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I was most happy to get your letter and the "Triple-Life" tablets. From this afternoon I'll start being triply alive. In the meantime, with whatever warmth of a single life I have, let me thank you for both the wisdom and the wit of your letter. Yes, wit has come in, whether you meant it or not. Of course, "always and all ways" is a conscious expression, but I don't think you intended a paradoxical pun in writing: "A world gone illiterate by increasing degrees" - that is to say, the more the academic qualifications obtained, the more incapable the world grows of a true reading of life's riddle! Then there is the phrase: "...as fast as glych and glamour are being embraced." Doesn't "embraced" get a double sense - a literal no less than a metaphorical one with "glamour girls" getting evoked?
Now for the wisdom: "To be a poet is to be the freest being in the universe; one sings the Song of Songs (to God) every second of one's life." Even here, I believe, the wit has stolen in. Look at the word "universe". You could have chosen "world". The "verse" in your choice chimes very suggestively with the poet's existence and activity. It is as if the world had as its origin an all-unifying master-maker of verse. The idea of the poet's freedom is a basic one and its relationship to singing God's praise is inherent. For, the poet's imagination soars above the earth's so-called realities to a super-sphere where dwell the idealities of all things, waiting to be embodied here. There is no hold on him of things as they are: he is in tune with that secret presence which "the poet's eye" in Shakespeare, behind the sight fixed on the interplay of outer motives and surface actions, conjures up -
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
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And this mysterious universal presence is a representative of what in its plenitude is above on the one hand and deep below on the other - the Supermind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, that has to manifest from its free domain and to emerge from its involved splendour in the cryptic base of our evolutionary earth. It is to this plenary Being that the poet addresses his rhythmic rapture. The Biblical term "Song of Songs" is most apt, for here is not only the quintessence of all poetry but also the profound accent of love, the spontaneous movement of the inmost heart. Hasn't Meredith spoken of poetry as the outflow of
Our inmost in the sweetest way?
The Biblical term brings even more than the warmth of love: it brings inevitably the glow of wisdom. For the Song of Songs is attributed to that legendary fountain of sagacity: Solomon. The poet whose mysterious stirring you feel within you is your "psychic being", the soul to whom Sri Aurobindo attributes an intrinsic "sweetness and light". Light here stands for an outbreak of God's truth - an infallible guidance from within, accompanying the sweetness that is an unfailing joy in everything and an unreserved affection streaming out to all. If indeed, as you generously say, I woke the sleeping poet in you, you must be right in holding, as you do, that the Mother sent you to me from far America. I could not have done you better service nor served the Mother in a finer mode. For to be a poet is to be like Sri Aurobindo in an important lifelong aspect. Hasn't he said that he was born a poet (as well as a politician): all else he developed. Perhaps it would be a fuller view of him to say that the future Yogi whom he developed lay in seed-form in the poet: from the rhythmic word grew the sense of the divine harmonies that lie at the base of the cosmic movement. Similarly, the born politician held implicit the dynamic visionary of a perfectly organised, faultlessly governed "One World", of which a free and renascent India was meant to be the pioneer.
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I like very much your emphasis on what I once told you on the tape. It has been not only your mainstay, but also mine. For I am an embodiment of the falling and rising act. My poor legs symbolise the downward propensity but my arms always stretch upward, ever beyond ordinary human reach and invoke the grace without which I can get nowhere. 1 once showed the Mother a pocket photo I had of her and our Master: behind it I had written "Help of the helpless." She contemplated the phrase for quite a time with a tender smile on her face, accepting the role in which I had cast her. Mention of this incident sends my mind back to an evening in the early 'thirties when a few of us used to sit in a semicircle in front of the Mother in the old "Prosperity" Room before the Soup Distribution downstairs. The question came up: "Who sends appeals to the Mother the most in day-today life?" She picked out two sadhaks. One was Dorai-swamy, the devoted advocate from Madras who visited the Ashram every week-end and was part of the group in the "Prosperity" Room. The other was Amal. This selection did not denote that either Doraiswamy or Amal was more deeply devoted to the Mother than the rest of those present: Nolini, Amrita, Pavitra, Dyuman, Champaklal, Lalita, Tajdar, Chinmayi, Dara, etc. It simply denoted that Doraiswamy and I turned inwardly to the Mother most frequently for help because we found ourselves more often than the rest in need of it, being unable to manage our affairs by our own strength. It must be our acuter sense of dependence on her Grace, that made us appeal continually to her to keep us moving on the Great Path. We felt repeatedly that without her assistance we would be nothing. We lived again and again by the sheer power of her impulsion and her protection.
