Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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FROM LETTERS TO FLORENCE RUSSELL

You are right in seeing a clear sign of the luminously unexpected - that is, of the "Hour of God" - in certain world-events where parties that had looked absolutely irreconcilable have come together to create a new harmony. But much in the world still remains untouched by the breath of the Spirit blowing from - to quote a Wordsworthian expression -

An ampler ether, a diviner air,

which betokens the subtle presence of Sri Aurobindo within our gross-physical space. The Hour of God has indeed struck - in fact it struck quite a time ago - but the ears of most men are closed. The only thing that somehow has sounded on their dull tympanums is that there should be no third world-war. But it needed the terrific blasts of the Atom Bomb to get this message in. I suppose the Divine could only be declared by such blasts which represent the utmost of sound matching the utmost of silence that is the natural atmosphere of the Supreme Reality. Has not Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri that mantric line? —

The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.

The word "omnipotent" is deeply significant here, pointing to the spiritual depth of warning that has lain behind the outbreak of the threat haunting the world with its "mushroom cloud".

You have written: "I wish you would tell me what you call surrender of the ego." I would answer that there are four phases of it.

First, a calm has to be cultivated so that the usual out-leaping reactions gradually diminish until they hardly take

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place - the reactions of strong like and dislike, pleasure and pain, desire and disgust, self-exaltation and self-abasement. Secondly, these reactions whenever they occur have to be inwardly offered to the Divine: the cultivation of the calm and the offering of the reaction to the Divine have to go on side by side. Thirdly, a call has to go forth to the Supreme to bring His presence into you in answer to the offering. This presence would consolidate the calm you have cultivated and slowly convert it into the spontaneous self-existent peace that belongs to the inmost soul and to the highest spirit. Fourthly, in place of the non-reaction that got rid of the old outleapings of the limited ego positively or negatively, there will come a new activity of the nature. This activity will be one of varicoloured delight: every occasion that once caused a positive or negative play of the limited ego will now become an interplay of the Divine with Himself. There will be no disturbance of any sort m the being but a smiling search for the Divine's progressive purpose in whatever situation stands before you. The outward aspects of the situation would not seem all in all; they would be merely the channels through which the Divine would work upon your inner self instead of upon your surface ego. Nothing will disturb you - what caused "irritations" and "disappointments" will be the Divine's strange touches - paradoxical happinesses, because your whole attitude, your entire pos-ture of confrontation has changed. Most probably, even those forces that attempted to irritate and disappoint you will give up their game and change their dealings with you.

♦

What a question to ask - whether you should humbly bow to me or humbly bow out!I have never desired to assume the guru's grandeur nor aspired to stand in any sort of unique splendour. You are always welcome to be by my side on an admired equal footing and if you wish to bring in anything like "bow", you can exercise the right to "bow-wow" at me

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whenever I myself seem a little dog-matic.

Your Catholic friend who read my letter to you and was astonished that a heathen from India could write like a Catholic - your friend is not to be blamed too much as an ignoramus. The usual impression people get of India is as of a land where all kinds of funny or weird creatures are taken as deities - say, an elephant-headed pot-bellied Ganesh riding on a mouse or a hanging-tongued fierce-eyed Kali with a necklace of skulls or a Hanuman with a monkey's face and tail. At a little less fantastic-seeming level, there is a Shiva with matted hair and a bull for his mount or else an Ardhanarishwara whose body is male on one side and female on the other.

Of course there is a symbolic imagination at play in these figures, not to speak of subtle actualities inspiring that imagination to perceive a many-sidedness in the unitary Divine Being who is at the same time an impersonal infinity of omnipotent peace self-multiplied endlessly and a super-personal eternity of omniscient love with innumerable soul-forms of his own to be interrelated. The experience of this Divine Being, even the vivid concept of it, give not only a proper meaning to the diversity of religious modes in India but also a true sense to the variety of religions in the world. One comes to see Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Zoroastria-nism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in their specific qualities as well as in their combinations, in a way that none of them by itself can see its own attributes. For, here is an all-inclusive harmonising vision instead of an outlook which sees itself in opposition to other outlooks.

I would expect none of these single-truth religions to even arrive at an adequate idea of the Indian spiritual phenomenon - except where a particular facet of the latter's complex Kohinoor corresponds to its own slanted seizure of the inner light. What I wrote struck a sympathetic chord in your friend's mind. If I had dilated on the six-armed dancing Nataraja or on Vishnu reclining upon the Snake Ananta and watching a blue lotus springing out of his navel, the good

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chap would have goggled.

Perhaps you will say that I am so enthusiastic about the Indian spiritual phenomenon because I am an Indian born to it. Actually I am not such a dyed-in-the-wool Indian: I was born a Parsi Zoroastrian, brought up in a single-truth religion like any Christian or Muslim or Jew. I arrived at the Indian synthesis by a partly natural and partly willed process. And, having been single-truthed for nearly 20 years, I am not oblivious of the several fine attributes of an early creed like mine. Each of the non-Indian religions develops to an exquisite point one or another aspect of the Universal Reality. These points are worth appreciating but their essence can be caught without our being limited to them. To go beyond them is not to run them down. To run them down would signify that one has not genuinely gone beyond them, since running down any religious outlook is precisely a defect of the single-truth creeds. All the less would I be out of tune with a western creed like Christianity. I have been enormously westernised and my whole education took place in a Roman Catholic school and college run by European Jesuits.

