Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

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Whether I reply soon or after some delay you are always present to me and happy thoughts fly towards you. Especially at the Samadhi there is a close communication, for there more than anywhere else I have a sense of us meeting within that eternal source of love and unity - the Mother's creative and transformative and all-harmonising heart. Always to live with a sense of being born from that fountain of felicity is the very meaning of life for us.

You have asked me how to meditate or concentrate. I know of no particular method and these terms never occupy my mind. I am aware only - as I have been saying from a long time back- of a warmth and a glow in my heart, and the warmth is the Mother's presence and the glow is Sri Aurobindo's. 1 try to make my hie a submergence in them and an emergence from them. The submergence may be called my eternity and the emergence my time. The former gives a touch of what the Neo-Platonic mystic Plotinus described as "the flight of the alone to the Alone." The latter brings the feeling of what the Upanishads figure forth as the one Fire that has become many flames. We may speak of the submergence as a hint of the Transcendent, the emergence as a glimpse of the Universal. And the real beauty of the Yogic life lit up by the grace of our uplifting Master and our enfolding Mother is that the high hint and the wide glimpse are not alternatives but concomitants. In literary language I may be said to be reminded of the poet Vaughan's line -

Rapt above earth by power of one fair face -

together with the dramatist Shakespeare's phrase:

O brave new world

That has such wondrous creatures in it!

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Perhaps you will express surprise at this exclamation, for the actual world is rather a huge medley. What I mean is that my inner turn towards the Mother's omnipresence brings about an attitude of both equanimity and benevolence and the ability to see a secret good in all things. There is also the conviction that if I appeal at all times to the omnipresent Mother and, remembering her, offer to her all the circumstances of life - my own actions as well as those of other people - everything that happens will somehow be turned by a mysterious divine alchemy to the good of my soul. Mark the word "soul". The Mother has said that when she sends her blessings they are meant for the soul. Not that no material benefits can come, but we cannot count on them. What we can be sure of is that through anything taking place the Mother's blessings will manage the soul's benefit, the soul's increase in light, its growing more and more a true child of the Mother.

From the stream of words thus far in this letter, please do not be swept away to the idea that Amal Kiran is sitting on top of the world spiritually. Keep in view my expressions: "hint" and "glimpse". There is also the word: "touch". I am indeed far from the spiritual magnitude and glory that we term "God-realisation". Nobody should want to fall at my feet - "feet of clay", to be sure! All I can say is that Sri Aurobindo, when he gave me my Ashram name, meaning "The Clear Ray", created for me the possibility of some soul-light by which the ever-moving jumble we call life might be somewhat clarified and irradiated to show itself to me now and again as - to quote Vaughan once more -

A quickness which my God hath kissed.

The kiss which is always occultly there is particularly palpable because of the fact that "my God" has been no faraway grandeur but an Avatar, a Supreme Being who has accepted to be flesh and blood and to take a share in the very jumble through which we humans pass. He has been

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gracious enough to look into my little depth and make it a tiny part of himself. The truth of the matter would be not that I have realised Sri Aurobindo but that Sri Aurobindo has realised me.

Not getting any letter from me for quite a while, you have ruefully written: "In this way days, especially 21 February, 29 March, 4 April have gone, big occasions for us. How long should I wait?" Surely, these great days must have brought you each its particular grace. What is 21 February? Do you remember that sloka in the Shwetashwatar Upanishad (III.8), one of the grandest utterances in the world's spiritual literature: "vedahametarn purusam mahdntam adityavarnam tamasah parastat" - "I have seen this great sun-coloured Being beyond the darkness." February 21, like August 15, marks the emanation of this Being from across the darkness into our world so that something of the sun-colour may come into our dull heads and our dim hearts. Next to these dates the most important is March 29 which brought together the two supernal emanations. The Mother's diary next day recorded her recognition of the Saviour Grace that had hailed from the Highest. And her experience in the preceding afternoon was a total permanent silence of her mind, the foundational state for the descent and settlement of all the infinities of the "overhead" light and force and bliss to be manifested in world-work. When asked about his experience of the meeting, Sri Aurobindo made an amazing declaration. In effect it ran: "I never knew what true surrender could be until Mirra surrendered herself to me - totally, down to every cell of her body." Here was revealed to him in fullness what he later made the central motive-power for us of his Integral Yoga of Supramental Transformation - the utter self-giving possible to the inmost soul - the psychic being - the foundational state without which a divinised earth-life cannot be built up. A date basic to the existence of a centre of radiation for the Aurobindonian Supermind is April 4. At 4 p.m. on that fourth day of the fourth month of the year, Sri Aurobindo set foot in Pondicherry in answer to an inner

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command of Sri Krishna, an adesa heard during his earlier Krishna-chosen exile in Chandernagore. From that moment the future Ashram was waiting to take birth.

