Patrick Beldio

The Mother (née Mirra Blanche Rachel Alfassa)

THE MOTHER TIMELINE

1878 (February 21):  Mirra Blanche Rachel Alfassa was born in Paris to non-observant Jewish immigrants.

1886–1892:  Alfassa took private lessons in art (painting) and music (the organ).

1897:  Alfassa finished her painting studies at the Académie Julian in Paris. She married painter François-Henri Morisset.

1898:  Mirra and Henri Morisset had a son, André.

1903–1905:  Alfassa exhibited paintings at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

1903–1908:  Alfassa met Max and Alma (Madame) Théon, leaders of Mouvement Cosmique in Tlemcen, Algeria. She contributed articles to the Mouvement’s journal Revue Cosmique in Paris and explored occult practices with Max and Madame Théon in Algeria. She hosted a discussion group, called Idéa. She had visions of a being she recognized as Krishna.

1908:  Mirra and Henri Morisset divorced.

1910:  Paul Richard, a lawyer, journalist, and aspiring politician who met Mirra at her Idéa discussions, first encountered Aurobindo Ghose in Pondicherry, and informed her about this unusual yogi.

1911:  Mirra Alfassa married Paul Richard.

1912–1913:  Mirra Richard met Sufi leader Hazrat Inayat Khan and Baha’i leader ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris.

1914 (March 29):  Mirra Richard first met Aurobindo Ghose in Pondicherry. Alfassa identified Aurobindo Ghose with the Krishna figure of her previous visions.

1914 (May):  In Pondicherry, a French colony at the time, Paul Richard ran for office in the French Chamber of Deputies, and lost.

1914 (August 15):  Aurobindo, Mirra Richard, and Paul Richard began a discussion group “The New Idea” and a monthly journal, Arya; the prospectus included four genres of writing (philosophy/theology, translations and commentaries, comparative religion, and methods in spiritual practice).

1915 (February 22):  Mirra and Paul Richard returned to France because of the Great War. Aurobindo continued Arya on his own until 1921; the articles became his major works in prose.

1916–1920:  Mirra and Paul Richard lived in Japan teaching French to earn a living.

1920 (April 24): Mirra and Paul Richard returned to Pondicherry; Paul later returned to France, disillusioned by Aurobindo. The date is now celebrated as a Darshan Day by members of the ashram.

1926 (November 24):  Siddhi Day or the Day of Victory marking the descent of the Overmind.  Aurobindo went into seclusion to strengthen his spiritual preparation, placing Mirra Alfassa in charge of their community. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded.

1927:  Aurobindo began calling Mirra Alfassa “the Mother,” and members of the ashram began calling him Sri Aurobindo. The two worked as one in the role of guru, or spiritual teacher, for their growing community.

1943 (December 2):  During World War II, families from diverse parts of India made their way to Pondicherry, and the Mother opened a school for children of disciples.

1950 (December 5):  Sri Aurobindo died of kidney failure.

1950–1958:  In discussions with the ashram school children and her ashramites, the Mother gave verbal commentaries on Sri Aurobindo’s writings and her own writings, which are now published as Questions and Answers (previously Entretiens).

1952 (January 6):  The Mother expanded the ashram school to include a course of study from kindergarten to college, which she named the Sri Aurobindo University Centre. She renamed it Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in 1959.

1955:  The Mother legally organized the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

1956 (February 29):  The Mother experienced the manifestation of the “Supermind” on Earth, the goal of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. Now celebrated as the Golden Day.

1956–1972:  The Mother painted 472 oil paintings called Meditations on Savitri with her student Huta as an expression of her yogic experience of the Supermind.

1957–1973:  The Mother discussed her yogic experience of the Supermind with a French disciple, Satprem; he published the transcripts and personal letters as L’Agenda de Mère (Mother’s Agenda). The Mother approved a selection of this material, now entitled Notes on the Way.

1960:  The Mother established the Sri Aurobindo Society, an NGO tasked with raising funds for the operational costs of the ashram and, later, to help develop the civic project of Auroville.

1968 (February 28):  The Mother inaugurated Auroville, an international urban experiment twelve kilometers from the ashram.

1973 (November 17):  The Mother died of heart failure in Pondicherry, India.

BIOGRAPHY

Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973) was a French woman who came of age at the turn of the twentieth century. [Image at right] She was an artist, musician, wife, mother, editor, occultist, and seeker who found her way to India in 1920. In 1926, she became the spiritual teacher or guru of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, sharing this role with Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), a Bengali who was her partner in what they called the Integral Yoga. While Sri Aurobindo went into seclusion, she remained the active and external part of their collaborative yoga to transform creation and their bodies with what they called “supramental force.” They taught that the special force of the “Supermind” exists in planes of consciousness above the mind, life, and body, and they sought to host the descent of the Supermind for the first time in creation. They designed the life of the ashram with the goal first to access and then to hold and strengthen this force for the immediate benefit of the community and then the world. After Sri Aurobindo’s death in 1950, the Mother underwent difficult processes of spiritual transformation with this supramental force that she claimed left her physically debilitated in many ways that were either temporary or permanent; however, she continued to direct the over eighty departments of the ashram and founded a new city a few kilometers outside Pondicherry called Auroville in 1968 to see how far this supramental force could be used to create and sustain human unity at economic, social, political, and cultural levels. She died in 1973. Like Sri Aurobindo, her devotees regard her as the incarnation of the divine, universal Mother (Mahashakti) whose primary role is to mediate the aspiration of creation for a perfect life divine on earth that includes a new human supramental species and the divine sanction that answers that call with the grace of the Supermind.

Mirra Blanche Rachel Alfassa was Parisian by birth, born in 1878 to Sephardic Jewish immigrants: [Image at right] her mother, Matilde Ismaloun, was from Alexandria, Egypt; and her father, Moïse Maurice Alfassa, was a banker from Adrianople, Turkey. She was not certain of her origins other than being Jewish since Jewish, Arab, Syrian, Turkish, and Egyptian identities mixed freely at the time (Heehs 2008:445). Her parents left Alexandria for Paris when Alexandria fell into economic and social disarray after the government began the difficult process of modernization. Living a rich lifestyle of horses and carriages, nannies and well-furnished homes, they moved in elite levels of French society and culture. Though her parents were materialists and atheists, from an early age Mirra was interested in spirituality and the occult, often spending hours in meditation. At age five, she began to experience spontaneously a kind of “inner light” as she described it, which to her was a guide for her growth in life, “though she did not know what it was” (The Mother 1992:156).

She became an accomplished artist, starting to paint at eight years old under the guidance of private tutors. She later said that “[a]ll aspects of art and beauty, but particularly music and painting, fascinated me” (The Mother 1992:156). When she was twenty-four, she finished her visual art education at the Académie Julian, the first school of its kind in Paris to include women among its student body. Her first husband, Henri Morisset (1870–1956), also attended the Académie Julian as well as L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied with Henri Matisse, a fellow student, under Gustav Moreau. Commercially, Morisset was a more successful artist than Mirra Alfassa, but her work was accepted at the prestigious Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts for exhibit in 1903, 1904, and 1905. She did not seek artistic success, however, but used it as a means for her spiritual search and growth. In fact, she thought of herself as “a perfectly ordinary artist,” though more mature in what she called “observations, experiences, studies” compared to the “great” fine artists that she knew (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda III: July 25, 1962). Alfassa moved in avant-garde circles with her husband, associating with artists, musicians, and writers such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, César Franck, Anatole France, and Émile Zola.

Henri and Mirra had a son, André, in 1898. [Image at right] By his own accounts, André enjoyed a happy childhood in which he lived part-time with his parents in Paris and also with his paternal aunts, grandfather, and a nurse 155 km away in Beaugency (Morisset 1978: 64–66). He later fought in the first world war, worked in France in the battery industry, and later came to be a follower of his mother and Sri Aurobindo. After his mother moved permanently to India in 1920, he kept in contact through letters, though most are lost. The few that remain are some of the Mother’s notes to André in which she gives guidance as she would for any of her spiritual students, but on occasion with a familiarity that might exist between any mother and son (The Mother 2004f:3–10). As an adult and directed by his mother, he worked on their behalf part-time in France and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram starting in 1949 until his death in 1982.

