CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XIX

'NEW LIGHT,' 'NEW WORLD'¹

'RISING FROM OUT of the solitary depths of the dark was a faint voice ringing in the ear: tapaḥ, tapaḥ, tapaḥ ! It was the voice of the Mother, of the World-Mother in the garb of Mother India on the threshold of a new life. Tapasya brought India into being, tapasya made her great, tapasyakept her immortal amid a thousand catastrophes, tapasya will give her a new body, endow her with a new youth, a new beauty and a new greatness, fill her with a new hope and a new victory, to the delight and ecstasy of her children....Give up attachment to soulless forms, plunge into the cave of your heart and draw strength from tapasya. Free the country with the wonderful force of tapasya. There is no other way.'

Sri Aurobindo wrote this in his Bengali Weekly Dharma some months before he left Bengal for Pondicherry. It was a call of the Mother to her devoted worshipper who listened and responded to it and the result was his retirement into what he called 'my cave of Tapasya'. It is a fact of mystic experience, said Sri Aurobindo, that God as Divine Sakti is leading India, and in this work those alone can help who become her faithful instruments and to whom she gives the vision of the Future. This fact cannot be proved to human reason; for, beyond reason is the higher Will that moves great souls.

The spiritual visions and experiences of Sri Aurobindo in jail were indications enough that he was from then a passive instrument in the hands of the Divine having no movement, no thought, no action of his own which was not willed by God. In fact, this had begun even before, as he himself had said in his letters to his wife, and to which all his outer activities bore ample evidence. One so guided cannot indeed err, at least in the deeper sense of the Spirit's direct governance of the souls open to its influence and working. It was, as he himself said, a command of God that brought him to Pondicherry from Chandernagore where in response to the same command he had gone from Calcutta.

Whatever the Divine intention behind the command, Sri Aurobindo's move from North to South recalls to our mind the similar act of his Vedic predecessor Rishi Agastya. The other coincidences are that both settled down at Pondicherry and fixed here the seat of their Vedic Culture, Agastya's asram being called Vedapuri, 'the seat of the Vedic culture'. The ancient tradition to this effect is supported by the recent finding

¹ Unacknowledged quotations in this Chapter are from Sri Aurobindo's writings including Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on The Mother.

of Jouveau-Dubreuil, a French archaeologist, according to whom Sri Aurobindo Ashram happens to stand on the very site of Agastya's Vedapuri. Sri Aurobindo dived into the Vedic depths and revealed the esoteric meaning of the Rigvedic hymns giving intimations of man's divine future, and what is most striking, both accepted Matter for its ultimate divinisation. Thanks to the Vedic bond forged by these luminous exponents, India today stands inalienably one and indivisible with her great Past and dynamic Present interlinked with her greater Future.

Thirty years before Sri Aurobindo's arrival at Pondicherry in 1910, 'it was predicted by a famous Tamil Yogi that thirty years later a Yogi from the North would come to the South and practise there an integral Yoga (Poorna Yoga), and that would be one sign of the approaching liberty of India. He gave three utterances as the mark by which this Yogi could be recognised and all these were found in the letters Sri Aurobindo wrote to his wife'.

Sri Aurobindo began his residence at Pondicherry under circumstances not at all happy or easy. The close police surveillance apart, there were acute financial difficulties due to which he and his four young companions had to pass through extreme hardships. To add to this, the British Government were hatching plans anyhow to remove him from Pondicherry and deport him. Their first attempt having failed, Lord Carmichael, Governor of Bengal, conveyed to Sri Aurobindo, in 1915, his proposal that he would provide him with all facilities for study and spiritual pursuits at Darjeeling if he would come out of Pondicherry. This he rejected. Next they manoeuvred to have him extradited by the French Government in Paris. Happily, their scheme fizzled out. The British Government singled him out for such special attention simply because they regarded him as the one powerful menace to their continued hold on India.

During his early years in Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo's Yogic pursuits included certain physical processes one of which was that in 1910 he fasted for twentyone days in order to test his already-attained mastery over bodily functions in Alipur Jail. During the period of the fast he carried on his day-to-day work with unimpaired energy and walked several hours daily in his room and broke the fast with his usual measure of normal food. The other was in 1915 when he took a big lump of opium in order again to test that mastery. There was no reaction. Sri Aurobindo once said that after his kāyāsiddhi in Alipor Jail he had never had any illness. In Alipore Jail also he had fasted for ten days sleeping once in three nights. He had lost considerably in weight but gained in vital, mental and physical energy. All this while, as before and after, he kept himself occupied with various phases of his Yogic pursuits.

While the Government looked upon Sri Aurobindo as their archenemy, India's millions knew and adored him as their greatest friend

and the inspired champion of their freedom. And the leaders of the nation continued seeking his help and guidance in the conduct of the national movement. About 1916 the great Tilak was the first to remember his co-worker when he felt that the Congress was in need of a fresh and dynamic leadership. Sri Aurobindo's work did not permit his accepting the offer. In 1918 Benegal Sanjeeva Rao, a Kannada Theosophist and educationist called on Sri Aurobindo, to whom he said that he foresaw 'an Indo-British Commonwealth in which India will be a free and equal partner with Britain and other dominions.' Of this Sri Aurobindo also gave clear hints in his sequence The Ideal of Human Unity then appearing in his philosophical review Arya. The same year came Sri Aurobindo's Nationalist co-worker B.S. Moonje to persuade him to preside over the next Nagpur sessions of the Congress. In 1921, Col. Joshua Wedgewood, a British M.P., called.

Tilak's co-worker J. Baptista made in 1920 a request to Sri Aurobindo to take up the editorship of a paper which would be the organ of the Social Democratic Party he was then organising in Bombay. Sri Aurobindo expressing his inability wrote back saying, among other things, that 'the country's will to self-determination is bound to prevail before long.' In 1920 came W.W. Pearson, a co-worker of Rabindranath in Santiniketan. He had met the Mother in Japan. On his second visit in 1921 he began practising Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. A high-souled Englishman, he aspired for India's freedom and greatness and believed, as he wrote in a book of his, that 'the Dawn will come from India who will take her rightful place of leadership in the new age, the age of mankind's spiritual civilisation'.

Before going further, let us cast our eyes six years back upon an event of supreme significance to Sri Aurobindo's life and to India and the world at large—the meeting of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry on 29 March 1914. How did it take place ? The fact to be noted is that even before corning to India and meeting Sri Aurobindo, the Mother had been working in France on identical spiritual lines and having repeated visions of one whom at the very first sight on the day of the meeting she recognised as the one seen in her visions. She felt assured that her work was beside him in India, her 'spiritual home', her 'true motherland' and the centre of her work for India and the world. On 15 August 1954, she declared herself as an Indian citizen with the words, 'From the first time I came to India I felt that India is my true country, the country of my soul and spirit.'

What were her first impressions of Sri Aurobindo ? Here is her own record : 'It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth : His presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, when Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.'¹

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, p. 88.

This destined meeting of two souls was meant to bring about a spiritual revolution on earth, unprecedented in its scope and content. In answer to a question, who the Mother was, Sri Aurobindo said : 'The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence.' 'The Mother comes to bring down the Supramental and it is the descent which makes her full manifestation possible.' 'Her embodiment is a chance for the earth-consciousness to receive the Supramental into it and to undergo first the transformation necessary for that to be possible.' This is the work for which she has come to the earth and has chosen the holy land of India as its centre.

The coming of the Mother is associated with another significant event —the publication of the monthly philosophical review Arya, the first issue of which appeared on 15 August 1914. It was edited by Sri Aurobindo in collaboration with the Mother and Paul Richard. The principal contributor to this unique journal was Sri Aurobindo himself whose massive revelatory sequences on the deepest problems of man's individual and collective life filled almost the whole of each issue, continually for seven years. All these have since been published in book form.

Writing in the Arya in 1918 on the sequences Sri Aurobindo said : 'Spirit being the fundamental truth of existence, life can be only its manifestation....To grow into the fulness of the Divine is the true law of human life, and to shape man's earthly existence into its image is the meaning of his evolution.' This is the theme of his great work The Life Divine. How to grow into this fulness is another theme elaborated in The Synthesis of Yoga which seeks 'to arrive at a synthetical view of the principles and methods of the various fines of spiritual self-discipline and the way in which they can lead to an integral divine life in the human existence—In The Psychology of Social Development, we have indicated how these truths affect the evolution of human society. In The Ideal of Human Unity, we have taken the present trend of mankind towards a closer unification and tried to appreciate its tendencies and show what is wanting in them that real human unity may be achieved.' In the sequence The Secret of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo discovers the inner meaning of the Vedic symbols and shows how in that meaning lies the truth of man's divine perfection. In this revelatory exposition of the Veda Sri Aurobindo points to 'the light of that Vast Truth' visualised by the Vedic Seers millenniums ago. In this vision he saw the birth of India's soul, the perennial source of all her spiritual strength and vitality sustaining her historic evolution through the ages. By his discovery of this truth of India's soul Sri Aurobindo became one with it, one with its light that is eternal. And as he himself said, this he did years before he actually read the Veda. His Essays on the

Gita harmonises action with spiritual life by establishing a new synthesis of the three principal Yogic disciplines, the practice of which prepares man for his 'attainment of union with the Divine Being, and oneness with the supreme divine nature.' The Future Poetry seizing the essence as well as the complex play of the poetic inspiration and surveying past English and Continental poetry, gives glimpses of the poet of the future as the seer whose work will be 'a voice of eternal things', 'a revelation of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and beauty of a greater spiritualised vision and power of life.' This poetry will be resplendent with the golden glory of New Dawns, a perennial inspiration of ever-new unfoldings of the Infinite Truth, the soul-expression of the new world in the making. Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri is a unique example of this future poetic creation. In his exposition of India's culture, a pretty long sequence, since published in book form under the title The Foundations of Indian Culture, Sri Aurobindo establishes the spiritual character of her civilisation; he lays his finger on the hidden truth of a larger resurgence of her soul and shows how that will place her in the forefront of the world as its spiritual leader.

These revelations contain the Creative Word of India's soul, the supreme word that would liberate man and create a new world of freedom, unity and perfection. A writer¹ calls the Arya, 'the Scripture of Indian Nationalism' through which the voice of India's soul utters the mantra of man's redemption,—'this is Indian Nationalism of the universal type.' A broad hint of this universal significance of Indian Nationalism could be read into Sri Aurobindo's writings and speeches of the Swadeshi days in which one of the points often stressed was that India was rising not for herself alone but for the whole world. And this was also Vivekananda's vision. Among those who understood and appreciated Sri Aurobindo's Arya writings was that versatile genius Dwijendranath Tagore, Poet Rabindranath's eldest brother, who said that what Sr Aurobindo said in the Arya had never before been said anywhere by anybody. Another was Romain Rolland, the eminent French savant, who called Arya, 'a review of the greatest importance' and Sri Aurobindo 'the last of the great Rishis who holds in his outstretched hands the bow of Creative Impulse'. About India's spirituality Romain Rolland said : 'It is an uninterrupted tide flowing from the most distant yesterdays to the most distant tomorrows.' This echoes the Vedic hymn : 'Usha the ancient Dawn is the first in the eternal succession of the Dawns that are coming.'

