Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

26

Reading your letter I find a great affinity with you. I am reminded of the occasions when the Mother asked for a definition of Yoga from those Ashramites who had the good fortune to form a happy semi-circle in front of her every evening just before the Soup Distribution which was a part of the Ashram's daily life for a few years in its early period. My definition was : "To feel always a warmth and a glow in my heart in my relation with the Mother." One may have expected from a supposed "intellectual" a more brainy attitude - a definition bringing in "a heat and a light in my head". But, as I said in one of my talks to the students here, I had lost my head over Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the moment I had seen them and that was surely the heart's doing. Since then the chief motive-power has been something other than the thinking mind. Not that I have renounced thought, but thought has been a winging rather than a pacing or even a running that it usually was. The change was due to the inmost kindling that took place in the presence of the two Gurus I had found - or, more accurately speaking, who had found me, a wanderer on the world's labyrinthine way, and pulled me straight to themselves.

"The inmost kindling" - the adjective in the phrase is important and significant. For the heart has a within and a without. The latter is often a blind whirl, a dangerous movement, but hidden in it is a shining enchantment which leads to a beauty drawing one to the eternal truth of things. Such seems - esoterically - the disclosure in that line of Sri Aurobindo's which 1 can't help quoting and requoting:

Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us...

In the midst of what I have termed "a dangerous movement" is the "within" to the emotional self and there glides forward the divine flute-player who is the unfailing

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saviour calling us to himself and guiding us to our own being's secret plenitude. In this secret plenitude the essence of our whole existence, our entire multiform activity, is treasured . From that concealed core emanate the warmth and the glow I have spoken of - the real sense of the Yoga to me. Please don't fancy that I experience these wonders in their fullness all the time. I wish I did. But by the grace of my Gurus something of the marvels has been gifted and if that sdmething were to vanish I would be as good as dead.

Forgive me for writing so much apropos of my definition of Yoga. It can be a long preamble to a brief answer to your query about how "the stress of the Yoga put on the most external consciousness" mentioned by me in October 1985, has acted in the succeeding year. One or two things I may say in general. The external consciousness, with its turning this way and that and its looking at a hundred sources of stimuli, realised one day - May 15, to be precise - that the true joy lies exclusively in the mysterious place whose physical entrance, as it were, one feels in the middle of one's chest and which I have designated the heart within and differentiated from the emotional self, the heart without. An intense awareness of an everlasting "paradise" which alone gives point to the word "bliss" came up with an extra dimension to the warmth and the glow I have been writing about. I have known this paradise in various aspects and to diverse degrees all these years but never with the uniqueness and absoluteness that was granted to me now.

'Paradise' is a Persian word and means "garden", particularly a royal one. We always talk of the Garden of Eden, don't we? - and the term "paradise" is used for Eden as in the title of Milton's epic, Paradise Lost. And I think the garden-concept is rather appropriate because there is a natural sense of flower and fragrance in connection with the profound consciousness of the psychic being, Yeats has sung how all things uncomely and broken and cruel "wrong thy image, O Rose in the deeps of my heart". Especially the sense of a rose is spontaneous since the physical heart is

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associated with blood, the crimson stream of life which is gathered and dispersed from the cardiac organ. Perhaps it is truer to say that the heart's blood is red and the poetic imagination brings up the rose-sense because in mystical experience a vast rose is actually glimpsed and felt both in the deep heart of God-love and in the high "overhead" of God-delight. Does not Sri Aurobindo make one of his most Mantric poems dilate through five stanzas on the "Rose of God"?

When I awoke, as never before in so concentrated and concrete a manner, to the secrecy in the middle of the chest, as if the body itself were feeling the psychic being at that spot, I could not help the rose-vision in a poem which took shape. I hope you won't be bored if I quote the verses:

At Last

At last the unfading Rose-

Felt mine yet sought afar

In the flowering of forms

That proved but surface sheens,

Mirrors of a Mystery

That never broke to a star.

