The Mother came to India in 1914 to meet Sri Aurobindo. She continued to live here to do his work. Destiny had brought them together in the fulfilment of a divine objective. Her task was to serve the Truth in order to hasten the Rule of Love upon Earth.

How was she going to accomplish it? By entrusting the destiny to him who guides us, who illumines us, moves and inspires us.
She recognised in Sri Aurobindo the Supreme incarnate the moment she met him on 29 March 1914. She met him in the afternoon and knew at once that in his presence all Darkness shall be transformed into Light. There shall be the beginning of a new life in the glory of the Divine. Therefore is her prayer addressed to that guide.

She comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is that descent which makes her full manifestation here possible.

Human aspiration to grow in divinity and the answering consent of that divinity are the two ends of the evolutionary process and it is she who, forming the dynamic link between the two, carries this evolution forward. From untruth to Truth, from darkness to Light, from death to Immortality has been the ancient prayer and its twofold fulfilment is the executive engagement of the Mother. Her concern is as ancient as the hills. Indeed, since the beginning of the earth wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of the supreme Consciousness she was there.

All along the strategy was twofold: to invoke higher and higher power and to establish it more and more in the material existence. In the present Avataric effort Sri Aurobindo and the Mother set themselves towards its full realization. When in 1926 Sri Aurobindo achieved the Overmental Siddhi in the physical, he began to concentrate on the descent of the Supramental in the earth-consciousness. The Mother’s share was to make it a dynamic fact in life.

The Mother now was at the centre of the organisation. In 1927 there were just 30 disciples in the Ashram, but in less than two years the number increased to 90. It began to expand rapidly. People came from all walks of life, men and women, elderly persons and the young, from different parts of India and from abroad, with varying backgrounds and qualifications,—writers, poets, painters, musicians, thinkers,philosophers, doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, businessmen. Accomplished souls aspiring to live a life in the greatness of the spirit, they found their age-long aspiration fulfilled here.

The Mother had to take care of them all. She had to organise services to look after such a large family with diverse interests and with different expectations. Soon she created a number of departments and attended to their daily essential problems.  Reception, Dining Room, Bakery, Laundry, Domestic Services, Health Care, Buildings, Electrical, Workshop, Furniture, Gardens, Agricultural Farms, Dairies Tailoring, Cobblery, Weaving, Cycle Shop were a few of these. Along with that grew other departments: Music, Painting, Poetry, Embroidery, Dancing, Drama, Theatre, Photography, Physical Culture, Cottage Industries, Printing Press, Publications, and so on. She did all this within the limited resources available at that time.
Work as a necessary aspect of spiritual growth is the truth that found its place in the scheme of things deeply spiritual. That gives a certain solidity and equipoise to one’s sadhana and prepares the base more luminously. By it the will in action opens out to higher consciousness bringing perfection to it. Similarly, to express the creative delight through music, painting, poetry was equally important and great attention was paid towards this.

During the Wartime another situation arose and the Mother had to start a School for the children of the disciples who had come to the Ashram. The Ashram entered into a new phase of activity. Spirituality stepped into another dynamics of life. A new world was perhaps under preparation. Indeed, mysterious appear to be the ways of destiny and every occasion becomes a cause of its functioning. We may briefly list the stages of these developments as follows:

·        2 December 1943 School formally opened.

·        24 April 1951 All India Convention to start a University Centre as a fit memorial to Sri Aurobindo.

·        6 January 1952 inauguration of Sri Aurobindo University Centre.

·        1959 Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.

It is a broad-based educational programme consisting of Humanities, Languages, Fine Arts, Sciences, Engineering, Vocational Training, etc. Not that these subjects are not taught elsewhere. In any good university there is perhaps a much wider coverage and a deeper presentation of the academic and professional aspects. But these tend to become too specialised to the extent that the wholesomeness of education suffers.

In the light of Sri Aurobindo’s teachings there should be a fivefold educational system to take care of the five aspects of an individual:

·        Physical—special emphasis is laid on building up a strong, healthy and harmonious body; gymnastics, athletics, sports, swimming, body building may be the elements of this education but awakening of the body consciousness to receive higher force and open to its possibility of perfection are the essential features of this education. Children from kindergarten, boys and girls, elderly men and women of all ages, even nonagenarians, participate in this comprehensive agenda.