After Alfassa’s divorce from André’s father in 1908, she gradually left her life in the art world of Paris. She began a new phase turning to inner realms and experimentation with the occult, though she continued to paint and sketch in brief periods. Her use of art for spiritual purposes, however, continued for the rest of her life.

Sometime in the first decade of the 1900s, Mirra Alfassa joined a spiritual group called Le Mouvement Cosmic in Paris, which Max Théon (né Eliezer Biemstein, 1850?–1927) and François-Charles Bartlet (né Albert Faucheux 1838-1921) founded in 1900. It was headquartered in Tlemcen, Algeria, but published its material in Paris. She helped to edit their monthly journal Revue Cosmique. Max Théon was a Polish Jewish occultist of Kabbala and other esoteric traditions. Alfassa seems to have met him at the earliest when she was age twenty-six in 1904. Max and his wife, MaryThéon (née Mary Ware 1839–1908), experimented together in the occult.

Mirra Alfassa visited the Théons two important times (1906 and 1907) in Algeria, and she explored her spiritual gifts with their collaboration. These included reading others’ thoughts, clairvoyance, telekinesis, mediumship, leaving the physical body and traveling to other cities, and going into other planes of consciousness where she met divine beings or battled demonic ones. At the same time, Alfassa continued her painting. Like those in many esoteric groups of the early nineteenth century, the participants in Le Mouvement Cosmique thought of themselves as upholding and honoring the wisdom traditions of the “Orient” to counter what they considered a dark age of Western materialism and individualism. Their teaching, however, was an innovation on Asian thought and practice since it sought to transform the material realm into a more divine reality, not transcend it. (See Van Vrekhem 2004:37–69 for the influence of the Théons upon the Mother’s teaching on descendent spirituality).

By the end of 1905, Alfassa was fully occupied with contacting and permanently uniting with her “inner light,” what she later called l’être psychique, or “the psychic being.” She claimed later that by the end of 1906, “My psychic being governs me––I am afraid of nothing” (The Mother, The Mother’ Agenda XIII: April 15, 1972). At about this time, she also had visions of a being that she recognized as Krishna. In these visions, she behaved like a Hindu devotee with a guru, though she knew nothing about India and proper courtesy toward a guru (The Mother 2004a:39).

During this exploration of the occult, Alfassa began a friendship with Paul Richard (1874–1967). He was a French Reformed Church minister turned lawyer and aspiring politician, who became interested in the occult. In 1907, he too went to Algeria to stay with the Théons. Paul and Mirra first met one another at the Morissets’ home during a discussion group she founded called Idéa, which explored intellectual topics on life and its meaning. Paul came to these meetings and impressed everyone with his insights. After Mirra and Henri Morisset divorced, she moved into the apartment building where Paul lived. They soon developed a relationship and started to live together. Though neither wanted to go through the formalities, they married to placate Mirra’s mother who was scandalized by their cohabitation. Alfassa felt, however, “that the animal mode of reproduction was only a transitional one and that until new ways of creating life became biologically possible her own motherhood would have to remain spiritual” (Heehs 2008:254). She told Paul to find sexual gratification elsewhere, which he did.

Their relationship was an intellectual one. Mirra edited Paul’s writings for a few journals that he published. They continued to participate in intellectual and spiritual groups and to give talks. Some of the first teachers of Eastern traditions in the West traveled through Paris at that time, and she met them in these gatherings. For instance, she met the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) of the Sufi Order, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844–1921), the son of the founder of the Baha’i Faith. These encounters are significant in that they exemplify a pattern that was very rare at the time, yet has become more commonplace today: Eastern spiritual masters coming to the West and Western seekers going to the East.

In 1910, Paul visited Pondicherry, India, which was a French colonial territory at the time, to stand for elected office in the French Chamber of Deputies. (His candidacy was usurped by another in 1910; when he ran for the same office in 1914 he lost.) Being a spiritual seeker, he inquired about meeting any well-known yogis. Through mutual acquaintances and much persistence, Paul eventually met Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), who was a well-known political figure in Bengal. [Image at right] However, only weeks previously Aurobindo fled British authorities and began his spiritual practice, or sadhana, as a way to build inner spiritual foundations for his political goals in the safety of the French colony. Paul and Aurobindo shared philosophical views and experiences, and grew to admire one another. Paul then returned to Paris, but four years later in 1914, he visited Pondicherry with Mirra at his side. Many years afterwards, the Mother said that as “soon as I saw Sri Aurobindo I recognised in him the well-known being whom I used to call Krishna. . . . And this is enough to explain why I am fully convinced that my place and my work are near him, in India” (The Mother 2004a:39). However, Mirra and Paul had to leave India because of the Great War (1914–18). After first returning to France, they sought greater proximity to India by going to Japan in 1915 to teach French.

Mirra Alfassa had not painted or sketched for many years, but in Japan, she returned to this way of relating to her environment. She wrote what is now entitled Prayers and Meditations (2003) during this period, detailing her inner life as she drank in the beauty of the Japanese landscapes in different seasons. She saw in Japanese culture an example of the unity of art and life that was her ideal: the integration of architecture with the landscape, and the artwork with the architecture, all supporting harmony among human beings. She learned the art of ink scroll painting and wrote in Japanese on these images. She made contacts with Japanese Zen practitioners who gathered with her to meditate. [Image at right] She painted or sketched many of their portraits. Though she was enamored with Japan, ultimately it did not provide the deep spiritual outlet that she had discovered in India with Aurobindo. “The artist in her was in a constant state of wonder in Japan, but the seeker in her lived in a spiritual vacuum. The dominant mood of her diary was withdrawal and expectation” (Heehs 2008:319). She and Paul Richard finally left for India in 1920.

As she settled in her new home in Pondicherry, Mirra Alfassa and Aurobindo began spending more and more time together in meditation and silence, which had the effect of making her husband and Aurobindo’s fellow residents jealous. This jealousy did not concern the couple. Mirra later described this time with her consort in terms of a vision:

I was standing just beside him. My head wasn’t exactly on his shoulder, but where his shoulder was (I don’t know how to explain it—physically there was hardly any contact). We were standing side by side like that, gazing out through the open window, and then TOGETHER, at exactly the same moment, we felt, “Now the Realization will be accomplished.” That the seal was set and the Realization would be accomplished. (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda II: December 20, 1961).

Paul’s jealousy led to rages and he demanded to know Aurobindo’s intention toward his wife. Aurobindo said he had become her guru, but he also seems to have provoked Paul. According to Heehs, “Aurobindo said that [their relationship] would take any form that Mirra wanted. Paul persisted: ‘Suppose she claims the relationship of marriage?’ Marriage did not enter into Aurobindo’s calculations, what was important to him was Mirra’s autonomy, so he replied that if Mirra ever asked for marriage, that is what she would have” (Heehs 2008:327). Paul Richard eventually left for France, legally ending the marriage years later.

Mirra Alfassa and another European female companion joined the community, which was unusual given both their nationalities and gender, but they adopted Indian dress and habits to fit in. Aurobindo eventually asked Alfassa to organize some community rules, which included curbing habits like cigar smoking and drinking alcohol, planting and tending a garden, and keeping the house more tidy than it was before she arrived. This caused some grumbling, but by and large, Alfassa remained behind the scenes for many years as her bond with Aurobindo deepened.

On what has become known as “Siddhi Day” or the Day of  Victory in the ashram, Aurobindo experienced the fourth realization that he mentions in his autobiography, that of “the higher planes of consciousness leading to the Supermind [to which] he was already on his way in his meditations in the Alipore jail [in Bengal]” (Sri Aurobindo 2011:64). This is known in Aurobindo’s movement as the “descent of the Overmind.” November 24, 1926 marks this important day in which Aurobindo and his community claimed to move closer to their goal of bringing the Supermind into creation in the intermediate form he called the Overmind. The Overmind is a plane of consciousness in which the gods are stationed, situated between human consciousness and Supermind. Today, this date is celebrated as the founding of the ashram. Afterwards, Aurobindo’s students began calling him “Sri Aurobindo” while he began to refer to Mirra as his shakti, eventually calling her “the Mother.” Shakti (“power,” the feminine power of creation) is said in Hinduism to be within all goddesses and women. Each male god is said to have a goddess/wife as his shakti.

