Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

17

I feel proud to have my photo so loved and honoured. Most photos that have an appeal are better than the actual persons in the sense that a good side of them is caught there whereas they themselves are changeable and subject to various moods. I am sure I also fall short of what my picture suggests to you, but I have always tried not to be a creature of moods. One of the first requisites of the Yogic life is a certain equableness of disposition - not to be on top of Mount Everest one moment and at the bottom of the Pacific the next or at least not swinging too much from gay sunshine to glum shadow. Of course it would be ideal if one were always in the light, bringing home to people the splendour of God's creative joy or, if one is a little distant with spiritual absorption, then a calm night-sky would meet the world with star on star softly smiling out the unutterable mystery of the transcendent Divine. Anyway, let me hope I'll be able to live up to the impression you have of my picture.

The affinity between you and me which you speak of is striking if long before you came to know that a fellow named Amal Kiran was knocking about in the Ashram you had a sense of his presence. I am glad my introduction as a writer came to you through Light and Laughter and not through any of my other books. For perhaps then you might have thought me a dry-as-dust thinker and considered me rather unapproachable. Did I tell you what a sadhak once told me? He said: "We read X and Y and Z and others like them in Mother India - and only when we have nothing else to read we read you." I told him: "Well, I have to be thankful for small mercies. And that in whatever circumstances you do read me at all is God's grace enough." Under my breath I said: "Maybe it is a bit of God's grace to you also."

Your relatives seem greatly struck by my library which forms the background in that photo. Yes, 1 do have a fairly large store of books and they are on a wide diversity of

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subjects, for I have been interested in many fields of human activity and have also written books on various topics. I believe about twenty-two have been published, two are in the press and about twenty remain in typescript ready for publication as soon as the money appears out of the blue. I am not sure whether, even with the money, so many unpublished books can come out in my lifetime. Some people are generously helping me, but how far can they go? Besides, close on 84, do I have enough time left to see all my books through the press? And even if I have it for these old creations, what will happen to the new ones that are sure to be born during that period? In order that my lifetime may cover the publication of all my stock at present, I must stop writing any further. I seem to be like "Fate" in Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes and having writ

Moves on...

What you say about people's maladies entering into you is rather disturbing. If you have the power to heal, it must not be exercised at the expense of your well-being. To take upon oneself the illnesses of others keeps the sum of illnesses in the world the same. Moreover, if the healer herself begins to suffer, she may even die and then who will heal the sick? The power must be used safely. It must be something that comes from the Divine through your soul and cures people without any in-take of their troubles. Though a sympathetic attitude is helpful in opening them to you, no identification of yourself with them must take place. You have to be only the instrument. The illness must be thrown out of people by the power that passes through you. If you yourself get ill, your healing gift is being misused by a hostile force. Whenever I have had the rare privilege to cure somebody, no reaction has occurred in me. A stream from the soul has entered the ailing party and infused a "brightness" in both mind and body without bringing about any "pallor" in my own self.

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I think you are mixing an uncontrolled pity with the curative process and allowing your over-generous emotional-vital to get sucked into the person who seeks your help. This is an unhealthy transaction. Instead of the spiritual power using the human, the human uses the spiritual power in the human's ordinary terms. Not emotional-vital pity but a radiant psychic peace, communicating the presence of the Divine, has to be in play. Don't endeavour to heal: be quiet and invoke the Divine who is in your soul to transfuse light into the patient. If you can't do this, stop your healing activity until the orientation of which I am speaking takes place.

You must develop a protective zone around you. Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me about such a development. Call the Mother's presence, try to be in tune with her Will in whatever you do: then a zone of light and peace will form. Nothing will be able to penetrate your atmosphere and only what you wish to give out of your depths will go through it to people - with no unhealthy after-effects on yourself. As you are sensitive even to letters, appeal to the Divine before opening them, offer them to the Divine and keep the sense of offering while reading them. If the zone of protection is there, the psychological aura of any letter which may affect you adversely will be kept out and you will remain safe. Of course, if a letter carries the Mother's light and peace it will automatically pass through the zone into you, for it will be in accord with the vibration there and serve to increase it.

(4.6.1988)

You speak of "depression". It is something you must never accept. The Mother has told us that all kinds of wrong movements can get into one when one goes on being depressed. (One must immediately shake oneself free of gloom. And really where is the room for sustained gloom when the Divine Herself came to earth and allowed us to be Her children? Her presence is ever with us and there is no

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cause for despair. Of course, at times we don't feel quite on top of the world, but we should take care not to persist in the bottom-of-the-world feeling.) For, I have always said: "There is no hole so deep that out of it the Divine grace cannot lift us up sky-high."

