Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

21

Your inquiry about the darshans, in response to my article in the November Mother India, 1990, is such that I feel I have succeeded in putting my very soul into this piece of writing. That is always my aim in writing letters. Even if the subject is intellectual, it should be tackled not with the mere mind but always by the Dweller in the Depths who lives in the light of the Divine Presence at all times. Shouldn't something like this be expected of anyone who has had the supreme luck to have touched the feet of the Master who was a dispeller of all darkness and the feet of the Mother whose smile could heal every wound?

Memorable was the whole series of darshans but perhaps the most memorable was the last on November 24,1950. And here I may speak of a reversal of the roles of the Master's look and the Mother's smile. Now it was the Mother whose look struck me. For even when I was at the door leading to the long passage at whose end was the darshan room, 1 saw her send a keen glance at me and the next moment she bent her head towards Sri Aurobindo and said something to him. Later I learned from her that she had said: "Amal is coming." When I reached the darshan room and stood with folded hands before Sri Aurobindo he started to smile. Never before, during the numerous occasions I had knelt for his blessing or devotedly faced him from a little distance, had he expressed his ever-present grace so pointedly. And I was told by my wife who was with me that he had kept smiling at me even when I had turned to go away.

After December 5 of the same year, the day of his departure from his body, I realised what this unique visible and sustained sign, at once grand and sweet, of his inner intimacy was meant to be. Over years this intimacy had been shown through wonderful letters continued even in the time - the last six years of his Life - when, except with Dilip Kumar Roy, all correspondence had stopped. During those years I

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was away from the Ashram but Sri Aurobindo overlooked the whole distance from Pondicherry to Bombay and sent me some of the most personally warm as well as some of the longest letters (twice covering more than 20 typed sheets). Now I understood that the prolonged smile set an explicit seal on this intimacy by way of a direct personal farewell.

Of course, I am not the only one to receive a farewell-sign. Some others too received it - similarly without understanding it at the moment. It proved clearly that Sri Aurobindo had already resolved upon the parting that he undertook 11 days after the darshan of November 24.

I have said "farewell", but I should rather say "Au revoir" in the essential sense. For, though that prolonged smile was the only unusual gesture towards little me of his endless grace on the physical plane, I have had clear indications of his caring to stoop from his superb Himalayan height to show the same intimacy in various ways from the subtle world closest to the earth, where, according to the Mother and also some dream-glimpses by her disciples, he has taken his stand - until, as the Mother has declared, his work of earth-transformation will be accomplished.

He - and now with him the Mother - will always be close to us. We are likely to forget this assured fact. But time and again come indications of it. And if through my writings I could produce the effect you speak of - "While reading this whole article my eyes were full of tears not out of sorrow but out of love for them and I began to love them more and more as my true father and mother who are always ready to help us, protect us and bless us" - surely I have not failed to impart something of the glorious truth about our Gurus that they are the soul of our souls, the inseparable source of our days and nights, no matter how difficult the days and how dense the nights. In one mode or another, directly or indirectly, my letters to my friends are meant to convey the eternal nearness of the supreme Transcendence that trod our dust and left guiding footprints for us to put our own steps

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into their moulds as if that Transcendence were one with us in our inmost selves. All we need to do is to tell them: "Be with us and never leave us." They are even more anxious to be our parents than we can be to figure as their children.

Dear friend, the warm leap of your heart towards them through my words is the greatest compliment I could receive for publishing "Life - Poetry - Yoga".

(23.12.1990)

As you want me to help you, you must know how exactly I have been on the move. You wonder why my "prayer" for your success in the venture you had in mind did not get answered. Maybe it failed because of my own shortcomings which are legion. But you must remember that the main thrust of whatever prayer I have is to put you in the Mother's hands as intensely as I can and the particular object you may have in view is carried along as a sincere recommendation but not pushed upon those hands. The main thrust tends to ensure that through whatever happens - outwardly favourable or not - the Divine may bear you closer to your soul's fulfilment. If there is a result unfavourable in appearance, you must still have the faith that, when the Divine has been deeply invoked, the heavenly hands will always be stretched forth to you even across the apparent contretemps and you have to reach out to clasp them and be drawn wherever they want to take you. This is the secret by which a transmutation can be made of the most drossy circumstance and by which the most winding ways can still lead you - in the Wordsworthian phrase - to "God who is our home".

