Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

25

What is this talk of depression and weeping? Let me tell you a small true story.

You must have heard of Martin Luther, the German priest who initiated the Reformation and started Protestantism as opposed to the Roman Catholic Church. Once he got into a mood of great depression. For days he would not smile and would hardly talk. One day his wife, fed up with his "blues", dressed herself in total black as if for mourning and appeared before him. Luther was surprised and asked why she had worn such clothes. She exclaimed: "God is dead!" Luther angrily retorted: "God can never die!" Then his wife quietly said: "If that is so, what is there in the world to depress anyone?" Luther immediately came to his senses and from that day never wore a gloomy look.

As long as the Supreme Light and Love exists behind all the changing play of sun and shadow that is human life -even more when "that many-splendoured Thing" has become not only a mental intuition but also a golden presence in the heart - how can we let any cloud hang over our consciousness? Until we have established complete equanimity, little pricks are bound to occur, yet they should not last: each prick should rather be a further call to the Divine within us to come to the surface of our being and meet the hurting touch with a smile - a smile lit up with the sense that there can be no loss ever while deep in us dwells the "crimson-throbbing Glow" which can never be quenched and which holds the quintessence of every possible delight and is a self-subsistent fullness.

I have gone through many difficult times - even what the world would term "tragedy" has struck at me on a number of occasions, but from the day I saw Sri Aurobindo I realised his all-soothing power and this power took its place in my heart. Vasari, the biographer of the great painters of the European Renaissance, wrote of Leonardo da Vinci: "With the splen-

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dour of his most magnificent countenance he could make whole every broken spirit." You must have heard that in one of his past vibhuti-embodiments the one whom we name Sri Aurobindo was this master-painter who gave us that unforgettable as well as that unfathomable beauty of a picture known as "Mona Lisa", the picture of a noble lady who is said to have been a past emanation of our Ashram's Divine Mother. Once, looking at the long finely moulded fingers of the Mother in a certain pose, I remarked to her: "How much your hand resembles Mona Lisa's as depicted in Leonardo's great painting!" She very quietly said: "Sometimes even small physical characteristics are carried over from life to life." Then she smiled. Eternal bliss seemed to radiate through that delicate curving of her lips and I knew once again what had come as a conviction to me ever since my eyes first fell on her face - a conviction which a line from Savitri has best served to express for me:

They who have looked on her shall grieve no more.

And I am profoundly grateful for the lavishness of the joy the Mother has heaped on her spiritual children so that we almost take overflowing grace for granted, failing to realise intensely enough what a gift we have received. A poem of mine starts:

Because you never claim of us a tear,

O Silent Love, how often we forget

The eyes of countless centuries were wet

To bring your smile so near!

Perhaps you would like to know the continuation of this poem? Here it is:

Forgive if I remember not the blaze,

Imperishable, perfect, infinite.

Of far omnipotence from which you lit

Your lamp of human face.

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Make me a worship-vigil everywhere.

Slumber and wakefulness one memory

That you are God. O let each pore of me

Become a mouth of prayer!

Apropos of the phrase "mouth of prayer", may I make a comment on a bit of news you have given me? You write, a little ruefully, that on 17 May a tooth from your lower row of teeth fell out. That's nothing to worry about. 1 have only 22 teeth in my mouth now. I believe I never had 32 as is said to be the rule. I had only 26 or 27, from which the first extraction of a left molar was done when I was 56 years old. Now there are only 16 in front (8 upper and 8 lower) and the rest distributed on the sides. At over 84 years of age, what can one expect? The path to the Supermind, which is our Integral Yoga, is a long one which is to be trodden through several lives. Time and again we shall be supra-dental before becoming supramental. But surely even a toothless mouth can pray and be happy?

