Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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I am glad you are reading my series "Life-Poetry-Yoga" with interest. The personal vein in which it is cast gives me a lot of liberty to express myself. And it seems to help people in their inner and outer problems. I receive encouraging words from several sadhaks when I go and sit my hour and a half at the Samadhi every afternoon. Generally it's the only outing I have and even the walk from the Ashram gate to the chair under the clock and the return "Marathon" plod gateward are trying. It is so fine of you to ask me to consider your Bombay flat my home, and to tell me that 1 should come there if ever I need to visit my native city. But my legs refuse to get along with that kind of feat. They have become noticeably unsteady, which is natural when I use a "walker" at home and "Canadian Canes" outside. My arms get stronger and stronger and the legs lose their "kick" - except when they will have to kick the bucket. As I wrote to a friend of mine, the "Canadian Canes", which are ordinarily my mainstay, become dangerous when the ground is wet from unexpected rain, I have to be very careful how I set them on the ground when picking my steps over the wetness lest they should slip. For, if I don't put the canes vertical I would myself at once become horizontal!

Symbolically, this wouldn't be undesirable. In our Integral Yoga the movement has to be both a vertical one from the earth-plane to the higher realms of consciousness and a horizontal one in which we widen out to embrace the earth-plane itself (though not necessarily in the sheer physical sense in which I sometimes do the embracing when I have a toss). Many sadhaks are content to soar into inner freedom and bliss but do not know how to be in their outer lives a centre of light from which their being may spread into a subtle oneness with the Universal Spirit and permeate with bliss all who come in touch with them. An indrawn and up-drawn concentration is surely an important part of our

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sadhana, but the final test of success is to be an illumined soul come forward into the waking state and feeling the Divine Presence radiate forth in all one's actions and relationships. At least this is the ideal I pray for and strive after in spite of repeatedly falling short of it. If I have any desire to go beyond my already excessive 85 years, it is to have a little more opportunity to realise my ideal.

(16.12.1989)

You asked me in the Ashram: "When our scriptures say that God is within us, do they mean what Sri Aurobindo calls our 'psychic being', the true soul in us?" I gave you a short answer on the spot. Let me make myself fully clear now. Our psychic being is not the same as the Divine within - it is the Divine's immortal delegate for evolutionary purposes. We may name it in our immediate context, at our present stage of evolution, the Divine projected in a subtle quintessential human form to manifest divinity in terms of mind, life-force and body - itself serving as a centre to them of a profound sweetness and light and strength: it is their guide carrying God's mandate of transformation. The Divine within is the psychic being's eternal companion — not only companion but also its direct origin, the Secret Splendour from which it is put forth on a small scale with a gradually unfolding infinity. The psychic being is inwardly one with that greatness but outwardly different as a developing entity.

When we become aware of it, we are bathed in a soft radiance, a warm happy glow is all about us and there is a constant intuition of the Divine's presence and a ceaseless self-giving to it at the same time that we feel held within an intensely intimate yet all-transcending vastness of purity and peace fused with power and rapture. From this unique experience, as if from an inexhaustible source, a stream of causeless inherently existing joy keeps running into the world around. Upon that stream every happening and everyone we come across are felt floating as a spontaneous

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offering from us to the Universal Lord and the Supreme Mother. No personal ego-sensitive reaction takes place and whatever we meet receives a silent blessing, an undemanding love. Not that we cannot discriminate between the good and the bad in the world before us so as to respond with the right insight, but there is no leap of superficial judgment. An invocation arises to the One who is beyond all error to intervene and help His Truth to find expression in the complex of earthly circumstances. Dynamic activity on our part is not ruled out; it is even imperative, at least at times. However, it issues across an inner passivity to the hearing of that Truth by our psychic being.

(17.12.1989)

Your letter of 21 November brought a number of significant themes - the chief being the grateful exclamation: "We have been so blessed in our lives, to be caught up in the blazing comet-trail of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, our life-span crossing a line of Earth's destiny." After creating such a vividly profound sentence you don't have to bewail: "I don't know how to express this. I wish I had your gift for words."