This does not mean that we should easily accept the obstacles in our path. Having set our aim we have to combat them, but the combat itself is to be inwardly dedicated to the Supreme. If it proves vain, we should not despair - much less hold that our prayer for achievement was poor and so God has turned it down. God may have refused to grant it for our own good which we have not yet comprehended - or

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else the passage has been blocked by the powers of Ignorance that still have a role to play in a universe the Supreme for a reason of His own has decreed to evolve from a starting-point the very opposite - the Rigveda's "darkness wrapped within darkness" - of the divine plenitude. But never forget that once we have truly put our fate in His charge He will pierce through to us no matter what the obstacle and make that very obstacle a short cut for us to the grand goal: an ever greater nearness to His life-perfecting Presence. On our part we have to call out to Him: "Make me realise that You are hidden behind this baffling misfortune, reveal to me your boon and your blessing at the end of this rough road, flash on me the soul's good that you can bring about through everything if I but strive to feel with all my heart that its beatings cannot but resound to Your secretly approaching footsteps."

I don't think you really need me to bring to your attention the truth I have expounded at some length. Apart from your bewilderment at one desired project coming to nothing, your letter shows an attitude born of the soul's spontaneously profound wisdom. I would not be able to state better the keen devotion to the Mother's guiding light and the enthusiastic confidence in its being all-in-all for you. 1 note also the wide charity of your heart, the fervent good-will towards every creature. But your estimate of me seems too high. True, I have accepted you as a dear friend and I shall do my best to help you in your aspiration to go side by side with me spiritually, but you and not only I must pray that I may have the right illumination from the Mother to advise you.

(2.2.1991)

I was indeed overjoyed to have appeared to you in far France at 5.30 a.m. with such a heart-suffusing effect. You had, as you say, "a tremendous cardiac shock" because my own cardiac organ must have roared and raged with love to fly to you and mingle its own impassioned glow with the dawn-break of August 28.

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Evidently it was on a surge of the vital being - the strongest and the most vehement part of our instruments of expression on the earth-scene - that my soul suddenly came to you. It could not have been the mental being on a visit, for then the soul would have projected itself more calmly, more ethereally. Nor could it have been the subtle-physical's France-ward sweep, for then some of the marked characteristics of the gross-physical would have lingered. I would have at least slightly limped and there would have been a soupcon of a small occasional impediment in speech.

It was quite fitting that the vital being was the vehicle of my visit. For it is through this component of the soul's many-aspected manifestation that the soul's emotion gets most effectively conveyed. Transposed to spiritual values its movement has been made most memorable to me by some words of the Mother. She once told me that the surrender of the vital being to the Divine is the most glorious possible: it has an absoluteness of expressive force, a throwing of oneself at the Divine's feet with a thundering completeness, as it were, which no other part of us can equal. A more personal reference by the Mother to the vital being occurred when I wondered to her what had held me on to her through so many distracting vicissitudes of my career and despite such a multitude of frailties in me. She said: "Your vital being." I was quite taken by surprise. I said: "I thought it was my mind which kept in me some Godward balance." My vital being had always struck me as a part full of waywardness and easily tempted away from the straight path of sadhana. That it had such a secret strength as to keep me turned in the divine direction in the midst of a thousand distractions was indeed a revelation to me.

When I looked into myself and tried to feel the shape and structure, so to speak, of this vital being of mine I realised some characteristics. There was a certain rashness from the very beginning. I seemed to be accident-prone, but J had the tendency to laugh in the face of danger and ill-luck. The two virtues I most admired were Courage and Generosity. I was

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never a dynamic nature, I preferred to be at rest and did not court enterprise and constructive activity. Special stimulus was needed for the best possibilities to come forth. That was Sri Aurobindo's reading: he recognised in me a capacity for heroism but mostly when extreme circumstances served as a goad. What was more typical was the power of endurance and a resilience in the wake of physical illness or psychological misfortune. There was also a lightness of heart, When Nirodbaran asked Sri Aurobindo how it was that he felt mostly in the dumps while his friend Amal was always laughing, the Master pointed to a difference in temperament. This meant, I suppose, that the same adverse circumstances could draw a response of brooding depression on the one side and on the other a gesture of brushing away the burden with a smile, as if to say: "Oh, it's just a passing whiff of foul weather!" Both the attitudes came by nature rather than by thought-out practice. And it was the vital being that reacted in two different ways.

What the Mother communicated by those words which baffled one who was wont to take himself as predominantly a mental person was the fact that, once having found in the depths of me the sense of the Divine in Sri Aurobindo and her, the vital being refused to go under when its own pull towards outer things and its own daring to take risks landed it in mazy conditions. I may recall here my appeal to the Mother never to slacken her inner grip on me no matter how much I may loosen mine on her. The conviction that she would get me out of the worst predicaments was the vital being's - something instinctive and not reasoned out. The same instinct prevailed when I let myself go into whatever attracted me, however unsafe it might be. I must have overdone my confidence in her, or else she would not have warned me once: "It is true, as you say, that we have saved you from various troubbng or unsafe situations, but you are tending to exploit our protection. Don't do that."

