Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER I

Apologia

I must start with an unusual apology: that I do not feel called upon to apologise for what I venture to undertake, to wit, to describe not so much how my Gurudev, Sri Aurobindo impinged on me, as how I reacted to him. For, when all is said and done, one can scarcely hope to delineate the beauty of a great personality in abstract terms with mere purple epithets. One can—at least that is how I have always looked upon all who are truly great—only portray one's own reactions of them, and very imperfectly at that. I would go further and submit that the greater a personality, the more he must elude us. Rabindranath once told me that we understand more than we think we do. To me the statement never seemed cryptic. For whenever, in my life's gropings, I have met a truly great soul, the impression left on me has grown in height and depth with time and I have felt that I have profited by him more than I was able to assess.

I can only speak of what I know, and since I am persuaded that what I do not even surmise as self-knowledge is yet unimportant part of myself, I am entitled to express it even at the risk of sounding somewhat unintelligible to many. Also, I would warn my readers, even when I humbly ask them to lend me a sympathetic ear—without which none can truly hear what another has to say—that I will have, on occasions, to make such mystic statements while reminiscing about one who came into my life like a storm at once liberating and imperious; whom I courted and yet wanted to disown; whom on numerous occasions I resisted and yet could not help clinging to; acclaimed and yet criticised with all my irreverent impetuosity; whom I accused bitterly of being aloof, although even his remoteness

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gave me boons of intimacy and vision which no physical proximity with my dearest friends and comrades have ever been able to rival. Also I would ask them, while they appraise my statements, to do me but the bare justice of believing in my sincerity; that is, to accept it when I say that I will not be consciously untruthful or theatrical when portraying my reactions to one whom I wanted to woo and yet felt so frantically impelled to desert that I had the temerity to write to him, time and again, that I had decided to end what seemed to me, in such turbid moments, a futile relationship and that what I found hardest to bear was that nobody must seek a private interview with him except when he himself deemed it necessary. In my spiritual crises I was, indeed, allowed to speak—even sing—to him, but still sometimes I went the length of apprising him, childishly, that I was going to leave him for good without any regret, when every beat of my heart rebuked me for wanting to stifle its breath. Reason never threw any light on this enigma although I hunted after a rational clue to the mystery as dispassionately as I could. I can only say now, when the supreme giver I cavilled at so often is no more, that I regard nothing that I count as an asset in my personality as not a gift, partial or entire, of his compassion—a compassion beside which the deepest human tenderness I have known pales into a glimmer. And yet I may well speak of him, from concrete indubitable experience, as being almost on a par with "the Unseen Beloved, the Lover whom we think not of who, even in this drab world does, sometimes," seize on us for his own whether at first we will or no. He may even come to us at first as an enemy with the wrath of love, and our earliest relations with him may be those of battle and struggle."*

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*Quoted from Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga, P. 690.

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