Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

38

Science of the Spirit

Let us not imagine that Sri Aurobindo was passing his time like any old scientist simply studying the movements of birds and beasts and insects, and their psychology. No. I dare say that that was but a by-product of his keen interest in all-life.

What was he doing then? "I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane," he wrote in a letter of 12 July 1911, from Raghavan house where he had met Alexandra David-Neel.

How did he go about it?

At Sundar Chetty's house he was already honing his skills. One of the first was to obtain the effectiveness of the Will on an object or event that had to be affected. The improved effectiveness was to lead to "the control of the object in its nature so that it is submissive to the spoken word, receptive of the thought conveyed or sensitive and effective of the action suggested."

He began with simple things. For instance, he knew of the new change of soul in their dog Yogini, and in late January it was confirmed by Bejoy. On 9 February to be precise, he willed "for the dog to shake off its heavy tamas and manifest the new soul. Rapidly successful, but the tamas still struggles

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to remain & the old bhava} [attitude or feeling] in the face and body persists." Two days later, on the 11*, Sri Aurobindo renewed his will-force and noted that it produced "an immediate effect, the dog doing what it had never done before."

There are different ways of applying one's will-force. Sri Aurobindo changed his tack, and instead of applying his force through the mind, he applied it through the heart. Two days later, on the 13^th, he noted that this time when he willed for Yogini to eat bread which it had always refused, "Suddenly it began eating with relish after first refusing." Next day he used the same means while willing the dog to refrain "from large piece of bread given, but [to] eat others. Persistently refrained even when it was broken into small pieces, except when induced to think it was not the same."

Imagine! He even exerted his will on an ant! He willed it to give up its object and go back ... and he succeeded "after a short persistence." Constant practice made the Power more effective. By December 1912 he could already note that in isolated cases the Power fulfilled itself frequently in small things: "A bird in its flight, an ant in its turnings, feels the thought strike it and either obeys or is temporarily influenced in its immediate or subsequent action."

The four young men living with him were also his fields of experiment. Just as a physician tries out the proper dosage

¹ When Sri Aurobindo wrote for himself in his Journal of Yoga' his notes were peppered with Sanskrit words whose meanings were perfectly clear to him. I am afraid it will not be so clear to us! Even though he thoughtfully wrote down their meanings. But the Sanskrit words cannot be entirely avoided, I have therefore tried to keep them to the barest minimum.

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on a patient, so did Sri Aurobindo on these young men. He would put forth some force and see how the boys reacted. "I have also to see," he explained, "how they would react if I put the force in a different way." Being scientific in his methods, he studied the laws that govern a force, under what conditions would it work and give tangible results.

Saurin, Mrinalini Devi's cousin, shared a room with Moni in Sundar Chetty's house. Once he suffered from acute diarrhoea. Sri Aurobindo used both his mind and heart into his will for its 'lessening.' On 9 February he noted in his diary: "fulfilled as soon as made." Next day, Sri Aurobindo willed "for rapid restoration of health and strength, repeated and fulfilled." On the 11* he again applied his will for Saurin's restored health and strength, and noted its success, "even the time coming correct."

It goes without saying that Sri Aurobindo applied these remedial measures on himself also. When he tried to stay nausea while eating, he was "immediately successful." He was equally successful in his attempt to clear the stomach of disturbances and heaviness. Indeed it is even striking how closely he monitored his own body's functions, and with what minuteness. After all, he did say that "it is not sufficient to open the mind and the vital being and leave the physical being to its obscurity." If we simply look, for instance, at a few first entries in his diary of 1912, what do we find?

"18.1.1912—The roga [disease or disorder] that came, is being slowly eliminated. Its chief characteristic is a dull form of watery nausea, slight in substance but with some tamasic power of oppression.... Hunger persists."

"20.1.12—A dull nausea has been persistent all the morning,

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but does not interfere with the appetite or disturb the prana. More has been eaten today than ordinarily & with full rati [pleasure] of food.

"21.1.12—Relics of watery nausea—much water rising in the mouth.

"24.1.12—Adverse movements [of the body] are chiefly the order of roga, a sore throat having taken hold after an interval of several years, and of bodily slackness ..."

During my early visits to the Ashram, when I was eleven or twelve years old, I would listen round-eyed about Sri Aurobindo's 'feats,' one of which was about his tea drinking. The narrator told me that Sri Aurobindo would be plunged in his work. His eyes would fall on the timepiece on his worktable. The hands would point to a particular time, and hey presto, Saurin would come exactly at the time shown with a steaming cup of tea!

Years later this is how Sri Aurobindo himself related it. "I was in the past a great tea addict; I could not do any work without my cup of tea. Now, the management of the tea was in the hands of my brother-in-law. He used to bring it any time he woke up from his sleep. One day I had a lot of work to do but couldn't get into it without the tea. I began to think, 'When will he bring it, why doesn't he come?' So far I had never asked anybody for anything for myself. Suddenly I found that a particular hour was written on the wall before me, and exactly at that hour the tea was brought in."

