Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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Thank you very much for holding me so deep in your heart and so high in your mind. To be given such value might lead the common man in me to a swollen head, but as I have sought to serve the Divine it spurs me to look for all the defects that prevent me from deserving the compliment you are-paying me. Your profoundly appreciative attitude sets me on the alert to shoot whatever "Clear Ray" ("Amal Kiran") Sri Aurobindo has put in me to mark out and pierce the multitude of defects still lurking in my nature. Reading your letter led me at once to feel extreme gratitude and to be aware of so much that is necessary to realise in order to be worthy of your affectionate praise.

Suddenly my mind went back to a greater challenge in a somewhat different way. When the Supramental Manifestation in the subtle-physical layer of the earth, which the Mother named the earth's "atmosphere", took place on February 29, 1956, there were two effects. On the one side all that was turned towards the Sun of Truth sprang up like

A fire whose tongue has tasted paradise.

New powers within us came into view and a glorious goad was felt urging us to reach out towards what Sri Aurobindo has called

Still regions of imperishable Light,

All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power

And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss

And calm immensities of spirit Space.

Not only was there a glorious goad; there was also a permeation of our selves by a force I may poetically term a laughing golden ease which swept away in many of us several obstructions we had been striving against for long.

On the other side, undreamt-of darknesses rose into our

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ken. Strange difficulties in the form of desires that seemed unnatural to the normal self confronted people. They learned of defects in themselves which had never before pestered them. The Mother was told of this weird counterpoint to the sense of exaltation and of heavenly help to deal with our life-problems and Yoga-demands. She explained that the new illumination could never cause them: it could only disclose what was already there, hidden from our usual sight. A more penetrating beam had fallen from on high upon our subconscious to reveal noxious matter crouching there and needing to be coped with some time or other.

Answering the question "Why have difficulties increased for quite a large number of sadhaks?", the Mother brought up an additional aspect of the situation: "There is yet another reason. When the Force which is at work is stronger, more insistent, naturally what resists, resists as strongly. And if instead - it is here I have to say something that's not very pleasant - if instead of being hypnotised by your little difficulties, your little inconveniences, your small discomforts, your 'big' defects, if instead of being hypnotised by all that, you tried to see the other side, how much more powerful the Force is, the Grace more active, the Help more tangible; in a word, if you were a little less egoistic and less concentrated on yourselves and had a little wider vision in which you could include things that don't concern you personally, perhaps your view of the problem would change."¹

Most of us did follow the Mother's advice. And after a while the frightening self-exposure passed. There remained only the wide quiet impression of a supreme gift from the Divine, a soft smiling security in the air around us as if the earth's future were no longer ambiguous. Whatever the appearances henceforth, the path to perfection had been secretly laid across the ages to come. From the distant future the saviour arms of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were stretched out to us just as from the past they were gently

1. Questions and Answers 1956, p. 220.

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pushing us forward and in the present upholding us with a loving word in our ears.

1 remember the Mother telling me about the divine movement corresponding from the opposite direction to the manifestation of the Supermind. 1 had thought that the Supermind involved in the earth's being, just as the life-force and the mind had been involved, had emerged even as they had emerged. The Mother proved me wrong but declared: "Now the emergence of the involved Supenrtind is certain. It is only a matter of time."

Perhaps this too will take place first in the subtle-physical layer of the earth? And when it does, the manifested Supermind will triumphantly appear in the gross-physical along with the involved supramental consciousness emerging there. Then shall be seen on a grand scale - here, there, everywhere - in a most literal and ultra-Miltonic sense "the human face divine."

Writing to me about my eighty-fifth birthday you have repeatedly wished me "a long life". I can't think I shall live long enough to see that great evolutionary consummation. Possibly, were I to achieve the feat of becoming a Parsi Methuselah to match the legendary Jewish patriarch who, according to Genesis 5.27, went on living for 969 years, I might look at a whole world of such faces with, at least partially, a "human face divine" on my own neck, too -provided, of course I sustain the Yogic aspiration over the centuries.... In actual fact, my life has been unexpectedly long as it is - unexpectedly because I was born rash and have taken all sorts of risks, at first with a deep-rooted confidence in an inexplicable vitality behind my own and later with an inner sense that the Divine, would see me through every adventure. As you know, the Mother once told me: "We have saved you from all kinds of disasters and it is indeed good that you have so much faith, but don't go on exploiting our protection." This means that I must have more wisdom, more forethought, though not necessarily what is called worldly wisdom and fear of the future. I am doing my best to

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live long both because I am happy and can give happiness and because I want as much time as possible to go nearer to Sri Aurobindo's luminous Truth and the Mother's radiant Beauty. All the same I am ready to say "Hurrah" whenever they tell me, "Your time is up."

