Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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You have inquired about the life here. I'll touch on what appears new to me. The call from the Beyond which is also the Within has been growing more and more intense in a particular point for a year or so. It is as if we were drawn to plunge not only our mind and heart but also our sense of being a body into that alchemic crucible which is the soul. This means — in addition to offering our body in service to the Divine - the attempt to remove, from our outermost being, all push of desire, all pull of attachment, and make every component clod of it rhyme with God.

So far the body used to be a devoted channel for the inner being to flow in the direction of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Now one feels thrown out into one's physical stuff and called upon to realise its own divine inwardness, so to speak, its own soul-dimension. The stress of the Yoga is put on the most external consciousness - on one's very feeling of having physical limbs. This stress does not make for much comfort in the being, but when the response of the external consciousness is keen, there is, as it were, a far and faint mirroring intuition of some supernal substance out of which are made

Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line,

Where passion's mortal music grows divine.

These two verses from a poem I wrote long ago may seem a flight of fantasy, but Sri Aurobindo has considered them to be revelatory along with another couplet in the same poem which refers to the God-goal of our Yogic life -

All things are lost in Him, all things are found:

He rules an infinite hush that hears each sound.

To be "revelatory" means that the expression catches a

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profound truth not only as an idea accompanied by emotion and image but as a word-form springing directly from a supra-intellectual reality and carrying the very self-sight and life-thrill of this reality in any of its aspects.

(20.10.1985)

Thanks for your solicitous inquiry whether I had reached my eightieth year. I arrived at that milestone on November 25, 1984. So now I have gone a little beyond the point at which, according to the Mother, complete blossoming should take place. We do not have enough records of what this point meant in the lives of well-known people. But some mixed interesting information is available about a few of them.

Sophocles, on becoming an octogenarian, heaved a sigh of relief, saying: "Now at last I am free from passion." A pretty good climax to the human drama - as notable an achievement as having penned Antigone or CEdipus Tyrannus. Goethe at the same age put the finishing touch to his Faust, the last lines of the great chorus with which it ends. In English they would read:

The Eternal Feminine

Is leading us upward.

Around this time I believe Goethe had also his last affaire du cceur, falling in love with a girl in her late teens. Victor Hugo at 80 was in full blast both as poet and novelist. In addition, he had eyes so good that he could recognise all his friends from the top of Notre Dame de Paris, had his entire set of teeth in such strength that he could crack the hardest nut, kept his shock of hair with nothing in it to tell his age except its greyness. His facial hair is said to have been so stiff that barbers blunted their razors trying to shave his beard and advised him against being clean-shaven. About Bernard Shaw, the critic and iconoclast and humbug-hater, it was reported that his satiric temper remained unabated in his old

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age and that we could suggestively declare: "The only difference between Shaw young and Shaw old is that his beard which was red with anger is now white with rage!"

To go to a higher grade of the world's life: we may record that Sri Aurobindo at 78 was in full career not only as a master Yogi but also as the mighty poet of Savitri and, though his eyes had grown somewhat hazy in the physical sense, the subtle seeing behind them was supreme: one could well quote his own epic -

A universal light was in his eyes -

or

His wide eyes bodied viewless entities -

and assert that whatever he dictated to Nirodbaran had the vision and vibrancy of the Mantra:

Words that can tear the veil from deity's face.

If he had decided to live longer and cross the 80-year mark he would have gone from glory to greater glory in his world-work. Our Divine Mother at 80 was playing tennis every afternoon and participating in the Ashram's activities and giving us the benefit of what Sri Aurobindo had called "the Mind of Light" which, as she told me, had got realised in her the moment he had left his body and about which I wrote a poem in 1954, whose first two lines she declared to be sheer revelation:

The core of a deathless sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.

Of course, it would be absurd to expect Amal Kiran to have so brilliant a record as even the non-Aurobindonian oldsters, but he has the well-founded hope that by the time you return to India his body will not have faded to a shadow and his post-80 blossoming will have something more to show than a

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blooming fool. How can his body shrivel up or his mind lack brightness or his heart lose warmth when he has the invigorating luck of being among your "loved ones"?

(17.12.1985)

I am glad you are delighted with the anthology you have bought of 400 years of English poetry. Your re-discovery of Donne (pronounced "Dun") must have been thrilling. The lines you quote are famous but are surely worth repeating:

Our two souls, therefore, which are one

Though I must goe, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion

Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.