Now wakes a sudden sky

In the centre of my chest.

Bliss-wafts that never die

Float from a petalled fire

Rooted in godlike rest.

They spread in the whole world's air.

Gold distances breathe close.

Worship burns everywhere.

Life flows to the Eternal's face.

Unveiled within, Light's spire,

At last the unfading Rose.

Let me come now to some othter questions of yours. My

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health is good. Several people have my welfare at heart. The greatest care is lavished on me by my young American friend Minna. By luck I have still my own teeth and my eyes are giving fair service - of course through glasses, thick ones after the removal of cataracts years back. Only my legs are rather troublesome. But I make it to the Samadhi every afternoon - not walking from my flat but from the Ashram gate to which a friend drives me in a car. Left safely there, I go on my own to a chair under the clock opposite the Samadhi. In walking I have to take the help of what are nicely termed "Canadian Canes". I spend nearly an hour and a half in that chair - from a little before 4.15 to just past 5.30, trying to be suffused with the sense of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. My memory is almost as good as before inasmuch as important things are concerned. Much of it has to do with a lot of poetry that keeps coursing through it from mostly my old reading. But in the midst of it, names and faces from the past and present bring a quiet smile to my lips and a great affection goes forth to people near and far, in India and abroad. Among them one of the most precious is you.

(5.11.1986)

You are a real beauty of a soul! The qualities natural to the psychic being are in most active play in your life. The three outstanding qualities are: sweetness, light, strength. Yes, strength in addition to sweetness and light, for the inmost soul is the secret cavern where burns the godhead Agni. This godhead's tongues of flame not only illumine us with divine mysteries which guide us in the right direction, not only taste at all hours a hidden paradise - thus shedding both light and sweetness: they also keep at bay with this holy heat the adversary Wolf and temper the will in us to bear the strokes of fate or else cut through opposing circumstances. In some people, one quality or another out of the basic three predominates but I see in you on most occasions all of them

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jointly at work. The way you are facing your body's troubles without losing even an iota of faith in the Divine Mother and with actually finding in them subtle opportunities to have a more intense relationship of love with her shows how strong the sweetness is and how radiant the strength and how calm and warm the light. It is this interfusion of the three qualities and their well-proportioned co-presence that led to the exclamation I make in the first sentence of my letter.

It makes my heart happy that you believe I have been of some help to you in your crisis of illness and tests of faith. There is not an afternoon at the Samadhi when I have failed to conjure up a sense of you near me and to offer you into the Mother's hands. A warmth streaming out from some depth within me envelops my sense of you and bears you towards that silent fragrant fountain of Grace which is the Samadhi. While reading your letter, on reaching the words - "a renewed change of my disease for the worse which was so intense as never before" - I could not go further a few minutes, for a powerful inwardness seized me and a dumb intense cry went up to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to protect you always and improve your health and prolong your life. It was not in my power to come out of this inwardness at will. So I just sat with eyes half-closed and waited for the Divine-ward movement to come to its own intended end. Then I resumed reading. I seemed to live with you the vicissitudes of your ailment, especially as I could feel from your words the Mother carrying you onward through the grim shadow which ought to have darkened into death but which gradually began to thin away towards the end of March and abruptly yielded to a change for the better which your new homeopath doctor had been expecting. I feel thankful at the same rime to this doctor and the one who was treating you earlier, for it was honest on her part to admit that she could go no further, even though she had still the confidence that nothing short of such a desperate strait would make her confess failure.