The experience of this event brought about very rapid spiritual returns for many members of the community, including visions, siddhis or powers, and experiences of the gods and higher planes of consciousness; however, many of the students were also becoming psychologically unbalanced. It was thought that a new strategy was needed that took more effort at a slower pace. Sri Aurobindo wrote that “instead of doing all from above, it seemed necessary to come down into the lower vital and material nature for a long, slow, patient and difficult work of opening and change” (Sri Aurobindo, qtd. in Heehs 2008:364). The “vital” nature in Sri Aurobindo’s thought is “the life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of actions, will of desire” (Sri Aurobindo 2005a:399). To ascend in consciousness like the two gurus, it was thought that the students first needed to strengthen and stabilize their bodies and emotional life. As Heehs notes, “[b]efore 1926 Sri Aurobindo emphasized the role of the mind in yoga,” to overcome the ignorance of the mind by rising through it to the Supermind (Heehs 2008:357). He continues:

This is what he had done in his own practice and he thought at first that others could follow his example. Some tried, lacking his experience and balance, they could not repeat his success. Eventually he realized that the transformation he envisioned would be difficult if not impossible for others without a preliminary awakening of the psychic being, a development of such qualities as sincerity, devotion, and inner discrimination. To bring about this awakening was the primary aim of the sādhana [spiritual practice] under the Mother’s guidance (Heehs 2008:358).

This kind of yoga led to a very practical kind of general ashram living that tried to integrate both material and spiritual growth for the students. While Sri Aurobindo entered what Heehs calls “an active retirement” of arduous spiritual work (spending long hours on correspondence, poetry, and revisions of most of his major literary works while he underwent transformative processes), the Mother oversaw the practical affairs of their community, which grew in many active ways. By 1928, the ashram had about seventy members; in 1929, eighty members; by 1934, 150 members; and in 1937, 200 members (Heehs 2008:370). At first, it was a community of Bengalis and Gujaratis with a few Europeans and Americans, mostly men, since women had such defined domestic roles in Indian society that made it difficult if not impossible for them to join an ashram. The population rose to about 400 during World War II, however, adding many more women, some of whom brought their children, fleeing the threat of invasion by the Japanese in northeast India. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mother did not allow children to live at the ashram, but with the crisis of World War II, she changed this rule and started a school in 1943. She made sure that food, clothing, and shelter were provided as the basis for learning at the emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual levels (Rules of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram 2003).

Sri Aurobindo died of kidney failure on December 5, 1950. The Mother then became the sole spiritual and material director of the community. [Image at right] In 1951 in honor of his work, she expanded the ashram school to include a course of study from kindergarten to college and named it the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre. She renamed it the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in 1959, and it still operates today.

For more than four years after 1950, the Mother sought to build on Sri Aurobindo’s work to, in his words, “hew the ways of Immortality” in matter (Sri Aurobindo 1997:17). Finally, on February 29, 1956 the Mother had an unusual experience that convinced her that the long-awaited supramental manifestation occurred in a universal way on the Earth. She told her students:

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. 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 (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda I: February 29, 1956).

This date is celebrated every leap year as the Golden Day in the ashram. In conversations with a French disciple named Satprem (Bernard Enginger, 1923–2007), conducted primarily from the Golden Day in 1956 to 1973, the Mother described with analytical detail her experience of the radical changes to her body as this manifestation continued to gather force and she sought to collaborate with it. Satprem became her amanuensis by recording most of these discussions on cassette tape. He later published the transcripts in thirteen volumes as The Mother’s Agenda.

The Mother’s physical changes can be linked to a spiritual process that in Hindu spiritual and philosophical contexts is called in Sanskrit manonasha (manonāśa), or “annihilation of the mind.” Manonasha is a concept that is found in late medieval Advaita Vedanta texts and much later in the twentieth century in the thought and practices of Ramana Maharishi (1879–1950) and Meher Baba (1894–1969), who were in conversation with Advaita Vedanta in diverse ways. It is also important in the teachings of Swami Sivananda (1887–1963) of the Divine Life Society. Independent of this tradition, and not using this word, the Mother described her own experience of manonasha and its destiny for all human beings. Because of her continual contact with the supramental forces after Sri Aurobindo’s death, the Mother claimed that her mental and vital centers were annihilated as her body discovered a new authority, initiating radical changes in her physical nature. This new ruler was comprised of the chakra in her heart (which she and Sri Aurobindo call the home of intuition) and “above her head,” that is, above the crown of her head such that she sensed, “thought,” felt, and acted from this new composite place of consciousness. She mentions this experience seventy times in The Mother’s Agenda. She explained that

the mind and vital [“life-nature”] have been instruments to . . . knead Matter––knead and knead and knead in every possible way: the vital through sensations, the mind through thoughts. . . . But they strike me as transitory instruments which will be replaced by other states of consciousness. You understand, they are a phase in the universal development, and . . . they will fall off as instruments that have outlived their usefulness (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda I: June 6, 1958. Emphasis added).

This is an evolution in thought about the mind as found in the writings of Sri Aurobindo. In 1932, Sri Aurobindo wrote about the mind’s ability to be purified and transformed, not its annihilation.

It is not to say that everybody can do it in the way I did it and with the same rapidity of the decisive moment (for, of course, the latter fullest developments of this new untrammeled mental power took time, many years) but a progressive freedom and mastery of one’s mind is perfectly within the possibilities of anyone who has the faith and the will to undertake it (Sri Aurobindo 2011:84).

Therefore, for the Mother’s consort at this stage in his experience, he was convinced that the mind would not disappear, but would follow the path in others as it did for himself; it would be purified and then grow into a higher form of itself and be taken into the supramental future since “the possibilities of the mental being are not limited and . . . it can be the free Witness and Master in its own house” (Sri Aurobindo 2011:84).

However, even before 1920 and her permanent stay in Pondicherry, the Mother spoke of the intuition and other spiritual faculties taking over the body, diminishing the use and even the existence of the manas (mind) and its instrumentation in the brain and nervous system:

This faculty [the intuition] which is exceptional, almost abnormal now, will certainly be quite common and natural for the new race, the man of tomorrow. But probably the constant exercise of it will be detrimental to the reasoning faculties. As man possesses no more the extreme physical ability of the monkey, so also will the superman lose the extreme mental ability of man, this ability to deceive himself and others (The Mother 2004c:164).

The editors of this text note that the Mother wrote in an earlier draft: “so also will the superman lose perhaps all of the power of reasoning; and, even, the organ itself may become useless, disappear little by little as the monkey’s tail, which was of no use for man, disappeared from his physical body” (The Mother 2004c:164). It would seem that in coming into contact with Sri Aurobindo and his personal experience of transformation of the mind, not its dissolution, the Mother tempered her view: the mind is compared to the strength of the monkey, not its tail; and the mind will lose its extreme ability to deceive, not outlive its usefulness.

This divergence of views changed later. At the Mother’s urging, Sri Aurobindo discussed the future supramental human body and its ways of knowing in a few short essays called “The Supramental Manifestation on Earth” right before his death in 1950. In them, he adopts the Mother’s previous perspective about the mind: “For it may well be that the evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the [internal] organs themselves in their material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their instrumentation and even of their existence” (Sri Aurobindo 1998:555).

During the Mother’s phase of what I am calling manonasha, another significant event happened. On January 1, 1969, the Mother experienced another step forward in what she says was the manifestation of a “new superman Consciousness,” now celebrated in the ashram every New Year’s Day as a special Darshan Day. As she described it, the event was more like an encounter with a person with “a smiling benevolence, a peaceful delight and a kind of opening out into delight and light. And it was like a ‘Bonne année’ [Happy New Year], like a greeting” (The Mother 2002:149).

