Blessed are those

The Meeting (Dr. Beena R. Nayak)

- Dr. Beena R. Nayak

From Kashi with gangajal, the sangha, to complete the yatra started for Rameshwaram, guarding the sacred water for abhisheka. In a burning, fiery track southwards, the sangha panted in the hot dusty plains where even the earth heaved sighs in vapors.

I and the sangha, with scorched faces chanting harinaam labored on with the fierce will, unfazed, to fulfil the yatra. Suddenly, across the road, we found a donkey, dying of thirst, panting, his eyes rolled upwards, as if begging for water.

The lead, chanting harinaam, diverted the sangha making sure, not to stop for this minor obstacle, even a moment. But for one of us, a humble harijan, looked at the poor creature lying in our way, eyes bloodshot, tongue lolling out. The pilgrims cried, "Han Hari" and ran forward, not sparing a glance, not missing a step, in carrying on their holy pilgrimage. The harijan just could not go forward, and taking the head of the poor animal on his lap, slowly, drop by drop, fed the holy water. The donkey, revived by the holy waters, stood up, and with a look of gratitude, went onwards on shaky legs, saved from sure death. Then upon joining the sangha, he was greeted by ironic comments -especially by a wise man, " Lo and behold! Now that your pot of gangajal is emptied into a donkey, what is there to offer at Rameshwaram !"-

The poor man said, bowing his head in humility,

"All I have to offer is my abhishek of tears in repentance".

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Poojalal, one of the poet educators of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry in 1926, published this poem titled ' A Successful Pilgrimage', in his Gujarati poetry collection, 'Parijaat.' He was inspired to write this poem in meter after he read a true story from the famous saint of Maharashrashtra Eknathji. I came across this as I tried to put together words to explain what is this remembering, of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, that we began in the early 2000s in Auroville. Why? Just as these links of remembering that started from the late 20^th century reached to you all in the early part of the 21^st century, with the meaning and significance intact, indeed, in the same way as in the remembering, through kirtana, harinaam, remembering in the form of the accounts of those who had met the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, helps bring the experience of the meeting alive. Thus this story, the poem, and the meaning they carry, all become a metaphor -that the Divine is in front of you, the Divine is in all, that the means to the end of a holy pilgrimage or your spiritual journey is remembering; that which you meet on the way, is also that which you seek on the fulfilment of your long, arduous trek. Similarly, through the program of remembering, where we collectively hear from one of us meeting with the Masters, what we experience is the process of searching and finding, of questing and discovering, the recognizing of the essential oneness through the memories of many lives edited to some moments of truth carried forward to that moment of remembering; bringing alive the lost teachings and learning in conscious bursts of recapturing and recreating of timeless moments of truth; those that happened before and those that will happen, in the meeting with the Masters. Again and again and again.

Infinite cycles of going forward, going backward, to uncover more dross covering the gold of that treasure of memories, across time immemorial, across thousands of miles of circumambulation of many lives, searching for that, the gold, the true, needing synthesis of all those vague hints and dusty recall not yet lost in

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the sands of material details, to remember that moment of the meeting of the soul with the Supreme, the learner and the teacher, the child and the Mother. Again and again and again.

Quoting the Gita, Shri Manoj Das Gupta from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram points to the importance of remembering of the message in the divine dialogue between Shri Krishna and Arjuna:

samwadmimadbhutam keshavssrjunayoho

punyam hrishyam cha muhurmuhuhu

(Srimad Bhagwad Gita Ch-18.sh-76.)

"Remembering the wonderful and sacred dialogue, I rejoice again and again and again"

Also, remembering is the act of reliving that experience which signifies the lesson given and cherished and shared with others on the same journey, until it becomes wisdom eternal, an indivisible whole of the Self. In his correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, Nirodda, asks, "Where is the higher Being that I had met with? " The Master replies, "Everything once gained is there and can be regained."

Remembering is this golden key that helps find the lost treasures within one self, symbolizing the mystical finding and losing and finding again, in one's spiritual journey, that often serves as an ignition to jumpstart the moving forward, on a very exhausting journey. Often one finds a fragment and then there is a 'loss' and we need to refind that which is 'lost', as the mind suffers many natural disasters in the long inexplicable travels through the vicissitudes of one's life. As Nirodda says in a poem " ..a deep glimpse of a memory, behind the veil of time, when my soul was with Thee.."

Further, signifying the consolation that we experience on listening to one of these remembering, inciting flames of inspiration that burn the dross of doubts along the way, as those deep-seated golden memories have a transfiguring touch on the resisting cells of hardened sanskaras, old habits,

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"..No more I ask of thee

What I have gained or lost,

What shadow-veils wrap me,

What distance I have crossed,

I feel within my soul

Crowding like gold fires

The hidden scroll,

The word that for thee aspires." (From 'Fingers of Light')

These events of remembering, using speech, language, sound use the process of multiple loops of knowledge, learning and memory creating the necessary wisdom to serve the tripod of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga - towards the essential synthesis, as in the kirtana, japa, harinaam, sumiran and other time honoured traditions of Indian paths of devotion. The speech used to remember the name of the Lord; the sound of the name of the Lord; the rhythms of accompaniments all produce a most complex result of an elevated emotional atmosphere within, rather like the vapors of an incense burning, overcoming even the physical laws of nature. All these form the ritual, the magic, the sacred space where a welcome to the Wonderful happens, of itself, as a natural consequence.

Also, in the Synthesis of Yoga, at several places Sri Aurobindo has said remembering is essential to - the process of surrender of ego, the aspiration to rise above the day-to-day function, the rejection of all that stands in the way - the foundation tripod of this Yoga. Maybe as in the japa, the sound rich with the emotions purified by the memory, connects to the primordial collections of sound stored in the inconscient as of the mother's voice in the child before the birth or, as in the devotee before the separation from the Master happens. Maybe the emotional charge of the heart filled with joy and wonder stored as memories recharges the tired cells to an awakening of an all experience anew. Maybe these links connect the soul once more to the Self as when forgotten memories come alive like a lightning across the terrible lonely dark terrain of the inconscient. Just a moment of truth is needed. A spark across

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the aeons. Thus confirming the knowledge that memory underlies ail learning, the link of remembering, to That, which has no end, no beginning.

The Mother remembered what an old European mystic, Giordano Bruno had to say, while illuminating a point to Huta in the collection of sayings of timeless wisdom, Gems, "..Time is nothing else than uninterrupted succession of the acts of Divine Energy, one of the attributes or one of the workings of the Divine. Space is the extension of this soul.. " The meeting, remembered in the act of sharing with others, is brought alive as a solid fact on the grid point of Time and Space, recharging with the Energy and situating in that Place, putting those who are listening to themselves, onto the timeless voyage once again.

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(Message for the Inauguration of Auroville)

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