Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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I am so glad my earlier letter has proved helpful to you, both inwardly and in regard to your health. I have been very much concerned about your physical condition and again and again I have offered it to the Mother with intense concentration at the Ashram Samadhi which I visit from 4.30 to 5.30 p.m. every day as well as at the inner Samadhi which I carry in my heart. I am sure there is such a Samadhi within you also. If your health does not permit a flight to Pondicherry, do not feel discouraged ever. As long as the urge to fly over is present, the Samadhi in your heart will grow more and more powerful and render an actual visit unnecessary in the existing state of your body. If in my little way I have been instrumental in making more and more real in your consciousness the Divine Presence at that sacred spot in the midst of worship-breathing flowers and heavenward-aspiring incense, I feel most humbly happy in the service of our two Masters who have brought their immensity home to us by being at the same time our souls' parents.

Of late a certain method of sadhana has been taking an increasingly concrete form with me. In the face of difficulties, however large-looming, and of sensitive situations when one's self-importance is hurt, and of personal problems whether psychological or physical, the best thing to do is immediately to make an offering of the whole affair to the Mother. Mostly one tries to get the shape of the problem clearly in one's mind and then decide on one's attitude. What I am saying is that without spending a single moment, without giving the slightest thought, one must catch the sense of the problem at the place where it occurs - that is, in the region of the "funky" or "touchy" heart - and pull it off from there and push it towards the Mother, delivering it into her ever-outstretched hands or laying it at her feet which are ever-waiting to receive the world-wanderer back to his starting-point beyond time and space.

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This instantaneous gesture has to be made in a very realistic way as if one were physically plucking something from the heart-region, freeing oneself from all relationship with it. At once there will be a tremendous relief - far greater than any to be experienced if one has spent even one minute revolving the occasion in one's thoughts. The next step is not to figure out the occasion and wonder how the Divine will act. Stop bothering about it altogether - as if it had completely vanished from your life. Leave the Divine to work out the solution. I don't mean that one should sit motionless and see what happens: one should go about one's business but not expect this or that result. The Divine will do all that is necessary and you will have won a wide persistent peace. If a solution is to come, it will surely come, but often the problems that arise do not require a solution: they need only a dissolution. And the gesture I have indicated will bring it. Of course, one should not lose one's practical sense: if, for example, a medical course is to be followed, it should be followed, but whatever worrying situation takes shape has to be dealt with in this manner which is simultaneously self-abnegating and self-liberating because it calls the Supreme into immediate remembrance and unhindered action. Believe me, the results are amazing.

What you write about Savitri gladdens me a great deal. We are so lucky to have this gigantic treasure-trove of spiritual truth and beauty at the disposal of tiny creatures like ourselves. All that Sri Aurobindo did was charged with - to quote one of his happy coinages - "immensitude" and yet within this vastness there vibrates a knowledge of all our minute needs. Along with

Words that can tear the veil from deity's face

we get

Words winged with the red splendour of the heart.

The illimitable Beyond reveals a rich concern for our little

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throbbing souls and brings - as a disciple of Sri Aurobindo has said -

A love that misers not its golden store

But gives itself and yearns to give yet more,

As though God's light were inexhaustible

Not for his joy but this one heart to fill!

(By the way, the word "misers" as a verb, transitively used here, is a coinage of the disciple referred to, whom you must have recognised.) You have alluded to some passages of Savitri which you have got by heart. Some day when you have time you may tell me what they are. Knowing them I shall feel closer to your inmost being and get in keener touch with their beauty and truth in the depths of the sweetness and light that are you,

