THE MOTHER/3... 1-2. The Early Sadhana All this was part of Mirra’s life on the surface — verifiable facts of what people call the everyday life, there for anyone to see. But all along she lived an intense parallel life nobody knew about — and nobody wanted to know about. Her father, externally a commonsense man-about-town while having internally withdrawn into a private kind of dream-world, showed no interest in the fancies or secret life of others, not even that of his daughter. (She may not have tried to confide in him very often.) And to her positivist mother all unusual inner experiences were ‘brain disorders,’ to be treated without further ado by the family physician. Her conscious inner life began when she was five years old. ‘I started at the age of five... I was five or six years old; at the age of seven it became very serious.’12 ‘She went and sat in a small armchair, specially made for her. It was a very small padded armchair like they made them at the time, covered with grey-blue cloth and [patterned with] flowers... She sat down and always felt that Consciousness above the head.’13 There is a photo of Mirra at that age, standing next to her small chair to which she withdrew when life was lashing out at her, in order to feel the very pleasant sensation of the light of that Consciousness — so pleasant and so interesting that at times she preferred it to going to the circus with her father. The Mother also said that her sadhana actually started in the womb: ‘When I was five, even three years old, I was conscious. The beginning was made in the womb.’14 And she said several times that she had chosen her parents before her conception. To understand this one must accept reincarnation. ‘Rebirth is an indispensable machinery for the working out of a spiritual evolution; it is the only possible effective condition, the obvious dynamic process of such a manifestation in the material universe... Rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process.’15 (Sri Aurobindo) When the soul has gone through all the necessary experiences in a given life, it withdraws by a process we call death and goes to rest in a world where it assimilates the essence of the life just ended. When in the course of their evolution certain souls have reached a level of maturity, or when certain souls descend with a special mission, they are able to choose the circumstances of their rebirth — in the first place their parents, and more specifically the mother, for the simple and obvious reason that the body of the reincarnating soul will be formed within the mother’s physical and psychological being. It is as if from its soul-world the soul spots a kind of beacon on the Earth, lit by the aspiration of the mother and calling for its descent. We remember Mathilde’s strong aspiration that her children would be the best in the world. Considering this, and the solidly practical, positivist family environment in addition to the physical robustness of Maurice, we can guess some of the reasons why the Mother chose these parents as her instruments of reincarnation. The practical importance of the choice will become clearer as our story unfolds. Young Mirra had many strange experiences and sometimes went into trance in the middle of a sentence or a gesture. She was supposed to have fallen asleep. At the time she herself had no explanation for this kind of occult experience, ‘but the faculties were already present.’ Thus it happened, during a ceremonious family luncheon at her parents’ house, that she perceived ‘something quite interesting’ in the atmosphere of a cousin, the one who would become Director of the Louvre. She had brought her fork halfway to her mouth and remained sitting like that as if she had been changed into a statue! She was severely scolded, of course, and told that she should not be present at such events if she did not know how to behave properly. At one time she started sleepwalking and writing poems during her nightly perambulations. Sometimes when she read history books, the text would suddenly become transparent as it were, and she would see other words or pictures telling her the true historical facts behind the fiction. Once, in the spacious salon (drawing room) of the house on the Square du Roule, where the family had moved in 1886, she wanted to show her friends how to dance. A running start being out of the question, she pushed off into the air, touched the floor once in the middle of the salon and came gracefully down, as if she had been carried, near the opposite wall some twelve metres away. On a visit to the Forest of Fontainebleau, where Mathilde had rented a cottage, she was pursued by her playmates and fell from a high bank onto a road covered with nasty cobblestones; everyone thought she must have broken a limb at least, but she had fallen ‘very slowly, as if carried.’ That was how she always felt: as if carried. ‘Interestingly there was nothing mental about it, I didn’t know the existence of these [occult] things. I didn’t know what meditation was, I meditated without having the least idea of what it was. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. My mother had kept it all completely taboo: those subjects were not to be broached, they drive you crazy.’16 ‘I practised occultism when I was twelve. But I must say I was never afraid. I was afraid of nothing.’17 Fear, as she would later warn time and time again, has no place in occultism; it is even extremely dangerous, for it attracts precisely that which is being feared. Gradually Mirra’s experiences grew in scope and importance. At the age of thirteen, for nearly a year, she used to go out of the body every night. ‘As soon as I had gone to bed, it seemed to me that I went out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the city [Paris], very high above. On those occasions I used to see myself clad in a magnificent golden robe, much longer than myself; and as I rose higher, the robe would grow longer and spread out in a circle around me to form something like an immense cupola over the city. Then I would see men, women, children, old men, sick and unfortunate people coming out from everywhere; they would gather under the outspread robe, begging for help, telling of their miseries, their suffering, their hardships. In reply the robe, supple and alive, would extend towards each of them individually, and as soon as they touched it, they were comforted and healed, and went back into their bodies happier and stronger than they had come out of them. Nothing seemed more beautiful to me, nothing could make me happier; and all the activities of the day seemed dull and colourless and without any real life compared to this nightly activity which was the true life to me.’18 ‘When and how did I become conscious of a mission which I was to fulfil on Earth?... It is difficult to say when it came to me. It is as though I was born with it, and together with the growth of the mind and brain, the precision and completeness of this consciousness grew also. Between eleven and thirteen a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man’s possibility of uniting with Him, of realizing Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon Earth in a life divine. This, along with a practical discipline for its fulfilment, was given to me during my body’s sleep by several teachers, some of whom I met afterwards on the physical plane. ‘Later on, as the interior and exterior development proceeded, the spiritual and psychic relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent; and although I knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions at that time I was led to call him Krishna, and henceforth I was aware that it was with him (whom I knew I would meet on earth one day) that the divine work was to be done.’19 We will see later on how Mirra met this ‘Krishna.’ And so she grew up, that quiet, well-behaved, intelligent and talented girl de bonne famille, and nobody knew about the crowded experiences she was involved in day and night — as nobody anticipated the drastic step in life she would soon take.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 13:38:06 +0000
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