The Story of a Soul

Introduction

ON the evening of July 25, 1954 a few disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother came to our estate in Miwani (Kenya). We assembled for readings, prayers and meditation. Among the passages read were the following verses from Sri Aurobindo's mystic epic Savitri:

I will pour delight from thee as from a jar,
I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,
I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,
I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought. ||154.37||
And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy,
And when thou liv’st one spirit with all things,
Then will I spare thee not my living fires,
But make thee a channel for my timeless force. ||154.38||
My hidden presence led thee unknowing on
From thy beginning in earth’s voiceless bosom
Through life and pain and time and will and death,
Through outer shocks and inner silences
Along the mystic roads of Space and Time
To the experience which all Nature hides. ||154.39||
Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:
This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats. ||154.40||
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! ||154.41||
O lasso of my rapture’s widening noose,
Become my cord of universal love. ||154.42||

These lines went on echoing and re-echoing in my heart. I fell in love with Savitri, the incarnation of the Supreme Mother. I was so fascinated that I felt the Divine Mother herself was reciting the lines to me.

Cascades of divine light and peace seemed to be falling all around me. It was as if my soul surged out of its body and floated in this magnificent atmosphere. That night I determined to relinquish ordinary life and embrace the Divine Life.

Ever since my childhood I had been aspiring to realise and live the Supreme Truth and Love. In the past no one had understood this feeling of mine, and now nobody knew of my final decision.

I had always felt like a stranger in a dark ambiguous world, searching for the One who would lead me to my divine goal.

I had met many saints, sadhus and sannyasis, I had read many religious books, including several on the Vaishnava denomination to which my family belonged; but my soul had refused to accept any leader or doctrine. I found that people believed in words: to talk about religion was enough. For them, performing complex rituals meant being religious—then they thought they had done their duty. But I felt that true religion meant spirituality: the soul's aspiration and cry to unite the whole being with the Supreme Lord, and to be THAT.