The Mother’s yoga-tapasya after the descent and manifestation of the supermind in the subtle-physical moved towards making the body itself open to the Divine Presence, to the Light and Force of the Supramental, in the very cells of the otherwise death-bound gross physical housing the deathless soul. There have been always reservations towards such a thing, the world quite unaware of its superior possibilities and the spirit ignorant of the world it made, the irremediable dichotomy of spirit and matter, they standing at opposites poles. But the beautiful discovery is, the Mother found that this need not be so, the material can respond to the spiritual as much as the spiritual breathingly and deathlessly enshrine itself in the material. After the 1956 event her concern became more and more focused towards this, for instance:

And it is the experience of the body. Before, those who had inner experiences used to say, “Yes, up there it is so, but here...” Now the “but here” very soon will no longer be. This is the conquest that is being done, this tremendous change: that physical life must be governed by the higher consciousness and not by the mental world. It is a change over of authority.... It is difficult. It is hard. It is painful. Naturally there is breakage, but... But truly one can see—one can see. And that is the real change, it is that which will enable the new Consciousness to express itself. And the body is learning, learning its lesson—all bodies, all bodies.

(Silence)

It is the old division made by the mind: up above, it is quite all right, you may have all the experiences and everything is luminous, wonderful; here, nothing to be done. And the feeling that when one is born, still one is born in the world where nothing can be done. That explains, moreover, why all those who had not foreseen the possibility that things could be otherwise, used to say, “Better to depart and then...” All that has become so clear. But that change, the fact that it is no longer inevitable, that is the great Victory: it is no longer inevitable. One feels—one feels, one sees—and the body itself has had the experience that soon here also it can be more true.

There is, there is truly something changed in the world.

(Silence)

Naturally, it will take some time before it is really established.

“…the body itself has had the experience…”—isn’t that a victory? And yet we say the Mother’s work of transformation has been “postponed”. What do we know of it to say that? Nothing.

RYD

Though there is a constant battle from all sides, the Mother has a definite realization that “the physical is capable of receiving the higher Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness”, that it is capable not only of receiving but also of manifesting it. That is an unparalleled realization indeed. She narrates how much Sri Aurobindo had worked since his departure from here, after 1950, worked to bring this vast change. All along, the body had thought that these are dreams, these changes in it, that it can never be so, receiving the higher Truth and Light and Consciousness were impossible to it. But now here is the tremendous progress mad by it, that not only was its diffidence removed, but also it has begun to have the experience of the divine Presence in it. The body now knows that things have changed, it knows the direction in which they are moving, towards it opening to the divine manifestation in it. Sri Aurobindo’s work in the subtle physical has brought about all this change, it has changed the physical structure itself. All the past spiritual experiences had left the body as it was, cold, brute, unresponsive, incapable of being the vehicle of the higher workings; one had all the experiences, but after returning to the body it was seen that this body was again the same, ruled by the same “for-mi-da-ble” old mental laws, mental laws in their forbidding pervasive ignorance, in their atrocity of resistance to the luminous functioning. But now, says the Mother, there is the “physical” recognition. Things have changed and the body knows it. Indeed, the “physical is capable of receiving the higher Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness and of manifesting it.”

Sure enough, things have to be worked out, “but the change is done—the change is done.” It is not easy and it needs endurance and will. Even as since 1 January 1969 the new Consciousness, the superman consciousness, is working, there is the visible change to see, and those who have the inner vision can see it.

“It was this, the work that Sri Aurobindo had given me. Now I understand. But it is as if from all sides—all sides—these forces, these powers of the mind rose up in protest—in violent protest—to
impose their old laws. It is finished. It will not be always so.” This is what the Mother asserted on 14 March 1970.

Something of this battle had been going on in this body these last days.... It was really very interesting.... There was outside, coming from outside, an attempt to submit the body to experiences in order to compel it to recognise: “No, what has always been will always be; you may try, but it is an illusion”, and so something happened, quite a little disorganisation in the body, and then the body answered with its attitude: a peace like this (gesture of immobility), and its attitude (gesture of hands open): “It is as Thou willest, Lord, as Thou willest.”... Like a flash everything disappears! And this has happened several times, at least a dozen times in a day. Then—then the body begins to feel: “There it is!”... It has this delight, this delight of... having lived the Marvel. It is not as it was, it is no more as it was—it is no more as it was. One has still to fight on, one must have patience, courage, will, confidence—but it is no more “like that”; it is the old thing that seeks to cling—hideous! hideous. But... it is no more like that, no more like that. And this also: how far, how far will the body be able to go? This also, it is... perfectly peaceful and happy: it is “What Thou willest.”

The body knows that all this is finished. Perhaps it will take centuries, but it is finished. For it to disappear, that may take centuries, but now it is finished.

This realisation, altogether concrete and absolute, that one could have only when one came out of Matter (Mother lowers a finger): it is sure, it is sure and certain one will have it even here.

How much he has worked since he left! Oh!... all the while, all the while.

(Silence)

It seems... it seems to be a miracle in the body. The disappearance of this formation seems truly miraculous.

The Mother’s work was proceeding with the speed of light, luminous as it was in the Will of the Lord. She was winning victory after victory and there is nothing like “this last victory” on this path of constant progress. It is a process, an occult-yogic process, a process in the Will of the Lord, and it has been set into motion. The body has opened to it.

RYD

In Savitri we have an unbelievable description of the “new and marvellous creation” established by Aswapati the Yogi in the House of the Spirit. (pp. 322-25) In his search for the truth that can make this world true, he was driven by the Breath of God and entered into God’s vasts. He stepped into them, they stretching beyond sight that is the last support of form. Over there reigned only the Spirit’s motionless Power. In those miraculous vasts of the Spirit he felt “the extinction of the world’s long pain” and his concern grew if this could happen in the mortal’s world here down below. But all was silence, the questions remaining unanswered. What prevailed was the Inexpressible’s hush that existed prior to the birth of the gods, the primordial hush before this creation was born. So, if something had to come about, if something had to happen it had to be by the action of the Power that stands behind this silence, the silence from whose womb everything issues out. This can be so, only in response to the deep creative urge, the creative Will casting its seed in that all-supportive silence. But nothing seemed to happen and the Yogi awaited the “Transcendent’s ultimate decree”.

But it appeared as though the ultimate decree itself had to be coaxed into operation. Aswapati the Yogi did it, he willed it, made a compelling samkalpa in the greatness and intensity of his soul. The result was a prompt transformative downward look, decisive and swift and amazing—“as if a sea was exploring its own depths”. The separation between “this” and “that” disappeared in that transcendental oneness. Suddenly there was the rush of Light and Bliss and Power and Love and all seemed to be that perfection’s manifestation. There

Existence found its truth on Oneness' breast
And each became the self and space of all.
The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul,
To feel was a flame-discovery of God,
All mind was a single harp of many strings,
All life a song of many meeting lives;
For worlds were many, but the Self was one.