As she was recording The Mother’s Agenda, between 1956 and 1972, the Mother also worked on many projects to express creatively the supramental changes in her consciousness and body. One of these ventures involved painting. She collaborated with a young disciple, whom she named Huta or “offering” (Savita Devjibhai Hindocha, 1931–2011), to paint 472 oil paintings called Meditations on Savitri. (Savitri was Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem, see below). She told Huta the goal of this painting project: “Yes, we are going towards a painting that will be able to express the supramental truth of things” (Huta 2009:96). The Mother also told her, “Child, the Lord wants you to do the new things––the new creation” (Huta 1972: DVD jacket). Huta described their collaboration this way: “The paintings of the whole of Savitri are the Mother’s own creation, based not only on her series of visions but also on her own guiding sketches: they are a reflection of her own Yoga” (Huta 2001:12).

The Mother told Huta in 1969 that in reading Sri Aurobindo’s poem and painting pictures of it with her, she experienced no mental activity. She said, “You see, Savitri is very good for me also, because while I read and recite, I do not think at all. I am only inspired. I need this experience” (The Mother 2015: n.p.). Huta wondered how the Mother could need anything since she believed the Mother to be divine. The Mother responded, “Yes, that I am but this is physical (pointing out her body). And there is the physical world and it must be perfected” (The Mother 2015:n.p.). Sri Aurobindo and his poetry were the key to this perfection. She said to Huta:

When I concentrate and go back to the Origin of the Creation, I see things as a whole in their reality and I speak. You see, each time when I speak, Sri Aurobindo comes here. And I speak exactly what he wants me to speak. It is the inner hidden truth of Savitri that he wants me to reveal. Each time he comes, a wonderful atmosphere is created. I have read Savitri before but it was nothing compared to this reading (The Mother 2015:n.p.).

In 1962 at age eighty-four, the Mother became very ill and retired to her small apartment for the rest of her life. Even still, at the age of 90, she inaugurated Auroville in 1968, a township almost twelve kilometers from the ashram. She commissioned the Parisian architect Roger Anger (1923–2008) to design it under her guidance (Auroville: The City of Dawn, 2018). She conceived it as a pilot project to see how far the supramental changes she saw occurring on the Earth could be externalized in the organization and government of a city. She wrote, “Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity” (The Mother 2004a:188).

The Mother’s health began to decline in March 1973. Not able to get out of bed she eventually cancelled all meetings, and only a few caregivers including her son André saw her until the end. On Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, August 15, she gave darshan one last time from her balcony. She died of heart failure on November 17, 1973 in her apartment in the ashram and was buried in the samadhi (tomb of an enlightened guru) in a chamber just above Sri Aurobindo.

TEACHINGS/DOCTRINES

The spiritual practice of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is called the Integral Yoga (purna yoga). Though Sanskrit texts were often used in Sri Aurobindo’s written works, the Mother was not a Hindu and Sri Aurobindo identified with Hinduism for only twelve years (1901–1912). Further, they distanced their spiritual practice from all forms of religion since they sought goals that went beyond any religion they knew. Sri Aurobindo said that his ashram “has nothing to do with Hindu religion or culture or any religion or nationality. The Truth of the Divine which is the spiritual reality behind all religions and the descent of the supramental which is not known to any religion are the sole things which will be the foundation of the work of the future” (Sri Aurobindo 2001:72). However, the Integral Yoga draws upon many traditional Hindu practices and philosophies, such as Shaktism, Vedanta, Tantra, and the yogas taught in the Bhagavad Gita, yet innovates on these to “divinize” or transform the Earth and body instead of transcending them. Its goal and mission is the “supramental manifestation” that generates a “new creation,” the crown of which is the supramental body or what the Mother sometimes called “the New Being,” in which “[t]he mind must fall silent and be replaced by the Truth-Consciousness––the consciousness of details integrated with the consciousness of the whole” (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda XIII: March 19, 1972). In the Mother’s understanding, this integration of consciousness will eventually lead to physical androgyny in the future, so that the New Being’s body will be “sexless” (The Mother 2002:301).

The Mother once said that “The Truth is not linear but global; it is not successive but simultaneous. Therefore it cannot be expressed in words: it has to be lived” (The Mother 2004b:279). Somewhat ironically then, between the Mother and Sri Aurobindo there are sixty-six published volumes in Collected Works of the Mother, The Mother’s Agenda, and The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo that have been organized from journal articles, diaries, talks, taped conversations, and personal letters. But if we take seriously their view of the “lived” nature of truth, their teaching must be studied in the lived interactions between the gurus, between the gurus and their students, as well as in the expressiveness of the arts that they valued: poetry, painting, music, drama, architecture, and material culture in the shared life of Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

The Mother’s life, work, and teachings are indispensable for understanding Sri Aurobindo’s creative and spiritual experience, teaching, and goals. To describe their partnership, one could characterize the two together as “spiritual consorts” who model androgyny or “sexlessness” for their students. Though “consort” often has a sexual connotation in many Hindu stories of deities and their incarnations, the gurus valued brahmacharya or celibacy. Sri Aurobindo shared the Mother’s view that sexual procreation will be replaced by a different means of propagation commensurate with the new supramental consciousness and body, so he viewed it as an ultimately vestigial form.

The term spiritual consort has wider application than its use in Hindu or Hindu-influenced contexts as I employ it here. It denotes a relationship in which one shares a spiritual destiny, or fate (sortem) with (con) another, a destiny that is related to the spiritual work that the collaborators seek to accomplish together. In this case, their fate is tied to the supramental manifestation, a goal they felt would be accomplished because of their combined efforts.

For the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, like many later Indian traditions starting in the Middle Ages, the divine masculine is the passive pole and the divine feminine the active pole of Brahman (the divine Absolute). In Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysical system, Brahman puts forward the divine Self in each form of creation, the Atman, who is the silent witness of His eternal and universal will carried out by the feminine divine measurer, Maya. Said another way, the divine personality or spirit, the Purusha (masculine) watches as Prakriti, or Nature (feminine), creates and sustains all form from His unlimited possibilities. Expressed still another way, the Lord of all, Ishvara puts forth His divine force, Shakti, the name par excellence of the goddess, to energize the universe. Sri Aurobindo integrated these three ideas when he wrote:

As there are three fundamental aspects in which we meet this Reality,—Self, Conscious Being or Spirit and God, the Divine Being, or to use the Indian terms, the absolute and omnipresent Reality, Brahman, manifest to us as Atman, Purusha, Ishwara,— so too its power of Consciousness appears to us in three aspects: it is the self-force of that consciousness conceptively [sic.] creative of all things, Maya; it is Prakriti, Nature or Force made dynamically executive, working out all things under the witnessing eye of the Conscious Being, the Self [Atman] or Spirit [Purusha]; it is the conscious Power of the Divine Being [Ishvara], Shakti, which is both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the divine workings (Sri Aurobindo 2005b:339-40).

These word pairs (Atman/Maya, Purusha/Prakriti, Ishvara/Shakti) originating from Vedantic, Samkhyic and Yogic/Tantric schools respectively, are used to express a composite understanding of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Without the divine masculine, the divine feminine does not exist; without her, he is unmanifest. The Mother said explicitly, “Without him, I exist not; without me, he is unmanifest” (Nirodbaran:1988:65). Commenting on the nature of divine relationship in Hinduism, Rachel Fell McDermott writes, “In all cases, these mediator-goddesses are said to be svakīya, or married to their consorts, and even if they are soteriologically more significant than the male gods, the latter are more important ontologically” (McDermott 2005:3607). In a similar way, Sri Aurobindo has ontological priority to the Mother for their devotees, but the Mother has more soteriological significance since she is the one who mediates his otherwise hidden presence in the experience of their devotees. Though they functioned in some respects as opposites, they complemented each other. In the role of Ishvara or “Lord,” Sri Aurobindo chiefly worked from a place of seclusion. In the role of Shakti, or “Power,” the Mother strove to manifest the achievements of his internal work in the shared life of the ashram, and later, in her own body. As he said to his disciples at the founding of the ashram in 1926, “Mirra is my Shakti. She has taken charge of the new creation. You will get everything from her. Give consent to whatever she wants to do” (Heehs 2008:345). It must be said, however, that the biological genders are not equal to the divine principles of masculinity and femininity in this practice. There were times when each played the role of the other as when Sri Aurobindo was more active in the nascent community in the 1920s and the Mother went into seclusion in the 1960s until she died.

