THE MOTHER’S MINISTRY—PREORDAINED CAPITULATION

V. Madhusudan Reddy

[This essay was earlier published in: V. Madhusudan Reddy, The Alchemy of Her Grace,
Institute of Human Study, Hyderabad, 1996, pp. 9–20 (Chapter 2)]

All was preordained; in the womb of Time everything was preplanned. Only the manner of its unfoldment had to be witnessed.

"‘He who chooses the Divine’,
the Master says,
‘has already been chosen
by the Divine’.
There is no escape from
the Hound of Heaven;
in fact, without knowing,
I was moving in the direction
of my Grand Hunter.
It was all Her Grace."

For several years I had secretly cherished the desire of offering my humble bit to the growing volume of literature on Sri Aurobindo. And with the completion of my Master’s degree in philosophy it became clear to me that I should do my Ph.D
in some area connected with Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Meta-philosophy’.
In the evolving scale of species in creation man cannot be final; in the perception of the Master he is only a transitional being, and Nature is secretly preparing the way for superman. No spiritual exercise known to human history or the assiduous practice of any religious ritual can ever succeed in bringing to surface this truth of the earth. It is the descent of the supramental Truth-Consciousness, affirms Sri Aurobindo, that alone can make mother Earth vibrate differently and enable her to give birth to an entirely new race—the gnostic race. It is the rationale or otherwise of this marvel that fascinated me as a university student and I chose the subject, ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of Evolution and the Problem of Human Destiny’ for my doctoral dissertation. But the admission was not that easy, for the Academic Dean, though a classicist by predilection, but relentless rationalist by training and who himself had a Ph.D from Germany, would not allow my choice for the simple reason that Sri Aurobindo was a great ‘mystic’ and that the treatment of the subject could not be rationally satisfying. I did not agree with the learned scholar. There are scores of scholars, if not hundreds, who have their expertise in Kant or Hegel, Schopenhauer or Sankara, and insisted that I would not join their ranks. I made it clear to him that Sri Aurobindo was my first and final choice. After about three months our good-natured Professor conceded, and immediately after, at the earliest opportunity in the following summer, I went to Pondicherry where I was destined to realise that the choice of my research theme was also the choice pursued by me through many of my past lives. Yes, ‘He who chooses the Divine’, the Master says, ‘has already been chosen by the Divine’. There is no escape from the Hound of Heaven; in fact, without knowing, I was moving in the direction of my Grand Hunter. It was all Her Grace.

*        *        *

It was Her Grace again that I was lodged in Golconde—our modern Himalayas—charged, with Peace and Silence. Room No.2W4 was a veritable cave of tapasya conducive for the celebration of Her omnipresence—the place where I was destined to stay for the next most memorable twenty four days of my life, days that changed the very course of my destiny.  Cloistered as it were, at first by necessity and then by a self-induced love of solitude, I kept myself mostly confined to my ‘cave’. Sri Aurobindo’s