is needed it is there, will lead you through, easily and securely.²⁶

How are we to mobilise the strength, the vigilance, the poise, and throw

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back the unceasing barrage of sly, perverse or wicked suggestions to which we are subject? The inner strength must come from Faith in the Divine, and in the Divine within ourselves; not mental faith alone, but faith reaching down to the most subconscious, the very cells of the body. While the unity and interdependence of the different elements in man (body, vital, mind, soul) and of man and Nature provide the basis of a universal harmony, this is often upset and Nature is 'ridden with calamities' and humanity has become a byword for disharmony. While a higher consciousness is pressing down for manifestation, it is also meeting with stubborn resistance:

All the disorder and disharmony that we see upon earth is the result of this resistance. Calamity and catastrophe, conflict and violence, obscurity and ignorance - all ills come from the same source.²⁷

The remedy, then, is to increase the receptivity below to the downpour of the new consciousness from above. Great messiahs in the past have tried to hew new paths to freedom, peace and harmony, and this in spite of much contemporary resistance. Some inner progress has surely been achieved as a result of the labours of the great pathfinders of the past, but much yet remains to be done - especially, the radical integral transformation of Man and Earth still awaits its hour.

It is also good to remember that, in the Divine scheme of things, the . action of the hostile forces is used only as "a testing process, so that nothing may be forgotten, nothing left out in the work of transformation. They will allow no mistake". But when the goal has been reached, the handicaps in the race will not be needed. Taking a long view, the hostile forces are allowed to exist "because they are necessary in the Great Work; once they are no more indispensable, they will either change or go". ²⁸ Hostile forces are thus meant, in the cosmic scheme, to put man's sincerity to the severest test, and the day man becomes "integrally sincere", they will disappear, for they will have no further cause for their existence.

VII

In Conversation VI, the Mother takes us to what is for us the uncharted world of the bodiless vital beings, and explains the dangers of our inadvertent or imprudent exposure to it. But sometimes such vital beings also inhabit human forms that have come to be known as vampires. Romen Palit writes that the Mother once warned him against someone who was such a vampire; and a few minutes' association with that person used to leave Romen "dejected and tired". ²⁹According to the Mother, vampires are not human though they may deceptively sport a human body:

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Their method is to try first to cast their influence upon a man; then they enter slowly into his atmosphere and in the end may get complete possession of him, driving out entirely the real human soul and personality .... If they come into your atmosphere, you suddenly feel depressed: and exhausted; if you are near them for some time you fall sick; if you live with one of them, it may kill you.³⁰

Better avoid vampires at the first suspicion caused by the symptoms of depression and exhaustion; cut off all connection with them!

Although vampires, when in a human body, may not be altogether conscious of their parasitical or blood-sucking nature, their influence is malignant all the same. Like the motiveless malignity of an Iago! Evil-doing is the svabhāva of a vampire, just as, for Satan, "Evil! be thou my good!" is the natural affirmation. One of the tragedies of organised human life is that only such people seem to control most of the money-resources of the world, and hence industry, business and commerce as well. While these possessed vampires readily respond to vitalistic pulls like sex, power, politics, fame, gambling, gluttony, drunkenness and luxurious living, they are insensitive to good causes and allergic to the intimations of the Spirit:

In those who are slaves of vital beings, the desire for truth and light and spiritual achievement, even if it at all touches them, cannot balance the desire for money. ³¹

In our fight against the hostile forces of the vital world, - the creatures of falsehood, the agents of evil, the children of darkness, - the human body, with its layers of density and grooves of resistance, is a natural fortress of protection. The Yoga has to be done while in the body, as in a tabernacle, and there is always the infinite reserve power of the Mother to bale us out of our difficulties:

No attachments, no desires, no impulses, no preferences; perfect equanimity, unchanging peace and absolute faith in the Divine protection: with that you are safe, without it you are in peril. And as long as you are not safe, it is better to do like little chickens that take shelter under the mother's wings.³²

VIII

For the seventh Conversation, the leading question related to the power of Thought, and to what extent one created one's own world. If, according to Shakespeare's Hotspur, "thought's the slave of life, and life's time's fool", and according to Milton's Satan,

The mind is its own place, and in itself

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Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n,

for Aurobindo Thought is the paraclete mediating between Here and Eternity, the lower and higher hemispheres of omnipresent Reality. There are thus apparently different ways of understanding the function and power of Thought. In the life of Yoga, the central limitation of Thought (or mind) is seen to be that it is "an instrument of action and formation and not an instrument of knowledge". ³³ Thought is most often imperfect, incomplete or perverse knowledge, and no wonder it causes perplexity and confusion. Much better would it be to silence Thought and listen in Silence:

If you listen in silence, you will hear rightly and understand rightly.³⁴

In the pursuit of the Divine, one has to abandon all mental conceptions and transcend Thought; and one of the common mental conceptions is that microbes cause illnesses. But there is also the inner condition of the body, for any disharmony within - in the physical, vital or mental - can equally father ailments. This problem was to come up again for discussion on 22 July 1953, when the Mother went into considerable detail. Normally we are under Divine protection, but when we permit doubt to infiltrate into our consciousness and open the way to fear - mental, vital, physical- then we fall ill, or meet with an accident. While there are both internal and external causes of illnesses, the former are the more crucial:

... all illnesses, all, whatever they may be (I would add even accidents) come from a break in equilibrium ....

... you must have a triple equilibrium - mental, vital, physical- and not only in each of the parts, but also in the three parts in their mutual relations.³⁵

The origin of an illness being so complex, it is not enough to look for the microbes alone. "And to discover the disorder, you must have an extensive occult knowledge and also a deep knowledge of all the inner workings of each one."³⁶ Actually, an illness invades and takes root because the protective outer cover - the etheric body, the nervous envelope - has been pierced.. It is this subtle yet invisible body that must be made truly impregnable, and for this peace and equanimity and confidence, faith in health and an unruffled and cheerful disposition are needed. After all, microbes and germs of all kinds are swarming about everywhere and all the time. But suddenly the body's defences seem to crumble, and the microbes invade and undermine the system. But whence this "depression of the vital force"? The Mother offers a convincing reply:

It comes from some disharmony in the being, from a lack of receptivity to the divine forces. When you cut yourself off from the energy and light that sustain you, then there is this depression, there is created what medical

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science calls a "favourable ground" and something takes advantage of it. It is doubt, gloominess, lack of confidence, a selfish turning back upon yourself that cuts you off from the light and divine energy and gives the attack this advantage. It is this that is the cause of your falling ill and not microbes.³⁷

Alas, normalcy for man is a condition of all-round fear; and this is the breeding-ground of diseases. To rest in the Divine is the only infallible remedy. It may also be added that, ultimately, only when man is established permanently in the supramental Truth-Consciousness that his body will be automatically protected from all inner disharmony and attacks from outside.

IX

Another question is the place for individual initiative in a world under the grip of the universal Will. If 'fixed fate' is the adamantine law, what's the scope for free will? Now such sharp oppositions - exercises in 'Either Or'­ are foreign to the structure of Reality which is a unity of linked-up relativities, a ladder of divers inter-connected planes of consciousness. And Man himself: isn't he a composite entity - so far as the evolutionary scene is concerned - made up of a psychic being, a mental being, a vital being and a physical being? And men differ widely, in the degree of their self-awakening, in the energy of their faculties, in their assumption of responsibility. A simple law will not therefore cover all cases:

In the universal play there are some, the majority, who are ignorant instruments; they are actors who are moved about like puppets, knowing nothing. There are others who are conscious, and these act their part, knowing that it is a play. And there are some who have the full knowledge of the universal movement and are identified with it and with the one Divine Consciousness and yet consent to act as though they were something separate, a division of the whole. There are many intermediary stages between that ignorance and this full knowledge, many ways of participating in the play. ³⁸

The essential thing, then, is to be united with the Divine Consciousness. First an opening up of the lines of communication with the psychic being which is one's eternal self, and then its linking up (which is a matter of course) with the Divine everywhere:

In the psychic consciousness there is not that sense of division between the individual and the universal consciousness which affects the other parts of your nature. You are conscious there that your individuality is your own line of expression, but at the same time you know too that it is an

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expression objectifying the one universal consciousness.³⁹

The spiritual or the divine consciousness is not antagonistic to the psychic; it is but the static poise behind the foreground play of the psychic manifestation. They are as it were the two sides of the same arc, but innately the same.

X

Like the issue between universal Will and individual initiative, that between Divine and human love is largely verbal shadow-boxing. But it is lucky that, on a June Sunday morning in 1929, somebody - Perhaps Miss Maitland? - put a series of questions to the Mother as a provocation for a memorable pronouncement, recalling almost Socrates' celebrated rhapsody on Love in Plato's Symposium. Of the Mother's many Aspects, Powers and Personalities, the face of Love was the most significant and nectarean, and it was as the Mother of Love that she manifested a power of 'the The Divine Shakti not hitherto witnessed - or witnessed to an equal degree - in the world.

The symphonic Divina Commedia of Dante concludes with a peal in of praise of "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars". Love is indeed the heart-beat that sustains and gives rapture to the phenomenal world. "Love," says the Mother, "is one of the great universal forces;" it is also a "supremely conscious Power". Love at first sight - people say, but what is it except "a wave from the everlasting sea of universal love"? At the dawn of first love, as when a Romeo sights a Juliet, "for a moment its divine touch awakens and magnifies all that is fine and beautiful". Nevertheless, ordinary human love is usually a prisoner of the ego, a distorted personal thing that is wayward and whimsical, and leaps at passion, possession, perversity, jealousy and satiety. Although human beings have thus turned love into "an ugly and repulsive thing" , something "low, brutal, selfish, violent, ugly", true love is "universal and eternal... a Divine Force". ⁴⁰The Mother's view of Love is not different from Savitri's, who limns its contours (in Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri) for the benefit of Death who is confronting her:

My love is not a hunger of the heart,

My love is not a craving of the flesh;

It came to me from God, to God returns.

Even in all that life and man have marred,

A whisper of divinity still is heard,

A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.

Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man

A Sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.⁴¹

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At its highest peaks of manifestation, this Love Divine coalesces and unites with Divine Knowledge:

Even the seekers through knowledge come to a point beyond which if they want to go farther, they are bound to find themselves entering at the same time into love and to feel the two as one, knowledge the light of the divine union, love the very heart of knowledge. There is a place in the soul's progress where they meet and you cannot distinguish one from the other. The division, the distinction between the two that you make in the beginning are a creation of the mind: once you rise to a higher level, they disappear. ⁴²

Nay more: there is a Beauty and the Beast mystery of alchemic transformation about the great holocaust of the Divine in an act of self-giving. " Through the power of Love, Beauty awakens the veiled beauty in the Beast. So too -

The Perfect Consciousness accepted to be merged and absorbed into the unconsciousness of matter, so that consciousness might be awakened in the depths of its obscurity and little by little a Divine Power might rise in it and make the whole of this manifested universe a highest expression of the Divine Consciousness and the Divine love. This was the supreme love... And yet none perhaps would call it love; for it does not clothe itself in a superficial sentiment, it makes no demand in exchange for what it has done, no show of its sacrifice.⁴³

Aren't all the million manifestations of human love but the result of the "impulse given by a Divine love behind the human longing and seeking"? The Mother goes further, and infers in all Earth and Nature the reign of Love. When night falls, for example, from the very roots of trees and plants rises "the aspiration of an intense love and longing", a craving for the return of the joy of light:

There is a yearning so pure and intense that if you can feel the movement in the trees, your own being too will go up in an ardent prayer for the peace and light and love that are unmanifested here. Once you have come in contact with this large, pure and true Divine love, if you have felt it even for a short time, you will realise what an abject thing human desire has made of it.⁴⁴

It is not that human love, in its aspiration to be transformed into Divine Love, should withdraw from the physical or the vital, and confine itself to the psychic realm alone. "It is only through the vital," says the Mother,. "that matter can be touched by the transforming power of the Spirit." Divine Love, being integral love, knows no exclusions; it is from the human end that the distortions and perversions erupt, and these have to be eschewed. Then comes the climactic revelation:

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Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, "There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love!" And with the awakening to love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace.⁴⁵

What was this world but insentient matter, till the Divine Love came down and stirred it into life? Love has so far flowered in a million imperfect ways, the noblest of them all being a mother's love for her child. But the ascent of Love towards the Divine summits hasn't been halted, and it may. be that man's consciousness will now wake up to "the Divine love, pure, independent of all manifestation in human forms". Love must one day return to the source itself, the Divine:

The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.⁴⁶

XI

In Conversation X, the issue is between Spirituality and Religion. Certainly, all religions had their beginnings in a seminal mystical or "The spiritual experience, some revelation from "what one could call a Divine Being ... bringing down with him from a higher plane a certain Knowledge and Truth for the earth".⁴⁷ Mahavira, the Buddha, the Christ, the Prophet Mahomet, Guru Nanak were all historical personalities, and were also divine-human persons who originated the several religions that still claim millions of followers today. But aside from the initial inspiration (which was basically a spiritual experience), what makes a particular religion distinctive are its dogmas, its theology, its body of ritual, its buttressing philosophy and ethics, its organised church and the rest of its institutional apparatus, all of which are man-made with the inevitable egoistic distortions . And so the uniting fount of the Spirit flows in different directions as so many religions, and each religion pools itself into so many creeds, sects and schools. The spirit is thus dead or asleep in its encrustations of dogma, ritual, superstition, custom and blind observance:

All religions have each the same story to tell. The occasion for its birth is the coming of a great Teacher of the world. He comes and reveals and is

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the incarnation of a Divine Truth. But men seize upon it, trade make an almost political organisation out of it.⁴⁸

The result is that each religionist begins shouting: "Mine is the supreme, the only truth, all others are falsehood or inferior." It is just this blatantly egoistic attitude that makes almost every religion stand in the way of true spiritual life. It is true all religions have thrown up giants and paragons of shining spirituality, but this is, as it were, in spite - not because­ of the religions. But the normal attitude is to make the accident of one's birth in a particular religion determine one's adhesion to it irrespective whether or not it answers one's soul's needs. Hence the Mother's exhortation:

If your aim is to be free, in the freedom of the Spirit, you must get rid of all the ties that are not the inner truth of your being, but come from subconscious habits....

All your relations must be newly built upon an inner freedom of choice ....

When you come to the Yoga, you must be ready to have all your mental buildings and all your vital scaffolding shattered to pieces .... Think not of what you were, but of what you aspire to be; be altogether in what you want to realise. Turn from your dead past and look straight towards the future. Your religion, country, family lie there; it is the DIVINE.⁴⁹

Not just the tolerance of other religions, not only the friendly co-existence of religions, not even merely the mutual understanding and appreciation of the divers reigning religions. One must dare farther still: Beyond the Religions! Beyond all religionism! Forward to spirituality, to the Sole Truth, to the DIVINE - for that would be the 'religion' of "The Next Future", the age when the Gods of the religions would be transcended by the one universally experienced Divine.

The Mother's morning Conversations of 1929 with her few selected disciples have since been read and commented upon and re-read times without number. For all their seeming informality and casualness, they have a range of coverage, a weight of thought and a tone of intimate urgency that give them a special place in the Aurobindonian Yoga-literature. The Mother no doubt speaks out of her manifold experience of this and the divers occult worlds, but what gives the talks their stamp of authenticity and authority is the sanction from Above, for it is clear she speaks generally from an overhead level of direct understanding. Life, art and Yoga, morality, religion and spirituality, free will, destiny and Grace, all are set forth at once in their integral unity and in their proper inter-relationships. And the mahāvākyas - Be conscious! Remember and offer! Plunge into the Divine! - stand out like high-power lamp-posts lighting up the way - all the way - to "The Next Future".

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CHAPTER 21

A Choice of Games

I

In an earlier chapter, the short-lived but psychically very potent effort at communion known as the Soup ceremony was described: its distant filiations with the Japanese Tea Ceremony, the evocation of a unique spiritual atmosphere in the Reception Room where it was held in the evenings, the mystic phenomenon of sharing and exchange, the rewarding experiences of some of the participating sadhaks, the gradual decline in the degree of consecration and dedication, the effect on the Mother of the one­sided exchange and her decision at last to withdraw her own personal participation in the ceremony - it was a marvellous lyric suspended half-way through, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan.

That too was the period when the Mother instituted other means also of engaging the sadhaks' attention and awakening and stimulating their dormant consciousness in desired directions. Again, the time was evening, immediately before the Soup ceremony; the place was the Prosperity Room on the first floor of the Library House. Recalling those days, Amal Kiran, one of the participants. says: "If the Soup ceremony had an air of . Divine Gravity, the Prosperity Meeting may be considered to have had about it a breath of Divine Levity."¹

The Mother would arrive in the evening about an hour or so before the time for the Soup ceremony, and first devote a few minutes to business connected with the Prosperity Stores. In the meantime, the sadhaks - the chosen or permitted ones - would assemble and occupy the numbered seatsassigned to them (Sethna's, for example, was 15 and Duraiswami Aiyar's 24) and the total number seems to have stayed at twenty-four. The sadhaks sat roughly in a semicircle facing the Mother, and while there was no fixed rule for the proceedings, there was a controlled spirit of teasing gaiety doubled with a serious inner engagement. There were short meditations, there were questions and answers, there were sleight-of-hand games like balancing of a lemon on the head, there were experiments with chance like opening at random a book by Sri Aurobindo and reading the passage found, and there were intellectual games too with some relevance to the sadhana. But the principal advantage was that, for about an hour, the sadhaks were enabled to come within the immediate aura of the Mother's power and personality.

Understandably enough, the silent meditations are the least amenable to objective description or evaluation. An island-atmosphere of silence was created, and since there was no preconceived rule or routine - which particular mantra to invoke, which symbol-idea or object to concentrate

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upon, which movement of consciousness to generate - the meditation of sadhak had its own individual character depending On his or her at mood, and also on the impact of the Mother's vibrations. As for the group as a whole, the brief collective silence had an efficacy of its own especially since most of them preferred to close their eyes when meditating. The cumulative force of the collective meditation was, however, a felt thing, though not exactly quantifiable. Now on one occasion, unable to concentrate, Amal Kiran started looking round at the rapt faces with closed eyes, and at last he turned to the Mother:

I have never seen the Mother as I saw her then. She was no longer human. Her whole body appeared to have become magnified and there was a light pervading her and the face was of a Goddess. I can only say that it was the face of Maheshwari. Sri Aurobindo has written of this aspect of the Divine Shakti: "Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them .... Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever .... " This was the first time I realised that when the Mother wants she can put forth the Divine Presence and Power completely into the physical being and manifest it. .. here before me was indeed a superhuman being without any veils.²

It is necessary we should remember the fact of this Presence, however much it may have been often deliberately veiled to facilitate the give and take of the familiarity and the fun. The Mother was a human moth playing with the children, and at the same time she was the Mother Divine - now putting forth this or that one out of her different powers, and sometimes veiling all of them with her sweet motherly smile and solicitude

II

Of the games fashioned by the Mother, the most colourfully spiritual was the Flower Game. From the very beginning, flowers - in their variety no less than in their opulence - gave a distinct character to the Ashram. Commenting on the place of flowers in terrestrial existence, Nary Prasad writes:

To human beings beset with pain and sorrow flowers are the Creator's boon and blessing. It is by flowers that Heaven bestows its glory upon earth. They express the glory and greatness of the Divine with a million tongues ... the Creator never ceases to scatter His floral bounty in forests and gardens ³

In the Ashram, the offering of flowers to the Mother at the time of Pranam - and to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at the time of the Darshans - was a

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symbolic act testifying to the spiritual kinship between the Divine and the devotees. In India, flowers have always been associated with offerings to the Gods and also used for decoration. The Mother too was uncannily susceptible to the influence of flowers and had a profound rapport with them. When she was in Tokyo and Kyoto, the artistic and psychic overtones of the Japanese flower arrangement - especially in association with the Tea Ceremony - had impinged on her deeper consciousness, and the resulting resonances became a part of her being. In Pondicherry, again, she established a deep sympathy with the world of flowers, registering instantaneous vibrations of colour, shape, smell and sensibility; and, even as Sri Aurobindo gave spiritually suggestive names to some of the sadhaks, the Mother gave new tell-tale names to the flowers. Just as Philippe Barbier de St.-Hilaire became "Pavitra", K. D. Sethna "Amal Kiran", Miss Hodgson "Datta", J. A. Chadwick "Arjava", Jenny Dobson "Chidanandini", Madame Yvonne Gaebele "Suvrata", Mehdi Begum "Chinmayi", Janet McPheeters "Shantimayi", and Miss Margaret Wilson "Nishtha", even so the flowers also - almost without exception - received , nāmakaranam at the Mother's hands. For example, Forget-me-not became Lasting Remembrance, a richer name. The Mother has said how, "spontaneously, without knowing anything", she gave the same meaning to flowers as in the Indian religious ceremonies, for "the vibration was there in the flowers itself ". Thus, while the lotus signified fullness and perfection to the Oriental mind, the Mother named it Divine Consciousness. The sacred tulasi, which is indispensable for worship in India, was named Devotion; pārijāta, the night jasmine became Aspiration; jasmine, Purity; the rose, Love [psychic love] for the Divine; pink rose, Surrender; white rose, Integral Surrender; the yellow champak, Supramentalised Psychological Perfection. Likewise other flowers acquired names such as Sincerity Devotion, Radha' s Consciousness, Transformation, Tapasya, Intuitive Mind, Successful Future, Divine Solicitude, Cheerfulness, Integral Opening, Patience, Service, Psychic Purity, Faithfulness, Realisation, Spiritual Power of Healing, Avatar: the Supreme Manifested on the Earth in a body, Victorious Love, Disinterested Work done for the Divine, Consecration, Mental Plasticity, Absolute Truth, Illumined Mind, and so on. Commenting on this half-esoteric flower-cult in the Ashram, Madhav P. Pandit writes:

For the Mother, flowers are not just items of decoration; they are not even merely symbols; they are living messengers linking the spiritual to the material worlds. When she gives a flower, she transmits a state of consciousness designated by that flower. Each flower is endowed with an occult capacity to receive, hold and conduct a particular force of consciousness.⁴

A French visitor, Lizelle Raymond, who was particularly sensitive and

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responsive to the Mother's ministry through flowers, writes perceptively:

Amongst all the offerings. made to the Divine, .the flower is the most subtle, and also the most mysterious; for, In Its simplicity, It carries the vibrations of the ākāśā, the ethereal element itself, - that is, all that is most abstract, pure and perfect. It is, above everything else, the all-powerful creative mantra.⁵

The offering of flowers to the Mother, the receiving of a flower or flowers from her, could mean much, could prove a decisive turning point in one's, spiritual life, for these flowers from the Mother were verily the Divine's symbolic emanations of beauty and goodness and truth. Also, when sadhaks offered flowers to her, their condition - fresh or faded - might reveal to her the psychological condition of the respective disciples; and when she gave a flower with her blessings, she also communicated a helpful state of consciousness as well.⁶ With their yogic names that insinuate their psychic power, with their potentiality for spiritual engineering, the flowers sanctified by the Mother's touch and blessings became emissaries of her Grace and agreeably mingled in the life-ways of the sadhaks, and made the Ashram something akin to a garden of the unfolding Divine manifestation and terrestrial transformation.

While the name given to a flower (say Aspiration, Devotion, or Fidelity) is important enough and no sadhak can look at that flower without recalling its spiritual significance, nevertheless it was when he actually received it from the Mother at the time of Pranam that it was charged with a power for direct action - either to initiate a process of rectification or to promote a needed movement of consciousness. When the question was put to Sri Aurobindo, "What is the significance of the Mother's giving us flowers at Pranam every day?" he wrote back: "It is meant to help the realisation of the thing the flower stands for." Answering the question whether flowers were "mere symbols and nothing more", Sri Aurobindo explained: "It is when the Mother puts her force into the flower that it becomes more than a symbol. It then can become very effective if there is receptivity in the one who receives."⁷ Again, the following exchange of letters took place in November 1933 between Nirodbaran and Sri Aurobindo:

Nirod: When we receive flowers from the Mother, are we to aspire for the things they symbolise, or are these things given with the flowers?

Sri Aurobindo: There is no fixed rule. Sometimes it is the one, sometimes the other. But even when the thing is given, it is given in power - it has to be realised. by the sadhak in consciousness, and for that aspiration is necessary. ⁸

The Mother herself consistently refused to imprison the dynamic yogic import of the flowers, and she rightly took the view that it was for her to

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decide in each particular case how exactly the blessings-flower should be charged with power and purpose. There is, for example, the white champak which in the early days of the Ashram she named Psychological Perfection. The champak has five distinct petals which were supposed to signify the psychological virtues of sincerity, faith (or faithfulness), aspiration, devotion and surrender. But years later, the Mother explained:

...to tell you my secrets, every time I give it to someone, they are not always the same psychological perfections. That depends on people's needs. Even to the same person I may give at different times different psychological perfections; ... it depends on the circumstances and needs.⁹

III

With this background concerning the Ashram flower-cult, it will be easier to appreciate the importance of the Flower Game instituted by the Mother in 1929. It was to be a relaxation with a serious purpose. The Mother would arrange some flowers (whose yogic names were known to them all), and leave it to the sadhaks to fill in the blanks and complete the sentence. Evening after evening there were flowers in their new permutations and combinations - and the finished sentence had always a relevance to the sadhana. Like a few swaras in music making a variety of ragas and kritis! The Mother had the clue, of course, and when a sadhak managed to stumble upon it and complete the sentence, he received a reward, which was a slab of chocolate, perhaps, or something else. For example, on 22 September 1929, there was an assortment of three flowers: Divine Solicitude, Disinterested Work, Transformation. The full sentence as conceived by the Mother was: "Divine solicitude is supporting you in the disinterested work through which you will attain transformation."¹⁰ Some resourceful linking-up of the key-words (the names of the flowers) was always possible, and the disciples had a go at the exercise and submitted their entries to the Mother. The one identical with - or closest to - the sentence the Mother had in mind won the prize. "It so happened," says Sethna, "that everyone of us had on at least one occasion the correct sentence implanted into our heads by her! What was thus demonstrated was not exactly our intuitiveness but her power to make us intuitive when wanted."¹¹ Amal's prize, when he came first, was a box of cough­pastilles named Fiama; and Champaklal came first too, once, his entry falling short of the correct answer by only one word. While some of the Mother's sentences were rather long, others were more compact, and all were pointed towards success in the sadhana:

Love the Victor will manifest when there will be established - through the five-fold psychological perfection, the love of the physical being for the

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Divine - and when, through loving consecration, there will be a complete faithfulness to the Divine. (24.9.1929)

Only to those who have a true humility will power be given. (10.10.1929) The power of Agni will keep the aspiration flaming in the physical being. Then can be founded and established in a vital opened to Radha's influence the true supramentalised friendship with the Divine. (12.10.1929)

Approach the Divine with loving gratitude and you will meet the Divine's Love. (14.10.1929)

Peace in the physical cells leads first to health and then to transformation.(22.10.1929)

In the sincerity of your effort towards silence lies the assurance of a purified mind (9.11.1929)

Turn your consciousness to the Supramental Light and let the Supramental influence permeate, through a pure mind, your sex centre. Then you will obtain mastery over the sex centre. (13.11.1929)

With aesthetic taste and vital purity build up vital harmony. This will make possible the manifestation of the supramental beauty in the physical. (14.11.1929)

Let an integral offering of your being be the form of your purified worship. (10.12.1929)

Let gold be turned to the service of the Divine; so it will get purified and take its true place in Krishna's play in the material. (26.4.1930)¹²

There was, indeed, no end to the varieties of affirmation and exhortation that the flowers could be made to articulate!

IV

Unlike the Flower Game, which had superficially a crossword puzzle look, the reading of a passage from one of Sri Aurobindo's classics, opened at random, seemed a very chancy thing. People have found clues to conduct or timely solace or guidance in a moment of crisis by a sudden sampling of the Bible, the Guru Granth Sahib, Shakespeare's Complete Works or even Robinson Crusoe. In the Prosperity Room, the books thus sampled were the Arya volumes containing The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and other writings of Sri Aurobindo, as also books like Essays on the Gita already reissued in book form. These adventures in random sampling went on from 18 March to 2 May 1931. The procedure was that one of those present (including the Mother) would concentrate for a few minutes and open the selected volume with a paper-cutter or a finger, and read the passage thus alighted upon. It may very well be asked whether this was anything more than playing with chance. But the Mother herself, In after-years, was to give a wholly convincing answer. Anyone is free to seek this

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kind of occult guidance: either because one has a baffling inner problem and wants its solution, or because one seeks an escape out of one's imprisonment in ambiguities, or yet because, quite simply, one is anxious to get at the keys to the Book's Vaults of Knowledge. The Book is at hand, and it is opened, preferably with a paper-knife:

...while you are concentrated you insert it in the book and with the tip indicate something. Then, if you know how to concentrate, that is to say, if you really do it with an aspiration to have an answer, it always comes.

For, in books of this kind (Mother shows The Synthesis of Yoga), books of revelation, there is always an accumulation of forces - at least of higher mental forces, and most often of spiritual forces of the highest knowledge.... Now, you, when you are sincere and have an aspiration, you emanate a certain vibration, the vibration of your aspiration which goes and meets the corresponding force in the book, and it is a higher consciousness which gives you the answer.

Everything is contained potentially. Each element of a whole potentially contains what is in the whole .... Sri Aurobindo represented a totality of comprehension and knowledge and power; and everyone of his books is at once a symbol and a representation .... Therefore, if you concentrate on the book, you can, through the book, go back to the source.¹³

A sentence contains the potentiality of a Book, and the Book the :potentiality of the Power that was its creator. Thus, the apparently fortuitous link with a chance-directed passage becomes really a linking up with the Power and the glory of the creator-spirit behind the Book itself. As the Mother viewed it, then, it was not just a game of chance, or an ingenious amusement, or a sophisticated form of distraction:

You may do it just "like that", and then nothing at all happens to you, you have no reply and it is not interesting. But if you do it seriously, if seriously your aspiration tries to concentrate on this instrument - it is like a battery, isn't it, which contains energies ... well, naturally, the energy which is there - the union of the two forces, the force given out by you and that accumulated in the book - will guide your hand ... it will guide you exactly to the thing that expresses what you ought to know" ¹⁴

V

It was thus a potent spiritual exercise in which the Mother engaged the sadhaks in those distant evenings of 1931 for a continuous period of almost six weeks. A number of passages were spotted out by sadhaks like Nolini, Amrita, Pavitra, Dyuman, Chinmayi, Rajangam, Sethna, Purushottam, Datta and by the Mother herself. Every time, whatever the volume

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opened, a seminal passage was located - a passage that was like the centre of the Aurobindonian universe, with widening circles fanning out towards the Infinite. In inspired writing like Sri Aurobindo's, the centre was apparently everywhere, and the circumference was nowhere. For example, on 6 April 1931, the Mother herself lighted upon this passage from the Arya:

The knower of Brahman has not only the joy of light, but gains something immense as the result of his knowledge, brahmavid āpnoti.

What he gains is that highest, that which is supreme; he gains the highest being, the highest consciousness, the highest wideness and power of being, the highest delight; brahmavid āpnoti param. ¹⁵

This is from Sri Aurobindo's "Readings from the Taittiriya Upanishad", and the passage indicates what we may hope for from the knowledge of Brahman: nothing less than the highest in being, consciousness. wideness. power and delight. Four days later, the Mother chose, first a passage from Essays on the Gita ("Slay then desire; put away attachment to the possession and enjoyment of outward things ... "), and next, this from The Yoga and Its Objects: "For those who can make the full surrender from the beginning, there is no question; their path is utterly swift and easy." Slay desire, and make total surrender: doesn't this sum up the whole secret of Yoga?

On 4 April 1931, Amrita had found a passage in Essays on the Gita describing the role of the Avatar. Wasn't Amrita concentrating, when he was about to open the page, on what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the twin Avatars were doing to him and to the other sadhaks and the rest of humanity? Why were they bearing the burden of earth-nature and treading its dolorous way? The answer was provided by the passage Amrita lighted upon:

The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic. disinterested, impersonal, universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the divine love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fill the consciousness of the human being and replace the limited egoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego into infinity and universality, out of birth into immortality. He comes as the divine power and love which calls men to itself, so that they may take refuge in that and no longer in the insufficiency of their human wills and the strife of their human fear wrath. and passion, and liberated from all this unquiet and suffering may live in the calm and bliss of the Divine.¹⁶

A laborious search may not have yielded an answer as concise, comprehensive and authoritative; it was Amrita's strength of aspiration that had summoned so definitive an answer.

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Likewise, when Amal Kiran came upon this passage in The Synthesis of Yoga on the Ego and the advantages accruing from its annulment, he was possibly concentrating on .the need to come to terms with his own far from passive ego, and seeking light from the Arya:

When the ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant's groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity and learns to trust itself to that which transcends itself, that is its salvation. The apparent freedom and self-assertion of the personal being to which it is so profoundly attached, conceals subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which it has made extraneous to itself. The self­abnegation of the ego is its self-fulfilment; its self-surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation and perfect freedom.¹⁷

Amal had got the perfect answer to his most pertinent question! As for Nolini, what should he choose but passages from the Kutsa-Angirasa hymns to the Mystic Fire as rendered into English by Sri Aurobindo:

This is the fire of our sacrifice! May we have strength to kindle it to its height, may it perfect our thoughts. In this all that we give must be thrown that it may become a food for the gods; this shall bring to us the godheads of the infinite consciousness who are our desire.

Let us gather fuel for it, let us prepare for it offerings, let us make ourselves conscious ....

God, thy faces are everywhere! thou besiegest us on every side with thy being. Bum away from us the sin! ...

As in a ship over the ocean, bear us over into thy felicity. Bum away from us the sin!¹⁸

Nolini must have concentrated and aspired as he opened the volume, for the progress not only of himself, but of the entire collectivity that was the Ashram. And, in response, the ancient Rishis gave the right words of aspiration and consecration, and in the charged atmosphere of the Prosperity Room, the words reverberated with a matchless potency.

VI

If the random sampling of Sri Aurobindo's writings under the pressure of concentration made the sadhak and the Divine sharers in the game, one making the call and the other responding appropriately, there were other games that had the shape of mini slip-tests for the sadhaks conducted by the Mother. Thus on one occasion the Mother asked the sadhaks in the Prosperity Room to answer the question "What is Yoga?" There were fourteen impromptu efforts at a definition, and happily these were preserved both by Champaklal and Amal.

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The latter didn't note down the names of the sadhaks against the respective definitions, and speaking about the event 40 years later,. he was driven to adroit guess-work. but quite a few are seen to be real hits, for they can be compared with the fuller record kept by Champaklal. Amal's general comment on the definition is shrewd and suggestive:

It is interesting to note how various individuals respond. to the spiritual call and envisage the integral Life. Some of the definitions incline to be philosophical in their terms, others bring out more feelingly the Ideal, while still others try to catch the actual working of Yoga in general, and the remainder hint the inner psychic movement in a purely personal mode.¹⁹

Here are ten of the fourteen definitions as noted by Champaklal:

To feel a warmth and a glow in the heart in my relation with You. (Amal)

Transformation of my consciousness in terms of the consciousness of the Mother. (Amrita)

To live in Mother and to know Mother's Will. (Champaklal)

To do as Mother directs us to do. (Chandulal)

A series of experiences which the individual soul feels from the time of its contact with the Divine up to the union with the Divine. (Dara)

Not to hinder Mother in making the best possible of us. (Duraiswami)

To be in complete union with You. (Dyuman)

To live only for Mother as if nobody and nothing else existed. (Lalita)

Divinising life. (Nolini)

To return home. (Pavitra)²⁰

Seven out of the fourteen definitions pointedly mention the Mother, and even in the others there is the clear sense or feeling for the Divine. According to Amal, the "five prominent workers" of the Mother at the time - though in different ways - were Dyuman, Chandulal, Champaklal, Duraiswarni and Datta, and it is obvious from the definitions of the first four that, for them, the Yoga meant only service of the Mother, being a plastic instrument in her hands, being in full rapport with her and feeling totally consecrated to her.

VII

Another exercise set by the Mother was "What do you want?", and this question also elicited a few revealing answers:

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An all surrendering love by which the whole vital being becomes purified and one-pointed. (Amal)

I pray constantly to Him to give me the realisation of the harmony between the inner and the outer that I may devote myself entirely and truly to the Mother. (Amrita)

Right attitude. (Champaklal)

Deep and complete Faith in all the parts (even in the physical cells). (Chandulal)

To be taken right into the Beyond in surrender. (Datta)

In the perfect peace the descent of the supramental light in the physical. (Dyuman)

Full conversion and consecration of the physical consciousness. Liberation from all sexual impulses and desires. (Pavitra)²¹

There is an obvious sincerity behind the words, a sincerity doubled with truthfulness.

Yet another theme was "Realisation", and among the fourteen entries noted by Champaklal are the following:

Let Agni lead you to Realisation. (Amal)

The Star of your Realisation is rising. (Dutta)

Prayer will lead you to Realisation. (Duraiswami)

Your Faith is the straightest way to Realisation. (Dyuman)

Keep burning in you the Flame that leads to Realisation. (Lalita)

Through Skill in Works you will reach Realisation. (Purushottam)

Pray for Realisation. (Rajangam)

Agni (Flame), Faith, Prayer, Karma Yoga (skill in works) - any of these will lead you to the Star of your Realisation!²²

On still another occasion, when the sadhaks were asked to record their most Valuable experience in the context of the Integral Yoga, Champaklal it he was constantly conscious of the Mother's Grace, that he felt a sense of unity with her, and that his only aspiration was that' 'the exterior being with all its energy should be entirely consecrated to the service of the Mother".²³. Just like Champaklal!!

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CHAPTER 22

Integral Sadhana

I

Some of the Mother's evening talks during 1930-31 in the Prosperity Room were recorded by Amal Kiran, and were published twenty years after as Words of the Mother, Third Series. Reminiscing about them, the Mother said on 14 May 1951, "We were a small group of twelve to sixteen, gathering regularly." She had often given them "the peace", but the sadhaks couldn't retain that blissful experience for long.¹ And yet the experiment of replenishment had gone on time and again!

There are twenty-five short talks, followed by a bunch of short writings culled from the Mother's answers to some disciples. The main exhortation in the talks is a call to the sadhaks to be open always, not to the physical, the lower vital, the emotional or the higher vital, or the double-edged mental, but to the psychic or the soul: "To dwell in the psychic is to be lifted above all greed."²To be thus poised in the psychic is to have the lines of communication with the Divine open, open always and in all things and persons; and there can be no upsets then, no regrets, no revolts:

The psychic is a steady flame that burns in you, soaring towards the Divine and carrying with it a sense of strength which breaks down all oppositions. When you are identified with it you have the feeling of the divine truth.³

The normal ego or individuality is really an abnormal siege of confusions and distractions, a closed and murky space only occasionally illumined by reflected flashes from within. This erratic and self-defeating ordinary life should first be exceeded by the discovery of the psychic or the true soul within: that will be the beginning of one's divine life on the earth.

To seek and find one's true self and to offer it wholeheartedly to the Divine is the whole secret of the sadhana. "Surrender," says the Mother, "is the decision taken to hand over the responsibility of your life to the Divine." For this surrender to be total and effective, all one's actions should be unified around the psychic will:

Patiently you have to go round your whole being, exploring each nook and corner, facing all those anarchic elements in you which are waiting for their psychological moment to come up. And it is only when you have made the entire round of your mental, vital and physical nature, persuaded everything to give itself to the Divine and thus achieved an absolute unified consecration that you put an end to your difficulties. ⁴

The whole push to Yoga commences because there is deep disgust with things as they are: the weariness, the fever, the fret, the sordidness, the

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ignorance; and one hankers after something infinitely better, the New Dawn. In this situation there is nothing to renounce, for nothing in the existing order is in any way attractive or worth keeping. A clean sweep of it all - and, then, the Next Future!

II

In one of her talks, the Mother showed the flower - Aspiration in the Physical for the Divine's Love - and explained that such aspiration should exclude all the lower forms of love. In itself, physical nature is but a darkness, and without the light of the psychic its education cannot start. The Mother's clear guideline is that the sadhak should first tackle this native darkness of the physical:

Illumine the darkness of your physical consciousness with the intuition and aspiration of your more refined parts and keep on doing so till it realises how futile and unsatisfactory is its hunger for the low ordinary things, and turns spontaneously towards the truth.⁵

The whole thrust of the Mother's argument in these talks is not for suppression, which will be merely negative, but rather for elevation and transformation, a far more difficult as also creative achievement. There are elemental forces in the universe that are also at play within ourselves. To indulge their every caprice is bad, and to suppress them altogether is equally bad. What then? -

What you should do is to throw the doors of your being wide open to the Divine. The moment you conceal something, you step straight into Falsehood. The least suppression on your part pulls you immediately down into unconsciousness.⁶

The crux of the problem is to rise from the lower human (or still lower bestial) to the higher divine consciousness. But how exactly is one to know that one has in fact risen to the higher consciousness? Doubtless it will be an exhilarating but ineffable state of poise and peace and power, but it is not possible for the mere mind, to measure or formulate its nature. And yet the experience will be unmistakable:

The true test is the direct experience of the Divine Consciousness in whatever you do. It is an unmistakable test, because it changes your being completely ....The whole universe will wear a new face and you yourself as well as your perception and vision of things will be metamorphosed. ⁷

In the Ashram itself, the simple test would be whether the sadhak could act, instinctively as it were, in accordance with the Mother's intentions.8 For the rest, one must do one's best to contain and reduce one's ego progressively and tune in to the Divine Will:

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The energy in you which is deformed into vital desire but which is originally the urge towards realisation must unite with the Divine Will, so that allyour power of volition mingles with it as a drop of water with the sea.⁹

III

In another talk, the Mother refers to two of the chronic maladies of the vital: the failure of stamina, and the itch for praise and flattery. Given to too much love of ease, comfort and quick results, the vital lacks endurance and perseverance; but unless one can endure - unless one can persevere fight on and last out-- one is hopelessly lost:

Kick your vital the moment it complains, because there is no other way of getting out of the petty consciousness which attaches so much importance to creature comforts and social amenities instead of asking for the Light and the Truth.¹⁰

The gluttony for endless praise is another symptom of vitalistic sickness. Why should one bother about what a so-called V.I.P. or some self-styled critic or censor or adjudicator says about one's work which is verily one's precious life-blood itself offered to the Supreme? Acceptance by the Divine, and the approbation of men and women of Truth, - these alone should matter. Once the pure Agni of aspiration burns steadily within, one develops "a loathing for the cheap praise which formerly used to gratify"; and with this conversion of the vital under Agni's influence, one is also able to face one's difficulties and ordeals - "you simply chase away depression with a smile. "¹¹

The vital or the life-force is in itself not a thing to be decried, for without it there would be no impulse whatsoever to change: "The body would be inert, just like a stone, without the force infused into it by the vital. "12 But the vital must shed its native diffidence, or tendency towards inertia, as well as its insatiable hunger for praise, and raise itself on the new foundation of Faith in the Aurobindonian vision of integral change and transformation:

Never for an instant does it [the converted vital] vacillate in its belief that the mighty work of Change taken up by Sri Aurobindo is going to culminate in success. For that indeed is a fact; there is not a shadow of doubt as to the issue of the work we have in hand. It is no mere experiment but an inevitable manifestation of the Supramental. The converted vital has prescience of the victory .... ¹³

One imperative reason advanced by the Mother (in another talk on the subject)

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for the conversion of the vital in this life itself is that otherwise, death, "the different personalities" in the individual "fall apart rushing hither and thither to seek their own suitable environments"; but the converted vital, integrated with the whole personality, could preserve continuity even after death:

The artist, the philosopher and other developed persons who have organised, individualised and to a certain extent converted their vital being can be said to survive, because they have brought into their exterior consciousness some shadow of the psychic entity which is immortal by its very nature and whose aim is to progressively build up the being around the central Divine Will."¹⁴

IV

In her brief talk on "Resurrection", the Mother gives the word an Aurobindonian connotation. Resurrection is not just a new lease of life after the holocaust of death. It is really the rise of the Greater Dawn after the plunge into the inconscience of the Night: "the Divine Consciousness awakes from the unconsciousness into which it has gone down and lost itself".¹⁵Even in the utmost depths of darkness, the supreme Light lies hidden, and Resurrection is merely the reawakening and the resurgence of that Light and Consciousness. In the opening canto of Savitri, there is an impressionistic description of the hour before the Dawn:

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.......

