Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

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It is curious that I have somehow neglected your birthday on the 12th of March. You have drawn my attention to it more than once but I have acted as if I were unconcerned altogether. I know that birthdays have an importance. According to the Mother, one is more plastic than at other times to the Divine and there is a new chance each year on that occasion to bring one's soul to the front. But there are people who are constantly being re-bom day after day, and for such people the official birthday is not of special significance. To me you are a person who is made "new" more and more in the image of the "true" every twenty-four hours. Your whole life is attuned to the Divine and each sunrise leads on to a finer harmony of the various parts in their turning towards the Infinite and the Eternal. Love of the Supreme leads in a preeminent degree to the state which the poet Tennyson, writing of love between humans at its best, conveys most memorably in those two lines:

Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords

with might -

Smote the chord of self that, trembling, passed in music

out of sight.

Yes, from earliest girlhood you have felt called to the spiritual life. But you have something of an ascetic in your nature and this, coupled with the typical woman in you, has made your physical life too hard-working. All women want to keep their rooms spick and span - a worthy ideal but not to be followed over-rigidly if it taxes one's health. A little dust here and there, a bit of disorder in some comers can't do much harm, provided one's heart remains clean of egoistic desires and one's mind holds first things first - namely, remembrance of the Divine. Further, if one is not physically very smart in arranging things, one should have in mental

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sight the spot where one has dumped one's papers, etc. I remember the Mother once telling us of Sri Aurobindo's habits. Unlike her, he was not a paragon of tidiness. His papers seemed to be piled up or scattered carelessly. But, according to the Mother's report, he had a recollection of where exactly in his dumps he had pushed this or that manuscript. When he wanted any to be brought to him, he would indicate the precise place in his room and the precise heap where it seemed to have got lost. I am much of an Aurobindonian in this respect though after about three months my memory dims and I need to be newly careless and disorderly while keeping track of things in general in my mind.

About my environment I can afford to be easy-going because a devoted friend is there to keep things in good shape. If she were absent and nobody took up at least part of her work my rooms would certainly be cobwebby, even if they might not resemble the state of things Omar Khayyam laments when thinking of the old Persia:

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The court where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep,

And Bahrain, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass

Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep.

Yes, I would be in a sorry plight, but I may muster some energy to prevent the lion and the wild ass from feeling at home in my flat. The lizard is of course welcome. The Mother liked its presence since it serves to keep insects and mosquitoes away. Easygoing though I am, I have not yet come to the grand limit reached by Dilip Kumar Roy who once told me: "If I had to dust my rooms, I would rather commit suicide."

In addition to your spick-and-span complex you have assumed the burden of too much discipline in sadhana. Your spiritual programme seems to be very distinctly charted out. Possibly a slight relaxation now and again in view of your

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health will not come amiss. But habits die hard, and you will be happy - or at least satisfied - only if the pattern in which you have taught yourself to move Godward is upheld. Here too I am quite easygoing. Except for the visit to the Samadhi for an hour and a quarter every afternoon, nothing is solidly set for me. At the Samadhi too I have no fixed mode of spiritual behaviour. I shut my eyes or keep them open, looking at the diverse design of fellow-sadhaks standing or bending at the Samadhi or else I look upward at the bright patches of far blue through the varied intertwining of steady brown branches and tremendous green leaves of the spreading "Service Tree" and experience an intense relief to my small human body's earth-bound existence. I even dare to answer briefly some questions and get occasionally reprimanded for ignoring the notice "Silence" - reprimanded not by expressive signs as it should be, but with words as silence-breaking as my own! Once the notice was even taken off its hook and held under my nose. I must say it didn't smell nice.

Yes, I have no fixities in my life. A visiting Englishman, a researcher, who subjected me to a battery of questions on the spiritual pursuit was surprised on hearing from me that, unlike his other interlocutors, I didn't make it a point to plunge for some time into deep meditation soon after getting up in the morning! I sounded quite frivolous when I said that after washing my face I generally sat at my typewriter and thumped away till bath-time. I explained to him: "In my understanding, meditation is not meant to be a special indrawn state divorced from one's outward active hours. It is a state in which whenever you feel so inclined you draw into a close quiet knot the various threads of your consciousness which, though outwardly oriented, are still to be held together in an easy manner at their starting-points in some happy sense of divine Presence within your heart. Along these threads this sense sends out feelers towards the divine Presence around and above - the Mother's Love enfolding you, Sri Aurobindo's Light uplifting you. The act of typing

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need be no distraction from the soul's aspiration towards the archetype, the supreme model of each part of us, waiting in some depth of eternity, some height of infinity, to manifest in the moments of time, the configurations of space."

