A Centenary Tribute

Celebrating a Centenary

A CENTENARY, if it has not to become a brief evanescent moment inspired by some faithful sentiments, is a time to look back. It is a looking back in a special way, to look back so as to move ahead, since that is the general direction in which flows the Time-spirit. And when we look back, especially upon the life of someone as great and many-sided a personality as our very own Amal Kiran, we have to be even more careful that we do not lose sight of the person who stands behind the personality. For, our persona is a mask that hides behind its veil of many hues, the face of the One Eternal whom we love in different forms. And this indeed is the true greatness of an individual, the greatness of the divine in him. For a man can be great and many-sided, he may possess a rare force of intellect, a strong and robust vital in a truly beautiful and healthy body. Yet if the secret soul is not born then there is nothing of true and lasting significance about him. The real worth of a man's life is not in what he does or does not do but in what he is and inwardly becomes. It is the extent to which he has been able to reveal to our mortal eyes the face and beauty of the Eternal who hides within every form. Our life will have meaning if through the facade of our outer nature, earth and humanity can come in some palpable touch of His Love, Light, Peace, Strength, Sweetness and Bliss. For is not Sri Aurobindo's yoga essentially about making the human consciousness a bridge through which the heavenly goods can be brought down upon earth:

What would be the use of man if he were not created to throw a bridge between That which is eternally but is unmanifested and that which is manifested, between

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all the transcendences and splendours of the divine life and all the dark and sorrowful ignorance of the material world? Man is the link between What must be and what is; he is the footbridge thrown across the abyss, he is the great cross-shaped X, the quarternary connecting link. His true domicile, the effective seat of his consciousness should be in the intermediary world at the meeting-point of the four arms of the cross, just where all the infinitude of the Unthinkable comes to take a precise form so that it may be projected into the innumerable manifestation....

That centre is a place of supreme love, of perfect consciousness, of pure and total knowledge. There establish, O Lord, those who can, who must and truly want to serve Thee, so that Thy work may be accomplished, the bridge definitively established, and Thy forces poured unwearyingly over the world.

(The Mother: Prayers and Meditations;

August 29,1914, p. 255)

Amal-da surely deserves this place of honour among Her children for being such an instrument and bridge for the Clear Ray of the Divine to shine upon our dull and clouded earth. It is not just the force and brilliance of his intellect that touches one so much as the clarity, light and sweetness of the soul in him. The throb of the soul and the light of higher regions are transmitted through a wide and plastic mind and clothed in powerful and luminous drapes from the creative vital. That makes a true genius in clay, and a beautiful one too. His is not just a bone-dry philosophy, brilliant and boring, analysing life from a remote and cold corner of the earth. It is rather a deep and profound wisdom born from life itself, a wisdom as of one who has truly lived his life and lived it fully, through all the senses and is yet somewhere free and above them. His is not a puritan, holier-than-thou attitude that makes you feel poor and low before a greatness man cannot touch. Greatness yes, but one that moves among the natural life of

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humanity, of one who has seen and known not only the rare summits of the inner Kanchanjangha or moved amidst the guardians of the sky, but also one who has seen and experienced the Grand canyons of life, passed through the dry desert-storms of Sahara, and is therefore full of a rare humility and compassionate understanding for the sweet-bitter follies of our earthly life. His is not the narrow equality of an ascetic temperament born of a withdrawal but from the touches that draw us out. It is more of the equality of a man who has seen all, lived all and loved all. Not the wisdom of a Jnani alone who sees but one half of the truth, but also and even more the wisdom of the courageous Bhakta who seeks after and finds his beloved everywhere, in the beatific splendours and raptures of high heavens as well as in the nerve-twisting agonies of hell. Such is the feeling one gets about him as one goes through the enormous work that the creative genius in him has been able to create. And what shines throughout these luminous pages is a deep devotion for his and our Masters Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. It is a kind of cheerful enthusiasm that flows out of some deep and soothing stream of love. It is a love that does not flow on the surface as a superficial sentiment but can be seen to a deeper view as a constant current intertwined in the very fabric of his consciousness and therefore very palpable through the light of the pages. Nor is this love of a traditional Bhakta who has forgotten man and humanity in his solitary and ecstatic contemplation of his personal Deity. It is rather a love that genuinely strives to find Him behind every mask, especially in that enigmatic mask of our humanity. It is this unique and beautiful blend of the loving Bhakta and the inspired, intuitive seer of truth rolled into one, this rare and forceful combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian that makes his personality so very integral and attractive. For, is not the purpose of the Integral Yoga in one sense to reunite the diverse and even seemingly contradictory elements in our nature in and around the inmost soul, to offer this many-petalled unity at the Feet Divine with a

