Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

52

Jail Experiences

Dilip Kumar Roy was an eternal sceptic. He had heard stories about levitation, and such other claims by sannyasis. He very much doubted the authenticity of such phenomena. But Sri Aurobindo told him not to dismiss these occurrences out of hand, nor term them as fraud, but to become competent to judge; for, said he, an ounce of experience is worth a ton of theory. That is why Sri Aurobindo could tell Dilip, "I take levitation as an acceptable idea, because I have had experience of the natural energies which, if developed, would bring it about and also physical experiences which would not have been possible if the principle of levitation were untrue." Yogis have verified levitation. Experience, after all, is the last touchstone of reality.

Other disciples before Dilip had heard that when he was in jail some part of Sri Aurobindo's body was raised in a peculiar fashion. "That was once in jail," he confirmed. "I was then having a very intense sadhana on the vital plane and I was concentrated. And I had a questioning mood: 'Whether such things as the siddhi of utthāpana [power of levitation] were

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possible?' Then suddenly I found myself raised up in such a way that I could not have done it myself with muscular exertion. Only one part of the body was slightly in contact with the ground and the rest was raised up against the wall, and I know I could not have held my body like that normally even if I had wanted to. I also found that the body remained suspended like that without any exertion on my part." In his characteristic way he added, "That is the only thing that happened." He had thought at one time that physical siddhi, that is spiritual power over matter, was impossible, but when after his meditation he found that his body had taken a physically impossible position — "it was actually raised some inches above the ground"—he accepted the fact of these siddhis.

Another experiment he tried was this: "Then, again, I was practising for a time to raise my hands and keep them suspended in the air without any muscular control. Once in that condition I fell asleep. The warder saw me in that posture and reported that I was dead. The authorities came and found me quite alive. I told them the warder was a fool."

In Alipore Jail his sadhana moved very fast. And it showed physically, as had happened when he was doing prana-yama. His hair, for instance. The boys were greatly struck by its brilliance. They thought at first that it was due to oil. But the prisoners were not getting any oil in the jail! Upen put the question to Sri Aurobindo, to which he simply replied that the hair's brilliance was due to Yoga. "You see, I am passing through some physical changes as I develop spiritually. My hair draws fat from the body."

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Upen goes on to say, "Later, I saw more of this sort of wonders in Arabinda. Once I was sitting in the prisoner's dock when I chanced to look at him. I saw his eyes set like glass-balls. I had heard that the total suspension of the diverse functions of the mind, and its concentration on a single thing might produce a physical result of this kind. I at once called the attention of some boys to it. None dared approach him; and at last Sachin slided up to him and asked, 'What have you got by your spiritual practices?' Arabinda put his hands on Sachin's shoulders and answered, 'Why, my boy, the thing I looked for.'"

Pain and pleasure shed their masks. "As for Divine rapture," he wrote in 1932, "a knock on head or foot or elsewhere can be received with the physical Ananda of pain or pain and Ananda or pure physical Ananda.... It began by the way as far back as in Alipore Jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses."

The Yoga also throws up some uncharacteristic things in the nature. Anger had always been foreign to Sri Aurobindo. So when he saw anger coming up and possessing him —"it was absolutely uncontrollable when it came"—he was very much surprised to see it in his nature. "While I was an undertrial prisoner in Alipore, my anger would have led to a terrible catastrophe which luckily was avoided. Prisoners there had to wait outside for some time before entering the cells. As we were doing so the Scotch Warder came and gave me a push. The young men around me became very excited and I did

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nothing, but I gave him such a look that he immediately fled and called the Jailor. It was a communicative anger and the young men rallied round to attack him. When the Jailor, who was rather a religious man arrived, the Warder said I had given him an 'insubordinate look.' The Jailor asked me and I told him I had never been used to such treatment. He pacified the whole group, and said while going: 'We have each to bear our cross.' " In a letter (13 November 1936) Sri Aurobindo explained: "I was noted in my earlier time before Yoga for the rareness of anger. At a certain period of the Yoga it rose in me like a volcano and I

had to take a long time eliminating it Must have come from

universal Nature." He clarified that that anger was not rudra-bhava which, naturally, he had also experienced. Rudrabhava is a violent severity against something very wrong. It rises from the heart.

In the jail, said Sri Aurobindo, "My views on illness and cure had undergone change and I did not have much faith in medicines. Unless the disease was severe, nature herself would cure it in her own way, such was my belief." Once he ran a very high temperature. Somehow he managed to get up from his bed of blanket, lurched to the door and asked the sentry to bring some water. The sentry did ... ice-cold water. Sri Aurobindo drank two or three glasses of that icy water, then lay down on his blanket on the floor. When he awoke the fever had gone.

Doors swung wide.

He heard. Bells rang and crickets chirped. So loud were the crickets that he thought they were just outside the door ! Also, "I have heard the change of music strange from a lyre

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which our hands cannot master."

He saw. Visions trooped, group upon group ... Among them: "I had an experience of Krishna-Kali in Alipore Jail. It was a very powerful vision."

Strange! Sri Krishna was born in a prison. He came to reveal himself to Sri Aurobindo in a prison.

