We are thankful to R.Y. Deshpande for bringing into our
notice a significant yet ignored page from the Record of Yoga where Sri Aurobindo has noted the former births of
some of his disciples namely K. Amrita, Bijoy Nag, Barin Ghose, Pavitra,
Kshitish, Kanailal Ganguly, A. B. Purani, Anilbaran Roy and S. Duraiswami. Mr.
Auroman has rightly pointed out that Anilbaran cannot be Vivekananda as
mentioned in the Record of Yoga. It
must be noted that Anilbaran Roy, who was born on 3 July 1890, was a young boy
of twelve when Swami Vivekananda left his body on 4 July 1902. And we must not
forget that it was the spirit of Swami Vivekananda who had shown the path leading
to the Supermind to Sri Aurobindo when the latter was imprisoned in the Alipore
Jail. Therefore, the ‘Vivekananda’ mentioned in the Record of Yoga has to be someone else and certainly not Swami
Vivekananda.
Apart from the disciples whose names have already been
mentioned in the beginning of this article, there were several disciples about
whose past lives Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has said or written. Mr. Auroman
has already written about the past lives of Dara and Udar Pinto. Dara’s brother
Aga Syed Yaqoob, who was later renamed Prashanto, was Aurangzeb (the sixth
Mughal Emperor) in one of his previous births. We know that Aurangzeb had
imprisoned and murdered Dara Shukoh. And in the Ashram, Prashanto was given the
duty of looking after Dara (who was Dara Shukoh in a previous birth). The
Mother has seen Horace (the Latin poet) and Hector (the Trojan warrior) as the
former incarnations of Dilip Kumar Roy. She has also said that Rajangam was
Barot (the leader of the French Revolution who later opposed Robespierre) in a
previous life. Nolini Kanta Gupta has said that he was Yuyutsu (the brother of
Duryodhana) of the Mahabharata period,
Virgil (the Roman poet), Pierre de Ronsard (the French poet), Francis
Walsingham (the councillor of Queen Elizabeth I), André Le Nôtre (who designed
the gardens of the palace of Louis XIV at Versailles) and André de Chenier (the
French poet who was guillotined) in his former births.
K .D. Sethna alias Amal Kiran had asked Sri Aurobindo in
one of his letters: “Have you any intuition in the matter of my past
lives?...[The Mother] has told me nothing about myself except that she is
positive that I was an Athenian.” Sri Aurobindo replied: “I have myself no
intuition on the subject of your past lives, though from general impressions I
would be inclined to wager that you were not only in Athens (that is evident)
but in England during the Restoration time or thereabouts, in Renaissance Italy
etc.: these, however, are only impressions.” (Light and Laughter, p. 50)
The Mother has said that she saw in one of her visions
Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya playing with marbles by the Acropolis on the street
of ancient
The reader might ponder: how did Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother recognize the past incarnations of their disciples? The answer lies in
the words of Sri Aurobindo who has stated that it is actually the psychic being
that stood behind the said personalities. Let’s read, with reference to the
present context, two letters of Sri Aurobindo. In the first letter, Sri
Aurobindo writes:
“…each being in a new birth prepares a new mind, life and
body—otherwise John Smith would always be John Smith and would have no chance
of being Piyush Kanti Ghose. Of course inside there are old personalities
contributing to the new life—but I am speaking of the new visible personality,
the outer man, mental, vital, physical. It is the psychic being that keeps the
link from birth to birth and makes all the manifestations of the same person.”
(On Yoga, Tome One, pp. 409-410)
In the second letter addressed to Dilip Kumar Roy, Sri
Aurobindo writes: “The soul comes into birth for experience, for growth, for
evolution till it can bring the Divine into Matter. It is the central being
that incarnates, not the outer personality—the personality is simply a mould
that it creates for its figures of experience in that one life. In another
birth it will create for itself a different personality, different capacities,
a different life and career…As the evolved being develops still more and
becomes more rich and complex, it accumulates its personalities, as it were.
Sometimes they stand behind the active elements, throwing in some colour, some
trait, some capacity here and there,—or they stand in front and there is a
multiple personality, a many-sided character or a many-sided, sometimes what
looks like a universal capacity. But if a former personality, a former capacity
is brought fully forward, it will not be to repeat what was already done, but
to cast the same capacity into new forms and new shapes and fuse it into a new
harmony of the being which will not be a reproduction of what was before…It is
not the personality, the character that is of the first importance in
rebirth—it is the psychic being who stands behind the evolution of the nature
and evolves with it…The psychic when it departs from the body, shedding even
the mental and vital on its way to its resting place, carries with it the heart
of its experiences,—but not the physical events, not the vital movements, not
the mental buildings, not the capacities or characters, but something essential
that is gathered from them, what might be called the divine element for the
sake of which the rest existed. That is the permanent addition, it is that that
helps in the growth towards the Divine. That is why there is usually no memory
of the outward events and circumstances of past lives—for this memory there
must be a strong development towards unbroken continuance of the mind, the
vital, even the subtle physical; for though it all remains in a kind of seed
memory, it does not ordinarily emerge.” (Sri
Aurobindo to Dilip, Volume I, pp. 342-343)
The Mother did share the secret of the former births of some of the disciples but eventually ceased telling them. This, she did, because “few are the humans who can bear the memory of their past.” (Georges Van Vrekhem, The Mother: The Story of Her Life, p. 452)