The Mother and the Beings of the Vital Plane
K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran)
The Mother and Sri Aurobindo did not work only on the physical plane. Behind the physical are subtle realms with influences good, bad and indifferent. The Victory Day of 24 November 1926 brought the Overmind Gods into direct alliance with our Gurus’ purpose of earth-transformation and rendered more effective their fight with the occult Evil that acts upon earth from its headquarters on the vital plane either directly or through human beings open to it.
The Overmind dynamism, preliminary to the Supermind power which was the ultimate aim, came into repeated use during the Second World War. This war brought into play two figures whom Sri Aurobindo and the Mother recognised as extending into the physical plane the occult Evil at its most dangerous. Hitler was seen as possessed by the Rakshasa-aspect of that Evil. The Rakshasa is a devouring “Giant” who openly declares his enormous greed and makes no secret of his ambition to dominate the world with a master-race of ruthless henchmen. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a glaringly open manifesto of such greed and ambition. In Stalin Sri Aurobindo and the Mother discerned a phenomenon not merely of possession but of incarnation, a vital being born in a human form and not just employing that form as its medium—and here was the Asura-aspect. The Asura is an all-gripping “Titan” who is even more destructive than a “Giant” but with a cold cunning intelligence which conceals its subversive policy under a mask of high ideals like economic equality and social classlessness. Stalin’s pronouncements are all couched in noble-sounding terms borrowed from Marx and Lenin but directed to nefarious ends.
There are several other orders of vital beings bent on harm—like those who bear the Pisacha-aspects. The Pishacha is the “Demon” obsessed with a defiling and mutilating mania: he is utter foulness and ugliness personified. The Pisacha always puts himself slavishly at the service of the Rakshasa and Asura.
The characteristic mark of all these denizens of the vital plane is that the force they express is “typal” and not, like the earth’s, “evolutionary”. The sign of a typal force is a drive towards mechanical uniformity, rigid regimentation, strict conformity to one type alone—a drive contrary to the many-sided, flexible and free movement of the evolving human soul striving, by means of trial, error, self-correction and through a thousand truths and innumerable impulses, to live and let live more and more abundantly, more and more profoundly.
The Mother and Sri Aurobindo considered the Second World War as their own war because of Hitler’s typal tyranny which, if successful, would have blocked their work of spiritual evolution. Sri Aurobindo kept in close touch with every development by means of a radio fixed in his room by Pavitra. Many of us understand that he intervened at various turning-points. But not many realise a most crucial intervention by the Mother. I came to know of it from private sources nearly twenty years ago, directly from Udar and indirectly through André. We may look upon it as based on a prophecy Sri Aurobindo had made at the end of his poem “The Dwarf Napoleon”.
This poem ridiculed Hitler’s pretensions to equal “the immense colossus of the past” who had arisen as a master-militarist to save the results of that progressive uprising, the French Revolution, from being submerged by the old-world powers ranged against it in all Europe outside France. Indeed, Napoleon was an autocrat, but Sri Aurobindo always pictured him paradoxically as a despotic defender of democracy. As the poem puts it:
A movement of enormous depth and scope
He seized and gave cohesion to its hope.
Far other was Hitler, yet “a mighty Force” had taken hold of him:
In his high villa on the fatal hill
Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,
Dictator of his action’s sudden choice,
The tiger leap of a demoniac skill. [Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon]
And Sri Aurobindo concludes:
Thus driven he must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
Until he meets upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil—or thunderstroke of God. [Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon]
This prophecy was penned in October 1939, when Hitler and Stalin had already signed a pact of non-aggression. Thus Stalin, the “greater devil”, seemed close-linked to the lesser—and against them both there could be only God’s thunder stroke preparing in the dim future. But within two years—to be precise, on 22 June 1941—the possibility of Sri Aurobindo’s prophetic words coming true loomed up: Hitler attacked Russia. Strangely enough, Stalin was caught somewhat on the wrong foot and there were German victories at the start. But “the Man of Steel” soon showed his diabolic superiority and, after the decisive blow at Stalingrad in 1942 on 25 November (Amal Kiran’s thirty-eight birthday, by the way!), the lesser devil was critically weakened. Spiritual-minded historians may surmise that Sri Aurobindo, especially since Russia was now automatically allied to Churchill’s England and Roosevelt’s America, backed with his Overmind puissance the greater devil temporarily in order to smash Hitler who was at that time the bigger immediate menace to civilisation. But would any of them guess that the folly Hitler committed of turning upon Stalin and drawing the more heinous devilry against himself had the Mother’s occult goad behind it?