A fathomless zero occupied the world.¹⁶

Presently there is the first stir of returning consciousness, and soon it gathers momentum, and the movement towards another dawn is initiated with a magisterial sureness and rhythm:

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;

A nameless movement, an unthought Idea

Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,

Something that wished but knew not how to be,

Teased the Inconscience to wake Ignorance ....

An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change ....

One lucent corner windowing hidden things

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.

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Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame!¹⁷

The idea is the same, but the crystalline clarity of the Mother's simple prose is here translated into sublime symbolistic poetry.

V

In yet another talk, the Mother draws a distinction between the "psychic presence", a universal phenomenon, and the "psychic being", which is developed in Homo sapiens alone. What is a veiled presence at first becomes individualised as a psychic being, and there are other likely developments still. For, as the Mother said in the course of one of her talks many years later:

The centre of organisation and transformation is always the presence of the psychic in the body ....

Earthly life is the place of progress .... And it is the psychic which carries the progress over from one life to another, by organising its own evolution and development itself. ¹⁸

And this evolution can be carried to the point where an involutionary force or power meets the ascending one:

In man alone there is the possibility of the psychic being growing to its full stature even so far as to be able in the end to join and unite with a descending being, a godhead from above.¹⁹

This phenomenon is described more explicitly in the Mother's talk in the Playground on 16 September 1953:

The psychic being is the result of evolution, that is to say, evolution of the divine Consciousness which spread into Matter and slowly lifted up Matter, made it develop to return to the Divine. The psychic being was formed by this divine centre progressively through all the births. There comes a time when it reaches a kind of perfection .... Then, most often, as it has an aspiration for realisation, for a greater perfection to manifest yet better the Divine, it generally draws towards itself a being from the involution, that is to say, one of those entities belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls Overmind, who comes then to incarnate in this psychic being. It can be one of those entities men generally call gods.²⁰

It is no doubt true that one is not ordinarily aware of the psychic being, as one is aware of the body, the life-impulses or the mental processes. It is Faith that first makes one look for the psychic being or soul or true self

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behind the egoistic desire-self; but once started on the quest, Faith helps one to gate-crash into the psychic citadel and station oneself at the psychic centre. What happens next is little less than a veritable revolution:

This is an opening of the inner being to the divine Presence in the psychic centre, and there you know at every moment not only what must be done but why it should be done and how it should be done, and you have the vision of the truth of things behind their appearances ... you see things from within outwards, and the outer existence becomes an expression, more or less deformed, of what you see within .... Instead of being outside the world and seeing it as something outside you, you are inside the world and see outer forms expressing in a more or less clumsy fashion what is within, which for you is the Truth. ²¹

VI

Of exceptional importance is the talk on the "Power of Right Attitude". It is indeed a law of life that defeatism is father to the fact of defeat, even as nothing succeeds as the genuine will to succeed. What you aspire for you achieve in the end; what you fear may happen, does alas actually happen, rather sooner than later! Examining the implications of the law, the Mother offers this piece of pertinent advice:

If, in the presence of circumstances that are about to take place, you can take the highest attitude possible - that is, if you put your consciousness in contact with the highest consciousness within reach, you can be absolutely sure that in that case it is the best that can happen to you ....

... Always keep in touch with the divine presence, try to bring it down ­ and the very best will always take place.²²

In other words, if there is this constant and utter rapport with the Divine, what looks like miracles can happen; and still they will not be miracles ­ thwey will only be the law at that level of consciousness.

What is said above may be illustrated by a series of happenings towards the end of November 1930. Sahana Devi has recorded how the Mother came one day to visit a house on the sea-front in Pondicherry where Sahana's sister Amiya and her two sons were staying. On learning that they intended to sail shortly for Burma, the Mother looked at the disturbed sea from a window and suddenly said: "It is better not to be on the sea now." The voyage was postponed accordingly, and on the very day they were to have started there broke out a cyclone:

It was a catastrophic storm uprooting many trees and razing houses to the ground, many roofs of houses were blown away. We could hardly keep our

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doors and windows shut, the bolts being useless, such was the fury of the storm.²³

That very night, hearing the "tremendous noise and splash of rain all about the place", the Mother went to Sri Aurobindo's room with the intention of helping him to shut the windows - but this was what she saw:

I just opened his door and found him sitting quietly at his desk, writing. There was such a solid peace in the room that nobody would have dreamed that a cyclone was raging outside. All the windows were wide open, not a drop of rain was coming inside.²⁴

This was no miracle; this was only the law at Sri Aurobindo's own level of consciousness. He had to will nothing, do nothing; Nature adjusted its movements to his sovereign peace and poised activity.

VII

Of the remaining talks, each has its distinct enlightening message that is of direct relevance to the Integral Yoga. There is this question, for example: What is the reaction of consciousness when one is in the presence of the Sublime and the Beautiful? The Mother herself makes this disarming confession:

I remember occasions when I used to be moved to tears on seeing even children, even babies do something that was most divinely beautiful and simple. Feel that joy and you will be able to profit by the Divine's presence in your midst.²⁵

The Mother certainly didn't subscribe to the old ascetic view that beauty had no place in Yoga; she felt, on the contrary, that "in the physical world, of all things it is beauty which best expresses the Divine ... it is natural to speak of it as a 'priestess', who interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. "²⁶It may almost be said that there is a pristine sacerdocy in the Sublime and the Beautiful that lifts us above ourselves to something far higher, that takes us as it were to the very doorsteps of the Divine.

In another talk, the Mother advises us, when we are in trouble, "to learn to go deep within" or "to step back into yourself". ²⁷ In a later talk, scientific knowledge is differentiated from yogic (or spiritual) knowledge. Contrasting Shankara's rnāyāvāda with Sri Aurobindo's world-view, the Mother explains how the former had "a glimpse of the true consciousness", and hence declared the phenomenal world to be false or verily non­existing, an illusion; but Sri Aurobindo, while perceiving the falsehood, realised also "that it has to be replaced and not abandoned as an illusion".²⁸ In other words, far more important than the feat of finding God

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or the Ultimate in the life Beyond is the adventure of fulfilling and realising the Divine in this life. Returning to this question during one of her later Playground conversations, the Mother said on 1 February 1956:

There are those ... who consider life and the world an illusion, and think it necessary to leave them behind in order to find the Divine, whose nature, they say, is the opposite of that of existence. So Sri Aurobindo says that perhaps they will find God outside life but will not find the Divine in life. He contrasts the two things. In one case it is an extra-terrestrial and unmanifested Divine, and in the other it is the Divine who is manifested in life and whom one can find again through life.²⁹

And in a universe that is still evolving, it should surely be expected that the sent falsities would diminish more and more and the divine manifestation become increasingly a matter of daily experience.

There are other talks too: "Chance"; "Different Kinds of Space and 'Time - Fearlessness on the Vital Plane"; "Knowledge by Unity with the Divine - The Divine Will in the World"; "True Humility - Supramental Plasticity - Spiritual Rebirth"; and "The Supramental Realisation". "Chance", says the Mother, "can only be the opposite of order and harmony"; and when the Supramental Truth-Consciousness alone comes to prevail, chance will have no place at all. In our lower nature, the supreme Truth is obscured, and conflicting forces act at cross-purposes and precipitate what we call chances. But this flawed old world-order must change, and is changing, and we are witnessing the throes of the birth of a new world-order:

It is the struggle between the old and the new that forms the crux of the Yoga; but if you are bent on being faithful to the supreme Law and Order revealed to you, the parts of your being belonging to the domain of chance will, however slowly, be converted and divinised. ³⁰

In Yoga, it is a constant intestine struggle between the Old that will not die and the New that is as yet powerless to be born, between the entrenched layers of Darkness and the invading rays of Light, between the unyielding Asura and the uncompromising Divine. As the Mother said in her talk on "Knowledge by Unity with the Divine":

Life is a battlefield in which the Divine succeeds in detail only when the lower nature is receptive to its impulsions instead of siding with the hostile forces .... What you have to do is to give yourself up to the Grace of the Divine; for, it is under the form of Grace, of Love, that it has consented to uplift the universe after the first involution was established. ³¹

This brings us back to the cardinal Aurobindonian formula for yoga sadhana that opens his inspired little book, The Mother:

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There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.³²

Avatar after avatar has added rung upon rung to the Ladder of consciousness, and the step that is being added now is the Supramental. But the whole aim of the Integral Yoga is both to reach the Supramental and join this summit to the bottom, thereby bringing about a total change and transfiguration of human and terrestrial life.

The talks cover indeed the whole arc of the Aurobindonian integral sadhana. Responding to the mood of the moment, the Mother scours the ocean of spirituality and brings out pearls of great price as instruction, edification, exhortation and intimations of profound significance. There is much wisdom in little space, and even after several decades, the talks still retain their steady glow of light and sharpness of continued relevance.

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CHAPTER 23

A God's Labour

I

From the beginning of 1926, the exhausting work of managing the community of sadhaks gathered around Sri Aurobindo, and keeping in touch with their sadhana had been devolving more and more on the Mother, but this silent transfer of responsibility and authority became visible only after 24 November, the Siddhi Day. There was also the additional circumstance of the steady growth of the Ashram community year by year: a more than fourfold increase during the 1926-31 five-year period. Some few left the Ashram, but many more were coming in. All this generated the pressures of expansion, new houses, new services, new departmental heads, and the constant concern to make both ends meet. It is true the Mother was Sakambari herself, as Vashishta Ganapati Muni had declared, and hence her touch betokened largesse and abundance. As Barindra Kumar Ghose later acknowledged, after 1926, "The Yogic Power of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo opened wide the doors of the unostentatious Ashram, so long in the grip of want and difficulty, to the steady inflow of sufficiency and prosperity. Spontaneous offerings came from disciples and admirers."¹

On the other hand, the economy of the Ashram was important only as the base for the individual and col1ective Yoga; and it was integral Yoga too, permitting no exclusions, no lop-sided developments, no violent oscillations between sordid indulgence and extreme asceticism. The Mother had to body forth the col1ective effort of the Ashram, and she had also to deploy the necessary force to advance the sadhana of the steadily growing number of disciples. On the administrative side, there erupted unavoidably a variety of problems.

One of the purely personal problems came from the fact that not al1 the sadhaks could converse in French, or even in English. A dozen or more languages were spoken in the Ashram, and the Mother had to turn them into a viable harmony of tongues. She once told Champaklal: "I understand all the languages ... but the man who wants to say something must be clear in his mind, absolutely clear." The Mother had a way of concentrating and entering into the minds of others, and reading what went on there like an open book. "When I want to know about the sadhaks," she said, "I enter into their consciousness and I know what I want to know."²

The Ashram community, again, included men and women of divers races, religions, creeds, castes. But they were in the Ashram, not as representatives of a nation, religion, creed or caste, but simply as disciples of Sri Aurobindo, trying to practise his Yoga. The Mother didn't like

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chronic backward glances at what one had been in the past, for that would only keep alive "an old and wrong mental attitude".³ No doubt old adhesions died hard, and people often wanted to keep one leg in the past while stretching the other towards the future, as it were, to have the best of both worlds! She would have liked her disciples rather to transcend their old affiliations at one go, but alas, there was much recalcitrance, and she had to make allowances for human frailties. All that called for infinite patience and a generous understanding little short of the Divine.

Aside from the difficulties caused by the polyglot nature of the Ashram community - an advantage, certainly, when the larger aim of the Yoga, world-transformation, was taken into consideration, but a disadvantage on a shorter view - there was the complicated problem of the organisation itself. There was the mass of correspondence between the Ashram and the outside world, and between the sadhaks and Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. As Secretary of the Ashram, Nolini Kanta Gupta, not only distributed the replies of Sri Aurobindo and of the Mother to the various sadhaks every morning, he also rode on a bicycle once a week to the French Post Office to get the Mother's foreign mail in two or three white canvas bags. Pavitra helped the Mother in her foreign correspondence, and was even otherwise a constant help. Amrita looked to many of the details of the internal management. Reports from each department came to the Mother every evening, and urgent matters at almost any time. She took careful note of the work done, and often gave instructions in writing as to the work to be completed next day. She had thus to have her hand on the pulse of every activity and of every person connected with the Ashram.

II

There was, then, the sadhana itself. The Mother's daily routine allowed for four or five hours' contact with the sadhaks - for darshan, for collective meditation, for pranam, for individual interviews. There were the visits to the sadhaks' rooms, the drives in the evenings. In the early months after the Siddhi Day, the daily collective meditation was the time when the Mother invoked the Overmind gods into the sadhaks, and there were brilliant - and, occasionally, startling - results. Several had visions - some slipped into trance-like states - and a few had occasional nightmares. It was as though the divine and the anti-divine forces were invisibly caught in an intestine conflict which was also reflected in the life of the sensitive Ashram community. The nucleus of a New World was being fashioned in the Ashram, and the forces of the Old World were up in arms against it! Anilbaran Roy has recorded how one night (12 December 1926) he had a fierce nightmarish attack by the dark Shakti supporting falsehood, strife and death. During the afternoon meditation, three days later, he saw "a

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ball of golden light on a semicircular base of blue above another semicircle of red light.⁴ He has also recorded how, one evening at the time of meditation, a sadhak acted as one possessed by a great force of consciousness and moved his hands and fingers in "a trance-like hypnotic way" and touched one after another as they bowed to the Mother and spoke about them half-audibly but with a "great force and effectiveness". ⁵ There was the Soup ceremony too in the evenings, with its vast potentiality for a quickening of the pace of the sadhana. Once, on being asked about its significance, the Mother explained:

Have you not heard of Divine Communion in this manner? My flesh and blood are to go to you and form your flesh and blood, but instead of actually giving my flesh and blood to you, I sip this soup, put my force into it and give it to be drunk by you.

It was as though the body and spirit of the Mother permeated the very cells and tissues of the sadhaks' being.⁶

There were, then, the fifteen Sunday morning conversational sessions in 1929. There was the tantalising Flower Game too, and there were talks again in the evenings during 1930-31, and other games as well. Once, says Sethna, it was a matter of balancing an orange on one's head; and the Mother herself did this surprisingly well:

It was a revelatory spectacle, showing how one whom we considered the Supreme Divine incarnate could come down to a funny game like this ... whenever I recollect the sight I think of... the second stanza of Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God .... A figuration of Maheshwari, the Goddess of my first vision, seems also in these lines, and the last of them -

Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour -

calls forth from me, as an equally profound disclosure of the sheer Divine, a new phrase, now too about a "golden Mystery":

Lemon on the head of the Mother, our host of the marvellous Hour! ⁷

In short, there was a quickened tempo of activity in the Ashram throughout 1929 and 1930, and this aw a further heightening or intensification during 1931, and all the Mother's time was filled with ceaseless activity of one or another kind. More sadhaks, more visitors, more problems; more buildings and other property to look after; more services to sustain and regulate; more maladies, inner and outer, and more and more complaints, real or imaginary, to tackle ... endless grouses, endless explanations! Why did the Mother smile - why didn't she smile - when somebody made pranam to her? Why did she go into a trance just when she was about to give the soup-cup? Why did she ... why didn't she ... the queries seemed to multiply. Most people wouldn't - or couldn't - understand the truth of the matter. As T. V. Kapali Sastry saw it:

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Her choice is a free choice, Her Will is the only Free-Will. She chooses, accepts or rejects, not for any human reason but for Her own reason. An dthat Reason is Her own Will, free and far above all our human considerations of worthiness or unworthiness. This is the sense of sarva-tantra-svatantra.⁸

While the Mother was divine-human (divine in essence though human in form and outer activity), the disciples - some of them - were yet all too human, and the days followed one after another with their 24-hour load of work, misunderstanding and reaction of consciousness. The daily Pranam, for instance, far from opening the doors of spiritual perception, only too often happened to stimulate in the sadhaks pettifogging speculations. In Nirodbaran's candid words:

Instead of the Pranam being a spiritual function we made it, to our shame, a dramatic function. Far from absorbing what the Mother was giving us, we tried to watch her movements vis-a-vis each sadhak and sadhika - whether she was smiling at the sadhak or was not at all smiling, how much she smiled; if she touched the disciple with one finger or two, or with only the tip of a finger; if she didn't touch him at all .... And the whole ceremony and the entire day were spoilt.⁹

The Mother was certainly divine, but she was after all housed in a human body, a tabernacle sensitised and protected by Yoga, yet a human body still. The schedule of daily engagements was so tight and so taxing that clearly, in a material sense, she was burning the candle at both ends. And one day - 18 October 1931 - she fell suddenly and seriously ill, and from the next day her daily run of activities - Darshan, Meditation, Pranam, Interviews, Talks, Games, the minutiae of Ashram administration - had to be suspended for over four weeks. Then, on 24 November 1931, she resumed her duties, though on a greatly reduced scale.

III

Although the pulse of Ashram life was now beginning to beat again, just as, after 24 November 1926, many a disciple had groused about Sri Aurobindo's withdrawal into seclusion, in October-November 1931 too, the Mother's withdrawal - though for quite other reasons - had caused a good deal of distress and dissatisfaction. As the days passed and still the Mother didn't come out, there were speculations about the Mother's illness. It was rumoured that she was recovering fast and that she could, if she liked, see the sadhaks again. While some of the sadhaks were genuinely anxious, some others were merely impatient, and some petitioned to Sri Aurobindo and asked for light. Where was the harm, they seemed to plead, in the Mother meeting the sadhaks again, receiving

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pranam, and giving her blessings? It needn't prove too tiring, and would help the sadhaks a good deal. Writing to a disciple on 12 November 1931, Sri Aurobindo said that, having had a serious attack, the Mother must "husband her forces in view of the strain the 24th November will mean for her". With a return to the old time-table, a single morning "would exhaust her altogether". With the Mother, a physical contact at the time of Pranam was not "a mere social or domestic meeting with a few superficial movements" that made no difference this or that way:

It means for her an interchange, a pouring out of her forces and a receiving of things good, bad and mixed from them which often involves a great labour of adjustment and elimination and in many cases, though not in all, a severe strain on the body .... I must insist on her going slowly in the resumption of the work and doing only so much at first as her health can bear. ¹⁰

This didn't mean, of course, that the sadhaks had brought about the Mother's illness. Rather was it due, as Sri Aurobindo explained in the course of another letter written four days later, "to a struggle with universal forces which far overpassed the scope of any individual or group of individuals". All the same the illness was a warning against a seemingly too lavish expenditure of the Mother's energies:

Conditions have been particularly arduous in the past owing to the perhaps inevitable development of things, for which I do not hold anyone responsible; but now that the Sadhana has come down to the most material plane on which blows can still be given by the adverse forces, it is necessary to make a change which can best be done by a change in the inner attitude of the Sadhaks .... ¹¹

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - the Mother even more than Sri Aurobindo - had to be at the centre of a struggle with adverse forces, and of a work of change and transformation of the old into a new consciousness. In so far as the Mother was doing the sadhana of the disciples, she had to identify herself with them, in other words sharing their difficulties, even receiving into herself "all the poison in their nature". But she had also to tackle "all the difficulties of the universal earth-Nature, including the possibility of death and disease in order to fight them out". ¹²It was this cumulative strain that had proved a little too much, and precipitated the breakdown. Now there was a clear need to reschedule her daily programme, retaining the essentials but cutting down on the others. Thus, from 24 November 1931 onwards, although the Mother resumed her ministry, it was with a difference; there was to be no harking back to the old spendthrift ways! When this occasioned some murmurs, Sri Aurobindo clarified the position on 7 December 1931:

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As for the Mother drawing back from the old course, routine etc. of her action with regard to the Sadhaks, it was a sheer necessity of the work and the Sadhana. Everything had got into a wrong groove, was ful1 of mixed movements and a mistaken attitude - and consequently things were going on in the same rajaso-tamasic round without any chance of issue - like a squirrel in a cage. The Mother's illness was an emphatic warning that this could not be allowed to go on any longer. A new basis of action and relations has to be built up .... ¹³

He wrote again, three weeks later:

... she was compel1ed by the experience of her il1ness to stand back from the old routine - which had become for most of the Sadhaks a sort of semi­ecclesiastical routine and nothing more .... To resume the soup on the old footing would be to bring back the old conditions and end in a repetition of the same round of wrong movements and the same results. The Mother has been slowly and careful1y taking steps to renew on another footing her control of things after her il1ness .... ¹⁴

Returning to the theme in March 1934, Sri Aurobindo remarked that, since in the way of the Yoga the sadhaks had to be taken inside her personal being and consciousness, their ailments physical and psychological - "their inner difficulties, revolts, outbursts of anger and hatred against her" - were apt to mount attacks on her own body. In some measure at least, this was how she had suffered a serious illness in October­November 1931 on account of "a terribly bad state of the Ashram atmosphere". Sri Aurobindo had then been compelled to "insist on her partial retirement so as to minimise the most concrete part of the pressure upon her".¹⁵

IV

We have no means of knowing how the Mother herself reacted to the sudden set-back in her health in October 1931. That month of withdrawal and tribulation was certainly a period of great anxiety. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had commenced a work of vast significance, nothing less than the structuring of a new heaven and a new earth; and this set-back seemed to cast a question-mark on the entire future of the Yoga of change and transformation of human and earth nature. It asked for all their dual tapasya to beat back the hostile forces, and not only retrieve the lost ground, but also to start the march again towards the supramental horizons.

In the Mother's spiritual diary, Prayers and Meditations, there are but a few entries after her final arrival in Pondicherry on 24 April 1920.

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The one dated 22 June 1920, with reference to some difficulty in life has already been referred to in chapter 14, section V. The next entry is under 6 May 1927, written at a time of crisis six months after the Siddhi Day calling for a fresh affirmation in the face of growing difficulties internal and external:

One must know how to give one's life and also one's death, give one's happiness and also one's suffering, to depend for everything and in all things upon the Divine Dispenser of all our possibilities of realisation, who alone can and will decide whether we shal1 be happy or not, whether we shall live or not, whether we shal1 participate or not in the realisation.

In the integrality and absoluteness of this love, this self-giving, lies the essential condition for perfect peace, the indispensable foundation of constant beatitude. ¹⁶

What though the field be strewn with difficulty and danger? Offer everything - life and death, success and failure, joy and sorrow-- to Him in love and total surrender. Let His Will be done! The result will surely be power, knowledge, love, delight - and the peace that passeth understanding.

Again, more than a year later, on 28 December 1928 there is a tremendous affirmation. The Mother had weathered the storms threatening the Yoga and the Ashram, and what she now wrote had the ring of divine certitude:

There is a Power that no ruler can command; there is a Happiness that no earthly success can bring; there is a Light that no wisdom can possess; there is a Knowledge that no philosophy and no science can master; there is a Bliss of which no satisfaction of desire can give the enjoyment; there is a thirst for Love that no human relation can appease; there is a Peace that one finds nowhere, not even in death.

It is the Power, the Happiness, the Light, the Knowledge, the Bliss, the Love, the Peace that flow from the Divine Grace.¹⁷

With the sanction of Grace, one has everything; without it, one can have nothing. There is a soul here below, and there is the Supreme Grace above. One has only to aspire aright, reject the false, and make complete surrender, ātmasamarpana Divine Grace will do the rest.

From the poise of this centre of certainty, the Mother's ministry took heroic strides during the next three years. For the first time, the Mother's symbol appeared in Sri Aurobindo's The Mother - as if illustrating its meaning and message. * There was already Sri Aurobindo's symbol: the descending triangle signifying the triple truth of Sat-Chit-Ananda and the ascending triangle (formed by life, light and love) of the triple aspiring response from matter; the junction of the triangles forming a square

*For the Mother's own explanation of her symbol, see Collected Works of the Mother, centenary edition, vol. 13, pp. 64-65.

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representing the perfect manifestation and having at its centre the lotus, the Avatar of the Supreme rising from the waters of the Multiplicity or the Creation. The Mother's symbol henceforth published, may be seen as the one primal Power emanating out of itself four major Powers and twelve subsidiary powers of creation. Actually, the two symbols are but two formulations of the same Truth, uncomplicated and immediately suggestive. There is the union of the many in the One, and there is the play of manifestation, alongside of mediation and transcendence. The Mother's symbol, which is a stylised lotus in bloom, has verily reserves of potency. If one must go into greater detail, one may say that the central circle signifies the Divine Consciousness, the four surrounding petals connote Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati, and the twelve outer petals or twelve powers "the vibrations that are necessary for the complete manifestation". Sri Aurobindo also gave his approval to the interpretation of a disciple that the central circle "of the Mother's symbol of Chakra" meant the Transcendental Power, the four inner petals the four powers working from the Supermind to the Overmind, and the twelve outer petals the powers from the Overmind to Intuition and Mind.¹⁸ But of course the real worth of a symbol is in its fusion of connotative richness and aesthetic appeal. "Always the symbol is legitimate," says Sri Aurobindo, "in so far as it is true, sincere, beautiful and delightful, and even one may say that a spiritual consciousness without any aesthetic or emotional content is not entirely or at any rate not integrally spiritual."¹⁹The Mother's symbol has certainly this "integrally spiritual" power, and helps a great deal to spread the Light in the Ashram and outside.

V

To sum up, between 1926 and 1931, there had been initiated certain adventures in consciousness, leading to conquests in the complementary hemispheres of the material and the spiritual. The eruption of the subterranean dark forces, however, had encompassed the breakdown on 18 October 1931. Then followed the lull, the night of dismay and bewilderment, but superseded by the new dawn of 24 November 1931, and on that day the Mother recorded in her diary:

O my Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down into the unfathomable depths of Matter, I have touched with my finger the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity. But in my heart was the Remembrance, from my heart there leaped the call which could arrive to Thee: "Lord, Lord, everywhere Thy enemies appear triumphant; falsehood is the monarch o the world: life without Thee is a death, a perpetual

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hell; doubt has usurped the place of Hope and revolt has pushed out Submission; Faith is spent, Gratitude is not born; blind passions and murderous instincts and a guilty weakness have covered and stifled Thy sweet law of love. Lord, wilt Thou permit Thy enemies to prevail, falsehood and ugliness and suffering to triumph? Lord, give the command to conquer and victory will be there. I know we are unworthy, I know the world is not yet ready. But I cry to Thee with an absolute faith in Thy Grace and I know that Thy Grace will save."

Thus, my prayer rushed up towards Thee; and, from the depths of the abyss, I beheld Thee in Thy radiant splendour; Thou didst appear and Thou saidst to me: "Lose not courage, be firm, be confident, - I COME."²⁰

The prayer had obviously been wrung from the very depths, de profundis. Five distinct but interwoven waves of Thought make the haunting music of this meditative prayer:

(i) I have made this deliberate descent into Matter, but only to accomplish Your work; and I have wrestled with the horror and filth and falsehood of this Nadir of Inconscience;

(ii) Yet my heart is inviolate still on account of my Remembrance of You;

(iii) My heart cried: "Lord, Your enemies - falsehood, doubt, revolt, passion, ugliness - are triumphant everywhere, and life, hope, faith, gratitude and love are in retreat";

(iv) "Lord, give me the command to conquer, and victory will be Thine. Although the world is not ready, I know that Thy Grace will save it";

(v) As I cried to You, I saw You, and I heard You say, "Lose not courage ... I COME."

All the drama of the recent past is here: the entire descent into the Inferno, the unflagging Light in the sanctuary of the Heart, the plenary call from below, the answering Grace from above. In its content and even in its phrasing, Sri Aurobindo's "A God's Labour" dated 1935-36 seems to be of a piece with the Mother's mantric prayer. When Sri Aurobindo read out the poem to the Mother, she is reported to have remarked: "Lord! how could you thus reveal all my secrets?" A God's labour - an avatar role ­ was always like this: hoping to build "a rainbow bridge" between high heavens and the sordid earth, the God descends into the clay, and willingly enacts the human role. But great is the toil, the tribulation and the travail:

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;

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But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my need since the world began ....

My gaping wounds are a thousand and one

And the Titan kings assail,

But I cannot rest till my task is done

And wrought the eternal wil1.²¹

The Mother has passed "beneath the yoke of grief and pain"; she has given "her life and light to balance here the dark account of mortal ignorance.²² She had explored the falsehood "planted deep at the very root of this she had "plunged through the body's alley blind to the nether mysteries"; and she had seen the source of the earth's agonies and "the inner reason of hell". But she was nothing daunted; she would persevere; it was all part of the avatar's role; and she would not rest till her tasks were concluded in accordance with the Divine Will:

A little more and the new life's doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and brighl.²³

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CHAPTER 24

Surrender and Grace

I

At long last, after a month's suspense, anxiety and longing, on the morning of 24 November 1931 the Mother came down, although still convalescing, to accept Pranam and prepare the disciples for the afternoon's Darshan. It was a blissful occasion for the sadhaks. Speaking for the Ashram community as a whole, Sahana Devi thus recalls the occasion:

All this while we were very heavy of heart. When we again met her at Pranam what a joyful day it was! The intensity of our feelings was as thrilling as when we had the occasion of Sri Aurobindo's Darshan. It is quite impossible to express in words the feelings of joy, a joy that is of a quite different quality - as if it was descending from heaven.¹

While this relief, this joy, was universal, there was also the remembrance of things past and comparison with the altered conditions now. One of the sadhaks, Mrityunjoy, while feeling grateful for the Mother's gracious coming, could also see how the form of the Pranam was very much changed:

It was no longer in the room where one could approach Her in privacy, but in the open verandah in the Meditation House, downstairs in front of Amrita's room, where we all sat together and looked at each person approaching the Mother, instead of concentrating on how to stand in Her Presence. No longer different flowers to every person this time; She gave the same flower and only one to each.²

But these minor regrets didn't diminish in any way the delighted relief at the Mother's renewal of her visible ministry. The Mother was graciously mingling in the sadhaks' life-ways again, and they were happy.

II

"In 1932-33 Pranam used to start at 6.30 in the morning," writes Narayan Prasad in Life in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. "From 6 a.m. the sadhaks would pour into the Ashram. When the Meditation Hall got filled with the fumes of resin, incense and sandalwood powder, it would appear as if the concentrated aspiration of the sadhaks was rising high in order to bring about more and more the descent of peace charging the whole atmosphere of the place."³

In the evening, the sadhaks used to gather in the Meditation Hall, and

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the Mother would come down almost to the foot of the staircase, and after the collective meditation, the sadhaks would file up to her and receive her blessings. While giving a flower, the Mother might unpredictably go into a trance which could extend, though only rarely, to almost an hour - which meant that the "blessing hour" would have to be prolonged till midnight or past.

During Pranam following the evening meditation, the sadhaks were not supposed to ask questions or raise any personal problems. The action of the Mother in the meditation was "at once collective and individual"; and her aim was to try "to bring down the right consciousness in the atmosphere of the Ashram". The evening meditation was a "brief period in which all is concentrated in the sole force of the descending Power", and the sadhaks were to feel that they were there "only to concentrate, only to receive, only to be open to the Mother". ⁴It was also an experience of sadhaks that, at the time the Mother came down and gave the meditation, the atmosphere of the Hall extended to the Ashram houses as well. This was hardly surprising because, as Sri Aurobindo explained, when the Mother "concentrated on the inner work," she spontaneously "spread her consciousness over the whole Ashram"⁵ As regards Pranam, it had an individual orientation. "The object of the Pranam," Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple, "is not that Sadhaks should offer a formal or ritual daily homage to the Mother, but that the Sadhaks may receive along with the Mother's blessings whatever spiritual help or influence they are in a condition to receive or assimilate."⁶ The main condition of course was to preserve a quiet and collected atmosphere without the intrusion of questions, doubts and discussions.

Besides these morning and evening opportunities for darshan, pranam, meditation and benediction, the sadhaks were on special occasions granted interviews as well. During the 1932-38 period, many wrote to the Mother or Sri Aurobindo about their personal and yogic problems, and received the necessary guidance in writing. The exceptional interviews, however, were on a different footing altogether. The sadhaks could, if they liked, pour their hearts out, expose their wounded sensibilities and detail their anxieties; and the patient compassionate all-seeing Mother gave a hearing and applied, whenever necessary, the soothing balm of love to the wounds.

But these interviews, being exclusive and private, are shut out from our scrutiny. It was, perhaps, not so much what precisely the sadhak said and what the Mother said that is important, but the fact of the meeting, the exchange and the communion. It was a periodical reaffirmation of the Mother-child spiritual relationship, and on the sadhak's side (and on the Mother's too) it had a basic value. Indeed, what was it for the sadhak except a tryst with the Divine? And for the Mother, wasn't it a gathering of the child in her protective arms, to wipe away the salt tears streaming down its cheeks?

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III

While it may be impossible to reconstruct the whole scene, the charged atmosphere, the mystic-dynamism of the Mother-child relationship, yet the diary-notes of some of the sadhaks help us to infer the kind of problem or situation that usually brought about such meetings. The diary-notes were not meant to be read by others, and one has therefore to approach them with humility, with imagination, with love. Wounds and sensitive spots are to be touched, if at all, only with love. Here, for example, are two entries in K. S. Yenkataraman's diary:

July 23, 1933

Long interview with the Mother. When I asked about my progress, she said: "Cease this asking about progress - feel the Divine everywhere and in everything - first feel it within yourself. .. that you are an integral part of the Divine - strengthen your consecration to the Divine and perfect it and there will be no need for concerning yourself about progress, Establish equanimity and don't feel insulted, for who can insult the Divine?"

January 28, 1936

Interview with the Mother. The main advice she gave me was to use my tongue carefully, that is. not to be indiscreet. She finds my progress satisfactory - is not in favour of my practising Hatha Yoga which I was seriously attempting.⁷

And here are a few extracts from T. Y. Kapali Sastry's spiritual diary relating to this period:

2.3.1933: [Received the flower] SINCERITY*

Morning: pranam time: prayed for intense divine consciousness. Mother answered ....

13.5.1933: FAITH; PSYCHIC FIRE.

Saw the Mother today. Mother decided to give me room in Z. house so that I might go to the terrace in the evenings (to stay there as long as she was on the terrace).

Spoke about skambha.† (Atharva Veda X.7)‡

I had meditation at the Feet, conversation and music ....

*Significances of the flowers given by the Mother are put here in capitals,

†Sastriar used to wait on the roof of his house to watch this 'Moving Column of White ,Light' which always recalled to him the Skambha hymned by the ancient Rishis of the Veda, the Cosmic Pillar, the Spinal Column of the Universe, - the Skambha in which All is rooted.... that upholds and enters into and possesses all this universe. (Coll. Works of Sastriar, Vol. 2, P.180)

‡The Cosmic Pillar that upholds, enters into and possesses all. (ibid,)

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3.9.1934: Saw the Mother. She gave SURRENDER, PEACE IN THE CELLS.

With the Mother: 11.10 to 11.55 a.m.

She was looking into me; I too was quiet with open eyes at Her for a few minutes and then I closed my eyes. She went within (eyes closed). Then, She asked me, "How did you decide?" I said, "I prayed to the Mother 'Put the Resolution into me,' and She has granted it." Then I explained.

She said many interesting things about Death and referred to Amma.* "I love her much, she has been here; she is bound to come to me; of course since you are in the Force, you can be of help by calm, remaining peaceful and collected. That will go to help the soul.. .. "

3.9.1935: The Mother had me at Her feet for 50 minutes. Gave PROTECTION for Amma and SURRENDER for self, saying, "You will receive my help." The whole time was spent in conversation ....

21.3.1936: FIDELITY

Twenty minutes at the feet of the Mother. Two minutes' meditation. The Mother said:

1. The cross is the symbol of transformation. The circle represents the New World.

2. The Light of the Mother: it is not all that see it. Those in whom the inner sense is developed see it.. ..

3. The sense of wideness means that you get out of the ego into wider world. It is not a mental concept.

4. The symbolic forms have value, are significant; even if they are fixed mental formations, they have meaning.

5 .... Concentration must be free, not strained. That is the true way ....

27.4.1937: Mother saw me for 40 minutes, all conversation.

Topic: about the Nada, its utility and cure ....

3.9.1937: Birthday. Interview; 35 to 40 minutes.

The Mother gave AGNI. After meditation, She spoke of "conversion of consciousness", (pointing to me, She said, "It is there.") inner realisation of the Divine, transformation of the nature ....

25.6.1938: Saw the Mother for 35 minutes.

"Something enveloping, surrounding... is exact - the result of the descending light .... " said the Mother.

The meditation was given to remove "the vital deficiencies and give a deeper opening".

Amma is in a "blissful rest". (today her anniversary).⁸

*Sastriar's mother who was seriously ill at the time. The talk refers to the possibility of her death and what will happen afterwards.

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It is clear that Kapali Sastriar didn't jot down these notes for other than his own eyes to see. Nevertheless, they reveal to us some of the pointer­readings during the long years of his sadhana under the guidance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A word or two, and one is drawn into the occult regions regions. Once Sastriar notes: "There was a new twinkle - significant - at pranam from the Mother; so joyous." On one of his birthdays, after meditation, the Mother gives him the flowers Vital Offering, Transformation­ Surrender and Divine Solicitude, and plays a tune on the organ which Sastriar recognises as the raga Mohana! One may wonder what the Mother does exactly during the meditation, the pranam or the blessings. Sastriar's friend, A. R. Ponnuswami Aiyar, gives a clue: "To get into us, she removes the coverings of thoughts that hover around us. These thoughts may not be ours, may come upon us from others." The jottings in Sastriar's diary are a kind of shorthand, but now and then they suddenly leap to life. And one seeks the invisible links between the aspiration and the response, the flowers given by the Mother and the climate of Sastriar's receptivity. Also, behind the entries - many of them colourless - one sees Sastriar himself, earnest, sincere, surrendered, poised between Amma who is seriously ill and dying and presently dead, and the Mother who is compassionate and all-understanding, and is the home of all souls. Sastriar loves the mother who gave him his body and cared for him through his childhood and boyhood years, and he loves the Mother Divine to whom he has made ātmasamarpana, śaranāgati, and at the appointed time his mother joins the Mother, the river mingles with the Sea. Here, then, is a moving and inspiring recordation of the music of the true Guru-Shishya relationship, and so indeed were many of the sadhana case-histories in the Ashram. All aspirations, all loves, all strivings, all thoughts, all works, all scaled the Himalayas of the Sadhana from different starting-points on the plains, drew nearer and nearer to one another as the ascent proceeded, and were to meet at last on the sunlit summits.

IV

In the Ashram, the sadhaks were not encouraged to develop friendships or other vital relationships of any kind, for the inevitable tendency of such extraneous relationships would be to interfere with the Divine-oriented sadhana and deflect it along undesirable or irrelevant channels. "The whole principle of this Yoga," said Sri Aurobindo, "is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody and nothing else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother-Power all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity, Truth-Consciousness and Ananda of the supramental Divine."⁹ From this it must follow that vital relations or interchanges with others could only pull down the soul to

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the lower consciousness. Even husband and wife, or parents and children, once accepted in the Ashram, were but individual disciples, and had no special status as a married couple or as a family. One and all had to seek union in the Mother, and also recognise one another in the Mother's consciousness alone. A pair may have first come as guardian and ward, but after acceptance, they became equal in the eyes of the Mother, for both were her children. When in the far future a true spiritual life becomes the law, personal relations will also undergo a transformation. Its very basis would be psychic and spiritual, not vital; it would derive from the higher Truth, and not be imprisoned in the lower Ignorance; and it would be seraphically free from the egoistic taint, but be charged with the radiance of the Spirit. Till that time of the Next Future, the only relationship considered legitimate was that of a child towards the mother, of a sadhak towards the Master of the Yoga. What prevailed in Sri Aurobindo Ashram was, in fact, a peculiar three-in-one relationship, child-Mother-Master, for the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's consciousness was axiomatically and experientially one and the same. Said Sri Aurobindo in 1935:

It is a very common experience, that of the identity between myself and the Mother. ...

There is one force only, the Mother's force - or if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo's Force.¹⁰

In a talk given on 24 February 1971, K. D. Sethna said that his theme was really a mixture of three ingredients:

One is the Ambrosia that is Sri Aurobindo, the second is the Nectar that is the Mother, and the third is rather a questionable one which can be best expressed perhaps in some lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: the taste was me.

So now you know the third ingredient. All the three form a kind of trinity­ in-unity.¹¹

The history of the Ashram is a collection of such innumerable mixtures, such spiritual case-histories. The Kapali Sastry story is but one of them, not untypical and yet not quite exhausting them. The inner history of every sadhak in the Ashram, and every disciple outside the Ashram, has followed its own zigzag course towards the summits, sometimes lost on the way among the thickets or the ravines, or seeking an arbour of pseudo­uietness, sometimes even retracing the steps a little, but generally persevering onward and upward towards the beckoning heights of Realisation. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother made no secret of the fact that their Yoga, while its aim could be stated in extreme simplicity, was very difficult indeed to practise. When Narayan Prasad wrote -

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The one thing that we all love and silently cherish is to sit at the Feet of the Mother, breathe her atmosphere, meditate with her, receive her inspiring touch and drink in her words^.12

he was obviously writing both for himself and other sadhaks and disciples. But always the emphasis had to be much more on the invisible undemonstrative inner than on the visible or outer relationship: in other words, on the psychic rapport and contact.

Sri Aurobindo made this explicit in letter after letter:

The relation with the Divine, the relation with the Mother must be one of love, faith, trust, confidence, surrender; any other relation of the vital ordinary kind brings reactions contrary to the Sadhana, - desire, egoistic abhimāna, demand, revolt and all the disturbance of ignorant rajasic human nature from which it is the object of the Sadhana to escape.¹³

The closeness to the Mother was not to be measured only by the physical closeness, or the frequency or duration of the pranams and interviews; of even greater importance was the soul's openness and sense of nearness to the Mother:

It is your soul in itself, your psychic being that must come in front, awaken entirely and make the fundamental change. The psychic being will not need the support of intellectual ideas or outer signs and helps. It is that alone that can give you the direct feeling of the Divine, the constant nearness, the inner support and aid. You will not then feel the Mother remote or have any further doubt about the realisation; for the mind thinks and the vital craves, but the soul feels and knows the Divine.¹⁴

The problem for the sadhaks, then, was to effect this transcendence of the ordinary physical, vital and mental attitudes to the soul-level, not simply their relegation or suppression, but rather their mastery and transformation, so that all thoughts, all emotions, all ambitions, all movements, all doings, all, all may grow this soul-dimension lit by the central Agni, and one's entire life may become a burning brazier of love and adoration of the "Divine.

