While she was in the body, the Mother at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, was both externally and internally the heart and raison d'être of everyone's existence there and each one's daily life gravitated around her and her radiant presence. The sense of a collective yoga was in-tensely experienced and the "howto's" were close at hand, because the Mother was available to answer to every specific circumstance. Anie Nunnally, whose name Anie was given to her by the Mother, spent four precious years at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville from 1968 to 1972. She had gone there with the Mother's permission and with the sole purpose of being under her spiritual aegis. During her years there she was associated with the Mother through letters and both public and private darshans. This was the time during which the Mother was at the height of her in-tense inner work with the descent of the supramental consciousness. Anie became deeply aware of the Mother's yoga shakti in her own life and in the lives of sadhaks of the Ashram with whom she has formed many deep and abiding friendships.
When the Mother withdrew from the physical body in 1973, many felt that the Integral Yoga would become im-practicable and that the Ashram would crumble since there was now no external guidance. A similar mood had arisen like a cloud after Sri Aurobindo's passing in 1950, but the Mother's presence and action were quick to dispel this mood. She more than amply filled in the space left by Sri Aurobindo's departure, and for good reason, for had he not said "The Mother's Consciousness and mine are the same"? But now there was no successor. How could the yoga be done? How would the Ashram run? From where would the answers come?
For those who had the concrete experience of the working of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's yogic force in their lives, this was no issue. Exclusively reliant on the inner guidance, nothing had changed. If anything. Their action had grown more available, more universal. Both in the Ashram and in Auroville the Mother had left a solid core of such sadhaks whose unshakeable practice of yoga grounded Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's living consciousness not only in their own lives but in the larger collective context. Individuals and the collective continued to grow horizontally and vertically more lives were touched, the yoga progressed. The grand experiment of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, pre-paring human lives to embody a divine life on earth, proceeded on schedule, paving the golden path to supermanhood.
Can the same be asserted for the present? In this rapidly changing world, with its trappings of modernity impacting every facet of life (and the Ashram and Auroville are in no way exempt from this), with the physical memories of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother growing more remote by the day and the generations of early sadhaks progressively dwindling, once more the doubtful question raises its anxious head does the yoga have a future?
Surprisingly, today the yoga is alive and well, not only at the Ashram and Auroville, but throughout the world. Increasing numbers are making the Ashram environs their home, the Ashram life their lives. It is the same for Auroville and testimony for the proliferation of the sadhana in all walks of life all over the world is borne by the swelling populations that arrive each year at the Ashram for darshans. Among these, the majority have never had any contact with either Sri Aurobindo or the Mother in Their physical embodiment and yet most feel Them intimately guiding their lives. A book, a photo or the example of a disciple has touched their lives and a door has opened they have been invited to the Great Adventure; a guiding hand has reached out to them from across the gulf that separates us from the unknowable mystery and has taken them by the hand.
But in spite of this, except for the few, our steps, bereft of the external guidance, have been at best faltering and we have turned for pointers to the lives and teachings of the Masters.
What was it like to live in the physical presence of the greatest open secret and mystery of our times the incarnated presence among human beings of the divine consciousness in double form? What effect did it have on the inner life? What living trace did it leave behind that the dwindling core of direct disciples continues to bear testimony to in their lives? There are the writings, letters and conversations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and a great deal has been written by disciples in the form of reminiscences, all of which are invaluable help to seekers of the Integral Yoga today.
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