Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

18

Before I try to answer your questions let me quote them back to you so that my reply may have a better look of relevance. You write:

"I do not wish to take up your time, but one thing I cannot stop myself from asking and that is: if we have Savitri with us, if we keep uttering Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's names, if we have their symbols affixed on our doors or are wearing them, if we carry the Mother's Blessings Packet with us, can the hostile forces still come to us and try to lead us astray? If Yes, then in what and where is the protection from them? Only in our own minds and hearts? One has heard the story of an evil force having taken the form of Sri Aurobindo and daring to come to the Mother herself. For her it was child's play to find it out, but what happens to those on a low plane? For, despite the protection the above things offer, if the hostile forces can still dare come to mislead and harm people, where is the progress? Is it that the soul only has to be advanced - nothing else is really protected? And then is it not also that the more advanced the soul the greater the attack?"

First of all, to attempt to rise higher than the ordinary consciousness, superior to the common way of living, is to open ourselves to two kinds of forces: the spiritual ones that come to help our aspiration and the anti-spiritual that endeavour to block it by creating difficulties - in both the inner life and the outer. Psychologically one has to develop the state which Sri Aurobindo describes Aswapati as having achieved:

A wide unshaken look on time's unrest.

"Time's unrest" is, of course, not only outside: it is also inside: our own weaknesses, our own painful responses to ordinary stimuli, our own general indispositions. These are

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part of what in Yoga we call the Prakriti side of us, the "Nature"-component. The Purusha side, the self who watches and acts on this nature, has to develop equanimity, stand aloof unaffected and offer to the Divine all that happens for whatever result the Divine may will. The Divine's help is always there, but we have to be prepared for hitches to our choice of the higher life. Whether we feel protected or not depends on how receptive we are to the help given to save us from being overwhelmed by the complex of events.

Secondly, the Mother's central concern is our soul. Her blessings are for the soul's progress. This progress may take place through various experiences which may not in every case look like the Divine's favours. Even death may be a part of the Divine's grace. Just because we have received the Mother's blessings we cannot expect success in all we do or a straight flower-strewn path. But once we have her blessings we can be sure that our souls are being looked after. We must constantly keep this faith burning and do our best to let the rest of ourselves co-operate with the Mother-embraced soul.

Thirdly, although we may not keenly realise the fact, we do have our outer being also protected when we have turned towards the Mother. Here we must think of all the bad things that might have happened but have not. Since they have not happened we think that they could not have taken place. Sometimes we find ourselves narrowly escaping harm. Then we become aware of our good luck. But when we escape altogether we don't realise it. The harm has been avoided from the beginning. We must not doubt that the protection has been present. To put ourselves in the Divine's hands and think at the same time that the Divine is not with us every moment is irrational. It is true that the Divine, by being omnipresent, is with each person, but since we have directly dedicated ourselves to Him, He is with us in a special sense. And if that is so it is simple logic to believe that many perils are spared us by Him without any sign we might notice.

Fourthly, as we are not at all moments in conscious touch

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with the Mother through our souls, the protection she has granted us can be pierced by the hostile forces. The Mother has often said that the protection is not unconditional. Quite often it acts in spite of us, but there are bound to be occasions when some part of us goes out of the radiant atmosphere she puts around us and then an opportunity is given to the hostile forces to break in. Merely to keep Savitri with us or put the symbols of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother upon our doors or even to carry them and the Blessings Packets in our pockets does not automatically ensure protection. Of course their presence may serve to keep us reminded of the Divine and thus serve an important purpose, but just a superficial remembrance does not always work. In great crises I have seen that the sheer fact of the Blessings Packet being there is talismanic. But in such crises the consciousness also turns spontaneously to the Divine and this helps to make the special power invested in the packet hyper-effective.

Finally, there is the universal Ignorance in which all of us live. We cannot claim to be unconnected with it. One way of being connected with it is to be connected with so many people who are not consciously attempting to be in tune with the Mother. Even without this relationship our natural being has emerged from the universal Ignorance and still has links with it, mostly in our subconscious depths. Sri Aurobindo has said somewhere that blows fall on everybody as a part of their fate in common with all mankind.

I may add that calamities can become gateways for our souls towards higher realisations - provided we offer the calamities inwardly to the Divine and do our best to seek out the secret Godhead who is behind everything. The right attitude can work wonders so far as our inner development is concerned. We must ask Sri Aurobindo: "O Lord, what is the gift you would give me through this horror of an event? In what way does your hand reach out to touch my soul across this dire hurt to my human heart?" I have known again and again in my life how the cuts from the hostile forces in the shape of calamities can go suddenly into the profound

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recesses of the being and prove short-cuts to a new light which had been glimpsed afar but could not be attained over years of good fortune.

