First Meeting with Mirra Alfassa 1914

Mirra Alfassa, who Sri Aurobindo will later install as The Mother of the Ashram, recollects her first meeting with him: “I came here….. I had an appointment for the afternoon. He was living in the house that’s now part of the second dormitory, the old Guest House. I climbed up the stairway and he was standing there, waiting for me at the top of the stairs….EXACTLY my vision! Dressed the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me…and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked (gesture of instantaneous shock), the inner experience immediately became one with the outer experience and there was fusion – the decisive shock.”

She recalls: “As soon I saw Sri Aurobindo, I recognized him as the well-known being whom I used to call Krishna and this is enough to explain why I am fully convinced that my place and work are near him, in India.”

Mirra was the wife of Paul Richard who had met Sri Aurobindo earlier in 1910. It was this meeting four years ago that paved the way for the present meeting of both Mirra and Paul with Sri Aurobindo. Paul had come for trying to get elected as a representative of French India in the French Parliament; but Mirra’s purpose was different. She had received signs that Sri Aurobindo was the person with whom her own spiritual mission was linked and she came to meet him.

Mirra’s diary leaf on the next morning reads: “Little by little the horizon becomes precise, the path becomes clear. And we advance to an ever greater certitude. It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, when Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth. O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with joy and gratitude when I think of it, and my hope has no bounds.”