object:1.07 - Bridge across the Afterlife
book classPreparing for the Miraculous
author class:George Van Vrekhem
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter
I
n 1961 the Mother spoke in a private conversation
about a certain activity of hers, began when she was
in her early twenties and continued since then without in-
terruption. It must be part of the work for which I have
come on the Earth. For even before meeting Thon [her
temporary teacher in occultism and the Kabbalah], before
having any knowledge, I had experiences during the night,
experiences of certain activities during the night in which
I looked after people who were leaving their body. And I
1 This talk was given in Savitri Bhavan at Auroville, on 18 Novem-
ber 2010, in commemoration of the Mothers passing on 17 November
1973.148
e l e v e n ta l k s
did that with a knowledge! although I did not know any-
thing, and neither did I try to know anything, or whatever.
I knew exactly what had to be done, and I did it. I was
about twenty at the time. ...
As soon as I discovered the teaching of Thon even
before I met him in person as soon as I read him and came
to understand all kinds of things which I did not know be-
fore, I started working quite systematically. Every night at
the same time I performed a work which consisted in con-
structing, between the purely terrestrial atmosphere and
the psychic atmosphere, a sort of protective pathways through
the vital, so that the people [who had just left their material
body] would not have to traverse it any more. Because, for
those who are conscient but do not have the knowledge,
that is really very difficult: it is infernal. (It is precisely
this knowledge which was provided in the Egyptian and
Tibetan books of the dead.) It is infernal. So I built that.
That was perhaps in 1902-1903 or 1904, I do not remember
exactly. But month after month after month I worked at it.
Afterwards, when I went to Tlemcen, I told all that to
madame Thon. She said: Yes, this is part of the work you
have come to do on Earth. All those whose psychic being is
a little bit awake, and who are able to perceive your Light,
will go to your Light at the moment of death, wherever they
may die, and you will help them cross beyond. And that is
a constant work. Constant. 2 Madame Thon was an even
greater occultist than her husband. The Mother went two
times to Tlemcen, in Algeria, in 1906 and 1907.
The pathways the Mother built are what is described
by many persons who have been clinically dead as tun-
nels, bridges or narrow mountain passes by which they feel
2
LAgenda de Mre, vol. II, pp. 258-259.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
149
protected and which they use to cross over directly into the
Light. They are able to report this kind of experience be-
cause, after having been clinically dead, they came back to
life. Although the first reports date from the Second World
War, near-death experiences started drawing the interest
of the general public because of the 1975 book Life After Life
by Raymond Moody, a medical doctor. According to a later
Gallup poll no less than 8 million Americans claim to have
had a near-death experience. Students of the phenomenon
claim that the number of near-death experiencers may be
much higher, as many persons who have gone through the
experience are reluctant to talk about it for fear of ridicule.
The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia defines near-death
experience as follows: Mystical or transcendent experi-
ence reported by people who have been on the threshold of
death. The near-death experience varies with each individ-
ual, but characteristics frequently include hearing oneself
declared dead, feelings of peacefulness, the sense of leav-
ing one's body, the sense of moving through a dark tunnel
toward a bright light, a life review, the crossing of a border,
and meetings with other spiritual beings, often deceased
friends and relatives. Near-death experiences are reported
by about one-third of those who come close to death. Cul-
tural and physiological explanations have been offered, but
the causes remain uncertain. Typical aftereffects include
greater spirituality and decreased fear of death.
As this definition indicates, the near-death experience
varies with each individual.
Yet Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, after listening to thou-
sands and thousands of people, found that there are four
successive main phases. 3
3 Elisabeth Kbler-Ross: The Wheel of Life, pp. 195 ff.150
e l e v e n ta l k s
1. People float out of their bodies; they are totally aware
of the scene he or she has left and assume an ethereal shape;
they experience wholeness.
2. They are able to go anywhere with the speed of
thought; they meet their guardian angels or guides who
comfort them with love and introduce them to the pres-
ence of previously deceased dear ones.
3. Guided by their guardian angel they enter what is
commonly described as a tunnel, bridge or mountain pass;
at the end they see a bright light which some call God; eve-
rybody agrees on one thing: that they were enveloped by
overwhelming love, the purest of love. None wants to re-
turn to his or her physical body. All lives are changed after
the experience.
4. They are in the presence of the Highest Source some
call God; they no longer need their ethereal shape for they
become spiritual energy; they experience a oneness, a com-
pleteness of existence. Some remember going through a
life review, a process in which they confronted the totality
of their life; they were made to understand the reason for
every decision, thought and action they had had in life.
