Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

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Your experience, during four or five months, of seeing Sri Aurobindo smile at you from his photograph while you have been concentrating on it after a whole clay's tiring work, has certainly a truth in it. Not that the picture itself undergoes a change but, since in every picture of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother the presence of them has been instilled, this presence responds and superimposes its gesture on your sight or, rather, on the consciousness behind your seeing, through the features in the representation.

I too have had a response from the photo of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. Just a few days back the big picture of the Mother which hangs on the wall just opposite the chair in which I usually sit spoke quite a lot to me through her eyes which seemed to move. Actually the picture belonged to Lalita and I asked Dyuman to let me have it because while I was sitting next to Lalita's dead body the picture spoke to me very forcefully through its eyes and the message made a deep difference in my inner life. At both times there was no precise verbal formulation: my mind translated the message into the appropriate words according to the drive of the communication. But even a clear-cut formulation in words can come. I remember how after Sehra's death I once appealed to my favourite front-face photo of Sri Aurobindo: "What should I do to get over this sense of a knife turning in my heart in spite of all the peace that is still within me as usual everywhere else?" This photo is not the one that is popular in the Ashram. There the eyes are slightly lowered - in mine they look straight ahead: the vision of some luminous future appears to be in them. When my appeal went to the photo, the answer was immediate in unmistakable words: "Be like me." It was indeed a tall order but the only one really ultimate. And, of course, with the order came the help to follow it as much as I could. The occasion marked a great change in me - an intenser phase of

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the feeling I always have of Sri Aurobindo's unity with me.

Let me explain what exactly 1 mean by "unity". Generally people speak of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother being in their hearts. I once told the Mother: "When I kneel at the Samadhi I do not have the sense of Sri Aurobindo within me. He seems too big to be held within my small heart. Rather I feel that I am within Sri Aurobindo, a tiny creature nestling in his mighty heart. He holds me one with himself rather than my holding him one with me. I live enfolded by his greatness. What is the right feeling to have? Am I wrong to differ from the general experience?" The Mother answered: "Both the ways are right. It all depends on one's own turn of feeling. But perhaps what you feel corresponds more to the spiritual reality and relationship."

Sri Aurobindo's "Be like me" puts me in mind of two points from the past. A vivid suggestion of how the inner greatness of Sri Aurobindo got expressed in his physical presence went home to me when I heard Purani say to someone: "After having seen Sri Aurobindo I feel no need to see the Himalayas!" And it is precisely apropos of this impression of Purani's that my second point acquires the most striking relevance. For it concerns an early poem of mine which expresses my own aspiration in anticipation, as it were, of Sri Aurobindo's compassionate command to me. Here is the poem:

At the Foot of Kanchenjanga

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

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And mute, from dawn to dawn address

Thoughts white like snow.

You may remark: "To hope to become like Himalayan Sri Aurobindo is one thing. But can one believe that such a hope could ever get fulfilled? Look at the grandeur that is Sri Aurobindo and look at us poor pygmies!" No doubt, he is not only superb: he is also an Avatar - and Avatarhood is not something one can choose to have: it is uniquely ordained. All the same, what the Avatar comes to do is to exemplify the possibilities open to us short of the Avataric role. Let me quote to you the letter Sri Aurobindo wrote to me in April 1935 in reply to my question whether we - "poor pygmies", as you would say - could legitimately aspire to be supra-mentalised:

"I have no intention of achieving the Suprmind for myself only - I am not doing anything for myself as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others. My supramentalisation is only a key for opening the gates of the Supramental to the earth-consciousness; done for its own sake, it would be perfectly futile. But it does not follow either that if or when I become supra-mental, everybody will become supramental. Others can so become who are ready for it, when they are ready for it -provided:

"(1) One does not make a too personal or egoistic affair of it turning it into a Nietzschean or other ambition to be superman.

"(2) One is ready to undergo the conditions and stages needed for the achievement.

"(3) One is sincere and regards it as a part of the seeking of the Divine and consequent culmination of the Divine's Will in one and insists on no more than the fulfilment of that

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Will whatever it may be: psychicisation, spiritualisation or supramentalisation. It should be regarded as the fulfilment of God's working in the world, not as a personal chance or achievement."

