The Most Dangerous Man in India Who Became a Saint

The Most Dangerous Man in India Who Became a Saint

Author Name:HigherGenius

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Transcript:
(00:00) On December 5th, 1950, in the tropical heat of Pondicherry, [music] a man's body refused to decay. For 5 days, it lay on a bed without embalming, without refrigeration, suffused in a golden light that doctors could not explain. But the real mystery [music] isn't how he died. It's what he did for the 40 years before that.
(00:27) A Cambridge classicist who once made bombs for Indian independence, sitting alone in a room filling cheap exercise books with the most extraordinary private diary in spiritual history. A day-by-day operational log of what happens when a trained Western mind turns itself into a laboratory for encountering God.
(00:50) His name was Sri Aurobindo, and his story begins about as far from India as you can get. He was 7 years old when his father, an Anglo-phile doctor obsessed with England, [music] sent him across the ocean with strict instructions. No Indian religion, no Indian languages, no contact with Indian culture at all. The boy was raised in a vicar's household in Manchester.
(01:17) [music] He grew up on Homer, on Shelley, on Latin grammar drilled into him before breakfast. He was brilliant, [music] that much was obvious early. At King's College, Cambridge, he devoured Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German. >> [music] >> His examiner, Oscar Browning, said he had never seen such excellent [music] papers in 13 years.
(01:40) He passed the Indian Civil Service exam, ranking first among all candidates [music] that year. Then he did something strange. He deliberately failed the horse [music] riding test, disqualified himself on purpose. He later [music] said it was partly his father's fault. He did not send money, and the riding lessons at Cambridge [music] were too expensive.
(02:04) Whether this was deliberate sabotage or negligence, the effect [music] was permanent. The man who had topped the ICS examination would never serve the empire. >> [music] >> He sailed back to India in 1893 as a stranger in his own country. He couldn't speak Bengali. He didn't know Sanskrit. He had to teach himself both from scratch.
(02:27) And somewhere in that process of relearning his own heritage, he found the Upanishads. By 1902, this Cambridge classicist [music] was running cells of the Anushilan Samiti, Bengal's principal secret revolutionary organization. His younger brother, Barin, handled [music] the bomb making. Aurobindo supplied the intellectual fire.
(02:53) He edited Jugantar >> [music] >> and Bande Mataram, newspapers that within a few years were selling [music] 20,000 copies and explicitly justifying political violence. The British classified him as the most dangerous man in India. >> [music] >> He didn't want spiritual liberation. He wanted, in his own words, strength [music] to uplift this nation.
(03:19) But four experiences kept breaking through his militant certainty. A vast calm descending on him at Apollo Bunder, the moment he [music] first stepped onto Indian soil. An encounter with vacant infinitude in the mountains [music] of Kashmir. A living presence he perceived in a stone statue [music] of Kali at a temple in Ichchapur.
(03:45) And a sudden [music] sense that something intervened to save him during a near accident. He [music] wrote the Kali vision into a poem, a living presence deathless and divine. He told no one about any of it. January 1908, Baroda. A Maharashtra yogi named Vishnu Bhaskar Lele sat across from him and gave one instruction.
(04:15) Sit in meditation, but do not think. Look only at your mind. You will see thoughts coming into it. Before they can enter, throw them away. Aurobindo had never heard anything like this. He sat down [music] and did it. In a moment, my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain. Within 3 days, all thought had stopped.
(04:41) Not temporarily, not as a fleeting meditative state, completely, permanently. The world appeared to him as, in his own words, a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality >> [music] >> of the absolute Brahman. There was no rapture, only an inexpressible [music] peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom.
(05:08) Here's the thing. The silence didn't prevent him from functioning. He went on making political speeches. [music] He edited a revolutionary newspaper. He argued legal points and organized cells. All of it continued as if carried by nature's habitual machinery. But there was no one inside doing it. All that got itself done, he wrote later, without any thought entering my mind or the silence [music] being in the least disturbed.
(05:40) Lele's final act was stranger still. A voice within the teacher told him to hand Aurobindo over to the divine within Aurobindo himself, enjoining an absolute surrender to its will. [music] The external guru had lasted 3 days. The internal one would last [music] a lifetime. He wrote a sonnet about it, called it Nirvana.
(06:04) The key line, the city a shadow picture without tone [music] / floats, quivers unreal, forms without relief / flow, [music] a cinema's vacant shapes. Then, on May 2nd, 1908, British police came for him. The Alipore bomb conspiracy. Two British women dead from a bomb thrown by members of his brother's cell. Aurobindo was arrested at his Grey Street office in Calcutta, woken by armed police at 5:00 in the morning.
(06:36) The charges read like a declaration of war, waging war against His Majesty [music] the King Emperor of India, conspiring to deprive His Majesty the King Emperor of India of the sovereignty of British India. >> [music] >> Each charge carried the possibility of death by hanging. It became the first state trial of any magnitude in India.
(07:03) 222 witnesses, 1,438 exhibits, over 5,000 pages of evidence. >> [music] >> The presiding judge was Charles Porton Beachcroft, the same man who had taken the ICS examination alongside Aurobindo in England, and who had ranked below him. The prosecution's best chance [music] was a king's witness named Naren Goswami, who had agreed to testify against Aurobindo.
