TToday, Sri Aurobindo Ashram is known as a great centre of spiritual endeavour. People from all over the world come to Auroville, in South India, to bathe in an atmosphere full of peace, light and joy, to live a life of sadhana and yoga, to imbibe a new spiritual force that can embrace and perfect life.
And the word they hear the most in the Ashram is ‘Mother’. From the beginning, Sri Aurobindo entrusted the Mother with full material and spiritual charge of the Ashram. Everything in the Ashram is her creation; every initiative draws inspiration from her and moves towards her vision.
The Mother beautifully summarizes her mission thus: “…my only aim in life is to give a concrete form to Sri Aurobindo’s great teaching and in his teaching he reveals that all the nations are essentially one and meant to express the Divine Unity upon earth through an organised and harmonious diversity”. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother strove together to embody and manifest upon earth this Divine Consciousness, with the Ashram as the starting point.
It was the Mother who, along with Sri Aurobindo, planted the seeds of a new way of life founded on this higher consciousness. It was her drive, her force, her guidance that made things happen. From the smallest insignificant detail to the overseeing of every aspect of maintaining the Ashram, from interacting with the children of the Centre of Education to the supervising of the athletic competitions in the sports ground—she was there, fully present, to see that everything is raised to its utmost perfection.
Just as Sri Aurobindo once said that his life “has not been on the surface for man to see”, it is indeed equally difficult to describe the Mother’s life as well. And yet, we may mention a few significant dates and features of her extraordinary life.