(31.5.1989)

Your appeal to clear the confusion in which the members of your Centre have fallen sets me thinking along several lines. What you quote from the Advent of February 1988, p. 12, seems to give a picture of the general process of higher powers from beyond the mind coming down to act in the aspiring consciousness in the course of the Integral Yoga. Here the Supermind, no less than the Spiritual Mind with its four levels - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - has been at play, but more indirectly than otherwise. The first direct action of the Supermind in the human constitution in a regular way took place on December 5, 1950, when, as the Mother told me and as she also declared in a Talk in the Ashram Playground, the "Mind of Light" which had hitherto been elusive or at most an intermittent power had been permanently realised in her the

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moment Sri Aurobindo had left his body. I may remark, in passing, that this fact gives us some insight into what Sri Aurobindo achieved in making what we have come to consider a sublime strategic sacrifice, his glorious body's absorption of all hostile destructive forces in order to clear for the Mother and thus for the future world the way of the descending Supermind. The Mother defined to me the new state as "the physical mind receiving the Supramental Light". In a poem which I wrote a few years later she found the first two lines to be a perfect revelation while the rest were an imaginative reconstruction. These lines, according to her, caught in exact word-form the truth of the Mind of Light, the precise experience which had got fixed in her. They ran:

The core of a deathless Sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.

But, of course, this realisation is only the first though extremely momentous step towards complete supramentali-sation. The latter would imply, as an ultimate consequence, a total divinising of the human body, rendering it infinitely adaptable, entirely invulnerable, quite free of inertia, full of a subtle radiance, ever-energetic, immune to disease, decay and death.

This point brings me to another dimension of the subject. I may distinguish two sides here - what I may rhetorically call the Yoga of evolutionary transformation and the Yoga of revolutionary transformation. The one means the slow progressive march of the human race through centuries under the influence of the Supermind established in the earth-nature. The establishment was done on February 29, 1956 in an initial though definite manner. But the Mother made it clear that it was achieved in the subtle-physical layer of the earth, what she termed the earth's atmosphere, and not in the gross-physical. Once this was done the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could be said to have been

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fulfilled so far as the evolution of man as a race was concerned .'The supramental principle was made a part of the earth's future history. Not with full strength even in the subtle-physical but with a gradual potency would the new entrant in the cosmic field operate, for, as the Mother said, the agelong entrenched agencies of darkness arose in revolt to overwhelm it. Through their siege the Supermind has to push forth its powers. As compared to their long-standing existence in the evolutionary arena it may be considered a new-born child, but one who is essentially almighty and intrinsically destined to triumph in the long run.

Revolutionary transformation means the bodily divinisation about which 1 have written. It is an individual process and, in the early days of the Ashram, it was openly thought feasible in one life-time. Not only were Sri Aurobindo and the Mother sure to be the grand exemplars of it, their followers also were considered candidates. No doubt, these were expected to observe certain conditions in order to qualify. But these conditions were not such as would be beyond their capacity. Thus one sadhak was told to have an inner detachment that would keep the human heart free from its usual sentimental ties and to see that he did not let any accidental damage happen to his body, which might permanently affect its vital organs. What was incredible was that he could be given the intoxicating assurance of the plenary achievement. He can never forget the absolutely amazing occasion in May 1929 when the Mother told him that he would have "the great transformation" in his present life itself. Neither can he get over the ecstatic shock on 31 January 1934 when Sri Aurobindo, in answer to this sadhak's inquiry whether like a self-deluding fool he could have misunderstood the Mother, replied that what the sadhak had reported was "quite accurate". Nor can this sadhak feel sufficiently grateful for the gracious statement of the Mother's to him on 19 May 1944: "...there were things which might act to delay your spiritual realisation and might be otherwise dangerous for you. This does not mean that the

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realisation will not come." Even less than a decade before she left her body she could allay his doubt and diffidence with the words: "I have not withdrawn my assurance. You are perfectly capable of participating in the realisation and will participate in it." All these personal memories - difficult for so faltering a person as that sadhak to credit -1 mention here not for boosting his spiritual career, but to underline the enormous hope held out to the disciple up to a very late period in the Ashram's history, Sri Aurobindo's departure, which was like an earthquake to many of us and to me in particular who had never for a minute wavered in my faith that he would fulfil in entirety the ideal he had set before us, did not deter the Mother from holding out supreme expectations to us. When, however, she quitted her body, I for one knew for a certainty that the programme had changed for all of us. The revolutionary transformation was, for some reason beyond our comprehension, postponed, as Nolini once put it.

