Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

14

Pranayama

"He never gave even a remote hint," wrote an overwhelmed Dinendra Kumar Roy, "of all the sleepless nights he kept vigil over my sickbed."

He was speaking of how Sri Aurobindo took care of him in 1899, when he was stricken with high fever. They were then living at Mir Bakarali's wada, at Baroda. A military doctor treated him, and "Aurobindo nursed me." D. K. Roy said, "When day after day I lay unconscious owing to the intensity of the fever, he spent sleepless nights nursing me.... All I understood was that without his nursing care I would not have survived.... When, after a long spell, the fever left me, he said to me one day, smiling, 'Roy, this time you have scraped through by the skin of your teeth. This "Baroda fever" is a terrible sickness; it is very difficult to escape from its grip. So I thought I might not be able to save you this time.' But not the slightest hint of all that he had done to save my life, not even incidentally. Whether in word or in deed, I have never seen such control."

Sukumar Mitra, in his article on Sri Aurobindo in

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Basumati, mentions that at one time Usha, a cousin of theirs (daughter of Sukumari, Rajnarain's third daughter) was ill with fever for a prolonged period. When Sri Aurobindo went to Deoghar he heard that many medical men had treated her but to no avail. One of the doctors, however, had suggested a change of air. That had not been done and Usha continued to ail. Hearing all this "Aurobindo rented a house in Simultala and took her there. Within a fortnight she was cured of that long-standing malady."

But Sri Aurobindo's compassion was not limited to his kith and kin. In a passage of his very important letter to his wife (30 August 1905), Sri Aurobindo wrote, "I have come to understand that all this time I have pursued the profession of the animal and the thief. Having understood it, I am filled with great remorse and self-contempt. No more of it. I give up this sin for good.

"To offer money to God means spending it for sacred causes. I have no regrets giving monetary help to Sarojini or Usha, because helping others is Dharma, to protect those who depend on you is a great Dharma, but the account is not settled if one gives only to one's brothers and sisters. In its present plight, the whole country is at my door, seeking shelter. I have thirty crores of brothers and sisters in this country, many of them die of starvation, most of them afflicted with sorrow and suffering are dragging on a wretched, precarious existence. They must be helped."

Very quickly his compassionate heart would expand to embrace not only his own country but the entire world. "It is

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not without reason," Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1935, "that I am eager to see something better in this well-meaning but woebegone planet."

But during the intervening thirty years Sri Aurobindo made a series of discoveries —stupendous discoveries to found his system of Yoga. Very early on he found out that "the whole universe is a play of forces." Fire, hurricane, or earthquake and flood, eruption of volcanoes, each elemental force of Nature is directed by a specific force. If one can learn to master that specific 'force' one gains control over its range of action, and can consciously direct it or manipulate it. Did not Sri Aurobindo say that by Yogic force he had cured himself of many stubborn diseases?

In 1935, by when he had completely mastered the use of the Yoga Force, he explained a bit of it in one of his letters. "The invisible Force producing tangible results both inward and outward is the whole meaning of the Yogic consciousness.... When I speak of feeling Force of Power, I do not mean simply having a vague sense of it, but feeling it concretely and consequently being able to direct it, manipulate it, watch its movement, be conscious of its mass and intensity and in the same way of that of other, perhaps opposing forces; all these things are possible and usual by the development of Yoga."

Just as an apprentice has to apply himself to learn his metier, so too here: the Yoga Force is not a mere freak or miracle. "One has to train the instrument to be a channel of this force; it works also according to a certain law and under certain conditions. The Divine does not work arbitrarily or as a

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This woe-begone planet.

thaumaturge," he stated emphatically. The Force, explained Sri Aurobindo, "is neither a magician's wand nor a child's bauble, but something one has to observe, understand, develop, master before one can use it aright or else —for few can use it except in a limited manner —be its instrument."

It was in his early days in Pondicherry that Sri Aurobindo set out to thoroughly master the intricacies of the metier. He was always thorough in whatever he undertook and, as he said, "I do not believe in short cuts." Naturally enough, he was his own laboratory. There he tested, more scrupulously than any scientist in his laboratory, all that his yoga was throwing up.

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"What led you to Yoga?" asked Nirod curiously. It was 5 January 1939, and all those who attended on Sri Aurobindo after his accident of previous November were there.

"What led me to Yoga?" Sri Aurobindo considered. "God knows what. It was while at Baroda that Deshpande and others tried to convert me to Yoga. My idea about Yoga was that one had to retire into mountains and caves ... and give up everything. I was not prepared to do that, for I was interested in the work for the freedom of my country."

