Prosperity Room meetings

(Amal Kiran:) “Closely connected with the Soup Ceremony was a series of meetings between the Mother and a few sadhaks in the Prosperity Room before she went down. If the Soup Ceremony had an air of Divine Gravity, the Prosperity Meeting may be considered to have had about it a breath of Divine Levity. It was enjoyable beyond description. The Mother came an hour before the Soup and sat down and attended first to the chits submitted for articles from the Stores. The man in charge was the one who bore the all-overtopping name: Purushottam (‘Supreme being’). Our present Prosperity-chief, Harikant, was just a baby at that time. Besides Purushottam there were two or three people sitting there. Champaklal was always the Mother's attendant in those days, just as he has been in recent times. The Mother says she keeps some lions about her: they belong to the occult planes – but Champaklal looks almost like a physical lion guarding her – a faithful vehicle, vāhana, of her Power. In the course of time more and more people gathered around the Mother in the Stores. But it was not because they chose to do so: the manner in which the group grew was incalculable and depended on the Mother alone. I remember how I happened to be in the group. I once went up to collect a writing pad I had asked for. The Mother was sitting in her usual place. I was at the door and Purushottam came and gave me the pad. Then the Mother just said: “Would you like to sit here?” I replied, “Of course, of course.” Most happily I went in and sat down. In a more or less similar fashion hardly preplanned, each of the others got a place. The total number stayed fixed at the end. I think it was 24. Like 6, 24 had a special value. 6 is the half and 24 the double of Sri Aurobindo's number – 12 – which represents ‘The New Perfection’. Sri Aurobindo had said that there are 12 powers or vibrations seen from the beginning above the Mother's head: these are indicated in the outermost circle of the Mother's symbol. Sri Aurobindo also had observed that there are really 12 planets in our solar system. 9 have already been discovered but 3 still remain. If you can manage to get this widely proclaimed, you will be hailed as a prophet when the tally is at last made. According to Sri Aurobindo, 12 rays (creating colour-effects) come from the sun, not 7 as we believe. …
         To each of us sitting with the Mother in the Prosperity Room she gave a number. I have the impression that Doraiswamy who used to be in the group whenever he came down from Madras had the last number. The first number was of Dara's youngest brother, René. My own was 15, which adds up its numerals to 6: 6 is the number of what is called ‘The Divine Creation’, of which indeed I am very badly in need of all the time!
         We sat before the Mother in a rough semi-circle. But there was one exception. At the Mother's feet was a stool, and Chandulal, our Ashram engineer, somehow got to lie flat in front of the Mother with his head resting against the stool, and the soles of his feet displayed to us. (laughter). ‘Bite-bite’, the cat, often came and made herself comfortable on Chandulal's chest and he would try to talk to her in the endearing way the Mother used to address cats. His attempts were extremely funny to hear. All of us and the Mother herself laughed heartily. Chandulal was full of humour and sometimes of unconscious humour, odd turns of speech, strange combinations of words. Some of his pronouncements were quite memorable. I'll give a few examples. Once we had been waiting a long time in silent suspense for the Mother to come down to the room where the evening meditation took place. The effect which her appearance produced on us was summed up by Chandulal in the sentence: “We were all aghast.” How the Mother enjoyed this freakish expression! His character-reading of the first American lady to come to the Ashram – Janet McPheeters, renamed Shantimayi, who formed part of the Prosperity group – ran: “Frivolous in the eyes but serious in the back.” (laughter) She was puzzled as well as amused, until in less original English it was explained to her that he saw a seriousness of temper behind her apparent light-heartedness. On another occasion, he was discussing the repair of the ceiling of the room below the one across whose floor Sri Aurobindo used to walk vigorously, as he had done in the room of the old ‘Guest House’, where I later stayed for 10 years. Chandulal explained to the Mother in technical language that, if he used beams of a certain thickness, theu would bear the moving load only of such and such a weight! (laughter) The Mother felt very tickled and Chandulal did not know why she and all of us laughed. At last it dawned on him that he had unwittingly referred to Sri Aurobindo!
         Various things were done in the Prosperity soirées. The Mother answered all sorts of questions and gave many talks. I would jot down her words in abbreviated long-hand and later reconstruct them. My transcriptions have appeared as the third series in Words of the Mother.

