Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

19

Your letter with the two poems came a few days back. "A Heart's Call" will usher in the New Year or should I say the New Ear? Indeed the old habit of audition, bent towards outer voices, has to change and what more likely to bring this about than a call of the heart? But this summoning has to be repeated before the tympanum turns its vibratory response inward and grows intent on discovering the true needs of the being instead of letting the being get moulded by the demands of the world around. The Upanishads have spoken of the Ear behind the ear. This has to be awakened. How? Of course, the regular spiritual discipline is the full answer. But short of it the best answer is: poetry and music.

They seem to hail from outside us but they have come from the poet's and the musician's depths and if one listens with a quiet mind they will reveal their secret source, the God-haunted movement which runs below the echoes they make to the roaring, the purling, the whispering, the kissing by which the cosmos communicates with us. Nor is that movement something alien to the cosmos. The cosmos itself has a presence in it which behind the communications made by a million differing forms waits to commune from a divine wideness with a superhuman profundity within us. When that communion takes place, there is no division left between outer and inner. But, for this division to go, a certain practice of inwardness is needed. In the terms of what I have indicated here, more music is to be heard, more poetry is to be read aloud.

The latter act admits of two modes: the declamatory and the soft-toned. Both have their uses, but when there is no audience except oneself the soft-toned mode is naturally the most effective. What should be guarded against is a slurring of the words. As one knows what one is reading, one is likely to blur one's articulation. If this is done, the very purpose of the loud reading is subverted. Each word should come out

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clear and keep its right connection with its fellows. Catching the general rhythm is not enough. The poet is said to be "a miser of sound and syllable". All has been most carefully, most sensitively fingered, caressed, collected. The rhythm in all its minute particularity has to be realised so that the special vowels or consonants on which the poet has doted may come endeared to us also and touch our heart.

Shakespeare will have wasted his inspiration on us if we do not respond like a lover, with detailed attention, to the exquisite overtures to us by that stanza in one of his sonnets:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves or few or none do hang Upon the boughs that shake against the cold Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Or take single-line examples: Tennyson's piercingly felt

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

or on a sublimer scale Wordsworth's meditatively discovered

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Not only do such lines with their directly subjective suggestion require close loving attention. Even those that seem to have a purely objective reference have to be relished for their magic: Gerald Manley Hopkins's strikingly structured evocation of nineteenth-century Oxford -

Towery city and branchy between towers -

or Burgon's single-phrased entry into poetic immortality with his softly spell-binding conjuration of ancient Middle-East Petra, now in picturesque ruins:

A rose-red city half as old as Time. -

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The litterateur in me has let himself stray too far afield apropos of the opening words of your poem. I must be on guard against a similar temptation offered by your "Helen"-lines which I have reserved for the Mother India of February 21, the anniversary of our Divine Mother's birthday. They are liable to set me off on another trail of enchanting quotations starting with Marlowe's never-stale ecstatic confrontation of the spirit invoked by his Faust:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium? -

and Vaughan's less picturesque yet equally thrilling appeal to the intuitive aesthete in us:

Rapt above earth by power of one fair face.

(29.10.1988)

Your letter has been lying with me for 12 days - rather a good number since it is Sri Aurobindo's. The very name "Sri Aurobindo" runs to 12 letters. This number is also representative of the Supermind's creative and transformative power which is at the basis of the cosmic manifestation and whose secret presence there must have led Sri Aurobindo to say in one place that the light of our sun has 12 and not 7 rays as well as that our solar system has really 12 planets (though only 9 have so far been discovered). It is also a fact that at least from 1902 onwards events of capital importance have happened in Sri Aurobindo's life in every 12th year: 1914, his first meeting with the Mother - 1926, the descent of the Overmind Consciousness into his body - 1938, about which the Mother has said that in that year she used to see the Supermind entering into his physical substance without yet getting fixed there - 1950, when Sri Aurobindo gave up his body in a tremendous fight to bring the realisation of a new consciousness which would pave the way towards the final

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victory. Do we not know that for five days after the certified clinical death his body was charged, as the Mother declared, with the Supramental Light as an overflow from the subtle-physical plane? We have also the Mother's statement that the moment Sri Aurobindo left his body the Mind of Light was realised in her - the consciousness which she has defined as the physical mind receiving the Supramental Light - an experience which, according to her, has been revelatorily expressed in the two opening lines of a poem by me:

The core of a deathless sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.

