Spiritual motherhood

A letter by Sri Aurobindo to a fanatic Muslim (which could equally have been written to a fanatic Christian, Jew, or Hindu). Plus: remembering Janina Stroka and Heinz Kappes

The other day, while working on the index for The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, I came across the following letter, which I’d like to share with you.

If you want the plain and simple truth, the plain truth is this that you have entered into a complete falsehood and have put yourself into the hands of a hostile Influence that lives by confusion and ignorance. You began by setting your own imperfect thinking power against a superior Truth and Knowledge. And by false and fantastic reasonings you have so clouded your mind that it has become entirely muddled and confused and incapable of understanding the plainest distinctions or discriminating between falsehood and Truth. This is evident in all you are saying and doing; it is not Truth and religion, but the false and inadequate ideas of your own confused and weakened mind that you are trying to force upon others.

The letter you wrote to me shows a surprising inability to understand the plainest distinctions and the simplest truths. The one who was an instrument for giving birth to the physical body of X was no doubt in her lifetime his material mother. But the relation which exists between the Mother here and X (and between the Mother and all who accept her), is a psychic and spiritual motherhood. It is a far greater relation than that of the physical mother to her child; it gives all that human motherhood can give, but in a much higher way, and it contains in itself infinitely more. It can therefore, because it is greater and more complete, take altogether the room of the physical relation and replace it both in the inward and the outward life. There is nothing here that can confuse anyone who has common sense and a straightforward intelligence. The physical fact cannot in the least stand in the way of the greater psychic and spiritual truth or prevent it from being true. X is perfectly right when he says that this is his true mother; for she has given him a new birth in an inner life and is creating him anew for a diviner existence.

Drawing by Janina Stroka

The idea of spiritual Motherhood is not an invention of this Ashram; it is an eternal truth which has been recognised for ages past both in Europe and in Asia. The distinction I have drawn between the physical relation and the psychic and spiritual relation is also not a new invention; it is an idea known and understood everywhere and found to be perfectly plain and simple by all. It is the present confused state of your own mind which prevents you from understanding what men have found natural and intelligible everywhere.

As for X and Y, you have no claim over them and no right to control their thoughts and actions. X is of an age to choose and decide; he can think and act for himself and has no need of you to think and act for him.... Your pretension to have the responsibility for him or her before God is an arrogant and grotesque absurdity. Each one is responsible for himself before God unless he freely chooses to place the responsibility upon another in whom he trusts. No one has the right to impose himself as a religious or spiritual guide on others against their free will. You have no claim at all to dictate to X or Y either in their inner or their outer life. It is again the confusion and incoherence of your mind in its present state that prevents you from recognising these plain and simple facts.

Again, you say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, — those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. Hindus and Confucians and Taoists and all others have as much right to enter into relation with God and find the Truth in their own way. All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. You cannot shut up God in the limitations of your own narrow brain or dictate to the Divine Power and Consciousness how or where or through whom it shall manifest; you cannot put up your puny barriers against the divine Omnipotence. These again are simple truths which are now being recognised all over the world; only the childish in mind or those who vegetate in some formula of the past deny them.

You have insisted on my writing and asked for the Truth and I have answered. But if you want to be a Mussulman, no one prevents you. If the Truth I bring is too great for you to understand or to bear, you are free to go and live in a half-truth or in your own ignorance. I am not here to convert anyone; I do not preach to the world to come to me and I call no one. I am here to establish the divine life and the divine Consciousness in those who of themselves feel the call to come to me and cleave to it and in no others. I am not asking you and the Mother is not asking you to accept us. You can go any day to Hyderabad and live either the worldly life or a religious life according to your own preference. But as you are free so also are others free to stay here and follow their own way. You are not entitled to try to make yourself a centre of disturbance and an obstacle to their peace and their spiritual progress.