When asked why the Arya was discontinued in 1921 in spite of the fact that it was self-supporting, Sri Aurobindo said that people were finding it difficult to follow the trend of its thought in all its deeper implications. On another occasion, in answering the question how he could manage to write in the Arya on seven different subjects at one and the same time, he

¹ Prof. Jyotischandra Ghose in his book Life-Work of Sri Aurobindo.

said that if he went on writing seven issues of the Arya every month for full seventy years, he could hardly exhaust all the knowledge that came to him from above ! This was just a way of saying that he was in possession of a knowledge of higher truths that knew no limits. We have it from Sri Aurobindo himself, as already referred to at length in Chapter XV, that from 1910, more particularly from 1914 he received ceaseless streams of light, force and universal consciousness, all from supramental planes. And the result ?—The new divine Message in the form of all his major prose works that he wrote in the Arya from 1914 to 1921. Once he said : 'If I wrote all that I knew it would be ten times the amount I have written.'

Apart from his voluminous writings in the Arya, there used to flow from his pen essays, poems, plays, dialogues, commentaries on and translations of, the Veda and the Upanishads. Poetry welled up in him when he was a boy of ten or eleven and continued its course freely all through his life, even through the busiest, most strenuous and critical periods of his political career. His files of manuscripts have brought to light a surprising variety of such writings, especially poems—dramas and narratives in English, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Bengali, and an epic of nearly five thousand lines in English hexameters on a Homeric theme. It may be noted that he started writing sutras in Sanskrit embodying the principles of his Yoga. But for the higher work of Yoga these had to be put aside.

In 1920 there came out from Chandemagore a weekly called The Standard-Bearer with an opening article from Sri Aurobindo in which he indicated the lines on which India's resurgence should develop : 'Our ideal is a new birth of humanity into the spirit; our life must be a spiritually inspired effort to create a body of action for that great new birth and creation. A spiritual ideal has always been the characteristic idea and aspiration of India. But the progress of Time and the need of humanity demand a new orientation and another form of that ideal. The old forms and methods are no longer sufficient for the purpose of the Time-Spirit.... Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit. It is to accept the world as an effort of manifestation of the Divine, but also to transform humanity by a greater effort of manifestation than has yet been accomplished, one in which the veil between man and God shall be removed, the divine manhood of which we are capable shall come to birth and our life shall be remoulded in the truth and light and power of the spirit....

'The West has made the growth of the intellectual, emotional, vital and material being of man its ideal, but it has left aside the greater possibilities of his spiritual existence....The West has put its faith in its science and machinery and it is being destroyed by its science and crushed under its mechanical burden. It has not understood that a spiritual change is necessary for the accomplishment of its ideals. The East has the secret of that

spiritual change but it has too long turned its eyes away from the earth. The time has now come to heal the division and to unite life and spirit.

'This secret too has been possessed but not sufficiently practised by India. It is summarised in the rule of the Gita, yogasthaḥ kuru karmāṇi. Its principle is to do all actions in Yoga, in union with God, on the foundation of the highest self and through the rule of all our members by the power of the Spirit. And this we believe to be not only possible for man but the true solution of all his problems and difficulties. This then is the message we shall constantly utter and this the ideal that we shall put before the young and rising India, a spiritual life that shall take up all human activities and avail to transfigure the world for the great age that is coming. India, she that has carried in herself from of old the secret, can alone lead the way in this great transformation of which the present sandhyā of the old yoga is the forerunner. This must be her mission and service to humanity,—as she discovered the inner spiritual life of the individual, so now to discover for the race its integral collective expression and found for mankind its new spiritual and communal order....

'Our call is to young India. It is the young who must be the builders of the new world,...; the young who are free in mind and heart to accept a completer truth and labour for a greater ideal. They must be men who will dedicate themselves not to the past or the present but to the future. They will need to consecrate their lives to an exceeding of their lower self, to the realisation of God in themselves and in all human beings and to a whole-minded and indefatigable labour for the nation and for humanity. This ideal can be as yet only a little seed and the life that embodies it a small nucleus, but it is our fixed hope that the seed will grow into a tree and the nucleus be the heart of an ever-extending formation. It is with a confident trust in the spirit that inspires us that we take our place among the standard-bearers of the new humanity that is struggling to be bom amid the chaos of a world in dissolution, and of the future India, the greater India of the rebirth that is to rejuvenate the mighty body of the ancient Mother.'

In 1919, in course of his review of Sir John Woodroffe's book Is India Civilised in Arya: Sri Aurobindo wrote: If we are to live at all, we must resume India's great interrupted endeavour; we must take up boldly and execute thoroughly in the individual and in the society, in the spiritual and in the mundane life, in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in thought, in political and economic and social formulation, the full and unlimited sense of her highest spirit and knowledge. And if we do that, we shall find that the best of what comes to us draped in Occidental forms, is already implied in our own ancient wisdom and has there a greater spirit behind it, a profounder truth and self-knowledge and the capacity of a will to nobler and more ideal formations. Only we need to work out thoroughly in life what we have always known in spirit. There

and nowhere else lies the secret of the needed harmony between the essential meaning of our past culture and the environmental requirements of our future.'

These are no mere ideas of a thinker but the spiritual perceptions of a Yogi which are as important today as they were when first published. In fact, they are the basis of all that Sri Aurobindo said on India's resurgence. Spirituality has ever been the lifeline of India's historic evolution. Today it must again be recovered in all its original strength and made the very basis of every endeavour towards the remaking of every sphere of Indian life—social, cultural, political and even economic.

1920, when Sri Aurobindo proclaimed to his countrymen their ideal, is a significant point in the process of India's resurgence in modern times. From almost the first year of the present century there began that upsurge of India's soul through which she discovered the ancient spirit and whatever she gained from it became for her the motive-force of all her strivings in the realm of art and poetry, science and politics, mysticism and Yoga. Sri Aurobindo once said that a light from above dawned on the consciousness of the nation and awakened it, and that a Force was at work in the national being impelling it to those endeavours whose splendid results are some of the brightest pages in the cultural history of modern India. J.Ramsay Macdonald uttered a great truth about this resurgence when he said: 'Bengal is idealising India, is translating nationalism into religion, into music and poetry, into painting and literature.' And it is of this Bengal of the Swadeshi days that Sir Henry Cotton said : 'The Bengali intelligentsia of the time were intellectually among the finest people of the world.' Apart from Sri Aurobindo and Bipinchandra who were direct instruments of this Light and this Force, there were many others who were inspired by them not only to those heroic endeavours towards national freedom but to express in a new form of language new revolutionary ideas of which they had known nothing before. Upendranath Bandyopa-dhyaya, a regular leader-writer of Yugantar, testified to this. While poets felt impelled to write inspiring national songs, there were writers who developed a prose that proved no less effective lever in the national uplift. These will find place in the history of modern Bengali literature when the objective historian becomes subjective as well.

Apart from these, among the outstanding creations, in the first two decades of the present century when the Sakti of India was overtly at work, were a new poetry and a new art both reflecting the ancient vision of India. Science also returned to its ancient root. Rabindranath produced some of his best poetry and prose, and Abanindranath and his pupils their marvels of art. Jagadischandra's scientific discoveries startied Europe. And all these, as seen before, centred round the pregnant year 1914. The politics of this period, rightly characterised as revolutionary Nationalism, was a dynamic form of Indian spirituality, founded on a

supreme vision. And the whole nation inspired by that vision made the first notable attempt to shake off its bondage. This attempt took another notable form in the Home Rule movement under the two notable great souls, Tilak and Annie Besant. Hitherto-unknown secrets of Yoga and mysticism and man s spiritual destiny were revealed by the Master-Yogi who also gave to his people an outline of how the New India of Tomorrow should develop. The Arya containing Sri Aurobindo's revelatory writings continued from 1914 to 1921.

After 1920 other forces and other ideas started to work in the life of the nation. The forces of the Spirit that were behind the various movements of the first two decades of the present century did not, because they could not, completely die down. In fact, they sank into the race consciousness and waited for the necessary conditions in which alone they could inspire creative endeavours and sustain them towards their larger fulfilments. As regards India's freedom, it has been seen how it became God's work when those pure and heroic souls dedicated themselves to its cause as His instruments. And it was His Will which brought it about when the propitious hour arrived.

Not only this, Yogis had for centuries been concentrating on the same end, said Sri Aurobindo. The Gurus or spiritual teachers mentioned by Hume—one of the founders of the Indian National Congress,—might trace their affinity with Sivaji's Guru Ramdas, who was one of the greatest. There were a number of such teachers, sannyasins and men of spiritual power who were behind the revolutionary movement in Bengal as in other parts of India, because they knew that India's spiritual mission in the world hung on her freedom. The Vivekananda-force was such a revolutionary agent. The eighteenth-century Sannyasi rebellion, an admitted fact of history, to which Bankimchandra refers in his Anandamath, was also a fillip to the revolutionary movement. Sri Aurobindo so many times said that though out of active politics, yet he had always done what he thought best for India's freedom but in his own spiritual way. That India's freedom had already been a fact in the world of basic forces was affirmed by Sri Aurobindo in 1918 and 1920, as mentioned in the previous chapter.

And it was also in that momentous year 1920 that the Mother finally returned to Pondicherry and started her spiritual work with Sri Aurobindo. Not long after her arrival, one day she told Sri Aurobindo what she saw in the occult world, that India was free and that her freedom would come without any struggle or bloodshed and under circumstances that would make possible a quiet withdrawal of British from India¹. Of course the truth came to her from her occult knowledge of the world of basic forces where events take their birth long before they get actuaiised in the external world which being imperfect often resists and delays such actualisations.

¹ This is known to those who were in the Ashram at the time.

In 1923 a notable visitor to Sri Aurobindo was Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das who a year before had written to Sri Aurobindo asking him to return to politics. Sri Aurobindo could not accede because he was determined not to work in the external field till he had 'the sure and complete possession of a new power of action—not to build except on a perfect foundation.' The purpose of Chittaranjan's visit was both spiritual and political. He came to seek spiritual help from Sri Aurobindo. One of the most important political problems he discussed with Sri Aurobindo was the Hindu-Muslim one, referring to which Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1946 when Calcutta witnessed perhaps the wildest communal frenzies. He said : 'What is happening did not come to me as a surprise. I foresaw it when I was in Bengal and warned the people that it was probable and almost inevitable and that they should be prepared for it. At that time no one attached any value to what I said although some afterwards remembered and admitted, when the trouble first began, that I have been right; only C. R. Das had grave apprehensions and he even told me when he came to Pondicherry that he would not like the British to go out until this dangerous problem had been settled.' In yet another letter written in 1934, Sri Aurobindo expressed the following views on the Congress policy towards the Muslim : 'As for the Hindu-Muslim affair, I saw no reason why the greatness of India's past or her spirituality should be thrown into the waste paper basket in order to conciliate the Moslems who would not at all be conciliated by such policy. What has created the Hindu-Moslem spirit was not Swadeshi, but the acceptance of the communal principle by the Congress (here Tilak made his great blunder), and the further attempt by the Khilafat movement to conciliate them and bring them in on wrong lines. The recognition of that communal principle at Lucknow made them permanently a separate political entity in India which ought never to have happened; the Khilafat affair made the separate political entity an organised separate political power.' Bipinchandra Pal had similar views on the Khilafat and that was one of the reasons why he could not support the Non-Cooperation movement.

