Tribute to Amrita on his Birth Centenary

PART - ONE

He Gave Us the Feeling of Infinite

WHEN people ask me to narrate my experiences of Sri Aurobindo, I have only one answer to give. What can be said about this Mahapurusha? And who can say that? However we might praise him and whatever the superlatives we might employ for the purpose, all that appears to be utterly inadequate to describe him.

So, when I am asked to narrate my experience, I am bewildered. I will set down just one experience during all the years that I spent under the shadow of Sri Aurobindo.

During the period when I had free access to the Master, I had often found him reaching down to my level and becoming one with me. Yet I used to have a feeling as though I was standing before a shoreless ocean, before the limitless stretch of space and to have the experience of a sense of the touch of the Infinite, the source and support of all that is and is not.

Yet another thing. Though he was like us before us, we could see and feel the shadow of our self falling off little by little, all through his grace and our being flooded with light, strength and joy. I have experienced this clearly and without doubt.

HYMN TO THE MOTHER OF RADIANCES

This 'Hymn just before the Mother of Radiances' was written by Amrita in January 1927. Later, Amrita's drafts were revised by Sri Aurobindo and arranged to make a three-part hymn. The revised version was also copied out in Sri Aurobindo's own hand.

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

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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!

2

Create in me a state of consciousness in which whatever I hear from you may at once turn into an intimate knowledge, a self-revelation, an expression of identity, an awareness at once of the within and the without. O Mother, whatever I gather from you, let it be of the deep vasts of the within which is omnipresent. May I be one with you in every way to have the supreme Delight, yet separate from you to stream forth devotion to you, one and yet separate like- life and its movements, like heat and light, like power and its expression, like true knowledge and its effecting force. Let what you give me be not a treasure to me but as if a thing of my own self-discovered.

Wipe out the division in my consciousness that I may see and listen to you as part of yourself. The life-energies in me aspire for the knowledge that comes from identity, for the vision that is born of identity, for the listening that takes its orientation in identity, — the identity that is yourself.

May I be the manifestation of a portion of you in your limitless and shining spaces.

3

Increase my fires and aspiration, make the surrender in me possible at once and in every way; widen my openness and receptivity; remove the coverings that delay the workings of psyche deep within; take away, O Mother, from me what I have and what I have not....

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The cells of my body, the filaments of my nervous coat, the five streams of my mind,— all make their unconditioned surrender to you, O Mother of Radiances, that there may not be falsehood in existence, division in consciousness, death in the living waters, want of harmony and misery in the nervecoils, disease in the body....

Thy voice replies to me:

"By the fivefold powers of surrender in the physical, by the quiet intensity of the psychic urge that is behind you, centrally, increase ever and ever the inherent Ananda and the hidden opulences of your consciousness. First of all, become conscious of what I have willed in you; be, next, that of which you have become conscious. Know at once and for ever, 'In me is your all.' "

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AN INFORMAL TALK

Between Chandulal* and Amrita

Which of the two.....

C: I like to obey sweet Mother in an absolute way, to have a very simple and total devotion, to scrupulously and faithfully execute what Mother wants. This is my aim. I do not worry at all about light or knowledge or even the widening of my consciousness. I am not a philosopher.

A: I too have fixed these riches as my aim: absolute obedience, total devotion and to be the instrument of an effective realisation of sweet Mother's will. All this in as ample a measure as you. But something in me aspires for a little more light, a little more knowledge, a little more consciousness. In this way obedience in me will grow more and more firm, devotion more and more intense and clear, my action will be based less and less on chaos and confusion. In fact, I have no fear of light or of knowledge or of consciousness whereas darkness, ignorance and unconsciousness frighten me.

C: I do not understand everything that you have said. I will do everything that sweet Mother will ask me to. One aim, that's all.

A: To imagine you can do what sweet Mother wants you to do, to imagine you can act according to the will of sweet Mother is quite different from being able to realise what sweet Mother wills. It is true that we can progress only through ignorance and inconscience, these are the very basis of our being at present. For instance, look at our friend X. He too is devoted to Mother and wants to do whatever Mother wills, just like us. But since his devotion lacks sufficient light it demands things that it has no right to; his obedience, since it lacks sufficient knowledge, weighs on Mother as a tiresome and unhappy burden and his action aims only at the satisfaction of the self since it is deprived of a clear and one-pointed vision.

C: I say this once again: I shall always do as far as possible what sweet Mother wills and I will act to the best of my capacity according to sweet Mother's will without ever withdrawing from a progressive light, knowledge and consciousness.

17th March 1947

* Chandulal was the civil engineer of the Ashram. Amrita and Chandulal were great friends and used to go to the Mother together.

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