Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

15

Quite a long life has been mine. For us in the Ashram length of living has value only inasmuch as it measures out a nearer and nearer approach to the Light of our Gurus. We are - in the depths of our beings - always at the Great Goal, but our surfaces have to trace in time and space a running golden reflection of that eternal Truth. When I look back I feel ashamed of so many opportunities missed, so many fallings-away. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never encouraged the backward gaze and the regrettings and sighings. I can hear them saying: "Turn your ear to the flute of the future. Its melodies are endless. Waste no hours on airs that have faded, wishing them otherwise. There is no real fading if you feel a fullness awaiting you in the days to come. Get caught up in its call and let the years beyond your 86 move like a Beethoven Symphony mounting" to its grand finale."

(23.11.1990)

If one is really under the spell of what is called "black magic", one would feel some kind of indefinable malaise. But all such malaise is not necessarily a sign of being under black-magic influence. I think the best thing is not to have the impression of any influence of this kind. To be obsessed with the idea of it may prove harmful even if there is no black magic done. For, the mentality which lives under that obsession may put itself in touch with the low occult plane whose forces may themselves act as black magicians. Keep your mind free from fear. After all, real black magic is rare.

As a support to keeping the mind free from fear, I would advise you to repeat the mantra: Sri Aurobindo sharanam mama ("Sri Aurobindo is my refuge"). It is a master-mantra of protection, given by the Mother herself. One who is not an Aurobindonian may be advised to take the name of his Guru or his ista devata ("chosen deity").

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Finally, if indeed some black magic has been done, it is possible that some peculiar sign has been traced on a part of your house. Look for it and, if there is one, rub it off. Sometimes the work is done through a young boy or girl servant. In case you have any such servant, watch out for any peculiar behaviour on his or her part. Of course, all such servants are not mediums, and you need not sack them just because they are young.

. At any rate, have faith in the mantra I have mentioned and be fearless. All will be well.

(26.3.1989)

It's ten at night now. I am alone, but not lonely - for the Unseen is always there, and most on the point of visibility when one is by oneself. It is in such a condition that one is most able to help somebody who appeals for "a few words which will stimulate and gladden" his "aspiration". That is why I have kept this quiet indrawn hour reserved for wishing you "Bonne fete". And what I mean by this wish is that you may never forget the constant source of happiness which is so near but which you mistakenly think to be "still so far away". You most probably know the story from the Mahabharata which I once recounted in a "Talk" of mine. Let me remind you of it.

Draupadi was dragged to the court of Duryodhana and threatened that her clothing would be taken off. Strip-tease had not yet come into fashion and in any case she could never have been a striptease artist, so she was quite bashful. In full view of the court a brother of Duryodhana's started pulling at her dress. Draupadi did not know whom to turn to. She thought of Sri Krishna the Avatar and appealed to him in her mind. She cried out inwardly: "O Lord of the highest heaven, come to my aid!" There was no response. The poor girl became more desperate. She sent again her cry: "O Master of the three worlds, help me!" No reply still - and more and more folds of her apparel came out. Once again

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Draupadi raised her heart's plea: "O Ruler of the four quarters of the earth, rush to my rescue!" All in vain -nothing resulted. Draupadi was really at a loss. Then she cried out in a final intensity: "O You who are hiding deep in my own heart, come!" At once Sri Krishna appeared before her subtle vision with his hand gesturing abhaya - "Have no fear." The clothing went on unwinding endlessly. Draupadi could not be stripped at all.

Later she chided Sri Krishna: "Why did you take so long to come?" Sri Krishna sweetly and coolly replied: "If I had to come from the highest heaven or from the three worlds or even from the four quarters of the earth, wouldn't it take some time? But when you summoned me from your own heart, there was no distance to cross. Naturally I came at once."

What you are going through is nothing strange. All of us have felt at some time or other that "life is a drudgery and so barren." A pessimist has said:

Year after year of living,

Yet no difference from death

Save the nuisance of moving

And the tediousness of breath.

An optimist has offered the paradoxical consolation:

Keep on smiling - don't look glum:

There is always worse to come.

But all these are bad jokes that can be played on us if we haven't come to the Ashram. Once we are here, we have no need to despair. Even though things may look bleak, there is the assurance from Savitri:

Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss -

Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.

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And I may tell you that the sense of nothing wonderful happening in our sadhana from day to day does not reflect any reality for us who have given ourselves into the hands of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Their secret Presence is ever with us and they are carrying us forward no matter if we feel we are standing still. At some moment what is being prepared behind the scene will break forth. Keep on hoping that it may come out soon. The best way to draw it nearer the surface of our life is to let a quiet smile play on our lips, confident in the faith, which I have underlined to people again and again, that there is no abyss so deep that the Divine Grace cannot lift us from it sky-high.

The smile I speak of is surely within reach of you who are always full of humour - and it should be all the easier when you know that you have the love of everybody - and most warmly indeed of your friend who, in one of his poems has visioned a glorious moment of the God Agni's grace turning everything to flame and felicity:

Lo now my heart has grown his glimmering East -

Blown by his breath a cloud of colour runs -

The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile.

