THE DIVINE
COLLABORATORS
RISHABHCHAND
SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM
PONDICHERRY
PUBLISHERS:
All Rights Reserved
First published in June, 1955
SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PRESS
PRINTED IN INDIA
THE DIVINE COLLABORATORS
By the same author:
IN THE MOTHER'S LIGHT—PART I, RS 2-8
IN THE MOTHER'S LIGHT—PART II, RS 3-8
THE INTEGRAL YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO —PART I, RS 3
THE INTEGRAL YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO—PART II, 4
In these six short chapters, the first five of which were published in the Advent and the last in Mother India, I have tried to trace the remarkable identity that existed between the thoughts, aspirations and ideals of the Mother and those of Sri Aurobindo before they had know I or even heard of each other. Their first meeting took place at Pondicherry on the 29th March, 1914, but the Prayers, discourses and essays written by the Mother before that date breathe the same intense aspiration for and are instinct with the same flaming will to integral transformation, integral union and integral manifestation of God in the material life of man, as we find in the writings of Sri Aurobindo. The key thoughts of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy were also the key thoughts of the Mother's life before their meeting on the physical plane; and an absolute identity in the germinal thoughts of two such original, dynamic, spiritual personalities could have and did have but one result when they met—a, close collaboration for the fulfilment of the divine Will upon earth.
The last chapter, written in the beginning of 1955, purports to give a brief outline of the developing work of the Mother as a progressive realisation of her life's mission. Those who feel interested in the Mother's experiences, thoughts and activities, are advised to read the foLl owing books:
1)Prayers and Meditations of the Mother
2)Words of the Mother
3)The Supreme Discovery—by the Mother
4)The Four Austerities—by the Mother
5)On Education—by the Mother
etc. etc.
RlSHABHCHAND
CHAPTER I
Even those who have only a smattering of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy know that they aim at these three signal achievements: (I) ascent of the consciousness of man from mind to Supermind, which is the Truth-consciousness, the Rita-chit of the Veda; (2) descent of the Supermind into Matter and the conversion and transformation of the integral nature of man—physical, vital and mental—by the Light-Force of the Supermind, and (3) the perfect manifestation of Sachchidananda on earth through the transformed and divinised human nature. Sri Aurobindo does not subscribe to the world-shunning asceticism of the old schools of spiritual discipline, nor does he advocate the hedonistic enjoyment of life lived in the Ignorance and in the trailing turmoil of the dualities. His message is of the essential divinity of man and the inevitable fullness and perfection of its self-expression in life, on this earth and in the human body. He does not regard a union with God or Brahman only in the depths or on the heights of the being as a complete union. Man's birth-right, he affirms, is a constant, dynamic, integral union—a union in the nature as well as in the soul, in every little movement of life as well as in the stirless silence of ecstatic contemplation.
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Life must become a sparkling flood of Light and its jarring discords pass into the inalienable harmony of the supramental consciousness reigning over earth.
It goes without saying that this triple aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy is a revolutionary departure and is absolutely original to his spiritual genius. There is no precedent or parallel to it in the annals of spirituality, oriental or occidental, ancient or modem. It is true that in the Veda we meet with some references to the Rita-Chit or the supermind. It is described there as the Truth, the Right, the Vast; as the supreme step of Vishnu; and some Vedic Rishis endeavoured to rise into its solar glory. But there is no trace of a collective ascent into it or of any attempt on their part to bring it down into the material life for a conversion of the earth-consciousness. It was even held by some Rishis that it was not possible to pass through the gates of the Sun, i.e. the Supermind, and yet retain the human body. The Upanishadic Rishis knew of the existence of this supreme Truth-consciousness, which they called the Vijnana, but the Vedic urge towards it was no longer there in its ancient intensity and amplitude. However that may be, it was Sri Aurobindo who first fixed upon the creative Supermind as the goal of human evolution and laboured to call down and canalise its all-achieving Force for the birth of a new race of humanity, the race of gnostic supermen. This new birth will be an emergence of man, as the culmination of his evolutionary progression, into the supreme Truth-Consciousness, which will admit of a simultaneous
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realisation of and union with the transcendent Sachchidananda and His universal Immanence—a consummation not yet achieved by man. But in order that this emergence may be complete and securely established on earth, it is essential, as a pre-condition, that Matter should be transmuted into the luminous substance of the divine existence from which it is derived, and that the physical nature of man should, in consequence, be definitively freed from the dark density, inertia and insensibility which are its heritage from its inconscient origin. Physical transformation by means of the authentic supramental Force is, therefore, the crux of the mission of Sri Aurobindo's life, and it presages a future for humanity which is too glorious even for the widest and keenest mind of the modern man to conceive.
This sublime ideal and a definite spiritual guidance to realise it and make it a concrete experience and an abiding base of all life's activities and achievements, are the special gift of Sri Aurobindo to man. But it is very interesting that the same ideal had been the shaping truth and realising force in the Mother's life even when she was in France and knowing absolutely nothing of Sri Aurobindo and bis thoughts. Conscious of the great mission of her life from her very childhood and confirmed in her foreknowledge by certain remarkable visions and mystical experiences, she had been pursuing her spiritual life and steadily rising to her destined stature. Her "Prayers and Meditations", in which she has transcribed some of her experiences, bear surprising
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testimony to the essential identity which had existed between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo even before she met him in person on the 29th March, 1914. We cannot account for this identity by deriving it from the mystical traditions of the West, which do not seem to be aware of the Supermind or any such plane of creative Truth-consciousness, where man can have a perfect union, both in silence and in action, and a simultaneous self-identification with the Transcendent and the Immanent. The general trend of mystical thought in the West, in spite of the towering achievements of Ruysbroeck and St. Teresa, inclines towards a denial of the possibility of a complete and constant union with God in human fife. "Man shall not see my face and live" has been accepted more or less literally by almost all the leading Western mystics. St. Gregory the Great believes that "no one is able to fix the mind's eye on the unencompassed ray itself of Light." One can only "attain to somewhat of the unencompassed Light by stealth and scantily." St. Bernard agrees with St. Gregory that "those who by transport of contemplation are at times rapt in spirit, are able to taste some little fragment of the sweetness of supernal felicity," though rarely and momentarily. Couched in the same key, but weightier in authority, is St. Augustine's verdict, "Contemplation is only begun in this life, to be perfected in the next" (Tract, in loan, cxxiv. 5).
This, then, is the prevailing conception in the West of divine union or contemplation, though it is somewhat
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contradicted by the experiences of a few mystics here and there. Regarding the descent of the supernal Light and the consequent transformation of human nature, it has always been a doubtful and mystified issue. True it is that the Orphic Mysteries aimed at some kind of trans-formation or deification, but what they meant by trans-formation and how they proposed actually to achieve it has been a lost science, having had little bearing on the life of the subsequent Western mystics. Besides, the question of the manifestation of God in Matter has hardly ever seriously exercised the thought of Western mysticism. That the physical nature of man, which has its roots in the murky depths of the Inconscient and most of its motive forces in the obscure welter of the Subconscient, can be, not only purified, but completely converted and trans-muted into the divine Nature, is a possibility unexplored even by the greatest mystics of the West.
In the absence of any such tradition in the West from which the Mother might have imbibed the main strands of her manifestational and life-transfiguring mysticism, and in view of her later domicile in India and self-identification with Sri Aurobindo's life-work, we think we are justified in regarding her spiritual development in the West as a prelude to and a preparation for her work in India, which is a work for the whole of humanity, and seeing in the identity between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo an evidence of the decree of God that East and West must meet as Shiva and Shakti, self-manifesting Light and realising and transforming Force, to raise man
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from mind to supermind and convert his life of division and discord into the creative unity and blissful harmony of the Life Divine.
The "Prayers and Meditations of the Mother" begins from November 2, 1912 and ends on October 23, 1937. Out of a total of over 350 there are only six Prayers from 1919 to 1937, the rest all ranging from 1912 to 1918. Here we shall confine ourselves only to the Prayers written between 1912 and March 28, 19141—about 97 Prayers, which bear eloquent testimony to the great ideal which was defining itself more and more clearly and pressing forward towards self-realisation in the Mother. We shall also draw upon some of her youthful writings in the form of discourses, delivered before select audiences in France, to substantiate our thesis that the identity between the ideal of the Mother's life and that of Sri Aurobindo's, even when they did not know each other on the physical plane, was not a chance coincidence, but a decree and dispensation of Providence for the great work of the future. To say that their souls are complementary to each other, that is, each filling up what lacks in the other, as some people have suggested, is not true; for, a searching perusal of their respective thoughts before their meeting on the physical plane does not bear it out. The Mother's mission is so definitely outlined in the Prayers of between 1912 and 1914 that it betrays no trace of an incompleteness
1 The Mother met Sri Aurobindo on the 29th March, 1914, as said above.
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or a wide gap anywhere to be filled up in the future; and Sri Aurobindo's thoughts and ideals are blazoned even in his earliest utterances and writings,—in his voluminous prose writings and, particularly in his poems,—so that there is no room for any doubt as to what he regarded as his fife's work. To say that Sri Aurobindo represents the static aspect of the Divine and the Mother the dynamic, is again not true; for the pulsing heart of their teachings is the divine dynamism, which they have both been labouring to instil into the earth-life. To call Sri Aurobindo static is to miss the very significance and the central, distinctive truth of his life and ideal. And that there is not only dynamism, but an untrembling status of eternal peace and repose in the Mother, will be amply proved by the Prayers we shall quote in the course of this essay. The truth of the matter is that the identity of their ideal was a natural flowering of the identity of their beings, and that their meeting from the two hemispheres was neither a chance nor a conjunction of complementaries, but a providential reunion of identities, separated for a time for the exigencies of the evolutionary terrestrial existence.
