18
Dearest Josef,
Minna and I are delighted to get your letter and are truly relieved to learn that your blood-trouble was such as to let you go home for the week-end. We pray to the Divine Mother to make you normal soon. I thank you for your renewal of subscription to Mother India plus your donation. It is indeed a generous gesture.
It must have been a big surprise to you that when everything was ready for the yearly flight to our Pondicherry Ashram you had to be whisked off to a Vienna hospital. But for those whose heartbeats are a japa of the names of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother all happenings turn into gifts from God bringing the devotee closer to the eternal Light and Love in various ways.
Those words of mine on the phone - "Our love is with you" - sprang without a deliberate thought. They were a proof that there's always a deep warmth within us enfolding our far-away friend and as a fellow-follower of our Divine Guides he is a part of their own golden presence in our lives -a presence which is well described in the words of a poet as "closer to us than breathing and nearer than hands and feet".
I am so pleased that the June Mother India was brought to you by your wife to be your companion in the hospital and that it happened to carry my letter to you of November 1990 as the very first item in "Life - Poetry- Yoga". It must have reassured you that no matter what happens, the grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is always with everyone of us and is invariably carrying us onward and inward and upward to their own Perfection which for all its ever-full sublimity and felicity never fails to brim over with sweetness and solicitude for us earthlings.
Most appropriately too this issue of Mother India brought back to your mind that Master Mantra from the Mother when
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you keenly needed to be told that Sri Aurobindo always stood as your "refuge", welcoming you to those Guru-feet of his that have touched the dust of our earth. They have blessed this dust and made themselves at the same time our guardians and the bearers of all those who cling to them towards the goal of the world's evolutionary pilgrimage.
(19.6.1991)
Note of june 27
I learned by a phone-call from Austria that our cherished friend - a lovely man all round - had passed away soon after receiving my letter as well as a letter from another of his intimate friends in the Ashram: Dimitri. He was only 56 years old.
I may note that the mantra Sri Aurobindo sharanam mama -"Sri Aurobindo is my refuge" - was given by the Mother to be repeated a hundred and twenty times as the sole last rite at the cremation or burial of Sri Aurobindo's disciples. It is significant that Josef should have picked it out for himself in his final days.
Josef was found suffering from uncheckable internal bleeding.
*
1 am extremely sorry that you are not well. Fever, nervousness, weakness - all these troubles cut to my heart and make me wonder what I should do to help. As soon as I read of them I concentrated on our Divine Mother and put them into her hands - those ready recipients, both graceful and gracious, of all our troubles. I am glad that you are not such a defeatist as to run to your bed each time there is an indisposition but are sitting in your chair and even moving about. When you tell me that you value my letter so much as to put in on your chest I feel deeply touched. Of course the worth of
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my letter - if any - is not due to my own small self: the communication has worth only inasmuch as this small self can be a little opening through which my adoration of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wafts towards you something of their sublimating, strengthening and soothing presence.
I am quite curious to know how my enlarged photo must be looking with all the loving tricks you play on it. If you hadn't said that the photo is framed (and therefore has a glass over it), I would have been startled to read that you had put some kumkum on my forehead! I like the idea of your putting a small picture of Sri Aurobindo on my chest to show how the manifest Lord is held in my heart. Yes, he is always there, but, as I have said in some letter, my feeling whenever I have knelt at the Samadhi has been that rather than Sri Aurobindo being in my heart tiny Amal is in the mighty heart of Sri Aurobindo. The Master is too big to be contained within his diminutive disciple. That is the ultimate reality, as the Mother hinted to me when I once told her of my feeling. But actually she was speaking in qualitative terms figured in terms of quantity. Quantitatively the Supreme is infinite not exclusively in extension: He is infinite in essence, as much a plenitude of presence in an atom as in a galaxy. Largeness or smaller than smaliness - a paradoxical way of putting its transcendence of all measurement. The same paradox is expressed more concretely in those four familiar lines of Blake:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. ..
