Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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You have become a storehouse of creative life, fissioning the human to set free the divine within and fusioning the human and the divine to bring about the super-person ahead. Then there is the energy evoked - energy to go through a car-journey and, instead of resting, sitting down to type out a scientific passage and interspersing it with mystic hints and glints. I used to be like that once - coming to Bombay by train from Pondy after two and a half days' run and immediately getting busy penning a long letter to my associate editor and fellow sadhak in Pondy on the philosophical implications of modern physics.

What is this about it being "wonderful to be with you, near you, at your feet, just as the doctor ordered"? I think the extraordinary doctor must have read symptoms of "poetic pains" in you and recommended the metrical feet — the iambs, trochees, anapaests, dactyls, spondees, pyrrhics - on which I move towards the Master of the Mantra. But haven't I told you not to bother about prosody? Perhaps, as an orthopaedic surgeon, you are interested in the non-prosodic long-short, stress-slack, which my feet exhibit with their semi-paraplegic oddities?

Your scientific quotation interested me in parts, for the ultimate hang of it somewhat eluded me. Anyway, the most important bits were your occasional interpolations, your running off into "Hari-bolo" - "the God's name" - without landing in Hari-boloney as often happens with misguided modem enthusiasts. The suggestion of a hymn to Indra is a little opaque to me, but I appreciate the remark about Grace on why "transformation is so essential to contain 'Grace' ". I would put the matter thus: "Grace comes God-knows-why (the Rigvedic Rishi might have said 'Perhaps even He does not know!') but we must not receive it as merely an enrapturing freak: we must become gracious and graceful as a result of its bewildering visits, so that we become examples

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of its victory, forms of light and love chiselled to perfection by its sudden kisses and caresses."

Your next query is: "The nescience is nearest the Divine in the 'tail-in-the mouth' snake-analogy; why couldn't it go in reverse gear instead of 'evolving' and causing all this bother?" If the divine car could have been put in reverse gear it would have been only the positive Divine dealing with the negative Divine, and perhaps there wouldn't be much fun in that. All the fun seems to lie in masquerading as Dinkar and Amal and their likes, who don't know they are Parabrahman and Paramatman and Parameshwar and in whom the Supremos have to play all sorts of fumbling, stumbling, grumbling roles, not to mention all the teeming multitudes of prehuman parts we have played. Of course it is a strange kind of fun with mocks and knocks and shocks and blocks which the Divine alone can willingly accept, but anything that does not involve the One functioning as the Many is not in the Divine's line of action.

"Involve" is a good cue for a few further words. For it is by our being "involved" that the evolution so regretted by you has taken place. And it has taken place because the real you felt that it would never be regretted. All of us - the Many in the One - chose the arduous evolution with a grand "Hurrah" when the prospect of breaking out of the Divine's very opposite - the Inconscient - was offered to us with the lure of a darkness which was a locked light. In a freedom of soul-sight the great adventure was accepted.

A cosmological question arising here is one that does not appear to be finally settled by Sri Aurobindo's writings. Did the empyreal Superconscient project the abysmal Inconscient first and then build up the ladder of the intervening planes or did He descend step by step with those planes to reach at last the inconscient state? Possibly the solution lies in saying that this state along with the so-called intervening planes came into existence simultaneously and the ensemble allows us to regard it from two different points of view, both of which have their legitimate significances. The Superconscient imme-

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diately turning into the Inconscient and the planes taking shape to link the twins would represent the magic of the Infinite and Eternal. The Superconscient growing less and less super until it ends up as the Inconscient would represent the Infinite-Eternal's logic. Unless the Divine is at once magic and logic, He cannot be the Divine. And this combination coming into action is rendered possible by the simultaneity I have mentioned.

Maybe we are getting into too deep waters. And I will conclude with one more thought springing out of your long quotation. It is in relation to its starting-point: "A pail of water." Your parenthetical "except the Yogis and sadhaks" to the article's statement that "no-one is anywhere near getting out more energy than they put in" finds appropriate elucidation in Sri Aurobindo's remark "Aspiration and will of consecration calling down a greater Force to do the work is a method which brings great results.... That is a great secret of sadhana, to know how to get things done by the Power behind or above instead of doing all by the mind's effort."

By the way the reference to electrons and neutrons in the article reminds me of one of the startling enigmas of fundamental physics. Particles like protons and neutrons - broadly classified as "hadrons" - are made up of parts which are now known as "quarks". But their fellow particles like electrons and neutrinos, broadly termed "leptons", have not been found to be composed of parts. They seem to be ultimate, which looks like an impossibility.

Your beautiful last sentence - "O how I adore Her and how much more I have to learn to love Her" - sums up the whole glory and grope of our endless Yoga.

(21.4.1986)

Your quotation of the Savitri lines on the black Inconscient brought back to my mind one of my cheeky criticisms of Sri Aurobindo in my chosen role (quite understood by him) of a modern mind previewing the unusual poem before it would

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break into publication. I had jibbed at what struck me as abstractness in his

Something that wished but knew not how to be,

Teased the Inconscience to wake Ignorance.

When in the course of his reply he wrote of the Inconscient's being no abstraction for him and of its coming in persistently as a power in the cantos of the First Book of Savitri, and he referred to the four lines -

Opponent of that glory of escape.

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force

Into the deep obscurities of form -

I protested that here was something vivid and visual and concretely suggested whereas the earlier instance left Inconscience no less than Ignorance unvitalised despite the concretely suggestive act of "teasing". Teasing here means insistently stirring, vexing, importuning. It is a memorable usage which can well bear comparison though not with the same shade of suggestion to the Keatsian apostrophe to a Grecian urn:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth Eternity.