Sri Aurobindo always stood for India's integrity, her oneness and indivisibility 'built on the common home, the common interest and the common love', the three principal factors in an Indian's vision of his country as the Mother. When an objection was raised against Bande Mataram being adopted as India's national anthem, on the ground that it is based on image worship in which certain religious communities do not believe, Sri Aurobindo's one answer was, 'It is India which is meant by Durga in the song, and that if she is at all an image it is India she represents, with all her aspects as symbols of India's spiritual and material wealth.'

Sri Aurobindo gave his 'full support to C. R. Das's Swaraj Party policy in which he found an echo of his principle of accepting whatever offer of

real power would come from Government and yet fight for more both in the legislature and outside till the goal was realised.' This was also the policy of Tilak. Sri Aurobindo knew that Chittaranjan had in him the power to lead the country to that goal. When in 1925 the great leader passed away Sri Aurobindo said : 'Chittaranjan's death is a supreme loss. Consummately endowed with political intelligence, constructive imagination, magnetism, a driving force combining a strong will and uncommon plasticity of mind for vision and tact of the hour, he was the one man after Tilak who could have led India to Swaraj.'

An important visitor after Chittaranjan in 1923 was Lala Lajpat Rai, Sri Aurobindo's co-worker in the Nationalist Party. He came with definite proposals and sought Sri Aurobindo's advice on the pressing problems of the time.

The same year to a question asked by a disciple Sri Aurobindo replied : India's freedom, Mother India herself will bring. With her awakening will come her independence. No power on earth can prevent it. The hour of her awakening is approaching.'

Now came 1926. A year of victory, which also saw the beginning of that organisation, 'the wonderful Ashram' as C. R. Reddy called it, 'in which life and joy of life are mingled in happy union with spirituality and spiritual progress.' That year, on 24 November, Sri Aurobindo had a decisive realisation, a direct descent of a higher consciousness that could be made an enduring basis for erecting a supramental structure in the earth-nature. He called it a victory, and the day has since been known and celebrated as a Victory Day. About this Sri Aurobindo wrote : 'November 24,1926, was the descent of Krishna into the physical. Krishna is not the supramental Light. The descent of Krishna would mean the descent of the Overmind Godhead preparing, though not itself actually, the descent of Supermind and Ananda. Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the overmind leading it towards the Ananda.'

Some idea of this spiritual event of epochal importance, though absolutely subjective, may be had from the recorded accounts of A. B. Purani, Nolini Kanta Gupta, and R. K. Palit, who were among the twentyfour— a number of occult value—present on the occasion. A brief summary only of what they wrote can be given here : The pressure of a higher force, growing more and more in many and becoming unbearable for some, made the disciples feel that something great was imminent. And when the day arrived 'a heavenly atmosphere prevailed in the Ashram', 'an oceanic flood of Light rushing down from above. Everyone felt a kind of pressure above his head.' 'In that silence', 'silence absolute, silence living', there was meditation for about fortyfive minutes, after which the disciples, one by one, bowed down to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who gave them their Blessings. 'Many had distinct experiences' and 'felt that it was

not a mere handful of disciples receiving Blessings from their supreme Master and Mother in an obscure corner of the earth but an event of vast significance for the whole world'. They were convinced that 'a Higher Consciousness had descended on earth'. They saw Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as majestic figures bathed in the effulgence of a celestial light.

After the Blessings Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went inside. And then, Datta (Miss Hodjson, an English lady) 'suddenly exclaimed at the top of her voice, as though an inspired Prophetess of the old mysteries : 'The Lord has descended. He has conquered death and sorrow. He has brought down immortality.'

Sri Krishna's Overmental Delight Consciousness descended on that day into the physical making possible the descent of the Supermind into Matter.

In order to concentrate on the work of preparing the earth consciousness for its supramentalisation, Sri Aurobindo retired into complete seclusion that very day, leaving the entire charge of the Ashram to the Mother.

'The Mother's endeavour at that time', says Nolini Kanta Gupta, 'had been for a new creation, the creation here of a new inner world of the divine consciousness. She had brought down the Higher Forces, the Gods, into the earth atmosphere, into our being and consciousness. She had placed each of us in touch with his inner godhead.... This was a period of extreme concentration and one-pointedness',¹ 'when the Ashram atmosphere was charged with the Force working in it'. Speaking on how they reacted to this the same disciple said : 'We had become so indrawn and self-concentrated that one day as I went out of the Ashram I began to feel rather queer, and had a strange experience, as if I was not walking on the ground. My legs seemed weightless. I floated in the air through a mist as in a dream and there was no solid ground or a setded path. I felt terribly uneasy, almost like a fish out of water. I hurried back and only when I reached the Ashram precincts I could heave a sigh of relief.'

This phase in the spiritual life of the Ashram was followed by other phases as and when they were needed for progressive stages of preparation for the ultimate goal.

On 24 November 1926 and thereafter, Amrita, now Manager of the Ashram, had similar experiences. Some of his later ones he has recorded in his book Visions and Voices. A word about him in passing. During the stirring days of the Swadeshi movement when he was about ten he used often to hear the names of its four great leaders one of whom, Sri Aurobindo, he says, 'caught my heart and soul'. In 1905 Amrita came from his village home to Pondicherry for study. When, in 1910, Sri Aurobindo arrived at Pondicherry, Amrita was 'full of joy, thrilled with delight', and became most eager to see him. He waited and waited, aspiring

¹ From Nolini Kanta Gupta's extension lecture at Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, given on 10 August 1962.

more and more from the depths of his soul, passing his days in the company of those who had the privilege of seeing Sri Aurobindo daily. One of them was the famous poet-patriot Subramania Bharati from whom Amrita 'imbibed a distaste for the old and a boundless attraction for the new'. And the decisive moment arrived on 15 August 1913 when he had Sri Aurobindo's Darshan and 'in a moment all the past vanished from within, and His image was as it were installed in the sanctum sanctorum of my being'. Amrita comes from a respectable orthodox Tamil brahmana family. On 4 April 1919, when he was 23, he left home and joined the Ashram quite like his Master who had left his all and arrived at Pondicherry ten years ago, on the same day—the 4th of April. He is one of the blessed souls called and chosen by the Master for his divine work.

Another such disciple to participate in the experiences of the Day, 24 November 1926, was P. B. Saint-Hilaire (known in the Ashram as Pavitra), a Frenchman of aristocratic birth with the highest engineering degree of France. During his active military service in the First World War, he felt a strong spiritual quest which, after the war, led him away from home to the Far East and thence, in 1925, to India where, in Pondicherry, he met Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and at once found in them what his soul had been yearning for. Since then Pavitra has been living in the Ashram without a break. He is now Director of Education, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, and a personal secretary of the Mother.

About a decade later, in 1935, in answer to a question regarding realisations in the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo wrote : 'There are already more than 5 or 6 in the Ashram who have had some realisation at least of the Divine.... Some have Vedantic and some Bhakti realisations too.' He added, 'If I were to publish the letters on sadhana that came to me, people would marvel and think that the Ashram was packed full of great Yogi.... Even the failures would have become Gurus, if I had allowed it, with circles of Shishyas ! X did become one. Y of course. But all that does not count here because what is a full realisation outside is here only a beginning of Siddhi. Here the test is transformation of nature, psychic, spiritual, finally supramental.'¹

Later in 1937, in answer to similar questions on the spiritual experiences of his disciples, Sri Aurobindo wrote : '...here there are any number of people who have had experiences which could be highly prized outside. There are even one or two who have had the Brahman realisation in a single year.'²

Under the fostering care and unerring guidance of the Mother, the Ashram grew and grew until today it is a unique institution where men, women and children from all over India and abroad have gathered and are

¹ Nirodbaran : Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 106.

² Ibid., Second Series, p. 50.

trained for an integrally perfect life in the Spirit envisaged in the Master's vision of man's future.

The Ashram is not an organised institution. It has been an organic growth; it is an organism. Neither planned, nor built, it is a natural and living expression—ever striving for more and more perfection—of the Ideal the Mother and Sri Aurobindo stand for. Its expansion since 1926 is a story in itself. Souls deciding to dedicate themselves to that Ideal came and, when accepted, became members of the Ashram whose number today is around fourteen hundred. Under the Mother's personal direction services were arranged for hygienic and ordered living. To be self-sufficient in so far as its external essentials are concerned is also another aim of the Ashram. Among the services, a few are : Building, Sanitation, Medicine, Domestic, Furniture, Laundry, Bakery, Dairy, Farming, Weaving, Engineering, Printing and Educational. Most of these are manned by the members of the Ashram who look upon their work as a form of selfless service to the Divine, as part of their spiritual life and as a disciplined expression of their progressive realisation of the Ideal.

The Ashram's educational work began in 1942 when the Mother started a school for the training of the children who were then permitted to come with their parents and guardians. The higher courses in the more important branches of Science and the Humanities were introduced in 1953 when the children completed their school course. The teaching of fine arts, such as, music, dancing and painting had been earlier inaugurated. The central aim here is to evolve a system of education based on the unity of all knowledge, of Science and the Humanities, and on the harmonious development of all the creative faculties of man, of all the parts and planes of his being—physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual. The teachings of Sri Aurobindo in their various aspects form the common course offered both by the Science and Arts students of the Higher Course.

The study and cultivation of these subjects along with poetry and literature in some major Indian and European languages, derive their inspiration from the atmosphere of the Ashram pervaded by the spiritual influence of the Mother and the Master, inspiration as well from their ideal of spiritualisation of fife and its activities. Traces of this inspiration are often perceptible in the work of the students and teachers, even in the untaught skill in children's art. The use of material things and mechanical appliances also is governed by the principle that the Divine Consciousness sustains everything, living and non-living, and underlies the harmony that sustains the world manifestation.

