Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

5

TWO LETTERS TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND

I've received two Sister Americas as against your receipt of one Mother India. This is a rather idiotically ingenious way of saying that you have written me two letters while I have sent you one copy of our periodical. But today I am in a somewhat ingeniously idiotic mood and this very frame of mind eggs me on to hair-split between being idiotically ingenious and being ingeniously idiotic! Perhaps I may best illustrate the former by the "famous" lines of Eliot:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table....

Here the stress falls upon ingenuity and the idiot-element grins from the background. But the grin, like that of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, is all over the place and drowns the ingeniousness when Wordsworth's straightforward paradox -

The Child is father of the Man -

is metagobrolised into the ridiculous riddle spun out by Swinburne:

The manner of man by the boy begotten

Is son to the child that his sire begets

And sire to the child of his father's son.

On a higher plane - the Chubbian plane, I might say where at present you are floating since you are now studying philosophy under my friend Dr. Chubb, I may cite as a magnificent example of the first category Shankara's theory of the world as Maya, Illusion, and his call upon an unreal individual to effect an unreal escape from an unreal bondage

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into the one and only Reality that is never either bound or individualised and is too static even to effect the most unreal of escapes!

Of course, by "the Chubbian plane" I mean simply a generality: the philosophical field of thought. I do not equate Dr. Chubb's philosophical position to Shankara's.

In this field, the second category may be piquantly exemplified by the theory known as Solipsism. Here the philosopher, sitting face to face with his students in a classroom, energetically argues to convince those students that since all he can know is his own perceptions the students have no existence outside the teacher's own mind and that the classroom is another construction of his mental consciousness which is roomy enough to hold everything in heaven and earth and is the sole subject-object deserving to be classed and studied as "existence"!

Maybe, philosophy sometimes falls into disrepute because of such gymnastics and people think it better to avoid grandiose problems and just stop with such popular questions and answers as: (I) "What is mind" - "No matter!", (2) "What is matter?" - "Never mind!".

Now for a spot of seriousness. Most philosophical problems arise from a lack of comprehensiveness in vision. The two questions and answers which I have quoted at the end of the last para seem often a necessity because of the exclusivist tendency in conceptual thought. To a comprehensive vision matter and mind are not opposites prompting a reductionist solution by which either the former is a mere sensation of the latter without having an existence of its own or else the latter is an epiphenomenon, a mere byproduct, a useless halo, as it were, of brain processes. Rather, mind and matter are both the aspects of a single reality which manifests itself through their opposition as well as interplay - a reality not "neutral" in its "stuff" a la Bertrand Russell but more luminous than mind and more substantial than matter: in short, a fundamental divine Existence variously creative of its own forms. It is indeed this Existence after which we Aurobindonians

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strive and by which we hope to change matter no less than mind to a perfect instrument of a Divine Life on earth.

I think your final impression of me from this letter will be that I am not quite unlike the first American woman to come to the Ashram, one Mrs. Macpheeters whom an Ashramite correctly hit off by a stroke of Indian English which mystified even that mystic-minded old lady. He characterised her as "frivolous in the face but serious in the back"!

(6.4.1974)

It was delightful to hear from you and to have the memory of you conjured up. Yes, those were indeed rich days in 1975 when you used to come and have a pretty pow-wow with Dr. Chubb and me.

Dr. Chubb seems to have given you a very vivid picture of me after my leg accident. The moving about by pushing a chair forward and being a six-legged creature safe from all tosses was so enjoyable that I sometimes thought I would adopt it even when my leg had recovered. Now I am out of plaster and practising again to be Plato's "featherless biped".

Mention of Plato brings me to your awe-inspiring programme of learning. With the subjects you have mentioned I'm sure you will soon be fit to rattle off a series of articles of your own on subjects like Teilhard de Chardin. I am glad you are following closely my own dissertations. If there is any point in them that specially makes your grey cells go radioactive, please do discuss it with me.

You have written of the ease in acquiring knowledge and the difficulty in acquiring wisdom. I suppose that when one goes on filling gaps in one's education and yet feels not only that gaps still remain to be filled but also that all knowledge is itself a big gap, one begins to be a little wise. One grows wiser and wiser as one more and more feels that this gap is a strange glow and that "a mystery we make darker with a name" (as Sri Aurobindo puts the situation) is trying to come through. Perhaps wisdom begins to grow really concrete

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when the gap is felt to be God-shaped and becomes a hushed expectancy and then an intense receptivity of the unknown Beauty which the heart must love before the eyes can see.

Things in Pondicherry are moving as usual. Does that amount to saying they are not moving at all? Perhaps the right way of putting it is that they are moving as if a stillness and an immobility were on the move. This reminds me of the Isha Upanishad's declarations:

."One unmoving that is swifter than Mind, That the Gods reach not, for It progresses ever in front. That, standing, passes beyond others as they run.... That moves and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That also is outside all this."

Yes, such would be the true report of the life here and of its seekings and its arrivals.

But let me whisper in your ear - or, as the Upanishad would say, in the Ear behind your ear - that life in the Ashram would be a little brighter if a certain face with a notable nose and a certain head with the surprising hair-do of a Roman Senator were to mingle as a foreground feature with that Aurobindonian vision:

Calm faces of the Gods on backgrounds vast,

Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes.

In passing, may I point out that the word "marvel" (singular) instead of "marvels" serves a fine poetic-spiritual purpose? "Marvels" would provide a general suggestion of great suprising features waiting to come out to us from the "infinitudes". It would not tell us what they are: it is not directly revelatory. The singular term reveals directly that the "infinitudes" themselves are a "marvel". Thus their presence goes home to us straight. Here is a masterly stroke of poetic-spiritual subtlety.

(23.1.1975)

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