Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

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I consulted all your recent notes and found a number of points apart from the dream of changing houses. First is the alleged remark by Shaw about Sri Aurobindo being the greatest brain on the planet. It is true that Sri Aurobindo has come to be known in various places where we would hardly expect it. But I doubt whether Shaw could have delivered any such superlative estimate. He once visited India. A very pushy Muslim lady, with a very obedient painter husband who let her claim that she inspired all his work, boarded the ship as it lay in Bombay harbour in the morning and pinned Shaw down to a visit to her place where she would be inviting notable people, Shaw went there and was "lionised" - but after half an hour he was suddenly found missing. Evidently he couldn't stomach the pretentious superficiality of the occasion. It was quite late in the evening now. A search was made in the dark compound of the house and he was discovered sitting quietly in a car parked there. He refused to come back to the meeting - and when the driver of the car had been located he went straight to his hotel room. Long ago I published in Mother India a letter he wrote to a friend about the richness of the Indian pantheon and how it provided satisfaction to every kind of religious temperament. So he was no ignoramus about India, but I haven't found any reference by him to any Indian of his time. Sri Aurobindo has a magnificent survey of Shaw's mind and personality in a long letter to Dilip apropos of the Irish character and he has some shorter remarks in a couple of letters to me. If Shaw had seen these letters, he would have been delighted as well as enlightened. And the comment on Sri Aurobindo he has been credited with would surely have been quite apt from his mouth. As things are, you are right in feeling it to be apocryphal.

It may interest you to know that the Mother also once gave an opinion on Shaw, It is being recorded here for the

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first time and you will be the first Ashramite to read it. The topic came up in one of the "Prosperity" evenings before the Soup Distribution. She said in effect: "Shaw is a very independent mind, free from all preconceptions and able to penetrate through appearances and get to the reality of the problems facing the ordinary life. Conventions cannot deceive him. I don't know if there is anything deeper beyond this powerful capacity."

You have referred to reading my poetry. Now that the galleys of my projected "Collected Poems" are pouring in, I find myself plunged in an intense fusion of past and present. Most vividly the visionary moments with their far-reaching resonances come back with a cumulative force. I realise how Sri Aurobindo was bent on my writing always at my highest. Though quite considerate about my less inspired efforts and patiently pointing out the precise respect in which this or that line fell short either in imagery or rhythm, he never wavered in urging me to be dissatisfied with anything less than the mot inevitable. There is a sonnet entitled "Sky-rims" which he appreciated very much except for its last line which seemed insufficiently shot with the revelatory rum of sight and sound. To fill the lacuna I invoked the Muse day after day. Harin Chattopadhyaya was a close friend at the time and he too sportingly took up the challenge for me. Actually the fault of the non-revelatory line was that it ran:

To yet another revelatory dawn!

Sri Aurobindo found the adjective of my choice "flat and prosaic, at any rate here." The best I could do at the end of several experiments was:

To yet another ecstasy of dawn.

Sri Aurobindo's comment was: "It is better than anything yet proposed. The difficulty is that the preceding lines of the sestet are so fine that anything ordinary in the last line

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sounds tike a sinking or even an anticlimax. The real line that was intended to be there has not yet been found." I made one more attempt and wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "I have got Harin to put his head together with mine. He has come up with: 'lambency of dawn'. A good phrase, no doubt - but I wonder if it suits the style and atmosphere and suggestion in my sonnet. After over a fortnight of groping I have myself struck upon: To yet another alchemy of dawn!' Do you like my 'alchemy'?" Sri Aurobindo replied: "That is quite satisfactory - you have got the right thing at last."

You have quoted Nolini's generous remark whenever matters concerning poetry were at stake: "Consult Amal." From the beginning he closely followed my poetic career in the Ashram. He had a fine aesthetic sense and an intuitive insight but perhaps was not sufficiently aware of technical subtleties connected with metre and rhythm. Besides, he knew how much time Sri Aurobindo graciously gave me, discussing the minutiae of poetic expression - and he was the only one privy, after the first week of absolute secrecy, to the immeasurable boon of Savitri in progress granted by the Master to this beauty-smitten mystery-haunted disciple who for all his limping spirituality was yet passionately panting for the "Overhead" Parnassus. Naturally Nolini thought of referring questions of poetry to me. This was part also of his humility: he did not arrogate to himself any role in which he felt he was not anywhere near being an absolute authority. His praise was unrestricted when he saw merit. Thus, after Sri Aurobindo had given extreme praise to the last eight lines of "This Errant Life", I remember Nolini saying to Amrita that Amal had written something equal to Shakespeare. I had marked that delicate, exquisite, finely suggestive poems appealed to him the most. Apart from "This Errant Life", I recall his happily appreciative response to the sonnet "Devotee" and the two-stanza'd piece "Two Moments", all three of which you must have seen in the proofs corning to me at present.

