from Georges Beyond Man-The Word of Creation As the Mother was now put in charge of the disciples, the six most carefree years of her life belonged to the past. In 1926 there were only twenty-four disciples, but the number would increase rapidly. In 1927 there were thirty-six and in the following year already eighty-five. The material side of the work demanded by the organization, housing, feeding and financing of the constantly increasing group was by itself enormous, especially in the India of that time. As for the spiritual side, there is no more difficult occupation than that of the true spiritual leader, the guru, for he takes the destiny of his disciples on himself, inclusive of all their difficulties, especially the psychological and therefore least perceptible ones. ‘I carried all of them in my consciousness as in an egg,’ the Mother would say later. It was she who was actually doing their yoga, so much so that Sri Aurobindo had to enlighten the disciples: ‘The Mother in order to do her work had to take all the Sadhaks inside her personal being and consciousness; thus personally (not merely impersonally) taken inside, all the disturbances and difficulties in them including illnesses could throw themselves upon her in a way that could not have happened if she had not renounced the self-protection of separateness. Not only illnesses of others could translate themselves into attacks on her body — these she could generally throw off as soon as she knew from what quarter and why they came — but their inner difficulties, revolts, outbursts of anger and hatred against her could have the same and a worse effect.’329 The feeling that she was ‘nothing but a Western woman’ who had come to live in India only a few years before, was still very much present in the minds of some Indian disciples. It even surfaces repeatedly in the literature, e.g. in K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s biography of the Mother: ‘There was no question about her managerial ability, her unfailing friendliness and her personal spiritual eminence. And yet … the ‘Mother’ of the Ashram? … With complete authority to direct its affairs and ordain the destinies of the inmates? After all, some of the sadhaks — so they felt — had been doing quite well in their sadhana under the old dispensation. Why, then, this drastic change? Was it sanctified by Indian tradition? Would it work after all? The new dispensation with the Mother at the head of the Ashram meant, first, an unquestioning acceptance of her as the spiritual Mother, second, a total surrender to her of one’s whole life, and third, a ready and happy submission to the discipline laid down by her for the smooth and efficient functioning of the Ashram.’330 Sri Aurobindo himself wrote about this problem in 1934: ‘The opposition between the Mother’s consciousness and my consciousness was an invention of the old days … and emerged at a time when the Mother was not fully recognised or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning. Even after they had recognised her they persisted in this meaningless opposition and did great harm to them and others.’ And here follows the well-known declaration: ‘The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play … If anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers.’331 The Mother embarked on the work, as always, with the force of the full commitment of her immense occult and spiritual knowledge and her supernatural powers. As she herself sometimes said jokingly, she always worked ‘at a gallop’, ‘with the force of a cyclone’ or ‘at the speed of a jet plane’. ‘I have not wasted my time,’ she said. She being an embodiment of the Great Mother, Maheshwari, Mahakali and Durga with their mighty divine capacities were three of her many emanations, and she held in herself the Power which creates the worlds. ‘Mother’s pressure for a change is always strong — even when she doesn’t put it as a force,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. ‘It is there by the very nature of the Divine Energy in her,’332 the Divine Shakti. The Overmind, personified in Shri Krishna, having established itself in matter, the Mother now started to work out its possibilities without delay. As she herself relates: ‘Sri Aurobindo had put me in charge of the external work because he wanted to withdraw in concentration to hasten the manifestation of the supramental Consciousness, and he had announced to the ones who were there [on 24 November 1926] that he confided to me the task of helping and guiding them; that I would remain in contact with him, of course; and that he would do the work through me. Things suddenly, immediately took a certain form: a very brilliant creation was being worked out with extraordinary precision, wonderful experiences, contacts with divine beings, and all sorts of manifestations which are considered to be miraculous. Experiences followed upon experiences. In brief, it developed in a completely brilliant way which was … I must say extremely interesting.’333 ‘I had started a kind of “overmental creation”, to make each God come down in a [human] being,’334 she said. The Mother, as Mother of the Gods and with her exceptional occult powers, had started materializing the Overmind, the world of the Gods, on the Earth. She was in possession of the Word of Creation, the Word that becomes Reality when uttered. K.D. Sethna says: ‘I vividly remember the substance of her account of it to me in an interview. She said she had come to possess the Word of Creation. When I looked a little puzzled she added: “You know that Brahma335 is said to create by his Word. In the same way whatever I would express could take place. I willed to express a whole new world of superhuman reality. Everything was prepared in subtle dimensions and was waiting to be precipitated upon earth.”’336 Elsewhere the same author writes: ‘The nine or ten months after the Overmind’s descent were a history of spectacular spiritual events. All who were present have testified that miracles were the order of the day … Those which were common occurrences in those ten months were most strikingly miraculous and, if they had continued, a new religion could have been established with the whole world’s eyes focused in wonder on Pondicherry.’337 A God was embodied in each sadhak — the God he represented in his inmost being. For all of us have a part of the One Godhead in us, and this part belongs necessarily to the divine manifestation. At the origin stands the Great Mother; out of her issued the cosmic Forces who are the Gods; out of them issued the forces which, for the most part, still remain unrealized in us. Sri Aurobindo said that ‘the inner being of every man is born in the ansha [a substantial part] of one Devata [a God] or the other.’ To fathom this gives a deep insight into the glorious destination awaiting each of us and which is the aim of the evolutionary adventure we have undertaken of our own free will and choice. Regrettably, the aspirants of the newly formed Ashram were not yet ready for that stupendous transformation which would have made them into overmental beings on Earth. About these days Narayan Prasad has related the following: ‘Between the end of 1926 and the end of 1927, the Mother was trying to bring down the Overmind gods into our beings. But the adharas were not ready to bear them; on the contrary there were violent reactions, though some had good experiences. There was a sadhak whose consciousness was so open that he could know what the Mother and the Master were talking about. One sadhak would get up while meditating and touch the centre of obstruction in someone else’s body. There were others who thought that the Supermind had descended into them. One or two got mentally unbalanced because of the inability to stand the pressure.’338 We go back to the narrative of the Mother. ‘One day, I went as usual to relate to Sri Aurobindo what had happened [in the course of the day]. We had arrived at something really very interesting and I may have shown some enthusiasm in my relation of what had happened. Sri Aurobindo then looked at me and said: “Yes, it is a creation of the Overmind. It is very interesting, it is very well done. You will work miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn the events of the earth upside down, in a word … ” And he smiled and said: “It will be a big success. But it is a creation of the Overmind. And what we want is not success: we want to establish the Supermind on the Earth. One must be capable of renouncing an immediate success to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.” With my inner consciousness I understood immediately — a few hours later, the creation did not exist anymore … And from that moment onwards we have started again on different bases.’339 Later the Mother once more looked back on that incredible moment in the history of mankind when the greatest religion the world has ever known might have been born. ‘He has textually told me: “Yes, it is an overmental creation, but it is not the truth we want. It is not the truth, the highest truth,”340 he said. I said nothing, not a word. In half an hour I undid everything. I undid everything, I really undid everything — I cut the connection between the Gods and the human beings, and destroyed everything, everything. For I knew that as long as it was there, it was so attractive, you know — one saw amazing things all the time — that one might have been tempted to go on with it, thinking: “We will adjust what is necessary afterwards,” but that was impossible. And so I remained quiet half an hour, sitting down, and I undid everything. We had to start something else. But I did not talk about it, I told it to nobody except him. Nobody knew it at that time, for they would have been completely discouraged.’341 In 1939, when after the fracture of his thigh Sri Aurobindo again conversed with some of his disciples, he himself would look back on those fantastic months. He said in answer to a question by A.B. Purani: ‘At the time you speak of we were in the vital.’ By this he meant that he and the Mother by then had brought the Supramental Consciousness down into the vital. ‘[It was] the brilliant period of the Ashram. People were having brilliant experiences, big push, energy, etc. If our Yoga had taken that line, we could have ended by establishing a great religion, bringing about a great creation, etc., but our real work is different, so we had to come down into the physical. And working on the physical is like digging the ground; the physical is absolutely inert, dead like stone … You have to go on working and working year after year, point after point, till you come to a central point in the subconscious which has to be conquered and is the crux of the whole problem, hence exceedingly difficult … This point in the subconscient is the seed and it goes on sprouting and sprouting till you have cut out the seed.’342 The limits of their Work were shifted again and again, every time beyond the horizon of the possible, of their expectation. After that brief brilliancy of the miraculous world of the Gods on the earth, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother descended in the black pit of Matter and of the Inconscient supporting Matter. Only when the Hell of the Night was conquered and exterminated in the underground caves of our world could the Heavens of the One Godhead be founded on earth. That was what they had come for, the Two-in-One — not for a realization somewhere halfway, however glorious. The Mother effaced the greatest most miraculous creation in the history of the world in less than an hour. ‘The greatest power in any hands during human history was set aside as if it were a trifle,’343 writes K.D. Sethna, and also: ‘This was without any doubt the mightiest deed of renunciation in spiritual history.’344 And nobody knew about it.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 13:18:56 +0000
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