The Mother's power of occult process

Re: Derrida, Death and Forgiveness by Andrew J. McKenna by rakesh on Wed 15 Nov 2006 08:17 PM PST Profile Permanent Link ... she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. I have couple of questions to ask...

1. "she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance" If soul is considered a representative of the transcendental purusha only then why in the above sentence does it say " put on like a mask the soul"?

2. "But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error"

What does it mean by "she has stooped to descend here into the darkness". What has stooped? Is it paraprakruti or the soul? If the mother as paraprakruti comes here as an avatar than the purpose of avatarhood itself is defeated. Please correct me if I am wrong.

by Debashish on Thu 16 Nov 2006 01:45 AM PST Profile Permanent Link To your question (1), on the passage "she....has put on like a mask the souls and forms of the Ignorance", I read it as - she has put on the soul of the Ignorance and the forms of the Ignorance. The soul of the Ignorance is not the soul of the jiva, the soul of the Ignorance is the lower prakriti, Apara Prakriti of Avidya. Para Prakriti of Vidya is masked as Apara Prakriti if Avidya, it is also masked as the forms of the Ignorance, the objectified manifestations and creatures. In terms of the soul of jiva, she has become the jiva as it is by process of her self-concentration that an aspect of Purushottama takes on individuality as the soul of jiva. Thus jiva is a self-becoming of Supreme Nature, paraprakritir jivabhuta.

This is brought out in the Gita, Chapter 7, verse 5, where after talking about the apara prakriti, Krishna says to Arjuna: "...know my other nature... supreme, which becomes the jiva and by which this world is upheld." Sri Aurobindo comments about this: "The supreme Nature, para prakritih, is then the infinite timeless conscious power of the self-existent Being out of which all existences in the cosmos are manifested and come out of timelessness into Time. But in order to provide a spiritual basis for this manfold universal becoming in the cosmos the supreme Nature formulates itself as the jiva." Jiva becomes the basis of the Purushottama's self-manifestation, or in Sr Aurobindo's words "...the eternal multiple soul of the Purushottama appears as individual spiritual existence in all the forms of the cosmos."

To question (2), it is undoubtedly Paraprakriti, the Mother who has stooped. Why should her doing so defeat the purpose of avatarhood? Avatars do not come to transform the creation. They come to establish new principles of consciousness in times of evolutionary crisis. But if this consciousness is to be manifested here effectively, the Mother's power of occult process must execute the transformation in and as Herself. This is the purpose of her avatarhood. We may indeed see this in the lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo's "death" (Dec. 5, 1950) established (or resutled in the establishment of) the new consciousness. The Mother's "death" (17th November 1973) effected the transformation in Matter.

One may question my reading or disbelieve it, but this is how I see it. Seen in this light, not only did the Mother "pass through the portals of the birth which is a death," which is the holocaust of the Prakriti, but effect its reversal, that is, she has passed through the portals of the death which is a birth - a new birth of eternal life in Matter. An elaboration of this reading may also be found in Georges' van Vreckem's "Beyond the Human Species." DB