A story from The Mother

Matt Agnio
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Many spiritual traditions (in the West, particularly the arcane ones) hold that there was an original, divinely ordained plan for life on Earth and long ago it was bisected by a diverting influence — and every last thing that we could call history is the story of humanity’s wandering, stumbling return.

In traditions that speak this way, there tends to be a certain amount of talk about that original fall and the ensuing restoration, but there are few truly recent, truly large-scale plot points in the narrative. One major exception to this rule, however, is supplied a mid-century yogi named Sri Aurobindo and, especially, his spiritual partner and the manager of their large ashram, a woman known as The Mother.

The Mother wrote explicitly about this vast story, with modern updates, and she had some fascinating things to say. One thing she said was that World War I and World War II were two episodes of the same war (a perspective common to historians already and one which will, as time passes, no doubt become the prevailing narrative as the 20th century is flattened by the lens of history). Also, she said that this war was the external expression of a spiritual war: more or less what the Christians have long anticipated as Armageddon.

The idea is that the in this one World War, the battle for the Earth was being waged from a higher plane, with spiritual influences on opposing sides overshadowing the thoughts and activities of us mortals. On one side you had the allied forces of good, including terrestrial and spiritual participants— she is less specific about these — and on the other side you have the forces of evil, with terrestrial forces like the Nazis ultimately being influenced from beyond by not one devil but four: embodiments of archetypal sin, which the Vedic tradition calls Asuras.

The Mother said the upshot of this battle is that the spiritual good guys won, but the spiritual bad guys did not completely surrender. She says some the spiritual “generals” in the war, unnamed entities speaking in the third personal “we,” admitted their side as defeated — that is, more or less final, series-finale-not-season-finale-type defeated — but even knowing they were defeated they vowed to do absolutely as much damage as they could before their ultimate fate caught up with them.

(In some versions of this story, by the way, the absolute nature this conflict accounts for the release into humanity of the fairly absolute weaponry of nuclear bombs. As that version goes, ideas about the bombs were inseminated into people’s minds a little ahead of the human developmental timetable — which could arguably be corroborated by the fact that, having leveled two cities, we have mainly used the technology to make steam and scare the piss out of ourselves.)

I think stories like these are fascinating and almost universally mishandled. They are either categorically dismissed without even a whiff of interest (which belies unacknowledged prejudices, I feel), or alternately they are embraced too fully, at the great expense of rationalism.

Having done both of these at different times in my life, I personally prefer to just entertain these stories now, and I find that as commentary on our world they certainly do entertain.

So on we go: the Mother said that, following the decisive defeat, which was marked on Earth by the end of World War II, only three Asuras surrendered. I’d have to go looking for the exact details, but basically one decided to be good again, one was “re-absorbed” into the creative consciousness from which all things have arisen, and I can’t remember what happened to the other one. If memory serves, it was detained in a sort of spiritual Gitmo, where at last report negotiations were on-going.

Here’s the part of the story that I find particularly entertaining, though — especially in our contemporary context. The Mother said that each of these four generals archetypically embodied a particular spiritual transgression (sort of like the avatars of the Seven Deadly Sins, only there were just four of them). And the one that refused to admit defeat, she said — speaking circa 1950-something — was the avatar of lies.

This is the part that sticks with me and that I find the most compelling:

Yeah. How much evil would persist in the modern world if we just controlled all the lies?

)
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