The principle of teaching followed here is Sri Aurobindo's : 'The principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught. The teacher is not an instructor or task-master, he is a helper and a guide. His business is to suggest and not to impose. He does not actually train the pupil's mind, he only shows him how to perfect his instrument of knowledge

and helps and encourages him in the process. He does not impart knowledge to him, he shows him how to acquire knowledge for himself. He does not call forth the knowledge that is within; he only shows him where it lies and how it can be habituated to rise to the surface.... Every one has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it and use it. The chief aim of education should be to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble use.' 'The evocation of the real man ('a conscious power of the Divine') is the right object of education and indeed of all human life.' It is a fact of great promise and of high significance that the educational experiments initiated by progressive minds in Europe, England and America in recent times, are a near approach to the lines laid down by Sri Aurobindo in 1909.

The Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, still in the process of expansion, has begun to attract the attention of educationists from all over the world. H. W. Schneider, then Head of the Division of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, UNESCO, who visited the institution in 1954, spoke highly of this 'authentic experiment'. Many such visitors express the view that 'institutions like this are the crying need of the day'. 'An institution having for its ideal the reshaping of human life and living' and which has behind it 'the necessary creative genius to realise that ideal, should deserve the first consideration of all concerned' is the opinion of three prominent members of the Congress in the Indian Parliament.

From its composition as a miniature world in itself, with its naturally growing international outlook, the Centre of Education points to the immense possibilities of the cultural and spiritual unity of mankind which will be the basis of the New World of Tomorrow. In this international centre of culture an integral education is being imparted to hundreds of young souls under the Mother's personal guidance, the essential aim being the growth of the whole man into his highest perfection. The integral approach in the treatment of the subjects studied' here envisages the development of a world culture based on an all-embracing spirituality.

This is the beginning of a very important aspect of the Mother's work for India and the world through which she is giving a concrete shape to the Ideal of Sri Aurobindo, to the highest ideal of ancient Indian culture and education, in unison with the one great need of the age,—dynamic spirituality embracing and transforming the whole of life. Once addressing the children the Mother said : 'Here, in the Ashram, you are in the most favourable conditions with regard to the environment, the influence, the teaching and the example, to awaken in you the supramental consciousness and to grow according to its law____ If your will is to become men of the new race realising Sri Aurobindo's supramental ideal, living a new and higher life upon a new earth, you will find here all the necessary

help to achieve your purpose.' In the course of a Message to the children in 1953, the Mother said : 'Sri Aurobindo incarnated in a human body the supramental consciousness and has not only revealed to us the nature of the path to follow and the method of following it so as to arrive at the goal, but has also by his own personal realisation given us the example; he has provided us, so to say, with the proof that the thing can be done and the time is now to do it.' A call and an assurance that come to man only at a great hour of the world.

Mention may be made here of an interesting incident. In 1919 Poet Rabindranath met the Mother in Japan. In fact, they put up in the same hotel for some time. And they became very good friends. The Poet asked her for help and advice in the matter of his educational experiment at Santiniketan.

A notable event after 1926 is Poet Rabindranath's visit to Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry on 16 February 1928. What he wrote on his return was the word of his soul : 'At the very first sight I could realise that he (Sri Aurobindo) had been seeking for the soul and had gained it.... His face was radiant with an inner light.... I felt that the utterance of the ancient Hindu Rishi spoke from him of that equanimity which gives the human soul its freedom of entrance into the All. I said to him : "You have the Word and we are waiting to receive it from you. India will speak through your voice, Hearken unto me." '

In a similar vein spoke K. M. Munshi, after his interview with Sri Aurobindo in April 1950. He said : 'A deep light of knowledge and wisdom shone in his eyes. The wide calm of the Spirit appeared to have converted the whole personality into the radiant Presence of one who shone with the light of Consciousness.... He was the absolute integration of personality, the Central Idea in Aryan culture materialised in human shape, one of the greatest architects of creative life.'

The radiance that Munshiji saw emanating from the Master's body in 1950 was the light that Rabindranath had seen and hailed in 1928. At Darshan, people saw it in different phases : rose-red, blue, golden, or blue and golden shading into each other.

Of all his features his eyes were perhaps the most expressive. A worker in the revolutionary field told the writer that whenever he came to Sri Aurobindo around 1907 for directions, he often found no need to speak his thoughts or hear the voice in answer. A look of his eyes—that was all. Others remark his eyes appeared at times in-drawn or penetrating, sparkling with affectionate humour or with smile of recognition, or most brimming over with compassion.

Frederic Spiegelberg of Stanford University, California, had Darshan of Sri Aurobindo in 1949. In the course of giving his impressions of it in an A.I.R. broadcast, he said : T will never forget the whole of my life the surprising, unexpected and amazingly strange effect of the look of those

bright eyes which change your inside out, which work like an X-Ray treatment objectively whether you want it or not, whether you resist them or not, and as far as the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo is concerned, I do not hesitate to call him the greatest living philosopher on earth.'

When after more than thirty long years the same revolutionary worker of those days saw Sri Aurobindo he was struck with wonder at the complete change in the complexion of his body. His slightly dark complexion had become golden. This ex-revolutionary was no disciple of Sri Aurobindo. When the writer's identical impression confirmed his own, he told the writer that Yoga was beyond him but that it could change one's bodily complexion was a fact of which he was convinced by the Darshan.

One day one of the attendants of Sri Aurobindo chanced to enter his room when the morning sun had just peeped in. The wonderful sight he saw was a golden child lying on his bed, looking all the more radiant with the gold of the sun added to the gold of the child. Another day another attendant, also making an unexpected entry, saw Sri Aurobindo sitting cross-legged on a side of his bed as a mighty figure of Siva, all luminous, a soft benign smile playing on his lips, as on the lips of Nataraja. Like Sri Aurobindo's, the Mother's divinity also appears before various eyes in various divine forms.

In 1930 Sri Aurobindo started on a new activity, or rather extended what had been occasional before. This was his daily correspondence with the sadhaks of the Ashram. Heaps of letters would daily come to him and his prompt replies to each giving personal guidance in Yoga kept him occupied almost throughout the nights, leaving him barely an hour or two's repose. Most of these letters have since been published in book-form.

A most interesting series of such letters was on poetry and literature. Those on poetry are extremely illuminating. In fact, they are a revelation. A born poet, Sri Aurobindo, before taking up Yoga, had always regarded two things as the most important of his occupations—poetry and politics.

Two massive volumes, a number of smaller ones and crowning them all, his epic Savitri are his poetic creations. Five five-act plays show that he was no less great as a dramatist. His later poems, particularly his hundred sonnets, are most of them records of his sublime spiritual experiences and realisations.

Here are a few lines from his spiritual poetry.

'I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine....

* *

'My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,

My body is God's happy living tool,

My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.'

'Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices come to me from God's doorway—

Words that live save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots.'

'Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest.'

'Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,

Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of grace.

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss :

Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life Beatitude's kiss.'

A distinguished critic¹ places 'on the brows of this giant a crown of triple triumph' for accomplishing 'three exceedingly rare things'. 'First, he has to his credit a bulk of excellent blank verse.' 'Quantitative metre is the second tier in Sri Aurobindo's poetic crown.' 'The third is not merely a revelation of strange rhythm-moulds, but also the laying bare of a rhythmic life beyond the ranges of inspired consciousness to which we have been so far accustomed.... Sri Aurobindo discloses planes that have been secret hitherto except for stray lines here and there, occurring as if by a luminous accident. Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystic and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Sri Aurobindo stands as the creator of a new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry.' Here he is the kavi, Seer in the proper Vedic sense of the word, 'the Poet and Priest of the Spirit'. His epic Savitri, quoted from at the end of this chapter, is epitomised by the Mother as 'the prophetic vision of the world's history, and the announcement of the earth's future.' 'Savitri', says Raymond F. Piper, the eminent American philosophical thinker and art-critic, 'has already inaugurated the new Age of Illumination', is 'probably the greatest epic in the English language. . . . the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful, and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of supramental spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massive-

¹ K. D. Sethna in his The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo.

ness, magnificence and metaphorical brilliance. Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind towards the Absolute.'1

Belonging to a temperamentally poetic race the earliest literary form of whose language is mystic poetry, Sri Aurobindo is not only the greatest spiritual poet of our day and the creator of a new age of spiritual poetry but also, perhaps, the only creator of poets. In a letter written to Nirodbaran he said that it is not always true that poets cannot be made. 'Here in Pondicherry we have tried not to manufacture poets but to give them a birth, a spiritual, not a physical birth into the body.' About Nishikanto, many of whose Bengali poems received high praise from Sri Aurobindo, he wrote : 'He got a touch here which brought out in him some powerful force of vital vision and word that certainly had not shown any signs of existing before....Nishikanto came out, a sudden Brahmaputra of inspiration ....' There are others whom the Master's touch transformed into poets. Nirodbaran, for instance, who had his training in medicine in England and who never had written any poetry, 'suddenly blossomed' into poetic beauty in English. His book Sun Blossoms has received high praise from critics. Sahana Devi is another whose book of Bengali poems Nirajana has also been well received. In a letter published therein Rabindranath wrote : 'Your poetry, what a surprise e to me ! Your pen, from where has it come out mounted as a rider ? As without, so within, it is in fine trim, a harmonious blend of body and soul. It seems the goddess of poetry passed straight into your depths where lay asleep your poetic self, and touched it with her wand of gold and that very moment it woke up to her light. Its full awakening waited for no effort .... '

An Englishman, J. A. Chadwick, who was renamed Arjavananda by Sri Aurobindo, turned poet of a most unusual quality under the Master's touch. To join the Ashram he had given up a professor's job at Lucknow where he had settled after a brilliant career (including a fellowship) at Trinity College, Cambridge. He had distinguished himself in Mathematical Philosophy. Very soon he developed the poetic faculty. Sri Krishna Prem (Ronald Nixon), another brilliant Englishman who has taken to Indian Yoga, has spoken of 'the delicate dream-like beauty' of Arjava's poetry dealing with 'the mysteries of the inner life'—quite a metamorphosis from a language confined to 'the arid propositions' of the philosophical intellect. Sri Aurobindo has remarked on the dynamic occult vision and subtle rhythm of Arjava's new work and he entertained hopes for him of a poetic greatness belonging to the highest rank.

Yet another, by a similar awakening, struck 'the pure mystic source' and wrote a number of mystic poems many of whose meanings were beyond their writer. There were others who have struggled hard to write poetry without any appreciable success. The touch of the Master helped

¹ Raymond F. Piper : The Hungry Eye : An Introduction to Cosmic Art, pp. 131-32.

them up. Rabindranath described one of them in his former state 'as a cripple', and his later stage as one 'who threw away his crutches and began' to run'. Rabindranath expressed his 'astonishment at the miracle'. K. D. Sethna, poet, critic and a writer of a very high order, is a splendid instance in point of how one with a poetic gift was inspired by Sri Aurobindo to write 'overhead poetry', that is to say, from higher than mental planes of consciousness, on which illumination and intuition are the rule. And he had the rare privilege of having his own Master's testimony to these qualities. His poems in periodicals, in his own books, The Secret Splendour and The Adventure of the Apocalypse, and his prose works on literary and cultural subjects are examples of his natural gift kindled by his Master into the light of genius which has won the admiration of competent critics in India and abroad. Sri Aurobindo's letters to Sethna are a revealing document of how he trained his disciple.