To turn now to less exalted themes: I hope my 12-day delayed letter will have for your life some sort of importance, however shadowy, from the Aurobindonian plane of vision. At present your life seems to be a curious mixture, if not a medley, of various pulls. My hoping is perhaps not unjustified when I understand, from what you write, that when your life gets Amalgamated with mine in your imagination you feel better. I too feel happy whenever you are in my thoughts and I renew my knowledge of your presence in my heart.

The exchange of calm and unrest is nothing peculiar to you: it is part of the general human condition. What you have to do is to let the spells of calm outnumber those of agitation. Don't harbour too many regrets when "things like anger, resentment, etc." crop up in you. These are difficult moods to manage - people who have lived in the Ashram for years are not free from their occasional visits. The right course is always to reject the sense that you are justified in having them. On the other hand, you mustn't indulge in too much remorse. Just catch them whenever they come and, without thinking any more, offer" them to the Mother and keep offering them to her until you feel clear and calm. You must also learn to look at their causes - namely, as you say, "not having things the way I wanted" - as carrying secret mes-

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sages to you from the Divine. I have always held that we can let the Divine reach us through everything. And if we look for the hand of Grace even in adverse circumstances it will stretch out to us and bring us benefits we have never dreamt of. I don't say that we must never want circumstances to be different from what they are. We may work towards a different denouement and yet reap profit from a situation that seems to cut across our plan. Everything becomes a gift of God in one way or another when we offer it to Him and await in our hearts His touch through it. This is one of the great lessons I have learnt and it is one of the paths to permanent peace. You have a deep sincere aspiration to live quietly and joyously as the Mother's child. It will carry you safely through all the ups and downs of earthly days. Have faith in your destiny of inward light.

(5.11.1988)

You write of borrowing a "walking stick" from me in the form of Equanimity. But at present I am using two sticks to help me walk, the so-called Canadian Canes. Symbolically they stand on one side for Equanimity and on the other for the accompanying principle and practice of "Remember and offer". Equanimity serves as the vast background, the standing back by the consciousness from the sensitive surface self, giving no ordinary responses to the touch of things, the impingement of persons - freedom from all reactions of hurt feeling, resentment, anger, frustration, despondency, sorrow. This is a poise of what I may call "positive passivity" -positive because here is no mere indifference which is a turning away from life, no avoidance of contacts. Life is faced but from an inner farness where the small complex tangled-up ego disappears or, at the most, hovers like an ineffectual ghost. I am speaking, of course, of the ideal condition aimed at. The actuality may be a mixture of deep peace and a faint haunting presence of the ego's reacting habit. Especially because of such mixture another movement of Yoga is

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needed. In itself too this movement is necessary because ours is not a Yoga of withdrawal: it is a Yoga of what in French military terms would be the strategy of reculer pour mieux sauter - "drawing back in order to leap forward better." Balancing the "positive passivity", there has to be an "uplifting activity". In our ordinary traffic with the world the activity is always horizontal, a pull or push on the common human level. Now, everything done, whether on one's own initiative or in answer to a stimulus from others or by confrontation of circumstances, has to be raised above that level: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are to be remembered and made the receiving-end of all our doings. Inwardly we must offer to the Divine whatever activity is ours, praying to the Divine to take it up and turn it to a luminous spiritual use in accordance with the highest Vision and Will.

