An inner journey

From my early years I was asking ‘What is life? Who am I?’ In the silence of the morning and evening, I used to wonder about the purpose of coming here upon earth.

My teachers used to ask me about my goal in life. Others would say they wanted to be a doctor or a politician, but I would say that I don’t know who ‘I’ am. And the teachers would laugh at me.

I took up yoga as a kind of hobby. While at college, I had back pain. I was getting treatment for it but it was not working. One day I went to a bookshop and somebody gave me a book called ‘Jain Yoga’. It told me that if you have a pain somewhere in the body, you need only concentrate on that place and it will go. So I concentrated for a week or two on my pain and afterwards it disappeared. It convinced me that concentration or one-pointedness had a power.

Later I came across a book by Vivekananda on yoga and started practicing hatha yoga and raj yoga. But I didn’t know where it was taking me because at that time I was 25 and in college, and there were plenty of opportunities to live a worldly life and seek a successful job. Yet, most of the time I was involved in meditation and reading spiritual books. 

This is why, when I joined Delhi University for my postgraduate study, I took ‘meditation – a way of life’ as the subject for my M. Phil dissertation. For my subsequent PhD I chose the topic ‘meditation – a way to enlightenment’. My research guide was not happy with this choice because he said, what are you going to do after this? There is nothing along this line that you can teach in University. But I explained that my inner being was searching for itself and I wanted to continue my inner journey. However, I could not tell my family this, they would think I was going mad, so I had to cover up my own interest by making it seem that I was simply engaged in an academic enquiry. 

Actually 1983, the year in which I took up this PhD topic, was the year that really changed my life. On 9th March – I remember the date – I was sitting in an easy chair in the students’ hostel. I was feeling quietness in my mind when suddenly my concentration went to the heart centre. I didn’t know what was happening. I was frightened that I might go out of my body, so I withdrew. But it happened a second time, and it felt so thrilling and exciting that I thought let whatever happens happen. And then I had this very strong experience of the oneness of the transcendental, the universal, and the individual.

After a few days, however, I forgot the experience. 

A few months later I went to a friend’s room. He was putting agarbathies before a photograph and I asked him whose photo it was. He told me it was The Mother and he couldn’t believe I had never heard of Her. Then he began explaining about The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. I listened very patiently to him for half an hour, and I felt that this is what I was looking for.

Later he introduced me to Dr Kireet Joshi who explained to me, over a series of meetings, the whole of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. Everything he said entered deeply into me, but I had no idea what I was going to do with this knowledge. 

 After that my friend introduced me to the Sri Aurobindo Delhi Ashram. I felt I should stay there for some time but I wasn’t sure if this would be possible. One morning, I was walking in the garden of Delhi University. I used to go there frequently and sit quietly. That day I had a book on Vivekananda with me. One of the professors who also frequented the garden had been watching me for many days and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was doing research on meditation: I didn’t reveal my deeper purpose. Then he said, ‘Come to my office tomorrow’. I didn’t understand why, but then he said he was the Vice-Chancellor of the university, and he would give me a recommendation letter. This would allow me to go to any educational institution anywhere and receive for free all the facilities I needed to conduct my research. 

I wondered where I should show this letter first. Then I thought about the Delhi Ashram because I knew that Tara, who managed it, was very strict about people staying there, and I thought this letter might help me. I told her I would like to stay for a week to do my research work and showed her the letter. She said “How much will you pay every day?” I was shocked as the letter said I could stay anywhere for free, but she said that a minimum contribution needed to be specified. So I said I will pay Rs15 a day! She immediately agreed.

I used to spend so many hours in the meditation hall there that Tara would tell me my hair would go grey! One day, while I was waiting to visit the relics, somebody came from there and patted me on my shoulder. He asked what I was doing in the ashram, and I told him I was working on my thesis. Then he invited me to visit him in his house on Deepavali, a few days hence, and gave me his visiting card. It was Dr Karan Singh.