The Mother knew exactly what Vital Being was egging Hitler on. She has dubbed him “The Lord of Falsehood”, a Rakshasa and Asura in one, as it were, who arrogates to himself the title: “The Lord of the Nations.” Finding Hitler going from strength to strength, she resolved to imitate the special form in which the Lord of Falsehood always appeared to him at his secret headquarters in the Bavarian Alps and inspired him to fantastic actions which yet proved triumphant. He used to come to Hitler clad in a silver cuirass and with a silver helmet from which a plume-like flame shot forth. Taking the same form in her subtle body and exteriorising her consciousness, the Mother went to the Führer and commanded him to launch on the most fantastic-seeming action of all: an attack on Stalin’s Russia, his publicly avowed ally. Hitler, as usual, accepted the order implicitly. In view of the unexpected brilliant successes in the past, there was no question now of his doubting the new mandate delivered out of the same flashing presence by the “sovereign Voice”. His resolve to unleash a sudden onslaught on his former partner was unbreakably set.
The Mother, on her way back from him, met the real Lord of Falsehood proceeding towards the Fuhrer’s “bunk” at Berchtesgaden. He was astonished to see his own special form face to face with him. He realised what must have happened. He hurried to Hitler to contradict what had been commanded. But Hitler remained unconvinced and carried out the attack. Secretly he had himself wished to destroy Communist Russia and, when that long-cherished yet hitherto checked dream, which had been outlined in his Mein Kampf, was given so glorious a push forward, he could not help thinking that the second appearance of the guiding spirit was some piece of fraud.
As Sri Aurobindo had predicted, the greater devil brought about the lesser’s downfall, but the prediction now revealed an unsuspected significance. At first sight Sri Aurobindo’s words would seem to posit two alternatives as responsible in the future for the downfall: either an encounter by Hitler with a more diabolical darkness than his own or else a terrific bolt from the Divine’s blue. Now the dividing “or” turned out to imply not a pair of different destructive forces but simply two different names for one and the same Mahakali, for the greater devil was pulled into action willynilly by the hands of the Divine. The Mother, by a bold piece of what we may call a divine outdevilling of the super-devil, the Lord of Falsehood, created directly a head-long clash between the two arch-enemies of Light, and managed to make this very clash a thunderstroke of God.
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The Mother and the Lord of Falsehood: A Reader’s Letter and the Author’s Answer
The Letter
I was going through the article “Our Light and Delight”, No. 18 and was astounded by the statement that the Mother assumed a form of the Lord of Falsehood in order to misguide Hitler and make him launch an attack on Stalin’s Russia. This seems incredible. I have not heard of this before and surely it is not the way the Mother worked for achieving results. Did she really say at any time that she had assumed this form?
The Answer
I am sorry I have disturbed you. But what I have written about is factual. Both Udar and André heard it from the Mother herself. It is also in a talk dated 12 January 1965, which was taped and is included in the publication called Agenda. I am told that the Mother is on record there as having said to Hitler: “Go… To have the supreme victory, go and attack Russia.” You have been shocked because you have misconceived the world-roles played by revolutionary Avatars like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Old ideas about spirituality are leading you astray in the assessment of the Supramental Incarnations.
Let me elucidate my point. But before I come to immediate particulars I may say a word on Incarnations in general—Incarnations in the Indian sense. The two greatest and most recognisable Avatars before Sri Aurobindo were Rama Dasarathi and Krishna Vasudeva. Both of them carried out sanguinary tasks involving the direct destruction of those who embodied anti-divine titanic forces. A lot of lives were lost not only on the side of these embodiments but also on the side of the Avatars. War in the full sense of the term, involving secrecy, ruse and surprise, was accepted as part of the Avataric mission. Orthodoxy is bound to get shocked and several attempts have been made to allegorise away the lives and deeds of Rama and Krishna. Particularly Krishna has given orthodoxy pause; it is finally through his stratagems—contrary to the traditional warriors’ code—that, according to the Mahabharata, the Pandavas destroyed their enemies and Yudhishthira became Emperor.