(21.11.1989)

You have asked me to comment on differences of temperament in Yoga. I have known a pair in the Ashram, one of whom - the husband - happened to have an optimistic temperament, while the wife was rather serious-mooded. Not that she couldn't laugh, but there had to be proper times for it. Thus with a laugh she had forbidden her partner to crack a joke before she had had her morning cup of tea! Jokes would be quite out of place if she hadn't been rightly conditioned by that warming-up beverage. She used to wonder how this fellow could be chirpy even on just getting up from bed.

Perhaps you'll imagine he was more in touch than she with what is termed the "psychic being" in our Yoga, the entity hidden deep within us which is constantly lit up because it is constantly in the Divine's secret Presence. You'll be wrong. Actually the wife was much more than he in the aura of the psychic being, for she had an intense love for the Mother, a rare self-giving devotion, so much so that the Mother once told the man that his wife's soul dwelt all the time in the Mother's own bosom! But she had a worrying-and hypersensitive temperament. I am sure that if she had lived long enough, it would have been quieted down. But such a turn of nature doesn't easily develop a mental standing-back from the surface of things, undergo a determined discipline of detachment, studiously practise non-reacting to the impingements of the outer life. One has consciously to create conditions that may keep going in all circumstances whatever degree of the sunny psychic sense one may happen to have.

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A special effort is to be made of what the Mother has called "Remembering and Offering". Here the most important thing is that the offering to her of those outer impingements must be immediate - before we start thinking of how we should respond. The temptation to give thought to them is great. Those who worry and are hypersensitive are liable to yield to it. A certain toughness of mind is required to resist it. And the habit of non-response has to become one of our main preoccupations. Activities which are usually supposed to be important should be made merely occasions for us to remember and offer instead of returning all-too-human answers or else making reactions according to our personal idea of spirituality. Not that we have to be passive in our daily life. We certainly need to act at many points, but the acting has to come out of an initial inner passivity in the hands of our Gurus - without private grudges, grievances, frustrations in relation to our fellow-sadhaks.

Please don't run away with the fancy that the man who is preaching here is an equanimous paragon. At least once a year he badly loses his temper for a second or two, generally over a trifle - and he feels profoundly ashamed for doing so. What I have tried to describe is a type of temperament in its perfection, towards which he strives hard because of a spontaneous affinity to it.

(9.11.1989)

The phrase haunting you - "divine Aurobindo died" - from a poem of mine which you couldn't find has somehow been ringing in my own ears time and again during the last month or so. It is not only "stunning", as you say: it is also heart-shattering. It sums up in three climactic words the long tragedy of our untransformed world. And there is a concentrated art in it which drives it home with a terrible poignancy as if putting a final seal on the transience and unhappiness of the cosmic condition. The art lies in the consonance-assonance of the two words "divine" and "died" in the midst

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of diametrically opposite suggestions. And the art of this connection gets a secret support from the occurrence of the d-sound in the name "Aurobindo", a sound which subtly counteracts the four-syllabic length of the name dividing -triumphantly, as it were - those two suggestions. The horror and the hopelessness of the mutability of even the greatest factors - or actors - in the earth-drama are clinched by the three-worded phrase's position at the end of the many-visioned sonorous octave of the sonnet. Then comes the sestet's surprise - the conjuring up of the paradox of a death that is a breakthrough into a new life for a humanity that has always dreamt of the undying although faced everywhere with the passing of the most beautiful, the most lofty. Yes, "dreamt", but mortality has ever intruded to make the vision splendid fade, and the most disastrous touch came when the hope was at its highest - during the career of Sri Aurobindo, the Supramental Avatar. The sonnet appears on page 38 of Altar and Flame. Here it is:

Heaven's Light and Mortal Doom

The Parthenon's pillars built to upbear the sky

Could keep not even an earthly roof; and all

That colour kindled for the Eternal's eye

In deep Ajanta fades; no rhythms recall

The two grand plays the terrible chisel-stroke

Of the titan mind of Aeschylus set beside

Prometheus Bound: their power Time's brute hand broke.

