A New Creation on Earth: Death and Transformation in the Yoga of Mother Mirra Alfassa

A New Creation on Earth: Death and Transformation in the Yoga of Mother Mirra Alfassa Stephen Lerner Julich1 Abstract: This paper acts as a précis of the author’s dissertation in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. The dissertation, entitled Death and Transformation in the Yoga of Mirra Alfassa (1878- 1973), Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: A Jungian Hermeneutic, is a cross-cultural exploration and analysis of symbols of death and transformation found in Mother’s conversations and writings, undertaken as a Jungian amplification. Focused mainly on her discussions of the psychic being and death, it is argued that the Mother remained rooted in her original Western Occult training, and can best be understood if this training, under the guidance of Western Kabbalist and Hermeticist Max Théon, is seen, not as of merely passing interest, but as integral to her development. Keywords: C.G. Jung, death, integral yoga, Mother Mirra Alfassa, psychic being, Sri Aurobindo, transformation. Mirra Alfassa was one of those rare individuals who was in life a living symbol, at once human, and identical to the indescribable higher reality. Her yoga was to tear down the barrier that separates heaven and earth by defeating the Lord of Death, through breaking the habituated belief that exists in every cell of the body that all life must end in death and dissolution. Ultimately, her goal was to transform and spiritualize matter. In my dissertation I applied a Jungian lens to amplify the Mother’s statements. Amplification, as it is usually understood in Jungian circles, is a method used to expand an analyst’s grasp of images and symbols that appear in the dreams of analysands. Of it Jung (1913/1985) wrote: “Once embarked on the task of examining . dream-material, you must not shrink from any comparison” (p. 145). “The analyst,” he wrote, “collects the historical parallels to every part of the dream, even the remotest, and tries to reconstruct the psychological history of the dream and its underlying meanings” (p. 147). Thus, myth, history, anthropology, psychology, literature, and spiritual traditions from all periods and cultures are mined to enrich the understanding of the symbols from the dream. 1 Stephen L. Julich, PhD., is a graduate of the East-West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His dissertation entitled: Death and Transformation in the Yoga of Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: A Jungian Hermeneutic, compares the symbols present in the Mother’s yoga with those from Western Occultism. A lifelong student of the work of psychologist C. G. Jung and his student Marie-Louise von Franz, Dr. Julich has a special interest in the interrelationship of matter, psyche, and spirit as revealed through the multivalent and numinous language of the unconscious—the symbol. [email protected] INTEGRAL REVIEW September 2013 Vol. 9, No. 3 Julich: A New Creation on Earth 81 It might at first appear reductionistic to use such a method when looking at the Mother’s visionary statements from the Agenda. To the disciple who experiences the Mother as the feminine principle of the Immanent Divine—the one whom Sri Aurobindo (Ghose, 2002) described as “the divine conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence” (p. 17)—it might even seem futile. To this objection I would offer two arguments. First, the Mother often referred to her first teacher, Kabbalist and Hermeticist Max Théon, with whom she worked while she still lived in France. Understanding Théon’s cosmology opens up extraordinary vistas wherein we can see the Mother’s work as part of a network of esoteric teachings reaching back through Western history to the pre-Socratics, Mesopotamians, Dynastic Egyptians, Indo-Aryans, descending in broken and unbroken lines all the way to late 19th century occult circles (Goodrick-Clarke, 2008). Doing this will also help clarify certain confusions concerning Integral Yoga’s terminology, especially the use of the term ‘psychic being’, which is considered to be unique to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work (Pandit, 2006, para 1), while it is in truth an idea the Mother learned from Théon, who developed it from Lurianic Kabbalah. Second, the often enigmatic visions the Mother had a striking resemblance to dreams, especially those of people approaching death (von Franz, 1986). Anyone who knows the Mother’s work at all, knows that she was often focused on her struggles with the asura (anti- divine being) known as the Lord of Death. Since her struggles were with this being, and since her visions do bear such a remarkable resemblance to dreams of impending death, I argue that amplifying her statements as one would amplify dreams makes perfect sense. This is not to put the Mother on