What you posted on the 27th illustrates your own gift in another fashion - that enchanting birthday-present to me, your poem:

Go words! and dance your way across the paper!

Make me a minuet to please my friend.

Join hands, process and part to stately measure -

But vex me no more with meanings that depend

On dictionaries. Follow the deeper note,

And weave a saraband or roundelay!

Whirl me a waltz — a tarantelle - gavotte —

A galliard for Amal's natal day!

The ant embraces the ant in wordless greeting;

A pulse of delight moves the delicate steps of the deer;

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All nature dances for joy at fortuitous meeting.

And treads out a burden of bliss in the listening air.

So words! I send you to Amal in Pondicherry.

From bondage to reason and rhyme I set you free.

Let your message of friendship, O words! be simple

and merry:

Dance my "pas seul" on the air of his ear like a bee.

. The very measure of the verse is exquisitely Terpsicho-rian. And the personal strain imaginatively woven into the word-pattern meant to celebrate a particular occasion, "Amal's natal day", sets us two - despite your "pas seul", your solo dance — delightfully together as partners tripping out of the poem into some subtle actuality to the rhythm of more than metrical feet. I don't know whether your conscious mind intended this overtone of suggestion, which is punningly there in the very words "pas seul" meaning "not alone" no less than "solitary step". But, as you know, poetry — even if deliberate workmanship has gone into it - is much more than the poet's doing and re-doing his speech. Yeats has somewhere said that though a lot of conscious labour may be spent upon a poem the result is worth nothing if it does not read like "a moment's thought". This "thought" exists originally beyond the poet's conscious mind, and if the latter toils, it is merely to dig a channel for that secret wonder to flow through, destroying all appearance of the passage prepared for it. And what breaks out from within carries often much more than the toiling poet is aware of. You have invoked "the deeper note" that goes past the "dictionaries", and I like the way you have delicately conjured up a sense of the ultra-real by bringing in the instinctive touches of movements that are earthly but outside the reality obsessing us - the human "bondage to reason and rhyme". Of course, "rhyme" in the present context spells the rational fitting of parts with a mechanical logic and not poetry's echo of things surprisingly blended by intuitive magic. I am charmed by the third quatrain about the ant and the deer, where such

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intuitive magic has play everywhere and not only at the rhyme-end of lines. The final "bee" too pleases me, for it hums its way to my ear, loaded with the honey of the heavenward heart of the poet in you.

I think it's the first time that "Pondicherry" has figured in a poem. Originally I heard of this town in connection with a competition in an old Times Literary Supplement. That was before I joined the Ashram. Readers were asked to invent a name for a book such as would never tempt anybody to buy and read it. The first prize was won by the title: "How to ride a tricycle." The second by the title: "The roads of Pondicherry." Evidently Sri Aurobindo was still unknown to the English public in general before 1927, the year of my Hegira. In literature proper the town had a minor place in Conan Doyle's second Sherlock-Holmes novel; The Sign of the Four. The four conspirators fixed on Pondicherry as their venue. This was still earlier than my TLS - much before Sri Aurobindo had made the capital of French India his Seat of Yoga. Now the name of the town is on everybody's lips, but none till the day of your verses has put it in poetry. You have even made it an end-word evoking the rhyme-phrase "simple and merry". If not for anything else your piece should be published for the sake of its making music with this name. The poem may also get noted for the phrase "Amal in Pondicherry". So far Pondicherry was associated thunderously with colossal Sri Aurobindo: now it may also be linked whisperingly with a tiny disciple of his.

I should like to dwell a little on your command to words to "be simple and merry" in their message of your friendship. Basically you have voiced here something appropriate and inevitable between us as followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and not only as two individuals who chime in unison and are joined all the more by both being in love with poetry. By the way, poetry itself is, according to Milton, "simple" no less than "sensuous and passionate" - "simple" in the special sense that it is a direct language rather than one that is complicated by speculative discourse - a fresh-welling

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utterance due, as Milton himself says, to dwelling

on thoughts that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers.