(8.11.1987)

You have become an expert dreamer - not only getting fascinating dreams, not only remembering them perfectly, but also exercising your analytic faculty in the course of them! The secret whispered to you - "Here is the end of the earth" - carried a symbolic meaning. Evidently it did not imply the end of your earth-life in a physical sense nor the end of the life of the earth - and, of course, the earth being round, there could be no real geographical end. The vision of North Africa that stretched before you, making you wonder whether beyond that vast expanse there was sea or mountain, symbolised the cosmic Ignorance in which we are set. Haven't you heard of Africa having been called "the Dark

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Continent''? And don't you know your speculation about the "other side" - "sea or mountain?" - touched upon the liberation from that Ignorance? The sea represents the Universal Consciousness and the mountain the Transcendent Reality. These are the two states of being that terminate the inner darkness in which our ordinary life is enclosed.

Naturally the question is: "How are we to get out of the cosmic Ignorance?" A suggestive answer was given in the next part of your dream-experience. You think that there was a "break". But actually the interval indicates the void expectant hush which is the pre-condition of our getting the answer to our life's problem. And what you term "the second phase of the dream" disclosed, again in a symbolic form, the answer: "Nolini, looking taller, bigger and fairer-complexioned" than in the outward physical aspect you had known. The tallness pointed to the Transcendent Reality, the bigness stood for the Universal Consciousness and the fairness represented the liberating light which would counteract the power of "the Dark Continent", the "Africa" of the earth-life's nescience. As Nolini had always struck you as the example par excellence of sadhana, it was inevitably his figure that you saw as the Saving Grace.

(18.5.1988)

I have commented quite often on your dreams of Nolini which seem to be stepping-stones towards your own Nolini-esque future - subtle contacts which are occasions for lighting up your consciousness with his own Mother-ward being. The adjective "Mother-ward" is of great importance, for we must not let the helpful friend of our heart be anything else than a cherished transparency - himself valuable in his own right of nearness and dearness to us but never ceasing to be a glimmering link between us and the all-luminous Presence who mothers his soul as well as ours.

The story of the meeting you had with Sri Aurobindo in a dream thrills me. The immediate answer by him to your

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ardent prayer before going to bed shows how close he is to you. The meeting started, you say, on the ground floor of the house. This indicates the subtle-physical plane. Then the contact moves to a place where the sensations are naturally intenser - the first floor, the vital-emotional with the psychic being adjoining it. The intimacy increases and culminates with his extending his hand towards you with a dish and wanting to fill you with food, a new life's substance. This gesture is meant to give you a chance to fulfil your desire for the divya sparsha, the divine touch: the index finger of the hand you stretch to receive the dish can manage to touch his hand. Here is your soul's pointer to a superhuman destiny for you. Indeed, as you exclaim, the Lord is both great and gracious.

The food-item in the dream brings me to your quotation from Savitri - the line which struck you while you were going through Book One, Canto Three:

On the tongue lingered the honey of paradise.

Food coming from the Divine symbolises essentially the mellifluous meeting between the Bliss of the Supreme Spirit and our human heart's insatiate hunger - insatiate because all that it finds in its search for happiness falls short:

All is too little that the world can give.

What that line about the paradisal honey is meant to convey most intimately is precisely the experience you were instantly reminded of on reading it: "During the early period of my stay in the Ashram... sometimes I used to feel a sweet secretion on my tongue. This continued for a period." Here is a rather rare experience. Sri Aurobindo himself had it and has explained it when a sadhak wrote to him of having the same experience. The gist of the explanation is that the Divine Ananda, the Supreme Bliss, can manifest itself in terms of physical sensation and be felt as a sweetness

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dripping upon the tongue through the brahmarandhra, the subtle opening that can take place at the top of the head to the spiritual ranges of consciousness beyond the brain-mind. This sweet sensation, says Sri Aurobindo, the Rishis of the Rigveda named amritam, the nectar of immortality.

His explanation sheds light on the fact that the Rishis, who personified the Divine Ananda as the godhead Soma, spoke of Soma as if it were an actual material drink. Ordinarily, commentators equate it to a hallucinogenic decoction in the ritual: researchers now hold it to be a preparation from the plant Ephedra. The esoteric view takes this preparation to be a symbol for an inner or higher immaterial Reality. But Yogic experience in exceptional moments discovers that the decoction was merely a substitute in external ceremony for something which was also material, though in a secret way, something which was an authentic translation of the supraphysical Reality into a sense-delight directly within the body and separate from any preparation to be taken in from outside.

I have used the epithet "material" for the sweet secretion, but truly speaking the tongue reflects, as it were, a sensation in the subtle-physical body which is ours behind the gross-physical. Were the saliva with the Soma-taste to be chemically analysed, I don't think a special sugary element would be detected. All the same, "the honey of paradise" remains a fact of bodily consciousness even if not of bodily substance.

