Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prithwi Singh

Addendum

(For the interest of the readers, we append here an extract of a conversation between Sri Aurobindo and Dilip Kumar Roy on February 4,1943, when Sri Aurobindo narrated this episode of stone throwing as an illustration of "materialisation.")

"Let me tell you," Sri Aurobindo said smilingly, "what I have seen with my own eyes if only to obviate your objection about the hearsay evidence. And it was an occurrence witnessed to by at least half-a-dozen people besides, who were with me."⁵⁴

[Next day Dilip wrote to Sri Aurobindo to supply him with details, as he wanted to be accurate. Sri Aurobindo complied and wrote:]

"I gave you this as an instance of actual occult law and practice, showing that these things are not imaginations or delusions or humbug, but can be true phenomena.

"The stone-throwing began unobtrusively with a few stones thrown at the Guest-House kitchen—apparently from the terrace opposite, but there was no one there. The phenomenon began at the fall of dusk and continued at first for half-an-hour, but daily it increased in frequency, violence and the size of the stones, and the duration of the attack increased also, sometimes lasting for several hours until, towards the end, in the hour or half-hour before midnight, it became a regular bombardment; and now it was no longer at the kitchen only but thrown in other places as well: for example, the outer verandah. At first we took it for a human-made affair and sent for the police, but the investigation lasted only for a short time and when one of the constables in the verandah got a stone whizzing unaccountably between his two legs, the police abandoned the case in a panic. We made our own investigations, but the places whence the stones seemed to be or might be coming were void of human stone-throwers. Finally, as if to put us kindly out of doubt, the stones began falling inside closed rooms; one of these—it was a huge one and I saw it immediately after it fell—reposed flat and comfortable on a cane table as if that was its proper resting-place. And so it went on till the missiles became murderous. Hitherto the stones had been harmless except for a daily battering of Bijoy's door—during the last days—which I watched the night before the end. They appeared in mid-air, a few feet above the ground, not coming from a distance but suddenly manifesting and, from the direction from which they flew, should have been thrown close in from the compound of the Guest-House or the verandah itself, but the whole place was in clear light and I saw that there was no human being there nor could have been. At last the semi-idiot boy servant who was the centre of the attack and was sheltered in Bijoy's room under his protection, began to be severely hit and was bleeding from a wound by stones materialising inside the closed room. I went in at Bijoy's call and saw the last stone fall on the boy; Bijoy and he were sitting side by side and the stone was thrown at them in front but there was no one visible to throw it—the two were alone in the room. So unless it was Wells' Invisible Man—!

"So far we had only been watching or scouting around, but this was a little too much, it was becoming dangerous and something had to be done about it. The Mother, from her knowledge of the process of these things, decided that the process here must depend on a nexus between the boy servant and the house, so if the nexus were broken and the servant separated from the house, the stone-throwing would cease. We sent him away to Hrishikesh's place and immediately the whole phenomenon ceased; not a single stone was thrown after that and peace reigned.

"That showed that these occult phenomena are real, have a law or process as definite as that of any scientific operation and that the knowledge of the processes can not only bring them about but put an end to or annul them.

"So you see," Sri Aurobindo said at the end of his narration, "the Mother who had studied occultism in North Africa could understand it all because of her deep occult knowledge."

(To bring this to a close, let us add what Dilip learnt from Amrita.)

"I was told afterwards by Amrita, who had been an eye-witness of the whole drama, that all this had happened in mid-winter in 1921 day after day. And fortunately, he had kept a record of the whole incident which he showed me. From this I gathered that a cook called Vattal was the author of the mischief. Infuriated for having been dismissed, the fellow had threatened that he would make the place too hot for those who remained. And he went for help to a Mussulman Faquir who was versed in black magic, and then it all began. I asked Amrita whether the stones could have been illusory. He smiled and said that he had had them collected and kept them as exhibits for months and that they had a very curious feature in that they were all covered with moss. I was also told that among those who were then on the spot there was the rationalist stalwart Upendra Nath Banerji who had at first pooh-poohed the black-magic story and girded up his loins to unearth the miscreants who were responsible for it all. But even he had to confess himself beaten in the end as he could not make any sense out of the strange episode. But it all transpired when Vattal's wife came in an extremity of despair and threw herself at the mercy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Her husband had realised that the nemesis had overtaken him for he knew occultism enough to realise that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had hurled the force back. When such occult forces are aroused against one who can repel them they inevitably recoil back upon the head of its original author. So her husband had fallen desperately sick. Sri Aurobindo in his generosity forgave the fellow and said in Amrita's presence: 'For this he need not die.' The black magician recovered after that."⁵⁵