Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

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Your letter has been in hiding for quite a number of days, but its place in my drawer did not mean that it was ever forgotten. Always my mind dwelt on it and it was securely lodged in my heart no less than in my drawer. Never to forget that it had been set aside for a less crowded time is really not to have set it aside at all in the true sense of the word. If, as Milton often says in Paradise Lost, small things may be compared to big ones, this morning when I have pulled your letter out I am reminded of what the Mother once told me after her son Andre's first visit to the Ashram. She said in effect: "Truly speaking, Andre was never absent. All through the years it was as if he were here but behind a screen. Now he has come out and become visible. That is the only difference in the way he has been present in the Ashram."

Of course, in Andre's case it was not just a matter of the Mother's constantly remembering him: it was also a matter of Andre's own incessant remembrance of the Mother. I am inclined to believe that something similar I may dare to say even in the case of your letter. When you write to me it is not mere words that come over. Your own self seems to get projected in the form of white paper and blue ink: they carry in intense symbol-suggestion the twofold aspect of your life -the purity of the in-world that is your natural ambience and the beauty of the over-world that is supernature softly expressing itself within that upward-looking soul-secrecy.

With this vision of you in my eyes I am not surprised at all at the unhappiness you feel whenever you notice "the paucity of kindness in the human heart". You have very finely and aptly said: "We always pray to the Divine for Grace but we are hardly gracious to fellow human beings." Yes, when we receive the "kindly light" which Newman invoked in a famous poem to "lead" him on, surely it is not meant to be looked upon with a miserly mysticism. Not that

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we should lose ourselves in a philanthropic frenzy as if service in any way to mankind were our object: we must never forget that God-realisation is our aim and what we have to bring forth in the midst of mankind is God-manifestation or rather what has to flow out of us is God manifesting Himself. This outward act of His has to be through a psychic spontaneity and not through a mind-managed intervention, though the mind's role of giving intelligent support is quite acceptable.

I may observe that spiritual graciousness towards fellow human beings comes more easily to a certain type of sadhak. By and large, there are two types. One has a marked capacity to go inward and meditate for a long time. When the born meditator emerges from his spiritual cell he is a good sight, for some aura of inwardness clings to his face. But often, instead of being calm and patient with people, as do the best of this type, he shows irritation with them and is eager to give them short shrift.)At the worst we have the example which the Mother once gave. Haven't I already written to you about it before? She said there was a chap who could get lost in meditation for hours. One day, while he was deeply interiorised, someone knocked at his door - hard enough to draw him out. The master of meditation rushed to the door, opened it and exclaimed: "You damn fool, don't you know I am meditating? How dare you disturb me? Off with you!" And the door was banged in the face of the unfortunate intruder. The Mother commented: 'This sort of meditation is worth nothing."

The second type of sadhak does not do much of set meditation. But whatever little is done by him serves to invite the inner to come out and be present as a quiet active force in his day-to-day life. Rarely, if ever, does he flare up, and in his contact with people the out-drawn inner being flows like a warm stream towards them bearing an unspoken benediction from the smiling Splendour that is the Mother and the silent Grandeur that is Sri Aurobindo. This kindness, this helpfulness is not really personal, it is only channelled by the

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giver and it is directed chiefly towards awakening in the receiver the hidden soul, the secret eater of a heavenly honey, the arch-healer by whose touch all physical handi-caps and difficuleties , all psychological hardships and entanglements get lightened and a soft bliss bathes the whole being.

The danger to which this type is exposed is the proclivity to throw oneself out too much, believing that the soft bliss will envelop all his doings. One must learn to draw a line, check the over-exteriorising tendency, stay clear of certain activities that are out of tune with the Dweller of the Depths who has graced with his presence the surfaces of life.

The ideal sadhak would combine the essences of both the types. To show us how this can be done we have the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. The Mother's natural movement seems to have been profoundly meditative. Again and again we have seen her withdraw into a trance. Occasionally she would be lost in the inner world for hours. Of course, there too she would be at work and was not just absorbed in self-beatitude. In fact, beatitude was always with her and there was no need to withdraw into it. What I am referring to is the tendency to be indrawn repeatedly, away from the pulls of the outer existence. But we have watched also how the Mother tirelessly toiled in the outer existence for our sake. It was as if Sri Aurobindo put her forward to face that existence while he remained behind in a sublime solitude of the Spirit. And yet the actuality is that throughout his intense exercise of the spiritual life Sri Aurobindo seldom shut his eyes! "Exercise" is indeed an appropriate word, for he at one time used to spend seven or eight hours walking up and down his room. I should know this best, for I occupied two old rooms of his in what was called the Guest House. He had lived there for about six years" and I had the tremendous luck to spend nine and a half years in that place. By his walking across the floor he had dug a semi-winding path to the Supermind. It had been plastered over with cement before my time. But the sign of the great passage still stood out. I

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used to follow it with my own feet, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mighty goal he had reached! The glimpse was never caught, but I would feel exhilarated by imagining myself in the atmosphere, if not of Sri Aurobindo's Supermind, at least of that magnificent mind of his with

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,

as a -Miltonic verse seems anticipatively to have figured it. Perhaps by the attempt to imitate his "exercise" of the spiritual life I got a far-away touch of the way he lived. For the point is that he who to all appearance remained behind, with the Mother put in the forefront, appears to have scaled spirituality's Himalayan altitudes and plumbed its Pacific profundities with his eyes wide open, apparently looking all the time at the non-Himalayan non-Pacific common levels of land and sea. Without plunging into unearthly trance, those eyes held perpetually

The light that never was on sea or land.