During Sri Aurobindo’s political period (1906–1910), the Divine Mother or Mahashakti (Great Shakti) embodied as India influenced his thought, activism, and educational aspirations for his country. The concept of Mahashakti was his way to ground an active national agenda to a spiritual vision, as well as to externalize a spiritual reality into material results. While fleeing British authorities, he took up residence in the French colonial city of Pondicherry in 1910. He worked alone on the Integral Yoga for ten years until Mirra Alfassa permanently moved to India in 1920.

In 1928, two years after the ashram was officially formed, Sri Aurobindo wrote and published his first book in about eight years, The Mother. In it, he explained to his budding community Mirra’s indispensable role in their spiritual practice and indeed in the entire universe to bring about “the new creation.” This role is the Universal Mother or Mahashakti, who now in the evolution of consciousness embodies four divine powers or personalities as Maheshvari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, and Mahasarasvati; or wisdom, strength, harmony, and perfection, respectively. In his estimation, Mirra (this French Jewish woman) fully incarnated these powers, a view his initially disbelieving followers increasingly adopted.

Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri, which has gone through several editions, symbolizes their yogic collaboration as spiritual consorts. As noted above, the Mother valued this poem as encoding the entire teaching and practice of the Integral Yoga for herself and her students. It is inspired by the tale of Savitri and its theme of conjugal love and duty in the Mahabharata. However, Sri Aurobindo turned it into a story of spiritual love between the main characters Savitri and Satyavan, whose union has cosmic import bringing down the sun-power of the Supermind into the earth to transform its mortal, ignorant, false, and suffering nature. Savitri’s husband, Satyavan, dies in both stories, and it is Savitri’s charge to bring him back to earth, which she does after a contest with the character called Death. In Sri Aurobindo’s version, Savitri proclaims to Death:

Our lives are God’s messengers beneath the stars;

To dwell under death’s shadow they have come

Tempting God’s light to earth for the ignorant race,

His love to fill the hollow in men’s hearts,

His bliss to heal the unhappiness of the world.

For I, the woman, am the force of God,

He the Eternal’s delegate soul in man.

My will is greater than thy law, O Death;

My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:

Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme (Sri Aurobindo 1997:633).

Even as Savitri and Satyavan exemplify a version of spiritual consorts that are related to the gurus, it would be incorrect to limit Savitri to the Mother and Satyavan to Sri Aurobindo. The goal of the Integral Yoga is to unite what these characters represent within the devotee: the pure truth of one’s inmost being (Satyavan, or “bearer of Truth”), who is held captive and hidden by the darkness of one’s lower nature, with the descending light of the supramental consciousness (Savitri, who is the daughter of Savitr, the god of the sun, whose name means “stimulator” or “vivifier”).

In 1969, when discussing Sri Aurobindo’s death, the Mother remembered a conversation she had with him when he said, “‘We can’t both remain upon earth, one must go.’ Then I said to him, ‘I am ready, I’ll go.’ Then he told me, ‘No, you can’t go, your body is better than mine, you can undergo the transformation better than I can do’” (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda X: July 26, 1969). The Mother later described her experience of being at his deathbed, which in her view, united them even more intensely together:

He had gathered in his body a great amount of supramental force and as soon as he left . . . all this supramental force which was in him passed from his body into mine.  And I felt the friction of the passage. . . . It was an extraordinary experience. For a long time, a long time like that (Mother indicates the passing of the Force into her body). I was standing beside his bed, and that continued.  Almost a sensation—it was a material sensation (The Mother 2002:328).

With this transfer of force, the Mother said, “I am only realizing what He has conceived. I am only the protagonist and the continuator of His work” (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda I:n.d. 1951).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Like Sri Aurobindo, the Mother made no spiritual practice mandatory in the Integral Yoga, which created a source of tension with those who follow this spiritual path within the ashram and without, as well as during her lifetime and afterwards. Methods in meditation are optional, individual, and varied in style and length in the ashram. In fact, they would be a hindrance if done ritualistically. Her way forward, as she discusses with Satprem in The Mother’s Agenda, is always a way of discovery that cannot rely on past religious forms. In a small discussion about helping a person who asked for some kind of ritual practice, the Mother and Satprem discussed this issue:

Satprem: What I tried to tell him is that this new consciousness doesn’t demand spiritual athleticism, great concentrations and meditations and tapasya [austerities], or special virtues. . . .

The Mother: No.

Satprem: Above all, he was afraid it was again a question of “spiritual discipline.”

The Mother: No, no, no! There’s no question of that. But people always fall for that! Even in Auroville: they want “meditation”! And I can’t decently tell them, “It’s useless”! (Mother laughs) (The Mother’s Agenda XI: May 23, 1970).

Specific ritual practices are not even mentioned as a necessary part of any of the ten rules of the ashram that were promulgated from the 1920s to 2003. It is significant that they established the ashram within the city of Pondicherry, a population of about 175,000 in the 1920s, and not on a mountain retreat like the nearby ashram of Ramana Maharshi, which is perched on the hill Arunachala above the smaller city of Thiruvannamalai to support very intense practices of meditation and tapasya (Antony 1982:305). All sadhakas (aspirants) in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram are expected to work in at least one of the more than eighty ashram departments for a minimum of six hours a day as part of their sadhana.

Each member of the ashram was given individual guidance to strengthen their sincerity, which is understood as the ability to contact one’s psychic being and then live according to that very personal truth. Starting in 1945, the Mother founded the Department of Physical Education in the ashram school to encourage physical exercise to strengthen the body for the supramental manifestation, not for competition or for its own sake. As a celebration of the founding of the ashram school on December 2, 1942, she instituted a yearly “sport’s performance” for all ages, demonstrating the mastery of a particular sport or exercise on the ashram sports ground.

One of the more public displays of the spiritual unity of the gurus for their followers was during the Darshan Days, [Image at right] when the Mother and Sri Aurobindo would sit together in a small outer room of their apartments and their students and visitors would have the opportunity to see and be seen by the divinity in the gurus. In India, such moments of darshan (seeing and being seen by a deity or guru) can be described as a give and take gesture of spiritual vision that confers blessing and inspires worship. The pair sought to give their divine consciousness (chit) through this experience to support some inner progress or realization in their students towards their supramental goal. “Here they remained for the next few hours as ashramites and visitors––more than three thousand by the end of the of the 1940s––passed before them one by one” (Heehs 2008:399). The Mother seemed to tolerate the events as they grew more popular. She explained:

In the days when Sri Aurobindo used to give Darshan, before he gave it there was always a concentration of certain forces or of a certain realisation which he wanted to give to people. And so each Darshan marked a stage forward; each time something was added. But that was at a time when the number of visitors was very limited. It was organised in another way, and it was part of the necessary preparation. But this special concentration, now, occurs at other times, not particularly on Darshan days. . . .  And I ought to say that these Darshan times with all this rush of people serve not so much for an inner progress—that is to say, inside the Ashram—as for a diffusion outside. . . .  But the concentration is less and there is this inconvenience of a large crowd, which was always there but which has been much greater during these last years than at the beginning (The Mother 2004d:262–63).

Except for rare occasions, these Darshan Days were the only times that anyone besides the Mother and a few privileged disciples saw Sri Aurobindo from 1926 until his death. During the lifetimes of the gurus, four Darshan Days occurred per year: the Mother’s birthday (February 21), the anniversary of the Mother’s final arrival to Pondicherry (April 24), Sri Aurobindo’s birthday (August 15), and the descent of the Overmind/founding of the ashram, which is called Siddhi Day (November 24). Four Darshan Days were added in the following years to include New Year’s Day, the Golden Day (celebrated every leap year on February 29), the Mother’s Mahasamadhi (the day she died, November 17), and Sri Aurobindo’s Mahasamadhi (the day he died, December 5). Today these celebrations draw large crowds from many parts of India and around the world to pay their respects at the joint tomb/shrine of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Devotees are given a card with a quotation from one of the gurus and sometimes a flower.

For a short period in the early days of the ashram, the Mother instituted a soup ceremony as an external means to contact her sadhakas inwardly. Sri Aurobindo explained to one student, “The soup was instituted in order to establish a means by which the sadhak might receive something from the Mother by an interchange in the material consciousness” (Sri Aurobindo 2012:568).