By insisting on transformation of the physical existence and not merely a purification as a step towards transcendence of earth and life—by bringing the new message of the Supramental Descent—Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are more specifically evolutionary in their mission and more openly opposed to the rule of the Asura and the Rakshasa in the world. Sri Aurobindo did not hesitate to take part in revolutionary politics in the days before he came to Pondicherry. His work meant risk of life both to himself and his followers, as well as to those who were ranged against him. He had even in mind an armed insurrection.
When World War II broke out he went out of his way to give support to the Allied Cause. This evoked a protest from orthodox spiritual thinkers: “How can a master of spirituality associate himself with a war instead of standing above both the parties? Surely the Allies are no saints as compared to the Nazis!” Sri Aurobindo took care to show that, whether the Allies be saints or not, they could not be equated to Hitler and his henchmen: the Allies represented a side which was in accord with the many-moded evolutionary drive of Nature, unlike Nazism which was an inrush from the typal Rakshasic plane to take possession of the human world. Sri Aurobindo also pointed out the common error of putting together a human historical phenomenon like British Imperialism and Hitler’s barbarous gospel of the Master Race. Lastly he not only espoused the Allied Cause but also took the bold step of calling the War “The Mother’s War”.
All this should show you how intimately the Mother and he were connected with the conduct of the war and with all its vicissitudes. They were like two Super-Generals. Sri Aurobindo has explicitly declared that he pitted his spiritual force against the Nazis and later against the Japanese. He kept himself acquainted with all the turns and twists of the campaigns both on the European front and on the Asian. What the Mother did at a critical moment was absolutely in accord with the roles they had assumed—and it was a continuation or development of the subtle and occult process which Sri Aurobindo had hinted at in the concluding lines of The Dwarf Napoleon.
I hope I have clarified the doubt you had expressed saying that the Mother could not have acted in the manner I have depicted and that this could not be her way of action.
[Source: Our Light and Delight]
Lest We Forget
Georges Van Vrekhem
On 6 June 2004 the Chancellor of Germany participated for the first time in the yearly commemoration ceremony of the Allied landing in France, on the beaches of Normandy, the decisive military operation which would lead up to the end of the Nazi regime and of the Second World War in Europe. The invitation of the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, and his embrace by the French President Jacques Chirac were meant as the final gestures of reconciliation which would put, after sixty years, a definitive end to World War II. In the newspapers one could read: “Time has healed the wounds. It’s time the Germans were there”, and the words of Mr Schröder, saying that his presence was ‘hugely symbolic’ and that it meant that “the Second World War is finally over.”
The Second World War is still very much alive in the consciousness of humanity, as shown by such successful films like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, The Pianist and the TV-serial Band of Brothers. There is, however, little knowledge about the historical facts. What remains in the general awareness are some vague notions of the Holocaust, the bombings of Great Britain and Germany, the SS, and the still fascinating but often caricatural personality of Adolf Hitler. Some prominent historians, like HR Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock, admit that they cannot explain Hitler, which means, considering the importance of the Führer in Nazi Germany, that they cannot understand the war. There is much writing about Hitler’s ‘charisma’, about the magic power his words exerted on his audiences, and about the ‘evil’ embodied in the SS and their reign in the concentration and extermination camps. But explanations of the gigantic and terrible event that was the Second World War there are as many as there are students of history, and most key-facts are prudently worded in the subjunctive mode.
We, Aurobindonians, have a general explanation of this war, in fact an encompassing one, provided to us by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In 1942 Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple: “I affirm to you most strongly that this is the Mother’s war. You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance.” The emphatic force with which Sri Aurobindo wrote here was rather unusual of him.
