Preparing for the Miraculous

184 eleven talksBut why? The Mother’s “Pourquoi?” resounds in so manyof her conversations. “He has left before telling us what hewas doing. I am absolutely busy making a path in a virginforest – more than a virgin forest.” 21 (Perhaps she was not allowedto know because she – her body – had to do the job. Itmay not have been permitted to have a knowledge beyondits effort.) “He told me: ‘The world is not ready.’” It looks asif “the world” here means the whole of the manifestation atthis point of its evolution. For that was the burden the Avatarhad to take upon him, which needed to be transformedin its foundations, and which kept resisting him.In his marvellous poem “A God’s Labour” – which mightalso be called “The Avatar’s Song” or “The Ballad of the Avatar”– Sri Aurobindo had described exactly this problem.A voice cried, “Go where none has gone!Dig deeper, deeper yetTill you reach the grim foundation stoneAnd knock at the keyless gate.”I saw that a falsehood was planted deepAt the very root of thingsWhere the grey Sphinx guards God’s riddle sleepOn the Dragon’s outspread wings.True, “the keyless gate,” “the grey Sphinx,” and “theDragon’s outspread wings,” all concrete elements of hisexperience, are little more than poetic metaphors to us. But“God’s riddle sleep” is clearly the dark Inconscient, andthat was what Sri Aurobindo descended into for an operationwhich only the Avatar, the very Divine, could perform.We find something similar in his sonnet “The InconscientFoundation:”My soul regards its veiled subconscient base,All the dead obstinate symbols of the past,21 Mother’s Agenda, vol. II, p. 285.