Surely it was she who picked me up safely times without number from the dangerous physical tumbles I was prone to experience because of a defect in my left leg - and from the still more perilous tosses due to my many-mooded, variously-drawn, complexity-shot nature prone to change on a
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sudden not only from sinner to saint but also from the right-moving Yogi to the easy-going stroller on the Left Bank of the Seine! The cry from the "Latin Quarter" and the call to the Indian Wholeness of spiritual being have been equally strong. Nothing except the vigilant and compassionate eyes of the Divine Mother could have led me to where I am at present. I recollect asking her whether the Supermind could transform an aspirant in spite of himself. On receiving a "Yes," I exclaimed: "Then there is hope for me!" I believe the drift of that affirmative answer was: "If the central part of one wanted the transformation, the Supermind directly acring would nullify the resistance and the denial by the peripheral parts. Otherwise these are able to have their say in whatever degree despite the central one's opposite pull," Even short of the Supermind, the guardian power of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has alone saved me from utter failure. All that I have done on my side is never to give up aspiring from my frequently supine situation in the dust. This has carried me a fair distance and, though I am pretty far from being much transformed, there seems now to be no escape from the purlieus of some inner heaven. Perhaps if 1 Live long enough beyond my current octogenarian phase I may come within sight of the threshold of that future which Sri Aurobindo has visioned:
A little more and the new life's doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
I appreciate your concern for my health. There is nothing radically wrong with it. The only trouble is deteriorating legs. I don't move about unless it is absolutely necessary. Luckily my life-style does not call for much movement. I can easily make the transition from the chair in which I do most of my reading to the chair where I sit to type. Inwardly the attempt is at transition from the human type to the divine archetype -
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and to do that I do not have to move even from one chair to another.
(26.2.1990)
An exploration of my drawer has brought to light three letters of yours - still unanswered. Shouldn't I rather say "brought the light" of them? For indeed they are shining with your soul and, coming from its depths, reach into mine like a sweet and soothing smile conveyed through you by our Divine Mother; Yes, it is She, the eternal radiance, who passes between us in the form of words. And that is why our friendship is so full - even without words - and a vibrant communicative silence holds us together in the gap between letter and letter. This silence makes strange my other expression: "still' unanswered." Although words have not gone forth from me for quite a time, each time I read your letter there is a leap of my heart towards you in quintessential response.
I think your latest dream is symbolic of this wordless interchange of friendship. All the circumstances are significant of it. You dream that you wake up from sleep. Rapt away from the outer consciousness by sleep, you have become aware of your inner being and are acting in it. And what do you find? Right at your door appears "a just born child" which you recognise with your own soul's instinct as representing the "Psychic". Whose inmost being could have been thus figured - spontaneously drawn to your "veranda"? Who in the land of the living is closest to you and has the sense of you always intense and intimate in his heart and mind? And to be seen as "just born" is to carry the aspect in which you usually feel your dearest friend - the aspect so well pictured in a famous passage of Wordsworth:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
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Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Wordsworth's poem develops the idea that as we grow older the "Heaven" which lay "about us in our infancy" starts to dim and "shades of the prison-house begin to close" upon us but still something of "the vision splendid" lingers through boyhood and youth until
At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day.
By the by, 1 may remark that these lines as well as those linking the ending with the quoted passage remind me of the dawn-process in the opening canto of Savitri - how the Goddess of Dawn appeared with a promise of some unearthly lustre, still unrealised in our world, but gradually
The message ceased and waned the messenger,
Too mystic-real for space-tenancy
Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:
The rarity and wonder lived no more.
There was the common light of earthly day.
To return to my subject: the movement which Wordsworth envisages of the slow fading of the "vision splendid" in ordinary life is reversed in the life of Yoga in the Ashram. What Wordsworth took to be faded starts to come back. Under the touch of Sri Aurobindo and at the Mother's beckoning finger the forgotten Soul re-emerges, scintilla by scintilla, and through the years of our sadhana it gathers strength and at last arrives at the point of near-plenitude, which Wordsworth speaks of, when from its home in God it comes "trailing clouds of glory". Step by step, from manhood's obscurity a progression takes place to the youth and
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the boy's semi-lit state and finally to the babe's halo of heavenly memories. When this phase is reached we are fullblown disciples of Sri Aurobindo, true children of the Mother. So I am happy to have been found by you as "a just bom child". I hope the reverse movement I have traced of the Wordsworthian story really holds good for me and the babe you saw was not a pretty little pretender but one whose tiny untutored look contained a "secret splendour" and deserved Wordsworth's insightful apostrophe:
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;...
