Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

20

I have been hearing from certain quarters time and again that our Yogic work at present is to divinise our physical cells. No doubt, the divinisation of the body, so that it becomes immune to disease, decrepitude and even death, is the crown of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga of the Supramental Descent and Transformation. To keep this climax in view and to create an eagerness and readiness in the body for it, so that the physical cells may open to the transformative Supermind, is nothing in itself to be scorned as mere fantasy and megalomania. But can their divinisation ever be achieved without first enlightening our narrow prejudice-ridden mind, our ambitious restive lust-gripped egoistic Ufe-force, our greedy self-regarding habit-driven ensemble of brain and nerve?

The true soul in the evolutionary mibeu - the psychic being, as Sri Aurobindo terms it - has to emerge and suffuse the rest of our nature with its sense of surrender to God, its sweet calm and its comprehensive compassion, its spontaneous insight into all problems, its constant offering of all work to the Divine. And at the back of this flowering of the deep heart should stand a wide tranquillity of consciousness, an ether of colossal clarity, an all-embracing warmth of wisdom, an ample reservoir of serene strength.

If we haven't got something in us of these states, how can we hope for a divinisation of our cells? We have radiantly to act on them, but how shall we do so except through some light caught from the smile of the inmost soul and from the blissful silence of the universal Spirit, both of them transmitting the glory and grace of the transcendent Supermind? Our chief concentration has to be - as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never tired of saying - on realising the Divine in our consciousness and on invoking His Will to work in us everywhere.

(9.2.1991)

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Some thoughts and experiences have lately been in some prominence with me and I feel like giving words to my outlook on them. I believe they will have a general bearing and not be solely applicable to my own little concerns.

When anxieties, resentments, frustrations - all leading to obsessive tensions of mind and nerves - are found to persist in spite of our attempt to impose some calm on ourselves, the most natural way to deal with them is to offer them from deep inward to whatever figuration we may have of the Divine. How do we do this? First, a movement outward to the Divine as standing in front of us - a sincere gathering of all the tensions and putting them as if into the hands of a Superhuman Presence. This Presence may be felt as at once a luminous being and a living fire.

In both aspects we are drawn out of ourselves - on the one hand into a beloved Beauty and Power which is a towering reminder to us of unknown summits and, on the other hand, into a golden rapture-rage, as it were, accepting all our dross and carrying it higher and higher without end in an act of purification. We grow aware that our offering, while it begins with an outward flow of mind and heart into some soothing Perfection, fills with the sense of an empyrean overhead from where this Perfection has descended into our midst. Then we feel directly the upward pull. The outward is no longer separate from the upward.

The experience now is not only of a Perfection that soothes: it is also of a Plenitude that simply swallows up our anxieties, resentments, frustrations and completely dissolves them. An entire release, an utter tranquillity, a total loss of the aching self, a freedom without the least drag of what we may poetically term sublunary life are the result. There are no problems any more and we await with a serene smile all that the future may "unfold - or, rather, all that will be worked out by this "voiceless white epiphany" (to use an Aurobindonian phrase) across earth's vicissitudes.

(26.7.1991)

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You have asked me for the best way to approach Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the great Darshan days. According to the Mother's own advice, we must do so with a quiet happiness. This creates a spontaneous receptivity. The state of being quiet makes for a sort of waiting void to fill up with the celestial charity, and the happiness is a sign of being the trustful grateful child of the Divine Light and Love. When we are in this condition, the Divine Light and Love can do what they want and not have to adapt themselves to the half-knowledge we have of our own nature's need.

(29.7.1991)

I'll write to you after a while apropos of your own communications. At the moment I am putting down a most recent experience of mine. I have spoken of its beginning to only one person so far. The whole of it is recorded here for the first time.

On August 3 I was on my way to the Samadhi in the afternoon. The car passed under the Mother's old balcony -the one on the first floor where she used to appear every morning before she permanently took to her second-floor room and would come to a high-up balcony only on special occasions. Looking at the old one I suddenly received a tremendous sense of life's emptiness. It was like a knock-out blow. The physical absence of the Mother whom 1 had daily seen on this balcony was driven home to me like a cosmic catastrophe. Life seemed utterly meaningless without her bodily presence. Never in all these years in the Ashram had such a feeling of desolation come over me. Everything grew worthless. All the literary work I had been doing lost its value totally, Sadhana itself gave the impression of a vacuous process, a plodding on across a desert with only mirages to console me. I said to myself: "Sri Aurobindo went away. Then the Mother left us. Why carry on the burden of a life on an earth where there is no longer that mighty peace and plenitude which was the visible form of Sri Aurobindo, that

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all-enveloping warmth and blessedness which the Mother's palpable figure brought us?"