Your meeting him so often at night is an enviable expe-

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rience. Your dream in which he asks Anima to give you some homoeopathic globules for some ailment of yours seems certainly to have brought an ultra-physical influence and I am not surprised that your painful knee which had prevented you from attending the Playground Gymnastic Marching for about twelve days was completely healed and you felt fresh and strong in the morning. I believe the sweet-tasting globules were symbolic of some aspect of the Divine Delight, Ananda, at work. This particular dream strikes me as a phase of sadhana. An unseen Power was in touch with you. Probably this Power keeps in contact with us all the time, even during our sleep, but it gets mixed up with a large variety of dream-movements which have nothing to do with our spiritual endeavour, and when it is at work we may not be consciously receptive to it. You were perfectly aware of what was happening. And in your case I feel convinced that your sleep is a mode of sadhana in which the surrender to the unseen Beneficence takes place with more the baby-cat's self-abandon than the baby-monkey's clinging.

Your quotation from a Bengali poem is very much to the point in the matter of what is called "Grace". The translation proper to English should run; "Such is the Lord's inexplicable grace that a heart of coal changes into a diamond and a robber turns into a saint!" Your comment too is quite appropriate: "Magic has its own way - it need not follow any logic." But we must understand "magic" here to be supra-rational, not infra-rational. And when we go to the supra-rational, we approach the Aurobindonian "logic of the infinite". For, in it there is nothing which can be called capricious or arbitrary, bom of a chaotic darkness. Everything there comes out of a Consciousness which is difficult for our human wits to penetrate by being the opposite of the chaotic and the dark: actually it is, as an old version of Savitri says:

Unseen because too brilliant for our eyes

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and as a later version tells us with a greater spiritual immediacy, an example of how Sri Aurobindo lifted his poem again and again to a higher level of revelation:

Veiled by the ray no mortal eye can bear.

Even things other than "grace" in the divine order are never quite dear. For instance, Sri Aurobindo once wrote that X was a bom Yogi: how then did it happen that he started to act queerly and finally left the Ashram? Maybe this too was grace: he was saved from the "disgrace" which might have resulted if he had continued being an Ashramite,Outside, he fitted well enough into the general milieu and even won some credit for his nationalist work. On grace in general 1 may hazard two remarks. First, it is inexplicable because it does not seem to act in a manner fitting the present circumstances. But I conceive grace as taking into account all the secrets of the past and all the mysteries of the future - the two unknowns lying hidden in our own depths which are open to the Divine's all-penetrating gaze. They form to that gaze a part of the present - a store of possibilities at the bottom of the very stream running from moment to moment. Secondly, take that sweetest sign of grace: the Mother's smile. Sri Aurobindo once observed that by an irony of fate the subject of this smile had caused a great deal of misery. People moaned and groaned, thinking that the Mother didn't smile at them during Pranam because she was angry with them or because they were in a most depraved condition, even though they were not aware of any depravity! It has been explained that merely a smile does not show approval. It may be just formal. On the other hand, the absence of it may be due to the Mother's being absorbed in some inner working on the sadhak in front of her. Again, if there was an inner understanding the Mother did not need to show her approval by a smile. Thus I never saw her beaming to Nolini or Amrita. They never took much time over the pranam and I could see the lack of formality and the brief quiet intimacy

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that was sufficient on either side. But I also noticed that whenever there was on the part of the sadhak a leap of the psychic being, the Mother's face was invariably wreathed in smiles. I have a poem called "Grace" in which the psychic being is offering itself wholly and asking for no boon of greatness or good fortune and is ready for all privation from the worldly viewpoint provided it could have from the Mother the sure sign of her recognition of it and the supreme gift of her all-enrapturing all-enriching love:

Take all my shining hours from me,

But hang upon my quiet soul's

Pale brow your dream-kiss like a gem.

Let life fall stricken to its knee,

If unto lone-faced poverty

You give your blessing's diadem.

Make of these proud eyes beggar-bowls,

But only drop your smile in them.