And he continued: “It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth, and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country [i.e. India] do not dream of and cannot yet at all realize.” [Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes, p.463]
For Hitler did not act on his own initiative. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have stated repeatedly that Hitler was possessed by an emanation of one of the great Asuras, ‘the Lord of Falsehood’ who calls himself ‘the Lord of the Nations’, and that he acted as his instrument. “One can say that Hitler is not a devil but is possessed by one.” [Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p. 575] Of this possession Hitler was ‘very conscious’, for he was ‘an excellent medium’. “Without this possession he would be a crudely amiable person with some mental hobbies and eccentricities … No one thought of Hitler as having anything in him. Then came the vital development, the vital Power holding him in his clutch.” [Purani, Evening Talks, p. 645; Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p. 85] This two-sidedness of Hitler’s character is mentioned by all his biographers. Often seemingly floating and indecisive, he could suddenly, “when the spirit descended upon him”, jump into verbal action and unleash a torrent of words with a power which left nobody in his presence untouched.
“The problem is to save the world from domination by the Asuric Forces”, said Sri Aurobindo in September 1939. “It would be awful to be ruled by the Nazis or Fascists. Their domination will let loose on mankind what are called the Four Powers of Hell—obscurantism, falsehood, suffering and death. Suffering and death mean the horrors of war.” [Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p. 232] In his sonnet ‘The Iron Dictators’, Sri Aurobindo calls these powers of hell “The iron dreadful Four who rule our breath, / Masters of falsehood, Kings of ignorance, / High sovereign Lords of suffering and death.” [Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, p. 136] It may be remembered that the four great Asuras, of whom Sri Aurobindo and the Mother always spoke respectfully, were the reversal, at the beginning of the cosmic evolution, of the essential divine attributes which are Light, Truth, Life and Bliss.
Hitler is still often misrepresented as something like the droll figure in Charlie Chaplin’s parodical film The Great Dictator, or as a kind of screaming, half-mad sexual pervert. The fact is that he was driven by the vision inspired into him by his Lord, and that this vision was world-encompassing. The Aryans (read: the Aryan Germans) were the master race, whose rightful duty it was to submit all other peoples and rule the earth. He, Adolf Hitler, was the German Messiah, sent with the mission to lead his people towards a golden age, the Empire of a Thousand Years. As the Germans were the Chosen People, there was no place for another people which claimed to be chosen, namely the Jews, who therefore had to be eliminated by any means. The human acquisitions of intelligence, individual liberty and social fraternity, together with the virtues of the soul, were no longer of importance. They had to be replaced by the properties of power, physical strength, harshness, insensitivity, and other attitudes which would favour the global domination of the (white) Aryans.
As each God contains in himself all the qualities of all other Gods and of the Divine as such, so each Asura contains in himself all the anti-divine qualities of the other Asuras. Falsehood, ignorance, suffering and death never exist separately, though they may be dominant according to the circumstances. In India the beings who are these powers are known as ‘Asuras’, the basically anti-divine cosmic powers said to be older than the Gods and who will do battle with them for as long as the divine Providence allows or deems necessary. This battle between the good and the evil Forces is the main theme of the mythology of all peoples. In the West the same four scourges are known as ‘the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’.
This takes us directly to Hitler, acting under the inspiration of the Lord of Falsehood, and the background of the Second World War which necessitated the direct intervention of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is the intention of the Asuras, still lords of the earthly evolution, to maintain their reign over the earth and all beings on it, for their existence depends upon this reign. The battle between the Asuras and the Gods has always been, in essence, a fight about the possibility of evolution upon the Earth. The Asuras want to keep things as they are, for they thrive in darkness and ignorance; the Gods want to construct the path of evolution that, from that darkness and ignorance, will lead back to the divine Light, Truth and Bliss. (One can follow the gradual advance of the progress made up to the present evolutionary stage in what Sri Aurobindo calls ‘the procession of the Avatars’.) The battle of the Gods has rendered the apparition upon earth of the human being possible. Humanity has now reached the critical point of transformation into a higher, supramental, divine being.
This transformation is, of course, what the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were and are about. The sequence of hot and cold global wars of the 20th century, seen in this light, acquires a significance which explains the huge acts of destruction and death, and even the menace of the extinction of mankind. One may search in vain for another explanation which so fully and clearly fits the facts. But the concepts mentioned in the previous paragraphs are, generally speaking, not within the horizon of Western thought at present and only still partially alive in the East. Besides, our ‘post-modern’ era is a time of confusion.
