Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Yogi of the Modern-Age

I AM asked by Mr. Deshpande to write about

Amal in this volume to celebrate his coming on the verge of the 9th decade of his wonderful life. I have been fortunately given the freedom to choose the aspect on which to write. Without that I would have been unable to write about such a multifaceted personality. He and Nirod, and some others are for me continuations of my two Gurus, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Without Amal I might not have been here at all, and definitely not what I am today, not much but better than what I would have been otherwise.  Amal has nurtured me like a tender plant for nearly 25 years and if that plant has not borne roses it is at least no more full of thorns. So what I am writing in this article is mainly glimpses from my diary of conversations with him in the last three years. He has been changing rapidly, growing more distant and more loving and near at the same time. I see him reluctantly dealing with the mundane, full of concern for everyone who approaches him in person or by writing or telephone. As one of my friends said while leaving him, "Oh, how he radiates peace and love!"

So here are some excerpts from my recorded conversations with him.

About the first two Darshans Amal had

Amal tells me: "My first meeting was without much significance. I was watching Sri Aurobindo's face and He mine. Mother later told me that Sri Aurobindo remarked about me that me that ‘he has a good face'.

But at the second Darshan after six months, He kept on gently nodding His head approvingly and placed both hands on my bent head. Oh that touch! I can still feel it. Later I went into Purani's room and suddenly it was as if a bar of steel was coming down my head!  I had to sit quietly to bear it. Later in the evening the Mother used to give us garlands she had got at Darshan time

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in the morning. I sat down at her feet as she took me inside the Darshan room. Then she told me that Sri Aurobindo had said he was very pleased with me and that there had been a great change.

It was true. Between the two Darshans the psychic being had burst ecstatically open and started to permeate the outer self - even the body. The hands used to feel as if whatever they touched would be divinely blessed."

*

All the time Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's hands are around us. Except for our follies, nothing happens without their consent. They are behind everything that happens, including catastrophes. Those are the means to push us towards a new direction.

*

Yes, they have to 'break' at times - not break bones. When Sri Aurobindo went to jail and asked Sri Krishna why he had to, the reply was that there was no other way to push him in the right direction. It is important to know why an event, an accident, has happened. The knowledge is not mental. It comes from a higher level, from the 'intuition' plane. When you know that, that gives a direction to the opportunity to be taken.

*

Make me yours, wholly yours. It is not that I belong to anything else, but my being yours is not concretised fully in the entire being.

This is my constant call.

*

22 October 1991

While in the Nursing Home after the accident, at about 1.15 a.m., Amal had this conversation:

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Amal: "What is my fate? What is the Grace giving me?"

Answer: "A greater calm and a greater self-dedication to the Mother.  She will lift you higher beyond everything."

He related this to me in the early morning. I asked him, "Was it a face to face conversation?" He said "Yes". On my further enquiry he confirmed that it was Sri Aurobindo, adding "I suppose."

*

29/30 October 1992

Quite sometime since there has been a movement that a radical change is going to happen. There has been an independent movement of the physical, puzzling, and at the same time a detachment from the physical. The other day while talking to you, I became conscious of a great stillness of the body, a compactness of consciousness in the physical, a statuesque immobility over which passes a breeze of happiness continuously, the body can't but be happy.

The physical arms are taking to a 'voiceless supreme delight' by themselves, the body has a separate identity of its own. Probably this is happening in the subtle physical. Everything happens there first before manifesting in the external physical. This is not a transformation but a change in the outer nature including the 'gunas'.

You are correct in that the change has occurred earlier in the external mind and vital, but there is no fixed rule about the sequence of the change though generally the change in the physical will be the last. Nature as such is a vast being of which individual natures are consolidations.

This, (holding both hands in front as if holding a ball) I could hold between the hands as it were, just for a moment when it seems to be absolutely immobile. Ananda is its natural state. This subtle physical probably has a shape, some sort of shape, but it is not at all rigid, not at all like the outer physical.

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There is no attempt on my part to be cheerful, no movement of the mind, absolutely no attitude, it just is.  So the long years of aspiration arc coming to fruition. Those four lines:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest.

It was in 1937 that I wrote to Sri Aurobindo, "I aspire to live, as well as echo in quality of inspiration, those four lines of yours which I consider a plenary Mantra. Show me a way to realise my aspiration, I feel very impatient though I must confess to my shame that aspiration of the poet is more frequently in the forefront than that of the Yogi."

Sri Aurobindo's reply started with "Impatience does not help;

intensity of aspiration does..."

At last this aspiration is coming to fruition.

