Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

11

I was delighted to get from you for the New Year the quaint coloured picture of a Lamb sitting on one of the paws of a Lion. I construed it immediately as showing the relationship of Lamb-Amal to Lion-Sri Aurobindo. The in-drawn majestic yet most forbearing and compassionate look of the Master is very well suggested. So also is that of the disciple with his wide confident smile, his eyes lit happily with a dream of the future, his big ears stretched out to catch the message of the Lord's silence. Lamb-Amal is sitting on that paw which has a wrist-watch above it, symbolising Lion-Sri Aurobindo's time-manifestation. I see that the golden Lion is clothed in green, the supramental Truth-Consciousness putting its presence into the vital world. The white Lamb - symbol of the psychicised purified being which I seek to reflect - is wearing a chequered red coat, the sign of the physical plane. In the earth-work these complementary factors are significant. So too are the different modes in which the arms are crossed. The lion has put his left wrist over his right, while the Lamb has done the opposite. If the Lion's left with the watch on it represents a time-involvement, the upper position of the Lamb's right points to an eternity-evolvement. The whole composition with its overall message of peace illustrating in a new manner a famous Biblical saying has gone home to me so much that I am going to stick it on one of my doors. When you come in the course of this year it will be the first thing you'll see on visiting me. And if it at all stands for something true as between Sri Aurobindo and me I shall consider myself worth visiting by my beloved friend. Nothing short of this harmonising of the high and the low is the goal of my aspiration.

I know that your aspiration's goal is essentially no other. So let me wish you too a New Year of all-linking all-equalling all-transforming Peace.

(3.1.1983)

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I have read the extract from Time (March 23, 1987) and given thought to your question: "Since the scientific theory estimates that the sun has a finite life (even though measured in billions of years), what is the effect of this apparently inevitable cessation of earth-life on our aspirations for the transformation of the human race and the establishment of the Divine on earth?"

Not only science but also all past spiritual tradition has considered the world to have an end. In Christianity the Second Coming of Jesus is taken as the mark of the world's end, accompanied by a resurrection of the dead and an uplifting of the resurrected bodies of the faithful into heaven after a Last Judgment which will separate the sheep from the goats, the latter going to hell, I suppose. Islam reflects more or less the Christian vision. In Zoroastrianism we find the background of much of Christian belief. After the liberation of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity by the Persian king Cyrus (559-530 B.C.), who helped them rebuild their temple at Jerusalem and whom the Book of Isaiah hails as "Messiah", Zoroastrian doctrines entered Judaism and through Judaism infiltrated Christianity. Zoroastrianism believes in heaven and hell, the soul's survival and the resurrection of bodily life at the end of time when a saviour, mystically continuous with Zoroaster's "seed", is expected, with a Last Judgment following.

In the traditional Indian vision there is a pralaya, a drawing back of the universe into the Divine after ages and ages of human history and then a new creation or rather a new projection of the universe. This process goes on interminably. According to esoteric belief, there have been seven projections and withdrawals. Now there is, in the view of us Aurobindonians, a different kind of history because of the descent of the supreme dynamic consciousness which Sri Aurobindo called Supermind. The pralaya comes because the principle manifested at each projection so far has been limited: it can progress thus far and no farther. The Super-mind-principle brings the infinity of the Transcendent and so

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an endless progression is possible, revealing deeper and still deeper ranges of the ultimate Divine. There will be no need of a pralaya. But if no pralaya is contemplated, what are we to make of the scientific theory of the sun's death and the consequent disappearance of the life on earth? Endless progression and this cutting short of the earth's existence seem to contradict each other.

However, even on the basis of science may we not hope for interstellar travel and the colonisation of one or another of the millions of heavenly bodies which astronomy assumes to have conditions comparable to our earth's? Technically, their number is said to be in the neighbourhood of 10²⁰. Science does not envisage a divinisation of man but it looks forward to immense technological development which could make man the scientist independent of the earth in the remote future. So the future Aurobindonian man, whom we may designate the divinised scientist, need have no worry even on purely scientific grounds. They will permit him to go past the extinction of our sun.

