Sri Aurobindo meets Yogi Lele & has the Silent Brahman Experience (Nirvana) (age 36)

Sri Aurobindo meets Yogi Lele for the first time in January 1908 and later recollects his instructions: “Sit in meditation, Lele said, but do not think, look only at your mind; you will see thoughts coming into it; before they can enter throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence.” I had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside, but I did not think either of questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit and then I saw one thought and then another coming in a concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire.”

Sri Aurobindo later recollects: “I got three things from Lele: the silent Brahman consciousness with its infinite wideness – an experience which was concrete; the power to speak and write without using the mind; and the habit of putting myself under the guidance of a Power higher than the mind.”

In 1908, Sri Aurobindo delivers a speech before the Bombay National Union

On 19 January 1908, Sri Aurobindo is to deliver a speech before the Bombay National Union. Sri Aurobindo recollects: “Not inexplicable certainly; it was the condition of silence of the mind to which he had come by his meditation for 3 days with Lele in Baroda and which he kept for many months and indeed always thereafter, all activity proceeding on the surface; but at that time there was no activity on the surface. Lele told him to make namaskara to the audience and wait and speech would come to him from some other source than the mind. So, in fact, the speech came, and ever since all speech, writing, thought and outward activity have so come to him from the same source above the brain-mind.”