While reading the Mother’s Agenda, at several places we find the reference of Rijuta, an American disciple of the Mother. It is a normal trend to ignore the reference of the disciples or followers as the reader is much more interested to know about the Mother only so often Rijuta has been sidelined. But what we cannot ignore are the realizations that the Mother had had in her presence as Rijuta was one of the few persons whose psychic being seems to have been fully developed. This was indeed a rare and great achievement in yoga. So, let’s know and learn more about Rijuta and her life.

Rijuta was born as Patricia Noonan. She hailed from the United States of America where she was quite well-known. She came to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1956 with her husband Michael and when she met the Mother, she caught ‘something’ and she declared to her husband that she would not return. Eventually she became the Mother’s secretary and also received the name of ‘Rijuta’ (meaning ‘straightforward’) from her on 21 May 1960. Rijuta acted as a liaison between the Mother and her American followers and disciples. They used to write letters to the Mother through Rijuta who would reply to them after getting the answers orally from the Mother. She was quite good at writing. The Ashramites remember her as a “very fine”, “wonderful”, “friendly”, “cultured”, “soft-spoken”, “kind and delightful” and “very sweet person”. She was quite pretty, slim and was of short height but whoever met her could never forget the solid tranquility that radiated from her personality and her lovely smile with which she used to greet others. She was quite close to Udar and Mona Pinto, Vishwanath Lahiri, Vasudha and Sujata Nahar. Apart from being the Mother’s secretary, Rijuta also did her manicure. In fact, it was the Mother who had chosen her for the said job.

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This is a prophecy coming directly from the Horse’s Mouth, the Supreme himself granting the boon to Savitri, prophecy of the coming of the new race, the Supramental Race, a manifestation which is inevitable in the very nature of evolutionary creation. It is a new race which cannot be assembled by the new dna discoveries or the power and capacity of the nano-technology howsoever appealing it might be to the science-based rationality. The science-based rationality should also keep in mind the aspect of “falsifiability of the scientific theory as maintained by one of its strong thinkers. The more a theory is falsifiable the more it is scientific,—as though falsehood is in-built in these empirical sciences. Such can never be the dictum or principle of a yogi’s approach. His discoveries are not contingent to science’s mode or logic of methodology; he is concerned with his own tools of cognition and knowledge which have their foundation on another order of reality, a firmer and assured reality. And then it is a gross mistake to link up these materialist approaches to things that are deeply occult and unknown even to the highest spiritual or yogic pursuits. The Mother was constantly busy with the awakening of the body’s cells, that they respond to the higher light and force. She was invoking the presence of the Divine himself in the cells and, ultimately, leaving things to his best Wisdom, that his Will be done. She was repeatedly saying that that knowledge is not given, the process by which it could be accomplished. The knowledge that was given was of the inevitability of the appearance of the new body, but it had to get translated on the material plane, translated in the pragmatics of things, Nature occupying herself in working out the details. The occult work that is going on is concerned with it. This might sound an act of faith to the agnostic or to the rationalistic-only of the Integral Yogist. It can’t be helped and, luckily, his is not the final verdict in the matter; besides, his arrogant insistences are themselves based on another set of arguments constituting another act of faith, a faith of another kind, that reason and rationality will not hoodwink him anywhere. Is there an assurance of any sort that it is so? None whatsoever. So let us look at the divine promise founded on a Yogi’s solid and verifiable experiences and realizations. The divine promise is based on its an incontrovertible logic, and in it is the full emergence of Supermind, and a rapid assumption of its powers, and disclosing of its forms and the creation of a supramental race and supramental life. Sri Aurobindo was writing this in 1950, and the Mother was engaged with the operative details, intensely more so during the last decade of her presence in the physical here. The Yogi saw the obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles, atoms endowed with a will, an inconscient will, and knew that it is that which has to be made luminous, this body-mind opening to the higher, the supramental light and force. That opening is what he called the arrival of the Mind of Light. With that arrival can be the beginning of the Supramental or Gnostic Race. The problem is the physical, and it is in the physical that the needed yoga-tapasya be done. There has to be the golden body, hiraņya tanu, the body of the Divine Agni, and it is that body which has to be first formed in the Transcendent, it, from there, supporting the body in the evolutionary process. Perhaps this is what the Mother meant when she said that it is the psychic being which will materialize. Psychic being supports, in fact carries forward the evolution and, it as the spark of the Divine, the supramental Agni, who will do it all here. In it is the assured immortality of the evolutionary race, it stepping into the higher domains, of light and truth and power and beauty and joy. For the appearance of the full resplendent golden body, hiraņya tanu, newer centres or chakras of activity have to be created and it is in their functioning that there will be the completer manifestation, the beginning of a new creation. When the Poet of Savitri is describing these aspects, detailing them, he is not creating just a happy sonorous piece of literature, though literature it is of the most splendid kind; he is yogically doing something vaster, something absolutely marvellous, transformative. It must be recognised that poetic speech of the mystic-spiritual kind has the power to make real what it expresses. Expression and Word are inseparable in that speech, and it is that which constitutes the supreme Mantra, the highest mode of utterance. It has the power also to put us directly in contact with the source from where it originates, the omniscient Hush, the Womb in which take birth things that come into manifestation. He has set down in it all his yogic achievements and perfections, siddhis, that caused into motion the rhythms of the truth and the right and the vast. Being a composition made toward the culmination of his avataric work, Sri Aurobindo has given us here in far-reaching perfection the gifts of god in god’s brightness and plenty. Savitri had asked the supreme Boon-giver that which shall make the earthly life the life divine. It is that which has been granted to her in the fullness of that Siddhi of the supreme Yogi: This earthly life shall become the life divine. Since the beginning of the world this is what was decreed in the deep essence of created things, and it is that which has been occult-yogically worked out and affirmed in this mortal creation. Sri Aurobindo spoke of the supramental body made in a supramental way, and it is that work which is now proceeding. This is something which is advancing apace, and our task is only to lend ourselves to be a part of that unstoppable progress. The human potential must develop in its richness, must awake to supermanhood, or else grow into God-light and God-force to reveal the secret deity seated deep in its heart. Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme. That is the work we have to do—because, the essential has already been done for us.

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The élite humanity preparing itself for the next stage is the march of human progress. Not that much has been done in this regard and it may look if there had been any progress at all, that it is not an illusion. If there had been Plato-Kant-Einstein, the dark side has perhaps become darker, moving from robbery-piracy-terrorism to genocide or holocaust or wars of a devastating nature. Yet the silent occult work goes on. The problem of the collective is a daunting problem and no easy-fix solutions are possible for it. However, human aspiration is something positive also and there shall be some to become the receivers of the transcendental glory. There are forerunners and there are leaders and heads proving themselves as the deliverers of limited mind. They will be the first-born of a new supernal race. They will not be exactly the beings of the Gnostic possibility, but they will pave the way towards it, usher in the divine successors. Sri Aurobindo saw the necessity of this Intermediate Race and yogically worked out the methodology for its appearance in the evolutionary process. This is a race of beings who will be governed by what he called the Mind of Light, the physical’s Mind receiving the Supramental. This will happen when the Supermind shall enter into the earthly Time. Then shall the superman wake in mortal man.

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