Transposed to another universe of discourse, the fact of the essential Divinity being formulable anywhere is thrust
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home to us by Sri Aurobindo when he wants us to break through the illusion that the world of gross-seeming Matter on which all other-worldly philosophy has frowned is really incapable of manifesting perfection. According to Sri Aurobindo, the fulfilment of us earthlings is finally at the two ends of existence - the Supermind bearing in itself the truth of both eternity and time at one extreme and at the other the terrestrial scene where all truth appears to be lost so that Sri Krishna of the Gita could say to Arjuna: "Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world, turn thy love to Me." Sri Aurobindo, in his poem "The Life-Heavens" sees man's consummation ultimately in a full embodiment of the Divine on the terrestrial scene. To one who has wandered into the alluring excitements of the "roseate cloud-fire" with its thrilling yet limited "sweetness of heaven-sense", what in Savitri is called "the Paradise of the Life-Gods", a sudden reminder rises from the earthly depths which he has abandoned. The reminder is at once of the Supramental Truth-Consciousness and of the seeming abyss in which man's evolution has been set. It is "Earth's outcry to the limitless Sublime". The last part of it runs:
"I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,
A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; -
My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.
"By me the last finite, yearning, strives
To reach the last infinity's unknown,
The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives
And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone."
Plato long ago intuited that on a high plane beyond ours there subsisted ideal forms, which he called archimages, of all things that are part of the flux of time. These things can merely approximate, distantly reflect, those idealities. That is because Plato made a distinction between the real world and
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the shadow world. And this distinction has held for all dreamers and aspirants as well as for philosophers and moralists. The aim of life has been visioned as the contact between the real world and the shadowy through an "imprisoned splendour", the "soul" which belongs to the former but has fallen into the latter and got trapped there. In Sri Aurobindo's eyes, the soul has deliberately come below and to him what is dubbed the shadowy world is one where the soul has to work out a divine manifestation. Not just to reflect but to incarnate the idealities - not to run away to join them but to draw them down here is its job, its true mission. But the question confronts it: "How can a genuine incarnation of the idealities be possible if life in matter is something different in its very stuff from them?" Unless the stuff is basically the same, the attempt will always fall short.
In however hidden a way, material life has to be divinity itself, for else the idealities will never be earth-existence altogether. As the lines I have quoted from "The Life-Heavens" show, Sri Aurobindo finds Godhead concealed in its entirety within the series of "fleeting lives" and within the very clay of which we are made. The idealities are all biding their hour in the obscurities of matter. We cannot at present reach them or open a clear pathway for them to emerge. But we can prepare for their emergence in some fabulous future. The means of this preparation is to hark to Sri Aurobindo's summons to change not only the inner being but also the outer. The day-to-day person in us has to live in the light of the soul. A consecrated consciousness should be ours with a sense of the Divine from within us coming forth, through all thinking and feeling and speaking and doing, to meet the Divine who is everywhere around and above and below — yes, even below, waiting to be recognised in dumb material things. Of course, this should not blur our perception of the diversity of instruments - we have to deal differently with persons and occasions, using common sense and tact and specific understanding - but all through we must still have the awareness of a secret divinity and whatever instrument
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we face and whatever occasion we meet must appear to us a veil from behind which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are communicating with us. By keeping them always within subtle sight we shall him everything into an opportunity of knowing their will in the world and of variously fulfilling it.
You are lucky to have "subtlle sight" in a special mode. Not only do you have darshan of guiding powers in trance: you get visions of them also with open eyes. You say that from" 1980 Sri Aurobindo and Mother Mira have deeply entered your life. Let your concentration on them keep increasing. Let them be the central presence. If the arrival of a fellow-disciple like me in 1986 has helped to make them more and more close and vivid, I am indeed pleased and feel that my friendship has borne fruit. You have paid many compliments to me: they are most sincere and I truly appreciate them, especially your sense that I am a messenger of the Great Reality that my Gums are. If you see any light in me, it is meant essentially to lead on to the Superb Source of it and be to your visionary eyes at best no more than
A golden temple-door to things beyond.
It should also serve to show by whatever genuineness there may be in it what the touch of my Gums can do with even the most difficult stuff ever brought to their onward-leading feet and their upward-bearing hands. For 1 came to them with a very complicated and critical mind looking in various mutually conflicting directions and with a sensuous nature over-keenly responsive to a myriad lures indicated by that old Christian formula: "the world, the flesh and the devil." Through such a problematic ensemble a speck or spark of some strange dream sought to work its way into the outer life. It was encouraged to come forward by two calls. One was the diversely sensitive "poet's eye" discerning a persistent beauty in earth's transiences, a beauty which drew near only to beckon me to some incomprehensible farness. The other call was a contact with a girl who was as simple as I was
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complex but had a beauty lit by an intimate touch on what had been to me an elusive distance.
