The Mother

Pondicherry is a land where many saints come from or gravitate to. The most famous holy people from Pondicherry are Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual partner, The Mother. While living in Pondy, I read some books and talked to a lot of people about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, and learned quite a bit of their fascinating history. There is certainly a lot to learn, especially since Aurobindo was an extremely prolific writer. Multitudes of disciples have written about their experiences as well.

Pondicherry is full of the Mother’s presence, full of flowers and golden sunlight. The city is distinctly feminine in my opinion, and it is full of calming grace. I must admit I feel extremely grateful to have lived in such a place for a year, the effect of it has penetrated deeper than my nerves.

Many people in Pondicherry wear a ring of the Mother’s symbol, a twelve-petaled lotus. Almost every little storefront has an image of the Mother on the wall, in front of which they place daily offerings of flowers. The Mother loved flowers, and she would hold them in her hand and meditate on their energy, and then rename the flowers according to what they emitted: Jasmine means purity, lemongrass means help, rose is love for the divine, plumeria is psychological perfection. Someone told me that even when she was a young girl in France, the flowers in the garden would tell her when they wanted to be picked or not.

Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878 to an Algerian mother and a Turkish father. When she was a little girl she would have a reoccurring dream of towering over Paris like a mushroom in a golden gown whose skirts had no limit. Her skirt would parachute around the whole city like a net of golden stars. People of Paris would climb up it and stick their heads out from underneath to implore her to help them with their woes. She could always give them whatever they needed, and this feeling was the best in the world.

As a young lady, she frequented in circles with famous artists, and she also became interested in occultism. She befriended the famous occultist Max Theon, who had a place high up in the mountains of Algeria. Once when visiting him here, she met Madame Theon, who had even more powerful powers than Max. Madame Theon saw Mira and pointed to her head and said, “You have THAT. You are Her.” What Madame Theon was referring to was a halo of twelve pearls she could see spinning around Mira’s head that represented the twelve qualities of the Divine Mother, a force always on earth that chooses to inhabit the body of a select few. Mirra knew there was something different about herself, but she didn’t really know what to make of Madame Theon’s words.

Her life is full of wild tales: attempting to banish demons from men’s souls, living in Japan, having two marriages, and having encounters with Lord Krishna in her dreams.

When she met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, she knew he was an incarnation of Krishna, and the person in her soul she had met time and time again. Sri Aurobindo also saw what Madame Theon saw, and acknowledged the Divine Mother in Mirra. Pretty soon after she joined Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1926, she took care of the followers in his ashram while he retired to his room for the rest of his life, communicating with his disciples by writing letters to them at all hours of the day.

Not surprisingly, many of Aurobindo’s followers were very suspicious of Mirra. She was a western woman who had been married twice, and now she was the Divine Mother, living amongst them in Pondicherry? In my opinion, the dual opposites of male and female, east and west, are some of the most fascinating aspects of the spiritual union between Aurobindo and the Mother. These dualites still cause tension in India and the world today. Aurobindo and the Mother were already calling people to transcend them in the 1920’s and believed there were no limits to the human soul, no polar opposites that could not be balanced and brought into harmony.

Multitudes of people from all over the world were drawn to Pondicherry to be with the Mother. Many say that while in her presence, they felt all their apprehensions melt away. She was an inviting and unintimidating character. A French man named Satprem spent a lot of time with her and has several volumes published of his talks with her. In these books the Mother’s speech is pocked with exclamation marks and spurts of laughter. She was full of wisdom and insight, but had a great sense of lightness and humor.

There is obviously much more to her story, and if you want to learn it you can pick up a biography, but I felt the need to introduce her briefly. I believe it is her who brought me to Pondicherry, and I believe she is a spiritual force who has joined with many others on my path. There is no doubt in my mind that I’ll be back in Pondicherry in my life. Now that I am away from Pondicherry, I sense how much I miss her presence being so close by. She is a woman who I will always feel in my soul, a saint who came down to earth for a brief while to inspire the Divine in others, and her spirit is still more alive than ever.