Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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It is hardly surprising that in the wake of immersing yourself in the grand passages I had sent you from Sri Aurobindo's translations of the Rigveda's hymns to the God Varuna you should dream of a deluge. This deluge is nothing else than the presence of Varuna with his all-enveloping infinity which at once overwhelms and embraces us and washes away our small many-stained self from us and with wonderful waves of the ever-widening resonance of a Mantra merges us in a supreme mystery of our own being.

Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.

Naturally our normal consciousness is a little alarmed at such an enormous sweep of divine grace and we think of looking for a place of safety, as you did - but, thank God, there is no safety from God! Once we have taken His Name and invoked His endless secrecies of a Bliss which turns all human happiness pale and poor, escape is impossible. Of course, we still want to cling to our tiny gleams of transient joy until billow on billow of a giant light breaks the bounds of our hearts and no longing to escape is left any more.

That is indeed the climax of our lives. And to live in the sense of it at all moments is to convert every occurrence of our day-to-day commerce with the world into a unique discovery of the Divine - either a truth that leads into the depth of things or a beauty that opens our eyes to ineffable dreams or a power clearing a path each hour for a love to smile at us out of whatever difficulty falls to our mortal lot.

(6.10.1989)

You have asked me not to give you "the slightest thanks". But I cannot stop the Mother from giving expression to a gratitude from the depths of me. It was She who from your

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deepest part sent help through you - with that typical soul-quality: the sense of being only a channel of Grace. And it is with a spontaneous outflowing of happiness on recognising that soul-quality by a similar presence in me that I write this letter.

Perhaps you will query: "How can the Divine give thanks? All is rightfully the Divine's!" But surely the Supreme Mother has concealed her divinity in the shape of an ignorant universe striving towards light and, whenever a spark of success is struck, a smile of humble bliss gleams out from her hidden greatness. It is as if she never expected to succeed - such was the stupendous gamble of looking for the infinite All through the play of infinitesimal dust - and thus most naturally the Supernatural itself is surprised on being found again and there breaks forth a "Thank you." Particularly is it so when the generosity is both spontaneous and substantial.

All this may sound like semi-Fichtean semi-Hegelian -metaphysics but it is really Aurobindonian truth Amalianly poeticised.

(25.9.1989)

I have received all your letters and the photographs. They give me an insight into your soul and the general mood of your good friends. I can see that simple devotion to the Divine is the very life of your life. The ceremonies are no mere religious gestures. They are there because of tradition but there is true love of God finding expression through these old forms. And I am happy and proud that you have mingled me with the spontaneous approach you have to the World-Mother. To be remembered in the movements of your inner being as at the same time a fellow-devotee and an intimate brother is indeed good fortune for me and gives an extra intensity to my own turning towards the Divine. Looking at the beautiful photographs I feel the past occasion a living reality. The consecrated expression on the faces of all

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the participants and specially on the face of my dear friend adds a new glow to the self-surrender I always aspire to make to Sri Aurobindo and to his Shakti, the transcendent and universal Creatrix who not only meets us as a close personal presence in the depths of our hearts but brought for year on sunlit year an embodied beauty and bliss to our adoring eyes and worshipping hands.

Someone has said that it is not by arguments that a man gets converted to belief in God. It is the sight of true believers in their spontaneous act of prayer and worship that turns a mere hypothesis of the Holy into a palpable reality and a life-enveloping radiance.

(4.10.1989)

You want to know the most memorable event for me this year (1986). In your earlier letter you said you were continuing the course in healing, and hope to be proficient enough to give me some healing influence when next you visit Pondicherry. This influence would have been quite welcome two months back when I had one of the worst tosses in my long life of many sudden and violent contacts with the ground, thanks to my inefficient legs. And this fall brought for me paradoxically the high-water mark of the current year in Yogic consciousness. Already I have written the story of this memorable event to some friends. Let me repeat it to you.

I have always valued old Confucius's maxim: "Our greatest glory lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall." Of course, the Chinese sage was not speaking in reference to treacherous lower limbs, but I found his words quite appropriate to my tumbling career. And I have ever been quick to get up. This time - at about 7 in the evening - I took long. The pain was so intense and wide-spread that I had to keep lying on the floor for nearly an hour. My friend Minna happened to be watering my little garden which is of her own making. Hearing me gasp several times she rushed

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in and sat down on the floor beside me. I don't know how the fall occurred. I was getting up from my chair, the same in which I had been sitting on the two occasions you had graced my flat with your visit. Suddenly my knees sagged. With a twist in my waist I fell backward and one of the comers of the small table fixed to my chair butted into me like a bull - or rather I was like an idiotic matador backing into the horns of a bull waiting for him. The butting was just near my spine and somehow it affected my breathing. The pain caused by it as well as by the contorted way I fell on the floor was of a kind unknown to me: it was as if swords of fire were slashing into me at a number of places. But as I lay supine in great physical distress I made a strange discovery. In the midst of the intense pain my mind and heart were absolutely at peace. Not a twinge of fear, not a tremor of anxiety!

Utter tranquillity seemed the very substance of my consciousness, I had never realised that such perfect calm had been permanently established in me by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, To the inner being, nothing had happened. I am almost inclined to say that the fall was worthwhile just for me to discover this profound serenity.

In former days I had found myself facing calamitous events as if from what Sri Aurobindo has called

The silent Being within

Who sees life's drama pass with unmoved eyes.

