THE MOTHER : by Sri Aurobindo
I
-
There are two powers that alone can effect in their
conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our
endeavor, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a
supreme grace from above that answers.
But the supreme grace will act only in the conditions of the
Light and the Truth; it will not act in conditions of Falsehood and
Ignorance. For if it were to yield to the demands of the Falsehood, it
would defeat its own purpose.
These are the conditions of Light and Truth, the sole
conditions under which the highest will descend; and it is only the
very highest supramental Force descending from above and opening from
below that can victoriously handle the physical Nature and annihilate
its difficulties . . . 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, a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the
mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the
earth Nature.
The surrender must be total and seize all parts of the
being. It is not enough that psychic should respond and higher mental
aspect or even the inner vital submit and the physical consciousness
feel the influence. There must be no part in the being, even the most
external, anything that makes a reserve, anything that hides behind
doubts, confusions and subterfuges, anything that revolts or refuses.
If a part of the being surrenders, but another part reserves
itself, follows its own way or makes its own conditions, then each
time that happens, you are yourself pushing the divine Grace away from
you.
If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for
your desires, egoistic demands and vital insistences, if you put these
things in the place of true aspiration or mix them with it and try to
impose it on the Divine Shakthi, then it is idle to invoke the divine
Grace to transform you.
If you open yourself on one side or in one part to the Truth
and on another side are constantly opening the gates to hostile
forces, it is in vain to expect that the divine Grace will abide with
you. You must keep the temple clean if you wish to install there a
living Presence.
If each time the Power intervenes and brings back the Truth,
you turn your back on it and call in again the falsehood that has been
expelled, it is not the divine Grace you must blame for failing you,
but the falsity of your own will and the imperfection of your own
surrender.
If you call for the Truth and yet something in you chooses
what is false, ignorant and undivine or even simply is unwilling to
reject it altogether, then always you will be open to attack and the
Grace will recede from you. Detect first what is false or obscure in
you and persistently reject it, then alone can you rightly call for
the divine Power to transform you.
Do not imagine that truth and falsehood, light and darkness,
surrender and selfishness can be allowed to dwell together in the
house consecrated to the Divine. The transformation must be integral,
and integral therefore the rejection of all that withstands it.
Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is
bound to do everything for you at your demand and even though you do
not satisfy the conditions laid down by the Supreme. Make your
surrender true and complete, then only will all else be done for you.
Reject too the false and indolent expectation that the divine
will do the surrender for you. The Supreme demands your surrender to
her, but does not impose it: you are free at every moment, till the
irrevocable transformation comes, to deny and to reject the Divine or
to recall your self-giving, if you are willing to suffer the spiritual
consequence. Your surrender must be self-made and free; it must be the
surrender of a living being, not of an inert automaton or mechanical
tool.
An inert passivity is constantly confused with the real
surrender, but out of an inert passivity nothing true and powerful can
come. It is the inert passivity of the physical Nature that leaves it
at the mercy of every obscure or undivine influence. A glad and strong
and helpful submission is demanded to the working of the Divine force,
the obedience of the illumined disciple of the Truth, of the inner
Warrior who fights against obscurity and falsehood, of the faithful
servant of the Divine.
This is the true attitude and only those who can take and keep
it, preserve a faith unshaken by disappointments and difficulties and
shall pass through the ordeal to the supreme victory and the greatest
transmutation.
II
--
In all that is done in the universe, the Divine through his Shakthi is
behind all action but he is veiled by his Yoga Maya and works through
the ego of the Jiva in the lower nature.
In Yoga also it is the Divine who is the Sadhaka and
the Sadhana; it is his Shakthi with her light, power, knowledge,
consciousness, Ananda, acting upon the Adhara and, when it is opened
to her, pouring into it with these divine forces that makes the
Sadhana possible. But so long as the lower nature is active the effort
of the Sadhaka becomes necessary.
The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration,
rejection and surrender, - an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing
- the mind's will, the hearts seeking,, the assent of the vital being,
the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and
nature; rejection of the movements of lower nature - rejection of the
mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that
the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, - rejection of
the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions,
selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility
to Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a
calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, - rejection of the
physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy,
pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, so that the true
stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body
growing always more divine; surrender of oneself and all one is and
has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the
Divine Shakthi.
