5
You were a bit on the late side for me to send anything for Singapore's celebration of August 15. The next best thing that has happened is that I am writing this letter on the August 15 of Pondicherry. As I was meditating, my mind went back to my first August 15 here. Between February 21, 1928, the Mother's birthday, which marked my first darshan of Sri Aurobindo, and his own birthday-celebration which at that time was the next since there was no April 24 in the interval, a great deal had happened. At the first darshan I had watched Sri Aurobindo's outer appearance closely - his eyes, nose, moustache, beard, hair - and found him impressive enough to be accepted as my Guru! When a day later I met the Mother and asked her whether Sri Aurobindo had said anything about me, she reported: "Yes, he said that you had a good face." Quite a tit for tat! But before the next darshan my whole being had opened up, there had been moments of unbearable inner ecstasy and a general effluence of the deep heart had become a part of my daily life. I had grown a beard and my hair had been worn a little long. As the Mother had noted, I had the face of an early Christian of the Desert. When I knelt at Sri Aurobindo's feet he blessed me with both his hands. Before kneeling, I had looked at his face - quite differently from the first time - and he had kept gently nodding. Later in the morning I had the experience of a tremendous bar as of luminous steel entering my head from above and making me dizzy. The same afternoon, along with a number of fellow-sadhaks, 1 met the Mother. She took me into the darshan room from the outer hall, closed the door, sat down on a small stool while I knelt a second time in the day at her feet. She blessed me and said with an entrancing smile: "Sri Aurobindo was very pleased with you. He said that there had been a great change." I was moved beyond measure.
I think it was after this darshan I started writing poetry in
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the new vein - from the in-world or the over-world. Of course, all genuine poetic stuff hails from these domains, but it is not always couched in the very tongue of them - the fire-tongue that has tasted paradise: it is translated into the imaginative language of the reflective mind or of the passionate life-force. There is a whole bunch of poems by me of the pre-Pondicheny time which belongs to this category -intense in thought and with a sensuousness passing often into artistic sensuality edged with a topsyturvy idealism. Most of them are unpublishable now when people are on the look-out for a halo round my head! But perhaps two or three may pass muster and serve as samples of my juvenile furor poeticus. Towards the end of the period a semi-mystical afflatus came into play, prophetic in a vague manner of my future poetry. Two or three products of it may be added to the other kind - after both groups have been touched up here and there on their technical side.
The "Collected Poems of K.D. Sethna", to which you look forward, is still a far cry. I seem to have imbibed something of the general South-Indian motto which may be said to have been anticipated by Shakespeare in its suggestion of a satisfied slow-goingness and a happy postponing tendency, though his line in its proper context has hardly the same mood. Detached from Macbeth's mouth, it is most apt with its emphatic
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...
Benjamin Franklin with his adage - "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today" - would have been furious; but perhaps our mood is tinged with the Browning-ian sense of a hidden eternity in our depths:
...What's time? leave 'now' for dogs and apes!
Man has forever.
The theme of a hidden eternity is a good one to close with
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on a day of such profound significance as August 15.1
(15.8.1987)
In the lines from Savitri (Centenary Ed., p. 537) you want me to clarify -
God must be bom on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God -
the second line's "even as God" is equal to "even as God is" and not to your second alternative: "even as God grows." But with "grow" before these words what we are told is: "become like God." In the two preceding lines —
If one of theirs they see scale heaven's peaks,
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb -
the sense seems to me to be simply the realisation of a superhuman or divine consciousness with whatever change it is bound to make in human nature. The specific idea of "transformation" such as Sri Aurobindo has put forth -namely, the permanent divinising of all our parts, ultimately even the body - is not directly there.
You have also asked whether the ascension of the heights has to be done only by "evolutionary avatars like Sri Aurobindo" or also by "accomplished avatars like Sri Krishna". No doubt, there is a distinction between the two types, but fundamentally every avatar has to do some ascension. If the Krishna, son of Devaki, who is mentioned in the Chhandogya Upanishad is the same as the Avatar Krishna of the later traditions, we see that he needed Rishi Ghora's illumined touch-to realise his own divinity to the full. An ascension was made, however rapidly or even
1. The projected book referred to in this letter is now at last published, (A.K., 1994)
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instantaneously. The Upanishad's Krishna was not born with the full divine consciousness: he was not, strictly speaking, "an accomplished avatar". Apart from the picture presented in Vaishnava legends, I don't think any avatar can be "accomplished" in the full sense. The veil of human birth has to be rent at some time or other, in one way or another.