Then something incredible happened, something for which the dumb ages waited through the long and painful march of difficult Time. In the embrace of that Oneness, in the flame-discovery of God, present everywhere, from the throbbings of that single Heart

And from the naked Spirit's victory
A new and marvellous creation rose.

This is a new creation, and not one that already existed in the Transcendent, behind the silence, not a creation that was being newly discovered, not that one which had come into sudden view. It is a creation born in the Will of the supreme Yogi himself.

Yes, that is the bright uniqueness of this creation, truly a new creation, entirely in the context of this evolutionary mortal world. Aswapati did it.

RYD

Aswapati by his yoga-tapasya has created a new world in the House of the Spirit. It is a world founded on the Law of Perfection. There were in that world infinitudes of happiness, and there was the rushing of beatific energies, they joining Time to the Timeless. There oneness expressed itself in a thousand aspects, and strife was turned to love.

On a meeting line of hazardous extremes
The Game of games was played to its breaking point,
Where through self-finding by divine self-loss
There leaps out unity's supreme delight
Whose blissful undivided sweetness feels
A commonalty of the Absolute.

There bliss was the pure undying truth of things, and there wisdom worked in all; there, in her glory and in her passion, the creative Force impelled everything. There (Savitri, p. 325)

Love was a close and thrilled identity
In the throbbing heart of all that luminous life.
A universal vision that unites,
A sympathy of nerve replying to nerve,
Hearing that listens to thought's inner sound
And follows the rhythmic meanings of the heart,
A touch that needs not hands to feel, to clasp,
Were there the native means of consciousness
And heightened the intimacy of soul with soul.

There in the Spirit’s House are worlds of wonder and happiness and light and harmony and there Aswapati became a portion of the universal gaze.

His mind answered to countless communing minds,
His words were syllables of the cosmos' speech,
His life a field of the vast cosmic stir.
He felt the footsteps of a million wills
Moving in unison to a single goal.

Here he saw plane above luminous plane climbing to utter God-states. Here Mind was a splendid sun and here the Word ushered divine experience. With laughter on her lips here Life pursued the bright adventure of creative delight: (p. 328)

Untired of sameness and untired of change,
Endlessly she unrolled her moving act,
A mystery drama of divine delight,
A living poem of world-ecstasy,
A kakemono of significant forms,
A coiled perspective of developing scenes,
A brilliant chase of self-revealing shapes,
An ardent hunt of soul looking for soul,
A seeking and a finding as of gods.

Even Matter found in it the spiritual quality, the density of the Spirit itself it possessed. (pp. 328-29)

There substance was a resonant harp of self,
A net for the constant lightnings of the Spirit,
A magnet power of love’s intensity
Whose yearning throb and adoration’s cry
Drew God’s approaches close, sweet, wonderful.

If Matter was plastic to spiritual light, events and facts became aspects of sheer reality. Thus every aspect of the cosmic manifestation found its true sense and content in this new manifestation in the House of the Spirit.

This multifold reality of the new creation in the truth of the creation itself was so authentic that Aswapati started wondering if it could appear at all in this imperfect mortal world, if it could materialise itself here. Already there were two negations opposing its descent upon earth: here is the spirit who itself is ignorant of the world it made; and there is the peculiar condition that the world is ignorant of the creator who is lodged in it and who is present everywhere. That is the dilemma Aswapati is now facing. True, “he saw a world that is from a world to be”; but there are difficulties also. However, one thing is certain, that by his yoga-tapasya he has established the prototypal creation in the Transcendent which can happen if the transcendental dynamic executive power behind it should condescend to come down and undertake the task. This must take place—if this creation has a divine meaning in it, a divine objective behind it.

RYD

Aswapati’s new creation in the House of the Spirit cannot materialize upon earth, earth in its present condition. That creation is too perfect to accept the flawed existence here, something which is perfectly understandable; for, if it were to do so, it would defeat its own purpose. But what is the actual difficulty that it could be cleared and the way opened out for its appearance here? There is presently the operational incompatibility between Spirit and Matter, they standing poles apart, in fact as if standing antagonistically one against the other. There is the Materialist Denial and there is the Refusal of the Ascetic, one not recognizing the universal Self and the Spirit, the foundational basis for this phenomenon of creation, and the other discarding the material unfolding into the higher possibilities of expression where life and light and love and truth and beauty can manifest themselves variously. We have a very detailed statement of this dilemma in The Life Divine (pp. 6-24), briefly put as follows:

If the affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence has to be maintained, we must first recognise eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this body as well as accept Matter as fit for it to inhabit, proclaimed by the Upanishad that Matter also is Brahman. But if we assert only pure Spirit or else only a mechanical unintelligent substance or Energy, Soul and Nature, the inevitable end will be that we shall deny one or the other.

In this regard the materialist, holding Matter as the originator of everything, has an easier field of positing the Monism of Matter. Philosophically, this will amount to saying that the material potential is rich enough to give rise to life and mind and higher grades of existence, give rise to these states by itself. But this is an unproven proposition and contradicts its own methodology. The known universe as the passive Purusha or the silent Atman with the inert Prakriti working here can never be satisfying.

The negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic each insists to be the sole truth, each dominating the conception of Life. If in one place there has been a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, its exclusiveness has also led to serious bankruptcy of Life; or else, elsewhere, the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit. These are unacceptable imbalances.

The denial of the materialist although more insistent and immediately successful is yet less enduring than the absorbing and perilous refusal of the ascetic. The former carries within itself its own cure. Its most powerful element is the Agnosticism which, admitting the Unknowable behind all manifestation, extends the limits of the unknowable until it comprehends all that is merely unknown. But there are in the universe knowable realities beyond the range of the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine rather than are determined by the material organs through which they hold themselves in touch with the world of the senses. If this is true, then it pretty quickly dismisses the premise of materialistic Agnosticism. In the sequel we get ready for a larger statement and an ever-developing enquiry.

Even if this is so, we must be careful not to rashly condemn what we are leaving or throw away one tittle of its gains. A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. The deeper truth is, the Unknown is not the Unknowable. If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reasoning from sense-knowledge, its very rush will carry it beyond and the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest of the energy and success which we may hope to see repeated in the conquest of what lies beyond, once the stride is taken that crosses the barrier. We already see that great unbelievable advance in its obscure beginnings.

Yet even if we had full knowledge and control of the worlds immediately above Matter, there would still be a limitation and still a beyond. The last knot of our bondage is at that point where the external draws into oneness with the internal.

Indeed, there is a beyond. On the far other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent. That supports the universal activity; it embraces life, everything. If the materialist is justified in insisting on Matter as the sole reality, so also is the ascetic, enamoured of that Beyond, justified in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality. The world of Matter is affirmed by the experience of the physical senses which would persuade us that the suprasensible is the unreal. Yet the denial of the suprasensible as necessarily an illusion or a hallucination depends on this constant sensuous association of the real with the materially perceptible, which is itself a hallucination.

Yet nothing can be resolved on the basis of the sense-obtained data; there is always a hiatus of experience which renders all argument inconclusive. There has primarily to be an extension of our consciousness, inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic existence. Mind which is calm and eternal, that broods equally in everything,—that must first be formed. Real then to the man who has had contact with it or lives in it, is this cosmic consciousness, with a greater than the physical reality; real in itself, real in its effects and works.

