Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

27

You say you are preparing for the birthday of Sri Aurobindo, August 15. May I put down a few thoughts that occur to me? They would, no doubt, apply to all Darshan days and not only to the one that is just ahead of us.

On a Darshan day now we have not only to think of Sri Aurobindo but also to visualise him, with the Divine Mother sitting on his right. Visualisation is important, for he and she are the Lord and his Executive Power in a physical shape and unless the physicality of them goes home to us in a vivid way we may fail to receive the full impact of the Light and Love they sought to transmit through a materially concrete channel to us who are so sadly caught in the density of our own bodies. Only by the Divine becoming human can we humans best approach divinity. So we would do well to focus our minds on their photographs - preferably on the picture taken on the Darshan day of 24 April 1950 which shows them both together. Those who have seen them with their own eyes do not need the picture but even they are likely to have got the image of Sri Aurobindo a little hazed because he was seen no more than four times a year. So the photograph can be helpful to them also. Of course, we don't have to go on staring at it: we may surely shut our eyes to meditate, but the sense of it should be there.

Some of us don't find it necessary to keep our eyes closed for meditation, for it is not so much the head meditating as the heart doing it with a spontaneous flow from the depth where the true soul of us knows itself a child of God. I have heard that Sri Aurobindo mostly kept his eyes open during much of his sadhana for the earth. In the old days he would be walking for six or seven hours a day. Nine years I spent in the two first-floor rooms which he had once occupied for six years or so. His persistent walk across them had dug a slightly curving path. Cementing had been done over it and I often retraced its winding progress in the hope that I might

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find my way to the Supermind sooner by literally walking in Sri Aurobindo's footsteps! He was a vigorous walker, as 1 know from having sat at times in the meditation hall on the ground-floor of the Ashram's main" building and heard him moving on the floor above in the corridor next to his room. Surely, his eyes being generally open during meditation to and fro was not due only to the spiritual movement going on in the soul-profundities, the inmost heart, rather than through the mental consciousness playing about the brain. A greater action was going on along with it. His mind was eternally silent and what acted in him was a self-luminous immensity above the head which reached out towards an endless Beyond and transmitted its magnificent mysteries to his embodied being. Do you remember those two stanzas from his poem, Descent?

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;

Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions.

Blaze in my spirit.

Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

The Mother, by contrast, used to shut her eyes very often. Sometimes, even in the midst of a conversation she would suddenly go within. This was so because she would receive messages from all over the world for help. She was like a wireles operator and the SOS would come to her at any moment and, being the gracious Mother of all, she would be bound to answer her children - appeals from helplessness, invocations for assistance, direct prayers to the Unseen, desperate cries of unbelievers to they-knew-not what. Often her in-drawn movement was for getting into touch with the inner state of those in front of her so that she might meet

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their needs most effectively. But occasionally she would keep her eyes open during a whole half-hour of general meditation as if she were trying to draw subtle realities into physical action by herself looking at them across bodily sight. On Darshan days she would be compelled to look outward, but even then she would snatch a moment of in-drawnness between meeting the gaze of one devotee and facing that of another as they passed before her.

Darshan days were special occasions when the fact of the Divine's physicality grew more intense - and to match the effect of these days we may try to render most real to our perception the marvel of their embodiment, the grand outflow of the Ultimate through the intimate achievement of Avatarhood.

And with what attitude should we approach the vision of their consenting to be our companions in flesh and blood? I would answer: "A happy blankness." We must have nothing to ask, nothing worked out in our minds, nothing even to be offered. Happiness should be ours because they are there and because they are our father and mother ready to give us new birth into a greater life - blankness we must carry to them so that they may find us ready to receive from them what they wish to give us, our beings a wide white space empty of our usual self and waiting for them to write on it the golden story of our soul's manifestation and their radiant presence with us for ever. And if at all there is to be any message from us to them, it should simply be this of gratitude and aspiration: "You have become like us in appearance, may we be like you in reality!" .

(8.8.1989)

It is 7 past 11 p.m. on August 15. Your letter - most welcome as always - came yesterday. I carried the thought of it and the image of its writer to the Samadhi this afternoon. I was very thankful to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for the help they had given you to be within sight of normality at last. My

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heart was really singing at the news you have reported. No matter how weak and stumbling you may feel yourself to have been, it is the pervading presence of the psychic being in the midst of all frailty and falling short, that has kept you going with what I may paradoxically call a smiling sigh on your lips. And the same soul-presence I feel when you write: "My faith in the Divine Grace is unshakable. But whatever, strictly speaking, the Mother decides to be my fate, I will accept without the slightest hesitation."

Ever since I woke up this morning and remembered what a wonderful day it was and looked at the photo of Sri Aurobindo on my bedside table, the photo which the Mother had titled "Compassion", I have carried within me a quiet coolness, a silent steadiness which even the body seemed to reflect by its unhurried movements, its calm gestures. But this state was no self-absorption. Out of it flowed unwaveringly a self-forgetful warmth towards the twofold Divinity I had had the supreme good fortune to have seen and touched. Such a state remained - sometimes just as vivid as in early morning, sometimes a little vague while doing my writing work - throughout the day. Even now, when I am ready to go to bed after finishing this letter it is still there, a happy depth not shut up in itself but with doors thrown wide open to the world. This inwardness taking spontaneously a form of outwardness is permeating the sheet on which I am typing. I am sure it will be felt by you as Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's love channelling itself through one human being to another, through something like what a poem of mine has called "a sun grown soft and small".

