Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

17

I have two letters from you and some photos. The first recounts the misery you feel when you don't hear from me for a long time. Fart of your misery is due to your fear that I may be unwell or may even have bidden goodbye to the earth. Except for the infirmity of my legs I am in fair-enough health and have had no wish to become "the late lamented". In fact I am likely to be rather "late" in becoming "lamented": I am already past 86. So be of good cheer. And what is this appeal to me that if I quit the earth-scene I should carry you along with me? You are 30 years younger than I am. Life for people like us is for doing Yoga and you should never think of cutting short the wondrous opportunity we have of coming closer and closer in heart and mind to Sri Aurobindo's glorious Light and the Mother's gracious Beauty. As much sadhana as possible is to be packed in the span of time available to us. Sadhana cannot be done except in the process of terrestrial evolution where alone it is significant: apart or away from it are the non-evolutionary "typal" planes. On each of them the consciousness is fixed in its own type, already fulfilled and playing variations on the same satisfying theme, "with no need left to aspire", as Sri Aurobindo says in his poem "The Life Heavens". To adopt Tennyson's words, only on earth are there

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

and hence an environment and provision to seek a remedy for its ache and realise the Divine. Bodily life is precious for the chance given us of questing for God through birth after birth and turning all conditions here into a happy home for Him. At present He is only a visitor; we have to build a permanent habitation for Him, making Him a universal King not only in the inner recesses of an illumined mankind but also in the outer circumstances of a transformed humanity.

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So don't be in a hurry to quit "this transient and unhappy world", the Gita's anityam asukham lokam imam, without carrying out as much and as long as you can the command of Sri Krishna: bhajasva mam, "love "and worship Me." Sri Krishna has graced our times with a manifestation still more luminous than in the period of the Bharata War. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have touched our earth with the blessings of their holy feet. Let us do our best to follow in their footsteps. Particularly you who have heard the call of the Magic Flute from the very beginning of your life should lengthen to the utmost the years in which you can attune your heartbeats to its depth-awakening notes.

You have referred me to your palm extended in the photo of you in bhava samadhi. I looked at it as soon as I saw the picture. But the lines are not clearly shown. As for my own palms, the life-line of my left hand is rather short. It may be pointing to the crisis I went through at the age of 34 when, as the Mother has said in a talk of hers, I would have surely died if something within hadn't instantaneously drawn her help because, according to the Mother, there happened to be the habit of remembering her and being in touch with her in a spontaneous and natural way. The line on my right palm is fairly long - strongly marked more than two-thirds of the way: then it becomes a little lighter but is long enough. So, from the point of view of palmistry, I shall be receiving your letters and communicating with you, though sometimes after a bit of delay, for quite a number of years. Set your sweet soul at rest and keep smiling as you so charmingly do in the photo you have enclosed of May 1964 with your landlady. Do you still smile often enough? You must guard against becoming too serious. Those whom Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have drawn into their radiance must let that spiritual sunshine come often to their faces.

Here I am not recommending just a jolly temperament, though that is an advantage. I am encouraging essentially the practice of being in contact with the glowing presence of our Gurus. By this contact I don't mean only the sense of them in

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our ever-aspiring souls. I mean also a constant remembrance of their bodily existence - the forms in which they walked on our earth. Those who have seen and met them personally will find such remembrance automatic. But even those who have not can practise a lively substitute for it on the evidence of their photographs. The Mother has said that each of their pictures is charged with the light of their consciousness. So these pictures, in their own way, carry the same aura that accompanies the memory of them for those who have physically known them. To be aware keenly of their bodily being is the source of a profound joy which, besides leading us to look at outward events with an eager or a patient smile, becomes an easy yet most effective process of sadhana, for it helps us to infuse into all our words and acts in the midst of outward events the awareness of the Mother looking at us and calling us to let our inmost souls be at play in whatever we do. When there have been concrete manifestations of the Divine Reality, when the very bodily substance has proved to be the instrument of God-realisation, when living and moving persons amongst us have been communicative of the Eternal and the Infinite, it will indeed be a pity if we fail to be in as vivid a relationship as possible with such a great gesture of the Supreme's Grace towards weak and ignorant humans.

Tennyson has called each of us

An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light,

And with no language but a cry.