It is true that there are certain Prayers in the "Prayers and Meditations", particularly those written immediately after the Mother's meeting with Sri Aurobindo, in which she speaks of all her inner constructions having vanished like a vain dream and herself left before the immensity of the divine "without any frame or system, like a being not yet individualised." That a great change did take place in her, a marvellous new birth, as a result of her
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very first contact with Sri Aurobindo, is clearly recorded in the Prayers and Meditations; but it was a change in the methods and processes of her spiritual self-discipline and a new birth of her instrumental being, or more accurately perhaps, a re-affirmation, a re-foundation, abinitio of what was already achieved. "All the past, in its external form, appears to me ridiculous and arbitrary, and yet I know that it was useful in its time." Describing this state in another Prayer (dated April 3, 1914), the Mother says, "It is as if I was stripped of all my past, of my errors as well as my conquests, as if all that had disappeared to give place to one new-bom whose whole existence has yet to take shape, who has no Karma, no experience it can profit by, but no error either which it must repair... I know that I must now definitively give myself up and be like a page absolutely blank on which Thy thought, Thy Will, O Lord, will be able to inscribe themselves freely, secure against any deformation." It was, indeed, a monumental revolution, a massive whirlwind preparation that took place in her; and as a result of it, a flood of new experiences came, tending to complete the divine union she had been longing for and clinching the role she was to play in the work of the creation of a supramental race of men initiated by Sri Aurobindo.
"The 'I' has disappeared, there is only a docile instrument put at thy service, a centre of concentration and manifestation of Thy infinite and eternal rays; Thou hast taken my life and made it Thine; Thou hast taken my will and united it to Thine; Thou hast taken my love
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and identified it with Thine; Thou hast taken my thought and replaced it by Thy absolute Consciousness". (April 10, 1914). But whatever the nature and magnitude of the change, the ideal and mission of her life, as outlined in the enlarging prescience of her early years, remained essentially the same. That these modifications and even radical reversals in the methods of her self-culture did not occur only once is attested by the Mother's Prayer of October 7, 1913, about six months before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo:
"A new door has opened in my being and an immensity has appeared before me...
"All is changed, all is new; the old garbs have dropped and the new-bom child half-opens its eyes to the light of the dawn."
And there are not a few subsequent Prayers depicting Remarkable transitions and new conquests. The Mother's sadhana has followed strange curves of ascent and descent, for it has not been so much an individual as a collective sadhana for the conversion of the earth-consciousness and the supramental self-expression of God in man. It would, therefore, be a great mistake to try to assess and understand it by the usual criteria of the mystical life. Many of her experiences are a prism or a reflex of the experiences of the earth-soul, and by far the majority a mighty prelude and preparation and prognosis. Hers has been a consecrated life of collective
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conquests, and it is only when the curves of her work come full circle that the veil will be lifted from the true nature of her experiences and an illumined elite of humanity or superhumanity will be able to comprehend something of the significance of her ideal and mission. For the moment it remains an impenetrable mystery pregnant with incalculable possibilities for the future of humanity—a mystery, which repels the advances of the prying analytical reason, but welcomes faith into its sacred heart and vouchsafes to it a revealing glimpse of its hidden secret.
Let us now proceed to a close and devoted study of the words written or spoken by the Mother before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo, and try to see how they are essentially identical with those of Sri Aurobindo. We shall study them under four heads: (I) The Divine Union, (2) Physical transformation through service in an integral surrender, (3) conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, (4) The Divine Manifestation and the Divine Life. It will be our humble endeavour in this study to follow the developing contours of the Mother's ideal and mission and relate them to those of Sri Aurobindo in order to substantiate our thesis that the meeting of the two identities from the two hemispheres of the world betokens the advent of the unity of mankind in the integral realisation and manifestation of the Divine in life.
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CHAPTER II
We have proposed to ourselves, first, a consideration of the essential identity between the Mother's conception of the divine Union as enunciated by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo and that of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo's conception, evolved out of the all-embracing integrality of his realisation, is a global synthesis of all the concepts of the past crowned with his distinctive gospel of the constant, dynamic union and communion with the Divine in the physical being of man. This original contribution of his to the ideal of the divine Union opens up an infinite vista of spiritual perfection and explains and justifies the soul's descent into human birth.
"These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being."1
The three highest forms of union aimed at respectively by the three great schools of Indian Yoga, Jnanayoga, Bhakti-
1Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. IV
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yoga and Tantra,—Sayujya, Samipya and Sarupya—are fused into one all-comprehending union which combines the rapt ecstasy of the embrace of the Eternal with the thrilled dynamism of His self-expression in Time. All nature and all life are included in the sweep of this integral union and every fibre of our complex being is meant to find in it its perfect fulfillment. This union is the sovereign means of reproduction, in the triple term of mind, Life and body, of the triple supreme principle of the transcendent Existence, Sat, Chit and Ananda, through the conscious and co-operating agency of the full-fledged psychic, the soul of man; of an unblemished transcription of the infinite glories of the Spirit in finite, living and thinking Matter. That which most impedes the attainment of this integral union is the dense physical being of man, entrenched in its obscurity and inert conservatism, and reluctant to open or respond to the higher light. Most initiates of Eternity have, therefore, sought to enjoy the transporting bliss of the divine union in the remote depths or on the lonely peaks of their being, leaving the physical part to vegetate in its habitual obscurity. It is only the rare heroic souls, the intrepid warriors of the Spirit, who have struggled to redeem the physical and render it capable of reflecting something of the light and power and ecstasy welling out of the union. But all that has been really achieved up to the present, by way of redemption, is a modicum of purification and illumination, but not a radical conversion and transfiguration; and without a total conversion and transfiguration of the physical being, the outer
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personality, it is impossible to have an integral and uninterrupted union with the Divine in active life—the surface self will either lie quiescent and sterile while the soul is entranced in the beatitude of the inner union, or dilute and distort and spill what is transmitted to it for expression. A perfect physical expression of the fruits of divine union has hardly been possible as yet in human life.
Sri Aurobindo's spiritual power has been bent on the achievement of the integral divine union and its undiminished and undistorted expression in the normal work-a-day life of humanity; but for this supreme consummation of the evolutionary effort of the human soul, two things are indispensable: a pioneer individual perfection and a progressive reproduction of the individual perfection in the general nature of the collectivity. But the individual, being a part of the collectivity, and not an isolated unit, cannot completely identify himself with the Divine until the rampant impurities of the collective nature have been to a certain extent eliminated. It is this dual work of individual and collective transformation that has been the mission and labour of Sri Aurobindo, and we shall miss all the significance, all the superlative greatness of it, if we lose sight of these two aspects of his ideal. No individual, however great he may be, can attain to the integral divine perfection through the integral divine union until the earth-consciousness itself has undergone a revolutionary transformation and the earth-conditions have definitely changed in its favour. The integral union with the Divine, as understood by Sri Aurobindo, is the
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ultimate and inevitable destiny of mankind, but it is an ideal that is to be striven for and attained, and not one that has ever been achieved in the spiritual history of humanity. It will come as the ultimate victory in a double war waged within man and without, individually and collectively.
If we bear the above salient points well in mind, we shall be able to follow the general trend of the Mother's aspiration and achievements and discover in them the same essential elements that constitute the ideal and the realisation of Sri Aurobindo, so far as the divine union is concerned.
In the very first Prayer of the "Prayers and Meditations", the Mother gives us a glimpse of the central aspiration of her being and the height of vision and experience to which she has already attained.
"I aspire for the day when I can no longer say I, for I shall be Thou."1
***
"I have now a constant and precise perception of the universal unity determining an absolute interdependence of all actions."2
The first quotation embodies the Mother's aspiration, but the second, which is very significant, shows that the
1 Prayer of November 2, 1912
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perfection of individual action depends to a great measure upon the conditions which make for the perfection of the universal action. This perception of the Mother of the interdependence of all actions is an index to the line her spiritual career has consistently taken—it is the dual line of individual and collective aspiration and conquest. It must have been a basic realisation of her consciousness, early in her life, that existence is one and indivisible, and that our individual perfection and fulfillment must include the perfection and fulfillment of all. The same idea is expressed by Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga, Book I:
"Accepting life, he (the sadhaka of the integral Yoga) has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world's burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others'; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence. Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it
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contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe."
It is evident, then, that the union the Mother aspires for in these Prayers is a progressive integral union, which, even when perfect at the centre, necessarily takes long to be perfect at the peripheries. But nothing short of it can satisfy the Mother's being any more than Sri Aurobindo's. In her Prayer of the 19th November, 1912, the Mother says to the Divine:
"I said yesterday to that 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." A little farther on in the same Prayer, she says, "How many times already when I pronounce it (the word 'I'), it is Thou who speakest in me, for I have lost the sense of separativity."
She has found the Divine "definitively", the Union is "constant", she has lost "the sense of separativity"; and yet she calls this union "poor and precarious" in comparison with what it will be possible for her to "realise tomorrow." The inner union has been attained and stabilised: "...It is Thou who breathest, thinkest and lovest in this substance...",but the Mother would not rest till she has become "Thou", completely and irrevocably, from the highest summits of her being to its lowest plains.