But when one goes even beyond this, when one steps into the truth of the infinite supermind, one knows that the world lives by That; That does not live by the world. And as we can enter into the cosmic consciousness and be one with all cosmic existence, so we can enter into the world-transcending consciousness and become superior to all cosmic existence.

We have been living here too long in the shadow of the great Refusal,—with renunciation as the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter. For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy. But in practice the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.

What is needed is to seek a larger and completer affirmation. The passionate aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently related to the descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so well understood as Its truth in the Spirit. If Materialism has greatly served the ends of the Divine, so should the still greater service rendered by Asceticism to Life be acknowledged.

While the two formidable Negations here seem to be meta-philosophical in character, their origin lies much deeper in the occult-spiritual, they exercising colossal power in the cosmic functioning. The problem is, “the divergent lines met not at all.” (Savitri, p. 330)

Three Powers governed its irrational course,
In the beginning an unknowing Force,
In the middle an embodied striving soul,
In its end a silent spirit denying life.

What we have in between, as an “infelicitous interlude”, a questioning Mind. It is in this terrestrial darkness that our nobler destiny is hidden. And yet the Superconscient ought to grow here. How? That is what Aswapati has to discover. He discovers. He knows that one who could make the New Creation established in the House of the Spirit manifest upon earth is the Consciousness-Force herself; it is she who must incarnate herself here and achieve the wonderful miracle. It is she alone who can do it, and none else. So, he turns towards her. It is in answer to his ardent prayer that, she takes the mortal birth as Savitri.

RYD

The transcendental Consciousness-Force, poised as divine Savitri to take birth in the mortal world, is the one who can make manifest on earth the new creation established by the Siddha-Yogi, Aswapati, in the House of the Spirit. She takes birth as his daughter, comes as a radiant daughter, kanyā téjaswinī as Vyasa calls her in his striking Mahabharata story. She is of flaming-fiery brilliance, jwalantīmiva téjasā, and steps into this darksome and death-bound den of ours. Hers is a birth directly in the context of the conquest of death, death who has been standing across the path of the divine Event ever since life entered into this evolutionary travail. It is that which will clear the way for the appearance of the new creation on earth, the creation in the Transcendent now awaiting this to happen sooner than later. Savitri’s birth is a divine birth, expressly meant for ushering in this new creation. It took place and the link between the soul and form grew sure: (Savitri, p. 355)

Flooded was the dim cave with slow conscient light,
The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,
The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.
At once she seemed to found a mightier race.

Savitri now stepped into her full youthful dynamism and (p. 369)

A morn that seemed a new creation's front,
Bringing a greater sunlight, happier skies,
Came, burdened with a beauty moved and strange
Out of the changeless origin of things.

But there must arise “Earth's wordless hymn to the Ineffable”, that the transcendental things are set into swift motion, that the morn leading the new creation’s front brings the day of a greater happier sunlight, that the things that were promised long ago are fulfilled. Savitri must receive the command. Presently it has happened and, in the perspective of her mission,

Again the mighty yearning raised its flame
That asks a perfect life on earth for men
And prays for certainty in the uncertain mind
And shadowless bliss for suffering human hearts
And Truth embodied in an ignorant world
And godhead divinising mortal forms.

The world’s wide ways opened before Savitri and her quest for love began, love triumphing over death. When that is accomplished, then it shall give a perfect life on earth; that shall then mark the rule of Perfection’s Law in this flawed mortal creation, That shall mean the coming down of the new creation which Aswapati had built in the House of the Spirit.

RYD

The invocation to divine Savitri has gone, invocation asking a perfect life on earth. In response to it she does come; not only that, at once she seems to found a mightier race. But the incarnate she has to also prepare herself while accepting the mortal’s lot, the terrestrial conditions of deathful suffering. Soon she shall do the Yoga of the Conquest of Death and clear the way for the descent and manifestation of the supramental on earth. This is necessary if the new creation established in the House of the Spirit has to manifest here. Aswapati the Siddha-Yogi has already established it in the transcendent but its appearance here, in the earth’s physical, is the one determining step that must be taken by the embodied Shakti that is Savitri herself. That is the task awaiting her and it is for that that she is getting the command, ādéśa from the high source of her being itself. Aswapati tells her so and it acts like a Mantra dropped in the Yoga’s ear.

The unfolding of this whole process has been the theme of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri. We find that the first half of the epic is devoted to the creation of the new world in the transcendent, that from there shall stream forth all the possibilities in this evolutionary process, the bright possibilities. Unless it is present in the Truth-Ideal, the Golden Womb of things, Hiranyagarbha, it cannot show up in the phenomenal. This has now been done. The second half is fully concerned with the aspect of materialization of this new creation on earth, something which the executive power alone has to carry out. That is her work, and she is there to do it in the Will of the Supreme. In its execution first there is the difficulty, the difficulty of Death standing across the path of the divine Event, the huge foreboding Mind of Night presenting itself as an obstacle. When this Mind of Night is transformed into the Mind of Light, the physical’s Mind receiving the supramental Light and Force, will then the process of supramental manifestation upon earth really begin. That’s the Legend and Symbol revealed to us in the supreme work that Savitri is.

RYD

Through the ages, the traditionalists of spirituality considered the notion of a divine manifestation upon earth to be an utter dream, a misleading hallucination; in fact they always thought it to be a kind of thoughtless insensitive illusion. This world is false, mithyā,—and that’s all. Then, to think of the Eternal living in what is only an imaginary shadow, what is fallacious, or entering into it becomes self-contradictory. And yet there is a strange door that opens only one way, the door of escape; in that case, wisdom lies in just passing through it. So, where is the question of the creation of a new world, or if it is there, of bringing it down in what is so patently transient and unreal? It is even stated that the question of the creation of the world is meant only for the beginners and for those who have made progress it is the non-creation that must be realized. If this is metaphysics, then the two negations, the denial of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic, are then getting sharply accentuated here. If this is based on a spiritual experience, then possibly it could be a partial experience, seeing or realising one side of the Spirit’s totality.

When Raman Maharshi was asked about his opinion regarding these matters, he seems to have replied to the following effect: “There is no creation and no dissolution. There is no bondage, no one doing spiritual practices, no one seeking spiritual liberation, and no one who is liberated. One who is established in the Self sees this by his knowledge of reality.”

In the context of the possibility of a supramental body, vijnānamaya śarīra, which will not be affected by disease, as held by Sri Aurobindo, the Maharshi expressed another view: “The body itself is a disease. To wish for a long stay of that disease is not the aim of the jnāni. Anyhow, one has to give up identification with the body. Just as the I-am-the-body consciousness prevents one from attaining Self-knowledge, in the same way, one who has got the conviction that he is not the body will become liberated even if he doesn't desire it.”