Apropos of this kind of earth-change, I should clarify two terms often mixed up. Strictly speaking, the word "descent" which has been so much in the air in relation to the Supermind is proper only to an individual being who is turned towards the Integral Yoga. We have various levels at which diverse forces in us work. The level of the life-force is centred in the region of the abdomen, the emotional in the area of the heart, the mental in that of the brain. Pragmatically, there are lower and higher levels. Above the brain-mind are planes of consciousness to which we may be said'to ascend and from which there can be descents. But this terminology fails to apply under another set of circumstances. The Supermind "descends" so far as the individual being is concerned. When a universal breakthrough by the Supermind occurs we have to speak of a "manifestation". This is the distinction the Mother herself made when referring to the event of 29 February 1954 in a talk with me. Though the terms are somewhat flexible, it is best for clarity's sake to observe the distinction. The irrelevance of speaking of

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descent in connection with the 1956-event was hard for me to grasp. But the Mother cut short my intellectual curiosity. It would seem that there is only one universal existence with diverse aspects which from the individual viewpoint we may describe as planes below and planes above.

The descent of the Supermind leading to bodily divinisation would be the crown of the Aurobindonian Yoga. As late as 1969, on my birthday, the Mother told me, among other things, that though it was an error to say that the Supermind had not descended into Sri Aurobindo's embodied being, for indeed it had done so a long time before, yet his physical substance had not been supramentalised. Then she caught hold of the flesh of her own arm and said: "This too is not supramentalised." However, there was no relinquishment of the ideal intended to be materialised. For, on my saying I wanted to live long enough to see her Victory she said: "Bon" — which means "Very well".

Even when that Victory had not been won, the presence of the Supermind in the bodies of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought about some effect on their bodies' own functions so that we felt that they were not like us at all and could transmit inner force and light and bliss, and could influence purely physical movements in us too. Right down to their subtle-physical there was transformation and naturally this had its radiant result in their gross-physical but not to the extent aimed at by the Integral Yoga. So we may opine that now when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are not with us gross-physically, that power is operating on us from their achieved perfection in the subtle-physical counterpart of the earth. And, along with this phenomenon of descended Supermind behind the gross earth-scene, there is the phenomenon of the manifested Supermind pressing on that scene from behind it. Today none of us in his senses hopes to divinise his body in his present life. But a movement has been set going towards that grand goal in some shining vista of the future. For the present, whatever is possible short of bodily divinisation is the legacy our Gurus have left us. And

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indeed a tremendous amount of inner transformation verging on a broad effect on the outer self is within our range and can be realised if we practise as wide an equanimity as we can and keep up the practice of remembering the Mother and offering to her all our movements inner and outer.

By the way, the statement you have quoted about the Supermind and 29 February 1956 from Mother India, February 1988, p. 96 - "Now on February 29, late in the evening it came down for good. What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had worked for during 30 years happened at last" - was made before the details of what had happened had come to my knowledge. It speaks in terms of coming down - of descent. It represents what I thought and not what the Mother afterwards told me. Even your closing item which provides the picture of the manifestation has the word "down", so difficult it is to avoid it: "The Mother has declared that 'the Supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow', after she had shattered to pieces the massive golden door separating the world from the Divine." But the picture , is of a universal event as contrasted with the individual event which I had in mind.

This picture, in its specific contents, was not laid bare in 1956. It was disclosed on 24 April the next year. Only the general import of it was given in 1956 - except to a couple of people. One was verbally told the specific contents and he tried to write what he had been told. The report was sent to the Mother after it had been touched up by an English friend. The Mother remarked to me that human beings make such a mess of things. Most probably if the actual note in French, which, as the Mother informed me, she had made of her experience had been seen and understood, the report might have been better. The other person who came to know the specific contents had the rare luck to read the very note. On his birthday, 25 November, in the year of the manifestation, when the Mother asked him to select books as a gift, he asked only for the grace of being shown the note of which

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she had spoken. During his interview with her in the evening she let him read the marvellous account. Of course he had to keep the disclosure secret. I have told elsewhere the full story of the grace. I am sketching here merely the bare outline of it.

(31.5.1989)

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