Blessed are those

Foreword

LEAPING TO THE FUTURE

Our sweet Mother has written three beautiful plays which give meaningful pointers to integral yoga. The third play, The Ascent to Truth, has a sub-title: 'A Dream of Life'. The play is a symbolic representation of the supreme need for perseverance. A group of people have come together "to find the truth". They have to ascend a mountain to get at it. There are seven stages in this ascent. One by one they fall back. The first to do is the Philanthropist as he cannot give up his attachment to the external world. At the sixth stage even the Ascetic decides to pitch his tent and not move further. He has gained personal salvation and so why should he worry about going on and on?

"In the course of our ascent I have discovered my true being, my true Self. I have become one with the Eternal and nothing else exists for me, nothing else is necessary. All that is not That is illusory, worthless. So I consider that I have reached the end of the path... And here is a sublime and solitary spot, a place that is truly favourable to the life I shall lead from now on. I shall live here in perfect contemplation, far from earth and men, free at last from the need to live."

The two Aspirants - a Boy and a Girl - alone reach the summit which is a presence of Truth. There is no space except that on which their feet rests. It is a surrealistic situation. They had reached the limits of personal effort. Together they leap forward with complete faith, not giving way to doubt or fear. Such total surrender as theirs has activated the wings of Grace which leads them to the land of Realisation. The play closes with the Girl's spontaneous utterance: "What marvellous splendour! Now we have only to learn to live the new life."

The Mother was no arm-chair philosopher. She set in motion the building of Auroville to realize the Future of "marvelous splendour" in concrete terms. She was always thinking of the Future. Navajata Bhaiji writes:

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"A few days before She retired, I told Her that it had come to me in meditation that we should have a world magazine in all languages. She nodded, and Champaklal gave Her a paper and She wrote down, the Next Future, and then asked for another paper and wrote in French, Le Prochain Avenir."

Incidentally, the epigraph chosen for this book is the Mother's 1971 message: "Blessed are those who take a leap towards the future." And so the aspirants came to the Ashram and the Auroville, literally leaping from the mountain of material life into the unknown, as the Boy and the Girl do in The Ascent to Truth. Some came on an impulse, a few were directed by their inner voice to take the plunge, others were simply born in the Aurobindonian atmosphere like Arabinda Basu. In the twentieth century world of cut-throat competition to go on and on and up and up, these chosen few preferred to set themselves sail on boats that had nothing to hold them up except total surrender. The wings of Grace did not abandon them, and a few of them have chosen to tell their tale. Spiritual life is never smooth-sailing but tenacity of purpose can overcome any obstruction. And so it has been with many of the persons who have documented their personal experiences. A few, such records have been brought together in this volume. They·gently point out the pathways they chose to reach their goal which was the creative and comforting world of the Divine Mother.

Most of the records are immediate responses from the hearts touched by the awe and ecstasy of having drawn close to the Divine in a human form. As when Bhaga describes the Aspiration community in 1973. But the physical conditions just did not matter. This was an altogether rarefied atmosphere based on the soul's strength where one could receive the Mahasamadhi of the Mother with equanimity, a feeling of being surrounded by a blissful light. All those who came in contact with the Mother achieved their own reception of this light in varied ways. It could be Clare receiving guidance for a conscious conception, the gentle withdrawal of Dr. Susil Pani's father, Francois Gautier getting "frozen" changing his life totally or Kireet Joshi seeing in Her an

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icon of "unsurpassable kindness." Just as no two persons experienced the Mother's presence in an identical manner, no two entries in this loving homage appear straight-jacketed. There is a joyous abandon in their style. There are reminiscences, interviews, passing thoughts, memories recollected in tranquility or recollected to overcome some personal crisis. But always a new angle, a new pitch.

Andre Morisset takes us back to the Mother's early days in Paris with a charming introduction when he was taken to his great-grandmother Mirra Ismalun in Lausanne. Mme. Ismalun asks the little child: "Good morning, my little Andre, you find me very old, do you not?" The poor child replies innocently: "Oh! Oui!" ("Oh! Yes!"). That is how the editors have made this collection trembling on the pin-point of earthly life that aspires towards the transformed state of divine living. Humdrum life and spirituality intermingle as each aspirant soul tries to climb up to God, with the help of this Golden Ladder. This is why neither Her age, nor pain that laid siege on the Mother in her last years on earth could shake the faith and firm tread of the aspirant community. No unbelief clouds us as we read the varied experiences. Thus Narad: "Each time I went to see Mother I had the same experience of entering a room without walls." And Loretta as she kneels down in front of Mother in 1972:

"My earlier impression of age and frailty disappeared. Mother was the youngest person I ever saw. She was shining as though there was a light inside Her, coming through Her skin, which was as white and smooth as a baby's. She looked extremely alive. Her blue eyes were very alive and bright. There was an atmosphere of clarity and consciousness around her."

The editors have structured the book in such a way that we get to have a complete picture of aspiration and acceptance, from almost the beginning to the ongoing construction of the Auroville, transforming dreams to realities. While memories from 2005 onwards come from fifteen devotees, most of whom are still active in serving the vision of the Mother which is concretized as the

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Auroville, the earlier days of the Ashram are brought to us by twelve well-known Aurobindonians like Amrita and Dmitri. We even get to have glimpses of Sri Aurobindo thanks to early comers to Pondicherry like my father K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar and Arabinda Basu. The gentle manner in which the Mother guided Her children, as when She asked Dilip Kumar Roy a question and answered it too: "Why do you think we are here? To please Sri Aurobindo." That is sadhana! Aravinda Basu explains the contours of this sadhana in detail:

"... the most difficult thing is to please Sri Aurobindo. Every fibre of your being has to be surrendered - completely, no reserve, nothing held back. Give, give, give."

There is never a dull moment in this compilation which gives several authentic visionary experiences of the disciples who are engaged in works and are learning about integral yoga, with unswerving devotion to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. So, in effect, these recollections are not of a past but recordations of a continuing present And thus they do become "the angel of the way" revealed to us by Sri Aurobindo:

"... love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one's love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover's being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation. "

The third part seeks to explain the divine experiment at Auroville. Thus Nolini Kanta Gupta writing on the "Mother's Creation." takes us beyond the City of Dawn:

"The Mother's work encompasses the whole world; it aims at a transcendence taking up the young and old, the men and women

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of the Ashram as well as the human race.... How various are the elements which constitute this earthly life, our institution will be a picture of that, a laboratory, as it were, for new creation..."

The work concludes with excerpts from the Mother's nectarean messages and Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, relating all this with the experience indicated in Isha Upanishad. All the writings gathered here personify the "angel of the way", bhakti. One just holds hands with these angels in a meditative mood and then life moves onwards softly, smoothly, sweetly. We can also read choice messages of the Mother that give practical guidance for day-to-day living. Though Auroville-centric, the book is about the larger community of seekers who had come into the aegis of the Aurobindonian world. I am infinitely grateful to the compilers of Blessed are those... for giving me the privilege of being associated with it. All I can say is to salute these pilgrims of infinity and say, "I am blessed."

Prema Nandakumar

Mudhal Tirumaligai

152/91, South Chitrai Street

SRIRANGAM-620006

1.1.2015

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