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What is this becoming "Thou"? It is not a mere identification with the Divine in the soul and the mind,—it is a spiritual rebirth of the whole being, a remoulding of the entire apparatus of the surface and the subconscient human personality, and, above all, a radical transfiguration of the body, its consciousness and its mode of working, leading to an untrembling dynamic poise in the Divine and a constant union and communion with Him in active life.
"So long as one element of the being, one movement of the thought is still subjected to outside influences, not solely under Thine, it cannot be said that the true Union is realised; there is still the horrible mixture without order and light,—for that element, that movement is a world, a world of disorder and darkness, as is the entire earth in the material world, as is the material world in the entire universe."1
That is why there is an intense, unceasing aspiration in the Mother's body—it is not a mental or vital aspiration imposed upon the body, but the body's own separate, individual, unquenchable aspiration—for a dynamic union with the Supreme through service...."This body whose will is to become Thy docile instrument and Thy faithful servant."2 "...This substance which, being Thy-
1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—Dec. 2,1912
2 ibid., Nov. 3, 1912
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self, desires to be Thy willing servant."1 This service, as the Mother understands it, is not a mere Karmayoga, a discipline of desireless and disinterested action, for the purification and liberation of the being; it has a double purpose and significance: I) the canalising of the supreme Love and Light into the material world and 2) the preparation and transformation of the physical being of man for the perfect Union and the eventual Manifestation. The Mother so much insists on service, because: I) Union with the Divine cannot be integral if the body is excluded from it; for, the body, as much as the heart or the mind, has a birthright to a constant and complete union with the Divine and a perfection in the expression of that union; and it is only when all the parts of the being of man are converted and transformed enough to enter into the union, abide in it and radiate its ineffable glory, that the Union can be called integral, and the entire being of man can have its completest fulfilment. 2) It is only through service that the Will of the Divine in the world can be victoriously fulfilled. In fact, in its advanced stages, service becomes another name for an unobstructed divine self-expression.2
Attuned to the same key, ring Sri Aurobindo's words: "Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the
1Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—Nov. 19, 1912
2For further details on the subject, refer to my book, "In the Mother's Light" in 2
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mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities."1
The Mother does not regard an exclusive, unilateral tension of the mind or the heart or the will towards the Divine as capable of leading anywhere near the integral union; it is a narrow intensity within a restricted field of consciousness and barren of any enduring and transforming effect upon life in the world. It can initiate the Godward turn, but cannot by itself consummate and fulfil it in an integral union.
"Even he who might have arrived at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from his body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself; by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would
1 The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo—Book I
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have refused cowardlike to accomplish his mission to re-deem and purify Matter."1
The same idea informs the following words of Sri Aurobindo: "Brahman expresses Itself in many successive forms of consciousness, successive in their relation even if coexistent in being or coeval in Time, and life in its self-unfolding must also rise to ever-new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the Light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all-embracing."2
There must be an integration and harmonisation of all the parts of our being and a global turning of it to the Divine, if the integral union be the supreme objective.
1Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—June 15,1913
2The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo, Chapter V
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Very often a partial union is so overwhelnring that it is easily taken for an integral one—the soul and mind and heart are immersed in bliss and peace, or the life parts vibrate with a mighty power; even the body reflects some-thing of its glow and thrill. But that is not what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo mean by Union. They mean, as we have already seen, something" more luminously and comprehensively complete, and more sovereignly effective; something in which the whole being of man, from his Self to the very cells of his body, permanently lives and moves and acts in the Divine. But this union cannot come about merely by an inner plunge and identification, or by any number of plunges and identifications. It includes also the union of our subconscient and inconscient parts with the Divine, which is possible only by the illumination and transformation of those nether regions by the direct action of the Supramental Force. It is a tremendous work, entailing a descent into the Subconscient and the Inconscient and a raising up of the dark elements which seethe or sleep there, so that they may be either destroyed or transformed into radiant spiritual energies and lend themselves to the total transformation of the physical personality of man. And, besides, according to them, union is not an end in itself,— that the soul never forfeits in its depths—it is the sole and supreme means to the ulterior end and reason of our existence, the object of the soul's descent into birth and its evolution, the purpose of the immanence of the Divine in the world, the aim of creation itself—the perfect
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Manifestation, the intended Epiphany of the Spirit in Matter. According to Sri Aurobindo, the aim of his Integral Yoga is not only to seek and realise the Divine but to call upon Him to manifest Himself in and through us in the material world. That is not only Union, but Union multiplied, universalised and dynamically self-revealed in its native glory in humanity. And in a sweet little Prayer, written on March 13,1913, when the Mother had not even heard of Sri Aurobindo, she too says,
"Let the pure perfume of sanctification burn always, rising higher and higher, and straighter and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee."
We shall now consider the essential identity1 existing between Sri Aurobindo's idea of physical transformation through service in an integral surrender and that of the Mother as expressed by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo.
1 Really speaking, the identity is not only essential, it is also practical, and even literal, as the Mother's frequent use of the expressions, "integral union", "perfect manifestation," "transformation", "earthly transfiguration" etc., which are the key-expressions of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and Philosophy, testifies.
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CHAPTER III
Sri Aurobindo insists so much on physical transformation, because without it the spiritual achievements of the human soul cannot be manifested in earthly life, individual and collective. It has been possible to purify the mind and the heart to a certain extent and even to discipline and regulate (more by suppression or repression than otherwise) the life-parts of man, but the physical nature has been left almost unreclaimed. Its customary habits and tendencies, its crude appetites and impulses, its mechanical reactions and responses to outward impacts have always been the disgust and despair of even the greatest of spiritual men. Hathayoga, righty practised, gives considerable control over the physical body, but not over the whole physical nature; and even the best control acquired by Rajayoga is neither conquest nor conversion.
The bitter truth has to be admitted that no amount of spiritual realisation has ever been able to overcome the inherent darkness and disabilities of the physical part of our human nature. Inertia, obscurity, disease, decrepitude and death, doubt, obstinacy in error, unwillingness to change, a helpless subjection to past associations, proneness to suffering and a sharp sense of egoistic
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separation have been the invariable stamp of it and a constant goad to a resort to absorbed contemplation or trance. Truth is not known in the physical being, because it is gross and dense; peace cannot dwell securely in it, because it is turbid and restless; the soul's limpid joy cannot flow out of it, because it is choked with the fungus of pleasures and pains. Even when universal love floods within, little slimy swirls of hatred or anger or grief or jealousy may be detected on its outer fringes, perhaps more as lingering remnants of past habits than as any fresh movements; but they linger long and seem never to leave definitively. And to crown all this, one is often surprised by sudden blinding and convulsive raids from the subconscient. Movements and elements of nature which one would have thought dead, suddenly recur and recur again and seek to recover their lost empire. There are many such awkward and disturbing factors which hide behind the calm and imposing facade of a Yogi's life, and betray themselves only to the eye that can probe below the surface.
Sri Aurobindo will have none of these ungainly sun-spots in the perfection of the Integral Yoga; for, the basic aim of his Yoga is a dynamic union with the Divine in life, in every movement of life, in the whole being, in the entire nature and in all its thoughts and feelings and actions; and a persistence of the obscure habits of the physical nature and the subconscient scum is absolutely incompatible with it. So long as a man is on earth, the terrestrial life is his field of achievement, and all that
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he gains by personal effort or by divine Grace must have a full and perfect expression in his life, whether the gain is physical, vital, mental or spiritual; and if any acquisition, however highly spiritual it may be, fails to manifest itself in his life, it means that it is still a potentiality and has to be realised in terms of the material existence. If the Upanishadic dictum is true that all that is here is there in the Beyond, and all that is there is also here, the only logical deduction can be that all that is there is latent here or only partly patent, and can manifest in its fullness; and that so to manifest is the sole reason of its being here.
Sri Aurobindo wrote in one of his letters to Barindra, "What God wants from man is to manifest Him here, in the individual and the collectivity—to realise God in life. The ancient systems of Yoga failed to synthesise or unite spirituality and life; they have explained the world away as Maya (illusion) or a transient Lila (play). The result has been a dwindling of the life-force and the decline of India."
In one of his letters to his disciples, he says, "Unless the external nature is transformed, one may go as high as possible and have the largest experiences...but the external mind remains an instrument of Ignorance." In "More Lights on Yoga", he remarks, "The whole physical life must be transformed. This material world does not want a mere change of consciousness in us. It says in effect, 'You retire into bliss, become luminous, have the divine knowledge, but that does not alter me.
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I still remain the hell I practically am! The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and make it an entirely new creation."
By transformation Sri Aurobindo does not mean mere purification, as we have already indicated. By physical transformation he means a reversal of the whole physical consciousness and a radical conversion of the very grain and gamut of its working—"...a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body."1 It is a long and difficult work depending for its success on two indispensable factors: self-offering of the individual through every action of life done as an oblation to the Divine, and the bringing down of the Light-Force of the Vijnanamaya Purusha into the physical being. The Vijnanashakti or supramental Force descends and suffuses the physical being and awakens and activates the divine consciousness that is submerged in it. Purification can be done by the enlightened human intelligence, but it is only a partial and precarious purification that can be thus effected; for the reaches of our being where lie the roots of our earthly nature are sealed to our mental vision, and in our impatient ardour for purification, we often end by doing nothing better than maiming and crippling much of our nature and even hacking away some recalcitrant elements which, once conquered and converted, might have
1 The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo
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contributed to a substantial enrichment and perfection of our being. The human mind cannot evidently be a wise and efficient agent of purification. Itself a creation and sport of the lower nature of the three gunas, and incurably conditioned in all its ideas and principles and judgements by those gunas working in staffing combinations, it cannot, by itself, achieve the dynamic freedom necessary for purifying the nature. Besides, even its highest ideas and principles are nothing but an evolution out of a complex of sense-data, inference, imagination, reasoning and the prevailing bent and bias of the whole being— they are not facets and formations of truth received undiminished and undeformed from their authentic origin. To meet Truth face to face, we have to go beyond our mind of dividing ignorance; and it is only when, transcending the mind, we have climbed to the Truth in its own domain, that we can bring down its authentic omnipotent Force to purify and transform our nature, mental, vital and physical. This Force is not only omnipotent, it is also omniscient, being the luminous Force of the Supreme, and it knows best how to grapple with the tangled skein of our nature and weave out of it a flawless divine Supernature, a miracle of transfiguration.
