|
Did I tell you what happened to my brother? No?... My brother was a
terribly serious boy, and frightfully studious - oh, it was awful! But
he also had a very strong character, a strong will, and there was
something interesting about him. When he was studying to enter the
Polytechnique, I studied with him - it interested me. We were very
intimate (there were only eighteen months between us). He was quite
violent, but with an extraordinary strength of character. He almost
killed me three times, [[On another occasion, Mother told Sujata more
about these three times her brother almost killed her: 'One day we were
playing croquet, and either because he got beaten or for some other
reason, he flew into a rage and struck me hard with his Mallet;
fortunately I escaped with only a slight scratch. Another time, we were
sitting in a room and he threw a big chair towards me - I ducked just in
time and the chair passed over my head. A third time, as we were
descending from a carriage, he pushed me down under it; luckily the
horse didn't move.' ]] but when my mother told him, 'Next time, you
will kill her,' he resolved that it wouldn't happen again - and it never
did. But what I wanted to tell you is that one day when he was
eighteen, just before the Polytechnique exams, as he was crossing the
Seine (I think it was the Pont des Arts), suddenly in the middle
of the bridge ... he felt something descend into him with such force
that he became immobilized, petrified; then, although he didn't exactly
hear a voice, a very clear message came to him: 'If you want, you can
become a god' - it was translated like that in his consciousness. He
told me that it took hold of him entirely, immobilized him - a
formidable and extremely luminous power: 'If you want, you can become a
god.' Then, in the thick of the experience itself, he replied, 'No, I
want to serve humanity.' And it was gone. Of course, he took great care
to say nothing to my mother, but we were intimate enough for him to tell
me about it. I told him, 'Well (laughing), what an idiot you
are!'
That's the story.
At that moment he could have had a spiritual realization: he had
the right stuff. page 309 , Mother's Agenda , volume 2 , 5th Aug. 1961. |
She was down on her knees before my brother. My mother scorned all religious sentiments as weakness and superstition and she absolutely denied the invisible. 'It's all brain disease,' she would say! But she could say just as well, 'Oh, my Matteo is my God, he is my God.' The devil knows why, but in Alexandria she gave him the Italian name Matteo! And she truly treated him like a god. She left him only when he married, because then she really couldn't continue to follow him around any longer. page 310 , Mother's Agenda , volume 2 , 5th Aug. 1961. |
Strangely, when he was ... sixteen, I think, or seventeen ... Did I tell you what happened to him? Yes, a voice said to him ... Yes, it said to him, "Do you want to be divine? ..." And he refused. [[See Agenda II of August 5, 1961. ]] He refused!Wonderful! Out of fear or skepticism?No: narrowness of consciousness. He didn't conceive of anything better than "helping others" - philanthropy That's why he became a governor. When he came out of Polytechnique, he had a choice between different posts, and he deliberately chose that post in the colonies, because he wanted to "help backward races to progress" - all that nonsense! Anyway, he did ONE good thing in his life, my brother. He was in the Ministry of Colonies, and the minister was a friend of his, a little older (I don't know what post my brother held, but anyhow, everything went through his hands). When the war broke out (I was here, it was the first of the World Wars), the British government asked the French to expel Sri Aurobindo and send him to Algeria - they didn't want Sri Aurobindo to be in Pondicherry, they were afraid. But we came to know of it (Sri Aurobindo came to know of it), and I wrote to my brother, saying, "This must not be passed." The expulsion order had gone to the Ministry of Colonies to be ratified, and he got the ratification paper in his hands - he put it at the bottom of his drawer. It disappeared completely, and we never heard of it again. page 35 , Mother's Agenda , volume 10 , 4th Jan 1969 |