What dwells on such thoughts is something within us which has an intuitive drive bypassing the usual activity of the mind. Here, by a different route, we hark back to "a moment's thought" a la Yeats.

Now to my point about us as Aurobindonians. There is no single path for them to the goal, for the goal marks the convergence of all possible movements of human nature towards an all-fulfilling transfiguration. But there is a path which Sri Aurobindo names "sunlit". The naming reminds me of the closing lines of my poem "Psyche":

A flame that is All,

Yet the touch of a flower -

A Sun grown soft and small.

The true soul in us which Sri Aurobindo has called the Psychic Being represents in terms of the evolving manifestation of the Divine on earth a central flame which has infinite potentialities. It is as if the Supreme Himself started as a luminous seed sown in the cosmic Ignorance and, with a nature of sweetness and light, exerted His secret strength against the surrounding darkness. The dynamic Truth that is the Supermind and whose symbol from the time of the Rigvedic Rishis has been the sun of our planetary system is present as a diminurive delegate in the inmost part of us which is our true soul. The Psychic Being is the Divine Child in us: it turns spontaneously to the Eternal as to a creative Mother of the worlds. With no egoistic demand, with no complicated side-issues involved, it goes straight to what it feels to be the sovereign source of the true, the good, the beautiful. An instinctive simplicity of self-surrender to God is its distinguishing mark. And this giving of itself is an act of

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joy: there is nothing forced, nothing strained, for indeed its very stuff is a causeless happiness. Every movement of it is a smile - it is a smiling repose, it is a smiling activity, it smiles in solitude, it smiles in company - and with its inherent smilingness it transmits to others its own endless rapture — its interplay with people is a healing balm, a dispelling of their shadows. Thus, along with its childlike simplicity is a childlike merriment. No matter how difficult the outer life may be, no matter what adversities may come from day to day, it is bathed in bliss. So your wanting your words to "be simple and merry" in the hearing of Amal in Pondicherry is a mission given them to evoke in him a remembrance of his psyche. The sunlit path is the one on which the heart of man, surging out of its depths rather than floating on from its surfaces, can go dancing to the Divine instead of toiling towards the Transcendent. Perhaps we may even sum up the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as being in its most concentrated and swiftest form an injunction to be sublimely simple and seraphically merry: that is to say, to bring forth the Psychic Being as the leader of the march from the limited human to the liberated superhuman.

(18.12.1989)

Your letter - deeply felt when written and as deeply felt when read - was most welcome. I have used the word "deeply" not just to indicate emotional intensity but also to point to a region of the being which goes beyond, our separate outer selves, a profundity where all of us are one and where our oneness reaches into a single divine Source underlying everything, A sweetly vibrant touch of this double-aspected depth was there both at the time you wrote and at the time I read. For you have spoken as if you were the mouthpiece of a multitude, the representative voice of all those who turn to Mother India for a glimpse of Sri Aurobindo as their guide, a whisper of the Mother as their impeller. And you have spoken thus because you have intuitively caught

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the sense I often have of being a channel, however limited and imperfect, of Sri Aurobindo's light and the Mother's love, two felicitous forces which have a universal movement behind every individual-seeming action and which through that universality bring to our fumbling and aching selves the hope of an all-consummating future, as envisaged in Savitri:

A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,

A Will expressive of soul's deity,

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

A Joy that drags not sorrow for its shade.

You have quoted what I wrote in the April issue of Mother India last year, p. 239. Nothing could have pleased me more to remember. My latest birthday wish was the same as the one you have appreciated so much. Only the words were not the same. My appeal to the Divine was: "Open me inward and upward to You more and more. Come through this opening and live in my heart with ever greater intensity. Then open me outward to You who are hidden in each of my fellow-beings and make me feel You opening them inward and upward to Your eternal truth in all that changes, Your immortal Beauty in everything that passes."

The postcard you have sent me, reproducing the painting by Leonardo which hangs in the Munich gallery and whose frame you have reverently touched shows in the figure of the Virgin and the Child the Transcendental Beauty watching from above with meditative tenderness the image of the Supreme Truth it has created in our world in the form of a perfect littleness destined to grow to fullness in the course of time. Here in her lap is a transparent embodiment of what the Upanishads have visioned as "the Being in the heart no bigger than the thumb of a man, who is like a fire that is without smoke and who was in the past and is now in the present, the lord of his today and the lord of his tomorrow -the truth which thou hast to seek."