I can't say I am anywhere near a hundred-per-cent success at my unplanned sadhana. But my whole trend is towards finding the true secret of such a life. In order to occupy ourselves as the fancy takes us and to be able to occupy our minds in whatever way we want without ceasing to do Yoga, the Yogic centre has to be what Sri Aurobindo calls the psychic being. The psychic being, which in physical terms is felt behind the middle of our chest, is a fountain of spontaneous remembrance of the Divine and the mainspring of an automatic offering of ourselves and our doings to the Supreme With that In-dweller awake, you can read or write or talk or carry on any other job without digression from sadhana, because you will not have to make any effort to concentrate on sadhana. The practice of God's presence will go on by itself just as the heart goes on beating, but now there will be a joy beyond the mere pie de vivre: an ecstasy of expectation of the Eternal Beloved will render your life the prayer which a stanza in Sri Aurobindo's Musa Spiritus f ormulates:

All make tranquil, all make free.

Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God

As He comes from His timeless infinity

To build in their rapture His burning abode.

Or else there will be a constant cry as in Sri Aurobindo's Bride of the Fire to Her whom a Savitri-passage calls "Wisdom-Splendour, Mother'of the universe" as well as "Creatrix, the Eternal's artist-bride" - a cry which culminates in that total appeal in the last stanza:

Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, -

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Call of the One!

Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,

O living Sun.

(9.4.1990)

I received your card and read the message inscribed in it. Thank you for your affection for me. There is not only an affinity between us but I have a strange recollection of your bearded face as something familiar. Trying to trace surface-causes I see it as a very attractive blending of my father in his early days and of my favourite Jesuit teacher at school: Father Kaufmann, a Swiss German. Kaufmann so influenced me that I even used to go about at times with a facial characteristic of his - knit eye-brows - as if I were angry! My desire to grow a beard was partly due to him and my father and partly to Bernard Shaw. Shaw's beard had become symbolic of his attitude to the follies of his time - an attitude which remained throughout his life so that an admirer of his, Gerald Bullett, could say: "The only difference between Shaw young and Shaw old is that his beard which was once red with anger is now white with rage!"

When I go behind surface-causes I feel from the way my own development has taken place in this life that 1 must have had a twofold contact with you in past lives. In the present life, at the beginning of my college-career, I was very much affected by Christianity. Even now I am tremendously interested in the earliest original form of this religion, the form which was prevalent in the time of Jesus himself as evinced from our earliest documents, the epistles of Paul who was acquainted with Peter and with "the Lord's brother", James. One of my eighteen still unpublished books is on this form, directly or indirectly, waiting like the others for the finance to bring it into the light of day. What is most significant is that the Mother, on seeing my photos after the first year and a half of my stay in the Ashram when I had grown a beard and worn my hair a little long, exclaimed: "You look like an early

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Christian, one of those who used to go and live in the desert." I knew of those monks: they had fled the cities and made their home in the Thebaid, thinking the devil was among the crowds of men insteadof within themselves. Perhaps you too were in that early ascetic group. Or else we may have been in some monastery later on, following especially a cult of the Virgin Mary. I wonder if there was any monastery in the places of Christian Europe with which I feel most familiar without ever seeing them in the present life: the Rhineland and, in the poet Longfellow's words, "the ancient town of Bruges, the quaint old Flemish city".

The second aspect of my touch of depth-on-depth with you emerges from the quick transition I made from my Christ-coloured student-days to the period of profound fascination by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda who served as a passage to the still wider call of Sri Aurobindo. This call with its "integral" earth-accepting Yoga conjured up as its background the age of the Rigveda when first what he has termed "Supermind, Truth-Consciousness, Gnosis, Vijnana, Mahas" was visioned and aspired after under the Mantric name of Satyam, Ritam, Brihat - "The True, the Right, the Vast". You and I may have been fellow-brahmacharis, with newly sprouting fluff on our chins, sitting at the feet of some grand old bearded Rishi chanting his superb experiences which, if couched in Sri Aurobindo's language, would reach our ears thus:

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;

Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions

Blaze in my spirit.

Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

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So it is both by the Way of the Cross and by the Path which the Ancients of India laid out for the Gods to descend and for men to ascend that your shapely beard bristles so familiarly, so intimately to the imagination of my soul.

Now to another matter than ourselves. If your relationship with the monks is improving, how exactly do you read the improvement? Have they come to understand the ideals that you hold? It will be interesting also to know how they look at the stupendous changes in Russia and Eastern Europe? Do these changes strike them merely as the failure of materialism - a prelude to conventional Christianity returning to power? I wonder whether they can grasp what I was trying to say in my last letter to you which has been published in the April Mother India. Russia is indeed a country religious at heart, but, as far as I can see, the modern enlightened mind among its people is likely to turn towards a non-sectarian spiritual view such as their Indological studies have brought before them - the wide Vedantic vision emphasising the Divine within the world, the Divine manifesting in the human and, because of the secret Divine everywhere, the earth's developing destiny towards universality and oneness.