To aspire after good health is nothing unspiritual. At one

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period in the past there was the notion that a sickly and weakened body was a help to the soul's development. Of course, anything that happens to us can be made a path to the Divine, but to put a premium On suffering and sickness in order to advance spirituality is to be both ignorant and sick in mind. Such an attitude forgets that the body too has the Divine in its substance and such an attitude has its eyes set chiefly on the life beyond. All this is old-worldly. In reaction to it science has put an over-stress on the body, particularly as it has serious doubts whether anything of us survives physical dissolution. The right balance is preserved by the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

It has three intuitions. First of all, the present life is not the only one: a series of embodiments has preceded it and a series will follow because God is to be realised and established on earth. As the Koran splendidly makes Allah say: "Thinkest thou that I have made the heavens and the earth and all that is between them in a jest?" Here is a truth not properly gauged by Allah's own followers. Though they have rightly felt a great vital force released by their Prophet, their goal is still the life beyond just as in Christianity and Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Buddhism, except that Buddhism for all its emphasis on a supra-cosmic Nirvana as the summum bonum has the doctrine of reincarnation which implies a sustained interest in earth-life rather than a looking forward to a heaven at the close of merely one brief experience in physical existence. Hinduism too is reincarnationist but has in addition the insight unforgettably expressed in this sentence in the Swetasvatara Upanishad: "That green bird hopping about, that other with the red eye, even that old man bent over his stick - these too are Brahman." The underlying godhead, the essential sacredness of Matter itself has always been part of the Hindu faith. Greatest of Matter's phenomena is the recurrent Avatarhood visioned by Hinduism - the series of special descents of the Supreme in a human form . In a more generalised shape we have the statement of one of the mightiest Avatars, Sri Krishna, in the

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Gita: "They who disdain or misuse the body forget that I am seated within it." All this prepares for the culminating truth revealed by Sri Aurobindo that the very tenement of clay which has so far been found, even by Hinduism, subject to disease, degeneration and death has a divine destiny - a perfect body waiting to come down from the Supermind which holds the archetypes of all things and a corporeal perfection waiting here in embryo for development out of the profundities of the Supramental Power involved in Matter and seeking to evolve from them and assimilate in terms of earth the substance of heaven.

I am afraid I have made rather a detour to arrive at the importance Sri Aurobindo attaches to the body and to the life terrestrial as the final scene of God's manifestation. So health should be our aim, but health so as to provide us with the chance to do to the maximum the work of belonging integrally to the Mother. A spur towards such a stand is the Mother's reminder that in the adventure of earthly evolution bodily life is naturally the only field of sadhana The main object of a sound body living as long as possible is an ever-increasing openness to the realisation of the fourfold ideal of our Yoga as flashed forth in that stanza by Sri Aurobindo which hails from the highest plane of spiritual inspiration available to us, the sheerest Mantra in which a vast yet precise vision takes up a deep and intense yet poised emotion and fully expresses it in revelatory word and rhythm:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest.

Read these lines clearly and slowly, letting each verbal vibration surround and penetrate you. A mantra like them has both an illuminative and a formative power in the highest degree to evoke the soul and open not only the mental and the vital being but also the body to the Ineffable that presses

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towards us to make all things new and true.

In the midst of the inner and outer atmosphere created by such lines, the idea of death grows shadowy, for the sense of immensity is all about us in which our small selves with their little bits of physical stuff lose the usual importance we give them. There is no room left for fear. For that immensity is not an alien grandeur. Within it are the Sri Aurobindo and the Mother we know and within them is the truth of each of us. A calm viewing of death, as well as of life, results. No desire remains for the former as a cure of our ills nor any shrinking from it as if the cure were worse than the disease. From what you write I have the impression that you have the correct attitude towards both life and death. Serenely and happily you have left them to the Mother's decision, yet realising that persisting health is necessary for enough time to proceed on your path to the Divine. The "order", along with the assurance, you heard in April when awakening from a nap -"Surely, 1 will help you, but you must not be impatient!" - is, without any doubt, the Mother's own voice. What you did, on hearing it, is a moving act: "I offered at once this impatience, which is one of my various weaknesses." I am glad you didn't repeat the famous prayer to God by a man lacking patience: "Please cure me of my impatience - at once!"

(21.6.1989)

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