Nagin Bhai Tells Me

Introduction

It was about six years ago, in 1994, that something unusual happened. I got a message through three or four friends telling me that Nagin-bhai wanted to see me as early as possible. I didn't get time and then followed another spate of errands. I was told that I should see him immediately, in the Ashram the next day during the 9:30 School recess. He also told me later that he wished to confide in me something very important and consult me about certain things which were to some extent crucial for him at that time. But my own feeling, in retrospect, is that it was perhaps more in the nature of opening himself out rather than seeking my views in connection with what he was going to tell me.

Nagin-bhai used to be in the Ashram doing Samadhi-duty between 8 and 10 in the morning and he thought that the most convenient time to have a brief rendezvous with me, just for a few minutes, would be the School recess period. We thus decided to meet for this short duration two or three times in a week.

In the beginning he would ask me questions of a probing manner, about some passages from The Life Divine or from the Letters. It looked as if he wanted some clarifications, for instance, about what Sri Aurobindo is conveying by the term Reality, whether this Reality is an abstract notion or an entity or a person. He even justified this kind of exchange with me by saying that it gave him a certain mental support which for him was essential in what was yogically happening within him during that period.

After this quick period of warming up, Nagin-bhai started telling me the important aspects of his sadhana as it was progressing in those days. His statements were always concise, and also precise. Moreover, I must say that generally he remembered well, word to word, what he had told me on earlier occasions. 1 believe my comments apropos of them, besides the contextual basis they provided to him, were helpful to him in some respect. Perhaps he got a degree of confidence to open himself out and talk to me more freely about his experiences. This I can maintain because he was extremely careful to speak about such matters to others.

Long ago, in the thirties when he was just a boy in his teens, Nagin-bhai had written the following to Sri Aurobindo: "In the

early days of my sadhana I once had an experience of great stillness in which my consciousness rose upward; at a certain height it felt the bliss, consciousness and existence all together and at the same time." Afterwards his sadhana went through many stages, with several long interruptions, sometimes coming almost to a stop. It seems that it began again, at a much higher level, or rather going deeper into the physical also, and he had a distinct intuition that presently something definite was being done in him. It is in this context that we may possibly understand what he was trying to tell me during our brief meetings. From the indicative statements he made it is quite clear that a great advance was made by him in his spiritual pursuits. He always regarded the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, to put it in his own words, "like my own mother and father'' and there is no doubt that it is they who were doing Yoga in him as his spiritual parents. This also means that he was a Yogi of a high order with remarkable spiritual achievements to his credit. I may quote here a poem of his, marking the intuition he had, much before the event of 29 February 1956, of the supramental manifestation in the subtle-physical of the earth:

Standing on the last horizon

I saw a golden gate opening.

It had no bolts, no hinges—

Only a huge lid that looked like a sun.

Amazed I watched on, forgetting my very self.

The opening lid made no sound,

Only a movement of light.

Then gushed out air the world had never breathed before.

Coming back to our meetings. These continued regularly for the first three years or so and later less often than in the beginning. I do not know whether he was becoming more and more reluctant to speak about his sadhana or whether there was a general lack of intensity because of his indifferent health. He was in his late

eighties. The last meeting was in February 1997.

I have put down in the following his experiences as faithfully as I could. I used to make the records the same day and therefore they are generally true to what he had told me. While I can say that these are mostly reproduced in his own words, they had to be redrafted at places for the sake of clarity of written expression. But I must also admit that he had never seen these records. However, I am pretty certain he must have thought that I would be recording them in my notebooks. Perhaps he wanted these to be left behind, although of it he never gave any hint to me.