Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

Personal Letters by Amal Kiran


26

 

 

 

You have sent me quite a tale "of woes crying out for panaceas:

 

"1) How to get rid of the wrench we feel when relations and friends, after spending some time, leave us?

2)How to get rid of useless thoughts and the nervousness that accompanies something we don't remember and we chide ourselves for forgetting it?

3)How to get rid of the remorse we feel when we forget to ask important questions to a friend Like Amal Kiran?

4)How to get back the equipoise we lose when someone near and dear dies and we feel we didn't do enough for him or her?

5)How to prevent ourselves from being shaken in the event of a friend committing suicide?

6)How to get over the terrible nervous instability in the being, followed by a fear of the unknown, which is felt round or above the navel?"

 

You remind me in general of St. Augustine who in a famous passage started with saying "Life miserable, life blind, life uncertain" and then listed various ills and ended with what he seemed to think the greatest of them: "Like a thief Death steals upon all these ills." But St. Augustine also wrote those profound words addressed to God, which I have loved to quote again and again and which point to the fundamental cause of all our discontents and sufferings and offer the sole basic remedy for them: "Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Apart from the common slashes of life he had one great inner trouble. In spite of having a keen philosophical mind which could distinguish the truths and virtues to be pursued, he was racked by an extreme sensuality. He wanted to control it yet found it most alluring. Hence his celebrated paradoxical prayer: "O Lord, give me chastity - but not yet!" When he succeeded in leaving his passionately loved mistress and fate


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freed him from his attachment to his dear son by her because of the boy's death and he took wholly to the spiritual life, his deep lament was: "Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty of ancient days who art ever new, too late have 1 loved Thee!" He was thirty-three at that time. I believe you and I were luckier than he. I came to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at the age of twenty-three. I am sure you came to them even earlier. So we found sooner than St. Augustine the master-key to the problem of human existence which had irked us despite our having been quite young - the master-key which Sri Krishna holds forth in the Gita: "You who have come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me." Yes, we were very lucky, but it is one thing for the inmost soul to have discovered the Secret of Secrets and another for the rest of our being to repeat the discovery. I had my tremendous ecstasies and still could not cope with the Yoga in all my parts. I plunged back into the chequered common life and went through diverse difficulties - but after 1 had prayed to the Mother at the time of parting: "Even if I tend to give you up, please never give me up." She said: "I am Like a fairy godmother. 1 can grant all wishes. If you want to be free from me, I can make you so. But if you want me to keep a hold on you, I shall do it always." Ultimately her promise was fulfilled and, thanks to her grace, all my parts have learned to seek the Light. I say "seek" and not "reach", for quite a lot in me falls short of the ideal, but every part feels at its centre the call of the Light and the long arduous way ahead of my infirm steps does not prevent the pilgrim's face from quietly smiling all the time.

 

Is this my answer to your six questions? Basically, yes. For, to let some response to the awakened soul take place in one's whole nature helps to cut the ground from under every difficulty, every malaise." But I shall try to deal briefly with each particular point you have raised.

 

If one has not attained an inner detachment which enables one to appreciate and enjoy the company of one's relations and friends without feeling deprived of them when


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they leave, one should develop a sense of them within oneself, a closeness warmly felt so that the outer separation never overwhelms one. Indeed, if one truly cherishes anybody, their presence is never lost and one keeps drawing sweetness from the thought of them. To put it the other way round, the thought of them immediately projects one into their company. And this is no mere fancy. There is a mind-space in which one can move freely even though our mind's e'nsheathment in a physical form prevents one from fully realising the fact. A further step is that, while holding relations and friends vividly within, there is a movement of offering them to the Divine. Such a movement ensures a sense of security for them and lessens the worry which one's affection for them brings about. Again, as the Divine is known to be everywhere and therefore always with one, one acquires the feeling that they are safely linked to one's heart in their subtle beings.

 

Getting rid of useless thoughts is a matter of practice. You can't just wish them away. I know of two methods against them. One is to cultivate a standing apart from them so that for lack of attention their stream dwindles or, even if they persist, you are separate from them. You can make the separation more distant by bringing in a preoccupying idea. Set before yourself the serene compassionate eyes of Sri Aurobindo, I remember two passages from my poems which are relevant here. Quite appropriate is the moving line:

 

O perfect one with the all-forgiving face!

Then there is the rapturous description:

All heaven's secrecy lit to one face

Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry -

A soul of upright splendour like the noon!

 

The "blinded cry" of the body does not refer directly to Sri Aurobindo's own physical self. It hits off the general human condition which feels a perfection somewhere to be attained


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but keeps fumbling for it unceasingly. In Sri Aurobindo it discovers the sight and the light - the hidden divine truth behind the evolving human is caught in its fullness and in a concentrated form in that tranquil countenance in which the entire broken history of mankind becomes a single shining whole of a knowledge penetrating all problems and a love whose purity, intensity and widensss can suffuse all sorrow and raise every striving spirit to its highest possibility. The inner evocation of Sri Aurobindo's face is the second method completing and transfiguring the first.