Questions and Answers 1929-1931
Questions and Answers 1930-1931 (from p.123)

PDF (331)

(Note on the texts:) “During 1930 and 1931 the Mother spoke with a group of disciples who met with her in a room of the Ashram known as Prosperity. One of the participants recorded some of these conversations in abbreviated long-hand and later elaborated his notes. These reports were not revised by Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, but the Mother did approve of their publication and made a French translation. They were first published as a book (Words of the Mother: Third Series) in 1951.”

At times there would be readings from the works of Sri Aurobindo. We would thrust a finger or a paper-cutter into the pages of a book and read out the passage on which we would thus alight. The Mother herself took part in this game. At other times she invented games to test or develop our faculty of intuition. She would arrange some flowers to make up a sentence according to the significances allotted by her to them. We had to guess what she had in mind. It so happened – most interestingly – that every one of us had on at least once occasion the correct sentence implanted into our heads by her! What was thus demonstrated was not exactly our intuitiveness but her power to make us intuitive when she wanted. There were other games by her. I don't remember all the details. Whenever we succeeded in scoring a hit we got a material reward. A slab of French chocolate was the usual gift. Only I went after an unusual prize: a box of French cough-pastilles named Fiamma. I preferred their taste to the chocolate's. All the time there would be joking among us or with the Mother. We were quite uninhibited and the laughter was sometimes uproarious. Many of the over-serious sadhaks in the Soup Room, waiting for the Mother to come down, were rather disturbed and did not at all approve of the bursts of Ananda upstairs! (laughter) It went on like this for an hour every evening.
         There were two sights most deeply engraved on my memory. Both relate to the Mother. Once there was a meditation and, as was my wont, I kept opening my eyes and looking around. After the meditation had progressed for some minutes they fell on the Mother. Well, I have never seen the Mother as I saw her then. She was no longer human. Her whole body appeared to have become magnified and there was a light pervading her and the face was of a Goddess. I can only say that it was the face of Maheshwari. Sri Aurobindo has written of this aspect of the Divine Shakti: “Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother’s eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever. ...” This was the first time I realised that when the Mother wants she can put forth the Divine Presence and Power completely into the physical being and manifest it. My wife Sehra has seen light coming out of the Mother's whole body and, as it were, assimilating the physical substance or else getting assimilated into it and making it radiant. I have never witnessed such a phenomenon, but here before me was indeed a superhuman being without any veils. I said to myself, “How much I would have lost if I had meditated!” (laughter) And, if the Mother showed herself like that all the time, we would not require even to meditate, because all the human part in us, all the mortality in us would be absolutely quelled.
         This concrete vision of mine was one peak of the memorable sight-seeing I had in the Prosperity Room. The other peak, which I might call just the opposite but equally divine, was when we were playing a certain game with big lemons. Each of us was trying to balance one of these fruits on our head. And then the Mother herself did the same and sat steady, most unself-consciously. It was a revelatory spectacle, showing how one whom we considered the Supreme Divine incarnate could come down to a funny game like this – I mean something which might look even ridiculous. The Mother sitting with a big yellow lemon on her head! Can you imagine anything more unexpected? But whenever I recollect the sight I think of the mighty fourth line in the second stanza of Sri Aurobindo's “Rose of God”. Here is the stanza:

“Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,

Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!

Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden Mystery, flower,

Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.”

(Amal Kiran:) “… When the Mother, as a gracious host, entertained us in those sixty minutes in the Prosperity Room, we saw not only her utter height but also her complete refusal to put on any airs. Perhaps ‘refusal’ is not the right term because any airs would be unnatural to her and she does not have to make an effort against them. But we have to be on guard against taking her for granted. She comes so close to our beings, acts so familiarly with us, as though she were one of us, that unless we keep our minds and hearts open we shall be in danger at times of missing to realise what she is.
         I am sure Sri Aurobindo behaved in the same natural manner. From Nirod's accounts we see him overflowing with humour, cracking all kinds of jokes. Some of the jokes were even unreportable! (laughter) When editing Nirod's accounts, I submitted a few of Sri Aurobindo's jokes to the Mother for approval and she said: “No, no, you can't publish that in Mother India.”