Particularly when something we don't like is to be met, this gesture of remembering and offering must spring from us without any thought of our own personal grappling with the problem. If there is a call on us to take any measure, our move must come after the moment of utter surrender of the occasion to the Divine: calmly, as if we ourselves were not concerned at all, we must wait for the higher inspiration and behave at its command. If our behaviour, however dynamic-seeming, passes swiftly from one point of peace to another, we may be sure that we are guided from a level beyond the purely human. Even when we are alone and there is no question of being related to the presence of others or to a public situation, the same remembrance and the same offering have to take place. No doubt, I am putting before you a counsel of perfection. We are bound to fail now and again. This must not discourage us. But an effort must be made to weave every occasion into the pattern of consecration I have suggested. That weaving I do my faltering best to carry out against the background of the attempted equanimity.

Shall I picture how one may feel such a double endeavour going on? At some distance behind one a wide silence may

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hang like an eternal self-existence, unaffected by anything. It would be linked to one as if one's inmost heart were a small projection from the centre of that infinite expanse. From this projection into the time-world may go forth a cry to the Mother and a submission to her of all that happens - one's own actions or what is done to one. One feels the cry to be a constant movement, the submission to be intermittent in the natural course. There may be times when one has deliberately to put upon the "flow" of the constant cry some problem which has become acute. And it is not just once that the deliberate offering may have to be made. Again and again it is required if one expects a result.

I may add that the inmost heart and its gestures may themselves be a mode of the Divine - they may be like a part longing for the whole. The inmost heart in each of us is the core of earth-existence, the pure psyche which, as I recently wrote to a friend, Sri Aurobindo has characterised as sweetness that is at the same time light, an emanation or delegate of the Supreme Ananda and Truth in the midst of the evolutionary grope. I quoted to my friend three lines from a poem of mine. There I have called the delegate

A Flame that is All,

Yet the touch of a flower -

A Sun grown soft and small.

I am writing this letter on November 24, the recurrence of the date sixty-two years ago which made a special milestone on the path of the Aurobindonian Yoga. On that date in 1926 there was the descent of the Consciousness of the plane Sri Aurobindo calls "Overmind" or the plane of the great Gods, into Sri Aurobindo's body. According to him the Overmind is the highest step of the Cosmic Ladder, the top of the series of the Worlds, from where the transcendent is to be attained. This descent is also termed the coming of the Krishna-Consciousness to aid Sri Aurobindo's work. Krishna, the greatest Avatar of the past, manifested himself from the

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Transcendent through the Overmind. The time has arrived now for the Transcendent to manifest directly from the plane designated by Sri Aurobindo the Supermind, the level where the Transcendent has formulated an archetypal or ideal cosmos which is to be worked out evolutionarily in the terms of the present physical universe. Sri Aurobindo is the Avatar of this Supermind with all the rest of the Transcendent waiting its turn in the distant future of our earth. Spiritual manifestation as an evolutionary phenomenon is a slow systematic process. Now that the mind-grade has been reached it is possible to co-operate in evolution consciously. The accelerated co-operation is what we know as the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, though that also is a systematic process which cannot be rushed if it is to gain established results. In the event on November 24, 1926, the foundation was laid for the fulfilment to begin of Sri Aurobindo's mission proper. The mission is the divinisation not only of the inner being but also of the outer, including the very body at the ultimate stage, by the descent into us of the Supermind's perfect originals of all our parts.

In the course of this gradual fulfilment, a radical step is the gathering up of our varied self-awareness into the poise of our true soul - "the psychic being" in our Yoga's terminology. Along with the movement towards this poise, there has to be the aspiration for the Supramental Consciousness to make that poise the fount of its transcendent all-divinising radiation here below. That is indeed a far prospect, but it is also far from being impossible if we set ourselves sincerely to live in and from the soul which the ancient Upanishad has described: "The being within us that is no bigger than the thumb of a man is like a blazing fire without smoke; he is lord of his past and of his future; he alone is today and he alone shall be tomorrow."

I hope I haven't lectured out of turn. To do so is the danger always besetting fellows like me who are professional pen-drivers.

(24.11.1988)

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