But the divinisation which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother hold out as the culminating hope in the time to come brings a transformation of the very stuff of man's physical being and implies certain powers: total plasticity, adaptability, invulnerability, plus immunity from disease, stoppage of the ageing process, freedom from the stroke of death. Along with this transformation of one's matter, there must come a power over matter in general, which could change world-conditions, affect even the stellar cycle of "contraction and re-expansion" which the Time-extract speaks of. The world in which lives Man turned Godlike cannot remain subject to the laws we scientifically regard as inexorable. Not only his own being but also his environment will be subject to the Divine Will set active fully in the universe of time and space. The physical sun is a symbol of the highest supramental creative and transformative Light: when that Sun of the Truth-Consciousness which is apostrophised in the Rigveda and the Upanishads and which the descent of the Supermind a la

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Sri Aurobindo is meant to make completely operative, even "the fate of the sun" which science predicts according to its present observations cannot be binding. Such a prospect seems incredible, but it is nothing beyond conception by the logic (which is also the magic) of the Integral Yoga.

(31.3.1987)

P.S. After writing this I came to read, in some detail, about what is known as the Anthropic Principle in physics. It is a speculation put forward by some scientific thinkers and they claim that on the basis of it one can make certain predictions which are testable and thus fall within the purview of physicists. A spur to it was given by the role of the "observer" in current quantum mechanics, a role which is sometimes taken to be such that, in a world which is subject to probability instead of classical causality, the observer, by choosing a particular set-up of observational apparatus, gets a particular picture of the physical world realised: he thus creatively turns its probability into a fact. Whether this concept of his participation in the nature of reality be correct or not, the Anthropic Principle has a philosophical basis, on the strength of which it peers both back into the past and forth into the future.

The principle takes into account the plain truth that the physical universe must be so built as to permit the observer's physical existence as an intelligent being. William McCrea, a TLS reviewer, has rightly said that," roughly, the Anthropic Principle states that we cannot discuss the universe at all unless the universe includes us. In other words, the universe is what it is because we were to be its end-product. This view specially crystallised when astrophysics found a number of near-coincidences of pairs of astrophysical quantities which "happened" to enable crucial processes to proceed in the way they do. If the minute difference in size between these quantities had been the other way around, these processes would have been impossible and the scientists would not be

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in existence to know it. The near-coincidences depend on the values of what are termed the fundamental constants of physics such as the masses of the hydrogen nucleus (proton) and of the electron, light-velocity, the gravitation constant, the electron-charge, Planck's quantum constant. We are told that in addition to the constants there are necessarily a series of parameters serving as initial conditions for the universe. Observation shows the number of radiation quanta to be about a billion times the number of "baryon" particles like the proton, and this is one of the parameters. It determines the cosmic epoch at which galaxies can form and finally plays a part in the various numerical coincidences crucial for the evolution of life whose ultimate outcome is the observer "anthropos".

The Anthropic Principle in its strongest formulation argues not only that the universe has an age by which alone the phenomenon of man can emerge from the initial "big bang" on a carbon-based life-evolution: it argues also that this emergence would have no sense if humankind were to die out before its full potentiality is realised. Man will continue to live and progress and expand his knowledge and power: he will gain control of all matter and forces and, if necessary, spread into all space. Catastrophic warnings of the sun's death will naturally have no meaning at that stage.

Such a consummation has been called the reaching of Omega Point, after the terminology brought into fashion by the priest-palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard spoke of the evolution of a collective being in the far future, a super-organism with a super-consciousness compassing the whole world. But, under the influence of orthodox Christian theology, he envisaged a world-end when the souls sharing the super-consciousness will break away from matter and pass into a non-spatial non-temporal dimension. The Omega Point postulated by the Anthropic Principle is unlike Teilhard's, a perpetual fullness of being within the framework of time and space.

