‘Sri Sri Thakur Anukulchandra’
… The first impressions of a Scientist
… By Shri Krishnaprashna Bhattacharyya.
To one whose life is not rooted in the bedrock of love and devotion, the senses are the only prop. ---- A passionate nature, is always keen to penetrate the depths of others minds. I imbibed all too dissecting a temperament and analyzed things to their very root. I had a sensuous hunger to drink life, to see through the mysterious veil of nature, which I could not penetrate. ----. I had fervour to know, to melt the mysterious block of hard nature with its wonders of the sky and earth, to rend to shreds the ignorance of man.
Radical in the extreme, I was an atheist. Reason could only dictate duties to me, so duties had I none. Like a saw in the carpenter’s hand or the cruel knife of the dissector my mind would tear everything to shreds. ----. I was absorbing myself in studies and to try to fathom the depths of human ignorance. Life was a hard nut for me to crack – I began to read voluptuously. To me all was thinking and abstracting and imagining, – a negative criticism, a positive fault finding ordeal. Only Science came to my aid. The electrons and protons, the quanta of Planck and relativity of Einstein helped me to visualize the ultimates of existence in the non-causal nothings of the whizzing of ultra atoms. Sankara, Hegel, Kant, and electrons – all made a foggy muddle in my brains and stole away the last remnants of reality in me.
---- I was in utter need of something – something to soothe me. I saw Rabindranath, Gandhi, Swami Dayananda and Thakur Haranath and many others. I longed for Sree Ramkrishna and Vivekananda. They were dead and gone. I heard of Sree Aurovindo. He attracted me. I was then a professor of Physics at Hooghly College and arranged to see him at Pondicherry during the summer. But events suddenly took a new unexpected course. The random reading of a few pages from a Bengali monthly invited my attention. I was a conversation. I resolved to see the man first who could talk so prophetically. He was at Pabna in a village.
The day came, I met him. It was a summer dawn. The Padma river was flowing on – a vast glassy sheet. The sandy banks were pious white, cattle were going to the fields, and a wild breeze gave a soothing touch of the corning. I landed down the ferry on the bank and wended my way with a throbbing heart. Darkness of night was melting away. There was a sense of the familiar all around. I, and my friend reached a cluster of cottages in a hamlet.
A Sudden sound of wooden slippers, then a familiar touch – a loving arm round my neck, a sweet low unhesitating voice. I got the touch – of whom I knew not then – but a positive touch of a long-separated acquaintance. My mind became disinclined to take exception to such a queer shock of sweet familiarity. My memory can never fail. I still remember the first silent touch of intimacy, the soaring eyes, the easy sympathy, the glow of his smile, the unique harmony and freedom in everything he did.
The evening drew near. Underneath a tree was a bamboo- scaffold. He was sitting there. The sun was setting. A shower of mellow light fell on his beaming face. He asked with a smile, “Brother! Don’t you ever like to bow down your head? I retorted, us. “Why should I bow down before a man? He smiled. He lay down on my lap and said in a low tone, “I have a pain, a blank here at the region of my heart.” Why? “From after the cinchona injection I had to take during a fever”. I said, “Why? Your adherents say, you are the Lord, the redeemer of the world, the world-teacher and you require injections and you can’t cure yourself. How can that be?” His face beamed. He took the challenge so easily and in a way peculiarly his own pointing out with his finger the acacia tree before him he said, “Don’t you see the tree before you? Just so – behold, it has a scar on it but it grows and grows upward with the scar on its bosom!” It could strictly be no answer to my question – but it was. For somehow I could understand, feel, realize dimly, vaguely but surely that f there be any Lord he is intimate with all the sorrow, and grieves of the world which are as painful scars on His bosom and He ever goes on and on with them. He grew interesting to me. We talked on and on. The shades of night fell on. We could only feel each other. I felt like one returning home to the precious silence of his loving guide and fried.
I talked of science, of atoms, of electrons, of Radium, of X-rays, of quanta, of the living and the non-living, of heaven and earth and of what not – on the breezy summer night under the star-glittered canopy of the sky. The Padma river was lashing her waves on her bank, I poured out my brains – I could not but do so. I found in him a loving responding receptacle of all the questionings and absurdities in me. Like one meeting his asked-for after a long separation. All my valves were open and my brakes were off. I laughed with him, kept silent for long with his head on my lap both gazing at the same stars in the same sky, rang with talks on all topics and there was an overwhelming response from him-sympathetic retorts, unique suggestions, and queries. I wondered how one how as I knew, was not initiated into academic culture could understand so profoundly and respond with such intelligent keenness. His utterances were so homely, so intelligent, so delicate, so nice, so living, so enlightening, with the latest discoveries of science and suggestive of newer avenues of thought and work – yet so nakedly simple. I doubted and asked, “How can you talk of these things, of electrons, of quanta? Surely you have read of these things?” He answered, “No! From my childhood I sometimes see the universe all melting into a glow of ineffable light particles and the light condenses and condenses into the material objects surrounding me.” His utterances burst out like eruptions volcanic but sweet. They were rough-hewn expressions of sensations – so immediate, so real, so real, so absorbing. I vaguely apprehended he can see the sciences, he can perceive the ultra-atoms!
