Spiritual experience

“Butterfly of Light” by Emanuele PDF (39 pages)

“My First Sunbeam” by Emanuele PDF (28 pages)

(Mother:) “You understand, none of my certitudes — none, without exception — have EVER come through the mind. The intellectual comprehension of each of these experiences came much later. Little by little, little by little, came the higher understanding of the intellectual consciousness, long after the experience (I don't mean philosophical knowledge — that's nothing but scholarly mumbo-jumbo and leaves me cold). Since my earliest childhood, experiences have come like that: something massive takes hold of you and you don't need to believe or disbelieve, know or not know — bam! There's nothing to say; you are facing a fact.
         Once, during those last difficult years, Sri Aurobindo told me that this was precisely what gave me my advantage and why (how to put it?) there were greater possibilities that I would go right to the end.
         I still don't know. The day I do ... it will probably be done. Because it will come in the same manner, like a massive fact: it will be LIKE THAT. And only much later will the understanding say,  “Ah! So that's what it is!”
         First it comes, afterwards we know it.”

(Mother:) “Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain). And it is an experience identical everywhere in all countries, among all peoples and even in all ages. If you meet the Divine, you meet it always and everywhere in the same way. Difference comes in because between the experience and its formulation there is almost an abyss. Directly you have spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, it is translated into your external consciousness and defined there in one way or another according to your education, your faith, your mental predisposition. There is only one truth, one reality; but the forms through which it may be expressed are many.”

(Nirodbaran:) “Does the Force work all the time, even when there is no aspiration in the being?

(Sri Aurobindo:) Yes, in those who have an inner urge. The intermittent bouts of aspiration may be due to the action of the Force behind.

(Dr. Manilal:) We request you to tell us how to get all that peace, joy, light, power.

The secret is to want it and nothing else. (Smiling) Too difficult, isn’t it? Well then, you have to wait. Yoga demands patience. The old Yogas say that one has to wait for twelve years before one can hope to get any experience. Only after such waiting can one complain. But you once said that you had many experiences. You have no right to complain.

True, Sir. I told you how meditation used to come spontaneously at Baroda at any time and I simply had to sit down to meditate, it used to come with such force! Occasionally it would come when I was just about to go to the hospital, and the experiences of peace and of other things would last for days. And then came the period of lull: nothing happened at all. But surely meditation should visit us once a fortnight? Sometimes I feel a pull on the head upwards.

Of course, it isn’t the physical head. It is a happening in the subtle body, the mind trying to ascend towards the higher consciousness.

(Nirodbaran:) One sees things like hills or seas in dreams or visions. What is their significance?

They are symbols: the sea of energy and the hill of being with its different planes and parts, with the Divine at the summit. They are quite common. When one feels the wideness, a vastness as if one were expanding, that increases the opening. The heart can expand just as the mind can. (Turning to Dr. Manilal) Have you never felt your inner being?

(Dr. Manilal): I have, Sir. I told you how I had found it and then lost it through fear. I felt as if I were going to die.

(Laughing) Ah, I forgot that tragedy!

At one time I felt as if my head were lying at the Mother’s feet. What does that mean, Sir?

It is the experience of the psychic being. So you had the psychic experience.

But unfortunately I couldn’t recognise it. (Laughter)

It is this ‘I’ that comes in the way. One must forget it, as if the experiences were happening to somebody else. If one could do this, it would be a great conquest. When I had the experience of Nirvana, I forgot myself completely. I was a sort of nobody. What’s the use of Dr. Manilal So-and-so living with this ‘I’? If in discovering your inner being, you had even died, it would have been a glorious death.

What happens when the human consciousness is replaced by the divine consciousness?

One feels a perpetual calm, a perpetual strength, one is aware of Infinity and lives not only in Infinity but also in Eternity. One feels Immortality and does not care about the death of the body. And then one has the consciousness of the One in all. Everything becomes the manifestation of the Brahman. For instance, as I look round this room, I see everything as the Brahman. No, it is not mere thinking, it is a concrete experience. Even the wall, the books are the Brahman. I see you no more as Dr. Manilal but as the Divine living in the Divine. It is a wonderful experience.”

(Sri Aurobindo:) “All these experiences of yours belong to what I have called the intermediate zone; a large proportion of them are of the vital plane. In the vital plane there are all kinds of things, good and bad, helpful and dangerous, true, half true and false, genuine and deceptive. One has therefore to be very careful and be always vigilant and turned towards the true source of Light. The difficulty is that here one may have a true spiritual experience and afterwards all sorts of imitative deceptions come in and bring with them the danger of a false experience. One has to watch, observe one’s experiences and try to discriminate and understand, — waiting for two things, the opening of a wider higher consciousness from above and the coming forward of the psychic being from behind. When these two things happen, then the chance of error is diminished and the true inner guidance begins to make itself more and more felt in the sadhana.”

(Amal Kiran:) “While talking about the guidance I must add that one had to be on one's guard against various kinds of voices which come from within. There are many parts of us which are occult and of whose existence we hardly know, and they come forward and give promptings, and often if the promptings suit us we think it is the soul talking. (laughter) … Also I might say that even spiritual experiences can be quite dangerous. One instance comes to my mind, of a friend who begun to have extraordinary experiences. He wrote to Sri Aurobindo about them: he felt Light descending into his head, and he described its characteristics. Sri Aurobindo wrote back that this Light came from the Overmind. That simply went to his head – “I am getting Light from the Overmind, so I am something wonderful!” He wrote to Sri Aurobindo: “Now that this is happening the victory is sure. You and I will do everything (laughter) and the Mother will surely help us.” (laughter) Then Sri Aurobindo wrote to him that after all the Light from the Overmind was not anything very exceptional: it was remarkable enough, but so many sadhaks had got it and people in the past too had got it. My friend wouldn't believe this. “Sri Aurobindo is just trying to water down the uniqueness of my experience” – that is what he believed. So all the correspondence of Sri Aurobindo he used to carry with him and go about showing even outsiders the letters to prove how he had got the Light from the Overmind. Very soon after that, he became so side-tracked from the true Path that he had to leave the Ashram.
         So you see how dangerous it is, not to understand what sort of experiences one gets and how necessary it is to be guided by the Guru. He went away and we framed his spiritual epitaph:
         “Undermined by the Overmind.” (laughter)”

(Mother:) “Those things are strange.... You don't remember actively, that is, you can't find any thought whatsoever to express the experience; even the active sensation of the experience fades away. And yet you are no longer the same person – that's the remarkable thing! I experienced this phenomenon several times (I don't remember clearly enough to tell you exactly how many times), several times in my life, it was always the same thing: no longer the same person, you've become someone else. All the relationships with life, with consciousness, with movement – everything changes. Yet the central thing is just a vague impression. At the moment of the experience, for a second, it's so clear, so precise – a thunderbolt. But then ... probably the cerebral and nervous system is incapable of preserving it. But all the relationships are changed, you are another person.”

(André Hababou:) “Right after these experiences, one doesn't realise really what has happened. One goes in all kinds of wrong directions. On the personal and the collective level, we have gone through moments which were truly... murky. I myself went through some period of devastation (which is something inexplicable if you consider the experiences I had had). And time passes. Months pass by, years pass by. You suffer, you flounder along, and then the memory comes back in a very strong way. The memory of what you should remember at each second. It becomes more and more intense. And if now I am asked to relate these memories, as I was asked by you, I do it. It helps me and I think it helps others.”

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See also

• Realisation
• =1 "How to be sure"
• Aldous Huxley (Sri Aurobindo comments on a passage from Eyeless in Gaza)