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Quite a number of notes you have struck in your recent letters. But three in particular are felt as tones and undertones and overtones.
There are light and joy on the surface — that is the poet responding to the magic and mystery of the world, the touch of bright nearnesses, the call of hazy distances. All these are what I name "tones", the varied spectrum of waking life.
But at one end of the spectrum is the infra-red and at the other the ultra-violet. The former I point to as "undertones", the hidden cries and gropings, the restlessness of a dream-life which glimpses elusive idealities. You have caught a sense of it with impressive originality in the poem entitled "Lonely Restlessness". Usually the sea is described as full of turmoil and agitation on the surface and the depths are said to be calm. You have reversed the scene. A happy swaying rhythm rather than unrest is your sea's outer being, a kind of calm that is sun-shot and a-glimmer. Below is the great unease, the ever-searching solitariness. Not that pleasure is absent, not that the thrill of beauty is lacking. The Divine is felt here at diverse play no less than in the many-coloured outer appearance, but here are subtle and secret ways that do not lead to tangible goals, the lurings of what you designate "the touch that hurts and delights", the more-than-human which is not easy to bear because of its strange enrapturing excess of loveliness. You get scattered sips of nectar which set you always seeking: the full sweetness cannot be drained. The only solution is to go from the dreaming inner to the tranced inmost, where hides
a petalled fire
Rooted in godlike rest.
What I have labelled as "overtones" is not the Divine below or behind or within: it is the Divine beyond - to us a
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superconscious sleep, not just the sweet essence of things that is found in the soul but the vast heaven of honey overflowing to infinity. None of us has made his home there but all of us have known vague drippings, through some tremulous opening in our heads, from the golden charity pouring at all times out of the spiritual empyrean whose physical image is-d la Fitzgerald's Omar "-that inverted bowl we call the sky."
Now to your personal problem. It has two aspects. You are restless because you are lonely - a great gap made by the loss of a companion to your mind and heart not only on the human level but also on the level of the pilgrim of Eternity is still acutely felt. Then there is the second aspect. You are lonely because you are restless. The unrest comes essentially for a more fundamental reason than the loss you have suffered. It comes of not having found permanent habitation in - or at least lasting neighbourhood to - the tranced inmost which does not depend for its happiness on circumstances, objects, beings, but is pervaded, permeated, perfumed by an Ineffable which is simultaneously Person and Omnipresence. Often the human heart is taken up into that profound paradise when it echoes incessantly that Christian prayer:
Change and decay in all around I see —
O Thou who changest not, abide with me!
(3.6.1986)
You must be ready for the operation or else the operation has taken place and you are on the way to a painless-knee'd existence. Somebody should devise an operation to make all movement through life painless. In a fundamental sense it has already been devised by Sri Aurobindo M.D. (Master of Divinisation) and Mira M.R.C.S. (Mother of Rapturous Caressing and Smiling), but none of us wants to be "patient" enough for the long process of being re-made. Their ability for the all-changing operation is hampered by our inability for all-changeable co-operation.
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I suppose their supramental surgery has come to earth precisely to deal with people like us who lack the power to put ourselves in their hands and can only pray to them to exercise their power to pick us up. Your appeal at the Samadhi is characteristic of the practitioner of the Integral Yoga: "Make me surrender fully and make me quickly your excellent instrument." After all, this is a Yoga of Grace and what has been brought to us is the Supreme Light and Love, the Omnipotence of the Truth-Consciousness which is not only world-formative but also world-transformative. I remember what the Mother told me when, before going on a visit to Bombay for the first time after six and a half years, I said to her: "I have only one prayer - 'Never let go your hold on me' ". She answered, "I am like a fairy godmother. I can grant whatever you want. If you tell me, 'Let me go away', I can do so. But if you ask me never to let go my hold on you I shall hold you to myself always." And indeed she has done this and dragged me through hell and high water to her holy feet.
I remember also what I said to her when there was a talk of the Supermind's descent: "I want to know only one thing. When the Supermind descends, can it transform us in spite of ourselves?" The Master replied: "I should think so." I cried out: "Then there is hope for me!" The Avatars of the Supermind have come with hope for all of us weaklings. Paradoxically, they want us to be weak - to be soft wet clay in their hands to be moulded as they wish. Somebody once said to the Mother: "How wonderful it would be if a Yogi like Vivekananda could come to you instead of poor stuff like us!" She paused for a moment and said: "People like Vivekananda would come with strong moulded beings. I may not be able to do anything with them. I want people who are not formed at all - whom I can turn into any form I like."
