Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

48

A Seed-Force

It was "in that condition of Nirvanic silence that I went first to Poona and then to Bombay." Lele went with him. They visited together the Parvati hill, where Sri Aurobindo had that experience at the 'Hill-Top Temple.'

During his visit at Poona, supposedly a private one, "citizens thronged to see him whenever he appeared," reports the Bande Mataram. On 12 January Sri Aurobindo was invited by Professor Ramamurti, the 'Indian Hercules,' to witness his extraordinary feats of strength. Sri Aurobindo thanked the Professor for his performance, invited him to Bengal, and requested the audience to develop their physical faculties so as to serve the country not only mentally but also physically, and to develop their will-power for national work. Some time later, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Bande Mataram: "We have seen Ramamurti break over his chest a strong iron chain tightened round his whole body and break it by the sheer force of will working through the body. India must work a similar deliverance for herself by the same inner force. It is not by strength of body that Ramamurti accomplishes his feats, for he is no stronger than

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many athletes who could never do what he does daily, but by faith and will. India has in herself a faith of superhuman virtue to accomplish miracles, to deliver herself out of irrefragable bondage, to bring God down upon earth. She has a secret will power which no other nation possesses. All she needs to rouse in her that faith, that will, is an ideal which will induce her to make the effort."

Girgaum Road, Bombay, early this century

The next day another meeting was held at Tilak's residence, Gaekwarwada. It was at six in the evening, a good number of Poona's citizens attended it. Tilak's Guru, Anna-saheb Patwardhan presided. Sri Aurobindo was the principal speaker, and he gave a brief sketch of the Nationalist Movement. At the end Tilak summed up the speech in Marathi and thanked the speaker. It was immediately after that Sri Aurobindo met in private the Yogi Annasaheb. What they talked about is anybody's guess !But it seems that Annasaheb predicted the yogic greatness of Sri Aurobindo; and considered him to be the greatest of all contemporary leaders. Later at night, Sri Aurobindo met some of Poona's young revolutionaries at another private meeting. Then to Bombay. There. at Cirgaum, for an hour and a half. he spoke on National Education. Among the things he said , as reported in the Kesari of Tilak: "The very geographical position of the country. isolating it from other parts of the world. argues its separate national existence ... . Let us bear in mind that we have a debt to discharge not only towards our ancestors. but also to our posterity.... In teaching geography, we impress upon the minds of our students that India is their motherland. and that Maharashtra produced Shivaji , that the Punjab was once ruled by Ranjit Singh. and that the Himalayas gave shelter to our ancient Rishis ." He also favoured learning and harnessing modern scientific inventions of the West for the welfare of mankind.

Then to Bombay. There, at Girgaum, for an hour and a half, he spoke on National Education. Among the things he said, as reported in the Kesari of Tilak: "The very geographical position of the country, isolating it from other parts of the world, argues its separate national existence Let us bear in mind that we have a debt to discharge not only towards our ancestors, but also to our posterity.... In teaching geography, we impress upon the minds of our students that India is their motherland, and that Maharashtra produced Shivaji, that the Punjab was once ruled by Ranjit Singh, and that the Himalayas gave shelter to our ancient Rishis." He also favoured learning and harnessing modern scientific inventions of the West for the welfare of mankind.

But he was finding it more and more difficult to make speeches in that state. "In that very silence, in that thought-free condition, we went to Bombay. There I had to give a lecture at

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the National Union. So, I asked him [Lele] what I should do. He asked me to pray. But I was absorbed in the silent Brahman and so I told him I was not in a mood to pray." So Lele held a day of prayer with other disciples "for me and at the end he said: 'Make a pranam to Narayana in the audience before you start and with your mind completely vacant. Then you will see that everything will come down and some power speak through you.' I did as he had said and found that the whole speech came down from above; not a single thought or expression was mine. It got hold of my organ of speech and expressed itself through it from beginning to end. In my tour from Bombay to Calcutta all the speeches I made were from that condition of silence." Sri Aurobindo, who always liked to be precise, added that those speeches "were of the same nature—with some mixture of mental work in some parts."