But action is the indispensable means, and without it the transformation of the physical nature is out of the question. It is not only a state of passive peace and purity that is sought for in the Integral Yoga, but a free and unhampered expression of the divine Will and a fulfilment of the divine purpose in a life of God-guided action. 3
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"Even for those whose first natural movement is a consecration, a surrender and a resultant entire transformation of the thinking mind and its knowledge, or total consecration, surrender and transformation of the heart and its emotions, the consecration of works is a needed element in that change....It is possible, indeed, to begin with knowledge or Godward emotion solely or with both together and to leave works for the final movement of the Yoga. But there is then this disadvantage that we may tend to live too exclusively within, subtilised in subjective experience, shut off in our isolated inner parts; there we may get incrusted in our spiritual seclusion and find it difficult later on to pour ourselves triumphantly outwards and apply to life our gains in the higher Nature, When we turn to add this external kingdom also to our inner conquests, we shall find ourselves too much accustomed to an activity purely subjective and ineffective on the material plane. There will be an immense difficulty in transforming the outer life and the body. Or we shall find that our action does not correspond with the inner light: it still follows the old accustomed mistaken paths, still obeys the old normal imperfect influences; the Truth within us continues to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant mechanism of our external nature."1
Having dwelt at some length on the question of the
1 The Synthesis of Yoga, Book I
Page 28
transformation of the physical consciousness and being of man, as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo, we turn now to the Mother's conception of it, as expressed by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo. It is here, on the question of the transformation of the physical being, that the identity of their views seems to be all the more striking; for, the subject with all its far-reaching implications is almost a new one, hardly ever treated in a complete and comprehensive way by any of the Yogis and mystics of the past, and yet all-important to the future of humanity The divine fulfilment aimed at by the Integral Yoga pivots upon the perfection of the physical transformation. If homo sapiens cannot be transformed out of his normal animality into a dynamic divinity, there can be no divine life upon earth. And yet, Sri Aurobindo affirms, the establishment of the divine life is inevitable, as it is the logical culmination of the process of evolution which brings out from the indeterminate inconscience the fundamental principles of existence involved there. As Matter has evolved, and life and mind, so the other principles must also evolve. Therefore the divine life on earth is a destiny which cannot be reversed, and of which the achievement of the physical transformation is an inescapable pre-condition.
In 1912 the Mother wrote: "The terrestrial transformation and harmonisation can be brought about by two processes which, though opposite in appearance, must combine,—must act upon each other and complete each other:
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(1)Individual transformation, an inner development leading to the union with the Divine Presence.
(2)Social transformation, the establishment of an environment favourable to the flowering and growth of the individual."
This terrestrial transformation of which the Mother speaks, can be nothing else than the physical transformation of man, individual and collective, leading to the establishment of the divine life on earth. On more or less the same subject, the Mother says in "The Supreme Discovery": "Let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love and give up to Him, without reservation, this marvellous instrument our material organism. He will make it produce its maximum on every plane of. activity." The stress is, as always, on the physical being of man and its radical change, so that the spiritual wealth may be poured out in terms of material facts.
Those who have read the Mother's "Prayers and Meditations" know how, practically through the whole book of over 350 Prayers, the recurring theme is the same: the transformation of Matter, the transmutation of the physical being of man. But this is not a theme that originated with the "Prayers and Meditations," but had its birth in the Mother's consciousness very early in her life, and has been ever since the one, outstanding mission of her life. She too felt like Sri Aurobindo that divine perfection could only be attained in earthly life by conquering and converting Matter, and not before that. In.
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a speech delivered in 1912 in France, she said, "Built as we are out of an imperfect substance, we cannot but 'share in this imperfection." "Whatever therefore may be the possible degree of perfection, consciousness and knowledge that our deeper being possesses, the simple fact that it incarnates in a physical body gives rise to obstacles to the purity of its manifestation. And yet, the incarnation has for its goal precisely the victory over these obstacles, the transformation of Matter."1 The perception of the inherent imperfection of Matter, which could very well have, as it almost always has in other cases, led to a world-shunning spirituality, sublime in its islanded grandeur, turned the Mother's whole being towards the conquest of that very imperfection and a definitive victory over Matter. And she has expressed in unmistakable terms the object of our birth or incarnation . here, the ultimate goal of our earthly life, as "the transformation of Matter" which is, as is well known, the central aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy.
In her Prayer of the 26th November, 1912, the Mother, addressing the Divine, says, "....Thou who everywhere raisest up Matter in this ardent and wonderful aspiration, in this sublime thirst for Eternity." These ideas of "raising up Matter," the "aspiration of Matter" and its "thirst for Eternity" are so very new to the philosophic spiritual concepts of the West and so very fundamental to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo that the identity we have
1 Words of Long Ago by the Mother
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been studying becomes apparent even to a cursory glance, and has not to be laboured into recognition.
Dwelling on the same subject in her Prayer of the 15th June, 1913, the Mother says that to know that a part of our being is perfectly pure and to commune and identify ourselves with that part is very helpful, but this knowledge and communion must be utilised for "hastening the earthly transfiguration," for, that is, indeed, "the sublime work" of the Divine in the material world. To be identified only with the immaculate soul and commune with it in the silence of the depths is not the ultimate object of human birth. This identification must be extended and reproduced in every part of our composite being, and utilised as a unifying and integrating force working at the same time as a potent leverage of our ascent to the Divine. It must be translated into the terms of the physical being for the "earthly transfiguration."
This work of physical transformation is no morbid obsession with the body. It is, in fact, only when one rises far above the body-consciousness that one gains the power to transform the body. Deploring the engrossing care for the preservation of the body, which is almost universal in men, the Mother says, "Nothing can be more humiliating, nothing more depressing than these thoughts turned always towards the preservation of the body, this preoccupation with health, with our subsistence, with the framework of our life. How trivial are these things, a thin smoke dissolved by a simple breath,
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vanishing like mirage before a single thought turned towards Thee (the Divine)."1 And yet it is not a neglect ' of the body that the Mother teaches, for she knows that "the body is a marvellous instrument" and that "there is ...no limit to its growth in capacities and to its progress." We are reminded of what Sri Aurobindo says in this connection in his "Bases of Yoga": "There should be no attachment to it (the body), but no contempt or neglect either of the material part of our nature." In his Letters, Vol. IV, he says, "Matter itself is secretly a form of Spirit and has to reveal itself as that, can be made to wake to consciousness and evolve and realise the Spirit, the Divine within it....That does not mean that the body has to be valued for its own sake or that the creation of a divine body in a future evolution of the whole being has to be contemplated as an end and not as a means...."
Regarding the indispensability of the active service of the Divine in an integral surrender, the Mother is as definite as Sri Aurobindo, and as uncompromising. This service is not a routine round of rituals which the religions prescribe, nor is it philanthropy, humanitarian-ism or altruism which pass by that name and usually constitute the active life of spiritual men. By service of the Divine the Mother means the constant and conscious offering of each movement of one's nature—physical, vital, psychic, mental and spiritual—to the Divine and to none and nothing but the Divine. All actions of life are accepted
1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—August 17, 1913
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and turned towards the Divine except those which are tainted with desire or clearly detrimental to spiritual growth. This wholesale offering of all work is the only means of dedicating all our faculties and their functions, all our energies and their hidden or apparent motives to the Mother, the supreme Force of the Divine, so that they may all be purified, illumined and transfigured for the very purpose for which they have been created—the perfect manifestation of the Divine. Service has therefore two stages: one, in which, casting away all our desires and self-interest, we offer all our actions to the Divine, and through this integral self-consecration attain to release from the ego and its separative ignorance; and the other, in which, liberated and transfigured in all our parts, we become luminous instruments of the unveiled Divine.
Sri Aurobindo's views on this point are much too well-known to need recapitulation here. We shall only quote a few lines from the Mother's writings to show how her thought and practice have moved on identical fines since the beginning of her spiritual life.