-x-
In proportion as the surrender and self-consecration progress the
Sadhaka becomes conscious of the Divine Shakthi doing the Sadhana,
pouring into him more and more of herself, founding in him the freedom
and perfection of the Divine Nature. The more this conscious process
replaces his own effort, the more rapid and true becomes his
progress. But it cannot completely replace the necessity of personal
effort until the surrender and consecration are pure and complete from
top to bottom.
Note that a tamasic surrender refusing to fulfill the
conditions and calling on the God to do everything and save one all
the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom
and perfection.
III
---
To walk through life armoured against fear, peril and disaster, only
two things are needed, two that go always together - the Grace of the
Divine and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and
surrender. Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic
faith in the mental and vital being tainted with ambition, pride,
vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire
for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and
smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards to heaven. Regard your
life as given you only for the divine work and to help in the divine
manifestation. Desire nothing but the purity, force, light, wideness,
calm, Ananda of the divine consciousness and its insistence to
transform and perfect your mind, life and body. Ask for nothing but
the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth, its realization on earth
and in you and in all who are called and chosen and the conditions
needed for its creation and its victory over all opposing forces.
Let your sincerity and surrender be genuine and entire. When
you give yourself, give completely, without demand, without condition,
without reservation so that all in you shall belong to the Divine
Mother and nothing left to the ego or given to any other power.
The more complete your faith, sincerity and surrender, the
more will grace and protection be with you. And when the grace and
protection of the Divine Mother are with you, what is there that can
touch you or whom need you fear? A little of it even will carry you
through all difficulties, obstacles and dangers; surrounded by its
full presence you can go on surely on your way because it is hers,
careless of all menace, unaffected by any hostility however powerful,
whether from this world or from the worlds invisible. Its touch
can turn difficulties into opportunities, failure into success and
weakness into unfaltering strength. For the grace of the Divine Mother
is the sanction of the Supreme and now or tomorrow its effect is sure,
a thing decreed, inevitable and irresistible.
IV
--
Money is a sign of universal force, and this force in its
manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is
indispensable to the fullness of outer life. In its origin and its
true action it belongs to the Divine. But like other powers of the
Divine it is delegated here and in the ignorance of the lower Nature
can be usurped for the uses of the ego or held by Asuric influences
and perverted to their purpose. This is indeed one of the three forces
-power,wealth,sex- that have the stroongest attraction for the human
ego and the Asura and are most generally misheld and misused by those
who retain them. The seekers or keepers of wealth are more often
possessed rather than its possessors; few escape entirely a distorting
influence stamped on it by its long seizure and perversion by the
Asura. For this reason most spiritual disciplines insist on complete
self-control, detachment and renunciation of all bondage to wealth and
of all personal and egoistic desire for its possession. Some even put
a ban on money and riches and proclaim poverty and bareness of life as
the only spiritual condition. But this is an error; it leaves the
power in the hands of the hostile forces. To reconquer it for the
Divine to whom it belongs and use it divinely for the divine life is
the supramental way for the Sadhaka.
You must neither turn with an ascetic shrinking from the money power,
the means it gives and the object it brings, nor cherish a rajasic
attachment to them or a spirit of enslaving self-indulgence in their
gratifications. Regard wealth simply as a power to be won back for
the Mother and placed at her service.
All wealth belongs to the Divine and those who hold it as
trustees, not possessors. It is with them today, tomorrow it may be
elsewhere. All depends on the way they discharge their trust while it
is with them, in what spirit, with what consciousness in their use of
it, to what purpose.
In your personal use of money look on all you have or get or bring as
the Mother's. Make no demand but accept what you receive from her and
use it for the purposes for which it is given to you. Be entirely
selfless, entirely scrupulous, exact, careful in detail, a good
trustee; always consider that it is her possessions and not your own
that you are handling. On the other hand, what you receive for her,
lay religiously before her; turn nothing to your own or anybody else's
purpose.
Do not look up to men because of their riches or allow yourself to be
impressed by the show, the power of influence. When you ask for the
Mother, you must feel that it is she who is demanding through you a
very little of what belongs to her and the man from whom you ask will
be judged by his response.