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will and aspiration that He may fill this flower with His sweetness and joy so as to make this earth a little more fra-grant, a little more beautiful? Or to put it differently, is not Integral Yoga an opening of our entire humanity to the divine influx from above so that all in us may be gradually moulded into a diviner image that can widely receive and flawlessly transmit the Divine Influence to our struggling and striving earth? And to the extent that one can do this or allow the Divine in him to do it, we discover the wonder of the person behind the personality. Since more than the individual it is the wonder and marvel of the Divine in him who can infuse Light, Beauty, Love and Truth into this engine seemingly built out of mud and broken as a toy after a day's use by careless powers. When we admire a person truly, we actually admire the Divine and His work in him. For who would be foolish enough to think or believe that an exquisitely carved vase full of rare and lovely flowers is a credit to the clay that allowed itself to be moulded and the flowers that resisted not the bloom when the sun shone above them! The divine artist is one with His art. Nay it is He Himself who becomes His art and wherever we find a touch of His splendour we can be sure that it is He who is hiding behind it or shining through it. Those through whom He shines are the creative works of His art, those through whom He yet shines not are also His works of art that are yet in the making. And are not all of us that, a little half-made, a little in the making! This is the real significance of looking back at the lives of those who have trodden the path before us. It helps us appreciate the working of the Divine in man and reveals to us something of His art and creative mystery in human terms.

Having said that let us now turn to something about these moments of celebrations and reminiscences on a more general note. In our approach towards those who have walked before us we sometimes adopt one of the two attitudes, that of admiration and offering a eulogy, or else that of denunciation and offering an apology. Both of these approaches are of no good, and depending upon the

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context may even be harmful. For, to be unduly impressed by someone is to come directly or indirectly under the influence of the person's individual consciousness, and if the individual has arrived at some higher perfection, he is still but one filter through which the Divine consciousness pours Itself and Its energies upon the world. We have to be exclusively under the Influence of the Divine who alone can be the true and perfect guide, who for us has assumed the form of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. When we appreciate and admire someone we must never lose sight of this central fact that it is the Divine who has made the person what he is. Once when the sehnai maestro Bismillah Khan in one of those rare soulful moments remarked, "People appreciate Bismillah Khan's sehnai, his music, but the real praise is to the Almighty who created a Bismillah Khan." So very beautiful and so very true! So this is not about eulogising any-one. But also in our approach to the lives of the truly great ones we should safeguard against the tendency of denouncing and criticising, of belittling the struggles and efforts of those who have walked before us. For when we do that we. are actually critical of the Divine in man. To criticise some-one is to actually interfere with the Divine working in that individual. It is also the sign of a warped ego failing to acknowledge the much greater difficulties of those who came along with the Divine and form part of His Work upon earth and humanity. Let us not forget that while theirs has been a greater privilege, theirs has been a greater difficulty as well. So let us in all humility owe the gratitude that is due to those who have shared with the Divine the burden of our frail humanity and accepted the difficulty that few could dare. At the end what counts is not who or what we were but what we could become by lending ourselves to the workings of the Divine Grace. Even to be able to stay near the Divine is no easy task, to bear the sweet and fiery assault of that ether and of fire. It is said and rightly so that fools judge the Master by the disciple while the wise judge the disciple by the Master.

