THE SILENT SELF-A TALK BY SHRADDHAVAN AT SAVITRI BHAVAN, AUROVILLE

THE SILENT SELF - A TALK BY SHRADDHAVAN AT SAVITRI BHAVAN, AUROVILLE ON JAN 7, 2008.

In January 1908, Sri Aurobindo had his first major spiritual experience at Vadodara, which he sometimes referred to as his 'Nirvana’ experience. To mark the Centenary of this event, Shraddhavan gave a talk at Savitri Bhavan. It corresponds to what Sri Aurobindo referred to as his first major spiritual experience. Sometimes he called it ‘my Nirvana experience’, and sometimes ‘the experience of the silent Brahman’. Brahman is the supreme reality, which expresses itself in both a silent and a dynamic form. The experience of the silent Brahman came to him in January 1908 when he was right in the midst of his most dynamic politically active period. Travelling around the country and giving political speeches he had just been attending a very significant session of the Indian National Congress in Surat. He took a few days off to return to the city of Baroda, the city where he had lived for thirteen years. He went there with a special purpose: to meet a yogi he had heard about from his younger brother Barin. He wanted to meet the yogi because he had become aware several years before that there is a power in the traditional Indian Yoga. He had been brought up in England. He was an atheist, he was a materialist; and he was determined to bring about the freedom of his country. When he had an experience which revealed to him that there is a great power in the Yoga tradition of India, he said, “I need that power for the independence movement, for the nationalist movement.” So he started practising Pranayama, which he learned from a friend of his. He later said that he experienced some interesting results, but after four years he had not achieved the results he was hoping for. His brother Barin told him about a Maharashtrian Yogi called Vishnu Bhaskar Lele and it was arranged that Sri Aurobindo should meet him after the Surat congress. When they met, Sri Aurobindo told Lele: “I do not want liberation and Moksha and silence and all that. What I want is divine power for the work.” And interestingly enough Lele replied, “It should be easy for you as you are a poet.” I do not know what Lele meant, but that is what he said. They were given a room in a friend’s house where they would not be disturbed. They spent three days there. Sri Aurobindo recounts that Lele told him “When you sit in meditation see the thoughts coming, and before they enter your mind, stop them.” Sri Aurobindo says that this was a completely new idea to him but he did not question it; he just did as he was told. He later said that within one day he had the principle, and within three days he experienced this complete silencing: ‘A silent spirit pervaded silent Space.’

This seems to imply that in his earlier practice of meditation Sri Aurobindo had already gone through the process of observing ‘the many births of thought’ and how thoughts are made, and had achieved a high degree of thought control, so that when Lele told him, “See the thoughts approaching the mind, and stop them before they enter” he was able to do it. The result was the experience of the silent Brahman.

When Sri Aurobindo had this experience, he was in the midst of the most active period of his political work. There were appointments to be kept: he had agreed to speak in Pune and Bombay and elsewhere, but he was experiencing this state of total silence. He asked Lele what was to be done. Lele told him to make Namaskar to the audience and wait: speech would come to him from some other source than the mind. That was what happened.

He has written: “In the condition of absolute inner silence I was making speeches and conducting a newspaper, but all that got itself done without any thought entering my mind or the silence being in the least disturbed or diminished.”¹

“The force made the body do the work without any inner activity.”²

Recounting his experience after the total silencing of the mind, Sri Aurobindo mentioned “an overwhelming feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world”³ and also referred to seeing “the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms”.⁴ Some images were seen, but they were empty and unsubstantial.

For many spiritual seekers this experience represents Moksha, liberation, the goal of yoga, because it is the liberation from the illusion of the senses, the illusion of the mind. Sri Aurobindo referred to it as his first major spiritual experience. Sometimes he called it his Nirvana experience and sometimes his experience of the silent Brahman.