The four-lined Mantra in my last letter, which has so impressed you -

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 -

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has to be made vibrant in its original English, set free from all translations which have been published. Perhaps the most foolish rendering is the German to which you have referred. The "taking to" of the first line cannot be deprived of its preparation and the present participle should not be made to have as its object the remainder of the line: it means at the same time devotedly moving towards an ultimate radiance and resorting to a refuge of perfect rapture, a distant marvellous Ineffable which yet gives itself in silent response to the earth's reaching out for it. The second line's "Eternal" hardly bears to be changed into "Eternity". The "Eternal" here is a glowing Super-Person whom our psychic-vital self can intimately touch. "Eternity" is not a word to be scorned as too abstract: it can be made living by a line like Sri Aurobindo's

White chambers of dalliance with eternity,

but here it is out of place and would denote simply a transcendent state rather than One who is such a state and who can be in warm contact with us. "Force" in the last line is certainly a substantive, as you have discerned, both in the grammatical sense and in the sense of being a Power that is a palpable substance, as it were, going forth to create and transform without losing a self-possession and a poise and an inherent plenitude as if what it seeks to achieve in terms of time and space has alrady been achieved beyond them. There can be no disturbance in the Divine despite his millionfold activity. The German version, construing "Force" as a verb, would signify that the "Arms", "Life" and "an unwalied Mind" compel us by means of something unimaginably restful. The word "one" is not the object of a supposed verb "Force";-it stands for "identical". I am afraid the translator has made a hash of an utterance at once massive and wonderfully winged from a Himalayan height which yet goes thrillingly home to the aspiring human heart.

(15.8.1989)

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There is a character in Proust's famous novel, translated as Remembrance of Things Past, who on failing to attend some important occasion would send a wire: "Impossible to come. Lie follows." My case is different. I don't have to invent an excuse for not writing to you earlier. My colossal criticism of the famous Finnish scholar Asko Parpota's huge new thesis -a splendid synthesis of varied research - hasn't yet come to an end. Twice I thought I had done with it, but new points cropped up and the perfectionist in me couldn't rest. Perhaps a couple of days will be needed before I sit back and heave a sigh of relief. So many things have been set aside. Some fascinating books have been forced to wait. Perhaps they may have to wait for some time even after I have finished with Parpola (or should I say "Finnished" in view of my equally long and detailed article?). For my eyes have been strained, both by poring over small type and by not shutting long enough in sleep. On several successive days I have gone to bed at 2 or 2.30 or even 3 a.m. and got up at 6.I never sleep during the day -1 have only about half an hour of quiet lying-down. Luckily I am alone at night and there is nobody to worry about my health. Ostensibly what I am doing is to bum my candle at both ends, an indulgence supposed to be dangerous when one is 85, but as I am enjoying it enormously and never worrying about the consequences, 1 believe the candle will attend to my mood and, dwelling on each bright moment, burn more slowly than it would ordinarily do and thus I shall be saved from any shortening of my life. It is anxiety and the frightened imagination that do most harm. There are untapped resources in us which can cope with unusual demanding circumstances. I hardly feel any the worse for sitting up at my typewriter till the small hours. Besides, there is a trick of drawing in or pulling up subtle-vital energy through the abdominal region as well as a way of recuperation by opening upward to an immense ether of an infinite Power emanating from an eternal Peace.

The eyes, however, have not found a means of getting easily refreshed. Too much time would be spent in doing Dr.

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Bates's exercises. I resort at bedtime to Locula 30% - drops which burn like hell but tone up the "optics".

I am glad to have been the subject of a talk between you and Ravindra Khanna. He has been a very affectionate friend for years and we have a keen common interest in poetry. If he or 1 pop off, the survivor will have nobody left to swap lines of poetry with from memory. His memory is more richly stored than mine - I believe he knows almost the whole of Ghalib and Iqbal by heart in the original Urdu or Persian. I don't think I can recite at short notice even my own poetical works in toto. But a good number of lines of English poetry float through my mind at all hours and if a particular word of note is brought up it recalls half a dozen or more lines of various poets in which it occurs. For the joke of a test 1 am picking out the word "note" in the preceding sentence and jogging my memory. Some lines from Sri Aurobindo are responding at once. First a triplet from Savitri about whose source 1 had questioned him and he had replied: "It may be the intuitive inner mind with the psychic fused together." Here it is:

But joy cannot endure until the end. T

here is a darkness in terrestrial things

That will not suffer long too glad a note.

The second visitor is from The Life Heavens:

Heaping note on enrapturing new note.

This pulls in another phrase from the same poem:

A high note and a fiery refrain.

The next discovery is provided by Descent:

Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,

Cry that anthem,finding the notes eternal...

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Going backward in rime I find the ending of Reminiscence:

A song, not master of its note, a cry-

That persevered into eternity.

