The Marvel that is the Mother

The ancient Vedic seers had a famous appellation for the Godhead Agni, the Mystic Fire, through whom they invoked and received the favours ofall the Gods. They called him the wonderful fire, Agni Adbhuta. The Upanishadic bards acclaimed that the Brahman is aascaryam, a marvel. The marvel in this twentieth century is the manifestation amongst us on earth, known as The Mother, the spiritual collaborator or Sri Aurobindo.

“She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.” This luminous line from the epic poem “Savitri” of Sri Aurobindo sums up her personality. When the Mother, as Madam Mira Richard first met Sri Aurobindo, she wrote in her diary as follows:

“It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth. His presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, when Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.

O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with joyand gratitude.”

What is this marvel and what is marvellous about the Mother? At all times, in India there have been great sages and saints and spiritual personalities. They have been a haven of refuge for humanity, practising in their lifetime what they preached. And when in due time they departed from the earthly scene, their spiritual message has survived and has become part and parcel of the rich inheritance ofthis country. Is the Mother just one more such spiritual personality in the long heirarchy of Eternal Mentors who leaven our very existence? Is Sri Aurobindo Ashram of which she has been the presiding genius and the moving Spirit, one more or the Ashrams that are littered all over the country?

All along, the spiritual tradition in India has been to build up the Spirit at the cost of Matter. Life is negated in order to affirm God. It has all along been deemed that Matter and Spirit are at cross purposes and one can be victorious only when the other is annihilated. It was left to Sri Aurobindo to rally the whole Indian thought to the Vedas and early Vedanta where itis declared that the man is the offspring of Heaven and Earth and he cannot disown his parentage from either of them, where again it is categorically stated that God is not realised in some remote Elsewhere but Here, in this life on earth itself, atra brahma samasnute. What has been wrong with the East is that it has been stressing on the Spirit at the cost of Matter and What has been ailing the West is that it has been emphasizing on Matter ignoring the Spirit. The time has come in the evolution of humanity when both the East and the West should unite in the common endeavour of welding Matter and Spirit together. It is by no accident that Sri Aurobindo, by birth belonged to the East and the Mother his close collaborator hailed from the West. Sri Aurobindo who inherited bybirth the hoary spirituality of the East had to spend his formative years in the West and the Mother who was heir to the pragmatic approach of the West had to repair to the East for the fulfilment of her life mission. Again, it was no historical accident that a Western settlement in the heart of Eastern culture and civilization was chosen as the place of their life-work, as the living laboratory of their breath-taking experiments. From Pondicherry in India has been radiating the Light that is the harbinger of a new world, the hope of humanity. It is the marvellous Hour of God, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, when the whole of humanity is being prepared for the next step in evolution.

This collaboration itself is a marvel. History has not witnessed such a united endeavour, close collaboration between twocontemporary spiritual stalwarts. Instances have been, where equally famous Master and Disciple have carried on at the same time the spiritual work taken up by them. Even in the case of great Descents of Divinity which occur from time to time to give a push to the tardy evolution of humanity, the force behind such Descents, the Avataara Shakti has always been in the ground. Not that the Force that motivated the descent was not recognised in its time–the Primordial Poet saw his work Ramayana intuitively as the great story of Sita, sitaayaah caritam mahat–but it was fused in the light of the Avataara. It is a marvel that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as the Shakta and the Shakti, as the Two in One, have been acting with such identified spirit and purpose. The supremacy of the Purusha stressed by the Vedantic ideal and the paramountcy of the Shakti emphasized by the Tantric goal find a happy fulfilment in the equal partnership of an integral realisation that is Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The identity is so complete that the Mother has made this declaration about Sri Aurobindo: “Without him, I exist not; without me, he is unmanifest.” Indeed, for the Mantra, the gospel of Integral Yoga, the Rishi is Sri Aurobindo, the candas is the Divine Will and the Devataa is the Mother.

