38 Science of the Spirit Let us not imagine that Sri Aurobindo was passing his time like any old scientist simply studying the movements of birds and beasts and insects, and their psychology. No. I dare say that that was but a by-product of his keen interest in all-life. What was he doing then? "I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane," he wrote in a letter of 12 July 1911, from Raghavan house where he had met Alexandra David-Neel. How did he go about it? At Sundar Chetty's house he was already honing his skills. One of the first was to obtain the effectiveness of the Will on an object or

45 One Day The bad shape of the economy made Sri Aurobindo move to a small house in the centre of the "native" quarters: N°59 rue de la Mission Etrangere, or Mission Street; Mata coil Street to the locals. Sri Aurobindo lived in this fourth house for six months, from April to October 1913. With him were Bejoy, Moni, Nolini, Saurin and V. Ramaswami. Two Bengalis, Nagen Nag and Biren Roy, joined them in July 1913. With no improvement in their pecuniary state in sight, Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal detailing their plight. "Our position here now is at its worst; since all efforts to get help from here have been temporarily fruitless and we have to depend on yo

11 Vedapuri Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry. Nobody knows when this port town on the Coromandel coast came into existence. Its birth is lost in the mists of time. But if you sit on its sandy beach, quieten your mind, and listen to the lapping waters of the ocean, you will be taken to a time beyond time. My spirit drifted off with the murmuring voices of the sea. I was startled out of it by a loud noise. I jumped to my feet and turned. I saw a forest. Elephants trumpeted as they passed through it. Behind them came other animals. The spotted deer was lovely (I remember him so well even now). All were running. Running towards the north. The last to run

20 The Fly in the Ointment In a general way, the French turned out to be more humane in their dealings with the native populations. But they too had their moments of aberration. Things had gone on for several decades, with more ups than downs, after the death of Francois Martin (1706).1 Left to themselves, things might have developed harmoniously between the French government and the Tamil population, the vast majority of them Hindus. But there is always a fly in the ointment. In the event, the fly was the Christian missionaries. Jesuits to be more precise. It was impossible for a tribe of those proselytizers to tolerate Hindu temples. Mind you,

40 The Traveller To be sure Sri Aurobindo never did anything haphazardly. He had a programme all chalked out which he was following. When Sarala Devi Chowdhurani, Tagore's niece, and Sri Aurobindo's fellow worker of the revolutionary days, came to meet him towards the end of 1920, Sri Aurobindo hinted as much. "As for myself, I have a personal programme," he told her. He was more forthcoming in 1923. It was his fifty-first birthday, and the dozen or so assembled disciples wanted to know the actual state of his sadhana. In the middle of the talk Sri Aurobindo let fall that he was "following a certain programme that was laid down for me when I came down t

21 Meanders of Destiny "Befall them in future." Future ? Well, as more than a couple of centuries has passed since those times and those deeds, history gives us a few answers. And provides us with a few meanders of destiny reserved for some of the above actors. Saint-Paul's Church. After leaving in 1748, the English regrouped themselves, and returned to the attack. On 16 January 1761, British troop entered the town. Lord Pigot, then governor of Madras, gave three months' time to the inhabitants to clear out. Then it was a 'Guy Fawkes Day.' Everything was blown up, but everything French. The white town with its fortifications, its fort, Dupleix'

49 Never a Dull Moment To be with Sri Aurobindo you have to have a feel for adventure. Adventure? what kind? Well, that depends. It could be an adventure of consciousness, where you explore inner worlds. Or ... Now one day before Amrita became familiar with Sri Aurobindo's house at rue Francois Martin, before Mother's arrival at the end of March, before Moni, Nolini, Saurin went away to Bengal in February 1914, something strange happened in that house. You may recall that in July 1913 Nagen Nag, a relative of Bejoy's, had come to stay with Sri Aurobindo to get cured of his illness. He had brought along with him an attendant, Birendra

44 The Have-Nots "The seers climb Indra like a ladder," fits the bill. Exactly. To our Seer much that remained to be done was becoming clear. Let us hear it from the horse's mouth. "All these matters as well as the pursuance of my work," wrote Sri Aurobindo to Motilal Roy in another undated letter,' "depend on the success of the struggle which is the crowning movement of my Sadhana—viz, the attempt to apply knowledge and power to the events and happenings of the world without the necessary instrumentality of physical action. What I am attempting is to establish the normal working of the Siddhis in life i.e. the perception of thoughts, feelings and happen

6 The Arrest Warrant Sri Aurobindo had left his own 'nearest and dearest' hundreds of kilometres away. Days had turned into weeks, weeks had rolled into months since he had vanished from public view. "The sudden disappearance of Arabindo," wrote his cousin Sukumar, "and being without any news of him for a very long time, his uncles and aunts and others at Deoghar, particularly Arabindo's maternal grandmother, Rajnarain Bose's wife, were stricken with anxiety." The family's worry found expression in Sukumar Mitra's article in the Bengali monthly Basumati. "They wrote us letters in Calcutta for Arabindo's news, but we were unable to tell them anything

-15_God^s Cracker.htm 12 God's Cracker Aeons passed. Aeons had passed before. But when aeons were not? When "Time moved not yet nor Space was unrolled wide?"1 Whamm! Cra-a-a-ck! Boom-booom-boo-ooom! What was that whiz-bang? A cracker bursting? My friends, had we been there to hear that ear-splitting noise, we would have had no ears left to hear anything. It was God setting off his cracker with a 'big bang' signalling the start of the World Game. Said Ishwar the God to Ishwari the Goddess: "When Light first from the unconscious Immense burst to create nebula and sun 'Twas the meeting of our hands through the empty Night that enkindled the fateful blaze;