More and more people are being "Indianised" in the higher sense of the word - I say the higher sense because everything in the outer India is not desirable, nor has it been desirable at all periods of the past.

*

We have heard of the fall of Rome starting the Dark Ages, and the Fall of Constantinople beginning the Renaissance, and the Fall of Paris commencing the horror of the Hitlerite Festung Europa. But nothing has moved me so much as the Fall of Florence a few weeks before, initiating God-knows-what new era of inner history and soul-development. It needs a never-forgetting Florentine like Dante to plumb with the triple rhymes of his Divina Commedia the profound cadence of this unexpected movement from vertical through

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slanting to horizontal. Corresponding to his terza rima, there is his threefold adventure in the Beyond: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Face to face with the recent catastrophe in Chicago, perhaps he would pen a Divina Tragedia and trace not an ascent but a descent from Florence's paradisal straight posture to a purgatorial downward bending and then the infernal nuisance of a thump on terra firma.

Not being as open to inspiration, whether soaring or plummeting, I can only mumble in plain as well as pained prose my grief at the thought of a most valued friend suffering "a sprained left ankle and a long gash in the right leg". But your saying that you imitated me makes my heart less sore, for a great feeling of being near and dear to you sweeps over me. And when you write that you are "happier over things" as a result, I mark the Divine's Hand using every fall in life to carry us higher than before — by a short cut through "a long gash" and by a sudden turn of the path through the surprise of a sprain.

I am not such a big Yogi as you think, but Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have lifted me a wee bit above the deceptive exteriors of life. Sri Aurobindo has put a little light into my mind so that I may see beyond the surface of things and catch an ecstatic glimpse of the Divine's subtle significances and symbols. The Mother has instilled into my heart a little sense of secret sounds enabling me to seize enchanted whispers of the Mantras that lie behind people's lives and seek expression through their hopes and reveries and loves. That is why I could recognise in you from almost the start a dreaming and a daring which were affined to my own inner self.

I might say that while Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aimed at making a great Yogi out of a budding poet they succeeded only in making a wide-eyed poet out of a tyro Yogi. But this success, though falling short of what should have been, was sufficient to clap a pair of pinions, small yet sure-beating, onto my far-from-Atlantean shoulders - and it has freed me from the superficial as well as from the humdrum.

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You need not feel sorry for having written to me of your Catholic friend's comment. I have not misjudged his intentions at all. Perhaps my analysis sounded as if I had suspected a condescending attitude in him. But I can well believe that there was no such thing and he was merely happy to find a clear Christian note in my Indian utterances.

*

Your gift is most welcome at the moment, though I'm not yet en route to the gloriously tragic stage of which Wordsworth speaks -

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

Maybe I have escaped that fate because of not being "mighty" enough - and thank God for that, for our aim is not to be mighty in the traditional way but to be a channel for - to quote Wordsworth again -

The light that never was on sea or land.

To attempt a paradox, I may say that in however obscure a manner we are meant to be mirrors of a luminosity that has not yet established its reign on earth, a supreme radiance that has never come down so far and whose one spark would be more precious, more potent than the most wide-spreading fame and name and flame the world has known. What I speak of is the transcendent Truth of things the Mundaka Upanishad dazzlingly glimpses in the Mantra as rendered by Sri Aurobindo:

There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but a shadow of that brightness and by its shining all this shineth.

If one can catch even in a single short poem the full force of

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this unmanifest grandeur, one would be more loyal to one's soul than if one out-Shakespeared Shakespeare and knocked Homer into a cocked hat.

I'm sorry I have been somewhat carried away into a bit of highfalutin'. Old Bill of Stratford, from whatever heaven to which his "poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" may have carried him, will send Amalward a sceptical smile, and the "blind bard of Scio's rocky isle" may thunder down from his empyrean a peal of Jovian laughter on my upstart head.

Your fantasy of striding life's stage - which the author of the famous speech beginning "All the world's a stage" would have read with interest - made exhilarating matter for me also. Both my mind and heart accompany your various roles: that's the artist in me speaking. But my soul is there too - and it is there to tell you that the rift you imagine between Yooga and the life you would like to lead through so many characters ranging from Brunhilde to L'Aiglon doesn't really exist. I mean the Aurobindonian Yoga of the Supermind. Don't you know that Supermind is Super-Brunhilde, Super-Duse, Super-Bernhardt, Super-L'Aiglon, Super-Mozart and what is most vitally important - Super-Florence? It is not the denial of passion and colour and music, but, as some Super-Amal hidden within this poor aspirant has written in lines which I have already quoted to you once and which Sri Aurobindo considered revelatory,

Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line

Where passion's mortal music grows divine.