Sri Aurobindo Ashram, a standing testimony tothe organisational capacity of the Mother, is a marvel by itself. It is not like any other Ashram where practisants far moved from earthly life in the solitude of caves and forests contemplate in serenity on the evanescence of existence. It is situated in the heart of a busy city and hums with the activities that constitute the normal chores of life. It is a human laboratory where each soul is tested in the crucible of Integral Yoga and a new consciousness developed for the advent of a New Life. About founding of the Ashram the Mother herself has said the following:

“At the beginning of my present earthly existence I was put into touch with many people who said they had a great inner aspiration, an urge towards something deeper and truer, but were tied down, subjected, slaves of that brutal necessity of earning their livelihood and that this weighed down upon them so much, took away so much of their time and energy that they could not engage in any other activity, inner or outer. I heard that very often.

“I was very young at that time and always I used to tell myself that if ever I could do it, I would try tocreate a little world–oh! quite a small one but still–a small world where people would be able to live without having tobe preoccupied by problems of food and lodging and clothing and the imperious necessities of life, to see if all the energies freed by this certainty of an assumed material living, would spontaneously be turned towards the divine life and inner realisation. Well, towards the middle of my life–at least what is generally considered the middle of human life–the means was given to me and I could realise this, that is, create these conditions of living.”

The Mother’s concern has never been for herself. Personal liberation, mukti, she had achieved long ago. Her sole preoccupation had been, to quote the entry in her diary, “tolive Thy Love, to radiate Thy Love with such potency and effectiveness that all may feel fortified, regenerated and illumined by our contact; to have power to heal life, to relieve suffering, to generate peace and calm confidence, to efface anguish and replace it by the sense of the one true happiness, the happiness that is founded in Thee and never fades.” It is a marvel that with such incessant contacts she had with all the motley multitudes of restless humanity, her soul consented to rest in a human body for such a length of time. It is a marvel again that she could have a unique relationship with each individual who looked up to her and at the same time maintain her universal consciousness. Her Light of Grace has shone equally on the summit of the Spirit and in the abyss of Matter. Identifying herself with this Earth and its suffering inhabitants, taking upon herself the burden of the evolving humanity her life has been one of unfailing hope, abiding faith and endless toil. Her early dream of a place “somewhere upon earth that no nation can claim as the sole property, a place where all human beings of goodwill, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth, a place of peace, concord, harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the cause of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities, a place where the needs of the spirit and the care for progress would get precedence over the satisfaction of desires, passions, the seeking for material pleasures and employment”–such a place is already taking shape in the pilot project of Auroville, the City of Dawn.

The Mother’s teaching is simple and direct. It transcends all religion. Her writings are full of spiritual clarity and directed towards the heart of humanity. Her ‘Supreme Discovery’, ‘Four Austerities and Four Liberations’ her essays on education, her vibrant messages, her pithy sayings–by their literary value alone–have earned for her a permanent place in modern French literature. To understand the writings of Sri Aurobindo, one should have some sort of ground of Indian religion and philosophy. The Mother’s writings do not demand any preknowledge of anything. Their appeal is so direct, so lucid. One should have the sincerity and receptivity of a child. That’s all. Her “Conversations”, “Questions and Answers” are a veritable treasure-house of occult wisdom and spiritual teaching. There has been no work of this kind in the spiritual field so far that lays bare the occult phenomena and the secret workings of the cosmic set-up and the human soul.

The Truth, the Right, the Vast that have been held in a physical body is the marvel that is the Mother. She has declared in unequivocal terms; “I belong to no nation, no civilization, no society, no race, but to the Divine.

I give obedience to no master, no ruler, no law, no social convention but to the Divine.”

And what matters in the ultimate analysis, we have her own words: “Do not ask questions about the details of the material existence of this body, they are in themselves of no interest and must not attract attention.

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

“Let endurance be your watchword: teach the life-force in you–your vital being–not to complain but to put up with all the conditions necessary for great achievement.”
–Mother