On the Relation Between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

The relation between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is an earthly representation of the truth of Ishwara (The Lord) and Shakti (His Eternal Power). The Lord is the Eternal Witness free from all that He creates through His Power. The Shakti is the Divine Mother who binds Herself to Her Creations and thereby becomes a bridge between the Lord and His creation. It is She who builds names and forms for the Lord to inhabit them. The Lord is pure Existence, Sat, void of all forms and figures through all existences are derived from Him. The Divine Mother is pure Consciousness (Knowledge and Power) or Chit tapas.  Alone the Lord is Infinite Peace which is liberative. Their coming together in a perfect Union brings into play the Eternal’s Ananda. This is what creation is meant to unfold through the long and tortuous journey needed to prepare earth and man to eventually embody the highest Delight or Ananda. Thus we have the great trinity of God as described in the Indian spiritual experience as Sacchidananda or Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss).

Seen thus, the Divine Mother is at once the Mother of God since it is She who endows the Ishwara with Form and Name and creates bodies for Him to be born as the Avatar. She is also His sister as the two are together as twins, emerging from the same Supreme who is beyond both Being and Non-Being. She is also His Spouse, the Eternal Feminine who manifests all that is hidden within the Ishwara or the Lord. She is also His daughter who has gone forth far from Him into the dark Inconscient to bring there the Light.

Since the two who are one came to give birth to the New Creation, their relation also reflects the truth of the Ishwara, the Lord and His Shakti. Sri Aurobindo however preferred to call Her ‘Mother’ since She came to give birth to and nurture and nourish the New Creation. The Mother addressed him as Lord or the Ishwara. Their relation is best described in Her words thus: ‘Without Him, I exist not; without me, He is unmanifest.’

Sri Aurobindo has best described their relation indirectly in his poem, The Mother of God.

THE MOTHER OF GOD

A conscious and eternal Power is here
Behind unhappiness and mortal birth
And the error of Thought and blundering trudge of Time.
The mother of God, his sister and his spouse,
Daughter of his wisdom, of his strength the mate,
She has leapt from the Transcendent’s secret breast
To build her rainbow worlds of mind and life.
Between the superconscient absolute Light
And the Inconscient’s vast unthinking toil,
In the rolling and routine of Matter’s sleep
And the somnambulist motion of the stars
She forces on the cold unwilling Void
Her adventure of life, the passionate dreams of her heart.
Amid the work of darker Powers she is here
To heal the evils and mistakes of Space
And change the tragedy of the ignorant world
Into a Divine Comedy of joy
And the laughter and the rapture of God’s bliss.
The Mother of God is mother of our souls;
We are the partners of his birth in Time,
Inheritors we share his eternity.
(-1945)