There it makes contact from the scientific side with the

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vision of the Integral Yoga. But there is no sign in it, as there is none also in Teilhard's "super-consciousness", that man the mental being will go beyond the utmost possibility open to mind itself. A widening of the mental consciousness and its achievement of technological mastery on a grand scale are the limits of its prognosis. But, if the cosmos is anthropos-oriented and if life emerges from matter and mind from life, there can be no necessary terminus with mind in however wide and powerful a form: a future Supermind is naturally on the horizon of this cosmos. Again, an anthropos-oriented cosmos must have behind it as well as within it a secret divine dynamism working itself out through conditions that are a total concealment of it in sheer matter-energy. The Anthropic Principle must make room, as in Sri Aurobindo's vision, for a principle of Theos, the hidden drive of a pre-existent God through an evolving universe whose aim is a divine fulfilment, the varied manifestation of One about whom we may aver in Meredith's words:

His touch is infinite and lends

A Yonder to all ends.

(31.3.1987)

I like the lines you have quoted from Rilke after a search in him for the "overhead" expression-

Dir wird die Stille im Weltall niemals verkundet,

Wie sie sich schliefst um ein Wachstum -

lines which you have tentatively put into English as

Never are you informed of the cosmic silence.

As it envelops a growth.

Rilke is full of subtle suggestions. What I gather here against the background of my general sense of the Rilkean

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Weltanschauung is something like: "Whatever develops on earth is secretly protected and fostered by a cosmic Presence. This Presence is a vast and deep silence by which alone all earthly expression gets its true and full form, but we hardly know of its nourishing ministry: it never obtrudes but with its all-accepting embrace both serves and moulds us. The more we become aware of its pervading mystery, the more we realise our authentic self, and grow into the archetype of our being which waits within that ever-watchful stillness like a guardian angel."

The series your German publisher has started is very fascinating. The choice of Meister Eckhart as the first to be compared with Sri Aurobindo is well made, for Eckhart is the one great figure in European mysticism who comes nearest to the Eastern Wisdom. Some of his formulas are pure Upa-nishad, beautiful variations on the theme of tat twam asi -"thou art That", God as the human soul's own essence and ultimate self. But these formulas which frightened the orthodox church and laid their maker open to the charge of heresy are not the whole of Eckhart. They express the Eckhart who wrote in German. The Eckhart who wrote in Latin manifests another shade of spiritual vision, the more typically Christian sense of the soul as distinct from God even when united with Him, enjoying a permeation by Him and not an identification with Him. The fact is that this sense is not actually a contradiction of the other but has been deemed such by the narrow divisive Schoolman-mind. In India it would be taken as one phase of the many-sided Truth, a shade of difference from God in order to feel the rapture of adoration and love. Shankara who was a supreme Monist was yet an impassioned singer of hymns to the Divine Mother. The Gita presents us with Brahman-Nirvana as well as with the creative Ishwara and even this Ishwara's human incarnation so that a prominent part of its message is happily summed up in the Savitri-]ine:

Living for Me, by Me, in Me they shall live.

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An appreciation of the two sides of Eckhart and an attempt to reconcile them would be a great step forward in bringing Christianity closer to Oriental and especially Indian mysticism.

By the way, my derogatory reference to the Schoolman-mind was somewhat overdone. It was not incapable of piercing beyond obvious divisions. It recognised a faculty which could do the piercing. The mind's analytic movement and its resort to logic was attributed to "ratio", the purely rational power. The power to see unities was termed "inte-lectus", an overall grasping - what would more appropriately be termed an intuitive movement as distinguished from the discursive, the movement by which wholes are recognised not by an outwardly additive activity but by an inwardly perceptive comprehension of the universal in things. It is such a comprehension, an intimate light of knowledge, that in connection with the highest religious turn Spinoza designates "amor intellectualis Dei" - "the intellectual love of God" - the mind's ardent seizure of the underlying unifying Reality by a direct intuition which is at bottom the One knowing the One or, in Plotinus's phraseology, "the return of the Alone to the Alone". But the Schoolman frowned on Spinoza's pantheism and refrained from extending the function of the "intellectus" to seeing God as the highest Universal, the supreme common factor and essence of all, whether as Pantheos or as the transcendent Deity who is not exhausted by the cosmic existence. To the medieval thinker God's omnipresence in the cosmos was not by a secret substance in all but only by a secret action and the transcendent poise was of a Creator who did not make the world from his own self but by a bringing of it into existence from nothing. The Indian vision is of a supra-cosmic Infinite who emanates or looses-forth the world out of His own being in whatever form He chooses.