If you are free from money-taint but without any ascetic withdrawal,
you will have greater power to command the money for the divine
work. Equality of mind, absence of demand and the full dedication of
all you possess and receive and all your power of acquisition to the
Divine Shakthi and her work are the signs of this freedom. Any
perturbation of mind with regard to money and its use, any claim, any
grudging is a sure index of some imperfection or bondage.
The ideal Sadhaka in this kind is one who if required to live poorly
can so live and no sense of want will affect him or interfere with the
full inner play of the divine consciousness, and if he is required to
live richly, can so live and never for a moment fall into desire or
attachment to his wealth or to the things that he uses or servitude to
self-indulgence or a weak bondage to the habits that the possession of
riches creates. The divine Will is all for him and the divine Ananda.
In the supramental creation the money force have to be restored to the
Divine Power and used for a true and beautiful and harmonious
equipment and ordering of a new divinised vital and physical existence
in whatever way the Divine Mother herself decides in her creative
vision. But first it must be conquered back for her and those will be
the strongest for the conquest who are in this part of their nature
strong and large and free from ego and surrendered without any claim
or withholding or hesitation, pure and powerful channels for the
Supreme Puissance.
V
-
If you want to be a true doer of divine works, your first aim must
be to totally free from all desire and self-regarding ego. All
your life must be an offering and a sacrifice to the Supreme; your
only object in action shall be to serve, to receive, to fulfill,
to become a manifesting instrument of the Divine Shakti in her
works. You must grow in the divine consciousness till there is no
difference between your will and hers, no motive except her
impulsion in you, no action that is not her conscious action in
you and through you.
Until you are capable of this complete dynamic identification,
you have to regard yourself as a soul and body created for her
service, one who does all for her sake. Even if the idea of the
separate worker is strong in you and you feel that it is you who
do the act, yet it must be done for her. All stress of egoistic
choice, all hankering after personal profit, all stipulation of
self-regarding desire must be extirpated from the nature. There
must be no demand for fruit and no seeking for reward; the only
fruit for you is the pleasure of the Divine Mother and the
fulfilment of her work, your only reward a constant progression in
divine consciousness and calm and strength and bliss. The joy of
service and the joy of inner growth through works is the
sufficient recompense of the selfless worker.
But a time will come when you are more and more of the instrument
and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion your
contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all
times you will have only to concentrate and to put everything into
her hands to have her present guidance, her direct command or
impulse, the sure indication of the thing to be done and the way
to do it and the result. And afterwards you will realise that the
divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and
carries out your works; all your movements are originated by her,
all your powers are hers, mind, life and body are conscious and
joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, moulds for
her manifestation in the physical universe. There can be no more
happy condition than this union and dependence; for this step
carries you back beyond the border-line from the life of stress
and suffering and ignorance into the truth of your spiritual
being, into its deep peace and its intense Ananda.
While this transformation is being done it is more than ever
necessary to keep yourself free from all taint of the perversions
of the ego. Let no demand or insistence creep in to stain the
purity of the self-giving and the sacrifice. There must be
no attachment to the work or the result, no laying down of
conditions, no claim to possess the Power that should possess you,
no pride of the instrument, no vanity or arrogance. Nothing in the
mind or in the vital or physical parts should be suffered to
distort to its own use or seize for its own personal and separate
satisfaction the greatness of the forces that are acting through
you. Let your faith, your sincerity, your purity of aspiration be
absolute and pervasive of all planes and layers of the being;
then every disturbing element and distorting influence will
progressively fall away from your nature.
The last stage of this perfection will come when you are
completely identified with the Divine Mother and feel yourself no
longer to be another and separate being, instrument, servant or
worker but truly a child and eternal portion of her consciousness
and force. Always she will be in you and you in her; it will be
your constant, simple and natural experience that all your thought
and seeing and action, your every breathing or moving come from
her and are hers. You will know and see and feel that you are a
person and power formed out of herself, put out from her for
the play and yet always safe in her, being of her being,
consciousness of her consciousness, force of her force, Ananda of
her Ananda. When this condition is entire and her supramental
energies can freely move you, then you will be perfect in divine
works; knowledge, will, action will become sure, simple, luminous,
spontaneous, flawless, an outflow from the Supreme, a divine
movement of the Eternal.