You write: "I give you a free hand to decide and advise me. Believe me, I want Her smile, never the fulfilment of my ego. So if any change on my part is required, please let me know without any hesitation so that the best and happiest results may be ours." Reading this as well as some other parts of your letter I don't think you need any guidance from me. Your soul is awake and your inner movements are right. Only one thing you must guard against. The postcard I sent you said: "Don't be despondent." I know that your life is difficult and the handicaps you suffer from are very unusual. But I am not preaching from a position of normality, I am greatly disadvantaged by the condition of my legs, and movement is both difficult and dangerous. Sometimes the body feels extremely strained and I just want to stop doing anything. But then I turn to "that being no bigger than the thumb of a man" which the Upanishads speak of as "a fire without smoke" kindled perpetually in - to quote the same scripture again - "the cavern of the heart". At once the shadow vanishes and I remember those lines of Sri Aurobindo's which I have often quoted to friends from the poem called "Musa Spiritus" meaning "The Muse of the Spirit":

All make tranquil, all make free.

Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God

As He comes from His timeless infinity

To build in their rapture His burning abode.

Trying to attune my ear to those footsteps I forget my own halting movement and even in the midst of it I feel tranquillity and freedom and my walk is as if a Maestro were executing perfectly some difficult passage in Wagner's music.

Certain things which we have to do pall on us, but that is

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because we have not inwardly offered them to the Mother. If some work we have to do is not enjoyed, we may be sure that it has not been consecrated to her. The moment the work is done as though for her sake, it becomes a path towards her -and what can be more refreshing than getting closer to her glorious Presence?

Possibly you will protest: "There are things which are so lowly, chores so common, even so soiled that it seems disgraceful to offer them to her. Is it not impertinent to associate them with the thought of her?" Such a notion is a great mistake. We cannot divide our life into matters fit for the Divine and matters unfit. To do so is to hide certain portions of our life from her transfiguring touch. How then can we follow Sri Aurobindo's motto: "All life is Yoga"? This motto has a general philosophical insight - the vision of a spiritual goal implicit in the evolution from matter to vital force and from vital force to mind, mind with its vague straining for perfection. In our immediate practical context, all life proves to be Yoga when whatever we do is made an occasion to invoke the Divine and lay it at His holy feet. To the Divine's love for us there is nothing great or small. The whole of us is wanted. This love is infinite and cannot be satisfied unless every finite bit of our lives is consciously dedicated to it.

(16.4.1991)

From where I sit at the Samadhi 1 get a view, through the "Service Tree'"s branches, of a patch of sky. Between 4.15 and 4.45 p.m., there is an intensity of colour which brings to my mind a phrase which resulted on my correcting a friend's poem:

The shining blue of the immortal light.

Into the depth of this colour I raise the image of whoever I am invoking the Mother for. Especially on the part where the

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lumbago has its grip on you - the small of the back - my imagination lets the sapphire luminosity play and I feel that lustre penetrating the whole aching area. I have the keen sense that the Mother's heavenly healing power is called forth by my prayer through this patch of a sustained splendour falling upon me as if - in the words of a poem of my own —

Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears

The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence.

As I know that you on your side are also a long inward cry to the Mother, I have the conviction that the communion 1 try to establish with her cannot just hang in mid-air but must go home to you and reinforce your own profound contact. I may add that it is not only at the Samadhi that the welfare of my friend is my concern. Time and again a movement of good will, with the Mother's bright eyes looking on, takes place. But, of course, at the Samadhi everything comes to a soul-keen focus.

I am afraid all that I have said apropos of that half-hour's intense blue will be regarded by the pragmatic modem mind as a riot of fancy. But the truly poetic consciousness, no less than the mystical, knows our world to be the meeting-point of various hidden planes of being, and through certain configurations of earthly elements they peer out at us and by means of our response start their strange activiti

(26.2.1991)

To answer your questions, we must first get them into proper perspective. You say that now that the Mother is not in her

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physical body the Darshan Days - 21 February, 24 April, 15 August, 24 November - which, according to you, were reserved by her to shower special grace, do not have the same old obligatory and indispensable character. You add: "Now, rather all round the year and throughout each day we should keep ourselves constantly open and endeavour to advance on Her way with the help of Her more subtle but still powerful forces."