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day....
A Presence which is not to be put by....
Now let me consider the earlier dream recounted in the letter you wrote on the 40th anniversary of the day on which you "started from Calcutta for Pondicherry for the first time". Now, unlike that anonymous baby visiting you, you are visiting me in your own identifiable shape. I am delighted to learn that you, standing at my door, hear me singing a famous song of Tagore's, whose gist is: "Whatever comes to me, O Lord, even if it be unpleasant, is a boon from Thee." This gist echoes in general what I have put in that credo of mine, the poem "Triumph is All". Let me quote two stanzas from it:
O mine the smiling power to feel
A secret sun with blinded eyes,
And through a dreaming worship bear
As benediction wintry skies.
For ever in my heart I hear
A time-beat of eternal bliss.
White Omnipresence! where is fear?
The mouth of hell can be Thy kiss.
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Yes, my poem answers to Tagore's memorable faith, but there is a further shade in it beyond the religious approach which reads God's Will even in unpleasant events. This further shade is a direct recognition of the Divine's open or hidden hand everywhere by the soul's awakened intimacy with its Supreme Source. There is not only faith and a sweet resignation, convinced that an Ultimate Goodness is at the core of things and that all shall be well at the end. The basic difference lies in hearing within one's heart
Beyond religious trust, beyond even a meditative contact with the Unknown, the very immanence of the Divine is here a living fact. The Blissful Boundless Beloved, the "Beauty of ancient days who is yet ever new" - this is a reality in the deep heart where the soul exists only by the existence of the supernal One who is the All. In the act of being itself, the soul is perpetually aware of being a portion of the Master of the worlds, a child put forth from herself by the Infinite Mother. By such an experience, every adversity is not merely felt in a vague way as a blessing in disguise, a boon in its essence: it is known as a working by the Divine under the conditions of an evolving imperfect world to bring by however strange a path the soul nearer to its Master, its Mother. A direct development is seen to happen by a paradox of pain leading to a higher spiritual peak, a greater closeness to God.
I am intrigued by your finding me an adept in Tagorian Bengali. I suppose that in the subliminal realm we are acquainted with things which are outside our ken in normal life . By some sort of poetic empathy I must have entered Tagore's "plane" of consciousness, the Gandharva world of magical rhythms, and felt at home in his creative activity. In waking life my contact with Bangla bani is very limited. From hearing Nirod and some others intersperse their English with mane, my logical mind deduced that this word meant "I
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mean". By a leap of imagination I once thought I had discovered that the Bengali for the English "key-hole" was, most surprisingly, "ki-holo". Later, I was disappointed to learn that it only conveyed "What's happening?" The Bengali for a sneeze seemed to be - onomatopoeically -"hochchay" - though some people sought to disillusion me by equating it to the bare "Yes". I also learned some peculiarities when in the middle 'thirties I was teaching English to the famous Sarat whom I had dubbed "a domesticated fanatic" and who, in answer to my morning inquiry as to how he was, would say: "Somehow I am feeling quite all right." I gathered from my experience with him that no one-hundred-per-cent Bengali can pronounce the word "above" properly. Sarat made it either "abub" or "avuv". Similarly I heard of a strange phenomenon on the Pondi sea-shore: "big babes leaping!" Then there was the equally strange experience when the Mother had made me the first furniture manager. I had to remove a cot belonging to Barinda. I arranged with Jyotin to get everything ready for me. He told me to go to the house concerned and added the startling news: "Now the cot is on Barinda." I remonstrated: "You mean that Barinda is on the cot?" He firmly replied: "No, no. The cot is on Barinda." Puzzled I went to the house and what did I find? The cot was on the veranda!
Whatever be the tricks the Bengali language plays on me, I am deeply grateful to it for the majesty it has given to our Guru's name by transforming the rather colourless Sanskrit "Aravinda". How impressive and full-rhythmed is the Bengali version: "Aurobindo"!
After this linguistic digression I come back to your dream. Our holding each other's hands and looking at each other are a natural consequence of our warm friendship, especially as fellow-sadhaks. But what you did next is most unexpected although at the same time most touching in more than one sense. You say: "I felt an urge to touch with my forehead our clasped hands - and I did it." Surely I do not deserve so much reverence blended with affection. And I have taken
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care to let the touch of your forehead go not to my head but to my heart.
On the 2nd of this month you gave me the thrilling news that you were on the last lap of The Life Divine and you end the news by quoting the final phrase of this multi-visioned cosmos-sweeping book. The closing sentences are worth citing in full:
"Our evolution in the ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature."