The Mother’s work with flowers [Image at right] was also an important use of visual culture in the ashram, one that expressed the values of her teaching, which include the beauty of the material world, art, and individual and communal growth. Over the years, she named 898 flowers, and exchanged them with her sadhakas on many different occasions to deepen the students’ contact with nature and with her consciousness. If one studies the names that she gave these flowers with her commentary, as well as the colors, the botany, and even medicinal qualities in some cases, one can come to a very full visual and creative understanding of the Integral Yoga. She would give a student a daffodil, for instance, if she thought the student could benefit from the “Power of Beauty,” which is what she called this flower (The Mother 2000:177). About the meaning held by the form of this flower, she commented: “Beauty acquires its power only when it is surrendered to the divine” (The Mother 2000:177). Students often gave flowers to the Mother as well, to offer their love, adoration, and devotion. Doing so, however, came with a risk. The Mother said, “When, therefore, you offer flowers to me, their condition is almost always an index of yours. There are persons who never succeed in bringing a fresh flower to me––even if the flower is fresh it becomes limp in their hands. Others however always bring fresh flowers and even revitalize drooping ones. If your aspiration is strong your flower offering will be fresh” (The Mother 1979:iv).

For the Mother, the most important characteristic of a flower was its “love and longing” for the sun, which is the yogic labor of “aspiration” for the Divine in plant form (The Mother 1979:i). She said:

Plants have more [aspiration] in their physical being than man. Their whole life is a worship of light. Light is of course the material symbol of the Divine, and the sun represents, under material conditions, the Supreme Consciousness. The plants have felt it quite distinctly in their own simple, blind way. Their aspiration is intense, if you know how to become aware of it (The Mother 1979:i).

The Mother’s continual use of flowers with her students was a practice to awaken in them this kind of intense longing and awareness.

The Mother recommended communing with nature at specific times to awaken this thirst. She wrote:

When the sun sets and all becomes silent, sit down for a moment and put yourself into communion with Nature: you will feel rising from the earth, from below the roots of the trees and mounting upward and coursing through their fibres up to the highest outstretching branches, the aspiration of an intense love and longing—a longing for something that brings light and gives happiness, for the light that is gone and they wish to have back again. There is a yearning so pure and intense that if you can feel the movement in the trees, your own being too will go up in an ardent prayer for the peace and light and love that are unmanifested here (The Mother 1979:i).

The Mother was paradoxically inviting the devotee to see nature in the dark. According to the Mother, it is there that aspiration and its stimulus to growth occurs. This experience is also about feeling aspiration and growth intuitively, even as one sits on the earth physically. The opposition of darkness is what awakens this aspiration and growth in the tree, awakening “an intense love and longing . . . for the light that is gone,” wishing to have it back again.

Of course, it is true that the light of the sun helps plants to grow. The Mother made the obvious observation that “plants need sunlight to live––the sun represents the active energy which makes them grow” (The Mother 1979:i). However, her point was larger. Darkness stimulates growth beyond boundaries of contentment and pushes it into a realm of what she called progrès (progress), a word she used more than two thousand times in her writings. If one wants to pressure a plant to progress beyond normal size, it is important to put the plant “in a place where there is no sunlight,” for there “you see it always growing up and up and up, trying, making an effort to reach the sunlight” (The Mother 1979:i).

This is instructive when trying to describe spiritual progress in the Integral Yoga and the way the Mother guided her aspirants as a guru. The implication is that just as continual life in the active sun cannot give progressive perfection to a plant beyond normal bounds, continual comfort and protection from suffering, fear, and death cannot stimulate progressive growth in a human being seeking to become “the New Being.” Therefore, her way was sometimes to place her students “in the dark” to stimulate more intense aspiration for God’s light. The Mother did this in a personal and specific way for each ashramite. She enacted Sri Aurobindo’s credo, “All life is yoga,” by guiding her students in diverse and challenging ways within the disciplined structure and evolving life-patterns of the ashram (Sri Aurobindo 1999:8).

LEADERSHIP

The Mother’s devotees and, more importantly, Sri Aurobindo viewed her as the center of their spiritual practice. For them, her charisma is found in being the embodiment of “the Divine Mother” who brings the supramental level of consciousness that is transforming creation and their own lives and bodies to the extent one practices the “triple labor” of the Integral Yoga; to the extent one aspires to its perfection, negates the influences of the lower nature that opposes it, and surrenders to its working (Sri Aurobindo 2012:6–7). Though Sri Aurobindo recognized Mirra’s spiritual status early on, it was a gradual recognition for the early sadhakas. In 1938 one devotee asked Sri Aurobindo, “Is she not the ‘Individual’ incarnation of the Divine Mother who has embodied ‘the power of these two vaster ways of her existence’—Transcendent and Universal?” to which Sri Aurobindo replied, “Yes” (Sri Aurobindo 2012:31).

Though she was not a Hindu, one can compare the Mother to other Hindu gurus who embody or incarnate the divine for their aspirants. Karen Pechilis writes that in Hindu spiritual teacher/student traditions, the “guru is understood to experience the real continuously,” the “real” being the experience of Brahman, which she defines as “pure, unmediated unity,” and one could add, an experience of sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) (Pechilis 2004:4). The Mother and Sri Aurobindo claimed to have permanently realized this experience as well, and like other gurus, they were “able to inspire [levels of] the experience of the real in others, for the purposes of spiritual advancement, total self-realization, or evolution as a human being” (Pechilis 2004:5).

The Sanskrit word “guru” may have its roots in either √gri (to invoke or to praise) or √gur (to raise up, to make an effort). As an adjective, guru means “heavy,” that is, heavy with wisdom, or weighty with spiritual significance. It is a cognate of the Latin word, gravis, which means grave, heavy, weighty, serious. In light of these meanings, the guru is literally the weight of divine wisdom’s pressure on the student, stimulating the student’s elevation in the context of the student’s labor (and the guru’s play or lila). The Mother was regarded as the active guru of the ashram (as opposed to Sri Aurobindo’s more passive or secluded role), a living embodiment of the pressure and weight of chit––what Sri Aurobindo actually calls the Chit-Shakti or “Consciousness-Force” throughout his major works, like The Life Divine. Their students aspire to surrender their chitta (basic consciousness) to that forceful weight in order to elevate and expand it. In other words, their aspiration is the transformation of the chitta into the Mother’s Chit-Shakti. What is distinct about the Mother’s work as a guru is that she begins with a realization of “the real” or Brahman, rather than ends with it. One of the devotees wrote to Sri Aurobindo about this topic: “Is the attitude that I am the Brahman not necessary in the Integral Yoga?” and Sri Aurobindo responded, “It is not enough to transform the whole nature. Otherwise there would be no need of the embodiment. It could be done by simply thinking of oneself as the Brahman. There would be no need of the Mother’s presence or the Mother’s force” (Sri Aurobindo 2012:34). The Mother’s work is not only in elevating one’s consciousness to that of sat-chit-ananda, but also bringing it down to (eventually) transform the physical being. This involves bringing the experience of sat-chit-ananda into permanent union with matter (what she called a supramental transformation of “the cells of the body” and “cells of nature”) instead of remaining on the spiritual planes above matter where one might enjoy this experience but leave the physical being unchanged. (See Sri Aurobindo’s last essays: “The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth” 1998:517-92; and throughout The Mother’s Agenda in which she discusses the transformation of the cells more than five hundred times).

Over the course of her development of the ashram, the Mother led dozens of projects and initiatives to provide environments that support this physical transformation based on bringing the mastery of spirit into matter in a context of basic physical security. These projects were often started in response to some practical need. In the late 1920s and 1930s as the ashram grew, she initiated a wood-working department that made furniture, a building and maintenance department, dining room and food service, electric service, a laundry facility, and general stores. She also started gardens to grow vegetables and flowers, and established cattle and poultry farms, along with granaries. The ashram publication department started in 1934 and its distribution agency began in 1952. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s the ashram experienced rapid growth and in response she developed many other departments. The physical education department began with the creation of the ashram school for children in the 1940s, which included tennis courts, a field for football (soccer) and a track, swimming pool, and basketball court, among many other facilities. The photography studio began in 1950 and the ashram library began in 1954. The Art House began in 1943 to make costumes for the ashram theater that mounted music, drama, and dance programs in celebration of the ashram’s spiritual principles, while the art gallery, also called the Studio, began in 1963. The art studio now houses the activities of weaving, embroidery, batik, and fabric painting, among other craft activities. There is also a handmade paper factory that began in 1959, and a Marbling Group, which started in 1965, that marbles paper and silk with dyes.

