Chapter 11

Sri Aurobindo’s Name

Words of Amal Kiran

What she felt about him could be seen every time she spoke his name. A taste of some Ineffable nectar seemed to be on her lips when with a musical blend of invocation of his presence from afar and evocation of it from her own profundities she pronounced it like a Mantra of mantras in a half French half English accent – the S of “Sri” becoming invariably Sh and the r of it as well as of “Aurobindo” emerging with a kind of golden gurgle from the throat. Utter devotion and utter identification appeared to be simultaneous in the sound/Her governance of the Ashram which he had put totally in her hands and which she moulded and expanded and brought to a multi-aspected creativeness was as if that Great Name were taking on Great Form everywhere. Although from the evening of November 24, 1926 he withdrew into a background of “dynamic meditation” to expedite his work of bringing about the descent of the hitherto-unmanifest Supermind into the blind-seeming long-suffering physical substance of the world and, although the Mother was to all intents and purposes our sole Guru, she ever acted out the verity enshrined in the letter of probably 1930, a letter written by a sadhak under Sri Aurobindo’s directions and corrected by him:

“I am afraid that you labour under a fundamental mis-conception regarding the Ashram. It is not an institution planned by Sri Aurobindo with certain rules of management, laws or regulations fixed and made to order. It has grown up of itself out of the force of the Truth he manifests and can follow only the movements of that Truth. Sri Aurobindo and the Ashram form one integral whole. His being is spread out in the Ashram, gathers and takes up the entire life of the latter into itself and into one harmonious spiritual unity. Its life is the life of the Spirit; its growth is the growth of the Spirit. It is entirely wrong to look at the Ashram as a group or collection of Sadhakas or to look at it as having a life or an aspiration or an aim that does or can exist apart from Sri Aurobindo. Its life and movements and activities are an expression, integrally, of its growth and development from within. It has no laws, rules or regulations, except the one law of spiritual growth and development in and through Sri Aurobindo.”

Words of Sri Aurobindo

All my realisations – Nirvana and others – would have remained theoretical, as it were, so far as the outer world was concerned. It is the Mother who showed the way to a practical form. Without her no organised manifestation would have been possible. She has been doing this kind of work from her very childhood.