Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

21

Your account of your various experiences is a clear sign to me that you have a fine inner life. The darshans of gods and goddesses must have brought great joy to you. Even to read about them brings a sparkling smile to my thought. I was specially interested in your experiment with a flower. I

The ugly things you see at times belong to the vital or the subtle-physical plane. I have marked many such scenes and figures - more deformed, more desiccated than anything on earth, just as on the opposite side there are beauties far transcending anything in our world. For instance, the subtle counterpart of the Pondicherry sea is a magically sinuous, many-colour-crested mass of liquid laughter set to some ever-varying rhythm of rise and fall like a poet's unrealisable-seeming fantasy!

Thanks for your fervent wish that I should live up to 120. It is a tall order. Of course, the Rishis of the Rigveda must have looked beyond even what they called "a hundred autumns", for they speak of seeing their grandchildren bom when they would themselves be a century old. You may wonder, in the first place, how Rishis, who were highly spiritual persons, could consent to be grandfathers and, in the second place, why they had to wait such a long time to

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have grandchildren. In ancient days the continuation of the race - especially in the form of sons - was regarded as a sacred duty. Furthermore, the Rishis were not like ordinary begetters. Their minds must have' been different from those of the common householders by the very fact that they could dandle grandsons and granddaughters on their knees at only so ripe an old age. The basis of this fact is the prolonged period of brahmacharya - sexless studentship - in the Rigvedic epoch. The period was 48 years. Old books mention several periods - 12 years, 24, 36 and finally the extreme I have mentioned. I remember reading in the Indica of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the court of the Indian king whom the historians of Alexander the Great called "Sandrocottus" (= Chandragupta), that the age of marriage for the Brahmins was 37. Evidently, around 300 B.C., this was the extreme. In the most ancient India it went still beyond. If it was nearly half a century, then naturally the sons of the Rishis would follow the same plan, so that when their fathers reached almost 100 years the sons would have their children.

The Upanishadic limit appears to be less than the Rigvedic. Don't we read in the Isha Upanishad the injunction about desireless and detached activity: "Doing verily works in this world, one should wish to live a hundred years"? In ancient Greek books too the longest life-span was put at a century and they equated this length of time to three generadons. Nowadays we count a generation as 25 years instead of a little over 33 as did Herodotus.

How is it that you get fatigued when people visit you? They must be drawing upon your vital energy and you must be letting it flow out in sympathy according to your generous nature. Whatever inner help goes forth from you should be out of a depth of serenity - the Divine Force using you as a calm pellucid medium.

The suggestions that sometimes harass you - "No progress, I am hopeless" - are from invisible hostile beings. You are going on quite well in your quiet way. All of us have the

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aspiration to come nearer and nearer our divine Gurus — Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - but we should never despair and never accept such notions of non-progress. We are in their hands and they will always help us go forward. Our one aim should be to give ourselves to them more and more in devotion and surrender and leave the problem of our progress to their profound and far-reaching vision. Our standards of advancement may be egoistic, looking only at apparent immediate results. A lot of spiritual working by the Divine is done behind the scenes for one who is dedicated to Him, We must trust in His wisdom and judgment and cast our gaze ahead. Advancement is assured if we can always pray to the Mother: "Please never let go your hold on me -even if I am foolish enough at times to lose my hold on you!" Not our own serious-minded strength so much as our all-confiding light-hearted weakness before her enfolding presence is the true way to our goal of integral transformation.

My good wishes are always with you, along with the prayer that the Mother may look after you and make you an ever sweeter child of hers.

(20.12.1988)

Congratulations on your coining a new word and enriching the English language! It is new and yet the most natural-seeming. You have written "lightful" and added to the store of beautiful English adjectives. I wonder why nobody before thought of a word-formation which could jump so easily from the pen. If we speak of "delightful", why not of "lightful"? Especially fitting it looks in the phrase you have made: "Very many thanks for your loving and lightful letter..."