As noted, the Mother used to assign each person to a department with an expectation of working at least six hours a day as part of the sadhana according to the 1965 “Conditions for Admission to the Ashram.” Today the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trustees assign roles “according to individual cases and the needs of the Ashram” (Rules of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram 2003:20, 26). After a trial period, accepted members may donate their funds to the ashram, while others may not. This is worked out on an individual basis. In either case, room and board and other basic needs are entirely covered by the ashram. Some of the departments also create revenue, like the publication department. Since all of the property had been in the name of Sri Aurobindo and/or the Mother, she created the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust in 1955 to guarantee the ashram’s future after she died.

On February 12, 1956 the Mother responded to a request from a north Indian group of devotees to establish the Delhi Branch of the ashram “as an extension of the centre of sadhana at Pondicherry” (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Delhi Branch 2018). Like the ashram in Pondicherry, it provides opportunities for shared living and service in its many departments, such as free medical services, research, book selling, hand-made paper, and flour and spice mill, among many others. There are Satsangs (“gatherings of wise people” or “people seeking truth”) that include meditations, music, and/or lectures on the teachings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. The Mother sent relics of Sri Aurobindo to the Delhi Branch in 1957, which are now housed in its shrine and meditation hall. There are also a few intentional communities in different parts of the world, like the Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham in Lodi, California, in which residents strive to live disciplined lives according to the teachings of the Integral Yoga (Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham website 2018).

There are other groups associated in name only with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The Mother began the Sri Aurobindo Society in 1960 as a fundraising entity for the physical maintenance of the ashram and later for acquiring and developing the property for her civic project of Auroville, not as another spiritual community (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda II: March 4, 1961). The Sri Aurobindo Society grew beyond her intentions, however, as it now seeks to be a spiritual voice in presenting the teachings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo to the world. It lists 332 centers worldwide that vary in activity and commitment (Sri Aurobindo Society 2018).

The Mother’s ambitious pilot project of Auroville has yet to fulfill its goal of attracting 50,000 citizens, as it currently has a population of 2,852, made up of people from fifty-six nations. About forty-four percent of the population are Indian and the ratio of women to men and girls to boys is about even (Auroville: The City of Dawn 2018). The urban design of the township resembles a galaxy that contains different zones: industrial, cultural, residential, and international. The center of the radiating township is a large banyan tree, and nearby is the Matrimandir (Temple of the Mother), an egg-like architectural structure made of concrete and covered in gold-in-glass tiles. The ashram and Auroville have many informal connections, but they remain legally separate and distinct in activity and purpose though the Mother said they share the same “attitude towards the future and the service of the Divine” (The Mother 2001:268–69). She further clarified, “But the people in the Ashram are considered to have consecrated their lives to Yoga. . . . Whereas in Auroville simply the goodwill to make a collective experiment for the progress of humanity is sufficient to gain admittance” (The Mother 2001:269). The Mother thought of Auroville as an urban experiment that sought to enact broad spiritual principles of human unity, symbolizing a political, social, and cultural harmony that she thought would manifest globally because of the supramental forces (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda VII: July 23, 1966). There is no “consecration to Yoga” or any expectation of recognizing the spiritual status of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. She hoped people from all countries divided by national ideals would come to Auroville, set up their own pavilions that expressed their national characters, and then live together “face to face, and shake hands” instead of “clashing with each other” (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda VII: April 23, 1966). In contrast, the Mother organized the ashram as a sharply focused spiritual experiment for devotees who seek to leave their external identities behind and to follow specifically the example of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in the Integral Yoga. They surrender to very disciplined patterns of life that the Mother established to become what they call a “gnostic community” of “supramental beings,” that is, to invite the transformations of the consciousness and body that the Mother sought and experienced (Sri Aurobindo 2005b:1099; The Mother 2004e:174).

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

In designating a French Jewish woman as guru of his ashram, Sri Aurobindo radically transformed what it means to be a guru in India. Karen Pechilis adds that “Sri Aurobindo’s extension of the paradigm to a foreign woman parallels his expansion of the traditional [Hindu] teachings to the international community” (Pechilis 2004:32). Some of the few students that gathered around him in the early days, most of whom where Indian and Hindu men, resisted Mirra’s increasingly prominent role, both before 1926 when the ashram formally began and even afterwards. This resistance was a challenge to Sri Aurobindo’s vision and practice, which included transcending cultural, religious, and gender biases. Convincing these first sadhakas to accept the Mother took some time and many lessons that reached a crucial stage in 1928 with the publishing of The Mother to lead them to his understanding that it was to her that they must surrender to reach his spiritual goals. It was not the Mother’s national and ethnic identity, (lack of) religious affiliation, or gender that was important to Sri Aurobindo, but her being internally prepared for the role of being his shakti according to what he saw as the progress of her chitta or basic consciousness, which he considered in a perfected state or Chit-Shakti like his own.

Alternatively, the Mother demonstrated some traditional Indian ways to be an ideal student of a spiritual teacher that also challenged the early disciples. Nolini Gupta, an early follower described this experience:

The Mother came and installed Sri Aurobindo on his high pedestal of Master and Lord of Yoga. We had hitherto known him as dear friend and close companion, and although in our mind and heart he had the position of Guru, in our outward relations we seemed to behave as if he were just like one of ourselves. . . . The Mother taught by her manner and speech, and showed us in actual practice, what was the meaning of disciple and master; she always practiced what she preached. She showed us, by not taking her seat in front of or on the same level as Sri Aurobindo, but by sitting on the ground, what it meant to be respectful to one’s Master, what was real courtesy (Gupta 1969:72).

As the Mother and Sri Aurobindo demonstrated here, gurus that come in pairs can model their ideal of a teacher/student relationship quite effectively for their disciples. However, in her later dealings with students, she seemed to diminish even these traditional relationships where the guru is on a “high pedestal” and the student “on the ground.” As the supramental forces were working on her as reported in The Mother’s Agenda, she increasingly saw the quality of all divisions, including those between spirituality and materiality, as inconsistent with the new supramental consciousness. She said,

That’s what I have learned, in fact: the bankruptcy of religions was because they were divided—they wanted you to follow one religion to the exclusion of all others. And all human knowledge has gone bankrupt because it was exclusive. And man has gone bankrupt because he was exclusive. What the New [supramental] Consciousness wants (it insists on this) is: no more divisions. To be capable of understanding the extreme spiritual, the extreme material, and to find . . . to find the meeting point where . . . it becomes a true force. And it’s trying to teach that to the body too, through the most radical means (The Mother, The Mother’s Agenda XI, January 3, 1970).

Her difficulty then became one of trying to redirect the adulation and worship of her form so that her devotees might spend time doing the discovery demanded of this yoga instead of putting her up on a pedestal and keeping themselves down on the ground. In other words, she sought to weaken traditional forms of religious practice, which she saw as incompatible with the new supramental consciousness, since that new consciousness overcomes all dualities, even the teacher/student duality.

Since the Mother’s death, pressures exist in the ashram, Auroville, and the transnational Integral Yoga community in different ways, which is summarized well in the WRSP profile of Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo (see also Heehs 2000; 2015). In terms of the ashram, some of these pressures have to do with gender as there are more women than men in the ashram. The pressures also have to do with differences in culture, as twelve percent of the ashramites are foreign nationals, with the remaining members from diverse parts of India. Finally, the pressures have to do with religious affiliation, as ashramites also come from many different religious backgrounds, or no religious background at all. The Trust does not keep a detailed record of the current number of ashramites since it does not value the growth of the ashram in terms of numbers. As an approximation, it states that there are about 1,200–1,500 full-time members in the ashram. Another 3,000–4,000 people in Puducherry (Tamil name for the city officially adopted in 2006) are informally associated (Ganguli 2018). Now that the gurus are gone, tensions have arisen. Controversies like the one surrounding the publication of Peter Heehs’ book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (2008), awakened the sensitivities of devotees inside and outside the ashram who regard the Mother and Sri Aurobindo as avatars (divine incarnations), since the historical treatment by Heehs, an ashramite, problematizes their status as avatars.