Here the inevitable link is flashed out between the psychic being's self-giving and the Divine's grace as manifested in that outbreak of plenary sweetness on the Mother's lips, her smile. I may generalise that any time the deep soul in us cries out to the Divine, the Divine's grace unfailingly responds. One aspect of the supra-rational logic of the Infinite behind the Infinite's magic which exceeds our rationality is this spontaneous relationship between these two phenomena.

Let me offer a small incident from my own life to illustrate that relationship. The period from the Mother's birthday on February 21, 1928 and Sri Aurobindo's on August 15 of the same year was for me a luminously crucial one. Although ostensibly an intellectual, I longed from the very start to have an opening in the heart-centre. The Mother, in order to make it easier for me, told me in what she considered terms most intelligible to me: "Think of or picture your heart as an open book." I somehow felt a little disappointed and said to myself: "What? Again a book? I am tired of being bookish!"

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As I had asked the Mother several times to let me have a profoundly emotional awakening to her divinity, a few months after her birthday a sudden opening took place. But it could not last. It even depended'on whether I lay on my back in bed or on my side! Lying on my back used to pull shut the aperture. When I told this to the Mother she laughed and so did Sri Aurobindo on her telling him that my psychic being peeped or drew back according to the lying posture of my body! But one day, even though 1 was lying on my back, there was a tremendous opening. I could hardly bear the ecstasy. I was breathless with unbounded bliss. Depth beyond depth seemed to bring forth a heavenly state -an indescribable enchantment of laughing flame and living fragrance rising far and far towards some marvellous Beauty. Hours and hours were spent in a felicitous aspiration. One early morning the call was so sweetly intense that I had to go to the Ashram, climb nearly half the staircase leading from outside Amrita's office to the Meditation Hall upstairs. I stood on the first landing all alone, yearning with all my heart towards the first floor where the Mother and Sri Aurobindo lived. All the doors were closed, but my body felt inwardly like one big open door of devotion. A few minutes passed. Then all of a sudden the door to the Meditation Hall swung outward and the Mother stood on the threshold looking at me with a smile. "Would you like to come in?" she asked. "Of course Mother," I cried out and quickly went up. She took me in by the hand and kept me with her for awhile. After this incident I could never dissociate divine grace from the soul's utter leap towards the Supreme Beloved.

Perhaps you are pretty impatient by now since I have not yet touched on the topic which was supposed to be the main one in the letter you were expecting from me: your recurrent dream of you as well as me changing houses. What is the drift of such a dream? A person who is pessimistic"? - might envisage a changing of "the house of clay" fairly soon: it would almost mean both of us quickly qualifying for rebirth

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hand in hand! Not a bad prospect for me. As Wordsworth said in connection with the daffodils:

A poet could not but be gay

In such a jocund company.

But, of course, rebirth is not the only result possible

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

We devotees of Sri Aurobindo would go to the subtle-physical plane where, according to the Mother, the Master after he had passed away would remain until his work was done. The Mother used the words "earth's atmosphere" for the subtle-physical plane. You may remember that she employed the same words in speaking of the Supramental Manifestation on earth. The subtle-physical plane is the earth's inner counterpart which may be said to mediate between the gross physical and the vital, the plane of the life-force. Once the Supermind in some form or other is there, it becomes a portion of earth-history and sooner or later is bound to emerge into the gross layer. In that world of rarefied physicality - hence the term 'atmosphere' - Sri Aurobindo, as the Mother has told us, has a house. People in the Ashram visit it sometimes in their dreams. Sehra did so on a few occasions and described something of it. Nirod too has been there at least once. So we, if we leave our present corporeal habitation in the near future, will get into contact with Sri Aurobindo's house which is now the Mother's as well, and not pass, with whatever vague interva] somewhere between birth and birth, into another "house of clay".

But this reading of your dreams is not compulsory. The house into which we move could very well be a new state of existence in the self-same body. Under the influence of that most holy house-agent - the soul in us - we may enter a better and ever better structure of mind, life-force and subtle-physicaUty which would ultimately affect our gross-physical

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itself and give it a finer presence, a richer ambience - some far-off yet genuine image of what a poem of mine visualises Sri Aurobindo to be like if he were moving amongst us:

Haloed with hush he enters, corona'd with calm he goes!

(2.6.1990)

1 am extremely happy that your brother's problem has been solved by the Divine Grace through an impossible-seeming event. He is a good man with true faith but sometimes the outer mind gets troubled and clouded. The Divine looks always deep inside and does not judge by surface realities. There is also the fact that your brother has the good luck of having for his sister one who is wholly devoted to the Spiritual Cause and, in spite of all difficulties, never swerves from the Light that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have brought to us poor wayward wandering human beings. I may add - taking my cue from the title of my own book of talks which introduced me to you - that you have cherished not only their Light but also their Laughter.