V

The burning brazier of aspiration is the primary requisite as far as the sadhak is concerned, but even as under Newton's Law action and reaction are always equal and opposite, it is the spiritual law too that, invariably, the ardour of the aspiration summons an appropriate or equivalent response of the Divine. In the Ashram, the response came from the Mother or from Sri Aurobindo - theirs was the same Consciousness, which

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for the sadhaks was axiomatically the Divine Consciousness. But how exactly the Divine operates is impossible to explain or describe in wholly intellectual terms. The SOS goes forth at any time of the day or night and from anywhere, - and there is instantaneous response. And yet the sadhak may not be outwardly conscious of what has happened. Once Sri Aurobindo had to write to a disciple:

It is not true that you have never received Force from us: you have received it to any extent; it can only be said that you were not conscious of it, but that happens with many. ¹⁵

As for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother being conscious of the action of the Force upon sadhaks, Sri Aurobindo explained:

It is not necessary for us always to be physically conscious of the action, for it is often carried out when the mind is occupied with outward things or when we sleep. The Mother's sleep is not sleep but an inner consciousness in which she is in connection with people or working everywhere. At the time she is aware, but she does not carry all that always into her waking consciousness or in her memory. A call would come in the occupied waking mind as the thought of the person coming - in a more free or in a concentrated state as a communication from the person in question; in a deeper concentration or in sleep or trance she would see the person coming and speaking to her or she herself going there. Besides that, wherever the Force is working, the Presence is there. ¹⁶

It was a misunderstanding of the way the Mother's Force acted that led to many of the grumblings of the sadhaks, their readiness to evaluate progress in their yoga in terms of the hucksterings of the market-place, and their only too common weakness to lapse into evasions, side-trackings and self­lacerations. But if the right conditions of receptivity were established, if the lid of the psyche were pierced, if the act of surrender were spontaneous, the results could be different, and even decisive. Here, for example, is Sahana Devi's compelling description of the sudden flowering of one's consciousness in the Ashram and the way this charged one with an immaculate new power of action:

If one could place oneself in tune with the force of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo constantly at work on us, amazing things are apt to happen. One can discern one's life moving in another rhythm, one gets a state of entering into a world quite different. Once one can enter into the current one can see that one has nothing else to do. Whatsoever there is to be done, accepted or rejected, is done automatically. There is no effort, no questions, no feeling of pain in rejecting anything nor even any vain pleasure to become someone. One feels oneself to be someone quite different living in another world, watching all from another level. One can feel an endless ardour, a love for all, that comes from elsewhere.

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All this is the natural movement of the consciousness that grows in one and leads towards its own particular goal. The most remarkable thing felt is that one hardly comes across the "I" that before used to be so much in the front.¹⁷

And yet, as the Mother and Sri Aurobindo saw, the Force they employed was, not only not properly nor fully used by the sadhaks for progress in their yoga; the Force itself fell short of the supramental, and hence lacked the ultimate infallibility or invincibility. "It is only the supramental Force that works absolutely," Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1935, "because it creates its own conditions."¹⁸ But the Force the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were using in the thirties, while it was strong enough to act definitively if the response was adequate, had only a partial effect if there was no openness or even returned on account of the resistance encountered at the other end. This explains the great variety of accomplishment among the sadhaks and disciples, ranging from the highly evolved at one end to the wayside drop-outs at the other. While the defectors, slackers and comparative failures attract easy attention, the sadhaks who persevere and arrive are little known, and do not advertise themselves. In a letter of 19 May 1936 Sri Aurobindo told Nirodbaran that several in the Ashram had had the Vedantic realisation, as also the bhakti realisation: "If I were to publish the letters on sadhana experiences that have come to me, people would marvel and think that the Ashram was packed full of great Yogis!. .. Even the failures would have become Gurus, if I had allowed it, with circles of Shishyas!"¹⁹ Again, when Nirodbaran wrote to Sri Aurobindo on 12 July 1937 drawing attention to the view of some people that the sadhaks here would count for nothing in the outside world, the reply was categorical:

? The quality of the sadhaks is so low? I should say there is a considerable amount of ability and capacity in the Ashram. Only the standard demanded is higher than outside even in spiritual matters. There are half a dozen people here perhaps who live in the Brahman consciousness - outside they would make a big noise and be considered as great Yogis - here their condition is not known and in the Yoga it is regarded not as siddhi but only as a beginning.²⁰

What the Mother and Sri Aurobindo aimed at was, not just Brahman consciousness, but the triple transformation - psychic, spiritual and, finally, supramental - of one's whole nature. And it was this insistence on the highest possible aim that made the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo so exceedingly difficult, certainly not attainable by an easy canter to the goal.

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CHAPTER 25

Ashram Calendar

I

After Sri Aurobindo's complete withdrawal in November 1926, the opportunities for the sadhaks to see or communicate with him were very severely curtailed. This was a terrible deprivation for them, all the more so because they had so long basked unfettered in the old unrestricted sunshine. The sadhaks who came later, not having known the earlier freedom of personal interviews with the Master and the open Evening Talks with him, had perhaps less reason to complain; and, besides, some of them - Sethna, Nirod and Dilip, for example - had the privilege of regular correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, not only on matters pertaining to Yoga, but also on art, literature and poetic composition, and even on matters political and medical. This privilege, however, was not taken advantage of by all the sadhaks, many of whom were mainly engaged in Karmayoga, doing works as an offering to the Mother.

The Mother was always easily accessible, except during her illness of October 1931. Nevertheless, to meet in some measure the understandable desire of the sadhaks to see Sri Aurobindo and offer pranam to him, the three Darshan days of 21 February, 15 August and 24 November were set apart, when the sadhaks and a select number of visitors were permitted to have darshan of the two together - the Mother seated to the right of Sri Aurobindo - and offer pranam to them. Since 1926 the number had grown year by year, but intelligent and tactful management made it possible for the Darshan to be completed in the course of the forenoon, or at least before 2 p.m.¹ The sadhaks and the permitted visitors first assembled in the Meditation Hall, and went up in a file carrying the garlands to be offered. A list giving the order in which they were to go up for darshan was put up on the notice board downstairs, and a copy was kept with Sri Aurobindo so that he could take note of the newcomers. Everyone was given a minute or two for making his pranam. Thus each was in the Darshan Room all alone with the visible divine Pair for a blissful interim, and then moved off, giving place to the next.² However, from 1939 (whence 24 April became the fourth Darshan day) several changes in this procedure were unavoidable. "Putting up the list of names and indicating the time was stopped for good ... as a check on unauthorised intrusion, cards were issued over the signature of the Secretary." Later still, the work of issuing passes was transferred to a Bureau Central. The Darshan time was fixed "almost at 2 p.m .... To get an opportunity to touch the feet of the Master became a thing of the past ... we had to form a queue and have Darshan while filing past. ³

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Darshan, of course, was much more than a concession to mere human curiosity, and Pranam no mere concession to the vitalistic desire for touch or for demonstrative love and devotion. Sri Aurobindo himself conceded a place for such "physical means" of approaching the Guru, the visible Divine, and "receiving the Light and materialising the psychic contact". But they would defeat their purpose and might even have a baneful effect if they were not done in the right spirit, or were tainted by "indifference and inertia, or revolt or hostility, or some gross desire". The best state to be in for Darshan was to be recueilli, that is to say, to be "drawn back, quiet and collected in oneself', ready to receive whatever is vouchsafed.⁴

II

For the sadhaks and disciples, the Darshan days came to acquire the character of milestones on the great journey to the Supramental Light and Force. There was hope and high expectancy in the air, the small room on the first floor of the Meditation House where the Darshan was to take place came to be decorated with loving care, and for the Ashram they were festive days as also days of fulfilment. "Each Darshan in our life," wrote Sahana Devi, "was an experience, nearly a supra-realisation." From Darshan to Darshan the heart yearned once again for the mystic face, the magic touch, and when another Darshan day dawned over the Ashram, there was a new elation and joy:

It brought to us the golden opportunity to reach out to the unattainable. He [Sri Aurobindo] instilled into us something that no one else could. Thus as the Darshan day approached our minds too, leaned to a self-gathering, with a view to receiving rightly .... ⁵

And here is Narayan Prasad's remembrance of these regular occasions of benediction and grace:

To each the Master gave a penetrating and gracious look and then blessed him .... In those days the Master's Grace would rain over us like Amitabha Buddha's. As through glass windows the things in a room are visible, so the Master's yogic eye would penetrate our being and read our possibilities. Newcomers would return with a new energy to fight the battle of life.⁶

The Sri Aurobindo-Mother-sadhak relationships in the Ashram acquired a focus and a clarification at the time of the Darshans. Although the sadhak could see the Mother daily, when he saw her on a Darshan day sitting by side of Sri Aurobindo, it was an enriching and revealing moment for him. On one such occasion, in August 1934, Nirodbaran "felt a great dryness", instead of the expected Ananda, Force or Light. On the next Darshan, in November, Nirod thought that it was Shiva he was seeing, and felt Ananda too,

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and "these happy impressions and recollections were with me vividly for 2 or 3 days. Then I found that all that consciousness has evaporated - and I have passed these days most passively, without any strong aspiration. But I marked that there was no depression."⁷ On yet another occasion, while Nirod found Sri Aurobindo "grave and austere", he found the Mother smiling seraphically.⁸ But a more vivid index to Nirod's opening and reception is his poem:

A moment's touch - what founts of joy arise

Running through dull grains of my life's dead sands

Like a cool stream where once never was shade! ...

The finite for this one moment brief drinks

The Infinite.⁹

Kapali Sastry's notes are brief but suggestive. Thus, after the Darshan on the Mother's birthday in 1936: "Sri Aurobindo gave recognition-smile. The Mother was gracious, putting a seal on his blessings." Again, on the same day next year:

The Mother looked long into me with a very benign smile and blessed me longer while my right cheek rested on her lap. Sri Aurobindo, majestic as usual, but not serious .... ¹⁰

Darshan was always a seminal moment, an act of divine insurance, a moment in time and out of time when something that was truly timeless was sought and won. About the sort of instantaneous effect the Darshan could produce there is this testimony by a visitor:

One look of Sri Aurobindo at a man's heart, and it is conquered. There is a lustre in his eyes that infuses itself into the soul of man and sets it aflame. The flame goes on growing in intensity. He puts into the heart of man the flower-seed of Divine love that is sure to grow .... ¹¹

Such, then, were the gains of the Darshan for the sadhaks, disciples and visitors who filed past Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and received the touch of their palms as the concrete symbol, as the electric currency, of their benedictions. It was certainly worth waiting for weeks, months and (with some) even for years; - but when would they be vouchsafed that grace again?

III

From Sri Aurobindo's or the Mother's point of view also, each Darshan had an importance of its own as a carefully controlled spiritual experiment. Every time Sri Aurobindo and the Mother tried to bring down a force or power of consciousness, a Ray of Light, a tremor of the Delight of

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Existence, and they would watch how the sadhaks and the others received it: whether there was a ready opening, or only the usual tamasic or rajasic resistance. For example, Sri Aurobindo wrote as follows about the Darshan on his sixty-fifth birthday, 15 August 1936:

The last Darshan was good on the whole. I am not now trying to bring anything sensational down on these days, but I am watching the progress in the action of the Force and Consciousness that are already there, the infiltration of a greater Light and Power from above, and there was a very satisfactory crossing of a difficult border which promises well for the near future. A thing has been done which had long failed to accomplish itself and which is of great importance ... it forms part of an arranged whole which is explicable only when it is complete. But it gives a sort of strong practical assurance that the thing will be done.¹²

In a Yoga that was verily a struggle and a march, the Darshan struck Sri Aurobindo as the crossing of a difficult border presaging ultimate victory. And wasn't the descent of the Supramental on 29 February 1956 the most decisive crossing into the Next Future, altering the whole character of the divine communion, introducing a fundamental change in the Sri Aurobindo­Mother-disciple relationships? As the Mother explained in her talk of 15 August 1956, - the day she had distributed the flower symbolising the supramental manifestation,

In the days when Sri Aurobindo used to give Darshan, before he gave it there was always a concentration of certain forces or of a certain realisation which he wanted to give to people. And so each Darshan marked a stage forward; each time something was added. But that was at a time when the number of visitors was very limited. It was organised in another way, and it was part of the necessary preparation.

But this special concentration, now, occurs at other times, not particularly on Darshan days. And it occurs much more often, on other kinds of occasions, in other circumstances. The movement is much accelerated, the march forward, the stages succeed each other much more rapidly. And perhaps it is more difficult to follow; or in any case, if one doesn't take care to keep up, one is more quickly out-distanced than before; one gets the feeling of being late or of being abandoned. Things change quickly.¹³

IV

In the late thirties, as if to make up for the loss of the long sessions of meditation, pranam and interviews in the morning and the games, talks and the soup ceremony in the evenings of the early years, a new experience was opened to the sadhaks in the form of a daily balcony darshan.

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This unique form of spiritual concordat between the Mother and her children began as an individual grace that very soon grew into a universalist charter.Mridu was a devoted Bengali sadhika, who was not only permitted to cook for Sri Aurobindo but even to have a daily glimpse of him when she took up her dish at noon.¹⁴Early in 1938, she was given a room in a building in Rue Saint Gilles opposite the north-facing balcony adjoining Pavitra's room in the Ashram main building. It was then that she is said to have declared that she would not have her breakfast until she had a darshan of the Mother. The Mother agreed to come to that balcony, so as to be seen by Mridu from her window across the street. *

The usual time of the Mother's coming was 6 to 6.15 a.m. and soon some sadhaks and visitors too began to gather for this early morning grace. It became an experience of immeasurable importance equivalent to a sacramental beginning for the day's run of activities. "Every custom, even ritual," wrote Naresh Bahadur in the late fifties, "grows stale by repetition. But the Balcony Darshan is an ever-new, ever-revealing phenomenon. For all is perennial freshness at Spirit level. "¹⁵ The silent crowd would be expectant - and suddenly the Mother would appear on the balcony:

The brief perpetual sign recurred above ....

Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

An instant's visitor the godhead shone:

On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood

And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.¹⁶

On 12 October 1959, the Mother wrote to a young disciple:

Every morning at the balcony, after establishing a conscious contact with each of those who are present, I identify myself with the Supreme Lord and dissolve myself completely in Him. Then my body, completely passive, is nothing but a channel through which the Lord passes His forces freely and pours upon all His Light, His Consciousness and His Joy, according to each one's receptivity. ¹⁷

Consequently, this daily darshan too used to affect variously different individuals, and even the same individual on different days. Some have glimpsed in the Mother one or another of their favourite Powers and Personalities of Mahashakti, and some have seen an aura around her day after day. On the question of the Mother's aura in general, Sri Aurobindo had written in November 1933:

*This darshan came to an end when the Mother fell somewhat seriously ill on 16 March 1962. Curiously, Mridu passed away in September 1962. Her house came to be known as Prasad House due to her practice of distributing the "prasad" that came back in the dish she used to take to Sri Aurobindo.

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The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, Darshan Day, 24 April 1950

What people see around the Mother is first her aura ... and, secondly, the forces of Light that pour out from her when she concentrates, as she always does on the roof for instance .... People do not see it usually because it is a subtle physical and not a gross material phenomenon. ¹⁸

The sadhaks and disciples who had developed this subtle sight - and those that had the higher psychic sensitivity - were able to see the aura, and even after the Mother's withdrawal from the balcony, some of the devotees are known to have stayed on for a while longer with an abstracted and self­absorbed air, perhaps seeing the Mother still, and the aura around her. While these were special experiences of a few, it may be said of the others that even their most prosaic reactions had a touch of the exceptional, and for the vast majority the Mother as she appeared at the balcony was rather like

A rose of dawn, her smile lights every gaze ­

Her love is like a nakedness of noon:

No flame but breathes in her the Spirit's calm

And pours the omnipresence of a sun.¹⁹

Once, when someone wanted to know why the Mother seemed to "appear different at different times", Sri Aurobindo had written: "It is rather, I think, dependent on the personality that manifests in front - as she has many personalities and the body is plastic enough to express something of each when it comes forward. "²⁰ The Mother herself once admitted that "at each Darshan I have the feeling that I am a different person ... someone I have known very intimately, with whom I have lived perhaps, but not me... that is to say, the body says: 'It is not me.' " And then, referring to the Terrace darshan* of 24 November 1967, she added:

When I went to the balcony, it was someone ... (and this happens to me from time to time, but more and more often) someone who looks from a sort of plane of eternity with a great benevolence mixed in (something like benevolence, I do not know how to express it), but with an absolute calmness, almost indifference, and the two are together, looking like that (Mother describes waves far down below), as if it was seen from very far away, from very high up, from very ... how to say it? seen with a rather eternal vision. It was that which my body was feeling when I came out to for the balcony. The body was saying: "I must aspire, there must be an aspiration so that the Force may descend upon all these people" , and That,

*On 21 February 1963, at 6:15 in the evening, the Mother gave darshan from "the Terrace (a covered east-facing veranda on the second floor of Meditation House), "the first for about nine months, since the 18th March last year"²¹ according to another report she had last came out on the 20th March. It must also be noted that henceforth she would come out on the Terrace only on the four Darshan days and always at around the same time until the last one on 15th August 1973.

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it was like this (sweeping gesture from above) .... And all this the body feels as though something were making use of it.²²

CHAPTER 26

The Golden Bridge

I

The seven-year stretch from November 1931 to November 1938 was a period of great inner and outer development in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The sadhaks steadily increased in number, the Kitchen and the Dining Hall were shifted in 1934 to a far more commodious place in front of the Park, and the several departments were beehives of dedicated work. After the Mother's serious illness of October-November 1931, she had to curtail the time devoted to meeting the disciples individually for pranam and interviews. views. And since early 1938, there was the daily Balcony darshan, and the evening meditation followed by Pranam. The externals of the Ashram life were thus easy enough to observe, and they seemed to add up to something - the Ashram was certainly a 'going concern', it was a 'modem' Ashram too, reproducing in the twentieth-century context the fullness and richness of the Ashrams of the Vedic Rishis. There was, besides, visible quantitative 'growth', and the inmates moved about in the Ashram and outside with the poise of natural self-assurance. But how about the inner growth, ­ how about the progress of the sadhana?

A visitor to the Ashram in 1935-36, the French writer Maurice Magre, wrote in a book published in 1936 in Paris:

In the order that reigns in the Ashram one feels admiration for the divine work. The work portioned out to each, the glances filled with quietude, the form of the shadow projected by the tree [the Service Tree in the Ashram courtyard], everything proclaims obedience to law. Happy the one who can find the divine law beautiful.. .. ¹

Although it is not easy to get entry into the world invisible yet omnipresent of the Spirit, his new-found faith was such that he apostrophised the Mother in a rhapsody:

O Mother ...

It is part of the attributes of your power to help the men who appeal to you at the beneficent hour of death ....

O Mother, when this hour comes for me, may my breath have strength enough to pronounce the syllables of your name; may my memory be lively enough to build up your exact image within the shadows of remembrance!

May you keep by my side like a seraph of pity and dispel before me the ensnaring people of the shadows! May you lead me, stripped of fear and pride, towards the abode where the pure ones go, where all is love and beauty! ²

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And Maurice Magre's words "shot with a psychic vision" ³ wrung from the depths were by no means untypical of the response of sensitive visitors to Sri Aurobindo Ashram during the nineteen-thirties.

The sadhaks were drawn from all over India, though Bengal and Gujarat were rather more heavily represented than other regions; and there was a sprinkling from abroad as well. Not all the sadhaks were intellectuals who could benefit by a careful study of Sri Aurobindo's writings - notably The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga - as in the seven Arya volumes. The first English edition of the Mother's Prayers and Meditations hadn't yet been published, and her Conversations of 1929 circulated only in typescript. For the non-intellectuals, indeed, the Yoga was a simple thing: "Remember and offer." They asked for and received appropriate work, and their work was the body of their Yoga - and their inner consecration was the soul. They felt close to the Mother - to Sri Aurobindo - to the Divine! Some few were pseudo-intellectuals and were disinclined to do hard work, and they had no creative vocation either - be it poetry, music or painting. They belonged to the group about which the Mother once wrote:

It is not that there is a dearth of people without work in the Ashram; but those who are without work are certainly so because they do not like to work; and for that disease it is very difficult to find a remedy - it is called laziness. ⁴

But some of the intellectuals had their problems too, for they were apt to veer between the extremes of either wanting to suppress the Beast of Intellectualism or expecting intellectual activity by itself to row them across the seas of Doubt to the shores of Faith and Realisation beyond. They were sincere, earnest and self-inquisitorial; they sometimes asked for Euclidean demonstrations; they expected quick results; and because they failed to arrive promptly, they bombarded the Mother and Sri Aurobindo with letters, - and of course they lapsed into seasonal sessions of frustration, more often self-induced than real. But they revived after a letter from Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, and once more started on the quest, and engaged in the intestine struggle, or commenced the weary climb.

Our period (1931-38) was the Golden Age of yogic correspondence in the Ashram, and several thousand letters were written by a comparatively small section of the disciples to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. At the beginning, almost every sadhak wrote a letter or two, and Sri Aurobindo had to sit most of the night to clear the correspondence. The Mother had at last to intervene, and she laid down that only a select few could write with previous special permission. When Dilip asked in 1935 how many were such privileged sadhaks, Sri Aurobindo answered:

The number openly accepted is two by habit and understanding, two by express notice and two by self-given permission. ⁵

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The hard core of the sadhak-correspondents was perhaps not more than half a dozen, certainly not more than a dozen out of a total of about one hundred and fifty at this time.

There were of course two sides to the picture. On the one hand, a clear statement of one's experiences, doubts and difficulties was a help to the Guru, for he could then know what exactly was happening, and give the necessary guidance and help. Thus Sri Aurobindo told Sahana Devi: "It is absolutely necessary to write everything and write daily." ⁶ On the other hand, if people wrote merely because it was the fashion to write even when they had nothing to write about, if the overwhelming question was whether one should bathe or not when suffering from cold or whether one should walk putting the right foot first or the left, that merely increased the load of work (reading the letters and discussing them with the Mother when necessary and finally answering them), but without any counterbalancing advantage. No doubt, more often than not, the replies from the Mother or Sri Aurobindo were pointedly brief, and the questions and answers just filled the pages of exercise books, much as words are exchanged in quick conversation. But there were also longer communications (especially from Sri Aurobindo), extending in a few cases to ten or more pages, and since the questions were wide-ranging covering the whole gamut from the trivial and the personal to the sublime and the universal, the answers had likewise to achieve a cumulative encyclopaedic range. And this went on day after day, night after night, for seven or eight unbelievable years.

II

Whatever the circumstances under which Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's letters were written, in retrospect they are of capital importance today, partly for the light they throw on the theory and practice of Integral Yoga, partly for their revealing hints on Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to bring the supramental consciousness into the everyday experience of man and the earth, and partly as readings in the yogic case-histories of several of the disciples. To no small extent, these issues were interlinked, for there was the Yoga - there were the two Gurus (who were really one in consciousness) - and there were the many disciples; and since the yogic battle was being waged on the individual as well as collective fronts, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were as much concerned with the disciples' sadhana as with their own, and some of the disciples felt perpetually intrigued by what was happening to the Supermind, whether at all - or exactly when - it would be coming down, and what would happen when it did at long last. It has to be remembered, however, that while the letters tell part of the story, the complete history is hidden from view. It may be thought that, for a proper understanding of the letters, we need the entire

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contextual framework: the background, of the sadhak who asks the question, the actual question and date, and the complete answer. On the other hand, any such deep involvement in the personal histories of the sadhak-correspondents may prove confusing and side-tracking to the earnest spiritual aspirant. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were hence definitely against such wholesale publication of the two-way correspondence. There is clearly the touch of universality in Sri Aurobindo's numberless letters on Yoga, even the most apparently casual, and when there is a judicious selection and piecing together, these could constitute an invaluable Guide to Sadhana in its multitudinous aspects. It is this editorial feat that has been accomplished, with Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's full approbation, in the published volumes of Letters on Yoga. Even so, the need for caution remains. Sri Aurobindo himself once warned that it was not wise to apply to oneself a mental rule formulated on the basis of what had been written for the benefit of another in a very different context. Nature abhors repetition, and each sadhak has his own unique psychological make-up. Sri Aurobindo wrote on another occasion:

People often catch hold of something written by me or said by the Mother, give it an interpretation quite other than or far beyond its true meaning and deduce from it a suddenly extreme and logical conclusion which is quite contrary to our knowledge and experience. ⁷

Sri Aurobindo thought that such deviations and derailments were part of the stock-in-trade of the hostile forces, and one had to guard against them. There was the further difficulty that, although Sri Aurobindo was apparently answering his correspondents at the mental level, the replies really came from the infinite reserves of the "higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge", ⁸ The comments, the admonitions, the instructions were offered by a Guru to a disciple, and were meant to be treasured as such and implicitly acted upon, and not to be bruited about promiscuously, torn out of the context and made the subject of a pseudo­ logical debate. Thus one has to read the consolidated volumes of excerpts from the letters that have been arranged under different subjects but without indication of the identity of the correspondents - one has to read these volumes with becoming humility and due circumspection. We are certainly on a different ground when we read the letters to the same correspondent - Nirodbaran, perhaps, or Pavitra, Sethna, or Dilip ­ especially when the questions are given too and the letters and replies are chronologically arranged. It is, perhaps, also necessary to mention the smaller collections like Lights on Yoga (1935) and Bases of Yoga (1936), whose selection and arrangement had been approved by Sri Aurobindo After all, while a reply may be provoked by a particular sadhak's statement his personal problems, universalist elements also must get into the answer, all the more so because the response is really from the level of the

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higher spiritual consciousness. This should explain why the excerpts from Aurobindo's letters put together in a book like Bases of Yoga have made it a minor Aurobindonian classic and popular guide to Yoga.

There were, then, the two interlinked problems that pressed for solution - or a positive movement towards a solution - in the 1930s in what was little less than the invisible spiritual battle-ground of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. First: How did the sadhaks, individually and collectively, respond to the challenge for a change of consciousness (from the human to the divine) posed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother? Second: How far did they, as the two "Leaders of the Way", succeed in their great aim of bringing down the overhead powers of consciousness, including the Supermind, into the earth-atmosphere, and into man himself, even down to the physical, thereby promoting the great work of building the 'golden bridge' between Here and Eternity, the Human and the Divine? These are of course extremely difficult things to discuss, as Sri Aurobindo was never tired of reiterating. The mind has to try to comprehend what is really beyond the mind, and we are prone to make material formulations to comprehend something that is really beyond the physical and even the mental categories. The problems can be neither tritely solved, nor honestly shirked. The letters are important sources of information in this regard, but alike in reading and interpreting them one should adopt an attitude of humility and inner silence of attention and receptivity.

As regards the response of the sadhaks to the challenge for a change of consciousness, the very fact of the organisation of the Ashram and its growth and superlatively efficient functioning during the thirties was part of the answer to the question. The fame and the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the personality of the Mother attracted some of the finest talents, some of the most ardent spirits, to the Ashram after 1926, and its spectacular growth during the next ten or fifteen years was quite astonishing. Human bricks became marble, raw adolescents became seasoned sadhaks, hard-headed intellectuals struck unsuspected artistic veins in themselves, and the atmosphere of the Ashram quickened the flowering of the consciousness of most of the inmates. All this clearly showed that, generally speaking, the collective sadhana of the Ashram was not failing to show results that were by no means unimpressive.

III

Since the very beginning, indeed, there has reigned an atmosphere in the Ashram which is quite distinctive, - the Ashram meaning, not the main complex in the Rue de la Marine alone, but also the wider cluster of Ashram buildings generally. The Mother has remarked that, "The area we call 'the Ashram' has a condensation of force which is not at all the same as

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that of the town, and sill less that of the countryside." ⁹ When a young sadhak expressed the wish to go out to pursue higher studies in a foreign university, the Mother, while leaving the decision to him, also uttered a timely warning:

No doubt from the exterior point of view, you will find in England all that you want for learning what human beings generally call knowledge, but from the point of view of Truth and Consciousness, you can find nowhere the atmosphere in which you are living here. Elsewhere you can meet with a religious or a philosophic spirit, but true spirituality, direct contact with the Divine, constant aspiration to realise Him in life, mind and action are in the world realised only by scattered individuals and not as a living fact behind any university teaching however advanced it may be. ¹⁰

The Mother has also testified how once, when she had gone in a car beyond the lake, she felt a sudden change in the atmosphere: "where there had been plenitude, energy, light and force," there was a sudden failure of every thing. ¹¹ If one kind of atmosphere could be elevating, inspiring, another could likewise prove depressing and enervating. So too visitors with sensitive spiritual antennae had been known to register the general atmosphere of the Ashram deriving from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the sadhaks open to him and advancing their mission and, on the other hand, the scattered isolated pockets of doubt, dissidence, darkness, negation and even revolt in which the hostile forces found a favourable soil for their anti-divine work. Writing on 15 March 1937, Sri Aurobindo made a reference to this dichotomy:

When people with a little perceptiveness come from outside, they are struck by the deep calm and peace in the atmosphere and it is only when they mix much with the Sadhaks that this perception and influence fade away. The other atmosphere of dullness and unrest is created by the Sadhaks themselves - if they were open to the Mother as they should be, they would live in the calm and peace and not in unrest and dullness. ¹²

While being fully aware of such stray pockets of falsehood in the Ashram itself, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were nevertheless extremely tolerant, and would not peremptorily throw them out. Champaklal has recorded that once, when he spoke to the Mother of a particular sadhika who had earlier been very close to her but later suddenly turned hostile, the Mother but cited Sri Aurobindo's words:

You know well it is not a question of this person or that person. Sending away one person won't help us in any way. We are fighting with the hostile force - not with the person. If you send away one person, it will catch hold of another. ¹³

On a similar occasion, Sri Aurobindo wrote about another sadhika,

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perhaps an even greater source of disturbance and disharmony:

People are here to change what is wrong in their nature so that they may do an effective sadhana. If they refuse to do that or even to try, they are not real sadhaks or disciples and can expect nothing from myself or from the Mother.

What was worse, she seemed prepared to be the instrument of an alien force, acting against the Mother, claiming victories against her, trying to lower her in the eyes of the sadhaks, asserting itself and its ways, traducing the Ashram and impairing the respect due to Mother and spoiling my work as much as possible. It cannot really succeed in this, but it can give trouble, and I do not see why I should tolerate it. ¹⁴

From all this it should be obvious that it would be both a risky and a deceptive exercise to generalise about the Ashram, the sadhaks or the sadhana in any facile manner. The stray discordances, apaswaras or false notes more easily strike the ear, while the great bass, the sruti, is apt to be ignored or merely taken for granted; and the wordless music of the sadhana of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga needed almost a new sense for its right understanding or assessment.

IV

Some idea of the sort of relationship that prevailed between a sadhak and the Mother - not wholly untypical of such relationships in the Ashram ­ may be formed by a careful study of the brief letters she wrote to one of her dear children, and published in 1964 as Some Answers from the Mother. The very first entry nearly clinches the issue.

Sadhak: I hope and believe Your work does not depend upon human beings.

Mother: No, it does not depend at all upon human beings. What has to be done will be done despite all possible resistances. ¹⁵

Hasn't Sri Aurobindo said in The Mother "The supramental is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness"? The human aspiration and opening from below may, perhaps, hasten the change, but human stupidity or resistance cannot close "the path of the divine Event" ¹⁶ . Being in tune with the Divine Will, the Mother knew that it must triumph ultimately. The next step in the evolution of the earth­consciousness would be really more of a revolution, though a revolution wiith a difference; the Mother wrote that, whereas the bloody revolutions of the past "quite uselessly" tore up countries but left men "as false, as ignorant, as egoistic as before", the change she and Sri Aurobindo were

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initiating would be "the most marvellous change ever seen". ¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo had written in his Arya days:

The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretations of present happenings and forecast of man's future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity. ¹⁸

In starting the Ashram, the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's aim was verily to engineer this spiritual revolution, or this integral transformation of earth­life. If people did not meet it half-way and cooperate with it, even so it would come all the same, engulf all resistances or sweep them away.

Having been told about the divine decree (the inevitability of the terrestrial transformation), the sadhak wants to know "What does the Divine want of me?" The Mother's answer is threefold: (i) find your true self or psychic being; (ii) master and govern your lower nature; and (iii) with this preparation, take your proper place in the Divine Work. ¹⁹ The regimen is not easy to follow, but the awareness of the Divine presence everywhere can be a help. But the disciple feels an inner unease and turmoil, and asks the Mother why. Her answer is a classic diagnosis of a recurrent and universal disease. There is a conflict within, between the sadhak's sattwic nature aspiring towards the Light and his tamasic which pulls him downward to the Night; in Shakespeare's words:

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council, and the state of man,

Like to a little kingdom suffers then

The nature of an insurrection. ²⁰

The sadhak has first to know what is at stake, and learn to turn to the Light alone. If he opens his heart "yet wider, yet better", the distance between him and the Mother will lessen progressively and disappear at last. The Mother herself will be with her child always:

I am in every thought, every aspiration which you turn towards me; for if you were not always present in my consciousness you would not be able to think of me. ²¹

V

The crux of the problem: How to find, how to unite with the divine Presence which is "always and everywhere"? Either go within, and find the Divine in your heart; or look out, and find the visible Divine in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother through love and self-giving. ²²

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The way doesn't matter; what is necessary is to find the Divine, and learn to see Him "in all things and everywhere". In a similar vein is Sri Aurobindo's letter to Nirod:

The two feelings are both of them right - they indicate the two necessities of the sadhana. One is to go inward and open fully the connection between the psychic being and the outer nature. The other is to open upward to the Divine Peace, Force, Light, Ananda above .... The best way is to aspire for both and let the Mother's Force work it out according to the need and turn of the nature. ²³

One day, in a fit of gloom or moment of excessive self-dramatisation, another sadhak writes to the Mother wanting to leave his body so that he may get closer to her. The Mother calls this "sheer stupidity" and "a big mistake". After death, the change of body may prove to be a change for the worse:

We have not to busy ourselves with the next life, but with this one which offers us, till our very last breath, all its possibilities ... so long as one is alive, nothing is impossible. ²⁴

In a parallel situation, Sri Aurobindo wrote to K. S. Venkataraman:

When one throws away the present life in that [violent] way instead of facing its difficulties one not only gets into blacker difficulties after death but in the next life all becomes not better but worse .... Instead of indulging such feelings ... turn to the Mother's Grace which has not failed and which is not going to fail you for strength and succour. ²⁵

If one looked closely into the inner lives of spiritual seekers, one would thus light upon similar SOS calls, similar screams of desperation, and similar admonitions followed by the same reviving shower of Grace.

Then, again, the usual grouse that one is not physically near enough to the Mother: that one is at her Feet for only a few seconds during Pranam: that one accordingly feels left out in the cold and the dark. This may be the sheerest folly, of course, and yet the Mother answers soothingly:

Go within into yourself, find your psychic being and you will find me at the same time, living in you, life of your life, ever present and ever near, quite concretely and tangibly. ²⁶

Or let him open his mind to the Guru's influence, withdraw deep into an inner silence, and call the Mother from the depths of that silence - and there she will be, standing at the centre of his being.

The exchange of letters continues, but it is' an exchange between penumbra and Light. Not all the Mother's sovereign assurances can quite set his mind at ease. Doubt wrangles with faith, fear with self-confidence.

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"I always wonder," the Mother writes, "that people imagine they can know the reasons for my actions! I act differently for each one, according to the needs of his particular case. " ²⁷ Let the sadhak shed all his burden of fear first and cultivate total frankness with the Mother, and immediately the distance between them will vanish.

No sooner than one mist is cleared then another fills its place. Doubts disperse, and new doubts appear. Wrong attachment - indifference - emptiness - dryness - moroseness: one thing or another interposes itself between the sadhak and the Divine. The Mother tells him that being sad or melancholy is no virtue. Sri Aurobindo too tells Nirod: "Cheerfulness is the salt of the sadhana. It is a thousand times better than gloominess." ²⁸ The Mother likewise tells the sadhak that "The Divine is not sad and to realise the Divine you must throw far from yourself all sadness and all sentimental weakness." He should also remember that "Psychic love is always peaceful and joyous; it is the vital which dramatises and makes itself unhappy without any reason." ²⁹

VI

It is at the vital level, alas, that jealousies and quarrels are rife, but psychic or divine love transcends all rivalry and struggle. True love eschews mere sentiment and tempestuous passion, and is silent in its very strength. At one point the Mother has to tell the sadhak sharply:

The Ashram is not a place for being in love with anyone. If you want to lapse into such a stupidity, you may do so elsewhere, not here. ³⁰

He should beware of the lure of the lower nature and avoid succumbing to "the great play, obscure and semi-conscious, of the forces of unillumined nature". The sadhak should also desist from thinking of himself too highly; let the Divine "determine our real worth". The sadhak's two prominent enemies are jealousy and vanity; let him therefore hold fast to this:

Only the Divine is the life of our life, consciousness of our consciousness, the Power and Capacity in us. It is to Him that we must entrust ourselves .... ³¹

With regard to the discipline of Yoga, the aim should be to avoid useless talk but concentrate on works: "No words - acts", as the Mother was to say in one of her later New Year messages. It is not so much the work itself but the attitude of consecration behind it that makes the true Yoga. A self­imposed discipline is the real physical foundation of the sadhana: "The great realisers have always been the great disciplined men. " ³² Wrong suggestions are scrupulously to be kept away, for they have a sinister way of actualising themselves; and one of the wrong suggestions is that some

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work is difficult; only, "the more difficult a thing is, the greater must be the will to carry it out successfully", ³³ Again:

Be calm, don't get disturbed, remember that the conditions of our life are not quite ordinary conditions, and keep your trust in the Divine Power to organise all and do all through the human instruments which are open to His influence. ³⁴

Once, when the sadhak frankly writes that he feels like succumbing to an attraction or temptation as the best way of overcoming it, the Mother calls the suggestion "a trap of the adverse forces". As well conquer the murderous instinct by actually committing a murder! To another sadhak, Mrityunjoy, the Mother wrote that he was in the Ashram for doing Yoga, to cultivate union with the Divine, and not to run after vitalistic human relationships:

Your consciousness will begin to get dulled, forces of the vital world will take advantage, and quite unawares you will be carried far into wrong tracks .... ³⁵

Among other suggestions of the hostile forces is the denial of the very possibility of physical immortality. But the Mother's reasoning against this 'orthodoxy' is unassailable:

It [the body] must become aware of the immortality of the elements constituting it (which is a scientifically recognised fact), then it must submit itself to the influence and the will of the psychic being which is immortal in its very nature. ³⁶

The Mother also advises the sadhak to read, not widely or desultorily, but selectively and deeply; and to seek in silence the source of the highest aspiration.

VII

In a spiritual adventure, in the, battle for Light as against the reigning Darkness, in the see-saw between hope and despair, the average sadhak is understandably often confused, and in an extremity he needs must appeal to the Guru who is the living God. Read in cold print, the neophyte's questions - the enumeration of the difficulties - the naive formulation of perverse courses of action - may all seem rather silly, and it may even appear odd that the Mother or Sri Aurobindo should have taken such letters seriously enough to vouchsafe replies, long or short, in almost every instance. But as pathfinders, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had themselves often been through their own difficulties, and hence they did not dismiss the groanings and moanings of the disciples, but rather tried to

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help them face and solve their problems. Sri Aurobindo made no secret of the fact that such serious difficulties had indeed assailed the path of the Gurus themselves:

I have had my full share of these things and the Mother has had ten times her full share. But that was because the finders of the Way had to face these things in order to conquer. No difficulty that can come on the Sadhak but has faced us on the path; against many we have had to struggle hundreds of times (in fact, that is an understatement) before we could overcome .... It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden. It was with that object that the Mother once prayed to the Divine that whatever difficulties, dangers, sufferings were necessary for the path might be laid on her rather than on others .... ³⁷

As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside ... had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play of Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path. But it is not necessary nor tolerable that all should be repeated again to the full in the experience of others. It is because we have the complete experience that we can show a straighter and easier road to others - if they will only consent to take it. ³⁸

And the easier road, the sunlit path, was to effect the psychic opening and from there to reach for the golden bridge to the Divine, and in everything to entrust the sadhana to the Mother.

VIII

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo often made it clear that the sadhana, although done by them, was not for their own sake alone. "My Sadhana was not done for myself," he wrote in May 1933, "but for the earth­consciousness as a showing of the way towards the Light." ³⁹ As path­finders, they were engaged in forging means of inner growth, transformation of the lower into the higher nature, and the manifestation of new faculties; but all this was ultimately for humanity as a whole. The supreme aim of their sadhana was. of course, the bringing down of the Supermind and harnessing it for the work of transformation, but that was yet to be. On 14 November 1933, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple:

No, the supramental has not descended into the body or into Matter - it is

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only at the point where such a descent has become not only possible but inevitable .... ⁴⁰

What they were engaged In was not a feat of miraculism but "a rapid and concentrated evolution" with a pace and process of its own: "a supramental but not an irrational process". But, while the movement had 'certainly been set in motion, a definite date for the supramental transformation could not be given.

Some months later, on 14 September 1934, Sri Aurobindo reported steady progress:

It is true that there is an increasingly powerful descent of the Higher Force. Many now see the lights and colours around the Mother and her subtle luminous forms - it means that their vision is opening to supraphysical realities, it is not a phantasy. The colours or lights you see are forces from various planes and each colour indicates a special force.

The supramental Force is descending, but it has not yet taken possession of the body or of matter - there is still much resistance to that. It is supramentalised Overmind Force that has already touched, and this may at any time change into or give place to the supramental in its own native power. ⁴¹

Three months later, Sri Aurobindo expressed himself in rather non­committal terms. The world conditions were bad, and this might actually hasten the event but nothing could be positively asserted. He wrote again on 25 December 1934:

As to whether the Divine seriously means something to happen, I believe it is intended. I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how .... My faith and will are for the now. ⁴²

It was six days later that Sri Aurobindo composed the two complementary poems "Thought the Paraclete" and "Rose of God", the former describing the flight of consciousness from the material to the supramental, and the latter invoking in five stanzas - the fivefold intensity of the Divine Consciousness - to come down and permeate the earth-atmosphere. Thought was the mediator, the bridge-builder:

Past the long green crests of the seas of life,

Past the orange skies of the mystic mind

Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God ....

Hungering, large-souled to surprise the unconned

Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond,

Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,

Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned,

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Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete

Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune. ⁴³

This was the ascent of consciousness, a prelude to the great descent which alone could effect the transfiguration of the earth and man. "Rose of God" was the flower with five petals: Bliss, Light, Power, Life, Love; and Sri Aurobindo would have this Rose, this Divine Consciousness, come down and encompass the marvel of integral change and supramental transformation: "Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame," -"Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme; Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time." ⁴⁴

Two months later, Sri Aurobindo maintained that his Sadhana was not "a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and consciousness on earth. " ⁴⁵ It was merely the attempt to quicken and realise certain potentialities that were there in Nature already. If he could do it, if the Mother could do it, so should others be able to do it in course of time. Gradually and ultimately it would be a human power, a widely shared human faculty. The Yoga was indeed no Grand Trunk Road, Sri Aurobindo wrote in August 1935; there wasn't going to be an immediate mass-march of humanity to supermanhood. A lot of spadework had to be done still, and Sri Aurobindo was busy clearing up the jungle of the inconscient. But while he was trying to open up the jungle and lay the road, he was also meeting with much local resistance.