In answering you I am answering the ideas which have been put in you by the Power of darkness and ignorance that is just now using you for its own purpose. This Power is very obviously not the divine Power. It is a Power of Falsehood that is making you do and say extravagant things which are not Islamic but a caricature of Islamic faith and action; its intention is to make not only Islam but all spirituality and religion ridiculous through you. It hopes to disturb the divine work upon earth, even if it can only do it a little. It is trying to spoil your brain and destroy your intelligence, to make you say and do foolish and extravagant things and turn you into an object of sorrow and pity for your friends and well-wishers and a laughing-stock to others. If you have any respect for yourself or for God or religion, if you truly hope for the Truth and Light, if you wish for the awakening and salvation of your soul, you must stop speaking and doing these extravagant things and you must throw away the Influence that is now driving you.

23 October 1929 [The Mother, with Letters on the Mother, pp. 107‒110]

Remembering Janina

The following text is adapted from A Captive of Her Love, a collection of letters, poems and paintings by Janina Stroka, a spiritual child of a spiritual mother if ever there was one.

Drawings by Janina Stroka

Janina was born on July 18, 1909 in Lvov, Poland [today’s Lviv, which in 1991, after the demise of the Soviet Union, became part of the independent nation of Ukraine]. After her secondary school exam, she entered the University of Cracow, and in 1933 received her M.A. in pedagogy and psychology. During the six following years she worked as a teacher in a teachers’ training college.

In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, the intelligentsia was advised to leave the country. Janina joined the exodus. She started her journey with a group of thirty or more people, travelling by all available means, including taking lifts in bullock carts and walking. As the days passed, the group grew smaller and smaller, many dropping out through sheer exhaustion. Reaching the Slovakian border, Janina found herself with only one companion, who collapsed as they were climbing a mountain. He entreated her to leave him to his fate and not lose her last chance of reaching safety. Soon she found herself on the other side, alone.

From Slovakia she went to Hungary and, via Yugoslavia and Turkey, to what was then Palestine, where she arrived together with other Polish refugees in January 1941. The refugees were given shelter in a camp near Jerusalem. Leaving the settlement in search of work, she knocked at many doors, to no avail. Finally arriving at Ram Allah, she presented herself at a boarding school for Arab girls. The headmistress, a Dutch lady who had been posted there by a Quaker association, took her in. In her she found a friend and kindred soul. It is to her that most of the letters published in this volume are addressed.

Once, in Jerusalem, a lecture on Sri Aurobindo was delivered by Heinz Kappes, a German clergyman who later translated many of Sri Aurobindo’s works into German. Hearing the message of Sri Aurobindo was for Janina the beginning of a new life. More books by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were obtained, and together with her friend she began to practice Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. It was also at that time that she started painting.

Work in the boarding school for Arab girls came to a stop with the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. In February 1948, Janina went back to Poland, where she worked in various educational institutions. Throughout this period, she continued to study the works of Sri Aurobindo and practice his Yoga. In November 1956, she obtained a passport, which allowed her to travel to Germany where her friend now lived. Learning once more to breathe and move and think as a free being in a free country, she realized how much her soul had been stifled, her spirit wounded, by life in Poland under the communist regime. She could not possibly go back. It was then that she decided to embark for India, arriving in Pondicherry in December 1957.

The Mother put her in charge of a nursing home for surgical cases. Keeping the building spotlessly clean, she managed to create an atmosphere of harmony and beauty. During her free time, she once more devoted herself to painting, drawing her inspiration from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The colors she chose were always symbolic of a state or plane of consciousness. She often used stippling: hundreds upon hundreds of dots, into each of which went all her concentration, each containing the Divine Name. In her creative periods she could not stop painting, yet she continued to take care of the patients with the same attention — the brush in one hand, the bedpan in the other, as she would say.

She also decorated pottery. Her designs were not simply ornamental; each line and shade had meaning. A spiral with turns of different colors would suggest the evolution from the black Inconscient to the orange-gold of the Supramental, the long journey of the soul through the spectrum of colors associated with the planes of existence or levels of consciousness: the divine spark, a golden dot at the center, growing from a pinpoint in the darkness of inconscience, burning progressively through all the colors, blazing forth into a golden sun.