"In the jail," he noted, "there were many such extraordinary, and one may say, abnormal experiences.... All these experiences passed away and did not repeat themselves." But something else established itself. For he was to have the second full realization, out of four on which his Yoga is founded. Close upon the heels of the realization of liberation and Nirvana in January 1908, he got the experience in the Alipore jail of the cosmic consciousness, that is, the Divine in all beings and all that is. "For instance," Sri Aurobindo said to Dr. Manilal, "as I look around this room, I see everything as the Brahman. No, it is not mere thinking, it is a concrete experience. Even the wall, the books are Brahman. I see you no more as Dr. Manilal but as the Divine living in the Divine. It is a wonderful experience." It all began in the Magistrate Barley's court. "I looked and it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel and it was not the Counsel for the prosecution that I saw; it was Sri Krishna who sat there ... and smiled." Sri Aurobindo disclosed all this in his speech at Uttarpara on 30 May 1909.

These and other experiences proved to him the truths of Hindu dharma. "They became living experiences to me

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and things were opened to me which no material science could explain."

He who once had been inclined to believe that many things in Hinduism were imaginations, was now given proof of its reality. Day after day, month after month, he realized in his body its truth, in his mind and in his heart the truth of Hinduism. And, unexpectedly, he was helped in his yoga by Vivekananda.

"In the jail I had the Gita and the Upanishads with me, practised the Yoga of the Gita and meditated with the help of the Upanishads; these were the only books from which I found guidance."

Then during his meditation Vivekananda came. "It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence The voice spoke only on a special

and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject."

In a talk Sri Aurobindo disclosed the field on which Vivekananda had come to teach him. "It was Vivekananda who, when he used to come to me during meditation in Alipore Jail, showed me the Intuitive plane.... He gave instructions about Intuition. One can get a glimpse of Supermind from the Intuition level, and such a glimpse was my first step." Thus in the jail itself he was on his way to the other two realizations on which his Yoga is founded.

There in Algeria, at Tlemcen, Mirra too had seen the prototype of the Supramental body when she had stood at the

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Vivekananda's revelation to Sri Aurobindo

threshold of the Formless. That was in 1907, just a year before Sri Aurobindo's own experience.

"It was the spirit of Vivekananda who first gave me a clue in the direction of the Supermind. This clue led me to see

how the Truth-Consciousness works in everything He didn't

say 'Supermind.' 'Supermind' is my own word. He just said to me, 'This is this, this is that,' and so on. That was how he proceeded — by pointing and indicating. He visited me for fifteen days in Alipore Jail and, until I could grasp the whole thing, he went on teaching me and impressed upon my mind the working of the Higher Consciousness — the Truth-Consciousness in general — which leads towards the Supermind. He would not leave until he had put it all into my head." Sri Aurobindo disclosed, "I had no idea about things of the Higher Consciousness. I never expected him and yet he came to teach me. And he was exact and precise even in the minutest details."

When Sri Aurobindo had returned from England to Baroda, he had been interested in the sayings of Sri Rama-krishna and his life, as also in the utterances and writings of Swami Vivekananda. He found their influence very strong all over India. He himself felt the influence of their words and books. In fact, as he related, "I had another direct experience of Vivekananda's presence when I was practising Hatha yoga. I felt this presence standing behind and watching over me. That exerted a great influence afterwards in my life."

Sri Aurobindo always acknowledged the role played by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda in his life, saying how, at one time, he had received inspiration from the sadhana of Rama-

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krishna and Vivekananda. "For myself," he wrote in 1913, "it was Ramakrishna who personally came and first turned me to this Yoga. Vivekananda in the Alipore Jail gave me the foundations of that knowledge which is the basis of our Sadhana."

But Ramakrishna's yoga was turned only to an inner realization of the inner' Divine. He himself never thought of transformation or tried for it. "He had not the idea of a new consciousness and a new race and the divine manifestation in the earth-nature." Where was the answer to the why of life and body? "If I did not try to repeat them [the experiences of the previous spiritual men], it is because I do not find in them the solution, the reconciliation I am seeking." But the importance of the stage reached by his predecessors had not escaped him. "The work that was begun at Dakshineshwara is far from finished, it is not even understood. That which Vivekananda received and strove to develop, has not yet materialised," he wrote in the Karmayogin, after his experience in the prison.

Sri Aurobindo was a born Pioneer. Always farther. "From the beginning I didn't feel Nirvana to be the highest spiritual achievement. Something in me always wanted to go farther."

His was not to sit on the realization of others. His was to proceed, to discover new territory.

Always beyond. To the peak of Divine endeavour. He had come to reconcile the two ends of existence and all that lies between them.

But certainly not to found a new religion. "I may say," he set forth in 1935, in clear and unambiguous terms, "that it is

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far from my purpose to propagate any religion, new or old, for humanity in the future. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded, is my conception of the matter."

He did remove the block.

He did open the Way.

He fixed a new principle in the earth's atmosphere.

Supermind. The full fullness of evolution.

Sri Aurobindo, who had passed his childhood without a mother's love, loved Mother India passionately in his youth, and in his manhood he loved profoundly this planet, Mother Earth.

"I am concerned with the earth," Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1932, "not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits."

A concentrated evolution.

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