(Amal Kiran:) “Something quite startling did happen once. You know we used to sit in a sort of semi-circle before the Mother. Suddenly she declared: “A fat black hostile being is sitting just in front of me.” We all looked at one another (laughter), and wondered who she could have meant. I happened to be right in front of her. (laughter) Well, I may be more or less blackish, perhaps some hostility too may have lurked, but surely I wasn't fat at all in those days. (laughter) So the suspicion slided off me, and then we could see from the Mother's eyes that she was looking at something that was invisible to us. After a while she packed the blighter off. “He has gone,” she said. We asked her: “Why didn't you finish him? Why did you just let him go?” She explained a very important point. These hostile forces take all kinds of forms. And it's no use destroying one form, because the forces themselves cannot be destroyed. They will take another form and come to harass you. But they do serve a purpose: they put their probing fingers on defect after defect in us, spot after spot which is receptive to them, so that every shortcoming of ours may spark up in our consciousness and we may be able to deal with all our weaknesses efficiently. They will go pricking us and poking us until we achieve absolute perfection. Then their existence will be nullified by becoming absolutely useless.”

(Amal Kiran:) “Another startler was when the Mother brought her original manuscript of Prayers and Meditations. The printed book had already come out, but we had never seen the handwritten version, the personal diary. With the shut volume in her lap, she asked us: “Name your favourite sentence.” All found out the words that had appealed to them most. Quite cooly the Mother picked up a pair of scissors and started cutting out from the manuscript the parts we had selected. Then she pasted them on pieces of paper, wrote our names on top, put the current date which was June 21, 1932, signed her name ‘Mira’ and handed the pieces to us. So precious a document she could just cut up and give away like that!”

(Champaklal:) “In those early days of the Ashram, every evening the Mother... came to the Stores (later named Prosperity) where, on the first of each month, she distributed articles for the daily use sanctioned to the Ashramites. In this hall, a small group of sadhaks and sadhikas whom she had permitted would be waiting for her. First she would examine the day's accounts kept by Purushottam (in charge of the Stores); then there would be talks and readings and sometimes what appeared to us light-hearted games. After these sessions she would go downstairs for the Soup ceremony for which the sadhaks and sadhikas assembled in the present Reception Hall.
         One was the Flower Game. Mother would bring some flowers and keep them on a stool in front of her. We would sit in a circle around her, each in the place she had allotted. From the significances that she had given to those flowers each of us had to make a sentence and bring our chits to her the next day. We read out our sentences and gave the chits to the Mother. Then she read the sentence she herself had composed. Thereafter, depending on how close our sentences had come to hers she would award prizes to the first three. I remember I was once given the first prize: my sentence had fallen short by just one word and that because I did not know the word. The Mother was very pleased.

Flower Sentences

The Divine solicitude is with you (meaning, you are getting all the help you need). But keep up your aspiration, remain faithful and the wrong movement will be changed into the right movement, so that the Victorious Love may manifest.

21.9.1929

By loving consecration and faithful service allow the Divine protection to be with you in your aspiring concentration for integral transformation.

23.9.1929

Love the Victor will manifest when there will be established – through the fivefold psychological perfection – the love of the physical being for the Divine, and when – through loving consecration – there will be a complete faithfulness to the Divine.
(Fivefold psychological perfection: faith, sincerity, devotion, aspiration, surrender.)

24.9.1929

Open with devotion your vital being to Radha's influence and you will get vital peace, the peace which leads to transformation.

25.9.1929

Through peace in the vital, aspire for the beginning of realisation.
(Peace in the vital is at once the basis of aspiration and the condition for the beginning of realisation.)

