Mirra Alfassa, known to her followers as The Mother or La Mere, was a spiritual guru, occultist and yoga teacher, and a collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who considered her to be of equal yogic stature to him and called her by the name "The Mother".
30 Facts About Mirra Alfassa
2.
Mirra Alfassa founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and established the town of Auroville; she was influential on the subject of Integral Yoga.
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Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878 to a Sephardi Jewish bourgeois family.
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Mirra Alfassa was born in 1878 in Paris to Moise Maurice Alfassa, a Turkish Jewish father who migrated from Edirne via Egypt, and Mathilde Ismalun, an Egyptian Jewish mother.
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Mirra Alfassa had an elder brother, Matteo Mathieu Maurice Alfassa, who later held numerous French governmental posts in Africa.
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Mirra Alfassa was close to her grandmother Mira Ismalum, who was a neighbour and who was one of the first women to travel alone outside Egypt.
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Mirra Alfassa learnt to read at the age of seven and joined school very late at the age of nine.
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Mirra Alfassa was interested in various fields of art, tennis, music and singing, but was a concern to her mother owing to an apparent lack of permanent interest in any particular field.
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Mirra Alfassa kept these experiences to herself, as her mother would have regarded occult experiences as a mental problem to be treated.
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Mirra Alfassa especially recalls at the age of thirteen or fourteen having a dream or a vision of a luminous figure whom she used to call Krishna but had never seen before in real life.
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In 1893 after graduating from school, Mirra Alfassa joined Academie Julian to study art.
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Mirra Alfassa's son Andre was born on 23 August 1898.
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Some of Mirra Alfassa's paintings were accepted by the jury of Salon d'Automne and were exhibited in 1903,1904 and 1905.
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Mirra Alfassa recalls herself being a complete atheist at this time, yet was experiencing various memories which she found were not mental formations but spontaneous experiences.
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Mirra Alfassa kept those experiences to herself and developed an urge to understand their significance.
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Mirra Alfassa came across the book Raja yoga by Swami Vivekananda, which provided some of the explanations she was looking for.
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Mirra Alfassa received a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in French, which helped her considerably in learning more about these experiences.
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In 1908, Mirra Alfassa moved to 49 rue de Levis, Paris, living alone in a small apartment and involving herself in discussions with Buddhists and Cosmic movement circles.
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Mirra Alfassa had come to know Mirra when he was in discussions with Max Theon.
20.
When she first met Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa recognized in him the person whom she used to see in her dreams.
21.
Mirra Alfassa left for Japan along with Richard, never to return to Paris again.
22.
On 24 April 1920 Mirra Alfassa returned with Richard to Pondicherry accompanied by Dorothy Hodgson.
23.
Mirra Alfassa moved to live near Sri Aurobindo in the guest house at Rue Francois Martin.
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Mirra Alfassa was initially not totally accepted by the other household members and was considered an outsider.
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Mirra Alfassa considered this was a considerable movement away from usual life in the ashram, which was until then about practising total renunciation of the outside world.
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Mirra Alfassa had a profound effect on her, which developed into a close relationship in later years.
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Mirra Alfassa started with just simple conversations and recitations, which later expanded into deeper discussions about integral yoga where she would read a passage from Sri Aurobindo's or her own writings and comment on them.
28.
Mirra Alfassa stopped all her activities from 1959 onwards to devote herself completely towards yoga.
29.
Mirra Alfassa had recorded their conversations, which later he gathered in a volume of 13 books called Mother's Agenda.
30.
Mirra Alfassa left her body at 7:25 pm on 17 November 1973 at the age of 95.