Small Vital Entities and Their Action in Human Life

The Mother relates two stories here about interactions she personally had with some small entities. One group were of good will and acted to remind her of things when she was otherwise distracted. She was able to pay attention to their hint and ensure that all worked out properly. It takes a great deal of quietness of the mind and development of a sensitivity to the touches of these vital entities to be able to recognise the hints and make use of them.

The second experience was clearly a type of ‘practical joke’ that an entity tried to carry out at Sri Aurobindo’s expense. How else can we explain 3 different clocks stopping at the same time in three different rooms? Sri Aurobindo obviously had some power of action on that subtle plane and soon, the clocks were up and running again.

A somewhat similar experience occurred some years ago when a manger of a company came to work and found that the chair he used in his office had disappeared! It was apparent that some ‘entity’ had taken the chair away as a practical joke. He caused to be announced over the P.A. System of the company that if the chair was not back at his desk within 1 minute, the person responsible would lose their job! (all in good fun, and the spirit of the day, of course.) The chair returned quickly. In this case, it was a practical joke carried out by a human individual and the specific person was identified and the action was clearly defined. Yet we cannot explain away the two stories related by the Mother as having a specific human cause….

The Mother observes: “I had the experience — among innumerable instances — but precisely of two very striking cases, of two opposite things, only it was not the same beings…. There are little beings like fairies who are very sweet, very obliging, but they are not always there, they come from time to time when it pleases them. I remember the time I used to cook for Sri Aurobindo; I was also doing many other things at the same time, so I often happened to leave the milk on the fire and go for some other work or to see something with him, to discuss with somebody, and truly I was not always aware of the time, I used to forget the milk on the fire. And whenever I forgot the milk on the ire, I felt suddenly (in those days I used to wear a sari) a little hand catching a fold of my sari and pulling it, like this. Then I used to run quickly and would see that the milk was just on the point of boiling over. This did not happen just once, but several times, and very clearly, like a little child’s hand clutching and pulling.”

“The other story is of the days Sri Aurobindo had the habit of walking up and down in his rooms. He used to walk for several hours like that, it was his way of meditating. Only, he wanted to know the time, so a clock had been put in each room to enable him to see the time at any moment. There were three such clocks. One was in the room where I worked; it was, so to say, his starting-point. One day he came and asked, ‘What time is it?’ He looked and the clock had stopped. He went into the next room, saying, ‘I shall see the time there’ — the clock had stopped. And it had stopped at the same minute as the other, you understand, with the difference of a few seconds. He went to the third room… the clock had stopped. He continued walking three times like that — all the clocks had stopped! Then he returned to my room and said, ‘But this is impossible! This is a bad joke!’ and all the clocks, one after the other, started working again. I saw it myself, you know, it was a charming incident. He was angry, he said, ‘This is a bad joke!’ And all the clocks started going again!”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch. 5 Occult Forces, pp. 113-114