(5.9.1988)

Thanks for ringing me from distant Austria on August 15. To be thought of by you is honour enough, but to be associated in your mind with an anniversary of the epoch-making birth of Sri Aurobindo is to feel beatified and sanctified.

Thanks also, in a different-seeming yet not really unrelated dimension, for the letter-paper specially chosen by you. One of the two horse-heads printed on it has a soft inquiring look; "Am I not still dear to you?" The other eyes me quite confidently: "I know we are dear to each other." Well, horses, apart from my having loved them from early boyhood and ridden them for nearly twenty years in the past, are an important symbol of my Yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, when the Rigvedic Rishis mentioned horses in their mystic hymns they meant the Life Force - and unless Sri Aurobindo's own Yoga is expressed in the terms of the Life Force it is not Aurobindonian at all. Did he not once write: "1 have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco"? What was the old fiasco? A fine illumined state within but in the world without, in the terms of the Life Force, the same blundering self-centred restless being. The Mother has told us a story which I may put in my own words as follows. A man was deep in meditation in his room, feeling happy and elevated. Somebody knocked on his door. He got up and, opening the door, shouted: "You fool, don't you know I am meditating at this hour? How dare you come to disturb me?" The Mother commented: "This man's meditation was worth nothing!"

Not to be disturbed by anything or anybody: that could be a short definition of my attempt at Yoga. I must be pretty much of a failure in many spiritual things, but I have tried my utmost to practise equanimity. When someone comes to me

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without notice and apologises: "I hope I am not disturbing you", I often answer: "To say this is hardly a compliment to me. Do you think I can be disturbed so easily?" People laugh in appreciation, but I am afraid they feel encouraged to come again in the same way. And why not? Truly speaking, I don't mind their bursting upon me. They have always something interesting to say and I stand to profit in one manner or another. They too, I think, get benefited, and it is a pleasure to me to be able to give help. As for my work being interrupted, a link always remains in my mind and I can carry on the work afterwards as if nothing had happened.

Now let me get back to my horses. They are not only the symbolic medium in which the soul has to fulfil its aim: "the Life Divine." To reach this fulfilment one has to note first how very human - or, as Nietzsche has said, "all-too-human" - life is. It has to be changed. The need to change it and the way to do so are the work the Avatar comes to show us. The Divine becomes human so that we may learn to make the human divine. The horses have to be controlled and trained. They have to be - scientifically speaking - equus caballus Linn.: domesticated horses, ready to be harnessed to pull a carriage or to be saddled for a ride. Of course, to be domesticated does not mean that the animal loses its spirit. Not at all. It remains fine-strung, a sensitively fiery creature, cavorting and tossing its head, saying - as the Bible puts it -"Ha, ha" to the sound of the trumpets, but everywhere obedient to its master: the inmost self as well as the highest. It is the purified vitality serving to express an enlightened consciousness along the many-directioned paths of earth, the consciousness which Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri has named "Aswapati", the heroine's father, literally "Lord of the Horse", metaphorically "Lord of Life".

(14.9.1988)

Quite a cataract of good luck - letter after letter rushing to me from you, bringing a multitude of thoughts and fancies and

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feelings. First is the big purple sun drawn by Sonia the Symbolist, along with the line which Sri Aurobindo added to Savitri -

And griefless countries under purple suns -

when I quoted to him Virgil's

Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit

Purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.

C. Day Lewis translates these two hexameters:

What largesse of bright air, clothing the vales in dazzling

Light, is here! this land has a sun and stars of its own.

The prose rendering I sent to Sri Aurobindo read: "Here an ampler ether spreads over the plains and clothes them in purple light, and they have a sun of their own and their own stars." In Latin the adjective "purpureus" has a double meaning: "purple" and "extra-bright". Lewis has accepted the second sense, whereas Sri Aurobindo has caught an esoteric occult hint and to my question: "What plane is spoken of by Virgil?" he replied' "I don't know, but purple is a light of the Vital. It may have been one of the vital heavens he was thinking of. The ancients saw the vital heavens as the highest and most of the religions also have done the same. I have used the suggestion of Virgil to insert a needed line."

