Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

19

Your name was on my lips for a few days before your recent letter reached me. I said to myself: "I have told B to keep me in touch with her health. Somehow I feel a little concerned." I am indeed sorry that the dreaded backache has returned. Maybe, as you surmise, when it had gone, you exploited your good luck too much by taking up normal daily work at home. You have to be rather careful and not push yourself. I am sure the body will again respond to the Mother's grace. Don't think, as you may tend to do, that she wants the body to suffer in order that your soul may come nearer to her!

One can always use one's bodily ailments as an opportunity to intensify one's call to her. But surely she does not wish to repeat the old Christian asceticism which welcomes pain as the best imitatio Christi and therefore the quickest path to salvation. A welcome to suffering entered the Indian mind too during the last century - most probably owing to the influence of Christian missionaries. But it is no real part of Indian spirituality. You may ask: "Isn't there the term tapasya meaning 'penance'?" I may assure you that this translation is a mistake and is most probably due to the Christian missionaries' influence.

"Penance" goes with a strong sense of "sin", especially the so-called "original sin" which is typically a Christian notion. According to St. Paul, God's sinless son Jesus came to suffer crucifixion as a sacrifice to cleanse men of the taint of the sin of disobedience which Adam had committed and which one who inherited its taint and went on sinning further had no power to wipe off. The Indian tapasya derives from the root tapa which literally means "heat" and figuratively stands for a directed intensity of consciousness or a fiery concentration of energy. And Yogic aspirants of a certain type go in for severe bodily discomfort in order to prove the power of mind over matter, a masterful independence of the body by the soul. But normally tapasya does not

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call for aberrations like keeping one arm lifted for years or lying on a bed of nails.

Philosophically, the term should go back to what Sri Aurobindo has added to the old formula sat-chit-ananda -existence, consciousness, bliss - describing the ultimate reality which is a threefold oneness. This formula may connote the Absolute as self-enclosed with no necessary bearing on the "relativities" of phenomenal experience. There need be no creative suggestion in it, so that phenomenal experience may even be conceived as having no basis in the ultimate reality and so may be considered "illusory". Sri Aurobindo's addition to the ancient formula is the word tapas. He speaks not simply of chit but of chit-tapas, "consciousness-force", suggesting "activity" and therefore "creativity" as inherent in "consciousness". Thus the creation of worlds by the Divine out of Himself is a natural act and automatically confers reality - however phenomenal and secondary - on them. The Supreme is both Brahman and Ishwara, God no less than the Absolute.

And through this vision Sri Aurobindo goes even beyond the usual theistic concept. The God inherent in the Absolute, exercising his consciousness-force, implies a shaping power which organises a set of ideal forms, a multiplicity of interrelated causes of our world but also a perfect original into whose image this world can be called upon to turn in the long evolutionary run. So the possibility of an all-round transformation is indicated by the very nature of ultimate things. This shaping power Sri Aurobindo designates as vijna-na or supermind or truth-consciousness, a fourth term accompanying his new triple formula.

You speak of boring me with your backache. I am afraid I have bored you with a complex Absolute at the back of an aching universe. So I shall cut short my cackle about the transcendent and the cosmic. But I'll be inwardly busy with them and link them with my beloved friend's well-being -especially at the Samadhi. You have been more than repaying my heart's turn towards you by your most touching and

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and undreamable sentence: "After the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's gracious names full of their Grace, I like to add your amiable 'Amal'." I understand why you bring in my name. You feel the divine help coming at the same time directly from your Gurus and indirectly through Amal's intense daily petition on your behalf. But I am sure you say my name some distance away from those two mighty mantric appellations. To the latter's enfolding greatness your heart must be moving vertically - to the former's loving littleness it must be getting linked horizontally.

(12.7.1991) .

