Mother and Me

Mother and Medicines

I was aware that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not like taking medicines for their recovery. However, they were never dogmatic about not taking them. Medicines are tools to support recovery from illness and throughout my contact with the Mother, whenever I prescribed a medicine for her, she never objected. What touched me most was her openness to everything. Perhaps one is open if one surrenders totally to the Divine. But for a simpleton like me, it is difficult to accept whatever the Divine gives with total and complete openness and surrender. Sometimes this ‘faith’ is overruled by ‘science’ or ‘logic’ and I find myself completely perplexed. When something inside me says “Have total faith,” my logical mind immediately counters, “Beware, it may be your ignorance!” The reasoning mind and the intuitive mind are always at loggerheads!

Anyway, I always prescribed medicines in ‘pediatric’ doses to the Mother. My ‘faith’ used to tell me that the Mother, being a realised soul, would not need the average normally prescribed doses, but science and logic would immediately tell me that the efficacy of the low doses were due to her age and gradually shrinking physical body. Whatever the case, she certainly used to respond most effectively to very low doses of medicines. Her suffering and pain used to disappear much earlier than I expected and this gave further strength to the ‘fourth dimension’ of health I used to talk about — the Spiritual dimension.

To Orientals, the fourth dimension of health is easily perceived. We call it the Spiritual dimension; but to Occidentals, it may be just mental or psychological. Whatever name we give it is immaterial. I call this Factor X and with the Mother, this Factor X — this fourth dimension, this Spiritual dimension — was so strong that I could feel it whenever I was with her. Sometimes it is not possible to put into words what you feel. And there were moments when I was unable to say what I thought.