Evolution of love

A Timeless Spring

He took my hand and we sat quietly. Finally, he said, “You are agitated. Why?” I did not know, and sat silently. “Why are you ambitious? Do you want to be like anyone you know who has got on?”

I hesitated and then said, “No.”

"You have a good brain,” he continued, “a good instrument that has not been used rightly. You have a drive that has been wrongly directed. Why are you ambitious? What is it you want to become? Why do you want to waste your brain?”

I was suddenly alert. “Why am I ambitious? Can I help what I am? I am busy doing, achieving. We cannot be like you.”

His look was quizzical. For some time he remained without speaking, letting what lay dormant within me reveal itself. Then he asked, “Have you ever been alone, without books, the radio? Try it and see what happens.”

"I would go mad, I cannot be alone.”

“Try it and see. For the mind to be creative, there must be stillness. A deep stillness that can only come into being when you have faced your loneliness.

"You are a woman, and yet you have a great deal of the man in you. You have neglected the woman. Look into yourself.”

I felt a stirring deep within me, the crumbling of the many crusts of insensitivity. I felt again the tearing anguish.

"You want affection, Pupul, and you do not find it. Why do you put out your begging bowl?”

"I don’t,” I said. “That is one thing I have never done. I would rather die than ask for affection.”

"You have not asked for it. You have smothered it. Yet the begging bowl is always there. If your bowl was full you would not need to hold it out. It is because it is empty that it is there.”

For an instant I looked at myself. As a child I wept so often. As an adult I permitted nothing to hurt me. I turned from it fiercely and attacked. He said, “If you love, then you do not demand. Then if you find the person does not love you, you will help the other to love, even though it is someone else.”

I saw myself with clarity—the bitterness, the hardness. I turned to him. “It is too horrible to look. What have I made of myself?”

"You are not solving the problem by criticizing yourself. There is no flowing richness in you, otherwise you would not need sympathy or affection. Why have you no richness? Look, this is what you are. You do not condemn a man who has a disease. This is your disease. Look at it calmly and simply, with compassion. It would be stupid to condemn or justify. To condemn is another movement of the past to strengthen itself. Look at what takes place in your conscious mind. Why are you aggressive? Why do you want to be the center of any group?

"As you look at the conscious mind, slowly the unconscious will throw up its intimations—in dreams, even in the waking state of thought.”

We had been talking for over an hour, but that span was meaningless. In his presence there was a shrinking of one’s sense of time as duration. I spoke to him of the changes that were taking place in my life. I was no longer sure of myself or my work. Although desires and urges still arose, they had no vitality.

I told him I realized that a great deal of the work I was doing was based on self-aggrandizement. It no longer seemed possible for me to enter political life. My social life was also changing radically. Of all things, I could no longer play poker. I had tried to play, but found that the intention to outwit the other players was lacking. Unbidden, I had moments of awareness in the middle of playing poker that made bluffing impossible. Krishnaji put back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

I told him that at times I felt an immense inner balance, like a bird playing with the wind. All desire dissolved in this intensity, spent itself. At other times I was swamped in becomings. My moorings were going and I was adrift. I did not know what lay ahead. I had never felt so unsure of myself.

Krishnaji said, “The seed has been planted, allow it to germinate—let it lie fallow for a while. This has been quite new to you. Coming to it with no preconceptions, no notions, no beliefs, the impact has been direct, the mind now will need rest. Don’t push it.”

We sat quietly. Krishnaji said, “Watch yourself. You have a drive few women possess. In this country men and women peter out so easily, so early in life. It is the climate, the way of living, the stagnation. See that the drive does not drop away. In freeing yourself from aggression, don’t become innocuous and soft. To be free from aggression is not to become weak or humble.”

Repeatedly, he was to tell me, “Watch your mind, let not a thought escape, however ugly, however brutal. Watch without choosing, weighing, judging, without giving direction or letting thought take root in the mind. Watch relentlessly.”

As I left the room he rose to see me to the door. His face was in repose, his body slim, uprising like a deodar tree. For an instant, overwhelmed by his beauty, I asked, “Who are you?” He said, “It does not matter who I am. What you think and do and whether you can transform yourself is alone important.”

As I journeyed home I suddenly realized that, in the many conversations I had had with Krishnaji, he had never said a word about himself. There had been no reference to any personal experience, not a single movement of the self had manifested itself. It was this that made him a stranger, however well you knew him. In the midst of a gesture of friendship, casual conversation, one felt it—a sudden distance, silences that emanated from him, a consciousness that had no focal point. And yet in his presence one felt the bounty of an infinite concern.