This is what Sri Aurobindo calls us to, for the goal he sets before us is not Divine Indifference but the kind of divini-sation my couplet sings out. And remember that it is a couplet - it is no lonely line, it is two rhyming and chiming dancers, a pair of inseparable inspired companions across whose being there is the play of a heat that is heavenly. Yes, a "play" which does not cast away the stage over which you would stride with "fury and fervor" but lifts it to a height

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where Godhead is just the last stage of Man being truly himself.

*

The two cheques to Mother India which you had to cancel are still wanderers like Demeter searching for the lost Persephone - the latter's role in this case being played by a less gorgeous personage, though one may not go so far as to dub this personage Parsi-phoney, a sheer contrast to that gatherer of flowers, herself, as Milton says,

the fairest flower, by gloomy Dis

Gathered.

Yes, I am a Parsi, as you already know, but not too much of a phoney - except in the sense that my ancestors have been in India for the last 1200 years and so may be said to have got their origin from the Iranian province of Parsa fairly rubbed off. Actually, barring distinctly Indian signs like the women's sari and a certain degree of browning of the men's skin, the Parsis of India, while never being stand-offish from the rest of the country's population, have retained their communal individuality more markedly than any other ingredient of India's multifarious inhabitants. I am tempted to write at some length on this fast-disappearing little group of a bare 100,000 members in the whole world, but I shan't let myself go at the moment. Let me touch on some matters you have alluded to.

"Dante Gabriel Rossetti" - I was delighted to see that name blaze out of your letter. Like his greater Florentine namesake, he and his work have attracted me ever since my late school-days. I have conned his House of Life as devotedly as La Vita Nuova and relished that peculiar blend of earthly and ethereal in it which would illustrate in a special manner the definition the Mother once gave of Poetry: "the sensuality of the spirit." I have enjoyed also in his verse the quest of

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unusual verbal artistry in the service of a happy ingenuity of impassioned idea. The sonnet to which you refer is an apt example of what I mean. In the early stage of my own poetic development I often found myself so "kindred to some phases of his pictorial poetry and poetic painting that I occasionally wondered whether he and I were not emanations of the same soul. A strange light was shed on my wondering when Sri Aurobindo remarked apropos of an early poem by my sister Minnie that she was surely a bom poet, although here and there were some gleams from Heine and Christina Rossetti. Minnie had not read either of these poets. But I made an astonishing discovery. I came upon a portrait of Christina done by her brother Dante Gabriel, which bore an extraordinary resemblance in facial feature, mood-expression and head-posture as well as hair-do to a photograph of Minnie at the time this poem had been written. I made a copy of Dante Gabriel's sketch and sent it along with that photograph of Minnie to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, They too were extremely struck. The likeness seemed certainly past all coincidence - and I, who had in early life asked myself whether I should concentrate on poetry or on painting, the two arts to which I had been naturally drawn by my own abilities, suddenly felt as though that pair of brother and sister, shining in the art-world of the later nineteenth century England and never quite discovering the true form of the Idea] after which they had strained, had entered earth-life again in the fulfilling time of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Maybe you too belonged to that same England and shared in the soulful aestheticism which came to what 1 may call flaming flower in the vision and work of the two Rossettis as well as Walter Pater, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

*

I feel rather worried about the condition of your eyes. I can't quite make out what exactly is wrong. It seems sometimes

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you can read and sometimes you can't. Why this fluctuation? Cannot some expert opthalmologist handle your peculiarity and give you the type of glasses you need? Surely, being a sexagenarian doesn't make your case hopeless?

You speak of a "vision-problem" which does not appear to refer altogether to your physical eyes. But surely, as far as I can see into you, your inner vision is absolutely unblurred. It is more clear than that of most people connected with the Ashram. In all that you write I can feel your love for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and your soul's sight of them as the Incarnate Divine. You are a wonderful and inspiring individual. It is great luck to be in touch with you. At the moment you are in a bit of the blues because all around you is so much ignorance, so much preoccupation with sheer Matter. But you have sufficient strength inside you not to let this darkness sweep over you. It can never put out the light within, but even the outer mind need not get depressed because of the encroachment of these shadows. Really they are shadows and not substances, however solid they may look. And if you glow with the conviction that the Mother's Grace is operative all the time not only will you withstand the clutching approaches of ignorance but you will also suffuse the surrounding blindness with a scatter of stars lit from the sun that is your soul. Just think that you are in the midst of all this gloom because this gloom requires your presence. Once you feel that destiny, the gloom itself will start feeling the real You. And remember that all of us here with whom you share the eternal sense of the Mother are with you in the in-world. You are never alone and can never be defeated. I am reminded of a stanza in a poem of mine entitled 'Triumph is All". The lines run:

Forever in my heart I hear

A time-beat of eternal bliss.

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be thy kiss.

The "immovable rock" within you of which you speak has

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two faces: one is a reflection of the inertia of matter, the other a reflection of the Spirit's changeless eternity. Within the former the latter is latent. When the latent becomes manifest you'll be able to say what a poem of mine on the Himalaya makes that mountain say:

I have caught the Eternal in a rock of trance.

Sri Aurobindo considered this line "superlative". Brood on it, let it live within you, evoke in yourself the truth of it, and soon you will feel not that you "can't budge" but that the Himalayan Sri Aurobindo will never budge from you.

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