It will surprise nobody that this subject, however well-
documented and confirmed by reliable persons, is the
target of doubt and ridicule by scientific and other posi-
tivist-minded people. They object, for instance, that the
immaterial is in principle unseen, unheard, and unable to
be sensed or measured empirically, and therefore improv-
able. Then they use anything, positivist or not, that might
explain those experiences, including dreams arising from
Carl Jungs collective unconscious; recollections of the birth
experience, an explanation proposed by the late Carl Sa-
gan (who was a cosmologist calling himself an exobio
logist); the effects of drugs and medicines; carbon dioxidebr idge ac r oss the afterlife
151
intoxication or oxygen starvation; or a flood of endorphins
released by the dying brain. Etc.
Obviously, this flood of experiences exceeds the bound-
aries of physical science, which by now at least should be
used to the astonishing and apparently impossible in its
own backyard. Only the science of yoga, and its experien-
tial knowledge of reality and the human personality, can
explain them.
A human being consists of more than a body, and even
more than a body-plus-mind, as has been the belief in the
West since its classical times. To this body-plus-mind may be
added a soul, although the Western philosophers and theo-
logians have generally identified the soul with the mind,
both being non-material. According to the common yo-
gic experience, however, a human being consists of several
bodies or sheaths, material, vital, and mental, contained in
each other. At the center of this complex being sits the soul
or psychic being, which has taken up its bodies in reverse
order when descending into a new terrestrial incarnation.
The material body is the one that dies, while the vital
and mental bodies survive for some time, still enveloping
the soul. It is in this condition that everyone has to traverse
the worlds that correspond to the state of his vital body and
the development of his mental body. In most cultures and
individual cases the mental body does not possess the nec-
essary knowledge to protect the transiting person. The low-
er regions of the vital plane can be, as the Mother said, in-
fernal or hellish, inhabited by hellish beings. (The concept
of hell originated from the remembrance of this kind of post
mortem experiences.) The Mother constructed the protec-
tive pathways precisely to protect the deceased against
such hellish experiences and to have them transit directly
to the plane of the psychic, which is a divine plane.152
e l e v e n ta l k s
These protecting pathways are what gives the impres-
sion of a tunnel, a bridge, or a narrow mountain pass. Still
carried by his vital and mental body sheaths, the transiting
person perceives the Light of the higher, spiritual hemi-
sphere (in fact the Mothers Light). The more he comes near-
er to it, the more intense it becomes. As Kbler-Ross writes,
that light radiates intense warmth, energy, spirit and love
love most of all, unconditional love; they feel peace, tran-
quility and the anticipation of finally going home. The ex-
periencers who have gone that far do not want to return to
the dark, difficult and painful world which they have left
behind; they want to discard their vital and mental sheaths
too and enter there where all is existence, consciousness
and bliss: the psychic world.
The mind-body problem
As mentioned before in passing, a Gallup poll pub-
lished in 1982 estimates that one in twenty adult Americans
has had a near-death experience. (This would translate to-
day to more than 15 million out of 312 million adults.) Fur-
thermore, of those people who came close to death, thirty-
five percent could report a NDE [near-death experience].
Researchers believe that these figures are conservative es-
timates. Moreover, these figures indicate the pervasiveness
of the experience in the general population. Its important
to add that there is no relationship between a persons gen-
der, age, socioeconomic class, or religious orientation. NDE
seems to be a universal phenomenon. 4
On 15 December 2001, an unusual article appeared in
the medical journal The Lancet. Written by Pim van Lom-
mel, a cardiologist at the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem,
the Netherlands, it described the results and findings of a
series of interviews that took place over a period of eight
4
See Wikipedia, on the lemma near-death experience.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
153
years. Its subjects were 344 patients who had been success
fully resuscitated after suffering a cardiac arrest. The article
reported that 18% of the patients told interviewers that they
experienced what is commonly termed a near-death expe-
rience, with 12% having what Van Lommel termed a core
experience an elaborate perception of the beginning of an
afterlife. This result mystified both Van Lommel and his as-
sistants. Van Lommel argued that if there is a purely physi-
ological or medical reason for the experience then most
patients who have been clinically dead should report one.
(Anthony Peake in Is There Life After Death?)
