A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine

Away from the terrestrial murmur turned
Where transient calls and answers mix their flood,
King Aswapathy listened through the ray
To other sounds than meet the sense-formed ear.

On a subtle interspace which rings our life
Unlocked were the inner spirit’s trance-closed doors:
The inaudible strain in Nature could be caught;
Across this cyclic tramp of eager lives,
Across the deep urgency of present cares,
Earth’s wordless hymn to the Ineffable
Arose from the ardent heart of the cosmic Void;
He heard the voice repressed of unborn Powers
Murmuring behind the luminous bars of Time.

It will be seen from what has been set forth in the earlier chapters that, on the one hand, Mirra was reaching the end of the Japanese interlude, having arrived at a new poise of purposive purity and serenity and puissance; and, on the other hand, Sri Aurobindo was approaching the end of the great Arya phase of his career, "tying up his bundle ... teeming with the catch of the Infinite", awaiting the right time to open it and call into existence his Deva Sangha. He had a few ardent young men with him, Nolini, Amrita, Moni, Bejoy Nag. But the Deva Sangha, the Ashram, was yet to be born. The Arya itself was magisterially drawing towards its preordained end. The major sequences had been concluded, and one or two were well on their way to a rounded close. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga had won phenomenal victories during the decade then ending, and the uplifting message of the Life Divine had been broadcast through the pages of the Arya.

A greater destiny waits you in your front:
This transient earthly being if he wills
Can fit his acts to a transcendent scheme.

He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes
Hardly from the Inconscient’s night aroused,
That look at images and not at Truth
Can fill those orbs with an immortal’s sight.

The Yoga was now poised for a new leap, for a new and decisive of phase action and manifold realisation. Everything was ready: the room, the lamp, the oil, the wick - and it only needed somebody divinely . appointed for the task to arrive upon the scene, strike the match, light the lamp and throw open the illumined chamber for the reception and initiation of the first of the new race, those that Mirra had described in 1912 as "the race of the sons of God" or the elect of Sri Aurobindo's Deva Sangha. That 'somebody' who came to Sri Aurobindo's aid was of course Mirra, the Mother. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1935, "the Sadhana and the work were waiting for the Mother's coming".¹ Anilbaran Roy has recorded

Sri Aurobindo telling a group of disciples in 1926:

When I came to Pondicherry, a programme was dictated to me from within for my sadhana. I followed it and progressed for myself but could not do much by way of helping others. Then came the Mother and with her help I found the necessary method.

But like a shining answer from the gods
Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.

Advancing amid tall heaven-pillaring trees,
Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe,
She seemed burning towards the eternal realms
A bright moved torch of incense and of flame
That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth
A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine.

There is a divinity indeed that shapes our ends, and answering its veiled dictates, Mirra and Paul Richard as also Dorothy Hodgson finally decided to leave Japan for Pondicherry in the early months of 1920. For Mirra, the four years in Japan had on the whole been a period of quietude and sadhana, a time for perfection in minutiae, a season for the cultivation of the integral as well as the miniature; in a word, the Japanese interim had proved a sanctuary and phoenix-hour for the whole tapasya of a Mahasaraswati.

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. 

O living inscription of the beauty of love
Missalled in aureate virginity,
What message of heavenly strength and bliss in thee
Is written with the Eternal’s sun-white script,
One shall discover and greaten with it his life
To whom thou loosenest thy heart’s jewelled strings.

On an evening in Christmas week 1920, a new visitor, T. Kodandarama Rao, happening to see Mirra, found her at the very first sight a "serene, sweet and beautiful divine personality"; and after a stay of a few days in 1921, he concluded that she was verily "a personification of 'Grace' ", and whenever he approached her, he felt "purity, peace and sublimity". It was also in 1921 that Champaklal, then a boy of eighteen, first made an adventurous journey to Pondicherry from remote Gujarat, and having made pranam to Sri Aurobindo felt that he had "nothing more to do" in his life. He didn't see Mirra at that time, but catching a glimpse of him through the opened Venetian blinds, she recognised in him a born servitor and "told Sri Aurobindo then itself: This boy will help me in my work; he will be very useful." When Champaklal came for good early in 1923, he saw first one and then the other. He felt that Sri Aurobindo was incarnate Shiva, Mirra was the Mother Divine! He experienced "an extraordinary closeness to her and saw and felt in her an embodiment of Beauty".

Transmuted by the white spiritual ray
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:
An equal greatness in her life was sown.

*A work comparing lines of Savitri, Canto “Call to the Quest” with the chapter Second Coming from the book “On The Mother”

(“On The Mother”, K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Chapter 14, “Second Coming”, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)