It was mentioned to him that “Sri Aurobindo wants to bring the power of God into the human body.” He answered: “If, after surrendering, one still has this desire, then surrender has not been successful. If one has the attitude, 'If the higher power is to come down, it must come into my body', this will only increase identification with the body. Truly speaking, there is no need of any such descent. After the destruction of the I-am-the-body idea, the individual becomes the form of the absolute. In that state, there is no above or below, front or back.”

David Godman in his The Power of the Presence reports the following conversation of a disciple with Raman Maharshi: Power of Presence

Q: Sri Aurobindo wants to bring down on the earth a new divine race.

M: Whatever is to be attained in the future is to be understood as impermanent. Learn to understand properly what you have now so that there will be no need of thinking about the future.

Q: Sri Aurobindo says that God has created various kinds of worlds and is still going to create a new world.

M: Our present world itself is not real. Each one sees a different imaginary world according to his imagination, so where is the guarantee that the new world will be real? The jiva [the individual person], the world and God, all of these are relative ideas. So long as there is the individual sense of 'I', these three are also there.

From this individual sense of 'I', from the mind, these three have arisen. If you stop the mind, the three will not remain, but Brahman alone will remain, as it remains and abides even now. We see things because of an error. This misperception will be rectified by enquiring into the real nature of this jiva. Even if the jiva enters Supermind, it will remain in mind, but after surrendering the mind, there will be nothing left but Brahman. Whether this world is real or unreal, consciousness or inert, a place of happiness or a place of misery, all these states arise in the state of ignorance. They are not useful after realisation.

The state of Atmanishta [being fixed in the Self], devoid of the individual feeling of 'I', is the supreme state. In this state there is no room for thinking of objects, nor for this feeling of individual being. There is no doubt of any kind in this natural state of being-consciousness-bliss. So long as there is the perception of name and form in oneself, God will appear with form, but when the vision of the formless reality is achieved there will be no modifications of seer, seeing and seen. That vision is the nature of consciousness itself, non-dual and undivided. It is limitless, infinite and perfect. When the individual sense of 'I' arises in the body, the world is seen. If this sense is absent, who then will see the world?

As long as one remains in the experience of the Passive Brahman alone, experience of the silent inactive static Eternal only, perhaps these conclusions are then inevitable. But the totality of the spiritual experience also asserts the dynamic aspect, the Eternal manifesting in the movement of Time. If the Upanishadic “Matter is Brahman, Annam Brahma”, then the positing of eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this body becomes perfectly conceivable, understandable even on the mental plane. There is nothing built up into the logical system to deny that Matter, if is an aspect of the Eternal, cannot house the Eternal, cannot become an instrument of its manifestation.

The difficulty comes when the dynamic side of the Eternal is not cognised. If there is the pursuit of the exclusive Self, the Adwaitin’s vast pursuit of the blank featureless Absolute, there could also be the intense gleaming pursuit of the creative-expressive Power in the multi-dimensionality of the Transcendental. What embraces Savitri’s emboldening vision is this Truth-dynamism. Not only Satyam but also Ritam have to be seen in the eternality of the Spirit’s working.

This simply means, if there can be the new and marvellous creation in the House of the Spirit, as occult-yogically established by Aswapati, then for its manifestation upon earth incarnation of the divine Consciousness-Force as Savitri becomes inevitable.

RYD

More serious than the ascetic’s rejection of this world, taking it as a dream-hallucination or an illusion, is the unkind and insensitive negation of Death himself about the impossibility of this creation having any meaning for a higher superior divine manifestation. It is a cosmic problem and its frightening roots are much deeper than accepting or snubbing this world or ours on an individual level. Savitri meets the challenge from Death even as she is pursuing him to claim back the spirit of Satyavan, claiming not for herself but for the sake of the earth. She is told that the physical body can never hold heavenly light in it, the body that is at the mercy of Death; instead, she must abandon hope to change things that have been arranged by God himself. In fact he has, according to Death, no interest in this world and the only way out is to forget all that is here. If there is a desire for eternal peace it must be sought elsewhere, in some paradise of perfection, and not here. Death tells her: (Savitri, pp. 646-47)

Cast off thy life and mind, then art thou Self,
An all-seeing Omnipresence stark, alone,
If God there is he cares not for the world;
All things he sees with calm indifferent gaze,
He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and desire,
He has bound all life with his implacable laws;
He answers not the ignorant voice of prayer.
Eternal while the ages toil beneath,
Unmoved, untouched by aught that he has made,
He sees as minute details mid the stars
The animal's agony and the fate of man:
Immeasurably wise, he exceeds thy thought;
His solitary joy needs not thy love.
His truth in human thinking cannot dwell:
If thou desirest truth, then still thy mind
For ever, slain by the dumb unseen Light.
Immortal bliss lives not in human air:
How shall the mighty Mother her calm delight
Keep fragrant in this narrow fragile vase
Or lodge her sweet unbroken ecstasy
In hearts which earthly sorrow can assail
And bodies careless Death can slay at will?
Dream not to change the world that God has planned,
Strive not to alter his eternal law.
If heavens there are whose gates are shut to grief,
There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth;
Or in the imperishable hemisphere
Where Light is native and Delight is king
And Spirit is the deathless ground of Things,
Choose thy high station, child of Eternity.
If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,
Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self
Immutable in its undying truth,
Alone for ever in the mute Alone.
Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;
Forgetting Love, forgetting Satyavan,
Annul thyself in his immobile peace.
O soul, drown in his still beatitude.
For thou must die to thyself to reach God's height:
I, Death, am the gate of immortality.

Death is not only belittling and ridiculing this world of sorrow and suffering; he is maintaining the impossibility of any change coming to it. In that case, the only way is to forget all this longing for happiness here and seek refuge in some eternal beyond. It could be only there where Death has no reach to claim things back for himself. This is how Death understands this creation, but this is the dark knowledge of it. Savitri, however, sees differently. She answers the sophist God who is trying to trap Knowledge itself in the snare of Ignorance. In the process, she unravels the mystery of this creation and asserts God’s will working in it, working to raise it to the diviner heavenlier states in the greatness of the Infinite. She tells Death, and tells him spiritedly, what the connotation is behind this vast creation and what the intention of God is for it, that it shall be able to manifest him in it. She gives a luminous lesson to Death about this act of creation, about God’s plunge into the utter Void and his emergence from it in the great sequel of his countless unfolding qualities. The present dichotomy between Soul and Nature is not the true truth of things, although at the moment it might appear to be so. In fact, the Soul must be able to express himself in Nature as much as Nature open herself to the Soul for his widening expression of divinity. If things are dark it does not mean that they cannot become bright. Her God-inspired refutal of Death’s reasoning is as follows: (pp. 648-49)

The world is a spiritual paradox
Invented by a need in the Unseen,
A poor translation to the creature's sense
Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,
A symbol of what can never be symbolised,
A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true.
Its powers have come from the eternal heights
And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss
And risen from it to do their marvellous work.
The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest,
The mind labours to think the Unthinkable,
The life to call the Immortal into birth,
The body to enshrine the Illimitable.
The world is not cut off from Truth and God…
My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,
My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest,
My mortal body is the Eternal's house.
Already the torch becomes the undying ray,
Already the life is the Immortal's force,
The house grows of the householder part and one.
How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
And Bliss can never invade the mortal's heart
Or God descend into the world he made?
If in the meaningless Void creation rose,
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
If green delight break into emerald leaves
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell,
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
How shall the nameless light not leap on men,
And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep?...
Already God is near, the Truth is close:
Because the dark atheist body knows him not,
Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?...
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit's liberty I ask for all.

