The Mother’s
final arrival at Pondicherry, 24th April 1920
One shall descend and break the iron
Law,
Change Nature’s doom by the lone
Spirit’s power.
And in her body as on his homing tree
Immortal Love shall beat his glorious
wings
She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless
bosom,
Strength shall be with her like a
conqueror’s sword
And from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss
shall gaze.
A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous
hour,
A branch of heaven transplant to human
soil;
Nature shall overleap her mortal step;
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging
will.
-
Savitri
That call must
haunt those who had heard it once, and Mirra of course had come to Pondicherry
in 1914 even without that particular call, and instantaneously recognised in
Sri Aurobindo "the Lord of my being and my God"; and now, after an
absence of five years in France and Japan, she was coming back to Pondicherry.
She was leaving behind in Japan her good friends - the Kobayashis, the Okhawas,
and others - and Japan meant the kindliest memories. But the boat was carrying
her towards the shores of India, and she was sublimely content. And on 24 April
1920, the boat approached the shores of Pondicherry. As she was to recall her
experience thirty years later:
“I was on the
boat, at sea, not expecting anything (I was of course busy with the inner life,
but I was living physically on the boat), when all of a sudden, abruptly, about
two nautical miles from Pondicherry, the quality, I may even say the physical
quality of the atmosphere, of the air, changed so much that I knew we were
entering the aura of Sri Aurobindo. It was a physical experience.”
Again,
returning to the subject two days later:
... in the
experience I was speaking about, what gave it all its value was that I was not
expecting it at all, not at all. I knew very well, I had been for a very long
time and continuously in "spiritual" contact, if I may say so, with
the atmosphere of Sri Aurobindo, but I had never thought of the possibility of
a modification in the physical air and I was not expecting it in the least, and
it was this that gave the whole value to the experience, which came like that,
quite suddenly, just as when one enters a place with another temperature or
another altitude.
(“On the Mother”, Chapter 14, K.R.Srinivasa
Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
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