The Darshan Days marked certain significant occasions. The occasions still remain significant.I f, as you believe, the Mother's grace operates all throughout the year in spite of the departure of her physical presence, why should it not be thought to operate on those Darshan occasions in a special way as it used to do when her body was with us?

I share your faith that whatever the Mother does is always for the good of her children. Perhaps the more accurate way of putting the matter is that whatever happens is turned by her to our good. I say this because in the world, originally posited by the Divine, of a myriad mixed influences and agencies, many events have to be considered as imposed on the Divine, but the Divine always meets them with a spiritual strategy which invariably looks to the inner good of us all so that everything is made to work for our souls' closer and ever more close approach to the Eternal Light and Delight. Seen thus, the termination of both the Mother's life and Sri Aurobindo's is aimed at the advancement of our souls.

How exactly this "advancement" is to be understood is not an easy question to answer. Since the ultimate goal is integral transformation, including the divinisation of the body, we may assume that the end of their lives ultimately served that objective. But, on the basis of Sri Aurobindo's statements that the Guru's physical presence is needed to carry on for the disciple the crucial process of the body's transformation, I hold that at present this process is postponed. Nolini was of the same view. But, of course, short of the physical divinisation there is a vast range of spiritual development open to us and paradoxically renderd all the

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more open by the decision Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took to leave their bodies, for something momentous in our path is cleared by what we may call their "sacrifice". But how much advantage we take of it depends on ourselves to a fair extent. We may be induced to think that their physical absence leaves us rather in the lurch. Actually the Mother has clearly said that SriAurobindo, on leaving his body, is yet very close to us, for he has become not just a general influence: he has taken his station in the subtle-physical plane and will remain there until his work is completed. The Mother too is surely poised on the same plane to work along with the Master towards the fulfilment of their mission. Besides, we have had the Supermind partially manifested in the subtle-physical layer of the earth since 29 February 1956 and pressing gradually towards manifestation in the gross-physical layer. There is also what the Mother called the Superman-Consciousness which came at the end of 1965 to push the earth forward. So the Mother has left powerful allies for us in addition to the fact that she, together with Sri Aurobindo, is inwardly watchful over all our needs. If we keep the flame of our aspiration bright, we may legitimately remain hopeful of progress towards the Great Goal in spite of its complete attainment having been deferred until such time as the reappearance of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, if not of both, in the midst of aspiring mankind.

However, the fact still stands that the Mother has physically withdrawn herself and that because of her withdrawal the crowning phase of the Integral Yoga has come in for postponement. This fact should give pause to the idea often put forth that now, with the Mother's freedom from attending to her body, her power over the earth has increased: she can act now with unhampered universality. But surely all the power she can exercise now on the universal scale was always there? There was always the Universal Mother as well as the Transcendent Mother in addition to the Individual Mother as manifested in a physical body. The embodied individual Mother's working put no bar to the working of her

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other aspects. They were not impeded in any way. Her embodiment was something extra - it was a special focus of her for direct and immediate earth-work. By its means she could get in touch better than otherwise with the most exterior part of earth's life - and, conversely, this part could get in touch with her divinity as never before. Such outermost inter-contact - either by letter or word of mouth or thought-transference - is now gone. How can one help missing that down-to-earth relationship? Particularly those who, more than the rest, used to be in physical proximity to the Mother feel most the absence of it.

Take my own case. Not only was I, along with a small group, in the Mother's presence or ambience on the first floor of the main building from about 9 a.m. to nearly 12.30 p.m. Somehow it happened that I continued to be on this floor even after everybody else had left. I would sit on the mat in the passage between the Mother's bathroom and the staircase to the first floor, while she had her lunch with Pranab behind a screen at the end of the room from which she could go up to her retiring room on the second floor. I could hear all the talk going on between the two and sometimes their discussion of certain situations taught me the special tactful way she dealt with them, but, as I was not supposed to hear anything, it has all been put in my brain's archives of privacy. In any case this overhearing was not what mattered to me in my personal relationship with the Mother. What mattered was the fact that almost daily I would write a note to her, put it under a paper-weight on a table on the hither-side of the screen and go back to my seat on the mat of the passage. After her lunch, the Mother would pick up my note, take it to her bathroom from a door on the side which did not face the passage, be there for some time, then come out of the passage-door and meet me. She would either bring a written answer or convey her comment to me verbally. I could have further talk too. At the end of this meeting all alone, naturally most enjoyable for me, she would go for her short siesta and I hurry home where my wife had kept my

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lunch waiting. This would be at about 1.30 p.m.