In answer to this appeal from age to age the Heavenly Parents have come at last - in shapes like our own and assuming the myriad difficulties with which we are beset so that by dissolving them in their own consciousness they may render available to us a solution of those resistances in ourselves. Because of these aims and achievements their bodies have grown centres of a beatific bounty. By concentra-

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ting on their bodies that have acted like ours yet won through to superhuman purity and peace, to deific love and power, we by faith and devotion can best attain our soul's fulfilment. Steeping our whole identity in a vision of the physical presence which the highest Purusha and His Shakti have projected in order to assist and consummate our evolution, we should pass our lives. At least, this is what I strive to do, this is what I define as my "Integral Yoga". The sweet and hallowed memories of the Mother's heart-hushing movements and Sri Aurobindo's mind-kindling repose as I have known them down the years are fundamentally the process I feel as carrying me onward. And when anyone happens to come to me for advice or encouragement, all I attempt to do is to let my recollection of the Mother's multi-splendoured eyes animate my words with the new life she has brought and the image of Sri Aurobindo's imperturbable gaze render my silences significant with mysteries never revealed before his advent.

Here let me go a little off at a tangent though not without essential relevance to my theme. There are two sides to my not inappropriate digression. The Mother always responded to the genuine leap of the heart to her and in a couple of seconds she could fill us with the rapture of her response. I have observed that several people whose deep-seated connection with her was known to me spent less than a minute in their pranam to her. Within that short time there was a perfect give-and-take. Many took much longer. Whenever the length of time had a special movement of the inner being behind it, the Mother always had a patient appreciative concentration in answer to it. But often she seemed to be just indulgent and kind. I know that she set no great store by mere ceremony. This attitude applied in general to the common religious practice of mankind. Formal devotional-ism had little meaning for her. I have heard her say in effect: "Far better than church-going and temple-visiting and conventional rites is a simple disinterested act. The Divine does not crave for or need worship as such. Much more valuable

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in his eyes as a movement of spirituality is an unselfish deed."

On the other hand(the Mother was always alert to the special gift Sri Aurobindo and she had come, at a great deal of unspoken sacrifice, to give to suffering and aspiring humanity. Indescribable was the smile, at the same time most intimate as if tasting the nectar of a truly devoted soul's flow of itself towards her and most remote as though looking earthward from the height of an impersonal plenitude of a hitherto-unknown grace - the smile that often went out from her to her children during their daily exchanges of love. Her sense of the new light which Sri Aurobindo had drawn from rare altitudes and was being lavishly distributed by her to their disciples was always lively - in fact it could not help being such to one who was an incarnation of this light. That sense made her keenly aware of whether or not the people who approached her were alive to the novel bounty. I recollect her telling me once about some visitors who had meditated with her: "They sat absorbed in what was evidently to them a fine spiritual state, but there was no connection at all with me!" Doubtless, she appreciated their attainment but she knew also the waste of the largesse she had been born to scatter and the loss to these seekers who happened to be locked up in whatever they had caught of the world's great spiritual past without becoming sensitive to the enlarging continuation of it for which Sri Aurobindo and she had accepted the burden of embodiment.

Your smiling photo has led me quite far a-field. Another one shows a rather Shakespearian forehead. I am sure it would have pleased our Master. He regarded Shakespeare as extraordinarily intuitive in his poetic expression. Perhaps he would have found your facial expression a pointer to an inner intuitiveness?

I see from what you have written that the spiritual pursuit is the most instinctive thing for you and that your resolve not to get married was never an ascetic fight with yourself: it was absolutely in accord with the trend of your own being. Lucky

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girl to be blessed with such an in-born turn towards the A11-Blissful from your very teens!

(29.4.1991)

I am glad that, looking at the picture of me which is with you, you find my forehead as Shakespearian as yours. My resemblance to the Bard must be closer because I am far nearer than you as a woman can be to the scarcity of hair above the forehead - another characteristic of the great Elizabethan dramatist. How he got so baldish at a relatively early age is a mystery. He died at the age of 52. Of course, he had his worries as we know from his Sonnets, but were they bad enough to weaken his hair-roots? I can imagine a particular worry doing immense damage. It is the one he would have been visited with if he had been like that strange entity which has inspired one of the greatest phrases his intuitive poetic mind created:

the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

If he could have prophesied the bitter controversy that has raged in later times as to whether he himself penned those 36 plays bearing his name or they were the work of either Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman or else Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, he would have been upset enough to tear his hair! I am sure he was never given to any such "dreaming on things to come". So I can't understand why at 52 years his pate was almost hairless. Maybe when the life-expectancy was much less than in modern times the bodily changes were speeded up. The age of 52 was considered in the sixteenth century to make one quite venerably old because the average life-span was no more than 60 years. As the famous Sonnets prove, the age of 40 was rated as furrowing and drying up one's face and beginning to run one's blood cold. If the poet's own physiog-

