The question of the Mother’s suffering, especially during the last six months in 1973, has come up at different times in the mind of people. This has even led to various speculations, including quite silly ones such as that Her then attendants were deliberately hostile to Her. This eventually needs to be addressed, but let us start with the most important aspect and that is about Her suffering.
The first thing required for us is to remember that an action derives its importance and significance from the person and the consciousness in which it originates. The Divine suffering in a human form is not quite the same as a human or an animal suffering thus.
He who would save himself lives bare and calm;
He who would save the race must share its pain:
This he shall know who obeys that grandiose urge.
The Great who came to save this suffering world
And rescue out of Time’s shadow and the Law,
Must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain;
They are caught by the Wheel that they had hoped to break,
On their shoulders they must bear man’s load of fate.
Heaven’s riches they bring, their sufferings count the price
Or they pay the gift of knowledge with their lives.
The Son of God born as the Son of man
Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead’s debt,
The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind
His will has bound to death and struggling life
That yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.
Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.
The Eternal suffers in a human form,
He has signed salvation’s testament with his blood:
He has opened the doors of his undying peace.
The Deity compensates the creature’s claim,
The Creator bears the law of pain and death;
A retribution smites the incarnate God.
If we take suffering as one of the means, not a good means though, that Nature uses to pull us out of ignorance and propel us to grow, then it is evident that neither the Mother nor Sri Aurobindo had any need to suffer. Fully conscious of Their Divinity and Immortality they could have easily withdrawn anytime from the earth. But that would have meant letting us humans remain subject to death and Ignorance for another million years or more, who knows. Hence Sri Aurobindo taking upon himself the burden of man’s fate descended into death to drink its poison draught from the roots so as to dry them up. As a result, we see the manifestation of the Supramental consciousness on the 29th of February, 1956. In a way, it marked the completion of their work, the end of their mission so to say. The Mother wrote in Her diary or rather corrected something she had written earlier in one of her meditations. On the 23rd of September 1914, she had written,
The Lord hast willed, and Thou cost execute;
A new Light shall break upon the earth.
A new world shall be born.
And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.
On 23rd of April 1956, she rewrote this passage as follows:
29 February – 29 March
Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:
A new light breaks upon the earth
A new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.
It is clear from this note that she had accomplished her mission. Now it was just a matter of time that the Supramental manifestation would gradually take over the earthly evolution and humanity will go beyond its slavery to mortality and ignorance. But this passage from man to supramental being itself was not a sudden one. Like all evolutionary transitions, it had to be through steps and stages and the creation of a number of intermediary beings. What the 29th February event ensured was that the New Creation is bound to be now rather than hereafter but this now in earthly terms would still mean a couple of thousand years through all the struggle of transition involved. This struggle as She foresaw would be most around the transformation of the bodily substance since it is the stronghold of the Inconscience and hence the seat of greatest resistance. The impact of the Supramental Substance released in the earth atmosphere upon the body will compel it to change and evolve new possibilities and capacities. It would also mean a radical shift in the way our bodily life functions, a transfer of power from organs still functioning along the way life is organized in the gross matter to a subtler mode, wherein organs become more like concentrated points of Energy, condensed supramental substance changing the cells in a most unprecedented way just as the entry of mind in the earth atmosphere shifted the balance and functioning of the animal life into human. The very brain and heart and all other organs, the life of tissue and nerve and cells were to undergo this change so as to bear the intense Delight and Force of the Divine. Right now also the Divine Force acts but from behind and through the layers that modify its action and thereby deflect or distort and complicate the workings of the Divine in us.
Now knowing all this and the new challenges it involves, she out of Her deep Love and Compassion for Her children chose to continue the work of this bodily and cellular transformation, though premature at this stage. She wanted to compress time as much as possible to make the passage to the New species as smooth as possible. It is in the course of this journey through the cells that she encountered the toughest of resistances. All life upon earth has evolved through this resistance in matter which is the inert fort of the Inconscience. She plunged into it headlong and hence took upon her body the burden of centuries if not millenniums. It is this that we find expressed in the last six months of her journey through the body as intense agonizing pain as the supramental forces started working upon the nerves and bones. She spoke about this several times during the course of her yoga of the cells. The nerves as we know are the most sensitive of all tissues, in fact everything else perceives sensations through the nerves. On the other hand bone (and teeth/nails) is the most dense and inert substance in the human body and yet life gushes from its marrow as blood. Besides if we take the human body as symbolic of the different planes of consciousness, then the knees represent the subconscious elements and all else below it as the Inconscient. So what she was experiencing is the dead inertia as of wood or stone in matter which was reflected as the most intense pain that perhaps no one else could ever bear. It was not only agonizing but almost paralyzing. Hence her leonine cry to her then attendants to make her walk. But each time they tried the body would lose balance since the shift was yet to be completed. In 1972 she did see her new body in the making but a portion of it below the waist was yet not prepared. It was this on which she was working and there are several pointers to indicate that She did eventually succeed in creating a completely new body.
This would mean now a new process of evolution wherein beings who are ready through the yoga for the new body would leave the gross physical, stay in or near the earth in the subtle body gradually being remodeled for the new, and then switch over into the human bodies ready to a certain degree or else condense and precipitate by an occult process that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother mentioned on different occasions. The purpose of the present human body would then be to prepare our human consciousness to receive the influences and experiences needed for its growth up to a point after which the new process will take over. What that process could be has been dealt with elsewhere but for now we may say that she took upon herself the suffering of matter in the human body under the pressure of the supramental forces. By doing so she made it easier for us and shortened the time further. The dilemma of the disciples is a small rather insignificant part of the much larger plot since her work hardly depended upon us. We can only have the joy of being the first pioneers of the new race that is all. This was the last scene of Her earthly lila before the curtains were drawn upon the human senses but a new scene had opened up in the great epic of earthly life, the transmutation of man into the supramental being. All this may well seem like a fairy tale to many. But could the chimpanzee or the worm ever imagine that their destiny is to fly an aeroplane let alone realize the Divine?
