Continued from PART 3
Editor’s Note: In Part 4, the author focuses on the Avatarhood of the Mother, because as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother both have said, they are One Consciousness.
4. The Mother Avatar
Outspoken or not, the avatarhood of the Mother has been much more controversial than that of Sri Aurobindo. From the beginning there were comments on the fact that Sri Aurobindo had taken her (and Dorothy Hodgson) into his house, and the presence as well as the person of that French lady were often put into question. After all, she had been married twice, wore perfume and make-up, and moved in mysterious ways. Besides, who had ever heard of a female Avatar, and a foreign, French female to boot?
In the letters of which his booklet The Mother is composed, Sri Aurobindo describes the Mother’s three essential aspects: the transcendent Mother, the universal cosmic Mother, and the human Mother in the yoga. A disciple asked him: “Do you not refer to the Mother (our Mother) in your book The Mother?” Sri Aurobindo answered with one word: “Yes.”
Then the disciple asked: “Is she not the ‘individual’ Divine Mother who has embodied ‘the power of these two vast ways of her existence’?” Sri Aurobindo answered again with one word: “Yes.” And he explained, “The Divine puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be the Divine. It is a manifestation that takes place, a manifestation of a growing divine consciousness, not human turning into divine. The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood,” when she was living in Paris. (CWSA, Vol. 32, pp. 31-32)
Let us choose two snap-shots, two aspects of the Mother from the rich literature.
During her experience of “the supramental ship,” in 1958, she was suddenly interrupted and called back into her physical body by somebody in her room, and at that instant she had a brief glimpse of herself.
“My upper part, particularly the head, was only a silhouette whose contents were white with an orange fringe. Going down towards the feet, the colour became more like that of the people on the boat, that is, orange; going upwards, it was more translucent and white and the red grew less. The head was only a silhouette with a sun shining within it; rays of light came from it which were the action of the will.”
~ CWM, Vol. 9, p. 274
This was the cosmic Mother during a phase of the ongoing supramentalization of the manifestation.
She also described herself on that all-important moment of the supramental manifestation, 29 February 1956. Late on that day she noted down:
“This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you [her audience at the Playground and perhaps the Ashram in general]. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.
“As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that ‘the time has come,’ and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.
“Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.”
~ CWM, Vol. 15, p. 94
READ:
Supramental Manifestation and the New World
About the Divine Mother, i.e. about herself, the Mother said:
“She has descended onto Earth to participate in their nature [i.e. the nature of the humans]. For if she did not participate in their nature, she could not lead them farther… Only, she does not forget: she has adopted their consciousness but she remains in relation with her own, her supreme consciousness … If she did not adopt their consciousness, if she did not suffer their pain, she would not be able to help them.
“Hers is not a suffering because of ignorance, it is a suffering because of identity. It is because she has accepted to have the same vibrations as they have, in order to be able to enter into contact with them and to pull them out of the state they are in. If she did not enter into contact with them, they would not even perceive her, or no one would be able to bear her radiance …”
~ CWM, Vol. 5, pp. 387-388
It is also interesting to compare the following passage from a conversation in the Agenda (27 June 1962) with Sri Aurobindo’s statement “Carrying on the evolution.”
“I said one day that in the history of earth, wherever there was a possibility for the Consciousness to manifest, I was there; this is a fact. It’s like the story of Savitri: always there, always there, always there, in this one, that one—at certain times there were four emanations simultaneously! At the time of the Italian and French Renaissance. And again at the time of Christ, then too….
“Oh, you know, I have remembered so many, many things! It would take volumes to tell it all. And then, more often than not (not always, but more often than not), what took part in this or that life was a particular yogic formation of the vital being—in other words something immortal. And when I came this time, as soon as I took up the yoga, they came back again from all sides, they were waiting…. That’s how I got those memories.”
~ Agenda, Vol. 3, pp. 222-223
The Mother Warrior
In the Ashram the Mother was usually addressed as “Sweet Mother,” but everybody knew that some of her emanations or individualized personalities, among them Kali or Durga, were great warriors. She carried above her eye the scar of an occult battle. And did Sri Aurobindo not call the Second World War “the Mother’s War”? Of Mahakali, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
“There is in her an overwhelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and obstacle. All her divinity leaps out in a splendour of tempestuous action; she is there for swiftness, for the immediately effective process, the rapid and direct stroke, the frontal assault that carries everything before it. Terrible is her face to the Asura, dangerous and ruthless her mood against the haters of the Divine; for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the battle.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 32, p. 19
In the Agenda of 1962 there is a telling part of a conversation where the Mother describes one of her vital beings, l’être blanc avec la hallebarde, the white being with the halberd. (A halberd is a weapon consisting of a long shaft with an axe blade and a pick, topped by a spearhead. In this case the weapon evidently represents a power or powers.) On 23 June 1962, the Mother narrated one of her experiences. “I suddenly became, or saw, a tall being, all white, with a kind of halberd in its hand and an expression of iron will. … I was seeing that tall being from above, like a great transformative power in the vital.” (Agenda, Vol. 3, p. 217)
Four days later she returned to this experience:
“What was standing there was a manifestation of one of my states of being, a part of my vital being, or rather one of my innumerable vital beings—because I have quite a few! And this one is particularly interested in things on earth.. …
“But this one [the tall white Being] is not of human origin; it was not formed in a human life: it is a being that had already incarnated, and is one of those who presided over the formation of this present being [Mother]. But, as I said, I saw it: it was sexless, neither male nor female, and as intrepid as the vital can be, with a calm but absolute power….”
~ ~ ibid., pp. 222-223
Not only do these words give us a glimpse, like so much else of what the Mother has communicated, of the complexity, the astonishing variety and the mind-boggling creativity of the worlds behind the façade of our material existence, they also provide us with some notion of the multiple and glorious personalities of the Mother – who was at one time sitting there in that simple chair on the second storey of the Ashram building, bent in the back and subject to the symptoms of old age.
The great World-Mother now in her arose…
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 21
A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks
Empowered to force the door denied and closed
Smote from Death’s visage its dumb absolute
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.
CONTINUED IN PART 5
~ Design: Beloo Mehra