'The present situation' is the heading of Sri Aurobindo's lecture at Mahajan Wadi under the auspices of the National Union. "I did exactly as he told me. On my way to the meeting somebody gave me a paper to read. When I rose to speak the impression of the headline flashed across my mind and then all of a sudden something spoke out." The paper had reported more sentences passed by the British against printers and editors. After dealing with the Administration's repressive measures, he ridiculed those who thought that "what God cannot give for the salvation of India, the British Government will give. What you cannot expect from God you are going to expect from the British Government. Your expectation is vain." Stands to reason! The interests clashed. He then spoke of the "Avatar

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in the nation." He spoke of the three hundred millions of people of this country who are "God in the Nation." He spoke of Nationalism. "... It is not, at the heart of it, a political self-interest that we are pursuing. It is a religion which we are trying to live. It is a religion by which we are trying to realise God in the nation...." Nationalism was a religion given by God, he said. "Nationalism is the gospel of inalienable freedom," he said elsewhere. I counted. Nationalism recurs ... twenty-two times in the speech!

That was "my second experience from Lele. It also shows that he had the power to give yogic experience to others." Then when he was parting from Lele he asked him what he should do. "Before parting I told Lele: 'Now that we shall not be together I should like you to give me instructions about Sadhana.' In the meantime I told him of a Mantra that had arisen in my heart. He was giving me instructions when he suddenly stopped and asked me if I could rely absolutely on Him who had given me the Mantra. I said I could always do it. Then Lele said there was no need of instructions. We had then no talk till we reached our destination." The destination was Nasik.

"When I was in Bombay, from the balcony of a friend's house, I saw the whole busy movements of Bombay city as a picture in a cinema show all unreal, shadowy. That was a Vedantic experience."

"All that I wrote in the Bande Mataram and in the Karmayogin was from that state. It used to run down to my pen while I sat down to write."

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In a letter to Dilip, written in May 1932, Sri Aurobindo summed it all up, and went beyond. When he had sat with Lele at Sardar Majumdar's house, he had not had the least understanding where Lele was leading him or where he himself was going. "The first result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness which he had never intended —for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and he was against Adwaita Vedanta —and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman. The final upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its will —a principle or rather a seed force to which I kept unswervingly and increasingly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no single rule or style or dogma or Shastra to where and what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter. Yet he understood so little what he was doing that when he met me a month or two later, he was alarmed, tried to undo what he had done and told me that it was not the Divine but the devil that had got hold of me."

Lele had come to Calcutta at Barin's invitation. "He asked me if I meditated in the morning and in the evening. I said, 'No.'" Without waiting for any explanation Lele began to give Sri Aurobindo instructions. "I did not insult him but I did not act upon his advice. I had received the command from within that a human Guru was not necessary for me. As to dhyana I was not prepared to tell him that I was practically meditating

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on "we began to follow our own ways."

Therefore for a very short time Sri Aurobindo had a guru.

In later years Sri Aurobindo came to be known as a great 'philosopher.' Decades later, on 4 September 1934 to be precise, Dilip transmitted to him a request from Dr. Radha Krishnan that he would introduce Sri Aurobindo to the West if he wrote a philosophical article for the Westerners; Sri Aurobindo declined.

"Look here !" he wrote back to Dilip . "Do these people expect me to turn myself again into a machine for producing articles? The times of the Bande Mataram and Arya are over , thank God f I have now only the Ashram correspondence and that is 'overwhelming' enough in all conscience without starting philosophy for standard books and the rest of it.

"And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher — although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry — I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher. How I managed to do it and why? First, because Paul Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review — and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, because I had only to write down in the terms

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of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!"

The Arya first appeared on 15 August 1914. Its last issue was on January 1921. That makes six years and six months of publication. Of course, Richard was there for the first seven months, and then he left in the last week of February 1915. We don't know whether he helped any after his return from Japan towards the end of April 1920. That leaves seventy-one months of Arya to Sri Aurobindo, "all by my lonely self."

How did he write them? He wrote to Nirod on 1^st November 1935: "Let me remind you also that when I was writing the Arya and also since, whenever I write these letters or replies, I never think or seek for expressions or try to write in good style; it is out of a silent mind that I write whatever comes ready-shaped from above." Another snippet of precision, when he added that since 1909 everything he wrote was "out of or rather through a silent mind and not only a silent mind but a silent consciousness."

Out of an absolute silence of the mind Sri Aurobindo, edited the Bande Mataram for three months, the Karmayogin for eight months, the Dharma for six months, and wrote seven volumes of the Arya, "not to speak of all the letters and messages etc., etc. I have written since." Whew!

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