Seventeen   The Passage Perilous If thou wouldst save the toiling universe, The vast universal suffering feel as thine: Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal; The day-bringer must walk in darkest night. He who would save the world must share its pain. If he knows not grief, how shall he find griefs cure?1                                                    — Sri Aurobindo   A kind of death         'I am no longer in my body,' said the Mother on 3 April 1962. If this sounds mysterious, her co

Twelve   Sri Aurobindo's Descent into Death Sri Aurobindo has come on Earth not to bring a teaching or a creed in competition with previous creeds or teachings, but to show the way to overpass the past and to open concretely the route towards an imminent and inevitable future.1  — The Mother   Mahananda         In 1946 a very important event took place which nobody was aware of at the time and which is scarcely remembered at present. As we have seen in the previous chapter, by far the greatest part of what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have done for the world on the occult and spiritual plane is not known; it was '

The Word of Creation   'I had begun a sort of overmental creation,' said the Mother, and she continued with it 'for some months' after 24 November. The reader will recall that the Overmind is the highest level of the lower hemisphere of the manifestation. It is the gradation of existence directly under and in essential contact with the Supramental, itself a world of many gradations, each one existing within the divine Unity-Consciousness where reign omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. In the Overmind the divine Unity is, by the process of involution, split up into an endless variety of forces, cosmic forces. These forces are also called Gods, for every force is a being.

The ship from the New World   Soon we will have to take leave of those wonderful Entretiens or 'French classes.' What we have read is only a fraction of the treasures they contain, chosen because they were felt to be essential to the story of the Mother's life. Here and there an edge of the veil is lifted, we get a glimpse of the way the Mother acted in many places and on many levels of existence, even while apparently just sitting there, addressing a group of students and disciples in the Playground. Let us therefore have a last look behind the scenes and participate in an experience the Mother had on 3 February 1958, and which she read out a fortnight later from notes d

Author's Notes   1. The quotations from works of the Mother are from the Centenary Edition of the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM). The quotations from the works of Sri Aurobindo are from the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SBCL), except for those from his epic Savitri, which are from the revised edition of 1993 (CWSA), or where otherwise indicated.   2. The-ize and -ozation spelling has been used throughout.   3. The English translations of texts originally spoken or written in French were checked and corrected where it was thought to be necessary.

Pathways for the dead       So many people come to her in the night for the passage to the other side whom she has not known in the body.7       — Sri Aurobindo   Even before Mirra discovered the teaching of the Cosmic Movement, she had 'certain experiences at night, certain types of nightly activities, caring for people who had just left their body.' Although still lacking the theoretical knowledge, she knew exactly what had to be done, and did it. When she Page-36 began reading the Revue cosmique, she understood many things she had not known before and, true to character, began to apply that new knowledge and to work it out systematically.

Acknowledgments   The author sincerely thanks R.Y. Deshpande (India), Alan Herbert (UK), Lynda Lester (USA), Jyoti Sobel (France) and Care! Thieme (The Netherlands) for the care with which they read the manuscript, and for their corrections and suggestions.

Throwing stones         The following incident, narrated here by the Mother,35 took place in December 1921 when she, Sri Aurobindo, Dorothy Hodgson and the others who formed the embryo of the future Ashram were still staying in the Rue Francois Martin. The house, number 41, was afterwards called the 'Guest House.'         'There was a time when we were living in the Guest House ... How many of us were there in that house? Amrita was there, [turning towards the disciple in question] Weren't you, Amrita? Do you remember that day? ... We had a cook called Vatel. This cook was rather bad-tempered and didn't like being reproved concerning his work. Moreover, he was in contact with so

Savitri He has crammed the whole universe into a single book.31 — The Mother       Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri consists of nearly 24,000 lines — 712 printed pages in the complete works. He worked on its twelve ever   Page-321 expanded drafts for half a century, from the last years in Baroda till a few weeks before his leaving the body.         Sri Aurobindo called Savitri 'a legend and a symbol.' The legend is a story from the Mahabharata that briefly summarized goes as follows: Savitri, daughter of King Aswapati of Madra, chooses Satyavan, son of King Dyumatsena of Shalwa, for her husband. Satyavan lives in the forest to which his blind fathe

Nine   Three Dragons [The Mother] has descended upon earth to participate in [her children's]nature. Because if she did not participate in their nature, she could not lead them farther. If she remained in her supreme consciousness where there is no suffering, in her supreme knowledge and consciousness, she could not have any contact with human beings. It is for this that she is obliged to take on the human consciousness and form: to be able to enter into contact with them.1  — The Mother 'Siddhi Day'         'In 1926,I had begun a sort of over mental creation,' said the Mother, 'that is, I had brought the Overmind down in matter, he