Thus in the Mother and Sri Aurobindo we have with a touch of paradox in both instances the blending of the two types raised to the nth degree. They set us the ideal. Till we come within some distance of it, let us develop whatever type is most congenial to us without falling into the perils of its exaggeration. I for one have mostly the bent of the second type - no doubt very poorly achieved in spite of my persistent effort. At least one shade of it has not been too far off, so that when people appear at various odd hours at my door and apologetically say, "We hope we are not disturbing you", I am able to quip: "What you are saying is hardly a compliment to me. Do you think I am so easily disturbed?"

Now to some other topics in your letter. You are right to think that callousness to people's sufferings does not imply the capacity in oneself to suffer courageously. Cruel men are mostly cowards. The example you have given of the noto-

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rious Eichmann is very pointed. As you recount, he who had sent hundreds to the horrors of the Gas Chamber exclaimed when he was caught by his Israeli pursuers in Latin America: "Oh, do not kill me, do not kill me!" You have doubted whether a monstrous person like Hitler could ever have been courageous. What distinguished him was the boldness of his ventures, the confident strokes of his strategies. We have learned from our Gurus that these masterful acts were inspired by an occult Asuric force. They do not necessarily bespeak a courageous personal nature. His final suicide when defeated may show a desperate courage. But I suspect that he would not have been driven to it if the Russian army had not been his potential captor. He took his own life because he dreaded being the prisoner of Communists -especially when they were headed by Stalin whom he had betrayed. Most probably he would have surrendered alive to the Americans. Perhaps one may ask: "Why could he not have escaped by air with his girl-friend Eva Braun?" My conjecture is that he knew that if he had tried to do so his followers might have shot him for a coward. He preferred to die by his own hand and be considered a hero. But can one be a hero when no course other than suicide is left to one?

I am touched by your intimating to me the "secret" of what you did when I was sitting with shut eyes close to Lalita's lifeless body. Your standing quietly by my side for a-few minutes was a very sweet gesture. Yes, we were not on terms of intimacy at the time but you seem to have had a presage of things to come. For I am sure it was a movement not only of natural kindliness but also of spontaneous affection. You have wondered what my state of mind was. Of course I was unaware of my surroundings.What I was cherishing in my heart with shut eyes were two experiences. One was the observation of an exquisite beauty that had appeared on Lalita's face some time after her death. It was as if her psychic being were still active within her physical frame and could somehow play the artist with the lines of her face, turning the preceding expression of peace to a hint of delicate

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delight at the subtle sight of the Divine Mother. I remember calling Richard Hartz's attention to this sweet change. The other experience was caught from a large picture of the Mother hanging behind the bed on which Lalita had been laid. This picture is now in my own room, hanging behind me as I am typing my letter to you. When I looked at it intently on that late evening, it conveyed to me most forcibly the message: "All you have done in your Yogic life is not enough. You have to change still more radically. Rise above the various weaknesses which are lingering in you. Do not waste any of the time that is left to your life." Along with the sense of Lalita's soft beauty, I was concentrating on the depth-opening power of the picture's silent command. 1 gave so much importance to the command that I requested Dyuman, who was attending to the general arrangements, to let me take the picture to my own place, so that its call to me to surpass myself might always hold my attention. Indeed it does so every day as I sit for hours in a chair facing it from the other side of my working room. Below it is a picture of Sri Aurobindo in his chair with his face fully fronting us. This picture is not the same as the one which is popular and in many people's possession. There the eyes are a little lowered. Here they are looking straight ahead as though with a prophetic certitude in them of a glorious future for the world.

(7.2.1990)

Thank you for the note, both wise and warm, of the 19th, congratulating me on the 36th anniversary of my final settlement in the Ashram. Yes, you are luckier than I in not having left even physically the Ashram once you had stepped into it on the 16th of the same month, exactly the same number of years ago! What I can say on my behalf is that, unlike the departure in 1938 which meant resuming the ordinary life though still without a snap of the inner link between our Gurus and me, my second home-coming was of

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a different nature. Even when it admitted a few visits to Bombay, it was always for work connected with the family there or, on the last occasion, for a cataract-operation, and never was there the idea to start again a non-Ashram life. So in that sense the poem I am going to quote speaks for both of us. I have myself a longer piece on the same theme which the Mother read with approval but I can't at the moment lay my hand on it. Here are the excellent lines of Arjava (john Chadwick before he joined the Ashram):

New Country

Precarious boat that brought me to this strand

Shall feed flame-pinnacles from stem to stern,

Till not one rib my backward glance can find -

Down to the very keelson they shall bum.