*

About Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo was a poised stillness and a tremendous power. Cartier Bresson was struck by the stillness when he was going around him taking photographs. There was Sri Aurobindo totally oblivious of everything going around him including the presence of Bresson and others.

Commenting on a Sadhak's vision of Sri Aurobindo in a Shiva Idol:

Sri Aurobindo was a vision of breadth of wideness and power in reclining repose.  And comes to mind what you saw - the majesty, the grandeur, the sheer power! Such is Shiva, such is Sri Aurobindo.

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Balcony Darshan

O radiant fountain of the world's delight,

World-free and unattainable above,

O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within

While men seek thee outside and never find.

This was the constant deep feeling within, an intense emotional response on seeing the Mother on the first floor Balcony, as if she was almost within physical reach, to see Her intimate face looking at one person then another, covering all, step by step. Even reciting these lines and reliving that Balcony Darshan makes me emotional and the voice gets strained, choked as I just found the other day reciting these tines to someone.

*

Refuge in the Mother and aspiration for the Divine life are the two essentials in this Yoga.

*

Once I asked Amal, referring to a talk of the Mother at the end of which she says: "Let us meditate, I will give you what has descended today." How many would have received what the Mother meant when she said "I will give you"?

Amal answered: "Maybe none. You wouldn't have if you had been there."

Then he added: "This is rather rude of me. How would I have known? I shall only say if you had been like me, you wouldn't have received it."

*

Leave all worries to Her and plunge in your work unmindful of happenings beyond your control.

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Just be yourself as She wants you to be, just be. That is the best way to help.

*

Once I asked him: "How long since have you been living within? Living within more often than not?"

Amal said: "A few months after I came here. The 'State of Grace' first came five months after my coming here, but many ups and downs- had to intervene before some stable continuity was possible. Oh, how often I have told the Mother — 'Put your hand on my heart, open me, make an opening.'!"

*

18 December 1992

"When did you start hearing the cosmic rhythm?" I asked. Amal answered: It happened when I was in Bombay.  During my Pondy days a steady rhythmic sound used to come from somewhere near and localised. The sense of a universal sound began to be established when I was in Bombay. What it was like has been indicated in a part of my 'Personal Preface' and poetised in one of the pieces in The Adventure of the Apocalypse.

*

The utmost vigilance is needed to guard against insidious spiritual pride. Active 'on the guard' ness is essential all the time. Best, of course, is complete surrender to the Mother.

*

You can always see Amal Kiran at the Samadhi in the late afternoon, usually 4.30 to 5.30. Often I would go with him from the Ashram. Sometimes he would narrate to me some of his experiences soon after they occurred. I give here three of them which reveal some aspects of his spiritual quests and the peaks

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that have been climbed. Following Mother's words that the time to rest is not now, Amal continues unceasingly this great adventure that is the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. All these three experiences have probably been published in Mother India.

17 August 1991, about 5 p.m.

Suddenly a great quiet took possession of the body and a sound was heard coming from far away and surrounding the still body. Then the body's borders seemed to thin and become open to permeation by a Vast Outside. I would call that 'transfluent' on the analogy of 'translucent', for now not light but a flow passed right through me - a flow which appeared to be the passage of a whole universe's movement through my form. The form still had its identity but it was not barriered against the rest of the universe. It was essentially continuous with a huge Existence and a wide Presence steadily advancing in time with a steady faintly audible rhythm. What a sense of freedom and serenity!

Automatically all thinking stopped: no ideas, no images. The universal flow was felt most in the region of the chest, although it was perceived as if at a slight distance in the head as well as the abdomen. I had to do nothing except sit in-drawn to this enormous flux which bore my embodied being onward to an unknown but beautifully trusted future.

Along with this open feeling within an unlimited uniform sound, there was a kind of effortless isolation from the immediate environment - except for a calmly sympathetic shadow - the Samadhi. That is why I use the word 'in-drawn'. And yet this very environment was, without its knowing it, part of the universal flux. It is that lack of knowing which my body was guarding itself against with an utter ease born of commingling with the tranquil majesty of the flowing Immense into which I had been taken up.

Heraclitus meant by his panta rhei — everything flows, that there is constant change, nothing stays the same. You can't step into the same river twice. What I sensed was a never-stopping fluency which was the continuity of some ever-identified Whole.

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If you are carried on the flow of the river, one with the flow, it is the same river always in relation to you. Of course this reference to Heraclitus is an after-thought in the terms of philosophy of what happened from 5.15 to 5.30.