The problem of the strange and immaterial thing that is
consciousness, and the way immaterial consciousness can
relate to a material brain and have an impact on it, haunts
the biological and neurological sciences since Descartes. He
had tried to get rid of it by declaring consciousness an epi-
phenomenon of matter, thus sticking a label on a bottle
without known contents. Neurology in the present day has
not advanced much further. Consciousness is now declared
to be a function of the material brain. Most psycholo-
gists now believe that consciousness is tied to the activity of
neurons in the central nervous system. (John Holland)
But most does not mean all, and some scientists have
strongly reacted against such academic obscurantism. Roger
Trigg e.g. states: Science is itself the product of human rea-
son. It cant, in the end, explain human reason away without
explaining itself away. 5 And the eminently reasonable Brian
Pippard wrote in a letter: Too many physicists (and others)
take for granted that in due course an explanation will be
found of conscious mind in terms of the material operations
of the brain. This is to put the cart before the horse it is
through our minds that we know of the brain, and we are
more likely to find how they are related by concentrating on
5
In Russell Stannard: Science and Wonders, p. 60.154
e l e v e n ta l k s
the fundamental thing (conscious knowledge) rather than on
its derivative (material brain). 6
These questions appear again on the scientific agenda
because of the solid evidence of so many near-death experi-
ences. Cardiologist Pim van Lommel concluded: This ex-
perience forces us to reconsider the localization of the con-
sciousness. Is it really in our brain? ... All patients mentioned
in our paper were clinically dead one-line EEG, no more
activity of the cortex, pupils fixed and dilated, no reflexes
left. Still their consciousness remained totally clear and their
sensations defined. And on the Wikipedia website we find
the following comment: Many view the NDE as the precur-
sor to an afterlife experience, claiming that the NDE cannot
be adequately explained by physiological or psychologi-
cal causes, and that the phenomenon conclusively demon-
strates that human consciousness can function independ-
ently of brain activity. Many NDE-accounts seem to include
elements which, according to several theorists, can only be
explained by an out-of-body consciousness. For example,
Michael Sabom states that one of his contacts accurately de-
scribed a surgical instrument [used after she was clinically
dead] which she had not seen previously. In other cases
persons and their actions and conversations are accurately
described under the same conditions, and one NDE-experi-
encer even remembered the number plate of the truck which
had hit and killed him instantly.
Three illustrations
There is already a wide-ranging literature about the
near-death experience, a topic which, if true, will concern
all of us at one moment or other. The following three illus-
trations are chosen because they highlight the phenomenon
from various angles.
6 Kitty Ferguson: The Fire in the Equations, p. 182.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
155
The 1979 movie All that Jazz, with Roy Scheider and
Jessica Lange, was scripted and directed by Bob Fosse, and
based on his own life-story. Fosse, all-round movie and
show business man, won an unprecedented eight Tony
Awards for choreography, as well as one for direction. He
was nominated for an Academy Award four times and won
for his direction of Cabaret.
All that Jazz tells the story of a choreographer and
movie director, Joe Gideon, who has led the life many well-
known show business people lead, or are supposed to lead,
with the relationships, the pills, drinks and drugs, the love,
hate and indifference, and the ups and downs of success.
Striking for an American movie, and therefore mentioned
here, is the fact that, in his moments with himself before the
make-up mirror, this professional showman Its show
time, folks! often finds himself in the company of a beau-
tiful, mysterious lady-in-white with whom he can be totally
spontaneous and sincere.
A loose and fast life like his leads slowly but surely to
heart problems and the inevitable attack. Still Joe Gideon
cannot manage the discipline to bring some order to his
life, although he knows full well that his condition is seri-
ous. Actually the problem and fear of death obsess him, for
he cannot stop viewing and editing his own movie about a
stand-up who parodies the successive standard reactions of
people when given the news of their imminent death. (The
enumeration of these reactions is part of the work of Elisa-
beth Kbler-Ross, who is mentioned by name.) The result of
Gideons desperate carelessness is more attacks leading up
to the fatal one, when in a drugged or comatose state, and
a magnificently staged finale, he sees his life as one grand
show. Then, when it is all over and the body bag is zipped
up, comes the surprise: waiting for him is the beautiful smil-
ing lady-in-white again, to help him on to another world.156
e l e v e n ta l k s
The second illustration is a case history from the Feb-
ruary 2002 issue of the French science magazine Science et
Avenir. Christiane, in her early thirties and pregnant, had a
miscarriage resulting in massive bleeding. She was declared
clinically dead. In her own words: I left my envelope of
flesh, I slid out of it and rose to the ceiling ... I saw my body
lying there, with three persons in white blouses very busy
around it ... Amazed I said to myself: But I am dead! This
did not upset me. I felt good and that poor body did no
longer interest me. I did not regret having left it. ... I en-
tered a long, dark corridor. At the end there was a point of
light increasing more and more, till it became an immense
light that enveloped me, fabulous, warm, full of love and
an indescribable happiness. I felt around me an immense,
indestructible love. It had nothing in common with the love
one may experience here below. I had no longer any other
desire than to melt into that infinite light of love ...
