My First Clue About the Times We are In

And How I Was Introduced to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother

Fifty-five years ago, spring of 1970, Cambridge, MA.

I had ‘dropped in’ to a hippie “drop-in school”, an experimental school in a small storefront on Prospect St, in Central Square, Cambridge, after dropping out of [technically being expelled from, for political activity] U. of Chicago the previous year, and hitchhiking to Boston the weekend of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival [but that’s another story… some day].

A somewhat older man, named Micky Finn, came to the store/school and announced he would like to teach a yoga class, and asked whom he should talk to.. For whatever reason, the person he asked pointed to me! Now, I had never evinced or even imagined an interest in anything called yoga. I had been introduced to Japanese Haiku by my HS girlfriend, I had studied the I Ching and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and the Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkkien in college, and devoured A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuinn earlier that year. So my mystical tendencies were well established by then.

But Yoga? However, talking to Micky and picking up on his sincerity and love caught my attention, and while a class never materialized [I had never organized anything in my life, and wasn’t about to start then!], Micky offered to teach me personally, as long as I would come to his place in Boston’s Back Bay so he wouldn’t have to come to Cambridge. I asked, “how much"?, since I didn’t really have a job at that point, so when he agreed not to charge me, I said It’s a deal!

Micky lived in a tiny two-room [K & BR] apartment at 91 Kilmarnock St. I would sit on the bed, and he in a small chair, and he would speak of Sri Aurobindo, and The Mother [in his thick Boston accent, saying “Th Muthah"!”, but with such love and devotion radiating out, there was no mistaking the depth of his love for this spiritual Teacher. In his eyes, She had literally saved his life. He had been a heroin addict for years after the war [WWII], until discovering this yoga, and by taking it in deeply, he was able to finally kick the habit and clean up his life.

SO. All this to say that, among the booklets he would hand out each week was one called The Hour of God, containing essays from Sri Aurobindo’s early years. But the title essay is the one that caught my attention, as powerful as it was, and as much as it encapsulated in a few short paragraphs his view of the times we were entering in to and what we needed to do to prepare for them.

And so, without further introduction, I give you,

THE HOUR OF GOD

There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being; there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism. The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny; the second are spaces of time when much labour goes to the making of a little result. It is true that the latter may prepare the former, may be the little smoke of sacrifice going up to heaven which calls down the rain of God’s bounty. Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.

In the hour of God cleanse thy soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy and vain self-flattering that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it. All insincerity of nature, once thy defence against the eye of the Master and the light of the ideal, becomes now a gap in thy armour and invites the blow. Even if thou conquer for the moment, it is the worse for thee, for the blow shall come afterwards and cast thee down in the midst of thy triumph. But being pure cast aside all fear; for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest, a treading of the winepress of the wrath of God; but he who can stand up in it on the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand; even though he fall, he shall rise again, even though he seem to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return. Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected, the incalculable, the immeasurable. Mete not the power of the Breath by thy petty instruments, but trust and go forward.

But most keep thy soul clear, even if for a while, of the clamour of the ego. Then shall a fire march before thee in the night and the storm be thy helper and thy flag shall wave on the highest height of the greatness that was to be conquered.