The Mother regards the daily activity of life as the anvil on which all the elements of our being must pass and repass in order to be "purified, refined, made supple and ripe for the illumination which contemplation gives to them."1 If one gives up the daily activity, one gives up the very process by which, and by which alone, the
1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—Nov. 28, 1912
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elements and energies of one's being can be purified and transformed. But, it must be carefully noted, the work of the transformation of the physical being is neither an easy nor a short work; for, each element of our physical personality has to be, not only purified and illumined, but impersonalised and taught "forgetfulness of self and self-abnegation." It is not enough to dislodge the ego from the centre of one's being,—that might be deemed enough by those who seek their spiritual fulfillment else -where than on earth—it must be dislodged from every element of one's being, every fibre of one's nature. That is why even for the best of sadhakas sudden and "striking eonversions cannot be integral." "Truly to attain the goal, none can escape the need of innumerable experiences of every kind and every instant."1
The secret of success in this uphill work of physical transformation is, according to the Mother, "Living Thee (the Divine) alone in the act whatever it may be, ever and always Thee." Divine union through integral self-offering, and transformation and divine fulfillment through integral dynamic union, is the formula of the life of service as conceived and taught by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo
In Matter itself, and not elsewhere, lies "the seed of its own salvation." Therefore, not by renouncing the material life and its activities,—a renunciation which the Mother calls "a struggle useless and pernicious"—but
1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—Nov.
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by recognising in each atom of Matter "the Will of God who inhabits it" and identifying oneself with it, that "the promised day, the day of great transformation will be near."1
1 The Supreme Discovery by the Mother
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CHAPTER IV
Nowhere is the identity between the Mother's views (as held by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo) and those of Sri Aurobindo so strikingly significant as on the subject of the Subconscient and the Inconscient. Even if all other subjects were passed over, this alone would be enough to prove that the identity was not accidental, but rooted in the uniqueness of a mission which is fraught with the highest possibilities for human culture, and which could not be fulfilled except by their collaboration. The identity of their views was an outer expression of the identity of their beings, and a precondition for the accomplishment of their work. These two pioneer personalities, belonging to two opposite ends of the earth, met on the soil of resurgent India to sow the seeds of a new, a divine humanity and weave a luminous pattern of life for it. They did not meet to swell the traditional cry of world-renunciation and create a parked-up spiritual atmosphere for preparing a few souls to cross over the dark waters of life and reach the haven of Light beyond. They did not meet to widen the gulf between the secular and the spiritual, or preach a shallow, spiritual culture which would combine the two in a clumsy practical
compromise, such as is fondly advocated by the modem idealists. They met to help man live in God and God in man; to convert human life into a vehicle of the divine Light, and human nature into divine nature. They met to declare that Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, the One and the many are essentially one, and that their oneness can be dynamically expressed in every movement of human life. It was for the complete transformation of homo sapiens and his ascent into the Divine Life that they have laboured for long years of unrelaxed collaboration. But the transformation is impossible without a radical dealing with the very base of human life and nature. This base, as both of them realised early in their lives, is subconscient and, deeper down, inconscient, and the source and store-house of most of the invisible forces which move mankind and prolong in it the residual life of the plant and the animal; and they bent their energies to the conquest and conversion of this nether base as much as to the bringing down of the Supermind, by whose omnipotence alone can this conquest and conversion be effected.
Obviously, it was a new work entailing infinite difficulties. Even the conversion of the individual subconscient has hardly ever been tackled with any conclusive thoroughness since the short-lived heyday of the great but tragic Tantric experiment, let alone the conversion of the collective subconscient. The dominant trend of most of the spiritual disciplines being otherworldly and escapist, the impurities of human nature were not traced
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to their ultimate roots, but lashed or lulled, and left to seethe or slumber in their unlit depths. It was, indeed, deemed an achievement if the inner consciousness could be separated from the turmoil of the outer and launched upon the Infinite,—the outer, thus abandoned and discouraged, usually lapsed into a chafing quiescence or, in some cases, consented to undergo just a modicum of purification. But there was no question of a radical transmutation of the very substance of the base and a definitive triumph over the ignorance and inertia of the material part of human nature.
Significantly enough, both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo started their spiritual careers with a clear perception of the Subconscient and the Inconscient and their immense hold on the motor springs of human nature; and they resolved to make them the targets of their most determined and sustained assaults. Without knowing each other, they yet continued their efforts on identical lines; and when they met, their efforts were fused into one mighty churning of the dragon foundation of human life. They strove not only for the triumph of the soul in the kingdom of Light, but also—and more—for the triumph of God in the kingdom of the material life. They strove, both of them, with an astonishing equipollence of intuitive knowledge, for the complete illumination of the material life and an unflawed manifestation of the Divine on earth —an Epiphany in transfigured humanity.
Human reason understands moral self-discipline, which is, to quote William James's apt words, "but as a plaster
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hiding a sore it can never cure". It understands too something of religious fervour in which the fire of Godward emotions bums up some of the dross of human nature. But it has no idea of the elemental forces that go to constitute human nature, and does not know from what murky depths they emerge into overt play. When it sees falsehood, corruption, dishonesty and cruelty running rampant in civilised human society,—the animal completely unleashed—it wonders how these brute passions could subsist along with so much of intellectual and cultural advancement. When an unsophisticated man of ethical culture hears of great scientists (science is the parent of culture, it is claimed) betraying the political or military secrets of their own motherland; eminent university professors (the universities, it is asserted, are the radiating centres of knowledge) found guilty of flagrant moral depravity, and university students in one of the most civilised countries in the world manhandling their teachers or making raids into the hostels of the opposite sex in broad day light and in brazen defiance of all restraints of morality and decorum; when he sees most of the modern educationists, politicians, sociologists—all men of fight and leading—competing with each other in the fruitful arts of lying and hypocrisy, and pursuing a career of unbridled power-lust and vile self-seeking; and above all, when he thinks of the inhuman brutalities that are being perpetrated by responsible men from day to day in cold blood and even in the very name of peace and patriotism, he cannot but reel under their shock. Is it civilisation, he
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asks in amazement, that turns men into beasts of prey? Is it culture that nourishes on their aboriginal passions? Is it education that educes all that is dark and barbarous in them and yokes their intellectual powers— God's precious gift to them—to the service of their animal self?
Human reason can only marvel, but find no solution of this distressing problem; for the solution lies beyond it. It lies in a double discovery: the discovery of that which is beyond the level of our mental consciousness and of that which is below it. Our present active self is but an outer fringe and surface of our far-ranging being which plunges into remote depths below and spreads high above in the infinitudes of the Spirit. The motive forces of our thoughts and actions, the impulses that drive us and the desires that dictate and direct our movements, all come from sources hidden from our view; and unless we plumb the depths and scale the heights, we live in a woeful ignorance of our self, of our nature and of the world in which we are set to evolve. Most of these motive forces surge up from the subconscient and the inconscient layers of our being, and if we want to transform our nature, it cannot be done by any surface adjustments and reforms, but by a thorough exploration of those submerged regions as well as of the superconscient, and the conversion of all blind and brute energies into their divine counterparts. But if the being of man refuses to exceed its present mental limitations and ascend into the Infinite and Eternal, it will go on pandering to the base passions of its animal self with all the formidable powers of its developing Intel-
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lectuality, as we see it doing today, and a universal resurgence of the animal in man with an almost limitless potentiality for evil and destruction will be the unavoidable dire result.
But that is not to be. Man's evolution cannot thus be wrecked on the shoals of his animal self. His inherent divinity must awake and assert itself. He must one day come to realise that this mind, however developed, is a tool of the obscure forces of the material life which emerge from the nether reaches of his being and express themselves in his character, temperament and action. This realisation will arouse in him an aspiration for freedom and mastery by his soul's union with the Infinite and Eternal. It was precisely to help this spiritual freedom and mastery of man by his union and communion with the Divine that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo undertook the tremendous labour of illumining and transforming the Subconscient and the Inconscient.
"The subconscient is the main support of all habitual movements, especially the physical and lower vital movements. When something is thrown out of the vital or physical, it very usually goes down into the subconscient and remains there as if in seed and comes up again when it can. That is the reason why it is so difficult to get rid of habitual vital movements or to change the character; for, supported or refreshed from this source, preserved in this matrix, your vital movements, even when suppressed or repressed, surge up again and recur. The action of the
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subconscient is irrational, mechanical, repetitive. It does not listen to reason or the mental will. It is only by bringing the higher light and force into it that it can change."1
If we read these words of Sri Aurobindo along with those written by the Mother in her Prayer of Nov. 25, 1913, we cannot help being struck by the identity of their views and experiences:
"The greatest enemy, of a silent contemplation turned towards Thee is certainly this constant subconscient registering of the multitude of phenomena with which we are put into contact. So long as we are occupied with cerebral activity, our conscious thought veils for us this excessive activity of our subconscient reception of things.... It is only when we silence our active thought.. .that we find surging from all sides the multitude of little subconscient notations which often drown us in their overflowing stream. This is why it happens, as soon as we try to enter into the silence of deep contemplation, that we are assailed by innumerable thoughts—if thoughts they can be called—which do not in the least interest us, do not represent for us any action of desire, any conscious attachment, but which only prove to us our inability to control the receptivity, we might say, mechanical, of our subconscient."
1 Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo
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It is clear from these quotations that no attempt at a radical reform of human nature or a reconstruction of human society that fails to explore, illumine and conquer the Subconscient and the Inconscient can ever succeed. The dark depths hold the secret of our evolutionary growth as well as dangerous explosives that may disrupt our being. We are moved by their obscure forces, even in spite of ourselves; even when we think we are guided by our own will and intelligence. "We are governed", says Sri Aurobindo, "by the subconscient and the subliminal even in our conscious existence and in our very self-mastery and self-direction we are only instruments of what seems to us the Inconscient within us." And yet, "the principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient, but wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya."1 Voicing the same truth, the Mother says, "...from many points of view our subconscient has greater knowledge than our habitual consciousness."2
Locating and describing the subconscient the Mother says in her Prayer of March 13, 1914, just a fortnight before her fateful meeting with Sri Aurobindo:
"The subconscient is the intermediate zone between precise perception and the total darkness of the ignorance; it is probable that the majority of beings, even of human
1The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo
2Prayers and Meditations of the Mother
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beings, live constantly in this subconscience; few emerge from it."