The Mother's stress on my vital being has made me happy when I view it in terms of symbolism. You know that

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the Rigvedic Rishis figured the vital being in man as a horse and you know too that I have been a passionate lover of horses and that in spite of my lame left leg I have ridden them exultantly, relishing all dangers like "a giant's wine" before I joined Sri Aurobindo's Ashram at the age of 23. Even after entering the peace of the Ashram my love of those galloping glories continued inwardly. One rare day I caught sight of a huge horse passing with its rider under my first-floor, window. I rushed down to the street and kept walking behind it until it grew a speck in the distance. The memory of this four-footed apocalypse haunted me for weeks. I even thought how marvellous it would be if I could have this horse living with me in my room! I believe that in a past birth I must have been the Roman emperor Caligula. He was a monster of cruelty but he had one transcendent redeeming feature. He had a horse which he adored. It was given the most luxurious apartment in the royal palace. Every day it was taken to the senate and privileged to have the decisive vote. All resolutions were accepted or rejected according as this paragon of supposed wisdom shook its head one way or another. Surely you will admit a Caligulan madness in me when I tell you what I thought on hearing the Mother once hold out the hope to me of having my lame leg cured some day by her supramental power. I was full of soulful gratitude, but the first thing I thought was: "How wonderful it will be to have, without a care in the world, a big beautiful white horse between my thighs!"

Quite an earth-bound vision - but doesn't it hark back to the Vedic white stallion, Dadhikravan - symbol of "the purified life-energy", as Sri Aurobindo has taught us -marching ever towards the dawn, the first flush of the Divine Realisation, according to Sri Aurobindo's insight into India's most ancient scripture?

Some semblance of this Dawn appears to have called Sri Aurobindo's "Amal Kiran" ("The Clear Ray") to rush subtly to his dear friend's room far away at 5.30 a.m. to share in the birth of daylight.

(10.9.1991)

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Your sincere poignant letter has deeply moved me. I can see that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are so shrined in your heart that nothing can ever remove them. I venture the paradox that even if you were let loose in a festive paradise teeming with enchanting houris and you took your fill of them, you would still be an ardent disciple of Sri Aurobindo, a fervent devotee of the Mother. How then can your fairly sparing conjugal life with a peaceful-minded, sweet-tempered and spiritually helpful wife plunge you into "utter gloom and depression" for "the next few days" after each sexual act? You are not living in the Pondicherry Ashram where abstention from the common turns of human nature is expected and where the very atmosphere is conducive to it. Living as you do, in the role of a "householder", the mental self-flogging and self-condemnation in such a violent way are out of place. Neither the Master nor the Mother would approve the fits of despair and depression which overwhelm you. A fall into them strikes me as worse than the periodic fall into what you feverishly consider devilish temptation.

These morbid reactions belong to the same level of the lower vital self as the moods of passion that trouble you every ten or fifteen days. I may go to the extent of saying that they are manifestations of the same force that sexually engulfs you - they are part of a manic-depressive syndrome and repare in a subtle way the future upsurge of lust. It seems to me that you take them as if they were penalties you have to pay for your supposed sins. I would advise you to avoid them altogether. Be perfectly calm and inwardly offer to our Gurus what you have just done. You may object: "How can I offer to the Divine what I regard as an act of shame?" Surely, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not say: "Bring to us only your"good points." They say: "Put before us all your weaknesses, all your faults and failures, so that we may deal with them. By offering them to us, you put them out of yourself. If your soul belongs to us, then the whole of you - 'warts and all' - must be laid in our hands, a

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continuously willing gift, for us to remould it in our own manner and in our own time.''

A wide equanimity is what you badly need to cultivate. Let the moments of sex-indulgence be a mere interlude between a serene stand before and a peaceful poise after. As a result of this practice, you will find that during this interlude itself a background-consciousness will develop which will be mysteriously you, untouched in the midst of all the excitement in your surface being and leading gradually to less and less frequency of the cry for "sex". Of course, the equanimity to be cultivated is accompanied by a remembrance of the Mother and by a gesture of offering one's being and one's doing. The slowly developing background-consciousness too will learn distantly to remember and offer.

Please give up your present fretting. You are a very normal householder doing Yoga. All the adverse effects on your health - "APD, colitis, symptoms of duodenal ulcer" and the general run-down feeling - are due to your hypersensitive fretting and not to your wrongly supposed demoniac lusting. I can assure you that fruitful Yoga can be done even by a householder outside the Ashram. I have lived as a married man outside the Ashram for ten years in Bombay: 1944-1954. So what 1 am telling you is from direct personal experience. Sincerity and a quietly burning aspiration and devotion will carry you through, step by step," towards your goal of brahmacharya.

