Mirra Alfassa’s encounter with Sri Aurobindo unfolded as the outer recognition of an inner relationship that had long been prepared. While engaged in deep spiritual and occult practice in Europe and North Africa, she had become aware of a guiding Presence, a divine being working for the earth’s spiritual evolution, whom she experienced inwardly in visions and meditations. When she later came to India with her husband Paul Richard and entered Sri Aurobindo’s residence in Pondicherry on March 29, 1914, she immediately recognized him as that very being who had silently guided her inner life for years. This instantaneous recognition was not merely emotional; it was for her a decisive spiritual certainty that her path and his work were inwardly one.

During this first stay in Pondicherry from 1914 to 1915, she lived near Sri Aurobindo and began to collaborate with him in a concrete way. Together with Paul Richard, she assisted in the planning and publication of the journal *Arya*, through which Sri Aurobindo’s major writings on yoga, philosophy, and the Gita were serialized. Her role was not only external or organizational; she offered an inner support to his yogic and evolutionary aims, participating in the atmosphere and orientation of his sadhana even before any formal Ashram existed. Circumstances related to the war and politics led her to leave India in 1915, and she spent several years in Japan, continuing her spiritual practice while maintaining an inner link with Sri Aurobindo.

Her return to Pondicherry on April 24, 1920, marked the beginning of a more continuous and fully acknowledged collaboration. From that time onward, she became Sri Aurobindo’s close spiritual associate in daily life, naturally assuming responsibility for the emerging community of disciples who gathered around him. As this community grew, she took charge of both its practical organization and its inner guidance, gradually becoming known as “The Mother.” When Sri Aurobindo later withdrew into greater seclusion to concentrate on his yoga, he entrusted to her the care of the disciples and the evolving collective life, affirming her role as his spiritual collaborator.

Their joint work came to be understood as a single endeavor: the realization of an integral yoga aimed at the transformation of human consciousness. Sri Aurobindo articulated the principles and vision of this yoga, while The Mother increasingly embodied and organized its application in the day-to-day life of the Ashram and its seekers. In this way, what began as an inward recognition ripened into a shared spiritual labor, in which two complementary centers of one consciousness worked together for a common evolutionary aim.