It is only the incarnate divine Consciousness-Force who can assert that even the physical body can express the Divine, can enshrine it in its manifesting splendour. Non-acceptance of possibility of the divine Power working here had been the difficulty of the past spiritual attempts and what became available was the door of escape. It is only by opening to her that this miracle of transfiguration can be worked out. It is she who alone can change the physical nature into dynamic divine nature. Until then belief shall be not, that the work can be done. (p. 55)

RYD

Aswapati has established a new and marvellous creation in the House of the Spirit. It is a new creation flourishing in the vast expressive delight of the transcendental Spirit. A possibility in the omnipresent reality was willed and it is that which, by his yoga-tapasya, got actualized in it. It is not that this creation was already present there, that it was pre-existent in the domain of Truth and Awareness and Joy, and that now it just came into his sudden view. It is not that it existed there earlier, as do exist permanently the countless hierarchical worlds, and that he simply spotted its existence in the transcendent. It is not like Keats’s stout adventurer who stood silent upon a peak in Darien and stared at the Pacific, amazed to see the vastness spreading beyond; it is not that for the first time a new planet in the upper sky, William Herschel’s Uranus of 1781, swam into the his most unexpected view. The truth is, it is a new creation, it is Aswapati who with his occult-yogic work brought newly into existence, it is with him that a transcendental possibility has become manifest in the Spirit. He willed it and established it over there, in the triple glory of the Spirit.

Now this actualized possibility in the Transcendent has to become a realized element of the earthly evolution. But this is a work to be done not by the Divine Being or Purusha; it is to be done by the Executive Force or Prakriti, the manifesting Power of the Divine. It is the work of Shakti and the Yogi-Tapasvin has to approach her for its fulfilment. This is what Aswapati does. He offers his prayer to her and persuasively pleads to incarnate herself here. He knows that it is she who alone can do it. However, she herself has reservation in the beginning, if the world is ready for that kind of hastening action; she cautions Aswapati not to force the issue. Truth born too soon, she warns him, might shatter the very structure on which he wants to build something divinely superior. She tells him to let things happen in the natural course of Time. But Aswapati does not see it that way and makes himself bold to tell her something different; he puts forward another proposal—that she must incarnate herself to do the difficult work. While her advice is one aspect of the high Wisdom, there is also the merit of asserting one’s will when it is well founded on the Truth itself. In that sense, Aswapati is not disregarding the counsel given to him, but in the freedom of the Spirit that upholds a thousand possibilities, he is putting forward another possibility. The boon is granted to him and the Shakti herself takes birth to make the new world a reality here. His will compels her mortal birth. Creating a new world by his yoga-tapasya and insisting upon her to incarnate herself here, that what was created be realized upon earth,—these are the two mighty and marvellous acts of his will, the individual’s will carried out in the freedom of the transcendental Spirit’s Will. Aswapati’s will has given to evolution a new birth in the heaven’s luminous greatnesses opening here.

Aswapati’s work is done and now Savitri’s has to begin. To will is the Purusha Yoga. To accomplish what the Purusha has willed is the Shakti Yoga. By this difficult alchemic Yoga she has to make manifest what has been willed and created in the bright golden skies. Indeed, without her he remains unmanifest. That is the great logic of things in which he and she operate.

RYD

Savitri has to meet the challenge of immortal Death. He admonishes her: “Dream not to change the world that God has planned.” The best she can do is turn to God and leave the rest to him. This is the fundamental opposition, the opposition of Death, thrown by the great Inconscience at the base of things and there has to be a mightier power to deal with it, the dire antagonism, nay hostility of the dark One.

What is spoken of in Savitri that the Mother does victoriously. Her occult-spiritual tapasya, particularly in the physical after the 29 February 1956 event was concerned with the problem of the gross inconscient inert “brute” Matter. It is in this context that her realizations assume the deeper transformative significance. Thus, for example, she has an incomparable experience on 5 November 1958 which she narrates as follows:

At the very bottom of the inconscience most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world.

This was the message she gave on 1 January 1959. In the same year, on 6 October 1959, the Mother spoke something momentous about the new world:

“Shortly before the 15th of August I had a unique experience… For the first time the supramental light entered directly into my body, without passing through the inner beings. It entered directly through the feet (a red and gold colour—marvellous, warm, intense), and it climbed up and up… I found myself in another world, but not far away… This world was almost as substantial as the physical world… it is not as if this new world of Truth had to be created from nothing: it is fully ready, it is there.” It is fully ready. Yes, it has been made fully ready. Sri Aurobindo had brought it into existence fully. When the Mother asked Sri Aurobindo as to when this other world, the real one that is there, so near, would come to take the place of this world of falsehood, he replied: “Not ready.” The Mother was given the charge of this “not ready”-earth; she took its entire burden upon herself. Unmindful of the hazard and the consequence she was actually standing on a dangerous brink. But she knew also that it was only by leaving everything to the Divine’s Will that there could be authentic progress. Sure enough, she was told: “Annul thyself that only God may be.” In it had disappeared the dangerous brink and she was marching ahead on the path, marching triumphantly.


RYD

Let us have a brief look at some of the events in the Mother’s life as we might discern from the biographical representation of it in Sri Aurobindo’s epic Savitri. According to it, there is sufficient ground to surmise that the creation of the new world by Aswapati in the House of the Spirit must have taken place sometime during the early 1940s. This was the time when Sri Aurobindo had finalised in his own hand the draft of Savitri’s first part, Books I-III. It is here that we have an elaborate description of this new and marvellous world governed by the Perfection’s Law. Prior to that, the indefatigable yogi-tapasvin was busy with bringing down the supermind in his physical. The Overmind had already appeared in the physical on 24 November 1926, the Siddhi Day, the day when the Krishna Consciousness entered the tough material-corporeal.

Sri Aurobindo explained the significance of the Overmind descent as follows: "The 24th November 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 his Ananda."

Immediately after this, the Mother built a creation based on the entry of the Overmental Gods in the physical’s evolutionary working. When the Mother told of it to Sri Aurobindo, he replied right away: “It will be a great success. But it is an Overmind creation. And it is not success that we want; we want to establish the Supermind on earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.” When Sri Aurobindo said so, it means that the possibility of the new world, the world governed by the Perfection’s Law was not yet there in sight, it lacked the transcendental quality the Master-Yogi was aiming at. Had that been there, the world governed by the Perfection’s Law, Sri Aurobindo would have certainly told so to the Mother, he would have mentioned that it is that world which they wanted to bring down and no other howsoever dazzling it might be. It clearly implies that this Overmental world was not the intended manifestation in their Yoga. Those things happened after 1926.

