Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

39

The Programme

"What has happened to you?" Purani could not refrain from exclaiming. He was astonished to see Sri Aurobindo so much changed when he saw him again in 1921; for it was but in December 1918 that he had seen him! But what a change! "In 1918 the colour of the body was like that of an ordinary Bengali—rather dark—though there was a lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating." This time though as he went up the stairs like last time, in the same Guest House, a great surprise awaited Purani. "I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light. So great and unexpected was the change that I could not help exclaiming: 'What has happened to you?' "

Sri Aurobindo smiled and countered: "And what has happened to you?" Purani had grown a beard.

It had taken Sri Aurobindo quite a few years, and sometimes concentrated work, to bring about this physical change. It proved that eventually the psychic body had been able to alter the physical sheath into its own image. Among the many elements of Yogic perfection, siddhi, he had also undertaken to develop physical beauty—saundarya. A willed modification

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of form. We find in his Yoga diary under the date 10 December 1912: "The first successes in saundarya limit themselves to

three____" After describing the first in some detail, he noted,

"The gain is a detail, but the important point is that the power of the will to change formations in the body has now been physically proved beyond doubt or dispute." The second gain: "The gloss, softness & smoothness of the hair has been restored." The third: "The tendency to unnatural entanglement and profuse loss of hair has been steadily diminishing, though it is not yet nil the hair is now exceedingly thin, shot with grey & threatening baldness above the temples. These signs of old age show no promise of reversal or dissolution."

'Signs of old age,' when he had just turned forty! Well, anyway, six months later, on 16June 1913, he was pleased to see that "the effusion of beard has been resumed after a very long period." Also his hair was curling, and there was an improvement of the face.

Not only hair, but teeth and skin colour were part of the action on beauty. "Improvement of hue in the leg (below the knee where it was black & clumsily glossy)," he wrote down on 20 June 1913, and continued with, "Whiteness of teeth (especially lower row) with some relics of yellowness." This is of special interest as it was now four years that Sri Aurobindo had not used "any artificial means of preservation or cleansing (brush, powder, etc.)...." After some ups and downs he got rid of the yellow film, and both the upper and lower teeth regained their whiteness.

Even more striking were the changes in shapes. Fingers, for instance. "A rounding off of the sharp angles of those fingers

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which were formerly square." A similar tendency came to the feet. He was, of course, quite aware of the slowness of the process. "The Will Power cannot alter the lines of the body," he observed on May 21, 1913, "except by a slow & tedious process & the bone still resists the alteration of status; still the figure has definitely changed, & in the colour, hair, feet, etc. there are slight but effective alterations. Some of the signs of old age, eg grey hairs, although no longer visibly increasing, still resist ejection." So it went on over the years. Purani had seen the result.

Impressive though it was, it was but one aspect of his many accomplishments. Sri Aurobindo has taught us that the experiences described in the Indian Yoga system can be had again and again by generation after generation of Yogis. Although Sri Aurobindo fretted at the slowness of the process yet the whole gamut of Yoga—which takes lives and lives—was to be covered in a short space of time. The Master of Yoga was making his Instrument burn up the road.

One commonly known faculty of a Yogi is the triple time-vision : trikdldrishti. It means "the direct knowledge of the past, the intuitive knowledge of the present and prophetic knowledge of the future." He took up the work of developing this faculty; and telepathy, and thought-transmission, and cognition, and a series of similar elements.

The development and perfection of the senses were not neglected. This subtle power of the senses, he explained, "is the power of perceiving smells, sounds, contacts, tastes, lights, colours and other objects of sense which are either not at all perceptible to ordinary men or beyond the range of your ordinary senses." He always had a keen sense of smell, but now

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he could smell baked bread, fish, onion, "perfumes & other scents not within the physical range or usual experience." Taste developed rather suddenly: "intensity & materiality are perfect & the range is not limited as it includes the sweet, the bitter & the pungent as well as nondescript tastes." Touch "is still confined to the habitual touches, rain, wind, insects, heat of the suksma [subtle] sun, fire, etc..." Hearing: "This sense which was the most acute & earliest to develop, is now the latest (rupa excepted) to perfect itself & the clear sounds of jail do not repeat themselves." Remember when he used to hear the sounds of crickets they were so noisy that he thought there were many crickets outside! Of rupa, or seeing not mere images but actual forms, "of which there were some instances in the jail & afterwards" there was "none here."

Nevertheless, many experiences in the Alipore jail were now reemerging "on a new basis of perfection."

The sweet taste of the nectar in the throat returned. Diluted at first, but later "much stronger, denser and more frequent and continuous, the mixture of phlegm less frequent."