26.9.1929

To keep Agni burning always in the psychic centre is an indispensable condition for the transformation.

27.9.1929

With simple sincerity offer your vital being to the Divine and the realisation will begin.

2.10.1929

The devotion that accompanies Radha's absolute consecration, this alone has the power of bringing down Krishna's Light in the mind.

5.10.1929

Realise an integral silence in the being and a complete force of faith in this silence; then only can power descend and bring mastery over the things of the earth.

8.10.1929

Let your aspiration for progress be cheerful and you will get the Ananda of progress.

15.10.1929

Let faithfulness to the Divine be your tapasya. Then there will begin to come a realisation of the true supramental friendship with the Divine.

19.10.1929

Peace in the physical cells leads first to health and then to transformation.

22.10.1929

A mind quiet and filled with the sweetness of thoughts exclusively turned towards the Divine is the gate through which there will be the constant connection between the supramental light and the material being.

29.10.1929

Wakefulness, resolution and an integral even basis in the physical are initial conditions for the realisation.
Aspiration in the physical for the Divine's Love, a complete opening of the physical being to the Divine s Love and the turning of the whole physical consciousness towards the Divine, are the conditions for the last and entire transformation.

3.11.1929

Only if you have faith and vital confidence in the Divine, can the Divine Help come to you.

7.11.1929

Turn your consciousness to the Supramental Light, and let the supramental influence permeate through a pure mind, your sex centre. Then you will obtain mastery over the sex centre.

13.11.1929

With aesthetic taste and vital purity build up vital harmony. This will make possible the manifestation of the supramental beauty in the physical.

14.11.1929

Let the flame of devotion help you to have the patience needed for transformation.

18.11.1929

The complete opening of the vital to the Divine leading to the entire conversion and to the transformation of the power in the higher vital and the conquest of low vital movements like greed for food and sexual desire are the necessary conditions for bringing into the physical the principle of eternal youth.

28.11.1929

By integral endurance, perfect mental plasticity and the organisation of an integral progress, conquer the vital enemies.

22.12.1929

By vital stability, by purified life-energy and by the supramental influence in the cells it will be possible for the body consciousness to undergo the supramental transformation which will fix the ananda in the sex centre.

23.12.1929

Be completely obedient to the Divine's Love. This will transform your being till it becomes supramentally plastic.

8.1.1930

Silence all outside noise, aspire for the Divine's Help; open integrally to it when it comes and surrender to its action, and it will effectively bring about your transformation.

11.2.1930

Let gold be turned to the service of the Divine. So it will get purified and take its true place in Krishna's play in the material.

26.4.1930

Surrender all falsehood; your physical mind will be converted and a mental victory won.

1.5.1930

(Champaklal:) “Among the other games, there was one in which each had to write what he wanted. We wrote on a piece of paper and gave it to Mother. I have those chits even now. Except the paper of Amal on which he has written his name, you will find that the Mother herself has noted the name on each chit. There were also other questions – once it was “What is Yoga?”, another day on “Realisation”, then “Experience” and so on.”

“What do you want?”

“An all-surrendering love by which the whole vital being becomes purified and one-pointed.” – Amal

“Full conversion and consecration of the physical consciousness. Liberation from all sexual impulses and desires.” – Pavitra

“To be taken right into the Beyond in surrender.” – Datta

“Deep and complete Faith in all the parts (even in the physical cells).” – Chandulal

“I pray constantly to Him to give me the realisation of the harmony between the inner and the outer that I may devote myself entirely and truly to the Mother.” – Amrita

“In the perfect peace the descent of the supramemal light in the physical.” – Dyuman

