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"..This was my first lesson...to see the cruelty and futility
of the [prison] system and ...to propagate and argue in [the favor of a
reform]
so that these hellish remnants of an alien order were not perpetuated in
a self-determining India. I also understood His second purpose: it was
to
reveal and expose before my mind its own weakness so that it might get
rid
of it for ever. For one who seeks the yogic state crowd and solitude
whould
mean the same. Indeed, the weakness dropped off within a very few days,
and now it seems that the mental poise would not be distrubed even by
twenty years of solitude. In the dispensation of the All-Good
(Mangalamaya)
even out of evil cometh good. The third purpose was to give me this
lesson
that my yogic practices would not be done by personal effort, but that
a spirit of faith and reverence (shraddha) and complete self-surrender
(atma-samarpana) were the road to attain self-perfection in the yoga,
and
whatever power or realisation the Lord would give out of His benignity,
to accept and utilise these should be the only aim of my yogic endeavor.
Since the day when the deep darkness of Ignorance began to lessen, I
started to see the true nature of the All-Good Lord's amazing infinite
goodness as I watched the different events in the ward. There was no
event -
great or small or even the smallest - from which some good has not
accrued.
He often fulfils 3 or 4 aims through a single event. We frequently see
the working of a blind force in the world; accepting waste as a part
of nature's method we ignore God's omniscience and find fault with
the divine Intelligence. The charge is unfounded. The divine
Intelligence
never works blindly, there cannot be the slightest waste of His
power, rather the restraned manner in which, throught the minimum of
means
He achieves a variety of results is beyond the human intelligence.
"Troubled by mental listlessness I spent a few days in this
manner.
One afternoon as I was thinking streams of thought began to flow
endlessly and then suddenly these grew so uncontrolled and incoherent
that I could feel that the mind's regulating power was about to cease.
Afterwards when I came back to myself, I could recollect that though
the power of mental control has ceased, the intelligence was not
self-lost or
did not deviate for moment, but was as if the intelligence was watching
quietly this marvellous phenomenon. But at the time, shaking with the
terror of being overcome by insanity, I had not been able to notice
that.
I called upon God with eagerness and intensity and prayed to Him to
prevent my loss of intelligence. That very moment there spread over my
being
such a gentle and cooling breeze, the heated brain became relaxed,
easy and supremely blissful such as in all my life I had never
known before. Just as a child sleeps, secure and without fear, on
the lap of his mother, so I remained on the lap of the World-Mother.
>From that day all my troubles of prison life were over. Afterwards
on many occasions, during the period of detention, inquietude, solitary
imprisonment, and mental unease because of lack of activity, bodily
trouble or disease, in the lean periods of yogic life, these have come
but that day in a single moment God had given my inner being such
strength
that these sorrows as they came and went did not leave any trace
or touch on the mind; relishing strength and delight in the sorrow
itself the mind was able to reject these subjective sufferings. The
suffereing seemed as fragile as water drops on a lotus leaf. Then
when the books came, their need had considerably lessened. I could have
stayed on even if the books were not there. Though it is not
the purpose of these articles to write a history of my inner life, still
I could not but mention this fact. From this one incident it will
be clear how it was possible to live happily during solitary
confinement.
It was for this reason that God had brought about this situation or
experience. Without turning me mad He had enacted in my mind the
gradual process towards insanity that takes place in solitary
confinement, keeping my intelligence as the unmoved spectator
of the entire drama. Out of this came strength, and I had an excess of
kindness and sympathy for the victims of human cruelty and torture.
I also realised the extraordinary power and efficacy of prayer."
Sri Aurobindo
From "Tales of Prison Life (karakahani)"
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