They are representative of his inspired wit, his blend of vivid feeling with curious bits of learning. But one would miss the full music of the lines if one didn't know how to say "expansion" as Donne wanted according to the seventeenth-century and earlier usage. To get the true rhythmic value of line 3, you have to expand this word to "ex-pan-si-on", four syllables which will make the line a tetrameter like the others and set it rhyming with the opening verse ending with "one".

The several phases you have touched upon of your present state are all promising. The diminished flow of memories is perhaps the most important. When the soul in us, the hidden "psychic being", takes control of our life and gleams on its very surface, everything that belongs to the old self tends to get erased - not necessarily that part alone which we would wish to erase but also the normally good part which used to alternate with the peccant one. The old goodness no less than the old badness may fade away, for both are complementary, and sometimes the former by its self-satisfaction is more a covering up of the psyche. The sustained emergence of the soul removes the need of the past

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happiness, the past sweetness which existed in contrast to their opposites, and brings forth a spontaneous light, either a sheer steady smiling white or a dancing play of rainbow hues, a shimmering sequence of varied rapture, a condition whose both aspects may produce an annulment of the past. I should add that even the future ceases to pose hopeful or fearful questions: nothing is there except an all-pervading present in which we are effortlessly carried from one exquisite intensity to another. This is the salvation to which we are pointed by that picture of the Mother under which is written, "Have faith and He will do everything for you."

You have mentioned Ganapati Muni. Yes, I met him long ago. He was a fine traveller on the Upward Path - not with the substantial solidity of a Raman Maharshi evocative of the Eternal, but with a delicate fluidity, as it were, suggesting the Temporal as the Eternal's mirror. When he first attended the Morning Meditation with the Mother and all of us, the result was unusual: the Mother remarked afterwards that the area of light had been distinctly enlarged by his being there. I think the story of his having been allowed to visit either Sri Aurobindo or the Mother without any appointment is apocryphal. There never was any meeting between Sri Aurobindo and him, with or without appointment. I have watched Ganapati Muni getting inspiration in Sanskrit. Purani jotted down the translation Ganapati made of several passages of Sri Aurobindo's little book, The Mother.

The ghaza! you have translated is pretty: it has some charming poignancies typical of the Persian temperament at its inwardly sensitive. What is wanting is the sheer plunge to the innermost for the Divine Beloved:

Your spirit in my spirit, deep in the deep,

Walled by a wizardry of shining sleep.

But, of course, there is room for all kinds of poetic attempts to utter the Unutterable with as unforgettable a failure as possible.

(15.12.1985)

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What you say about words and their sounds is quite like my own perception. It has been so ever since my childhood when at the age of five and a half I was found repeating through half the night the expression "Lafayette Galeries" after having visited that place of pictures with my papa and mamma during our stay in Paris. The expression seemed to be sheer nectar in my mouth. I suppose all poets are enamoured of verbal music. I can imagine Shakespeare smacking his lips when he wrote -

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang -

and Sri Aurobindo must have had a delicious moment in Baroda, composing the line in Love and Death -

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?

The largest opportunity to get wonderful effects out of words and their combination was in ancient inflected languages where one could shift words as one liked because their tails automatically linked them to make sense no matter how separated they stood for the sake of euphony. Thus in Latin, if one fancied the sonority, one could arrange, without impeding the sense, Sri Aurobindo's line in some such pattern as

Fierce in too flood art whelmed this wailing thou.

In modern times Mallarme practised harmoniously mysterious rearrangements of common sequences as far as the partly inflected nature of the French tongue would allow. His aim was not only musicality but also a suggestion of strange secret dimensions of being by an unusual distancing of noun and adjective, verb and adverb.

I can understand your delight in ghazals which marry Sanskrit to Arabic words and Hindi words to Persian ones and bring out an extraordinary beauty of both sense and

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sound, particularly when the wedlock is guided by an inner feeling and not just by the ear's joy in match-making. Actually, in the inter-marriage of different languages the most natural and successful medium is English which has assimilated Greek, Latin, French, even a bit of Hebrew and Hindi, into its Anglo-Saxon structure and its mixture of Celtic sensibility with Teutonic strength. Thus in that line from a Shakespearean sonnet, "Bare" is Old High German, "ruined" is Medieval Latin Frenchified, "choirs" is Old Latin, "late" is Germanic Latin, "sweet" is Gothic, "birds" is Old English and "sang" Germanic.

