Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

8

It is 4.58 in the morning. I have got Up nearly an hour earlier than usual. Before my eyes opened, there were these words in my mind: "He is everywhere" — and when I opened my eyes I spontaneously whispered: "Everywhere is He." Somehow the very next thought was to write to you. And I realised that a connection had been made between you and me through an invisible Omnipresence. I know that to say such a thing is rather high-flown and the spirit of our age is all for a subdued key where matters beyond the senses are concerned. But we must not fear to be poets and mystics. They do not belong just to one age or another. They belong to the subtle eternity that runs through all time - and equally valid today as at any moment in the past is that cry from Shelley's heart:

Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.

In far Germany you must still be asleep - unless my intense remembrance of you has momentarily pulled you outward or else more inward to that dimension in which the Divine Mother holds all her children together in the depths of her love. I have been graced with a general sense of this dimension, for there is in my heart a warmth and a glow which I feel in a certain measure to be simultaneously my own Little soul and a heavenly hugeness known to be Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, a hugeness with whom I am in intimate relation and within whom I perceive myself sweetly related to a multitude on whose lips the Two Great Names are a secret sound at all hours. When I think of one person or another, it is not as if they came into my mind from outside but as if they emerged into recognisable form out of some hidden world of the One who is Many. Now this morning you are vividly before me and I am writing to you not only as a response to your affectionate letter but also as though

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at a call from that manifold Unity.

The news you give makes me at once sad and glad. Your hint at a long confinement to a hospital bed in the early months of the year and your mention of being "tormented again and again with very aching attacks of lumbago caused by muscular atrophy" due to that experience - all this saddens me very much. But I am glad to see that your faith and courage are always present and even a sense of humour gleams out. That sense reminds me of something I said in my Talks on Poetry, a copy of which you received some months back with the most touching gratitude. I tell my students that I am being visited by this awful complaint -- "rheumatic pains in the lower back and loins", as the dictionary puts it. I explain how I shall make history by my battle with that hellish visitor to my body. "The history will be made in three stages. First, there will be a realisation of the full presence of the dread torturer - full presence summed up by my thundering out the name as it is: 'lumbago!' Next you will see me tackling the demon and sending him away by a mantric strategy of the resisting will. I shall shout: 'Lumba, go!' The last stage will find me quite relieved, a conqueror wearing a reminiscent smile and whispering with the sense of a faraway unhappiness, the almost fairy-tale expression: 'Lumb, ago' "

I am encouraged as a letter-writer by your saying that the opening part of a letter to a friend published in the July Mother India, dated 7.4.1990, helped you a great deal to counteract your ailment. Remember that when 1 appeal to the Divine at the Samadhi it is not merely for protecting you and keeping you going. The appeal is an extreme one, invoking the Mother to cure you. And along with my fervent prayer there come to my mind on almost every afternoon some phrases from a poem of mine, which I once quoted to you because Sri Aurobindo had discerned a touch of the Overmind in the second line:

What visionary urge

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Has stolen from horizons watched alone

Into thy being like a fathomless smile ... ?

I think the three verses breathe something of your present and your future in relation to the Divine. Your soul is seen peering into the dream-distances that are our approach to the immensity of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is isolated from the hubbub and hunger of the common world and wants nothing but the holy and healing influence of that far-seeming Perfection. Out of that remote prospect where earth and sky appear to meet, a happy message, too deep, too wondrous to be expected and to be comprehended, wafts secretly an assurance to your dedicated self, promising to you an image of its own all-transcending Bliss.

Your lament that your English is not adequate to explain things to me is unnecessary. You want me to read between the lines, but your lines say enough about the state you are in, both of body and of soul - and what they convey in the spaces between them is the aura of your sweet friendship to which no words can do full justice.

(6.8.1990)

Thank you for your kind thoughts about me and for the generous movements of your heart. Contrary to your own view, I find you a good and sincere person. When you have the faith that the Mother whom we adore in the Ashram and whom Sri Aurobindo put before us as the incarnate Shakti of the Supreme is indeed such and when you are convinced that she has protected you, helped you in critical situations and kept you alive by her grace, how can you consider yourself a "zero"? You are indeed her child and hasn't she said that no child of hers can ever be a zero? You condemn yourself because you have "sex impulses" and cannot cross the bar they set up in sadhana. Have you heard of St. Augustine? Although he had a Godward aspiration, sex impulses stood in his way. There is the famous cry of his to

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God: "O give me chastity — but not yet!" Again and again carnal desire lured him away from the path he longed to tread and in spite of his aspiration he could not bring himself to resist the temptations of the flesh. But in the midst of all side-tracks the flame of prayer to be free kept burning - and finally he got over his sensual hankerings. His tremendous difficulties and his ultimate triumph over them has made him in the Roman Catholic Church "the patron saint of chastity." He exemplifies the Mother's saying that our chief weakness points to what we are meant to represent in the list of the Divine's victories. A line to the very opposite of it is indicated by it as leading to our special individual fulfilment in spirituality. But always for this fulfilment God's grace is to be invoked again and again.

