Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

24

Thank you for so prompt a letter of genuine sympathy after hearing from S about my fracture. But why do you say I have had repeatedly to cope with such accidents? In my life of 87 years and of at least 870 tosses, this is the first time I have broken a bone - though I seem to have counterbalanced my long immunity by breaking the biggest bone in the body, the thigh-bone! You may be interested to realise that the leg is the same - the right one - and the bone too identical - the femur - as Sri Aurobindo's in 1938. So in one sense I may be considered to have walked very faithfully in my Guru's footsteps. Unfortunately I have done it with a great initial disadvantage: having had infantile paralysis - fully in the left leg and partially in the right.

I have heard that when Sri Aurobindo had his fracture and his body was thus made somewhat abnormal he remarked: "Here is one more problem to solve." Evidently he had the subject of physical Supramentalisation in mind. So we may say that up to the end of 1938 there was no question of changing the range of his Integral Yoga, And the hope the Mother had earlier expressed of curing me by the Super-mind's power was still a golden prospect. Even in 1950 Sri Aurobindo did not radically change his range; only, he for a purpose of his own gave up his body's fulfilment and left it to the Mother to fulfil the ultimate aim. Now that she too has abandoned it for her own reasons, the whole problem on which you have dwelt has arisen: "Will it be realised by any of her children in the near future?"

You have dwelt on it with two focal points in your letter to Nirod as well as in the letter to me. One is the question of postponement as declared by me. The other is whether anybody staying outside the Ashram and not in the intimate physical presence of our Gurus could be thought of as enjoying the privilege of getting physically supramentalised. In this connection you refer to a passage in Nirod's corres-

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pondence with Sri Aurobindo and you state your own case in which, in spite of your proposing to offer all your possessions to the Mother and settle in the Ashram, the Mother told you to carry on your yoga and your work outside the Ashram. Your query is whether by being told this you could be said to have been excluded from the possibility of becoming a supramental Swiss.

I have written out a reply in place of Nirod. He has read it and signed it as showing his approval. I am enclosing it with this letter of my own.

Let me end by again appreciating your concern for me and by hinting that paradoxically this terrible-seeming accident at so advanced a stage of senescence (though luckily not of senility) has brought an unexpected inner boon.

Reply in place of Nirod

As regards physical transformation, it is not only Amal who has written that it is postponed: Nolini also said the same thing.

Several doers of the Integral Yoga have wonderful experiences seeming to relate to the body. But these experiences are really in the subtle-physical and, in spite of them, the gross-physical remains unchanged. Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother achieved physical supramentalisation though it can be inferred from certain statements of theirs that if their yoga had been an isolated one they would have finished it long ago.

After the supramental manifestation on February 29, 1956 in the earth's subtle-physical layer, the Supermind has become an active factor in the earth's evolutionary process. Slowly it will press into the gross-physical layer in the course of time. What our present yoga seems to be is a participation in a gradual process extending over a long span of time which would be more than our present lives. In other words what Amal has somewhere called the "revolutionary" phase of our yoga which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were

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carrying on with a view to achieving everything in one life is no more there. It has given place to an evolutionary phase.

I believe that without the close physical presence of our Gurus the final transformation, involving a lot of difficulty and danger, cannot be done. But this does not mean that those whom the Mother herself commanded to work and do yoga outside the Ashram were considered unfit for it. Even in the Ashram the time had not come for the final stage. So it did not crucially matter, in relation to the ultimate transformation, whether one was in the Ashram or away from it -particularly when one was outside by the Mother's wish. If the time had come for the final phase these people would certainly have been summoned to be here. To see the situation in terms of exclusion is unwarranted. There is really no inconsistency in what Sri Aurobindo wrote and the actual state of affairs as regards being in and out of the Asliram.

The Mother's wanting Ananta to be here while advising you to work outside is easy to understand. The only chance for him to progress was in the Ashram.

You have mentioned politics. The Mother was against politics as practised today, but surely she could not exclude from the Supermind's sphere any part of essential human activity. The same would hold in the matter of money-making.

To speak of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother failing is shortsighted. We can only say that they chose not to continue their work as at one time envisaged. We must remember that line in Savitri:

His failure is not failure whom God leads.

Also to be remembered are Sri Aurobindo's words to Dilip. They called on him not to have crude superficial ideas about the Avatar's work. Sri Aurobindo asked why the Avatar should not choose what looked like failure if such failure suited better his long-term strategy.

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Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been to us both separate and one. Sri Aurobindo put the Mother forward in his spiritual work, saying that this arrangement was made not only for convenience's sake but because it was the right arrangement for an aim like earth-transformation, involving as it did the detailed play of the Shakti, the dynamic divinity.

In the matter of spiritual relationship, he declared that to accept the Mother as one's Guru was automatically to accept him. On the other hand, according to him, "if one is open to Sri Aurobindo and not to the Mother it means that one is not really open to Sri Aurobindo". This implied that one could seemingly open oneself to him without opening oneself to the Mother, but such a disparity would violate the full, integral doing of his Yoga. The Mother is the all-compassing figure in it.

After he had left his body, his oneness with the Mother and his approach to us through her became even more a dynamic truth than before. But one may not have realised it at once. I can tell you how it was driven home to me.

When, on her 80th birthday the Mother gave a message in which she referred to her body as "un corps transitoire" in French and translated the phrase into English as "a transitory body". I got a shock. It suggested to me that she might give up her body some time and, what was worse, its constitution was such that it could not be a lasting one - one which would gradually undergo complete transformation and become a spiritual physical instrument with an intrinsic permanence, a natural immortality, answering to the non-transitory character of her divine consciousness.

