Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

14

You have asked me: "Is it wrong to tell one's yogic experiences to an intimate friend?" My answer is: 'True intimacy means constant thought by friends of each other's welfare both outward and inward, an identification by one with the other's triumphs as- well as troubles - a hand immediately goes forth either to help or to felicitate and just as there is a spontaneous sharing of pain an automatic participation in joy takes place. Not a single twinge of envy at one's companion's good fortune occurs. It is because of jealous reactions that it is advisable not to share one's precious experiences with people. Through the envious eye of the hearer the hostile forces attempt to snatch away the benefits of our self-deepenings. Not many realise that our goal here is the Divine Mother's victory. And if she is victorious anywhere she is potentially victorious everywhere. For the human stuff, which she deals with and works at to transform, is the same in all of us and if she has succeeded in touching it to glory in one place an opening has been made through which her light can reach every place. Among true friends the promise of the pervasiveness of the Divine Action is not difficult to perceive. A beautiful experience of one is a matter for rejoicing by the other: the jealous look is never cast. So it is perfectly right to share with an intimate friend one's happy uplifting experiences."

I like the way you have put your morning experience: "A thin layer of darkness still enveloped the sky. One could hear a faint footfall of light in the eastern horizon. A stillness and quietude prevailed all around. I was in my deck-chair looking at the sky. Today one need not meditate. Meditation descends of its own." My" mind goes back to the glorious morning when first Sri Aurobindo showed me his supreme grace by beginning to disclose to me in private his slowly progressing and repeatedly revised masterpiece - the epic Savitri. The morning was of October 25,1936. And part of the

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passage, with which the poem as it stood at that time opened, ran:

The impassive skies were neutral, waste and still.

Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.

A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,

The insistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along the moment's fading brink

Fixed with gold pane and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

The last line points me to your phrases: "Today one need not meditate. Meditation descends of its own." For, when there is an opening to the mystery behind the gate of one's aspiring dreams the divine Presence breathes out, as it were, from its golden inwardness and then the very air one inhales is meditation. In my passage I find also a personalising suggestion in the words "gesture", "touch", "hand", which would prepare for what you have termed "a faint footfall of light". And actually Sri Aurobindo, a litle later, brings in the Dawn-Goddess's footfall:

Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts...

Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close:

The waking ear of Nature heard her steps...

All that you have written is well-inspired and I can intuit our Master emerging from the night's vagueness and enfolding his disciple's mind and heart with a reminiscence of the poem the disciple has deeply loved. Whether in moments when the meditation comes of itself or in those when one sets one's being in accord with the call of sadhana, the Master is ever with you. On November 8 you will feel him lifting you bodily, so to speak, and bearing you across

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"mystery's verge". I say "bodily" because this day commemorates your ever-existing soul's new embodiment. All the more emphasis I put on the corporeal fact because the Master himself brought his own eternity and infinity to a focus of flesh in our day and met the corporeal fact of us on the level of the human. Our body has a great importance and significance because of this earthly descent of Grace and we should do our best to let it be charged with the inner light in whatever measure we can reflect the visible and tangible phenomenon of divinity we have called Sri Aurobindo:

All heaven's secrecy lit to one face.

Yes, with his suffusion of physical form with the presence of Godliness, he has set us an example of divinising the most outward life - life in which the body has to be the transmitter of the illumined soul. Do you remember that ringing pronouncement of Sri Aurobindo's: "I have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco"? And what is the farce of long standing which he has refused to accept? He has explained it: "a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the law of the external nature." Perhaps the most striking illustration of Sri Aurobindo's meaning is an anecdote the Mother has told somewhere. There was a man who had a great capacity of remaining in meditation. He could be absorbed for hours in an inner state which he felt to be wonderful. Once, while he was enjoying his trance, someone knocked at his door - and quite hard, too. The samadhi-expert got up from his chair, rushed to the door and throwing it open shouted: "You damned fool, how dare you come at this time? Don't you know I am with God?" The poor intruder was overwhelmed by that thunder out of heaven and stole away. The Mother's comment was: "This kind of meditation is worth nothing."

