Accepting the Mother I have no intention of altering the arrangement I have made for all the disciples without exception that they should receive the light and force from [the Mother] and not directly from me and he guided by her spiritual progress.22  — Sri Aurobindo       From 24 November onwards there was a kind of 'division of tasks' between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. They remained of course essentially one, and 'all the realizations he had, I had too, automatically.' But now it was Sri Aurobindo who remained 'hidden,' as he said 'to work things out,' and the Mother who moved in front. We remember how, in Japan, she defined

Eight   The Seven Hidden Years What is known as Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.1 — Sri Aurobindo   The seal is put         Paul and Mirra Richard, accompanied by Dorothy Hodgson, left Japan in March 1920 and arrived in Pondicherry on 24 April. They probably arrived at Colombo aboard one of the Japanese passenger-cum-treight ships such as the Kamo Maru and transferred to one of the ships of the Messageries Maritimes with final destination Calcutta and Pondicherry as a port of call. 'I was on the boat, at sea, not expecting anything — I was of course occupied with

Freedom at midnight True spirituality is not to renounce life, but to make life perfect with a Divine Perfection. This is what India must show to the world now.4  — The Mother India became independent at midnight on 15 August 1947. Lord Mountbatten had been responsible for the choice of the date, thus putting into motion at breakneck speed a sequence of highly important and far-reaching decisions. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have narrated, in Freedom at Midnight, how Mountbatten chose the date on the spur of the moment during a press conference, though he pretended to have had a date in mind. 'Mountbatten's

Overman — the transitional being Overman — the transitional being   Meanwhile, the Ashram school and its Department of Physical Education had grown to such an extent that the Mother wanted to bring out a quarterly magazine, the Bulletin of Physical Education, the first issue of which was published on 21 February 1949. (It was later renamed Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.)         Sri Aurobindo had started revising The Life Divine shortly after the accident to his leg. In 1945 his eyesight deteriorated badly; he probably had cataract in both eyes. From that time onwards he dictated everything to Nirodbaran, who thus became his amanuensis, or his 'scribe,' as Nirodba

Cranks, seekers and sages   it is undeniable that in our human world today an elite manifests itself of which the distinctive mark is a higher Consciousness that wants to participate in a wisdom beyond the rational knowledge.5       — M. Schwaller de Lubicz   'When I was in Paris, I went to many places where there were meetings of all kinds and people who were doing all sorts of research, spiritual (so-called spiritual), occult, etcetera.'6 This was a world in the shadows of public life, as it were, but the object of widespread interest and busily frequented. It was the world of mediums, spiritism, automat

The Mother and the disciples I am not eager to be the Guru of anyone. It is more spontaneously natural for me to be the universal Mother and to act in silence through love.29 — The Mother       'When someone is accepted, the Mother sends out something of herself to him and this is with him wherever he goes and is always in connection with her being here,'30 wrote Sri Aurobindo. The Mother herself said: 'With those whom I have accepted as disciples, to whom I have said "yes," there is more than a tie, there is an emanation of me. This emanation warns me whenever it is necessary and tells me what is happening. Indeed I receive intimations

The big pulsations         It would be misleading to think that the Mother had 'withdrawn' because her presence outside the central Ashram building, at 9 Rue de la Marine, had been reduced to a minimum. How could she withdraw, she whose body was becoming the whole world in an ever more literal way? Besides, the daily occupations had not diminished at all. There were the Ashramites waiting for her at a certain hour and place, in the passage from one room to another, before and after she entered her bathroom, before and after she had her scanty meals, before and after her midday rest. Most of these meetings had become standing privileges, and the Mother would never forget anything, n

The new body         The Mother's progress which we are trying to sketch here was complex, as complex as Life, of which most humans have only a very narrow, superficial notion. The subconscious and the Inconscient were for her a conscious reality where she fought most of her battles, while for us it is a hidden reality by which we are blindly driven. Simultaneously, there were concretelypresent to her all the upper levels of existence, the realms of Light, and Beauty, and Joy, and Love. It is true that she         * The Mother means that all parts of the personality should be unified around the psychic and under its direct influence. Page-531 gave the proporti

Kyoto For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder.16  — The Mother For the next three years the Richards stayed mainly in the beautiful city of Kyoto, the former capital of Japan. Their close friends there were Dr. and Mrs. Kobayashi. When K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar and V.K. Gokak went to Japan in 1957, to participate in the International P.E.N. Congress, Dr. Kobayashi, a surgeon, was no longer alive, but his wife, Nobuko, received them with great courtesy and undiminished affection for her former friend Mirra. 'She came here to learn Japanese and to be one of us. But we had so much to learn from her and he

The Mother   The Story of Her Life       Georges Van Vrekhem         HarperCollins Publishers India HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt Ltd 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002   First published in 2000 by HarperCollins Publishers India     Copyright © Georges Van Vrekhem 2000 Photographs © Sri Aurobindo Ashram