Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER III

Reorientation

It was Tagore who first told me that even as a child he had been imbibing things which had to lie for a long time in his subconsciousness as seeds before they could come to full flowering. He told me, as I have recorded elsewhere, that some of the best things in life work in us like a leaven, an invisible influence, as, for example, the inspiration of woman in her totality. "Woman's function in life", he said, "is not really confined to the physical plane: she is indispensable to man's mental creation as man is to her physical. It is only because on the mental plane she works from behind the screen that we do not visualise her contribution. But that is only because we are unimaginative"*

I well remember how, in the first flush of my youth, this idea of the subconscious storing up all our forgotten impressions came to us from the West. It just swept us off our feet and made us feel so proud of our new-found knowledge that we heightened it, by the epithet scientific, alas, little suspecting that the knowledge that is popularly called scientific was not going to prove as incontrovertible as its votaries claimed. And it was Sri Aurobindo who first told me that the theory of the subconscious was no brand-new idea of the West but was known almost as the A.B.C. of the hoary Yogic lore of India. I can still recall how I was startled when he assured me that the modem penchant of the Western psycho-analysts and psychiatrists for explaining everything through the agency of microscope of the subconscious, however commendable as a first attempt of psychological research of the deeper kind in the West, could not possibly go far

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*Among the Great, p. 177.

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until, that is, it began to take stock of the Yogic way of observing ourselves and change its modus operandi. "I find it difficult", he wrote to me, "to take Jung and the psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinize spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch lights—though perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. No doubt, they are very remarkable men in their own field; but this new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t=c-a-t, t-r-e-e=t-r-e-e) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below: upari budhna esham. The Superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is, besides, poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part, and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the province of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing." In another letter he wrote to me in reply to a question of mine about Eddington's 'Science and the Unseen World': "The part about the changed attitude of modem science to its own field of discovery is interesting. The latter part about religious experience I find very feeble; it gives me the impression of a hen scratching the surface of the earth to find a scrap or two of food—nothing deeper."

I am enlarging on this stray view of his with a definite motive: I must remind my readers that I have set out to portray, among other things, such of my reactions to my Master as are

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likely to prove profitable to those who have a spiritual opening and yet cannot accept the loud lead given by vociferous Gurus. I appreciate their difficulty which is genuine enough as I myself used to fling at my Guru time and again when I argued animatedly against Guruvada in his own citadel. Many people are today terrified at the prospect of deifying the Guru because having contacted some fake Gurus in India, they dread, if not abhor, the idea of being dictated to or halted by arbitrary 'Thou-shalt-nots' of an obsolete authoritarianism. That is, as I wrote to him once, the main reason why the Zeitgeist of today is definitely ranged against the traditional type of Guruvada—because it is an intransigent imposition from above, not a willing acceptance from below. He wrote back that he knew very well the" spirit of the age" and had even subscribed to it, once upon at time. But to live was to change as he used to say often to his brother, Barindra Kumar, the famous revolutionary, who told me that Sri Aurobindo was wont to say, whenever reminded of a view of his in the past: "Don't quote me against myself, Barin!"And Barinda showed me a letter of his (dated April, 1920) in which he wrote: "I do not wish to be a Guru myself. If I am able to awaken the sleeping Divine in but a few I shall be content." .To me he wrote in a letter (16.1.36) in a light-hearted mood: "In spiritual things the religionists do not matter, for their action, naturally, is to make a dry formula and dry shell of everything, not Grace alone. Even 'Awake, arise' leads to the swelled head or the formula which can't be avoided when Mr. Everyman deals with things divine. I had the same kind of violent objection to Gurugiri but you see I was obliged by the irony of things—or, rather, by the inexorable truth behind them—to become a Guru and preach Guruvad, Such is Fate!" But to return to my theme: how my fate compelled me to capitulate under protest to Guruvad.

When I first arrived at the Ashram, in 1928,1 was given to understand by some neophytes—there were about eighty of us in those days—that one must never even dream of questioning any law laid down by the Guru. This made me, indeed, very

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unhappy till I began to have regular weekly conversations with the Mother. I found her so tolerant that one day I asked her, at a venture, why she who was so understanding, wanted us to fear her and Sri Aurobindo. "Fear!" she exclaimed in surprise. "What an idea! We only want you to have the attitude of simple trust as a child has vis-a-vis its parents."