The outer personality with its petty and egoistic habits of thought, feeling and action has to be irradiated if the Aurobindonian Yoga is to be truly done. The consecration of

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each movement of our conscious embodied life to the Divine Mother is demanded. There is that command by Sri Aurobindo: "Love the Mother. Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present." From the Mother deep within us to the Mother who is everywhere and within everyone our life has to move, guided by - in Sri Aurobindo's terminology - our "psychic being" and our "spiritual self". Out of a wide tranquillity beyond "time's unrest" a consciousness dedicated to Sri Aurobindo has to concentrate and channel itself to the outer world through that in-gathered profundity of shining sweetness and smiling strength which is our inmost heart, our true soul, spontaneously a child of the Divine Mother. When all thought, all word, all deed issue from that circumambient peace and that centre of luminous power into a world of body dealing with body, "the old fiasco" will begin to disappear,

I cannot wish you a happier birthday than one in which that body of yours which Sri Aurobindo has blessed and the Mother has caressed will help more and more the Golden Age visioned by our Gurus to gleam forth.

(7.11.1990)

Of late there has been a strange sense of far-away-ness. Maybe something in me has withdrawn more from the usual run of life; time seems so short for the great goal I have set myself and I am a little impatient; so it is possible the sense I speak of is a result of my present attitude. Not that my love for you has diminished by the slightest, but it is as if I were sending it to you from some spot on the moon rather than from Pondicherry. Perhaps the more correct way of putting things would be that I am myself in two places - one part on earth and one in the midst of a lunar landscape of changeless dream. But the dream is with open eyes and they still blend the pull of the inward with the call of the distant drama of terrestrial movement, in which something in me continues

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the hope to play a significant and helpful role.

(5.5.1985)

The account of your travel and your meetings with various people is thought-provoking. What did the wife of Krishna-murty's personal physician have to say about her husband's famous patient? Is she one of the bewildered "illuminati" trying to practise K's gospel of getting beyond the detailed clinging "time-consciousness" into some grooveless interiority? I may remark that such a gospel is not absent from Sri Aurobindo's teaching. Very clearly he has visioned

The superconscient realms of motionless peace .

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.¹

But Sri Aurobindo does not end there. His revelation has another aspect:

Timeless domains of joy and absolute power

Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;

The ways that lead to endless happiness

Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:

Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze

White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.²

In Sri Aurobindo's teaching there is something which can give meaning to the multifarious movement of time and can change it to an evolving projection of the many-ness which is secretly present in an archetypal form in the One whom the Mandukya Upanishad sees to be "without a second". We must not forget that this Upanishad terms the full Reality fourfold and the deepest of the three other statuses, the status which opens into the fourth, is designated "the womb .

1.Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, 1972 Ed., pp. 35-36.

2.Ibid., pp. 39-40.

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of Brahman". Without abrogating the ultimacy of the unity it is possible in spiritual experience to find this unity endlessly creative without losing its unitary essence. If you will excuse the pun, I may say that in the One "without a second" not only many a second but also many a minute and hour and day and year are a haloed hiddenness - missed by those who try to catch a shadow of the exclusive systems of Buddha and Shankara. These systems had a utility in the past and the core of them cannot be neglected even now. Sri Aurobindo himself started with an overwhelming experience of Nirvana or Silent Brahman. But he had other realisations after it which were just as authentic. They formed with it a greater whole which gave at once an absolute freedom from the time-consciousness and an absolute source of fulfilling the long labour of the earth's ages.

(31.1.1986)

What has happened is opening up yourself to your own depths and, as a result, revealing the Mother's presence within you more and more. The assurance that has come to you from her has now an intenser tone which is bound to leave a lasting reverberation not only in your mind and heart but also in what Sri Aurobindo would call your "nerves of sensation". I can feel them vibrating all through your two letters. When the period of pain is gone, the vibration will not be so marked in its frequency but a steady movement will continue. It will form a kind of settled music in your most outer consciousness, a keen yet controlled response of this consciousness to the inner Mother in her act of emerging increasingly into the surface of your being and there radiating forth from her child in you to all her children outside you. Not that so far such a thing has never happened. But I think there was a self-awareness during it which made a mixture of your own individuality with the Divine - a very pleasant mixture, no doubt, since you the individual are a very pleasant fellow, but now a certain transparency will be

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there due to a self-forgetfulness, so that the Divine's radiation through you will have a sweeter and stronger spontaneity. What I call "self-forgetfulness" may be explained by your own statement that now your opening to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is "ever-growing" from all the parts of your being.

You have written of my helping you. My prayer has been fervent in two directions. One is for getting you out of the present pain and inconvenience as quickly as possible. The other is for making the quick passage as fully as possible a channel for the Divine's purpose shining out through the accident - or rather for the accident turning into "a forced march" of the innermost into the outermost by a sustained cry on your part to the Divine to reach out to you across the abnormal circumstances that have caught you up in their whirl.