Next year there was a grimmer note. Writing on 30 May 1936, Sri Aurobindo candidly remarked:

No, it is not with the Empyrean that I am busy: I wish it were. It is rather with the opposite end of things; it is in the Abyss that I have to plunge to build a bridge between the two. ⁴⁶

It was this bitter and prolonged subterranean struggle that he described in "A God's Labour", finalised at about this time:

But the god is there in my mortal breast

Who wrestles with error and fate

And tramples a road through mire and waste

For the nameless Immaculate ....

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep

At the very root of things

Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep

On the Dragon's outspread wings.

I left the surface gods of mind

And life's unsatisfied seas

And plunged through the body's alleys blind

To the nether mysteries. ⁴⁷

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He had "delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart" and had "heard her black mass' bell", and he knew at last the whole horror that had to be mastered, changed and transformed. But he was not without hope, for he knew that the process of reclamation, reconciliation and alchemisation had already begun.

And not long after, at the time of the Darshan on 15 August 1936, Sri Aurobindo saw that "there was a very satisfactory crossing of a difficult border", which he thought augured well for the future.

IX

It was both a period of immediate if limited fulfilment and of great promise for the future. With this favourable tide in the sadhana, it was desirable it should be taken at the flood to be led on to the goal. On 23 October 1937 the Mother wrote the mantric piece, now the final entry in her published Prayers and Meditations, "A prayer for those who wish to serve the Divine":

Glory to Thee, O Lord, who triumphest over every obstacle.

Grant that nothing in us shall be an obstacle in Thy work.

Grant that nothing may retard Thy manifestation.

Grant that Thy will may be done in all things and at every moment.

We stand here before Thee that Thy will may be fulfilled in us, in every element, in every activity of our being, from our supreme heights to the smallest cells of the body.

Grant that we may be faithful to Thee utterly and for ever.

We would be completely under Thy influence to the exclusion of every other.

Grant that we may never forget to own towards Thee a deep, an intense gratitude.

Grant that we may never squander any of the marvellous things that are Thy gifts to us at every instant.

Grant that everything in us may collaborate in Thy work and all be ready for Thy realisation.

Glory to Thee, O Lord, Supreme Master of all realisation.

Give us a faith active and ardent, absolute and unshakable in Thy Victory. ⁴⁸

It is more than a coincidence that Sri Aurobindo should have indited the very next day, 24 October 1937, the sonnet "The Divine Hearing", which is almost complementary to the Mother's prayer:

All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice:

Music and thunder and the cry of birds,

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Life's babble of her sorrows and her joys,

Cadence of human speech and murmured words,

The laughter of the sea's enormous mirth,

The winged plane purring through the conquered air,

The auto's trumpet-song of speed to earth,

The machine's reluctant drone, the siren's blare

Blowing upon the windy horn of Space

A call of distance and of mystery,

Memories of sun-bright lands and ocean-ways, ­

All now are wonder-tones and themes of Thee.

A secret harmony steals through the blind heart

And all grows beautiful because Thou art. ⁴⁹

The sadhana for the change in the earth-consciousness, the sadhana of building the golden bridge between the Empyrean and the Abyss, thus seems to have reached a significant stage during 1937. And although the sadhana was spearheaded by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, "the Mother's victory", as he remarked in a letter of 12 November 1937, was "essentially a victory of each Sadhak over himself'. ⁵⁰

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CHAPTER 27

Joint Adventure

I

During the seven years between 1931 and 1938, there was, as we have seen, a decisive progress in the sadhana, the lead of course being given by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and the disciples too - most of them - were no slackers, and were reasonably responsive to the demands of the Yoga: some moved fast, some at a moderate but steady pace, and there were laggards as well, and even a few detractors. However in a collective sadhana involving so many sadhaks, - the number had increased from about 100 in 1931 to over 150 in 1938 - such inequalities couldn't be helped, and the crucial thing was the force imparted by the Engineers and the momentum of the whole. The Ashram was certainly in a fairly strong position, and it was growing wings of varied achievement, and attracting wide attention. Within and outside the Ashram, the old Arya numbers were the quarry of an increasing number of thinkers and sadhaks. While the many pored over books like The Mother, The Riddle of this World, Lights on Yoga, Bases of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Ideal of Human Unity, or read copies of Sri Aurobindo's innumerable letters to his disciples or the Mother's Conversations, life in the Ashram was marked calm, orderliness, efficiency and an inner richness of ardour, aspiration and realisation. The deviations from the norm only emphasised the normal reign of poise and purpose, light and love.

II

Aside from the letters to the disciples, Sri Aurobindo composed a number of sonnets, lyrics and epic fragments during these years of sustained sadhana punctuated by moments of high yogic realisation. These effusions were his reports on the way, musings, recapitulations, interim or intermediate poetic recordations. Thus in "In Horis Aeternum" composed on 19 April 1932:

Here or otherwhere, - poised on the unreachable abrupt snow­solitary ascent

Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light .... ¹

"The Bird of Fire", written on 15 October 1933, was a mighty peal commemorating the triple living Fire of the Divine Consciousness, compact of Light, Tapas and Love:

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One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight;

Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face. ²

And he affirmed in "Trance", written on the same day:

My mind is awake in stirless trance,

Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;

Dispelled is the senses' flicker-dance,

Mute the body aureate with light. ³

In "The Life Heavens", composed a month later, Sri Aurobindo put into Earth's mouth a challenging declaration:

I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;

My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,

A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; ­

My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.

By me the last finite, yearning, strives

To reach the last infinity's unknown,

The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives

And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone. ⁴

A reference has already been made in the previous chapter to the two complementary pieces "Thought the Paraclete" and "Rose of God", both written on the last day of 1934. But earlier in the year, on 25 April, he had written the marvellous fragment in Alexandrines:

I walked beside the waters of a world of light

On a gold ridge guarding two seas of high-rayed night ....

I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance;

I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance. ⁵

That was but a momentary discomfiture, for the mist presently lifted, and there was Light again. And so the metrical instruments constantly fashioned and refashioned to his purpose seem like the pointer-readings of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual odyssey during the years. In "Musa Spiritus", for example, he invoked the Descent from "the upper fire" to redeem and reclaim the "seals of Matter's sleep":

All make tranquil, all make free.

Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God

As He comes from His timeless infinity

To build in their rapture His burning abode. ⁶

Then came the series of sonnets, beginning with "The Kingdom

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Within" dated 14 March 1936, and including "The Pilgrim of the Night" written two years later -

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo ....

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality. ⁷ -

and several other pieces of the war period. These shorter poems and sonnets of this time were, however, no more than by-products, whereas Sri Aurobindo's major preoccupation in poetry at that time was the mystic symbolic epic, Savitri.

III

Sri Aurobindo is supposed to have made an early draft of Savitri at Baroda, as a companion-piece to his Urvasie and Love and Death. And the fact that the Savitri legend also relates to the theme of love and separation and death as in Uloupie and Chitrangada (the other narrative poems of the Baroda days), lends credence to this belief. However, the earliest manuscript we have is dated 1916. There is too the letter dated 31 October 1936, where he says: "Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came, as a narrative poem in two parts .... " There are later drafts and revised versions, but the idea of a more drastic revision seems to have come to him after his withdrawal in November 1926, and from time to time he took up the old exercise books and made alterations and additions here and there. His indefatigable correspondent, K. D. Sethna, having by now come to know about this 'work in progress', started asking for information. In 1931, Sri Aurobindo wrote that he was then trying to turn the old legendary tale into a symbolic poem, but was able to give attention to it "once a month perhaps".⁸ Next year, Sri Aurobindo wrote to Sethna that in the new Savitri the blank verse would have an Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement of end-stopped lines. Two years later, he wrote again:

What you write about your inspiration is very interesting. There is no invariable how - except that I receive from above my head and receive changes and corrections from above without any initiation by myself or

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labour of the brain. Even if I change a hundred times, the mind does not work at that, it only receives. Formerly it used not to be so, the mind was always labouring at the stuff .... Savitri is a work by itself unlike all the others. I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration. Afterwards I am altogether rewriting it, concentrating on the first Book and working on it over and over again with the hope that every line may be of a perfect perfection - but I have hardly any time now for such work. ⁹

In the meantime, a good deal of correspondence erupted between Sethna and Sri Aurobindo about 'overhead poetry', and particularly poetry from the highest 'overhead' the Overmind whence would come the specifically mantric poetry of the future. As Sethna recollected later:

One day ... I made a singular request. I wrote:

"I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity

or Wordsworth's

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone,

which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary .... Please don't disappoint me by saying that, as no English writer has a passage of this kind, you cannot do anything for me."

He wrote back in his characteristic vein:

"Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things yet to come - the 'future poetry' perhaps, but not the past."

With the familiarity - almost the impudence - he permitted us, I replied:

"I think the favour I asked was expressed in perfectly clear language. If no English poet has produced the passage I want, then who has done so in English? God alone knows. But who is capable of doing it? All of us know. Well, then why not be kind enough to grant this favour? If difficult metres could be illustrated on demand, is it impossible to illustrate in a satisfying measure something so naturally Aurobindonian as the Overmind? I am not asking for hundreds of lines - even eight will more than do - all pure gold to be treasured for ever. So please ... Perhaps it is possible only on Sunday ­ the day dedicated to golden Sūrya and rich for you with leisure from correspondence: I can wait answerless for twenty-four hours with a sweet samatā."

The answer came the very next morning:

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"I have to say Good Heavens again. Because difficult metres can be illustrated on demand, which is a matter of metrical skill, how does it follow that one can produce poetry from any blessed plane on demand? It would be easier to furnish you with hundreds of lines already written out of which you could select for yourself anything Overmindish if it exists (which I doubt) rather than produce 8 lines of warranted Overmind manufacture to order. All I can do is to give you from time to time some lines from Savitri, on condition you keep them to yourself for the present. It may be a poor substitute for the Overmental, but if you like the sample, the opening lines, I can give you more hereafter - and occasionally better." ¹⁰

And there followed in Sri Aurobindo's own hand the first sixteen lines of the Exordium to Savitri beginning with the grand mysterious line:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

That day was 25 October 1936, and Sethna later described that day as "one of the most important, if not the most important, of my life here". ¹¹ Henceforth more and more excerpts from Savitri passed between the seer-Kavi and the neophyte-rasika, and the latter's abounding interest and perceptive comments were perhaps a catalytic that helped the progress of the poem during the next few years.

IV

That Savitri was the great upākhyāna or tale imbedded in the Mahabharata, now being rendered anew in the light of the Aurobindonian vision and packed in its every rift with the ore of his own spiritual experiences, made the poem important enough. Some had a shrewd notion that Savitri as yogic poetry was complementary to the spiritual philosophy of The Life Divine and the practical spirituality of The Synthesis of Yoga in the other harmony of prose; and in 1963, the Mother was to write on the top of a diary containing quotations from Savitri: " ... that marvellous prophetic poem which will be humanity's guide towards its future realisation". ¹²Back in the thirties, there were not wanting guesses either that in the scheme of the epic, if Aswapathy was Sri Aurobindo, then Savitri was the Mother hewrself. In fact, in a letter written in 1936, Sri Aurobindo said that in his poem Savitri was "an incarnation of the Divine Mother", and not just a paragon of chastity and symbol of the flaming power of love. ¹³

In another letter he said that he looked upon the composition of Savitri as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative"; in fact, the poem itself was for him "a means of ascension".¹⁴ And the Mother too was to say in the course of a conversation in French with an ardent young disciple, on 18 January 1960 ¹⁵

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To read Savitri is indeed to practise Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. ¹⁶

Further she is reported to have stated to a professor of English:

For the opening of the psychic, for the growth of consciousness and even for the improvement of English it is good to read one or two pages of Savitri each day. ¹⁷

Sri Aurobindo was thinking besides of his aim to cram a whole cosmos into his poem, and not a static cosmos either, but a dynamic and an evolving one. As the Mother maintained in the conversation referred to above:

Yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there ¹⁸

V

When Sri Aurobindo took up Savitri again in the nineteen-thirties, the additions and alterations were in the first Part, notably in what is now "The Book of Beginnings", "The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds" and "The Book of the Divine Mother". Writing to Sethna in 1938, Sri Aurobindo said that "The 'Worlds' have fallen into a state of manuscript chaos, corrections upon corrections, additions upon additions, rearrangements on rearrangements out of which perhaps some cosmic beauty will emerge!" ¹⁹ It is mainly this long Book that is packed with the experiences of the occult World Stair: the worlds of Light above, the worlds of Darkness below, the worlds of subtle Matter, the Life-Force and the Mind in between, these together comprising the whole inner structure of the cosmos. In fact, all the three Books of Part I were retouched as often as the inspiration directed, and new passages were added as Sri Aurobindo's intimacy with the occult increased day by day; and there were the experiences of the Mother too.

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri has doubtless the bone-structure of the tale in the Mahabharata, but the tissues and the cells, the blood-streams and the pulse-beats, all derive from the Mother's and the Master's inner experiences and yogic realisations. In the Mother's prayer of 24 November 1931, she has admitted to touching with her finger "the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience", and Sri Aurobindo too has spoken in his "A God's Labour" of his digging mid "a horror of filth and mire", probing "the nether mysteries" and "the human abyss" and seeking "the inner reason of hell". The 7th and 8th Cantos ("The Descent into Night" and "The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness")

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on Book II could be read as an exhaustive report of the explorations hinted at in the Mother's prayer and Sri Aurobindo's poem:

He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause .....

The veil was rent that covers Nature's depths:

He saw the fount of the world's lasting pain

And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance; ...

A tract he reached un built and owned by none:

There all could enter but none stay for long.

It was a no man's land of evil air,

A crowded neighbourhood without one home,

A borderland between the world and hell ....

A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,

If worse can be where all is evil's extreme;

Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst ....

Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,

Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule

And using blood and torture as a seal,

Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world ....

Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke

And faced the pain and danger of the world.

He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:

He met with his bare spirit naked Hell. ²⁰

Nay, worse there is none; it is the heart of Hell ­

Then could he see the hidden heart of Night: ...

The Anarchs of the formless depths arose,

Great titan beings and demoniac powers, ...

Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,

As in a studio of creative Death

The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan

The drama of the earth, their tragic stage. ²¹

But however dismal the experience, the journey into the mud and the murkiness was not to be avoided, for "None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell." ²²

In this infernal realm he dared to press

Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,

Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest

Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:

In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,

In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell. ²³

Still undaunted, and unaffected still, the Traveller pursues his probe, and then the mystic Truth dawns upon him:

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He saw in Night the Eternal's shadowy veil,

Knew death for a cellar of the house of life, ...

Hell split across its huge abrupt facade

As if a magic building were undone,

Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.

Into being's gap scooped out as empty Space

In which she has filled the place of absent God,

There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn,

Healed were all things that Time's torn heart had made

And sorrow could live no more in Nature's breast:

Division ceased to be, for God was there.

The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,

Matter and Spirit mingled and were one. ²⁴

This was the miracle of transformation: at the very centre of Darkness was secreted the principle of Light, at the densest core of Matter veiled Spirit had its sovran shrine. And having thus found the root and cause and cure of Hell, the Traveller - who is it but Sri Aurobindo, who is it but the Mother herself? - comes out of the Abyss, and journeys through the Paradise of the Life-Gods, the Kingdoms of the Little and the Greater Mind, and so on, till at last he reaches "creation's centre" and the "still fixity and brooding passion of the world of Soul", and there is now the iridescence and ecstasy of a sheer apocalyptic experience:

There he beheld in their mighty union's poise

The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,

A single being in two bodies clasped,

A diarchy of two united souls,

Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;

Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world. ²⁵

Another Vision still for the Traveller, "the mystic outline of a face"; and

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,

An atom of her illimitable self

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,

Tossed towards the shores of her ocean ecstasy,

Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,

He cast from the rent stillness of his soul

A cry of adoration and desire

And the surrender of his boundless mind

And the self-giving of his silent heart.

He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone. ²⁶

There is little doubt, then that these and many of the epiphanies and evocations in Savitri were but the transcriptions of Sri Aurobindo's and the

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Mother's spiritual adventures and realisations. To the young sadhak she spoke to in 1960, the Mother had said, "It is my experiences he has presented at length and they were his experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind." Sri Aurobindo's overhead consciousness was identical with the Mother's, that was how he had been able to tap uncannily from her immense store of past experiences and realisations as well. Theirs was the joint adventure into the Supermind and, in those high ranges of experience, what happened to her, what happened to him, had accordingly the same contours, the same colours, the same force of impulsion. Savitri thus became essentially the inner life-history of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. As the Mother has succinctly put it, Savitri is:

1) The daily record of the spiritual experiences of the individual who has written.

2) A complete system of yoga which can serve as a guide for those who want to follow the integral sadhana.

3) The yoga of the Earth in its ascension towards the Divine.

4) The experiences of the Divine Mother in her effort to adapt herself to the body she has taken and the ignorance and the falsity of the earth upon which she has incarnated. ²⁷

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CHAPTER 28

Asuric Upsurge

I

As we have seen in the preceding chapters, during the seven-year period between 1931 and 1938 there were broad indications that the Yoga at the individual and even collective levels was making steady progress. The Mother's sudden and serious illness in October 1931 had been a set-back of course, a temporary triumph for the hostile forces, but presently the divine dispensation visibly reasserted itself. The whinings, grumblings and philosophic doubts punctuating several of the letters written by some of the intellectuals among the disciples at this time should be viewed only in the wider perspective of this general progress, outer and inner, of the Ashram community. These had their part to play no doubt in the collective sadhana of the Ashram community, for many of their letters acted as catalytic agents and engineered the emanation from the Source of the much needed general and particular illumination with regard to the theory and the practice of the Yoga.

On a synoptic view, then, the Ashram was growing in its total strength and the intensity of its evolving consciousness. There was a burst of literary and artistic activity, and the three Darshans were like minor landmarks indicating the steady, if not spectacular, progress of the sadhana from the bases of inconscience and ignorance and flawed half-lights up the winding zigzagging slopes of Ascent towards the summits of the supramental Truth­Consciousness and supreme Ananda.

While in appearance the Ashram was a world apart and sheltered from the wider world, and although in the Ashram itself Sri Aurobindo was in self-forged double isolation, it was still no escapist retreat, for the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's consciousness knew no limitations of space and time. He read the papers, he discussed local and world happenings with the Mother, and their brooding identity of consciousness comprehended all the sinuous movements of Becoming. On 25 September 1938, Sri Aurobindo could write in his poem "The Cosmic Man":

I look across the world and no horizon walls my gaze;

I see Paris and Tokyo and New York,

I see the bombs bursting on Barcelona and on Canton streets.

Man's numberless misdeeds and rare good deeds take place within my single self.

I am the beast he slays, the bird he feeds and saves.

The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill,

I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.¹

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This is not to be read as mere rhetoric, this was vivid personal involvement and experience. The thirties were the poisoned time when there was aggression and war on many fronts: Japan's in Manchuria, Italy's in Abyssinia, the Sino-J Japanese war, the Spanish civil war, and the ominous rise of Hitler. There were the pathetic but abortive attempts to contain the developing world crisis through the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo could, beyond any Tiresias, see everything and see through everything. And such a gift of vision may have been a terrible burden, for that involved also a proportionate responsibility.

II

1938: it was a year of continuing crisis. On 12 March 1938, Austria was annexed by Hitler. Then day after day, week after week, Hitler mounted pressure on Czechoslovakia:

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;

Its hard and shameless clamour filling space

And threatening all who dared to listen to truth

Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

And braggart dogmas shouted in the night ... ²

Mussolini's Italy was behind Hitler, and so was Japan. The Western powers - Britain, France - were tense with anxiety and apprehension. President Roosevelt of U.S.A. felt deeply concerned, but could do little. Stalin's Russia was enigmatic, impassive, apparently neutral. Was it going to be war or peace? Neville Chamberlain was only too agonisingly aware of Britain's inadequate war-preparedness, and Daladier of France too was looking for an escape route from immediate entanglement in a full-fledged conflagration. In India, very few could have guessed the deeper issues at stake, and none had Sri Aurobindo's comprehensive grasp of the developments in their historical setting. In his lone room Sri Aurobindo sat and brooded out the issue of peace or war, and the Mother brought all her immense proliferation of occult knowledge into the assessment of the European and world situation. On 14 December, while discussing another subject, Sri Aurobindo was to remark:

I am not occupied with details of occult working. I have left them to the Mother. She often hears what is said at a distance, meets sadhaks on the subtle planes, talks to them. She saw exactly what was going to happen in the recent European trouble. We know whatever we have to know for our work. ³

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother must have been deeply concerned during

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those weeks of gathering storm and mounting tensions. On 29 September 1938, the humiliating (but perhaps at the time very necessary) Munich Agreement was signed by Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier and Chamberlain, giving the frightened world a little breathing-space - but no more than that! Sri Aurobindo had no doubt whatsoever regarding the powers that were behind Hitler, for on 14 November 1938 he wrote in "The Iron Dictators":

I looked for Thee alone, but met my glance

The iron dreadful Four who rule our breath,

Masters of falsehood, Kings of ignorance,

High sovereign Lords of suffering and death.

Whence came these formidable autarchies,

From what inconscient blind Infinity, -

Cold propagandists of a million lies,

Dictators of a world of agony? ...

Thou, only Thou, canst raise the invincible siege,

O Light, O deathless Joy, O rapturous Peace! ⁴

Falsehood, Ignorance, Suffering, Death: these are the Iron Dictators who run half the world through infernal agents such as Hitler. How easily the eyes were dazzled by the fires of Hell, how fatally half-headed people were inhaling the fumes from the Pit? Half the world had already been bewitched into acquiescence, and the other half held its breath in be­numbing fear. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother saw clearly and straight through the intervening mist and māyā of the propagandist falsehood. They could see right from the beginning the kind of threat Hitler and his "Children of Wotan" posed to man's future on the earth. The following passage in Savitri was quite obviously inspired by the Hitlerian horror that spread and established its hegemony over Germany:

A mighty energy, a monster god,

Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,

It stared at the harsh unpitying world it made

With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea ....

To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:

It claimed the whole world for Evil's living room,

Its party's grim totalitarian reign

The cruel destiny of breathing things.

All on one plan was shaped and standardised

Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight. ⁵

With her uncanny occult powers, the Mother could see - as she was to explain many years later - how Hitler was indeed under the domination of an evil Force or nefarious being that dazzled and led him on and on,

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seemingly from one sensational victory to another and still another:

Hitler used to retire into solitude and remain there as long as it was necessary to come into contact with his "guide" and receive from him :inspirations which he carried out later very faithfully. This being which Hitler took for the Supreme was quite plainly an Asura, one who is called the "Lord of Falsehood" in occultism, but who proclaimed himself the "Lord of the Nations" .... Generally he used to appear to Hitler wearing a silver cuirass and helmet; a kind of flame came out of his head and there was an atmosphere of dazzling light around him .... He used to tell Hitler everything that had to be done - he played with him as with a monkey or a mouse. He had decided clearly to make Hitler commit all possible extravagances till the day he would break his neck, which did happen. ⁶

In almost identical terms, Sri Aurobindo wrote on 16 October 1939 in his poem on Hitler:

In his high villa on the fatal hill

Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,

Dictator of his action's sudden choice,

The tiger leap of a demoniac skill ....

Thus driven he must stride on conquering all,

Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,

Perhaps to meet upon his storm-swept road

A greater devil - or thunderstroke of God. ⁷

Indeed, under the Hitlerian dispensation, the Nazi millions became "a race possessed". The 'foul fiend' is normally held in severe check by "the heart's human law" and "the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought". But in "a fire and earthquake of the soul", the devil is let loose, and he invokes the Night and imposes his treacherous reign. A whole people can be bewitched into accepting a philosophy of perversion and the religion of ignorance and hatred.

III

November was the month of the Siddhi Day, and as usual the sadhaks were looking forward to the Darshan on the 24th to receive Sri Aurobindo's blessings. And the visitors were coming, more and more day after day; and by the 23rd there were about one thousand sadhaks and others, awaiting the "divine Event" of the next day. The atmosphere of the Ashram was filled with a suppressed excitement. Friends and strangers came together, and the accents of many languages were heard. Those who had come to the Ashram for the first time felt a responsive calm to receive the benevolent impact of the Invisible. They were on the threshold of a unique experience,

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- exactly what, they didn't as yet know. And they just wondered, in their humility and awe.

Among those who had come for the first time was Miss Margaret Wilson, the eldest daughter of President Woodrow Wilson. Having learnt about Sri Aurobindo in the late twenties, she started corresponding with him, read some of his seminal writings, and began doing his Yoga. But it was only in late 1938 that she was permitted to come and settle in the Ashram. On 5 November she was given the name "Nishtha". Sri Aurobindo, while thus naming her, wrote: "The word means one-pointed, fixed and steady concentration, devotion and faith in the single aim - the Divine and the Divine Realisation." ⁸ Nishtha was now all eagerness to have her first darshan of the author of Essays on the Gita (which she considered her Bible). And so were the others - sadhaks, disciples, admirers, visitors - feeding on expectancy, sitting in the Ashram courtyard, or whispering to one another. The whole day passed in subdued animation, beginning with the morning when the Mother gave balcony darshan. "Embodiment of the Mahalakshmi Grace and Beauty," says Nirodbaran, "she poured her smile and filled our hearts with love and adoration. ⁹ During the remaining hours of the day, the sadhaks walked as on air, and fed on 'honeydew and the milk of Paradise'.

When night came, most retired early, and stillness reigned in the Ashram. There was a solitary light burning in Sri Aurobindo's room. By 2 a.m. Ambalal Purani was up too, for he had to prepare hot water for Sri Aurobindo's bath. And then, sharply the emergency bell rang from the Mother's room. When Purani rushed up the stairs, the Mother who was standing at the top told him: "Sri Aurobindo has fallen down. Go and fetch Dr. Manilal'' From faraway Gujarat, Or. Manilal had come for the Darshan, and he was now awakened, and he hurried to Sri Aurobindo's room. Nirod and the other Ashram doctors too were called. This was what had happened: as he was walking from his sitting-room to the bathroom, Sri Aurobindo had stumbled over a tiger-skin on the floor and fallen, his right knee striking against the tiger-head. He could not get up, and lay quietly. But reacting to the strong vibration in her sleep, the Mother awoke and rushed to the place, took in at a glance what had happened, and rang the emergency bell. As Nirod recapitulates the scene:

The Mother was sitting by Sri Aurobindo's side, fanning him gently. I could not believe what I saw: on the one hand Sri Aurobindo lying helplessly, on the other, a deep divine sorrow on the Mother's face .... His right knee was flexed, his face bore a perplexed smile as if he did not know what was the matter with him; the chest was bare, well-developed, and the snow-white dhoti now drawn up contrasted with the shining golden thighs. A sudden fugitive vision of the Golden Purusha of the Vedas! ¹⁰

The doctors diagnosed it as a case of fracture. Within two to three hours,

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the right leg was put in plaster, and Sri Aurobindo was conveyed to his bed. To the great disappointment of the assembled sadhaks and visitors who were looking forward to the Darshan scheduled to commence at 7.30 in the morning, there was an announcement of cancellation of the programme. The Mother, however, gave Darshan to all in the evening, thereby wiping away "their gloom with the sunshine of her smile and the power of her touch". ¹¹

When later, after the X-ray photographs had been taken and examined, a clear diagnosis emerged, it was "like a stunning blow". What they revealed was an "impacted fracture of the right femur above the knee, two fragments firmly locked together". ¹² The specialist advised that Sri Aurobindo should stay in bed for a number of weeks. The next day when Dr. Manilal tried to make light of it to the Mother, she almost flew into a rage. "It was Mahakali's wrath." The Mother knew that not the doctors, but Sri Aurobindo alone could initiate the process of cure. And so she "prostrated herself on the floor before Sri Aurobindo," writes Nirod, "and, I believe, began to pray to him. From this supplication I could realise the gravity of the situation .... Calm and solemn, Sri Aurobindo heard the silent prayer.^"13 The pulse of recovery began to beat again.

IV

While the strict outer explanation of the accident was that Sri Aurobindo stumbled while walking, the timing of the fall and the seriousness of the fracture hinted at some occult intervention. ¹⁴ The Hitler-peril, although halted for the nonce by the Munich Agreement, was far from being exorcised away and the real trial of strength between the forces of Light and Darkness was still to come. The world was very near the brink, it was almost touch and go. But in their anxiety for the world's welfare, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were perhaps a little careless of themselves and the hostile forces suddenly struck.¹⁵ Sri Aurobindo himself explained thus the cause of his accident: "The hostile forces had tried many times to prevent things like the darshan but I had succeeded in warding off all their attacks. At the time the accident to my leg occurred, I was more occupied with guarding the Mother and I forgot about myself. I didn't think the hostiles would attack me. That was my mistake." ¹⁶ The Mother was asleep - and all was quiet, the hostile forces were able to slip through and cause his fall. In Nirodbaran's words:

The forces must have been very sly - clever indeed to have chosen the time when the Mother had retired, the Gods were asleep. But the Powers of the Inconscience were awake to strike their infernal blow. It was really the hour of the unexpected! ¹⁷

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For a whole year almost after the accident, the Mother's central preoccupation was Sri Aurobindo's health. She suspended pranams and personal interviews, and attended to the all-absorbing question of hastening Sri Aurobindo's recovery, and there were also the details of the working of the Ashram. To the amazement of the attending doctors, the Mother showed a surprisingly close - if intuitive - knowledge of medical science. When the orthopaedic surgeon came from Madras to examine Sri Aurobindo, the Mother "put many intricate questions to him on various possibilities, the prognosis, lines of treatment, etc., etc., and the specialist wondered with admiration at her possession of so much technical knowledge." ¹⁸ When in late February 1939 the splints were removed and Sri Aurobindo's thigh looked swollen, the specialist tried to give some reassuring explanation:

The Mother was not however so easily satisfied. She questioned him very closely on the cause of the oedema, its pathology, complications and danger, or other possible sequels. When the specialist stated that sometimes movements might dislodge a venous clot and bring about serious complications, the Mother caught him at once and asked how then could he recommend massage and passive movements. The doctor was not prepared for such an astute question ... and said that the Mother was a very intelligent person! ¹⁹

Again, when massage was to be given, the Mother watched the application, putting forth her force to speed up the recovery. Also, she made careful and comprehensive arrangements with regard to every aspect of Sri Aurobindo's life and satisfied herself frequently in the course of the day that all was indeed well.

By April 1939 there was substantial improvement, and Sri Aurobindo was able to walk, though for a time only with the support of Purani and Champaklal. The sadhaks and disciples who had already missed two Darshans in succession (24 November and 21 February) were unwilling to wait till 15 August, and so 24 April - the date of the Mother's second coming to Pondicherry in 1920 - was chosen as a Darshan day. But it was no prolonged affair as of old, extending from 7.30 to well past noon, but a. brief benediction, "over within an hour" ²⁰ in the afternoon, a quick processionary communion.

V

In the days following the accident, Sri Aurobindo's right leg was in plaster and he was confined to bed. He spoke little in the beginning, but as the days passed, he became more communicative. Besides Purani and Champaklal the doctors - Manilal, Nirod, Becharlal, Satyendra - were in attendance and at times there were two or three others besides. When questions were put to him, he was not unwilling to answer.

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As the days passed he was rather free and relaxed in his comments. Occasionally the Mother also joined the group. Thus the 'talks' started, which were to assume considerable importance during the months and years following, becoming an institution almost. It was as though the Evening Talks of the pre-Siddhi. days were now resumed, though under altered conditions. Whatever the issue, Sri Aurobindo spoke gently, intimately, and in a "finely cadenced voice" , talking as if to himself and not looking at anybody in particular.

The Mother used to drop in every evening on her way to give a meditation to the sadhaks, and she too occasionally joined the conversation. Thus, on 11 December 1938, she said on entering Sri Aurobindo's room, "Are they again making you talk?" Sri Aurobindo answered that there was some discussion about justice. The Mother, intervening, remarked:

Of course, there is justice. Do you think these people [evil-doers] can have an easy and comfortable life? They can't; they suffer, they are tormented, they are not happy within ....

... in some cases as the Divine pressure goes on acting on them, at one time or another, especially during some impending catastrophe, a sudden change takes place in them. ²¹

The discussion then turned on Grace, which could supersede even the Law of Karma, but one had to have total faith in the Grace. Certainly, Grace was unconditional, but suppose one resisted it - denied it - threw it back? "It would be like constantly spilling from a cup in which something is poured," she said, and added:

If one recognises the Grace and expresses gratitude, it acts more quickly and more powerfully ....

But the Grace does not work according to human standards or demands. It has its own law and its own way. How can it act otherwise? Very often what seems to be a great blow or calamity at the present moment may turn out to be a great blessing after ten years or so, and people say that their real life began only after that mishap. ²²

Another evening Dr. Manilal asked the Mother whether it was a sin to kill bugs, mosquitoes, scorpions and the like. She answered that in her early Pondicherry days, she used to drive mosquitoes away by her yogic force, but Sri Aurobindo didn't approve of it. On this Sri Aurobindo commented jokingly, "Because you were making friendship with them." ²³ While Dr. Manilal presented the extreme Jain viewpoint on Ahimsa, the Mother said: "In order to be a true non-killing Jain, one must be a Yogi. Then one can deal rightly with these animals and insects." ²⁴

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A few days later, on 4 January 1939, the Mother entered a caveat against hypnotism:

What is hypnotism? Doesn't it mean that the subject's will-power is replaced by somebody else's? I know a case of exteriorisation where the operator was able to exteriorise the vital being of the subject in an almost material form and replace it by another's and not by the operator's own. If one replaced it by one's own, there would be no operation. But these operations are extremely dangerous, for there are so many forces round about that may easily take possession of the body, or else death may follow. One shouldn't do these things except under guidance or in the presence of a Master. ²⁵

Some years later, when Sethna wrote about his experiences on leaving his physical body and making explorations in his subtle body, the Mother wrote firmly:

It is much better to stop the experiences altogether. They seem to take you into levels which are undesirable and most unsafe; they are not at all necessary for any opening in the Yoga. ²⁶

The Mother's own trances and travels in the occult regions were of a different kind, being those of an adept; even so, the times the Mother was in trance - sometimes for hours together - were "a very trying phase". Not only while giving a meditation, receiving pranams, offering a flower, but also when walking into Sri Aurobindo's room or out of it, discussing the Ashram letters, reports or account-books with Sri Aurobindo, or doing a flower-arrangement in her own room, she was apt suddenly to go into a trance and remain in that state for quite some time. In Nirod's words:

Such trance moods were more particularly manifest at night during the collective meditation below, and in that condition she would come to Sri Aurobindo's room .... He would watch her with an indulgent smile and try all devices to bring her down to earth .... Then going back to her room, she would start the 'flower-work' in this state of trance .... Hundreds of roses daily came to her as an offering from our gardens. She would spread all of them on trays, pick and choose them according to size, colour, etc., trim and arrange them in different vases, aided by a sadhika. This would continue till the early hours of morning....²⁷

It was extraordinary that her hands could work with such mechanical precision, although she was all along in a condition of trance; "the eyes were half-closed, the body swayed, but the hands were doing their work . Once she told Nirod: "I can see everything. I have eyes at the back of my head." At a time when her consciousness was far away, perhaps somewhere in the occult regions of the world-stair, her limbs and senses still seemed to function properly. Her feeling for atmosphere was uncanny, and

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she could look into the uttermost truth of things and persons, and gauge the measures of the infinite and the infinitesimal alike.

VI

At Munich on 29 September 1938, Britain and France had purchased an uneasy and what many considered a humiliating peace. Looking at a photograph of Neville Chamberlain and Hitler taken at Munich, Sri Aurobindo had said that the British Prime Minister "looked like a fly before a spider, on the point of being caught". ²⁸ It was but the simulacrum of peace that Munich won for Europe and the world, for the Axis Powers ­ Hitler and Mussolini - were on the rampage still. Their open help to General Franco in the Spanish Civil War had sustained him for long; they recognised his regime on 27 February 1939, and the civil war itself ended in his favour on 1 April. In the meantime, Hitler's and Mussolini's actions left no doubt regarding their nakedly aggressive intentions. The sabre-rattling went on without a break, and there was much secret activity undermining the titular governments in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Albania and Lithuania. On the one hand, by their acquiescence at Munich, Daladier and Chamberlain had not only let down Czechoslovakia, but also initiated a process of demoralisation in their own countries. On the other hand, they had made Hitler and Mussolini feel that they could get all they wanted through the mere brandishing of the big stick. During a conversation on 2 February 1939, Sri Aurobindo summed up the situation in these terms:

Even the two [France and Britain] are no match for the dictators. And, besides, one doesn't know what England will do .... Blum and Daladier made the worst possible blunder: one by his non-intervention policy in Spain, the other by betraying the Czechs. Franco's victory is most dangerous for France .... The dictators know their own interests ... and they can't be separated. England and France tried the game of separating them ... but both failed. It is not that Germany and Italy like each other. The Germans despise the Italians and the Italians hate the Germans. But they know on which side their bread is buttered. ²⁹

At the same time, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo also realised that what was happening in Europe had global implications. Unknown forces were locked in struggle, and the future of humanity itself was being determined by the developing clash between the Western and the Axis Powers. In the course of the same conversation, Sri Aurobindo said:

The problem is to save the world from domination by Asuric (Demonic) Forces. It would be awful to be ruled by the Nazis and Fascists.

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Their domination will let loose on mankind what are called the Four Powers of Hell - obscurantism, falsehood, suffering and death. Suffering and death mean the horrors of war. ³⁰

And now, even as Sri Aurobindo had anticipated, things began to happen with diabolical precision and rapidity. On 16 March, Hitler annexed Bohemia and Moravia, and made them a German Protectorate. Now it was to be Poland's turn, and a virulent campaign was unleashed against that country. Presently Hitler wrested Memel from Lithuania on 21 March, and on 7 April, Mussolini seized Albania. It was as clear as daylight that the Munich Agreement was no more than a scrap of paper. However tardily, Britain introduced conscription, started talks with Russia, and signed the Anglo-Polish Treaty. But Russia double-crossed the Western Powers, and on 23 August signed the German-Soviet Pact. And on 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun indeed.

From the very beginning, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother felt deeply involved in the course of the War and in its ultimate outcome. Superficially things were blurred, and there were people in India who were ardent admirers of Hitler and Mussolini, and who felt a sense of elation every time the Allies sustained a reverse on the battlefield. But some others felt concerned that the Allies were on the rout, or at best only on the defensive. While the British were intensely disliked as the colonial Power in India, a few felt that its substitution by Nazi Power would be immitigable Hell. Gandhiji, Jawaharlal Nehru and some of the other Congress leaders seem to have held this view, but they certainly lacked the vision and the bold statesmanship to declare unambiguously for the Allies and lend a helping hand to the Allied war effort. There were, then, the pro-British groups that, out of habit or self-interest, but only half-heartedly and half-headedly, gave support to the Allied war effort. Presently, leaders like Rajaji (Rajagopalachari) and M.N. Roy looked favourably at their cause. It was only Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who saw clearly the issues at stake and gave open support to the Allies.

The early days and weeks of the War were a period of moral and military violence and ruthlessness, and when the Nazi forces penetrated deep into Poland, the Russians attacked from the East on 17 September. Ten days later, Warsaw capitulated to the Nazis, and Soviet and Nazi forces met near Brest Litovsk, and on 29 September, the Nazi-Soviet Pact sealed this new partition of Poland. On the Western front, however, the French felt safe behind their Maginot Line, and the Nazis behind their Siegfried Line. Thus the War settled during the 1939-1940 winter months into a 'phoney war', with business going on as usual in Britain and France. On the contrary, the Soviet-Finnish war that erupted in November-December brought at first some humiliating surprises to the Soviet army, but

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ultimately, in March 1940, Finland had to agree to cede some valuable territory to the Russians.

VII

In October 1939, Hitler had reached one of the peaks of his career, not as an agent of the Iron Dictators alone, but even seemed a military genius. Polandd had been overrun as a result of his blitzkrieg (lightning war), and the Western Powers were reduced to a defensive posture behind the Magionot Line. It was at this time that Sri Aurobindo wrote "The Dwarf Napoleon: Hitler, October 1939". Military commentators were at the time given to comparing glibly Hitler with Napoleon, but only Sri Aurobindo with his synoptic view of the past, present and future could know the abysmal difference between the two. Napoleon, after all, had been cast in a heroic mould:

Napoleon's mind was swift and bold and vast,

His heart was calm and stormy like the sea,

His will dynamic in its grip and clasp.

His eye could hold a world within its grasp

And see the great and small things sovereignly.

But who was this cruel Hitler, this "Dwarf Napoleon", that would bestride the agitated earth like the Colossus of old? There was all the difference between the sun-god and a satyr:

Far other this creature of a nether clay,

Void of all grandeur, like a gnome at play,

Iron and mud his nature's mingled stuff,

A little limited visionary brain

Cunning and skilful in its narrow vein, ...

Intense neurotic with his shouts and tears,

Violent and cruel, devil, child and brute,

This screaming orator with his strident tongue,

The prophet of a scanty fixed idea,

Plays now the leader of our human march; '"

A Titan Power supports this pigmy man,

The crude dwarf instrument of a mighty Force ....

A Will to trample humanity into clay

And unify earth beneath one iron sway, ...

