Many have been the past births attributed to The Mother

Re: The Mother’s Past Births

RY Deshpande Fri 01 Feb 2008 05:47 AM PST

Many have been the past births attributed to the Mother—Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Mona Lisa, Queen Elizabeth I, Mirabai, Catherine the Great, apart from some of the earlier Egyptian births. But there is no clue about her being there in the time of Vedic or Upanishadic glory. Maybe, Vladimir could say something about this. Importantly, however, here was all along “the Divine working within the ordinary human limits,” as Sri Aurobindo writes to young Nagin Doshi in the mid 1930s. In a few cases, when some of these possibilities were pointed out to Sri Aurobindo, he did not set them aside, inferentially taking that as his approval. Yet “vividness” of their memory is quite reassuring in several instances.

In the Record of Yoga Sri Aurobindo himself has noted down the past births of some of the early disciples. He did disclose to Dilip Roy some of his (Dilip’s) past appearances during various periods. Similarly, when Amal asked about Harindranath Chattopadhyaya being the incarnation of Shelley, Sri Aurobindo replied:

“I imagine Shelley was not an evolutionary being but a being of a higher plane assisting in the evolution.”

Could that be the reason that he wrote of falling on the thorns of life and bleeding? About Amal’s own past births:

“…I would be inclined to wager that you were not only in Athens (that is evident) but in England during the Restoration time or thereabouts, in Renaissance Italy, etc…”

Well, what can we say about these deep matters? One can be pretty romantic about them and drift in whatever direction one might like to drift. This is a hazardous proposition, a dangerous proposition, in fact as Sri Aurobindo writes to Amal, it is a “perilous game”, and not of much avail to us, as we are not equipped to use that knowledge in moulding in any way our present or future life. Yet some of the clues about the past births of the Mother or Sri Aurobindo could be, not scientifically-rationally but perceptively-intuitively used to re-look into the history as otherwise we maintain to understand it. That whole era could be reconstructed in that perception-intuition by marshalling science and rationalism themselves. But I’d request you again to elaborate on the “good guesses” made by Amal. RYD