|
These
extraordinary animals, do they come back in a human body after
death?
Ah!
There
was a cat... what its name was I don't know; and I had many
cats, you know, so I don't remember now, there was one called
Kiki, it was the first son of this cat, and then there was
another, its second son (that is to say, born another time)
which was called Brownie.
This
one was admirable and it died of the cat disease - as there
is a disease of the dogs, there is a disease of the kittens
- I don't know how it caught the thing, but it was wonderful
during its illness and I was taking care of it as of a child.
And it always expressed a kind of aspiration. There was a
time before it fell ill... we used to have in those days meditation
in a room of the Library House, in the room there - Sri Aurobindo's
own room - and we used to sit on the floor. And there was
an armchair in a corner, and when we gathered for the meditation
this cat came every time and settled in the armchair and literally
it entered into a trance, it had movements of trance; it did
not sleep, it was not asleep, it was truly in a trance; it
gave signs of that and had astonishing movements, as when
animals dream; and it didn't want to come out from it, it
refused to come out, it remained in it for hours. But it never
came in until we were beginning the
meditation. It settled there and remained there throughout
the meditation. We indeed had finished but it remained, and
it was only when I went to take it, called it in a particular
way, brought it back into its body, that it consented to go
away; otherwise no matter who came and called it, it did not
move. Well, this cat always had a great aspiration, a kind
of aspiration to become a human being, and in fact, when it
left its body it entered a human body. Only it was a very
tiny part of the consciousness, you see, of the human being.
.. this one was a cat which leaped
over many births, so to say, many psychic stages to enter
into contact with a human body. It was a simple enough human
body, but still, all the same... There is a difference in
the development of a cat and of a human being...
It
happens... I think these are exceptional cases, but still
it happens.
In
these cases is the psychic conscious?
The
aspiration is conscious, yes, conscious. The aspiration was
very conscious in it, very conscious. It is not a formed psychic
as when the psychic becomes a completely independent being,
it is not that; but it is an aspiration, it is an ardent aspiration
for progress - as we, you know, we have the aspiration to
become supramental beings instead of remaining human beings,
well, it was something absolutely similar:
it
was a cat doing yoga - exactly - to become a man.
It
was perhaps because its mother had in it a movement, a formation,
an emanation of consciousness which had belonged to a human
being; it is probably that which
had left a kind of nostalgia for the human life which gave
it this intensity of aspiration. But truly it did yoga for
that.
The Mother
23
March 1955
|
