A Luminous Life

The Darshan and a sudden healing

Once we had returned and my father had written for my Darshan, the reply came that I should wait six months, since I had until then been underage. I was thirteen. But in those six months, without anyone teaching me, I had already stumbled into the very kind of meditation Sri Aurobindo describes in Bases of Yoga — before I had ever read it. Each evening, sitting quietly on the terrace of our rented Cuddalore house as the sun went down, I would feel something enter — a golden light, it seemed, entering and dissolving me, and I would not blink for the whole time. Afterwards a great peace would come, and then a presence — exactly the sequence he describes to a disciple: remain quiet, let the quietude enter, and afterwards the peace descends, and after the peace, the presence. No one had taught me this. My grief over my grandfather began, quietly, to lift, worked upon, I now believe, by the Master and the Mother together.

When my Darshan finally came, I stood in the queue with my father ahead of me and my mother behind. As I stepped to the threshold of the room, I saw the Mother first, seated on his right, smiling at me. Then my eyes met Sri Aurobindo's — he was not smiling — and it was as if two beams of silvery-blue light entered my eyes and passed through me. I could not blink; I could not look away, even as I was carried forward in the queue and my head turned automatically to keep his gaze until I passed out of the far door. What I felt afterwards was a vast calm, an oceanic reservoir of power and serenity, somehow held within a human body — the mystery, I thought, that is enacted every time a divine being takes birth on earth.

I had suffered for years from chronic throat trouble. After that single glance, it vanished completely, and did not return for ten years. An instantaneous, physical healing — the kind I would later see the Mother perform many times herself.