“What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves”, wrote Sri Aurobindo. “If they put themselves on the Asuric side, they at once make themselves instruments of the Divine purpose in spite of all defects, errors, wrong movements and actions which are common to human nature and all human collectivities. The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces; the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.” [Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes, pp. 465-466]
The human being consists of matter, the life forces and the mind. So does humanity as a whole. The possibilities of the individual being remain limited by the possibilities created in the species in the course of the long battle of the divine and the anti-divine forces during the upwardly spiralling cycles of humanity. Within humanity this battle is fought as the yoga of the select souls which carry the destiny of humanity, by the vibhutis, and at the most crucial moments by the Avatars. The Avatars incarnate in times of greatest need, when humanity itself, in its great souls and vibhutis, is not able to go beyond its capabilities. These times of greatest need have always an evolutionary significance: the Avatar comes to take evolution a step forward.
It would be illogical to suppose that humanity can produce the next higher being, provisionally called the ‘superman’, if it is not fully developed, if it has not fully explored and realized its inherent capabilities. According to Sri Aurobindo, humanity at the present point in its cycle of evolution has reached the required maturity for that unique moment in human evolution: the moment of transition into a new, higher, divine being. For this to be possible at least an upper layer of the mass of humanity had to reach the full mental development, which was the task of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The new values created in these accelerating periods of the human development were to become an integral part of the general human constitution.
“If mankind is to be spiritualized, it must first in the mass cease to be the material or the vital man and become the psychic and the true mental being. It may be questioned whether such a mass progress is possible, but if it is not, then the spiritualization of mankind as a whole is a chimera.” [Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, p. 253] “The mind and intellect must develop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race may rise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lower nature in man, the intelligent mental being … So long as the hour of the rational age has not arrived, the irrational period of society cannot be left behind, and that arrival can only be when not a class or a few but the multitude has learned to think, to exercise its intelligence actively.” [Ibid., p. 88]
“Whatever modifications may arrive, whatever new tendencies intervene, whatever reactions oppose, it could hardly then be doubted that the principal gifts of the French Revolution must remain and be universalized as permanent acquisitions, indispensable elements in the future order of the world,—national self-consciousness and self-government, freedom and enlightenment for the people and so much social equality and justice at least as is indispensable to political liberty; for with any form of fixed and rigid inequality democratic self-government is incompatible.” [Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity, p. 345]
Whatever happens in history—and the path of evolution is dotted with catastrophes, which seem to be, like the wars, a means of intensified change—“to go back is impossible, the attempt is always, indeed, an illusion.” [The Human Cycle, p. 42] But to counteract the unique possibility of progress now present in humanity was precisely the intention of the Lord of Falsehood who, firstly, caused an anti-Enlightenment and anti-intellect wave, called Fascism, and who, secondly, inspired Hitler with a similar, although much more radical far-reaching, programme. “God’s front is the spiritual front … Hitler’s Germany is not God’s front. It is the Asuric front, through which the Asura aims at world-domination. It is the descent of the Asuric world upon the human to establish its own power on the earth.” [Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p. 669] “Hitler did not want the keep the wheel of history moving, he wanted it to turn backwards”, writes the German historian Guido Knopp, who also speaks about Hitler’s intention “to go back to pre-modern, even pre-civilized forms of society”. [Hitler – Eine Bilanz, pp. 176, 177.]
There can be no doubt about this when one reads Hitler’s Mein Kampf—which at the time too few did seriously—and when one reads his recorded sayings about his vision. “Creation is not finished”, he said, “at least not as far as the human being is concerned. The human being stands, biologically speaking, clearly on a turning point. A new kind of human being becomes discernible … This causes the old species Man, as we have known it until now, to become inexorably decadent … All the creative power will be concentrated in the new species Man. Both species will quickly separate and develop in opposite directions. The one will sink below humanity, the other will rise far above the present humanity. I might call the former ‘god-man’ and the latter ‘mass animal’ … Yes, man is something that has to be overcome. Nietzsche knew already something about this in his own way. … Man becomes God, this is what it means in simple words. Man is the becoming God … Do you understand now the depth of our National Socialist movement?” Hitler asked Hermann Rauschning, the man to whom these words were addressed. “He who understands National Socialism only as a political movement knows practically nothing about it. It is more than a religion: it is the will to create a new humanity.” [Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler, pp. 231-232.]