VI
--
The four powers of the mother are four of her outstanding
Personalities, portions and embodiments of her divinity through
whom she acts on her creatures, orders and harmonises her
creations in the worlds and directs working out of her thousand
forces. For the Mother is one but she comes before us with
differing aspects; many are her power and personalities, many her
emanations and Vibhutis that do her work in the universe. The One
whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that
dominates all existence, one and yet many-sided that to follow her
movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the
freest and most vast intelligence. The Mother is the consciousness
and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates. But
something of her ways can be seen and felt through her embodiments
and the more seizable because more defined and limited temperament
and action of the goddess forms in whom she consents to be
manifest to her creatures.
There are three ways of being the Mother of which you can become
aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious
Force that upholds us and the universe. Transcendent, the original
supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation
to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal, the
cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and
enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and
forces. Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster
ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and
mediates between human personality and the divine Nature.
The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above
all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme
Divine. Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable
Presence; containing or calling the Truths that have to be
manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they
were hidden into the light of her infinite consciousness and gives
them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless
life and a body in the universe. The Supreme is manifest in her
for ever as the everlasting Sachchidananda, manifested through her
in the worlds, as the one dual consciousness of Ishwara-Shakti and
the dual principle of Purusha-Prakriti, embodied by her in the
Worlds and the Planes and the Gods and their Energies and figured
because of her as all that is in the known worlds and in
unknown others. All is her play with the Supreme; all is her
manifestation of the mysteries of the Eternal, the miracles of the
Infinite. All is she, for all are parcel and portion of the divine
Conscious-Force. Nothing can be here or elsewhere but what she
decides and the Supreme sanctions; nothing can take shape except
what she moved by the Supreme perceives and forms after casting
into seed in her creating Ananda.
The Mahashakti, the universal Mother works out whatever is
transmitted by the Supreme and enters into the worlds that she
has made; her presence fills and supports then with the divine
spirit and the divine all-sustaining force and delight without
which they could not exist. That which we call Nature or Prakriti
is only her most outward executive aspect; she marshals and
arranges the harmony of her forces and processes, impels the
operations of Nature and moves among them secret or manifest in
all that can be seen or experienced or put into motion of life.
Each of the worlds is nothing but one play of the Mahashakti
of that system of worlds or universe, who is there as the
cosmic Soul and Personality of the transcendent Mother. Each is
something that she has in her vision, gathered into her heart of
beauty and power and created in her Ananda.
But there are many planes of her creation, many steps of
the Divine Shakti. At the summit of this manifestation of
which we are a part there are worlds of infinite existence,
consciousness, force and bliss over which the Mother stands
unveiled eternal Power. All beings there live and move in an
ineffable completeness and unalterable oneness, because she
carries them safe in her arms for ever. Nearer to us are the
worlds of the supramental creation in which the Mother is the
supramental Mahashakti, a Power of divine omniscient Will and
omnipotent Knowledge always apparent in its unfailing works and
spontaneously perfect in every process. There all movements are
the steps of the Truth; there all beings are souls and powers and
bodies of the divine Light; there all experiences are seas and
floods and waves of an intense and absolute Ananda. But here
where we dwell are the worlds of the Ignorance, worlds of mind
and life and body separated in consciousness from her source, of
which the earth is a significant centre and its evolution a
crucial process. This too with all its obscurity and struggle and
imperfection is upheld by the Universal Mother; this too is
impelled and guided to its secret aim by the Mahashakti.
The Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world of the Ignorance
stands in an intermediate plane between the supramental Light, the
Truth life, the Truth creation which has to be brought down
here and this mounting and descending hierarchy of planes of
consciousness that like a double ladder lapse into the nescience
of Matter and climb back again through the flowering of life and
soul and mind into the infinity of the Spirit. Determining all
that shall be done in the universe and in the terrestrial
evolution by what she sees and feels and pours from her, she
stands there above the Gods and all her Powers and Personalities
are put in front of her for the action and she sends down
emanations of them into these lower worlds to intervene, to
govern, to battle and conquer, to lead and turn their cycles, to
direct the total and individual lines of their forces. These
Emanations are the various divine forms and personalities through
which men have worshipped her under different names throughout the
ages. But also she prepares and shapes through these Powers and
their emanations the minds and bodies of her Vibhuthis, even as
she prepares and shapes minds and bodies for the Vibhuthis of the
Ishwara, that she may manifest in the physical world and in the
disguise of the human consciousness some ray of her power and
quality and presence. All the scenes of the earth play have been
like a drama arranged and planned and staged by her with the
cosmic Gods for her assistants and herself as a veiled actor.
The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into
this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even
the movements of Ignorance, are herself on veiled power and her
creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force,
and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the
Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities
of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has
put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But
personally too she has stooped to descend here into the darkness
that she may lead it to the Light,into the Falsehood and Error
that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may
turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate
sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming
ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and greater love for
her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this
obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing
influences of the powers of Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to
pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon
herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of creation, since it
seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and
Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice of the
Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the
sacrifice of the Divine Mother.
Four great Aspects of the Mother, four of her leading Powers and
Personalities have stood in front in her guidance of this Universe
and in her dealings with the terrestrial play. One is her
personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and tranquil
benignity, inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing
majesty and all ruling greatness. Another embodies her power of
splendid strength and irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her
overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking
force. A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep
secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and
subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and her captivating
grace. The fourth is equipped with her close and profound
capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet
and exact perfection in all things. Wisdom, Strength, Harmony,
Perfection are the several attributes and it is these powers that
they bring with them to the world, manifest in a human disguise in
their Vibhuthis and shall found in the divine degree of their
ascension in those who can open their earthly nature to the direct
and living influence of the Mother. To the four we give the four
great names, Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati.
Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking
mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and
largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the
mighty and wise One who opens us to supramental infinities and the
cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to
a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless
movement of the Mother's eternal forces. Tranquil is she and
wonderful, great and calm for ever. Nothing can move her because
all wisdom is in her; nothing is hidden from her that she chooses
to know; she comprehends all things and all beings and their
nature and what moves them and the law of the world and its times
and how all was and is and must be. A strength is in her that
meets everything and masters and none can prevail in the end
against her vast intangible wisdom and high tranquil power. Equal,
patient, unalterable in her will she deals with men according to
their nature and with things and happenings according to their
Force and truth that is in them. Partiality she has none, but she
follows the decrees of the Supreme and some she raises up and some
she casts down or puts away into the darkness. To the wise she
gives a greater and more luminous wisdom; those that have vision
she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the
consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads
them according to their blindness. In each man she answers and
handles the different elements of his nature according to their
need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the
required pressure or leaves them to their cherished liberty to
prosper in the ways of the Ignorance and perish. For she is above
all, bound by nothing, attached to nothing in the universe. Yet
she has more than any other the heart of the universal Mother. For
her compassion is endless and inexhaustible; all are to her eyes
her children and portions of the One, even the Asura and Rakshasa
and Pisacha and those that are revolted and hostile. Even her
rejections are only a postponement, even her punishments are a
grace. But her compassion does not blind her wisdom or turn her
action from the course decreed; for the Truth of things is her one
concern, knowledge her centre of power and to build our soul and
our nature into the divine Truth her mission and her labour.