“Make my body a perfect instrument of your work.” – Satyen

“Right attitude.” – Champaklal

(Amal Kiran:) “On one occasion the Mother asked us: “What is Yoga?” That's a good subject to end with; for after all, we must know what we are trying to do. Several of us gave the Mother our definitions. I have recovered a copy of them from the limbo of my old notes of mine. But I don't remember quite exactly who was the author of which definition. I can give you my own conjectures and perhaps you can form surmises of your own. I'll read the definitions to you. It is interesting to note how various individuals respond to the spiritual Call and envisage the Integral Life. Some of the definitions incline to be philosophical in their terms, others bring out more feelingly the Ideal, while others try to catch the actual working of Yoga in general, and the remainder hint the inner psychic movement in a purely personal mode.
         Here is the first definition: “Divinising life.”
         Who could have framed it? It sounds like Nolini to my ears. He is in the habit of being either short and sweet or else short and severe, and in each case gets rid of a question or a questioner as quickly as possible. (laughter) But he puts a lot of stuff into his few words and gives plenty of food for thought. Not much demonstrativeness, but a good deal of concentrated self-dedication.
         The next definition runs: “Faith in the Divine and aspiration for the Highest.”
         This has for me the ring of Amrita. It has a spontaneous putting of oneself in the Mother's care, believing in her implicitly and trying one's best to live up to her expectations.
         Then we have a long definition: “A series of experiences which the individual soul feels from the time of the contact with the Divine up to the union with the Divine.”
         Quite a dictionary definition – a satisfying one from the intellectual standpoint but a little lacking in the human sense of things and in personal particularity. I seem to hear a man named Satyen. I am not sure any of you have heard of him, for Satyen left the Ashram not long after the contact with the Divine but very long before the union. Perhaps the series of experiences proved a process too long-drawn-out?
         The next is: “The process by which we transcend the ego and put on the Divine Consciousness, and by which we transform the lower nature into the Divine Nature.”
         This too is a bit of a mouthful, but it has more particularity. The ego seems to have been a troublesome thing and the lower nature a rather demanding proposition. Transcendence and transformation are prominently felt as needs. A sort of talkativeness about one's problems also comes through – and I have the impression of our great Dara, with his portly presence and his lively interest in the ego's doings and the lower nature's problems, as well as his constant commentary on what used to go on in himself.
         Now we have: “Birth of the supreme harmony in matter from the union of the above with the below.”
         Possibly the pronouncement is of the person named Purushottam who was in charge of the Prosperity and much occupied with material objects. He was also constantly concerned with movements from below – not low movements but a thrust as of the Divine concealed in matter. That impulsion used to make him jerk his legs again and again during meditation. (laughter) But the above also was not outside his feeling. Of course, his name itself – colloquially speaking – means the chap who is above all, the topmost fellow – and its bearer seemed interested in other people's tops too. Once during a collective meditation with the Mother he moved about in an inspired way and pulled out a fistful of hair from a sadhak's head. (laughter) Don't laugh; for, though it looks as if the sadhak must have taken good care not to expose himself again to Purushottam's inspiration, such a thought could never have crossed his mind then. Let me tell you that those were very serious sessions and the Mother was drawing down the beings of the Gods into people, and the sadhaks felt great exaltation and had an remarkable experiences. With what Purushottam did, that sadhak had an unforgettable spiritual experience. The Mother confirmed its genuineness and indicated the extraordinary meaning of what had happened to him. Hers had been the general guiding force, even if the particular form given to it may have shown Purushottam's originality.
         Then there is the definition: “To be entirely cleansed of falsehood so that there may be purity to know the Divine Will and respond to the Call at every moment.”
         Some worker wishing to be totally consecrated and made ready as an instrument of the Divine is voiceful in these words. But who could it be? In those days there were five prominent workers in different ways. There was Chandulal, there was Champaklal, there was Dyuman, there was Doraiswamy and there was the Englishwoman Datta, originally Dorothy Hodgeson. Doraiswamy mostly worked outside the Ashram for the Ashram, and he had to deal with a lawyer's world which is notoriously in need of being cleansed of falsehood. And he was also known to be constantly invoking the Divine inwardly to guide him and help him in his complicated cases. Our sentence is phrased in a matter quite consistent with such a habit and it has the lawyer's language – well-knit and logical. So he could be its author. The statement is perhaps too long for Champaklal or Dyuman and is not quite in character with Datta's more direct and less ample movement. It is quite possible for Chandulal in its general bearing, but accurate expression of a complex thought was not precisely Chandulal's strong point.
