Udar Pinto on Sri Aurobindo's Mahasamadhi

Excerpts from the Book, Udar, pp. 37-38.

‘Mother gave me instructions for the casket which was made of solid wood and lined with silk. Sri Aurobindo was still lying on his bed and there was the most marvellous golden light emanating from his body, and a scent like a celestial perfume. The Mother told me how deep to go into the Samadhi and how to design it.

‘We built the Samadhi not as a hole in the ground but as a vault with thick concrete walls nine inches thick with cement floors and a cement roof. We went down eight feet and built a four-foot room with cement slabs. Over that the Mother instructed me to build another room also with walls, a floor, and a roof. She told me to fill it with clean river sand and to put a large slab on the top. Thus was the Samadhi built.

‘Mother wanted Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Samadhi’ to be under the Service Tree in the Ashram courtyard. She gave detailed instructions, saying how deep we should go and that we should construct a waterproof chamber down below with a waterproof cement slab cover and then an air-space with another waterproof cement slab cover. Then earth was to be filled over this till it came above the surface of the ground, and around it the walls of the Samadhi were to be built.

‘The Mother also told us to prepare a fine case for His body. I got the Harpagon Workshop to start making one in solid thick rosewood with brass straps and brass rings on the side to take the ropes.

‘We started working from the morning of the 5th. We decided to build the Samadhi ourselves without paid labour. The ground was hard—very hard—and breaking it was quite a job. It was decided that the burial would take place on the evening of the 5th. Discoloration of the body generally sets in within 24 hours, 35 hours is the outside limit. But when it was about time for the burial there was no sign of decomposition at all. In fact, even though life had left the body, it was suffused with a golden light and Sri Aurobindo’s face shone with it.

‘On the morning of the 9th, Mother decided that the body would be put into the Samadhi already prepared. The body was placed in the casket and covered with a bed sheet but the face was uncovered. The Mother stood over it and concentrated for quite some time in order, as She explained to us afterwards, to free the physical body from the subtle body and other conscious parts of the being that normally continue to stay with a body for several days after death.

‘Then Mr. R.K. Tandon, the Indian Consul General at Pondicherry… was called in to witness the closing of the casket with the body of Sri Aurobindo inside.

In Savitri, 'The Book of Death' is short. When Sri Aurobindo was asked about this he said, "You cannot be expected to write something you have never consciously experienced. " So he experienced death consciously and will return to complete the Book of Death.

— Udar

K.D Sethna on Sri Aurobindo's Mahasamadhi

"No doubt, it was not death in its utter commonness. The uraemia that preceded it had been unique. Every medical sign was there of its absolute hold over the body's reactions — save one: Sri Aurobindo, as if by an independence of comatose brain and nerve, could command consciousness again and again, inquire what the time was or ask for water. Unique also was the sequel of the uraemic poisoning. Between the instant when life clinically ended and the instant when the body was laid in a casket and lowered into a special Vault in the Ashram courtyard, nearly five days passed without a trace of decomposition. And many saw with even their physical eyes the body glowing with what the Mother had called the concentration in it of the light of the Supermind, the Divine Consciousness in its integrality which Sri Aurobindo and she had been labouring with the patience of heaven-sent pioneers to bring down for the first time to suffering earth. Mortality in its normal form was not here; yet something of its age-old doom was present and that was a question-mark glaring in the face of every disciple and making most enigmatic that varied wonderful life of seventy- eight years, triumphant over all human difficulties.

The question-mark cannot be completely removed. Depths beyond depths lie in an event of this nature: the human mind is unable to compass them all. But a few significances gleam out for an initial understanding and set a general perspective in which our aching and groping gaze may rest.

There was no failure on Sri Aurobindo's part: this is certain from the psychological and physical details put together — of the preceding months as well as of the actual illness. There was only a strange sacrifice. And if Sri Aurobindo the indomitable made the sacrifice, must be one that was a sudden terrible short-cut to some secret victory for God in the world at the cost of a personal consummation. We may remember the opening of his sonnet entitled "In the Battle"- 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.

What occasioned the present sacrifice appears to have been earth's insufficient receptivity to the Aurobindonian gift of the descending Supermind. Something in the gross constitution of terrestrial creatures would not thrill to the Grace from on high, would not appreciate with a response deep enough the colossal work that was being done at a selfless expense of energy and with a silent bearing of "the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal". If the earth's consciousness had been more receptive, the crisis of the human body's conversion into terms of divinity would have begun in a less radical shape and without so extreme an upshot for one individual in the van of life's fight towards perfection. Hence much of the responsibility for the upshot lies with the absence of co-operation by the mind of the race .It was as if the beings Sri Aurobindo had come to save had turned his enemies — not deliberately in all cases, yet with a dullness of perception and an inertia of the will that were as crucial.

This dullness and this inertia were not only an obstacle to the descending Divine: they were also perilous for the world itself. To the obscure occult forces — powers and principalities of darkness — which always oppose the Divine's work and which were reacting against the tremendous pressure of the Aurobindonian light in a vast upsurge, to these forces bent on a final calamitous counter-attack across the battle- field that is man, man's dullness and inertia gave a ground of support and thus signed his own doom. Sri Aurobindo, born to put his mission above everything else, could not but follow the course he did: how could he betray the long- invoked Supermind whose hour on earth was preparing to strike, or let the world which he had bound to his heart pay disastrously for its unreadiness for the divine advent? He gathered, as it were, the myriad antagonist spears into his own breast, took upon himself a globe-wide catastrophe.

