Page 5 - All India Magazine Feb-2025

Reminiscences

The Flame-Child
When I was a child of about thirteen, for nearly a year every
night as soon as I had gone to bed it seemed to me that I went out
of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the
city, very high above. Then I used to see myself clad in a magnifi-
cent golden robe, much longer than myself; and as I rose higher,
the robe would stretch, spreading out in a circle around me to form
a kind of immense roof over the city. Then I would see men, wom-
en, children, old men, the sick, the unfortunate coming out from
every side; they would gather under the outspread robe, begging
for help, telling of their miseries, their suffering, their hardships. In
reply, the robe, supple and alive, would extend towards each one
of them individually, and as soon as they had touched it, they were
comforted or healed, and went back into their bodies happier and
stronger than they had come out of them. Nothing seemed more
beautiful to me, nothing could make me happier; and all the ac-
tivities of the day seemed dull and colourless and without any real
life, beside this activity of the night which was the true life for me.
Often while I was rising up in this way, I used to see at my left an
old man, silent and still, who looked at me with kindly affection
and encouraged me by his presence. This old man, dressed in a
long dark purple robe, was the personification — as I came to know
later — of him who is called the Man of Sorrows.
Now that deep experience, that almost inexpressible reality, is
translated in my mind by other ideas which I may describe in this
way:
Many a time in the day and night it seems to me that I am,
or rather my consciousness is, concentrated entirely in my heart
which is no longer an organ, not even a feeling, but the divine
Love, impersonal, eternal; and being this Love I feel myself living

All India Magazine, February 2025 5