You have written: "Would you resolve one problem of mine? There is this apparent contradiction between Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's words. Sri Aurobindo says, 'Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is bound to do everything for you at your demand... do even the surrender for you' while the Mother says, '...you have nothing to do, you have only to allow the Lord to do everything. And He does everything... It is so wonderful.' "

There is no contradiction here, not even an "apparent" one. You have focused on the first part of the Mother's statement and not let the second part shed light on the first and have its effect. Allowing the Lord to do everything is an act expected from you: it is you who have to allow Him -activity and not passivity is demanded of you at the start. Later too, the activity has to go on in order to make you passively lie in His wonder-working hands. This amounts to Sri Aurobindo's reminder of "the false notion that the divine Power will... do even the surrender for you". What the Mother asks is a total whole-hearted putting of ourselves at the Lord's feet and receiving His grace and guidance rather than following all the time the way of strenuous personal effort. But "the sunlit path" indicative of the inmost soul's emergence and self-consecration is not reached at a bound and some labour of a daily gesture of love is required.

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Your other question is about the significance, in spiritual terms, of a sadhak's birthday. You ask: "Would it so happen that the decisive and path-breaking advance on the date, as suggested by the Mother, will take place inevitably or does it also depend on one's aspiration and opening at that moment of the year?" The Mother has spoken of a creative rhythm repeating itself on one's birthdays making one specially receptive and plastic on each such occasion and she has wished us to take advantage of this cyclic grace. Evidently one has to put oneself in the right frame of mind and be open to receive the gift waiting for one. I would like to add what I think the best way to avail oneself of the occasion's boon. It is to regard every day as our birthday and aspire for God's bounty, His gift to us of His own self, His leaning with all His love towards His child. Then the special rush of sweetness and light on the anniversary of our birth will be most easily received. Even if we are not able to recognise the special rush, we should not worry provided we have quietly prepared for it throughout the year. If there has been the preparation it is bound to take effect sooner or later. "Readiness is all."

(12.7.1991)

I am indeed surprised to know from you the way I entered your life. It is highly significant that my entry should be connected with Sri Aurobindo's book on the Gita and with your vision of him. You say that you read the book in the morning when you were in despair and in the evening you sat in an easy-chair under a tree of yellow flowers and suddenly our Master became visible, with the words: "We are with you. You are our Amal Kiran." Your letter follows up this piece of information with: "I had never heard this name before or read any book of yours. I asked what Amal Kiran meant. Then the vision and voice stopped. Afterwards I got a list of books from SABDA and there was one book in a Gujarati translation: Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran.

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Struck by that name I put an order for the book. In it there were talks also by Nirodbaran. When I read yours I felt 'Amal Kiran was my brother in a past birth.' I wondered what he would be in the present. This was at the end of 1983 or the beginning of 1984. Afterwards in 1986, by the grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, we got in touch with each other by means of letters and you accepted me as your little sister and student."

The words you heard - "We are with you. You are our Amal Kiran" - are a bit of a puzzle. They can only be understood in a super-mystical sense. I interpret them thus: "The soul we have named 'Amal Kiran', meaning 'The Clear Ray', will be so mingled with your life that just as we consider and feel him to be ours, you will take him to be your own and thus get identified with him and we shall take you as our child as if you were one with him. Soon you will realise this truth: we have already foreseen it. In showing you the shape of things to come, we are hinting to you our intimacy with your soul - an intimacy you will recognise when Amal Kiran appears in your life and you will know that having him as our child could be as though you were the same. The meaning of his name - the ideal to which he has been intended to rise in order best to unite with us, the ideal of combining a pervading clarity and a suffusing radiancy whereby there can be not only far-sight and in-sight but also a steady warmth and a quiet glow in the being with an intuition of the love and light of the Divine Presence everywhere - the many-aspected meaning of his name could be for you as it is for him a pointer and a guide to the goal, at once time-transcending and time-transforming, which we have attempted to make time-transparent through the labour and laughter of our 'Integral Yoga'."