MAHAKALI is of another nature. Not of wideness but of height, not
wisdom but force and strength are her peculiar power. There is in
her a overwhelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to
achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and
obstacle. All her divinity leaps out in a splendour of tempestuous
action; she is therefore swiftness, for the immediately effective
process, the rapid and direct stroke, the frontal assault that
carries everything, before it. Terrible is her face to the Asura,
dangerous and ruthless her mood against the haters of the Divine;
for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the
battle. Intolerant of imperfection, she deals roughly with all in
man that is unwilling and she is severe to all that is obstinately
ignorant and obscure; her wrath is immediate and dire against
treachery and falsehood and malignity, ill-will is smitten at once
by her scourage. Indifference, negligence and sloth in the divine
work she cannot bear and she smites awake at once with sharp pain,
if need be, the untimely slumberer and the loiterer. The impulses
that are swift and straight and frank, the movements that are
unreserved and absolute, the aspiration that mounts in flame are
the motion of Mahakali. Her spirit is tameless, her vision and
will are high and far-reaching like the flight of an eagle, her
feet are rapid on the upward way and her hands are outstretched to
strike and to succour. For she too is the Mother and her love is
as intense as her wrath and she has a deep and passionate
kindness. When she is allowed to intervene in her strength ,
then in one moment are broken like things without consistence
the obstacles that immobilise or the enemies that assail the
seeker. If her anger is dreadful to the hostile and the vehemence
of her pressure painful to the weak and timid, she is loved and
worshipped by the great, the strong and the noble; for they feel
that her blows beat what is rebellious in their material into
strength and perfect truth, hammer straight what is wry and
perverse and expel what is impure or defective. But for her what
is done in a day might have taken centuries; without her Ananda
might be wide and grave or soft and sweet and beautiful but
would lose the flaming joy of its most absolute intensities. To
knowledge she gives a conquering might, brings to beauty and
harmony a high and mounting movement and imparts to the slow and
difficult labour after perfection an impetus that multiplies the
power and shortens the long way. Nothing can satisfy her that
falls short of the supreme ecstasies, the highest heights, the
noblest aims, the largest vistas. Therefore with her is the
victorious force of the Divine and it is by grace of her fire and
passion and speed if he great achievement can be done now than
hereafter.
Wisdom and Force are not the only manifestations of the supreme
Mother; there is a subtler mystery of her nature and without it
Wisdom and Force would be incompetable things and without it
perfection would not be perfect. Above them is the miracle of
eternal beauty, an unseizable secret of divine harmonies, the
compelling magic of an irresistible universal charm and attraction
that draws and holds things and forces and beings together and
obliges them to meet and unite that a hidden Ananda may play from
behind the veil and make of them its rhythms and its figures. This
is the power of MAHALAKSHMI and there is no aspect of the Divine
Shakti more attractive to the heart of the embodied beings.
Maheswari can appear too calm and great and distant for the
littleness of earthly nature to approach or contain her, Mahakali
too swift and formidable for its weakness to bear; but all turn
with joy and longing to Mahalakshmi. For she throws the spell of
the intoxicating sweetness of the Divine: to be close to her is a
profound happiness and to feel her within the heart is to make the
existence a rapture and a marvel; grace and charm and tenderness
flow from her like the light from the sun and wherever she fixes
her wonderful gaze or lets fall of the loveliness of her smile,
the soul is seized and made captive and plunged into the depths of
an unfathomable bliss. Magnetic is the touch of her hands and
their occult and delicate influence refines the mind and life and
body and where she presses her feet course miraculous streams of
an entrancing Ananda.
And yet it is not easy to meet the demand of this enchanting Power
or to keep her presence. Harmony and beauty of the mind and soul,
harmony and beauty of the thoughts and feelings, harmony and
beauty in every outward act and movement, harmony and beauty of
the life and surroundings, this is the demand of Mahalakshmi.
Where there is affinity to the rhythms of the secret world-bliss
and response to the call of the All-Beautiful and concord and
unity and the glad flow of many lives turned towards the Divine,
in that atmosphere she consents to abide. But all that is ugly and
mean and base, all that is poor and sordid and squalid, all that
is brutal and coarse repels her advent. Where love and beauty are
not or are reluctant to be born, she does not come; where they are
mixed and disfigured with baser things, she turns soon to depart
or cares little to pour her riches. If she finds herself in men's
hearts surrounded with selfishness and hatred and jealousy and
malignance and envy and strife, if treachery and greed and
ingratitude are mixed in the sacred chalice, if grossness of
passion and unrefined desire degrade devotion, in such hearts the
gracious and beautiful Goddess will not linger. A divine disgust
seizes upon her and she withdraws, for she is not one who insists
or strives; or, veiling her face, she waits for this bitter and
poisonous devil's stuff to be rejected and disappear before
she will found anew her happy influence. Ascetic bareness and
harshness are nor to her not the suppression of the heart's deeper
emotions and the rigid repression of the soul's and the life's
parts of beauty. For it is through love and beauty that she lays
on men the yoke of the Divine. Life is turned in her supreme
creations into a rich work of celestial art and all existence into
a poem of sacred delight; the world's riches are brought together
and concerted for a supreme order and even the simplest and
commonest things are made wonderful by her intuition of unity and
the breath of her spirit. Admitted to the heart she lifts wisdom
to pinnacles of wonder and reveals to it the mystic secrets of the
ecstasy that surpassed all knowledge, meets devotion with the
passionate attraction of the Divine, teaches to strength and force
the rhythm that keeps the might of their acts harmonious and in
measure and casts on perfection the charm that makes it endure for
ever.
