Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER I I

The Pilgrimage

As I look back, after having been havened at his feet for well over two decades, I find it still difficult to decide what it is that drew a man of my temperament to one whose ways were so utterly different. Was it his genius? His "face radiant with an inner light", as Rabindranath had so aptly described? Or, was it the magnetism of a mystic aureole that engirdled him, an overwhelming sublimity that conquered one even when it baffled definition? Or, was it the ocean of peace he spoke of so often, a vastness which cradled him or because his "life" had become "a throb of His eternity" as he put it in his beautiful poem, Bliss of Identity? He impinged on my consciousness at different times in different ways, so I cannot claim to be able to say definitely why I found him so irresistible even when to his aloof seclusion I have never been able to get reconciled. I suppose a truly great personality not only attracts diverse types but also fascinates in entirely different ways on different occasions. Whatever it was, I confess that I cannot answer such extremely pertinent questions with any accent of certitude. A time was when I might have—when, that is, I was an idolater of Reason, the Infallible. But not now—when my proud faith in the human intellect as the final judge of Truth with a capital T has been completely sapped after years of hopeless struggles with one who was so formidably equipped against "intellectual rationalism" as I was wont to put it once upon a time. The result is that, in the end, I feel that the more one comes to know a mystic par excellence like him the less is one likely to be able to appraise him with the intellect.

Did I ever truly know why I had not only come to him as bee to rose, but clung to him with all the tentacles of my attachments

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even when I chafed and fumed, telling myself that the rose no longer had any honey to boast. Many a time have I assured myself in my self-willed revolt that a seclusion like his was an anachronism in our age because nobody could go on living in an ivory tower of self-centered contemplation in the twentieth century and yet retain his power to combat the hot passions and fratricidal strifes of today. The age is past, I told myself over and over again, when one saw nothing wrong at all about blind acceptance of ancient tenets which the credulous so often equate with faith and the faithful with loyalty.

And yet here am I, an ultra-modem to the core, writing about one to whose call I had responded with all my heart! Could this have come to pass if I had been what I have all along believed myself to be, to wit, an intellectual and an artist and I do not know what else, but certainly not a mystic or a Yogi by nature or persuasion, as I so often told him categorically? I will try to answer this self-imposed question in my own way, albeit incidentally. For my central theme is going to be his greatness, love and understanding which made him come to me as he did.

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