When the wonder-struck poet kindled into a lover whose object of affection had already heard the flute of Krishna, something awoke in him relating itself not only to the human charm in front but also to a Beyond in that charm. Then the search for the Unknown linked the two beings as much as what their eyes delighted in. This search brought them together to the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, and the great Path they shared in common as companion-pilgrims put an end to their old passion. Sri Aurobindo wrote to me: "...it was through the psychic element in both that you were united to her, the connection that was formed on the way to the Divine and led to your both coming here, after which its utility ceased to exist." .
(20.6.1991)
You don't seem to have been a careful reader of my long-continued series "Life - Poetry - Yoga". Otherwise you would not have written: "If my letter will disturb your contemplative mood, I may be excused." Two words here are rather inapt. First, "disturb". Even when people unexpectedly come to my door and say out of politeness: "We hope we are not disturbing you", I sometimes say: "What you are saying is hardly a compliment to me. Do you think I am so easily disturbed?" Time and again in my articles I have written that I try to practise equanimity - along with the formula "Remember and Offer". A letter - and that too from a cherished friend - is surely very far from being anything like an earthquake, however minor. Perhaps a full-fledged Yogi, which I am not yet, would not be disturbed even by an earthquake: he might -meet it by a mirthquake on his part, though that would possibly be a super-manifestation of Ananda rather than of peace.
The second erring term is "contemplative". It would hardly be correct to picture Amal Kiran in any pose even
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vaguely resembling the Greek image of an Indian Yogi's occupation: "omphaloskepsis" - "contemplation of the navel". One of the impressions my articles are bound to create is that their author rarely sits in regular meditation or concentration: mostly he is doing something - reading or writing or typing or speaking or else walking a bit lest his already poor legs should atrophy. Amal Kiran's life is spent in what he has called "unplanned sadhana". There is no regime of regular "in-going" by means of notable sessions. This Aurobindonian is generally posed midway between "ingoing" and "out-going" - his attempt is at a gathered-up consciousness with open eyes, living in the sacred presence of the Master and the Mother by a constant evocation of the memory of them and laying imaginatively in their hands or at their feet all his actions - and, if he is caught off his guard, all his reactions to unpleasant outer circumstances. So to refer to him as being in what is commonly understood as "contemplative mood" bespeaks a somewhat inattentive reading of his monthly publication of "personal letters".
Most probably you'll be surprised at my making such ado about a conventional apologetic phrase. But you must make allowance for the cacoethes scribendi which is the pedantic equivalent of the "itch of writing" - a practised writer's eagerness to find an occasion to indulge in the art of words -hopefully to some original effect.
You have mentioned the importance of the month of June for you, since it contains the 26th, the date on which in 1969 our Mother is said by you to have directly intervened and saved you during your first operation. The exact date, but in 1938, is also memorable for me. In one of her talks, without mentioning my name, the Mother has spoken of what happened to me. According to her, by all ordinary standards I should have died, the heart should have stopped - if there had not been in the being an immediate cry for help, a cry which the Mother said was due to a habitual all-time turn of the consciousness to her. In one of the talks recorded by Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo said that I had been saved
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from death by a divine intervention.
Your question - "Why are you so silent about the Samadhi?" - has set me off on a shining trail. What did you want me to say? My appeals to the Mother on behalf of my friends go on as usual. But your use of the word "silent" is quite suggestive. One can't help being silent in connection with the Samadhi - not only because the qualities of this holy place exceed one's power of speech but also because the Samadhi essentially represents the power of silence. Mind my expression: with silence I have associated power. Such an association is most apt in relation to Sri Aurobindo. As he had withdrawn into the solitude of his room after the end of 1926 to concentrate on his spiritual work, and put the Mother in the forefront to deal with his disciples from day to day, we were physically in his presence on only four special occasions in the year and naturally there was silence during them. But, unlike a Yogi like Ramana Maharshi sitting quietly for hours and diffusing intense peace, Sri Aurobindo keeping silent filled us with what I may indicate by inverting a mantric line from his "Life-Heavens" thus:
Rest one with unimaginable Force.
