“The Mother of Dreams” — Some Experiences from 1973 (6)

6

Dream of 17-11-1973

There were several dreams of the Mother between September 29 and November 17 but their impression was not strong and they have now faded from my memory. But the short one I had on the night of the day which was the Mother’s last in her body has stuck in my mind ineffaceably.

There is no prelude to its main feature as far as I can make out, nor does there seem to be a sequel to it. The Mother was before me in a strange kind of light — neither clear brightness nor marked dimness. The atmosphere was most unusual. I stood facing her. She had a big bunch of reddish-pink roses in her two cupped hands. She gave them to me, saying, “Put them upon your head.” That was all.

What did this mean? Reddish-pink is the colour of psychic love and indicates “Surrender”. I believe I have to put my head under the power of the surrender which is the natural movement of the deep soul’s loving self-gift to the Divine. Perhaps the Mother meant that she was herself giving me the capacity of a full self-giving of all my mind in psychic love to her? The sense of “full” is shown by the numerousness of the roses. The big bunch seemed to represent a blessing from her hands — a last gift to enable poor me to realise in life the message of the flower which, a long time ago, she had described as my typical flower and whose painting I had made and hung, as she had ordered, in Sri Aurobindo’s old room which I had occupied for 10 years in the Guest House — the flower called “Krishna’s Light in the Mind”. Sri Aurobindo has said that Krishna’s Light is also his own. Krishna’s and Sri Aurobindo’s Light — a whitish blue — surely needs for the preparation of its establishment in the mind the latter’s complete psychicisation by devoted submission to the Mother. Even in that whitish blue the white, according to Sri Aurobindo, comes of a fusion of the blue light of Bliss (Ananda) with the Mother’s white light of pure Consciousness-Force (Chit-Tapas) in which everything originates.

The next morning a trunk call came from Pondicherry to announce that the Mother had passed away at 7.25 the previous evening. Towards the beginning of November my wife and her sister had come to Bombay. My niece and her husband were already there. All of us, together with my sister, made ready to fly to Pondicherry by the first available plane. The husband of my wife’s niece was connected with the airways and he tried his best to get us seats. But there was a semi-strike on — and most planes were either cancelled or considerably delayed. We could not fly during the whole day which we spent at the airport. The earliest booking we could obtain was on a night plane to Bangalore, from where we would have to hire a taxi and ride down to Pondicherry.

At the airport I developed severe tachycardia — the heart racing at about 120 beats per minute. I stood it for nearly two hours and then felt rather tired and uncomfortable. So I stretched myself on one of the sofas in the waiting hall. As the tachycardia wouldn’t stop I was told that perhaps the flight was not advisable for me. But I was determined to go. By night-time the heart was on a little better behaviour. We emplaned, all our hearts seeming to be already in the Ashram where the Beloved’s body awaited our last look at it, the shed vehicle of the Warrior Spirit that had come as the Avatar of the Supreme to save us with its love from our darkness and that could say like Sri Aurobindo:

Often, in the slow ages’ long retreat
On Life’s thin ridge through Time’s enormous sea,
I have accepted death and borne defeat
To gain some vantage by my fall for Thee.

For Thou hast given the Inconscient the dark right
To oppose the shining passage of my soul
And levy at each step the tax of Night:
Doom, her august accountant, keeps her roll.

All around me now the Titan forces press;
This world is theirs, they hold its days in fee;
I am full of wounds and the fight merciless.
Is it not yet Thy hour of victory?

Even as Thou wilt! What still to Fate Thou owest,
O Ancient of the worlds, Thou knowest, Thou knowest.((( Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5.)))

SUPPLEMENT

Nearly 2 years have passed since the dream on the night of November 17, 1973. Several dream-darshans have been experienced in the meantime, one or two of deep personal significance: but none had any notable connection with the old series except the one which I am reporting below.

Dream of 11-10-1975

I was at the window of a high storey in a tall building. On the opposite side across a broad street was a place where people had to go to have the Darshan of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. One had to leap over the breadth of the street to reach there. I had the impression that it was a space I had leaped over several times in the past. But now I was hesitating.

Then Champaklal came along to the window and without a moment’s thought took a leap. But he misjudged the distance and, instead of reaching safely the opposite house, he fell short of it and dropped vertically down, head first, towards a stone block in the street. To save his head from striking the block he thrust his arms forward so as to take his weight on them. But before he could reach the block some people rushed out and caught his legs in mid-air. When he got back on his feet he swayed a little uncertainly but without any fuss kept moving on to meet the Master and the Mother.