He was then an agnostic, but nevertheless "always thought that the great figures of the world could not have been after a chimera and if there was such a Power why not use it for the freedom of the country?" Thus he entered the path of Yoga by a side door, as it were!

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"Then I began to practise pranayama —in 1903. A Baroda engineer [Deodhar] who was a disciple of Brahmananda showed me how to do it and I started on my own. I practised pranayama at Khaserao Jadhav's place in Baroda. Some remarkable results came with it.

"First, I felt a sort of electricity all around me.

"Secondly, there were some visions of a minor kind.

"Thirdly, I began to have a very rapid flow of poetry. Formerly I used to write with difficulty; for a time the flow would increase, then again it would dry up." This Dinendra K. Roy had already observed, when he noted that Sri Aurobindo "was not a fast writer." But now the flow "revived with astonishing vigour and I could write both prose and poetry at tremendous speed."

"I used to write poetry in those days," Sri Aurobindo said in one of his evening talks in 1926. "Before the pranayama practice, usually I wrote five to eight lines per day, and about two hundred lines in a month. After the practice I could write two hundred lines within half an hour. That was not the only result. Formerly my memory was dull. But after this practice I found that when the inspiration came I could remember all the lines in their order and write them down correctly at any time." And that flow never ceased, as he remarked in 1939. "If I have not written much afterwards, it was because I had something else to do. But the moment I want to write, it is there."

Another time Sri Aurobindo mentioned casually, "I first began on my own with pranayama, drawing the breath into my

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head." He then set certain misconceptions aside: pranayama does not bring dullness in the brain. "My own experience, on the contrary," he said in 1926, "is that the brain becomes illumined. When I was practising pranayama at Baroda, I used to do it for about five hours in the day —three hours in the morning and two in the evening. I found that the mind began to work with great illumination and power." In fact, the dullness in the brain is caused by some obstruction in it which does not allow the higher thought to be communicated to it. Pranayama can remove that obstacle and bring about a change in the brain. For, as explained Sri Aurobindo, brain is not the seat of thinking, but only a communicating channel, "it is only a support for the higher activity." It is the mind that thinks; the brain is a physical device. Actually "all things on the physical plane are merely devices —they are a system of notation —just like the wireless or telegraphic messages, but often we get too busy with the device and mistake it for the thing that is behind the device." Sri Aurobindo went on to affirm that "this applies to all scientific discoveries. For instance, when you say 'hydrogen and oxygen in certain proportions form water,' the statement does not explain anything. It only states a fact. You do not know what water is. It only means there is something behind which manifests itself as water under those conditions."

"It is the same with the theory of 'electrons.' So far as the physical facts are concerned the theory may be perfectly true. But why should the blessed electrons," he asked, "which are fundamentally the same substance, form totally different

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elements and compounds by the change of arrangement of the same number?"

Our error evidently comes from giving too much importance to the form of the device, because we think the physical plane to be the most real. Is it?

"So I say," Sri Aurobindo said matter-of-factly, "there is something behind the device which already pre-exists on some plane and it is that which adopts the device in order to manifest itself. But the device is not the reality." And, as was his wont, he said something tremendous entirely in passing. "The power from behind can change the device."

He also provided us with a clue as to why people mistake the device for the real thing. "Of course, the power working from behind comes down on the physical plane through the device, and so people generally think that it is the device which is responsible for the manifestation."

Pranayama brought Sri Aurobindo good health, lightness and an increased power of thinking. "Along with these enhanced functionings I could see an electrical activity all round the brain, and I could feel that it was made up of a subtle substance. I could feel everything as the working of that substance." It brought some visible results.

"Fourthly," Sri Aurobindo continued his observations, "it was at the time of the pranayama practice that I began to put on flesh. Earlier I was frail and thin. My skin also began to be smooth and fair. The women of our family noticed it first, as they have a sharp eye for such things. And there was a peculiar new substance in the saliva, owing to which these changes were

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probably taking place." He explained. "The Yogis say some sort of amrita (nectar) flows down from the top of the brain that can make one immortal." Ever practical, he added, "Another curious thing I noticed was that whenever I used to sit for pranayama not a single mosquito would bite me, though plenty of mosquitoes were humming around."

And, with the opening to the Brahman, "I used to hear sounds of crickets and bells," he said. "The sounds of crickets were so noisy that I wondered whether there were many crickets outside."

In his letters also Sri Aurobindo has indicated some of the results he obtained through pranayama. "After four years of pranayama and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss." It was at this juncture that he met the Maha-rashtrian Yogi, Lele.