We know that Sri Aurobindo liked his tea and his cigar. Champaklal told us that Sri Aurobindo smoked Spencer's 'Flores.' These could be bought readymade from the market and he could smoke when he felt like it. But tea? Someone had to

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make the steaming cup. Normally it fell to the lot of Saurin to make tea. But when he was sick? Well, then it had to be Moni! But Moni was fond of his afternoon nap. So Sri Aurobindo had to apply his will. On 10^th February 1911 he willed for Moni to wake up—"Immediate success." So far so good. But, though awake, Moni showed no inclination to get up, let alone make the tea! So Sri Aurobindo sent forth another will for Moni "to get up and give the tea. Succeeded after a slight resistance, lasting five to ten minutes." That is how Sri Aurobindo got his tea that day. It is quite likely, though, that this happened frequently. Because Saurin was pretty irregular in his habits. Sri Aurobindo had to use his will rather often to improve the situation. On 16 February he willed for Saurin's "regularity in the afternoon, immediately fulfilled." Not so the next day; it took half an hour on the 17^th to be fulfilled. On the 18^th however, his will was "fulfilled under adverse circumstances (they sat down to cards at 4) within quarter of an hour."

Simultaneously he was developing many other faculties. For example, on 13 February he felt striking in his own consciousness a feeling coming "from Saurin of the idea of making the tea. Immediately after I heard him talk of it, & a minute after he came and made it."

By the way, it is only after his knee accident in November 1938 that Sri Aurobindo stopped drinking tea. Thank goes again to Champaklal for this scrap of information.

If you ask me why I am talking of such trivialities as tea, I shall reply that it is part and parcel of our life, and for Sri Aurobindo nothing in life was trivial—"All Life is Yoga"—nothing of life and Matter was to be rejected or excised. Everything counted,

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be it micro or macro. Sri Aurobindo actually used the most trivial domestic happenings as exercise to hone his powers. Did he not repeatedly say that the aim of 'our Yoga' was "to return upon life and transform it"?

As a matter of fact, later when Sri Aurobindo obtained complete mastery over the willed use of subtle force, he applied the effective will worldwide, when necessary; as in the two World Wars "to secure a particular result at some point in the world." Let us not be astonished. Because, as Sri Aurobindo took the trouble to explain to Dilip, "Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves, etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind-waves, thought-currents, waves of emotion—for example, anger, sorrow etc.—which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result."

Well, among the many faculties he was developing was the power of cognition. "I saw the time by the watch in the sitting room to be 2-40," he noted down on 28 January 1911, "ideally cognised the time by my watch to be 2-43. Verified, exact to the minute." Then he began chasing away a dog! "A little later after a chase of the opposite house-dog, having lost the intellectual idea of the time, I ideally cognised it to be just 2-50. Verified, exact to the second." The cognition worked for other things than divining time. "All rooms being closed, I ideally perceived that all were asleep. Verified immediately afterwards by no one moving when the servant repeatedly banged for admission at the door."

As a matter of fact the siddhis he was trying to perfect normally entail a long, hard slog. But in his case, though perhaps

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not of meteoric speed, it was very rapid indeed! Take the power of healing. What was begun in a small radius in 1911, was already expanded in 1912. "Power is also telling on the bodies of others a little," he jotted down on 19 November, but he still felt that it was "only in its commencement." Seven months later, on 6 July 1913 to be precise, he noted that "therapeutic power is on the increase." He succinctly cited a few cases. One such case was "given up as hopeless by the doctor, rid in less than two days of his worst symptoms (difficulty of breathing at once, difficulty of urination in a day)," and so on. He however observed that "the most desperate cases still offer a stronger resistance. The control of the will over my own bodily states has also increased."

But I must recount to you another episode. Well, we know that children were drawn to poet Bharati. How enchantingly he sang! How absorbing were the stories he told! Bharati himself was very fond of children. Once in 1913, in spite of his own penury, he took under his wing a local boy, mentally unsound. Bharati kept the boy near him as much as he could. He oversaw the boy's intake of food, and even when he slept he kept the boy close. Bharati did not miss praying to his Goddess. To the intense surprise of Bharati's sceptic friends, and the boundless joy of the boy's parents, suddenly, one day, the boy was cured ... Everybody remained mystified. The mystery is finally resolved by Sri Aurobindo. In his notes dated 6 July 1913 we come across the following lines. "Therapeutic power is on the increase, eg. Bharati's hysteric patient not cured by him in spite of strong effort and personal contact & suggestion, cured after a distant & moderate application of Will by myself in two days." Bharati himself never claimed that the boy was healed by him. He sent

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his heartfelt gratitude to the Mother Goddess.

I could give you more cases, but by now you must have got the gist of it.

Finally, when Sri Aurobindo had a perfect mastery over this power of healing, how did one perceive it? Let us hear from the most reliable source! I mean from Mother who had a long experience of it.

"You know," she said to Satprem on the eve of her ninetieth birthday, 'You know that after living with Sri Aurobindo for a year, when I left [for France in 1915] at the time of the war, because of the war, all the nerves fell ill: they were in a state of irritated tension (I think they call it neuritis, when all, but all the nerves are ill). It's particularly painful, and everything is disorganized all over: the circulation was disorganized, the digestion was disorganized, everything was disorganized (it was in France, in the South of France). The nerves remember that, and I don't know why, once when things here [in Pondicherry] were very difficult, they remembered. Sri Aurobindo was there and I told him.... I absolutely had the feel of a hand coming and taking the whole pain away like that—in one second it was gone." Mother's excruciating pain was lifted with the sweep of a hand. Satprem remembers Mother saying that when Sri Aurobindo cured somebody, one often saw a subde hand come with a current of blue force and seize, as it were, between its fingertips, the vibration of the illness or disorder.

And why did Mirra get that terrible neuritis in France which lasted for weeks? "I got it in France," Mother explained to Satprem, "because when I went away, I left my psychic being here, and that was the result."

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