You are right in^- seeing me as "absorbed" in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and as telling you to draw help at all times from them. I am absorbed not only to the exclusion of common mundane attractions, though I do not look down my nose at their play in the lives of people in general. I am

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absorbed also In the sense that I exclude even other spiritual influences from the world's past and present. Not that I fail to recognise their historical relevance or the gifts they bring today. I never do hot-gospelling on behalf of my Masters. When the opportunity arises for me to speak up I do so as fully and devotedly as I can and, if necessary, make comparisons with other paths of spiritual vision and practice. The comparisons are made not out of missionary zeal and with a one-track mind. I have sincerely studied what the great religions have to offer at their highest.

Judaism's fervent energetic self-dedication to its grandiose all-demanding God, Zoroastrianism's call for a purity of prayer like a fire rising up to an overarching Truth-supporting Divinity and for a smiling service to one's fellow Truth-lovers in need, Christianity's ardour for a World-Saviour sent by a Deity of justice and mercy to a sinful mankind through a miraculous virgin birth and insisting on works of charity and on converting by all means possible the whole of mankind to faith in that one and only and exclusive Son of God, Mohamedanism's urge of forceful obedience to an all-commanding Master of the world who sharply distinguishes between the faithful and the unbeliever, Vaishnav-ism's sweep of passionate devotion towards a Lord of Love variously and endlessly at play in the cosmic movement, Tantricism's surge towards a World-Mother fighting earth's evils and towards a raising of all desires in her direction, Taoism's sense of a simple universal basis of being which can always rightly uphold and lead one along paths of peace. Buddhism's grand escape into an infinite silence from the mind's "labyrinthine ways" and the wandering urgencies of the little heart, Vedanta's plunge into a boundless Self of selves ever free and serene in its eternity behind the march of the ages - all these turns of the searching human soul I have studied with sympathy. But I found them all insufficient and some of them narrow in attitude when I stood in the presence of Sri Aurobindo and his gracious co-worker whom his disciples hailed as the Divine Mother incarnate.

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Such intimate knowledge of the world-process, such illumined understanding of human nature, such evocation of the inmost soul to suffuse the commonest activity, such invocation of a supreme Light and Love from a transcendent Reality to awaken that Reality's own hidden counterpart in ignorant mind and stumbling life-energy and imperfect material existence, such depth and dynamism of spirituality and occult science as I discovered to be quietly put in action by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother from their poise in what they designated as "Supermind" I had never come across anywhere. No wonder I am "absorbed" in these two personalities who struck me as having brought forth some most ancient secret which the Rishis of the prehistoric Rigveda seemed to have caught glimmers of and which took account of a most modern insight like the vision of an evolutionary earth and which considered as its natural milieu the complex field of progressive life today looking for a fulfilment of terrestrial values rather than a withdrawal from them.

Only two figures from the long train of past sages, saints, yogis, prophets, avatars are in my view- most affined to the Aurobindonian Era of the Integral Yoga. One is Sri Krishna of the magic flute capturing the whole world's heart as well as Sri Krishna of the wide-visioned Gita in the war-chariot at Kurukshetra - Sri Krishna who revealed himself to Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Jail and later secretly commanded him to leave British-ruled Calcutta first for French-ruled Chandernagore and then for Pondicherry, the capital of French India. The other figure is Sri Ramakrishna of our own time with his manifold sadhana having a tremendous central motive-force in what Sri Aurobindo has called the psychic being, the soul in the inmost heart, and stressed as the greatest mover in his own Yoga - Sri Ramakrishna who after his death appeared to Sri Aurobindo on three occasions in connection with Yogic workings and whose chief mouthpiece Swami Vivekananda paid a visionary visit, day after day for a fortnight, to Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Jail pointing beyond the mental consciousness towards the