It was as if we were stilled into a deep surrender to a Divine Presence that irresistibly carried us forward on the path of Perfection. This Presence is well hit off by the paradox in that stanza from Sri Aurobindo's "Jivanmukta", a poem on the Vedantic ideal of the living liberated man about which he noted: "Perhaps I have given a pull towards my own ideal which the strict Vedantin would consider illegitimate." The stanza runs:
A Power descends no Fate can perturb or vanquish,
Calmer than mountains, wider than marching waters,
A single might of luminous quiet Tirelessly bearing the world and ages.
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What I mean by the extraordinary element in Sri Aurobindo may be most pointedly driven home by my feeling when I first looked at his body after he had left it on December 5, 1950.1 marked that there was nothing like what people usually speak of when they stand before someone dead. They refer to the expression of peace on the face. I saw the very opposite. Certainly not any stamp of agitation but the unmoving source of a sovereign dynamism. A tremendous power seemed to emanate from the face and figure. Wave after wave of it filled the room and surrounded me. I perceived an overwhelming air of Conquest. A king was taking his siesta after a supreme victory. From the flaring nostrils to the way in which the legs were stretched out, slightly apart, there was a natural aspect of domination. Spontaneously, effortlessly an assertion of empire could be experienced. Here was a silence, transcendent of all creation - an ultimate absolute of the ineffable - from which had originally flowed forth a creative energy and which now was sending out a power of re-creating all life. Such was the mysterious death of Sri Aurobindo. And it is this fount of new life that is enshrined in the Samadhi at the centre of the Ashram courtyard.
A most holy hush of infinite grace by whose radiant omnipotence of love everything could be blessed into an outgrowing of old forms that have become fetters - this is the Samadhi where both the Master and the Mother are laid - his casket the support of Hers, as it were, and both together symbolising a silence with the power to put an end to all past failures, to remove our futile frettings and unobtrusively, without the fanfare of even one word, bring about the beginnings of an earth discovering its own hidden divinity. There is nothing to be wondered at in one's being "so silent about the Samadhi" if one's wordless state reflects in however distant a measure the almighty secret hinted in that flower-decked incense-wreathed monument from where our Two Adored Ones waft to us mutely the message: "We are always with you!"
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After this paean do not run away with the idea that one has to be within physical reach of the Samadhi all the time if not spend all one's hours sitting in front of it. No doubt, the Ashram has a special spiritual virtue, it is the central powerhouse of the Aurobindonian Yoga because here the Master and the Mother lived and their "material envelopes", sanctified by the lives led in them, are preserved. But the Master and the Mother were essentially realities of consciousness and it is with our consciousness that fundamentally we have to be in contact with them. Just as on darshan days people came to Pondicherry from all over the earth, so too some physical touch with the resting-place of the Avatars' bodies is needed, but to conjure up the silence of the Samadhi within our souls is the basic need.
(8.6.1991)
Your mother must have passed on to you my comments on your poems as well as on what attitude to take towards the poet in you. Every poet should have the urge to write, as Meredith said, "our inmost in the sweetest way". By "sweetest" he did not mean mere elegance of expression or pleasing musicality: he had in mind the search for the beauty and harmony of the revealing word which gives at the same time the precise shape and impact, as it were, of the theme and an "aura" of suggestion beyond the apparent line and hue and thrill. There is, of course, no one single way of realising the Meredithian ideal. One may be exquisite as in Coleridge's
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness,
or grand as in the same poet'
The alien shine of unconcerning stars
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or one may progressively lead from the one mode to the other through what may be termed a subtlety of descriptive insight as in the closing passage of this very poet's "Frost at Midnight";
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee.
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
Admittedly, these instances belong to an old though never to be out-dated tradition. The modem temperament is more nervous, less patient in its poetic responses and naturally the technique tends to lose something of the steadiness and regularity and sequential movement, but this is no defect in itself, provided the "inmost" a la Meredith is at play and the aesthetic sense, set to however new a pattern, is not coarsened. Actually an anticipation of true modem poetry in quintessence is in the strange successions and tempo-changes of "Kubla Khan" 's kaleidoscopy and I am glad that this poem has gripped your imagination no less than the researching intellect in you. You certainly have a genuine poet breaking through your young, slightly rebellious days and I see the magic and the mystery floating even across the semi-serious charm of the face in the photo of "The Three Graces", as I would call it, which I have received: your wonderful mother with a daughter standing on either side.
(10.9.1986)
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