Krishna represents both the universal Godhead and the immanent Godhead, he whom one can meet within one’s being and in all that constitutes the manifested world.
And do you want to know why he is always represented as a child? It is because he is in constant progression. To the extent that the world is perfected, his play is also perfected —what was the play of yesterday will no longer be the play of tomorrow; his play will become more and more harmonious, benign and joyful to the extent that the world becomes capable of responding to it and enjoying it with the Divine.
The Mother – Words of the Mother: CWM, Vol. 15, p14
You can’t expect me to argue about my own spiritual greatness in comparison with Krishna’s. The question itself would be relevant only if there were two sectarian religions in opposition, Aurobindoism and Vaishnavism, each insisting on its own God’s greatness. That is not the case. And then what Krishna must I challenge,—the Krishna of the Gita who is the transcendent Godhead, Paramatma, Parabrahma, Purushottama, the cosmic Deity, master of the universe, Vasudeva who is all, the immanent in the heart of all creatures, or the Godhead who was incarnate at Brindavan and Dwarka and Kurukshetra and who was the guide of my Yoga and with whom I realised identity? All that is not to me something philosophical or mental but a matter of daily and hourly realisation and intimate to the stuff of my consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo – Letters on Himself and the Ashram: CWSA, Vol. 35, pp431-32
…. He placed the Gita in my hands [at the Alipore jail]. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the sadhana of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually but to realise what Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit , to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure , yet not to do His work negligently.…
Sri Aurobindo – Karmayogin – Uttarpara Speech: CWSA, Vol. 8, pp5-6
…. I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was not the tree , I knew it was Vasudeva , it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me His shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision He gave me. I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies. Amongst these thieves and dacoits there were many who put me to shame by their sympathy, their kindness, the humanity triumphant over such adverse circumstances ….
Sri Aurobindo – Karmayogin – Uttarpara Speech: CWSA, Vol. 8, pp6-7
When the case opened in the lower court and we were brought before the Magistrate I was followed by the same insight. He said to me, “When you were cast into jail, did not your heart fail and did you not cry out to me, where is Thy protection? Look now at the Magistrate, look now at the Prosecuting Counsel.” I looked and it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel and it was not the Counsel for the prosecution that I saw; it was Srikrishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled. “Now do you fear?” He said, “I am in all men and I overrule their actions and their words. My protection is still with you and you shall not fear. This case which is brought against you, leave it in my hands. It is not for you. It was not for the trial that I brought you here but for something else. The case itself is only a means for my work and nothing more.”…. I heard it again and again, always I listened to the voice within: “I am guiding, therefore fear not. Turn to your own work for which I have brought you to jail and when you come out, remember never to fear, never to hesitate. Remember that it is I who am doing this, not you nor any other. Therefore whatever clouds may come, whatever dangers and sufferings, whatever difficulties, whatever impossibilities, there is nothing impossible, nothing difficult. I am in the nation and its uprising and I am Vasudeva, I am Narayana, and what I will, shall be, not what others will. What I choose to bring about, no human power can stay.”
Sri Aurobindo – Karmayogin – Uttarpara Speech: CWSA, Vol. 8, pp7-8
…. He showed me His wonders and made me realise the utter truth of the Hindu religion. I had had many doubts before . I was brought up in England amongst foreign ideas and an atmosphere entirely foreign. About many things in Hinduism I had once been inclined to believe that it was all imagination; that there was much of dream in it, much that was delusion and maya . But now day after day I realised in the mind, I realised in the heart, I realised in the body the truths of the Hindu religion. They became living experiences to me, and things were opened to me which no material science could explain….
Sri Aurobindo – Karmayogin – Uttarpara Speech: CWSA, Vol. 8, pp9
37—Some say Krishna never lived, he is a myth. They mean on earth; for if Brindavan existed nowhere, the Bhagavad could not have been written.
Does Brindavan exist anywhere else than on earth?
The whole earth and everything it contains is a kind of concentration, a condensation of something which exists in other worlds invisible to the material eye. Each thing manifested here has its principle, idea or essence somewhere in the subtler regions. This is an indispensable condition for the manifestation. And the importance of the manifestation will always depend on the origin of the thing manifested.
In the world of the gods there is an ideal and harmonious Brindavan of which the earthly Brindavan is but a deformation and a caricature.