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"overhead" planes whose culmination is the earth-fulfilling Supermind realised and rendered operative for the first time by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Apropos of the Aurobindonian Supermind it is quite interesting to me that you in your simple-hearted admiration of me should have written: "My dear brother's thoughts are like those of great sages - like Plato's thinkings." How did Plato of all "sages" swim into your ken? From my boyhood I have had a strong affinity with ancient Greece. Even in my school-days 1 delved with intense joy into the Socratic dialogues of Plato - the shorter ones: Crito, Phaedo, Apologia and Symposium. In the B.A. of Bombay University 1 had the pleasure of taking Philosophy Honours with Plato's Republic for special study. When I came to the Ashram, the Mother once told me that in a past life I had been an ancient Athenian. Later Sri Aurobindo, in reference to his general "impressions" about my past Lives, mentioned the time of the European Renaissance and the period in England called the Restoration. He took care to say these were only impressions, not intuitions. But he affirmed that there was not the slightest doubt about my having lived in ancient Athens. Somehow I never was curious as to who exactly I had been in that wonderful centre of the intellect's search for truth and beauty and goodness, the theme of Pindar's celebrated lines:

O shining white and famed in song and violet-wreathed,

Fortress of Hellas, glorious Athens, city of God!

Whoever I may have been, I feel it in my bones that I had very much to do with the Platonic circle around Socrates. I have heard from Nolini that Sri Aurobindo was Socrates. It should, therefore, be no surprise that I would imaginatively be so much at home in that circle. What is of special relevance in relation to your likening my thoughts to Plato's thinkings is that the foundation of Plato's metaphysics which was laid, according to him, by Socrates is an intuition that links up with Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision of what we may term First and Last Things.

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Sri Aurobindo's First Things in relation to the cosmos are the Supermind's perfect originals of the mind-vitality-body complex which has evolved as the human unit in the course of time. Mis Last Things are to be here amongst us: a mind which possesses truth instead of questing for it, a life-force which is a master-builder charged with inexhaustible vigour rather than a dreaming desire which strains after its goals and trips up again and again on the way, a physical organism completely harmonious, shapely, secure in place of one seeking health and beauty and longevity but with a flesh which is, as Shakespeare's Hamlet saw, heir to a thousand ills and doomed finally to degenerate and die. In manifestation the Last Things can be as the First because "evolution" is only the gradual outbreak of a Supermind buried in utter "involution" at an opposite pole to Supermind in full flower in a luminous transcendence. A divine pressure mysteriously from above and a divine push secretly from below are the history of our world. The Socratic Plato gbmpsed a realm of divine models or "archimages" beyond this world and perceived at the base of the cosmos an undifferentiated flux of being which is almost like non-being. Upon this flux a creative Power which he named the Demiurge (the Divine Workman) imposes reflections of the ideal forms that are above and he turns the lower chaos into an orderly universe. But as the forms themselves are never present below in their pristine power either by descent or by a hidden "involution" in the chaotic flux, there can be no future of perfection for travailing earth - only splendid yet evanescent spurts of God's light. Like ancient Athens.

However, the intuition of a perfect world above throwing a shining shadow of itself below is a triumph of philosophical thought which Plato alone has achieved in some anticipation of Sri Aurobindo's vision.

Am I taxing your mind too much? Forgive me for being carried away by my enthusiasm at your breathing the name of Plato. Indeed the very word "enthusiasm" has a Platonic air and should be appropriate in this context. I remember Sri

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Aurobindo writing: "What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentauty... That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of which Plato has spoken." Literally the term means: "entry by a God."

The poetic enthousiasmos blows often through Plato's prose. He was an artist in language and not only a fashioner of philosophy. There is the saying: "If Zeus were to speak in the language of mortals, it would be in the Greek of Plato." How particular he was for the right order of vocables and the sovereign rhythm of their combination may be judged from the fact that he wrote seven versions of the first sentence of his Republic before he struck the note that satisfied him. I am also a stickler after the correct expository or revelatory form in my writings.