I fully sympathise with your cry, "O Mother! I am tired of not getting tired, of not getting impatient." I have often had the sense that I was happily stagnating. But when this cry arises in the midst of such a state, one has to understand the situation with some intuitive penetration. The urge to sadhana is surely shown by an appeal to make the Mother spur one to greater effort; but at the same time the strange happiness accompanying the sense of stagnation shows that one is in touch with one's soul and one is slowly progressing by the baby-cat method, in which effort is almost nil but by which one is carried forward by the mother-cat in a quietly careful way. So long as one is not complacent but is peaceful around a small inner flame, one need not believe that one is in a bad situation. No doubt, the inner flame has to spring up and break through to a beatific Beyond without limit, but fretting does not help. What does help is giving oneself up more and more to the baby-cat consciousness, so that the-feeling of being happily carried becomes intense and the small inner flame suffuses one's whole outer being and an ecstasy of self-surrender fills every limb.

Why are you afraid of being swallowed by the sharp-toothed giant of "aloneness"? If you could really be alone you would, by a paradox, know omnipresence - as promised by a poet you know well:

Silence that, losing all, grows infinite Self.

(10.1.1986)

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It's gladdening news that you are physically better. Perhaps your friends and your family were interested in your health problems, but I would expect them to make at least a faint inquiry about your inner life - what they might consider your erratic rush to the hellish heat of unknown India from the equable climate of that familiar paradise: Lausanne. Maybe they feel it wouldn't be tactful to refer to your "folly". Otherwise it is inexplicable how they can refrain from showing the slightest interest - unless they are in Cimmerian darkness. Perhaps they are - and that is what you mean when you say they are still in what Sri Aurobindo designates as the "conventional" stage of social evolution.

I can see that the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are proving a great standby in the sort of world you are living in. As to your question about the rending of the veil I can't say offhand what is meant in The Life Divine without the context being given. In general I should think the expression means four different things. First, the passing from the outer to the inner consciousness, culminating in the discovery of the true soul that is a pure emanation of the Divine. Then, the opening out into the Cosmic Consciousness - the still Self of selves or the dynamic play of a universal Force. Next, the breaking through into the infinite luminosity above the mind. This is the state described in the following lines of Savitri:

For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above...

A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault...

Abolished were conception's covenants

And, striking off subjection's rigorous clause.

Annulled the soul's treaty with nature's nescience.

All the grey inhibitions were torn off

And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid;

Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room...

Fourthly and finally, there is the entrance from the Overmind into the Supermind. The Overmind is the top of the

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"lower hemisphere". After it begins the "higher hemisphere" consisting of the Supermind, the Bliss-plane, the plane of Consciousness-Force and that of sheer Being (Vijna-na, Ananda, Chit-Tapas and Sat). I may add that the lower hemisphere consists of two parts: the universe of Ignorance and the universe of Knowledge. The emergence of the human consciousness from the one into the other is spoken of in the Savitri-line I have quoted. "Knowledge" here means the inherent experience of the one Self in all.

As to your inquiry about ancient Indian physics, we can't properly appraise it unless we understand that it is based on the direct spiritual perceptions of the ancient Rishis. It may sound queer by modern standards, especially its nomenclature may distract one, but if one took it in the way it was meant a good deal of light would be shed. In matter itself the Rishis saw several levels. What science has explored so far is the level of "Agni" - the formative fire-principle. Here there are three kinds of fire: the earthly, the electric, the solar. Science has reached the solar fire, what is known as the constant explosion of the hydrogen bomb, so to speak, in our sun, accounting for its inexhaustible-seeming energy of light and heat. Beyond the level of "Agni" is that of "Vayu" - the aerial principle which makes contacts and interactions possible, preliminary to the formation of objects. Sri Aurobindo has said that only when this level is penetrated we shall have the true explanation of "gravitation". As you know, Newton's theory of gravitation has given way to Einstein's, which yields very good observational results. But it is as queer as anything a modern scientist may see in the old physics of India. We are asked to believe that space is not filled with any subtle matter such as the physicists of the nineteenth century called "ether" - space is utterly empty and yet physical bodies create a "curvature" in it along which lesser masses gravitate towards bigger ones. Thus sheer emptiness can be structured! This is one of the concepts of the famous general theory of relativity. Perhaps I am just as comprehensible when in a jocular mood I summed up to an

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Ashram audience the result of my research in physics. I said something like: "Newton showed that all physical bodies attract one another. Einstein with his relativity theory provided the reason for it. He said that the attraction is due to the fact that all these bodies are relatives!" Don't you think I deserve the Nobel prize for this illuminating rapport 1 have made between Newton and Einstein? So far they have been set at loggerheads.

