Date: December 13, 2025
Venue: Matriniketan, Pondicherry
As part of the residential programme organized by Uditam: Institute for Integral Healing, Sri Aurobindo Society, Dr. Beloo Mehra, Director, BhāratShakti, was invited to facilitate a group discussion session on Saturday, December 25, 2025. Since this session was held on Christmas, a Day as per the Mother marks the return of Light, or Day of Light, for her session, Dr. Mehra focused on the topic – Sri Aurobindo’s Arrival in Pondicherry as Return of the Light.
The session began with Dr. Mehra sharing briefly about the Mother’s explanation of significance of Light for the festival of Christmas. She then narrated briefly how Sri Aurobindo was recognised by “three signs” as ‘Uttara Yogi’ when he came to Pondicherry. She also recounted some of the dramatic bits of the journey Sri Aurobindo undertook from Chandannagar to Pondicherry via a stopover at Calcutta. The participants found this part quite interesting.
Dr. Mehra then spoke about the almost dead-city that Pondicherry was in 1910, cut off from all the political and revolutionary fervour that had gripped much of India at that time. And how for a long time British colonial establishment could not believe that Sri Aurobindo had given up all revolutionary activity. She briefly narrated the various ways they tried – force, fraud and temptation – to get Sri Aurobindo out of Pondicherry. But Sri Aurobindo would have none of it, and he stayed firm in his conviction that this was going to be his cave of tapasyā.
Why Pondicherry as cave of tapasyā? To address this, Dr. Mehra brought the participants’ attention to the Vedic Rishi Agastya and Rishika Lopamudra and the yoga they were engaged in somewhere around this part of the country. She mentioned that there is some historical evidence that there used to be an important center of Vedic learning in or around Pondicherry area. But what is commonly agreed upon is that Sage Agastya had sojourned to the southern part of the subcontinent and did immense yoga.
Dr. Mehra briefly highlighted the parallels between the integrality of the spiritual work of Agastya and Lopamudra, and that of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A Yoga that aims to integrate Matter and Spirit and bring down a new Supramental consciousness required a deep digging into the Inconscience – a work that had also been taken up in the past by Rishi Agastya and this is the work that had come to its culmination in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
There was also some discussion of the general awakening that Pondicherry went through as a result of being a meeting point of many nationalists and revolutionaries. Dr. Mehra pointed out the important collaboration that ensued between Subramania Bharati and Sri Aurobindo which gave the world a deeper understanding of the relation between Tamil and Sanskrit languages, as well as the inner oneness of the civilisational roots of India and her worldview.
The topic was explored in such a way so that the idea of the return of light was emphasised throughout. The session was kept informal and interactive, so that some of the deeper aspects could be explained in a simpler manner.
To read more of our sessions conducted for Uditam, see HERE.