And after she had come back: Why did I not go to the
other side? I would have liked to go there so much. ... I am
no longer afraid of death.
The third illustration is a historical episode of the Sec-
ond World War, with Albert Speer as its protagonist. Speer,
an architect, is one of two persons who at one time were
closest to Adolf Hitler, the other one being Rudolf Hess. In
the last phase of the war Speer was Minister for Produc-
tion, which means that he was the boss of some 12 million
slaves forced workers from conquered countries, among
them the Jews who, still more or less healthy, temporarily
escaped extermination. In the rapidly worsening circum-
stances Hitler expected Speer to perform miracles, in other
words to continue producing the aircraft, tanks, subma-
rines and canon needed to stem the invasion of the Allies
who, from the east and the west, were squeezing Germany
in a pincer movement.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
157
In January 1944 Speer had to be hospitalized for a serious
knee and lung infection. The moment was not opportune for
him because Gring, always covetous of more power, had
been intriguing against him, using the sinister Bormann to
manuvre Speer into disfavour with Hitler. The medical in-
stitution where Speers condition had grown critical was a
state-of-the-art Party hospital at Hochenlychen, near Berlin,
run by Dr Karl Gebhardt. This was an SS-Gruppenfhrer
and the personal physician of Himmler, who, as Speer said
later, had directed Gebhardt to eliminate him.
In Inside the Third Reich, his memoirs, Speer wrote:
The doctors prepared my wife for the worst. But in con-
trast to this pessimism, I myself was feeling a remarkable
euphoria. The little room expanded into a magnificent hall.
A plain wardrobe I had been staring at for three weeks
turned into a richly carved display piece, inlaid with rare
woods. Hovering between living and dying, I had a sense
of well-being such as I had only rarely experienced.
In Speers conversations with Gitta Sereny, however,
we read what really happened: he, the very ambitious, very
materialistic and very matter-of-fact architect, powerful
minister and top Nazi, had had a near-death experience! As
Sereny reports the particular conversation: I have never
been so happy in my life, Speer said. He was above, he
said, looking down at himself in the hospital bed. I saw
everything very clearly. The doctors and nurses hovering,
and [his wife] Margaret looking sort of soft and slim, her
face small and pale ... What Professor Koch and the nurses
were doing, Speer continued, looked like a silent dance to
me. The room was so beautiful ... He smiled at the memory.
I was not alone; there were many figures, all in white and
light grey, and there was music ... And then somebody said:
Not yet. And I realized I had to go back and I said I didnt
want to. But I was told I had to it was not yet my time.158
e l e v e n ta l k s
What I felt then was not something I know how to describe.
It wasnt just sadness, or disappointment it was a long
feeling of loss ... To this day I think that I felt things in those
hours which the man I know myself to be cannot feel, or
see, or say. I tell you one thing: Ive never been afraid of
death since. Im certain it will be wonderful.
Then why hadnt he written all this in his memoirs?
Speers answer: Well, I was supposed to be that super-ra-
tional man, you know, writing a definitive book on this ter-
rible history of our time. What do you think readers would
have said if in the middle of that book I had suddenly writ-
ten that I am sure, sure to this day, that I died that night
and came back to life? Can you imagine the fun the critics
would have had with that? 7
This extraordinary testimony, the authenticity of
which is beyond doubt, not only confirms the reality of the
near-death experiences, it also raises several interesting
questions. For Albert Speer was without any doubt a war
criminal responsible for the suffering and death of many
thousands of slave workers, and he was as responsible for
the slaughter on the battlefields as were Gring (who com-
mitted suicide) and the Nazi heads executed at Nuremberg.
Although he escaped the gallows by convincing his interro-
gators that he was a decent man and denouncing his Nazi
cronies, most historians today agree that his twenty years
of imprisonment, in comparison with the other sentences,
was too lenient.
Then why was such a person sent back, obviously by a
direct decision of the Highest Authority, at the crucial pe-
riod of the war when he was irreplaceable in his ministe-
rial position, and when his leadership contributed directly
to the prolongation of the fighting and the cruel death of
7 Gitta Sereny: Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, pp. 416-417.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
159
uncountable lives, military and civilian? Why was he, at
that tragic juncture, sent back even against his own will?
It would seem that in heaven the norms for making the
accounts differ from those here below. It would also
seem that events, whether insignificant or on a world scale
wars, mass deportations and massive catastrophes are
elements or links in processes beyond our understanding.