MAHASARASWATI is the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of
perfection and order. The youngest of the Four, she is the
most skillful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical
Nature. Maheswari lays down the large lines of the world-forces,
Mahakali drives their energy and impetus, Mahalakshmi discovers
their rhythms and measures, but Mahasaraswati presides over their
detail of organization and execution, relation of parts and
effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude of result
and fulfilment. The science and craft and technique of things are
Mahasaraswati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can
give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise
knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive
mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect
worker. This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and
efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan
and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation
and new building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute
and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is
persistent, integral and flawless. For the will in her works is
scrupulous, unsleeping, indefatigable; leaning over us she notes
and touches every little detail, finds out every minute defect,
gap, twist or incompleteness, considers and weighs accurately all
that has been done and all that remains still to be done and all
that remains still to be done hereafter. Nothing is too small or
apparently trivial for her attention; nothing however impalpable
or disguised or latent can escape her. Moulding and remoulding she
labours each part till it has attained its true form, is put in
its exact place in the whole and fulfils its precise purpose. In
her constant and diligent arrangement and rearrangement of things
her eye is on all needs at once and the way to meet them and her
intuition knows what is to be chosen and what rejected and
successfully determines the right instrument, the right time,
the right conditions and the right process. Carelessness and
negligence and indolence she abhors; all scamped and hasty and
shuffling work, all clumsiness and *a peu pres* and misfire, all
false adaptation and misuse of instruments and faculties and
leaving of things undone or half done is offensive and foreign to
her temper. When her work is finished, nothing has been forgotten,
no part has been misplaced or omitted or left in a faulty
condition; all is solid, accurate, complete, admirable. Nothing
short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is ready to
face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her
creation. Therefore of all the Mother's powers she is the most
long-suffering with man and his thousand imperfections. Kind,
smiling, close and helpful, not easily turned away or discouraged,
insistent even after repeated failure, her hand sustains our
every step on condition that we are single in our will and
straightforward and sincere; for a double mind she will not
tolerate and her revealing irony is merciless to drama and
histrionics and self-deceit and pretence. A mother to our wants, a
friend in our difficulties, a persistent and tranquil counsellor
and mentor, chasing away with her radiant smile the clouds of
gloom and fretfulness and depression, reminding always of the
ever-present help, pointing to the eternal sunshine, she is firm,
quiet and persevering in the deep and continuous urge that drives
is towards the integrality of the higher nature. All the work of
the other Powers leans on her for its completeness; for she
assures the material foundation, elaborates the stuff of detail
and erects and rivets the armour of the structure.
There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother, but they
were more difficult to bring down and have not stood out in front
with so much prominence in the evolution of the earth-spirit.
There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental
realisation, - most of all one who is her Personality of that
mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a
supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf
between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and lowest
abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful
divine Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of
all the other Powers of the universe. But human nature bounded,
egoistic and obscure is inapt to receive these great Presences or
to support their mighty action. Only when the Four have founded
their harmony and freedom of movement in the transformed mind and
life and body, can those other rarer Powers manifest in the earth
movement and the supramental action becomes possible. For when her
Personalities are all gathered in her and manifested and their
separate working has been turned into a harmonious unity and they
rise in her to the supramental godheads, then is the Mother
revealed as the supramental Mahashakti and brings pouring down her
luminous transcendences from their ineffable ether. Then can human
nature change because all the elemental lines of the supramental
Truth-consciousness and Truth-force are strung together and the
harp of life is fitted for the rhythms of the Eternal.