This is how the Mother narrates, on 10 July 1957, the event that took place after the Overmind descent:

…a very brilliant creation was worked out in extraordinary detail, with marvellous experiences, contact with divine beings, and all kinds of manifestations which are considered miraculous… One day, I went as usual to relate to Sri Aurobindo what had been happening—we had come to something really very interesting, and perhaps I showed a little enthusiasm in my account of what had taken place—then Sri Aurobindo looked at me... and said: “Yes, this is an Overmind creation. It is very interesting, very well done. You will perform miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn all events on earth topsy-turvy, indeed,...” and then he smiled and said: “It will be a great success. But it is an Overmind creation. And it is not success that we want; we want to establish the Supermind on earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.” With my inner consciousness I understood immediately: a few hours later the creation was gone... and from that moment we started anew on other bases.

Sri Aurobindo’s yoga-tapasya then proceeded pointedly and intensively, particularly so during the mid 1930s. Even as would a tireless God carry out the difficult labour to build the foundation in the depths of the inconscient Void, about this time Sri Aurobindo perhaps started establishing the new creation in the House of the Spirit, a creation based on the Perfection’s Law. It is that which he wanted to bring down. Perhaps he had an idea about it when he had earlier told the Mother about the “brilliant creation” she had worked out after the Overmind descent.

The descent of the golden Light, the supramental Light in Sri Aurobindo’s physical started happening early in August 1938 and, surely enough, it had connection with the “new and marvellous creation” which was later described in great detail in Savitri. (p. 323) The draft of this part of Savitri, the first three Books, was completed by September 1942. We might therefore say that it was during the first half of the Second World War, perhaps during August 1938 and September 1942, that this new creation had taken its birth in the transcendent. It is that which had to be brought down.

We shall see some of these aspects in brief detail as we shall proceed in our discussion of this topic.

RYD

In 1956 the Mother announced the birth of a new world: “A new light breaks upon the earth, A new world is born.” This is not something which is just a conception that now got materialized, something which happened in the field of thought, a continuation of the old world new-formed. But what has happened is the birth of a new world, an altogether new world which was never here earlier. About this new world the Mother said later, on 10 July 1957, the following:

Well, I announced to you all that this new world was born. But it has been so engulfed, as it were, in the old world that so far the difference has not been very perceptible to many people. Still, the action of the new forces has continued very regularly, very persistently, very steadily, and to a certain extent, very effectively. And one of the manifestations of this action was my experience—truly so very new—of yesterday evening. And the result of all this I have noted step by step in almost daily experiences. It could be expressed succinctly, in a rather linear way: First, it is not only a “new conception” of spiritual life and the divine Reality. This conception was expressed by Sri Aurobindo, I have expressed it myself many a time, and it could be formulated somewhat like this: the old spirituality was an escape from life into the divine Reality, leaving the world just where it was, as it was; whereas our new vision, on the contrary, is a divinisation of life, a transformation of the material world into a divine world. This has been said, repeated, more or less understood, indeed it is the basic idea of what we want to do. But this could be a continuation with an improvement, a widening of the old world as it was—and so long as this is a conception up there in the field of thought, in fact it is hardly more than that—but what has happened, the really new thing, is that a new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of transition where the two are entangled—where the other still persists all-powerful and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where the new one is quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed—unnoticed to the extent that outwardly it doesn’t disturb anything very much, for the time being, and that in the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And yet it is working, growing—until it is strong enough to assert itself visibly.

But such a birth cannot take place out of nothing, it cannot be ex nihilo. It happened because it was first built or gathered up or assembled, so to say, from the transcendental elements, it was first established in the transcendent, it was created as a kind of prototype, a breathing-living template, a master document as a source or fountainhead of all activities, an original, created by the force of Real-Idea in the world of Real-Idea. It is that world of Real-Idea which had to be projected in the evolutionary field. The creation of this Master-World in the House of the Spirit was the King-Idea and the Master-Act of the Yogi-Tapasvin himself who accomplished it at the beginning of the Second World War.

There was an imperative behind it and it had got to be done. In Savitri the fate of the evolution is clearly stated in terms of several alternatives, for this new thing to happen. Thus when Savitri gets initiated into the Yoga by a mighty and uplifting Voice, she surveys the cosmic past and foresees the possibilities in which direction the future will move. Thus (Savitri, pp. 486-87):

All this the spirit concealed had done in her:
A portion of the mighty Mother came
Into her as into its own human part:
Amid the cosmic workings of the Gods
It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,
Dreamed in the passion of her far-seeing spirit
To mould humanity into God's own shape
And lead this great blind struggling world to light
Or a new world discover or create.
Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.
But for such vast spiritual change to be,
Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart
The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil
And step into common nature's crowded rooms
And stand uncovered in that nature's front
And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

Savitri has to mould humanity into God’s own shape, or a new world discover, or a new world create. Whichever might be the alternative, Earth must transform to equal herself with Heaven or else Heaven must descend into earth’s mortality to change it into its own kind.

The Mother’s announcement of the supramental descent and manifestation in 1956 means that the alternative was decisively pinned down : it was a new world that was born; it was not changing the present humanity into God’s own shape, nor creating a new world here, but it was giving birth to an altogether new world. But this is not an altogether new world also, in the sense that it was a world created by Sri Aurobindo in the transcendent, in the House of the Spirit. Unless there is the transcendental support available to it, the transcendental ādhāra, it cannot come into existence here. Its gleaming roots are in Heaven and therefore can its million branches spread in the vast cosmic field down below, grow in the evolutionary march of Time.

The time has come and now it has happened, in February 1956. As the Mother says, “I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that the time has come,” and in it she acted.

RYD

After meeting Sri Aurobindo just a few months ago, we have a remarkable prayer of the Mother, dated 25 September 1914. It speaks of a promise that, a new Light would break upon the earth and that a new world be born. The promise was fulfilled on 29 February 1956: a new Light broke upon the earth, a new world was born.

Later, in a talk in July 1957, the Mother said that “what has happened, the really new thing, is that a new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born.” The time had arrived and the thing was done. This creation which was already envisioned and willed four decades ago, “a new and marvellous creation”, has now been supramentally established in the earth’s subtle physical.

This new world was first created in the transcendent by Sri Aurobindo and his next concern was to bring it down, bringing it down by invoking the descent of Supermind upon the earth. His withdrawal on 5 December 1950 as an act of yogic will hastened the pace towards its realisation.

Sri Aurobindo found it expedient to make a strategic move in 1950 when the difficulty of bringing down the Supermind in the physical became more and more acute. In fact, he had remarked to the Mother, just a year before this epochal event, that for their work to be completed, one of them would have to go. It had become very necessary to descend into death for “consciously experiencing and transforming death,”—as Georges van Vrekhem puts it. Perhaps Sri Aurobindo had already foreseen such a possibility when in the Record he wrote in 1913 that the Siddhi of the higher Amrita might not be in this life.