Your dream-vision about your crushed head is strange but not without meaning. The particles of your brain being all separate but at the same time golden suggests that the Divine Light has touched your physical mind but its effects are not yet integrated. Their floating in water seems to imply that the God-touched particles are separate because your outer mentality is affected very much by the vital element in you which is fluid and moving in diverse directions - being subject to moods, impulses, changing impressions, passing sensations. The vital element needs some order and the mental part needs to be less dependent on this element so that it may be less dispersed. The golden light which is somewhere within you should get a good chance to assert its own power and to make steady your being and organise it in a happy pattern of self-dedication to the Divine's presence which your soul feels in the midst of all human weaknesses.

(17.7.1988)

I woke up this morning with four lines of poetry on my lips -

This scattered life, both flux and flame.

You must seize as one and stamp

As a love-letter to Eternity

From the transience of a tramp.

The lines are not a remembrance but a reminder. They are my own and they point in the same direction in general as the end of your latest letter to me. "Love" was the cry of your being, love for the universal as well as the transcendent "That" of the Isha Upanishad's ending. This "That" is hit off in a slightly different but essentially similar vein by those two verses in Savitri:

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The triune being who is all and one And yet is no one but himself apart.

The philosophy of these verses is caught epigrammatically in the single line elsewhere in the poem:

Universal he is all, transcendent none.

I say "philosophy" but actually nothing in Savitri which looks philosophical is coin of the speculative intellect: everything carries the stab of revelation and presents a pull towards realisation. If I may use some words of the Isha-quotation, "That is far and the same is near." It seems a vision gleaming in the distance, but the living language which conveys it makes us feel it like a truth already embodied by the one who has given it visionary expression, a truth whose seed is implanted by that expression into our own body for sprouting and leafing and flowering and fruiting.

My use of the word "body" takes me back to a passage in your letter which goes home to me very vividly:

"body's hold." "hold on the body," "loosening of the hold on the body." "Surrender increasingly progressive of the body to the Divine, by the soul, by the other parts and by the body itself unknown to the others": all these seem to me to be progressive stages of attaining freedom. I think of a bird, which has nearly forgotten to fly, fluttering its wings and wondering with thrill and fear at the pressure of upswinging air built up by the wings' action!

This is a beautiful passage and "surrender... of the body... by the body itself" strikes a chord which has been the keynote of my Yogic life for many months now - more and more pervadingly the aspiration of the outermost to reflect the innermost and to echo the uppermost or rather to feel

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something of its own archetype - the innermost's and the uppermost's outermost, so to speak: the "subtle body" and the "causal body" inherently belonging to them and waiting to manifest along with the subliminal self and the self that is superconscient. I know that the archetypal-physical is beyond our capacity to realise in any true sense at present, but a distant feeling of it is not ruled out and such a feeling is essential for a total consecration of our lives to the Perfect and the Absolute so that we may respond in however faint a way to the whole of that sovereign Overmind utterance by Sri Aurobindo of the Integral Yoga and not respond merely to its second, third and fourth lines:

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.

(By the way, the expression "taking" should not raise the question: "taking what?" It is an intransitive present participle and with the preposition "to" it makes the composite meaning: "having recourse to", "adopting as help", "being drawn or attracted to".)

One of the major signs of the body's direct "intuition" of its archetype would be a complete disappearance of the sex-urge. Long ago, shortly after joining the Ashram, I had for a few seconds the sense of a total sexlessness. At that time -the early '30s - the Ashram was a complex of several separate houses with their own courtyards which were connected by small "tunnels". Every evening, after the Soup Distribution the Mother used to pass through a "tunnel" from the Library House towards her own building. Dara would be carrying a hurricane lantern in front of her. I used to go ahead and wait on the other side. It was once during my brief passage through this "tunnel" that I had that sudden experience of a total sexlessness. And it was not anything negative but a wonderful crystalline transparency of being, a quietly intense

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bliss, an all-sufficient emptiness which was a rapt fullness of freedom. An initial representative of this state would be the pervasion of the emotional and sensational self by the sheer psyche, a deep happy spontaneous purity. Neither the representative nor the original is loveless or insensitive to beauty, but the drive of desire, the pull of possessiveness are gone - and, though women may remain a part of one's life, there is not the slightest physical ache for any of them.) In that blessed condition we can live out what Sri Aurobindo expresses in his "Bride of the Fire": we become ready to unite inwardly with that "living Sun", the sovereign Shakti of the ultimate Godhead. The "Bride of the Fire" is, according to me, the one whom Aswapati hails in Savitri with the cry:

O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,

Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,...

O radiant fountain of the world's delight,

World-free and unattainable above,

O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within

While men seek thee outside and never find,

Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue...