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nomy is mirrored in these words, I must be comparatively in the prime of life at 86 years and 6 months since people remark about my "mug" that though my jowls sag a little my eyes have neither crow's-feet on their sides nor pouches below.

Now a brief reflection on palmistry. I am surprised that you have gone one better on me by showing no Life-line at all on your left palm! 1 have always had doubts about palmistry and this fact should clinch them. Facts of my own palms should also help my scepticism. Just as my life-line is very short on my left hand, my head-line is deeply marked for a very brief length on my right. Afterwards there is a faint continuation. This should show that I was in good mental shape for about half my life and then began to deteriorate into a blooming idiot. At present I must be pretty advanced in mindlessness. Perhaps it is true in a sense beyond the comprehension of palmists. For it is only when the mind ceases to act that the higher light takes up the job of working in its place. I am very far from being able to say about myself what Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me about his mind -namely, that it was eternally quiet and that everything came to him from "overhead". But my practice, helped all the time by Sri Aurobindo, of receiving poetic inspiration again and again from the planes above that of the creative intelligence -Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - has trained the mental Me not exactly to escape

...from the confines of thought

To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth¹

but at least to follow the inspiring precept:

Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight²

or else to call down splendid surprises of vision and rhythm

1.Savitri (Centenary Ed.), p. 383.

2.Ibid,, p. 276.

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without letting the usual inhabitants of the thought-world interfere with the Higher Mind's large clarities of spiritually vibrant Ideas, the illumined Mind's passion and colour of revelatory images, the Intuition's sudden glowing stabs into the very heart of things, the Overmind's massive mighty movements bringing forth an eternal world-voice from even the smallest transience of Nature's process and human life.

Further, the practice of intent receptivity to the Beyond in the midst of the common run of thinkings and willings and rememberings has given an ease to these ordinary mental modes so that there is very little sense of exertion and an almost utter absence of what is termed "brain-fag". The usual intelligence seems urged by unseen hands and moved to brighter issues than it would normally envisage. No doubt, there are less spontaneous, less felicitous intervals but a fair amount of freedom from mental labour has been one of the boons granted by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Yes, great has been their grace in several ways. Yet how far am I from the spiritual states which were Aswapati's in Savitr! When will I be able to say about myself at all times any of the things said of him? - for instance:

Indifferent to the little outpost Mind,

He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.

His being now exceeded thinkable Space,

His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic sight:

A universal light was in his eyes,

A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;

A force came down into his mortal limbs,

A current from eternal seas of Bliss;

He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.³

Enough of this digression about my own pluses and minuses. Let me return to your concerns. You write: "My nature has been serious from the very beginning but zealous

3. Ibid., p. 79.

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always. I become gloomy sometimes. From 1981 to 1986 sadness and depression overwhelmed me but when I read your book Light and Laughter in 1984-end I felt pulled up." You also say you heard Sri Aurobindo's voice telling you during a meditation: "Weeping and depression are not for you. You must be a warrior. Be bold. Smile out." If we are sincere in our choice of the spiritual path, we shall always have the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with us and that presence is at the same time an extreme sweetness and a never-failing strength. Physical suffering is not always avoidable — a headache or a rheumatic joint may have to be endured, but it is possible to keep the heart suffused with a quiet joy which does not depend on anything for its existence, since it is the outflow of the soul's little bit of oneness with the secret blissful basis of all that exists - the Divine Mystery which is always waiting to enfold our sighs and our sufferings because of that most wonderful of all paradoxes: Etermity in love with Time.