So I visited him that Deepavali – I remember he was talking to a Tibetan monk and a spiritual guru when I entered – and on Deepavali days for the next two or three years, and we had long discussions. 

In 1991, he was visiting Auroville for the first time as Chairman of the Governing Board of the Auroville Foundation. He wrote me a letter saying that when he was walking in Auroville and around the Matrimandir, he felt the divine consciousness penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere, and thought I would be interested to hear this. 

At that time, I was waiting to take up a job as a university professor in Mumbai. But before that, I visited a friend in Lucknow who knew I had visited the Delhi Ashram, and he suggested that I should go to Pondicherry first.

I arrived in Pondicherry on the night of 14th August, 1992. The next day I met a friend who I knew from Delhi Ashram, and he asked me to accompany him at some time to the Ganesh temple in Auroville. 

I went there on 31st August, Ganesh Puja day, and was introduced to some Aurovilians. Judith invited me to come to Auroville. I wasn’t sure where I could stay, but Madanlal told me there was a student guesthouse in Bharat Nivas. I moved there the next day. 

At this time, I felt like a dry leaf carried by the wind. I had no idea of my future direction, although I felt that if I needed to become an Aurovilian, I would do so. One day as I was walking around, Judith saw me and took me to meet the Entry Group.

I remember a very important day. I was very fond of going to the inner chamber. That day, after coming down, I sat down under the Banyan tree and started reading Savitri. Then I felt I should be reading it aloud, not something I would normally do. But the feeling was so strong I could not resist doing it, even though I was conscious that under the Banyan I should be silent. 

Lakshminarayan was nearby and heard me reading. He suggested that we could sit there every Sunday and read Savitri together. Soon on Sundays a small group of us started sitting under the Banyan tree and reading Savitri. When it rained, we would go to Lakshminarayan’s room nearby and read there.

At that time the Secretary of the Auroville Foundation, whom I had met before in Pondicherry, phoned me. He said that more people wanted to join the reading, and suggested that we read in the Centre of Indian Culture building, which was more spacious. 

So we shifted there. But after two or three months, so many people were coming that we found the room was too small and we felt we needed a new, dedicated place. Finally we were given the land, and with Shraddavan and Helmut’s help Savitri Bhavan was manifested. 

So I say that the Savitri Bhavan movement came from my loud voice! And I remembered that moment when Nirodbaran, during the inauguration of the first building of Savitri Bhavan, made the important statement that Matrimandir and Savitri Bhavan are twins, that they complement each other. 

For many years I had forgotten what I had experienced that day when my friend first introduced me to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother in the students’ hostel. But when I arrived in Auroville, suddenly I remembered everything. So then I understood what it meant when it is said that Sri Aurobindo is not a teaching but a direct action from the Supreme, because that’s what happened to me. Before I heard about him, I was preparing to do my best to lead a worldly life, but like a bird in the hand of a hunter he did not allow me to take this route. I was forced to have this life. 

For in the end we are just instruments. None of us can choose this life, because we are egoistic human beings who don’t know what the divine consciousness is, so how can we consciously choose that? How can we, in our ignorance, be servitors of that? That’s why Sri Aurobindo said we are already chosen for this life, but this is revealed to us only at a later stage of our advance in the yoga when it is brightened by the divine consciousness. 

Mother said that the first necessity for an Aurovilian is to make the inner discovery, and that the Divine is in our heart waiting to be discovered, and unless we find our true self, we cannot talk of transformation: until we discover that, the transformation of our lower nature is not possible.  

This is not a one day event: it can take considerable time. This is why, while I’ve been living in Auroville for 30 years, I’m very quiet. I’m little involved in Auroville activities, although I practice karma yoga and take classes on topics like yoga and the evolution of man, because my only interest is in this extraordinary adventure of consciousness. 

(Based upon a talk given by Dr. Jai Singh at Savitri Bhavan and streamed live on 11th August.)