But I had never dreamed that my own physical disasters could be looked at in the same imperturbable manner. And this unshaken state was also different from the detached condition in which I had undergone the pain about 9 years earlier when I had slipped on the wet courtyard of Dr. Sircar's house and had hurt both my legs so badly that my wife Sehra had thought I would never be able to walk again. On that occasion of getting bedridden for a time I could draw myself inwardly away from my body's lower part, but there was some link subtly left with the body. Now it was like

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standing quite apart from it. "Standing" may sound an odd word to use when I was lying flat on the floor. Yet it is really the mot juste to drive home the fact that my body and I were two separate things and that the toss still left me unfallen in mind and heart,

(1986)

You have stated your puzzlement over certain expressions in my little piece of poetic mysdcism, "When Poems are Born." Let me first quote it, then cite your questions and then attempt an explanation step by step. Here are the 16 lines:

When poems are born

No man and woman meet:

A lion and a nebula

Vanish in a single heat.

A light that is nameless and formless

Plucks up the master of life -

Limbs of carved thunder take

An infinite silence for wife.

And, by the unfathomed fusing

Of below with beyond,

A mystery leaps out of slumber, .

Breaking time's bond.

A cry like immortal honey

Foretastes of the truth behind

Our human grope - the almighty

Body of Supermind,

You have written: "I know in the animal world examples of the female swallowing the male after conception. I have also no difficulty in understanding that a thought-parent is dissolved while the child - the words - is born from some

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brain ceils, but 1 have never known both parents vanishing in a sclience instance while heat of conception and delivery are almost simultaneous. Obviously this does occur since you describe it so beautifully. Will you explain in some detail what your 'lion' and 'nebula' stand for?"

Now for my reply. Although hints are taken from the physical world of mating and breeding, the process described should not be judged according to what happens in biology. The very first line gives a warning that here is a metabiological process pictured. But this process is envisaged in an extreme functioning - the creation of a mystic poem. However, such creation is still in the realm of poetry and what happens during its production is foreshadowed in all poetic activity. So I may begin with the nature of all poetry.

The near and the far, the earth and the empyrean, the conceivably concrete and the intuitively sensed, what is clear to sight and what is figured out by insight, the vital formative power and the spiritual creative elan from some depth or height of revelatory secrecy - all these go to the birth of a poem. The two elements coming together from two ends, as it were, are imaged by my "lion" and my "nebula". These entities enclasp each other, interpenetrate, catch fire, grow one blaze of beauty, disappear as separate existences and forces, become something which at the same time combines both and is a different transcendent "third". This culmination gives point to the word "vanish" in my piece.

The first stanza is to be read in conjunction with the less radical expressions of the second and the third. "A light that is nameless and formless" is the "nebula", "limbs of carved thunder" are the "lion". The former - the empyrean reality -takes into itself the latter who is called "the master of life", while this master makes that reality, termed now "an infinite silence", merge with himself as his wife. The "lion" stands for the shaping energy in its extreme drive to incarnate a supreme perfection on earth. The "nebula" is "an infinite silence" which gives to the expressive shape hewn by the

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artist vitality an archetypal significance, a profundity of suggestion, a liberating atmosphere of the endless evermore. When matter's inconscience is made to meet by creative art the divine "beyond", then from that "below" of grandly moulded "slumber" the hidden Godhead - "a mystery" -breaks forth, setting earthly limitations ("time's bond") at nought. The result of the "single heat" in which the "below" and the "beyond" participate and lose themselves is the poem. That result is the "immortal honey" distilled into a lyric "cry", a flow of light and delight, a beauty that is truth and a truth that is beauty, conveyed by the magic of a form whose lines at once shine with a seizable message and shade off into those rapturous "reasons of the heart which the mind cannot know".

This chiselled yet shimmering shape comes as a blissful anticipation - in verbal terms - of that flawless formulation of the Divine Being, which Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental Body. The formulation without a flaw, while already existent in the empyrean as the guide of "our human grope", is waiting to descend with its "almighty" artistry to refashion the outer no less than the inner life of earth.

In short, every authentic poem prefigures in one way or another in the world of words the Integral Yoga we are striving to practise in order to bring, into the evolutionary products of the Supreme who has hidden in the Inconscient, the all-transformative power of the Skabda Brahman, the Logos which articulates in time the marvels of the Eternal -the Aurobindonian Supermind.

(4.7.1985)

I am glad to receive a photograph of your recently born son. Now an important part of your life is to see how the little one becomes a big one in the course of time. And when I say "a big one" I do not mean merely a growth in size. Of course, the bodily welfare has to be looked to, but equally momentous is the development of the inner being. And this

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development depends to a considerable extent on its environment, especially its psychological environment.

A child is extremely sensitive and easily absorbs something of the presence of things and of persons around it. An atmosphere of harmony and happiness is the best gift one can make to one's child. The art of bringing up a child is in its own way a kind of Yoga. Faith in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is, no doubt, an important matter, so that the infant soul may catch their subtle presence. But faith is not enough. The manner of life counts a great deal.

Between the two parents there must be a play of sweetness and light, those two natural attributes of the Psychic Being. Also, one's individual and personal habits create an aura of their own. The consciousness has to be calm, clear, bright and has to express itself in a certain attitude and activity of the outer being, which must practise poise, orderliness, bodily care, regularity, balance of movement. Spontaneously the child will take in through its twinkling eyes the drama of life around it and by its sensitive soul, which will be very much on the surface during its first few years, it will tend to be an image of its parents.

Please forgive me if I seem to be preaching a sermon. But I have no intention of putting forth goody-goody advice. What I have said is what I myself try to put into practice, although I have no baby to take care of (thank God!). Rather I am myself a sort of baby. But this baby feels very intensely Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as its parents and has tried to absorb something of their presence. So it knows how your own baby will be disposed to act in response to its physical and psychological surroundings.

I have written to you as your friend who has a great affection for you and something of this affection extends to both your wife and the child and I would wish all three of you to live in the vast creative sunshine which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have brought into the ordinary life. May this new year unfold a rich inwardness and outwardness for all three of you.

(12.1.1988)

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