On July 17, 1964, the eve of her fifty-fifth birthday, as she was recovering from a fever, she suddenly died. Just prior to that, she had been working intensely on a series of forty-eight pictures she wanted to offer to the Mother on that day. They illustrated her favorite theme: the journey of the soul out of the Mother’s Heart, the plunge into the Abyss and, by the Divine Alchemy, the ascent through the worlds and the Return and the Crown. She too was returning from her journey.

From one of Janina’s letters (June 30, 1958):

My life seems to be becoming slowly concentrated only on Her. I have endless conversations with my God and I begin to discover that He (or She), being the Immensity, is at the same time something very, very simple. I can quarrel with Her, or put my head on Her lap and cry, or I can smile and laugh. She will accept everything. Oh! at last I can be completely natural, completely, completely, as I am now with all my imperfections. She knows each corner of my being and She loves me as I am. I feel Her more and more clearly in my inner being, close to me. She embraces me and we both as witnesses watch all that is being done by Her as God the Worker — in me and everywhere. This does not mean that all is easy. Oh! I feel so exhausted often and have strange headaches, but now all has become different. I have really given my adhara [Sanskrit: vehicle or vessel in which the consciousness is at present contained] to Her. I no longer have a headache — She has it. Let Her do with it what She likes and with my fatigue too. My eyes are also inflamed again, but I do not worry. Let Her worry!

On August 11, 1964, the Mother recounted the following:

The very day when Janina died, around 4 in the morning, something made me suddenly take interest in this question: What will the new form be like? What will it be?

The Mother here refers to the form of the transformed, supramental body (see this post).

I was looking at man and at the animal, and then I saw that there would be a far greater difference between man and the new form than between man and the animal. I began to see certain things, and it so happened that Janina was there (in her thought, but a material enough and very concrete thought). It was very interesting (it lasted a long time, nearly two hours), because I saw all the timidity of human conceptions, while she had made contact with something: it wasn’t an idea but a sort of contact [with a future reality]. And I had the sense of a more plastic Matter, more full of Light, much more directly responsive to the Will (the higher Will), and with such a plasticity that it could respond to the Will by taking on variable and changing forms. And I saw some of her own forms, forms that she conceived (rather like those beings who don’t have a body as we do, but have hands and feet when they will it, a head when they will it, luminous clothes when they will it — things of that sort), I saw that, and I remember I was congratulating her. I told her: “Yours was a partial but partially very clear perception of one of the forms the new Manifestation will take.” And she was very happy. I told her: “You see, you have fully worked for the future.” And then, suddenly, I saw a sapphire blue light, pale, very luminous, with something like the shape of a flame (with a rather broad base), and there was a kind of flash — pfft! — and it was gone. She wasn’t there anymore. I thought, “Well, that’s odd!” An hour later (I saw that around 6 AM; all the rest had lasted about two hours), they told me she was dead. Which means she spent the last moments of her life with me, and then, from me, pfft! went off towards ... a life elsewhere.

It was very abrupt. She was so happy, you know, I told her, “How well you have worked for the future!” And suddenly, a sort of flash (a sapphire blue light, pale, very luminous, with the shape of a flame and a rather broad base), pfft! she was gone. And that was just the time when she died.

It’s one of the most interesting departures I have seen — fully conscious. And so happy to have participated! ... I didn’t know why I was telling her, “Yes, you have truly participated in the work for the future, you have put the earth in contact with one of the forms of the new Manifestation.”

Remembering Heinz Kappes

Some personal history to begin with. As a teenager I intended to study physics and especially astrophysics (which then still went by the name astronomy). But then I became interested in consciousness and Indian philosophy. I wrote to a publisher of books on these subjects (who herself had written a book on ashrams in Asia) asking which Indian ashram she would recommend. She gave me the names of Riek and Heinz Kappes, who had spent some time in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. On their recommendation I wrote to Henry Morisset, the Mother’s (physical) son, who conveyed to me her permission to visit the Ashram and to study at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.