The letter contains a potent threefold hint of Sri Aurobindo's Avatar-status - the awareness of a pre-existent conscious plenitude as if everything were already achieved, and the ardour of manifestation heroically ready to undergo the utmost labour as if nothing were achieved anywhere, and the utter selflessness which in spite of no need of one's own seeks to pioneer an impossible-seeming accomplishment in order to make easy for others the path to their perfection through a whole-hearted dedication on their part to serve the Divine Will and nothing else. The letter assures also that what Sri Aurobindo can have is essentially open to all his followers in the terms of their individual make-up.

A general comment I may make that since Sri Aurobindo for some reason of his own did not exemplify the last stage of supramentalisation - the physical stage - we cannot look forward to it in our present lives, but all the marvels on the way to it are within our grasp in the measure of our devotion to the ideal and in accordance with God's vision for our work. From what you write I think you are doing well enough what lies in your power, and that smile of Sri Aurobindo's suggests that he is pleased with you. The detail you mention that, "while smiling, his left-side lip slightly goes up as also his cheek" brings to my mind an occasion when the Mother said to us that people had been saying that after Sri Aurobindo's departure her face was looking more and more like his (minus of course the moustache and beard!) especially when she smiled. As far as I recollect, the smile was understood to be somewhat like what you have indicated.

(16.3.1990)

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Speech after long silence is not unwelcome and is also likely to be both rich and studied, on the watch not to be superfluous or irresponsible. But it is also likely to be abundant and your letter is no exception. You have put a number of questions, a few of them of undoubted importance and one of them rather embarrassing to me, being of a very personal nature and with a flattering suggestion to the little ego that is always ready to pop up.

"Coil" in the expression to which you point on p. 731 of Mother India, November 1989 should hardly puzzle you. Surely you must know, as does Macaulay's famous "every schoolboy", that to "shuffle off this mortal coil" is Shakespearian poetry for the prosaic act of dying. But "mortal coil" does not refer to our perishable body, as most people think. It means "the turmoil of life".In general "coil" as an archaic or extra-literary turn of speech connotes "disturbance, noise" and could stand also for "fuss" in colloquial Elizabethanese. In Sri Aurobindo's early poetry it has an Indian avatar with a trema-sign over the i: "coil". It is the Hindi name for the cuckoo whose Sanskrit appellation is "kokila". In common English the current spelling for this bird is "koel" with the accent on the first syllable which is intrinsically long.

Now for the query which embarrasses me. It raises some other issues too in the course of its formulation. It is so important that I have to face it. To get my answer into focus I would like to put together passages from two different places in your letter. You write:

"You speak of death as a suggestion which need not necessarily be accepted, after already having dropped some hints concerning your own self in this same connection. You hint at some experiences at the age of 85 which are quite in line with what is to be expected of you as the only person to my knowledge of whom the Mother said that he would undergo the Great Transformation in the present body. I don't really know what to think of it, but it's such an extraordinary statement that - no matter what may be our difference of opinion in other fields - you are in this context

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the most important person remaining in the Ashram if not the most important person anywhere. If, as stated, the Great Transformation will take at least 300 years from the time of the definite installation of the higher consciousness (of which I don't even know whether you have already achieved it), we may expect you to be seen on earth for much longer than we shall have eyes to see. So what 1 wanted to ask you is whether you may not have something more to say on the subject - which at least to me is of supreme interest and importance - than what you have already hinted at....

"Sri Aurobindo, as was indicated to us, could afford to leave because the Mother was there to continue the work. The Mother was in the same position after the Manifestation of February 1956 as she herself stated shortly thereafter in a most interesting and revealing passage quoted somewhere in Champaklal's Treasures. In it she says that now that things are essentially fulfilled it remains to be seen whether and to what extent her own body is needed to complete the work or whether this body can be abandoned and the work be accomplished in other bodies than hers. And here is where, according to none other than the Mother herself, amazingly and incomprehensibly, you come in first and foremost by a long shot. For who could be the others? To Nolini, I believe on his 80th birthday, she spoke of many more years on the way to transformation. Perhaps that was fulfilled by his remaining for another 15 years. To Satprem she stated in the 1962 Agenda that in his meditations she saw him entering into the timeless and spaceless fields, the consciousness of Sat, a fact enabling him with the proper procedure to begin the work of transformation even from that moment. But there is no indication of whether he has succeeded in carrying out that task. His external behaviour to me would seem to point to the contrary. Her statement concerning you was much more clear and sweeping. It does not seem to leave room for any possibility of failure. All eyes should therefore be glued on you, although people don't appear to know or realise it."

