II. PARIS (1897-1904)         The Mother grew up in Paris, the metropolis of the great painters of Impressionism; it was the time when artists like Matisse, Manet or Cezanne rose to world-fame. In this very milieu she lived and moved among the cultural avantgarde of the time. She had finished her studies at the Académie Julian and some of her paintings had been exhibited in the Salon. At the age of nineteen, on 13 October 1897, she married Henri Morisset, a disciple of the painter Gustave Moreau. Her son Andre was born on 23 August 1898.         The Mother's talks with young students in the Ashram in Pondicherry reflect her intimate knowledge of the milieu of Parisian artists. Once she re

IX. THE INNER WORK         The outer activity of the Mother, her role as head and organiser of the Ashram, as a guru of the sadhaks, was only one aspect of her life, the visible side of her work. She had another wider existence in the inner planes too. The inner experiences which according to her own statement took place uninterruptedly, could certainly fill a whole library if they had been registered second by second. But only a fraction of it has been recorded, partly in her talks, partly in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. This main work of Sri Aurobindo in poetry, which takes its motive from a story in the Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic, is a spiritual epic in nearly 24.000 blank verses. Sri Au

XII. SRI AUROBINDO LEAVES HIS BODY         The history of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram until 1950 could be presented in three periods of 12 years: 1914 - first physical meeting of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the beginning of their collaboration. 1926 - descent of Overmind; the Mother takes charge of the Ashram. 1938 - Sri Aurobindo's accident which takes him out of his seclusion; beginning of a decisive battle against asuric forces. 1950 - Sri Aurobindo leaves his body in order to continue his work from the subtle-physical plane, whilst the Mother strives on for the fulfillment of his object on earth: the manifestation of Supermind, which, in its turn, took place six years later in the earth's

XV. THE YOGA OF PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION         What work remained to be done now for the Mother, after the supramental manifestation and Nature's consent to participate in the divine work? In 1958 her Yoga of physical transformation began in its most material sense, that is, her working on the cells of the body, their purification, their liberation not only from the suggestions of the physical mind, but also from what the Mother termed the body-mind, the basic cellular consciousness as it has been up till now. The former with its seemingly ineluctable mechanisms, keeps telling us, 'if you do this, you will fall ill', 'if there is rain, you will catch a cold', 'today you will have a bad day', 'n

THE MOTHER A SHORT BIOGRAPHY   Contents Pre-Content Preface Introduction I. Birth and Girlhood II. Paris (1897-1904) III. Paris and Tlemcen (1905-12) IV. Diary Notes and Meeting with Sri Aurobindo V. Japan (1916-20) VI. Pondicherry (1920-26) VII. The Formation of the Ashram VIII. Sadhana IX. The Inner Work X. Four Aspects of the Mother XI. Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the World (1938-50) XII. Sri Aurobindo Lea

V. JAPAN (1916-20)         Even though the Richards had specially returned to France because Paul had been drafted as a reservist, they only stayed there for a year. Paul was freed from military service and moved to Marsillargues with the Mother, where Andre, the Mother's son, visited them during the summer vacations and heard for the first time about Sri Aurobindo. In October it was his turn to join the Army, and from then he always felt the protection of his exceptional Mother, piloting him through those difficult times. Meanwhile, Paul Richard got some work in Japan and thus we find the Richards in London on 13 March 1916, embarking on the long journey to the Far East. They reached Japan in Ju

IV. DIARY NOTES AND MEETING WITH SRI AUROBINDO         Sri Aurobindo's complete works (Centenary Edition) comprise 29 volumes (plus an index volume). The major part of these works are texts which were written by him, even though there are also the transcripts of a few speeches. Furthermore, a few disciples like Nirodbaran or A.B. Purani have recorded some talks with him on the basis of notes. But he was mainly communicating himself through the pen (or the typewriter), and his voice has not been recorded. Just the reverse is the case with the Mother. Out of the 15 volumes of her Collected Works most contain transcripts of her speeches and talks with students, the greatest part of which were recor

XVI. AUROVILLE         The year 1965 had at first started with a drawback for the Mother's cause. In the night of 11 February a powerful attack by rowdy elements of Pondicherry took place on many Ashram buildings and there was considerable damage. The original cause was an anti-Hindi-agitation in Madras state, the protest of South Indian Tamils against the imposition of Hindi (which is mainly spoken in the North) as the national language of India. The agitation then spread to the neighbouring Pondicherry, and the Ashram which is no party to the idea of Hindi being imposed, became quite illogically its victim.         Undaunted by this event, the Mother decided to realise further an old '

VII. THE FORMATION OF THE ASHRAM         There are some utterances of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother which indicate that they were not really eager to become gurus. And yet they adopted this role when it fell on them in the natural course of events. Something similar was the case with the Ashram which was not consciously planned or necessarily intended from the beginning. This can be seen from Sri Aurobindo's statement:         "There was no Ashram at first, only a few people came to live near Sri Aurobindo and practise Yoga. It was only some time after the Mother came from Japan that it took the form of the Ashram, more from the wish of the Sadhaks who desired to entrust their whole inner

XIII. THE INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF EDUCATION         Sri Aurobindo had left his body, but not the work for whose achievement he had come on earth. The Mother stood alone now and shouldered the burden with unbroken determination. The following lines in Savitri - they were among the last which Sri Aurobindo dictated - prophetically point towards her new role:         A day may come when she must stand unhelped On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers, Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast, Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge. Alone with death and close to extinction's edge, Her single greatness in that last dire scen