I on my part must thank you not only for the pleasure you have given me by this verbal coinage in so well-turned a sentence but also for the compliment you have paid to my writing and, through the writing, to the writer. To be at the same rime "loving and lightful" is to be expressive from the

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depth of one's being. People can be "loving" from the vital-emotional nature or they can be ''lightful" from the ideative mind, but it is only when one acts from the true soul that one can be both warm and illuminative and bring the atmosphere of a consciousness which has a spontaneous sense of the truth of things.

(24.1.1989)

The dream you have recounted is very significant. The fact that you find yourself in Pondicherry shows at the same time your soul's sense of its true home and of its true relationship with me as a companion of your inmost being. My sitting in a chair is the most natural pose for me. The greater part of my day is spent like that - in reading or writing or typing, when I am not talking to people who come with their questions. In your dream you also came with a question about my accepting a gift from you for February 21 this year. And my answer, "We should ask the Mother," is typical. For when anybody puts me a question, my first instinct is to put it inwardly before the Mother and let the answer stream out, as it were, on the warm flow I feel going out of my heart towards the Divine. In your dream, the immediate appearance of the Mother in our midst shows how close she always is to those who appeal to her - all the closer is she when the appeal is from one who really feels helpless without her aid but who also feels that

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

Once, when a few of us were gathered, as we were wont to do, in the "Prosperity" room in the Library House, in the evening before the hour of the Soup Distribution by the Mother in the room downstairs, the Mother brought her file of 'Prayers and Meditations' written in her own hand. She asked each of us what his or her favourite sentence was. I chose the one which in the English translation reads: "O

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divine and adorable Mother, with Thy help what is there that is impossible?" The Mother immediately cut out for me from her manuscript the passage which opens with these words, stuck it on a separate piece of paper, wrote "a Amal" on top in the right hand corner and the date at the bottom on the left. The date was Pondichery, le 21 }uin 1932. The Prayer itself bore the date: Pondichery, le 25 Septembre 1914. She gave to everyone present a manuscript-clipping like this of the passage they liked best. And she signed each piece of paper.

Suggestively enough, my sentence is the beginning of the Prayer whose ending served, with an appropriate change of the tenses, as the Mother's Message soon after the Supramental Manifestation on February 29, 1956, in the earth's subtle-physical layer, what she called the earth's "atmosphere".

Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute,

A new light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.

This Message is reproduced on the imprint-page of Mother India every month. Mother India's motto from the very start has been: "Great is truth and it shall prevail." We may say that with the manifestation of the Supermind, the supreme dynamic divine plane which is both creative and transformative and which Sri Aurobindo designated "Truth-Consciousness", the prophecy about Truth prevailing has essentially proved right, and the seed has been sown for a Divine Life to emerge for man in the future.

Indeed there has been the realisation of what had looked "impossible" in the midst of modern materialism and its rat-race and, on a backward gaze, the burden of the long career of human folly down the centuries despite the appearance of sage and saint and prophet and Avatar. Perhaps the most "impossible"-looking event from my own personal viewpoint - a change in the life of fumbling, stumbling, grumb-

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ling though luckily, never crumbling Amal Kiran - could also take place just by his constant appeal to the divine and adorable Mother for help.

It may be of interest to you to know what the Mother said when once in the meeting in the "Prosperity"-room the question arose as to who most often made a call to the Mother for help. She named Duraiswamy, a well-known advocate of Madras who used to come to the Ashram on weekends, and the fellow who is writing this letter. Evidently, we two were most in difficulties again and again and finding ourselves in dire need of more-than-human guidance and assistance. Her picking us out did not mean any special spirituality in us but simply the sense we had of our own weakness and our being constantly confronted by inner problems and outer quandaries.