Down memory-lane comes another occasion to my mind. I quoted to the Mother with great admiration an epigram of Meredith's: "Men fall from God because they cling to Him
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not with their strength but with their weakness." She exclaimed: "This is clever rubbish. It is egoistic to think that one can show strength to God. One has to go to Him with one's weakness, with one's dependence on Him."
Now a last reminiscence. There was a complaint to the Mother that enough justice was not done in the Ashram: that is, the strength of people's merits was not fully attended to. The Mother remarked: "The Ashram is not a place of Justice, It is a place of Grace. If justice were done, who would deserve to be kept here?" All of us are allowed to be in the Ashram because the Divine Love overlooks our weaknesses. There can be no claim in this Yoga: we have to surrender ourselves to gain everything. Hasn't the Mother often declared: "Let me do your Yoga for you. All I am asking is: 'Don't stand in my way. Give up and I shall do all that is needed.' " The only thing we have to do is to open ourselves to the Grace constantly - a persistent attitude of being a simple child in the arms of the Divine Mother. From the little that I know of practical sadhana I would call this attitude a state of never-stopping flow of spontaneous warmth from the heart-centre to the Truth that is Sri Aurobindo and the Beauty that is the Mother.
All this should throw some light on the inner meaning of your son's cryptic-mystic rejoinder to the Catholic Sister's sympathetic observation that patients in European hospitals are very alone and that he should go with you to talk to you. His words - "Someone will always be with my father" - must have meant to the Sister that you were a very chummy sunshiny fellow who would surely attract friendly contacts. What the Sister must have understood is true, but does your son or, for that matter, do you realise that what is wanted goes beyond even his meaning of the words? The Mother is always with us and in that sense we are never alone. But are we always with her? This is the heart of the issue. We have to see that she is never left alone. Unfortunately, the Divine, in spite of his omnipresence, is generally left thus because the world forgets him and is preoccupied with other faces than
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those into which he has moulded his formless glory time and again. Not that we should shut our eyes to other faces, but we should have both sight and insight. Let the Divine look out at us from these faces and let us not be over-attached to their aspect of sur-faces. Human exchanges of affection and understanding we all require, but a glow in our depths should lead us to see - as that famous Yeatsian couplet wants -
In all poor foolish things that live a day
Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.
Your estimate of my poem "At Last" is very gratifying, but I am unable to pin down its "plane". Perhaps I am too close to it for critical appraisal. Apart from the metaphors it is a straight transcript of an inner condition and its antecedents. So at a venture I should say that it breaks out from the psychic realm through the inner mind which gives it most of its expression with just a halo of the source haunting the words. The metaphors are partly traditional partly imaginative but selected by a spontaneous sense of the details of the pervasive experience.
Your tracing of "disharmony-restlessness" to various centres is good Yogic analysis. I suppose you go by the nature of the state as felt at different places. From the solar plexus would come a powerful ache which is often at a loss"to know why the knife is turning and turning there. No rasa-taking of the pain and the turmoil in that spot, no glint of insight except rarely the feeling of inevitable fate and dumb resentment, a la Housman in a rebellious mood, against
Whatever brute or blackguard made the world.
When the heart-centre is pierced, there is either the exquisite Virgilian cry, as passed through Amal Kiran's translation (or transcreation):
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Haunted by tears is the world and our hearts by the
touch of things mortal -
or else the melancholy-mystic profound truth-seizure by St. Augusdne, which is the motto of my labyrinthine life: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." With the forehead-centre involved, Housman's mood of noble-practical stoicism is at play:
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity and shall not fail.
Bear them we can and, if we can, we must:
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
A more visionary stoicism too can find voice, I think it is best caught in a juxtaposition I once made of lines culled from two contexts in Savitri to make a sequence in which the last word of each line is picked up by the beginning of the next:
To know is best however hard to bear.
Bear: thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.
The centre at the top of the head is, as you say, incapable of restlessness. The utterance that comes from there is that superb invocation by Sri Aurobindo:
Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits
of being,
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing! Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden
Mystery, flower. Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the
marvellous Hour.