Of course Eckhart is not the sole thinker possible for comparison, Leibnitz, Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, Steiner are others who in various ways can provide a hold. Nor is

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Heidegger so far astray as you believe from the Aurobindonian line. His Being and Time, an early work, with its stress on Angst - anxiety — over one's finitude may not seem fruitful in the Aurobindonian context, but the Heidegger of 1927 was not the same as the Heidegger of 1953 when his Introduction to Metaphysics appeared. Here, as if feeling an incompleteness in his old theme, he widens it out to its true shape, and thus, without annulling it, he plays on it a momentous variation. I may cite something I wrote ten years back:

'To the mature Heidegger, we have fallen out of Being, we have lost Being's 'nearness and shelter'. We run after one thing or another instead of seeking the 'Ground' through which all things are - Being in its own self. Being that is the 'Holy' (Heilig) and that is 'Healing' (Heilen) and is 'Whole'. We should not get lost in the superficial mass-man nor in the outer life's disconnected 'beings' - 'from genes to spaceships', as a commentator puts it: an inner return to a direct experience of the one Being should be our pursuit. The negative inner intensity of each of us existing 'towards our end', which is death, and thus facing Nothingness, has been transformed into a positive expansion of the self into its basic reality which, as the absence of all separate superficial states, is a superb Nothing.

"We must distinguish the nature of Heidegger's being from the psychological means by which it is to be attained. Those means are dreadful and dark, yet they conduct us to a different condition, one of radiant happiness. 'Knowing joy... is a door to the Eternal.' Being is associated with 'light' and with the 'joyful', Being 'calls the tune'; 'to think Being' is to arrive at one's true home. No doubt, Heidegger not only criticises technological society and the role of science: he also turns away from common religion; but, as another commentator remarks,'Heidegger has no place for God, whose absence nevertheless plays an important role in his thinking. He does not exalt human goals but sees human existence as a cult of being - a notion not unlike certain notions of God.' "

(6.6.1986)

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Reading Plotinus is indeed a very good occupation. The Enneads are an old friend of mine and, in my view, next to Plato's Dialogues they are the profoundest philosophical scripture of the West. In a certain sense Plotinus, whose source is Plato, is a river that is better than its source, for though the source is the crystalline mind, the river reflects something higher. For it is a paradoxical river and it does not flow down from the source but flows up from it. While Plato was a superb idealist, Plotinus was a master-mystic - though we have to guard against the ultra-mundane drift of his mystical consciousness and keep hold of Plato's Socratic sense that the Divine is present even in the market-place and remember always the prayer of Socrates that the outer should be brought into tune with the luminous inner. Plotinus is reported to have had an aversion to mirrors lest he should chance to see that contemptible thing, his body.

(14.7.1986)

It's good to find you in such fine fettle and at the same time a philosopher putting, as you say, your "hits" and "misses" in the right perspective. Rather fancifully I picture the 'hits" as masculine and the "misses" - as the very word suggests - as feminine. The former stand out with their forward-moving vigour, as men would: they come with a future-facing enterprise. But behind them are the subtle forces like those of women: many a Miss with sweet and silent visage bringing about a delicate deepening of our nature saves us from brashness and crudity, refines our strength for the future by a distillation of wisdom from the past. To adopt another imagery, the "hits" are the mental-vital personality, the "misses" bear a breath from the psychic being: they teach us humility and allow us time to look around and contemplate and render our dynamism selective in the goals towards which it sets its course. Once the exquisite lesson taught by the Miss has permeated the consciousness of the Mister who wants to make a hit in the world, the time to come will bear

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the stamp of the progression hinted at by the memorable close of Goethe's Faust which I may render:

The Eternal Feminine

Is Leading us upward.

I discover that my fanciful picture has terminated in conjuring up with Goethe's final phrase the presence of the Divine Mother whom Sri Aurobindo has put at the head of our human march.

(11.5.1986)

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