It is interesting to compare with these words what Sri Aurobindo says on the same point:
"The Subconscient lies between this Inconscient and the conscious mind, life and body. It contains the potentiality of all the primitive reactions to life which struggle out to the surface from the dull and inert strands of Matter and form by a constant development a slowly evolving and self-formulating consciousness; it contains them not as ideas, perceptions or conscious reactions but as fluid substance of these things. But also all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscient, not as precise though submerged memories but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience, and these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, action, etc., as complexes exploding into action and event, etc., etc. The subconscient is the main cause why all things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in appearance. It is the cause why people say character cannot be changed, the cause also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of for ever. All seeds are there and all samskaras of the mind, vital and body,—it is the main support of death and disease and the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of the Ignorance. All too that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and
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remains as seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment."1
The goal of evolution, as conceived by Sri Aurobindo, is the complete conversion of the Subconscient and the Inconscient into luminous consciousness, and the principal means to attain it is a descent of the supreme divine Light into them. "Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscious in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit."2 This is the conquest that the Mother speaks of in many of her Prayers,—the conquest of the divine Light over the sombre night of the subconscience and the inconscience.
"....And all Thy (God's) effort consists in drawing the substance from this first obscurity so as to make it be born into consciousness. Passion itself is preferable to inconscience. We must therefore constantly march to the conquest of this universal bedrock of inconscience, and making our organism the instrument, transform it little by little into luminous consciousness."3
She speaks elsewhere of the subconscient passivity "which we have to conquer and awaken to the
1Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo
2The Life Divine, Vol. II, Chap. XXVI
Prayers and Meditations of the Mother
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consciousness of Thy divine Presence,"1 and calls this conquest "the work to be accomplished, the mission to be fulfilled upon the earth."
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are both agreed that so long as we live under the dismal sway of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, we are almost amorphous in our psychological being, repeating indefinitely, helplessly, mechanically, the desires and cravings, the impulses and instincts, the passions and propensities which enter into us from the universal nature of Ignorance.
"To feel Thee and aspire for Thee, we must have emerged from the immense sea of the subconscient; we must have begun to crystallise, to define and so to know and then to give ourselves as that alone can give itself which belongs to itself. And how many efforts and struggles are needed to attain to this crystallisation, to come out of the amorphous middle state..."2
We do not remember having come across any instance of an organised spiritual campaign against the bedrock of the Subconscient and the Inconscient that can be cited along with that of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. And yet it is the most momentous humanitarian work ever undertaken; for, without a complete transmutation of the
1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother
2Ibid.
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basic stuff of human nature, it would be idle to dream of a happy and harmonious human life on earth. Man can be redeemed and released into his inherent divinity only by the double discovery we have spoken of above: the discovery of the golden summits of his being and the dark base from which he has started on his evolutionary pilgrimage. A simultaneous conquest of the summits and the base has to be attempted, if the integral being of man has to have an integral divine fulfillment in life. This is the fundamental perception upon which the work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo has been progressing, and its consummation will be the manifestation of God in life, the Life Divine. If we lose sight of this fundamental perception, we shall find ourselves lost in the many-sided vastness of the aim and the incalculable swing and sweep of the process of the Integral Yoga propounded by them. This perception was the well-spring of all the efforts of the Mother even when she knew nothing of Sri Aurobindo, and it has ever been the same in their unwearied collaboration.
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CHAPTER V
THE DIVINE MANIFESTATION AND THE DIVINE LIFE
Before we proceed to note the identity existing between Sri Aurobindo's views on the Divine Manifestation and the Divine Life and those of the Mother before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo, we had better be clear about what Sri Aurobindo understands by Manifestation and the Divine Life.
There are two important elements which give a distinctive character to the above terms and mark them out as the most creative concepts in spiritual philosophy. The first is the evolutionary and the second the collective element. Manifestation is, according to Sri Aurobindo, the very purpose and goal of evolution. All creation is, in a sense, the manifestation of that which lay latent and unmanifest in the Absolute. It is an expression, a self-expression, of the creative delight of existence; a self-revelation in name and form of the nameless and formless Infinite. But what Sri Aurobindo means by manifestation is not a flawed and imperfect self-revelation under the conditions of mental ignorance and material limitations, as we have today in the mental man, but a perfect self-expression of the Divine Sachchidananda in the triple term of mind, life and body, as the crown of Nature's
evolutionary endeavour. He says that emerging from inconscience, the soul of man is mounting, through whatever stumbles and zigzags, towards its own infinite consciousness and bliss in the Divine; and the more it climbs the more it can reveal here, if it will, the light and power and harmony of the higher reaches of its being. The culmination of this evolutionary ascent will be the supreme creative Truth-Consciousness, the transcendent Supermind or Vijnana, in which man will live, even as the Divine lives, in the unfading glory of infinite knowledge and power and creative delight of an immortal existence.
The ascent to the Supermind will be followed by a descent of the supramental Consciousness-Force into the nature of man and the latter's transformation into the divine nature or Para Prakriti. When the transformation is complete,—it is only the supramental Force that can radically transform human nature—the whole being of man will be ready for a "perfect manifestation of the Divine in life, which is the ultimate end of evolution. This evolutionary aspect of Manifestation has to be taken fully into account in any correct appreciation of Sri Aurobindo's gospel of the Divine Life, for it argues the inevitability of such a consummation.
The second element is, that Manifestation, according to Sri Aurobindo, will not be a spiritual victory of an individual or a few exceptional individuals, but a signal triumph of the collective man over the forces of ignorance. For, the crux of the problem of Manifestation is the transfiguration of the physical being of man which is
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half embedded in the Subconscient and the Inconscient —a thing of obscure appetites and mechanical habits, Stubborn in its refusal to admit light and order and any higher conscious force into itself; and no individual, however great he may be, is capable of completely transforming his physical being without there being a considerable change and modification in the general physical being of humanity itself. Matter, like Mind and Life, is an indivisible substance, and if the manifestation of the spirit in it is the final destiny of terrestrial evolution, it has to undergo the supramental transfiguration, just as any other part of the human being; and whatever transformation takes place in it, will be the heritage of humanity at large, and not the enclosed monopoly of only a few gifted individuals. It is true, of course, that a few individuals will be the pioneers in this spiritual work of transformation and manifestation, but what they will achieve will be the pledge and prophecy of what humanity in general is called upon to accomplish. This collective aspect of the message of Manifestation foreshadows the splendour of a more or less universal perfection in humanity.
This Manifestation of Spirit in Matter, of God in man, will be an unhampered expression of man's integral living in the Divine. His body, life, soul and mind, in possession of the Divine and possessed by Him, will reveal nothing but Him in thought and feeling and action, and fulfil Him and His Will in the world. This is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Divine Life. Defining
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the process and the condition of the Divine Life Sri Aurobindo says, "The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of Super-mind towards the divine Being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemisphere, is where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them. The rending of the veil is the condition of the divine life in humanity, for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending Supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life possess its divine power in the play of omnipotent Conscious-Force and Matter open to its divine liberty as a form of the divine Existence. And if there be any goal to the evolution which finds here its present crown and head in the human being, other than an aimless circling and an individual escape from the circling, if the infinite potentiality of this creature, who alone here stands between Spirit and Matter with the power to mediate between them, has any meaning other than an ultimate awakening from the delusion of life by despair and disgust of the cosmic effort and its complete rejection, then even such a luminous and puissant transfiguration and emergence of the Divine in the creature must be that
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high-uplifted goal and that supreme significance."
That the ideal of such a Manifestation with its implicits of divine perfection and fulfillment in general humanity, as an inevitable evolutionary consummation, is a new one cannot be gainsaid. There is no evidence of its existence either in the traditions of Indian spirituality or in Western religious and philosophic Idealism. The Christian ideal of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is at best an ethical ideal of righteousness and piety, carrying no implications of a collective ascent of mankind to a higher than the present mental level of consciousness and a corresponding descent of any higher Truth-Consciousness into humanity. The idea of Satyam Yuga, as it prevails in India, is also a rather vague anticipation of a cyclic reign of Truth and Justice ending the sway of ignorance and falsehood. The idealistic thought of mankind has, indeed, dreamed of a millennium upon earth, but the dream, except being a remote inspiration to the higher endeavours of a very small section of humanity, has never been able to base itself on any definite truth of spiritual experience or any comprehensive vision of the purpose and possibilities of evolution. Sri Aurobindo's ideal of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life on earth claims originality, in as much as it is "a thing to be achieved that has not yet been achieved, not yet clearly visualised, even though it is one natural but still secret outcome of all the past spiritual endeavour." What Sri Aurobindo envisages as the aim of his Integral Yoga,—for he holds up not only the sublime;
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ideal, but gives a definite guidance on the way to its realisation,—is "not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in of a Power of consciousness (the Supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active."