I am glad you are constantly reading those two supreme masterpieces of Sri Aurobindo: Savitri and The Life Divine. They are also rated as perhaps the most difficult of his writings - but their charm is that the difficult matter is conveyed in the most engrossing manner. Whether or not you follow precisely the thought building up in The Life Divine, the breath of its inspiration carries you onward and upward and you feel that even if you can't trace minutely with your mind all the lines and curves of this colossal architecture your being seems to get stretched wide and pulled high as though a new personality were in process of construction. Of course if one is able to follow the various directions of the multitudinous yet accurately marshalled thought one will be aware of the inner restructuring with greater clarity, but even otherwise invisible hands will go on raising up in your depths a more Aurobindonian You. For here is not a Spinoza or Hegel challenging you to trace the edifice of his speculative system: here is God's grace seeking to impress on the deepest part of your mind the shape of the

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cosmic vision projected by a power beyond the mind. Sri Aurobindo's philosophical revelation is bent on giving itself to you and, whether you completely grasp or not its grand details, it will enter into you and remain there a vibrant mass of glorious meanings fashioning anew your look on life and universe and godhead. The only condition we may take it to make is that you should not read too much at a stretch. The moment you feel the slightest strain, stop. Read slowly, happily and try to imagine that your head is open at the top, for all that Sri Aurobindo has written has its origin in what we may call the Spirit's ether.

This way of reading and of receptivity holds even more for Savitri, since Savitri is in tenser literature than The Life Divine. Not only does it go into more vivid disclosures of spiritual reality: it also comes with what one may designate as the very life-throb of occult realms, it carries in its surge or sway of interrelated words and modulated metre the footprints and footfalls, as it were, of divinities in traffic with earth.

You have referred to my comments on Savitri in my book Sri Aurobindo - the Poet. They comprise three articles. The first tells how Savitri, Sri Aurobindo's long-kept secret, got slowly divulged to me in private, with a tremendous response from me and a profound gesture of gratitude on my part. The second tries to explicate the sense of the poem's opening passage on "the hour before the Gods awake". The night spoken of here has baffled many readers. They have the impression that Sri Aurobindo is describing the very commencement of the cosmic manifestation from the Incons-cience. But, as shown by his letters to me as well as by hints in the passage itself -

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse...

As in a dark beginning of all things...

A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown...

he is speaking in terms of symbolism and comparison and

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similitude. What he is dealing with is the night preceding the dawn of the day on which "Satyavan must die". Like the dawn which serves as a symbol of the divine illumination to come for man's consciousness in the future, this night is made to image the Divine's utter self-concealment in what the Rigveda calls "darkness wrapped within darkness" at the start of the univers's evolution. My third piece dwells on the various qualities of Savitri as a poem and as a revelation.

You have paid a great compliment to my letters to you. If they stimulate you inwardly and even infuse more life into you so that you are helped to get over your bouts of ill-health I am deeply thankful to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother whom I invoke every time I write. Before I put pen to paper or tap the keys of my typewriter I look within me and associate our Gurus with the act of communicating with my friends. Be the subject seemingly trivial or patently serious, there is always this association and in touching on serious matters I try as much as possible not merely to paraphrase out of a book but to convey what has been proved upon my own pulses.

Let me close with telling you of the soul-"pulsing" of a few days back. At the Samadhi usually something or other which leaves a happy mark on me takes place. At times the mark is very deep. On the 9th of this month the afternoon air brought particularly a breath of silence and solitude but with a secret in them of some unimaginable future outflowering. Suddenly a mantra of Vivekananda's sprang to my mind as if to crystallise the condition in which I was caught up. Vivekananda once spoke of his ideal of sitting in meditation under a height in the Himalayas and hearing a waterfall thunder forth: "Hara! Hara! - Vyom! Vyom!" (Sanskrit for "The Free! The Free! The Void! The Void!"). I felt completely divested of all bonds, all attachments and the whole courtyard seemed entirely empty of every creature, yet there was no sense of any deprivation. A mysterious fullness within a wondrous vacuity: such was my "experience". What was totally free and void appeared to be waiting to be repopu-lated - by millions of Sri Aurobindo, a countless number of

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the Divine Mother! It was the thrilling presage of a transformed humanity, a perfected earth-life. This prophetic part of the "experience" denoted the new turn given by the Integral Yoga - the creative turn - to the glorious escapism of the old spirituality, the grand flight from the finite and the fugitive. No ultimate power was conceived in the past as coming back from the Absolute to renovate everything in the future so as to evoke from some super-Shakespearian Miranda the cry: .

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in't!

(13.5.1991)

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