Here the sense is that something exceedingly beautiful in its meaningful depictions without ever saying a word for thought to fasten on takes us beyond thinking just as the feeling aroused by the idea of eternity dumbs and numbs the brain. Keats has another moment too of Eternity's teasing, though without the actual term being employed. In an Ode to Pan woven into his Endymion, Pan's temple is addressed:

Be thou the unimaginable lodge

Of solitary thinkings such as dodge

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Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain....

Unformulable mysterious movements of the mind are said to take place exceeding the range and grasp of the physical conceiving consciousness. A sort of reverse movement, not anything arising from our life but visiting it from the Higher, the Illumined, the Intuitive Mind occurs when Savitri's future father Aswapati has returned from his supra-mundane travels:

Once more he moved among material scenes,

Lifted by intimations from the heights

And in the pauses of the building brain

Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.¹

I am afraid poetic associations have carried me far from the questions you have asked. Perhaps the questions are difficult to answer and so I have sidetracked into a domain where I am more at home. I suppose the Inconscient is no passive reality but an active adverse power by which the divine presence hidden in the cosmos - like "a slumberous Infinite" - is creatively bestirred into no more than forms ignorantly obscuring the soul which is born within them. Aswapati escapes from this world of living Death - "Death and his brother Sleep", as Shelley's phrase sums up. The terms in which Sri Aurobindo expresses Aswapati's breakthrough interest me very much because of the line -

A ray returning to its parent sun -

1. I am using in the third line the preposition "in" which appears in 13 versions before the very last which has "twixt" by what is to me an inexplicable oversight completely reversing the meaning of the preceding versions and contradicting. Sri Aurobindo's often-repeated advice to quiet the mind -make the building brain pause - in order to receive messages from beyond or behind our ordinary consciousness.

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which keeps me in mind of what the name given me by Sri Aurobindo - 'Amal Kiran (The Clear Ray)" - commands me to do. My destiny is to

Climb through white rays to meet an unseen sun.

But, to fulfil it, there must come the omnipotent Grace from beyond, such as Aswapati meets in those lines about "a strong Descent" which you feel to be from the Overmind plane:

As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure

A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, A Flame,

A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,

A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,

Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs

And penetrated nerve and heart and brain

That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:

His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.

Indeed the lines are very powerful,not only luminously descriptive but penetratingly creative: the reality pictured in them takes hold of word and rhythm: the sheer stuff of their sense comes alive in their movement and vibration, and Aswapati's experience is so expressed as if it could seize the reader himself. A super-Shakespeare's vitality and vividness are here, revealing and communicating with the Overmind's blend of the immense and the intense the Divine as at once a vast Puissance and an intimate Person, bringing "stupendous limbs" and "the Unknown's grasp".

If we identify with the inspired energy of the passage, both illuminative and formative, we shall not merely feel tired of our all-too-human today but also bring closer our Aurobindonian "tomorrow".

(6.5.1986)

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It is not inconsistent with my image of you that you should have an illness of one sort or another but always I see you smiling. A perverse form of that smile is in your saying about your severe attack of sinusitis: "I suspect I even liked it." Of course you noticed the perversion and "came out of it". Still, behind it is the smile of the poet who can get the rasa, the enjoying taste, of the tragic and the terrible by his touch on the Divine's delight in all possibilities. Rembrandt's portrait of his mother in which wrinkled dejected old age is caught in a perfection of pose and pattern and pigment - Picasso's delineation of the manifold composite harmony of war's cut and slash and gruesome grotesquerie which we witness in his "Guernica": that is how the world comes to the rasa-drinker, or should I say rasa-Dinkar? And as long as you can keep a smile on your face in the midst of all sinusitis or even osteoarthritis you will not only have the artist's universal pleasure but also move towards the deep soul's unconditional bliss.

The joy that is known to giants,

The joy without a cause,

as G.K.C. puts it, not quite knowing what he was talking of, for the only giant who can have such joy is one hidden within the Divine Dwarf in our depths, the Upanishad's "Purusha no bigger than the thumb of a man", the true Soul or psychic being, who has the power to go towering towards heaven, at the same time his original home and destined goal.

Apropos of this reference I may quote to you a poem of mine which you will be the first to read. It expresses the culmination of a long-drawn-out experience and marks a crucial moment of the inner life. It was written on May 15 this year (1986) and looks as if only on that day what is said took place. Actually, it focuses with a finality a truth to which I have always been feeling my way with a wondrous warmth in the heart but had never fully realised before as the sole felicity:

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At Last

At last the unfading Rose -

Felt mine yet sought-afar

In the flowering of forms

That proved but surface-sheens.

Mirrors of a mystery

That never broke to a star.

Now wakes a sudden sky

In the centre of my chest.

Bliss-wafts that never die

Float from a petalled fire

Rooted in godlike rest.

They spread in the whole world's air,

Gold distances breathe close,

Worship burns everywhere,

Life flows to the Eternal's face.

Unveiled within, light's spire, At last the unfading Rose.

{18.5.1986)

Postscript

"Sole felicity" does not mean that one finds no happiness any more in the things of life. It means that all the other happinesses become transparent to the presence of the inner paradise, turn into aspects of it even while their individual lines are appreciated to the full and, in the process of their change, they lose their shortcomings, grow purified, allow the heart to remain free and, if they pass, there is no aching absence left.

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