Mira Alfassa was a Frenchwoman who, through her association with the great sage, Sri Aurobindo, became known as The Mother. Sri Aurobindo saw her as an incarnation of the Divine Mother and together they built a community of spiritual aspirants in Pondicherry, South India, that is still vitally alive today. There are schools begun by The Mother that today are filled with uniformed children; playgrounds with tennis courts, manicured soccer fields, and beautifully kept halls of French Colonial architecture, all painted a soft, glowing white. There is a bakery, a publishing house, incense manufacture, a factory turning out fine papers of all sorts. The ashram itself, surrounded by its community of Aurobindans, is a center of peace emanating out through the city of Pondicherry that, coupled with the sea air from the Bay of Bengal, makes it unique in India for its cleanliness and orderliness.

When one is in the city, it seems that everyone is involved in seeking the Divine in their own fashion. Of course this is true for much of India, to one degree or another, but in Pondicherry it is perhaps even more pervasive. This can make one's time there painful or profound, depending on one's state of mind.

One of the things about the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother that makes them useful for students of the Veda is that they are by and large non-religious in their approach to the Vedic knowledge. The whole of their system is based in the idea of the necessity for Man to evolve to the next level of spiritual knowledge, capable of embodying fully the Truth that resides within each of us. Both of them spent their lives attempting to do themselves what they called upon others, too, to be about. This aim is encapsulated in this quote from The Mother:

The true aim of life is to find the Divine's Presence deep inside oneself and to surrender to It so that It takes the lead of the life, all the feelings and all the actions of the body.

This gives a true and luminous aim to existence.

The Mother, from Words of the Mother Volume Fourteen

Each day we must be about this business of growing, of transforming ourselves. If we are done transforming, done growing, then in a very real sense we are saying to nature we are done with being alive. Nature will listen to us if we say this long enough. This is not the message we would like to send. Rather, we would like to send the message that we have much still to learn. One way we send this message is to make of ourselves each day an empty vessel and to pour into that empty vessel the words and thoughts of someone who knows, someone who has seen further down the track than perhaps we have. We want to show ourselves in alignment with the evolution of nature.

It's so simple, so easy. It can take as little as a minute, either before or after meditation. Pick up a spiritual book, read a page a day or open it at random and see what you find. Take something from it that is new--a new idea or a new way of saying an idea you've already embraced. Follow your instincts and the fine level of feeling within to find the writings that are right for you. Let yourself be guided by charm. Put some things into your mind that may begin to stand up to the running negative commentary that sometimes we face within. Help yourself change. Help nature change you.

To be and to become more and more what the Divine wants us to be should be our greatest preoccupation.

The Mother, from Words of the Mother Volume Fourteen

Today I will read something that speaks of nature or of the Divine, and that brings me at least a moment of joy.