I should say "you here", for there is a "you yonder", a high-above counterpart to the deep-below Psyche, the Divine-impelled aspirant. It is the "you yonder" who is hidden in the glowing red sun you saw in your dream-vision, the bliss and fire which have to take possession of the sweetness and light already with you. Of course the sun is the transcendent Truth-Power, not exactly unquiet and stuggling, as you say, but intensly acting for the highest Self of you to break out from it and, blazing through those trees in your vision, be in close contact with the Psyche. I think the "dark tall coniferous trees" are the cosmic ignorance in us which is still an aspiration, however blind it may be, towards the luminous Unknown. They are an upward call but rooted in the earth's dense inconscience. The downward pressing sun is at once an answer to them and their conqueror. They surge towards some uncomprehended fulfilment, which, paradoxically, would destroy their present character of darkness in the very act of responding to them and fulfilling their instinctive cry. The fiery red of the sun seems to be the supramental arch-mage of the dull red of the earth. And it occurs to me that a great Force of the Divine has announced

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its coming to work on your very body. Meet it with a great calm, a wide silent happiness, a quietly self-dedicating receptivity - and whenever you take any medicine do so with a thankful awareness of the Mother making a special intervention on your behalf, taking a particularly direct hand in your treatment.

(22.11.1987)

I am always happy to hear from you, for there is always a soul-touch in your letters and the breath of deep things wafts to me from them. Sadhana means a great deal to you — in fact it is your way of life and that is why whatever you write brings the soul in me to the surface or, rather, makes the surface feel more intensely the soul which is mostly hovering there after all these years of seeking for the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with the waking consciousness. They have said, while not discouraging meditation, that to remain calm and concentrated and self-consecrated in the midst of one's occupations in life is more helpful towards our goal than being locked in a shut-eyed in-drawnness. For, is it not our goal to manifest dynamically the Divine Truth in our day-to-day dealing with the physical world? This Truth has to become a normal active part of our bodily awareness instead of remaining a static supernormal fact of inner experience. A smiling equality of attitude as the wide background of the constant act of remembering and offering - such is the state in which we are expected to be on the way to our goal, the state best expressed in a certain phrase of the Gita: "a fire burning steadily upward in a vast windless space."

Let me add that what the tongues of this fire convey to the Supreme is not only a keen "Take me, take me" but also a glowing "Thank you, thank you." For a gratitude, moving Divine-ward for all the Grace that has come to one, is a true sign of the awakened soul and the more grateful one feels the closer will one get to the infinite freedom of the all-blissful,

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all-bountiful - the "Beauty of ancient days that is ever new," as St. Augustine puts it at the beginning of his Confessions.

It is indeed good news for me that your health is better. Quite often, when I sit facing the Samadhi, a warmth from my heart goes forth, carrying an image of you in a prayerful gesture to that Silent Source of Blessings. On your part I would ask you to keep a memory of the Samadhi vivid at the same time that you invoke our Gurus. For here is something that can serve as a symbolic physical link with their subtle omnipresence. This way you will increase the effectivity of the healing Force which already your spontaneous call has set soothing your trouble. When I say "call' I do not mean that you have asked the Divine just to cure you: you have sent out your cry basically for the Divine just to come. There is nothing wrong in praying for the welfare of your body, but the core of every invocation is the appeal to the Divine to fill wholly your being and make it a humble part of his perfection. I remember those lines of the poet AE.

Some for Beauty follow long

Flying traces - some there be

Who seek Thee only for a song -

I to lose myself in Thee.

Now for your selections from Savitri.To get mental guidance from the lines is naturally the immediate response we make and even when we have profounder responses this guidance is never absent, for even the most recondite expressions in Savitri communicate a glint of seizable significance. Savitri is not what passes most often as Surrealism in Europe, over-entangled emblems or else disjointed apparitions from the subconscious. Savitri has both clarity and harmony: if we fail to get them altogether, it is because the clarity is colossal, the harmony immense - too great for us to catch at one stroke or at the start. Some purchase-point, however small, is invariably there and from it we try to fan out our consciousness into the unknown to receive the

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impact of the many-gloried Secrecy. Sri Aurobindo gives us always a visible spectrum to begin with, but it is often a pulsating pull towards the infra-red of the sheer mystical, the intricately revealing, or towards the ultra-violet of the pure spiritual, the straightforwardly revelatory. Perhaps we should say that everywhere the grip is felt of what is beyond the mind: the only difference between the two kinds of phrases is that in the latter the "overhead" power is felt mostly through the rhythm, whereas in the former it touches us predominantly through the vision. I may try to illustrate the difference. Take that favourite of most readers:

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

There is an organ-music of the wide-spreading "overhead" in the rhythm. The substance is comprehensible to every religious mind. Even a non-religious one can make out its message without believing in it. A little baffling to both is a verse such as:

Years like gold raiment of the Gods that pass.