Scholarship on the Integral Yoga is difficult to find as the temptation of researchers has been to focus on Sri Aurobindo and either to downplay or ignore the Mother. Such an oversight leads either to an incomplete analysis, or an unreliable one. Further, from the Mother’s own accounts, supramental transformation is tied to manonasha or “annihilation of the mind,” which has many implications for spiritual growth and how that growth is expressed and communicated. Since Sri Aurobindo chose poetry and the Mother chose painting and music as the supramental means, each of their roles as guru-artist becomes more salient than their political or philosophical roles. What William Cenkner writes of Sri Aurobindo could similarly be said of the Mother:

Another stage of Aurobindo studies will emerge when scholars begin to approach Aurobindo as an aesthetic personality, who articulates a vision of reality from an aesthetic imagination and even an ethic within an aesthetic framework. If Aurobindo is primarily a poet, as the role of Savitri indicates, his moral thought takes on different meanings and functions (Cenkner 1981:123).

Diane Apostolos-Cappadona already began this stage of Sri Aurobindo studies in her article, “Poetry as Yoga,” published in 1980, and Cenkner subsequently contributed to it in a book chapter (Cenkner 1984). Their contributions, focusing on Sri Aurobindo’s poetry as “a ritualization of yoga,” highlight the centrality of the creative process as a means of yogic ascent in consciousness and then its “divine descent” (Cenkner 1984:174), as well as the importance of the imagination that is surrendered to the divine in this “poetic, philosophic and yogic” process (Apostolos-Capadona 1980:265). This aesthetic approach has mostly remained undeveloped and even ignored, however, with the exception of Beldio (2016; 2018), who builds on this tradition, focusing on the Mother in equal measure as her spiritual consort.

The Mother is crucial for understanding the Integral Yoga and the spiritual goals of Sri Aurobindo. [Image at right] For him, she is the living embodiment of his poetic inspiration, philosophic revelation, and yogic ideal of a supramentalized human body. She is the “Transcendent, Universal, and Individual” nature of the “universal Mother” or Mahashakti, who works in the highest spiritual planes, the entire cosmos, and within specific human beings (Sri Aurobindo 2012:14, 15). For him and those who practice the Integral Yoga, she embodies Mahashakti’s powers of wisdom, strength, harmony, and perfection that transform creation into something new, capable in the future of manifesting an even broader power of Ananda (bliss) in time and space. Sri Aurobindo summarizes this transformation centered on his consort:

The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother. The Mother’s power and not any human endeavour and tapasya [asceticism] can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal’s Ananda (Sri Aurobindo 2012:26).

IMAGES
Image #1: The Mother (Mirra Alfassa). Courtesy of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.
Image #2: Mirra Alfassa as a girl. c. 1885.
Image #3: Mirra Alfassa at age 24 with son Andre. c. 1902.
Image #4: Aurobindo Ghose. c. 1915–1918.
Image #5: Dorothy Hodgson, Mirra Alfassa, Paul Richard, and Japanese friends in Tokyo. c. 1918.
Image #6: The Mother telling a story. 1950-52. Photo by Pranab Kumar.
Image #7: Last darshan of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother together. 1950. Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Image #8: The Mother at Durga Puja. 1954. Photo by Robi Ganguli.
Image #9: The Mother with child. 1971. Photo by Tara Jauhar.

REFERENCES 

Antony, Francis Cyril. 1982. Gazetteer of India. Pondicherry: Administration of the Union Territory of Pondicherry.

Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane. 1980. “Poetry as Yoga: The Spiritual Ascent of Sri Aurobindo.” Horizons: 265–83.

Beldio, Patrick. 2018. “The Integral Yoga of the Sri Aurobindo Asram: Gender, Spirituality, and the Arts.” Pp. 123-36 in Modern Hinduism in Text and Context, edited by Lavanya Vemsani. New York: Bloomsbury.

Beldio, Patrick. 2016. “Art and Beauty, Opposition and Growth in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Catholic University of America.

Beldio, Patrick. 2015. “The Androgynous Visual Piety of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and St. Clare and St. Francis.” Journal of Hindu Christian Studies 28: 11–32.

Cenkner, William. 1984. “Art as Spiritual Discipline in the Lives and Thought of Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo Ghose.” Pp. 169-86 in Ultimate Reality and Spiritual Discipline, edited by James Duerlinger. New York: Paragon House Publishers.

Cenkner, William. 1981. Review of Robert Minor’s book Sri Aurobindo: The Perfect and the Good. Journal of the Academy of Religion 49: 123.

Chakravarti, Nirodbaran. 1988. Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Ganguli, Devdip. 2018, July 16. Email to the author.

Heehs, Peter. 2015. “Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram, 1910-2010: An Unfinished History.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19: 65–86.

Heehs, Peter. 2008. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. New York: Columbia University Press.

Heehs, Peter. 2000. “The Error of All ‘Churches’: Religion and Spirituality in Communities Founded or ‘Inspired’ by Sri Aurobindo.” Pp. 209-24 in Gurus and Their Followers: New Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India, edited by Antony Copley. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Huta (Savita Hindocha). 2009. The Story of a Soul 1956. Volume 2, Part 2. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Huta (Savita Hindocha). 2001. “My Savitri Work with the Mother.” Invocation 13: 8–25.

Huta (Savita Hindocha), dir. 1972. Pictures of Sri Aurobindo’s Poems. DVD. Pondicherry: Havyavāhana Trust.

McDermott, Rachel Fell. 2005. “Goddess Worship: The Hindu Goddess.” Pp. 3607–11, Volume 6 In Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Lindsay Jones. Second Edition. Detroit: Thompson Gale.

Morisset, André. 1978. “Remembrances.” Sri Aurobindo Circle 34: 64–66.

The Mother. 2015. About Savitri. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2004a. Words of the Mother – I. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2004b. Words of the Mother III. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. 

The Mother. 2004c. Words of Long Ago. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2004d. Questions and Answers, 1956. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2004e. Questions and Answers, 1957-58. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. 

The Mother. 2004f. Some Answers from the Mother. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2003. Prayers and Meditations. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2002. Notes on the Way. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2001. On Thoughts and Aphorisms. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 2000. The Spiritual Significance of Flowers: Parts I and II. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 1992. Paintings and Drawings. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

The Mother. 1979–1983. The Mother’s Agenda. Translated by Satprem. 13 Volumes. Paris: Institute de Recherches Évolutives.

The Mother. 1979. Flowers and Their Messages. Second Edition. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Nakashima, George. 1938-1939. “Golconde Notebook” (diary). Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and Research Library.

Pechilis, Karen. 2004. “Introduction: Hindu Female Gurus in Historical and Philosophical Context.” Pp. 3-49 in The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States, edited by Karen Pechilis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rules of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 2003. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Sri Aurobindo. 2012. The Mother, with Letters on the Mother. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Sri Aurobindo. 2011. On Himself. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Sri Aurobindo. 2005a. The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Sri Aurobindo. 2005b. The Life Divine. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Sri Aurobindo. 2001. Undated Letter. Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education 53:72.

Sri Aurobindo. 1999. The Synthesis of Yoga. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Sri Aurobindo. 1998. Essays in Philosophy and Yoga. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Sri Aurobindo. 1997. Savitri. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

Van Vrekhem, Georges. 2004. The Mother: The Story of Her Life. New Delhi: Rupa & Co.

SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES

Auroville: The City of Dawn. 2018. Accessed from https://www.auroville.org/contents/95 on 2 January 2018.

Sri Aurobindo Ashram Delhi Branch. 2018. Accessed from http://www.sriaurobindoashram.net/index.cfm on 16 June 2018.

Sri Aurobindo Society. 2018. Accessed from http://www.aurosociety.org/about-us/index.aspx#cbg on 2 January 2018. 

Post Date:
15 October 2018

 

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