A Luminous Life

The descent of Light

There is one experience from those early years that I kept to myself for a very long time, and I should set it down properly, because I only alluded to it a moment ago.

On the twenty-ninth of February — this was 1956 — the Mother was taking her usual class, and we all sat around her as we did in those days, close enough to remain in her presence for a good while. I was not well that day, and at some point I simply nodded off, missing part of the class. When I woke with a start, I felt at once that something was different, though I could not say what. I looked around at the others, thinking that if something significant had happened, I would surely see it in their faces — but I saw nothing unusual there, and so I told myself I must simply have dreamed something in my doze. I felt ashamed at having fallen asleep in the Mother's presence, and said nothing to anyone. It was only afterwards that the Mother spoke of a golden light having descended that day, and I understood, with a pang, that in my own unconsciousness I had missed witnessing the great Supramental Descent itself. I did not regret it greatly — after all, simply witnessing it would not by itself have transformed me; the sadhana still had to be done.

The second descent, though — the horizontal one, when the force spread outward across the world — that I was fully conscious of. I had gone for the early morning balcony Darshan, and suddenly I saw what looked like streamers of golden light spreading everywhere, over the whole horizon. I said to myself, "Oh!" — and then I felt it in my own body too, which had always been a sickly one: a sudden, distinct sense that there was hope for it now, that some kind of physical transformation had become possible. I understood only later, in my mind, what that hope really meant.

I told no one about it — not even Madhav, who was already going to the Mother daily by then. It was only two days afterwards that I thought to ask him, "Has Mother said anything about her own experiences recently?" "It's remarkable that you mention it," he said, "because she has just told a few people close to her that there was a horizontal descent of the Supramental Force." "Oh," I said, "I felt something like that myself." He was quite cross with me for not having told him at the time — he said he would have carried the news to the Mother, and she would have been glad to know that others had felt it too.

It was around this same time that I once mentioned a related experience to an older colleague in the library — the devoted, artistic old-timer I have already spoken of — and she only looked at me strangely and said nothing, though I learned afterwards, through a common friend, that she had herself felt the very same descent and was simply laughing at me behind my back for confiding it. "My God," I thought, "here is my childhood thing coming up again, and in this Ashram of sadhaks too." And I closed my mouth once more, and did not open it again on such matters for a very long time.