Kashmiri Bhatta

Online Chat

Mirra Alfassa (21 February 1878 – 17 November 1973), known to her followers as The Mother, was a spiritual guru, occultist and yoga teacher, and a collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who considered her to be of equal yogic stature to him and called her by the name "The Mother". She founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and established the town of Auroville; she was influential on the subject of Integral Yoga.

Mirra Alfassa (Mother) was born in Paris in 1878 to a Sephardic Jewish bourgeois family. In her youth, she traveled to Algeria to practice occultism along with Max Théon. After returning, while living in Paris, she guided a group of spiritual seekers. In 1914, she traveled to Pondicherry, India and met Sri Aurobindo and found in him "the dark Asiatic figure" of whom she had had visions and called him Krishna. During this first visit, she helped publish a French version of the periodical Arya, which serialized most of Sri Aurobindo's post-political prose writings. During the First World war she was obliged to leave Pondicherry. After a 4-year stay in Japan, in 1920 she returned to Pondicherry for good. Gradually, as more and more people joined her and Sri Aurobindo, she organised and developed Sri Aurobindo Ashram. In 1943, she started a school in the ashram and in 1968 established Auroville, an experimental township dedicated to human unity and evolution. She died on 17 November 1973 in Pondicherry.

The experiences of the last thirty years of Mother life were captured in the 13-volume work Mother's Agenda by Satprem, who was one of her followers.

Mirra Alfassa was born in 1878 in Paris to Moïse Maurice Alfassa, a Turkish Jewish father who migrated from Edirne via Egypt, and Mathilde Ismalun, an Egyptian Jewish mother.[citation needed] They were a bourgeois family, and Mirra's full name at birth was Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa. She had an elder brother, Mattéo Mathieu Maurice Alfassa, who later held numerous French governmental posts in Africa. The family had just migrated to France a year before Mirra was born. Mirra was close to her grandmother Mira Ismalum (née Pinto), who was a neighbour and who was one of the first women to travel alone outside Egypt.

Mirra learnt to read at the age of seven and joined school very late at the age of nine.[citation needed] She was interested in various fields of art, tennis, music and singing, but was a concern to her mother owing to an apparent lack of permanent interest in any particular field.[3][4] By the age of 14 she had read most of the books in her father's collection, which is believed to have helped her achieve mastery of French.[5] Her biographer Vrekhem notes that Mirra had various occult experiences in her childhood but knew nothing of their significance or relevance. She kept these experiences to herself, as her mother would have regarded occult experiences as a mental problem to be treated.[6] Mirra especially recalls at the age of thirteen or fourteen having a dream or a vision of a luminous figure whom she used to call Krishna but had never seen before in real life.

On 2 December 1943 Mother started a school for about twenty children inside the ashram.[citation needed] She considered this was a considerable movement away from usual life in the ashram, which was until then about practising total renunciation of the outside world. However, she found that the school would gradually align to the principles of Sri Aurobindo's integral yoga.[40] The school later became known as the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. From 21 February 1949 she started a quarterly magazine called "The Bulletin" in which Sri Aurobindo published a series of eight articles under the title "The supramental manifestation upon earth" wherein for the first time he wrote about transitional being between man and superman.

Sri Aurobindo died on 5 December 1950. This was a very difficult experience for Mother.[41] All the activities in the ashram were suspended for twelve days, after which Mother had to decide the future course of the ashram. Mother decided to take up the entire work of the ashram and also to continue the integral yoga internally. The years from 1950 to 1958 were the years where she was mostly seen by her disciples.

Many politicians visited Mother on a regular basis for her guidance. She had visits from V.V. Giri, Nandini Satpathy, Dalai Lama, and especially Indira Gandhi who was in close contact with her and often visited her for guidance. [49] By the end of March 1973 she became critically ill. After 20 May 1973 all meetings were cancelled. She gave her final Darshan on 15 August of the same year, visiting the outside terrace where thousands of followers were waiting to catch a glimpse of her. Mother left her body at 7:25 p.m on 17 November 1973. On 20 November she was laid to rest in Samadhi, next to Sri Aurobindo's body in the courtyard of the main ashram building.

Courtesy – Wikipedia
- Mirra Alfassa

Online Chat

© 2021 - All Rights Reserved