All these¹ are another type of marvels in Sri Aurobindo's unique creation in so many fields of knowledge and culture. There are prose writers, those exponents of Sri Aurobindo's teachings, who received and continue to receive even today help and guidance from the Master. Some of them address international gatherings. Mention may be made here of K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Professor of English, Andhra University, and V. K. Gokak, Director, Central Institute of English, Hyderabad, both of whom as well-known writers in English, as prominent members of International P.E.N., visiting professors to foreign universities, and delegates to various international conferences, take every available opportunity to introduce Sri Aurobindo's poetry and thought into their addresses and writings. Besides, Prof. Gokak is an eminent writer and author in Kannada and belongs to what he calls 'the Gnostic Group' of Kannada litterateurs, directly inspired by Sri Aurobindo. To this group belong also D. R. Bendre and R. S. Mugali, two other eminent poets and authors in Kannada.

What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have wanted to do is to bring down on earth a New Light from above, a New divine Power, and by it to divinise man, that is to say, liberate him from his bondage to the dark Forces into the freedom and power of that heavenly Light, of a God-like perfection. Consequently, the forces of Darkness that dominate earth, finding their suzerainty challenged, seek to frustrate the work of the Divine. And the nearer is the Manifestation, the fiercer is their resistance.

It is these forces which chose Hitler and his satellites to act as their instruments in order to destroy human civilisation and thereby baffle the work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo saw in the Nazi aggression 'the peril of black servitude and a revived barbarism threatening India and the world'. Supporting the defence against them Sri Aurobindo wrote : '... it is a defence of civili-

¹ Most of these facts are from Nirodbaran's book Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, Part Two.

sation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity. To this cause our support and sympathy will be unswerving whatever may happen.' He characterised the struggle of the Allies as not one Tor certain nations against others or even for India' but one 'for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future.'

The next occasion that called for his personal intervention was when Britain in seeking India's cooperation in the war effort made an offer to the Congress. Sri Aurobindo had foreseen this and attached to it great value. The offer was made in March 1942 through Sir Stafford Cripps. Sri Aurobindo in a message to Cripps wrote : T welcome it as an opportunity given to India to determine for herself, and organise in all liberty of choice, her freedom and unity, and take an effective place among the world's free nations. I hope that it will be accepted, and right use made of it, putting aside all discords and divisions. I hope too that friendly relations between Britain and India replacing the past struggles, will be a step towards a greater world union in which, as a free nation, her spiritual force will contribute to build for mankind a better and happier life.' Sri Aurobindo followed it up by sending personal messages to Congress and Hindu Mahasabha leaders and sent an envoy to place his views before the Congress leaders. His main point was that 'it would be better to get into the saddle and not be particular about the legal basis of the power. Once the power came into our hands and we occupied seats of power, we could establish our positions and assert ourselves.'

But the Congress read into the offer other meanings and rejected it. Its leaders chose to go by their own reasons rather than pay heed to the Seer, one who for the first time during his long retirement since 1910 made a public pronouncement on a subject which he regarded as of vital consequence to the destiny of the country. An instance of the tragic failure of the human mind to seize the opportunity that came its way. Truly has the Poet said :

'For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.'

Sri Aurobindo, choosing to intervene outwardly on occasion and besides giving support and encouragement to those who sought his advice about joining the war effort, concentrated and relied on his Yogic powers and did far more than he possibly could on the human plane.

The Master-Yogi was always at work on the spiritual plane for the liberation of India and the world. He knew well enough that the freedom of India would come notwithstanding the rejection of the Cripps offer

by the Congress. In September 1935 he wrote to one of his disciples that 'India's independence was arranged for, that he had to bother about what she would do with her independence.

True to his prevision, the independence came, but a broken one, perhaps because the conditions, internal and external, could not respond fully to the action of the spiritual Force. But this Force would not for that matter cease to act. It is, as the Master said, always at work and more so now, in order to overcome all oppositions and bring things to order that India might go ahead towards a larger fulfilment of her destiny.

Among the immediate forces that combined to bring about India's independence were the international situation following the Second World War, the country-wide revolutionary turn taken by India's struggle for freedom, the will of powerful spiritual figures like Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the will of every one of whom was one with the Will of the Divine Sakti presiding over the destiny of India and the world. They all knew, as said before, that India's freedom was divinely decreed and indispensable for her work for the world. These forces must have acted on the British mind and produced in it a far-reaching statesmanship and sagacity that led it to transfer power to India with a gracefulness which at the same time forged unseen bonds of friendship between the two. This friendship, regarded by an Indian publicist as a unique event in history, and the recent attempts among the nations at international amity and understanding, are significant steps towards the world union envisaged by Sri Aurobindo.

When on 15 August 1947, India became independent, Sri Aurobindo in the course of his declaration said : 'August 15, 1947, is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age....

'August 15 is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence, not as a fortuitous accident, but as a sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps on the work with which I began life, the beginning of its full fruition. Indeed, on this day I can watch almost all the world-movements which I hoped to see fulfilled in my lifetime, though then they looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement. In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position.

'The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India. India today is free but she has not achieved unity.' Pointing out the dangers of the partition, Sri Aurobindo said : '...By whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go; unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future.

'Another dream was the resurgence and liberation of the peoples fo Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation.

Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated.... The third dream was a world-union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind.... For unification is a necessity of Nature, an inevitable movement.... There must grow up an international spirit and outlook, international forms and institutions must appear....A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race.

'Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever-increasing measure. That movement will grow....

'The final dream was a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solution of the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society.... Here too, if this evolution is to take place, since it must proceed through a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers.

'Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India.' It is for India, her people and her government, no less than for the rest of the world, to take note of these profound significances revealed by the Master-Seer of the age.

In 1948, Sri Aurobindo gave another Message to the nation through Andhra University when it offered him the Sir C. R. Reddy National Prize : 'In this hour, in the second year of its liberation, the nation has to awaken... to vast possibilities opening before her but also to dangers and difficulties that may, if not wisely dealt with, become formidable.... There are deeper issues for India herself, since by following certain tempting directions she may conceivably become a nation like many others evolving an opulent industry and commerce, a powerful organisation of social and political life, an immense military strength, practising power-politics with a high degree of success, guarding and extending zealously her gains and her interests, dominating even a large part of the world, but in this apparently magnificent progression forfeiting its Swadharma, losing its soul. Then ancient India and her spirit might disappear altogether and we would have only one more nation like the others and that would be a real gain neither to the world nor to us.... It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. This must not and will surely not happen; but it cannot be said that the danger is not there....No doubt we will win through, but we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and change,

a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India's true destiny.'

On what that destiny of India is, here are the words of Sri Aurobindo : '.. '.the Light which led to Freedom, though not yet to unity, still burns and will burn on till it conquers. I believe firmly that a great and united future is the destiny of this nation and its peoples.... A free and united India will be there and the Mother will gather around her her sons and weld them into a single national strength in the life of a great and united people.'

In his book The Renaissance in India Sri Aurobindo says : 'India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature . . . . She has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new light illumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became barriers to its expansion and further application, she can now break down and give her spirit a freer field and an ampler flight : she can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge.'

But before an attempt is made to see how Sri Aurobindo discovered and revealed this ancient knowledge in its larger implications mention may be made of what the Mother said about India's future. In the course of an interview in 1954, the Mother said: 'The future of India is very clear. India is the Guru of the world. The future structure of the world depends on India. India is the living soul. She incarnates the spiritual knowledge in the world. The Government of India ought to recognise this significance of India and plan their actions accordingly....Divine power alone can help India... .According to a very old tradition, if twelve honest persons unite to incarnate the divine Will, they can compel the Divine to manifest. —There must be a group forming a strong body of cohesive will with the spiritual knowledge to save India and the world. It is India that can bring truth in the world. By manifestation of the divine Will and Power alone India can preach her message to the world and not by imitating the materialism of the West. By following the divine Will India shall shine at the top of the spiritual mountain and show the way of truth and organise spiritual unity.' India's place in the world is clear from the Mother's words: In the whole creation, the earth has a place of distinction, because unlike any other planet, it is evolutionary with a psychic entity at its centre. In it, India, in particular, is a divinely chosen country.' Modern India's resurgence has thus an organic connection with human evolution.

The truth of India's soul is the truth of the spiritualisation of life for its ultimate perfection in the perfect Existence, perfect Consciousness, perfect Bliss. 'The ultimates of life,' says Sri Aurobindo, 'are spiritual and only

in the full light of the liberated self and spirit can it achieve them. That full light is not intellect or reason, but a knowledge of inner unity and identity which is the native self-light of the fully developed spiritual consciousness —and preparing that, on the way to it, a knowledge by intimate inner contact with the truth of things and beings which is intuitive and born of a secret oneness.'

All problems in life, says Sri Aurobindo, are essentially problems of harmony whose solution lies not in the mind which cannot see the truth in the whole but in a higher consciousness where all are one in the Spirit, where the One who is in all embraces the Many. The gravest world-problem today is human unity. But no true unity is feasible unless it rests on the basic principle of harmony. And harmony is the natural flowering of a sense of inalienable oneness, universally established through spiritual means, between man and man, nation and nation. Again, for not having corresponding inner development, man is unable to make proper use of his mastery over the potencies of Nature laid bare by science. Here also the need is of developing a higher consciousness for the purpose.

How man can grow towards that higher consciousness is clearly pointed out in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Whose one aim is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinise human nature.'

'Sri Aurobindo's teaching states that the One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with the mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Super-mind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it will become possible for life to manifest perfection.

'But while former steps in evolution were taken by Nature without a conscious will in the plant and animal life, in man Nature becomes able to evolve by a conscious will in the instrument. It is not, however, by the mental will in man that this can be wholly done, for the mind goes only to a certain point and after that can only move in a circle. A conversion has to be made, a turning of the consciousness by which mind has to change into a higher principle....Sri Aurobindo teaches that a descent of the higher principle is possible which will not merely release the spiritual Self out of the world, but release it in the world, replace the mind's ignorance or its

very limited knowledge by a supramental Truth-Consciousness which will be a sufficient instrument of the inner self and make it possible for the human being to find himself dynamically as well as inwardly and grow out of his still animal humanity into a diviner race. The psychological discipline of Yoga can be used to that end by opening all the parts of the being to a conversion or transformation through the descent and working of a higher still concealed supramental principle.'