But if its tenebrous empire were allowed,

Its mastery would prepare the dismal hour

When the Inconscient shall regain its right,

And man who emerged as Nature's conscious power,

Shall sink into the deep original night .... ³¹

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It needed a seer's vision, a scholar's historical sense, and a humanist's

CHAPTER 29

Attack, Defence and Counter-Attack

I

The accident to Sri Aurobindo's leg having occurred on the eve of 24 November 1938, the scheduled Darshan on that day had to be abandoned as related earlier, and the next Darshan too could not be held on 21 February 1939. Then came the Darshan on 24 April, for by then Sri Aurobindo had recovered enough to stand the strain of sitting in the same posture for over an hour while before him flowed the procession of sadhaks and admirers. Except that he could not walk as freely as before, Sri Aurobindo was in good general health. Before the accident, he had had to spend most of his nights and part of the daytime - some ten hours or more in all- writing replies to the letters from the sadhaks. There was now no resumption of correspondence on that frightening scale, and the exceptions were rather rare. Since the proposal was mooted at this time to bring out The Life Divine in book form, the Mother persuaded Sri Aurobindo to take up this work. The sequence of chapters had originally appeared in the Arya month after month from August 1914 to January 1919, and the revision had to be more than notional, and indeed involved also much new writing. Book One saw expansion of the Chapter on "The Double Soul in Man" and the composition of a long chapter introducing the concept of intermediate powers of consciousness between mind and Supermind, the highest and most important of which is Overmind. The exposition of the later chapters was considerably simplified and some new chapters were added. Curiously enough, the progress of the revision ran parallel to the worsening of the political situation in Europe, and once started, Sri Aurobindo seemed to write with phenomenal speed and concentration. As Nirod described the scene:

There he was, then, sitting on the bed, with his right leg stretched out .... No sooner had he begun than followed line after line as if everything was chalked out in the mind, or as he used to say, a tap was turned on and a stream poured down. Absorbed in perfect poise, gazing now and then in front ... he would go on for about two hours. The Mother would drop in with a glass of coconut water ... he took the glass from the loving hand, drank it slowly, and then plunged back into his work! It was a very sweet vision, indeed, the Mother standing quietly by his side with a smile and watching him, and he forgetful of everything writing away; then a short exchange of beatific glances. ¹

He gave installments of the finished script to the Mother, who passed them on to Prithwi Singh for typing; and so the copy went to the Gauranga

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Press, Calcutta. The first volume subtitled "Omnipresent Reality and the Universe", with its twenty-eight chapters, appeared in November 1939, when Hitler had already overrun Poland and partitioned it with Russia. The second volume of The Life Divine, "The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution", appeared in two Parts in April 1940, synchronising with Hitler's swoop upon Denmark and Norway, followed by the massive invasion of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

We have seen in an earlier chapter how the Arya (in which "The Life Divine" always had pride of place) leapt into life soon after the commencement of the First World War, and now the revision and book publication of The Life Divine likewise coincided with the Nazi lightning offensives against Poland in the East and France and the Benelux countries in the West. Aggression, predatory violence, the descent of darkness, the galloping hooves of Death, the reign of misery, these on the one hand and, on the other, the unfolding of a grand dialectic, the building up of a great synthesis of knowledge, the lighting up of the fires of aspiration, the spirraling of inspiring future possibilities, and the generation of vast circles of peace! Twice within a quarter of a century, Asuric forces had unleashed the dogs of war and destruction and pushed mankind to the brink of the abyss almost; and twice from India, from the same corner, from the same powerhouse of the Spirit, had come the glorious counterblast, the divine affirmation, the ambrosial charter for a new heaven and a new earth. Neither in 1914 nor in 1939 was it a mere fortuitous coincidence; rather was in the proof that the sanction of the Supreme was behind the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And when The Life Divine appeared as a mighty two-volume symphony in 1939-40, it made an immediate impact on sensitive minds, and Sir Francis Younghusband said not long afterwards that it was "the greatest book" that had been produced in his time. Making a pointed reference to the War and the Book, Younghusband wrote in his letter to Dilip:

This war has been a terrible catastrophe and we here in London suffered badly .... But bad as it is the calamity has had one good effect; it has turned men's mind to God .... Ami The Life Divine could not have appeared at a more opportune moment. ²

II

In his lightning Spring offensives against Denmark and Norway, Hitler exploited to the full the tactics of surprise and attack in overwhelming force, and the role of the Norwegian traitor, Quisling, hastened the Nazi victory. Commenting on the happenings, Sri Aurobindo remarked on 15 April:

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This Quisling of Norway should have been shot. Do you know what he has done? When the Norwegians were defending Trondjheim with their coastal batteries, Quisling sent them directions to stop fighting and when they knew that he had betrayed them it was too late. ³

There was then the massive attack on France and the Benelux countries on 10 May. Churchill now formed a new Government in Britain, which Sri Aurobindo thought was a strong one with most of the ablest men in it. and even the inclusion of Amery as the India Secretary wasn't a bad thing since he had said in an interview that India would "soon have to be considered as force independent".⁴ Churchill's fearless imaginative lead notwithstanding, the run of disasters for the Allies continued. The German army, by a surprise move, had pushed swiftly through the Ardennes, crossed the French border on 12 May, and the Meuse the next day; and on 20 May, it had reached Abbeville. Holland and Belgium capitulated in near-despair, and the British Expeditionary Force and the French First Army were isolated and separated from the main French Army. In an effort to escape the encirclement and the threatened annihilation, the British Expeditionary Force in France successfully organised a mass evacuation at Dunkirk, and in the early days of June, 338,400 British and allied troops were safely landed in England through the deployment of almost 1000 sailing vessels of all kinds. Although Weygand now replaced Gamelin as the Generalissimo, it made little difference to the war situation. The German army relentlessly pressed towards Paris and occupied this 'open city' on 14 June. Churchill's bold and magnanimous offer of a union with France was rejected by the French Government (an action that was deeply deplored by the Mother), and on 16 June, the aged Marshal Pétain formed a new Government with the sole aim of making peace with Hitler on any terms whatsoever. After a few more reverses, and the entry of Mussolini into the war against France, Pétain accepted Hitler's draconian armistice terms on 25 June.

Now when England stood all alone against Hitler and the reign of universal Night as the sole bastion of the Light of Freedom, he ordered an aerial offensive as a prelude to invasion. In the ensuing Battle of Britain waged with unprecedented ferocity and ruthlessness, on 15 August - Sri Aurobindo's 68th birthday - 180 Nazi planes were destroyed over England, and three days later, 152 more met the same fate. The air offensive continued in September also but, undeterred by the strain and the damage, Britain stood the trial gallantly, and at last Hitler was forced to abandon the Battle of Britain.

It was in August 1940 when the air battle over Britain was raging in a frenzy of fury and Hitler was fuming and foaming at his mouth and decreeing the annihilation of his enemies, that Sri Aurobindo wrote "The Children of Wotan". The rhetorical question "Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan?" provokes this infernal response

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from Hitler's hordes overrunning Europe and threatening to overrun the entire world:

We march to make of earth a hell and call it heaven..

The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven;

The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise ....

Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails.

We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.

When they are asked whether they are not afraid of the backlash of divine punishment, they but gleefully and exultingly cry:

We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at his altar.

Our leader is master of Fate, medium of his mysteries.

We have made the mind a cipher, we have strangled Thought with a cord;

Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature's Lord..

We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan's peace.

We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan,

We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage.

A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will,

We are born in humanity's sunset, to the Night is our pilgrimage.

On the bodies of perishing nations, mid the cry of the cataclysm coming,

To a presto of bomb and shell and the aeroplanes' fatal humming,

We march, lit by Truth's death-pyre, to the world's satanic age.⁵

It was much more than just human foresight or poetic fancy and imagination - it was really yogic vision that saw so vividly and described so arrestingly the full implications of Nazi world dominion. The words came under a terrific compulsion as it were, and the mere utterance of the warning was a gesture to arrest the wild and horrifying Rake's progress towards the Satanic Age.

It is important to remember that during the agonising weeks following swoop upon Denmark and Norway and the lightning breakthrough in the West, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were anxiously following the events, and where necessary or feasible, directing a spiritual force in favour of the Allies. Sri Aurobindo's daily talks, morning and evening, with his attendants throw a good deal of light on his close knowledge of the developing events and his shrewd and often prophetic appraisal of men and events in the global political and military drama. For example, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said on 31 May 1940 that the fog that facilitated the evacuation from Dunkirk was "rather unusual at this time" ­ was it, perhaps, the result of divine intervention? Sri Aurobindo, writing of himself in the third person, has also admitted:

In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever

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necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and a silent spiritual action... there is a spiritual dynamic power which ... is greater that any other and more effective. It was this force which, as soon as he had attained to it he used ... in a constant action upon the world forces. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results or to feel the necessity of any other kind of action. ⁶

Then, more pointedly, he made this categorical admission:

At the beginning [of the World War] he did not actively concern himself with it, but when it appeared as if Hitler would crush all the forces opposed to him and Nazism dominate the world, he began to intervene .... Inwardly, he put his spiritual force behind the Allies from the moment of Dunkirk when everybody was expecting the immediate fall of England and the definite triumph of Hitler, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the rush of German victory almost immediately arrested and the tide of war begin to turn in the opposite direction. This he did, because he saw that behind Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind: it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing of all the work that had been done for her liberation. ⁷

What Sri Aurobindo was directing in support of the Allies was an overmental, not a supramental force; it was not infallible, for much depended also on the receptivity of the instrument, the nature of the field of action and the Asuric concentration at any particular point of time and place. As Sri Aurobindo explained later:

My present effort is not to stand up on a high and distant Supermind level and change the world from there .... I have always said that the spiritual force I have been putting on human affairs such as the War is not the supramental but the Overmind force, and that when it acts in the material world it is so inextricably mixed up in the tangle of the lower world forces that its results, however strong or however adequate to the immediate object, must necessarily be partial. ⁸

It was a global consciousness that acted as a power behind the scenes, but even when apparently ineffective, it left open the possibility of future rectification.

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III

From certain remarks made by Sri Aurobindo in the course of his daily talks his room, as also his own explicit admission in the passage quoted above, it should be clear that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were not only closely following the fortunes of the War on he various fronts and the vacillations and snap decisions m the chancelleries an cell ones of the world, but they were also intervening whenever or wherever possible with a direct and potent "spiritual dynamic power" which, though it didn't carry the supramental stamp of infallibility, had at least an overmental amplitude and strength. But many in India and several in the Ashram had very different views regarding the War. Britain's difficulty, they thought, was India's heaven-sent opportunity. There were not wanting people either who admired Hitler openly with an almost idolatrous fervour. Nearly everywhere there reigned the ignorance of the lessons of history, and there lay like a pall the even starker ignorance of the clash of the occult forces behind the visible façade. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, however, based their conclusions and actions on the certain knowledge of the movements in the occult world-stair and the light it threw on the actualities of the current world situation. Sri Aurobindo conned the news and reports in the papers, and listened to the news coverage, while the Mother took a deep interest in the BBC feature 'Front-Line Family' put out daily at 4 a.m. Accordingly, whenever the Mother and Sri Aurobindo intervened with a spiritual force, such action was properly correlated to the realities at the Front and the immediate exigencies of the war situation. For a man who kept to his room in remote Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo's knowledge of military and diplomatic moves was most uncanny, the result as much of the study of history as of yogic intuition and direct vision. Thus, for example, on 1 June 1940 when the evacuation from Dunkirk was in progress:

I was wondering why the Allies were not [digging] something like trenches around Dunkirk to defend it more effectively against mechanised tanks, and I now find that they have done exactly that. ⁹

Again, on 21 June, after the fall of France and the total collapse of French resistance:

Russia is following a dangerous policy for herself. Does she think that Hitler will be so damaged by his fight with England that Stalin will be able to destroy him by an attack? When Hitler gets the whole of France he will build up his position very strongly; then he might try to blockade England, since a direct invasion of England is out of the question. ¹⁰

And thus on 29 June 1940:

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Are they [the French] such fools as to believe in Hitler's words [that the colonies wouldn't be touched]? .. That is the Asuric influence cast all over the world. The Mother says that m Apocalypse there is a prophecy that the before the millennium when anti-Christ will come everybody will believein his sweet words and be deceived and no one will judge him by his acts. ¹¹

Sri Aurobindo was also always frank and forthright about his so-called pro-British attitude. He wanted that Britain should win, not for the sake of its Empire, "but because the world under Hitler will be much worse. ¹²

IV

During the excruciating weeks when the Battle of France was as yet undecided, Sri Aurobindo had viewed as a "serious matter" the pro-Hitler sympathies of some of the Ashramites. That sort of attitude was basically wrong, and might even have led to the suppression of the Ashram itself. He said firmly on 17 May:

If these people want that the Ashram should be dissolved, they can come and tell me and I will dissolve it instead of the police doing it. They have no idea about the world, and talk like children. Hitlerism is the greatest menace that the world has ever met. If Hitler wins, do they think India has any chance of being free? ¹³

This was forthright, but also packed with compassion; foreknowledge was a cross, and only Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew how much was at stake. The Mother too had told Nolini the same morning:

It is treachery against Sri Aurobindo to wish for Hitler's victory. Sri Aurobindo's cause is closely connected with that of the Allies and he is working night and day for it. ... If Hitler or Stalin wins, spirituality is doomed. ¹⁴

On 20 May, Sri Aurobindo said that Hitler was really possessed by the Asura:

Human beings by themselves are no match for the Asuras .... Here in Hitler's case it is not an influence but a possession, even perhaps an incarnation. The case of Stalin is similar. The Vital World has descended upon the Physical. That is why the intellectuals are getting perplexed at the destruction of their civilisation, of all the values they had made and stood for. They deny the existence of the worlds beyond the physical and so they are bound to be perplexed.¹⁵

The next morning, he expressed astonishment at the attitude of those sadhaks who, while wanting India's freedom, yet admired Hitler the

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destroyer of human freedom everywhere. Then, a week later, Sri Aurobindo sent the message that Hitler's Germany was not "God's front" but the Asura's. Even with all these clarifications and admonitions, the few doubting sadhaks wouldn't be convinced, and they continued to ask and ask again. How could the Allied Powers be identified with the Divine cause when they were obviously imperfect and inefficient too at the same time? In a letter of 4 July, the Mother wrote to a disciple that in the terrestrial play there was the constant clash between the pro-Divine and the anti-Divine (or Asuric) forces, and men as well as nations became consciously or unconsciously the instruments of these forces:

If the nations or the governments who are blindly the instruments of the divine forces were perfectly pure and divine in their processes and forms of action as well as in the inspiration they receive so ignorantly, they would be invincible because the divine forces themselves are invincible. It is the mixture in the outward expression that gives to the Asura the right to defeat them.

To be a successful instrument for the Asuric forces is easy, because they take all the movements of your lower nature and make use of them, so that you have no spiritual effort to make.

On the contrary, if you are to be a fit instrument of the Divine Force you must make yourself perfectly pure since it is only in an integrally divinised instrument that the Divine Force will have its full power and effect. ¹⁶

Then came August, and Hitler's decision to launch his Operation Sea-lion, preceded by a furious aerial assault, to effect the invasion of Britain. The first air battle was fought on 12 August, with heavy losses for the Luftwaffe. Was it not odd that Hitler should have fixed 15 August - Sri Aurobindo's birthday - as the day of fiercest aerial onslaught on Britain, a definitive offensive meant to cripple her defences and facilitate a quick invasion and occupation? But on that day and on the 18th August as well, the Luftwaffe received heavy punishment, and with his teeth thus blunted, Hitler could only fret and bark against his enemies. There was a major air raid again on 7 September, and over 100 Nazi aircraft were destroyed; and on 13 September, bombs were dropped on Buckingham Palace. Two days later, Sri Aurobindo remarked: "He [Hitler] had really missed the bus!. .. Now another force has been set up against him. Still the danger has not passed." ¹⁷ It was in this context that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother thought that a positive gesture on their part was necessary, and hence they publicly aligned themselves in September by writing a joint letter to the Governor of Madras enclosing a contribution to the Madras War Fund as a token of their complete adhesion to the Allied Cause:

We feel that not only is this battle waged in just self-defence and in defence

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of nations threatened with the world domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of the civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity. To this cause our support and sympathy will be unswerving whatever may happen; we look forward to the victory of Britain and as the eventual result, an era of peace and union among the nations and a better and more secure world-order. ¹⁸

A donation had already been sent to the Viceroy's War Fund, and other contributions had been made directly to the French Caisse de Defense Nationale "before the unhappy collapse of France". Besides, Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's open and unambiguous avowal of the Allied cause encouraged some of their disciples or their sons and daughters to enter the Defence Forces of India or otherwise participate in the war effort.

V

The preoccupation with the vicissitudes of the War was but one part of the life of the Ashram, and it was also confined only to one section of the sadhaks. No doubt, when the letter to the Governor of Madras was published in The Hindu (Madras) of 19 September and the fact of the donation to the War Fund became public, there was some bewilderment among the Ashram community, and rather something more outside - even a scream of disapproval. The Indian National Congress had directed that the war effort should not be supported, whereas Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, by precept and example alike, did just the opposite. It was natural that people looking up to the Congress leadership should be confused. Although belonging to one of the Allied nations, the Mother took it upon herself to speak the word of persuasive wisdom and commonsense to a distracted disciple:

When you see your neighbour's house on fire, and yet you do not go to help to put it out, because he has done wrong to you, you risk the burning of your own house and the loss of your own life. Do you not see the difference between the forces that are fighting for the Divine and those for the Asuras?.. Churchill is a human being. He is not a yogi aspiring to transform his nature. Today he represents the Soul of the Nation that is fighting against the Asuras. He is being guided by the Divine directly and his soul is responding magnificently. All concentration must be now to help the Allies for the victory that is ultimately assured .... ¹⁹

On another occasion, when her advice was sought on the question of donations to the War Fund, the Mother said simply: "Sri Aurobindo has

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contributed for a divine cause. If you help, you will be helping yourselves" ²⁰ This found general, if not universal, acceptance among the sadhaks and disciples. The doubters, however, became a diminishing and vanishing number.

All this while, life in the Ashram went on much as usual. The Ashram's departments were expanding, wartime controls and shortages set difficult problems in the context of the steadily increasing number of inmates, and the Ashram, although a sheltered place, couldn't altogether insulate itself from the currents and commotions of the war-torn world. Once The Life Divine had come out, Sri Aurobindo engaged himself in divers ways. There was the War itself, and the need to keep track of its movements and apply correctives wherever possible through the deployment of a dynamic spiritual force; there was the work of revision of his poems and plays for ,publication in a Collected Edition; there was, - as one may infer from their compelling recordation in a series of sonnets, - the shifting kaleidoscope of cosmic experiences; and, of course, there was the work in progress, Savitri.

The Mother had her own exacting schedule of work: Balcony darshan in the morning, collective meditation and selective pranam in the evening, and packed in between, a thousand activities and ministrations. Since, after the accident, the privilege to correspond with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had more or less been withdrawn, the sadhaks were now permitted to talk to the Mother at the time of Pranam after the evening meditation about their problems and difficulties. This again was to impose an unconscionable strain on the Mother, and she was obliged to receive Pranam and listen to the sadhaks for hours on end, shifting the time of her meal and sleep further and further towards the late hours of the night or the early hours of the next morning.

Some idea of the collective evening meditation may be had from this impressionistic account by Surendra Nath Jauhar, a Delhi businessman, who paid his first visit to the Ashram towards the end of December 1939:

We reached the Meditation Hall at about 7 p.m. A few scores of men and women were already seated there with their eyes closed, lips virtually sealed and heads bowed. All the lights had been put out ... there was just a glimmering of light. .. the atmosphere of meditation was infectious ....

Now there was a complete hush. But lo! my eyes suddenly beheld something which looked so utterly superb but so dream-like .... My gaze was fixed at that fairy-like figure whose calm and beautiful face was radiating light and making the whole atmosphere so supernatural that she looked every inch an angel descending from Heaven.

She now stopped and stood at the bend of the staircase, her wide open eyes surveying the scene from one end of the hall to the other. In a few moments she went into a trance .... While she stood there statue-like, I felt as if she was suddenly soaring above .... The halo of serenity and divinity

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around her was like a circular rainbow in the multi-colours of which my eyes perceived visionary images....

And now suddenly a smile dawned on her lips .... The smile blossomed into a flower and then the petals of blessings and Grace showered down on the entranced devotees .... Her departure was as blissful and mysterious as her advent and my racing gaze in a few moments lost the heavenly track on which trod that divine figure. As the congregation dispersed we learnt that she was the Mother.

Jauhar felt that night that "the fleeting glance of a few moments" had brought to him a felicity which "the toil of a whole life often fails to achieve". This was "the supreme discovery" of his life, the "miracle of Pondicherry" where he lost his heart and won "the soul and the real life". ²¹

When by and by the Meditation Hall was found to be too small to accommodate the growing number of sadhaks and visitors, the Ashram courtyard, suitably expanded with the demolition of some of the smaller structures, became the venue of the evening meditation. The Mother would appear on the low terrace above Dyuman's room (and once Swami Suddhananda Bharati's). From there she commanded a fair and full view of the congregation gathered in the courtyard below, These evening meditations seem to have evoked enriching and liberating experiences for the participants, one of whom, Suvrata (Mme, Yvonne Gaebele) has given fine expression to her feelings at the time. In translation it runs:

O! the sweetness of the evenings in the Ashram gardens,

Where each flower, each ray has a soul ..

Each, each one awaits Thee, O Mother,

And when Thou dost appear, up above the base of black skies,

Lo, our hearts are like the pure monstrance

Where the divine touch comes softly ...

In the silence the gong sounds, a flame

Invisible descends...Joy, Sweetness, Benediction ...

Thou art there now...All is Adoration!

So beautiful and so mighty, Thy forehead crowned with a belt of stars,

Towards us Thou leanest... Thy silk floats in the air. ..

And suddenly, in us, all is wide, all is pure ...

Towards Thee our hearts rise in a rhythm strong and sure,

Thy light answers, enveloping our souls ...

O! the splendour of the evenings in the Ashram gardens ²²

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VI

A reference has already been made to the Ashram cult of flowers. It was of course much more than a cult;. it was a part of the poetry and discipline of spiritual life. The sadhaks tended the Ashram gardens with infinite love and care, and a thousand flowers seemed to bloom in all the seasons. At time of Pranam, the sadhaks offered flowers to the Mother, and the Mother gave flowers with her blessings to the sadhaks. As mentioned earlier, in the Ashram flowers had their distinctive yogic names, and the offering or receipt of a flower was symbolic of the ardour of the inner aspiration, the magical response of Grace, and the opening of the psychic bud petal by petal, and the progression towards full efflorescence. Remembering her days in Japan, the Mother experimented in flower­arrangement in her room at night, and this was not a means of relaxation, but was always charged with a purpose. Flowers were psychic links between soul and Soul, between Here and Eternity; and every flower in its very fragility carried an elusive and elemental strength defying evil in its every form

like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim hors'd

Upon the sightless couriers of the air. ... ²³

In fact, during the War, the Mother seems to have used flowers as symbols of her spiritual army resisting the mad and maddening march of the "Children of Wotan". The outer flower-formations, flower-emanations, and perhaps even flower-offensives, had links with the potent spiritual­dynamic actions originating from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Only on this basis could we understand what the Mother ordained during the whole course of Hitler's War as described by the French visitor, Lizelle Raymond:

During the whole of the last world war and the two years which followed it, the Mother had all the flowers growing in the Ashram counted with minute accuracy, corolla by corolla, button by button and a meticulously drawn list was made. The disciples, in groups, counted the flowers, thousands of each kind, with blind patience and perfect calm. Visitors used to join them at certain times of the year. In full baskets the flowers were brought to the Mother - a huge offering mute and secret, an ardent sacrifice of beauty to counterbalance the brutal delivery of Nature in one of her crises of destruction. The neutralising Force was acting through the eternal smile of compassion; love was enveloping the dark night, love was answering the calls, calming down the pangs of what was being born and what was dying­ huge sacrifice to the accomplishment of the Word. "All that comes from

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the Divine must return to the Divine." Tears had become the perfume of offered flowers. ²⁴

There, on the battlefields, lay mangled the flower of Europe's manhood whose death had been decreed by Hitler. And here, in the Ashram, were gathered the day's flowers in an act of adoration to invoke Divine Grace for the early end of the War unleashed by the Asura.

VII

While there was all this solemn resolve to mobilise the flowers of Light against the forces of Darkness, the outer life of the Ashram was not seriously affected by the constraints and anxieties of the War. The Yoga was in its dynamic stage of giving a relentless fight to the Asura, the Lord of Falsehood, the Lord of the Nations! But since all life was Yoga, while other activities went on as before, Hitler's War too was taken in the yogic stride. When the Mother had a few moments to spare after the evening's meditation and Pranam but before retiring, she used to arrange flowers in her room much as a generalissimo deployed his forces on the battlefield. Individual flowers and the specific formations were presumably charged with a nameless occult force of action to counteract movements and possibilities in the distant theatres of the War.

There were also chance spells of unexpected sunshine. On one occasion early in 1940, Champaklal came in and showed the Mother a print of the celebrated 'Mona Lisa', and the following brief conversation ensued:

Mother: Sri Aurobindo was the artist.

Champaklal: Leonardo da Vinci?

Mother smiled sweetly and said: Yes.

Champaklal: Mother, it seems this [painting] is yours?

Mother: Yes, do you not see the resemblance? ²⁵

The Mother had once said, as was mentioned in the first chapter, that she had been an Egyptian princess in one of her early births, and now the implication here is that she was also Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa'. ²⁶ When somebody had asked Sri Aurobindo in 1935 to elaborate his statement that, since creation started, he and the Mother had been carrying on the evolution albeit in disguise, he answered:

That would mean writing the whole of human history. I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another. ²⁷

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The identification with one or another historic figure had some importance, but not much, for a personality like the Mother with her individual, universal and transcendental aspects of manifestation or non-manifestation; the Mother was the Mother, she was the Mother Divine, and she was a large and unique whole that contained all the multitudes of the manifestation.

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CHAPTER 30

The Mother's War

I

In the last months of 1940, although Hitler had had to abandon his idea of invading Britain, the Luftwaffe sporadically continued its aerial warfare and among the cities receiving special attention were London, Coventry, Southampton, Bristol, Sheffield and Manchester. There was punitive counteraction too, and so the War entered 1941, extended to North Africa, and caused widespread destruction and dislocation. The seesaw between attack and counter-attack went on, and the comparative lull in Europe was too good to last much longer. Realising at last that a successful invasion of Britain was impossible so long as the mass of his troops had to keep guard in the East, Hitler took the fateful plunge and on 22 June ordered an attack on Russia all along the border. Brest-Litovsk fell a couple of days later, and a relentless advance was maintained towards Leningrad, Moscow and Kharkov. Russia lost considerable territory, but also inflicted heavy damage on the Nazis. Then, on 7 December, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, and declared war on Britain and the USA. Four days later, Hitler too declared war on America. Now it was a global conflict indeed, and the War was to rage with redoubled fury on land, sea and air. Hong Kong fell, Rangoon was raided, and in the opening months of 1942, Singapore fell, Java fell, and the Andamans as well. It was clear that India was vulnerable to attack, and indeed the Japanese bombed Calcutta, Visakhapatnam and Madras. India was now almost in the thick of the War, and that was the time for a fresh searching of hearts and a bold rethinking about ends and means.

II

The Mother's New Year prayers always had, as we have seen earlier, an urgency of temporal and spiritual relevance in the perspective of the collective Yoga of the Ashram and of the unconscious Yoga of humanity, but the wartime prayers were even more, for each was almost a winged squadron of the spirit and made straight for the intended target. The Mother herself has admitted: "During the war it was wonderful, it was like a prophecy of what was going to come."¹ Thus, after Munich, on 1 January 1939:

Will be the year of purification.

O Lord, all those who take part in the divine work implore Thee that by

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a supreme purification they may be liberated from the domination of the ego.²

Then, in the middle of the 'phoney' war, on New Year's day 1940:

A year of silence and expectation ...

Let us find, O Lord, our entire support in Thy Grace alone.³

Evidently the Mother was not deceived by the 'phoney' war with the combatants safely entrenched behind the Maginot and Siegfried Lines. Britain and France were vulnerable, and Grace alone could sustain them! Sure enough, French resistance was to crumble like a pack of cards, and France was to reject the grace of the offer of 'union' with Britain extended by Churchill. After the fall of France and the failure of Hitler to invade Britain, the prayer for 1941 was thus wrung out of the depths of the Mother's heart and soul:

The world is fighting for its spiritual life menaced by the rush of hostile and undivine forces.

Lord, we aspire to be Thy valiant warriors so that Thy glory may manifest upon the earth.

No ambiguity here! It was a war between the divine and the Asuric forces, and the Allied front was God's front, and the place of the Mother's warrior-children was with the Allies alone.

Although the Mother hadn't minced matters in her New Year prayer, in the early months of the year a few sadhaks and visitors to the Ashram continued to talk glibly or thoughtlessly, making mock of the Allied war effort. The Mother therefore found it needful to utter a word of warning and admonition on 6 May:

It has become necessary to state emphatically and clearly that all who by their thoughts and wishes are supporting and calling for the victory of the Nazis are by that very fact collaborating with the Asura against the Divine and helping to bring about the victory of the Asura. . .. ⁴

She wrote again, on 25 May, with a sense of extreme urgency:

The world situation is critical today. India's fate too is hanging in the balance .... People and forces in India have acted in such a way as to invite Asuric influences upon her: these have worked insiduously and undermined the security that was there.

If India is in danger, Pondicherry cannot be expected to remain outside the danger zone. It will share the fate of the rest of the country. The protection I can give is not unconditional .. any sympathy or support for the Nazis (or for any ally of theirs) automatically cuts across the circle of protection .... The Divine can give protection only to those who are whole­heartedly faithful to the Divine .... ⁵

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It is surprising that, almost a month before Hitler's attack on Russia and over six months before Pearl Harbour and the entry of Japan into the War on Hitler's side, the Mother should have so clearly inferred the grim shape of unfolding possibility, and especially of India's involvement in the global War. The Mother's occult vision seems to have told her of the imminence of the extension of the War to Russia and the Pacific, the death-grapple between Japan and the USA, and the quick fall of the French, British and Dutch colonial possessions to Japan on the march.

III

In the early years of Japan's career of aggression - first in Manchuria, then in China - Sri Aurobindo didn't seem to attach much importance to it. But things assumed a different complexion when, after the eruption of the War in Europe, Subhash Chandra Bose escaped from India, established contacts with the Nazi and Japanese leaders, and organised the Indian National Army on foreign soil for the liberation of India from the British yoke with the aid of Japanese arms. After Japan's entry into the War against Britain and the USA, Subhash Bose's broadcasts to India, and the fall of Singapore and Rangoon, people in India were perhaps even more confused than before. While Gandhiji and the Congress leaders advised only withholding of support to the British war effort in India, the INA asked for active all-out resistance to the British Government in India. This was a further serious complicating factor, and as the first months of 1942 registered a series of spectacular Japanese victories, many in India - in their flawed knowledge and half-ignorance - began to feel and even hope that British power would soon collapse in India too, and that the INA and the Japanese supporting army would accomplish their 'Chalo Dilli!' plan of conquest. But Sri Aurobindo had no doubt whatsoever that the winning of freedom with Japanese help was not the way to solve India's problem, and he declared:

Japan's imperialism being young and based on industrial and military power and moving westward, was a greater menace to India than the British imperialism which was old, which the country had learnt to deal with and which was on the way to elimination.⁶

For the fateful year 1942, the Mother distributed this prayer:

Glory to Thee, O Lord, conqueror of every foe!

Give us the power to endure and share in Thy victory. ⁷

The victory would be to those who endured, but without faith ther.could be no endurance. As Japanese arms steadily advanced in the Pacific and Indian Ocean expanses overrunning Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies,

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and as the War approached the shores of India, on 11 March 1942 Churchill offered to create a new Indian Union with a Dominion Constitution to be framed by India's own representatives after the War. In the meantime, the Indian leaders were invited to join a responsible Central Government and help the allied war effort. When presently Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in India to work out the details of an Indo-British concord, Sri Aurobindo extended an open welcome to him on 31 March 1942:

I have beard your broadcast. As one who has been a nationalist leader and worker for India's independence, though now my activity is no longer in political but in the spiritual field, I wish to express my appreciation of all you have done to bring about this offer. I welcome it as an opportunity given to India to determine for herself, and organise in all liberty of choice, her freedom and unity, and take an effective place among the world's free nations. I hope that it will be accepted, and right use made of it, putting aside all discords and divisions. I hope too that friendly relations between Britain and India replacing the past struggles, will be a step towards a greater world union in which, as a free nation, her spiritual force will tribute to build for mankind a better and happier life. In this light, offer my public adhesion, in case it can be of any help in your work.⁸

Stafford's response to this unexpected but authoritative support was he was "most touched and gratified" by the kind message from one who occupied a "unique position in [the] imagination of Indian youth".

IV

While such was Sri Aurobindo's reaction - which was also the Mother's ­ to the Cripps Mission, some of the sadhaks were critical. The day after Cripps' broadcast, there was a discussion in Pavitra's room, and the Mother happening to come that side, joined the group and spoke her mind with supernal calm. Although an exact account is not available, she is reported by one of the group to have said:

One should leave the matter of the Cripps' offer entirely in the hands of the Divine, with full confidence that the Divine will work everything out. Certainly there were flaws in the offer. Nothing on earth created by man is flawless, because the human mind has a limited capacity. Yet behind this offer there is the Divine Grace directly present. The Grace is now at the door of India, ready to give its help .... But if it is rejected the Grace will withdraw and then the nation will suffer terribly, calamity will overtake it.⁹

The Mother then referred to France rejecting Grace in 1940 when Churchill, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, offered a 'union' and joint

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nationality with Britain to fight Hitler, the common enemy. The Grace withdrew, and the. soul of France went down:

But India, with her background of intense spiritual development through the ages, must realise the Grace that is behind this offer. ... My ardent request to India is that she should not reject it. She must not make the same mistake that France has done recently .... ¹⁰

Later in the day, the sadhaks came to know about Sri Aurobindo's message to Cripps (in response to his broadcast) and his telegraphic reply. But not content with his public espousal, Sri Aurobindo also sent Duraiswami Aiyar as his personal emissary to the Congress Working Committee then holding its meeting in Delhi. Sri Aurobindo's (and the Mother's) point of view was that India had more to fear from Japanese imperialism than from the British, which after all was on its way out. It would be advisable to get into the seats of power now that the chance had come, without squeamishly arguing about the exact legal basis of that power. The Cripps Proposals also offered an opportunity for Hindus and Muslims to work together and thereby once and for all lay to rest the ghost of the 'Two Nations' theory. And, above all, it was necessary to organise the collective strength of the country and repel the very real danger from Japan. ¹¹

V

But it was all to no purpose. Gandhiji had described the Cripps Plan as "a post-dated cheque on a bank that was crashing"; and that was enough for the Congress leaders! Since Britain's was quite obviously the losing side, why then rush to its support? The Congress thus shied away from the invitation to join the Central Government. Divine wisdom was cavalierly vetoed by short-sighted political calculation, the proffered Grace was spurned, and the possibility of a free and united India was jeopardised irreparably. On coming to know about the rejection of the Cripps Proposals, the Mother only said out of the sadness of her heart and her infallible occult perception: "Now calamity will befall India."¹² Years later, K.M. Munshi was to say in the course of a speech in Delhi on 16 August 1951:

He [Sri Aurobindo] saw into the heart of things ... when the whole country wanted to maintain neutrality, it was he of the unerring eye who said that the triumph of England and France was the triumph of the divine forces over the demonic forces. We were very angry, but it was a fact ....

He spoke again when Sir Stafford Cripps came with his first proposal .. We rejected the advice ... but today we realise that if the first proposal had

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been accepted, there would have been no partition, no refugees, and no Kashmir problem.¹³

.

The question may be asked if, with his cosmic consciousness, Sri Aurobindo couldn't have known that his word would be rejected, indeed accompanied by "ungracious remarks for the gratuitous advice". This was to be the subject of a talk in his room, and here is Nirodbaran's record of the conversation:

When the rejection was announced, Sri Aurobindo said in a quiet tone, "I knew it would fail." We at once pounced on it and asked him, "Why did you then send Duraiswami at all?" "For a bit of niṣkāma karma" was his calm reply .... We know the aftermath of the rejection of the Cripps' Proposals as well as the failure of the Cabinet Mission: confusion, calamity, partition, blood-bath, etc.¹⁴

Certainly, after the rejection of the Cripps offer, the situation in India was grim enough, whichever way one looked at it. In their perverse purblindness the Congress leaders, not only rejected the Grace that came with the Cripps offer, but they also queered the political pitch by mouthing aggressive slogans and adopting uncompromising postures. The leaders were obviously confused, and the mass of the people even more so; and things came to a point of no return when, in August 1942, spurning the seasoned appeals of statesmen like Rajagopalachari, the Congress under Gandhiji launched the Quit India movement. Repression followed, there was some sporadic sabotage and underground action, but happily that didn't bring about a breakdown in the administration or seriously impair the war effort. On the contrary, the Indian army, greatly strengthened by the new recruits (some of whom were the Mother's ardent disciples), became a notable fighting instrument and magnificently served the Allied cause in different theatres of the War.

VI

The collapse of the sudden expectations raised by the Cripps Mission coupled with the advance of Japanese forces through Burma towards Calcutta created a climate of uncertainty and apprehension all over India. Disciples wrote frantic letters to the Mother seeking her advice as to what they should do. Was it wise to stay on in Calcutta, Madras - or even Pondicherry? Suppose the Japanese should bomb the coastal cities, or attempt a quick landing? On 6 April, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple:

Calcutta is now in the danger zone. But the Mother does not wish that anyone should leave his post because of the danger. Those who are very

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eager to remove their children can do so, but no one should be under the illusion that there is any safe place anywhere. ¹⁵

Answering a similar inquiry, the Mother wrote on 26 May 1942 in rather more uncompromising terms:

During bombardments, to those who quake for their skins and flee:

Why should you be in safety when the whole world is in danger? What is your special virtue, your special merit for which you should be so specially protected?

In the Divine alone is there safety. Take refuge in Him and cast away all fear. ¹⁶

Those that elected to remain in Pondicherry - in the Ashram - were asked to dismiss "all idea of an assured personal safety". It was not possible in times like those to give a guarantee of safety or ease, and people should be prepared to face any eventuality whatsoever. The real need was "reliance on the Divine will ... but not the lower vital's bargain for a guaranteed and comfortably guarded existence". On 29 July, again, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a sadhak with a renewed and strident emphasis:

I affirm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother's war. You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future.

The question was not whether Britain and the other Allied nations had not committed mistakes in the past; nations, like individuals, were knotted with imperfections. But one could see on which side of the inner struggle they had ranged themselves. If the Nazi-Fascist-Japanese combination won, there would be an end of "freedom and hope of light and truth", and there would be the "reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race". If the Allied side won, this danger to humanity and the future would have been averted. And so Sri Aurobindo concluded his letter with the forthright declaration:

Those who fight for this cause are fighting for the Divine and against the threatened reign of the Asura.¹⁷

VII

While the War raged with undiminished fury on the several fronts ­ notably on the Russian, where the Germans were advancing towards the Caucasus - Sri Aurobindo's seventieth birthday was quietly celebrated in

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the Ashram on 15 August 1942. The occasion was marked by the publication of his Collected Poems and Plays in two volumes, and also the first number of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, published by Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir, Calcutta. By now the sadhaks in the Ashram numbered about 350, and children were admitted too, owing to the exigencies of the War.

The latter half of 1942 was a time of unprecedented uncertainty and anxiety, for the future hung in the balance by the slenderest thread. Then, worker after 15 August, there were the first faint but distinct signs of a swing in favour of the Allies. On 6 November, the formidable German army was decisively halted in front of Stalingrad; in October there was the massive Allied offensive in Egypt with Rommel's 'invincible' army now in full retreat; and the American navy scored a sensational victory over the Japanese at Guadalcanal. With 1943, there was a clear turn for the better, for the German army before Stalingrad surrendered to the Russians, and that was indeed the beginning of the end of Hitler.

VIII

The Mother's New Year prayer for 1943 was tempered on the anvil of the Moment, and was a call for commitment to the Divine Cause:

The hour has come when a choice has to be made, radical and definitive.

Lord, give us the strength to reject falsehood and emerge in Thy truth, pure and worthy of Thy victory. ¹⁸

On the other hand, the spasmodic movement from 1942 to 1943 had by no means been easy for India. While providentially the War had been kept out of India, a sort of civil strife had been precipitated by the Quit India movement and by the widely scattered underground guerilla groups. And the situation had been further aggravated by the terrible famines in Bengal, Bijapur and elsewhere. There were serious shortages, there was a sudden spurt in the cost of living, and there was a serious erosion of values as well. Some of the sadhaks were still assailed by speculations on the rights and wrongs of the Allied cause, and many questioned the description of the War as a dharma yuddha, with the Allies cast for the role of the righteous Pandavas. These questions and doubts that were floating in the Ashram atmosphere were given a sharp formulation by Dilip, and on 3 September 1943, Sri Aurobindo gave in the course of a long reply his considered view of the matter. Sri Aurobindo began by saying that, imperfect as they were, the Allies were on the side of the evolutionary forces. England, France and America - the Allies of 1943 - were the nations that had given to the world the ideals of liberty, democracy, equality, international justice and the rest. They had crossed their imperialistic designs and actions with the spread of these anti-imperialistic

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ideals and the planting of democratic institutions. Wasn't the British Commonwealth idea quite a unique force fashioning a free future? It was necessary to look at things from all sides and think mainly about the future. It was really a war between two occult forces, the Divine and the Asuric:

What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if I they put themselves on the right side, they at once make themselves instruments of the Divine purpose in spite of all defects, errors, wrong movements and actions which are common to human nature and all human collectivities. 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 .... The Allies at least have stood for human values ... ; Hitler stands for diabolical values .... That does not make the English or Americans nations of spotless angels nor the Germans a wicked and sinful race, but as an indicator it has a primary importance....¹⁹

Then, adverting to Nolini's reference to Kurukshetra, Sri Aurobindo said that the parallel between the Mahabharata war and the war initiated by Hitler should not be pushed too far. At Kurukshetra, the side favoured by the Divine (Krishna) triumphed, "because the leaders made themselves His instruments". The Pandavas were flawed men, though much less so than the Kauravas; and the War could also be viewed as a clash between rival imperialisms. But the heart of the matter was that the victory of the Pandavas was necessary in the particular historical context for the onward march of the race:

The Divine takes men as they are and uses men as His instruments even if they are not flawless in virtue, angelic, holy and pure. If they are of good will, if, to use the Biblical phrase, they are on the Lord's side, that is enough for the work to be done. Even if I knew that the Allies would misuse their victory or bungle the peace or partially at least spoil the opportunities opened to the human world by that victory, I would still put my force behind them. At any rate things could not be one-hundredth part as bad as they would be under Hitler. The ways of the Lord would still be open - to keep them open is what matters.²⁰

IX

In the meantime, the Allied forces, after a series of victories in North Africa, invaded Sicily on 10 July, Mussolini resigned on 25 July, and by 15 August all Sicily was in Allied hands. On the very day Sri Aurobindo wrote the above letter to Dilip, the Allies invaded the Italian mainland itself, and in a matter of days, Italy capitulated. On the Russian front, there were

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reverses for the Nazis, and in the Far East and the Pacific, for the Japanese. And so 1944 opened rather more promisingly than the immediately preceding years, and was greeted by the Mother with the following prayer for the New Year:

O Lord, the world implores Thee to prevent it from falling back always into the same stupidities.

Grant that the mistakes recognised may never be renewed.

Grant lastly that its actions may be the exact and sincere expression of its proclaimed ideals.²¹

In her occult seeing, it was already clear to the Mother that the War was being won, and only total discomfiture and defeat awaited the Nazis and the Japanese militarists. But what next? The Mother was looking into the future, scenting possible unsavoury developments, and warning people against them. The victors mustn't lose the peace by relapsing into the old "stupidities" that had generated two sanguinary global wars within a single generation.

On the divers fronts the run of Allied successes continued throughout the year. There was a Russian breakthrough in Poland on a 40-mile front, there was vigorous anti-Japanese action in Burma, and on 5 June the long­awaited - and, by the Nazis, much dreaded - Allied invasion of Normandy began, and on 15 August, the Allies invaded Southern France. Hence­ forth. the Axis powers were to be mainly on the defensive. By the middle of September, the Germans had been largely pushed out of France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and the Allied forces were within German territory and pursuing the still retreating Nazis.