Leonardo's Virgin looks downward while the Child looks

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upward at some invisible point with both his little arms stretched forward to it. Again, an intent of forward striding is suggested in the way his two stretched legs are poised. One hand of the Virgin clasps the Child at the back, the other gently touches the last finger of his raised right hand as if to assure him of her subtle support. The Virgin's head is crowned with golden curls. On her right shoulder hangs a golden wrap which emerges more fully and brightly below as part of her dress, in almost the centre of the lower part of the picture. There seems to be some symbolism in this golden colour at the centre-top and the centre-bottom, for this is the colour of the divine Truth-light. Two other shades make up the Virgin's dress: a brown underjacket and over it a blue robe - emblems of earth and sky. Her slightly bent head is against a black background which is the middle of a wall with two arched openings on either side of the head. Through these windows we glimpse a landscape of brown earth, greenish vegetation, blue mountain-rocks under a faint whiteness with light blue above it. The suggestion is of a slow several-aspected ascension made visible to us through those apertures in the dark background of the Virgin's fair face. All this appears to be significant of the varied conditions under which the Divine Mother consents to work in her earthly manifestation through the development of what we term the Psychic Being down the ages, the inmost Soul projected from on high to bring gradually the heavenly plenitude on the terrestrial scene.

If my understanding of Leonardo's lovely pattern at once of peace and mobility, outer shape and inner sense, has any validity, it may be because of what, as you remind me, Sri Aurobindo wrote to me - that according to his impression I may have been present during the Italian Renaissance as well as in Restoration England. (Ancient Athens was, of course, a certainty for me.) You have recalled my saying that I may have been "a footling of a painter" tutored by the master mind and revelatory hand which gave us "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper". Handing paint-brushes to that past

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maniiestation of Sri Aurobindo, during the Creadon of those great visions, was perhaps my happy job.

At the Samadhi on November 25 I thought several times of the hour it would be in Grafelfing. Your information that 11.45 there would be 4.15 here and 1 on your wrist-watch be 5.30 on mine proved a good guide to my imagining what you might be doing at any particular moment in that span of seventy-five minutes. Once I imagined that you were at a window and the lines from my poem "Far Flute" floated into my mind:

What visionary urge

Has stolen from horizons watched alone

Into thy being like a fathomless smile?

It may interest you to know that the second line has been characterised by Sri Aurobindo as "Intuition with Overmind touch." May I mention a few of the other phrases in my poetry which have received the same touch, thanks to Sri Aurobindo's grace? I should like to quote them, because if one learns from Sri Aurobindo what plane is at work, one can absorb more livingly its atmosphere through the rhythm and the vision, and let not only the spiritually-turned aesthetic sense but also the very substance of the soul feel the impact and grow more Aurobindonian.

(1)The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind. "Intuitive with Oveirnind touch."

(2)Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,

The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind...

"Illumined Mind with the Overmind touch."

(3)An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I

Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.

"Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed together."

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Now back to the Samadhi and you. A second imaginative look at you found you poring over a book, but the book seemed to be one in which the true essence of all things was gathered together. Recollecting this scene I am now put in mind of a particular aspect of Dante's vision in the highest rung of Paradise. Slightly modifying the beginning of line 2,I may cite Laurence Binyon's English rendering:

Leaves I beheld within the unfathomed blaze

Into one volume bound by love, the same

That the universe holds scattered through its maze.

I can only think of a "volume" like The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga which in terms of earthly literature could reflect the state of Divine Consciousness Dante hints at, a state wherein the multiplicity and diversity of the phenomenal world interweave and blend to discover their all-hansforming unity or, rather, meet in a warm and glowing union which discloses the truth of each in all and all in each.

I must cry halt now with my best wishes for you to move towards the healthy, the happy and the holy.

(30.11.1989)

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