Knowledge physical and spiritual, and its seasons
If one had read earlier about the Mothers protective
pathways across the afterlife, say before the publication of
the first books on NDE, her narrative of what she had ac-
complished in the beginning of the 20th century might have
looked like another of those chimerical experiences mystics
think they have. Yet this is only one of many elements in
Sri Aurobindo and the Mothers writings which have in
the meantime come within the compass of science, and
there will no doubt be more to come. For there is a spiritual
knowledge which is independent of and more true than
scientific materialism, bound by the limitations of the hu-
man mind. Spiritual insight is based on direct knowledge;
mental activity remains inexorably restricted by the human
constitution, as has been recognized by philosophers like
Plato, Berkeley and Kant.
Another example of Sri Aurobindo and the Mothers
foreknowledge is the very special nature and purpose of
the Earth, as commented upon in the talk 2012 and 1956:
Doomsday? It must suffice here to remind that the Mother
said in the 1950s: From the occult and spiritual point of
view, the Earth is the concentrated symbol of the universe.
... For the convenience and necessity of the work, the whole
universe has been concentrated and condensed symbolical-
ly in a grain of sand which is called the Earth. And therefore
it is the symbol of all all that is to be changed, all that is to160
e l e v e n ta l k s
be transformed, all that is to be converted is here. At the
time she said this, this sort of view was still squarely con-
tradicted by the Copernican Principle 8 , stressing the fact
that the Earth was but one planet among possibly billions
in the universe, and man no more than an animal among
animals. Now, however, when indeed many exoplanets
are discovered, this certainty is called into question in sci-
entifically argued books like Rare Earth by Peter Ward and
Donald Brownlee, The Eerie Silence and The Goldilocks Enig-
ma by Paul Davies, and The Privileged Planet by Guillermo
Gonzalez and Jay Richards.
The direct and continuous influence of the mind on the
body has time and again been highlighted by Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother, especially in matters of health and the doc-
tor-patient relationship. At the centre of this topic are the
power of a doctors suggestions and the placebo effect. In
a special file about the intriguing placebo effect and titled
When the spirit cures the body the French science maga-
zine Sciences et Avenir writes: This powerful effect has been
used since the night of time in the doctor-patient relation-
ship, but without knowing its intimate secrets. Having re-
mained obscure for a long time, it begins to be decrypted by
a new discipline called neuro-endocrino-immunology, the
study of the interactions between three principal systems of
our organism. ... The placebo effect does exist! 9
The Mother has explained several times that the brain
has the capacity to continue developing during its whole
lifetime. Science, on the contrary, held that the enormous
mass of neurons of this most complicated of objects in the
universe, was fixed once and for all, and that it could only
diminish and degenerate. Recently this physiological tenet
8 See talk 6: Being Human and the Copernican Principle.
9 Sciences et Avenir, November 2005, p. 62.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
161
has been modified drastically. One reads now about the
five ages of the brain and the fact that it continues evolving,
even in advanced age, on condition that one does not stop
stimulating it, in other words that one remains mentally
active or, as the Mother said, that one remains young.
In one of the first chapters of The Life Divine, Sri Au-
robindo wrote: For it will be evident that essential Matter
is a thing non-existent to the senses and only ... a concep-
tual form of substance, and in fact the point is increasingly
reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought di-
vides form of substance from form of energy. 10 Now you
find popular science books with a title such as The Matter
Myth, and physicists who say: Speaking as a physicist, I
judge matter to be an imprecise and rather old-fashioned
concept. Roughly speaking, matter is the way particles be-
have when a large number of them are lumped together. ...
Matter is weird stuff ... (Freeman Dyson) 11 Or: Quantum
field theory paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves
away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations
of invisible field energy. In this theory, little distinction re-
mains between material substance and apparently empty
space, which itself seethes with ephemeral quantum activ-
ity. ... Quantum physics undermines materialism because it
reveals that matter has far less substance than we might be-
lieve. ... Even the apparent solidity of ordinary matter melts
away into a frolic of insubstantial patterns of energy. 12
Already during the First World War, when writing the
instalments that would become The Life Divine, Sri Auro
bindos interpretation of the terrestrial evolution contained
elements which would only later enter the scientific discus-
sion about the development of the life-forms. In those texts
10 Id., p. 18.
11 Freeman Dyson: Infinite in all Directions, p. 8.
12 Paul Davies and John Gribbin: The Matter Myth, pp. 8 and 229.162
e l e v e n ta l k s
from the Arya we find what Eldredge and Gould would
call punctuated equilibrium in 1972; the discussion of life
in plants and a rather developed mind in higher animals;
the statement that species, including the human, cannot
evolve beyond themselves by their own effort; the confir-
mation that there have existed civilizations of which no
trace is found today, and that peoples considered primitive
a century ago were actually retrograde populations from
former times; the standpoint that in evolution there is a de-
sign, defined by an Intelligence and worked out by It. Etc.