(19.9.91)

Referring to Savitri as "a wide ocean" and your feeling that you "can touch a drop only", you quote a sloka from the Gita: "Even a little of this dharma delivers from the great fear." The last two words ring a bell in my mind. This mahato bhayat - this great fear." - what does it evoke in the spiritual vision? Somewhere in the Upanishads there is a phrase with some such suggestion as: "Where there is one, there is no fear: fear comes where there are two." The Isha Upanishad

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asks about the spiritual seeker in whom the One Self has become all creatures: "How shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, who sees everywhere oneness?" Evidently, the delusion, the grief come from the common human state obsessed by cosmic multiplicity and lacking in the realisation of the unitarian Atman, the single Brahman who, in the Isha's words, "has gone abroad" and manifested the diverse devious phenomena in which we are submerged. The "great fear" of your quotation strikes me as being the unillumined condition of our life, what the post-Upanishadic Vedanta dubs samsara, maya, with their perils and pitfalls, in which the soul is ever liable to wander for ages away from its true goal. My idea gets confirmed when I read in the Taittiriya (II. 7) that when a man has found the invisible, bodiless, indefinable and unhoused Eternal to be his refulgent firm foundation, then "he has passed beyond the reach of fear". If "fear" characterises or represents the phenomenal existence, the world of meandering multiplicity, surely Atman or Brahman, the ultimate Self of selves, the single supreme Reality would be the very opposite. And actually we have the Brihadaranyaka (IV. 4.25) saying: "Brahman is indeed fearless. He who knows it as such certainly becomes the fearless Brahman." Again, the same Upanishad (TV.2.4) figures Yajnavalkya exclaiming: "You have obtained That which is free from fear, O Janaka!" It is curious that, unlike Shankara and his ilk, the Upanishads rarely allude to moksha or mukti, "freedom, liberation". I can find only one reference anticipating in a general manner the sense of mukti. The Brihadaranyaka (IV.2.8) has the expression: "being freed." Obviously the Upanishads are more psychological in a poetic way than philosophical in an abstract manner in rendering their spirituality. In this respect they connect up with the Rigveda rather than the Brahmasutras. In fact, I recall from the former some phrases aptly bearing on the theme I am discussing. The gods are said to bring about, by their fostering, the "fearless Light", abhayam jyotih, even in this world of fear and danger. Furthermore, we hear about Swar,

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the divine "solar" plane, in terms of the usual cow-bull symbolism: "The wide and fear-free pastures of the shining cows" (12th Hymn to Agni, verse 6).

Perhaps the compound adjective standing for the Rigvedic attitude points to at least a strong strain in the original Indian spirituality which persisted in the Upanishads in the midst of some tendencies towards the future sense of world-illusion and differed markedly from the later Shankarite complete intransigence towards earth-life as such but from what in it makes for fear - the fact that our existence does not rest on a sense of oneness and is always aware of a multitudinous otherness which is a cause of fear. A synonym of the "fear-free" mark of the state desired, aspired after, is the epithet "wide" in the Rigvedic phrase, since "wideness" is all-covering and leaves no room for confrontation with anything outside oneself.

(10.9.91)

I am glad you liked in my series "Life - Poetry - Yoga" of the October Mother India (pp. 236-37) the summaries I have essayed of the various religions of the world. You feel particularly apt my glimpse of the religion to which you belong and which was also mine until I joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and found there a widening and deepening and heightening of the central urge of Zoroastrianism as well as an exceeding of it as of all other religions not only by a direct spirituality but also by what struck me as a new vision in even the spiritual realm.

Yes, what you say about the Parsi community has much truth. Though it has in certain respects a happy-go-lucky superficiahty, it does have, as you observe, a general plasticity of mind and an instinctive drive towards whatever has a progressive prospect in it. But I wonder if our community has realised the most outstanding manifestation it has given of these qualities in their profoundest aspect. Even those

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who sing the praises of this microscopic yet distinguished group of less than a hundred thousand souls in a subcontinent teeming with hundreds of millions do not seem to have marked that manifestation. Let me focus it for you.

On 24 November 1926 Sri Aurobindo withdrew into privacy for a dynamic meditation towards a swifter descent of the Supermind upon earth and put the Mother forward to take charge of his disciples. Under her a regular Ashram in his name got organised. A lttle more than a year later - to be exact, on 16 December 1927 - a Parsi couple, husband and wife who had got married only a few months earlier arrived to dedicate themselves to the Integral Yoga which, of course, involved, among other things, giving up the married life. At this time the Ashram had only forty members and two of them were Parsis! Just contemplate what this means statistically. Out of the crores of non-Parsis no more than thirty-eight were permanent Aurobindonians. The two Parsis made a percentage hundreds of times higher in recognising at almost the very start of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as Avatars of a new age in human history with a project and a process for a total transformation of earthly life.

Don't you think these two people brought the greatest glory possible to their minute community and rendered it thereby for the future the most promising component of super-multitudinous India?

(2.10.1991)

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