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CHAPTER 31

Coming of the Children

II

In the Ashram during the War years, especially after 1941, as if in answer to the violence and destruction outside, there were assembled day after day for the adoration of the Lord all the flowers of the Ashram gardens and as if in answer to the adult lunacies and horrors in the War theatres there, in the Ashram, more and more of the flowers of humanity - the children of the sadhaks and disciples - found a free atmosphere for integral growth. The War, for one thing, had forced the hands of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and made them agree to the withdrawal of the earlier rule of exclusion of children from the Ashram; and for another, the harbouring and training of children could be the best insurance for the future, the best way of preventing the post-war world from falling back into "the same stupidities" of all our poisoned yesterdays. By 1944, the number of sadhaks alone was over 350, and there was also the steep rise in the cost of living. In August 1944, the Mother is reported to have informed Sri Aurobindo that every month the cost of milk alone was Rs. 2000, and food-grains and other marketing expenses came to another Rs. 8000; an annual expenditure of Rs. 1,20,000 on these basic items alone¹. And now there were the children, an incommensurable responsibility! As the Mother said in 1953:

It was only after the war that children were taken. But I do not regret that they have been accepted. For I believe there is much more stuff for the future among children who know nothing than among those grown-ups who believe they know everything.

Then the Mother cited the example of sculpture: without wet plastic clay, no modelling could be done. Once the model was baked, nothing more could be done:

Something like that happens in life. You must not attain something and then remain crystallised, fossilised, immobilised....

So long as one remains thus clay-like, very soft, very malleable, not yet formed, not aware of being formed, something can be done. And as long as one remains a child... it is a blissful state.²

The Mother added that, whereas people in general walked round and round a whole lifetime to reach the heights of a mountain and arrived there exhausted, with the proper guidance children could be taken - as it were, by the funicular railway - right to the top by the shortest way.

If the coming of the children was forced by the War, their coming was

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also an exciting and an all-absorbing experience. Their arrival immediately brought about an agreeable change in the physiognomy and character of the Ashram, for these children of different age-groups seemed to be ready one and all to open themselves out like the petals of a bud responding to the rays of the morning sun. Everything had to be organised for them - dormitories, classrooms, playgrounds - and everything had to turn around them, and the very organisation of the Ashram had to suffer a sea-change. There had to be a relaxation of the old austerity, for children had first to attain maturity before they could be made to choose aright:

In order to choose you must at least know a little the elements to choose from. And for that you must have a certain inner formation, a certain culture. And you certainly do not have that when you are five years old - except some.³

The Mother had come across a few who, even at the age of five, had an intense aspiration, although they could not express it in words, and they wouldn't leave the Ashram when their parents wanted to take them away:

Even at the age of five... the psychic consciousness was there, and they could feel. Well, these children are of an infinitely higher stuff than that of people who have already had three-fourths of their head blunted by the education they have been given in the ordinary schools....⁴

II

When the number of children increased and several were found to be of a schooling age, the Mother took the decision to open a School. This was done on 2 December 1943,⁵ with Pavitra and Sisirkumar Mitra in charge of the twenty pupils. The ultimate direction and guidance in every detail was of course the Mother's, who accepted this burden of divine responsibility with a light heart. There is the story of a seasoned educationist meeting the Mother when the School had been functioning for some time, and suggesting to her that a principal should be appointed to run the place on proper lines. The Mother is reported to have concentrated for a while, and then asked the educationist as if in bewilderment: "A principal?... Then what am I here for?" The educationist understood at once. The soul of the School was the Mother herself, even as she was the soul of the Ashram.

Beginning with but a few pupils, the School increased its enrolment in the coming months and years. The pupils were all children of the sadhaks or of disciples living in distant places, and the teachers also were recruited from the sadhaks. But what gave distinction and a spiritual aura to the School was the Mother's daily and active participation in its life. She spent the evenings with the children, took classes herself, narrated stories and

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blessed the divers functions, games, sports and entertainments with her divine presence. In Narayan Prasad's words:

It looked as if she had lost herself in the younger section of the Ashram.... Her evening classes of little children, ending with distribution of sweets, were beautiful scenes in which restless and noisy children grew quiet and silent, as if discipline had sprung into being among them.⁶

The Mother's hope was that some of the children she taught would one day become teachers in their own right and start the intended and necessary revolution in teaching. When she was once asked, some years later, why the education given in the Ashram School was not very different from what was imparted in the outside schools, and why a true Aurobindonian orientation hadn't been given to the instruction, the Mother said:

Yes, my child. And for years I have been fighting for it to be otherwise. When you - you children, here - when you are old enough and ready to become professors, then you will be entrusted with teaching the newcomers the right thing, in the right way.⁷

But even otherwise, there was something indefinable, yet of seminal value, in the Ashram education from the very beginning. What was it except a question of atmosphere? As the Mother explained:

You are plunged in a sea of consciousness full of light, aspiration, true understanding, essential purity, and whether you want it or not it enters... There is an action here during sleep which is quite considerable... visitors, people just passing by - they are all quite bewildered: "But you have children here as I have never seen elsewhere!" For us, we are used toil, aren't we? They are spontaneously like that, quite naturally. But there is an awakening in the consciousness, there is a kind of inner response and a feeling of blossoming, of inner freedom which is not found elsewhere.⁸

III

In the developing life of the Ashram under the sovereign aegis of the Mother, the coming of the children meant, in the first place, a larger freedom, a freshness and an exhilaration, a play of variety, a rush of innocence, an opulence of unfolding experience; and in order to contain, temper and transform it all there was, in the second place, a well-knit yet silken organisational set-up, partly through the extension of the existing Ashram organisation and partly through the new physical education with its mystique and its many-sided discipline. The influx of children was at once an upsetting as well as a tonic experience for the older sadhaks accustomed to a measure of austerity and a regimen of silence, sobriety,

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order and a strenuously self-imposed tapasya. Being drawn from all over the country, the children were a cosmopolitan crowd, and being young and fresh and open, they easily mingled in one another's life-ways making a pool of refreshing new consciousness. The old hermitage-like place, the Ashram, now rang with scintillating cries, and the lights of miscellaneous smiles and buoyant laughter filled and enriched the atmosphere. As Nolini Kanta Gupta reminisces about the children's coming:

Under the influence of that green new life, dry branches flowered, as it were, in the external life also of us, who were the old... at the age of 60,1 had to join the playground and do gymnastic drill....⁹

The participants were divided into groups by the Mother, Nolini being in the Blue Group with Udar Pinto as Captain. By bringing the young and old together on the Playground, the Mother aimed at a purposeful communion and transcendence, hinting at the ultimate emergence of a new race of supermen.

The children of course - most of them, at any rate - hadn't deliberately opted for Ashram life as the elder sadhaks had; the children had only been brought or sent to the Ashram by their parents, and there was no question of the children doing anything like conscious Yoga. They were there to have a chance to grow into boyhood and girlhood under the Mother's omnicompetent care. Once the Mother accepted children, she also assumed all the attendant responsibilities. If she found in Sisirkumar Mitra, formerly of Shantiniketan, a seasoned academic head, she likewise found Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya a dedicated exponent of physical culture; and there was Pavitra to give purpose and shape and proper direction to the School. While the academic courses were organised on efficient lines, physical culture received equal importance. As Nirod saw it, the daily regimen of physical education "served the most important purpose of keeping the inflammable material of young boys, girls and children under a strict supervision through compulsory activities from 4.30 to 7.00 p.m. or so".¹⁰ Without such canalisation of their energies the children may have gone astray, all the more so because of the large freedom they enjoyed in their Ashram life. Studies, group life, physical culture, the ambience of the elected Presence, the psychic opening stimulated by the Ashram environment, all helped the promotion of a gymnastic fused in the harmony of the Spirit, the flowering of a bright young race with the flame of freedom in their souls and the light of knowledge in their eyes. Perhaps, it was with heir coming efflorescence in his mind that Sri Aurobindo painted this apocalyptic picture of the future humanity:

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

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Forerunners of a divine multitude ...

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world ...

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy, ...¹¹

IV

More and more sadhaks joined the sports activities, partly because it helped them to keep fit, but also because it meant basking in the golden sunshine of the Mother's presence. One thing led to another, and the Mother began playing table-tennis, finding it a light exercise as well as a means of contact with the children. Why not tennis, then? After discussing the matter with Sri Aurobindo, the Mother secured from the Government on long lease a stretch of wasteland on the northeast of the town along the seaside, and gave directions that the whole apparently God-forsaken area should be reclaimed and turned into a ground with facilities for tennis and several other sports; it came to be called the Tennis Ground since the Mother played tennis there. The building of a long rampart as a bulwark against the lashing sea-waves had to be done first, and asked for bold and imaginative planning and resourceful execution. As if an alchemic technology were at work, in an incredibly short time the whole miserable and filthy area now underwent a marvellous change:

The stink and the loathsome sight made the place a Stygian sore and a black spot on the colonial Government. The Mother changed this savage wasteland into a heavenly playground, almost a supramental transformation of Matter. The sea-front was clothed in a vision of beauty and delight,¹²

And of course, as with other massive enterprises in the Ashram - the construction of Golconde for example - here too the Mother took sustained and informed interest in the execution of her plan. Since she worked, not from the mental but from a much higher level of consciousness, once she had taken the decision, it meant that the necessary resources would be found and the right men would turn up to translate her ideas into realities.

V

The opening of the Tennis Ground fringing the sea was an invitation to the sadhaks to participate in a number of games and a variety of sports and athletics including swimming. The Mother herself played tennis in the

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evenings daily for about an hour with the younger people by turns, and even took part in tournaments. In her younger years she had played excellent tennis, but taking it up again around the age of seventy was quite an astonishing feat. An hour's strenuous play every evening, and this, in addition to her heavy and variegated load of work spread over nearly the twenty-four hours of the day! Having observed her closely at play, and often played against her, Nirodbaran writes:

She played very well for her age and her claim that she had become a champion in her youth was amply borne out by her steady, sharp forehand strokes which were above all a marvel of precision. Naturally she could not run a great deal, but her agility was remarkable. In her vision tennis is the best game spiritually and physically. She used it not only for her physical fitness, but as in everything else, as a medium for her spiritual action on the players. It was this inner movement that interested her as much the other. For, playing with the Divine meant an aspiration, opening, right attitude, reception of her force through the game....¹³

After her daily game of tennis, the Mother used to go to the Playground and complete her usual round of activities, returning to her rooms after eight, or even as late as nine. Her evenings were thus crowded, and for the pupils and the sadhaks they were a period packed with miscellaneous fulfilment. When the evening's schedule was over, Pranab would offer a garland to the Mother, and back in the Ashram, she would in her turn place it at Sri Aurobindo's feet.

VI

When the Mother found that it was rather cumbersome for women to complete their round of exercises in pyjamas, as was initially the custom, she had second thoughts. The pyjamas were too loose and impeded free movement of the limbs, and sometimes even occasioned a fall. The Mother accordingly decided to introduce a simpler, but boldly functional uniform. After a couple of days, she called one of the sadhikas and said, "I have solved the problem of the uniform. The girls will put on white shorts, a white shirt and a kitty-cap on the head for their hair. Prepare them and try them yourself. Pyjamas are unwieldy".¹⁴ Being approved by the Mother, this revolution was soon carried out with remarkably little fuss. Conservatism and timidity of course raised their eyebrows, and some few gave vent to shocked whispers: Was it wise? Was it necessary? Was it prudent to permit boys and girls so "scantily dressed" to do exercises together? And - what will people say? But the Mother said with calm certitude:

Why should we follow the others? They have no ideas, we have ideas.

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I have come to break down old conventions and superstitions.¹⁵

It was not the itch for mere novelty either: the changes had really their sanction from above. In Nirod's words:

I believe, she prepares the ground in the occult planes and manipulates the forces to her advantage before she takes any hazardous step.... We can realise now the wisdom of her vision... I think it was one of the most effective means to eliminate sex-consciousness between the male and the female. We are in this respect much better than before now that shorts have become almost our normal dress.¹⁶

The Mother certainly didn't subscribe to the philosophy of education that asked for different types of education and different kinds of physical culture for boys and girls, even as she firmly discountenanced the only too common tendency of women to overemphasise their femineity and men their masculinity. For the Mother, as for Sri Aurobindo, men and women alike, boys and girls alike, were but vessels of the immortal spirit, and the whole aim of education - and of Yoga - should be to get people to grow more and more conscious of this potentiality and progressively to realise it in their everyday life.

VII

In this context it may be recalled how, since her early years the Mother had always held the view that the 'male-female' antinomy was but mischievous and pointless. During the First World War she wrote an essay on "Women and the War" in which she exposed once again the "futility of the perpetual oppositions between men and women". The War had shown how easily women could replace men "in most of the posts they [men] occupied before". What was the lesson of the War, then? It was "a severe, a painful" lesson:

It is no longer the moment for frail competitions and self-interested claims; all human beings, men or women, must associate in a common effort to become conscious of the highest ideal which asks to be realised and to work ardently for its realisation.¹⁷

Men and women alike had first to station themselves on the firm ground of spiritual equality; the rest would follow as a matter of course.

Many years later, the question was once posed whether, during their monthly periods girl pupils could join in the sports and athletics as usual, or whether a modified regimen was necessary. The Mother answered both in general terms about the physical education of girls and in specific terms on the particular points raised.¹⁸

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There was little sense, the Mother felt, in the supposed boy-girl contrast being constantly projected before adolescent pupils in school or college. It would be far wiser to remember that both boys and girls were alike human beings, equally emanations of the Spirit. The human body is doubtless shaped like an animal's, a mammalian's, and it is the allotted role of the female body to conceive the child, build it up for about nine months in the womb, and deliver it to start its independent existence. The surplus blood in the woman is designed by Nature to help the mother to build and nurture the child in the womb. At other times, however, "the surplus blood has to be thrown out to avoid excess and congestion". This being Nature's arrangement, there is no need to get upset, or to resort to all sorts of frantic defensive reactions.

But while the human-animal body cannot be cast away, there is no justification to make a fetish of it or to sentimentalise over it. What has to be remembered is that our cumbrous mammalian body is not everything, for there are other dimensions too to our existence:

We have in us an intelligent will more or less enlightened which is the first instrument of our psychic being. It is this intelligent will that we must use in order to learn to live not like an animal man, but as a human being, candidate for Divinity.

The human body is in part the animal of yesterday, and potentially the man-god to be. In this context, proper physical culture can help the body to grow sufficiently and serve as the means of fulfilment of the ideal that man sets before himself. Scientific advancement on the one hand and the evolutionary influx of a new consciousness on the other pose challenges of adjustment to present-day man, and the body should accordingly be in readiness to meet with self-assurance the coming events. Hence the primacy the Mother gave to physical culture in her scheme of integral education.

As regards the particular questions Whether there should be different sets of exercises for boys and girls? Whether the muscular woman was for that reason alone ugly as well? Whether participation in games and athletics was likely to create difficulties at the time of childbirth? - the Mother was no less forthright. Girls should face problems as they come, relying only on Nature's strength and their own native fortitude. They should shed their acute sense of diffidence and difference from the boys, and act with ease, poise and complete self-reliance. Many troubles are really of psychological origin, and should hence be met at that level in an attitude of "quiet forbearance". Where pains have a sexual origin, the only too common human tendency to succumb, hoping thereby for cure through satisfaction or satiation, must prove tragically illusory. But there is of course "another way, a better way, - control, mastery, transformation; this is more dignified and also more effective".

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Nor is it necessary, in the name of the 'blessed feminine', to insulate girls from all association with boys. The organisation of separate sets of exercises for boys and girls would create more problems than it would solve, and might even congeal the superficial differences into unwholesome rigidities. Robust health in women couldn't possibly be inimical to beauty. It was but superstitious stupidity and aesthetic perversion to equate weakness and fragility with feminine elegance and charm. And as for childbirth, for the healthy woman it is no problem at all. If such easy childbirth (as is even now natural with the working woman in the countryside) is something that "cannot occur in a civilised world with all the so-called progress that humanity has achieved", well, so much the worse for civilisation! In the age now unfolding it should be woman's privilege as also man's to try to become a fit instrument for the Divine Work, and, as children of the same infinite Mother to be "aspirants to the one Eternal Godhead". And the New Woman should opt only for this integral ideal of Beauty:

A perfect harmony in the proportions, suppleness and strength, grace and force, plasticity and endurance, and above all, an excellent health, unvarying and unchanging, which is the result of a pure soul, a happy trust in life and an unshakable faith in the Divine Grace.

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CHAPTER 32

War and Peace

I

The Mother's New Year prayer for 1945 was partly an announcement of the coming victory and peace, and partly a hope and a warning that, unless the victorious powers fashioned a truthful and just peace, the fruits of victory would once again slip out of their hands:

The earth will enjoy a lasting and living peace only when men understand that they must be truthful even in their international dealings.

O Lord, it is for this perfect truthfulness that we aspire.¹

On the eve of the New Year when the darkness hadn't lifted yet, the Mother could already see the clear streaks of the dawn of victory, but also the gathering clouds far distant threatening to darken the day once more. There was the need to deal with the vanquished powers on a fair and truthful basis; and there was the even greater need for the victors to preserve a becoming sobriety and not to quarrel among themselves.

Towards the end of 1944, the Nazi forces counter-attacked and crossed into Belgium and Luxembourg again, but were halted near the Meuse. This was no more than the last flicker of the dying candle, for with the New Year, the Allied and Russian armies began penetrating deep into Germany from the West and East respectively. By March, the Rhine had been reached and was soon crossed, and in April, Berlin itself was surrounded by the Russians. Hitler's death was announced on 1 May, the German forces surrendered not long after, and the war in Europe was over on 8 May. The war against Japan continued for three more months; then, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (5 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) accounting for stunning devastation, Japan surrendered unconditionally, and 15 August was the day of complete victory.

In 1940, after the fall of France, Hitler had fixed 15 August as the day of his triumphant tryst with Britain. That he - guided by the Asuric genius that was the Lord of his fevered thoughts and uncanny actions - should have thought of 15 August (Sri Aurobindo's birthday) as his date with destiny was itself an indication that he was being blindly driven to hurl himself against the Divine. In a conversation on 20 May 1940, Sri Aurobindo had said that Hitler's fascination for 15 August was itself the sign that he was the enemy of the Divine's work that was being attempted in the Ashram; "and from the values concerned in the conflict it should be quite clear that what is behind him is the Asuric, the Titanic power".² Actually, Hitler was to receive a major set-back on that day in the aerial Battle of Britain. Again, five years later, the capitulation of Japan on 15

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August 1945 was another indication of the inner nature of the world conflict. The Ashram at Pondicherry was inwardly in the thick of this fight, although superficially out of it; and the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's force had been active all the time, and sometimes with decisive results. Now that the Enemy was vanquished at last, the Mother gave a prayer on 15 August:

The Victory has come, Thy Victory, O Lord, for which we render to Thee infinite thanksgiving.

But now our ardent prayer rises towards Thee. It is with Thy force and by Thy force that the victors have conquered. Grant that they do not forget it in their success and that they keep the promises which they have made to Thee in the hours of danger and anguish. They have taken Thy name to make war, may they not forget Thy grace when they have to make the peace.³

II

Victory had come in the East, as earlier in the West, but at what cost? It was the Atom bomb that hastened the end of hostilities, for on each of those two occasions, in the course of a split second, lakhs of innocent human beings - men, women, children, the aged, the sick, the helpless, one and all - had been destroyed or mutilated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Atom bomb: what was it really? The Devil's definitive weapon - or, somehow, a hope for the future? When the question was put to her, the Mother wrote dispassionately on 30 August 1945:

The Atomic bomb is in itself the most wonderful achievement and the sign of a growing power of man over material nature. But what is to be regretted is that this material progress and mastery is not the result of and in keeping with a spiritual progress and mastery which alone has the power to contradict and counteract the terrible danger coming from these discoveries. We cannot and must not stop progress, but we must achieve it in an equilibrium between the inside and the outside.⁴

In other words, while there is a vast difference between the rugged stone implements which the paleolithic man used and the sophisticated atomic arsenal at the disposal of the modern man, in his basic inclinations and character man is still wolf to man: homo homini lupus\ Even where man has developed intellectual qualities, these are more often than not mere bond-slaves of the vitalistic pulls and desires. Without an inner advance, a radical change in consciousness and character, the current heady pace of technological change can only mean a quicker and a deadlier capacity to kill and overkill, a racing of mankind towards self-perversion and a global suicide club.

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The choice is between integral Truth - and annihilation!

Every scientific advancement, albeit achieved as a result of an inquiry in the realm of pure science, has permitted massive misuse as well as right use in the service of man. What engineers the wrong use is not the knowledge itself, but the vitalistic pull, individual or collective, that exploits that knowledge. Only, with the present pace in scientific advancement, the possibilities of proper use and criminal misuse have acquired a like exponential range. As an answer to the threat posed by modern science and technology, one might ask for a moratorium on further research, or even the destruction of all machinery and a return to Nature. But the Mother's answer was different: an inner development matching the outer, an integral change in consciousness that equates consciousness with the whole force of Truth. The Mother's answer to the danger posed by hectic scientific advancement was the transmuting power of Yoga, the discipline of soul-awakening and spiritual mastery. The future of civilisation, then, would depend on how soon, and how successfully, man acquired the necessary self-mastery and world-mastery through Yoga. Here, as the Mother saw it, was a positive role for the Ashram.

III

During the War years there was a steady expansion of the Ashram, measured not only by the number of inmates (including the children) but also the number of buildings rented or purchased, the institutions founded, and the Services organised. Because of the steady influx of visitors, especially at the time of the Darshans, more and more houses had to be requisitioned, and there was also a need for at least one modern residence for sadhaks with all reasonable amenities. In 1938, taking advantage of a handsome donation by the Government of the Nizam of Hyderabad on the initiative of the Diwan, Sir Akbar Hydari, who was one of Sri Aurobindo's ardent disciples, it now became possible for the Mother to plan the construction of a really good residence to be named Golconde. The Mother threw herself into this task with her customary zeal and meticulous attention to detail. The Harpagon Workshop came into existence, first as an ancillary to the Golconde enterprise, though it was presently to develop on its own. For a time all roads led to Golconde, and all talents were mobilised to hasten its completion. The Mother had an idea of her own, which the architects - Raymond, Sammer and others, an international team - translated into significant form. As many as possible of the sadhaks were pressed into service, and they worked shoulder to shoulder with the mass of paid workers. The old buildings on the site had first to be demolished, and then the architectural phoenix rose like a wonder as from nowhere. In Nirodbaran's words:

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She was in constant touch with the work through her chosen instruments... To anyone young or old asking for work, part time, whole time, her one cry: "Go to Golconde, go to Golconde." It was one of her daily topics with Sri Aurobindo who was kept informed of the difficulties... and at the same time, of the need of his force to surmount them.... How often we heard her praying to Sri Aurobindo, "Lord, there should be no rain now."... The Divine Force would of course win.... But as soon as the intended object was achieved, a deluge swept down as if in revenge.... During the roof-construction, work had to go on all night long and the Mother would mobilise and marshal all the available Ashram hands and put them there. With what cheer and ardour our youth jumped into the fray at the call of the Mother, using often Sri Aurobindo's name to put more love and zeal into the strenuous enterprise! We felt the vibration of a tremendous energy driving, supporting, inspiring the entire collective body.⁵

But a dormitory so uniquely beautiful yet so thoroughly functional needed careful maintenance as well as thoughtful use. The rules, as approved by the Mother, were rather strict, and some of the visitors to the Darshan of 21 February 1945 seem to have felt irked by the restrictions, and on this being conveyed to Sri Aurobindo, he wrote on 25 February explaining the Mother's view of Golconde and the paramount need for discipline in life:

First, Mother believes in beauty as a part of spirituality and divine living; secondly, she believes that physical things have the Divine Consciousness underlying them as much as living things; and thirdly that they have an individuality of their own and ought to be properly treated, used in the right way, not misused or improperly handled or hurt or neglected so that they perish soon and lose their full beauty or value; she feels the consciousness in them and is so much in sympathy with them.... It is on this basis that she planned the Golconde. First, she wanted a high architectural beauty, and in this she succeeded - architects and people with architectural knowledge have admired it with enthusiasm as a remarkable achievement... but also she wanted all the objects in it, the rooms, the fittings, the furniture to be individually artistic and to form a harmonious whole. This, too, was done with great care. Moreover, each thing was arranged to have its own use, for each thing there was a place, and there should be no mixing up, or confused or wrong use. But all this had to be kept up and carried out in practice.... That was why the rules were made and for no other purpose.⁶

But discipline in Golconde was only a part of the general discipline of the Ashram. Discipline indeed was the outer aspect of true tapasya, and to rebel against it was to sin against the very objectives of the Ashram. For some visitors, including even a few well-to-do, to want to stay in the Ashram and yet to grumble about paying the very moderate charges levied by the Mother was not exactly conducive to the Ashram discipline.

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Sri Aurobindo felt that perfect discipline in the Ashram was still a desired ideal and not the achieved fact:

What there is is organisation and order which the Mother has been able to establish and maintain in spite of all that. That organisation and order is necessary for all collective work; it has been an object of admiration and surprise for all from outside who have observed the Ashram; it is the reason why the Ashram has been able to survive and outlive the malignant attacks of many people who would otherwise have got it dissolved long ago.⁷

But if there was to be real organisation, rules and discipline could not be avoided. But those were by no means arbitrary impositions but merely the requisites for generating the necessary momentum for reaching a particular goal:

We have undertaken a work which includes life and action and the physical world. In what I am trying to do, the spiritual realisation is the first necessity, but it cannot be complete without an outer realisation also in life, in men, in this world. Spiritual consciousness within but also spiritual life without. The Ashram as it is now is not that ideal.... But, all the same, the Ashram is a first form which our effort has taken, a field in which the preparatory work has to be done. The Mother has to maintain it and for that all this order and organisation has to be there and it cannot be done without rules and discipline.⁸

Then, towards the end of the long letter, Sri Aurobindo referred to the difficulties faced by him and the Mother in keeping the Ashram going in wartime, and the sanction of Grace behind the whole endeavour:

It has been an arduous and trying work for the Mother and myself to keep up this Ashram, with its ever-increasing numbers, to make both ends meet and at times to prevent deficit budgets and their results; specially in this war time, when the expenses have climbed to a dizzy and fantastic height.... Carrying on anything of this magnitude without any settled income could not have been done if there had not been the working of a divine Force.⁹

IV

The War had indeed come to a grinding halt, Germany was under the occupation of the four Big Powers (USA, USSR, UK and France), the new Poland was a truncated nation as compared with the Poland of 1939, and Japan was under the American sway. On 20 November, the trial of the Nazi war criminals opened at Nuremberg. In India, the general elections

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only polarised - more sharply even than before - the pro-Congress and the pro-Muslim League Provinces. Whether on the international or the Indian scene, the deployment of forces indicated potential confrontation rather than lasting reconciliation and harmony. The future was verily an ominous question-mark.

The Mother's New Year prayer for 1946 fully brought out her vast concern for the unfolding ambiguous future:

Lord, it is Thy Peace we would have and not a vain semblance of peace, Thy Freedom and not a semblance of freedom. Thy Unity and not a semblance of unity. For it is only Thy Peace, Thy Freedom and Thy Unity that can triumph over the blind violence and the hypocrisy and falsehood that still reign upon earth.

Grant that those who so valiantly struggled and suffered for Thy Victory, may see the true and genuine results of that victory realised in the world.¹⁰

The United Nations Organisation was being brought into existence, but this too - like the League of Nations after the First World War - was only a concert of the victorious powers. Already USA and USSR were enacting confrontation and carving out spheres of influence. The world was getting divided again into the victors and the vanquished, and the haves and the have-nots. Peace, Freedom, Unity: these were the godheads of the soul - not just verbal fabrications. The War against the Axis Powers had no doubt been won though at such a great cost, but not the war against violence and hypocrisy and falsehood. The violence was still there, and while America was determined not to share the secret of the Atom bomb with her former Allies, Russia was making frantic attempts to make bombs on its own. Hypocrisy sat entrenched in politics and diplomacy, and the Lord of Falsehood, the Lord of the Nations, stalked imperiously abroad as of old.

Millions had died, millions had been maimed, millions had been impoverished - all because of the War. Millions of young men had sacrificed their lives to make the victory over the Axis Powers possible. And yet, when the victory came, the double-dealing diplomats, the rapacious empire-builders, the creatures of the Lord of the Nations - the apes of perversion and greed - were taking over. The Mother's occult vision could clearly see the political configuration ahead, and hence this Prayer of 1946 out of the depths of her being.

V

As the Mother had feared, the political situation in India continued to be bedeviled by distressing disharmony in Hindu-Muslim and Indo-British relations. In September 1944, the Gandhi-Jinnah talks had failed to

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hammer out an agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League. The year of victory, 1945, had been wasted in futile poses and vain recriminations. The revolt of the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946 was the writing on the wall to the alien bureaucracy, and there was some rethinking in the right quarters. Earlier, Attlee had succeeded Churchill as the British Prime Minister, and Wavell had become the new Viceroy of India. A Cabinet Mission consisting of Cripps, Pethick-Lawrence and Alexander came to India with the offer of a three-tier Constitution for Free India. In a message dated 24 March 1946, Sri Aurobindo explained how he had always stood for India's complete independence, how as early as January 1910 he had prophesied that in the coming era the whole world would see "sudden upheavals and revolutionary changes", and how India would be free. The coming of the British Cabinet Mission was the latest sign that India was on her way to freedom. And Sri Aurobindo concluded, hopefully:

It remains for the nation's leaders to make a right and full use of the opportunity. In any case, whatever the immediate outcome, the Power that has been working out this event will not be denied, the final result, India's liberation, is sure.¹¹

But the leaders wrangled and mounted qualification upon qualification and a blurred picture became more smudged still. Even incitement to violence was not wanting, and riots were engineered, now here, now there, and presently over most of Northern India. Although an interim Government was installed on 2 September, it was followed by communal riots in Noakhali and Bihar. In that poisoned atmosphere, the all-India Constituent Assembly that was convened on 9 December 1946 was doomed from the very beginning to break up ultimately into two. The bestial Calcutta killings on 16 August 1946 had started a diabolical chain reaction over many parts of the country, and Jinnah's intransigency had grown new virulent wings of wild irresponsibility; and the Congress leaders had themselves lost their faith in the unity and integrity of the country. From the very outset, the Interim Government worked at cross purposes, the Congress members pulling one way and the Muslim Leaguers in the opposite direction. All efforts, whether in India or in Britain, to preserve a United India were successfully stalled by Jinnah and his associates. The year 1946 closed for India in bitter disillusion indeed.

VI

Throughout 1946, the Ashram preserved a calm exterior, and the communal and spiritual life of the sadhaks as also the education and physical culture of the pupils in the School were sustained at a high level of harmony and efficiency.

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But the Ashram, although it was a world apparently separate and secluded, could not be wholly immune to events in the outside world. Newspapers and Radio broadcasts spoke of chronic civil disturbances, and there were appeals to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo for advice, for help, for the deployment of their spiritual force. Numberless were the friends of the Ashram outside, and numberless the relations and friends of the sadhaks and children in the Ashram who were still outside the immediate charmed circle of protection in Pondicherry. Writing to a correspondent, Sri Aurobindo said on 2 June 1946:

I know that this is a time of trouble for you and everybody. It is so for the whole world. Confusion, trouble, disorder and upset everywhere is the general state of things. The better things that are to come are preparing or growing under a veil and the worse are prominent everywhere. The one thing is to hold on and hold out till the hour of light has come.¹²

Then exploded the bestialities in Calcutta and elsewhere, followed by the formation of the Interim Government at Delhi (to be called by Sri Aurobindo "the Interim mariage de con venance"). This again was greeted by the abominations at Noakhali and Tipperah on 14 October, to be echoed by those in Bihar on 25 October. In between, on 19 October, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple admitting that things were "certainly very bad" in Bengal, and that the condition of the Hindus there might become even worse. But despair was not the way out of the difficulty. Surely, if Hitler couldn't quite exterminate the Jews, the Muslim fanatics too wouldn't succeed in liquidating the Bengal Hindus.

As for Hindu culture, it is not such a weak and fluffy thing as to be easily stamped out; it has lasted through something like five millenniums at least and is going to carry on much longer and has accumulated quite enough power to survive.

Sri Aurobindo added that he had warned the people of Bengal almost forty years earlier, and C.R. Das too - in the early 1920's had entertained grave apprehensions, and even told Sri Aurobindo while on a visit to Pondicherry that "he would not like the British to go out until this dangerous [communal] problem had been settled". All the same, it would be unwise to surrender to despair:

I know and have experienced hundreds of times that beyond the blackest darkness there lies for one who is a divine instrument the light of God's victory.... There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a black yoke of the Asura 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. Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended.¹³

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It was in this spirit that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother continued their work, sustaining the Ashram and the inevitable expansion of its activities; tending it with divine solicitude as a controlled experiment for hewing new paths to the future, and also intervening in world affairs wherever feasible with a spiritual force to avert a disaster here, to ease a situation there, and generally to keep the lines open for a free evolution of humanity towards the next radical phase of self-development and global unity. Nor should it be forgotten that, whenever a message or important letter went forth from Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, it carried the authority and force of the other too, for theirs was a joint spiritual movement for man's and for the earth's ultimate transformation.

VII

For 1947, the Mother gave as the New Year prayer something that was more than a prayer:

This is not a prayer, but an encouragement.

Here is the encouragement and a comment upon it:

"At the very moment when everything seems to go from bad to worse, it is then that we must make a supreme act of faith and know that the Grace will never fail us."

The hours before the dawn are always the darkest.

The servitude just before freedom comes is the most painful of all.

But in the heart endowed with faith bums the eternal flame of hope which leaves no room for discouragement.¹⁴

In the closing weeks of 1946, it was altogether soul-searing to think of the happenings in the country, - the near dead-locked Interim Government, the Hindu-Muslim confrontation in many parts of India, the proliferation of the communal virus, the retreat of the 'unity' ideal, the insane spread of defeatism and despair. The cumulative situation wasn't unlike the reign of Inconscience delineated by Sri Aurobindo in the opening canto of Savitri which appeared on 15 August 1946 in the fifth volume of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual:

A fathomless zero occupied the world.

And yet the cardinal insight of the Savitri exordium was that "It was the hour before the Gods awake." Although it struck one as the hour of darkest extremity, yet Grace was round the comer, and would intervene effectively at the appropriate time. However thick the pall of darkness, however opaque the crust of the inconscience, nothing could forever resist the invasion of Grace:

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Intervening in a mindless universe,

Its message crept through the reluctant hush

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy

And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,

Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.¹⁵

VIII

The year 1947 saw Lord Mountbatten as Governor-General of India in Wavell's place. Mountbatten was given a free hand to deal with the developing chaotic situation in the country. He had a mandate too to make firm arrangements for the transfer of power to Indian hands. Mountbatten's arrival, however, was the occasion for fresh communal riots in the Punjab partly engineered, it is said, by a group of British officers stationed there. The dance of destruction and the Rake's progress of cynicism went hand in hand, and faith seemed to knuckle under. Writing on 9 April 1947, Sri Aurobindo referred to this cynicism, this "refusal to believe in anything at all, a decrease of honesty, an immense corruption, a preoccupation with food, money, comfort, pleasure, to the exclusion of higher things, and a general expectation of worse and worse things awaiting the world". The classic ruse of the hostile forces is to sow defeatism where faith and hope had reigned before. Even so, Sri Aurobindo had no doubt that the Dawn wouldn't be delayed long:

I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come.¹⁶

True enough, the 'leaders' of the country, having successfully if also purblindly polarised the people into suicidally aggressive attitudes, were now (most of them) only all too eager to leap into the dangled seats of power ignoring the larger interests of the country. They were tired old men, or not so old but very ambitious men, at any rate they were men seized by a sense of fatality; and they had been overtaken by events whose meaning they couldn't understand, and being both short-sighted and faint-hearted they made all kinds of noises and futile gestures. After a series of meetings with this miscellany of leaders, it became clear to Mountbatten that if Britain was to have some chance of safeguarding at least her vast commercial interests in India, she should withdraw soon after partitioning the country and handing over power to the 'two nations'. While things were still hanging in the balance, Sri Aurobindo seems to have made one more attempt through Surendra Mohan Ghose to get the Congress leaders to act on certain lines. But although some of the leaders said, "A very good

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thing, very good," nothing was really done - or could be done - to implement the suggestions. The leaders wouldn't follow Gandhiji's advice either and reject the partition proposal outright. Caught in a vicious trap, partly of their own making, they were prisoners of puzzlement, and Mountbatten had his way with Jinnah and the Congress leaders alike.¹⁷

IX

On 2 June 1947, the day after the announcement regarding the Partition was made, the Mother issued a statement, with the full concurrence of Sri Aurobindo:

A proposal has been made for the solution of our difficulties in organising Indian independence and it is being accepted with whatever bitterness of regret and searchings of the heart by Indian leaders.

Why had Partition become necessary? Why indeed? It was because, said the Mother, of the "absurdity of our quarrels", and only by accepting the Partition could people have a chance of living down that tragic absurdity! At the same time, the Mother added with her uncanny gift of near and far vision:

Clearly, this is not a solution; it is a test, an ordeal which, if we live it out in all sincerity, will prove to us that it is not by cutting a country into small bits that we shall bring about its unity and its greatness; it is not by opposing interests against each other that we can win for it prosperity; it is not by setting one dogma against another that we can serve the spirit of Truth. In spite of all, India has a single soul and while we have to wait till we can speak of an India one and indivisible, our cry must be:

Let the soul of India live for ever!¹⁸

But what is meant by "the soul of India"? Has a nation - a human aggregate inhabiting a seemingly arbitrary geographical area - a soul of its own? As if answering these doubts, Nolini explained in an editorial that he wrote in August, based on one of the talks by the Mother:

A nation is a living personality; it has a soul, even like a human individual. The soul of a nation is also a psychic being, that is to say, a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it, a power and aspect of Mahashakti. A nation is not merely the sum total of the individuals that compose it, but a collective personality of which the individuals are as it were cells, like the cells of a living and conscious organism.¹⁹

The slothful logic of expediency, the infernal arithmetic of selfish 'party' calculations, the fear of the possible immediate danger (the eruption of a

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civil war) and the ignoration of the bigger danger to the national psyche and the security of the subcontinent, all had conspired to batter down Congress resistance and stampede the leaders into ignominious acquiescence. But at least, the Mother hoped and the Mother prayed, that "the soul of India" wouldn't be rent in two but would still maintain its native splendorous unity. Sri Aurobindo too, although he had perforce to accept the event, was far from satisfied. Someone asked him whether he could not have prevented the monstrous division of the country? What had happened to his Yogic Force - to the supramental action? Writing on 7 July 1947, Sri Aurobindo explained that, after all, he was using, not the infallible supramental, but only the overmental force which in its operation on individuals and human collectivities might meet with sinister resistances resulting in unforeseen distortions. And he added with a touch of wry humour:

That is why I am getting a birthday present of a free India on August 15, but complicated by its being presented in two packets as two free Indias: this is a generosity I could have done without, one free India would have been enough for me if offered as an unbroken whole.²⁰

X

And so, Sri Aurobindo's 75th birthday - Friday 15 August 1947 - became the day of India's independence. In his message for the day, intended for broadcast from the Tiruchirapalli station of the All India Radio, Sri Aurobindo dwelt in some detail on the significance of the double event and the possibilities of the future.²¹ First about his birthday coinciding with the day of Independence:

As a mystic, I take this identification, not as a coincidence or fortuitous accident, but as a sanction and seal of the Divine Power which guides my steps on the work with which I began my life. Indeed almost all the world movements which I hoped to see fulfilled in my lifetime, though at that time they looked like impossible dreams, I can observe on this day either approaching fruition or initiated and on the way to their achievement

Then he spoke of the five ideals or movements: a revolution which would bring about India's freedom and unity; the resurgence and liberation of Asia; the emergence of 'one world' in place of the many warring nationalisms; the assumption by India of the spiritual leadership of the human race; and, "finally, a new step in the evolution which, by uplifting the consciousness to a higher level, would begin the solution of the many problems of existence which have perplexed and vexed humanity, since men began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society."

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India had become free, but because of the Partition, it was only a "fissured and broken freedom". It was sad that the old communal division into Hindu and Muslim should have at last "hardened into the figure of a permanent political division of the country". But he added also this word of caution doubled with a word of prophecy:

It is to be hoped that the Congress and the nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest. The partition of the country must go, it is to be hoped by a slackening of tension, by a progressive understanding of the need of peace and concord, by the constant necessity of common and concerted action, even of an instrument of union for that purpose. In this way unity may come about under whatever form - the exact form may have a pragmatic but not a fundamental importance. But by whatever means, the division must and will go. For without it the destiny of India might be seriously impaired and even frustrated. But that must not be.

During the long years since this prophetic declaration was made, we have been witnessing the fulfilment almost to the letter of the many fears and hopes then expressed: the constant tension between India and Pakistan, the endemic prevalence of civil strife, the Chinese invasion of 1962, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the terrific strain on India's economy, the reign of genocide in East Pakistan in 1971, the coming of 10 million refugees to India, the emergence of free Bangladesh followed by the Simla Agreement between India and Pakistan, and the hint of a possible betterment of relations between the nations that now constitute the Indian subcontinent. But whether - or when, and in what manner - Sri Aurobindo's positive forecast that the Partition "must and will go" would be accomplished is still for the future to unfold.

As regards Sri Aurobindo's other seemingly "impossible dreams", in August 1947 they did seem in greater or lesser measure - to be in a process of fulfilment:

Asia has arisen and large parts of it have been liberated or are at this moment being liberated.... There India has her part to play and has begun to play it....

The unification of mankind is under way, though only in an imperfect initiative, organised but struggling against tremendous difficulties. But the momentum is there....

The spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever increasing measure....

The rest ["a new step in evolution..."] is still a personal hope and an

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idea and ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds.... Here too... the initiative can come from India....

Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far or how soon this connection will be fulfilled, depends upon this new and free India.

XI

It was an extraordinary message, notable alike for its vast comprehension and its insights into the near and far future. It was a message for the statesmen and the philosophers, for bridge-builders and man-makers, and for the forward-looking men and women of all countries. On the other hand, for the millions and millions of Mother India's children now suddenly sundered by the mechanics of the Partition, for the numberless Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists who still felt that they lived only as the cells and arteries and tissues and blood-corpuscles of India the one beloved Mother of one and all, for these anguished children the right prayer for the occasion that evoked joy and sorrow at once, was given by the Mother out of her vast compassionate understanding and love:

O our Mother, O Soul of India, Mother who hast never forsaken thy children even in the days of darkest depression, even when they turned away from thy voice, served other masters and denied thee, now when they have arisen and the light is on thy face in this dawn of thy liberation, in this great hour we salute thee. Guide us so that the horizon of freedom opening before us may be also a horizon of true greatness and of thy true life in the community of the nations. Guide us so that we may be always on the side of great ideals and show to men thy true visage, as a leader in the ways of the spirit and a friend and helper of all the peoples.²²

Also, in the morning the Mother hoisted her - flag which was to be called "the Spiritual Flag of India" - blazoning forth India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma and Ceylon all together, with her own symbol at the centre, over the main Ashram building. There was a record number of visitors to the Ashram, and over two thousand had Darshan in the afternoon. Presently the Mother appeared on the low terrace over Dyuman's room; the courtyard was packed to capacity. The Bande Mataram was sung as it had never been sung before, for now it was the moment of fulfilment, and the Mother responded with 'Jai Hind!' and the congregation was to cherish the memory of her marvellous gesture for long afterwards.