May I relate a most memorable incident that took place during the hour from 12.30? Once I got a little sleepy sitting in the passage and went to sit in Sri Aurobindo's room. I lost track of time. Suddenly I felt that there was a figure outside the room, close to the farther doorway which is near the small end-room serving as Nirodbaran's office. I turned and found the Mother standing. Hastily I got up and rushed towards her and asked: "Mother, what are you doing here?" She coolly replied: "I came to look for you. Not finding you at your usual place I knew you would be in Sri Aurobindo's room." I felt overwhelmed by her solicitude and apologised for having left my seat. We both walked, talking, to the passage. She went for her rest and I to my flat.

Most probably we walked hand in hand, for I had always the urge to catch her hand. On several occasions when I was on my knees before her and had moved slightly aside to let Champaklal or someone else talk with her, I would gently hold the hand hanging by her side. What was most delightful to me was not just my clasp on her - it was the immediate response of her fingers, her spontaneous return of the sweet warm privacy ventured by me. Her talk would go on along with the silent exchange as if of equal feeling between the infinitesimal and the infinite.

When I remember all the face-to-face communion between the embodied Divine and my small self in various ways and at diverse times, with all the personal help received by me through such interchange, I cannot but be a little discontented with what goes on in the absence of the Mother's embodiment. Indeed a great deal of positive life goes on and, as she once told me, one could feel her subtle-physical body with great concreteness if one were sufficiently sensitive; yet one can't be so receptive as a rule. Naturally then for people like me the Mother's withdrawal is a heavy loss. And even for those who had less physical contact there is bound to be a difference - whether they acknowledge it or not - by the lack of her action as before from that physical

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focus of her consciousness and force and bliss and beauty.

Hence I do not agree that, as you put it, we are now under "her still more powerful force" or that "she sacrificed the most auspicious day of her bodily transformation with a view to making our integral transformation more feasible". No doubt, I always believe that whatever Sri Aurobindo or the Mother did was done for the benefit of their children on the path towards the Divine; but my understanding of the benefit from the Mother's acceptance of death tends to be as follows. Because of allowing unrestrictedly, for the first time in human history, the Superrnind's tremendous action in her body during old age, the Mother had reached a dire physical state from which there appeared to be no real turn for the better, though she would persist for whatever small amelioration could be obtained for a time. Furthermore, I surmise that she had come to know the answer to the question which she had put to the Lord, whether or not her body would go successfully to the end. The secret so far hidden from her was now known - namely, that the Will of the Supreme - her own transcendent self - was that her present body would not serve for the final supramentalisation. She could have gone on for some time more but the state in which she was would not have been to the benefit of the Ashram. Her physical condition about which Pranab spoke in a talk soon after her departure was a severe strain on her children and so she removed the irremediable burden at a moment she thought tit.

According to me, things being what they were, she considered it spiritually advantageous for the Ashram to lose her bodily presence. Besides, she had brought about the manifestation of the Supramental Light, Consciousness and Force in the earth's "atmosphere" as she put it, so that by an evolutionary process the Supermind was certain to create the Superman in the course of the ages. Once, referring to this manifestation, she even said her work was essentially finished. Against the background of February 29,1956 the postponement of the physical transformation which she was

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endeavouring to pioneer in our own day for the sake of mankind would not matter in the long run. Is it not illogical to hold that such transformation has been hastened for us by her departure and that it is even likely in the life-time of some of us?

The Mother's grace has made the Ashram flourish even in her absence and it has become increasingly a centre for the earth's peoples to flock to and inwardly profit there from the Divine Presence she has subtly established, a Presence most effectively radiating from the Samadhi where her body and Sri Aurobindo's have been enshrined. But I cannot say that the intensity of the spiritual life has actually increased on the whole as a result of the Mother's demise. Mind my phrase "on the whole". For some to have been thrown back upon themselves by the absence of the Mother in the flesh must have served as an incentive to more consecrated effort. But it would be an exaggeration to affirm that by and large there has been a greater measure than before of such effort.

I shall leave the complex subject at this point - for you to get whatever new perspective you may derive from my personal vision of things.

(2.4.1991)

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