It seems to me that this "honey" can come to us in various forms. It need not be confined to being a sweetness on the tongue. I consider it to be essentially present in what happened after the sudden pressure you felt on the middle of your forehead, the surface site of the Yogic ajna -chakra, the occult centre where thought and will can open to the Supreme Spirit. You write: "The feeling was very soothing and peaceful. It was coming down like a thin stream on my nose, eyes and the cheeks under the eyes. At times this feeling was so sensitive and strong that I felt like wiping it off. It continued. Even when I went to the Dining Room on

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foot, it did not wane. At times there was a pressure on my head too. As a matter of fact all that area of the body was vibrant. This is not the first time - in the past too 1 had the same experience on occasion. At tunes it lingered for hours. Do you agree with me if I say that it is peace that descends?"

If I have compared this experience with that of a strange sweetness in the mouth - both of them a prolonged flow from the inner and the higher being of ourselves - I should believe that what is at play is at once peace and power, serenity and felicity, Sri Aurobindo's imperturbable Himalaya getting mirrored in the Mother's gleaming and laughing Ganges.

Perhaps this description could apply also to the prolonged flow of Savitri, at the same time a grandeur of sight and a subtlety of sound. I am not surprised that you are "totally seized by Savitri and there is no escape". Your reading the poem "slowly" is just the right thing. The reason you give is delightful; you read slowly "lest it might finish soon". But actually Savitri can never be finished - it has depth beyond depth and it is no wonder that it is not only giving you "immense delight" but also "shedding more light than it did in the past", Sri Aurobindo has himself said that to him Savitri was not a poem to be written and done with: it was a ceaseless experiment of using poetic language again and again from an ever-ascending curve of spiritual consciousness - an adventure of seeing how far the speech of human poetry could go along the path of more and more lofty Yogic realisation. Across the years Savitri grew not in length alone: it increased immeasurably in a detailed depth from the time in 1936 when the Master first confided to me passages from it day after day to the time when in 1950 he gave by dictation touch on finishing touch by way of adding scores of new passages bringing out still greater secrets than before.most of the lines in Savitri, by being read slowly and audibly - with the ear no less than the eye inwardly on the alert - carry on an endlessly widening aura and vibrancy of suggestion to the soul in us. With each novel shade of spiritual reality caught

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in the words, our soul adds a cubit to its stature, visions "an ampler ether", breathes "a diviner air". Whether or not we experience a supernatural sweetness on our tongues with the reading of Savitri, always

Its tones of fathomless joy instil

A taste of the Ineffable.

(4.1.1991)

I like your calling me "Dadhikravan", the Rigveda's white horse galloping ever towards the dawn. As an inveterate lover of horses I cannot help feeling highly complimented. But what makes the compliment more desirable is that the animal of the Rigveda symbolises the purified life-force. The purification of the life-force is the rarest of rare achievements, and if I happen to be on the way to it nothing can be a better portent for my future. Without it neither the mind nor the body can be taken as totally given to God. The vital energy is the most effective element in us and it is the element by which the mind can have an impact on earth-circumstances and by which the body can carry out the mind's dreams and designs as well as its own hungers. But it is our most intractable part: its lust for pleasure and power appears to be endless and it can easily dictate its desires to its mental and physical companions. In the Rigveda the ultimate goal, figured as the dawn, is the outbreak of the Divine Consciousness upon our ignorance. And the final problem of Yoga is the turning of the vital energy away from its own vigour -first to the ideals of the visionary intelligence and to the healthy poise our limbs seek, then to the adventure of the Boundless and the Omnipotent. This turning towards its own Archetype, the supernal origin of its strength, so that a strange new elevation is achieved, seems to be pictured in that far-seeing line of the French poet Rimbaud:

Millions d'oiseaux d'or, 6 future vigueur!

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which may be rendered:

Millions of golden birds, O vigour to come!

Mark the word "golden". It points to an ilumination from some high space of being, an alchemisation of the gross drive into a purified passion. Here the life-force has found a superhuman freedom, the eternal Light has dissolved all limits, a multitudinous potency has touched it from a divine distance, a futurity of imperishable flame. In a different image we have here once more the stainlessly shining steed of the Rigveda, the uncheckable dawnward Dadhikravan.

I have to confess that this glorious creature is not yet a full-speeder in me. The process of purification has still much to catch up with. There are times when the inner movement seems to echo that line of Virgil's:l

Quadrupedante putrem quatit cursu ungula campum,

whose English lumination from

Horse-hooves trampled the crumbling plain with a

four-footed gallop.

But the outer movement lacks the full resonance of the inner occasions. The psychic being, the inmost soul, has its say again and again in the region of the life-force no less than in the realm of the thinker and the domain of the physical doer. Perhaps I may even aver that in basic matters it has brought about the consent of the vital energy to self-conversion: the horse's head has been turned irrevocably towards the Spirit's glimmering East and there is no halt in the pacing in that direction. What I await is the sweeping up of the total physical consciousness into the rhythm of the Rigveda's unstoppable courser with its eyes a-lit for ever.

(2.2.1991)

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