I was rather unnerved at the sight of what had happened, and so I did not jump. I thus missed the Darshan. In the next scene I was sitting with some others near Champaklal who had come back from the Darshan. He told us that, on his way in, he had been attacked by two fellows who had short knives in their hands but he too had a similar knife and he got past them though with a few scratches on his back. Then he asked me if I had gone for the Darshan. I said, “No.” He was a little surprised.

I resolved to go up to where the Mother had retired after the Darshan. I climbed staircase after staircase from floor to floor. I had no lameness in my left leg and mounted rapidly. From far below, my natural mother was heard shouting in fear, “Don’t climb so fast!” I emerged onto a balcony at a great height. Looking down on the street I saw two or three men running to the house in answer to mamma’s alarm. I waved to them, telling them all was safe. Then I ran up another floor to reach the Mother.

Suddenly I saw the Mother herself coming swiftly down a small staircase. She was dressed in cream pajamas and a cream khameez. There seemed to be a soft yellow-white radiance about the dress. Her face was also calmly luminous and looked as if she were rapt in a trance with open eyes. She made a majestic all-silencing picture. Evidently she was coming down for my sake. As I looked at her, there was intense emotion in my heart and the words “Mother, Mother, Mother!”, as during a dream-darshan of her over two years earlier, came out. I rushed to her, fell on my knees and gave my head to her to bless. She blessed it. Then I brought it down to her feet and touched with it first her left foot and then her right. It was a most fulfilling experience.

When I got up she started to move back upstairs. There were a few people on the upper landing. I remember only Udar. The Mother whispered something into his ear. Then I heard Champaklal saying, “She will see Bala.” The Mother passed into a balcony which was at the back of the landing. As she disappeared there, I saw that her clothes were a pale shiny orange.

When I woke up from the dream my mind was filled with a vivid memory of the Mother’s presence as she had come down that small staircase. Rather the frontal part of my mind was full of it, while at the back of it I found the image of a familiar face from my waking life.

I pulled my wrist-watch out from under my pillow to see the time. It was 4.50 a.m. Immediately my thought went on a numerological track. First I realised that the date was the 11th, the digits of which add up to 2. When I had looked at the watch-dial what I had noted was that, while the minute hand had been at the 50-minute mark, the hour-hand had stood at the 24-minute mark, just a little before the numeral 5, since the time — 4.50 — meant also 10 minutes to 5. Now, 50+24=74=11=2.

What does 2 signify in this dream’s context? We must observe that the original Darshan was to be not only of the Mother but also of Sri Aurobindo — a side-by-sideness explicitly possible only with the Mother physically disembodied like Sri Aurobindo. The two of them were together in one and the same sense — a joint presence on a plane other than the earth, though about it one could always say in Shelley’s words:

Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.

The leap which Champaklal instantly essayed showed the distance of that plane from our earthly stance. I failed to make it and consequently lost the chance of the full glory of the new side-by-sideness. But the Divine Grace forgives our fears and vacillations and grants whatever is still possible. That is why the Mother responded to the cry in the soul of her hesitant child, especially as a bold attempt was made to climb high in spite of some danger. The sign was given that the Mother, for all the gap between her present plane and ours, was always ready to answer a true call and would come forward on her own, descending towards us. Yet even in the descent she kept her consciousness aloof and above at the very time that her eyes were open to the needs of the world below. This was the impression created by the kind of trance she was in. The rapt open-eyed state beckoned us towards the subtle dimensions of her being while making a move of love and help in our direction.

The yellow-white radiance accompanying her rapid descent of the small staircase symbolised the spiritually mental form taken by the answer she gave to the soul yearning through a wide visionariness of the mind. When the dress changed to a pale shiny orange on the way to the Mother’s own chamber where Sri Aurobindo must have been waiting, a glimpse was afforded of the nature of the work both of them are at present intensely doing; for orange or red-gold light is the light of the Supramental in the physical, and the whole effort of the Master and the Mother is to emanate into our outer material world the Supermind’s Truth-luminosity which is theirs in this world’s inner subtle-physical background where they have now joined their forces.

Mother India, November and December 1975