the psychologist’s couch, but to develop a broader understanding of the images, which have not only historical provenience, but psychological as well. That said, I do not use Jung’s ideas here in a therapeutic sense (I will not bring up any actual dream material in this paper), but in an attempt to understand their broader application as indicators of the multifaceted reality in which we are embedded, which Jung claimed was only approachable through the psyche—and even then only symbolically. In other words, I enlist him to help delineate the archetypal and symbolic dimensions of her statements. One of the richest images from the Mother’s (Alfassa, 1981) conversations, is that of Death as a veil, threshold, or doorway between worlds (p. 237). This is also the central revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s (Ghose, 1993) poetic retelling of Savitri—a short tale of love’s conquest of death from the Indian epic Mahābhārata, which Sri Aurobindo expanded into an epic of terrestrial and cosmic evolution. In Sri Aurobindo’s poem, it is when Savitri, who has descended into the underworld to retrieve the soul of her deceased husband, reveals to Death that she is in actuality the Divine Mother, and that Death himself is merely a mask—a transitory prop of the Divine— that Savitri finally breaks through Death’s persona (a Jungian term that literally means “mask”). When Death’s grip is destroyed, the world above and the world below are united in the body of the reborn Satyavan. The Mother (Alfassa, 1981) stated emphatically that the sections of Savitri concerned with the confrontation of the Lord of Death were written about her “experience EXACTLY” (pp. 37–38). INTEGRAL REVIEW September 2013 Vol. 9, No. 3 Julich: A New Creation on Earth 82 One could unpack this revelation strictly from within Integral Yoga, expanding one’s understanding through Sri Aurobindo’s (Ghose, 1998) writings on the Véda and other subjects. There, one would find riches abundant enough for a lifetime of research. I would suggest, however, that to neglect the rich Western heritage the Mother brought with her to Pondicherry would be to risk misunderstanding many of the images and ideas about which she spoke, which were aesthetically quite different from the Indian sources written about by Sri Aurobindo. Integral Yoga is the product of two individuals. To discount or otherwise negate the Mother’s decidedly Western roots is to misunderstand the teachings. Sri Aurobindo adopted many of the terms the Mother brought with her from Théon (Heehs, 2011, Julich, 2013). One obstacle to understanding the extent to which not only the terms, but the ideas of Théon are present in the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s work, is that until recently Théon’s own writings were relatively unavailable to researchers, and very little critical work had been done on him as a result. This lacuna has gotten some attention from the scholarly community in the last twenty years (Deveney, 1997; Greenfield, 1997; Godwin, Deveney, & Chanel, 1995; Johnson, 1994), and Théon’s (Theon, 1991; 1992; 2012) own idiosyncratic writings have been made available through Argaman Press in Jerusalem. When we look into his work, and research the lineages from which he drew his synthesis, we can begin to see that Integral Yoga sits at the confluence of numerous streams from both the East and West. A fascinating artifact of the nascent globalization occurring at the end of the 19th century, it is perhaps the very first historical example of a meeting of two such remarkable personalities from different cultural milieux, and perhaps the only major exemplar of its kind in the field of spirituality. Transformation in Integral Yoga My research is concerned with symbols of death and transformation in the Mother’s yoga, through comparing the mythology of the Sun-Door (Coomaraswamy, 1997; 2004) and other Gnostic and alchemical symbols with images from her visions and conversations. Although both she and Sri Aurobindo believed that the change they predicted would happen in the natural course of time, they hoped to catalyze the coming evolutionary jump through actively engaging it in their yoga. The reason for this was twofold. First, they saw nature’s lack of urgency as terribly wasteful—having created countless entities capable of experiencing the pain and suffering of mortality. Second, Sri Aurobindo argued that there was no guarantee that humanity would be able to keep from rubbing itself out through internecine hatreds, ignorance and greed. In this way their yoga was salvific. Sri Aurobindo is said to have drawn down the spiritual plane of consciousness they called the supermind (understood to be a subtle plane that sits between Transcendent Being and embodied existence), into the vital sheath surrounding his material body.

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