Most unlike him would it have been to do anything in the crisis save sanction the very worst that could happen to him because of humanity's unresponsiveness, and somehow weave it with his invincible spiritual art into the design of his own master mission.

That mission was the conquest of the very foundations of life's imperfect structure through the ages. Not only to build a golden dome but to transform what he symbolically called the dragon base in the Inconscience from which the universe has evolved: this was Sri Aurobindo's work. And it had to be done one way or another. There could have been a way of slow conquest, preserving his own body by a careful rationed spirituality which would run no deadly hazards for the sake of rapid salvation of the sorrow-burdened world. The way of revolutionary evolution, thrown open like an abyss, was to let his body admit an illness symbolic of the drive of the Inconscience from below and, after a limited though intensely significant contest, carry in an actual death its own godlike presence into the stuff of the Inconscience. Death was the glory-hole desperately blown into the massive rock of that stuff for the physical divinity of Sri Aurobindo to permeate in a direct and literal sense the darkness wrapped within darkness which the Vedic seers had long ago intuited to be Nature's cryptic womb of lightward creation. By identifying his physical divinity with that primal Negation of the Divine, he has effected an immediate entry into the heart of the enemy's camp: he has taken by surprise the central strong- hold of all that frustrates and destroys, all that renders precarious the body's beauty, frail the life-energy's strength, flickering the mind's knowledge, and swallows up in its monstrous void the marvellous legacy left to mankind by the hero and the sage.

By passing beyond the visible scene he has not passed to some transcendent Ineffable. He who had held incarnate within himself both the potence and the peace of the Transcendent — the creative Supermind, the Truth-Consciousness of the ultimate Spirit — needed no flight from the universe to reach the Highest. Nor like a background influence would he act now on earth, he whose whole aim was not only to widen and heighten the individual but make all wideness and height focus themselves and become dynamic in the individual instrument. Still in the foreground of events, in the thick of time's drama with eternity as his theme, still as a 3concentrated individualisation of the wide and the high, an organised being in whom the Supramental kārana śaīra or causal divine body has descended into the sūkṣma śaīra or subtle body built of mind-stuff, life-stuff and even what we may term subtle-physical as distinguished from gross-material stuff, he stands close to earth with his sacrificed corporeal substance as a firm irremovable base and •centre in the Inconscience for spreading there his immortal light and changing earth's fate from the sheer bottom of things no less than from the sheer top.

This is how the occult eye sees the paradoxical climax whose first anniversary falls today. And as one watches the holy spot that is Sri Aurobindo's samadhi in the midst of his Ashram and all about is the aroma of flowers and incense- sticks expressing the mute prayer of the thousands of hearts to whom he is the Avatar of a super-humanity to be, the concrete close reality of the Master of the Integral Yoga requires no proof. But the entire sacrifice, with its immense mysterious potency, was possible because, commemorating each future anniversary and conducting the Ashram, there is amongst us his co-worker, his manifesting and executive Shakti, the Mother. It is because she, in harmony with his plan to tight from two bases, remains on earth to foster the golden future, that he could draw back from the visible scene as if to pull inward the taut string of the spiritual bow and make the God-tipped arrow fly swifter and farther. She who has been one with him in the Supramental attainment, one in vast vision and integral work, joint-parent of the new age in which the outer physical as well as the inner psychological is meant to be Godlike and wonderfully immune, she is the bridge across which Sri Aurobindo's triumph of winning all while seeming to lose everything moves in ever-increasing beauty and power into Matter's ignorant world of a life that is but death in disguise. Without her embodied mediation, without her retention of the Aurobinionian consciousness in full visibility before us, the upward illumining of the Inconscience by Sri Aurobindo for Matters transformation would lack in completeness of result. Her protective hold on earth justifies the withdrawal he has accomplished: her radiant presence fulfils the miraculous power of his absence.

By the co-operation between that absence and this presence a leap in spiritual evolution has been made. A hint of it is in a new expression that comes again and again over the Mother's face. The Supermind, whose realisation and subsequent descent are the Aurobindonian Yoga, seems now not only active as before from above, unfolding its gigantic downward dynamism in its own time, but also operative as a gleaming nucleus of World-Will from even the physical brain-level of the embodied consciousness that is the guru, day after day, to the Godward movement of our souls. In other words, the Supermind possessed overhead by the Mother is now commanded more and more by her from its own growing poise below. The wish of the very earth-self in her begins to be binding, so to speak, on the creativity of her own Supreme Self in the Transcendence. This means a developing adjustment of the incalculable time-rhythm of the Supramental descent from on high to the impatient beat of the aspiring human heart. The possibility dawns of a rapturous acceleration of the Truth-Consciousness's transforming process — and a greater, more luminous mastery of material life, a deeper invasion of the body by the Immortal Existence, a swifter and more palpable progress towards the conquest of darkness and death for which the secret decisive blow was struck in that strangely fateful moment in the dead of night one year ago."