(11.4.1990)

I am always glad to hear from you but feel sad that all the news is not happy. There are two components here: one is the actual physical weakness, trivial thoughts, lack of normal sleep - the other is the worry about these things. Take them for brute facts without thinking: "How long will they last? Will they be there for ever? What other troubles will come in their wake?" When you write "My equipoise is gone", you touch the real mishap. But this is not an irrevocable affair. Call for Sri Aurobindo's peace which is invisibly there all the time above you and around you and deep within you. Once he has accepted you as his own, he never leaves you. The same with the Mother's sweet grace. She can never be far

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and both she and the Lord hold you always in their arms. Try to be conscious of this fact and don't allow your heart to be vexed, your mind to be clouded, no matter how many outward "ills" (as Hamlet would say) "the flesh is heir to." The Divine Presence has been established in your life: you have only to grow aware of it all the time. Once you realise that it is ever accompanying you, all those "ills" will be held securely in an inner calm, confined within their proper limits - that is, the sheer physical sense of them and not permitted to overflow into the rest of your psychology. I am telling you all this not out of a book of wisdom; I am reading out what is written on the pages of my own life. So many bodily inconveniences and even aches are part of my days - and nights - and yet my eyes are filled with the glorious memory of Sri Aurobindo's serene greatness and the Mother's depth of love, and with this memory their actual beings are present with me from hour to hour and a far-away smile plays about my lips - far-away because I am inwardly taken to a dreamful distance from those inconveniences and aches. From that distance they look small, insignificant. The same can happen to your troubles, for surely you are as much a child as I am of His imperturbable immensity and of Her intensity of bliss. Remember also that I invoke their help for you every afternoon at the Samadhi and seek to make you remember the help which is unfailingly with you.

Why do you say the death of Suddhananda Bharati, renamed Radhananda by Sri Aurobindo when he entered the Ashram where he stayed for nearly 22 years, was not announced in any paper but mentioned only on radio? I read of it in the Indian Express and there was even a picture of him. I knew him quite well. He had a frank, friendly and cheerful disposition. He told me that he used to believe he was the "Mahapurusha" ("Great Being") of the age but when he saw Sri Aurobindo he realised his mistake. He was a genuine Yogi with a versatile sadhana, including work on the Kundalini, but he was eccentric in his ways and those ways were often more laughable than impressive. An entry on him

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{p. 44) in a recent publication - Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo's Writings, compiled with wide and generally brilliant research over years by Gopal Dass Gupta of the Ashram Archives - errs in my opinion by saying about Radhananda that "his austere looks and leonine movements make an unforgettable impression on the visitor". Evidently Gopal Dass has got this bit from some books by an admirer, a "lioniser", of Radhananda's. Perhaps the impression was due to the fact that for a long time when his admirers came to meet him he would not come out of his room in the Ashram courtyard but talked with them in a few words through his window which may have had bars. I am sure he did not growl or roar at them but his remaining confined to his room and his inaccessibleness except across that aperture made them feel he was like a lion in a self-chosen austere cage. I don't think anyone in the Ashram would have made the remark quoted by Gopal Dass who did not have the chance to meet Radhananda. It is true, as the entry avers, that Radhananda wrote profusely. But some of his expressions were rather odd. I recall from one of his most popular books - a compendium of Yoga - things like "Agitate not, vegetate not, only cogitate" and "the Supermind is the electric lift to the Supreme." Once a talk about him and this book took place in the Prosperity Room where some of us had the luck to sit in a semi-circle in front of the Mother before the evening's Soup Distribution. The Mother was told that this book, from which I had quoted to her, had been buried in the Washington Vault among other writings and objects for people some centuries hence to open and see what our time was interested in and productive of. The Mother smiled and said: "The Americans like somewhat fantastic things." But I may add that she is reported to have encouraged Radhananda when he wrote poems in French every day during one period.

In connection with the compendium of Yoga she spoke in general of writers who are prolific and those who are economical. The former do not always care to produce

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perfect pieces while the latter are bent on perfection. As the highest examples of the two categories she mentioned Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert.

Radhananda was multilingual and wrote English poems no less than French and Tamil ones. But a certain composition in English attributed to him in Champaklal's Treasures and reproduced with Sri Aurobindo's extremely instructive corrections was not his at all. It was a very early attempt of mine after'I joined the Ashram.

