Darshan of Sri Aurobindo
(Satprem:) “The day I saw Sri Aurobindo, all of a sudden... well, I was filled by that same thing I had... gropingly experienced as a child, that I had touched in the camps.
And it was RIGHT THERE. It was looking at me and filling me – right in front of me.
It was in front of me, alive. It was right there, in a gaze.
… to me he was still a ‘thinker’. And suddenly, I was before something that was not a ‘thinker’, before a being unlike any I had met on earth. A being who was a BEING, living. Not a man in a three-piece suit, or even with a white chaddar on his back. Something that was... that embodied in a gaze, in a body, in his atmosphere, what I had experienced on the open sea, in my boat. That whole immensity was there, in a being. And IT was looking at me.”[1]
(Satprem:) “But Mother... I had seen her with Sri Aurobindo before that whole circuit of mine. And she had... she had a different kind of gaze from Sri Aurobindo.
A different kind of gaze.
In fact, what had overwhelmed me when I had seen Mother was her gaze... It seemed that, for the first time, someone was looking at me with love. ...
It was not like Sri Aurobindo's. Sri Aurobindo looked at you... and you felt immensity, infinity. You felt as if you were melting there, moving through centuries and centuries, and it was soft, and it was like a great snow. And you lost yourself there, and it was... Oh, there were no more words; it was all over, and you felt so... so comfortable! You felt so at home, in a country you had known forever.
But with Mother it was... it was quite extraordinary – it was a sword. But a sword filled with love. It wasn't something trailing into infinity; it went straight down into matter, into the ‘heart’ (for me, at least).”[2]
See also