Since the divinisation of the whole nature of man is the aim of this Yoga, it seeks to integrate and harmonise all the different parts of his being— physical, vital, mental, emotional and spiritual—into an organic whole so that the power and potentiality of each part can be fully developed, dynamise and geared up to serve the inmost truth of his being and make for his ultimate divine perfection. Based on the dynamic Yoga of the Veda, and embracing the central principles of the Yogas of the Vedanta, the Gita and the Tantra, Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga goes beyond them. It is a renewal and enrichment of India's spirituality in its deeper significance for the achievement by man of his divine fulfilment through a new reconciliation of Matter, Life and Spirit. It promises to transform matter and manifest the Divine here upon earth. It takes up all human endeavours to realise the Truth in its multiple oneness. In order that the fruits of these endeavours may be dynamically effective in every part of his being, man must transcend the limits of his mind and the dominance of his ego, and gain the crown of his evolution, the Supramental Consciousness, and by the Light and Power of this supreme Creative Consciousness, transform the very substance and texture of his earthly life and nature. It is only then that can prevail on earth the Harmony of the Whole and a Perfect Order of life. This is the Yoga of the present age when man the mental being feels the call of the Unknown to rise to the next stage of his evolution into the supramental being, his ultimate destiny.

How does man stand, today, in relation to this divine destiny ? Says the Master: 'Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine superman-hood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but troubled and limited mundane existence.

'We mean by man mind imprisoned in a living body. But mind is not the highest possible power of consciousness; for mind is not in possession of Truth, but only its ignorant seeker. Beyond mind is the supramental or gnostic power of consciousness that is in eternal possession of Truth. This supermind is at its source the dynamic consciousness, in its nature at once and inseparably infinite wisdom and infinite will of the divine Knower and Creator. Supermind is superman; a gnostic super-manhood is the next distinct and triumphant evolutionary step to be reached by earthly nature.

'The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement

in the earth's evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature's process.

'The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the first glint of some coming divine Light, the first far-off promise of a godhead to be born out of Matter. The appearance of the superman in the human world will be fulfilment of the divine promise. Out of the material consciousness in which our mind works as a chained slave is emerging the disk of a secret sun of Power and Joy and Knowledge. The supermind will be the formed body of that radiant effulgence.

'Supermanhood is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge., power, intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits; it is a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature____

'Man's greatness is not in what he is, but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour in which supermanhood is being made ready by a divine Craftsman. But he is admitted too to a yet greater greatness and it is this that, allowed to be unlike the lower creation, he is partly an artisan of this divine change; his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him. His aspiration is earth's call to the supermental creator.

'If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation.'

The call of the earth means the aspiration of man and his fulfilling three conditions laid down by the Master: 'There must be a total and sincere surrender; there must be an exclusive self-opening to the Divine Power; there must be a constant and integral choice of the Truth that is descending.'

What the Vedic Rishis glimpsed as a distant light of heaven is now seized and realised by Sri Aurobindo as a creative Light of the Supreme —called by him the Supermind. It may be noted that this knowledge and realisation came to him years before he read the Veda the study of which later only confirmed what he had already independently realised. Thus came into his possession the highest truth of India's soul, which, born in the Vedic Vision of the Light, passed through age-long processes of preparation to its incalculable magnitude now in action over the earth.

The conflicts and confusions that prevail almost everywhere in the world today are some of the signs of this coming spiritual change in the life of man. Mystics and prophets of all ages and climes have averred that the brightest Dawns are always preceded by the darkest Nights. 'The adverse Forces,' says Sri Aurobindo, 'increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter.' 'The Supramental Force,' he said in 1934, 'is descending....' The same year he de-

clared: 'I know this Descent is inevitable—I have faith in 'view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later age.'

It seems the clock of human Destiny has struck the fateful hour. The higher mind of the race is now catching the first glints of a dawning glory. It has begun to feel that out of the present painful throes a new world is slowly coming to birth. It is also opening to the truth that unless and until man changes in his nature there can be no true solution of his problems.

And the most heartening promise of that great event is that she who would liberate man is come and is here on earth today—she who is the Leader of the Way, the Bringer of the Light. Let us repeat the words of the Master: 'The Mother comes in order to bring down the supramental.'

And here is the Mother's declaration: 'The will of Sri Aurobindo is bound to be done....His work of transformation cannot but end in a supreme victory. And what he calls the supramental world will be brought down on earth and realised by us here and now.' Here is what the Mother says about the ultimate meaning of this transformation and earth's readiness for it: 'The intervals between different incarnations seem to become more short, as if matter has become more conscious, more and more efficacious, more and more decisive; this matter will go on multiplying itself until the entire universe becomes the total Avatar of the Supreme.'

The forties saw the publication of all the major works of Sri Aurobindo both in Indian and American editions. Their steady circulation in India and the world initiate a movement of the soul of humanity towards the truth of its spiritual destiny.

The Master now took the decision that he would leave his body. He gave intimations of it to his attendants, to one of whom he said, T must finish Savitri'. To an anxious question why he did not use his invincibleYogic Force to throw off his ailment just as he had thrown off graver ailments before, just as he had cured innumerable hopeless cases of others, he simply returned the answer, 'Can't explain; you will not understand.'

His asking the time, his looking at the clock suggested a forechosen moment of departure.

Neither the help of the medical experts present nor the help of his Yogic Force he would use. He was grimly carrying out his own decision.

On 5 December 1950, he entered into Mahasamadhi.

'About a year ago,' said the Mother, 'while I was discussing things I remarked that I felt like leaving this body of mine. He spoke in a very firm tone, "No, this can never be. If necessary for this transformation I might go, you will have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental descent and transformation." '¹

His physical body after he had withdrawn from it remained aglow, 'surcharged with a concentration of light', defying decomposition to the

¹ Dr. P. Sanyal : "A Call from Pondicherry", in Mother India, December 1953.

bewilderment of medical science and the reversal of Nature's law, for more than m hours—'a period more than double the record time which Lyons' Medical Jurisprudence gives of a body keeping undecayed in the climatic conditions of the East.'

After his passing Sri Aurobindo's assurance to the Mother was that 'he would remain here and not leave the earth atmosphere until earth is transformed.' Here are the Mother's words: 'The Master leaves his material frame, but his work continues. He leaves his body, obviously for the reason that only by so doing he could consummate his work. His vision stands as the unfailing and infallible Light and mankind and earth shall accomplish whatever he aimed at and worked for—the supreme Consciousness he brought down into earth's sphere is there, continuing to guide and shape and achieve.'

When on 8 December the Mother asked Sri Aurobindo to resuscitate, he said : 'I have left this body purposely, I will not take it back. I shall manifest again in the first supramental body built in the supramental way.'

The possibility of the manifestation of a supramental body built in a supramental way is indicated by Sri Aurobindo in his book The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, in which he said that 'a soul wishing to enter into a body or form for itself a body and take part in a divine life upon earth might be assisted to do so or even provided with such a form by this method of direct transmutation without passing through birth by the sex process or undergoing any degradation or any of the heavy limitations in the growth and development of its mind and material body inevitable to our present way of existence. It might then assume at once the structure and greater powers and functionings of the truly divine material body which must one day emerge in a progressive evolution to a totally transformed existence both of life and form in a divinised earth-nature.'

'One day I will return, a bringer of light,

Then I will give to thee the mirror of God.'

What is Sri Aurobindo for the earth ? The Mother only can say.

'Since the beginning of earth history, Sri Aurobindo has always presided over the great earthly transformations, under one form or another, one name or another.'

The birth of Sri Aurobindo is an 'eternal' birth.

'Physically, the consequences of the birth will be of eternal importance in the world.

'Mentally, it is a birth that will be eternally remembered in the universal history.

'Psychically, a birth that recurs for ever from age to age upon earth.

'Spiritually, the birth of the Eternal upon earth.'³

¹ The Mother on Sri Aurobindo.

How Sri Aurobindo's teachings are influencing the mind of humanity is evident from its growing response. It is indeed another luminous chapter in the history of the expansive movement of Indian thought which in modern times began with Swami Vivekananda, that mighty prophet of resurgent India, who said that the world was waiting for a complete civilisation which was to come from India, and that India would bring about the spiritual liberation of the entire human race. Sri Aurobindo sums up the why and the how of that liberation when he says : 'We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others.' This perfection, says he, is attainable quickly and consciously by Yoga. 'The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence.' Therefore, says the Master, 'Yoga must now be revealed to mankind because without it mankind cannot take the next step in the human evolution.'

A people, new and fresh, the Americans are ever ready to accept new and inspiring ideas, and when these are from the East, they stir the soul of this receptive people. It has been seen in the case of Swami Vivekananda; it is seen again in the case of Sri Aurobindo. An evidence of it is the steadily increasing appreciation and demand of Sri Aurobindo literature in America. Frederic Spiegelberg of Stanford University, California, who visited Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1949, said in a press interview : T can foresee the day when the teachings—which are already making headway—of the greatest spiritual voice from India, Sri Aurobindo, will be known all over America and be a vast power of illumination.' On another occasion the same professor said, T am sure that once America is informed about Sri Aurobindo and about The Life Divine which is his main work, there will be a great amount of studies, there will be many circles growing around the study of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and if I had any money to invest, I would invest it in the future of Sri Aurobindo and of the greatness of Indian philosophy in America.' Similar views are held by a large number of American professors and thinkers. Universities and public institutions have many of them already introduced the study of Sri Aurobindo. To P. A. Sorokin, the world-famous sociologist, 'Sri Aurobindo is one of the greatest living sages of our time; the most eminent moral leader.' Raymond F. Piper, whose views on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri have been quoted before, says : 'Gandhi is the greatest saint, Tagore the greatest

poet of modern India, but Sri Aurobindo is the greatest thinker, indeed has attained incomparable triune greatness, as poet, philosopher and saint.' Says Denis de Rougemont : 'Sri Aurobindo himself is so chaste of mind, so experienced, so wide in his philosophical sympathy that he can be accepted as a Hindu model of unprejudiced perennial philosophy.' Chile's Nobel Laureate, Gabriel Mistral, wrote : 'Sri Aurobindo brought me to religion. He opened the way to my religious consecration.' Cultural Integration Fellowship in California with Haridas Choudhuri as Director, and Sri Aurobindo International Centre in New York with Eleanor Montgomary as President, are among the institutions that are disseminating the teachings of Sri Aurobindo in America.

Haridas Choudhuri, Director, Cultural Integration Fellowship, and Frederic Spiegelberg of the Stanford University, California, jointly edited a commemorative symposium of The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, contributed by distinguished American, British and Indian scholars, and

published in 1960 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. London. Dr Choudhury is among the well known exponents of Sri Aurobindo, and author of a number of books on him. Invited by him as also by Louis and Nicolas Duncan of Sri Aurobindo Centre at Crescent Moon Ranch, Arizona, A. B. Purani of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, also an author of a number of books on Sri Aurobindo, visited U.S.A. in 1962 and delivered lectures on Sri Aurobindo at C.I. Fellowship and its branches and at Sri Aurobindo centres. Sri Purani and S. K. Ghose of Visvabharati University, another exponent of Sri Aurobindo, especially of his poetry, addressed in the same year various American Universities and cultural institutions on Sri Aurobindo. Dr Ghose was in the States as a visiting professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where Sri Aurobindo was one of his subjects. Thanks to the spirit of seeking of the American people, both Sri Purani and Dr Ghose were everywhere cordially received and listened to with great interest in and deep appreciation of the Master's thought.