You - with your sun generously and mysteriously endowed with fourteen rays, double the ancient sacred number seven - have plunged into an entirely new dimension of sight and insight. Your focus is on "griefless", and for you it is from the purple suns that grieflessness is radiated. You pass beyond all vital heavens which, for all their felicity, limit one and are not in inner accord with the ever-evolving human psyche. Something of a divine transcendence both of typal worlds and of travailing earth is what you have in view.

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Your cry is evidently to Ahana, the God-light breaking upon the striving and aspiring human consciousness. In Sri Aurobindo's words it would run:

Open the barriers of Time, the world with thy

beauty enamour -

Trailing behind thee the purple of thy soul and the

dawn-moment's glamour....

You have well distinguished past poetry from future poetry and the characteristic of the poems in my Adventure of the Apocalypse as freedom from "the touch of tears", and as outflow from the "griefless countries" of the inmost self. This self reflects the Sun of Truth spoken of in the Isha Upa-nishad, whose "most blessed form of all" is Eternal Bliss.

You have a rare "empathic" understanding of these poems when you say that if "Griefless Countries" or "Griefless Suns" does not appeal to me for the title of my "Collected Poems" my "title should suggest fire, flame, light or radiance". You have told me: "Your theme is always the longing to capture your shining quarry in a net of sound." Here I am interested by your finding in me an affinity with Rimbaud rather than with Mallarme. Perhaps the most thrilling prophecy of the new magnificence that has to emerge from the unexplored mystery beyond us is in those two lines of Le Bateau Ivre:

Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles,

Millions d'oiseaux d'or, O future Vigueur?

Is it adequate to English them thus? -

Within such fathomless nights do you sleep, exiled,

Millions of golden birds, O Force to come?

...I find most attractive and apt your definition of poetry. You have written:

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"If you would like me to add something to your definitions, I would like to add Truth. You have spoken of sight and insight, light and delight, passion and peace, intensity and harmony, magic and mystery and secrecies beyond.... You will tell me truth is implied, and I know it. Nevertheless, let us say that poetry is

Words charged with the music of Eternal Truth.

I almost said:

Words lit by the lightning of Eternal Truth.

"Lightning is a most fascinating phenomenon. Did you know that it strikes upwards, not downwards, as we think? On the earth below the clouds there is a build up of positive electricity, a mirror image of the negative charge above. When the differences in potential become enormous, a leader track begins to zigzag its way to earth. But, when the leader track is within a short distance from earth, streamers leap up from earth (we don't see them) but when one happens to make contact a brilliant spear of light soars UPWARD. It is the return stroke that we see.

"Lightning is a pretty accurate image for what happens in poetry. The aspiration builds up, leading to the unattained heights. Then contact is made, the illuminating flash occurs, the music of that inevitable line is the RETURN FLASH THAT WE SEE -

A thunder wearing the lightning's streak of smile,

as you have written somewhere,"

Do you realise that both your definitions are themselves perfectly moulded poetry - beautiful pentameters with extremely apposite modulations on the iambic base? You begin with a striking spondee showing the full weight of the spiritual message put forth from the heights of Being. Then

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there is an anapaest with its quickening of the pulse, as it were - an emotional leap - as you disclose the power that has gone into the verbal form. Next is a low-stressed iamb "...ning of" - which seems at the same time to distance and to connect the last part of the statement and the rest of it that has gone before. Thus the two concluding words stand by themselves poised on two regular iambic feet - "Eternal" significantly stretched out to three syllables quantitatively short while the single-syllabled "Truth" is an intrinsic "long" as well as the bearer of a full stress, well-fitted both ways to be the grand finale of a momentous penetration into the essence of poetry.

I am glad you have included "Eternal Truth" openly in this essence, thereby pointing to the loftiest range of inspiration, the Overmind which is the ultimate fount of all poetry and whose basic motif is Truth above everything else, though this truth, being Eternal, has always a mould of Beauty because out of an infinite self-existent Bliss it is projected into basic cosmic creation and activity.

The Vedic poets call themselves "seers and hearers of Truth". Your two definitions bring in seeing and hearing, by means of the words "lightning" and "music" but in separate lines. How about trying to combine them? What about a Soniamal manifesto like

Words glowing with music of Eternal Truth?

Perhaps a more vivid present participle than "glowing" and a more multiple-meaninged sequel to it would come if we said:

Words kindling to a music of Eternal Truth.

"Kindling" is nearer to your vision of "lightning" and "to a" signifies simultaneously a passionate responding and an intense becoming.

(22.8.1988)

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