These two sentences are a couple of insights spanning all time and linking convincingly the phases of a double movement which is at bottom one single activity in two gigantic steps: the evolution in the ignorance and the evolution in the Knowledge, the one with an embodied vital-mental complex half-lit by the hidden soul in it, the other with the soul come forward in this vital-mental embodiment and with the power of the Spirit above the mind at open play. Mark that Sri Aurobindo presents the first state of "half fulfilments" as leading "inevitably" to the second. There is an implicit logic at the back of the succession because the Divine is already in things and what we call nature is an immense whole in which our current sense of Nature reveals only a part. What is "still a Supernature" to us is not anything extraneous to the world-scheme: it is Nature in its "true power" - a power which is really everywhere but manifest and dynamic in entirety only in the inmost and topmost ranges of consciousness. This "true power" is implied in those lines in Sri Aurobindo's poem "Descent", where it is said to express itself in Mantric inspiration and revelation:
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Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits.
Ecstasy's chariots.
It may interest you to know that when I took down from my shelf the American edition of The Life Divine, which I keep handy for quick reference, I found on the last page the date on which I had finished reading it over months of continued light and delight: 21.9.1951. Your date of reaching the grand finale is 2.9.1990. The month is the same and my day includes as its initial figure your 2.
Your idea of following up with a re-reading of Savitri is in tune with a common chord of composition-pattern in this work and the The Life Divine. Both the books have been planned on a cyclopean scale. Savitri has a mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine. The latter deals with every aspect of spiritual philosophy in prolific detail and is comprehensively illustrative of what Shelley has termed "a mind grown bright, gazing at many truths". In Savitri as in The Life Divine, "length", as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me, "is an indispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and everywhere there is this length...in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto or section of a canto.... It aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation." As in The Life Divine, its method is "architectural" - "to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness." There is only one difference in the midst of the common extensive treatment. The Life Divine abounds in lengthy sentences, winding majestically on, unfolding idea after luminous idea in a closely concatenated form. Savitri is built of short sentences as a rule. It mainly dispenses with enjambment, the flow-over from line to line as mostly in Milton's blank verse. Each line here stands strongly by itself, though yet fitting harmoniously with other apparently independent lines, each seeming complete in its span of five feet. This is a technique
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difficult to sustain effectively unless the imagination is highly charged and carries in every brief part a subtle sense of its predecessor and successor even while standing revelatorily on its own.
I may add that both Savitri and The Life Divine need to be read audibly. All great literature is at the same time sculpture and music. And in these books there is not only artistic rhythm: there is also the wing-beat of the Mantra, the significant sound that lives in a modulated phrase as if it entered it - whether ideatively or imaginally - from a vast of wisdom above the human mind and a depth of exaltation beyond the human heart. Without the ear sensitively responding along with the attentively answering eye, the life-thrill of the superhuman planes from which the words come will not be sufficiently caught in our being. The Mantra, in order to make its impact in full, requires to be realised in its vibration no less than in its message. Perhaps you will wonder whether philosophy can be Mantric. All depends upon the source of it. In the Overmind, whence the Mantra hails, Truth and Beauty are one and it is Gods and Goddesses that covertly move in the steps of sentences like the one with which The Life Divine opens its procession of logical vision:
"The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thought and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality."
Now for a bit of closing personal touch out of our own present preoccupation. I am referring to a recent feeling of mine in the midst of our faltering attempts at "the Life Divine". In a letter written two days back to a friend in Bombay I had occasion to allude to the same spiritual
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perception. It is a sort of variation on the life-theme couched in that song of Tagore's and at greater application in my own poem "Triumph is All".
Of late I have been feeling as if the Mother's presence were not only above me and in front of me and within me but also behind me enfolding my body and carrying me onward according to her will. Of course now and again my own impulses and ideas seem to come in the way of this wide warm .wind of love and power supporting and urging me. I try my best to get my choices and my actions float on its quiet impetus. When I succeed, it is such a relief for hours and hours, if not days and days, to have no worry over good fortune or bad fortune, no care about right or wrong. Whatever this love and power at the back of me is able to do with me and through me brings the automatic assurance that all, no matter what the appearance, is invariably for the best. And there is a sense of happy rest in everything that happens, as well as a calm confidence that the Mother whose presence is behind is ever taking her child nearer and nearer to the Mother who is above and in front and within.
It is a little past midnight now. Let me hope to figure again in your sweet dreams.
(10.9.1990)
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