Preparing for the Miraculous

sri aurobindo’s descent into death 187Years: “I also saw, to my utter wonder and delight, that theentire body was suffused with a golden crimson hue, sofresh, so magnificent. It seemed to have lifted my pall ofgloom and I felt light and happy without knowing why. ...Pointing to the Light the Mother said: ‘If this SupramentalLight remains we shall keep the body in a glass case.’ It didnot remain and on the fifth day, on the 9th of December inthe evening, the body was laid in a vault.” 24And K.D. Sethna, many years afterwards, would writein Mother India, the Ashram periodical of which he was theeditor: “I marked that there was nothing like what peopleusually speak of when they stand before someone dead.They refer to the expression of peace on the face. I saw thevery opposite. Certainly not any stamp of agitation but theunmoving source of a sovereign dynamism. A tremendouspower seemed to emanate from the face and figure. Waveafter wave of it filled the room and surrounded me. I perceivedan overwhelming air of Conquest ... From the flaringnostrils to the way in which the legs were stretched out,slightly apart, there was a natural aspect of domination.Spontaneously, effortlessly an assertion of empire could beexperienced. Here was a silence, transcendent of all creation– an ultimate absolute of the ineffable – from whichoriginally had flowed forth a creative energy and whichnow was sending out a power of re-creating all life. Suchwas the mysterious death of Sri Aurobindo.” 25 The poetthat was K.D. Sethna had seen better than most of his lessintuitive co-disciples.“What we are doing will be a beginning, not a completion,”Sri Aurobindo had written in a letter. 26 He, as no oneelse, knew how difficult his envisioned transformation of24 Nirodbaran: Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, p. 280.25 Mother India, December 1991, p. 5.26 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 10.