·        Vital—channeling of the life-force for creative activities, preparing oneself to meet difficulties and conquer them, promoting the spirit of heroism, inculcation of nobility for better fulfilment of life.

·        Mental—formation and organisation of activities, development of mental faculties and putting them at the service of higher values is necessary for an-all round development.

·        Psychic—The divine spark that grows from life to life is the psychic being; it makes one a true individual. Becoming conscious of the psychic being is the real aim of education.

·        Spiritual—beyond this education is the preparation to grow in the Divine Consciousness. This will allow the race to develop itself further and bring the birth of the supramental being closer.

Enlarging on the Ashram experiment, the Mother moved on to larger humanity, to prepare it as a necessary step towards a new race capable of manifesting the supramental. She was 90 when the Auroville project was initiated, but it was all in the enthusiasm as if in terms of years she was in her young age.

 In 1964 a World Conference was organised and the international city soon started taking shape. It is planned as a universal town where men and women from all countries will be able to live in peace and progressive harmony. The purpose is to achieve human unity. There is a yet deeper significance in it. In order to realize the possibility of the supramental life upon earth Sri Aurobindo had already brought the Mind of Light into play. Also in 1956 the supramental manifestation had occurred in the subtle-physical. The next important step was to see that in the evolutionary scheme the intermediate race based on this consciousness is established. It is this new humanity from which will come beings to join the supramental race living a divine life upon the earth. The Mother was occupied greatly with it.

The Mother envisioned that “there should be somewhere on earth a place…where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth…” Although it was a dream, she was conscious of the fact that it could be turned into a reality. It was the dream of the Lord, she said, and his dreams turn out to be true. As a part of the collective work she began to make it real.

Inauguration of Auroville took place on 28 February 1968. Almost every nation (124) and all the states of India (23) were represented.

Auroville divided into four zones,—Residential, Industrial, Cultural, International,—is a city planned for 50 000 residents. According to the Mother, a place larger than this is not fit for living. There are at present 1500 members with some of them living there for 30 years.

On 21 February 1971 the Mother initiated the project of Matrimandir as a living symbol of Auroville’s aspiration for the Divine, a unique place in the wilderness of man’s hopes and struggles. Matrimandir is the soul of Auroville.

If the Ashram and Auroville were the preparatory projects of the Mother, their true fulfilment is to be seen in the New World she was preparing to make it a reality on the earth. This was a task far beyond the earlier possibilities. Unmindful of the lack of human receptivity, she started it and put it into action entirely in the Will of the Supreme.

On 25 September 1914 the Mother had addressed her prayer to the Divine and adorable Mother as follows: “The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute: A new Light shall break upon the earth. A new world shall be born, and things that were promised shall be fulfilled.” After years of intense tapasya the Will of the Lord was executed by the Power that came down upon the Earth to accomplish it. On 29 February 1956 the great step was taken. About it the Mother tells:

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.

As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that the time has come, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.

Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.
She also declared:

A new light breaks upon the earth, a new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.

About this fulfilment of the promise the Mother spoke as follows: The really new thing is that a new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born. It is a new world never known earlier. Indeed what was to be done was done.

Earlier, in 1926, she had received the Word of Creation and built a new world. But this was not to be. She had begun a sort of overmental creation for some months. But Sri Aurobindo saw it differently. “We want to establish the Supermind on earth… in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.”

That had meant a more arduous and prolonged endeavour. The beginning of it was in the realisation of the surhomme consciousness on 1 January 1969. A golden light, transparent and benevolent, very strong, very powerful, filled the body’s cells. They told of their effort to be transformed.

The work of physical transformation was the last one Sri Aurobindo had entrusted to the Mother. It involved altogether new difficulties, the difficulty of the dark and inconscient matter. The physical had to receive the supramental. The sleep of the past had to be awoken and the body’s cells had to respond to the Light that was coming down all the way up to the subtle physical. The course adopted by the Mother was to invoke the Divine Will and leave all to it. She used the body of the past to build the New Body, a prototype of the supramental body, and stepped into it on 17 November about thirty years ago, in 1973. The complete psychisation of the cellular consciousness was the assurance of immortality of the physical. She is there in the new body and the work continues in the Will of the Supreme.

From Darkness to Light made possible the passage from Death to Immortality. Her one aim in life was to give concrete form to Sri Aurobindo’s great teaching. He had told her to do it and that is why she did it. Hers was a life charged with earth’s destiny and hers was the God-given might.