Radhananda had the habit of coming late to the general meditation, inwardly absorbed and with his eyes half shut, and taking his way to his usual seat after putting one foot in the lap of whoever sat on the fringe of the group! Mridu, the usually vociferous explosive, often happened to be in that place. You can imagine her indignant state. But she had to keep mum as meditation was going on. Whatever his idiosyncrasies, the Mother once gave Radhananda the compliment that he was the only person in the Ashram capable of real Tapasya (severe self-discipline) and she on one occasion recounted the extraordinary concentrated manner in which he comported himself after a heavy fall on the terrace of the house where he had been put up before his transfer to the Ashram compound. Without that manner the fall might have had serious consequences to the internal organs. Yes, he had unusual modes of acting and behaving, both admirable and strange. One peculiarity of his was that after the Mother had given flowers at pranam he thought of getting the utmost benefit of the spiritual power put into them by simply eating them up!

Now to another topic. You find it difficult to understand why, as related in "Dyuman - the Luminous One", dyuman didn't look at Sri Aurobindo while fixing up something in his room. I may try to lessen your difficulty by relating one incident. After the Soup Distribution I used to go ahead and wait in the courtyard of the main Ashram building for the Mother to pass on her way to the staircase leading upstairs. Once I saw the silhouette of Sri Aurobindo behind the open shutters on the first floor. I felt very happy. When I told the

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Mother of it afterwards, she said: "It is better not to look at him since he does not want it." Obviously his retirement in November 1926 implied this along with other exclusions. The work he was doing on his own body during the years of his withdrawal was not to be interfered with by anyone looking at it. All vibrations, however subtle, touching it were to be avoided. We know that his withdrawal did not mean cutting off all relationship with us or an aversion from world-affairs. He was in close daily contact with his disciples through letters - I used to receive two a day sometimes - and he kept himself informed of what was going on in the world. It was from physical relationship that he had drawn back: his body was being worked upon by the Supramental Force and it needed to be aloof as much as possible from even the intrusion of eyes with their curiosity and their claims.

Apropos of your experience of anaesthesia by ether as well as pentothal sodium you have asked me what operation under ether I have referred to in my letter. When I was two and a half years old I suffered an attack of infantile paralysis, whose pet name nowadays is polio. The heel of my left foot was pulled up so much that I had to walk with my hand on my left knee in order to press the heel down to floor-level. The knee-muscles were also affected: I could not lift up the lower part of my leg with their help. My father realised - all the more acutely because he was a doctor - that by walking bent all the time I would develop permanent spinal curvature. He was resolved to save me from it and let me have a fair deal in life. First he tried out the two treatments available in Bombay - massage and electric shocks. He realised they were inadequate and as nothing else was possible he took me, along with my mother, to London when I was almost six years old - which means the middle of 1910. In London he and I went from clinic to clinic in the famous Harley Street. He asked each surgeon his technique. Dr. Tubby's struck papa as the best. All the others had offered to do the work free, papa being himself a doctor. Tubby was greedy and demanded a big fee. But papa accepted him. There were two operations under anaesthesia with ether. They made me a

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straight fellow and in course of time I could indulge as I liked in that passion of mine: Horse-riding - though with special manipulation of the stirrup-straps. In Pondicherry I could go cycling every day - until quite a late period - the early part of my second "home-coming" in 1954. I wasn't so handicapped as now - or if I may perpetrate a horrible pun, "leggi-capped" - until about ten years back - more acutely from 1985 or so. I think my outer life would have been greatly impoverished without knowing by intimate experience the glory of galloping horses. When the Mother told me that she hoped to cure my bad leg one day with the Supramental Power, my first thought was: "O I shall be able to have a grand white horse between my legs without any of the old abnormal arrangements to keep my grip and balance!" Later, when I studied Sri Aurobindo's Secret of the Veda I realised that my physical-seeming aspiration reflected the Vedic vision of the white horse named Dadhikravan which was the leader of the human march upwards - the steed which was said to gallop always towards the dawn, that symbol of the spiritual awakening. Then the secret reading of Savitri, which Sri Aurobindo graced me with, by privately sending me every morning a passage from the on-going composition of the epic, brought me the Yoga of Savitri's father Aswapati -literally, "the Lord of the Horse". When I asked Sri Aurobindo whether this horse was Dadhikravan, he answered "Yes." My sense of affinity with that name became all the more vivid when I found that the white horse represented the purified life-energy. Much of my Yogic effort had been concerned with the rebellious vital force in me. Both the calm-moving mind and the pure-passioned soul had to be put at play in order to make the unruly varicoloured courser of that force learn to reflect the hue and harmony of the spiritual world. All my effort was now bent on turning into a living reality that line in a poem of AE's:

White for Thy Whiteness all desires burn....

(7.4.1990)

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