The Mother

French-born spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, co-founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, founder (in 1968) of Auroville — the international experimental township in Tamil Nadu intended as a living laboratory for human unity — and the woman known throughout the Aurobindo lineage simply as The Mother. Born Mirra Alfassa in 1878 in Paris to Sephardic Jewish parents from Egypt and Turkey, she pursued painting, music, and esoteric studies (including a deep relationship with the Theonic and Cosmic teachings of Max Théon), met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1914, and from 1920 collaborated with him in the development of Integral Yoga and the supramental work. After Aurobindo's withdrawal in 1926 she became the Ashram's primary teacher and organizer; after his passing in 1950 she carried the work forward for another twenty-three years until her own death in 1973. The vast Mother's Agenda — thirteen volumes of conversations with her disciple Satprem covering 1951-1973 — preserves the most detailed first-person record of late twentieth-century yogic experience available in any tradition.