Our Light and Delight

5

The Exercise of Divine Power

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Divine Power which is all the time present in the world as well as beyond the world and especially the Divine Power as embodied by them for a new manifestation could do a lot of impossible-looking things. I know from my own experience how it could get us over the supposed necessity of acting in conformity with Nature's "laws" operative in the physical world and the living body.

Once I had a fall very badly hurting my left knee and resulting in a large collection of water over the joint. I went through a whole night of acute pain. My inner appeals to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought on some alleviation now and again but no appreciable relief. Soon after sunrise, my friend Ambu who used to be a great help to me in the early days of my stay in the Ashram came to enquire how I was. I told him of my restless night and gave him a note for the Mother to be taken immediately to her door and to see that it got into her hands as soon as possible. Shortly after this the pain was completely gone.

A still more serious occasion was when, during a long visit to Bombay, I developed myocardial weakness and passed through an initial phase of severe collapse on the 8th of May 1948. I have told elsewhere the story of what followed. Here I may touch on a few points. There was a sudden plunge into the psychic consciousness, which in Yogic terminology is the consciousness of the deepest heart or the inmost being, a plunge which seemed a surprising metamorphosis of the terrible prolonged sinking feeling in the middle of the chest as if I were passing inexorably out of life. I was inwardly calling to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for help but also acted in a "realistic" manner by calmly telling my wife that there appeared to be not much hope of my survival. I believe it was the sustained intensity of my cry to my gurus that widely opened up the depths of

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my being and took unexpected advantage of the sensation of the life-force falling as though abysmally away from the cardiac centre where, in the Upanishads' view, the whole complex of the living human consciousness with all its various radiations has its hub.

After the doctor had come and given an injection of atropine and morphine and advised complete rest instead of the anticipated drowse a profound tranquillity and inner awakening took place which seemed to look Wordsworthianly into the heart of things and felt the whole universe as a Divine Being, charging even the most ordinary physical objects like the tables and chairs of my room with a wonderful spiritual presence. Towards nightfall I read several parts of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. In the middle of the night during a state of calm in-drawn-ness lines of poetry started to get composed in front of my eyes. In the morning I was still in a state of poetic sensitivity and creativity. Actually for three months the flow of poetry continued, constituting the book entitled The Adventure of the Apocalypse. Day after day, although the doctor had advised me not even to raise my head from the pillow if I could help it, I used to sit up and write poems in a condition of thrilled inspiration which made my heart go like a race-horse. All the time I felt the force of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo behind the poetry and, with every act of offering the surprising results to them, the room within me of receiving their presence grew ever wider. In spite of my flagrantly disobeying the doctor's strict orders, on his visit each morning he found me better and better was pleased both with his own treatment and with my supposed obedience to his orders.

I used to send to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother every day the two or three poems that flowed out spontaneously with a strange burden of occult symbol and spiritual sight. I would also send bulletins of my progress in health and told them of the absolutely shocking unmedical behaviour of mine which still kept me improving. I stressed my utter faith in their curative powers passing within me like a subtle electricity through the constant production of poetry. The Mother wrote to me: "My dear child, I quite agree with you that there is a power other and much more powerful than that of the doctors and the medicines and I am glad to see

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that you put your trust in it. Surely it will lead you throughout all difficulties and in spite of all catastrophic warnings. Keep your faith intact and all will be all right."

From Nirodbaran, who used to be in close touch with our Gurus on many fronts, I have heard of cases of advanced tuberculosis which a doctor would sternly segregate and copiously treat, being made light of by the Mother, allowed to move freely in the Ashram and completely cured within a short time. What the Mother and Sri Aurobindo principally did was to deal with the occult forces which are be- hind all the diseases and to reinforce with their spiritual light the life-power of the body, more easily when one had faith but often even without conscious co-operation by the patient. They believed that the spiritual consciousness could achieve all kinds of undreamt-of results and that there were interconnections between physical events and spiritual movements. But they also had a poised scientific mind ever testing their own experiences and guarding against too much credulity. Thus when a disciple proposed an intimate relation between a certain earthquake in India and the work of Sri Aurobindo in his birth-centenary year, the Mother very coolly denied it. I remember also a short talk between the Mother and one or two sadhaks who had brought some miraculous stories of dematerialisation. I think it was Ravindra of the Dining Room who spoke of a report about an Indian saint who was said to have disappeared from a closed room and left in the place of his dematerialised body a heap of flowers. The Mother heard this account and some other tales very quietly and then said: "Everything is possible. I know of spiritualistic mediums who under rigorous scientific conditions dematerialised and rematerialised. But every reported incident is not necessarily true. Such things don't occur very frequently and under all circumstances." When she was pointedly asked whether we should credit the particular phenomenon mentioned about the saint's disappearance and the substitute-appearance of flowers, she said: "Its occurrence is not impossible but I don't think it really happened."

In their own spiritual overridings of natural limits Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were careful to define the nature and the range of the powers their mission demanded

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of them. When there was a question of Sri Aurobindo employing the power of what he has named the supermind, he always disclaimed the direct use of it. He repeatedly said that what he was directly utilising was the Overmind power. Not that the Supermind was still unrealised inwardly, but that he had not yet, at the time involved, established it as an active force from the station of physical consciousness he had taken up for the specific world-work he had come to do. The Mother once told me that she hoped to cure the damage infantile paralysis had done to one of my legs, but that the cure could be effected only by the Supermind when it had been brought into the very substance of her body. So the marvellous cure was to be on some far future day.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were wonder-workers in many respects but they were not miracle-mongers and they were perfectly honest and clear-headed. Moreover, their central job was to bring about a radical change in our inner and outer beings — a drawing forth of the hidden God-lit soul, the widening out of the mind into an infinite peace, the raising of the consciousness into realms of light overhead, the calling down of the spiritual Reality from beyond the human status into our whole psycho-physical organism to bring about an integral transformation. Whatever super-natural capacities would come automatically into play in the process of their Yogic concern with individuals and the world at large, these they would exercise without hesitation. Theirs would also be responses of miraculous Grace and the constant assurance of more-than-human help on tap, as it were, yet never an emphasis on spectacular disclosure of powers nor any indiscriminate claim for themselves and for other workers in the spiritual field.

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