These astonishing and revealing words leave little doubt that Hitler’s vision was, by way of speaking, the shadow of Sri Aurobindo’s. In fact, he systematically counteracted everything the Enlightenment stood for in order to build his pseudo-Darwinist racist world in which the ideal, its ‘god’, would be a kind of magnificent beast of prey, and the individual a cell in the integrated body of the people or nation. “If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one, because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile”, we read in Mein Kampf. And in the comments to his Table Talk we read that Hitler said: “My pedagogics are ruthless. What is weak must be hammered away. I want my youth strong and beautiful, masterful and fearless. The free, magnificent beast of prey must flash from their eyes. In this way I wipe out the years of human domestication and I obtain the pure, noble material of Nature. And I will be able to create what is new.”
Germany became the uniformed, drilled, militarized society which would be ‘the fist of the Führer’ and ‘the sword of God’. (Hitler has always been convinced that he was faithfully carrying out the instructions of his ‘God’.) It became “the rigid, armoured, aggressive, formidable Nazi state”. [The Human Cycle, p. 42] But “uniformity is death, not life”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, for whom individual freedom was an absolute principle without which real growth is impossible. He wrote in the heyday of Nazism: “If this trend becomes universal, it is the end of the Age of Reason, the suicide or the execution … of the rational and intellectual expansion of the human mental being. Reason cannot do its work, act or rule if the mind of man is denied freedom to think or freedom to realize its thought by action in life. But neither can a subjective age be the outcome …” [Ibid., p. 206] We know that the subjective age is necessary for the further development of the spirit in humanity and for its transformation into a higher kind of being.
This must suffice to indicate what was really at stake in the Second World War: the future of humanity, of the earth, of evolution. “Even if I knew that the Allies would misuse their victory or bungle the peace or partially at least spoil the opportunities opened to the human world by that victory, I would still put my force behind them. At any rate things could not be one-hundredth part as bad as they would be under Hitler. The ways of the Lord would still be open—to keep them open is what matters. Let us stick to the real, the central fact, the need to remove the peril of black servitude and revived barbarism threatening India and the world …” [Autobiographical Notes, p. 467]
Most people did not know what Hitler really had in mind, they did not realize that if they did not belong to the white Aryan master race, they would have to polish its boots. Especially the coloured peoples, rated somewhere with the animals, were the subject of his disdain. “To me, as a nationalist who appreciates the worth of the racial basis of humanity, I must recognize the racial inferiority of the so-called [colonially] ‘oppressed nations’, and that is enough to prevent me from linking the destiny of my people with the destiny of those inferior races”, he wrote in Mein Kampf. The treaty with the Japanese was only a matter of opportunity, for they were a kind of yellow monkeys, as the Nazis said behind their back. What the ‘reign of falsehood and death’ really meant became terribly clear when the gates of the concentration camps were crushed by the invading tanks, and when the documentary films and huge stacks of files were produced before the first military tribunal at Nuremberg.
Some details of the way in which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother put their force behind the anti-Hitler armies can be read in Nirodbaran’s Talks with Sri Aurobindo, in Purani’s Evening Talks, in Sri Aurobindo’s letters and in the conversations of the Mother. This, however, is only a small part of their real action, which was constant. The Mother would later say that in those years the situation was so serious that the avataric Yoga came to a complete standstill. This happened at a point that the descent of the Supermind was expected, as we find confirmed in K.D. Sethna. It must have been the last chance for the Asura to prevent the great turnabout the world is now subject to—the great swirling confusion which actually is the result of the momentous birth of a new world.