To go back to your dream. Your spontaneous gesture of putting your head on the Mother's feet without the slightest delay is exactly like you - the child-soul's straight answer to its spiritual birth-giver's presence. What the Mother did and said are quite significant. She sweetly encouraged you and fully supported your idea of celebrating her birth-date. Your hearing her words in Gujarati is no illusion. She has explained in one of her talks that when a message is sent from a region beyond words, the region of pure ideas which is beyond that of thoughts, the word-formulation in whatever language is natural to the speaker can be received by the hearer in the hearer's own habitual tongue. My smile at the close of the dream is not uncharacteristic, for I believe in what the Mother has written somewhere: "If you smile at life, life will smile back at you."

(8.2.1989)

As regards the Samadhi and you, both are very much together. Quite often you are on the stream of self-offering that flows out of my heart. Sometimes it is like the Ganges "pacing leonine to the sea". At other times the gentler

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Jamuna would represent the inner movement - Jamuna with its memories of Krishna and the Gopis. Your presence can go well with either, for there is in you something delicately soft as well as something bravely strong - the former spontaneously yields to the Mother, the latter is what you are when the Mother has accepted you. Both these aspects of you I see in your dealings with your illness. You leave everything to the Mother and at the same time stand up to the illness, looking with a quiet courage beyond it. Yes, you must always cast your gaze into the future - a free and firm future with all the trouble left behind.

The disease you mention must be kept at bay by a change of diet and whatever medication may be necessary. I am sure it will be so with your profound faith in the invisible Skill that exceeds the capacity of a million doctors and with your taking to heart the statement: "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." You are bewailing that "precisely this constant is still the main problem" in your endeavour. I should think that if you feel its absence so acutely, the constancy desired is very much there behind the scene and is pushing towards being a presence in the days ahead. Along with aspiring for it as an emergence from your own soul, pray to the Mother for it as a gift of Grace.The Mother has always been eager to do our sadhana for us and the more we put ourselves helpless in her hands the swifter we are carried forward. We must learn to surrender to her not only our non-sadhana, the dull dragging part of us, but also our sadhana, the bright winging part, so that her strength and swiftness and not just our own soul-power may take us up and keep us lifted in

The shining blue of the immortal light.

Mention of "blue" brings me to your first dream-vision. The pebbly footpath, at which you were looking while walking along it, seems to me to represent your none-too-

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easy life-movement. The green meadow-lining which you mark may be a sign of the vital plane. What next happens is really an enchanting discovery: "Suddenly there shot up between the stones and out of the lawn small lovely blue flowers." What I have called "discovery" is in fact "revelation". The spiritual world which we are seeking is shown to be secretly with you even here on earth and not only in what is high above. You receive -

Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears

The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence -

the grace of those moments in the very midst of the ordinary course of time in the form of these little blue flowers. The hidden soul-element in earth-existence has given you a preview of the spiritual Reality that is your true home. The soul-element is clearly indicated by the flower-symbol - and, as the psychic being in us is a representative of our highest Spirit-Self, its pushing into your sight sparkles of a blue beauty is quite natural. This dream-vision is a reminder to you of the Divine's presence pervading your life and penetrating with its love and bliss all your hours.

The other dream-vision — a bright flame burning vividly on your horizontally lifted right forearm and giving you a happy feeling afterwards - strikes me as signifying two things. First, the activity going forth from you towards the world in general. Second, the dynamic guidance of a greater light than our own intelligence - simultaneously enlarging the range of your sight and imparting the truth-touch to all your work. To be the effective bearer of this inwardly satisfying as well as outwardly creative force, one does not have to be a wide-scale worker, much less an epoch-maker. Within one's own private circle this force can act with equal authenticity. The problem is the same everywhere: to be the instrument of the inner being's Truth-Will.

(1.12.88)

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You are never absent at the back of my mind and quite often you spring into the front. Yes, smiling, though occasionally your eyes are a little wistful. I am glad for this combination; without that peering into unknown distances, without wondering, as a poem of mine puts it,

what visionary urge

Has stolen from horizons watched alone

Into your being,

the smile on the mouth will be just a surface rose with no roots in the soul, a smug satisfaction with common humanity's present state, lacking the secret sense of the Mother's depth of beauty to be explored and Sri Aurobindo's height of truth to be scaled.

(18.7.1988)

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