Those who are developed inwardly, either in their senses or in their minds, perceive these realities which are invisible (to the ordinary man) and receive their inspiration from them. So the writer or writers of the Bhagavat were certainly in contact with a whole inner world that is well and truly real and existent, where they saw and experienced everything they have described or revealed.
Whether Krishna existed or not in a human form, living on earth, is only of very secondary importance, for Krishna is a real, living and active being; and his influence has been one of the great factors in the progress and transformation of the earth.
The Mother – On Thoughts and Aphorisms: CWM, Vol. 10, pp60-61
…I remember the days when Sri Aurobindo was here and I used to go downstairs to give meditations to the people assembled in the hall. There’s a ledge above the pillars there, where all the gods used to sit—Shiva, Krishna, Lakshmi, the Trimurti, all of them—the little ones, the big ones, they all used to come regularly, every day, to attend these meditations. It was a lovely sight. But they didn’t have this kind of adoration for the Supreme.
They had no use for that concept—each one, in his own mode of being, was fully aware of his own eternal divinity; and each one knew as well that he could represent all the others. They felt they were a kind of community, but they had none of those qualities that the psychic life gives: no deep love, no deep sympathy, no sense of union. They had only the sense of their OWN divinity. They had certain very particular movements, but not this adoration for the Supreme nor the feeling of being instruments: they felt they were representing the Supreme, and so each one was perfectly satisfied with his particular representation.
Except for Krishna…. In 1926, I had begun a sort of overmental creation, that is, I had brought the Overmind down into matter, here on earth (miracles and all kinds of things were beginning to happen). I asked all these gods to incarnate, to identify themselves with a body (some of them absolutely refused). Well, with my very own eyes I saw Krishna, who had always been in rapport with Sri Aurobindo, consent to come down into his body. It was on November 24th, and it was the beginning of ‘Mother.’
Yes, in fact I wanted to ask you what this realization of 1926 was.
It was this: Krishna consented to descend into Sri Aurobindo’s body—to be FIXED there; there is a great difference, you understand, between incarnating, being fixed in a body, and simply acting as an influence that comes and goes and moves about. The gods are always moving about, and it’s plain that we ourselves, in our inner beings, come and go and act in a hundred or a thousand places at once. There is a difference between just coming occasionally and accepting to be permanently tied to a body—between a permanent influence and a permanent presence.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 2, pp298-99
It was only… (how can I put it?) a participation from Krishna. It made no difference for Sri Aurobindo personally: it was a formation from the past that accepted to participate in the present creation, nothing more. It was a descent of the Supreme, from… some time back, now consenting to participate in the new manifestation.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 2, p300
O Thou whom at first sight I knew for the Lord of my being and my God, receive my offering.
Thine are all my thoughts, all my emotions, all the sentiments of my heart, all my sensations, all the movements of my life, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood. I am absolutely and altogether Thine, Thine without reserve. What Thou wilt of me, that I shall be. Whether Thou choosest for me life or death, happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes to me from Thee will be welcome. Each one of Thy gifts will be always for me a gift divine bringing with it the supreme Felicity.
Sri Aurobindo – The Mother with Letters on The Mother: CWSA, Vol. 32, p647
Once, without telling me anything, someone brought me a sprig of tulsi. I smelled it and said, ‘Oh, Devotion!’ It was absolutely a… a vibration of devotion. Afterwards, I was told it’s the plant of devotion to Krishna, consecrated to Krishna.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 2, p61
…. I used to walk up and down on the verandah (Sri Aurobindo was in his room, working), and I would walk alone; but I was never alone: Krishna was always there—Krishna, the god Krishna as he is known, but taller, more beautiful, and not with that ridiculous blue, you know, that slate blue! Not like that. And always, we always walked up and down together—we would walk together. He was just a little behind (gesture behind, almost against the nape of the neck and the shoulders); I was a little in front, as if my head was on his shoulder, and he would walk (I didn’t have the feeling of my head resting on his shoulder, but that’s how it was), and we would walk, we would communicate. That lasted more than a year, you know, every day. Then it ended. Afterwards I saw him from time to time; sometimes at night when I was very tired, he would come and I would sleep on his shoulder. But I knew very well that it was a way Sri Aurobindo had of showing himself. Then when I came here [to Mother’s present room], Sri Aurobindo had left, and I began walking up and down while reciting my mantra. Sri Aurobindo came, and he was at exactly the same place as Krishna was (same gesture, just behind the head); I would walk, and he was there, and we would walk together day after day, day after day. And it was becoming so concrete, so marvelous that I started thinking, “Why look after people and things, I want to remain like this forever!” He caught my thought, and he said, “I am not coming anymore.” And he stopped. I said, “Very well,” and I started my mantra to the supreme Lord, and I tried a lot to have Him come and walk with me, but in no other form but Himself. And the Force, the Presence, everything was there, and I would feel Him more and more clearly, staying like that, just behind me, impersonal. For a few days, I’ve had a sort of feeling that I was close to something; and yesterday, for half an hour: THE Presence—a Presence… An absolutely concrete presence. And it is He who told me, “First Krishna, then Sri Aurobindo, then I.”
