Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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Your whole Holland-experience - a varied bitter-sweet -strikes me as an inevitable phase in your development, carefully planned in all its kaleidoscopic complexity by the Divine. 1 don't think anybody could have prevented it. You have grown considerably - numerous eyes have been opened. Some of them forcibly, others flowerily: you appear to be like a little Argus, half interested in the hundred directions suddenly shining into view, half bewildered by their seemingly different calls. What is to be felt with a clarifying keenness is that all these varied vistas are really radiating from a single centre in the depths of your heart and that each of them leads to the same wide circumference - the Mother -surrounding your life like an embrace from some infinite unknown. When you succeed in feeling these two truths, the little Argus will mature and realise something of that infinite unknown within himself and exclaim to the Supreme Beloved in the words of the young Aurobindo romantically mysticising in some clear evening at Cambridge in mid-spring:

My spirit is a heaven of thousand stars

And all these lights are thine and open doors on thee.

(4.10.1986)

There are a number of good insights in your letter: (1) "a lover's right never to be satisfied", (2) "I want to return to her my right to choose", (3) "Your strength is mine and if ever You let me go I will fall like a stone." Your "fresh 'free verse'" is also insightful in the lines:

Like yesterday's delicious dinner,

Like the day before's dear gods,

Like last month's tears and smiles.

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Like last year's spring and winter,

Like friends of times gone by,

All things of old and gold

Have their special place,

Their particular slot,

Not anywhere else, and yesterday's bliss

Could be today's curse.

Numbers (1) and (2) of what I have called "good insights", as well as the second line in the above free-verse are especially fine. The first statement might be a suggestion of greed, but the word "lover" lights it up and frees it from the penumbra of egotistic grumbling. A sunshine from the depths is in that word and the term "satisfied" has a sort of smile in it which shows appreciation and happiness at the same time that the lips seem to be open with a mute plea for more nectar. No. (2) has a couple of bright truth-points - the realisation that you have been given "freewill", the right to choose and that it is out of your own heart's wish, your liberty to say "Yes" or "No", you offer yourself to the Mother and place your life in Her hands to do with you what She desires in her wide wisdom. The phrase "Like the day before's dear gods" indicates the Infinite ever ahead of us and the ever-progressive movement of life, as pictured in the sestet of a sonnet of mine:

For the Divine is no fixed paradise

But truth beyond great truth, a spirit-heave

From unimaginable sun-surprise

Of beauty to immense love-lunar eve,

Dreaming through lone sidereal silence on

To yet another alchemy of dawn.

The phrase concerning "gods" is particularly profound: the others which bring in "dinner", "tears and smiles", "spring and winter", "friends" suggest that new things have to come into the picture but not necessarily that these novelties

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would be essentially better, whereas the one about "gods" sparks off the sense of the supreme and the paradox of the "supremer", which is the core of true progress - the seeming highest giving place to a still greater peak and so on in an astonishing succession of epiphany-splendour and initiation-secrecy. The adjective "dear" for "gods" is also significant. While the context directs us with the noun to the perennially largening objective dimension of spirituality, it makes us aware by this adjective of the increasing subjective largeness needed: the Yogi has constantly to outgrow the cherishing, the devotion, the worship which his heart offers, he must be ready to give up the degree in which he held as precious to himself whatever he took to be the Ultimate and go in for an intenser love exploring the Unknown for a marvel sweeter and sublimer. The adjective and the noun form a simple spontaneous combination lit with inevitability.

I was particularly struck by your light-hearted and at the same time light-packed phrase: "the route I have taken on this hard but fun-filled road." You have hit off to a profound nicety the character of the Aurobindonian Yoga. We have been summoned to accomplish a labour that can make a Hercules blanch and yet the summons is from the mouth of a Heavenly Humorist who can make the yoke which is implicit in the term "yoga" rhyme most naturally with "joke", for there is abundant play (yes, play and not only action) of grace, a smiling sweetness with surprise after surprise of sunshine for us when all seems gloomy and the way ahead obstructed. This sunshine can indeed be fun-shine.

(27.10.1986)

You are right in thinking that continuing on the path of Yoga is itself a progress even if no markedly impressive development may have been there. Not only is the persistence a sign of progress but the Force at work is such that we are bound to go further and further, however subtly and imperceptibly, just as we can't help being carried on in the earth's rotation

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around its own axis and the earth's revolution around the sun as well as its journey forward with the whole solar system which is moving towards the star Vega in the constellation Lyra. What is essentially required to ensure this automatic Yogic advancement is a basic resolve to do one's best- one's fairly feeble best in most cases - to be sincere in self-dedication to the Divine. Then in the course of time the hidden benefits will break out, like flowers from seeds secretly lying in the earth and waiting for sun and rain to call forth their colour and fragrance.