The Mother's - flag the Spiritual Flag of India - which since 15 August

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1947 has been for us a flaming minister, a symbol of hope and a declaration of faith, has been flying high and serene in the minds and sensibilities of countless numbers of Indians. The blue flag figuring the great Indian subcontinent stretching from Kashmir to Sri Lanka, from Sind to Burma, environed by the Himalaya in the North, the Indian ocean in the South, the Arabian sea on the West and the Bay of Bengal in the East, and with the Mother's symbol of her Shakti, her four powers and her twelve emanations concentrically arranged as the heart of the living Mother of a seething mass of humanity numbering almost a billion, - what is this Spiritual Flag of India but a revelation, an epiphanic projection, a visual recordation of the deeper reality, the inspiring Truth, of this primordial Asiatic region, the matrix of the stupendous human adventure on the earth, and the destined scene of the next leap forward to the horizons of supermanhood?

This flag symbolising the spiritual reality and unity of Greater India - the true India - was verily the Mother's answer to the brutal partition of India decreed by the erstwhile British rulers and accepted by the shortsighted and faint-hearted Indian leaders of 1947, for the Spiritual Flag of India with the Mother's symbol as the central design and highlighted by the blue background was the Ashram's flag as well. Explaining its significance, Sri Aurobindo said in 1949:

The blue of the flag is meant to be the colour of Krishna and so represents the spiritual or divine consciousness which it is her work to establish so that it may reign upon earth.

It is used as the Ashram flag because "our work is to bring down this consciousness and make it the leader of the world's life".²³ It was by no means irrelevant to talk of the Spiritual Flag of India, for the Spirit is elemental Affirmation, the Everlasting Yea; the Spirit is the great harmoniser; the Spirit is the great unifier. What the politicians, the communalists, the calculators, the soulless power-mongers, the pinchbeck lords of the sub-nations had fissured and fractured and sundered, the Mother still viewed as an integral whole, breathed life into it, and lighted up the divine Agni within. The physical body is a prisoner of its own limitations, the vital is often caught at cross-purposes, even the mind is usually content to be a slave of the vital's irrational pulls and drives: these are but dungeons walled within the walls of the human personality. Only the soul can leap over all frontiers; only the river of the human soul can flow seraphically free from all obstruction and join the ocean of the spirit; only the soul can affirm:

The world's deep contrasts are but figures spun

Draping the unanimity of the One.

My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,

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My body is God's happy living tool,

My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.²⁴

Like the human soul, the nation's soul too defies all man-made boundaries - physical, legal, constitutional - and embraces the infinities. Even so, by charging the new Map of India with a spiritual glow and infinitude of connotation, the Mother tried to undo in some measure the mischief of the Partition mentality of self-fragmentation, the surge of mutual suspicion and hatred, and the enthronement of communal and sub-national egoisms that were alien to the spiritual ideal of oneness, wholeness and integrality, India was the Mother - India was Bharati, Bhavani Bharati ²⁵ - and the Mother was not limited to the head alone, the feet alone, the hands alone, or even the visible body alone. The Mother's ambience of protective love and sovereign Grace overflowed the visible boundaries. Salute to the Mother! Vande Mataram! Jai Hind!

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CHAPTER 33

After Independence

I

In August 1947, the Congress leaders stampeded by Lord Mountbatten to some extent - had agreed, to the Partition in the hope of averting further communal strife and the resultant bloodshed. Actually, the "tryst with Destiny" - the midnight hour preceding the dawn of 15 August - was to prove the signal for the flow of rivers of blood in the Punjab. The anticipated moment of triumph and fulfilment was surpassed by shame-faced perplexity and the benumbing sense of fatality. The butcher's knife of vivisection let loose unimaginable horrors and the desecration of cherished national and all humane values. Lahore, Multan, Rawalpindi, Amritsar, Gujranwala, Sheikhpura... almost everywhere the coming of freedom meant, for hundreds of thousands, a death-trap fashioned by the inscrutable working of the Time Spirit.¹ The violence and humiliation, the bestiality and insanity, the terror and the pity of it all! Gandhiji had once ruefully speculated:

It almost appears as if we are nursing in our bosoms the desire to take revenge the first time we get the opportunity. Can true voluntary non-violence come out of this seeming forced non-violence of the weak? Is it not a futile experiment I am conducting? What if, when the fury bursts, not a man, woman or child is safe and every man's hand is raised against his neighbour?

The Mahatma had been prophetic indeed, and on 15 August and the days following "not a man, woman or child" was safe and every man's hand was raised against his brother and his neighbour. Also, it meant a colossal two-way traffic of uprooted humanity on the run Hindu and Sikh to India, and Muslim to Pakistan - daring the unspeakable abominations on the way. This was to raise the stupendous problem of rehabilitation and resettlement of the millions of refugees who had fled one way or another leaving all behind. In short, Hell was let loose, civil authority broke down, and the military was sometimes partisan and often ineffective. There was thus no end to the miseries of the children of mangled and mutilated Mother India.

It must, however, be conceded that those months were also a period of super-human endeavours - by men of iron like Sardar Patel, by unflinching humanists like Nehru, by great reconcilers like Rajaji, and by thousands of mute unknown knight-errants of succour and sisters of compassion - that somehow redeemed the envenomed time and began rearing slowly on the very ruins of the shattered citadel a new habitation for the future.

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II

It was in this context, when the fumes and marsh vapours and the smell of the blood of the innocents of the affected areas in North India could be felt even in the Ashram's sanctified precincts in Pondicherry, that the Mother gave this New Year prayer for 1948, out of the plenitude of her occult vision and overhead consciousness:

Forward, for ever forward!

At the end of the tunnel is the light...

At the end of the fight is the victory!²

No use repining; no use casting backward glances; no use opening up old sores! One must persevere, one must hold on - to win at last!

The Partition hadn't brought peace into the subcontinent, nor amity between the Governments of India and Pakistan. While the Punjab was all ablaze in the weeks after Independence, Mahatma Gandhi was able to bring peace in Calcutta and Bengal, as if indeed he were an effective one-man boundary force in the East. But the exodus continued, and the invasion of Kashmir by Pakistan, Kashmir's accession to India in October 1947, and India's resistance of Pak aggression were to sow the seeds of strife and enmity among the people, and there were to be violent recriminations, and even Gandhiji was to be misunderstood and reviled; and on 30 January 1948, he was struck down on his way to a prayer meeting. It was a black day for the people of India, and for all humanity On 4 February, Sri Aurobindo sent a wire in reply to a distracted devotee's call: "Remain firm through the darkness; the light is there and will conquer."³ The next day he gave the nation a message in answer to a request from the All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli:

I would have preferred silence in the face of the circumstances that surround us.... This much, however, I will say that the Light which led us to freedom, though not yet to unity, still burns and will burn on till it conquers. I believe firmly that a great and united future is the destiny of this nation and its peoples. The Power that brought us through so much struggle and suffering to freedom, will achieve also, through whatever strife or trouble, the aim which so poignantly occupied the thoughts of the fallen leader at the time of his tragic ending; as it brought us freedom, it will bring us unity. A free and united India will be there and the Mother will gather around her her sons and weld them into a single national strength in the life of a great and united people.⁴

But the Kashmir question continued to bedevil Indo-Pakistan relations, and the dispute was to be endlessly debated in the United Nations Security Council. Jinnah's death followed in September 1948, and the hopes of concord and cooperation in the subcontinent receded further still.

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The international scene was not much better. The 'cold war' was the grim image of global power-politics: the fall of Benes in Czechoslovakia was a portent, and the ascendancy of Mao Tse-tung in China, pushing Chiang Kaishek more and more into the background, was another. It was as though, within three years of the exorcising of the Hitlerite terror, another darkness was enveloping the world. Replying to a correspondent who had struck a pessimistic note, Sri Aurobindo wrote on 18 July 1948 that he could hold out but cold comfort to those who lamented the current situation. Things were certainly bad and growing worse and worse. What, then, was the best way of facing the ugly posture of affairs? The truth of the matter was that certain possibilities had to be suffered first and thrown out before "a new and better world" could have a chance of emergence:

It is, as in Yoga, where things active or latent in the being have to be put into action in the light so that they may be grappled with and thrown out or to emerge from latency in the depths for the same purificatory purpose.⁵

The night was very dark indeed, but the coming of dawn was inevitable, and the new world struggling to be born would be made of a different texture which would come from within and not without. One must hold on, one must master the art of endurance - and one must open oneself to the force and light of transformation.

III

If some disciples questioned Sri Aurobindo about the bewildering Indian and world situation, others ventured to doubt the wisdom of the Mother giving so much importance to sports in the Ashram, and of her playing tennis "for long hours" in spite of her advanced age and evincing a disproportionate interest "in the sports programmes and events, thereby taking needed time" away from "the more vital concerns" of Ashram life. Was the great Ashram to dwindle into a mere gymnasium? Was one's progress in Yoga to be measured by one's proficiency in games and sports alone? Was it true that the Mother was apt to frown upon those sadhaks who didn't take part in games and sports? In respect of all such hasty misjudgments, the Mother's stand was enunciated in a letter of 19 November 1948:

Do not judge on appearances and do not listen to what people say, because these two things are misleading....

...There is in the Ashram no exterior discipline and no visible test. But the inner test is severe and constant....⁶

But censorious people, driven by the demon of doubt and suspicion, could still continue to make unwarranted accusations.

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But Sri Aurobindo wouldn't dismiss even such irresponsible animadversions with a mere shrug or a gesture of contempt. He wrote to a correspondent on 10 July 1948, dismissing the popular fallacies and setting the matter in the right perspective. The sports and physical exercises, Sri Aurobindo wrote, were primarily for the school children, and were teamed with the academic studies exemplifying, incidentally, the ancient concept of a healthy mind in a healthy body. If the younger sadhaks also joined, it was a voluntary choice, and was clearly in addition to their other normal duties and yogic preoccupations. Actually, the Mother didn't bother as to who among the sadhaks took part in sports, and who didn't; it was entirely their own lookout. As for the question "Why any sports at all in the Ashram?" Sri Aurobindo said that "to be concerned only with meditation and inner experiences and the escape from life into Brahman... applies only to the ordinary kind of Ashram... this is not that orthodox kind of Ashram. It includes life in Yoga". And hence anything that was useful and not inconsistent with the imperatives of the Spirit was permissible activity in the Ashram. Although ever since "the shadow of Buddhism stalked over all the land" and the philosophy of Illusion hypnotised men into inactivity the 'ashrams' became mere monasteries, places of retreat and nooks of quietism, a very different ideal had flourished in still earlier times:

The old Ashrams were not entirely like that; the boys and young men who were brought up in them were trained in many things belonging to life: the son of Pururavas and Urvasie practised archery in the Ashram of a Rishi and became an expert bowman, and Kama became disciple of a great sage in order to acquire from him the use of powerful weapons. So there is no a priori ground why sports should be excluded from life of an Ashram like ours where we are trying to equate life with the Spirit.⁷

IV

One reason for the recurrent misunderstandings of the Mother's actions was her habit of throwing herself heart and soul into any new development or enterprise till it acquired the necessary sureness of momentum to stand or move on its own. It was thus she had ushered into existence the divers Ashram services and departments, notably the Dining Hall, the Bakery, the Building Service, the Workshop, Golconde, the School, the Printing Press, the Playground, and the rest. Above all, she had her own occult way of taking decisions and implementing them, and it was futile to weigh them in the sheerly mental balance of propriety and utility. Hers was an inner vision, and an integral consciousness. This the sadhaks - not all of them - would understand. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in the course of a subsequent letter:

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If she is busy with the organisation of these things [sports etc.] - and it is not true that she is busy with that alone - it is in order to get finished with that as soon as possible after which it will go on of itself without her being at all engrossed or specially occupied by it, as is the case with other works of the Ashram.⁸

In fact, even in the heyday of her supposed excessive preoccupation with sports when she played tennis for an hour and spent an hour or two in the evenings with the children on the Playground, even in that period of the evolution of the Ashram,

the Mother's whole day from early morning and a large part of the night also has always been devoted to her other occupations connected with the Sadhana - not her own but that of the Sadhaks - Pranam, blessings, meditation and receiving the Sadhaks on the staircase or elsewhere, sometimes for two hours at a time, and listening to what they have to say, questions about the Sadhana, results of their work or [other] matters, complaints, disputes, quarrels, all kinds of conferences about this or that to be decided and done - there is no end to the list: for the rest she had to attend to their letters, to reports about the material work of the Ashram and all its many departments, correspondence and all sorts of things connected with the contacts with the outside world including often serious trouble and difficulties and the settlement of matters of great importance.⁹

This passage is remarkable for its description in miniature of the Mother's heavy schedule of activities - and she was past seventy at the time! - comprehending the entire spectrum from the material to the spiritual. After a visit to the Ashram on 21 February 1948, the Ceylonese writer, J.Vijayatunga, wrote:

I have found here more 'Santi' than I did at Santiniketan, and a more perfect organisation than at any other community centre in India.

The personality behind the organisation, to the minutest detail, is the Mother.... A woman of great dignity and beauty in her youth, as well as of great intellect, she embodies in her frail frame to-day an amazing vitality, through her eyes pours a radiance that is not earthly.¹⁰

The Mother was all the time at once building, sustaining, and building again. Nor was she deterred by conventions, conservatism or sordid calculation, but relying on the Divine alone she dared and darted forward to her chosen goals, and always arrived on time. During the War years and after, under her intrepid and imaginative stewardship, the Ashram registered phenomenal advance in several directions. The Ashram Press was established with the help of Mr.Pillai, a former Director of the Government Central Press, Hyderabad. On 24 November 1945 came out The Four Aids, a "highly valued chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga". This "first

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fruit", as the Prefatory Note described it, was composed mostly by the sadhaks and sadhikas themselves.¹¹ And the first important publication was Sri Aurobindo's Hymns to the Mystic Fire (1946). A quarterly journal, The Advent, dedicated to the exposition of Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Future, was launched on 21 February 1944, in the first instance from Madras. Since 1942, Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual has appeared regularly from Calcutta on 15 August. Sri Aurobindo Circle, another annual publication, first came out from Bombay on 24 April 1945, and later shifted to Pondicherry, and has been appearing every year. And 1949 was to see the publication of two more journals: Bulletin of Physical Education, a quarterly, whose first issue appeared on 21 February, and Mother India, a cultural fortnightly, whose inaugural number came out from Bombay, also on the Mother's birthday. All these journals - with others to follow, in English as well as in the languages of India - were to establish themselves as authoritative organs for the exposition and propagation of the divers aspects of Sri Aurobindo's Thought and World Vision, and of the Mother's divine ministry radiating from the Ashram at Pondicherry.

V

It was on 11 December 1948 that the Andhra University, Waltair, honoured itself at its annual Convocation by awarding the C.R. Reddy National Prize for the Humanities to Sri Aurobindo, though in absentia. In his citation, Dr. Reddy, the Vice-Chancellor, hailed Sri Aurobindo "in all humility of devotion... as the sole sufficing genius of the age... among the Saviours of Humanity". Dr. Reddy reached Pondicherry on 19 December 1948, and the Mother received him the same evening, and found him a nice man who was quick to understand things. Next morning he had an interview with Sri Aurobindo whom he had known as a senior colleague over forty years earlier at the Baroda College. They were together for about thirty minutes, and Dr. Reddy personally offered the gold medal and cheque to Sri Aurobindo. Later, Dr. Reddy went round the Ashram, and in the evening witnessed in the Playground a demonstration of physical culture by the boys and girls, and had a discussion with the Mother about the working of the Ashram. Recalling the impressions of his visit, Dr. Reddy wrote in the columns of Mother India:

...this extraordinary Ashram in which life and the joy of life are mingled in happy union with spirituality and spiritual progress....

But in many respects what impressed me most were the educational institutions maintained by the Ashram and the ancient spirit of strength and joy that pervades them. The Mother, the embodiment of grace, light and tenderness, ordered an exhibition of games and physical exercises by

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the boys and girls of the Ashram School. I said to myself, "If all the schools were like this, won't India be unassailable by internal foes or external?" The parades were excellent. The exercises were gone through not merely efficiently but cheerfully. The girls... performed hazardous exercises like vaulting. Though there was risk of accident to limb, if not to life, they advanced, cool, calm, and resolute with bright looks and confident smiles, and went through the exercises without a single hitch or a single failure.... She told me that it was the Calcutta killings and the bestial abominations perpetrated on our helpless women and children that made her think of organizing the students in her schools, boys and girls, into a corps capable of self-defence. At the root is the great Vedic idea that, without a strong body, you cannot have a strong soul, undaunted in danger and ready to perform the great task, the root principle of all Dharma, of defending the weak and helpless.¹²

During his interviews with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, they discussed - though in brief - national and international problems, and they agreed that the times were truly out of joint. In India, after prolonged sufferance of the Razacker excesses, Sardar Patel ordered 'Police action' on the Nizam's Hyderabad, and the army quickly overran the State which presently became a part of India. Following Jinnah's death, the age of uncertainty began in Pakistan. The UN mediator in Palestine, Bernadette, was cruelly assassinated. In China, Mao's Communist forces continued their relentless advance, and captured Mukden on 30 October. The cold war in Europe seemed likely to wax at any moment into a shooting war. The Berlin blockade was an atrocity beyond description. And the Russians were frantically trying to explode an atomic device to achieve parity with America. These elements in the international situation added up to something quite ominous, and the future was almost frightening. But the Mother gave as the Prayer for 1949:

Lord, on the eve of the new year I asked Thee what I must say. Thou hast made me see two extreme possibilities and given me the command to keep silent.¹³

VI

To the superficial observer, the Mother was Ashram-centred, and her hands were full with the day-to-day problems of its organisation, as also of its school and the sadhana of the inmates. But the Mother's, like Sri Aurobindo's, was a plenary consciousness, and contained the globe and its maladies and its meanderings. In 1948, at a time of scarcity, she directed that soap-bits, instead of being thrown away, should be kneaded into new cakes and used again. "The world's economy is in my hands," she explained to Champaklal, "so I had to start from the Ashram."¹⁴

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From the apparently trivial to the incomprehensibly cosmic, her attention was everywhere all at once, and between her waking and sleeping states, there were the trance states when she roamed the immensities. As Sri Aurobindo had said:

The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence.¹⁵

The people around her, the people who saw or interviewed her, the people who even wished to be censorious about her actions, what did they know? How much did they see? That frail fair form, (she weighed less than 50 kilograms at this time ¹⁶) with eyes that were windows of the Real, who spoke words that were the accents of the Real, the tread of whose footsteps constituted the rhythm-beats of Existence, she the Mother was also a woman, a grand householder, an ethereal comrade on the Playground, - and, suddenly, when caught in an epiphanic stance, an apocalyptic vision as well. She was the endless enigma, she was the constant refuge, she was Grace incarnate. There was no end to the calls on her time, her patience, her boundless love. Birthdays were special occasions when the Mother received people, accepted their pranam and gave her blessings. Infinite as was her comprehension, so was her compassion. In 1946, on the birthday of a small girl whose parents had wanted her to learn the alphabet from her, the Mother "gave a pen in the hands of the little one, held it and made her write MA in English".¹⁷ Fond parents would beg the Mother to see and approve the bride or bridegroom chosen by their son or daughter; or to bless a son or son-in-law on the eve of his departure abroad. When someone close to her was bereaved, she would react in a divinely appropriate way. For example, coming to know of the death of Champaklal's father, she "kept silent, looked down for a long time" and there ensued this brief conversation:

Mother: Now your mother is alone there?

Champaklal: No, Mother, my elder brother is there.

Mother: Yes, that I know. She does not want to come here? Last time she was here she told me that she would like to come and stay here.... If she wants to come, she is welcome here. You will write that from me.¹⁸

But there was another side to the medal too, for to the human eye, this woman unparalleled was clearly overworking, she was exhausting herself. On 24 January 1949, she finished her day's work in the early hours of the next morning, almost at four. "No time to go to bed," she said - and so the routine for 25th January began.¹⁹ On 26 April, again, she told Sri Aurobindo that she had been going on from morning till night for four days

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running, finding no time even for tennis.²⁰ Nor would she disappoint those waiting for pranam or blessings. When Champaklal once suggested that she might take a day off from her work, she answered smiling: "I do not have so much freedom."²¹ But, then, she could also somehow find time, amidst her crowding preoccupations and the exhausting demands of her work, to do pencil sketches - of Sri Aurobindo, of herself, of Champaklal, of Pranab's fist and profile!²² If only she could be persuaded to find the time to do a painting of Sri Aurobindo in oil colours! Wouldn't that prove to be a real masterpiece? Although she finally agreed to try, things did not turn out like that, and the oil-painting was never done!²³

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CHAPTER 34

Manifold Ministry

I

When the Mother found that the Ashram School was growing sinews of strength and its Department of Physical Education was serving school-children and sadhaks alike, she blessed the formation of the Sports Association of Sri Aurobindo Ashram (Jeunesse Sportive de l'Ashram de Sri Aurobindo), and she launched on 21 February 1949 its organ, Bulletin of Physical Education, a bi-lingual (English-French) quarterly journal. It was to contain articles by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, reports of the Ashram and School activities during the quarter, and a wide range of photographs. In the Aurobindonian world-view, the physical was in intimate relationship with the vital, mental, psychic and spiritual, and there could never be any doubt regarding the ultimate unity of matter and spirit. It was not surprising therefore that the Bulletin took all knowledge and experience for its province. After some years, the name of the journal was changed to Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, and was also to appear in a Hindi edition. By popular use, however, the journal is known only as Bulletin, and is immediately recognisable with its red cover and the Mother's Flag (which is also the Ashram's) at the centre: a full-blown stylised lotus in gold, with concentric circles of 4 and 12 petals respectively, and centred in a square background of silvery blue:

This blue is the blue of the spirit and the gold is the colour of the Supreme Mother. The red of the cover surrounding the flag signifies the illumined physical consciousness.¹

The Bulletin was the Mother's own paper, and over a period of twenty-five years she helped to make it stamp itself indelibly on the awakening consciousness of humanity.

Once she had taken the decision towards the close of 1948 to launch the Bulletin, she went about it with her customary thoroughness. She asked Sri Aurobindo for a Message, which he dictated on 30 December. This gave him an opportunity to define the role of sports generally and also to answer some of the doubts obstreperously floating in the Ashram atmosphere. Sri Aurobindo recalled how, at the height of the Hellenic civilisation, "all sides of human activity were equally developed and the gymnasium, chariot-racing and other sports and athletics had the same importance on the physical side as on the mental side the Arts and poetry and the drama". The situation in independent India asked for the promotion of a like harmonious growth of faculties in the citizens and future citizens. The institution of the Olympiad helped the nations to key their physical culture

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to the highest levels of expectancy. Physical education would mean health, strength and fitness of the body, but even more to the point would be the growth of discipline and morale and sound and strong character, and the development of the habit of team-work and the flair for leadership, the two chiming in concert as in splendid orchestration. The main thrust of physical education would of course be the awakening of the body consciousness and the growth of the sporting spirit:

That includes good humour and tolerance and consideration for all, a right attitude and friendliness to competitors and rivals, self-control and scrupulous observance of the laws of the game, fair play and avoidance of the use of foul means, an equal acceptance of victory or defeat without bad humour, resentment or ill-will towards successful competitors, loyal acceptance of the decisions of the appointed judge, umpire or referee. These qualities have their value for life in general and not only for sport, but the help that sport can give to their development is direct and invaluable.... More important still is the custom of discipline, obedience, order, habit of team-work....²

Regarding "Correct Judgment", the Mother remarked on a later occasion that in sports competitions, equity in giving decisions was most important, and only that umpire or referee who was "above all likes and dislikes, all desires and preferences" could look at things with perfect impartiality.³

On a total view, the scheme of physical education in force in the Ashram is to offer opportunities to children and sadhaks alike to discipline and perfect their bodies under expert guidance and on proper lines. In Yoga, there is always the danger of wrong-headed differentiation between what was spiritual and what was not. The Mother therefore thought it necessary to give this simple piece of advice:

From the point of view of a spiritual life, it is not what you do that matters most, but the way in which it is done and the consciousness you put into it. Remember always the Divine and all you do will be an expression of the Divine Presence.⁴

II

Sri Aurobindo's "Message" was only the starting-point, for the subsequent issues of the Bulletin carried a series of remarkable essays by him on '"Perfection of the Body", "The Divine Body", "Supermind and the Life Divine", "Supermind and Humanity", "Supermind in the Evolution", "Mind of Light" and "Supermind and Mind of Light" which cumulatively constituted the ripest testament of his spiritual vision. Starting with the ideal of the perfect body, Sri Aurobindo explores its fullest ramifications

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so as to seize and comprehend the full circle of his integral and supramental Yoga. The utmost possible total perfection was indeed the aim of the Yoga, the establishment of the Life Divine on this earth; and the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base, had to be purposefully linked so as to interpenetrate the intermediate regions of the soul, mind and life as well:

The soul with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together.⁵

This must mean a general heightening of efficiency or integral perfection of the whole, as well as individual perfection of the several parts:

A supreme perfection, a total perfection is possible only by a transformation of our lower or human nature, a transformation of the mind into a thing of light, our life into a thing of power, an instrument of right action, right use for all its forces.... There must be equally a transforming change of the body by a conversion of its action, its functioning, its capacities as an instrument beyond the limitations by which it is clogged and hampered even in its greatest present human attainment.⁶

Sri Aurobindo's argument in the entire series of articles embraced almost the whole of Yoga, glancing incidentally at a new power of consciousness, the Mind of Light, to which no reference had been made in The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga, and the whole demonstration resounded like a diapason of the inevitability of the Supramental Manifestation on the earth.

On 7 July 1949,. the Mother had told Sri Aurobindo: "I am writing the practical side of your writings."⁷ But of course, with the Mother, the boundary that divided the practical from the profound was very thin indeed. Even as she wouldn't see the spiritual and the material as mutually exclusive, so too theory and practice were, for her, only the two sides of the same arc of realisation. There was thus in her writings and messages - as published from time to time in the Bulletin - a crystalline simplicity, a clarity and directness, and a native power that mostly retain their effective strength even when translated from the original French into English. She wrote, or she spoke, even as she breathed, or walked or attended to her multiple chores; the normal mental activity was generally withdrawn, and only the consciousness Divine was the originator of her actions, speech and writing.

Writing on 2 February 1949 on "Youth" the Mother said:

Youth does not depend on the small number of years one has lived, but on the capacity to grow and progress....

One can also teach the body that there is almost no limit to its growth in

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capacities or its progress.... This is one of the many experiments which we want to attempt in order to break these collective suggestions and show the world that human potentialities exceed all imagination.⁸

The collective suggestion is that, as the years pass, the body must weaken, decay and race towards decrepitude and death. But there is nothing inevitable about it all. Modern man has learnt to ride the bicycle, fly the aeroplane and achieve incredible feats of endurance and accommodation - even to the extent of the demands imposed by space-travel in conditions devoid of the force of gravity. There is thus no reason why man should not be able through the arduous discipline of the body to put off senility and even keep death at bay. As if to reinforce Sri Aurobindo's vision of the ultimate stage of the physical development in which the human body is "suffused with a light and beauty and bliss from the Beyond",⁹ the Mother said in the course of her article "Energy Inexhaustible":

One of the most powerful aids that yogic discipline can provide to the sportsman is to teach him how to renew his energies by drawing them from the inexhaustible source of universal energy. ...

...there is a source of energy which, once discovered, is never exhausted, whatever the outer circumstances and physical conditions of life may be. It is the energy that can be described as spiritual, and is received no longer from below, from the inconscient depths, but from above.... It is there, all around us, permeating everything; and to enter into contact with it and to receive it, it is enough to aspire sincerely for it, to open oneself to it in faith and trust, to widen one's consciousness and identify it with the universal Consciousness.¹⁰

It should be clear, then, that as viewed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother alike, physical education was not an end in itself, but a possible means preparing the beneficiary for the ardours and adventures and realisations of Integral Yoga.

The importance of physical culture in the total scheme of self-perfection being thus established, the sadhaks - excepting for the few who kept aloof for personal reasons - felt attracted and joined the Playground activities. It now came to be realised that the School and its children were far more than a mere vestibule of the Ashram; they were really part of the heart of the community, and held the key to its future. At the time of the Darshan on 24 April 1949, all the members of the Playground sporting programmes in their group uniforms filed past Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and it was truly a heart-warming and inspiring sight:

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn, ...

Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,

Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,

Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light, ...

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Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth

And justify the light on Nature's face.¹¹

III

The coming of the children and the opening of the School meant no doubt the usual academic grind (but 'without tears' as far as possible), and also the intensive regimen of sports, and the organisation of recitations, theatricals and the like, all of course with a spiritual orientation. The Mother took a great deal of interest in dramatic coaching, and often discussed her plans with Sri Aurobindo. She chose the play or the theme, assigned the roles to the various participants, and personally supervised the progress of their acting. "I have been told," writes Nirodbaran, "what minute care she took to correct the movements, articulations of each actor, and how she did not spare anyone.... Thanks to her assiduous personal training and attention, our novices learnt the art of acting with beauty and refinement."¹² Champaklal too has recorded a conversation between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on 24 May 1949 about one of her theatre projects:

When Mother came for Sri Aurobindo's food tonight she brought yesterday's file and started reading the sheets to him when he was taking food....

When Mother finished reading Sri Aurobindo nodded his head and said: Ah, ah.

Mother asked: How did you find it?

Sri Aurobindo: Very good.

Mother: Can it be played?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, I suppose it can be played....

Mother: Sahana will sing from the back stage. B's voice is very beautiful, has volume, it is sweet; she understands.... A, who read the Rose of God, has fine expression, eyes are rounded as required. V knows French well, but her part is brief. Men will be dressed in pants and ladies will be in saris because the modern dress is very ugly.¹³

This has obvious reference to the Mother's play Towards the Future (Vers I'Avenir) which she had just completed working at high pressure, and was planning to produce it on 1 December. Now that she had read it to Sri Aurobindo and secured his approbation, she could go ahead with the finalisation of the cast, the choice of costumes, training of the actors and the background music. After its successful production, the play was published as supplement - in French as well as in English - along with photographs of some of the scenes, in the next issue of the Bulletin.

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IV

Towards the Future¹⁴ is a one-act play in prose "that can be staged in any country, with small changes in the details of the presentation which local custom may require". The characters are only five: She; the Poet; the Clairvoyant Musician; the Painter; the Schoolmate. The last two are brought in only to help the action to move. Thus the play is really about the first three, an idealistic-futuristic variation of the classical 'triangle'. "She" may also be in some respects, an autobiographical projection of the Mother herself, the Mirra Morisset of forty years earlier.

Although undivided, the one-act piece falls naturally into five distinct scenes. As the curtain rises, She is sitting on a sofa in her room with her Schoolmate, who has just come to see her friend after many years. In the interval, She has married the Poet. The Schoolmate is rather surprised at this development, for in their days of nonage She had often castigated the whole institution of marriage. What was marriage but "a co-operative venture in consumption and production"? And She had expressed a proper disgust too for human animality, and announced triumphantly: "Let us not be mammals." And yet....

That was true enough. She answers: "I have always enjoyed making fun of current ideas and social conventions"; but she hadn't condemned true "love that comes from a deep affinity and is marked by an identity of views and aspirations". Also She had dreamt of "a great love that would be shared, free from all animal activity, something that could physically represent the great love which is at the origin of the worlds". Rather like the climactic vision in Dante:

O Light eternal who only in thyself abidest, only thyself

dost understand, and to thyself, self-understood and

self-understanding, turnest love and smiling! ...

To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire

and will were rolled - even as a wheel that moveth

equally - by the Love that moves the sun and the other

stars.¹⁵

She had married the Poet, hoping to translate that dream into reality, but her expectations hadn't been fulfilled. They had achieved comradeship, but that great love had eluded them; perhaps, for such love to materialise, "human nature would have to change so much"! Mutual respect had kept the marriage going somehow, but She couldn't avoid a poignant sense of separative isolation. As a cure, She was desperately trying to lose herself entirely in that marvellous cause, "to relieve suffering humanity, to awaken it to its capacities and its true goal and ultimate transformation". The Schoolmate can see that it is no ordinary Light that is ruling her friend's life and is the inspiration behind it.

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The purpose of the 'first scene' is to open up the theme: the failure of a marriage that had begun with the highest hopes. We have been introduced to one of the partners, and heard her point of view. Now, in the 'second scene', her husband the Poet returns from his walk. The Schoolmate has already left. The Poet looks refreshed but is in an introspective mood. He tells her that, thanks to the bracing air outside, he has been able to visualise the end of his poem in progress:

I end with a song of triumph, a hymn of victory in praise of the evolved man who has discovered, together with the consciousness of his origin, the knowledge of all that he is capable of doing and the power to realise it. I describe him advancing in the happy splendour of union towards the conquest of earthly immortality.

Would it not be better for poetry, painting, music to dwell on beauty, victory and joy, rather than grovel in ugliness and defeat? But, then, when will the frightening budget of discontents end? When will mankind rise beyond the current reign of falsehood and suffering?

She advises him to set to work because work "is the best cure for sadness" and She will in the meantime go out for a while to meet her friend and share with her the new teaching that is the inspiration of their lives. Women too should ponder over the serious problems of life, and not just waste their time talking of 'frills and furs' and other futilities. Most women, under the surface of their seeming frivolousness, hide "a heavy heart" and "an unfulfilled life":

Even in the strongest of women, there is a deep need for affection and protection, for an all-powerful strength that leans over her and enfolds her in comforting sweetness. This is what she seeks in love, and when she has the good fortune to find it, it gives her confidence in life and opens up for her the door to every hope. Without that, life for her is like a barren desert that burns and shrivels up the heart.

The Poet agrees with her, and promises to make it the theme of his next book.

In the 'third scene', the Poet is alone and muses about the general sweetness of her nature:

When I look at her, it is like seeing a light: her intelligence and kindness shine so brightly around her, spreading to all who are near her, whom she guides towards nobler horizons. I admire her, I feel a deep respect for her.... But all that is not love. Love! What a dream! Will it ever become a reality?

Even as he is musing thus, he hears a melody sung by a marvellous voice, wafted from the adjoining house. As the melody dies away, there is a knock and his friend the Painter comes in. He has lately made the

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acquaintance of an accomplished young musician, who is a newcomer to the place and is the neighbour of the Poet and admirer of his work. The Poet acknowledges that he has heard her voice and how it stirred all the fibres of his being. The Painter suggests that the Poet should use his influence and try to arrange for her to give concerts, since she is all alone in her life and needs some support to sustain herself. The Poet agrees, and the Painter goes out to bring the young lady from the next house. Left to himself, the Poet wonders whether the already experienced affinity between himself and the Clairvoyant Musician can further his fulfilment in life.

Presently the Painter returns with the Clairvoyant, and at once the Poet tells her how he has admired her beautiful voice in the service of her art. While taking leave of them, the Painter refers to his dealer who only wants "to make me paint absurdities because, he says, it is the current taste". This is probably a reference to the painter mentioned by the Mother in her talk of 9 April 1951 at the Ashram Playground:

I knew a painter, a disciple of Gustave Moreau; he was truly a very fine artist, he knew his work quite well, and then... he was starving.... One day, a friend intending to help him, sent a picture-dealer to see him... he showed him all the best work that he had done. The art-dealer made a face, looked around, turned over things and began rummaging in all the corners; and suddenly he found [a piece of canvas used for daubing the scrapings of leftover colours from palettes after a day's work].... The merchant suddenly falls upon that and exclaims, "Here you are! my friend, you are a genius, this is a miracle, it is this you should show! Look at this richness of tones, this variety of forms, and what an imagination!"

And although the painter pleaded that it was but palette scrapings, the art-dealer said, "Silly fool, this is not to be told!" He not only undertook to sell it, but offered to take as many of such as he would supply. And so, in order to be able to live at all, the painter made a compromise and did something "which gave the imagination free play, where the forms were not too precise, the colours were all mixed and brilliant...." And, in course of time, he made a name for himself with these 'horrors'!¹⁶

In the Mother's play, however, the Poet asks the Painter to resist the art-dealer's pressures, and fight "this degeneracy of modern taste, this lapse into falsehood which seems to have seeped into the consciousness of all our contemporaries, in every field of human creativity". The traffic in the ugly, the false, the hopeless, the heartless and the fantastic, that is the new wave, that is modernism!

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V

In the 'fourth' and longest scene, the Poet and the Clairvoyant Musician are left alone. The Poet tells her that he will introduce her to a famous orchestra director who can help her to a career in music, and he also confides to her what an inspiration her music has been to his own work during the last six months. The Clairvoyant herself feels quite at ease, for the atmosphere of the room is so reassuring and soothing. With many to choose from, she had chosen an apartment close to the Poet's house, as if by a sort of intuition. It is a case of affinity between them, an inspiration for him, a protection for her! She is now overtaken by the need to sleep and stretches herself on the sofa. The Poet tells her she needn't bother about conventions and customs; such fetters have no meaning! The Poet passes his hand over her forehead several times till the persistent pain in her head ceases, and she goes to sleep with a look of joy and comfort. The Poet sits by her side, and gazes at her face. But although asleep, the Clairvoyant's inner eye is open, and she sees an aura of violet light around the Poet and begins talking in her sleep:

It is a living and luminous amethyst. It is all around me too, it is giving me strength. It is a protection, a sure protection.... Nothing harmful can come near me now. (Enraptured) How beautiful is the violet light around you!

The violet colour symbolises Divine Compassion (Karuna or Grace), as also "the radiance of Krishna's protection".¹⁷ No wonder the Clairvoyant, now psychically awakened, feels comforted and protected.

The Poet too is profoundly moved, for he is now flooded with a peace and happiness he hadn't known before. But he is also disturbed, for if he is to feel responsible for the Clairvoyant's safety and yield to this new-found felicity of mutual trust and love, how about his obligations to his own wife? How is he to tell her that his whole being is concentrated upon another? But hypocrisy too is to be ruled out! By now the Clairvoyant is awake, and feels quite refreshed and happy. She talks of the aura she had seen around his head - "a nourishment and a protection". The Poet explains to her that the aura is really a reflection of a man's true nature:

We are made up of different states....

.. .what is more subtle in us forms a kind of sheath round our bodies and we call this subtle sheath the aura.

... the aura is the exact reflection of what is within us, of our feelings and our thoughts.

With her clairvoyance, she had seen this aura, but all do not possess this gift of vision. The Poet tells her that, while most people today are totally engrossed in material satisfactions, all is not lost, for there are "guardians of the supreme knowledge" who know the Truth, whose aim is to "awaken

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man to the consciousness of what he truly is and what he can do". The Clairvoyant feels greatly thrilled, and hopes they can see one another often: "I wish we never had to part again.... While I was asleep I felt that you were everything for me and that I belong to you for ever."

Yes indeed, the Poet answers: "Just now while you were asleep, I felt a calm and a quiet happiness which I had never experienced before." Then, thoughtfully, he adds: "Yes, this is the true love, which is a force; it is the union that enables new possibilities to be realised." There is here a hesitation in his speech, and noticing this, the Clairvoyant asks what could possibly be the impediment, and just then She suddenly enters, having heard what they said from behind a screen.

The 'fifth' and final scene: the Clairvoyant sees that the Poet is married, and this comes almost as a shattering blow to her. But the heroine - She - tells them not to be upset. Yes, She had overheard the end of their conversation; and She is eager to help them. Love is the only legitimate bond of union, and "the absence of love is enough to invalidate any union". A union without love, like hers with the Poet, based only on esteem and mutual concession, may have been tolerable enough, but now that the Clairvoyant has awakened true love in the Poet, the earlier association will have to be annulled.

The Poet is relieved, yet unhappy; what will now happen to his wife? No doubt She lives always on the summit of her consciousness "in a pure and serene light", but can She stand by herself, all alone? But She is unruffled and magnanimous, She joins their hands together and offers them her good wishes. She will now join those - "who possess the eternal wisdom" - who have already been guiding her from a distance. But these two - the Poet and the Clairvoyant - should cherish the blessing of love and not allow their union "to serve as an excuse for the satisfaction of animal appetites or sensual desires". As for herself, She fully knows her mind:

I now know for certain that only one love can satisfy my being: it is the love for the Divine, the divine love, for that alone never fails. Perhaps one day I shall find the favourable conditions and the necessary help for the achievement of the supreme realisation, the transformation and divinisation of the physical being which will change the world into a blessed place full of harmony and light, peace and beauty.¹⁸

VI

It may seem strange that, although the Clairvoyant Musician has been their neighbour for six months, she doesn't seem to know that the Poet is married already; also, while he has heard her music so often, he hasn't

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even once seen the Clairvoyant. But, then, the play should not be judged as a realistic exercise, for Towards the Future belongs more properly to the realm of ideas. The theme is, not so much the break-up of a marriage because of the intrusion of the Third, but the cracking of the cosmic egg and the preordained leap into the future. A marriage sustained by mutual respect and adjustment could be viewed as a happy marriage by worldly-wise people; and so indeed it is, till the Clairvoyant Musician arrives. Then the Poet and the Clairvoyant awaken to the true love, and on her part She seeks the Love Divine. In a message given to the daughter of a sadhak on the occasion of her marriage, the Mother has said that the union of physical existences and material interests, the sharing of defeats and victories, is the very basis of marriage; yet that is not enough. Being united in feelings, having the same tastes and pleasures, vibrating in a common response to the same things, all this is good and necessary; but this is not enough either. To be one in sentiments and affections, to be jointly proof against all shocks of life, to be able to experience happiness together under all circumstances, all this is very necessary; yet this too is not enough. As with the physical, the emotional and the sentimental spheres of life, to accomplish the union of minds, thoughts and intellectual preoccupations, that is splendid, yet even this is not the seal and sanction of integral success in marriage. What, then, is the ultimate secret of success?

Beyond all that, in the depths, at the centre, at the summit of the being, there is a Supreme Truth of being, an Eternal Light, independent of all circumstances of birth, country, environment, education; That is the origin, cause and master of our spiritual development; it is That which gives a permanent direction to our lives; it is That which determines our destinies; it is in the consciousness of That that you must unite. To be one in aspiration and ascension, to move forward at the same pace on the same spiritual path, that is the secret of a lasting union.¹⁹

The limitations of human love in its many forms and the quality of divine love as the culmination and crystallisation of human love were to come up again for discussion in a conversation of 19 September 1956. How is one to give up - or outgrow - the lower forms of love in favour of the Love Divine? The Mother answered:

.. .the best way when love comes, in whatever form it may be, is to try and pierce through its outer appearance and find the divine principle which is behind and which gives it existence. Naturally, it is mil of snares and difficulties, but it is more effective. That is to say, instead of ceasing to love because one loves wrongly, one must cease to love wrongly and want to love well.

Instead of drying up the veins of love, it would be wiser to purify them:

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...one must learn how to love better: to love with devotion, with self-giving, self-abnegation, and to struggle, not against love itself, but against its distorted forms.... Not to want to possess, dominate.... Simply to be happy to love, nothing more.²⁰

And from the purer forms of human love, it should be a natural movement towards divine love, whether it be manifested in a personal being (an avatar, for example) or whether it is unmanifested and impersonal. In a later conversation, the Mother described the quintessence of this divine love, how difficult it is to realise, and yet how needful:

This Divine Love which animates all things, penetrates all, upbears all and leads all towards progress and an ascent to the Divine, is not felt, not perceived by the human consciousness, and that even to the extent the human being does perceive it, he finds it difficult to bear not only to contain it, but be able to tolerate it... for its power in its purity, its intensity in its purity, are of too strong a kind to be endured by human nature....