The next day I felt him with reluctance. My pretensions of knowledge got a rude shock from him who has no university education and cannot even speak in English. I again met him soon at Calcutta and kept his company for months. His vivid description of the ultimate of physical nature did not only tally with present day science but suggested new lines of research which were so brilliantly original and prolific to me and to most of my scientist friends that I soon gave up the work I began with Prof. C.V. Raman at the Palit Laboratories, Calcutta University and joined him in his cottage home. The words of Max Planck rang in my ears – “Scientists will arise who will have much keener perception than the scientists of to-day. What we need to develop are the perceptive faculties themselves. The development of the powers of perception is one of the main tasks have to meet. That seems to be Einstein’s idea.” And that idea I saw realized in him, in his queer visions. But above all I found in him a lover, a friend, a guide – a redeemer of an atheist like me. On this my friends gave up all hopes of me and had grave suspicious about my sanity.
Days and years rolled on in his company as if in a sweet but active dream. I soon gathered his past life from him, his mother, his villagers, his relations and adherents. My pen cannot do the least justices to his life so varied and eventful. Born in 1888, from his very childhood he was the favorite and wonder of all. His mother, relatives and playmates were often taken aback by his deep insight into the spirit of man and nature. His love from early childhood worked miracles amongst his associates. He would penetrate and perceive things so deeply and directly with his quick senses that mysteries unraveled before his eyes in all their details from his very boyhood. He had many interesting visions and many a time in the effulgence of the light, which penetrated his whole being he would swoon away for which his mother suspected him to have the sacred sickness. He would often perceive the whole universe around him melting into tremors of light which could speak – could transmit thrills of a celestial music. The heavenly light and sound incarnated themselves into tangible things – the tress, the plants, the beings and the earth below him. In an ecstasy of joy he would rush forward to embrace the luminous glow and the hard solid things would knock against him. Struck with wonder he would again descend from his being of light and sound into the solid world of flesh and blood. Thus one with the universe, he could not but love his surroundings – he felt them part and parcel of his own self.
Overwhelmed with a spontaneous love and sympathy for all, his youth swelled in dance and music on the banks of the Padma captivating all by his emotions and fervent zeal. None could resist his supreme charm. During these days of dance and music he would become unconscious of his body. His system gave no response to any stimulus, his heart stopped its beatings – sometimes for hours together, and his flushing face became radiant with a heavenly glow when brilliant sayings came out of his lips to the utter wonder and astonishment of all. People would flock in numbers. Every one felt the shock of his sayings – and the sweet melody of his voice trembling with holy messages would reverberate in one’s heart long after one left his company. During these periods of trance he would speak sometimes in a sweet commanding voice peculiarly his own. Frequent repetitions of such status and the extraordinary sayings on the ‘being and becoming’ of humanity at large and the universe, especially attracted people from all parts of the country. Only for seventy-one days during these holy trances could his saying be recorded. Still he was a normal human – a simple son deeply devoted to his mother. He read at the High School at Pabna but could not matriculate. The depraved teaching in the schools could but drive a genius like him out of their precincts. He went to Calcutta to learn the medical science but returned without any diploma to his village home to practice as a physician. He worked miracles as a physician. Rumors spread he could revive the dead. But the physician was compelled with the pressure of circumstances to minister unto minds diseased. Many came to be cured of their disease but ultimately turned into his followers.
From the time I saw him he was quite homely. The trances were not more. Under the shade of acacia trees on the bank of the Padma or in the homely cottages we would keep his company for hours together morning, noon and night. We would talk on Philosophy, on Sociology, on Politics, on Education, on Economics, on the Medical Sciences. His touching remarks like a searchlight swept over the heaven and earth and penetrated into the departments of existence. We talked of the world old and new, past and present and got glimpses of the future that is to come.
We thought rather experienced together. The first touch of faith and regard wields a magic wand and opens the secrets – new vistas of necessities, new appreciation and fresh activities. And the resultant of all this is character. His adherents were unknowingly forming their characters and crystallized round the central figure, their Thakur or the Lord as they called him.
(Reproduced and adopted from Introduction to ‘THE MESSAGE’ VOL. I. by Krishnaprasanna Bhattacharyya, January, 1935, Satsang, Pabna.)
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