"Sit down," I was told, "look and you will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before they enter, fling them back." I sat down and looked and saw to my astonishment that it was so; I saw and felt concretely the thought approaching as if to enter through or above the head and was able to push it back concretely before it came inside. In three days — really in one — my mind became full of an eternal silence — it is still there.*

A free intelligence: A universal mind

From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire.

Static and dynamic Brahman

At the same time an experience intervened: something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative. What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt himself moved by that in all his Sadhana and action. These realisations and others which followed upon them, such as that of the Self in all and all in the Self and all as the Self, the Divine in all and all in the Divine, are the heights to which Sri Aurobindo refers and to which he says we can always rise...

* Sri Aurobindo refers to his realisation of Nirvana in January 1908 at Baroda, that he had under the guidance of the Maharastrian Yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele.

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A first step: Not a culminating finale

Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world — only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real.... I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above. But meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion* is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine. ...

Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible...

Beyond the Silence

Vast, God-possessing, embraced by the Wonderful,

Lifted by the All-Beautiful into his infinite beauty,

Love shall envelop thee endless and fathomless,

Joy unimaginable, ecstasy illimitable,

Knowledge omnipotent, Might omniscient,

Light without darkness, Truth that is dateless.

One with the Transcendent, calm, universal,

Single and free, yet innumerably living,

All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,

Act in the world with thy being beyond it....

Sri Aurobindo

* In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence. (Sri Aurobindo)

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Turning a prison into God's trysting ground*

I... knew something about sculpture, but blind to painting. Suddenly one day in the Alipore jail while meditating I saw some pictures on the walls of the cell and lo and behold! the artistic eye in me opened and I knew all about painting except of course the more material side of the technique.

.... I was then having a very intense Sadhana on the vital plane and I was concentrated. And I had a questioning mind: 'Are such siddhis as utthapana [levitation] possible?' I then suddenly found myself raised up in such a way that I could not have done it myself with muscular exertion. Only one part of the body was slightly in contact with the ground and the rest was raised up against the wall. I could not have held my body like that normally even if I had wanted to and I found that the body remained suspended like that without any exertion on my part.

It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence... The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience

and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject.

The foundations of Yoga: Equanimity, love, faith, surrender, grace

(From Tales of Prison Life, original in Bengali) ...

It is true that the causes of hardship, which I have pointed out, were there, but thanks to the kindly grace of the Divine, it was not for long that I suffered from them.... For, after a short while, I got beyond the sense of hardship and discomfort and became immune to suffering. That is why when the memory of my jail-life recurs to my mind, it occasions a smile rather than anger or grief....

I learnt the remarkable lesson of love in my solitary imprisonment at Alipore. Before I had gone there, my personal love even for men was confined within a very narrow circle, and the dammed up tide of my love for birds and beasts had hardly ever had a chance to flow out freely.

At Alipore I realised what a deep love for all creatures might dwell in a human heart and how, at the sight of cows, birds, and even ants, it might thrill with a sudden burst of keen delight!...

I realised, too, how, in this very condition one finds a rare opportunity for experiencing

*Sri Aurobindo was taken to Alipore jail in 1908 on charges of the conspiracy where he stayed for one year as an under-trial. It is here, in the ja il that he had his second major realisation, the realisation of the cosmic consciousness and the vision of the Divine as all beings and as all that is.

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God's infinite grace and attaining union with Him. ... God, who is All-Good, turns even evil into supreme good. The third purpose (for which he took me to Alipore jail) was to teach me that my personal efforts would avail nothing in my Yoga, that faith and total self-surrender alone were the means of attaining spiritual perfection, and that the only object of my aspiration for union (Yoga) was to use for His work whatever power, perfection or divine bliss (Ananda) He would vouchsafe to me in His grace. From that day onward the thick darkness of ignorance began to thin, and from that day on I have been realising the infinite goodness of the All-Good God in all my observation of the happenings of the world. Nothing happens — whether it is something momentous or the most insignificant— but contributes to some good. Often He serves several purposes through a single act. Many a time we see the play of a blind force in the world and, denying God's omniscience, find fault with His divine Intelligence on the assumption that waste is the rule of Nature. But that is a groundless complaint. The Divine Force never works blindly, and there cannot be one jot or title of waste in Her dispensation; rather, it passes human understanding with what supreme control and little expenditure She produces plentiful results. ...

Sri Aurobindo

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