An ant-bite in the jail had produced in his body a feeling not of pain but of ecstasy, ananda. Now it awakened in his body a feeling of intense ecstasy, "pure raudrananda without discomfort." (Mosquito bites were less manageable, I dare say!) Yet, when his right knee got fractured (on 24 November 1938) it happened so suddenly, so swiftly, that he could not immediately change the intense pain into ananda. Later, when the intensity subsided, and the pain settled down into a steady sensation, Sri Aurobindo could change it into ananda. Decades of practice had not prepared him for such an experience. Sri Aurobindo

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said as much, "Perhaps it was to give me knowledge of intense pain!"

But in the 1910s, Sri Aurobindo was still training his body to feel several types of ananda. One of which was electric or vaidyuta. "It comes as a blissful electric shock or current on the brain or other parts of the nervous system & is of two kinds, positive or fiery & negative or cold, saurya or chandra, conveyed through the sun or conveyed through the moon." His sensations perceived them as a feeling of internal heat or as rheumatism "turned into a form of physical pleasure...." He added reflectively, "It is, probably, these two forms of sukshma vidyut that are the basis of the phenomena of heat & cold—such at least is the theory suggested to me in Alipur jail." Practice makes perfect. So later he could say confidently, "I know very well what ecstasy and Ananda are from the brahmananda to the sarîrananda, and can experience them at any time."

One experience of the jail which Sri Aurobindo practised assiduously was levitation—utthapana. Mind you, it was not at all like the levitation with which we are familiar, when the whole body remains suspended in the air unmindful of the law of gravitation. What a delightful feeling of rest and lightness that gives! even if it occurs in our dreams. But Sri Aurobindo was out to conquer all laws of physical nature. He therefore went about it in his own way. He would keep an arm or a leg suspended in the air for more than two hours sometimes. "Utthapana, in spite of resistance, in left arm, legs neck," he noted on 20 June 1913. Then there was the utthapana of other parts of the body—the back, loins, etc. He did all this standing or sitting or supine. In the main though he walked and walked. For

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hours together. 'Yesterday nearly 12 hours were passed in walking or the erect position" he noted down on 2 January 1913. The results were "the old pain in the soles of the feet..." and some stiffness in the thighs, but both passed away at once, convincing him of "material falsity."

He was also aiming at the conquest of exhaustion. In the process he mastered four physical attributes. Mahimdand garima which give the body abnormal strength, and "may even develop into the power of increasing the size and weight of the body." Laghimd makes you so light that you can walk on air. Animd brings subtlety to the body, makes you as fine as an atom so that you can disappear into thin air.

Our severe scientist of the Spirit noted down everything meticulously as does an experimentalist in his laboratory to establish control. How many hours he walked, with what intervals, what were the results; how many hours he slept, the kind of sleep it was, the types of dreams he had. And all sorts of things besides. The main concern of a true scientist is with physical phenomena; he observes them, he studies the conditions, makes experiments, and then deduces the laws. Exactly what our Scientist of the Spirit was doing; putting everything to the test of hard physical experience.

In his Journal of Yoga, under the date of July 1^st 1912, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "August, 1912, will complete the seventh year of my practice of Yoga. It has taken so long to complete a long record of wanderings, stumbles, groupings, experiments,— for Nature beginning in the dark to grope her way to the light— now an assured, but not yet a full lustre,—for the Master of the Yoga to quiet the restless individual will and the presumptuous

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individual intelligence so that the Truth might liberate itself from human possibilities 8c searching and the Power emerge out of human weaknesses and limitations. The night of the thirtieth marked by a communication from the sahasradala [the thousand-petalled lotus above the head], of the old type, sruti [hearing], but clear of the old confusions which used to rise around the higher Commands. It was clearly the Purushot tome speaking and the Shakti receiving the command." Then there is his observation. "In this yoga at least nothing has been abrupt except the beginnings,—the consummations are always led up to by long preparation & development, continual ebb 8c flow, ceaseless struggling, falling & rising—a progress from imperfection through imperfections to imperfect and insecure perfections 8c only at last an absolute finality and security." Certainty was now his.

It was in late November 1912 that Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The regular record of the sadhana begins today, because now the perceptions are clear enough to render it of some real value and not merely a record of mistakes and overstatements." Because "the theory of the Yoga has been proved. The perfectibility of the human being, trikdldrishti, Power, the play of the Divine Force in the individual, the existence of the other worlds, & of extra-mental influences, even the possibility of the physical siddhis are established facts—vijnana [supramental knowledge], the Vedic psychology, the seven streams, everything is established. What is wanting is the perfect application, free from the confusions of the anritam [falsehood] which result from the play of mind."

I remember Sri Aurobindo wishing: "Just as people are

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advancing in physical science and trying to explore every possible secret of Nature, so also if they went into the inner being and tapped the powers from the unusual ranges of Nature then there could be no limit to possibilities."

Oh, how astonishing it is that those two worlds, both available to our eye, yet remain hidden each from the other.

He was now poised for the next step. "The siddhi has now reached a stage when the test of its positive world ward side has to be undertaken."

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