The term "evolutionary avatar" has to be properly understood. It does not mean that avatarhood is achieved as something one was not born with. None can ever become an avatar. Avatarhood is preordained and is a state from birth. If we consider Sri Aurobindo an avatar, he was as much a born avatar as Sri Krishna. He did not evolve into an avatar. The born avatarhood gradually manifested in him in a particular way attuned to the intended harmony of human and divine to be played out in his life. This playing out is the sense of the epithet "evolutionary" we apply to his avatarhood. Further, being "evolutionary" does not stop with scaling "heaven's peaks", nor does living as "one of theirs" confine itself to sharing the common consciousness of men. The evolutionary avatar goes through the entire gamut of human experience. Some lines before those already quoted emphasise this:
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief's cure?
Then we have the stanza from "A God's Labour", which Sri Aurobindo cited to Dilip in a letter before the poem was published:
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
In this stanza we have a hint which goes beyond a pointing to "heaven's peaks". It points to the work of bringing "the
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heavens here". The phrase may be said to summarise the essence of Sri Aurobindo's avataric labour. It connotes much more than realising God, much more even than establishing a spiritual sangha, a communion of saints. It implies the transformation of human stuff into divine substance - the counterpart to the ascent to the Supermind: the Supermind's descent and the permanent change of earthly existence into a divine life. This counterpart holds the true significance of the epithet "evolutionary". A new species evolving from the human just as the human has evolved from the animal: such is the ultimate sense of the avatar's being "evolutionary". By his arduous manifold sadhana he exemplifies the supreme step of a process of Nature, which has, of course, always Supernature behind it. Sri Aurobindo is an evolutionary avatar in a spiritually scientific sense.
In the Age of Science - the post-Darwinian age, strictly speaking - the so-called "accomplished avatar" would be an anachronism. And though it may surprise you, the "evolutionary avatar" is missioned to do much more than simply bring down superhuman powers to establish a divine life by altering the human state, not only in consciousness but also in material terms. For, this alteration may be possible by imposing on embodied existence an all-pervading godlike state: what in Indian nomenclature we would call a divinisa-tion by a miraculous siddhi, a supernatural power of the highest kind. But this would not be truly evolutionary. Earth would be colonised by divinity: it would not be divine by native means. The Aurobindonian evolution implies that at the base of matter, in the very heart of the lnconscient, the Supermind lies "involved". This involved Supermind has to evolve by its own push upward meeting the downward pressure of the free Supemind. When this co-operation between the concealed Truth-Light below and the unhampered Truth-Light above is complete, earth-life will be by its own right, as it were, godlike. And a total security will be there. Colonisation from above may come to an end: there can be no inherent security and hence no intrinsic perma-
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nence under it. Genuine evolution takes place only if divinisation is accomplished not by an imposed unearthly power, siddhi, but by the earth's own divine dharma, natural law of being, emerging into action. To evoke this dharma would be yogically consonant with the Zeitgeist today. Sri Aurobindo is an "evolutionary avatar" exercising a Super-science which will bear total fruit one day from the supramental seed he has sown in a clay occultly in love with it and ready to make it germinate by means of the Eternal hidden in the hours
And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone.
P.S. Thank you for wishing me to live long. I may do so -at least in order to write long letters!
(16.5.1990)
I appreciate the first point you make apropos of my letter of 16.5.1990: "You have used at the end the figure of the supramental seed sown by Sri Aurobindo. Of course this figure has its sense, but it appears to me that 'Godhead pent in the mire and the stone' is more properly the seed helped in its germination by the power brought down by Sri Aurobindo."
I grant that you are more accurate, for the "pent Godhead" is itself earlier hinted at in the poem "The Life Heavens" as
A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven.
So I should alter my nomenclature. What Sri Aurobindo brought down should be likened to the sun and rain which would make the buried seed of the involved Supermind germinate. Thank you for the correction.
You also write: "The distinction between the two types of avatars has not been clarified sufficiently. Does it merely consist in the thickness of the veil of birth and the time taken
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to rend it? Sri Aurobindo says about the Mother that she is divine because she had the awareness of her divinity from her childhood. Against this there is the scaling of heaven's peaks, which implies arduous labour."
It is true that the Mother was aware of her divinity in a way in which Sri Aurobindo was not. But even she had to progress and grow deeper, wider, higher and become full at a stage of her life far enough from the time of her childhood. Her more conscious sense of being divine did not preclude "a God's labour" at a later period, an arduous scaling of heaven's peaks.
