New translation (2015) of a memoir by Amrita in tamil mainly about his relationship with Sri Aurobindo. 'Old Long Since' was an earlier translation in 1969.
These reminiscences tell the story of how Amrita, at the age of fifteen, conceived a great desire to meet Sri Aurobindo and pursued this dream for more than three years until he finally met his Master in 1913. Amrita writes of his early life in his village, his days as a student in Pondicherry, his contact with the poet Subramania Bharati, his efforts to meet Sri Aurobindo, his studies in Madras, and his gradual initiation to Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. This brief narrative, written in 1962 in Tamil, was translated into English in 1969 and published under the title Old Long Since as part of the larger book Reminiscences. In this book, the English translation of Amrita's memoir is being published for the first time as an independent book.
AN inner fullness has come in like the coming in of light in dark caves. It fills, it illumines, it vibrates the multiple strings of life; it has found the contact with the forgotten achievements of the past to enable me to start the new ones of the future on the basis of the changing formations of the present. The currents of life well up to meet the descending rays of light from the upper heavens for transmutation base and the dark into the luminous and the true, for transmutation of the ugly and the wrong into the beautiful and the right.
O Mother of Radiances, you have dawned in the narrow horizons of my mind. Out of its depthless rigidities, in the midst of its walled-up spaces you have created a heart-like something that will live its eternal life. You have revealed to me a chamber alive and warm within the mind’s substanceless polar regions and there I can safely retire and find in you my refuge.
The lower network of moving forces remains, but I feel your presence in its midst. The higher network of moving forces remains, and here you have stepped in also shedding a warmth of life that was not there before, you have turned the dull grey luminosity into a brilliance of living waters. Your active and living presence is everywhere; you have heeded my words of aspiration, the fire of my demand for your omnipresence. More than what I ignorantly sought for, you have revealed to me. You are intimate and one with me when in truth and in law and yet away and far off from one me when in error and in falsehood.
When there are no more darkening shadows about me; when you see me bared of all shams and shows in every part of the being; when you see in every cell of my body an eternal home for you and an eternal temple; when you see me one with you in identity and still worshipping you; when you melt the compact gold of knowledge in the living and running waters of devotion; when you break my earth and release the energies; when you turn my pride into power in your hands and my ignorance into light, my narrowness into wideness, my selfishness into a true gathering together of forces in one centre, my greed into a capacity of untiring search after the truth for the attainment of its substances, my egoism into the true and conscious instrumental centre, my mind into a channel for you to descend, my heart into your heart of pure fire and flame, my life into a pure and translucent substance for your handling, my body into a conscious vessel for holding what of you is meant for me; then, O Mother of Radiances, my aim in life now and hereafter will be fulfilled in the true and right and vast way. Aspiration wakes in me! Achieve in me all that I flame for!
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