Editorial

THE WORLD NO MORE THE SAME

THE MOTHER

(December 30, 1972)

The Mother: So it is going to be the new year ...

Question : Do you feel anything for the new year?

(After a silence)

The Mother: Things have taken an extreme form, so there is as it were an uplift of the atmosphere towards a splendour…almost inconceivable and at the same time the feeling that at any moment one may... one may die–not “die” but the body be dissolved. And so the two at the same time form a consciousness (Mother shakes her head) all the old things seem puerile, childish, unconscious–within there ... it is tremendous and wonderful.

So, the body, the body has one prayer–and it is always the same:

Make me worthy of knowing You,
Make me worthy of serving You,
Make me worthy of being You.

I feel in myself a growing force...but it is of a new quality...in silence and in contemplation.

Nothing is impossible (Mother opens her hands upward).

(Silence)

It was on the eve of the New Year, 1973, that the Mother had given this hint–that it was not unlikely for her to give up her body during the year that was setting in. The year 1972 had seen her in her natural resplendent form–inspiring and guiding her children in the Ashram and all around the world at many levels of their need–for it was the great year of Sri Aurobindo’s Birth Centenary. In this ground it was not unnatural for most of us to miss the import of the hint.

Nevertheless, a simple question wells up from many a mind: Victory over death was a set goal of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. How is it then that both the Master and the Mother of the Yoga had to leave their bodies?

Such a simple question is the result of our having too much simplified the process of understanding the Yoga. To achieve a victory over death as such was never the goal of the Integral Yoga. What we ordinarily understand as victory over death is a survival of the body.* With the life as we live it, its illogical prolongation in the body could not be the motive of God’s labour!

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo was meant for making man grow into a divine consciousness–for ushering in a new phase in the evolution–for an ascent from darkness into light, from ignorance into true knowledge. Death itself was a result as well as a form of ignorance. “Death is a question Nature puts continuously to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself.”

But this need not be a settled fact unto eternity. There would be a day when man would possess a true life–a life free from falsehood and ignorance. It is only then that he could rise above the tyranny and obstinacy of death. May be the day is far off, but its advent is assured.

So, it is not the popular notion of immortality which holds any good here. It will perhaps be proper to say that immortality will be one of the several marked traits of that hitherto unrealized phase in evolution–the supramental phase–and “the supratmental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were doing their tapasya to bring down this supramental consciousness onto the earth-nature. The marvel the advent of this consciousness can achieve is termed by them as the transformation. Man, at present, “only partly liberated from the animal involution”, can then transcend himself and evolve into a much greater being. Birth and death–in between a life lived either happily or unhappily–need not be the unalterable epitome of human life. Man’s destiny carries a promise sublime.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have revealed that promise to us and have done all that was necessary for the fulfilment of that promise. Their experiences and achievements have been too profound, too mystic for the language we understand.

“The supermind alone can transform the lower nature.” On the other hand the present condition of the world was by no means congenial to the manifestation of this power. It was through such an extraordinary situation or paradox that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had to negotiate their tapasya. They had to invoke and hold this mighty power of Truth in their divine bodies–a power which coming in contact with the gross falsehood of the earth could have shattered the latter otherwise. But the power would work out its miracle in a natural way now that it had found a home in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother amidst this alien earth domain.

How this force has worked and is working is primarily a matter of experience although much idea can be formed about it from the works and letters of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What the Mother has achieved for us in her being and body, will perhaps take a long time to be felt and realised byhumanity, although all who turn inwardly towards her will not lack in an inner conviction and a sure touch of the truth.

The world, despite its appearance, is never the same after the advent of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

    Sri Aurobindo Ashram                                                                                                                                                                    –MANOJ DAS
           Pondicherry                                                                                                                                                                                Guest Editor

* It is significant in this context, to remember what Sri Aurobindo says in a foot-note in The Life Divine: “Even if science–physical science or occult science (Italics ours)–were to discover the necessary conditions or means for an indefinite survival of the body, still, if the body could not adapt itself so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner growth, the soul would find some way to abandon it and pass on to a new incarnation. The material or physical causes of death are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being.”