The Mother ( 1878-1973)

The Mother was born Mirra Alfassa in Paris on 21 February 1878. An accomplished painter and musician, she began to have spiritual experiences at a very early age. In the beginning of the present cen­tury she studied occultism under Theon in Algeria.

In 1914 she came to Pondicherry and at once recognised Sri Aurobindo as the teacher who had been occultly guiding her spiritual development. She helped him start a monthly review Arya, in which most of his major writings, The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Human Cycle etc., appeared between 1914 and 1921. The Mother spent the years of the First World War in France and Japan. She returned to Pondicherry on 24 April 1920 and resumed her collabo­ration with Sri Aurobindo.

When, on 24 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo withdrew for exclu­sive pursuit of his spiritual work, the guidance of the spiritual disci­ples who had gathered around him was entrusted to the Mother. This was the beginning of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, which has since developed into a many-faceted centre of spiritual endeavour and research.

In 1956, the Mother declared that “the manifestation of the Su­pramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a real­ity.” Till her Mahasamadhi on 17 November 1973, the Mother was engrossed in the arduous tapasya of what she called the “yoga of the cells” — working on the gross matter to divinise and supramentalise it … to discover the path to the Supramental being, the next higher stage in the terrestrial evolution, after man.