And all this ordered within a coherent system, valid before
the positivist theories of evolution (Lamarck, Darwin, de
Vries, Neo-Darwinism) were fashioned, and equally valid
after those theories have been seriously questioned and will
within a not too distant future become history.
Vroeger toen ik groot was! (Before, when I was big) is a re-
markable little book by the Dutch author Joanna Klink (1990),
with spontaneous reminiscences by small children about the
time before they entered their mothers womb and during
their stay in it. They remember their choice of the mother, the
moment they entered her womb, and the surrounding cir-
cumstances before and during the pregnancy. What is striking
here is that everything these children said agrees completely
with what the Mother has told on the same subjects. For ex-
ample, the soul chooses the physical mother and watches
over the fetus, even when not yet definitively joining with it;
the moment of the definitive union differs in each case and
may even take place after birth. The being that is to be born
is aware of all that goes on around the mother as it is of its
own world. An unborn apparently perceives, with his vivid
awareness, much more than we think, writes Klink. And:
Children do not believe in death, they still know better.
They also mention quite spontaneously the silver thread
which connects the subtle with the gross material body, and
which, when cut, results in separation (death).br idge ac r oss the afterlife
163
Remembering the Mother
Returning to our main theme, one could ask the ques-
tion: Why was this invaluable protection after death pro-
vided only recently, so late in the history of our species?
An answer on this level of things is not to be given by
mental understanding. As madame Thon told the Mother,
building the bridges across the afterlife was part of what the
Mother had come to do on Earth, and the light mentioned
in all NDE experiences is the Mothers Light. In the words
of madame Thon: All those whose psychic being is a little
bit awake, and who are able to perceive your Light, will go
to your Light at the moment of death, wherever they may
die, and you will help them cross beyond.
These words refer directly to the status of Mirra Alfassa,
the French woman whom we now call the Mother, there-
by meaning the Great Mother incarnated as the female part
of the Avatar Sri Aurobindo-Mother. Before, the Avatar had
always been male, and many Hindus still have difficulty in
accepting a male-female Avatar. But it is quite clear that if
there is an earthly evolution, in which the successive Avatars
play a crucial role, and if in the present stage of humanitys
history this evolution is reaching a critical point, the Avatar
has to represent in himself the complete human being in
order to transfigure it. Only the Great Mother, because she
manifests all levels of existence and also transcends them,
could perform a task like building bridges across the planes
of existence, and constantly help the dying onward to their
psychic resting place.
The significance of she whom we call the Mother can
only be fully understood in her three aspects as the Great
Mother of many names, but always the one original tran-
scendent Shakti; as Mahashakti, the cosmic Mother of the
Gods; and as the incarnated Mother in the Yoga.164
e l e v e n ta l k s
The Great Mother is known in all great spiritual and
occult traditions, even though variously named and de-
scribed. We find her in Isis, Cybele, Sophia, and the Virgin
Mary. She is the One who became Two the active Brah-
man from eternity divided into Ishwara and Shakti, Puru-
sha and Prakriti. On the Origin of the World, a gnostic text
from around 200 CE, defines her in terms which, if properly
understood, agree with those of the Vedantic scriptures:
It is I who am the offspring of what gave birth to me
[what gave birth to her being the One];
And it is I who am the Mother
[the Great Mother, the one original transcendent Shakti];
It is I who am the wife
[Shakti to Ishwara, in human metaphorical language];
It is I who am the virgin
[for ever the untouchable Origin of all];
It is I who am pregnant
[with all the power and manifestations of the universe];
It is I who am the midwife
[the middle term chit-tapas in the Vedantic sat-chit/tapas-
ananda];
It is I who am the one that comforts pains of travail
[who justifies the pains of the evolutionary manifestation];
It is my husband who bore me
[Ishwara is also the Brahman];
And it is I who am his mother
[who gives shape to him in his manifestation Isis, Mary];
And it is he who is my father and my lord.