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wholly through the mind but to a considerable extent through the psychic presence at the back of the mind. That is why you experienced, along with the sense of fullness, "a kind of soft play of Her fingers". The combination of the full and the soft is typical of the Inmost transmitting the Upmost:
A flame that is All,
Yet the touch of a flower -
A sun grown soft and small.
I shall end with these lines which are themselves the end of a poem of mine.
(4.7.1986)
1 quite understand your dichotomous condition - the inner being clear and calm and enveloped by the Mother, the outer being confused, hurt and restless. As long as the inner is not lost in the outer's turmoil, you are basically safe and the shore is in sight across the swirling surge. But a quicker home-coming is promised by the fact that side by side with the inner's prayer for the outer's safe arrival the outer itself desires to be prayed for. There is no real conflict in you. There is only a passing disturbance. Within the heart of the disturbance is a smile, a faint upward curving of the lips answering to the broad Godward grin of the soul secure in Sri Aurobindo's hands. A game is being played with the mobile, many-turned, sensuous, imaginative, love-hungry, liberally self-giving, dream-pained, reality-searching Dinkar of day-to-day by the Dweller of the Depths in order to shape him into a true image of the Aurobindonian soul. You may ask: "Why is the game necessary?" The answer is simple: "The slow, intricate process of evolution." A comparative short-cut is possible if, instead of the outer self merely desiring to be prayed for, this self takes to praying on its own. When we turn to the Divine in that act of self-consecration which is Yoga and even the body seems to pray, it is not
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actually the body's prayer that goes forth; it is the inner being who is praying through the body and not only for the body. The outer self is affected, even occasionally pervaded in the midst of its frailties by the inner's light: it joins its palms in supplication to the Supreme, but what it is doing is transmitting the inner's appeal. This is indeed fine, but there comes a phase when the palms grow aware of their intrinsic existence and want to let it stream out like rays through their ten fingers to touch the Invisible and draw aside its veil and caress the immortal Beloved. That is what I understand by the opening line of Sri Aurobindo's Mantra of mantras:
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.
When the arms are not transmitters but originators, the hidden psychic element in matter has awakened. The awakening is not always a very pleasant one. A great disturbance seems to happen to the equilibrium one has attained by the co-operation of the outer with the inner. One often feels at a loss, as if one's contact with the free-flowing psyche of the depths is endangered and one is thrown out on the outer's own resources, but if one persists in the new consciousness and lets the awakened "material" psyche take its course all difficulties in the way of the Yogic life get fundamentally solved and one's home of perennial happiness is in the deep heart. This is a subject not easy to write about, but the key to a spontaneous God-centred living is there.
(14.8.1986)
Your letter of 13th August is a very significant one. You have passed through the abyss of pain and found the Mother even there. That is why you have come out of the darkness with a
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command from the Divine ending in a way which goes most home to me because 1 have always tended to do what the Mother says in it:
Feel yourself within me,
Live contentedly within my heart.
You may remember how I once told the Mother: "When I kneel at the Samadhi, I feel that Sri Aurobindo is too big to be kept in my heart. I feel that I am within him. His immense heart holds tiny me. People always talk of his being in their hearts. What do you say?" The Mother answered: "Both the experiences are valid, but perhaps yours corresponds more to the truth of things." The advantage of my experience is that one can never lose the Divine. Even if one's heart is clouded over and does not sense the Divine within it, one is still aureoled with the Divine, the whole circumambient universe is the embrace of the Supreme. Sri Aurobindo sky-high, the Mother horizon-wide enfold atomic Amal and, however blindly, he has the sense of being carried along their path of secret light to the hidden gold of their future.
Of course, this sense of their enveloping largeness does not fill the need which both of us very acutely have for the Divine's "eyes and lips and face". Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, having taken particular names and forms, can never lose them for us; but these are what Sri Aurobindo describes in his account of the young Savitri as being
A golden temple-door to things beyond.
Your other poem is full of the double aspect of the Divine, though with a greater stress on the individual side. From this stress the ending again' fans out, as it were, into a sort of saviour largeness, the small Dinkar himself flowering forth into a universal radiance, with his own personal pain turned into a Christ-like sacrifice:
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Let the flame of my pain
Warm all hearts
And remove darkness from everywhere.
A very original, even if a slightly abrupt and unprepared, close.
(17.9.1986)
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