Footprints of God

The Bridge Between Heaven And Earth

Integral truth about the world and the Divine

My own life and my Yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly withTout any exclusiveness on either side. All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered into my mental field and some, like politics, into my life, but at the same time, since I set foot on the Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere.... In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview — the spiritual and the material — and to try to establish the Divine Consciousness and the Divine Power in men's hearts and earthly life, not for a personal salvation only but for a life divine here. This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been my view and experience of the reality and nature of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me as

nearly as possible the integral truth about them...

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Sunrise splendours: Some early experiences

Sri Aurobindo had some spiritual experiences, but that was before he knew anything about Yoga or even what Yoga was, — e.g., a vast calm which descended upon him at the moment when he stepped first on Indian soil after his long absence, in fact with his first step on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay: (this calm surrounded him and remained for long months afterwards); the realisation of the vacant Infinite while walking on the ridge of the Takhti-Suleman in Kashmir; the living presence of Kali in a shrine on the banks of the Narmada; the vision of the Godhead surging up from within when in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay, etc. But these were inner experiences coming of themselves and with a sudden unexpectedness, not part of a Sadhana.

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Vision of the Godhead surging from within

Above my head a mighty head was seen,

A face with the calm of immortality

And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

In the vast circle of its sovereignty.

His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;

The world was in His heart and He was I:

I housed in me the Everlasting's peace,

The strength of One whose substance cannot die...

Vision of the World-Mother

Or you stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what? — a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother.

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In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,

From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me,—

A living Presence deathless and divine,

A Form that harboured all infinity.

The great World-Mother and her mighty will

Inhabited the earth's abysmal sleep,

Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable,

Mute in the desert and the sky and deep...

*

After unnumbered steps of a hill-stair

I saw upon earth's head brilliant with sun

The immobile Goddess in her house of stone

In a loneliness of meditating air.

Wise were the human hands that set her there

Above the world and Time's dominion;

The Soul of all that lives, calm, pure, alone,

Revealed its boundless self mystic and bare... .

Sri Aurobindo

1. Sri Aurobindo's experienceat the carriage accidentin Baroda, noted in his poem The Godhead.

2. Sri Aurobindo's exeperience at Karnali (Gujarat) noted in his poem The Stone Goddess.

3. Sri Aurobindo's experience at Pune on Parvati Hills noted in his poem The Hill-Top Temple.

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Practice of Pranayama

A Baroda engineer who was a disciple of Brahmananda showed me how to do it, and I started on my own. Some remarkable results came with it. First, I felt a sort of electricity all around me. Secondly, there were some visions of a minor kind. Thirdly, I began to have a very rapid flow of poetry.... Fourthly, it was at the time of the Pranayama-practice that I began to put on flesh. Earlier I was very thin.... 1 took more and more to Pranayama, but there were no further results. It was at this time that I adopted a vegetarian diet. That gave lightness and some purification.

What I did was four or five hours a day prāṇāyāma. ... The flow of poetry came down while I was doing prāṇāyāma, not some years afterwards. If it is the flow of experiences, that did come after some years, but after I had stopped the prāṇāyāma for a long time and was doing nothing and did not know what to do or where to turn once all my efforts had failed. And it came not as a result of years of prāṇāyāma or concentration, but in a ridiculously easy way, by the grace either of a temporary Guru (but it was not that, for he was himself bewildered by it) or by the grace of the eternal Brahman and afterwards by the grace of Mahakali and Krishna.

Q: But didn't you begin Yoga later on in Gujarat ?

A: Yes. But this began in London, sprouted the moment I set foot on Apollo Bunder, touching Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage.

Sri Aurobindo