Yes, Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga lays out a superb programme. Even to traverse in mind the wonder after wonder of spiritual experience it discloses to the aspirant is to attain a permanent opening - an empty space, no doubt, but one which constantly invites the multi-splen-doured Plenitude. The Synthesis is most helpful if we can feel that Sri Aurobindo is not merely describing states of the Spirit: he is letting these states communicate themselves in a mode of expression proper to prose-writing. Prose has to be true to the gods of clarity and order so that the thinking mind may be able to grasp things and discern a system in them, but it has also to convey something of the beauty of whatever it holds forth as truth. Prose and not only poetry is an art, and the sense of perfect form is to be kindled by it. This is what Sri Aurobindo does to an extreme degree and in doing so with an "overhead" afflatus he brings to the intellect simultaneously a moving series of lucid concepts and a call to the imagination to prepare an inner silence in which these concepts may serve as shining shadows of realities beyond the intellect's ken, realities waiting to become life on earth.

Regarding contact with those who have passed away, I believe that occasionally we do meet them in the early period after their departure. Since departed sadhaks and sadhikas live with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and since the latter two are established on the subtle-physical plane our dead friends are also there. But I conceive that they are absorbed in being with the dual Divine and do not bother to be concerned.

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with earth-affairs. Only rarely will they make contact with us in their form-aspect, though psychically they may be reached by us in the midst of their absorption. In not more than four or five instances, when I have dreamed of my wife Sehra in the last six years, could I feel sure she was concretely with me.

What you say about poetry has always been my view. I hold that all poetry is "dramatic" in the sense that the poet does not express merely his experience. I use "experience" in a wide connotation. I mean not only actual incidents but also actual suggestions - suggestions coming both from one's own sensory or mental movements and from books, particularly from poems of others when a phrase or an image in them starts proliferating in one's consciousness. Whatever the stimulus, the creative faculty begins drawing to oneself all sorts of relevant features extending the contents of the experience, deepening their original shock-surprise, enriching their initial glow of thought and warmth of feeling. The seeing mind and the responsive heart link up with what Sri Aurobindo calls the "soul" in his Future Poetry - not the psychic being as such, to which his later directly Yogic writings give that name, but the inmost intuitive self in whatever plane the poet is poised on. If we like, we may consider this self the psychic being's representative within that plane. Of course, infiltrations from the "overhead" also take place, mostly getting coloured by the atmosphere of one's habitual inner level. At times, poetry is "dramatic" in an extraordinary sense: something from the inner or higher levels comes sheer and the poet is entirely a passive channel with no recognisable life-experience except for the general sadhana-state to spark off the "muldfoliate" expression. Many of Nirod's poems are outburts or downpours of this nature. Broadly speaking", all poetry is a god taking a cue from a man.

This cue-taking can occur independently of poetry. That is what you are after, so that every movement of life finds its profound or uplifted significance. You are asking for the

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process of this intensifying or immensifying of all life. I know of only two keys. One is the practice of a standing back - a self-detaching silence in the midst of the world's rumble and your own grumble - a reposing in some vast background studded with "calm faces of the gods", as it were,

Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes.

The other key is the simple formula: "Remember and offer." With the first key the mystery of the universal Spirit gets opened, with the second the secrecy of the true individual soul gets unlocked. I may add that accompanying the hushful withdrawal there awakes an awareness of the Unthinkable above, so that one may feel, as Emily Dickinson says, the top of one's head blown away. One may not always be able to assert, with Sri Aurobindo,

My consciousness climbed like a topless hill,

but one may have the intuition of an enormous sun-blazed or moon-glinted or star-tingled dome replacing the usual feel of one's thick-wooded or sparse-growth'd or desert-bare skull. If one succeeds in standing back in a poised spread-out serenity and then from the centre of that circle whose circumference tends to be everywhere one makes the continuous gesture of giving everything - one's own inner movements and the outer to-and-fro of "time's unrest" - to a gracious Presence whose finite form of human-seeming loveliness with yet an endless aura of the unknown stretches out welcoming hands - if one carries on this twofold process all happenings within and without will catch a revelatory hint of some Supreme Design, some Archetypal Order waiting to be manifested. Ordinary phenomena will disclose enchanted meanings, unfold signs of a superhuman existence appearing to shadow forth the Ineffable. Thus the experience of love between human beings, with the heart beating faster in joy, could turn into that vision a la Flecker:

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A red immortal riding in the hearts of men.

Tennyson's quiet, solemn, simple representation:

Twilight and evening star

would change into that revelation made by an Aurobindonian poet intimately known to you:

The wideness with one star that is the dusk.

Small events from day to day would become apertures across which gifts of inner development would be received. All words, all acts, whether one's own or of others, would be stepping-stones athwart the flood of transience towards eternal truths,

(8.11.1986)

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