The divine Manifestation in the Divine Life has been the constant preoccupation of the Mother also all through her life, the single aim of all her spiritual strivings. As we read her "Prayers and Meditations", we find it to be the recurring refrain of all her heart's songs mounting towards the Divine. Not content with the bliss of an absorbed union with the Supreme in the immobile depths of her being, she has laboured for long years and through unimaginable difficulties to extend the orbit of the union and its creative bliss down to her most outer physical being, so that from her soul to her body and its activities, all may be an uninterrupted expression of the Divine Presence and an integrated means of the fulfillment of His Will.1 This colossal work of revealing the divine glory and dispensing the divine Grace in a life of ceaseless activity, she has undertaken, as the "Prayers and Meditations" proclaims from page to page, in response to the
1 For fuller details refer to my book, "In the Mother's Light" in 2
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express Will of the Divine, so that the fruits of her labours may be reproduced in humanity and there may be a perfect Manifestation of Spirit in transformed Matter.
In her Prayer of the nth December, 1912, the Mother says to the Divine, "Thou alone art the doer and I am the instrument; and when the instrument is ready for a completer manifestation, the manifestation will quite naturally take place." Even so far back as 1912, she knew that the Manifestation of the Divine on earth was inevitable and that she was the pioneer instrument chosen for that purpose. The knowledge of her supreme role was clear and definite, and she expresses it with a selfless candour and joy in her Prayer of the 10th February, 1913: "My being goes up to Thee in thanksgiving, not because Thou usest this weak and imperfect body to manifest Thyself, but because Thou dost manifest Thyself, and that is the Splendour of splendours, the Joy of joys, the Marvel of marvels." Again, in her Prayer of the 13th March, 1913, she speaks of the ceaseless prayer of her integral being which desires "to unite with Thee (the Divine) so as to manifest Thee." Union has for her at once a static and a dynamic aspect, for, without a dynamic union in the full flood of life's activities, there cannot be any Manifestation in Matter. The path of discipline which leads to the dynamic union, she has chalked out in her Prayer of the 28th November, 1912, and in many a subsequent Prayer; which proves, if any proof were at all needed, that she knew what she meant by Manifestation; and what she meant was exactly what Sri Aurobindo has always held up
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before humanity as the ideal of his Integral Yoga and the goal of the evolutionary march of Nature. In her Prayer of August 8, 1913, she calls upon the essential divine harmony which is immanent in all things to manifest itself "in the most outward forms of life, in every feeling, in every thought, in every act." Her insistence has always been on the perfection of the most outer, the most physical part of human nature. And we have the same ideal stressed time and again in the writings of Sri Aurobindo:"...Its (of his Yoga) aim is not only to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter."1
With regard to the "Advent" of the Divine, that is to •say, His unveiled manifestation in collective humanity, the Mother has been as positive as Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo says,
"If I believe in the probability and not only possibility, if I feel practically certain of the Supramental Descent (I do not fix a date), it is because I have my grounds for the belief, not a faith in the air. I know that the Supramental Descent is inevitable—I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later age....I have been testing day and night for
1 Lights on Yoga by Sri Aurobindo
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years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter." "I know with absolute certitude that the Supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable."1
Let us now listen to what the Mother says in her Prayers to the Divine so far back as 1913-1914. In her Prayer of the 17th August, 1913, she speaks of flying up into "Thy divine atmosphere with the power to return as messengers to the earth and announce the glorious tidings of Thy Advent which is near." Again, on November 29, 1913, she says to the Divine;
"But the hour of Thy manifestation has come. And canticles of joy will soon break out from every side."
Knowing, as she does, her pioneer part in the Manifestation, she prays to God, on February 8, 1914:
"I implore that more and more perfectly identified with Thee, I may become nothing else than Thou manifested in word and act..."
Another Prayer (dated Feb 23, 1914) breathes the self-same aspiration:
1 Letters of Sri Aurobindo Vol. II
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"Grant that I may be a useful and clairvoyant collaboratrix and that all in me may promote the plenitude of Thy manifestation."
And what is the best way of promoting the plenitude of the divine manifestation?
"To live in Love, by Love, for Love, indissolubly united to Thy highest manifestation..."1
"But the supreme science, O Lord, is to be united with Thee, to confide in Thee, to live in Thee, to be Thou; and then there is nothing that is impossible to the man manifesting Thy omnipotence."2
"There is only one resource, it is to unite ourselves as perfectly as we can with the highest and purest light we can conceive of, to identify our consciousness as completely as possible with the absolute Consciousness, to strive to receive all inspiration from it alone, in order to facilitate as best we can its manifestation upon the earth, and, confident of its power, consider the events with serenity."3
In the first and third quotations, the Mother speaks of "the highest manifestation" and "the highest and purest
1 Prayers and Meditations—March I,
2Prayers and Meditations March—17, 1914
3Prayers and Meditations March—23, 1914
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light," which evidently means what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental manifestation or the supramental light, which is the goal of earthly evolution. She knows that the manifestation she is heralding, initiating and incarnating will be something surpassing all that has taken place up to now. It will be a New Creation, as Sri Aurobindo terms it, or a new race of humanity. The unprecedented perfection of such an eventuality can be glimpsed through one of her old writings of 1912 where, outlining the path of "the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity which is One," and indicating "the most useful work to be done," she says:
"To individualise the states of being that were never till now conscious in man and, by that, to put the earth in connection with one more of the fountains of universal force that are still sealed to it."1
This unsealing of the sealed fountains of Force and linking the earth to them—is it not the central secret of Sri Aurobindo's work of the supramental manifestation?
In fact, the more we reflect upon the ideal the Mother had been endeavouring to realise in her life before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo, the more we are struck by the identity of their life's mission and the unwavering certitude of victory with which they have engaged in a grim combat with the forces of terrestrial ignorance. This
1 Words of the Mother
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certitude of victory the Mother had from her early years, not as an outcome of faith, but of a series of profound experiences, and her knowledge about herself and her life's work was luminously confirmed much later by Sri Aurobindo when he wrote,
"Her (the Mother's) embodiment is a chance for the earth-consciousness to receive the Supramental into it and to undergo first the transformation necessary for that to be possible."1
"The Mother comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is the descent which makes full manifestation here possible."2
Born to collaborate with Sri Aurobindo in the work of the supramental manifestation and the establishment of the Divine Life on earth, the Mother had the most decisive physical confirmation of her inner certitude when she first met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry on the 29th March, 1914. The whole teeming mass of her past experiences melted and lit up into one thrilled revelation. The earth shuddered with joy and the heavens showered their benediction when the Mother's soul went up in prayer to the Supreme:
"It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is
1 Letters of Sri Aurobindo on the Mother
2 Letters of Sri Aurobindo on the Mother
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on earth: His presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, when Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth."1
And thus commenced the marvel of a fateful collaboration for the achievement of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life upon earth.
1 Prayers and Meditations—March 30, 1914
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CHAPTER VI
THE MOTHER'S WORK*
WHEN Sri Aurobindo left his body more than four years ago, most of his disciples and devotees, living in the world outside, made anxious enquiries as to what would now be the fate of the Ashram and the great work of the supramental transformation which he had laboured for during the forty long years of his strenuous seclusion at Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo had asserted time and again that the descent of the Supermind and its establishment in the earth-consciousness as a principle and power of the infinite Knowledge-Will, superseding and completing the mind of man, was inevitable, and that a divine life on earth was the crowning glory of human destiny. How was that great work going to be accomplished? Who would now be the leader of the supramental evolution? Was it not merely a lofty dream of a spiritual visionary— one of those dreams and ideals that flash for a moment across our mental skies and fade away into the fight of the common day, leaving but a memory of a splendour and a sublimity never to be achieved on this petty planet of our brief habitation?
* Mother has taken the body because a work of a physical nature (i.e. including a change in the physical world) has to be done..." —Sri Aurobindo
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What reply did the inmates of the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo give to these eager queries? What proof, what certitude did they advance against the turbid surge of facile doubts and misgivings? Stunned by the first shock of separation from One they had so profoundly loved and adored, so faithfully followed and served, they did not know what reply to give, how to convince the doubting, unbelieving minds. Their sole proof, their whole certitude, their absolute faith stood personified before them—the Mother, she who had been to them at once the path, the guide and the goal; and the solemn words of Sri Aurobindo rang in their hearts:
"A day may come when she must stand unhelped
On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,
Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.
Alone with death and close to extinction's edge,
Her single greatness in that last dire scene,
She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man.
In that tremendous silence lone and lost
Of a deciding hour in the world's fate,
In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time
When she stands sole with Death or sole with God
Apart upon a silent desperate brink,
Alone with her self and death and destiny
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As on some verge between Time and Timelessness
When being must end or life rebuild its base,
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.
No human aid can reach her in that hour,
No armoured God stand shining at her side.
Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.