If you desire this transformation, put yourself in the hands
of the Mother and her Powers without cavil or resistance and let
her do unhindered her work within you. Three things you must have,
consciousness, plasticity and unreserved surrender. For you must
be conscious in your mind and soul and heart and life and the very
cells of your body, aware of the Mother and her Powers and their
working; for although she can and does work in you even in your
obscurity and your unconscious parts and moments, it is not the
same thing as when you are in an awakened and living communion
with her. All your nature must be plastic to her touch, - not
questioning as the self-sufficient ignorant mind questions and
doubts and disputes and is the enemy of its enlightment and
change; not insisting on its own movements as the vital in the
man insists and persistently opposes its refractory desires
and ill-will to every divine influence; not obstructing and
entrenched in incapacity, inertia and tamas as man's physical
consciousness obstructs and clinging to the pleasure in smallness
and darkness cries out against each touch that disturbs it
soulless routine or it dull sloth or its torpid slumber. The
unreserved surrender of your inner and outer being will bring this
plasticity into all the parts of your nature; consciousness will
awaken everywhere in you by constant openness to the Wisdom and
Light, the Force, the Harmony and Beauty, the Perfection that come
flowing down from above. Even the body will awake and unite at
last its consciousness subliminal no longer to the supramental
superconscious Force, feel all her powers permeating from above
and below and around it and thrill to a supreme Love and
Ananda. But be on your guard and do not try to understand and
judge the Divine Mother by your little earthly mind that loves to
subject even the things that are beyond it to its own norms and
standards, its narrow reasonings and erring impressions, its
bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident
knowledge. The human mind shut in the prison of its half-lit
obscurity cannot follow the many-sided freedom of the steps of the
Divine Shakti. The rapidity and complexity of her vision and
action outrun its stumbling comprehension; the measures of her
movement are not its measures. Bewildered by the swift alteration
of her many different personalities, her making of rhythms and
her breaking of rhythms, her accelerations of speed and her
retardations, her varied ways of dealing with the problem, of one
and anther, her taking up and dropping now of this line and now of
that one and her gathering of them together, it will not recognise
the way of the Supreme Power when it is circling and sweeping
upwards through the maze of the Ignorance to a supernal Light.
Open rather your soul to her and be content to feel her with the
psychic nature and see her with the psychic vision that alone make
a straight response to the Truth. Then the Mother herself will
enlighten by their psychic elements your mind and heart and life
and physical consciousness and reveal to them too her ways and her
nature.
Avoid also the error of the ignorant mind's demand on the Divine
Power to act always according to our crude surface notions
of omniscience and omnipotence. For our mind clamours to be
impressed at every turn by miraculous power and easy success and
dazzling splendour; otherwise it cannot believe that there is the
Divine. The Mother is dealing with the Ignorance in the fields
of the Ignorance; she has descended there and is not all
above. Partly she unveils her knowledge and her power, often holds
them back from her instruments and personalities and follows that
she may transform them the way of the seeking mind, the way of the
aspiring psychic, the way of the battling vital, the way of the
imprisoned and suffering physical nature. There are conditions
that have been laid down by a Supreme Will, there are many tangled
knots that have to be loosened and cannot be cut abruptly
asunder. The Asura and Rakshasa hold this evolving earthly nature
and have to be met and conquered on their own terms in their own
long-conquered fief and province; the human in us has to be led
and prepared to transcend its limits and is too weak and obscure
to be lifted up suddenly to a form far beyond it. The Divine
Consciousness and Force are there and do at each moment the thing
that is needed in the conditions of the labour, take always the
step that is decreed and shape in the midst of imperfection the
perfection that is to come. But only when the supermind has
descended in you she can deal directly as the supramental Shakti
with supramental natures. If you follow your mind, it will not
recognise the Mother even when she is manifest before you. Follow
your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth,
not your mind that leaps at appearances; trust the Divine Power
and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into
an expression of Divine Nature.
The supramental change is the thing decreed and inevitable in
the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is
not ended and mind is not its last summit. But the change may
arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below
with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and
there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power
that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and
power of the Divine Mother. The Mother's power and not any human
endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering
and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity
and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life
divine and the immortal's Ananda.