In 1946 the Mother of Delight or Anandamayi Mata had come down into the earth-atmosphere and there was a perceptible change everywhere; but no support or ādhāra was available for her action. She is the one who has the greatest power of transformation of the body and therefore for her action to become possible another route had to be discovered, another yogic path tread. This is what Sri Aurobindo did, he willed it and prepared it through the act of supreme sacrifice in the Yajna of the Divine. It was not a sacrifice in the traditional or conventional sense; but it was an act of yogic will. It was, as the Mother says, a practical way of achieving something that otherwise was not happening. Indeed, it was the Yajna of the Divine to prepare this unyielding matter to respond, open to the higher light and power. By Yajna in which grows the Will-Force is achieved whatever has to be achieved. That was Sri Aurobindo’s sacrifice, his Yajna.

How much he has worked, how much suffered in the process—of it we have no idea. The Mother’s prayer on Sri Aurobindo’s Samadhi speaks briefly of it: “To Thee who hast been the material envelope of our Master, to Thee our infinite gratitude. Before Thee who hast done so much for us, who hast worked, struggled, suffered, hoped, endured so much, before Thee who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to Thee.” (9 December 1950)

In a talk, to Mona Sarkar, the Mother tells: “He walked into the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery, to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the Supreme’s Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like him.”

We are given a brief glimpse of it in the definitive autobiographical Savitri, for instance, in the following: (pp. 229-30)

In this infernal realm he dared to press
Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,
Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest
Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:
In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,
In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.
Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;
He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,
The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.
Above was a chill deaf eternity.
In vague tremendous passages of Doom
He heard the goblin voice that guides to slay,
And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,
And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.
In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes
Companionless he roamed through desolate ways
Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream
And Death's black eagles scream to the precipice,
And met the hounds of bale who hunt men's hearts
Baying across the veldts of Destiny,
In footless battlefields of the Abyss
Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,
Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes
And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal…
He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

Through this vast occult-yogic act “he imposed upon the dark atom and dumb mass the diamond script of the Imperishable.” This diamond script produced the result on 29 February 1956.

Now what the Divine Being or the Ishwara has willed has to be made manifest by the Divine Shakti or the Ishwari. She has to lift up the golden hammer and shatter the golden lid that separates the world from the Supreme. But all this has to happen not by passing through the door of the sun, sūryasya dwāra as the Upanishad would say, but through the door of death. That is an aspect of the Shakti Yoga when it comes to the question of dealing with the stiff inconscient nature. If until now Death had been a sharp and cutting instrument in promoting a certain growth of Life on the Path of the Spirit, an accomplice in Life’s intent, it ought to become a transformed instrument to remove all that is malignant so that even the physical might be an expression of the Divine’s joy of existence. The dark wounding path has to become the sunlit path in its noblest brightest sense. To tread this path is to follow the Integral Yoga of the Future. The Mother’s yoga-tapasya in the physical, as greatly foreseen in Savitri and as it progressed during the period 1956-1973, is full of that significance.

RYD

Dr Sanyal was Sri Aurobindo’s physician who had come on an urgent call from Calcutta to Pondicherry. This was towards the end of November 1950, in fact on 30 November, when the condition of the divine patient had become ‘critical’. But the decision to ‘withdraw’ was already taken by the divine patient. About Sri Aurobindo’s passing, on 5 December 1950 in the early hour at 1.26 am, the Mother told that he was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons totally beyond our comprehension. She also told Sanyal the following:

People do not know what a tremendous sacrifice Sri Aurobindo has made for the world. About a year ago, while I was discussing things, I remarked that I felt like leaving this body of mine. He spoke out 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.”

The matter was sealed in divine intuition of the luminous future. All this was in 1950, the epochal year. Later, on 18 January 1951, the Mother said that Sri Aurobindo is always with us, doing the work for which he had come. Another way of doing it was found, a unique way. He “sacrificed his physical life in order to help more fully his work of transformation”; after his withdrawal, he worked to hasten the whole process by operating from another domain where the corporal limitations were absent. While he was thus active with the work in the supramentally glowing occult-subtle, the Mother had to carry it out on the harsh and difficult physical plane, in the terrestrial conditions, carry it out to fulfil the Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation.

She did it in the speed of light and declared that, a new light has broken upon the earth, a new world was born, that the things that were promised have been fulfilled. There was an uninterrupted rush of the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness upon earth. Following this rush, “half an hour later”, took place the birth of the new world, in the evening of 29 February 1956. Her task was accomplished. And yet stop she would not—whatever the Supreme should will for her she would be there to do it.

The Supermind had touched the earth on 29 March 1914. It entered in the earth’s subtle-physical on 29 February 1956. It was not only a descent; it was a manifestation. What Sri Aurobindo had built in the House of the Spirit some fifteen years before, that manifested upon earth. That was the promise given ages ago and it is that promise which now got fulfilled.

And yet the Mother had to move on. In the wake of this wonderful event, decisive possibilities opened and she had to work out the next crucial transition, work them out in the Will of the Supreme. Sri Aurobindo had given her the work of Supramental Descent and Transformation. The birth of the new world has taken place in the subtle physical; it has to get transcribed into the gross terrestrial. The transcendental’s blueprint in all its dynamism is present there and it has now to get expressed in the death-burdened and suffering mortality. It should also be recognized that transcendental’s blueprint has in it all the effectuating power to carry out what it contains. In its transformative action it itself is constantly working things and events from there, irresistibly and divinely shaping them in its infallible way.

The hyperlink between the transcendental’s blueprint and the human potential ready to receive the higher has to be forged. In fact, this has already been done by the Master-Yogi himself, done in the form of the Mind of Light, the physical’s mind opening to the supramental. How wonderful! The Mother was operating in it, down to the cellular level.

RYD

The new world created by Sri Aurobindo in the House of the Spirit manifested in the earth’s subtle-physical on 29 February 1956. This was the work that the Mother carried out after the strategic sacrifice of the Master-Yogi on 5 December 1950. This manifestation now in the subtle-physical has to materialize itself in the earth’s gross physical. But there is an essential difference between the two, one governed by the Perfection’s Law and the other subject to Imperfection and Ignorance and Death. Therefore the question that arises is: what is it that can take care of the situation, provide a mechanism by which things here receive the transcendentally higher?

Sri Aurobindo saw the necessity of an operative dynamic link and created it in the Mind of Light. In him the physical’s mind opened to the supramental Light and Force and it is that which he passed on to the Mother at the moment of his departure. She herself tells us:

He [Sri Aurobindo] had gathered in his body a great amount of supramental force and as soon as he left... . You see, he was lying on his bed, I stood by his side, and in a way altogether concrete—concrete with such a strong sensation as to make one think that it could be seen—all this supramental force which was in him passed from his body into mine. And I felt the friction of the passage. It was an extraordinary experience. For a long time... I was standing beside his bed, and that continued. Almost a sensation—it was a material sensation. For a long time.

We also have another statement from her: “As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he called the Mind of Light got realised in me.”