When I reached the Ashram, I found that the easy passage across which I had daily gone to the Samadhi was under cementing and therefore blocked. So a detour had to be made: a number of hurdles lay in the path of my poor legs now, quite difficult to get over. Friends helped me negotiate them. I accepted the risks because I did not want to accept defeat and go back safely home. "Here is one more setback," I said to myself, "and it makes more pointed the difficulty of facing my life. But, of course, even without any new difficulty, what's the use of breathing in a vacant world?" 1 remembered a phrase in an old poem of mine which had won Sri Aurobindo's admiration:

Thwarted, alone,

We struggle through an atmosphere of stone.

The way back from the Samadhi was less of an obstacle. I came out by another gate. 1 reached home a little soothed after the hour and a half at the Samadhi. Still the void left by a world bare of the Mother no less than of Sri Aurobindo lingered on, deep inside me. Talking to a close friend who is eager to look after me and who had accompanied me, 1 realised that in a special sense the vanity and inanity of the earth must strike forcibly one who has experienced Nirvana. Nirvana would be a grand emptiness, a stupendous disappearance of limitations, an indescribable freedom from the common world, rendering that world barren of significance, a mere spacious shadow in spite of all its teeming contents. In order to know the universe to be a phantom without getting hurt and obsessed by its voidness, must I turn my being to that giant Zero that is yet All? This seemed a desperately splendid remedy. But why jump to such an extreme? And am I capable of it? Is there no other means of getting over the recoil from life? Doubfiess, an easy way out would be to answer with some analogue to the "bare

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bodkin" suggested by the famous situation that faced Hamlet;

To be or not to be - that is the question!

But I am not a violent nature. Besides, as the Mother has said, self-undoing does not - in a perspective of rebirth -solve any problem. Actually, my problem had no particular shape and was not caused by any sharp confrontation of life's hardships. Except for my infirm legs I had nothing to complain of, so far as my own personal day-to-day was concerned. So I went on through a couple of days as calmly as I could. The acute stage had subsided, but the general disappointment did not disappear: it just simmered.

It goes without saying that the first thing I had done when the blow had fallen was to offer to the Mother what I may call my vast world-wound - as 1 do everything that befalls me. At times the answer from her arrives more swiftly than 1 can imagine. At other times I have to wait quietly for the untying of whatever knot has formed. Now there was no response from her that I could discern. Nearly 48 hours had gone since the heart-felt call.

In a most unexpected manner the response came. And it dissolved the knot at one stroke. I was reading some matter given me to edit - part of the series telling how people came to the Ashram. Out of the new story three words stole into my being like soft yet all-sufficient and decisive music and I was wholly my old self again. They were about the Ashram. They simply said: "This divine place,"

Like a master-mantra they filled the entire infinity of my loss with the presence of the Mother. Their childlike note of direct truth evoked in my mind a superb sloka of the Mundaka Upanishad translated by Sri Aurobindo:

"The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal."

(4.8.1991)

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Your enlargement of my coloured photo was received with much interest. It is the biggest picture of me I have seen so far and I can mark in it some minute features even. Of course, a mirror would also show them but I rarely halt before a mirror except when something abnormal crops up on the face for special attention. Using an electric shaver I don't need to watch myself regularly every day. Now with your gift immobilising my appearance in a big way in front of me I can't help making a close study. What sort of person is here? Not a strikingly handsome fellow, to be sure - yet perhaps with some particularities plus peculiarities on which one can make significant observations - a general character-reading for your amusement and possibly advantage.

When I ask myself why at all I should bother to make any character-reading, I remember my first darshan of grand Sri Aurobindo, implying also his first darshan of minuscule me! This was on February 21, 1928. I may have recounted the occasion to you already, but here it is appropriate to bring it in. I was a novice in spiritual matters and looked at the Master of the Integral Yoga mainly with the outer sight. I examined his eyes, nose, moustache, mouth, beard and decided that here was a Guru worth accepting. The next day when I met the Mother I eagerly asked her if he had said anything about me. She replied: "Yes. Sri Aurobindo says that you have a good face." I was quite disappointed at having my aspiring soul completely ignored. But later I said to myself: "What else can I expect? I was examining his face and he was examining mine. Indeed tit for tat!" Now glancing back I realise that Sri Aurobindo's remark was the first sign to me of his compassion no less than his humour. He had not refused to give a bit of countenance to my spirituarfuture: he had-granted me some possibility to make good as a disciple of his in however remote a way to come. In any case, is it not a memorable thing for my raw 23-year-old physiognomy to be dubbed favourably in general by the greatest Seer of all time? So, no matter if it lacks striking

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handsomeness, it may not be deemed undeserving of a passing probe.