On May 25, 1972, the Mother for the first time received me in her room. This day has a special significance for me, since May 25 is also the birthday of my physical mother. Speaking metaphorically, a spiritual Mother was born to me on that day, or else I was spiritually reborn by Her.

Reading most of the volumes of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library as they came out that year (1972 was Sri Aurobindo’s birth centenary), I realized the immense significance he attaches to the material creation, and my interest in physics returned. Thus, after two years, I returned to Germany to study physics at Göttingen, not to eventually become a physicist but to understand the physical aspects to the creation of matter by, to quote Sri Aurobindo, “a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency.”

While in Göttingen and later, after settling in Pondicherry, during my trips to Germany, I frequently paid a visit to the wise, loving, and lovable Heinz Kappes and his wife Riek, who was none other than Janina’s friend from Palestine, to whom most of her letters were addressed. The spiritual atmosphere I experienced in their flat in Karlsruhe and (after Riek’s death) in his flat in Stuttgart, can only be compared to the atmosphere I experience during visits to the Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s rooms.

Heinz Kappes

There is a German biography of Heinz Kappes (1893‒1988) titled Wir sind keine stummen Hunde (“We are no mute dogs: Christian and Socialist in the Weimar Republic”). Following in his father’s footsteps, Heinz took over his first parish in 1923. Soon after he had begun his vicariate in Karlsruhe, he incurred the first rebuke of the Church leadership, right after his first sermon. His offence: he had compared the contemporary trade unions to the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan!

Heinz was eventually “relieved” by the mayor of Karlsruhe of all duties as a city councilor of the German Socialist Party. When, after the Nazi Party’s seizure of power, he refused to describe his being a religious socialist as an aberration, the 40-year-old pastor received his final professional ban from the Church authorities. In 1938 Heinz emigrated to Palestine, where he worked for the British administration, taught German, and became friends with Martin Buber and a member of Buber’s study circle. In a Jerusalem bookshop in 1944, he found a copy of Sri Aurobindo’s The Divine Life (or, as he put it, it found him) and purchased it for a significant portion of his monthly salary.

While reading Sri Aurobindo’s magnum opus, Heinz had a series of spiritual experiences about which he wrote to Sri Aurobindo. He never received a reply, but during his visit to the Ashram in the 1960s he learned that his letter had been read out to a few disciples by Sri Aurobindo, who jokingly remarked (I can’t vouch for the wording): Here is someone in far away Jerusalem who has these remarkable experiences just by reading The Life Divine, while you right here complain about your lack of such experiences! Incidentally, that very copy of The Life Divine, having been lent by Heinz to a catholic priest, now rests in the library of the Vatican (probably in its poison cabinet).

In 1948, Heinz returned to Karlsruhe, where he was rehabilitated by the Church leadership, taught religion, translated all of Sri Aurobindo’s major works into German, and became something of a social institution, describing himself as a “Seelenheilpratiker.” This is a merger of “Seelenheil” (salvation of one’s soul) and “Heilpraktiker” (therapist). During his stay in the Ashram, Heinz once asked the Mother if he could consider the people who came to him for help or guidance as being sent by her. The Mother concentrated for a moment and then simply said, “Yes.”

Heinz believed that the greater the psychological mess one was in, the nearer one was to a spiritual breakthrough. When one has lost all faith in one’s personal effort, one is ready to capitulate to the Divine Force (or whatever — Heinz couldn’t have cared less about names) which is always ready to take over. Instead of killing one’s body, which would only aggravate the situation, what one should do is to “kill” one’s ego! This is not what Heinz would have normally told someone seeking help; it is what he helped that person do by his spiritual influence and the power of his love. It is therefore small wonder that after retiring from his ecclesiastical work Heinz poured his seemingly inexhaustible energy into A.A. and similar organizations.

In the Kena Upanishad it is said: “The name of That is That Delight. He who so knows that, towards him verily all existences yearn.” Heinz was such a person.