It should never be forgotten that when Hitler was at the zenith of his powers, in 1940 and 1941, he had, according to Sri Aurobindo, ‘a fifty percent chance of success’. [Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p. 939] Sri Aurobindo said clearly: “He is the enemy of our work.” [Purani, Evening Talks, p. 710] And in the days of Hitler’s greatest triumphs Sri Aurobindo said: “There is no chance for the world unless something happens in Germany or else Hitler and Stalin quarrel.” [Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p. 552] “Now only Hitler’s death can save the situation.” [Ibid., p. 721] Sketching the tactical moves of Hitler in October 1940, Sri Aurobindo commented: “So Hitler comes to Asia Minor and that means India.” [Ibid., p. 939] That Hitler’s pincer movement, through the Balkans and Southern Russia on the one hand and through North Africa on the other, was intended to reach India, is now abundantly documented. If Hitler had won, the evolution of the world, in its most critical stage, would have been turned back ‘for centuries if not for millennia’.
Now India is free, the Asian nations have taken their places among the nations of the world, the world is growing one, Indian spirituality is penetrating into the mind of the West, and the roads into the future, where man will become superman, have remained open. (These are ‘the five dreams’ of Sri Aurobindo as formulated by him in his radio message on the occasion of India’s independence.) Few know about the role ‘the Sage of Pondicherry’ and his ‘companion’ the Mother have played in rendering these developments possible. Sri Aurobindo lived secluded in his apartment, there on the first floor of a compound in Rue de la Marine, where apparently he sat mostly in a big chair. But in his autobiographical poems (and in Savitri) we read about his wounds which were ‘a thousand-and-one’, caused by the attacks of ‘the Titan Kings’. Nobody knew of his battles, except when in one such attack his thigh was broken. Nobody knew or knows much about the superhuman work Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have done for the world.
It is Sri Aurobindo himself who has compared the spiritual battle of the Second World War with Kurukshetra. “Ours is a sadhana which involves not only devotion or union with the Divine or a perception of Him in all things and beings”, he wrote, “but also action as workers and instruments and a work to be done in the world or a force to be brought in the world under difficult conditions; then one has to see one’s way and do what is commanded and support what has to be supported, even it if means war and strife carried on whether through chariots and bows and arrows or tanks and cars and American bombs and planes, in either case ghoram karma: the means and times and persons differ but it does not seem to me that Nolini is wrong in seeing in it the same problem as in Kurukshetra.” [Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 219]
[Source: The New Spirituality]
About the Authors: K.D. Sethna (25.11.1904 — 29.6.2011) was a Parsi sadhak who joined Sri Aurobindo Ashram at the age of twenty-three in December 1927. He was a noted poet, author, scholar and cultural critic whose published works include more than fifty titles. In 1930 he received the name of Amal Kiran from Sri Aurobindo. He was the editor of the monthly magazine Mother India from the time of its inception in 1949. Some of his notable books are The Secret Splendour, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, The Adventure of the Apocalypse, The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence, The Indian Spirit and the World’s Future, Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare, The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo—The Poet, Altar and Flame, The Mother: Past-Present-Future, The Problem of Aryan Origin: From an Indian Point of View, Ancient India in a New Light, The Spirituality of the Future: A Search Apropos of R.C. Zaehner’s Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, The Beginning of History for Israel, The Inspiration of Paradise Lost, Problems of Early Christianity, Problems of Ancient India, Our Light and Delight: Recollections of Life with the Mother, Science, Materialism, Mysticism: A Scrutiny of Scientific Thought and The Development of Sri Aurobindo’s Spiritual Thought and the Mother’s Contribution to it.
Georges Van Vrekhem (28 March 1935—31 August 2012) was a Flemish Belgian journalist, poet and playwright who became acquainted with the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in 1964. He visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1970 and joined it as an inmate. In 1978, he shifted to Auroville. A prolific writer on the lives and teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and recipient of the prestigious ‘Sri Aurobindo Puraskar’ awarded by Sri Aurobindo Samiti, Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata, his published works include masterpieces like Beyond Man: The Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Mother: The Story of Her Life, Overman: The Transitional Being between the Human and the Supramental Being, Patterns of the Present: From the Perspective of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Hitler and His God—The Background to the Nazi Phenomenon, Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God and Preparing for the Miraculous. His last book The New Spirituality was published after his demise in 2012.