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Yet there is something really important that we can learn by looking at the life of these vanguards of the future. And therefore is this effort of looking back abundantly rewarding. The very first thing that we learn by turning the pages in the life of these illustrious ones who have lived close to the Divine is something about the Divine's dealings with our humanity. It is a Bhagavata in its own right, the Lila of The Lord with His playmates whom He called along with Him from those concealed spheres of Light. And just like the Bhagavata it has also a liberating effect upon us since it brings the Divine so very close to us. It is thanks to the many reminiscences of these early forerunners that we get within the range of our vision the human side of the Divine and the pragmatic side of the yoga. We can relatively easily identify with them, with their ail-too human difficulties, with their aspirations, hopes and falls and climbs. Because there is one thing that is uniquely human and that is faith. For while we can see all other human qualities sublimated, purified, intensified and uplifted to their true divine stature in the Divine-become-human, it is only faith that is the special privilege of humanity since it does not yet live in the self-aware light of the Divine consciousness. The story of the Divine revealed in a human form is the story of Love and Strength and Compassion and Grace and Truth and Force and Harmony and Peace and Wisdom and Bliss. But the story of the Divine half-revealed, half-masked in man is the story of faith, aspiration, courage, perseverance, sincerity, devotion and surrender. Both are a necessary complement to each other; both inspire us, one from above, the other from below and within. If the Divine Master opens the path and shows us the way and carries us in His arms, the devotee of God shows us how to walk on the path thus opened, how to be carried despite ourselves and our follies. For in the end what counts is not our follies but our faith, not the number of times we fell on the road but the number of times He helped us get up and walk and climb again, not the failures of yesteryears but the victory of tomorrow. For a man is not his failings,

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just as he is not his success, not his personal deficiencies, just as he is not the capacity of a more or less developed nature. These are only pale hints and weak reflections, distortions of a truth by the mirror of his outer nature which is not yet polished and pure. There are some who can see nothing but the surface and the shadow in others. Trapped in their own surface mud they are blind to anything deeper within and therefore see by proxy in others what they al-ways carry but refuse to acknowledge in themselves. It is foolish to measure a man merely by his outer capacities and achievements. It is even more and doubly foolish to measure a man by his outer failures and deficiencies. The true measure of a man is his inmost aspiration and faith. It is this that the Divine sees, this that carries the stamp and seal of the Divine within him. And when we turn to the lives of these great and shining ones this we must see, the fire of aspiration that they carry within their hearts and souls and the faith with which they are born. For truly a man is his faith says the Gita.

...there comes a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were, made of sraddha, a faith, a will to be, a belief in itself and existence, and whatever is that will, faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he. Sraddhamayo yam purusoyo yac-chraddhah sa eva sah. If we look into this pregnant saying a little closely, we shall find that this single line contains implied in its few forceful words almost the whole theory of the modern gospel of pragmatism. For if a man or the soul in a man consists of the faith which is in him, taken in this deeper sense, then it follows that the truth which he sees and wills to live is for him the truth of his being, the truth of himself that he has created or is creating and there can be for him no other real truth. This truth is a thing of his inner and outer action, a thing of his becoming, of the soul's dynamics, not of that in him which never changes. He is what he is today by some

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past will of his nature sustained and continued by a present will to know, to believe and to be in his intelligence and vital force, and whatever new turn is taken by this will and faith active in his very substance, that he will tend to become in the future. We create our own truth of existence in our own action of mind and life, which is another way of saying that we create our own selves, are our own makers.

(Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, p. 482)

What we leave behind as we look back is the shadow of our past, but what is still unborn in us and towards which we inevitably move navigated by the light of faith is our future. For as is a man's faith, that in the end he becomes. Faith is the cry of the unborn child in him. It is this that we must look for and be inspired by in turning towards those who walk ahead, their backs turned against the trail of the shadow left behind, their face turned towards the blazing lights of God ahead. For God moves always forward in a perpetual and endless becoming. And that is what we must wish for each of those who have gone ahead and for many who are still to follow the footprints of the Divine left upon the waste-lands of human life. For wherever we find a divine bloom, something true and beautiful, something high and inspiring, something that uplifts us beyond our little humanity, there has He passed by and His breath has leant its fragrance to our otherwise insipid life. So let us end as we began but on a more practical note. To celebrate the centenary of some-one like Amal-da is to celebrate a hundred years of a fruitful life lived in close collaboration with the Divine. And that indeed is the most unique achievement. Let us wish them hundreds of years more of such a wonderful collaboration. Let us celebrate one more passage to victory of the Divine in man.

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