The role of the Mind of Light as a functional principle, in fact an effectuating power, is seen to be that of the leader of a type of new mental beings, of a presiding official over the intermediate race, the race governed, in the Mother’s phrase, by la conscience du surhomme, the superman consciousness. This new race, the new humanity, not just the élite humanity, will be “not only capable of standing enlightened in the radiance of the Supermind but able to climb consciously towards it and into it.” This surhomme is not simply 'aboveman' or 'overman'; it is already governed not by Overmind but by the delegate power of the Supermind itself. Indeed, the appearance of the Mind of Light is the first definite and assured entry of the Supermind itself in the gross earth-consciousness, the beginning of the process of supramentalisation on the physical plane. It is that which will carry out the preparatory work and bring mortality’s travail closer to its end. It will be the commencement of termination of the presently death-processed evolution. The Mind of Light is a crucial operative step in between—and that has been taken.

Sri Aurobindo saw an important place for the Mind of Light occupying in the scheme of things. It will create an order of beings who will form an intermediate race, a race with the physical mind prepared to receive the supramental. That is to say, the presently covert supermind in the material world will open out to directly receive in evolution the supermind proper for its full dynamic play here: It is the involved supermind in the physical that is going to receive the superconscient supermind leading to assured glory of a fully transformed divine life upon earth.

RYD

There are the two ancient antipathies for the coming of the material glory here in this world of our mortality: the ascetic’s denial and the materialist’s refusal. If on the one hand there is the relentless Law of Entropy leading to heat death of the universe, there is on the other, simply the dismissal of this universe as insubstantial and illusory. But belief shall be not till the work is done. In one of his letters Sri Aurobindo writes that the seeker of the distant beatitude of Heaven alone would change nothing in the creation here, that the evasion of a liberated soul from the world makes to that world no difference. “But this crossing of the line if turned not only to an ascending but to a descending purpose would mean the transformation of the line from what it now is, a lid, a barrier, into a passage for the higher powers of consciousness of the Being now above it. It would mean a new creation on earth, a bringing in of the ultimate powers which would reverse the conditions here, in as much as that would produce a creation raised into the full flood of spiritual and supramental light in place of one emerging into a half-light of mind out of a darkness of material inconscience. It is only in such a full flood of the realised spirit that the embodied being could know, in the sense of all that was involved in it, the meaning and temporary necessity of his descent into the darkness and its conditions and at the same time dissolve them by a luminous transmutation into a manifestation here of the revealed and no longer of the veiled and disguised or apparently deformed Divine.” (Letters on Yoga, pp. 31-32)

What was postulated as a new creation here, upon earth, has now become a reality in the earthly real. The forging of the golden link of the Mind of Light will now bring that reality yet closer, will become instrumental in leading humanity to God as much as it becoming acceptable for God to step into it. If the unfolding cosmic past held in it an indicative possibility, an alternative that

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state,

with the Mind of Light operatively formed one could say that

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
And Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.

The Mind of Light, the physical’s mind opening to the supramental Light and Force—that’s the secret, that’s the key for such a miracle of transition to occur, for the double process to take place. In the present circumstance the physical looks like an obstinate difficulty, nay, is a stiff impediment, grave and irremovable. It is that which once, long ago, quite long ago at the beginning of the whole thing, gave rise to the two famous Negations, the supremacy of the inconscient Void and the absolute denial of God. But at that time it was necessary also. The physical’s mind formed under the sway of the inconscient Night and Power alone could give rise to definable shapes and structures in the indeterminate Emptiness; this Mind of Night was fashioned to consolidate it, to provide a stable basis to erect new worlds of life and mind. Had it not been so, the inconscient Nothing would have simply swallowed them up.

Therefore, today if the mind of the physical becomes a difficulty on the path towards a new body, there is also another aspect of it. There has to be a connection between the new body formed out of the inner mental, inner vital and inner physical with the inmost being that actually supports it with the psychic being, psychic being who is the authentic leader of the evolutionary march. It is the psychic being which will, says the Mother, materialize and become the supramental being. It will cross over into the new species. It is through it that the supramental will manifest itself. Materialization of the psychic being will give continuity to evolution and make more and more progress in the Spirit possible. This materialization means the abolition of death. It means immortality in the material world, upon mrityuloka. Which also means that whatever is not in accordance with the Truth of things will disappear.

The Mind of Light will prepare the Intermediate Race connecting the Mental with the Gnostic. The psychic being will materialise itself and become the supramental being. But the knowledge of the process yet remains unrevealed. The new creation has manifested in the earth’s luminous subtle-physical and it is that which will have to be taken forward by this double effort in evolution.

RYD

The Mother tells about her experience of 7 November 1958 that, what she had was an altogether new revelation, that it was a vision of the Inconscient, its condition when Mind came into picture: “… it was the mental Inconscient. Because the starting point was mental. A special Inconscient—rigid, hard, resistant—with all that the mind has brought into our consciousness. But it was far worse, far worse than a purely material Inconscient! A ‘mentalised’ Inconscient, as it were. All this rigidity, this hardness, this narrowness, this fixity—a FIXITY—comes from the presence of the mind in creation. When the mind was not manifested, the Inconscient was not like that! It was formless and had the plasticity of something that is formless—the plasticity has gone. It is a terrible image of the Mind’s action in the Inconscient. It has made the Inconscient aggressive—it was not so before. Aggressive, resistant, OBSTINATE. That was not there before. Yes, that’s it. It was not an ‘original’ Inconscient. It was a mentalised Inconscient. With all that the mind has brought in in the way of OPPOSITION—of resistance, hardness, rigidity… Well, the mental Inconscient REFUSES to change—which is not true of the other one… this one is an ORGANISED Inconscient—organised by a beginning mental influence. A hundred times worse!... The experience is of the Inconscient that has undergone the influence of the Mind in creation. It has become… it has become a FAR greater obstacle than before.” (14 November 1958)

The mouldability of the material Inconscient had disappeared. Forms acquired fixity—which was a gain from material Inconscient to mentalised Inconscient fighting against tendencies of the all-swallowing Nothingness, but also a terrible bother, its tenacity and impenetrability becoming a basic cause of failure of this creation as far as transformation is concerned. So if the present forms produced by the mentalised Inconscient are to be made to change, if they have to become open to the superior Light and Force, one must first deal with this mentalised Inconscient. Is this not the “mind of Night standing across the path of the divine Event” with which the narrative of Savitri starts? Sri Aurobindo first wrote “spirit of Night” which he later significantly changed to “mind of Night”. If the Mind of Light is the physical’s mind receiving the supramental, we can say that the Mind of Night is the physical’s mind doing the work of the Inconscient. Of course, this Mind of Night was necessary to organize what was fluid, plastic, what was constantly changing, protean, was incapable of assuming an enduring form to hold its own inherent possibilities; it gave to the inconscient Indeterminate architectural and structural stability, formulated concreteness, that on it could be founded whatever had to be founded. However, now, because of its rigidity, its unyielding stiffness that itself has become an obstacle. What was once prudently necessary has itself turned into an inflexible adversary who must be now conquered.

The Mother’s work in the physical was concerned with this aspect, of making the physical’s mind open to the higher working. Product as it is of