There is no cause for you to despair. It has been well observed that we are never defeated as long as we go on fighting and that there is no failure except giving up. The only thing I would like to add is that one should find the right mode of fighting. A head-on meeting of the lower movements with the force of our human will is not always the correct confrontation. The Mother has advised a turning away of the mind somehow or other when those movements are perceived. Open a book of Sri Aurobindo's or go out for a long walk or immerse your eyes in the beauties of Nature or else seek harmless happy company. She has also told us that nothing throws the hostile powers into disarray so effectively as laughter in their faces. Laughter at them blows off their pretence of overwhelming strength and evokes in us a sense of the Divine Ananda hidden in our depths. It stirs into activity the true soul of us that is sweetness and light and strength and an intrinsic unstainable purity. This "psychic being" is an effortless dweller in the presence of the Supreme, a spontaneous all-surrendering instrument in the hands of the Lord and by that winsome weakness a born king over life. Have the smiling confidence that Sri Aurobindo stands looking at you and beckoning you to freedom across even the darkest-seeming upsurge of physi-

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cal desire. Behind each devil God waits, masked, to be recognised and to be called for assistance in that peculiar context of difficulty which is most natural to your make-up. Never feel helpless. The Divine is within your reach every moment and in the thick of every temptation. Even if you fail at times to resist it, never think you are cast out from the Mother's love. Offer the failure itself to her with the faith that she will take note of it and save you from its recurrence. I believe I struck upon a great truth when I wrote to a friend in dire trouble: "There is no pit so low and deep that the Divine Grace cannot lift you out from it sky-high."

As for your job, why should you take it to be at a tangent from the line of sadhana? Whatever the job, tackle it with an inner dedication of it to our Master and Mother. We cannot always pick and choose our vocations, but all work is acceptable to the Divine if done with consecration to Him. It then becomes a gift from His own wise and compassionate consciousness.

(17.6.1990)

Two attitudes of yours are full of wisdom. You are ready for any kind of future and you have no complaints against life. When I probe these attitudes I see that they have their roots in the Yogi in you - or more accurately you the Aurobindonian. Whatever prospect opens to us in the time to come is bound to lead us towards the same goal - the heights of the Divine Master's all-enfolding serenity, the depths of the Divine Mother's all-soothing affection. We are in the hands of the one Divine's dual manifestation we have been lucky enough to know in terms of very earth and these hands can bear us only towards the goal of the Infinite and the Eternal whose attainment through the path of assuming a humanity like our own is symbolised by those feet at which our souls have knelt. Here two stanzas from that credo-poem of mine, "Triumph is All", surge up in my memory:

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Not only where Thy silver steps

Twinkle a night of nenuphars,

But everywhere I see Thy heaven:

I love the night between the stars....

The whole world is my resting-place:

Thy beauty is my motherland:

Sweet enemies are wounds of age -

My body breaks but by Thy hand.

These stanzas cover both the attitudes I have mentioned. They peer into the future and look around at the present, but all is seen as vivid generalities. The word "complaints" which you have used suggests particularities as well, including small day-to-day pricks no less than the larger obstacles the milieu may set up. A philosophical temper should suffice to bear things stoically. A religious approach would help one to read God's Will in all unpleasant events or else discern the after-effects of our own past Karma. But we Aurobindonians can practise a finer art of living in the midst of whatever big or small "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" the Shakespearian-seeming World-Drama may bring us. There is, first, the wide calm we have to develop or call into ourselves with the remembrance of Sri Aurobindo's face, about which one of his disciples has written:

All heaven's secrecy lit to one face

Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry -

A soul of upright splendour like the noon!

The human body through the ages has struggled for light and appealed to some celestial Mystery to put off its veil so that our life may not feel-dark with ignorance of the ultimate Truth. With the advent of Sri Aurobindo we have a revelation of supreme knowledge, a countenance whose eyes have visioned that Truth and which wears as a result the peaceful expression of a radiant life-fulfilment. Nor, I may add, is this

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knowledge confined to a powerful insight into the complexities of the various planes of existence: it is also a technique of transforming and harmonising our whole many-aspected nature so that this nature may no longer be a play of shine and shadow as at mom and eve but a shadowless glory as when the sun is at its midday zenith.

Yes, first there is the Aurobindonian crown of luminous calm to be won for ourselves. Then there is in its wake the sense of Sri Aurobindo's presence looking at us through all the vicissitudes of our little days. He has accepted us as his followers and thereby taken into his hands the tenor of our lives: he can meet us across every incident and turn it into a passage between our littleness and his greatness. If we are vigilant enough to realise that he has our lives in his charge and can convert all the apparent "slings and arrows" into his own dynamic messages, piercing our superficial selves and making ways for our profounder beings, our hidden souls, to come forth - if we have the faith that there is nothing he cannot use for the growth of our Yoga and if we constantly offer to him whatever takes place, no matter how unpleasant or hurtful, surely we shall meet his illuminating grace at every step and the missiles seeming to be hurled at us will prove to be a shower of blessings. Indeed, a twofold spiritual art of living is open to us beyond both common philosophy and religion.