Heaven's light passes - divine Aurobindo died.

But this one death where Heaven's own self gave room

For dire eclipse of its eternity

Has spent the whole blind force of mortal doom

Against the soul's vision of a wondrous sod

In which the Undying can work His artistry.

Now Man breaks free to grow for ever God.

(25.3.1988)

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The story of your experience on the staircase leading to the Meditation Hall on the first floor on one of your birthdays in the 'sixties at a time when the Mother was not seeing people is most enchanting. I marked two or three points in it for comment. You wrote of sitting at "the foot of the stairs". 1 think it was a soul-instinct which made you choose the place, as if you were at your Guru's feet. The foot of the stairs which went up and up and the remembrance of the One who was at the top recall to me an early poem of mine with the name "Kanchinjanga" in its title. The name means "Golden Ganges". No appellation could be more apt for our Mother, the radiant fount of Divine Grace. Here is the poem:

At the Foot of Kanchinjanga

I have loved thee though thy beauty stands

Aloof from me,

And hoped that dwelling in thy sight

From dawn to dawn at last I might

Become like thee -

Become like thee and soar above

My mortal woe,

And to the heavens, passionless

And mute, from dawn to dawn address

Thoughts white like snow.

The second point I marked was your phrase: "a force was descending in me." Now again the Ganges-suggestion was unavoidable. All of us know the wonderful story of Rishi Bhagiratha's invocation and the descent of the Ganges from heaven through the wide-growing hair of Shiva's head -' Shiva who offered his Himalayan head to bear the terrific impact of the heavenly river so that it might not fall directly and unbroken upon little earth and shatter it to bits. Here another poem of mine swept through my memory. Let me quote it to you:

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O Ganga of the In-world!

O Ganga of the In-world! luminous

With the calm passion of the Master's Will,

Celestial Grace, thou flowest unto us,

Voiceful from the remote Inerrable -

Pure in thy beauty, softening the might

Of summits absolute for our valleyed ways,

That like a wondrous yet familiar light

Eternity may mingle with our days,

And in thy deep melodious ecstasy

Drowning all fear, our souls go fordfied,

Daring the ultimate peaks of destiny,

Seeking the dazzling fountain of thy tide,

To contemplate the illimitable form

Of Shiva silent like a frozen storm!

Point three is apropos of the felicitously bold phrase with which you end your short account of the descending force: "It was so peaceful, so sweet, so delightful and at the same time so powerful that I felt my head would melt into honey!" I am reminded of Rishi Vamadeva's mystic words in his hymn to Agni;

"May we taste that honeyed wave of thine which is borne

in the force of the waters where they come together." -

Apam anike samithe ya abhrtah,

tam asyama madhumantam ta firmim. (IV. 58.11)

What you experienced was a touch of the divine Ananda which is no passive bliss but a dynamic beatitude. What finer, what greater gift could one expect from the Mother on one's birthday?

You have asked me: "Did it descend from outside or did it emerge from deep within?" I should answer: "The soul in you which is deep within opened up to its own supreme

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potentialities which are hidden above in the empyrean of the Spirit. When they are on the verge of being realised, the within and the above grow suddenly one - or rather the secret truth of their oneness breaks forth; the inmost soul's aspiring consciousness turns into the sheer sparkling nectar that comes from the Spirit, dissolving all bounds."

It is true that I forgot the exact date of your "bonne fete". I forgot because you drew my attention to it too far ahead. If you had written to me about it a couple of days before the happy occasion, my still continuing preoccupation with the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola's thesis would not have covered it up from my sight. But, of course, you are always in my heart and mind. You have asked me whether I did anything on that occasion which would distinguish it. Well, my friend Madanlal, who recently recovered from a fractured "neck of the femur" and bravely carries on with his handicap and meets me with a smile every afternoon at the Samadhi, asked me in view of my rather secluded life: "Do you ever feel like going to the seashore or, if you can't, do you feel sorry on missing the freshness and openness that are there?" Spontaneously I said: "Why should one? Within us there is a glorious self-sufficiency." I meant: "If one lived in contact with one's inmost being, one would miss nothing. One would have the sense of all journeys done - of having reached that home of oneself for which all journeys seek."

(9.11.1989)

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