Mother's life with Sri Aurobindo
“During that return to the past over the last few days, the life I led with Sri Aurobindo suddenly came back to me.... What helped this to happen was reading passages about me in his book, [Sri Aurobindo on Himself] letters he wrote about me that I had never read before. And it all came back, those full thirty years I lived with him....
Psychologically, there was no struggle, no tension, no effort – not ONCE; I was living in total and confident serenity. On the material plane there were attacks, but even these he took upon himself. Well, I saw it all, all those thirty years of life; not for a SECOND did I have any sense of responsibility, in spite of all the work I was doing, all the organizing and everything. He had supposedly passed on the responsibility to me, you see, but he was standing behind – HE was actually doing everything! I was active, but with absolutely no responsibility. I never felt responsible for a single minute – he took the full responsibility. It was really....
For the first seven years he was doing the work, not me. He was the one who saw people; I looked after his personal affairs, his housekeeping, his food, his clothes and so forth. I kept myself quietly busy with that, doing nothing else, not seeing people, simply looking after his material life – like a child at play. It was seven years of integral peace.
Later, when he withdrew and put me in front, there was naturally a bit more activity, as well as the semblance of responsibility – but it was only a semblance. What security! A sense of total, total security – for thirty years. Not once.... There was just a single scratch, so to speak, when he had that accident and broke his leg. There was a formation at work (an adverse force) and he wasn't taking sufficient precautions for himself because it was directed against both of us, and more especially against me (it had tried once or twice to fracture my skull, things like that). Well, he was so intent on keeping it from seriously touching my body that it managed to sneak in and break his leg. That was a shock. But he straightened everything out again almost immediately – it all fell back into place and went on like that till the end.
And the feeling was so strong that even during his illness (which lasted for months, you know), I had a sense of perfect security; so much so that the idea of his life being really affected in the least by this illness couldn't even occur to me! I didn't want to believe it when the doctor said, “It's over.” I didn't want to believe it. And as long as I stayed in the room ... with me in the room he couldn't leave his body. And so there was a terrible tension in him – on the one hand the inner will to depart, and then this thing holding him there in his body: the fact that I knew he was alive and could only be alive. He had to signal me to go to my room, supposedly to rest (I didn't rest); and no sooner had I left his room than he was gone.
They immediately called me back.... That's how it was. Then when he came to me, when I really saw what had happened, when he went out of his body and entered into mine (the most material part of him, the part involved with external things) and I understood that I had the entire responsibility for all the work AND for the sadhana – well, then I locked a part of me away, a deep psychic part that was living, beyond all responsibility, in the ECSTASY of the realization: the Supreme. I took it and locked it away, I sealed it off and said, “You're not moving until ... until all the rest is ready.”
(silence)
That in itself was a miracle. If I hadn't done it I would have followed him – and there would have been no one to do the Work. I would have followed him automatically, without even thinking about it. But when he entered into me, he said, “You will do the work; one of us had to go, and I am going, but you will do the work.”
And that door was opened again only ten years later, in 1960. Even then, it was done with great care – it was one of last year's major difficulties.
(silence)
And only in the last few days have all those memories been allowed to rise up again from the subconscient where they were being kept; and with that, the state I lived in for thirty years has resurfaced – with this tremendous difference.
And suddenly I said to myself, “How could it be? During all the time he was here, the time we were together (after I came back from Japan, when we were together), life, life on earth, lived such a wondrous divine possibility, so ... really so unique, something it had never lived to such an extent and in such a way, for thirty years, and it didn't even notice!”
That ....
That's what I have been experiencing recently.
Yes, at one point I wondered (I don't remember when, a few days ago): “How could people have lived here, so near (but the same thing is still happening), how could human beings on earth who had an aspiration, who had their consciousness turned towards those things, have lived that possibility, have HAD that possibility at their fingertips, without being able to take advantage of it! How could something so wonderful and unique have taken place here, and yet people had such a small and childish and superficial image of it!”
Truly, I wondered, “Has the time really come? Is it possible? ... Or will it once again be postponed?” ”[1]
- ↑ Mother's Agenda 1962, 9 January 1962
See also