It is he who is my force
[because I am his force, Shakti];
I am in the process of becoming
[the complete Divine is growing up in the Manifestation],
Yet I have borne a Man as lord
[the cosmic Purusha, the archetype of what humanity is to
become].br idge ac r oss the afterlife
165
The Mother herself gave us a glimpse of Mahashakti,
the cosmic Mother, when she narrated one of her experi-
ences on 3 February 1958. The supramental world exists
permanently and I am there permanently in a supramen-
tal body. I had proof of it this very day, when my earth-
consciousness went there and remained there consciously
between two and three oclock in the afternoon. Now I
know that what was lacking for the two worlds to join in a
constant and conscious relation is an intermediate zone be-
tween the physical world as it is and the supramental world
as it is ... She saw this intermediate zone as a huge ship,
as large as a city, which was a symbolic representation of
the place where this work is going on. On board of this
ship were people destined to become the future inhabit-
ants of the supramental world. They were trained for their
task and ready to go ashore.
The Mother was in charge of the whole enterprise from
the beginning and throughout the proceedings. I had pre-
pared all the groups myself. I stood on the ship at the head
of the gangway, calling the groups one by one and sending
them ashore.
During this experience the Mother was suddenly inter-
rupted and called back into her physical body by somebody
in her room, and had at that instant a brief glimpse of her-
self. My upper part, particularly the head, was not much
more than a silhouette of which the contents were white
with an orange fringe. The more down towards the feet, the
more the colour looked like that of the people on the ship,
that is to say orange; the more upwards, the more it was
translucent and white, with less red. The head was only a
contour with a brilliant sun in it. Rays of light radiated from
it, which were actions of the will.
And then there is the Mother in the Yoga who this
time had not come as a Vibhuti (Hatshepsut, Jeanne dArc,166
e l e v e n ta l k s
Elisabeth I 13 ) but as the Avatar. Many devotees have dif-
ficulty in understanding the three aspects of the Mother, as
she said herself. Most of them expect her to be shiningly di-
vine in all her earthly ways, twenty-four hours a day. And
that she was, of course, but not like the temple Gods or the
Gods in the Puranas. For she was here not only in a human
body, she had also to take upon her or rather into her the
full human condition in order to transform it, more spe-
cifically the human condition of the disciples. To be a real
guru is a task of which the disciples usually have no idea,
for it means taking their shortcomings, deformations and
subconscious darknesses upon oneself. Being the Avatar of
the age meant not only that; it meant also having to suffer
and transform all that was low and animal-like below and
preceding the human condition.
One reads from the pen of several authors that the
Mother was so human. M.P. Pandit for instance wrote:
She was supremely divine but equally extremely human.
This is a misconception of the Mother which interprets her
perceptible actions and her gracious relations with people
according to the human ways. Indeed, she had to move
among the disciples, the Ashram youth and the visitors;
she had to answer all kinds of questions instantly; she had
to make decisions constantly; and she had to respond im-
mediately to requests, prayers and inner expressions of
adoration and love, but also to attitudes of anger, malevo-
lence and even hate. Yet it was she who said: It has come
to the point that even those who are here put on me feel-
ings and reactions which are purely human. In Savitri Sri
Aurobindo wrote: Even when she bent to meet earths in-
timacies / Her spirit kept the stature of the Gods.
13 See Georges Van Vrekhem: The Mother The Story of Her Life, chap-
ter 14.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
167
Some still consider the Mother to have been a disci-
ple of Sri Aurobindo. It is therefore important to state that
such was not the case. Sri Aurobindo had his amanuensis,
Nirodbaran, write to Arindam Basu: The Mother is not a
disciple of Sri Aurobindo. She has had the same realization
and experience as myself. And he wrote in a letter: What
is known as Sri Aurobindos Yoga is the joint creation of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother. 14 The equivalence of Sri Au-
robindo and the Mother is evident when considering the
following basic declarations. Sri Aurobindo: The Mothers
consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Con-
sciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play.
The Mother: Without him I exist not, without me he is
not manifest. These pronouncements reflect the truth of
the Divine essence and its manifestation. There is no dif-
ference between the Mothers path and mine, wrote Sri
Aurobindo, we have and have always had the same path,
the path that leads to the supramental change and the di-
vine realization; not only at the end, but from the begin-
ning they have been the same. 15
The Mother herself narrates, in Words of Long Ago,
how in 1912 she had noted down the whole program of
what Sri Aurobindo has done and the method of doing the
work on Earth. ... I met Sri Aurobindo for the first time in
1914, two years later, and I had already made the whole
program. That program reads as follows: The general
aim to be attained is the advent of a progressive univer-
sal harmony. The means for attaining this aim, in regard
to the Earth, is the realization of human unity through the
awakening in all and the manifestation by all of the inner
Divinity, which is One. In other words: to create unity by
founding the Kingdom of God which is within us all.
