The Divine has four aspects: Sat, Chit, Tapas, Ananda, or Existence, Consciousness, Force, Bliss. The four Asuras are the inversion of these four primary aspects. Existence turned into Death or non-existence, Consciousness turned into unconsciousness, Force into weakness, Bliss into suffering.
These are the four original Asuras, the very opposite of what this creation is meant to become. Their work is to oppose the Divine Work upon earth, to oppose the evolutionary march of mankind, to oppose the growth of Light and Love and Harmony and Peace and Joy. Yet their opposition too ends up serving the Divine Purpose by making creation more sincere, pointing out the defects and deficiencies and wrong turns that they use as openings to enter and attack. In the Vedas, they are naturally given different names in Sanskrit, that is, Vritra, Pani, Vala, Namuchi. Later in the Puranas, they have been given different but corresponding names such as Apsmar, Madhu, Kaitabh, etc.
One of the purposes of the Avatar is to defeat these Asuras at the evolutionary level at which humanity stands by killing their human representatives. But the final victory will come when the Asura itself is dissolved or converted. Much of humanity unfortunately lives by these very Asuric forces, opening to them instead of the Divine by misusing the freedom of choice given to man. Hence, the Divine does not want to destroy them, though He very well can because, it would mean that a large part of humanity that has opened to the Asuras also gets destroyed. That is why The Mother tried to convert the human incarnations of these Asuras by keeping them near Her. It included some of those physically close to Her, especially the two most prominent ones. Among these, Max Theon, the master occultist was an incarnation of the Asura of Death, whereas her husband, with whom She came to Pondicherry, was the Asura of Falsehood. There were others, some who agreed for conversion and were kept near Her by the divine arrangement.
Affectionately,
Alok da