...a human being, unless he raises himself to the divine heights, is incapable of receiving, appreciating and knowing what divine Love is.²¹

But the ascent of aspiration can always occasion the descent of Grace, and love with its first human beginnings can flower and fructify as the Love Divine.

Towards the Future is a radiant manifesto for the future, when the current distortions of love will give place to love undefiled and divinely oriented; when even the human lover will be able to affirm like Savitri:

My love is not a hunger of the heart,

My love is not a craving of the flesh;

It came to me from God, to God returns.

Even in all that life and man have marred,

A whisper of divinity still is heard,

A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.²²

VII

It was towards the close of 1949 that the Mother saw again her son, André, whom she had left as a boy of eighteen in France when she sailed for Japan in 1916. In the intervening period which saw two World Wars, hardly twenty letters had passed between mother and son. Having married in the meantime, he had two daughters, Janine and Francoise (much later to be given the Ashram name Pournaprema'). On 12 August 1949, the Mother informed Sri Aurobindo that Francoise was to be married on that day.²³ André's own visit to India was decided on in the summer of 1949 and took place in November. On the way, he spoke at a meeting in Calcutta for about fifteen minutes on his boyhood memories,

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and how the Mother used to say even in those distant days that she had come to the world with a special mission.²⁴ When it was known that André was to visit the Ashram on 21 November, the Mother told Sri Aurobindo:

André is coming today.... They want to arrange things in such a way that he can meet me as soon as he comes from Madras without waiting....

It is many years since we last met. Perhaps if we met on the road without being introduced to each other I would not know him, and he too would not recognise me.... He reads your books and understands them too. He had sent his wife's photo; she resembles me. André had also written to me that she very much resembles me.²⁵

When André arrived in the evening, Pavitra told him that the Mother was expecting him in the room in Golconde where he was to stay for some time. It was quite dark when he reached Golconde, and he hastily climbed two storeys and then, "in the dim light of the corridor, I saw a white shape with her back against the door in a very familiar attitude". Though they had not met ever so long, the reunion was that of a mother and a son: "We were at once in full understanding and I had the strong impression of being still a small boy seeking safety in his mother's lap."²⁶

Introducing Champaklal the next day to André, the Mother said that, having come very young, he learnt many things from her and was attending with "devotion and joy" to "everything with regard to Sri Aurobindo",²⁷ As for the Ashram, what struck André was "the perfect harmony of the whole"; all details fitted together, and all work was done "with an evident pleasure and not as a necessary duty"; and such harmony in the right functioning and perfect dovetailing of the details would be impossible "without the Mother's presence in all of them". André had Darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on 24 November, and he felt that no words could describe "the overwhelming impression of benevolence, knowledge and strength" which radiated from the Master and the Mother:

It is not at all surprising that so many people undertake long journeys in order to have the privilege of paying their tribute of devotion. What they get in return is a glimpse of a higher and truer life which responds to the most innate aspiration of human nature.²⁸

VIII

For the Mother herself, the meeting with her son André was but a brief encounter, although he had been and would ever be - as anyone she had seen even once would be - in her deeper consciousness. A load of work was awaiting her always, and there was no respite for her.

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The economy of the Ashram was a ticklish thing, and needed constant attention. On 15 December 1949, she is reported to have informed Sri Aurobindo that the bonus alone to be paid to the Ashram workers came to Rs 20,000, which meant there would be no balance left; perhaps she should sell some of her jewellery!²⁹ And the ceaseless pressure on her time, and the endless calls on her love: for example, somebody would come at midnight to read Prayers and Meditations with her, another for lessons in arithmetic, a third for a smile and a flower, and so "the wheel went round and round with hardly a stop".³⁰ And how variegated the meetings, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Once a boy came for Darshan, and after seeing the Mother felt that there was another Mother within the visible Mother. Hadn't he seen far more than what most - including many seasoned sadhaks - manage to see? On the other hand, sometimes a self-important person would seek an interview, and tell her pompously: "Oh! I have worked a lot in my life, now I want to rest, will you give me a place in the Ashram?" And the Mother would smilingly say: "Not here... this is a place for working even harder than before."³¹ And as if to set an example, the Mother never spared herself, but used her day's twenty-four hours to the best purpose.

At midnight on 31 December 1949, in the round-the-clock rhythm of her matchless ministry, the Mother played the organ and sent out streams of music to flood the Ashram and the world with joy and hope incommensurable. Later, she distributed the message for 1950:

Don't speak. Act.

Don't announce. Realise.

There was a terrific sense of urgency in this rather unconventional message that was really an exhortation teaming with an admonition. Perhaps she knew it would be a year of difficulty and uncertainty, and it asked for foresight, resoluteness and unflinching action. The Mother also contributed a piece "Foresight" to the 21 February issue of Bulletin:

By yogic discipline one can not only foresee destiny but modify it and change it almost totally. ...

...be always at the summit of your consciousness and the best will always happen to you.... If this ideal condition turns out to be unrealisable, the individual can at least, when he is confronted by a danger or a critical situation, call upon his highest destiny by aspiration, prayer and trustful surrender to the divine will.³²

The Mother's was no coward median goal, she was for the summit itself:

We are not aiming at success - our aim is perfection.

We are not seeking fame or reputation; we want to prepare ourselves for a Divine manifestation.³³

Again, in the August issue of the Bulletin, the Mother pleaded for "an

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integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities", and to this end there was the need for the true consciousness which "is at the centre, at the heart of reality and has the direct vision of the origin of all movements". The same issue of the Bulletin carried her note "What a child should always remember" and "An Ideal Child". In the Mother's view an ' 'Ideal Child'' is always good-tempered; in games, he never gives way; he is patient and honest, enduring and persevering, courageous and cheerful, modest and fair and obedient. An ideal child, in short, is a SPORTSMAN.

With children young or old (for some "mentally remain children always"), a story or tale well-told, even if it were an oft-told tale has a more lasting effect than a heap of theoretical expositions. With the Mother action always followed thought, and so she published a book containing a bunch of tales and parables for the use of the Ashram children, and children everywhere and of all ages. This book called Tales of All Times was not actually her own writing but a selection and adaptation from F.G. Gould's Youth's Noble Path which she had done during her stay in Japan over thirty years back.

IX

Tales of All Times, first appeared in French as Belles Histoires in 1946, and in English in 1951.³⁴ In a brief prefatory note written in February 1950, the Mother said that the stories were intended to help children "discover themselves and follow a path of right and beauty". The stories are garnered from the whole world, the accumulated memories of the human race. Fable, fiction, history, myth, legend - India, Japan, Arabia, Persia, Jerusalem, Italy, Guyana - Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian all agreeably mingle in this humanistic pot pourri; and the result is an utterly wholesome meal for children, young and old alike.

The Mother's concern is obvious enough: How are the children of the Ashram School (and children generally) to be helped to hold in check (and to throw out altogether) their wrong impulses and perverse propensities, and also, how are they to be coaxed into bringing to the fore and maximising the good in themselves? By means of this double action, curative and creative, children should be enabled to "follow the path of right and beauty''; and the truthful - the path of rectitude - is also the path beautiful, and must lead on to the total good and happiness of one and all. But how is the experience and distilled wisdom of the race to be mobilised on the issue of the collective well-being of the future? How are children to be taught to fight ignorance, tamas and ugliness? This was the large aim of this little book, and the Mother's telling of the tales, born of her intense

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love for her children, is simple and direct, earnest and persuasive.

The cardinal exhortation is Know thyself, for if you can know yourself, you are unlikely to go wrong in your inner or outer movements, and your life cannot turn awry, sour or ugly. The tales are grouped with an easy naturalness and effectiveness under eleven heads, each extolling or exemplifying a distinct moral quality; and these eleven together make a symphony of virtue, a hymn of human excellence.

We had seen in an earlier chapter how, in one of the pieces in Words of Long Ago, the Mother had offered a parable, "The Virtues". To the Hall of Intelligence in the Palace of Truth come one after another the several Virtues - Sincerity, her faithful guards Humility and Courage, the veiled woman Prudence, the quiescent Charity, and her escort made up of Kindness, Patience, Gentleness, Deference "and others". And Gratitude too, the last to appear, uninvited and unrecognised! Tales of All Times may be read, partly as an illustration, partly as an extension, of the earlier essay. Some of the Virtues recur: Sincerity, Courage, Prudence, Patience; among others. Charity and Gratitude are missing; and there appear these homelier but necessary Virtues also - Self-control, Cheerfulness, Self-reliance, Perseverance, The Simple Life, Right Judgment, Order, Building and Destroying.* Inner and outer life are both covered, and the aim is individual felicity coupled with social harmony and well-being.

X

First, self-control - the key one might say, to the inner countries of self-knowledge, self-respect, self-reliance. Self-control is not so much a negative virtue, in other words keeping an evil force under check, but a meeting and mastering, a transformation of a destructive into a creative force. Unlike the ferocity of the tiger, the wildness of the horse is amenable to control and proper direction by means of the little metallic bit of the bridle. Likewise the random impulses and untamed passions of man can also be tamed and transformed into engines of constructive effort. A verse from the Koran alchemises Hussain's sudden anger into generosity of understanding. Like Stavrogin in Dostoevsky's novel, the insulted boy restrains himself with a marvellous exercise of self-control, and wins the greater reward of his antagonist's gratitude and friendship. But self-control needn't mean brazen self-abasement either. And so the Mother concludes with the Buddha's advice to the complacent Brahmacharin that the man of wisdom should be unaffected by flattery and blame alike, but base his conduct on the Right Law and live in Peace.³⁵

*Several hitherto unpublished stories have been added as an Appendix to "Tales of All Times" in the Collected Works of the Mother, vol.2, 1985.

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Self-control, certainly, but the self-control of the brave, not the weakness of the coward. And courage has its gradations, altitudes, intensities. There is the almost universal or rudimentary courage of self-interest, there is the courage of gallantry in rushing to another's help, and there is the moral courage of standing up to arbitrary power, as Vibhishana reprimands Ravana for the evil done to Sita. There are times that ask for cool orderly courage, as when a ship is about to sink, but at other times what is needed may very well be intrepid or reckless courage, or even a stoic courage expressed in tuneful numbers like the ailing Abu Sayed's noble exhortation:

Despair not in your grief, for a joyous hour will come and take it all away;...

Therefore be patient when troubles come, for Time is the father of wonders;

And from the peace of God hope for many blessings to come.³⁶

Still greater, however, is the courage to hew new pathways of human conduct, as a Moses, a Siddhartha, a Jesus, or a Muhammad did.

Cheerfulness of course is a child's native virtue, for children wear a daily beauty and buoyancy in their lives. But cheerfulness equally becomes the elderly, and especially in times of defeat or difficulty. The Mother recalls the story of the Amir of Khorasan who found sweet uses in his hours of adversity and could smile still - and even laugh at himself. Indeed, cheerfulness costs nothing, but is of immeasurable value in the commerce of the world:

...liveliness, serenity, good humour are never out of place.... With them the mother makes the home happy for her children; the nurse hastens the recovery of her patient; the master lightens the task of his servants; the workman inspires the goodwill of his comrades; the traveler helps his companions on their hard journey; the citizen fosters hope in the hearts of his countrymen.³⁷

As with courage, there is a whole hierarchy of ascending intensities with self-reliance as well. Earning one's own living with the sweat of one's brow is commendable, but beyonding one's immediate need and rushing to another's help in a time of need is even better. Gushtasp of Persia, for example, spurns the privileges of his princely birth, fights his way in life, and succeeds his father as King. And it is during his reign that Prophet Zoroaster proclaims his new faith. The virtue of self-reliance should exceed private need and embrace the environment, the community, the race. The feats of magic and miraculism are but trifles that distract our attention, but the real miracles are those encompassed by man's own endeavour:

Personal effort brings about still greater marvels: it covers the soil with rich

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harvests, tames wild beasts, tunnels through mountains, erects dykes and bridges, builds cities, launches ships on the ocean and flying machines in the air; in short it gives more well-being and security to all.³⁸

'Two men I honour, and no third," said Carlyle: the man whose physical labour yields the needed goods and services, and the man whose intellectual and spiritual labour yields value beyond measure for human progress. And self-reliance is the start and main sustenance of either success-story.

Patience and Perseverance come next. Kafka said that the deadly sins were but two, impatience and intemperance; nay, there was only one primary sin, impatience, for Eve herself fell because of her impatience. And the antidote to impatience is patience. As for perseverance, it is "an active patience, a patience that marches on". Columbus the explorer, Palissy the potter - they couldn't have "arrived" where they did without the double virtue of patience and perseverance. In illustration, the Mother tells the life of Pratap Chandra Rai whose untiring efforts were to result in the publication of the first English translation of the Mahabharata; and there was likewise M. V. Ramanujachari who brought out the Tamil Mahabharata. To undertake some great and worthwhile task is verily to compel the answering response of Grace to see the task through to a successful end. "In this wide world," says the Mother, "there is no lack of noble work to be accomplished, nor is there any lack of good people to undertake it." But without perseverance there can be no safe arrival at the desired goal.

Prudence and Right Judgment are important ancillary virtues. Courage without prudence or self-reliance without right judgment can easily precipitate disaster. Didn't King Dasaratha, relying too much on his śabdabhedi or his unerring skill for shooting by the sound, once kill an innocent hermit's son fetching water from a brook for his thirsting aged and blind parents? The curse provoked by the event was to unroll itself in the fullness of time as the tragedy of Rama's banishment on the day fixed for his coronation, the abduction of Sita, and all the tribulations that followed. As in the Japanese picture of the three monkeys, it is no more than prudence to look for no evil, nor to listen to it, nor yet to speak it. But right judgment is equally necessary, and one must learn to take the right measure of things in the total context of time, place and circumstance. All that glitters is not gold, and the lion's skin worn by the donkey doesn't transform it into the King of the Jungle. On the other hand, one must equally refrain from condemning the young swan as the ugly duckling! There is a soul of good in things apparently evil, and there is a hidden divinity that shapes our ends. Even a criminal has a soul that may be suddenly awakened, and always it is a question of faith and trust invoking the right answering response.

The Mother gave at all times a high place to sincerity, which is indeed the presiding Virtue in the Hall of Intelligence. Her robe is transparent

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"like clear water", and the crystal in her hand reflects things and phenomena without the slightest distortion. To be able to see the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - to develop the uncanniness to differentiate between truth and hearsay, truth and superstition, wishful thinking - and to summon the requisite courage, straightforwardness and utter sincerity to reveal, when necessary, the whole body of the living truth: this is to be brave, upright and wise. Mere cleverness, sophistry, hypocrisy, diplomacy and glittering 'word-fact' traffic with varieties of falsehood or adulteration of truth, and they must all prove self-defeating in the long run. It is said that King Solomon had devisee a throne that was an unfailing lie-detector, instantly exposing the liar. But honesty shouldn't need the sophistications of Solomon's Throne for ensuring the reign of Truth, for it is a spiritual, not a mechanical, Power that ordains the provenance and pre-eminence of Truth. One is often afraid of speaking the truth because one fails to remember that always, always irrespective of anybody else who may also be present, one is ever in the presence of the Divine. Where that ultimate sovereignty is present, all other persons and potentates must lose their power, and falsehood and hypocrisy lose their occupation. At the behest of Ravana the Rakshasa Lord of Falsehood, a thousand phantom Ramas and Lakshmanas appear on the battlefield to confuse the Vanara hosts led by Hanuman, but the real Rama's mighty arrow attacks the phantoms and dissolves them into air. Even so, says the Mother, "Every straight word from a sincere man is like an arrow that can destroy much falsehood and hypocrisy."³⁹

The soul of sincerity is to be wholly truthful in thought, word and deed - and keep away from self-deceit, falsehood and hypocrisy. Generosity itself has a qualitative, not a quantitative, measure; the mythic squirrel's pebble for the building of the causeway to Lanka was more beloved of Rama than huge hillocks brought by the mightiest veterans. Krishna preferred the homely but sincere hospitality of Vidura to the lavish insincerities of Duryodhana. Since sincerity and utter truthfulness are a basic virtue and a rare blessing, it would be wise to cultivate them - or prayerfully invoke them - even as a child, and they must be a life-long adherence and a consecration as well.

XI

The remaining strings of stories centre round the concepts of Order, Building and Destroying and the Simple Life. Ours is a world of ceaseless flux and change, of destruction and fresh creation, yet also of orderliness, of rhythm, and of significant forms. Order is heaven's eldest law, which Wordsworth called Duty the "stern daughter of the Voice of God":

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Flowers laugh before thee on their beds

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.

There is the rhythm of Becoming, and there is the poise of Being. There are the organic filaments of decay and death that phoenix-like spring up as new creation. The cycle of the seasons, the rhythm of dawn, noon, night and dawn again, of birth, growth, death and birth again, the wide-ranging notes in the musical scale, the singular vicissitudes of the terrestrial play of Becoming, all are enacted in the invisible theatre of immaculate Being. Beneath the disorder and the cacophony, there is the triumph of order and the music of Existence. Life, life, life! - which is part of the rhythm of the phenomenal world - matches and masters the counterpointed hiss of Death, death, death! The Mother tells the legendary story of the new-born babe, Tiruvalluvar, who is abandoned by his parents in a grove, but he thrives all the same, being amply nourished by honey-drops from the Ilupay flowers above. It was this same Tiruvalluvar who later composed the Kural, a Tamil classic, and also rid hapless Kaveripakkam of a demon who was the scourge of the countryside. Like Tiruvalluvar, it is man's privilege and the burden of his destiny to be destroyer and preserver both, the destroyer of the agents of evil and the upholder of the imperatives of Dharma.

It is significant that the Mother should have devoted a whole chapter in praise of the Simple Life. She notes that "in all countries many people are beginning to understand that a simple life is more desirable than a life of extravagance, vanity and show," and ardently pleads for a higher quality - rather than a higher standard - of life. The prophet Muhammad, St. Francis, St. Banarasi Das who made a strong impression on Akbar, the poet Virgil, were living examples of simplicity and austerity. The advance of science and technology has in practice meant the galloping pace of consumerism, the proliferation of the expensive inessentials and the subjugation of mind and soul to the blandishments of the paradise of the electronic gods. Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi were also among the prophets of the simple life, and asked for the elimination of all surplusage. But although wealth by itself is no evil, for wealth too comes from the Divine and could be made a servant of the Divine, there is much indeed to be said in favour of the simple life. After all, the luxury of one too often involves the misery of another or of many, and hence the ideal of poor communities and countries could only be plain living and honest thinking for all, rather than criminal self-indulgence and conspicuous spending and waste by a few made possible by marginal existence and terrible misery for the vast majority. And of course gluttony and intoxicants are body-wasters

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and soul-killers, for whereas the fabled demons of old caused hurt only to the body, excessive self-indulgence can lead to the mind's enfeeblement and the crash of character.

These tales of all times are thus truly a kaleidoscopic feast of reason and flow of instruction. The stories glide into one another, explication fuses with exhortation, the several virtues balance and reinforce, the filiations between the worlds within and without are firmly forged, and as the lessons draw to a close, the reader or listener knows that the course is rounding itself purposefully. As if to underline the essential instruction, the Mother concludes the book with a rapid unconventional summary. There are things to wrestle with in life, things to bring under control, and things to promote and sustain. For the children of every land, and for good men and women, there is a whole budget of programmes of rehabilitation and reconstruction. To tame floods and forests, to drain marshlands and reclaim wastelands, to build roads, bridges and ships, to fight hunger, squalor and disease, to give ceaseless fight to evil in its numberless forms: all this is but part of the epic struggle ahead. Equally it should be part of the practical religion of man to cherish and promote life and art in their divers forms:

And what are the things that man should cherish and defend? All those that give him life and make him better, stronger and more joyful.

So, let him watch over every child that comes into the world, for its life is precious.

Let him protect the friendly trees and grow plants and flowers for his food and delight....

Let him build dwellings that are strong, clean and spacious.

Let him preserve with care the holy temples, statues, pictures, vases, embroidery as well as beautiful songs and poems, and all that increases his happiness with its beauty.

But above all, children of India and other lands, let men cherish the heart that loves, the mind that thinks honest thoughts and the hand that accomplishes loyal deeds.⁴⁰

This brief peroration is of a piece with the general tone of the little collection of tales packed with divination and charged with urgency. The words of the Mother articulate the call to awaken the slumbering soul within, and to "follow a path of right and beauty". All life is a journey and a struggle, an itinerary of ups and downs, a prospective of perils and possibilities; and the struggle and mastery within have to precede the outer Kurukshetra with its trying vicissitudes. But this only means that all life should be viewed as the theatre of Yoga, the occasion for right aspiration, integral and intense effort, and splendorous realisation.

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CHAPTER 35

Mysterious Sacrifice

I

During 1949, Sri Aurobindo had busied himself, along with other activities, with the revision of his book. The Ideal of Human Unity, and dictated a postscript chapter bringing the discussion to the post-1945 era of Big Power rivalry and the cold war. This addition appeared as "The Ideal of Human Unity" in The Advent of February 1950. The War had no doubt ended in total victory for the Allies, but the new 'cold war' attitudes persisted and cast ominous shadows ahead:

The actual danger presents itself rather as a clash between two opposing ideologies, one led by Russia and Red China and trying to impose the Communistic extreme... and on the other side a combination of peoples, partly capitalist, partly moderate socialist who still cling with some attachment to the idea of liberty.... In Asia a more perilous situation has arisen, standing sharply across the way to any possibility of a continental unity of the peoples of this part of the world, in the emergence of Communist China. This creates a gigantic bloc which could easily englobe the whole of Northern Asia in a combination between two enormous Communist Powers, Russia and China, and would overshadow with a threat of absorption South-Western Asia and Tibet and might be pushed to overrun all up to the whole frontier of India, menacing her security and that of Western Asia with the possibility of an invasion and an overrunning and subjection by penetration or even by overwhelming military force to an unwanted ideology, political and social institutions and dominance of this militant mass of Communism whose push might easily prove irresistible.¹

Almost all the developing trends of the last thirty years are forecast in this seminal passage: the West-East confrontation, the cold war with its global ramifications, the rise of Red China and the massive peril to the rest of Asia, the danger to India in particular via Tibet and the whole Himalayan frontier, the danger to the democratic way of life and the basic human freedoms. At a time when India was officially applauding Red China and fraternising with her it is astonishing that Sri Aurobindo - although living in seclusion and denied all access to the sources of relevant information except the newspaper and radio reports - should have nevertheless so accurately inferred the probable configuration of things to come.

Again, when Sri Aurobindo was asked to send a message on the occasion of his birth anniversary celebrations in New York on 15 August 1949, he pleaded for a transcendence of the East-West differentiation:

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There is a common hope, a common destiny, both spiritual and material, for which both [East and West] are needed as co-workers. It is no longer towards division and difference that we should turn our minds, but on unity, union, even oneness necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere.²

There is no doubt an increasing divergence between the tendencies of the East and the West, the former laying more emphasis on the truth of the Spirit, the latter on the world of phenomena. This divergence should be healed, and both the East and the West march together towards the new horizons of a spiritual evolution of human and earth nature so that a "divine life" on the earth may emerge ultimately out of the present. The Mother, in a succinct message, exhorted men and women all over the world to stop thinking that some were of the West and some of the East; all were essentially children of the Divine, and were meant to manifest the unity of this origin upon the earth.³

Again, when on 25 June 1950, communist North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, K.D. Sethna the editor of Mother India (then coming out as a fortnightly from Bombay), asked for Sri Aurobindo's guidelines for his editorial comment on the subject. Sri Aurobindo replied on 28 June in categorical terms:

There is nothing to hesitate about there, the whole affair is as plain as a pike-staff. It is the first move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these Northern parts and then of South East Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with regard to the rest of the continent - in passing, Tibet as a gate opening to India. If they succeed, there is no reason why domination of the whole world should not follow by steps....⁴

Sri Aurobindo expected President Truman to intervene effectively and save the situation, and indeed that is what he did, and North Korean forces were driven to vacate the aggression. When, years later, President Kennedy was shown by Sudhir Ghose a typed copy of Sri Aurobindo's letter of 28 June 1950 (widely publicised in India in August 1950), the President is reported to have remarked:

Surely, there is a typing mistake here. The date must have been 1960, not 1950! You mean to say that a man devoted to meditation and contemplation, sitting in one comer of India, said this about the intentions of China as early as 1950?

Sudhir Ghose had to tell Kennedy that the date was correct, and it was merely an instance of infallible yogic vision. Just as Sri Aurobindo had

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given a firm advice in 1942 that India should accept Cripps' offer, so again, in 1950, he was merely telling the truth about the future as he saw it in its unfolding possibilities.

II

Don't speak. Act.

Don't announce. Realise.

This was the Mother's exhortation in her New Year message for 1950, and the stress was thus on quiet action, on firm realisation. She had to be available for darshan, meditation, pranam, consultation and interviews; she had to be in the Playground in the evenings; she had to keep the complicated wheels of the Ashram machinery moving without the slightest hitch. Early in 1950, the Mother once told Sri Aurobindo with a touch of exasperation that there was only one place left where she could spend time alone: and "that was the bathroom".⁵ From 15 March, the Mother did not stand while seeing people, as she used to before, but sat in a chair. The demands on her attention were so many that she needed to have eyes on her back as she informed Champaklal on 11 May. On 7 June, after seeing several people at different times in the early morning, she told him:

You cannot imagine even, how sick I become, it is suffocating. People are so much deep in tamas, unconscious; they do not know.

Even so, a fortnight later, she had to stand for over two hours for Pranam by people who came upstairs, and when she returned to Sri Aurobindo she said just one word, but with full expression: KILLING,⁶ and he felt deeply concerned. If such were the Mother's trials of endurance and exasperation in the course of her manifold ministry, the predicament for Sri Aurobindo was grimmer still, and this too necessarily affected the Mother.

In April 1950, for the first time in about thirty years, the Mother permitted fresh photos of Sri Aurobindo to be taken. The French artist, Henri Cartier-Bresson, not only photographed Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at Darshan time on 24 April, but took also numerous other photographs of the Master, the Mother and the Ashram. Was there, after all, a purpose in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother relaxing the earlier rule prohibiting new photographs of themselves?

While outwardly the life of the Ashram was apparently going on as usual, if anything only with an accession of enthusiasm and dedication and a widening spread of interests, behind the scenes there was being enacted from mid-1950 onwards a mysterious struggle on the issue of victory or defeat - at least of a postponement of victory - for the cause represented by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. People who met Sri Aurobindo daily and were in constant attendance like Champaklal and Nirodbaran could

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see that he was becoming more and more withdrawn, as if pondering issues of cosmic amplitude and importance. The daily talks with Sri Aurobindo covering all the triple worlds were a thing of the past. There was now an impressive reign of taciturnity, excepting when he was dictating verse or prose. The sounding cataracts of humour, wit, repartee - where had they gone? "However much we tried to draw him out from his impregnable sanctum of silence," says Nirod, "we were answered by a monosyllabic 'Yes' or 'No' or at most a faint smile."⁷

True enough, Sri Aurobindo had developed an ailment of late - prostatic enlargement - with its inevitable consequences. But once its presence had been detected, it was soon brought under reasonable control, though more through yogic force and will power than through any sustained medical treatment. At the same time, although conversation was reduced to the absolute minimum, when it came to Savitri, Sri Aurobindo still deployed for brief spells the whole vigour and splendour of his inspiration. Nor had correspondence ceased altogether. Besides, as we saw, the Korean crisis brought out his sharp reaction and powers of divination. Nevertheless, during the last months of 1950, an awesome reticence was the law of his life, for, as he told Dr. Satyendra once, it was a serious time.⁸

It was on 9 July 1950 that K.M. Munshi, once Sri Aurobindo's pupil at Baroda and now a Cabinet Minister at the Centre, had private darshan of the Master. After the passage of forty years, a very different Sri Aurobindo confronted his former pupil and sprayed on him his immaculate peace:

I saw before me a being completely transformed, radiant, blissful, enveloped in an atmosphere of godlike calm. He spoke in a low, clear voice which stirred the depths of my being.⁹

But a month later, at the time of the 15 August Darshan, one of the sadhaks, more open than many,

saw Sri Aurobindo drawing into himself dark fumes that were rising from the subconscious parts of the people as they were coming to him for "darshan" in a procession. He was gathering up the lower elements of earth-nature within this area of representative humanity and then drawing them into himself.¹⁰

What was the meaning of that vision? Was the battle raging even when the Darshan was in progress? Was Sri Aurobindo enacting the drama of his sonnet:

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo. ...

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.¹¹

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III

After the Darshan on 15 August, as the days crawled on, there was a gradual worsening of the condition of Sri Aurobindo's health, and he too - and the Mother as well - seemed to accept this development with an inexplicable resignation. The only silver lining was Sri Aurobindo's continued interest in Savitri, especially the two cantos of Book VI, "The Book of Fate", and in the revision of The Future Poetry then in the press. One day in October, Sri Aurobindo seemed to take up Savitri in rather real earnest with the intention of finishing it "soon". While he dictated the fines, Nirod took them down:

We took up the same two Cantos that had proved so intractable. The work progressed slowly; words, ideas, images seemed to be repeated; the verses themselves appeared to flow with reluctance.¹²

The two cantos were finished at last, and Sri Aurobindo spoke with a calm sense of satisfaction, "Ah, it is finished?" He asked next, "What is left now?" On being told that two other books ("The Book of Death" and "Epilogue") remained unrevised, Sri Aurobindo said with a casual air almost, "Oh, that? We shall see about it later on." But there was to be no "later on", for by 10 November 1950, Sri Aurobindo had more or less folded up his literary work.

Barely a week passed, and from 17 November there was a further worsening of Sri Aurobindo's condition. Medical experts were called in, but the disease couldn't be brought under control. Darshan day (24 November) came, but the Event had to be hurried through. Nevertheless, for the thousands of devotees who filed past, "The Mother and Sri Aurobindo were love and compassion incarnate; light, joy, peace, sweetness and strength emanated .from them as from the sun and moon."¹³

The days following were a period of suppressed anxiety to the people around Sri Aurobindo. The wide circle of sadhaks, school-children and visitors could also scent that something was amiss, but the general rhythm of Ashram life seemed to go on undisturbed. On the other hand, Dr. Sanyal was summoned from Calcutta, and when he arrived on 30 November, he found Sri Aurobindo "seemingly unconcerned, with eyes closed, like a statue of massive peace". Whatever the physical suffering, Sri Aurobindo was "above it". But, then, the Mother could see with the clarity of her occult vision something quite different at about this time. "Each time I enter his room", she confided, "I see him pulling down the Supramental Light."¹⁴/font

The School anniversary celebrations on the first and second December kept the Mother busy, but deep within her, there was infinite concern. On 3 December, she did not attend the Playground and a pall descended on the Ashram. In the evening, in Sri Aurobindo's room she declared, "He is

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losing interest in himself.... It all depends on him."* But the next day, as Nirodbaran notes, "he emerged from the depth", and got up and sat in his chair. Then he was asked entreatingly by Champaklal whether he was not using his spiritual force to cure himself, he said "No!" When the question was repeated he gave the same answer. "Why not?" they persisted, "How is the disease going to be cured otherwise?" But his reply was brief: "Can't explain; you won't understand." The minutes wore on, and at midnight when the Mother came to Sri Aurobindo's room, "the two looked at each other in a steady gaze.... Sri Aurobindo's look seemed to bear a touch of unusual softness." The Mother retired for a while, came back at 1 a.m., and retired again saying, "Call me when the time comes." It was already 5 December.

Sri Aurobindo was now in an apparent trance of deep peace. Then, suddenly from that indrawn state, "about ten minutes before the grand end" he asked Nirod for a drink and sipped a little. The end came at 1.26 a.m., "in the presence of the Mother who stood near his feet with an intense penetrating gaze, an incarnation of divine strength, poise and calm".¹⁵ When she was asked many years later, on 20 December 1972, about that fateful hour of Sri Aurobindo's passing, she answered thus:

He had gathered in his body a great amount of supramental force and as soon as he left.. .all this supramental force which was in him passed from his body into mine. And I felt the friction of the passage.... It was an extraordinary experience. For a long time, a long time like that (Mother indicates the passing of the Force into her body). I was standing beside his bed, that continued.

Almost a sensation - it was a material sensation.¹⁶

IV

The Mother could feel this transference with the clarity of a material experience, and when it was over, she withdrew from the room.

Those now left behind sat near Sri Aurobindo's body sunk in silent grief, till Sanyal reminded Nirod and the rest that the body should be prepared for public view. It was soon covered in spotless white silk and placed on a cot, which was also covered in pure silk, in the room Sri Aurobindo had occupied for over twenty-five years. A picture of the Buddha copied from the Ajanta fresco adorned the eastern wall, and the

*In November 1953, the Mother told Nirod, "I did not believe till the last moment that Sri Aurobindo was going to leave his body." On the same day, she had told Sethna that Sri Aurobindo would soon read Sethna's drafts for his editorials in Mother India and had let him leave for Bombay that night, because Sri Aurobindo's "departure had not been decided yet". (Contacts: 57-58).

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whole room was strewn with flowers. Presently the Mother entrusted to Udar Pinto the arrangements relating to the body's final resting-place beside the protective "Service" tree in the Ashram compound. Udar remembers her instructions clearly: "I want to keep him in the centre of the Ashram. There are those three tanks in the courtyard. Keep the western tank as it is; the other two you can join into one. Go deep down, go down ten feet. Put Sri Aurobindo's casket at the bottom."¹⁷ Preparations accordingly started in the morning with the sadhaks themselves doing the whole work.

Before dawn, Sri Aurobindo's body had been laid in state, and first the sadhaks had their last Darshan of their beloved Master between five and six, and afterwards the local people and others who had come from outside filed past silently in an unending stream and paid their profound respects with tear-filled eyes to the almost mythical Person, the man-God who had made Pondicherry his home and Cave of Tapasya and Power-House of the New Consciousness.

The news of Sri Aurobindo's passing had been broadcast early in the morning by the All India Radio, and a stunned world tried its best to come to terms with the "greatest tragedy to humanity at this critical juncture in its history", as S. Duraiswami Aiyar described the event. How were the tens of thousands of Sri Aurobindo's disciples all over the world to understand his inexplicable withdrawal from his body - that marvellous body of the Golden Purusha? "I also saw," writes Nirod, "to my utter wonder and delight, that the entire body was suffused with a golden crimson hue, so fresh, so magnificent".¹⁸ Had Sri Aurobindo made a deliberate assignation with Death to be able to penetrate to its ultimate centre of Inconscience, so that the imprisoned splendour of Superconscient Light could be released once and for all? Sri Aurobindo had already made Rishi Narad say in Book VI, canto 2, of Savitri:

He who has found his identity with God

Pays with the body's death his soul's vast light. ...

Hard is the world-redeemer's heavy task; ...

He must pass to the other shore of falsehood's sea,

He must enter the world's dark to bring there light.

The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes,

He must learn its cosmic dark Necessity,

Its right and its dire roots in Nature's soil. ...

He must enter the eternity of Night

And know God's darkness as he knows his Sun.

For this he must go down into the pit,

For this he must invade the dolorous Vasts.

Imperishable and wise and infinite,

He still must travel Hell the world to save.

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Into the eternal Light he shall emerge

On borders of the meeting of all worlds; ...

Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain.

Earth shall be made a home of Heaven's light, ...

This mortal life shall house Eternity's bliss,

The body's self taste immortality.

Then shall the world-redeemer's task be done.¹⁹

Was it an anticipation? Was it a resolved feat of adamantine predestination? Was this Winter's withdrawal of life to be followed in course of time by the promised efflorescence of a new burst of Spring or the decreed Supramental Life?

Although the Mother may have intended at first that Sri Aurobindo's body should be interred on the 5th evening, she found it "charged with such a concentration of supramental light" that the process of decomposition seemed to have been miraculously annulled, and it was therefore decided to keep the body lying in state as long as it retained its lustre and remained intact. The golden crimson hue that Nirod noticed raised his spirits and he felt an inexplicable joy. The Mother pointing to it remarked, "If this Supramental Light remains we shall keep the body in a glass case."²⁰ A glass case was actually ordered through Udar.

By evening on the 5th, over 60,000 had queued past the sublime Master their eyes dimmed and their visible grief merging in the spontaneous and solemn silence. Many felt that Sri Aurobindo was still alive, only sleeping with a deep aura of peace; many thought that the body had grown a new tejas that they had missed at the previous Darshan on 24 November; and many, carrying their flawed personalities and the humid inner climate of their souls, felt for the nonce cleansed and purified by the still radiant Presence of the Master.

V

For three more days - 6th, 7th, and 8th - Sri Aurobindo's body retained its challenging freshness and glow, and this without any attempt to interfere with the ordinary processes of Nature through artificial chemical means. Twice or thrice a day in her snowlike robe and with a scarf covering her head, the Mother visited Sri Aurobindo's room, sometimes accompanied by Nolini, Amrita, Pavitra and others, and silently communed with Sri Aurobindo. "Her face calm and grave, yet softened with a maternal sweetness, she looked", says Nirodbaran, "like Maheshwari of transcendent glory."²¹

The processionary homage went on hour after hour, day after day. Everybody could see the freshness and the glow on Sri Aurobindo's face,

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but when Dr. Sanyal asked the question where was the "Supramental Light" the Mother had spoken of, the Mother placed her hand on his head, and now he could see too: "There He was - with a luminous mantle of bluish golden hue around him." Rushing to Pondicherry from Bombay, K.D. Sethna found the recumbent body "spiritually imperial", and "the atmosphere of the room was vibrant with a sacred power to cleanse and illumine". An unending mass of humanity streamed past and had their last (or perhaps, their only) darshan of Sri Aurobindo on the 6th; and on the 7th, the Mother articulated this prayer out of the compulsion of her divine predicament, a prayer to the Lord that was also a benediction to the bereaved:

Lord, this morning Thou hast given me the assurance that Thou wouldst stay with us until Thy work is achieved, not only as a consciousness which guides and illumines but also as a dynamic Presence in action. In unmistakable terms Thou hast promised that all of Thyself would remain here and not leave the earth atmosphere until earth is transformed. Grant that we may be worthy of this marvellous Presence and that henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfilment of Thy sublime Work.²²

At 8 a.m. on the 7th, fifty-four hours after Sri Aurobindo left it, the body was still radiant and intact, and was so certified by the Chief Medical Officer of French India. People who had come from far away were permitted to have darshan on the 7th and 8th, and the vigil and the filing past continued in all the solemnity of sadness and adoration and love abounding.

What was the mystery of that sustained lustre and freshness, defying the known laws of science and the weight of human experience? Was it to be the prelude to a tremendous revival and resurrection? But on the 8th Sri Aurobindo firmly told the Mother at the occult level that he had left his body purposely, and would not take it back; he would, however, manifest again in "the first supramental body built in the supramental way".²³ But early in the afternoon of the 9th, after over one hundred hours of supramental sustenance, the body showed, "here and there"²⁴ , the first signs of discoloration, and the Mother decided to inter the body in the evening.

Designed by Udar, the casket was manufactured in the Ashram Harpagon Workshop by expert carpenters supervised by Panu Sarkar, Udar's able assistant. It had large brass rings to hold the ropes with which it would be lowered into the deep vault, and on the lid was fixed Sri Aurobindo's symbol cast in pure gold. The inside was lined with silver sheets and Swedish satin between which was kept a layer of felt. The casket was so heavy that it took ten people to lift it even when it was empty. It was now carried up to Sri Aurobindo's room. The Indian Consul-General in

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French India, Mr. Tandon, an ardent devotee who had kept himself at the Mother's beck and call throughout in order to help cross every bureaucratic hurdle, too was present. The Mother herself and Sri Aurobindo's personal attendants placed the body over a couple of large velvet cushions inside the casket and it was covered with a chadder specially embroidered in gold thread; and Champaklal, it is reported, covered Sri Aurobindo's face with a white cloth chosen by the Mother. Then Udar used a rubber seal between the lid and the box in order to make it airtight and he, Pavitra and Purani screwed the lid down.²⁵ Then Nolini, followed by the others in the room, offered pranam to the Mother, signifying their complete surrender to her, since she and Sri Aurobindo had a single divine consciousness, the Mother's presence really included all of Sri Aurobindo's as well. Several among the close attendants broke down and the Mother had to admonish and console them as only the Divine could.

At 5 p.m., the Mother having decided on who was to carry it for which part of the way, the casket was carried downstairs to the courtyard, and lowered to the bottom of the water-proof vault. Udar, who had climbed down into it, arranged it so the head was towards the east. A concrete slab was cast on the spot and with it the bottom tier was sealed. A second tier, as ordered by the Mother, was then made and similarly sealed after filling it with clean river-sand. Over it, first Champaklal, then Moni, Nolini and the others placed potfuls of earth. There was nothing credal or sectarian about the ceremony; not a whisper could be heard - there were no audible hymns or prayers - and there were no rites indicative of adhesion to any particular religion. The enveloping silence, however, partook of the mystical sublime, and the deathless scene the sun setting, the "Service" tree with wide-ranging interwoven multiple branches seeming to cover the courtyard with protective peace and benign compassion was ineluctably symbolic of the epic ending of a great life and glorious ministry, an end that was also a mighty new beginning:

His death is a beginning of greater life, ...²⁶

It was significant that Sri Aurobindo's body should have been interred at the centre of the Ashram complex, and beside the "Service" tree. Was it all part of "God's secret plan" that the Mother had asked Dyuman and Manubhai, the Ashram gardener, to bring a sapling of Peltaphorum pterocarpum (Copper Pod) from the French colonial garden to replace the mango tree that had died sometime back? Was it again part of that divine foresight that she had named the flower of this tree "Service"? On Tuesday, 4 January 1930 the sapling was placed in a six foot deep pit that Dyuman, Ambu and Manubhai had themselves dug and filled with compost. The tree flourished in the coming years, and its branches spread out in all directions, often obstructing the movement of persons in the Ashram courtyard. A proposal was made to the Mother that the tree or

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at least some of its branches should be cut down, but she would not hear of it. In fact the Mother used to pay special attention to facilitate the full and unimpeded growth of its hundred arms and pervasive personality. She asked Sammer, the Czech architect of "Golconde", to design artistic pillars and railings to support the sagging branches.²⁷ Known always and loved as the Service tree, it was now - in the winter of 1950 - to serve with its golden flowers as the golden canopy for Sri Aurobindo's Samadhi and give harbourage to an unceasing flow of disciples and devotees at all hours of the day. Rightly has the Service tree inspired many an Ashram poet to spontaneous rhythmic utterance. Thus Pujalal, whom the Mother had called "My poet":

Calm thou standest here close by

The Master's deep material trance;

Thine is a silent prayer's cry

That mates with God's all-gracious glance. ...

The Golden God thou serves! here

Thou hast the Mother's golden grace;

All gold thou shalt be. Soul sincere!

And shower gold on earth apace.²⁸

And thus, William Jones, a devotee poet, in "Sylvan Samadhi":

Fraternal tree, this metaphor is best:

My immobility became a tomb

Of massive grey-veined marble; incense bloom

Of rose and jasmin dreamed upon its breast;

A gold embrace of boughs a golden vigil kept;

Close by a sacred body's sleep, my thinking slept.²⁹

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