         As regards the next definition, I am positive about its authorship. It goes: “To return home.”
         The statement has a beautiful brevity. It was Pavitra (Philippe Barbier St.-Hilaire) who framed these words. They have the French flavour – the simple blended with the suggestive, a felicitousness of phrase bringing out a delicate depth of feeling, and it is the feeling of the inmost heart, into which Pavitra, when he meditated, was in the habit of penetrating. From his face one could gather that he had found there his happy repose.
         Not much longer is the definition that follows: “To do as Mother directs us to do.”
         This could be any worker speaking. It could be Champaklal or Dyuman, the ever-ready obedient servants of the other, full of the zest of putting her Will into action. But perhaps there is here a certain leaning towards outer guidance, a waiting for the spoken command, the explicit directive. I sense a kind of English trait. Was it Datta defining Yoga thus? She was a very close attendant on the Mother for years.
         Next we read: “To live in Mother and to know Mother's Will.” Here is the same aspiration, with just the colour of a greater tendency to go inward into a devoted awareness of the personal Divine. A more Indian trait is evident. Maybe Champaklal, may be Dyuman.
         Then: “Not to hinder the Mother in making the best possible out of you.”
         It could have come very well from an Iranian lady named Tajdar, who unfortunately went away after several years of service to the Ashram life. When I knew her, she was always eager to put all of herself at the Mother's disposal.
         The next one is: “To be in complete union with the Mother.”
         A good summing-up of our ideal, but a little on the general side, showing a bent towards mental expression. Perhaps it came from a girl who had the most mental turn in those days among the sadhikas: Chinmayi. She had a great striving in her to be one with the Mother, but obstacles in her being, which others would not have made much of in themselves, she felt terribly. In a certain sense this was due to an intense sincerity which felt extreme dissatisfaction at the slightest shortcoming, a dissatisfaction which could be very upsetting. She passed away many years ago.
         Now only two definitions are left. One of them is: “To live for Mother as if nobody and nothing else existed.”
         Here is the echo of the strong movement of self-giving which once characterised Lalita. At one time it seemed as if she were an inseparable part of the Mother.
         Now the very last: “To feel a warmth and a glow in my heart in my relation with Mother.”
         This somewhat emotional-sounding expression comes – strange to say – from somebody who would be expected to use more brainy language. Instead of “a warmth and a glow in my heart”, one would imagine him saying, “a heat and a light in my head.” But actually he had lost his head over Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and that surely was the heart's doing – but for a long time he didn't know what had happened and felt a kindling and unkindling of the heart's love for the Divine – and was all agog to stop the latter and keep always the flame he knew in the Mother's presence. Poor chap, he is still trying to tend the sacred fire. We'll wish him a steady progress and as few stumbles as possible. (laughter)

“What is Yoga?”

“To feel a warmth and a glow in the heart in my relation with You.” – Amal

“Transformation of my consciousness in terms of the consciousness of the Mother.” – Amrita

“To live in Mother and to know Mother's Will.” – Champaklal

“To do as Mother directs us to do.” – Chandulal

“A series of experiences which the individual soul feels from the time of its contact with the Divine up to the union with the Divine.” – Dara

“To be so entirely cleansed of falsehood that there may be purity to know the Divine Will and respond to the Call at any moment.” – Datta

“Not to hinder Mother in making the best possible of us.” – Doraiswamy

“To be in complete union with You.” – Dyuman

“To live only for Mother as if nobody and nothing else existed.” – Lalita

“Divinising life.” – Nolini

“To return home.” – Pavitra

“Birth of the supreme harmony in matter from the union of the above and the below.” – Purushottama

“The process by which we transcend the ego and put on the Divine Consciousness and by which we transform the lower nature into the divine nature.” – Satyen

“Faith in the Divine and aspiration for the Highest.” – Tajdar

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See also

• The Soup Ceremony
• Talks with Sri Aurobindo (book)