About the faculty of vision, Sri Aurobindo said that it is difficult for mentally active people. "At one time I had great difficulty myself because of my mind, especially as regards vision." Nevertheless, before embarking on the practice of pranayama, Sri Aurobindo was already training his 'psychic sight' as he termed it. "I had myself a remarkable experience of the psychic sight," narrated Sri Aurobindo. "I was at Baroda and my psychic sight was not fully developed and I was trying to develop it by dwelling upon the after-image and also

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by attending to the interval between wakefulness and sleep. Then I saw this round circle of light, and when I began pranayama it became very much intensified." This circle of light "is a round globe of light which goes on increasing. This is not due to anything physical" —such as by pressing the eyeballs. "It is the light from one of the inner centres, especially the ajna chakra, the centre of Will, and you can make it very bright and big by connecting it with the brahmarandhra, the centre on the top of the head." I was very pleased when I came across this, for, as it happens, as a young person and up until my teens, I always used to see a point of light —bigger than a pinhead but smaller than the head of a drawing pin —without any concentration, often with eyes open. So I could, and would, fall asleep with ease. And I thought that everybody saw the same!

Sri Aurobindo once quoted a talk he had with a scientist friend of his on the 'subtle sight.' "I remember" he wrote in 1932, "when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images —'these are only after-images'! I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time —he said, 'no,' to his knowledge only for a few seconds; I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth, since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values —he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so-called scientific explanations break down as soon as

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you pull them out of their cloudland of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend to decipher."

. Naturally enough, I did not know anything of all these psychic or subtle sights —the only sight I knew was physical — when I first met Mother and Sri Aurobindo. It was on the occasion of Mother's birth anniversary on 21 February 1935. That was one of the three days in a year when Sri Aurobindo gave Darshan. From Calcutta we, that is Father, my brother Abhay and I, went to Pondicherry. In those days young children were rarely permitted to visit the Ashram. But for some reason, unknown to me, we two were granted permission, although I had barely completed nine and Abhay was twenty months older than me. We reached a few days before Mother's birthday.

We always saw Mother dressed in a sari, with her head covered. Every morning Mother would come down the stairs to the ground-floor meditation hall, sit in a low chair set against the wall, give a meditation, which was followed by Pranam. One by one people made their Pranam, each according to his or her liking. I always put my head on her lap, and she would lay her palm on my head, and a sense of well-being would flood my body and soul. Then, from a dish kept near her, she would take flowers and put them in my hands, as she did with others. Each flower had a meaning given by Mother.

In the evenings, there was a meditation, and —oh, joy! — we two could attend it. Mother would come down one flight of steps, pause a moment on the landing, and take three or four steps down, turn to her right to face the people sitting

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in the hall. She herself meditated standing, with her hands resting lightly on the banister. Once she had taken her position all the lights were switched off, except a dim one which was left burning in the upper flight of the staircase. A pale light could be seen through a square aperture on the wall just behind where Mother stood. The meditation lasted, I presume, from twenty to thirty minutes. But I did not fidget. Something held my attention and I watched with interest: a light around Mother's head. Coloured. My eyes would remain glued on the light—open eyes, of course! —and each day the colour would be different. I always thought that it was a fanciful electrician who changed the bulbs. Then, ages later, one day when I was talking to the electrician, I asked, "Bulada, why did you stop changing the bulbs during the evening meditations?" For, I never again saw those coloured lights around Mother's head. He was so astonished. "But it was always the same electric bulb!" He was quite taken aback. "I never, ever put any coloured bulb there." That taught me something, I can tell you. The next time I saw Mother with light around her, I did not make the same stupid mistake, I assure you.

Talking of Mother reminds me of what she said to Satprem as to what she and Sri Aurobindo did while practising pranayama. "I did it myself for years," she said, "using the same system: inhale, hold, exhale, remain empty. But holding the lungs empty is said to be dangerous, so I don't advise it. I did it for years. Without knowing it, Sri Aurobindo and I did it nearly the same way, along with all sorts of other things that aren't supposed to be done! That's telling you that the danger

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is mainly in what you think. In the course of certain movements, both of us made the air go out through the crown of the head —apparently that's only to be done when you want to die!" Mother laughed. "It didn't kill us."

This is a process much used by Indian Yogis. A yogi draws up the Life-Force— prana — into the brahmarandhra, and then departs leaving his body.

But what Sri Aurobindo wanted was "immunity from all sorts of diseases which are the agents of death."

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