Now to the unreal sea-line I would no more yearn;

Fain to touch with feet an unimaginable land....

The gates of false glamour have closed behind;

There is no return;

Arjava is rather compact in his language and subtle in the turns of his expression. So perhaps a few elucidatory words from me to you would be in place. "Precarious boat": we come to the spiritual life, the "New Country" of the title, through events and circumstances that have both a forward and a backward tension: hence the "boat" is "precarious"-that is, dependent on chance, uncertain, insecure, exposed to danger. It is also a possible means to go back, a temptation for a reversal of the voyage. Therefore it needs to be destroyed wholly, from the front part ("stem") to the hind part ("stern") - subjected to the fire of the soul's aspiration, the inner flame that rises upward: its horizontal body offered up to the "pinnacles" which that psychic intensity forms by its aspiring movement. But the destruction is done not only because the boat may tempt one to retrace one's way: there is

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also a firm resolve, a command from the inmost being. That is the suggestion of "Shall". And the totality of the destruction is driven home by mention of the boat's ribs. A rib is one of the curved timbers of a boat to which planks are nailed. "Not one rib" will escape the fire, which means that fire will consume all the ribs. It is with the sense of all of them that the next line uses the plural number "they". Not content with saying this, the poet goes on to say that they shall burn "Down to the very keelson". The phrase points to the sheer bottom of the boat. "Keelson" or "kelson" is the line of timber fastening a boat's floor-timbers to its keel. A keel is the lowest piece of timber running lengthwise in a boat, on which the framework of the whole is built.

Parenthetically I may add that in poetry "Keel" denotes in general a boat or ship by the figure of speech called synecdoche in which a significant part does duty for the whole. Before Keats gave the world those wonderful lines -

...magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn -

he had written "keelless" instead of "perilous", but, feeling some lack in both suggestion and sound, brought in the epithet which, instead of telling us that the waters concerned were barren of ship-traffic, hints to us that ships could hardly cross watery expanses such as these. Our imagination rather than the merely observant mind in us is touched and stirred. Besides, the second foot is converted from a two-syllabled iamb into a three-syllabled glide-anapaest which conveys in a subtle manner the threatening tremble of the seas, and the conversion not only catches up three of the several consonantal sounds which stream hauntingly through the lines -m, n, f, s, r ,l - but, along with r, l and s, it provides an echo to the p of the previous line's "opening", thus enriching the music of the couplet. I feel that if "keelless" had remained in place of "perilous" the two lines would have just fallen short of the category in which Sri Aurobindo puts them: the sheer

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unclassifiable "inevitable", the ultimate voice of poetry, beyond the inevitabilities of the four styles he defines: the adequate, the effective, the illumined, the inspired.

Now back to Arjava from Keats - from the latter's "perilous seas" to the former's "unreal sea-line". This expression points to the horizon which is not a real terminus to the voyager but proves illusory as one sails further and further. One "yearns" towards it in pursuit of a terminus. Now that the voyager has disembarked on a marvellous land which surpasses every possibility of imagination he is so glad ("fain") that all the old lure of distances that keep deceiving one is lost.

Next comes the grand finale. The poet has turned his back on the sea-line. Behind him lies, shut off for ever, the "false glamour" of the ordinary human existence always searching for beauty and happiness but finding only deceptive and transitory appearances. Never more will he be attracted by them. Their call is over. And this profound finality is branded upon our minds by those few sweeping words: "There is no return." Mark how short is the line they make -compared to the preceding seven. Five of them - 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 -are pentameters. One - 5 - scans most naturally as an Alexandrine. The next, as if prepared by this length of six feet, flows into seven as though in answer to a sense of a once-faraway yet now-reached region's vistas, lengthening on and on, of a heart-enrapturing future. It is a fine play of expressive art to introduce this substantial variation. But the variation is still part of a pattern to set off the shortness of the eighth verse. The phrase - "There is no return" - gets an absoluteness even technically by there being no return here to the long measures we have met before. The utter end of all the past, the end of all utterance of it, are here. The "unimaginable land" on which the poet has planted his feet is evoked by this two-footed concluding phrase as a sudden short-cut to the Ineffable

Shakespeare in the famous Hamlet-soliloquy wrote of death as

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The undiscovered country from whose bourne

No traveller returns....

Arjava points to the Immortal Consciousness, the goal of the spiritual seeker, as the bourne from which no traveller would want to return. In "New Country" the spiritual seeker in Arjava has expressed the action of the Supreme on the human soul's ancient cry which the Brihadaranyaka Upa-nishad has caught:

From Appearance lead us to Reality,

From Darkness lead us to Light,

From Death lead us to Immortality.

"New Country" is a very powerful, very perfect poem working out its details of the inner life in a vein at once visionary and concrete within a small compass which is yet packed with vivid significances and leaves nothing essential unsaid - a small compass raised to the nth degree of effectiveness by the markedly short ending to a run of seven long lines

(20.2.1990)

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