Memories of First Darshan

THREE SECONDS FOR ALWAYS

It was the 24th of April 1946. I was twenty-two and a half years old.

I knew nothing about Sri Aurobindo when I arrived at the “Pondicherry Government.” I knew only that he was a “revolutionary,” that he had been jailed by the British, and that he had almost been sent to the gallows.

That made me like him immediately!

People said he was also a “sage.”

But I was a complete layman in regard to the “Wisdom of the East.” I had greater understanding of Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and the Breton pirates boarding the Spanish galleons. And, to be perfectly frank, I preferred Spartacus to the Buddha.

But on that particular 24th of April, everything was overturned toward a new, unknown sea.

It was half past two in the afternoon. And the heat was suffocating. Pavitra, a French graduate from Ecole Polytechnique (God!), was waiting for me on the first floor of the “Ashram.” He was such a fraternal and straightforward man, with a smiling gleam in his eyes. I followed him up a narrow staircase thronged with disciples, then onto a landing, and then into this... absolutely silent – one could almost say solidly silent – room draped in white linen. Two people were sitting inside.

Somewhat mechanically. I stepped forward and folded my hands in the Indian fashion, as I had been told to do. There He was – a mass of immobile power. His face was suffused in blue light (I thought it was neon lights). He looked at me. That look felt so vast, oh, vaster than all the sands of Egypt, softer than all the seas! And everything seemed to be engulfed in... something unknown. It lasted three seconds.

Then Mother, seated on his right, tilted her neck and chin toward me and gave me a broad, radiant smile as if to say, “Aah!” I was completely dumbfounded. Three seconds.

I returned to my room at the “Governor's Palace,” sat on my huge bed, which probably dated back to the Compagnie des Indes, and stayed there, stunned, much as I had been stunned by the Valley of the Kings and Thebes. Something kept on vibrating, vibrating in the depths, far, far away, beyond all known horizons, and I no longer knew anything. I only knew I had encountered “something for always.” Three seconds for always. A unique being unlike anyone I would ever meet. A being.

Then I felt as if a thumb were being driven into my skull through the top of my head. It was very strange – a physical sensation. It felt very still, powerful, yet without sense. Nothing made any sense!

And yet, I never felt as alive as I did on that day.

We are so very poor at expressing what is in our hearts.

We are always obliged to use some convoluted process that goes in roundabout ways. When will we speak in music?

- Satprem

(The Revolt of the Earth, by Satprem)

And the day I saw Sri Aurobindo

And the day I saw Sri Aurobindo, all of a sudden... well, I was filled by that same thing I had... gropingly experienced as a child, that I had touched in the camps.

And it was RIGHT THERE. It was looking at me and filling me – right in front of me.

It was in front of me, alive. It was right there, in a gaze.

Towarnicki: Try to remember. Tell me about that meeting. How does one meet, in India, a man like Sri Aurobindo?

With Sri Aurobindo it was a little special. He never received anybody. But three or four times a year, his disciples,

and whoever wished to, were allowed to pass in front of him to see him (what is called a "darshan" in India).

So that day, I followed the crowd and passed in front of him, thinking he was a great thinker, you see, and that's all. Sri Aurobindo was a "thinker," a "philosopher." Through the little I had read of him on arrival, to acquaint myself, I thought he was a great thinker.

Towarnicki: But where was he?

He was seated in a big armchair, with Mother beside him. And there was a sort of procession – actually, you passed before him in order to be LOOKED AT by him. Not to look at him, but in order for his gaze to open up... that door in us, that door that fills.

Towarnicki: Did you already know his work?

No. But as soon as I arrived in India, before meeting him, I immediately read Essays on the Gita; I read a number of books.... And immediately I felt: this isn't like anything you've ever read before, not like anything you've understood before. It's something different.

But to me he was still a "thinker." And suddenly, I was before something that was not a "thinker," before a being unlike any I had met on earth. A being who was a BEING, living. Not a man in a three-piece suit, or even with a white chaddar on his back. Something that was... that embodied in a gaze, in a body, in his atmosphere, what I had experienced on the open sea, in my boat. That whole immensity was there, in a being. And IT was looking at me.

So, it's as if I suddenly recognized my home. I recognized the place where I could breathe, the place I came from – I was home.

Towarnicki: And it all happened in the flash of a look?

It lasted, I don't know, four seconds.... Four seconds. And I never forgot it.

Towarnicki: As when Swami Vivekananda met Ramakrishna for the first time. It lasted a fraction of a second.

It's a recognition, you see. That's exactly it. It isn't that you discover something different; you suddenly recognize something.

It's... like a "yes," but so much deeper than a "yes." That is "IT," you see. It's no longer a stranger. It's me looking at myself – it's ME, suddenly. Me, really me, precisely the what's-left after it has been stripped of all its falsehood and superfluity. That's what's-left.

That's what was in those eyes.

Towarnicki: It was your first meeting.

Yes. I never forgot it.

So I decided I had to live that. I said to myself: If one man can embody that, can BE that, which I felt as being "mine," well, that's what I must live, what I must find.

- Satprem

(My Burning Heart, Satprem's interview)