Apollo Bunder, touching Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage. Precise enough?Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1. 1935
Letter ID: 1460
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
October 31, 1935
But it is unthinkable and almost unbelievable to have any experience of Self, in the circumstances you have described! [In Dilip’s letter.]
I can’t help that. It happened. The mind’s canons of the rational and the possible do not give spiritual life and experience.
But can you not tell us what the experience was like? Was it by any chance like the one you speak of in your Uttarpara Speech1 – the Vasudeva experience?
Great Jumble-Mumble! What has Vasudeva to do with it? Vasudeva is a name of Krishna, and in the Uttarpara I was speaking of Krishna, if you please.
But didn’t you begin Yoga later on in Gujerat?
Yes. But this began in London, sprouted the moment I set foot on Apollo Bunder, touching Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage. Precise enough?
By the Self, I suppose, you mean the individual Self?
Good Lord, no. I mean the Self, sir, the Self, the Adwaita, Vedantic, Shankara Self. Atman, Atman! A thing I knew nothing about, never bargained for, didn’t understand, either.
I had a dream of the Mother: we were all sitting in the pranam hall, when a very rich man came with his sick child. He said to Mother that if she accepted the child, he would give her lots of money. Mother thought awhile, drew out something like a horoscope which seemed somewhat like the Taj Mahal. Through a tubelike instrument, she gazed at the design. She found that this child had a counterpart in Delhi whom if she secured, she’d cure this child. This man seemed to have some connection with the millionaire Hukumchand. What are these things now?
Dreams of the vital plane corresponding to some reality there, but not necessarily to any exact reality in the physical, though it does sometimes touch on physical realities. The connection with Hukumchand was either a touch of the vital mind or else only an indication of the class of men this belonged to, if it touches the physical.
1 In 1908, in the Alipore Jail, Sri Aurobindo had the vision of Krishna in everything, which he described later in his famous “Uttarpara Speech” (30th May 1909)