(2.6.1988)

You write: "I have one tendency - to take everything in my stride and because of that I do not very often get wonder-struck - marvel as anyone else would - don't know if that is a gain or a loss - Grace or non-Grace." To my thinking as well as a bit of experiencing, to take everything in one's stride is one of the best ways of getting ready for Yoga. Perhaps I should say it is already a beginning of Yoga, even if one is not consciously a Yogi. It implies a calm competence to meet every turn of life - not to be taken by surprise, not to lose one's poise - it implies a wisdom in the very act of being aware, an automatic understanding of the variable quality and character of the world-movement. I don't see why it should prevent one from being wonder-struck. What you

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have in mind is possibly a kind of indifference, a lack of interest, even a thick-skinned attitude. Not being ruffled or elated by whatever happens but being "equal" to all vicissitudes is not to lose one's sense of the shades of things. When the self in us - the Purusha - stands back and watches somewhat like Alexander Pope's God

Who sees, with equal eyes as lord of all,

A hero perish or a sparrow fall,

we need not, by giving up personal reactions, give up noting the distinction between a hero and a sparrow or the difference between one hero and another or how the same hero does deeds of dissimilar degrees of courage and endurance. The condition should be, on a generalised scale, akin to an artist's, who can feel beauty everywhere, in even the mud-pool and haggard old age, and depict everything with revealing line and hue, but who knows also the high notes and the low, the intensity or immensity in one manifestation of beauty more than in another. Perhaps I should say he is wonder-struck all the while yet he is aesthetically aware of the varying range of some eternal light piercing the passing show of time.

My four lines, with which I woke up on 2.6.88, I called a reminder and not a remembrance. The last word should have stopped you from asking when they were written. They were composed at the moment of waking or, more correctly, the waking moment gave them to me as a programme or project to be worked out. Yes, they point towards "integration", but an integration into the Yogic state and the main sign of it is that Eternity should be the Beautiful One to whom must be addressed all the quiverings of the heart and mind - "flame" and "flux" - which are now vagaries and wanderings in a world of finite loves and fancies. All should be gathered together in one gesture of warm self-offering and total loyalty to the Divine, (The four lines I quoted from Sri Aurobindo sum up this gesture in its fullness as well as in its fulfilment.

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His starring with "arms" and then proceeding to "Life" and "Mind" and Will-"Force" does not signify that Yoga has to concentrate on the body first. Also we must see that under "Life" the heart is subsumed as we can catch from the expression "close breast". An Aurobindonian Bhakti Yoga is mainly hinted at here, just as a Jnana Yoga a la Sri Aurobindo is touched upon in the third line and a Karma Yoga as visioned by our Master in the last. What Yoga the first line suggests may be imagined as a blend of Hatha Yoga and the Tantrik discipline. But, of course, all is to be viewed sub specie Aurobindonis. The stability and strength and super-powering of the body which Hatha Yoga aims at after a strenuous complicated labour of posture and breathing is no direct part of the Integral Yoga nor is the paradoxical purity which the Tantrik experimenter dangerously tries for. We do not attempt to raise the Kundalini, the "Serpent Shakti" from below to energise through the diverse poses of the limbs the physical organism to an occult capacity. We do not with the aid of the same Shakti fill our nerves with the erotic impulse in a new orientation which through the feminine partner evokes the sense of the Goddess filling one with an illumined vitality. We invoke the free Goddess-Power of the higher realms to descend into us and release both occult and spiritual potentialities in the body and ultimately fit it to receive the Causal Sheath of inherent immunity and immortality which carries with it an ineffable and immutable Bliss ("voiceless supreme delight"). Our Bhakti too is something beyond the emotional exuberance of the proverbial devotee turning his heart to the chosen deity: we seek to bring forward the secret Dweller in the deep heart - the chaitya purusha - which has at once the poise of Purusha and the elan of Prakriti so that there is a quiet intensity of love moving most naturally towards the Divine. Our Bhakti is activated by that speciality of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's spiritual path - the Psychic Being - the true Soul which lies behind what they term the desire-soul and which passes from birth to birth in a subtle progression and is not set on reaching

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merely some beatific Beyond like the Vaishnava Golok but is intimately connected with earth-existence. It is the core of Life - the core by which Life is able to meet "the Eternal with close breast", taking the outer heart and its bodily sense along with it as a passage for that glowing Within. Our Jnana Yoga exceeds the static vastness of the Atman-realisation -essentially equivalent to the experience of the Silent Brahman or of Nirvana - which would find its end in the leap "to fade in the Unknowable" instead of being ready to "thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite", across which the creative and transformative Supermind may sweep to terrestrial shores. The Aurobindonian Karma Yoga is not content with one's becoming an instrument of Sri Krishna's power of action: our consciousness has to receive the descent of Sri Krishna and realise Him acting as our own selves from our very bodies, not just from above them. And, along with His action, there is the experience of the everlasting Plenitude which needs no action because in it everything is already achieved and all is complete in a marvellous consummate crowning peace ("unimaginable rest").

