Amal Kiran - The Pilgrim of Truth
Sri Aurobindo gave him the name Amal Kiran, a Sanskrit name that means The Clear Ray. With this name, Sri Aurobindo revealed K.D. Sethna's spiritual identity and his life's goal-of integral transformation for the Su-pramental Truth - the Supreme Light. On September 3,1930, at the age of nearly 27, thus began with Sri Aurobindo's santion this Pilgrim of Truth's exalted yoga sadhana of commitment and consecration in search of his destiny and its fulfilment. Sri Aurobindo had early on delineated to him the very nature of his personal Integral Yoga sadhana,
.. .There is only one truth in you on which you have to lay constant hold, the truth of your divine possibilities and the call of the higher Light to your nature.... Fix upon your mind and heart the resolution to live for the divine Truth and for that alone.. 1
Amal Kiran has been single-minded about his quest all his life like a yogi. Even at an early age of twenty-three, he had expressed to the Mother, "I have seen everything in life. Now I want only God." We notice that at the age of twenty-four, his inmost longing was granted along with the assurance of fulfilment as recorded in his letter to the Mother,
Mother Divine, ever since the day you told me that it is my destiny to be transformed,I have tasted some-thing of the Peace that belongs to the time-transcending Consciousness in which the future is no uncertain
1. Nirodbaran and Deshpande, R.Y., Ed., Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994, pp. 7-8.
Page 81
possibility but a path already traversed, a goal already attained, a truth of Eternity waiting only to be revealed and realised in Time.
.. .But with utter finality came your answer: "When I refer to your destiny, I mean this life and no other...2
In my pursuit of the Integral Yoga, I have immensely enjoyed reading Amal Kiran's writings. I have come to recognise that Amal Kiran's Yoga sadhana and his poetic endeavours are intertwined. His inner prayer, which he described as an echo in his depths became his fount and font of poems of deep within,
Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, -
Call of the One!
Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,
O living Sun.3
He expressed what he experienced or aspired and his expressions became beauty and truth of his inner being. I consider yogi Amal Kiran a seeker of the Truth and discoverer of cosmic splendour as a poet of Integralism. His characterisation of his own poems published under the title, The Secret Splendour, is clearly indicative of his pursuit,
Poems seeking a new intensity of inner vision and emotion that would catch alive in words the deepest rhythms of the spirit secret behind man's life and the world in which he labours and aspires.
To me he is the sage poet of the Ashram. He inspired me and comforted me with recognition that my spiritual quest may be personal but that I am not alone in my endeavours. For instance, I find his following poems are representative of the universal nature of his poetry:
2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 325.
Page 82
"Pilgrim of Truth"
Each moment now is fraught with an immense
Allure and impulse of omnipotence;...
And all my waking grows a fathomless force,
An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I
Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.4
"My Life"
I live not from hour to hour
But in dream on dream of you, Sweet!
The dawn is the ten-petalled flower
Of your holy feet... .5
"This Errant Life"
This errant life is dear although it dies;...
Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,
And all Thy formless glory turn to love
And mould Thy love into a human face.6
In ancient India, the Seers were the poets of spirituality. They had heard the eternal Truth whispering in their inner being and seen the infinite Truth within and without. Their revelations were mantric in nature. We are fortunate to have Amal Kiran among us as an Aurobindonian poet, which he has characterised as follows,
The Aurobindonian poet recognises within himself the Lord of the Flame into whose creative beatitude he incessantly steeps his imagination by surrendering his conscious being to the spontaneities of mystical love and by contacting through the intuition of the aesthetic unity of the world a common spiritual foundation, to himself
4. Sethna, K.D., The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems, Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1993, p. 433.
5. Ibid., p. 244.
6. Ibid, pp. 70-71.
Page 83
and his environment, of a multiple yet unified glory presiding over the inferior phenomenon of the Spirit's hide-and-seek with Itself....
The Aurobindonian poet will be not merely... an instrument of forces which will work through him by passing inspirations. It will be a commentary on the consistent sainthood of his personality, on the divine way he will carry himself, the godlike way he will repose, the inexpressible way he will be silent.7
It is self-evident and inspiring that Amal Kiran as a pilgrim of Truth in the role of an Aurobindonian poet has be-come a shining example of the Mother's message: "Let your life be a constant search for the Truth and it will be worth ' living."
Amal Kiran is regarded around the world with admiration, respect and affection. He is a versatile genius and a polymath. He is an acclaimed poet, humorist, artist, historian, critical thinker, holistic philosopher and, above all, a sadhak of the Integral Yoga.