To begin with: I note that around the pupils of my eyes the not uncommon ring of dark brown fades away into a broad circle of blue. This unusual combination in the iris seems to give the face a twofold look, at once attentive and far-away, earth-tinged and sky-touched - apparently whatever of the poet I have in me and whatever of the Aurobindonian Yogi I strive to be: the visionary of mysterious distances who yet has to be precise in dealing with the many-shaped multi-mooded procession of terrestrial objects. By the way, I must not forget to mention that at the age of eighty-six and nine months my eyes, though bespectacled because of deficient sight, are yet unaccompanied by either "crow's feet" or "bags".

The nose is neither too short and self-involved, as it were, nor too long and inquisitive of others. It has a somewhat curved moderate intrusion into the outer world. Within a bit fleshy rather than elegant knob, the nostrils are a little on the large side, freely breathing the earth's air. Between the nose and the upper lip intervenes a more-than-ordinary space, appearng to suggest that the dip into, and interchange with, the earth's air do not easily affect the mouth's possible disclosure of thought and feeling: the thought and the feeling have a certain independence of traffic with external agencies. The mouth, like the eyes, has a twofold expression. It presents somewhat thin lips, slightly pulled in at the same time that they are faintly smiling, as if there were a self-control which is not so much a discipline as the sense of one's self placed consciously in the power of some blissful Love which can guard and guide. The chin has nothing special about it. It has no particular strength and normally might even betray a tendency to go easy and not be sufficiently assertive or individualistic.

At the other extreme of the face is the fairly high forehead which has become somewhat Shakespearian by a receding hair-line. However, I have escaped what Shakespeare des-

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cribes as his lot in his sonnets which were surely written at the latest in his 'forties since he died at fifty-two:

Against my love shall be as I am now.

With Time's injurious hand crushed and o'erwom;

When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow

With lines and wrinkles...

I see hardly any creases across my forehead. At my age I should be expected to speak like Confucius who, when asked how his brow could show such three deep furrows, answered: "The first reminds me of the gross defects with which my nature was marked from birth. The second recalls the track of great follies across my life. The third represents the stamp on my memory of the terrible ingratitude of friends." Not that I was born less defective in nature or haven't exceeded that master of mandarins in ghastly mistakes or never had cause to cry out like Shakespeare's Amiens'in As You Like It:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude...

But, having put my brow at the feet of Sri Aurobindo and the Divine Mother, all the lines cut by Karma, my own or those of others, have tended to get wiped off and the being has tried to move assiduously, as near as my frail nature allows, towards the state Sri Aurobindo describes:

I have heard His voice and borne His will

On my vast untroubled brow.

A leap from the sublime-seeming to the ludicrous-looking I have to make in remarking on what the picture discloses on one side of the forehead.,The single ear visible because the face is semi-front does not create any regret in me that I can't

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gaze at its duplicate. If any Mark Antony were to address me as he did the Roman populace and say, "Lend me your ears", I would gladly part with them and not charge the least interest on the loan as there is nothing interesting about them. I hope that what the Upanishads call "the Ear behind the ear", the hidden listener to the universe's subtle hints, the undertones and overtones of cosmic existence, has a prettier configuration.

Enough of comments on "the counterfeit presentment", as Hamlet would have said, of what modern slang would term my "mug". Let me turn to more congenial topics. Apropos of my train of thought following your mention of "Plato's writings" in connection with my letters to you, you refer to my intense liking for Plato and observe that your favourite is Socrates rather than Plato. May I point out that I spoke of Plato's Socratic dialogues? It is the Plato permeated by and suffused with Socrates that has been gloriously close to my mind and heart ever since my school-days. There is also the question: "Can we separate Socrates from the young Plato?" Do we know any substantial Socrates apart from those early dialogues? No doubt, there was Xenophon's report of him, but if we had only this report we would hardly have the wonderfully wise personality whose intellect ranges over all the heights and depths of reality, confronts the acutest problems of human conduct with a smiling keenness, hearkens to the voice of the mysterious daimon within him, a voice from the innermost heart coming as if from a godlike spirit concealed there and so mingling with the movements of the intelligence that the tetter's lines of clear-cut thought run in hidden harmony with the former's spontaneous divinations. Not only Socrates the master-dialectician but also Socrates the revealer of mysteries mounting from visible beauty to the ultimate ineffable Loveliness present to the high-uplifted contemplative consciousness and also the Socrates who built up before the Athenian judges the amazing "Apologia" for his right to die for truth and virtue -where except through the eye and ear of Plato does he come