Let me assure you that in the references you have cited, I

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did not at all have in mind the subject you have raised. I only mentioned my sense of not getting my life shortened by such rashness as sitting at my typewriter at times up to 3 a.m., and getting up at 6 in the morning as usual and not resting for more than half an hour in the afternoon. I never meant to suggest that this feat pointed to my getting younger and younger on the way to an ultimate immortality due to "the Great Transformation" which the Mother had prophesied in an interview I had been graced with in May 1929 and which Sri Aurobindo confirmed as her prophecy when on 31 January 1934 I sent him my report of the interview. I asked him whether the reporter had not been a self-deluding fool misrepresenting what the Mother had actually said. You want to know my comment on the matter now after all the decades that have gone since those two tremendous occasions.

Although 1 cannot make the lament that these decades have marked an increasing decadence, I must record that side by side with some progress in opening to the Divine in both the inner and the outer life the body itself has not kept pace in every feature. I indeed don't feel less fit in general at 85 than at 25 when the Mother made the grand declaration, but, as I have repeatedly written to friends, my legs have grown worse and worse in the last ten years or so. The lower body has suffered, though without affecting in the least my day-to-day mood which - while lacking the famous "flashing eyes" and very much the equally celebrated "floating hair" -is touched by something of the light and delight Coleridge ascribed to his visionary poet in Kubla Khan:

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of paradise.

Perhaps the discrepancy between the lower body and the rest of me is the result of a defect in my sadhana. While I have opened more and more to the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother within and around and above, I

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have not been able to experience it below. For bodily transformation it is the Divine crypted in Matter who is to be realised and released in full response to the free Divinity elsewhere. I believe that to get at this crypted Divinity a luminous pressure is required by an incarnate Divinity. You may recall the Mother once telling me: "I hope to cure your polio- affected leg one day. But only the Supramental Power can help . Not even the Overmind can have such an effect on Matter." Years after this, Sri Aurobindo himself got in trouble with his right leg owing to an accident in November 1938. He is said to have remarked: "It is one more problem to tackle." He would have had to work in the very domain where my own difficulty lay, and the descent of the Super-mind into the most outward physical was needed. Twelve years later he chose to leave his body. About twenty years afterwards the Mother began to have trouble with her legs. The last words reported from her had to do with the possibility of her legs becoming useless: "Make me walk, make me walk!" When our Gurus themselves were concerned with the difficulty of setting free the crypted Divine and when they are no longer there in physical forms, how can I hope that my legs will become strong? How long these lower limbs will drag me on is anybody's guess. Possibly much will depend on the way the rest of Amal's body fares under the influence of that part of his consciousness which is the Supreme Mother's child. Let us look forward to a progressive "second childhood" of this sort accompanying his advance towards a tottering, though hopefully not doddering, nonagenarianism.

Here you may well ask: "How about the glorious prophecy of 1929 which singled you out so clearly?" All I can say is that it was the most clear crystallisation, in one particular case, of what was expected in general about several of us in the early phase of Ashram life, which coincided with our own youth. Do you remember Wordsworth's lines about the beginning of the French Revolution which seemed to promise a new age and in which he took some part? -

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Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven...