14 Sri Aurobindo: On Himself, p. 459.
15 Ibid., p. 459.168
e l e v e n ta l k s
The following is therefore the most useful work to be
done: 1. For each individually, to be conscious in himself
of the Divine Presence and to identify himself with it. 2. To
individualize the states of being that till now were never
conscious in man and thus to put the Earth in connection
with one or more of the fountains of the universal force
that are still sealed to it. 3. To speak again to the world
the eternal word under a new form adapted to its present
mentality. It will be the synthesis of all human knowledge.
4. Collectively, to establish an ideal society in a propitious
spot for the flowering of the new race, the race of the Sons
of God. 16
She has worked out this program in intimate collabora-
tion with Sri Aurobindo once formulating their one divine
personality as mothersriaurobindo in writing and she
has gone on working it out when alone in her avataric body.
They had come to lay the foundations of the future and to
build the archetype of the supramental species. This is a
rather well documented real story, more fascinating than
any myth, in which one sees the constant interaction of the
three personalities of the Mother. In her conversations dur-
ing the last years, as well as in the transformation of the
cells of her physical body, it was unfortunately the human
aspect that was most visible to human eyes.
Day by day and year after year Sri Aurobindo fought
his occult and spiritual battles without anybody around
him being aware of it; one only gets some glimpses of his
real Work in his poems and in Savitri. The Mother has
spoken about her battles in the subconscient, her physical
sufferings and some of her victories. But who was aware
that that Being sitting there in a simple armchair, on the first
floor of the central Ashram building in Pondicherry, was no
16 The Mother: Words of Long Ago, p. 47.br idge ac r oss the afterlife
169
longer what the eyes perceived? Her back was bent and her
visible body reduced to its elementary humanity; her invis-
ible body within the visible one was glorious. On 24 March
1972 she said: For the first time, early in the morning, I saw
myself, my body. I dont know whether it is a supramental
body or how to say this? a body in transition. But I had
a body altogether new, in the sense that it was sexless, it
wasnt a woman nor was it a man. 17 It was very white, but
this is because my skin is white, I suppose, I dont know. It
was very slim ... It was pretty, truly a harmonious form. So,
this was the first time. I didnt know anything at all, I had
no idea of what it would be like or whatever. And I saw that
I was like that, I had become like that.
The tears and the desperation at the time of the Moth-
ers passing were the human reaction resulting from the
human perception of a life which had attempted and suc-
ceeded to incorporate, for the first time in the history of the
Earth, the Supermind into Matter. She and Sri Aurobindo
accomplished the impossible, so much beyond the human
comprehension that their accomplishment today is a living
reality to not more than a handful of followers. Her body
specially chosen and composed with care in her mothers
womb, and declared by Sri Aurobindo to be better than his
for the initial attempt at the supramental transformation
her body lying there was not a cause for grief but the token
of a triumph without precedent.
Coda
In Champaklal Speaks we read the following anecdote
from the time the Mother still gave darshan on the balco-
ny of the central Ashram building in the morning: When
Mother had her breakfast after Balcony, she said that she
17 The supramental body is a-sexual. Cf. talk 1: Adam Kadmon and
the Evolution.170
e l e v e n ta l k s
had come to know a very interesting thing. She had seen
on the forehead of Mritunjoys sister (who had just passed
away), the symbol of Sri Aurobindo. Mother said that she
was very much surprised and had said to herself: What?
On this one? ... Then she heard Sri Aurobindo saying:
Henceforth whoever who dies here [i.e. in the Ashram], I
will put my seal upon him, and in any condition uncondi-
tional protection will be given.
We find this confirmed by the Mother herself in the
Agenda conversation of 24 June 1961. Mritunjoys sister was
psychologically in a terrible state, said the Mother: Elle
navait pas la foi she did not have the faith. This led the
Mother to ask Sri Aurobindo what happens to people who
do not have the faith when they are in the Ashram and die
there. Sri Aurobindo said: Watch. The woman in ques-
tion was in the act of leaving her body at that very moment,
and the Mother saw on her forehead the symbol of Sri
Aurobindo in a kind of solid golden light ... And because
of the presence of that symbol the psychological condition
did not have any importance any more, for nothing could
touch her. As we have seen, it is the psychological condi-
tion at the time of death which attracts the corresponding
worlds and their beings. Then Sri Aurobindo said to the
Mother: All those who have lived in the Ashram and who
die there have automatically the same protection, whatever
their inner state.
At the time Auroville did not yet exist. Would it be un-
reasonable to surmise that a similar recognition and pro-
tection might be given to those who had the faith and sur-
rendered their lives to the same ideal in Auroville?
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