EXPERIENCES OF EARLY DAYS

GLIMPSES OF THE MASTER'S EXPERIENCES IN HIS OWN WORDS

[Experiences of early days—Tantric and other Sadhanas—Experience of the Nirvikalpa state—The Master s perpetual God-consciousness—How the Master prayed—The Divine in &ood and evil alike—The Master on his illness—The Master a combination of humanity and Divinity.}

In his younger days, when taken to task by his elder brother for neglecting his studies, the Master said in reply: " Brother, what shall I do with a mere bread-winning education? I would rather acquire that wisdom which would illumine my heart—that wisdom gaining which one felt satisfied for ever."

In the early days of his spiritual-life, the Master's nephew, Hriday, noticed him meditating at night in the seclusion of a jungle, quite naked, and without even the sacred thread. On being asked how nudeness was connected with meditation, the Master replied: " One should meditate free from all bondages and fetters. From his-very birth man has been fettered by the eightfold shackle of hatred, shame, family pride, social conventionalities, fear, prestige, pride of caste and egotism. Even the sacred thread is a fetter—it is a token of egotism and makes one feel that one is a Brahmin and is superior to all. So, when one meditates on the Divine Mother, one should make oneself free by throwing aside all these shackles."

When the great yearning for God had developed in him, the Master found life unbearable without His vision. He was therefore about to put an end to his life, when the blessed vision dawned on him suddenly. Describing it the Master said : " The room with all its doors and windows, the temple and everything around me, vanished from sight. I felt as if nothing existed, and in their stead I perceived a boundless effulgent ocean of intelligence. Whichever side I turned my eyes, I saw from all quarters huge waves of that shining ocean rushing towards me, and in a short while, they all came, and falling upon me, engulfed me completely. Thus getting suffocated under them, I lost my ordinary consciousness and fell down. Referring to the same experience he said on another occasion: "I fell down on the floor of the room, completely lost in the ecstasy of the vision. I was perfectly unconscious as to what happenened outside, and also how that day and the next passed. The one thing which I was internally conscious of was that through my soul was rolling an ocean of ineffable joy, the like of which I had no experience before. At the same time I was also conscious, to the inner core of my being, of the hallowed presence of the Divine Mother."

But this experience of God did not bring on the Master a state of perpetual God-consciousness. He had to pass through periods of dryness, and a yearning for the constant vision of the Divine therefore goaded him on to pray unceasingly to the Divine Mother with bitter tears of grief and loud cries. Describing the state of his mind in that period, the Master said : " If a concourse of people happened to gather round me (attracted by loud cries and prayers) they appeared to me like shadows or so many figures drawn in a picture—so unreal and shadowy they appeared—and therefore I never used to feel any kind of shame or shyness before them. But whenever I used to lose my external consciousness through an unbearable pang of the heart, the next moment I always used to behold the radiant spiritual form of the Mother. I used to see the form sometimes laughing, sometimes talking with me, and sometimes advising and consoling me.

Describing the days he passed in intense yearning for God, the Master said: " As I was perfectly unmindful of cleaning the body at that time, the hairs grew long and got matted of themselves, being smeared with dirt and dust. When I used to sit in meditation, the body used to become stiff and motionless like a stock through intense concentration of mind, and birds, taking it to be an inert substance, came freely, perched on the head, and pecked into the matted hair in search of food. Sometimes I used to feel so intensely the pangs of separation from God, that in great bitterness I rubbed my face on earth; often it used to get lacerated and bleed. And in meditation, prayer and other devotional practices, the day used to fly away so quickly that I was not conscious of it. At dusk, when the approach of night was announced by the ringing of bells and the blowing of conchs from the temple, I used to be reminded that the day had passed and the night had set in. With this consciousness a frenzy of despair would seize my soul, and I would throw myself on the ground and rub my face on it, crying loudly, ' Mother, a day has passed; still Thou hast not appeared before me ! A gnawing anguish used to torment my soul, and those who saw me like that, writhing in agony, thought that I was suffering from colic pain."

Soon after the Master s return to Dakshineswar after his marriage, his old divine madness seized him again. About the state of his mind in those days he said: " The ordinary man would have died, if he were to experience even a fourth of the spiritual metamorphosis that my body and mind underwent. And of this body too (meaning himself) the same would have been the fate ; but fortunately the major portion of my days was passed in ecstatic oblivion of the Mother's divine vision. Henceforth for six long years not a wink of sleep ever visited my eyes, and the eyelids would never close, try though I might. All sense of time vanished from me, and the body idea was totally obliterated. A terrible fear would seize me at the slightest reversion of the mind from the Mother to the body. Often the fear came whether I had really run mad. 1 would stand before my image in a mirror, and when on poking my eyes I would find them insensitive, I would burst into tears in terror, and pray to the Mother; 'O Mother, is it that as a result of all my prayers and absolute reliance on Thee, Thou hast brought on me an incurable disease ? But next, the alternating thought would come : ' O Mother, whatever fate may overtake my bodyr do Thou never forsake me 1 Vouchsafe unto me Thy vision and Thy mercy! O Mother, have I not taken complete shelter at Thy hallowed feet ? Except Thee, O Mother, I have no other refuge ! ' And thus praying tearfully, my mind would be filled with a strange enthusiasm, creating an unbounded disgust for the body, and would lose itself in the comfort of the Mothers Divine vision and consoling, words."

The Master s pure mind was itself his first and most important teacher. About this the Master said: " Whenever necessity arose, a young Sannyasin from inside my body, in appearance exactly like myself, would come out and teach me everything. When he came out in this way, sometimes I would retain a little consciousness of external objects and at other times, I would lose all consciousness of the outside world except for the awareness of his presence and doings. When he re-entered the body, I would again become aware of the external world. What I had heard from him before, the same teachings I heard from Brahmani, Totapuri, and others. What I learnt from him before, the same I learnt from these teachers later."