With a perfectionist from Paris as our beloved spiritual Mother and leader we were in the ecstatic beginning of what I may call the French Evolution promising the most novel epoch in history - a stage beyond the human. And the goal aimed at - total supramentalisation - was conceived and seen as waiting for her followers as much as for herself. Nor were such conception and vision confined to the Ashram's initial period though most overtly entertained in those days. Even less than a decade before she left her body she could allay my doubt and diffidence with the words: "I have not withdrawn my assurance. You are perfectly capable of participating in the realisation and will participate in it." Some years earlier, when I was in Bombay and reported from there an extremely vivid experience of all of me giving itself up to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother she replied (19.5.1944) that the experience seemed to her "a valid promise" that the realisation would come if I made up my mind to it. In answer to my reference to a "warning" she had given me she explained: "as for what I meant in my last letter it was simply that there were things which might delay your spiritual realisation and might be otherwise dangerous for you. This does not mean that the realisation will not come." (A general statement of the Mother's may be cited from Questions and Answers of 1957 (p. 165): "Sri Aurobindo expected of us to become supermen - I think -I know - that now it is certain that we shall realise what he expects of us. It has become no longer a hope but a certitude... let each one do his best and perhaps not many years will roll by for the first visible results to be apparent to all." What, then, led to her own departure and the uncertainty in which we live today?

Of course this uncertainty relates only to the "Great Transformation": wonders on wonders are possible short of it and all of them are within reach of us: full psychicisation, complete spiritualisation, life in the Overmind Conscious-

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ness touched by the Supermind. Only supramentalisation appears to be beyond us at present. Sri Aurobindo's words in a letter to me in April 1935 - a typical Avataric pronouncement if ever there was one - ring in my ears: "I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only - I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others." The last sentence sounds crucial. Here "myself" should be taken to include the Mother. So I would say that if he and she did not do it, we can't either - at the current stage of spiritual history.

' I must clarify two issues at this point. Please note that I have said that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not undergo physical transformation. I have not said that they could not. The supramental Avatars come from beyond the cosmic law. There is never a could not for them. They may observe the cosmic law but nothing binds them down. Their own choice and not any necessity stops them. If they appear to fail, it is because apparent failure - with all that preludes it - suits them for a reason we may not be able to fathom.

That is the first issue. The second relates to your reference to Champaklal's Treasures. You quote the Mother as declaring that "bodies other than hers" might accomplish the work if she would abandon her own body. Your implication is that the bodies of people like us, or of those still to be born of our kind, might be the performers of physical supramentalisation. According to me, what she meant was a contrast between her present body and whatever body she might take up for herself in the future. On p. 96 of the book there is no reference to a number of bodies: there is a reference to only one body as an alternative to the body she is inhabiting at the time of speaking, and this alternative appears to be her own next embodiment. Her actual words simply are: "Is it that the mission of this form is ended and that another form is to take

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up the work in its place? I am putting the question to The and ask for an answer - a sign by which I shall know for certain that it is still my work and I must continue in spite of all the contradictions, of all the denials." Over against her existing form, which is meeting with a lot of difficulty and obstruction, she puts another which she would assume in a birth to come. She did not have in view some Nolini or Satprem or, as you imagine, Amal Kiran.

No doubt, the Mother had no egoistic regard for her own body. She was bent on the embodiment of the Supermind by whatever instrumentation. If any of her disciples could do it after her departure or even instead of her while she was with them, she would have no objection. But I do not see the slightest evidence of her actually envisaging an alternative to herself. In 1969 Bulletin, April, p. 89) she says that if her body, in spite of her persistence, did not "hold on", she would be constrained to let the transformation "be for another time". In a later talk {Bulletin, August 1972, p. 81), while referring to the new glorious body in which she had inwardly lived on February 15, 1969 as if it had been the most natural sheath for her, she points to her existing body and exclaims: "Is that going to change? It must change or it has to follow the old ordinary process of undoing itself and remaking itself." I find in no place a clear-cut reference to anybody other than herself continuing her work of physical supramentalisation, whereas the pointer to her own future continuation of it is fairly explicit. I remember also, though at the moment I can't quote chapter and verse, the Mother recording that(she was told by the Lord that hers was the only body which could accomplish the difficult change - the first such experiment in human history.

I leave aside the idea sometimes entertained that the Mother would materialise her "new body" directly and not pursue the line of rebirth- She is said to have expressed in the Agenda a strong dislike for such a line. But the dislike of again being born and growing up and slowly developing may emphasise her wish and eagerness to complete her mission

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in the very life at her disposal. I don't know whether the idea of precipitating a new body after the end of her existing one has been distinctly visualised in the way her rebirth is in the two talks I have mentioned. Even -the possibility of that precipitation must be thought of after considering Sri Aurobindo's announcement through the Mother that he would be the first to manifest in a supramental body built in the supramental way - that is, without the intervention of the common human birth-procedure. It is not easy to think of his return without the Mother being already there to represent the human supramentalised to complement his representation of the supramental humanised. This would imply her rebirth as one of us to pioneer the fulfilment of earthly evolution.

