From: sucetas mon (sucetas@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Dec 23 2000 - 14:45:54 PST
From: "sucetas mon" <sucetas@hotmail.com> Subject: THE MOTHER, by Sri Aurobindo (Chapter 6, of 6) Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 22:45:54 -0000 Message-ID: <F23865pSHkoM3EVjKFU00006ca1@hotmail.com>
Om Amrtesvaryai Namah
"The Mother", Chpt. 6:
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 the
working out of her thousand forces. For the Mother is one but she comes
before us with differing aspects; many are her powers 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 so 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 of 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. Transcendant, 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 the
human personality and the divine Nature.
The one original transcendant 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 and dual consciousness if 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 it into seed in her creating
Ananda.
The Mahashakti, the universal Mother, works out whatever is transmitted by
her transcendant consciousness from the Supreme and enters into the worlds
that she has made; her presence fills and supports them 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 Transcendant Mother. Each is something that she has seen
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 as the 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 a perfect
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 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 their source, of which this 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 heirarchy 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 in this universe and in the terrestrial
evolution by what she sees and feels and pours from her, she stands there
above theGods and all her Powers and Personalities are put out 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 the individual lines of their forces.
These Emanations are the many divine forms and personalities in 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 Vibhutis, even as she prepares and shapes minds and bodies for
the Vibhutis 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 earthplay 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 the
Ignorance, are herself in 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 great 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 the 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 the 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 called sometimes the 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 guidence of the Universe and in her
dealings with the terrestrial play. One is her personality of calm wideness
and comprehending wisdom and tranquil benignity and inexhaustable compassion
and sovereign and surpassing majesty and all-ruling greatness. Another
embodies her power of splendid strength and irresistable 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 opulence, her compelling attraction and
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 their
several attributes and it is these powers that they bring with them into the
world, manifest in a human disguise in their Vibhutis 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 the 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 and unalterable in her will she deals with men according to their
nature and with things and happenings according to their Force and the 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 from her
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 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 or to
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 inexhaustable; 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 wideness but height, not wisdom but force
and strength are her peculiar power. There is in her an 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 there for 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 scourge. 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 the great achievement can be
done now rather 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 incomplete 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 irresistable 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 and its figures. This is the power of
MAHALAKSHMI and there is no aspect of the Divine Shakti more attractive to
the heart of embodied beings. Maheshwari 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 existence a rapture
and a marvel; grace and charm and tenderness flow out from her like light
from the sun and wherever she fixes her wonderful gaze or lets fall 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 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 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 not pleasing to her nor 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
surpasses 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 forever.
MAHASARASWATI is the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and
order. The youngest of the Four, she is the most skilful in executive
faculty and the nearest to physical Nature. Maheshwari 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 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 succesfully
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 pre's 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 fulness 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 strightforward 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 us 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 the lowest
abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divinest
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 supramntal action become 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
their 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 into dynamic divine nature
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 resistence and let her do unhindered her
work within you. Three things you must have, consciousness, plasticity,
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 enlightenment and change; not insisting on its own movements as
the vital in 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 its pleasure in smallness and darkness cries out against each
touch that disturbs its soulless routine or its 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
of another, 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 here 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 veils and 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 can she 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 a 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 that 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.
-'The Mother', by Sri Aurobindo, 1928.
In Amma's Love,
~sucetas~
OM LOKAH SAMASTAH SUKHINO BHAVANTU
OM SHANTI SHANTI SHANTIH
OM SRI GURUBHYO NAMAH HARIH OM
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