Preparing for the Miraculous

166 eleven talksElisabeth I 13 ) but as the Avatar. Many devotees have difficultyin understanding the three aspects of the Mother, asshe said herself. Most of them expect her to be shiningly divinein all her earthly ways, twenty-four hours a day. Andthat she was, of course, but not like the temple Gods or theGods in the Puranas. For she was here not only in a humanbody, she had also to take upon her or rather into her thefull human condition in order to transform it, more specificallythe human condition of the disciples. To be a realguru is a task of which the disciples usually have no idea,for it means taking their shortcomings, deformations andsubconscious darknesses upon oneself. Being the Avatar ofthe age meant not only that; it meant also having to sufferand transform all that was low and animal-like below andpreceding the human condition.One reads from the pen of several authors that “theMother was so human.” M.P. Pandit for instance wrote:“She was supremely divine but equally extremely human.”This is a misconception of the Mother which interprets herperceptible actions and her gracious relations with peopleaccording to the human ways. Indeed, she had to moveamong the disciples, the Ashram youth and the visitors;she had to answer all kinds of questions instantly; she hadto make decisions constantly; and she had to respond immediatelyto requests, prayers and inner expressions ofadoration and love, but also to attitudes of anger, malevolenceand even hate. Yet it was she who said: “It has cometo the point that even those who are here put on me feelingsand reactions which are purely human.” In Savitri SriAurobindo wrote: “Even when she bent to meet earth’s intimacies/ Her spirit kept the stature of the Gods.”13 See Georges Van Vrekhem: The Mother – The Story of Her Life, chapter14.