(07:29) >> [music] >> In August 1908, two co-accused, Satyendranath Bose and Kanailal Dutt, shot Goswami dead inside the jail. >> [music] >> One of them said simply, "I killed him. It was because he was a traitor to his country." [music] Both were hanged. Meanwhile, [music] in his 9 by 5-ft cell, Aurobindo read the Bhagavad Gita.
(07:55) He meditated, and the empty world filled up. The Nirvana had shown him that the world was unreal. Now, in prison, a second realization arrived. The world was not empty. It was the body of God. His testimony is the Uttarpara speech, delivered days after his acquittal in May 1909. [music] Listen to what he said. I looked at the jail that secluded me from men, and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned.
(08:28) No, [music] it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, >> [music] >> but it was not the tree. I knew it was Vasudeva. It was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there [music] and holding over me his shade. I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, [music] and as I looked at them, I saw Vasudeva.
(08:51) It was Narayana whom I found in these [music] darkened souls and misused bodies. Then, in the courtroom, I looked, and it was not the magistrate whom I saw. It was [music] Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. It was Sri Krishna who sat there. It was my lover and friend who sat there and smiled.
(09:13) The structural irony. The magistrate whose face he saw as God was likely [music] Beachcroft himself, the man who had once ranked below him at Cambridge. He [music] also reported hearing the voice of Swami Vivekananda, dead since 1902, speaking to him constantly for a fortnight during solitary [music] meditation.
(09:36) Aurobindo was precise about the scope. The voice spoke only on a special and limited, but very important field of spiritual experience, specifically the mechanics of the intuitive mind and the first openings to supermind. And it ceased as soon as it had finished [music] saying all that it had to say on that subject. No embellishment.
(09:58) The voice delivered its data and stopped. On 6 May 1909, Beachcroft acquitted him. His brother Barin was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. Aurobindo walked free. >> [music] >> In April 1910, following an inner command, he left British India and sailed to a Pondicherry in French territory. >> [music] >> He was 37 years old. He never left.
(10:25) The revolutionary was finished. The systematic Yogi was born. Between 1909 and 1927, he kept a private diary, the record of yoga, published only in 2001, over 50 years after his death. It is not autobiography, not philosophy, not devotional writing. It's an operational log. Coded entries in a hybrid English-Sanskrit shorthand, tracking 28 parameters of inner development organized into seven groups he called the Ashta Chakras Shuddhi.
(11:05) The notebooks themselves were nothing precious, cheap student exercise books, perforated pads of notepaper, 28 of them used exclusively for the record, plus scattered jottings on loose sheets. He wrote in a dense, almost impenetrable shorthand that hybridizes English grammar with Vedic and Tantric Sanskrit, heavily modified by algebraic abbreviations.
(11:29) The diary reads less like spiritual literature and more like [music] a lab notebook or a developer's code base. Consider [music] what he tracked. Trikaladrishti, exact anticipation of future events. Aishwarya, the power of will [music] to influence external reality. Alipi, luminous inscriptions perceived in subtle vision.
(11:55) Utthapana, timed endurance of physical postures. Arogya, health beyond illness. Even developed a tiered notation system for tracking the integration of knowledge and will. T3 for the early stage where telepathy and force operated independently, T2 for when direct perception and will force [music] unified, and by January 1927, just T, what he called gnostic T, where the vision of what should happen contain the [music] exact force required to bring it about.
(12:26) "When it acts," he wrote, [music] "it is of the nature of omniscience and omnipotence." He tested on every scale. A January 1913 entry [music] describes applying his will to the movements of ants on a wall. "Wherever my idea turned, there the ant, with but slight variations, immediately corrected, turned to follow it.
(12:50) " He tracked some half hundred successive movements, then recorded that the experiment was marred by only one actual and final failure. He scaled up to dogs, Aishwarya on the dog perfectly successful. It was made to get up and go to the gate when it was made comfortably asleep, and birds, where he noted Aishwarya on the bird succeeded in one case, failed in another.
(13:15) He logged his regressions with [music] the same precision. On February 1, 1913, he recorded [music] comprehensive systemic failure. "Outwardly a day of retardation, almost of relapse." His visionary capability had [music] once more lapsed into a state of murky obscurity. His physical bliss had failed in sustained intensity.
(13:40) A June 1913 entry records, "Arogya suffered a violent break in the digestion." He tested at the palm of the arm in horizontal position for an hour and a half, noting abnormal stiffness. "An artificial pressure from above strove to depress the arm." By 1927, [music] he admitted that his early attempt at bodily transformation through fasting had failed entirely.
(14:09) "The entire giving [music] up of food cannot be the condition of the realization." He demanded total honesty from himself. He wrote that a month with insufficient diary entries was a sorrow to my heart and a blister to my eye, believing that the omission of negative data compromised the scientific validity of the yoga. The notebooks were nearly lost.