Next, further back in years are a line and a half towards the end of Love and Death:

A single grasshopper

Near him repeated fierily its note.

Out of a pre-Pondy past the last line of a poem by another poet peeps out but I am not sure of the wording:

The songs are forced, the notes are few.

I shall ask that walking treasury of verse, Ravindra Khanna, to tell me the correct version and its context.¹

Well, enough of this tomfoolery! Let us go to more serious things. I don't know how the topic of death arose in your chat with Ravindra. Perhaps the mention of "disease" triggered it off. The Mother's letter which he quoted to you seems to be an answer to some apprehension of dying as the result of a disease. When she writes - "Keep quiet and fearless - everything will be all right" - she can't mean that if Ravindra keeps quiet and fearless he won't ever "shuffle off this mortal coil". She must mean that he need not fear he may die because of some bodily trouble he may be suffering from at the moment. Or possibly she means that even if R dies there is nothing to worry about since she is there to take care of him. But her message - "This suggestion of death comes from the 'ego' when it feels that soon it will have to

1. Postscript Note: On consulting Ravindra I have learned that the line I was trying to recollect occurs in Blake's lyric "To the Muses" about the rarity of true poetry in the 18th century and really runs:

The sound is forc'd, the notes are few.

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abdicate" - gives us the idea that, if the ego abdicates while we are still alive, not only will the suggestion of death never come but also we shall enter a condition in which we shall rise above both life and death into the consciousness either of the inmost immortal soul, the true individual, or of the highest eternal Self of selves, the universal One within the many.

You are very lucky in your sleep-state. I think it is the constant presence of the psychic being in all your actions and reactions that makes your sleep a rendezvous with Nolini again and again and even with the Beyond-Nolini.

Your latest dream is indeed amazing. It shows how close your heart and mind are to your friend's and how illumined your inner contact can be. The dream that I am "concentrating on Vedic verses" and that you are feeling "their atmosphere" brings into view, without my telling you anything, my present preoccupation for the last several days. In the course of my critique of Parpola's treatment of India's antiquity I got steeped in the Rigveda and have been haunted by its hymns. Especially has the God Varuna come alive to me. Glorious verses connected with him(who is at once like an all-encompassing ether and an all-pervading ocean are part of my thought day and night or rather he has taken my thought at all hours into his infinity. Here are some renderings by Sri Aurobindo:

"Luminous Varuna has embraced the nights; he holds the Dawns within him by his creative knowledge; *vi-sioned, he is around every object."

"He is the hidden ocean and he climbs passing beyond heaven; when he has set the sacrificial words in these dawns, then with his luminous foot he tramples asunder illusions and ascends to Paradise."

"Vast is this wisdom which I declare of Varuna the far-heard, the mighty Lord, for he stands in our mid-world as with a measuring-rod and wide he measures our earth with his ilumining sun."

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"Vast is this wisdom of the godhead, greatest in seer-knowledge and none can do violence to it; for into him, the one, the ocean, the bright fostering rivers pour their waters, but they cannot fill him." "

I shall stop now, leaving you with the vision of this Aurobindonian immensity, within which as co-sharers of its blissful transcendence are carried Amal and his precious friend, close-hearted to each other, hand in hand in their aspirations.

(20.8.1989)

If the study of astrology has led you to the distressing question - "Am I at all free to do anything or is everything destined so that 1 am just a puppet?" - it is high time you laid aside your astrological chart. I shall not go into theological questions, for you have not raised the crucial point which at one time drove me nearly crazy as you may learn from the book Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran. I shall touch only on a simple fact of psychology which is relevant to your context.

What is the basic psychological difference between the mentality of animals and ours? Surely, animals are conscious but they are not conscious of being conscious. We humans have a self-observing poise. Something in us stands a little apart from the diverse processes going on in our physical-vital-mental system. It knows that it can watch these processes to a certain extent, adopt an attitude towards them as if it were not identical with them though at any moment it may plunge into them and be carried along in whatever dull or dynamic, weeping or laughing, vicious or virtuous turn the endless movement within us may take. The very fact of this witness-posture, however limited and precarious it may seem, the very fact of its ability to judge even if it be at an inch's distance the never-ceasing stream of thoughts, feelings, proclivities and sensations is evidence of a degree of

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freedom in us - a degree of being uncaught by that stream and a degree of being the acceptor or rejecter of it. Such freedom as an inherent part of our make-up and of our existence should convince us that no astrological chart can completely rule our life - unless we are sophists enough to argue that our very conviction or decision that it cannot rule our life is itself predicted in it and therefore fixed! But then we can play counter-sophists and say that we can be fated to be free!

My general advice is: "Get out of the astrological obsession." Astrology at its best shows a graph of physical possibilities. By saying "physical" I don't exclude the life-force and the mind, for, while being essentially non-physical, they have their surface-manifestations which are closely linked with material factors. Physical possibilities do not exhaust the range of our existence. And, remember, the astrological chart can show no more than what can tend to become actual, for man the witness, the stander-back, can say - at least for one critical moment - "Yes" or "No" from his in-drawn poise.

(5.9.1989)

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