From England come words of light voiced by Rev. E. F. F. Hill : 'Aurobindo is the greatest contemporary philosopher ... the embodiment cf a revolution in human life which new knowledge, new powers, new capacities are creating at this hour.... Because Aurobindo is in this world the world is becoming able to express progressively Unity and Diversity instead of Division Love instead of Hatred, Truth-consciousness instead of Falsehood freedom instead of Tyranny, Immortality instead of Death; it is becoming progressively that which it is : a movement of the Spirit in itself.' Sir Francis Younghusband called Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine has been very favourably reviewed in the British press says : 'Since he is a poet as well as a mystic Sri Aurobindo's vision is both creative and prophetic. I believe there is no greater mystical thinker in

the world today.' Introducing the above book the British Book News wrote : 'Aurobindo promises to outshine all the latter-day prophets.' In a letter to K. R. Srinivas Iyengar of the Andhra University Dorothy M. Richardson, the well-known English writer and novelist, said : 'Has there ever existed a more synthetic consciousness than that of Sri Aurobindo ? Unifying he is to the limit of the term.' A. Basu, an Indian professor, now Spalding Lecturer in Indian Philosophy and Religion at the University of Durham, is often invited to deliver lectures on Sri Aurobindo in the Universities and international conferences in England, Europe and America. He says 'the response is always encouraging.' In 1961 the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, invited him to deliver a series of lectures on Sri Aurobindo. Prof. Basu supervised the preparation by Rev. Herbert P. Sullivan, an American member of Episcopal Church, of a thesis on 'The Concept of Man in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy' for which he received a doctorate from the Durham University. The same University conferred the degree of M. Litt. on an Indian student from South Africa for his thesis on 'The Social and Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo', also supervised by Prof. Basu. In 1961-62 Prof. Basu examined a number of doctorate theses on Sri Aurobindo from Indian Universities including Calcutta, Delhi and Osmania. Public interest is growing in the Sri Aurobindo Study-Circle in London.

To eminent French thinkers Sri Aurobindo is 'the last of the Rishis', 'the World-Teacher', 'Shiva the Divine'. C.F. Baron, a former Governor of French Pondicherry, said : 'Sri Aurobindo announces a new step in the evolution of the human race.... The Mother is the greatest lady that I have met in this world.' J. Masui said : 'I think that the prediction of Tagore that "India will speak to the world through your (Sri Aurobindo's) voice" is on the way to fulfilment.'¹ Masui is the editor of an important cultural monthly of the South of France through which he spreads Sri Aurobindo's ideas. There is a Sri Aurobindo centre in Paris. French editions of Sri Aurobindo's works are already in circulation in France and South America. In 1962 the presses Universitaires de France brought out L'Evolution Future de L'Humanite: La vie divine sur la terre, an anthology of Sri Aurobindo's thought on the significance of the present-day crisis and the future evolution of man, compiled and edited by P.B. Saint-Hilaire (Pavitra). George Allen and Unwin of England have published the English original of this anthology. A German version is being brought out by Otto-Wilhelth-Barth-Verlag, West Germany. A publisher in Argentine, South America, has commissioned a Spanish translation of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, which he will publish. Sri Aurobindo's philosophy forms a subject of study in many German Universities. The German editions of his works are in increasing de-

Sri Aurobindo's philosophy forms a subject of study in many German Universities. The German editions of his works are in increasing de-

¹ This and the preceding quotation are from the speeches at the Sorbonne Sri Aurobindo Commemoration meeting held on 5 December 1955.

mand. The famous German thinker Count H. Keyserling characterised Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga as 'the most important contribution to see the light of day up till now on the synthesis between the spirits of the West and the East.' At their residence in Karlsruhe, Heinz Kappes, a retired University professor, and Mrs. Kappes have regular sittings in which they give readings from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and expound them, when necessary, to groups of German seekers, young and old. Individuals from various parts of West Germany and Berlin come to them to discuss their problems and have the light of Sri Aurobindo's answers. At Stuttgart and several other places, there are centres for the study of Sri Aurobindo. According to Dr. Kappes, interest in Sri Aurobindo is growing among individuals of all classes in Germany. A selection from Sri Aurobindo done into German by Otto Wo11f has had a very wide circulation in Germany along with a study by the same author of modem Indian mystics which includes a long chapter on Sri Aurobindo.

In Holland Sri Aurobindo has been the theme of several public lecturers. Carlo Schueller of Sri Aurobindo Centre in Switzerland is doing good work in giving publicity to Sri Aurobindo literature in Europe, and in arranging lectures on Sri Aurobindo in Switzerland, West Germany and in other countries. Recently the University of Geneva has admitted a thesis on Sri Aurobindo for the doctorate. Sri Aurobindo is included in the syllabus of the University of Florence whose professor Fillipe Belloni is an exponent of Sri Aurobindo. The Italian Institute regularly arranges lectures on Sri Aurobindo. There is a study-centre in Tuscany. Sicily has a number of people interested in Sri Aurobindo. Along with other leaders of modern Indian renaissance, Sri Aurobindo is being studied and translated at the Institute of Asia, Moscow. {The Modern Review, Calcutta, April 1963, p. 291). In his book on India's freedom movement A.I. Chicherov, a Russian Indologist of the same Institute, has given his study of 'the outstanding contribution' of the Bengal leaders including Sri Aurobindo to the first phase of that movement. (Amrita Bazar Patrika, Calcutta, I April 1963.)

On his way back from U.S.A., A.B. Purani of Sri Aurobindo Ashram visited England, France, West Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and East Africa. Everywhere he addressed gatherings and Sri Aurobindo centres, on Sri Aurobindo and found good response. He met with seeking souls in many places.

Indian residents in Africa have organised centres for the study and propagation of Sri Aurobindo's teachings. The Gandhi-Tagore Lectureship Society of Nairobi invites lecturers on Sri Aurobindo. The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, is interested in Sri Aurobindo. Its Professor Hugo Bergmann is the contributor of the article on Sri Aurobindo in the Hebrew Encyclopaedia. He says : 'Sri Aurobindo has infused a new life into the messianic idea and hope in all their cosmic significance

and their implications.' T. Olsvanger, Rector of the Hebrew University is translating Sri Aurobindo's Savitri into Hebrew. His son, a genius in music, has in an inspired moment set to tune lines from Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri.

China's great savant Tan Yun-Shan, Director of Cheena Bhavan, Visva-Bharati, visited Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1939. After having Darshan of Sri Aurobindo he said : 'Sri Aurobindo, the Maha-Yogi, is the bringer of that Light which will chase away the darkness that envelops the world today. Buddha conquered China. Sri Aurobindo will conquer her again.' After meeting the Mother he said, 'She is indeed the Mother of all', 'the Universal Mother as visioned by the ancient seers of China and India.' Dr Tan is often invited to deliver lectures on Sri Aurobindo. He has written and published a number of articles on the Master both in Chinese and English. There are Sri Aurobindo study-circles in Hong Kong and Malaya.

In India the Ashram itself is the radiating centre of Sri Aurobindo's light at work all over the land. It forms a nucleus of an international community drawing members from every part of India and from various parts of Asia, Europe, America and Australia.

A recent extension of the Ashram's work is the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Society with the Mother as President. One of its main functions is to coordinate the activities of the Sri Aurobindo centres in various parts of India and abroad and thereby enable them all the better to expand in their usefulness. World Union is another organisation working for human unity on Sri Aurobindo's lines, with S.M. Ghose, M.P. as President.

The feelings of India's great sons about Sri Aurobindo have been already mentioned. Here is C.R. Reddy, Vice-Chancellor, Andhra University, speaking in his Convocation Address, 1948 : 'In all humility of devotion, I hail Sri Aurobindo as the sole sufficing genius of the age. He is more than the hero of a nation. He is amongst the Saviours of humanity, who belong to all ages and nations, the Sanatana, who leaven our existence with their eternal presence, whether we are aware of it or not.' Some of the Universities in India have prescribed Sri Aurobindo's works for post-graduate courses. Some admit theses on Sri Aurobindo for the doctorate. A recent doctorate on Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri

The inner meaning of the phenomenon that is Sri Aurobindo is beyond the mind of man. Of the vastness and variety of his work in the outer world here is a summing-up by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar : 'While Sri Aurobindo certainly played several "parts" during the many decades of his terrestrial existence, it is no less true that they had an integral relation to one another. The politician, the poet, the philosopher, and the Yogi were all of a piece, and made the sum—the Power—that was Rishi Aurobindo. He turned the political movement in the country towards the right goal, and even determined somewhat the pace of its progress; he defined the ends, and he helped to forge the means. In his philosophy and Yoga, again, Sri Aurobindo went further and turned the current of human progress itself towards the goal of Supermanhood, and laboured for long years fashioning the means of attaining the goal. And even his poetry was meant to bridge the present and the future, self-divided present life and the Life Divine that is to be. The Seer has glimpsed the contours of ultimate Possibility, the mystic poet has hymned his "gloried fields of trance" ; the philosopher has sought to interpret the Vision in terms of reason, while the Yogi has formulated a method, a multiform technique, for achieving the desired total change of consciousness ; the sociologist has thrown out significant hints with regard to the organisation of tomorrow's world, while the creative critic has sensed the rhythms of the 'Future Poetry' 'and described how the' "new" poet will ride on the wings of an elemental spirituality and articulate the ineluctable rhythms of the Spirit.'¹

After an interlude of the play of divergent ideologies India is waking up to the truth and light that Sri Aurobindo is. One recent instance concerns the relics of Sri Aurobindo taken for installation on 21 February 1959 in a specially-erected temple at Bangavani, Navadwip, the birthplace of Sri Chaitanya and a famous historic town of Bengal. It was an occasion for an unprecendented demonstration of love and reverence for the great figure by all sections of people along the entire route from Pondicherry to Navadwip, Calcutta taking the leading part, hailing the relics as Sri Aurobindo's return to Bengal.

The Ananda Bazar Patrika, an outstanding Bengali daily of Calcutta, in its editorial of 15 August 1959 said: 'In the history of modern India's reatness the rise of Sri Aurobindo, like the rise of a new sun, is a wonderful phenomenon whose effulgence has illumined the very thought of the age and infused into its sceptical and despondent mind the urge to rise to a greatness beyond even the perfect manhood, the urge to the founding of a life divine. Sri Aurobindo's divine realisations are the treasure not to save the bankruptcy of modern Indian life alone but to meet the supreme need of the entire world.' A writer in the same issue calls Sri Aurobindo the Badarayana and the Sankara of India's spiritualised liberation move-

¹ K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar : Indian Writing in English, p. 125.

merit. Centres of study in almost all cities and towns and educational institutions and periodicals in various languages, devoted to the teachings of the Master, the Government of India's installation of Sri Aurobindo's portrait on 15 August 1959 at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, with a simple impressive ceremony, its undertaking to publish representative selections from Sri Aurobindo's works in major national languages, are evident signs of India's true resurgence in the Spirit.