There is also the evolutionary avatar's aspect of undergoing all sorts of human difficulties. Here too the Mother is on a par with Sri Aurobindo - she even goes one better! Sri Aurobindo2 writes to a disciple: "We have had sufferings and struggles to which yours is a mere child's play...." Again:3 "As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure... hostile masses to conquer - a work such as, I am certain, none else had to do before us. For the leader of the way in a work like ours has not only to bring down or represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity to the full and experience, not in mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled, hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the path." Finally, about difficulty and suffering and danger: "I have had my full share of these things and the Mother has had ten times her full share.... It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden."
I hope that now you do not find the Mother standing in any manner at odds with Sri Aurobindo in the matter of
2.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1953), p. 368.
3.Ibid., pp. 369-70.
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evolutionary avatarhood, and that my distinction between the two types of avatars has been clarified to your satisfaction.
(26.5.1990)
The pleasure of our meeting was mutual. I found you very open-minded and good-natured - the right condition to profit by a first visit to the Ashram. Here is a new life being experimented with and a new life demands not only a plastic mind but also a nature ready to take things with good grace. For, surprises both pleasant and unpleasant are bound to be in wait for one. You seem to have taken everything in your stride and are in love with what you have seen and experienced in the Ashram. A second visit is certain - and, of course, this means giving me the pleasure once again to meet you.
You have presented a rather strange but, I think, not quite unnatural situation:
"I have been reading Savitri daily, and have nearly finished it. I find that I experience very strong emotions these days, in the sense that I react very strongly to everything. I am not a volatile person at all, but these days the smallest thing evokes an emotion that doesn't seem to have a bearing on my personal
Reading Savitri, with a serious absorption in doing it, is bound to affect one deeply, for this poem is not just a literary creation. In fact no true poetry is just that. But most poetry comes from depths behind the usual psychological levels. Savitri comes from sources beyond those depths and carries the power to reconstitute one's being in the secret light of a Reality mostly unknown to our normal consciousness or
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even to our rare moments of an enlightening inwardness. But it throws a bridge between that Reality and the world we know - our inner world as well as our outer one. Else it would not be able to remould us. It is not a bewildering novelty like the products of Dadaism or Surrealism or even some less sensational attempts of the modem mind to strike novel attitudes in art. Savitri takes the traditional forms of image and word and rhythm and infuses into them a creative light and delight which may best be characterised in some lines from the poem itself about a class of Rishis among those the heroine of the poem met during her quest for a fit mate for her life:
Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,
Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,
Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens.
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great
deeps.4
When poetry such as the last line here summarises with a most living power, poetry in which mighty ranges of a superhuman consciousness are active, enters one's life, a great change in one's being is to be expected. At times a profound peace overwhelms one: at other times one begins to see new meanings in the life to which one has been accustomed: at still other times one's ordinary control on habitual movements may get suspended and one may not be at once able to act from the strange reaches to which one has been suddenly opened up. This last result would be rather exceptional, but it would correspond to the experience some
4, Line 2 in this passage has been added from Sri Aurobindo's MS which was under study by some of us for the projected "Critical Edition" of Savitri. The new edition is now called "Revised" instead of "Critical" as the latter technical term was misunderstood by many.
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people have when they first plunge into Yoga in the Ashram: the manner in which they were wont to act from the usual rational mind is taken away and to their own astonishment they find themselves queerly reacting to things and persons -mostly out of character. Gradually a new light of guidance emerges. If the action of Sri Aurobindo's consciousness and of the Mother's brings about on occasion such a result, I don't see why a massive epic in which Sri Aurobindo's highest realisations have been given revelatory expression should not have it in rare cases. What you report shows a conjunction too close to be accidental. The extreme sensitivity with which you received the influx and impact of the unknown powers articulated in the poem have taken away the old rhythm of responses to the everyday world and a new pattern of inner and outer answers has not yet set in.
Your phrase - "all emotions are very intense" - hits off accurately the new state in which you seem to lose your old bearings. Especially people who are very particular about practical details can be affected thus. Don't be frightened at this change. The fact that you are perfectly aware of it and want to understand it and get over it is a sign that you will soon be on the way to experiencing, in place of the negative side of the psychological revolution, the positive side which will produce the genuine life-counterpart of the fresh future that Savitri embodies in the sphere of poetry:
deeps.
My advice is that you should start a second reading. Sit in silence for a little while to put yourself, however distantly, in rapport with what the Goddess of Inspiration did in the process of creating Savitri. From the poem itself we can gather the details of her work:
In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
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Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts.
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.