(1.2.1986)

The Upanishad's saying is: "When the knot of the heartstrings is rent asunder, the mortal, even in this body, enjoys immortality." The rending takes place either by a spontaneous growth of the being - a calm detachment from the world and a happy devotion to the Divine - or by a stroke of circumstances, causing keen disappointment and deep distress. The first way is naturally straight, the second may be quite winding. For the stroke may not drive home the Gita's high liberating world-pessimism: "Thou who hast come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me." The stroke may make one yearn for a better experience with one's fellow-creatures or with life's chances. Then it takes long to "enjoy immortality" - that is, to come into close warm touch with one's psychic being or into wide cool contact with the single Self of selves, and thus experience something within one that is for ever and participate in the Ultimate Reality. Of course, this experiencing may not be full at once, but even a hint or glint of feeling

Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast

is enough to make one know the abyss of difference between the grip of the world's delusion and the breakthrough into a luminous Beyond. With most of us the way to inner freedom is a mixture of a sincere attempt to walk, as you say, without crutches and a forcible taking away of crutches by "fate".

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Yes, our attempt is sincere, but we are not prepared for quick results. We want a slow independence of props. The Spirit presiding over Yoga is not averse to giving us time, but when it notes that the central part of us is ready for a leap and that only peripheral parts are holding us back, it lets circumstances so shape themselves that we get pushed into crutch-lessness and are forced to find the needed balance of unaided walking.

The state into which we are thrust is not easy to cope with, but if we attend to the call with which it comes - the call to take our consciousness deeper in order to draw the necessary strength to meet the new outer situation - the going on without comfortable props will be less painful than it is likely to be on account of the sudden push towards developing stronger legs.

Are you answering sufficiently the more inward pull which would make this push more bearable? Here some relevance may be discerned of my past comment: "Not to think of living but only of loving will take you out of the world where life-problems exist." For a turn of events may be such as to put us ill at ease and someone we love may do things we never expected and may thus take on an unlovable aspect. At this crisis-point of the heart, the soul's capacity to love without demand has to come to the fore, replacing the emotional self's demand that the one we love should prove worthy of being loved, as then alone living would be worth while. If we can get beyond wanting such a rationale for life and let the psychic being's "joy without a cause" relate itself to our immediate circle in the form of "love without a reason" we shall get out of the grip of the world of life-problems. To effect the change, one's personal effort is required, but it must mainly be directed towards putting one's various personalities- mental, vital, physical - more and more into the Divine Mother's ever-stretched-out hands of help. In other words, the effort is towards becoming free of effort - towards getting those hands to draw closer and closer and catch hold increasingly of all one's personalities.

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This would be the dynamic, active surrender which I have spoken of - the constant happy cry to be at all moments the child of the Divine Mother.

I am glad you have no doubts that you are very near me. You have really been so from the beginning of our friendship. But perhaps now you realise that you are sharing in whatever little Yoga I may be doing - and, strange as it may seem, you are sharing it most when you write: "There is no zest either for living or for dying" - but a small impediment enters when you add: "I am impatient with this long transition." You are impatient because you have not understood that passing beyond the pleasure and pain of either living or dying is to be within the aura of the state whose description I have quoted from the Upanishad. For, the immortality spoken of there is that of a consciousness unbound by the process of birth and death - on the one hand the true soul which goes from embodiment to embodiment by surviving death again and again as well as by transcending life repeatedly - on the other the secret spirit whose delegate is the soul and which never enters the birth-and-death process and is the individual focus of the universal Atman. You fail to realise the great thing that has happened to you because you have caught it by the negative end and missed the positive: namely, the zest of neither living nor dying. I suppose the negative experience has to be gone through first, but if you understand it to be a blessing in disguise the "transition" to an entry into the aura of the great deliverance with its two-sided blissful beyond will not be "long" and whatever span of time will occur will be faintly tinged with the psychic silver or the spiritual gold or, by their blend, a mystic platinum.

Perhaps you will ask me why I mention only the "aura". I mention it because I myself can claim no more than a distant glimmer and I make it a point generally to refer to nothing that I have not personally known in however vague a manner - unless, of course, when I am Sri Aurobindo's philosophical exegete, the Mother's intellectual expositor, rather than one who, echoing that invocation "O divine

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adorable Mere!" from Prieres et Meditations, reveals the truth of his life:

O not by keen conceiving is she known:

Our very self must mingle with her own!

Descend, O seer, from thy majestic top

Of azure contemplation, learn to implore

With sightless awe and frailty's fear of sin,

Disclosure of the unutterable Grace

Whose image is her blissful countenance!

Enclasp her feet in prostrate ignorance,

Till, from the measureless vacancy within,

A holy gleam is shed on the dark gaze,

And the still heart drinks heaven drop by drop.

(25.3,1989)

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