It was only then that I decided to give my heart's adhesion to the Ashram and the ideology it stood for. My flaws of character are doubtless legion, as my innumerable detractors will agree in full-throated unison, but I doubt whether even the bitterest of them would adjudge me a timid man. And so, because I found the very idea of fearing the Guru intolerable, whenever any disciple of the Ashram spoke too solemnly so as to put God's (or the Guru's) fear into my soul it was only iron that entered into it. Unfortunately for me, I found out that the idea of obeying the Guru from fear was not half as repugnant to others as it was tome. Many is the time that I was gagged the moment I breathed a question as to why the Guru had laid down such and such laws, or issued certain general injunctions in the Ashram. This, after the initial shock, made me, indeed, go on fretting so much, day after brooding day, that, unable to bear it eventually, one day I asked the Mother who was in charge of our Ashram. She was very kind and explained to me at once, the gist of which was that nowhere in the world could an institution carry on without some laws laid down or codes formulated for general guidance. "But," she added instantly, "I do mean it when I say that I would have no rules at all if the Ashram could be run without them. Also I am wide-awake and hold that all rules should come from within. So I never sanction more codes than are absolutely necessary."

About Gurudev this was even more demonstrably true as I went on discovering day after refreshing day. In the famous letter to his brother (already referred to) he wrote:

"I am fully persuaded that the origin of the weakness of India is neither political servitude nor material poverty, still less the dearth of spirituality: we have degenerated because of the waning

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of our capacity to think and concentrate. Except for a few solitary giants everywhere you meet the average man who has no strength and who does not want to think nor can. The result: ignorance reigns today in this our land of knowledge!"

As this remained his opinion to the end, I shed gradually my malaise till, finally, I came to be reconciled to the cloistered limitations of our Ashram. And then, with time, I learned to turn to him more and more to be soothed whenever I felt out of sympathy with those I met. This forced me again to look to him for guidance, the more so as he willingly came down to my level, I repeat, to show me the way out in every impasse.... And lastly, the more he encouraged me to argue with him freely, the less ill-at-ease I felt, no matter what some others told me about the wisdom of docility, because I came to be persuaded that so far as I was concerned he was beyond taking amiss the liberties I took with him. Thereafter, as my happy confidence in him deepened, thanks to his unfailing tolerance, I ventured further a field and began taking exception to this and that till I caught myself sometimes even criticising him in the end. This made many people aghast: e.g. my dear friend and mentor Sri Krishnaprem from Almora took me once to task for it. "You write that you have sometimes 'gone for Sri Aurobindo!' You must not. Of course he will not mind. He sees the jewel in the lotus and can smile at your criticism but you mustn't do it. Even in thought you mustn't criticise him. It all springs from the desire to have things one's own way. He is your Guru and, in the first place, it is sheer ingratitude to critic

ise one who has shown you the light and, in the second, the Guru is inseparable from Krishna. He is the one who has shown you the Light and your whole life can be no repayment for such a gift. Even if you were to spend the rest of your life with no further 'experience' at all, you would be utterly wrong if you refused to give yourself to him. As far as I know he does not ask for blind obedience from his disciples (at least so I gather from your letter) but one must never criticise even when one can't follow. If one could understand everything one's Guru said, then there would be hardly any need for a Guru at all."

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I cannot honestly deny that here he was right. But can I with equal honesty own that I aim really repentant for having again and again committed the misdemeanour he so strongly reprimanded? I will go further and presume to ask my own heart whether I have not had a deeper vision of Gurudev's greatness through having been led by him, almost unawares, to spar with him as one would with an equal? And then could it have been at all possible for such as we to have dared him thus to duels had he not himself, in his infinite indulgence, consented to the thrust and parry with such inept tyros? Apropos, I am reminded of a letter which a colleague of mine wrote to him once in a light vein:

"But what disciples are we of what a Master!" he wrote in one of his beautiful moods. "I do wish you had chosen some with a better native stuff, like Krishnaprem, for instance!"

His rejoinder was characteristic:

"As to the disciples, I agree. But would the better stuff, supposing it to exist, be typical of humanity? To deal with a few exceptional types would hardly solve the problem. And would they consent to follow my path?—that is another question." But the crux of the difficulty as he himself saw it, was expressed rather trenchantly in the very next, the third, query: "And if they (these might-have-been disciples with the better stuff) were put to the test, would not the common humanity reveal itself? That is still another question."

I know to my cost—and I speak here as a mouthpiece for the rest—how disconcertingly and obstinately common, even banal, this stuff turns out to be when probed deep enough by the revealing ray which comes down in answer to the agonised prayer, in each of us, of the "bleeding piece of earth".

But what I mean by this cannot be properly explained before a picture of the Ashram life—as it evolved before me, day by day, from 1928 till today—is achieved. It will not be an easy task: nevertheless it must be attempted at this stage.

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