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alive to us down the ages as the ideal philosopher and the archetypal moralist? We have to speak of the Platonic Socrates no less than of the Socratic Plato. Thus, in the final perspective, you and I may be seen as standing together and when you by way of praise compare my writings to Plato's you really mean the writings of Plato as the door through which Socrates in all his inspired unity and diversity walks out into our midst as he did into the market-place of Athens in the 5th century B.C.

Of course, the Socrates of my "Platonic" writings is Sri Aurobindo. It is he who moves in and out when I write letters to you and others. To quote from my poem "Soul of Song" the last Line:

Haloed with hush he enters, corona'd with calm he goes.

Luckily for the world, unlike Socrates he has communicated with it independently of whatever Plato may mediate his message. I say "luckily" not only because direct interaction is possible but also because nothing can transmit the magnificence and mercy of his light as does his own Word. What we can do is to pass through our disciple-selves some living sense of that light as it operates in one form or another of our human smaliness. A friend or stranger who happens to resemble us may find advantageously focused this or that aspect of the light which may most concern him. Through such an aspect he may get an easier approach to the solar centre of the omnipresent grace that is Sri Aurobindo. All may not be able to face that apocalypse at once. Therein lies the raison d'etre for little kindlings like us to help fellow-aspirants. But always our aim should be to direct all eyes towards the sovereign blaze of revelation and benediction which is - to use Rigvedic language - like a great golden Eye turned from the heavens upon our suffering and our striving. And this aim cannot be truly carried out unless we are more than mere thinkers setting forth to be interpreters: we have first to feel in as many moments as possible a turn

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towards the Master and the Mother in our little hearts as an exquisite ache that is sweeter than all the throbs of pleasure the earth can give.

(6.8.1991)

The inner life lately has been as usual a series of brights and vagues and fortunately no darks except one of an uncommon kind which had nothing to do with my own shortcomings but came like a gigantic thunder-cloud: a sudden overpowering realisation of the Mother's physical absence. I have already written of it to a friend and you'll come to know of it through an instalment of my "Life - Poetry - Yoga". Let me make you the first recipient of a written account of something really fine that happened yesterday - the 17th August -during my afternoon visit to the Samadhi,

Unlike other days, this day found me a Little listless. But at about 5.15, without any preparation a great quiet took possession of my body and a non-descript sound was heard coming from far away and surrounding the still body. Then the body's borders seemed to thin and become open to permeation by a vast Outside. I would call them "trans-fluent" on the analogy of "translucent", for now not light but a flow passed right through me - a flow which appeared to be an inwardly audible passage of the whole universe's movement through my form. The form did not lose its identity, but it was not barriered against the rest of the universe. It was essentially continuous with a huge Existence, a wide Presence of One World steadily advancing -rather an infinite Living Space advancing in Time with a steady faintly heard rhythm. What a sense of freedom and serenity!

Automatically all thinking stopped: no ideas, no images. The universal flow was felt most in the region of the chest, although it was perceived as if at a slight distance in the head as well as in the abdomen. I had to do nothing except sit indrawn to this enormous flux which bore my embodied being

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onward to an unknown but fully trusted future.

Along with the open feeling within to an unlimited uniform sound, there was a kind of effortless isolation from the immediate environment - save for a calmly sympathetic shadow that was the Samadhi. That is why I use the word "in-drawn". And yet this very environment was, without its knowing it, part of the universal flux. It is that lack of knowing, which my body was guarding itself against with an utter ease born of commingling with the tranquil majesty of the flowing Immense into which I had been partly taken up.

When I look back on that rapt quarter of an hour - 5.15 to 5.30 -1 am reminded of the tradition of a sound in which the cosmic consciousness exists: the mantra OM. What I sensed was inseparable from an eternal-seeming rhythm sustained on all sides. Perhaps I would best characterise it as an infinite honeyed hum. Does OM echo this hearing?

(18.8.1991)

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