Dilip Kumar Roy

[Guest guest]

How I Came to the Maharshi - IV

by

Dilip Kumar Roy

 

Dilip Kumar Roy is known throughout India as a famous singer, apart from

which he himself composes songs and writes poems, especially devotional

songs and poems to Sri Krishna. For many years he was an inmate of Sri

Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. Now he is the head of the Hari Krishna

Mandir at Poona where, aided by his foremost disciple, Indira Devi, he acts

as guru to the many Krishna bhaktas who come. This account of his visit to

the Maharshi is taken on his own invitation, from his book The Flute Calls

Still, reviewed elsewhere in this issue.

 

It happened in 1945, I think. I was still living as an inmate of Sri

Aurobindo Ashram, even though I had come to feel a growing sense of

isolation and begun to surmise that I was a misfit there. My sadness and

sense of dereliction only deepened with time till what little peace I had

left me completely and I felt all but stranded. But I need not go into the

why and wherefore of it all; I would plunge straight into what keeps me

company as one of the most unforgettable experiences I have ever had. It

does, as it was a landmark in my life.

 

After having been for weeks in the grip of a deep gloom, I ... wrote

straight to Sri Aurobindo. He wrote back at once giving me the needed

permission, which I deeply appreciated.

 

I took the train to Tiruvannamalai where Ramana Maharshi lived. But as the

train rolled on I felt a deep and growing malaise ... How could I win the

needed peace at the feet of one who was not my Guru when I could not attain

it at the feet of my revered Guru, Sri Aurobindo, whose wisdom and greatness

my heart had never once questioned.

 

Well, I alighted at the station in a mixed frame of mind...

But it was too late then, for I was already at the gates of Ramanashram. How

could I return now, after having crossed the Rubicon? Besides, I was driven

by an irresistible urge to meet in the flesh the great Yogi who - unlike my

own preceptor, Sri Aurobindo - was available to all at all hours. And, to

crown all, I wanted to test the Maharshi for myself and see whether he, with

his magic compassion, could lift me out of the deep slough I had landed in.

But he did, and against my worst prognostications at that, so that I could

not possibly explain it away as a figment of autosuggestion. I mean - if

there were any auto-suggestion here it could only be against and not in

favour of my receiving the goods. But, as the Lord's ways are not ours, I

won an experience I could never even have dreamed of. So listen with bated

breath.

 

I can still recapture the thrill of the apocalyptic experience that came to

me to charm away as it were the obstinate gloom which had settled on my

chest like an incubus. But, alas, words seem so utterly pale and banal the

moment you want to describe an authentic spiritual experience which is

vivid, throbbing and intense. Still I must try.

 

I entered a trifle diffidently a big, bare hall where the Maharshi reclined

morning and evening among his devotees and the visitors who happened to

call. Accessible to all, the great saint sat on a divan looking straight in

front at nothing at all. I was told he lived thus all the time, in sahaja

samadhi, that is a constant super-conscious state. I was indeed fascinated

by what I saw, but I will not even attempt to portray with words how

overwhelmed I was (and why) by what met my eyes. For what is it after all

that I saw? Just a thin, half-naked man, sitting silently, gazing with

glazed eyes at the window. Yet there was something in him that spoke to me -

an indefinable beauty of poise and a plenitude that cannot be limmed with

words. I wrote afterwards a poem1 on him that may give a better idea, but I

must not get ahead of my story.

 

I touched his feet and then, without a word, sat down near him on the floor

and meditated, my heart aheave with a strange exaltation which deepened by

and by into an ineffable peace which beggars description. My month old gloom

and misgivings, doubts and questionings, melted away like mist before

sunrise, till I felt I was being cradled on the crest of a flawless peace in

a vast ocean of felicity and light. I have to use superlatives here as I am

trying to describe as best I can my experience of an ineffable bliss and

peace which lasted for hours and hours. I can well remember how deep was the

gratefulness I felt towards the Maharshi on that sleepless and restful night

as I reclined, bathed in peace, in an easy chair under the stars at which I

gazed and gazed in an ecstasy of tears. And I recalled a pregnant saying of

his: "Just be. All is in you. Only a veil stands between. You have only to

rend the veil and then, well, just be."

 

I had found this favourite remark of his rather cryptic heretofore. But in

that moment I understood for the first time and wrote a poem in homage to

the Maharshi.1

_________________________

1 - This poem has already been published in The Mountain Path of April 1964,

p, 87.