I raised a vehement objection to the word "transitory". I proposed that the right epithet would be one which would translate in English as""transitional". This epithet would mean that the Mother's present bodily state was part of a changing process - a phase among various phases of physical alteration leading ultimately to "le corps glorieux", the human body glorified into being divine.

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When the Mother did not seem impressed by my protest and went even to the extent of saying: "All bodies are transitory", I impulsively blurted out: "If Sri Aurobindo were here he would never let you use the word 'transitory'." After a moment's silence absorbing this most extraordinary outburst such as no one could ever have been expected to make, the Mother remarked in a steady yet cutting tone: "You are being insolent. Do you know where Sri Aurobindo is?"

"Suddenly I felt my eyes opening wide and seeing the truth. Surely Sri Aurobindo was with her all the time; surely he was one with her and whatever she said came from him!

I answered: "Oh, I am sorry, Mother. I know that he is centred in you and when you say or do anything, it is he who is working. Please forgive me." She smiled compassionately and blessed the fool in front of her. What "transitory" had truly meant remained unexplained at that time. Later, perhaps seeing my real concern for her physical continuance, she handed me a note which explained her adjective: "All body in course of transformation is by this very fact transitory. Transformation means being changed into something else."

In connection with this incident I remember an occasion when the Mother casually observed to a few of us present: "People are saying that now something of Sri Aurobindo's facial expression is coming into me. My smile looks somewhat like his."

My sense of Sri Aurobindo's immanence in the Mother came acutely to the fore on the occasion when the question arose of seating people during a certain special meditation. A number of disciples had come to be allowed to sit upstairs meditating with the Mother during darshan days when the larger group sat downstairs around the Samadhi in the Ashram courtyard. Nolini had made a list and I was given, along with some others, the supposed privilege of sitting in Sri Aurobindo's room. The Mother herself as usual would be in the Meditation Hall, the outermost of the three parallel rooms upstairs - the room at whose inmost extremity there

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was a small room where Sri Aurobindo and she used to sit and give darshan.

The moment I was told that my seat was in Sri Aurobindo's room I could not help protesting: "No, Mother, I don't want to sit there. I want to sit where you will be sitting." She gave me a knowing look, smiled faintly and told Nolini: "Change Amal's seat as he wishes." To me Sri Aurobindo's room was indeed very sacred - permeated as it was by the atmosphere of his stay there over 23 years. Like everybody I knew how intense this atmosphere was and yet the conviction was borne in on me that Sri Aurobindo must be most directly present where the Mother was. Now that he had left his own body his presence would be most powerful, most dynamically immediate in her body.

Of course, one cannot deny that Sri Aurobindo could be present at many places at once. His would be a multifarious omnipresence, and such would be a fact not only in terms of wide-spread infinite consciousness but also in terms of a concentrated focal point - a subtle body setting forward Sri Aurobindo just as he had been set forward in the years of his physical embodiment.

I recollect a talk with the Mother on this aspect of Sri Aurobindo's existence after he had passed away. An account had come of how on one occasion Dilip Kumar Roy, after he had left the Ashram, had been reading a long poetic composition of his. Indira, his chief disciple, who had many occult powers which had developed during her short stay in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram with Dilip, said that she saw Sri Aurobindo himself listening to the recital. I reported to the Mother what Indira had said. The Mother remarked: "It is true that Sri Aurobindo had made an emanation of himself to accompany Dilip. And it is evident that he has not withdrawn this emanation. Indira with her 'second sighf perceived its presence. But it does not mean that Sri Aurobindo in his central reality in a subtle form was there. That reality is here in the Ashram, with me."

I may add that for many, after both the Mother and Sri

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Aurobindo have withdrawn from the visible physical scene, their central reality, in a subtle yet recognisable form corresponding broadly to their previous physical manifestation, is in the Ashram and not anywhere else. That is the basic importance of this place where the two Avatars had physically lived.)To the sincere soul anywhere, both of them are concretely its companions, but that is by way of emanation. The emanation is indeed no other than they, being essentially a gift of the Divine's Grace, yet there is always the centre of a circle distinguished from the radii carrying the effluence of this centre all around.

A famous definition of God's presence is: "A circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere." This is true of God in His eternal infinity, but when God has taken a physical form, when He has assumed Avatarhood and made Himself like us for our sake and entered into the chequered manifoldness of our human existence, the very fact of this earthly focussing of that eternal infinity not only conveys in general an extra power of Godhead to the earth; it also sets up a particular source of this power where the earthly focussing established its bodily self-expression.

We cannot ever forget how that self-expression glowed beatifically among us while it sought to spread its light and love and laughter to every corner of our long-labouring, grief-pursued yet immensity-haunted and mortality-challenging speck of a globe careering, secretly all-important among millions of galaxies, through endless time and space.

(8.12.1991)

You have asked, "What is it to be an Aurobindonian?"

To me an "Aurobindonian" is essentially one who constantly carries on the practice of the presence of Sri Aurobindo and aspires to catch as much as possible the traits which we discern as typical of him. What are, in brief, the "Aurobindonian" traits?

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A poised serenity of tranquil strength,

A wide unshaken look on time's unrest, .

an immense patience allied to an untiring pursuit of perfection, a deep faith in an omnipotent guidance leading us through all, an up-gaze towards a plenary Truth by which every side of life can be transformed, a universal light in the out-looking eyes, a compassionate insight into human frailties, a joyous imaginative response to Nature, both living and inanimate, a lordly sense of the supreme Self of selves, a simple heart ever adoring the Divine Mother and with profound humility facing always an Infinite still to be realised.

(22.11.1991)

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