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At the Feet of The Mother

The Mother was Inwardly above the Human even in Childhood, pp. 354-356 (SH 183)

Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Savitri Book Four: The Book of Birth and Quest, Canto One: The Birth and Childhood of the Flame

Sri Aurobindo responded to a pointed query about the Mother that ‘the Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood’. To his brother Barin, Sri Aurobindo revealed that the Mother was ‘born free.’ As an Avatara She did take upon Herself the load of humanity but always She remained above the human and in contact with the Truth. The Will and Wisdom that guides the world from within now came in the very forefront of the human quest in Her. Even Her very body was framed by the gods to express divinity in earthly signs.


Once more that Will put on an earthly shape.

A Mind empowered from Truth’s immutable seat
Was framed for vision and interpreting act
And instruments were sovereignly designed
To express divinity in terrestrial signs.
Outlined by the pressure of this new descent
A lovelier body formed than earth had known.
As yet a prophecy only and a hint,
The glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole,
It came into the sky of mortal life
Bright like the crescent horn of a gold moon
Returning in a faint illumined eve.
At first glimmering like an unshaped idea
Passive she lay sheltered in wordless sleep,
Involved and drowned in Matter’s giant trance,
An infant heart of the deep-caved world-plan
In cradle of divine inconscience rocked
By the universal ecstasy of the suns.
Some missioned Power in the half-wakened frame
Nursed a transcendent birth’s dumb glorious seed
For which this vivid tenement was made.

The body is the casing or the house and the instrument of the soul. The Divine Mother’s body has been built for a special purpose and all the cosmic forces have designed it to bear the pressure of the special Work She has undertaken. Her mind and the impulsion to acts, Her slightest gestures revealed the presence of a greater Being within this frail material stuff. To give and ask for nothing, to receive as if all belonged to Her was Her way to live.

But soon the link of soul with form grew sure;
Flooded was the dim cave with slow conscient light,
The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,
The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.
At once she seemed to found a mightier race.
Arrived upon the strange and dubious globe
The child remembering inly a far home
Lived guarded in her spirit’s luminous cell,
Alone mid men in her diviner kind.

Even in her childish movements could be felt
The nearness of a light still kept from earth,
Feelings that only eternity could share,
Thoughts natural and native to the gods.
As needing nothing but its own rapt flight
Her nature dwelt in a strong separate air
Like a strange bird with large rich-coloured breast
That sojourns on a secret fruited bough,
Lost in the emerald glory of the woods
Or flies above divine unreachable tops.
Harmoniously she impressed the earth with heaven.

Aligned to a swift rhythm of sheer delight
And singing to themselves her days went by;
Each minute was a throb of beauty’s heart;
The hours were tuned to a sweet-toned content
Which asked for nothing, but took all life gave
Sovereignly as her nature’s inborn right.
Near was her spirit to its parent Sun,
The Breath within to the eternal joy.
The first fair life that breaks from Nature’s swoon,
Mounts in a line of rapture to the skies;
Absorbed in its own happy urge it lives,
Sufficient to itself, yet turned to all:
It has no seen communion with its world,
No open converse with surrounding things.

From Her very childhood She lived in a larger air and dwelt with the sense of oneness to which nothing is alien but merely an extension of oneself.

There is a oneness native and occult
That needs no instruments and erects no form;
In unison it grows with all that is.
All contacts it assumes into its trance,
Laugh-tossed consents to the wind’s kiss and takes
Transmutingly the shocks of sun and breeze:
A blissful yearning riots in its leaves,
A magic passion trembles in its blooms,
Its boughs aspire in hushed felicity.
An occult godhead of this beauty is cause,
The spirit and intimate guest of all this charm,
This sweetness’s priestess and this reverie’s muse.
Invisibly protected from our sense
The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray
And feels another air of storms and calms
And quivers inwardly with mystic rain.
This at a heavenlier height was shown in her.
Even when she bent to meet earth’s intimacies
Her spirit kept the stature of the gods;
It stooped but was not lost in Matter’s reign.
A world translated was her gleaming mind,
And marvel-mooned bright crowding fantasies
Fed with spiritual sustenance of dreams
The ideal goddess in her house of gold.

[Savitri: 354 – 356]


(line breaks are added to emphasize separate movements)

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