Now a word on your experiences at night and in daytime. I repeat that night with its stillness and its opening up of a star-studded immensity calls out your soul in a spontaneous response and whether awake or asleep the inner and the outer in you are at one. I can understand very well that "burning aspiration" which you feel when by chance you get up from sleep at some hour of the night. Neither is your whispering of lines from Savitri or some other poem a surprise to me who am haunted by a hundred voices from the English-speaking poetic past or else the one superb voice from the present which sums them all up and exceeds them with a succession of rare revelatory rhythms -

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The lines that tear the veil from deity's face.

What puzzles me a little is why on rising at 4 a.m. to begin the day one should be troubled by a raid of unpleasant mechanical thoughts for some time. Perhaps your nights, with their dreams of happy contact with fine friendly beings, make too much of a contrast with the day's common routine and there is a lurking fear which opens the gate of your mind to the subtle influences of the "subconscient"? With most people it is the deep-engulfing sleep that invites

The demon and the goblin and the ghoul.

Of course, what happens to you can hardly be described in such terms. But some lack of smooth transition into the quotidian consciousness is responsible. Perhaps you get out of bed at once at the end of sleep. Try to stay within your mosquito-net for some time after your eyes have opened and review quietly the night's experiences and think peacefully of the waking hours ahead of you. And when the night and the day have met smoothly in your mind, step out of your bed. In a more jocular vein I would advise you to imitate what a relative of mine used to do whenever he had to get up at night to go to the bathroom. He would always keep one eye shut so that sleep might not fly away from him! If you could psychologically open only one eye at 4 a.m. and later gaze fully at the coming day, you would not feel too sharp a breakaway from the magic realms of reverie. In any case I don't think you should worry about those unwelcome mechanical thoughts. It is worrying that gives them strength. Just let them be and go about your business until the usual time when you start to read The Life Divine and, facing the prodigality of knowledge in it of all the aspects of our cosmos, say to yourself: "Surely, the author of this book must be the author of the universe!"

(4.8.1990)

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I am happy to learn that you have always taken an interest in poetry. The names you have listed bring a glow to my memory - Keats for the rich texture of his verbal felicities evoking significant imaginative pictures, as in his description of the sea-bottom:

...nor bright nor sombre wholly

But mingled up, a gleaming melancholy,

A dusky empire and its diadems,

One faint eternal eventide of gems -

Shelley for his subtle suggestions and haunting rhythmical patterns, like airs caught from another world:

A tone

Of some world far from ours

Where music and moonlight and feeling

Are one -

Wordsworth for his profound simplicities and his powerful visionary effects due to a philosophical mind attuning itself to a secret Spirit behind universal Nature, a Spirit which is also behind this very mind but mostly wakes to awareness of its own depths by touches of sound or silence or quivering colour from wood and stream, hill and sky. Well could he say,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,

and affirm feeling

A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

You may have been out of contact with English poetry and, if my Talks brings back to you the happy thrill you had in times past, I shall think myself rewarded. I live in a vast

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inner world of many-moded poetry — scores of lines throng my memory and come to the forefront of attention either on their own or in answer to occasions and sometimes a stray word starts up a series of lines from various poets in which that word found apt use. Even a part of my Yoga comes from the sense of perfect form which the finest poetry achieves. The flawless, the unsurpassable, the archetypal, the transcendental, the absolute — the presence of such an ultimate goes home to me in a most magical way through the diverse modes in which poetry attains inevitability of expression, the acme of its fusion of matter and manner, its moved precision of measured speech. The subject may be anything, the style may be vibrant with any level of our multifold being and yet through the delicate or forceful unity of intense vision, word and rhythm the creative poet sets before me an airy but irresistible pageant in which gods of infinite bliss and goddesses of eternal beauty seem to interplay. I am stirred to a feeling of the Supreme and the Divine even when nothing directly spiritual is uttered by a poet, for what he says conjures up a sheer perfection of verbal form, at once meaningful and musical, as when Shakespeare tells me of King Duncan lying in his grave -

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well -

or when the same poet makes Romeo exclaim at first sight of Juliet's beauty at a ball given by her family:

O she doth teach the torches to burn bright! -

or else when that distillation of the Stoic in the Roman temper is put in Caesar's mouth in Antony and Cleopatra:

Be you not troubled with the time, which drives

O'er your content these strong necessities,

But let determined things to destiny

Take unbewailed their way.

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Mantra after sudden Mantra leaps out to me from unexpected places because I respond not only to the many-passioned heart of poetry but also to the unimpeachable art with which it gets embodied, gaining an utterly ravishing outline for its inner substance. The result is that I catch in all shapes of the poetic intuition, be they ever so secular, something manifested of the spiritual reality which is figured in that couplet of mine which Sri Aurobindo declared to be revelatory in the Yogic sense:

Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line

Where passion's mortal music grows divine.

(12.7.1990)

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