Over the years, I have come to know Amal Kiran as very affectionate Amal in my relation with him. Amal Kiran fascinated me in my earlier days because of his keen intellect, incisive analytical prowess, exhilarating ability to remember and relate disparate topics with thoroughness, and charming ability to synthesise seemingly complex issues in a reasonable and conclusive manner. His very precise and often-comprehensive discourses on Integral Yoga that seem to encompass literature, philosophy, science, history and spirituality in a very natural and harmonised way stimulated my interest in those subjects as well as they illumined my limited mind. He has been my hero when it comes to pursuing spiritual journalism to advocate, elaborate, elucidate and to counter criticisms of Sri Aurobindo's pursuits by
7. Amal Kiran, "The Aurobindonian Poet", Mother India, February 2001, pp. 99-101.
Page 84
people endowed with partial knowledge, preoccupied with preconceived notions, and limited ability to see things holistically. I used to think of Champaklal as the Mother's Lion, guarding Her physical domain. Likewise, I view Amal Kiran as Sri Aurobindo's Lion of mental-spiritual pursuits.
Yes, all these and some more are the reasons why I was drawn to Amal, in the first place. However, what has kept me coming to him time and again, and what has enabled me to strike an evolving and everlasting friendship with him is his engaging affection and his eagerness to welcome me whole-heartedly with a genuine soul-beaming smile. Yes, I know, I am fortunate! I am fortunate not because I deserve any of it but because it is the Grace of God working in a human relation. It is how Amal Rasa experience began for me and has continued.
After his hip injury in 1999, Amal opted to relocate to the Ashram Nursing Home. I visited him several times during my Pondicherry pilgrimage in the summer of 2000. Amal enjoys, gazing at the waves of the Pondicherry sea through the windows of the Nursing Home. During one of my visits, he seemed to plunge into the vast inner consciousness while enjoying the perpetual shore-bound motion of sunlight reflective luminous waves. It has been my privilege to take his photographs during my visits and so many of them have his affectionate notes on the back making them my priceless treasure. I would like to share two of them as they have pivotal significance indicating his transition from expressing to experiencing.
On May 1, 2000, he reflected about himself looking at his photographs taken by me. On the back of one photo-graph he wrote: "His look seems to try to pierce some will and to wonder whether any proper words could be found to express the discovery."
In addition, on the second photograph he wrote: "He seems to feel that the expression is possible but only with words native to the height and the depth and wideness of the plane envisioned."
Page 85
How remarkable these comments are! Amal, the master wordsmith was pondering about finding the proper words for the inner discovery! Amal, the articulate par excellence was experiencing inadequacy of our human language to capture and convey what was experienced deep within in the profound silence of his soul -chamber! Amal had transcended the glorious literary persona Amal. Amal was immersed in the rhythm of the cosmic vibration. Amal instead of being splendidly expressive about "it", was becoming humbly one with "it". It is a momentous transition from expressing to experiencing and this distinction is of a paramount significance. It reminds me of revelatory lines of Savitri:
A world unseen, unknown by outward mind
Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.8
This transition of Amal Kiran as a silent individual is indicative of a paradigm shift - signifying the fundamental change in the state of his being. After decades of sadhana of consecration leading to prodigious creation, Amal now seemed to be at the threshold of the next step of his inner journey - not busy describing but submerged in experiencing and becoming. His poem, "My Emptiness", (February 26, 1981) was poignantly indicative of such things to come:
"My Emptiness"
So few can understand
My emptiness
Which the Ineffable
Chooses to bless...
Now waits my life without
A gripping "I"-...
How shall those unseen glories
Poor words express,
When all I show is a vigil
Of emptiness?9
8. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 27.
9. Sethna, K.D., The Secret Splendour, p. 641.
Page 86
To appreciate better his progressive transition, let us con-sider his poem "The Divine", (January 1,1944) in which Amal seeks the Divine that seems far far away and yet in the poem "Great Wings" (June 9,1948) he expresses his realisation that the Divine is within us!
"The Divine"
Frail boat of mine,
Be brave! Far though you wander,
Your prow will face a secret yonder:
Ever the gleam of a new horizon-line
Is the Divine.10
In the poem "The Divine", Amal portrays a mental im-age of where and what the Divine is.
"Great Wings"
But life gains not this liberty
Unless a wideness ever free
Is the formless depth of what we are,...
Godhead is only godhead by
A soar of Self within Self-space.11
"Great Wings" is a very remarkable poem as in this poem Amal is sensitive to and expressive of the essential requirement of boundlessness of the inner-self to find the Godhead within. It resonates the aspirations or the rev-elations so elegantly expressed by others: Kahlil Gibran had whispered in his book, The Prophet, "...And then I shall come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean." Kabir, India's saintly bhakta had echoed the same spiritual encounter in a reverse sense as a duality of human-divine relation where the Infinite merges into an infinitesimal, "nave mey doob gai nadiya - river got submerged
10. Ibid., p. 539.
11. Ibid., p. 294.
Page 87
in canoe." Sri Aurobindo in Savitri: The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds revealed the reality of divinity as, "All ocean lived within a wandering drop."