(28.8.1990)

Your account of how your saffron robe and cap carried you triumphantly everywhere in the USA was very enjoyable. It shows that the Americans are sensitive to spiritual symbols and are eager to get in touch with the truth behind them. They must also be perceptive of people's beings behind their physiognomies and appearances. For the USA has had quite an abundance of fellows claiming to represent Indian wisdom but each of whom my Associate Editor and I used to dub "Swami Bogusananda". I wish you had held the seminar the chap in Atlantic City wanted to attend. Perhaps if I had been in that city during your seminar I would have been hard pressed to decide whether to visit the Casinos for which it is famed or listen to my enlightened friend holding forth on the rapturous risks of the soul in this world which Sri Aurobindo has called

The wager wonderful, the game divine.

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I recollect also a sentence in The Life Divine or in The Synthesis of Yoga about how "the Purusha in a wager with himself" undertook the adventure, the perilous task of creating the stark opposite of everything divine and then starting to manifest his true reality from the inconscient. Vivekananda spoke of his God the poor, the miserable, the persecuted. I am inclined to speak of my God the gambler. And I think every mystic in quest of Him is himself one about whom the contented of the world, the observers of limit and measure cry out as in Sri Aurobindo's "Ahana":

Who is the nomad then? who is the seeker, the gambler

risking .

All for a dream in a dream, the old and the sure and the

stable

Flung as a stake for a prize that was never yet laid on the

table?³

Indeed I am glad of my God the gambler, for more than most people, even those who with their mystical bent know what Sri Aurobindo further says in the same poem -

All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle -⁴

I am a queer case for whoever hopes to defy the warning of the worldly-wise:

All things created are made by their borders, sketched out

and coded;

Vain is the passion to divinise manhood, humanise

godhead.⁵

If Sri Aurobindo did not exemplify a gambling Avatarhood, would he have ever accepted the hazard of a case like me,

3.Collected Poems, 1972 Ed., p. 529.

4.Ibid.

5.Ibid.

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such a dangerous complexity of personalities, each with its own demand to be fulfilled - including one that loved to indulge literally in various games of chance with real money involved?

Before I came to Pondicherry at the end of 1927 I knew a theosophist named Venkatachalam, an art-critic by profession. When he happened to know of my spiritual search he told me: "Nobody except Sri Aurobindo will satisfy so complex a person as you." Strange words issuing from a theosophist with a mind haunted by those "masters"who control everything in the universe, leaving no room for anyone like Sri Aurobindo to have a significant role anywhere. But this theosophist had been to Pondicherry in the days before the Ashram was formed and had met Sri Aurobindo and he could not help reporting to me: "Sri Aurobindo lives in the cosmic consciousness." I came to Pondicherry swept up on a wave which seemed irresistible. Sober thinking would never have brought me here. I once asked the Mother: "Will the Supermind, when it descends, be able to transform us in spite of ourselves?" She laughed and said: "I should think so!" I exclaimed: "Then there is hope for me!" My situation has only one saving grace. Somehow from the very start I, who had the reputation of being a brainy sort, told the Mother to open me up in the heart. Even on the last occasion I met her - on my birthday before the time she retired completely - my last words were: "Put your hand here (indicating the middle of my chest) and open me up." She put her hand there and, somehow sensing the heart, said: "It is beating very fast." I answered: "Yes, for I am very impatient now," She gave me one of her unforgettable smiles.

Luckily a radical beginning was made in the first few months of my stay in the Ashram - some time in mid-1928. I used to feel a pain in my chest every time I sat to meditate. I complained about it to the Mother. She remarked: "Don't worry. I know what it is. It will go." And go it did one day when I felt as if a wall had suddenly crumbled down in my

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chest and a marvellous depth disclosed the fire and fragrance of an ineffable felicity whose very stuff was an incessant spontaneous sense of the Eternal Beloved. The depth has not remained open in that extreme fashion always. But some experience of it has persisted through the years and now and again there has been its outburst. All complexities, all conflicts of the various selves in one, find their point of resolution, their world-forgetting rest, in that 'Immortal in the mortal" (to use the Vedic phrase about the Fire-God Agni dwelling within us).

I may add that this In-dweller, building up divinity in our nature, has also been the safeguard of the gambler Amal. In the midst of the thousand dangers - the pull in diverse tempting directions - to which I am exposed, here is an intuitive guide - not with open-eyed knowledge as in the hard-to-reach planes above the mind but with a truth-feeling in secret continuity with the impulsions of our vaguely searching emotional self. Here the wagering wanderer finds a centre of repose where the sense of a certainty waiting to be discovered is the bright allure to his bid for a winning bet in this "beautiful and perilous world", as Sri Aurobindo has called the field of the Supreme Purusha staking all to win all.

(7.11.1990)

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