Then begin to read the poem audibly - let a soft voice feed the ear with it while the eye traces the pentameters on the page. Thus both the "revealing thought" and the "vibrant cry" of the Aurobindonian vita nuova will best be helped to go home to the budding aspirant for it that you are. All that has become abnormally "intense" will take its true shape when the "immense" that is coupled with the "intense" in Savitri enfolds you like a Divine Mother.
(17.5.1990)
There is no question of my misunderstanding or misjudging you. What you have written about the ridiculousness of "the well-meaning attempt of many to present the Ashram as a garden of spiritual delights and miracles" is correct. Not that the attempt has no truth at all behind it, but such propaganda does smack, as you say, "of the banalities American advertising agents go in for." I am glad you realise that the Ashram life is inwardly a battlefield. I for one never induce anybody to take up Sri Aurobindo's Yoga as an escape from the trials of the ordinary life. Only if there is an intense call for it would I encourage them and then too after giving a balanced picture of how this Yoga is all the harder because it is practised as if under the conditions of that life. The conditions are such that we seem to be leading this life but without its inner facilities. We live constantly among people and work with them and are bound to have relationships with them and yet the-whole attitude to social living is worlds apart from the one which would be natural in a similar context. Here is a life of loneliness in the midst of company, restraint in the thick of opportunities, peace in the heart of traffic, consecration to an invisible Presence in a
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milieu of crowding tangibilities, self-giving to a great Another while pursuing one's own individual and apparently self-centred occupations, an unremitting search of one who ever draws us to exceed ourselves - like the "Spirit of Colour" in a Meredith-poem -
Because His touch is infinite and lends
A yonder to all ends.
I am glad to find you saying: "If and when I do find my way permanently to Pondicherry, it will not be because I am assured of a comfortably lazy retirement in a balmy Carrib-bean beach resort but because I have to begin a new and probably more intense phase of my sadhana." Genuine sadhana is never easy and, when terms are set which are the very opposite of the conventional and traditional ones, extra courage is required, unless the so-called seeker is what a friend of mine used to call "Swami Bogusananda", one who has somehow got in and is only after external conveniences while pretending to be yogic. It is not for nothing that the Mother has said: "Victory is to the most enduring."
Talking of Swamis, I remember a half serious half ironic incident. An ochre-robed visitor earnestly desired to join the Ashram. He had undergone strict Sannyasi discipline, had won severe control over his senses, passed through plenty of bodily discomforts, renounced those famous temptations: kamini-kanchan, which we may modernise as "glamour-girl and gold." What better qualifications for entering an Ashram of Integral Yoga? Sri Aurobindo did not doubt his achievements, but he foresaw all the difficulties he would meet with in living with men and women who went about their businesses like ordinary people, made no outer gestures of renunciation, wore normal clothes, had decently furnished quarters, imposed no fasts or even unusual restrictions in food upon themselves. Hence, very quietly he advised this old-world ascetic to go to his native village and live there like an ordinary human being and meet the common demands of
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life for some time. What was meant is that those who have shirked the difficulties of the world would not be able to cope with the paradoxical situation of the Ashram: the seemingly normal tenor of living and the utter inner self-dedication to the Divine, the complex preparation of a sustained divine earth-life under the aspect of humanity's day-to-day existence.
No doubt, there is the discovery here of a marvellous Innermost who in Rigvedic-Upanishadic language would be called the Immortal in the mortal, the Fire that is without smoke, the Eater of an eternal honey. If we hold that here too are in some form "the tears of things" that haunt the human heart, we must also realise that here in addition is (a la Amal)
The longing of ecstatic tears
From infinite to infinite.
Supporting the strenuous experiment of a life which is to all appearances like any other on earth and yet strives to be free from its usual shortcomings and deviations, we have had the all-calming gaze of Sri Aurobindo and the all-delighting smile of the Mother, and their presences are still with us not only in their uplifting consciousness-infused photographs but also as luminous guides acting at once from within, around, above.Even those who have never met them physically are soon made aware of His Light of Truth pointing them onward and upward, Her warmth of love about which we can say with a slight alteration of the tense in those lines of Savitri:
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbars a gate in heaven.
To use an image from the Taittiriya Upanishad: if their subtle ether were not all about us, who could breathe here for a single moment? But though the celestial ether is there, the air
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is yet terrestrial and the non-sannyasi acceptance of drawing one's breath in pain in this harsh world like some Horatio in the process of gaining a halo is always a fact.
Since you know very well both the "exultations" and the "agonies" in store for you, you are most welcome to join us in our unprecedented "adventure of the apocalypse".
(18.5.1990)
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