Amal's "This Errant Life" is not merely a poetic expression of thoughts voyaging through Eternity randomly but it clearly reveals the blueprint of the inner transitional process of self becoming selfless to embody the Self within:
If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow...
Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow....
Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,...
How prophetic is Sri Aurobindo's revelation:
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self...
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.12
Regarding the influence of Sri Aurobindo on his quest, Amal conveys in his introspective Introduction of The Secret Splendour, "...he (Sri Aurobindo) has been the end of my quest for a life-transforming spirituality as well as a poetry seeking a new intensity of vision and emotion, an illumined inwardness that would catch alive in words the deepest rhythms of the human soul evolving towards infinite beauty and eternal joy." In view of Amal's such consecration and aspiration, it comes as no surprise to notice the parallel between some of the lines of Savitri and the sadhana he pursues with utmost sincerity.
A wanderer in a world his thoughts have made,...
He journeys to a home he knows no more.
His own self's truth he seeks who is the Truth;
12. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 67.
Page 88
He is the Player who became the play,
He is the Thinker who became the thought;
He is the many who was the silent One... .13
The Voice replied: "Remember why thou cam'st:
Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,
In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,
Then mortal nature change to the divine.14
Sri Aurobindo has helped us with the framework of the blue-print of life's evolutionary mission but it is our choice to follow it. The choice is always ours - The Divine does not dictate the course of action. If the evolution is the driving force of the mystifying universe, the fathomless free choice seems to be one of its most alluring governing principles. This choice has to come from deep within us and one has to be able to hear it as well as recognise it as one's true calling. Amal Kiran's life journey is illustrative of this principle and reassuring to the seekers of Truth about the feasibility of it. It is indeed comforting to know the doability of life's mission when our individual undertaking is like J. R. R. Tolkien's the "Ring Bearer" but of individual destiny, which is how-ever inexplicably and integrally connected to the occultic universal scheme of things.
Maybe, someday Amal Kiran would choose to share with us the glimpses of his twilight journey culminating in a trans-formation of his transitional human self to a being of evolution of next step. Maybe someday, as and when it happens and if Amal Kiran would choose to narrate them, we may be privy to the process involved, the experiences encountered, and the milestones attained - the saga of Grace.
It seems to me that for the Poet Amal Kiran his poetic transition is reflective of his own inner transformation. His own transformation may be subtle in appearance but it is of significant value. Maybe the poet himself is sublimely be-coming the part of the cosmic poem of Splendour. This all-
13. Ibid., p. 68.
14. Ibid., Vol. 34, p. 476.
Page 89
encompassing reality of oneness with multitudinous cosmos most certainly leads to recognition of an individual self as a part and parcel of the Universal Being. It also seems that Amal in his eloquent silence is indicating that the journey of life is for the understanding of this transcendental Reality and internalising it as realised experience through one's own inner calling and sadhana.
This notion of oneness of an individual self with the Universal Being is not new. It is a verifiable statement of spiritual fact supported by the very essence of India's ancient Veda. It means that Existence is integrative and it is a unified seamless whole with infinite perspectives inherently impregnated with the trinity of Truth, Bliss and Beauty (Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram). This transformational relationship of man and God is depicted in the two-bird metaphor in Mundaka Upanishad, which derives its origin from the two-bird parable in Rig Veda. In case of Amal, an inevitable mile-stone in his pursuit of the Integral Yoga appears that he internalised this realisation, which is expressed in his poem,
"Two Birds"
Lost in a dream no hunger broke,
This calm bird - aureoled, immense -
Sat motionless: all fruit he found
Within his own magnificence.
The watchful ravener below
Felt his time-tortured passion cease,
And flying upward knew himself
One with that bird of golden peace.15
Amal by virtue of his quest and yogic sadhana has be-come a true example to all the Aurobindonians aspiring for the Truth and pursuing the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, "I aspire to infinite force, infinite knowledge, infinite bliss.
15. Sethna, K.D., The Secret Splendour, p. 131.
Page 90
Can I attain it? Yes, but the nature of infinity is that it has no end. Say not therefore that I attain it. I become it. Only so can man attain God by becoming God."16 Sri Aurobindo has presented to us the golden key of heavenly existence here on earth as, to find God, one has to become God. The New Year Message of 2000 in the Mother's words was: "O divine Master, let Thy light fall into this chaos and bring forth from it a new world. Accomplishing what is now in preparation and create a new humanity which may be the perfect expression of Thy new and sublime Law."
Among us, a few have dedicated their soul, life, work, and wealth completely to the Mother in the preparation of this new creation. They are the harbingers of a New Dawn. Amal is one of them.
Happy 100th Birthday, Amal Kiran - The Clear Ray!
16. The Hour of God, SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 2.
Page 91
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.