(23.7.1991)

The quotations you have given me from Shankara under the general caption "Dangerous Wealth"¹ are not devoid of sense, but properly considered they are not against money as such but against the "crazy pursuit of wealth, earning it, hoarding it or spending it" and against the "keenness of ego-glorification" and "the greed of misers". They also have the ideal of sannyasa (renunciation) in mind and, after saying that "one cannot hope to achieve liberation through wealth", assert: "The truly great souls... take recourse to solitude far from the madding crowd after renouncing their unwanted wealth". For those who do not or cannot follow the ideal of sannyasa Shankara says: "When one is without wealth, one is able to lead a carefree and peaceful life: one, rid of (unnecessary) wealth, is most respected in all company. He need not fear robbers, the wicked or the rulers (revenue-collecting agents). He can lead a happy Hfe under any circumstances, whereas the wealthy are ever agitated and are

1. The Indian Express, Madras, May 19, 1991.

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constantly afraid of their own children and, therefore, suffer from chronic anxieties." Surely, these words are not a plea for poverty or non-possession of money? The poor may not fear robbers, the wicked or the rulers but they have other anxieties: for example, how to get sufficient food for themselves and their families or have sufficient and comfortable space for living? Here is a life not at all happy because of lack of money. What Shankara opposes is "the mad pursuit of wealth" and he rightly warns: "Surprisingly, even virtuous persons get addicted to the pursuit of wealth and prosperity, thereby losing their power of discrimination of what is good and bad."

As I have remarked, Shankara's ideas are not without sense and they certainly do not advocate poverty for those who have no call to sannyasa. An adequate amount of money is implied to be a good thing. Of course, even here it is implied that one should not be attached to whatever one has. I find the expression "inner harmony" in one of the quotations. It is a good starting-point for considering the attitude of our Gurus - Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - to the problem of money in general and of wealth in particular. .

Their stress primarily is on the inner condition. There has to be peace and poise in the being and this peace and poise must cover all items of one's being and one's life. That means no lopsidedness, no contradiction between one part and another; in short, harmony has to prevail. Inner harmony naturally involves a balanced outlook. In the case of money-matters there would be no stress on extremes but at the same time the inner balance would see even the point of extremes and, if necessary, accept them. In other words, a wide equanimity which keeps a calm equal attitude to everything and on the basis of it appreciates with a free mind and heart the plus and minus of all occasions.

As regards money-making in general, Sri Aurobindo has said that it is not wrong to do business honestly and, by gaining reasonable profit, to reach a fairly flourishing state. Referring to himself, he says that he could well conceive of

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himself as receiving an Mesh, a divine command, to do business and if such an adesh had come he would have gone in for business; business as such has nothing contradictory to the Divine's purpose in the world. There is nothing intrinsically unspirituai in being in a flourishing condition or even becoming wealthy, provided honesty is not sacrificed and miserbness not developed.

Refusing to believe, as Shankara did, that in the ultimate vision the world is an illusion or a delusion, neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother accepts "the refusal of the ascetic" to grant material life a final goal, just as they do not accept "the denial of the materialist" to accord a reality to a "soul" or "spirit" exceeding material life and serving as its very basis and as the reason of its existence. Since money is an important force at work in the field of the spirit's manifestation and of the soul's evolutionary expression, our Gurus do not turn their faces away from it or look down their noses at it. They put an emphasis on the right means of making money as well as on the right perception in using it. To those who take fully to the Integral Yoga, their advice is to dedicate to its cause the money earned. But here also there are no cut-and-dried rules. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother judge each set of circumstances according to their insight into its truth and they make and break rules in the light of this insight. They have allowed and even approved various types of financial relationships between themselves and their followers, but they have always insisted on an inner self-consecration and the correct working out of whatever relationship has been established - a working out in which the remembrance of them is never absent and in which one always feels that they are looking at¹ us. The money is essentially theirs: we are only its trustees.

As a broad guide-line for their disciples there cannot be a better quotation than the following from Sri Aurobindo: "The ideal sadhaka in this kind is one who if required to Uve poorly can so live and no sense of want will affect him or interfere with the full inner play of the divine consciousness,

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and if he is required to live richly, can so live and never for a moment fall into desire or attachment to his wealth or to the things that he uses or servitude to self-indulgence or a weak bondage to the habits that the possession of riches creates."

On my own, keeping in view the background of all that has been said so far, 1 may sum up with an epigram: "There is nothing fundamentally wrong in possessing wealth, but it is a fall from grace if one is possessed by wealth."

(19.5.1991)

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