We get a sense of the mysterious in our temporal process, making it strangely radiant by a hint of the formations of light in which divine beings appear during their courses of action in the supra-terrestrial. Perhaps a denser challenge to the day-to-day intelligence is:

Earth's winged chimeras are truth's steeds in Heaven.

Possibly as dense yet intuitively more graspable comes the line:

Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.

Half mystical half spiritual is the notation of an all-transcending experience:

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Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed

Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgement ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

The passages you have chosen are very good for practical spirituality - practical in the sense of the efforts we make to keep going on the Great Path. The heart-warming declaration -

An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives -

and its sequel are surely a tremendous encouragement in sadhana, as is the grand assurance breathing through the lines starting with

His failure is not failure whom God leads

and ending in

And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?

I have found great solace in these two phrases:

One who has shaped the world is still its lord...

A mighty Guidance leads us still through all...

The passage from

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate

to

Below, the wonder of the embrace divine

is one of the finest in Savitri, revealing the Divine Mother in magical words that can stand full comparison to what I have termed the mantra of mantras, the description of the Divine Mother's incarnation in the young Savitri, breaking upon our marvelling eyes and wondering ears with

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Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven

and leaving us ecstatically dumb with the final sweep of the Love-God's satisfaction:

In her he met his own eternity.

In this long passage comes that masterpiece of complex cryptic vision which, for all its strangeness of image and word, bursts upon us like a revel of light:

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple-door to things beyond.

Your selections from Book Six, Canto Two, excerpts from Narad's speeches, are deep-toned and such as might change one's tenor of life or at least lift one above distressing vicissitudes. Especially memorable are lines like

Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,

For through small joys and griefs thou mov'st

towards God,

the second of which creates by its long-drawn-out run of monosyllables ending with "God" the sense of life's littlenesses adding up to a sight of the Infinite, the Eternal, who from the distance pulls silently the labouring soul. (The preposition "towards" can be a monosyllable, pronounced "tordz" or "twordz",) The other passage - "Thy goal, thy road... the indwelling God" - seems a counterpart to the

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earlier one. While the latter gives the feel of outer time and space as the field of spiritual realisation, the former points inward, the "road" of days and nights leading to a discovery of the Immortal within - "thy secret self", "the indwelling God."

Book Seven, Canto Two provides you with a brief vision of the height to which our Yoga has to mount and the depth from which it has to work out its destiny. High above "There is our aspect of eternity" and towards it the "greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts" toil with help from overhead and from deep within. What is deep within is given a clear sight in the phrase about "our soul" acting from "its mysterious chamber" and this clear sight is widened when we read:

Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart

The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil...

And step into common nature's crowded rooms...

The master-key is here - the emergence of the psychic being without which the "hidden greatnesses" cannot find their full play. This key on the one hand conducts us to a fulfilment of light and power in our relations with the outer waking world and on the other hand it breaks open a way to

Our summits in the superconscient's blaze...

The long passage in Book Seven, Canto Five is dear to me also. One line from it struck me a long time ago with an "emphatic" force touching the full reality of its theme with a marvellous brevity:

This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.

A fitting close to your cullings is that cry, "O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven... And made of the body a capitol of bliss". (The word "capitol" meant originally the temple of

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Jupiter in Rome, Here it seems to connote a supreme divine habitation.) From this passage and from all else I can reach out to the centre of your Aurobindonian life: that centre is the "crimson-throbbing glow" of the inmost heart where the supreme Harmonist, the divine Flute-player, is our beloved and refuge and trail-blazer,

(8.2.1988)

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