For this the silent Force came missioned down;
In her the conscious Will took human shape:
She only can save herself and save the world."1
With the flaming ardour of a renewed loyalty and the spontaneous self-abandon of an overflowing love, they clung to the Mother in that grim hour of their life. She was there, to whom they had already surrendered all of themselves and on whose guidance they had learned to depend exclusively in all the details of their lives. She was there, who had been leading their spiritual unfold-ment from stage to stage, across many a path and bye-path, over many a gulf and chasm, many a quagmire and precipice, towards the perfection that had attracted them to the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Their contact with Sri Aurobindo had always been through her, and they had come to realise the truth of Sri Ramakrishna's dictum that the key to the abode of Brahman is with the Mother, and that none can enter there unless She, in her Grace,, opens the door. Wearied out by the inner struggle, they had reposed and revived on her lap; battered by the
1 Savitri—Book VI, Canto II
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blasts of life, they had taken refuge at her feet; menaced by the forces of darkness, they had clung to her bosom of boundless love and compassion. Her love had been their mainstay, their never-failing friend and protector, their healer and comforter, and the solitary leader of their spiritual journey. Her love had been, indeed, the very sap and sustenance of their lives. If they stumbled on the rugged path of Yoga, she was there to lift them up; if they were confused and clouded in their vision, her light was always there to brighten up their consciousness and show them the right way. If the path appeared long and steep and laborious, and their heart's fire seemed to sink, her beaming eyes pointed to the distant horizons, golden with the glory of the eternal Sun. With her, they knew they were invincible; without her, they could hardly conceive of existence except as a painful illusion. To be united with her, to be her pliant and docile instruments, to fulfil her work in the world, have been the only aspiration of their hearts. So, when Sri Aurobindo left his body, they naturally looked up to her, yearning to find him in her. She assured them that he had cast off his material vesture only for a definite purpose, and not compelled by any ineluctable law of Nature; and that he was here still, in the earth atmosphere, toiling, as ever, for the fulfillment of the great work of his life—the descent of the Truth-Consciousness and the supramental transformation of man. She assured them that he was present in their midst, not in a figurative sense or as a universal, impersonal consciousness, but as the
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very divine being he had been in his physical body, as the very dynamic Master they had loved and adored. . Sri Aurobindo had often told them that his consciousness and the Mother's were one; and now they realised that truth more and more, in a sense more living, quickening and intimate.
A meditative silence reigned in the Ashram for twelve days after the passing of the beloved Master. Then the normal activities began, but with a striking difference. One felt a pervading Presence in the Ashram atmosphere and the Mother's Force as more sovereignly in command of the life blossoming there. There was an imperative call, a kindling inspiration, almost an irresistible pull to transcend the normal levels of human consciousness and ascend to the radiant heights of the Spirit. Concentration came easier and the need for total self-consecration became more imperious than ever. Many felt an urge, never felt in the same way before, to ferret out all that was unholy and unlovely in them, all that opposed their self-transcendence, and fling them away for ever, so that the influence of the Mother alone could enter into them and mould them in the image of their innate divinity. Besides, each successive day brought a greater contact with the world outside, resulting in a rapid expansion of the Ashram and, which is remarkable, a greater and more enthusiastic acceptance by the world of the ideal for which the Ashram stood. The expansion appeared, indeed, to exceed all expectation. The departments of the Ashram work multiplied and the energies of the
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sadhakas found new channels of self-expression. It is a singular, though usual, feature of the Ashram activities that they develop of themselves, as if impelled by some invisible force, without any previous plan or blue-print. A person comes and starts a new line in which he appears to be an expert, or one of the sadhakas suddenly develops a capacity of which he never suspected any trace in himself before, and it becomes the occasion for a new department. Those who live in the Ashram and have observed how the departments come into being and thrive, know well enough that their single source of inspiration is the Mother, whose supramental Will manifests itself in its inscrutable way in the various life of her children. The working of that Will now made itself felt more powerfully than ever and sought manifold ways of self-fulfillment. Streams of visitors poured in, day after day, month after month, to pay their homage to the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo, catch a glimpse of the ideal of the Life Divine and imbibe something of the Light and Force emanating from the Mother. It seemed as if the flood-gates of a dynamic spirituality had been flung wide open to the whole world without any distinction of creed and colour. It seemed that the Mother's will and aspiration breathed by her Prayer of January 9, 1914, when she knew nothing of Sri Aurobindo and his teachings, had begun to be realised:
"O Lord, unseizable Reality, Thou who constantly escapest before our conquering advance even though it is
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effective, and who wilt always be the Unknown in spite of all that we shall learn to know of Thee, in spite of all that we shall have ravished from Thy eternal mystery, we would, with a complete and constant effort, combining the multiple paths which lead towards Thee, advance like a rising and indomitable flood, breaking all obstacles, crossing all barriers, lifting all veils, dispersing all clouds, piercing all darknesses, advance towards Thee, always towards Thee, with a movement so powerful, so irresistible, that a whole multitude will be swept on behind us, and the earth conscious of Thy new and eternal Presence will understand at last what are her true ends, and live in the harmony and peace of Thy sovereign realisation...."
It seemed that the mission of her life of which she had spoken in so many of her Prayers was going at last to be fulfilled:
"Grant that I may accomplish my mission, that I may help in Thy integral manifestation."
"Grant, O Divine Teacher, that we may more and more, better and better, know and accomplish our mission upon the earth, that we may fully utilise all the energies that are in us, and that Thy sovereign Presence may become more and more perfectly manifested in the silent depths of our soul, in all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our actions...."1 She, who had always kept herself
1 Both these Prayers were written by the Mother in 1914,
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in the background and shunned the lime-light, became now the cynosure of countless eyes and the hope and refuge of many wandering souls. Many who came to see the Ashram came again, and again, to see more, and more; for they felt that here there were more things below than on the surface; and some even came, decided to stay and enroll themselves as warriors in the great spiritual bated. Parents left their children, husbands left their wives, brothers left their sisters, whole families came and settled—all drawn by some irresistible, mysterious magnetism. Even little children, once they came and felt a touch of the Mother's love, refused to go back with their parents and were happy to live and grow under the Mother's outspread wings. The Mother dislikes advertisement and propaganda, particularly in the cause of spiritual institutions. She says that, if her work is the work of the Divine, workers will flock to her from all parts of the globe. And so, indeed, they have been flocking—from America and England and France, from Germany and Holland and Spain, from Sweden and Australia and China and Japan, and from almost every part of India. The stream expands as it pours in and rushes forward to bathe the Mother's feet. Fired with
remarkable in them is not only the word 'manifestation', but the expression 'integral manifestation', which has always been the keyword of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy. This insistence on the integrality of the realisation, unheard of before Sri Aurobindo, is the most conclusive evidence of the identity of their souls and their mission upon earth.
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the new spirit, the standard-bearers of the new Light gather round her to help fulfil her mission. Each day brings, as if by miracle, a more admiring appreciation of the Ashram and its expanding activities. Is it any wonder that men feel spontaneously drawn to one who can awaken their souls, unveil their innate harmony and happiness and lead them to the perfect fulfillment of their divine destiny?
In 1951 the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre came into existence. On the occasion of its convention the Mother said: "Sri Aurobindo is present in our midst, and with all the power of his creative genius he presides over the formation of the university centre which for years he considered as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life. In his name I open today this Convention meeting here with the purpose of realising one of his most cherished ideals." It is a centre where irrespective of race and clime, men can receive a harmonious education designed to develop and enlighten not only their mind but their whole being—soul, mind, life and body—and give them a definite lead towards a dynamic spiritual life lived in God and devoted to the fulfilment of the divine Will in the world. It is a centre where men can learn how to achieve their perfection and fulfilment, not only on one but on all planes of their existence, and express their inherent divinity which is now
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masked by their half-animal humanity. It is a centre where they can learn to rise beyond all artificial divisions of race and country, sex and age, caste and creed, and find themselves one with all, in peace and harmony with all—in God. It is a place where they can serve humanity best by learning to serve the Divine in humanity.
The University is growing, slowly but steadily, in the silent way things grow and flower under the benignant eye of God, when the bustling mind of man, in its arrogant incompetence, ceases to interfere. The number of children has been increasing by leaps and bounds and, but for the extreme difficulty of accommodation, would have swollen to unmanageable proportions. It is in the flower-like faces of these children, more than anywhere else, that one can perceive the gleam of the heavenly Light the Mother has been striving to establish in the earth-consciousness, the Light about which she wrote decades ago in her Prayers and Meditations:
"A new Light shall break upon the earth, a new world shall be bom: the things that were promised shall be fulfilled."
Addressing the children of the University, she said in 1951:
"There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man. Because man is, for the moment,
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the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material habits and instincts. Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.
"Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it.
"You have the immense privilege of having come quite young to the Ashram, that is to say, still plastic and capable of being moulded according to this new ideal and thus becoming the representatives of the new race. Here, in the Ashram, you are in the most favourable conditions with regard to the environment, the influence,
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the teaching and the example, to awaken in you this supramental consciousness and to grow according to its law.
"Now, all depends on your will and your sincerity. If you have the will no more to belong to ordinary humanity, no more to be merely evolved animals; if your will is to become men of the new race realising Sri Aurobindo's supramental ideal living a new and higher life upon a new earth, you will find here all the necessary help to achieve your purpose; you will profit fully by your stay in the Ashram and eventually become living examples for the world."
This, then, is the Mother's work—to awaken in man the supramental Truth-Consciousness and help him grow according to its law. Evindently it is a signal departure from the aims and objects of traditional spirituality, which points to the Beyond as the only kingdom of perfection and fulfilment. The Mother's Force is directed to the radical transformation of the whole active nature of man, so that the gulf between his outer consciousness and the divine Consciousness may be bridged and that he may manifest the Divine in every movement of his individual and collective life on earth.
The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo is the Mother's creation, and she has built it up, stone by stone, arch by arch, so that one day it may become a temple and a radiating centre of the new Light, a prism of the splendour of the Supermind. With her will united with the Will of the
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Divine, her unbarred vision contemplating the future more clearly than we can contemplate the immediate present, and her supramental Force creating the principles and conditions of the Truth-life upon earth, the Mother has been silently proceeding with her work, unmindful of the praise or blame of the world. What has been achieved is little by the side of what she has to achieve for God and humanity—a refounding of human life on the peace and bliss and creative harmony of the Spirit, a perfect revelation of God in Matter.1
1 "All here shall be one day her sweetness's home, All contraries prepare her harmony..."
—Savitri, Book III, Canto II
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