Note: In the first days of January 1908 at Baroda - short after the Surat Congress, , Sri Aurobindo had made the spiritual experience of the "Silent Brahman" under the guidance of the Guru Lele. He says in "On Himself", "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" (p. 84).
In the following days, Sri Aurobindo had to make several "political" speeches.
"The most important of the speeches was the one Sri Aurobindo gave on 19th January before the National union. Although the people knew about the lecture only three or four hours earlier, a gathering of over 3,000 had assembled to hear him. When he went to the meeting, the silence of the mind was the sole reality and there was no stir of activity at all on the surface. But Lele, who had accompanied Sri Aurobindo, asked him to make namaskar to the audience and wait - and speech would come to him from one source other than the mind. So in fact the speech came, and ever since, all speech, writing, thinking, outward activity were to come to him from the same other-than-mind sovereign source. " (from K.R.S. Iyengar: Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history p. 262)