Your astrological reflections are a little puzzling. How can the Indian system of Zodiacal signs differ so much from the western so that one who is symbolised by a bull in the former gets characterised by a horse in the latter? How can I have faith in astrology after this revelation? Of course it would be nice to have these two suggestive signs at the same time. Historically, both the bull and the horse have the honour of going back to Rigvedic antiquity and being spiritually significant as well as anthropologically meaningful. But the bull appears to be more basic to the old Aryan thought. The supreme godhead is designated a Bull, never a Horse. That is one of my grievances against the Rishis no less than against the composer of the Gita who dubs Arjuna "Bull among the Bharatas" and nothing like "Horse among the Pandavas". Sri Aurobindo, however, has given pride of place to the horse through Savitri's father Aswapati, "Lord of the Horse". In an earlier version, a whole section was called "Yoga of the Lord

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of the Horse" - and when I asked Sri Aurobindo whether this horse was the Vedic white courser Dadhikravan which ever marched towards the Dawn, he replied that it was. After my question he even wrote a long passage on the theme but found it unsatisfactory and ran a line over it, completely cancelling it.

Although the ancient Aryans are nowadays remembered most as the first domesticators of the horse, they themselves did not specially emphasise this animal - nor even the bull, for all its figuring the creative power of the Godhead. The cow was the focus of their symbolic spiritual thought. But one of the most laudatory expressions in the Rigveda connected with it has given rise to India's agelong prohibition of cow-slaughter. The Mother of the Gods, Aditi, the Infinite Consciousness, gets the title "Cow unslayable", pointing to her immortal nature, the epithet "unslayable" was caught hold of by later commentators and interpreted as forbidding the slaughter of cows. Actually, it is used as a distinguishing mark of Aditi from cows that are slayable. Modern researchers like our own Sankalia as well as western scholars like Macdonell and Keith, authors of the Vedic Index, deduce from several expressions that the spiritual forefathers of the Indian people were non-vegetarians or at least not rigidly imitative of their own cows and horses in their dietary habits.

Mind you, I am not defending meat-eating. My own natural instinct is in the opposite direction, but I have a respect for historical situations. Furthermore, the faddist identification of vegetarianism with spirituality, as if abstention from animal flesh gave one the right to the feeling of "holier-than-thou", irks me. I don't believe that even our Mother ever encouraged this faddism. I recollect her to have always been ironical in such matters.

Apropos of the cow-theme, a curious amusing idea strikes me. My birth-sign is Sagittarius, the Centaur, half man half horse. As you know, I am a passionate horse-lover. And I think I am fairly masculine, but Sri Aurobindo's name

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for me - Amal Kiran, 'The Clear Ray" - can have both a bovine and feminine overtone if we follow the esoteric reading of the Rigveda. For, according to Sri Aurobindo, the word go, connoting "cow", means also "ray". So I could be addressed as "The Clear Cow"! I suppose I thus get assimilated to the Krishna-legend and become a part of his herd and would stand out by being clearly recognisable as his ward and by being clear in recognising him as my leader. There is also the Vaishnava fancy that if Krishna is the one unique Divinity with whom the soul has to unite, all souls are feminine and He the single Male, Master, Lord, Husband. So the sex-change suggested by my ray-hood is nothing to worry about.

Nor should it be a subject of worry that your sadhana seems to you to proceed only as if you were compering with a snail. While keeping a healthy desire of the moth for the star going, one should not disturb one's nerves by forgetting what difficult jobs we are for the Divine to manage. The Divine can't help our being slow. But we should forget the slowness and carry on our job: "Remember and Offer." Preoccupation with how much we are advancing every day would be a sign of egoism. However, we can pray to the Mother: "O let all of me belong to you - may your light take possession of me wholly!" What we shouldn't do is to ask ourselves: "Why am I not getting a halo soon and sprouting wings swiftly?" Not that impatience is forbidden. But there has to be a difference in the temper of it. The soul, not the ego, has to cry for speed in Yoga. Perhaps the difference may be phrased by noting that the soul concentrates on the Divine and appeals to the Divine to come close speedily while the ego wants itself to reach the Divine fast. The soul's impatience is humble and quiet, the ego's is pushy and clamorous. The soul, though its devotion strains to something afar and wants it to be near, is yet ready to wait for the response: the ego frets that, in spite of its insistent call, the response is not immediate.

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I am afraid my rather rambling epistolary response to your two letters has been somewhat slow, but as I am very distant indeed from being anything divine you may well complain without being considered egoistic.

(9.7.1988)

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