The Light shows both the true path ahead and the follies that have tended to sidetrack us. It makes us aware at the same time of God's strength and man's weakness so that we may know that the help is ever there to carry us onward and that such and such are the impediments put by ourselves to our own progress. But knowledge is not enough. Though the mind is enlivened as the Divine's disciple, the heart is still not uplifted into being the Divine's child. Here the role of Laughter comes in, together with that of Light. The Laughter ringing out from the hidden heights and depths proves to us that the Supreme does not take too seriously the burden we create for Him and is confident that He can bear us along further and further. This also saves us from being weighed down too much by our own failings. Not only are we encouraged by the Bliss with which we are surrounded from above; we are encouraged too to find that we can cut

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ourselves free from the despair about our defects instead of thinking them unforgivable by God and ineradicable by man.

The Mother once said that the most powerful weapon against gathering darkness is a smile. I may say that the demons may persist against Light but they get puzzled and quite upset on seeing our eyes twinkle carefree and our lips curve happily as a prelude to a burst of Laughter. This devastating gaiety rises from the heart and is made possible by the second of the two attitudes Ramakrishna mentioned: the baby-cat's attitude as dinstinguished from the baby-monkey's. The baby-cat surrenders itself to its mother's mouth in a state of happy abandon while the baby-monkey makes an effort with its own force to cling to its mother's belly. In the one the trustful joyous heart is acting, in the other the eager expectant mind. Neither of the two movements is to be neglected. But we as rational animals find it easier and more natural to be little monkeys. But then our anxieties do not disappear and an element of fear remains lest our strength should fall short of the demand of the Light. If we become baby-cats the fear vanishes, for a greater power than we can muster has taken charge: it laughs at the world's obstacles and is ready to do everything for us if only we let the golden bells of its infinite happiness find a silver echo in our tiny heart-beats.

The pure adhesion to the Divine Laughter is no easy thing. The human heart is sensitive and it is as much prone to grief as to joy. No doubt, it has the capacity of bubbling gaily, but blubbering grievously is also natural to it Only with more and more faith, with ever increasing trust, with a development of deepening love does the art of happiness become the heart's constant practice. And then suddenly there breaks out what Sri Aurobindo terms the "psychic being", the true soul, the. inmost core of the impulsive and emotional self, the spark of the eternal Ananda lit in the world of time as the centre of the Divine's evolution in the human. Once the secret soul has shown its face, its spontaneous rapture of the Supreme Presence will spread over all

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the parts of our life. Even in the midst of the mishaps and errors and ailments that cannot be avoided as long as we are not completely transformed by the Aurobindonian Supermind a taste of heavenly honey will be ours. And when this taste runs through all the varied food and drink of pungent, bitter or pleasant experiences that come and go, it is possible that the mind which usually clings to the Divine, with an endeavour of its own, will find the baby-monkey of its sadhana turn into a baby-cat. A soft silence, a soothing peace, an in-gazing quietness will tend to replace the old seeking after the Light. A meditation forming a wide-spread mirror under some unknown immensity above the head will be the general state. Then no effort at seizing truth but a hushed intense receptivity with a face lifted upward will be there and truth will itself suffuse the intellect, and the thinker will grow into the seer. The brain-cells will open to hold what the ancient rishis would have called the nectar of Knowledge. In such a condition Light will come as a revelatory Laughter. Indeed the Light of the higher planes is best considered the aura of Ananda and this ultimate nature of it is realised best by the mind's putting its own individuality helplessly in the care of the Unthinkable, the Unnamable. The English Language has a word which can very aptly suggest Light's being included in Laughter: the word "Delight."

(15.6.1990)

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SHAW AND SRI AUROBINDO

A Letter from K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar to the Editor

I was looking into the Mother India of October 1990, and chanced upon your remarks on Shaw and Sri Aurobindo on p. 652. On my first visit to U.K. in 1951, I visited 'Shaw's Corner', Ayot, St. Lawrence. This was on 22 September '51, and scanning his Library I saw prominently The Life Divine (the 2 volumes 1939-40 edition). Was the author of Man and Superman especially attracted to The Life Divine with its projection of the Future Man endowed with the Supermind?

Failing eyesight notwithstanding, it is a tonic experience to read Mother India.

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