When it was time for me to go home there was no concern with any philosophy during the rapt ineffable quarter of an hour. What is really relevant is the tradition of a sound in which the cosmic consciousness exists: the Mantra OM. What I sensed was inseparable from an eternal-seeming rhythm arriving from all sides. Perhaps I would best characterise it as an infinite honeyed hum. Does OM echo this hearing?

*

2 January 1993

Amal told me the following experience soon after we went back to his home from the Samadhi:

I was sitting quietly facing the joint Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Suddenly a voice within me addressed it, 'All of me belongs to You'. The voice seemed to pervade the whole being and express every part of me. But was every part of me really speaking? I did not feel sure because I knew that much of me remained which could not be considered to have made a total surrender.

When I concentrated on my condition I discovered that the voice had a centre from which it radiated. The centre was the inmost heart. The true soul, the psychic being was spontaneously making the statement. It was its natural joyous cry. The rest of the being was evidently fully conscious of its soul. To put it otherwise: the soul was completely aware of being a child of the Divine and its awareness flowed out and flooded every corner of the complete creature I was. But every corner was essentially a medium for the soul's self-giving gesture, the soul's self-given existence. Something of every corner vibrated in unison while serving as a channel. But it was not saying on its own, as an inherent flow of itself, the simple yet wonderful words with which it was filled.

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I felt somewhat concerned that this should be so — but I soon realised that concern was out of place. I just sat calmly without any thought and felt blessed with the soul's full awakening and allowed its sweetness to keep streaming forth up and down on all sides of the bodily life.

If such a state could go on at all hours in an utter intensity of what I call a serene strength of love, at once soft and irresistible, the future would indeed be an unperishing thousand petalled 'Rose of God'.

*

28 April 1993

Long ago I read a letter of Sri Aurobindo to the effect that it is the lesson of life that everything fails a man except the Divine if one truly clings to the Divine. I had wondered whether there was any reference here to outer circumstances and events taking a favourable turn by one's adherence to the Divine by means of faith or prayer.

Of course external things could change to some extent, but the non-failure of the Divine in this sense struck me as too superficial and having little bearing on the progress of one's Sadhana.

Yesterday there was an incident as if something important were failing me radically, a solid support abruptly giving way. I kept offering the painful occasion to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. All of a sudden, at the Samadhi, I felt a complete opening inwardly to Them. I myself was there in the heart-centre and behind me, sustaining my being was a wide warm Presence perpetually transfusing into me a deep peace, a profound happiness, the sense of a personified eternal smile holding me up and passing the strength of unending sweetness into my inner poise.

All external features at the Samadhi vanished. My eyes kept closing and as if drowning in the vast surge, the embrace of that blissful love which was fully unveiled to my heart because this heart had turned to no support except its mighty mystery. The pain that was in the heart was enveloped by the powerful warmth

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which was tending all the time to erase it with a joy capable of blotting out everything.

I understood most vividly what Sri Aurobindo had meant by those words - the modus operandi of the one unfailing factor possible to realise amidst the vicissitudes of 'this transient and unhappy world' into which we have come yet within which Sri Krishna points to an unchanging support when he gives the call 'Love and worship me'.

A little later an external circumstance came to my help. I received an assurance that the hurtful situation conveyed to me was utterly a mistake.

*

21 May 1993

How are you?

A (holding hands on the sides and in front of the upper abdomen with a movement towards the abdomen and away);

There is the movement of a force, an energy coming in, filling up, then going out, radiating.

Is it rhythmic ?

A: Yes, and it goes on all the time.

Is it the Cosmic force?

A: Something like that.

*

25 September 1993

People often forget that apart from Light, Love and Sweetness, there is immense strength in the psychic when it comes forward.

*

Mother had once told me that one can realise the Divine in the vital plane and remain there only and think 'this is it' and not move, progress any more. And then one becomes a Guru!

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Sri Aurobindo once told me, 'Keep on calling on the Mother. That would build around you a zone of peace.'  

That is what I do. Nothing enters through, not even sound, noise, unless I open the door. Sometimes something enters and attacks and then I have to deal with it.

*

I could go on, and on, and vainly try to elucidate what Amal is in relation to our Gurus. I know that no spiritual personality can be fathomed or measured. I have tried to give a glimpse of what he is in his own words. All the words quoted and the experiences narrated have either been already published or have been seen and confirmed by him.

I have often seen him to be of immense help, spiritually and psychologically, to many Sadhaks and devotees of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. He has carefully nurtured the natural talent of many persons, be it in poetry or painting or music, and has gently and subtly turned that talent in the direction of Sadhana. I am sure that he will continue to be a guide and a light to many more in the years to come.

DINKAR D. PALANDE

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