(14:35) When Aurobindo moved rooms in 1926, his former quarters were given to a disciple named Anil Baran Roy. Roy eventually found a massive heap of discarded papers, half a basketful of torn small bits. To his horror, he recognized Aurobindo's handwriting. The fragments were pieced together over several days.
(14:58) Some sections of the late record were recovered, many were not. After Aurobindo's death, the existence of the diaries was known only to an inner circle. The Ashram kept them locked away. It was only in the mid-1980s, after the death of their chief guardian, that scholars began cautiously serializing portions.
(15:22) The complete record of yoga was finally published in two volumes in 2001, 51 years [music] of institutional silence. The reason for the delay was simple. The raw data, the failures, the regressions, [music] the entries where powers dimmed and the body broke down, was fundamentally incompatible with the public image of Aurobindo as [music] an infallible, fully realized avatar.
(15:47) When historian Peter Heehs published a biography in 2008 that drew on these diaries, presenting Aurobindo as a brilliant [music] but struggling human being, it triggered lawsuits, visa revocation petitions, and the Ashram's formal disavowal of the book. The raw data was dangerous. The concept organizing the whole enterprise was the supramental descent.
(16:15) Not an ascent out of the body into bliss, but a bringing down of a higher truth consciousness into the mind, the vital forces, and the physical cells themselves. He experienced this descent as a concrete [music] physical pressure entering from above the head. The opposite of traditional Kundalini yoga, not energy rising from the base of the spine, but light descending from above and pressing into matter.
(16:43) He drew a sharp line between overmind, vast, cosmic, many-sided, and supermind, unitary, unfragmented, the truth consciousness itself. No other Yogi in the Indian tradition had made that distinction so clearly. In March 1914, a French-Egyptian artist and occultist named Mira Alfassa arrived [music] in Pondicherry.
(17:08) She recognized Aurobindo instantly as the figure she had been seeing in inner vision for years. Her diary entry the following day, "He whom we saw yesterday is on Earth. His presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be changed into light." [music] She became the Mother, his spiritual collaborator for the remaining 36 years of his [music] life.
(17:35) On November 24, 1926, the date remembered as ISD Day, Aurobindo experienced [music] the descent of the overmind into his physical being. Eyewitness AB [music] Purani described an oceanic flood of light rushing down. A disciple named Data spoke into [music] the silence. "The Lord has descended into the physical today.
(18:02) " Aurobindo was precise about what had occurred. "24th was the descent of Krishna into the physical. Krishna is not the supramental light. The descent of [music] Krishna would mean the descent of the overmind godhead preparing, though not itself actually bringing [music] the descent of supermind and Ananda." A milestone, not the goal.
(18:26) The supermind was still above. He withdrew into complete physical seclusion, handed all management of the growing Ashram to the Mother, concentrated on the final push. He would not appear [music] publicly again. During World War II, he shocked Indian nationalists by supporting the Allies and sending financial contributions to the British war effort.
(18:51) His reasoning [music] was occult. Hitler was possessed by an Asura, a force of falsehood, and an Axis victory >> [music] >> would have made the evolutionary work of supramental descent impossible on Earth. He claimed to have directed spiritual force to support the Allies [music] during the crisis at Dunkirk.
(19:12) He revised his epic poem Savitri [music] continuously during these final decades, nearly 24,000 lines [music] of blank verse. He called it the record of a seeing and said he used it >> [music] >> as a means of ascension. "I began with it on a certain mental level. [music] Each time I could reach a higher level, I rewrote from that level.
(19:36) " The poem was not allegory. It was testimony rewritten from progressively higher altitudes of consciousness. Then came December 5, 1950, 1:26 in the morning. He had been suffering from uremia, a kidney condition that ordinarily causes rapid blackening [music] and decomposition. Instead, his body became suffused with a golden crimson light.
(20:06) French and Indian doctors examined the body 60 hours after death. No discoloration, no decay, no odor. The mother postponed the funeral and issued a public announcement. His body is charged with such a concentration of super mental light that there is no sign of decomposition. The body remained intact for over 111 hours, five full days in tropical heat before the light began to fade and he was interred.
(20:39) She said later [music] that he told her, "I shall manifest again in the first super mental body built in the super mental way." What do you do with a story like this? A [music] man trained at Cambridge in Greek and Latin who could have spent his life in the Indian Civil [music] Service, who chose revolution instead, who found permanent silence in three days of meditation, who saw God in murderers and magistrates, [music] who spent decades keeping a private operational log of inner experiments, tracking successes and failures with the
(21:14) same algebraic precision, scaling from ants to [music] dogs to birds to the cells of his own body. And whose body at the end glowed gold [music] for five days in the heat and refused to decay? You can file it under delusion. You can file it under sainthood. You can treat it as an [music] artifact of colonial India's encounter with modernity.
(21:41) Or you can do what Aurobindo himself did, open the notebook, record what you observe, note where the experiment [music] succeeds and where it fails, and keep going. The record of yoga sat locked in an ashram for 51 years. It's available now, 28 cheap exercise books rescued from destruction containing the most meticulous first-person account of sustained inner experimentation ever [music] written.
(22:12) What would you find if you read it?