The Mother – Agenda: Vol.6, pp135-36
Only a few days ago, on the morning of the 29th, I had one of those experiences that mark one’s life. It happened upstairs in my room. I was doing my japa, walking up and down with my eyes wide open, when suddenly Krishna came—a gold Krishna, all golden, in a golden light that filled the whole room. I was walking, but I could not even see the windows or the rug any longer, for this golden light was everywhere with Krishna at its center. And it must have lasted at least fifteen minutes. He was dressed in those same clothes in which he is normally portrayed when he dances. He was all light, all dancing: ‘You see, I will be there this evening during the Darshan.’ And suddenly, the chair I use for darshan came into the room! Krishna climbed up onto it, and his eyes twinkled mischievously, as if to say, ‘I will be there, you see, and there’ll be no room for you.’
When I came down that evening for distribution, at first I was annoyed. I had said that I didn’t want anybody in the hall, precisely because I wanted to establish an atmosphere of concentration, the immobility of the Spirit—but there were at least thirty people in there, those who had decorated the hall, thirty of them stirring, stirring about, a mass of little vibrations. And before I could even say ‘scat’—I had hardly taken my seat—someone put the tray of medals on my lap and they started filing past.
But what is surprising is that in a flash, no one was there any longer. No one, you understand—I was gone. Perhaps I was everywhere, though normally there is the sense of the body, a physical center, but that evening there was no more center! Nothing, no one, not even the sense that there was no one—nothing. I was gone. There was indeed something handing out the medals which felt the joy of giving the medal, the joy of receiving it, the joy of mutually looking at each other. It was simply the joy of the action taking place, the joy of looking, this joy everywhere, but me?—Nothing, no one, gone. Only later, afterwards, did I see what had happened, for everything had disappeared, even the higher mind that understands and organizes things. That also was gone. And this lasted the entire distribution. Only when that [the body] had gone back upstairs to the room did the consciousness of what is me return.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol.1, pp 358-59
Sweet Mother, about Radha, in all the Vaishnavite stories and in the accounts of many mystics, there are always tears and anguish: “She wept and the Divine did not come…. The Divine tormented her….” What does this mean? She was integral purity, then why…
…. That happens when one is still on the way, when one has not reached the goal. They have that, they insist a lot on this, for… for they like to prolong the human road, simply because they enjoy this human road and because, as I told you, if you want to remain in life, in contact with life, a certain relativity necessarily remains in the experience. They like it that way―they like to quarrel with the Divine, they like the feeling of separation, these things give them pleasure! For they remain in the human consciousness and want to remain there. The moment there is perfect identification, all this disappears. So, it is as though one were depriving oneself of the pleasure of a drama! There is something that has gone out of life, that is, its illusion. They still need a reasonable amount of illusion; they can’t enter directly into the Truth.
In fact, for the feeling of separation to disappear, you must have realised within yourself a perfect identity; and once this perfect identity is realised, well, the story comes to an end, there is nothing more to tell.
The Mother – Questions and Answers: CWM, Vol. 8, pp 224-25
Krishna’s Light in the Overmind
The Overmind ready to be Divinised.
Salvia farinacea
Mealy sage, Mealy-cup sage
Small lavender blue bilabiate flower with a broadly extended lower lip marked with a white patch in the centre and light grey blue calyces; borne in whorls in erect terminal spikes. A branching lightly pubescent perennial herb.
The Mother – Spiritual significance of flowers