I come back to my main point: the unlikelihood of the Mother's having had in mind the bodies of other people achieving supramentalisation in the wake of her relinquishing the attempt at it. So I cannot help concurring with Nolini that physical transformation, though not cancelled, has been postponed as far as our present age is concerned.

This does not signify that we must quite divert our attention from our bodies and not think of charging them with the superhuman, the divine. We should do our utmost to make them rhyme with our inner concords. But this is done by concentrating first on those concords and letting them overflow as much as possible into our physical cells. To put in the centre of our work something like changing the "genetic code" is to set about in the wrong way. Our "genetic code" need not be neglected, but - as Sri Aurobindo always insisted - our chief task is to unite with the Divine by bringing forth our soul-depths and reaching out to spiritual heights and passing beyond ego, rancour, anger, desire, falsehood, ambition, unrest. Change of consciousness as a consequence of inner union with the Divine is the radiant core of the Aurobindonian life, the central fountain of the Integral Yoga. Unless this change is brought about in intense earnest, the attention given to physical cells will be a side-

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track and prove to be a blind alley. I know that the Mother was concentrating on them during the last years of her earthly sojourn, but with the background of a supreme divine consciousness held within her body and acting upon the cells from its profundity and its altitude and its circum-ambience. Without overlooking the cells, let our primary aim be to catch something of that consciousness.

Now I come to the German woman who proffered the information "that Sri Aurobindo was married away by his family as is the custom in India, but that he didn't really want it and never touched his wife". As you comment, it is as if she were writing about Sri Ramakrishna and his marriage. Sri Aurobindo's situation was different. Nirodbaran once asked him why he had married when his destiny was spiritual. Nirodbaran made the pathetic remark with other cases in mind: "We feel so sad about Buddha's wife, so too about the wife of Confucius." After discussing the matter half jocularly and half seriously Sri Aurobindo concluded: "Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life. When the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it - nothing puzzling in it." Again, there was never any question of his family getting Sri Aurobindo paired off with Mrinalini. In 1900 he himself chose to wed and got many offers and personally selected the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose of Calcutta. A photograph of him and his fourteen-year old wife shows quite a poetic and romantic young man in full English dress sitting close to Mrinalini; there seems no aversion to touching her. It is also on record that they went to Nainital on "Honeymoon" for a month. This was in April 1901, No doubt he did not prove to be a good family man. He had a fairly short spell of conventional family life owing to his absorption in political work, and afterwards in spiritual practice. In a letter to his father-in-law he explained: "I am afraid I shall never be good for much in the way of domestic virtues. I have tried, very

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ineffectively, to do some part of my duty as a son, a brother and a husband, but there is something too strong in me which forces me to subordinate everything to it." But marriage was not from the beginning foreign to his life-style any more than it was to the Mother's. Perhaps as representative leaders of the whole of human life's activity to the spiritual goal both he and the Mother had to pass through all phases of it before founding the Integral Yoga.

As regards the French "imbecile" and the English "moron", about which I made some observations in a letter in Mother India I am making unexpected discoveries. I suppose the French locution could have been directly translated by the English one with the same sound and spelling, but, apart from the colloquial meaning, the English word has a bearing worse than "moron"! The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a moron technically as an adult with intelligence equal to that of an average child of 8-12. This is the definition I quoted in my letter. But I read now the same authority's entry on "imbecile": "a person of weak intellect, especially adult with intelligence equal to an average child of about 5." So to be dubbed a moron is quite a compliment in comparison to being called an imbecile. The worst thing it seems, is to be designated an idiot. Technically, "idiot" signifies: "a person so deficient in mind as to be permanently incapable of rational conduct." I guess the most harmless term on the whole and most close to what the Mother intended is "fool" or, if a more lively English rendering is to be made, one may say "silly-billy".

(10.3.1990)

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