Chapter Nine   FROM MAN TO SUPERMAN      [Present] man is but the shadow of  Man; Man is but the shadow of God.1          Inscription deciphered on a bas-relief in a Babylonian temple.         To Most of us, anything related to the spirit seems airy, insubstantial, unreal and on the whole fictitious. We have been cheated too many times by the so-called representatives of the spirit vaunting their abilities to describe to us the intangible and invisible, and to formulate the inaudible. Their contact with the spirit was the only true contact, they claimed, and had to be accepted at face value under the penalty of eternal damnation of our soul. Th

Chapter Twenty-one    THE SHIP FROM THE NEW WORLD       One must first of all fight an enormous mass of foolish prejudices which put material and spiritual life irreconcilably against each other ... One must be able to take up all, to combine all, to synthesize all.1                                                                                     — The Mother        The Quality of the atmosphere had changed, the Mother said. 'The development has been much accelerated. The stages of the march forward follow each other much faster ... Things are changing quickly.'2 She felt that very concretely during the projection of a film at the Playground.

Chapter Eleven   ALL LIFE IS YOGA    In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga.1                                      — Sri Aurobindo         In our story we have now arrived at 1926, the year Sri Aurobindo withdrew in seclusion for the rest of his life and put the Mother in charge of the corporeally present guidance of the disciples; by this fact the small group around them became an ashram, a spiritual community. To fully understand the importance of this milestone in the life of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, it is necessary to take a closer look at the effort at transformation t

Chapter Twenty    THE GOLDEN DAY        The world unknowing for the world she stood.1                                                                          — Sri Aurobindo        The Period from December 1950 to December 1958 has no doubt been the most 'visible' in the life of the Mother. From before daybreak till after midnight she was up and about in the Ashram, resting not more than a couple of hours — a rest which could hardly be called sleep. 'The Ashram had become a rather gigantic enterprise,' remembers Satprem in his trilogy Mere. 'She looked after everything in the smallest detail, from the quality of the paper for a book in the Ashram Pr

Part One   Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfassa   Chapter One   A PERFECT GENTLEMAN         Sri Aurobindo wrote to one of his first biographers: 'I see you have persisted in giving a biography — is it really necessary or useful? The attempt is bound to be a failure, because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see.'1         It is not the intention to include in this book an extensive biography of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, not even a concise one, but it seems indispensable to narrate some of the principal facts and events in their lives otherwise much of our story of

Chapter Four   OF PAINTERS AND OCCULTISTS            Mathildeismaloun was born in Alexandria, at one time the crossroads of the world, and her husband, Maurice Alfassa, came from Adrianople, now the Turkish town of Edirne. 'He had the .skin of the people of the Middle-East, just like mine,' the Mother would say. As the story goes, the nonconformist Mathilde once refused to bow to the Khedive in the manner exacted by protocol and as a consequence was banished from Egypt. The young household, with its son Matteo still less than a year old, went to live in Paris in 1877. They were somewhat familiar with their new surroundings, thanks to Mathilde's mother, Mira Ismalou

Chapter Twenty-four   THE TRANSFER OF POWER       Her single greatness in that last dire scene Must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny Where all is won or all is lost for man.1                                                                         — Sri Aurobindo        An Agglomerate        There was the certitude that what had to be done had been done and that the Supramental Realization on Earth had essentially been accomplished — six years (only six years) after 1956. We remember that at the time the Mother had asked the Supreme whether she should continue her task in her earthly body; she had

Chapter Sixteen   THE LORD OF THE NATIONS   It is well-known that the Nazi party proved itself to be anti-intellectual in a blunt and even boisterous manner, that it burned books and classified the theoretical physicists among its 'Judeo -Marxist' enemies. It is less well-known  in favour of which explanations of the world it rejected the official Western sciences. And still less is known about the concept of man on which Nazism was based, at least in the minds of some of its leadc.s. When knowing this, it is easier to situate the last World War within the framework of the great spiritual conflicts; his

      REFERENCES       A             L'Agenda de Mere       AR          Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research       CP          Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo)       CSA       Correspondence With Sri Aurobindo (Nirodbaran)       E             Entretiens (the Mother)       EG           Essays on the Gita (Sri Aurobindo)       ET           Evening Talks (recorded by A.B. Purani)       FIC          The Foundation of Indian Culture (Sri Aurobindo)       Glimpses   Glimpses of the Mother (compilation)       HC           The Human Cycle (Sri Aurobindo)       IHU          The Ideal of Human Unity (Sri Aurobindo)       LD           The Life Divine (Sri Aurobin

Chapter Fourteen   THE MOTHER AND THE 'LABORATORY'    People [in the Ashram] are an epitome  of the world. Each one represents a  type of humanity. If he is changed, it  means a victory for all who belong to his type and thus a great achievement for our work.1                                                          — Sri Aurobindo         The Mother too had gone down into hell, without the slightest hesitation, along 'the downward road on which I started the descent together with Sri Aurobindo. And there is no end to the labour there 'O my Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down in the unf