My tendency had always been to focus on the individual as the intrinsic nexus in a transformation process that might ultimately change conditions in the world. With the expansion I was feeling this inclination was not superseded, rather something else happened. I realised that it was the logical development after my years of involvement with the Indian Teacher whose concern was entirely riveted on an individual process: Change yourself first and be concerned with nothing else, because you are the world, you are the society in which you live. But I always felt that he would stop short of a full exposition. On numerous occasions during his talks and in private meetings, I was left with the distinct sensation that he would check himself suddenly, as if he considered that he was going too far and was crossing a threshold not permissible for him. It seemed to me his was decidedly a preparation. His work in the world was restricted solely to that. The destructive process he seemed to be espousing, which left many of his listeners disturbed for he seemed only to break down and not to offer any constructive process after this dismantling, was a necessary method to prepare for a work that was to be a truly new experience. What that new creation was he left entirely in the realm of the unknown. It lay beyond that ‘threshold’ and hence for him it was the unknowable.
The Indian Teacher was set upon deconditioning the individual and there was no doubt but that society was in desperate need of this cleansing process. It was as if he had been sent to break up all the old forms, to leave a tabula rasa so that the new could manifest. He seemed to be loosening the consciousness-fibres of our world. But he gave no indication of what that newness might be. Carry out this process, he might say, and then you will know what no one can tell you or teach you. His method was a disturbing, constant negation. In Indian philosophy and psychology it is known as ‘neti-neti’, ‘not this, not that’. The enquirer reaches the truth by a process of elimination. The disquieting feature of this method is that it leads to a nirvanic experience, a devastating dissolution of everything. The ‘ultimate’ in this process is Nothingness. All else, all the elements that constitute our world of time and space are seen as illusion, maya. But can one build a new world, a society on this planet which is the product of time and space when everything that constitutes that material creation is termed ‘illusion’, and when Nothingness is the only and highest truth?
In Sri Aurobindo and my own experience of his way I found the fuller reality and the next step. With this extended perceptive capacity, I saw that his work was that new thing. The threshold which the Indian Teacher never crossed was where that newness came into being. If that crossing was made, only then could the individual come to know a total process and integration of the various dimension of our world and the truth-essence of all the constituent elements of a creation in matter.
Negation was not the key to this attainment. By negation one ended up in Nothingness. Integration was the means and it resulted in a completeness which the individual could never know if he or she engaged in a process of constant denial of the very elements that form our material world. A means had to be provided to the human being to perceive rightly, to focus the vision and bring the perceptive faculties to the point of seeing truth in those very elements which are indispensable for the emergence of material forms, for the continuation of the evolution of the species and the world itself. Science, it was clear, was using those elements to destroy. Spirituality therefore could not proceed along the same path of destruction through processes of denial and negation, no matter how camouflaged these might be. Rather, a new creative process had to emerge and I knew Sri Aurobindo’s message and realisation held that key.
Certain dreams I had had in Rome during my involvement with the Indian Teacher now made perfect sense, their symbolism was entirely clear. In one dream I was holding before him a glass bowl, like a fish bowl filled with water. In it were all the original forms of life, the earliest biological structures which ultimately eveolved to provide the human consciousness with a vehicle in this world. I was pointing this out to him, stressing creation as the real key to Love. Then I gave him a clock which was also symbolically connected to that Love. Indeed, Time, I later came to discover, was the executive power of Love in the world.
These dreams were disquieting at the time because I was teaching him. But it was clear that on some very deep level the method he was espousing was disturbing and though I might control the reaction in my waking consciousness, in sleep these profound responses came forth.
The Indian Teacher might eschew process, method, and proclaim an instantaneous realisation; but I knew that method and process (and hence time) were valid, and the nature of the process itself revealed the ultimate attainment. Negation brought one to Nothingness. The creative process introduced something entirely new and never before experienced in a world in which only destruction has been the way. I saw that the way of the Indian Teacher was paradoxically an old way. He was the final exponent and superior realiser in a line of stunning Negators. The work of the great sages like Gautam the Buddha, like Shankaracharya, reached an apotheosis in him. He was indeed Lord Maitreya the world of Buddhism had for so long awaited, as he had been hailed in his youth. His coming at this time was the immaculate proof that the Earth was facing her most dire moment, when the fullest powers of destruction and creation would stand face to face in her final hour. The nuclear holocaust threatening complete annihilation was the perfect symbol-result of the way of negation leading to Nothingness.
The experience I had had at the birth of my first child was becoming clear. The ‘message’ given to me was that this (birth experience) was ‘the reason I was born a woman’. It was not procreation. It was a creative process in which consciousness and form blend for the establishment of a new world and a transformed individual within that creation.
The goal of Sri Aurobindo’s work was a grand synthesis of Individual, Cosmos, and Absolute; and this would be the foundation of a new world, an entirely new manifestation on Earth. The Indian Teacher could never explain or introduce this new creation. His task was simply to leave the Earth-field ready and to provide a choice, or perhaps an elegant ‘way out’. He poured all his energy and being into this task, travelling ceaselessly to every corner of the globe to prepare the planet. But he went no further than that. He never crossed that sacred threshold which discloses ‘supermind’s organisation for the Earth’, which introduces a new way of creation, indeed of Woman.
. . . The Mother’s symbol disclosed the need for three necessary poises and phases in the course of the establishment of the supramental creation. I realised that I could never have remained satisfied with the thought of the Indian Teacher because it contained no elements for this integral process. It provided no concrete means to discover the purpose of evolution, of life on this planet. True, his command was, Realise this and then you will see! And that was what I was engaged in: the realisations which would allow one to see, – and to be.
With this cosmic extension of the work I also understood why the Indian Teacher strove incessantly to find words to express his seeing and often lamented that ‘there are no words’ for That. This ‘language’ emerged only when that threshold had been crossed. And the cosmos provided a basis for that formulation which was truly a ‘universal language’, a vision of objective truth – provided, however, that that cosmic dimension had also been divested of the veils clouding its truth. For this the individual had to be poised properly in the act of seeing. Sri Aurobindo offered the method to attain that new poise, after which ‘all things were made new’. The exclusive focus of his work was that new creation. The breaking down of the old he left to others.
And so, I saw myself being carried into a new dimension of their work, a logical and organic development. No true understanding could come of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were attempting in the world if one closed oneself in a box of a narrow focus on just one poise of the three when an integration was demanded if at all a new world was to manifest.
Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet
* The 10th Day of Victory, Volume One was subsequently published by Aeon Books in 2004. It is also available at www.aeoncentre.com/shop for the Indian audience. The 10th Day of Victory, Volume 2, Book One was published in 2014 and is available via the same links.