These stray and isolated developments certainly do not by themselves make a world movement. But this is how a new truth is accepted first by the élite of humanity. And then through them it reaches the generality. That Sri Aurobindo's word and action are influencing humanity is evident from the fact that seekers from distant corners of the world are making their approaches to the Mother through letters, communications meditative or otherwise, and personal visits. Propaganda and demonstration forming no part of her work, it is the dynamic silence of the Divine Will that rules, the Will whose action, ever-expanding action, is for the discerning eye to see. 'A constant action,' says the Mother, 'is going on in the world. It is spreading and it is effective everywhere. Everywhere it gives new pushes, new turns, new ideas, new will-formations.' 'Through the apparent chaos a new and better order is being formed. But to see it one must have faith in the Divine Grace.'

The very fact that individuals and groups of different faiths and persuasions are turning to Sri Aurobindo's way is a happy start for a world movement that is thus born to culminate in a divinised humanity, a new race. Here we may recall the Mother's words : 'The solid foundations of Thy work upon the earth are made ready, the basements of the immense edifice are constructed; in every corner of the world one of Thy divine stones is laid by the power of the conscious and formative thought; and in the hour of realisation, the earth thus prepared will be ready to receive the sublime temple of Thy new and completer manifestation.'

Manifestation

The greatest event in the spiritual history of man has happened. The Supramental Light has manifested upon earth and has become the dynamic principle of its evolution. The Mother of the gods embodying the Light kindles now the celestial flame in the aspiring soul of man so that the impure clay of earth that he is may change into the pure gold of heaven and earth itself into a new paradise. The movement of world-liberation is now the movement of world-transformation. Man now enters upon a new cycle, his history from now will be an ever-unrolling scroll of a new life divinising itself more and more into the transcendent glory of a new creation, India being the centre and the whole world the vast field of its growth and expansion. Therefore does the Mother prepare the coming

of the New Man, the New Society, the New Civilisation, the New World and thus fulfil the Master's Vision of the Future. ¹

The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.

It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.'

This historic declaration the Mother made on 24 April 1956, the occasion being the thirtysixth anniversary of her final arrival at Pondicherry. The other Message from the Mother was :

'A New Light breaks upon the earth,

A New World is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.'

It may be recalled that the Mother's first meeting with Sri Aurobindo took place on 29 March 1914.² Since then she has been in close collaboration with the Master, in fact, as occult knowledge should testify, she has collaborated for ages without number. On 25 September 1914, a few months after that meeting, she recorded in her Prayers and Medications the assurance :

'A new light shall break upon the earth,

A new world shall be bom,

And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.'

Of this assurance the declarations, just quoted, are the positive and complete fulfilment. They mark the consummation of their joint and ageless work. Man is saved, saved from himself, saved for the Divine. 'And the things that were promised are fulfilled.'

Since the Manifestation there has been a continuous and dynamic working of the New Light and Force in the earth to such an extent that 'the supramental substance', said the Mother in August 1958,³ 'is now almost everywhere spread in earth's atmosphere' preparing for the emergence of intermediaries and supermen—an altogether new creation within the old—and acting on the mental man so as to put him in conscious relation with the new creation. This superman, says the Mother, 'will be a species of transition, because it will discover, as it is to be foreseen, the means of creating new beings without passing through the old animal method, and it is these beings, having truly a spiritual birth, that will form the elements of the new race, the supramental race.'

In view of the change that has taken place in the earth atmosphere

¹ This paragraph was written in March, 1956, soon after the Mother's announcement of the Manifestation that took place on 29 February 1956.

² This is the year, be it repeated₃ in which Mother had her prevision of India's independence as a divinely-settled fact in the occult world. It is remarkable also that while the world was feverishly preparing to plunge into the First World War, these two mighty souls were divinely led to join their spiritual forces to save it from self-destruction and evolve out of it a New World.

³ Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, August 1958, pp. 85-86.

during the two years after the Manifestation the Mother says : 'If things continue to move at this speed, it is more than possible, it is almost evident that what Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter would be a 'prophetic announcement : 'The supramental consciousness will enter into a phase of realising power in 1967.' 'There is a possibility that this might happen even earlier.'

This is 'the hour of God' 'when the breath of the Lord is upon the waters of our being', 'when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny.' In this supreme hour comes to man the call from heaven, the call to accept the sublime Ideal and consecrate himself to the New Light and Force that are at work on earth for its transformation. Self-opening and self-consecration to this Force will change man's destiny and hasten his entry upon a new cycle of divine living.

How will the New Light affect the life of humanity ? Says the Master : '. .the presence of the liberated and now sovereign supramental light and force at the head of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in the whole evolution. An incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life of the lower evolutionary stages ; something of the light, something of the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action the hidden Truth-Power everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance; the discord, the blind seeking, the clash of struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes of exaggeration and depression and unsteady balance of the unseeing forces at work in their mixture and conflict, would feel the influence and yield place to a more orderly pace and harmonic steps of the development of being, a more revealing arrangement of progressing life and consciousness, a better life-order. A freer play of intuition and sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the opportunities and difficulties of existence....'¹

In the rapidly changing world of today are there not already signs of the initial action of the New Force visible to an ordinary eye ? The Force and the Light seem to be working everywhere, even in regions given to the forces of Darkness which also are destined to vanish before the growing intensity of the Light.

This is how the Dawn widens towards its noontide glory, the birth of a quite New World for which all the past dawns in the history of the race have been a preparation. As the Light grows, man also grows till he becomes its perfect incarnation.

This incarnation will be the truth-conscious superman or the gnostic being of Sri Aurobindo's vision revealed in his The Life Divine,

¹ Sri Aurobindo : The Life Divine, Vol. II, pp. 1030-31.

Book of Everlasting Day¹ of this epoch-making epic :

'The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demi-god

Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

Revealing the secret deity in the cave.

Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme.

His bright unveiled Transcendence shall illumine

The mind and heart, and force the life and act

To interpret his inexpressible mystery

In a heavenly alphabet of Divinity's signs....

Then shall the embodied being live as one

Who is a thought, a will of the Divine,

A mask or robe of his divinity,

An instrument and partner of his Force,

A point or line drawn in the infinite,

A manifest of the Imperishable.

The supermind shall be his nature's fount,

The Eternal's truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,

The Eternal's truth shall be his light and guide.

All then shall change, a. magic order come

Overtopping this mechanical universe.

A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world....

A soul shall wake in the Inconscient's house;

The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle,

The body intuition's instrument,

And life a channel for God's visible power.

All earth shall be the Spirit's manifest home,

Hidden no more by the body and the life,

Hidden no more by the mind's ignorance;

An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.

The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes,

The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force.

This world shall be God's visible garden-house,

The earth shall be a field and camp of God,

Man shall forget consent to mortality

And his embodied frail impermanence....

Even should a hostile force cling to its reign

And claim its right's perpetual sovereignty

And man refuse his high spiritual fate,

¹ The whole of this one-canto Book of 1396 lines was the last thing dictated by Sri Aurobindo three months before his passing. And not a single word or a punctuation mark was changed after the first draft was dictated—a feat hardly possible or natural except to a Master-Seer.

Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail.

For in the march of all-fulfilling Time

The hour must come of the Transcendent's will:

All turns and winds towards his predestined ends

In Nature's fixed inevitable course

Decreed since the beginning of the worlds

In the deep essence of created things :

Even there shall come as a high crown of all

The end of Death, the death of Ignorance....

When superman is born as Nature's king

His presence shall transfigure Matter's world :

He shall light up Truth's fire in Nature's night,

He shall lay upon the earth Truth's greater law;

Man too shall turn towards the Spirit's call....

The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze

And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.

Then man and superman shall be at one

And all the earth become a single life.

Even the multitude shall hear the Voice

And turn to commune with the Spirit within

And strive to obey the high spiritual law :

This earth shall stir with impulses sublime,

Humanity awake to deepest self,

Nature the hidden godhead recognise.

Even the many shall some answer make

And bear the splendour of the Divine's rush

And his impetuous knock at unseen doors.

A heavenlier passion shall upheave men's lives,

Their mind shall share in the ineffable gleam,

Their heart shall feel the ecstasy and the fire,

Earth's bodies shall be conscious of a soul;

Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds,

Mere men into spiritual beings grow

And see awake the dumb divinity....

The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,

More and more souls shall enter into light,

Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear

And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame

And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight

And human wills tune to the divine will,

These separate selves the Spirit's oneness feel,

These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,

The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy

And mortal bodies of immortality.

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act

And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns

And every feeling a celestial thrill.

Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come

Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;

A sudden bliss shall run through every limb

And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.

Thus shall the earth open to divinity

And common natures feel the wide uplift,

Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray

And meet the deity in common things.

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine.'

An earnest of the fulfilment of the Divine Word, of the Eternal Promise —the full manifestation of the Light so long enshrined in India's soul.

This is the Light that made her 'dawn's victorious opening' in the Past when the rest of the world was asleep in ignorance; the Light that sustained the life-line of her civilisation through her long and chequered history; the Light that motived all her great movements and, in our day, inspired an unprecedented upsurge of her nationalism, and then liberated her from her political and economic subjection.

India has the word of her Seer-Patriot that the same Light will complete her freedom with her indissoluble integrity and her indivisible oneness and crown her with the Supramental Light and Consciousness-Force that will remake India and remake the world.

The latter part of his word now stands fulfilled. The supreme aim of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga—the descent and manifestation of the Supramental Force on earth—has been achieved. Since 29 February 1956 the new Force has been dynamically operative in the subtle-physical atmosphere of the earth pending its manifestation and fuller working in the gross physical.

While as a consequence of the action of this Force, the next higher order of creation, a supramental race, may take a few centuries to appear on earth not in the human but in the supramental way, as already indicated by Sri Aurobindo, the immediate possibility the Force opens to Man, says the Mother, is to get transformed by its help into an intermediary stage of superman.

The Light visioned by the ancient Fathers of the race has become the Light realised by the Father of the New Age and is installed in the firmament of human consciousness as an irresistible creative force. And its noontide effulgence will heal all wounds and divisions, flood India and

the world with its glory, fuse 'the unbeginning Past', 'the moment's beat' and 'the unending Future' into an infinite expanse of One Consciousness, One Life, One World, all aglow with a divine splendour radiating from the vastness of the World Mother's breast.

This glorious achievement, however, marks no end of Sri Aurobindo's concern for the world. In Ms infinite compassion, he is and will be in the earth atmosphere, with the Mother in front in the material sphere, both watching, helping, guiding it till their work of transformation consummates itself in the divinisation of Man and Earth.

It is now for Man to wake up to his High Destiny and realise it and remake himself in this 'Hour of God'.