Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

16

Break the Habit

In the course of a single night Sri Aurobindo could cure a person of a fever and send him fresh and full of strength to his work. A cure without medicines.

And Mother. She healed. She healed all wounds —inner or outer —that life is wont to inflict on us.

She had such a tender way of doing it too! Oh, how many times did I see her with children who had fallen sick, removing their pain, curing them of fever by passing her hand over and over again, so gently, from the top of the head to the back and down the spine. Then, when she knew that the action was done, Mother would stoop and kiss the forehead of the child. A good night's sleep, and the next morning the child was shining like a new coin! Mother's hands, the right one specially, had the material power of healing.

I had a peculiar habit. At one time I got into the habit of headaches. So what did I do? I would rub my forehead against Mother's thigh and get rid of the headache! I did that standing, of course. Let me add that I was my normal 158 centimetres, it was Mother who was tall, so tall that my head did

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not come higher than her thigh. You see, this used to happen at night, while my body was lying in bed.

But awake too. In my games of basketball or volleyball or ... I would get knocks. At one time it began to happen too frequently, for several months on end. As a rule I did not care. But when my hands began to get bruised much too much, hampering even my typing work, then Satprem thought fit to intervene and told Mother. She drew a circle round my hands, and said, "We'll protect that ... like this." Mother then explained. "That too is a habit. It's nothing but habits: forces playing in Nature. So it takes an inner movement," she made a tiny gesture of severing, "to break the habit."

Habit or 'groove' to use Sri Aurobindo's expression, what we call the 'law of life,' in other words, birth-growth-decay-death, is but a groove created by Nature. And just as breaking a habit does not destroy but improves us, so too this groove of Nature can be changed without destroying the universe, bringing a divinized Life here in this physical world.

In fact plenty of people in the Ashram got rid of their ills without medicine, by reliance on Mother. Whenever I said, "Mother, this person has fever, that person is suffering from terrible pain, etc.," she would select a flower, hold it in her hands for a while, eyes closed, then opening her eyes she would put the flower in my hand. I would then take the flower and go hand it over to the friend of mine who was sick, or sometimes touch lightly the patient's forehead with it. A week's fever and pain gone the next day. That was Mother's way of sending her spiritual power of healing. The power did not

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wither with the flower! "Rowers," explained Sri Aurobindo, "are the moment's representation of things that are in themselves eternal."

It was intolerable to Mother to see physical suffering. "Physical suffering is to me like a child being beaten.... But then," Mother told Satprem one day, "when that true Compassion of Divine Love comes and you see all those things that look so horrible, so abnormal, so absurd, that great pain over all beings and even over things.... Then there was born in this physical being the aspiration to relieve, to cure, to make all that disappear." Mother relieved the suffering, cured the illness of thousands, not necessarily living in the Ashram. "There is something in Love in its Origin that is constantly expressed by the intervention of the Grace; a force, a sweetness, something like a vibration of solace, spread everywhere, but which an enlightened consciousness can direct, concentrate on certain points."

But alas! Everybody does not have Sri Aurobindo and Mother. People are generally in the hands of doctors. And even the best among them are liable to make mistakes. "My grandfather and cousin," wrote Sri Aurobindo to Nirod (24 December 35) "were patently killed by the medicines administered by one the most famous and successful allopathic doctors of Calcutta."

But other systems of medicines than allopathy were known in India. "Once I had a nasty abscess on the knee in Baroda," said Sri Aurobindo. "All treatment failed. Then Madhavrao Jadhav called in a Mahomedan who pricked the

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knee at a particular point and brought out a big drop of black blood and the abscess was cured soon afterwards I

Sri Aurobindo described another type of cure. "I also remember Jatin Banerjee curing many cases of sterility by a Sannyasi's medicine given to him. Cases of ten or fifteen years' sterility have been cured by it and people got children within ten months.... Many such things known to India are being lost now."

Prayer, of course, has a great power as is known. Mother told us stories of how people on their deathbed got cured through prayer. Sri Aurobindo also. He gave some examples from his personal observation. "And then there is what happened about Madhavrao's son." Could have been the Anandrao whom we have already met. "He was dying; doctors gave up hope. Madhavrao wired to them to stop medicines and to pray to God. They did it and the son was cured. I know this as a fact. Madhavrao himself showed me the telegram."

But more frequently he would cite the case of his cousin Kumudini. Sukumar recalls that Sri Aurobindo was very fond of her and wrote a poem on her birthday; he had presented her with a coloured photograph of his. "As for prayer, no hard and fast rule can be laid down," Sri Aurobindo wrote to Dilip. "Some prayers are answered, all are not. An example? The eldest daughter of my Mesho, K. K. Mitra, editor of Sanjibani, not by any means a romantic, occult, supra-physical or even imaginative person, was abandoned by the doctors after using every resource, all medicines stopped as useless. The father said

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'There is only God now, let us pray.' He did, and from that moment the girl began to recover, typhoid fever and all its symptoms fled, death also. I know any number of cases like that." About Kumudini's case Sri Aurobindo gave further details in a talk. "The doctors had given up all hope after trying all remedies, even snake-poison. She was a typhoid case — the consciousness wouldn't come back. Then they prayed and soon after the prayer the sign of life returned. Without prayer she would not have been saved." She was being treated by no less a doctor than Dr. Nil Ratan Sarkar who was the best Bengali physician of the time. Added Sri Aurobindo casually, "I was at Baroda at that time. They wired to me about her hopeless condition."

Another example: Bankim Chandra's grandson was at death's door. All the best doctors gave up and left. Then Bankim sat in front of his family deity, Radhaballav, with the resolve not to move till he got God's Grace. He got it. When he touched the boy with the water obtained by washing the feet of Radhaballav, Death fled away. The boy was cured.

"Well?" Sri Aurobindo asked Dilip. "You may ask why should not then all prayers be answered ? But why should they be? It is not a machinery— put a prayer in the slot and get your asking."

In fact nothing is a 'machinery' in life. It is even less so in Yoga, as Sri Aurobindo said forcefully, this time to Nirod. "What happy-go-lucky fancy-web-spinning ignoramuses you all are. You speak of silence, consciousness, over mental, supramental, etc. as if they were so many electric buttons you have only to

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discover everything about the working of all possible modes of electricity, all the laws, possibilities, perils, etc., construct roads of connection and communication, make the whole far-wiring system, try to find out how it can be made foolproof and all that in the course of a single lifetime. And I have to do it while my blessed disciples are firing off their gay or gloomy a priori reasonings at me from a position of entire irresponsibility and expecting me to divulge everything to them not in hints but at length. Lord God in omnibus 1"

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