 

As for failing to remember something and becoming nervous about it, I often miss words or phrases in poetic passages that have stuck in my memory, but I don't get nervous about them. There is a touch of mild annoyance at times, but I have noticed that the best way is to do one of two things. Either I make a gesture of pushing the "blanks" backward as if into the subliminal depths and asking for a response from these recesses which are said never to forget anything - or else I offer the "blanks" to the Mother just as I do everything else, particularly whatever in ordinary circumstances would tend to hurt me. Before the emotive reaction might occur, the matter is removed from the personal plane and woven into the sadhana of "Remember and offer". Of course, the "blanks" are merely brief inconveniences and can be tackled with ease. The nervousness you speak of is absolutely out of place. And the calmer you are, the sooner will they be filled either by the subliminal that is our own natural background or by the suprabminal that is the Mother, the Power by whose help we hope to succeed all round in what Srinivasa Iyengar would term "beyonding ourselves". Within a short time the answer arrives. An extra aid would be to keep repeating the general context of the missing matter. This practice got -me through the difficulty of recalling the first adjective - "miserable" - in St. Augustine's jeremiad about "life". In less than half a minute I was out of what you would consider the "misery" of forgetting "miserable".


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Your third item is given by you a more serious look than it merits. It becomes really serious if, instead of Amal Kiran being involved, we have Sri Aurobindo in mind. I have often been gnawed by "remorse" for not asking him for clarifications of certain aspects of his philosophy or certain turns of expression in his poetry. One philosophical problem is: "What carries Karmic impressions from life to life?" I don't recall any direct answer in the Master's works. In the Mother's I have come across just one passage1 directly bearing on the problem. Here it is:

 

Q: Sri Aurobindo says that some time after death the vital and mental sheaths dissolve, leaving the soul free to retire to the psychic world before it takes up new sheaths. What happens about the Karma and about the impressions - Samskaras - on the old sheaths? Do they also dissolve without producing any result, good or had, which they should according to the theory of Karma? Also, what becomes of the vital and mental beings after the dissolution of the vital and mental sheaths?

 

A: The outer form only dissolves, unless that too is made conscious and is organised round the divine centre. But the true mental, the true vital and even the true subtle-physical persist: it is that which keeps all the impressions received in earthly life and builds the chain of Karma.

 

Now, wouldn't this answer by the Mother mean; "Our true beings - subtle-physical, vital, mental - remain the same for us from life to life down the ages. They, no less than our psychic being, have continuous survival. And the psychic being picks them up while acquiring new subtle-physical, vital and mental sheaths to accompany the physical body into which it is born."? When I turn to Sri Aurobindo I don't get quite the same picture. He2

 

1.Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 134.

2.Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 22, p. 434.


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analogous vein: 'The soul gathers the essential elements of its experiences in life and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution; when it returns to birth it takes up with its mental, vital, physical sheaths so much of its Karma as is useful to it in the new life for further experience" Here there is no pointer to where the Karma resided and to any compulsive chain of Karma: the soul picks and chooses to serve its own purpose. Will any intellectual of our Ashram shed light in terms of the Aurobindonian philosophy?

 

One of my literary difficulties are a number of lines in an early poem of Sri Aurobindo's. They occur in "Night by the Sea":

 

O her name that to repeat

Than the Dorian muse more sweet

Could the white hand more relume

Writing and refresh the bloom

Of lips that used such syllables then,

Dies unloved by later men. (Collected Poems, p. 17)

There is even a whole little piece, ''Miracles", whose central theme is still opaque to me:

Snow in June may break from Nature,

Ice through August last,

The random rose may increase stature

In December's blast;


But this at least can never be,

O thou mortal ecstasy.

That one should live, even in pain,

Visited by thy disdain. (Ibid., p. 48)

 

What is this "mortal ecstasy"? Some occasions in Savitri too need for me Sri Aurobindo's comment. But I came upon them after he had passed away. Whatever was available to me earlier I consulted him about in case of difficulty or uncertainty. Yet several matters elsewhere were missed.


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Take these lines from Aswapati's speech to the Divine Mother:


The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed;

Heavy and long are the years our labour counts

And still the seals are firm upon man's soul

And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.

O Truth defended in thy secret sun, '

Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens

On things withdrawn within her luminous depths,

O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,

Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride, *

Linger not long with thy transmuting hand

Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time,

As if Time dare not open its heart to God.


(Part One, p. 345)

 

Now in the lines -

O Truth defended in thy secret sun,

Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens -

 

who is indicated by "her"? The apostrophised "Truth" is of course the "Voice" - but whose voice is it? Two lines later we have

O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe...

 

So "her" can't refer to this "Mother" who is directly addressed. The only possibility seems to be in the line preceding the apostrophe to "Truth":

And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.

 

Surely the ancient Mother can't be the one who is directly spoken to as "O Wisdom-Splendour"? But how shall we conceive "her mighty musings in shut heavens" as having that ""Truth" as her "Voice"? And is this apostrophised


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"Truth" different from the "Wisdom-Splendour"? It can't, since Aswapati is throughout addressing the "Mother of the universe". "The ancient Mother" may be thought of as at the same time the Earth-Spirit and the Earth-Spirit's inmost and ultimate reality to whom a general allusion is made in the lines just before the beginning of our passage:

 

All heavenly light shall visit the earth's thoughts,

The might of heaven shall fortify earthly hearts;

Earth's deeds shall touch the superhuman's height,

Earth's seeing widen into the infinite.

Perhaps my suggestion is supported by lines in an early part of the poem:

Along a path of aeons serpentine

In the coiled blackness of her nescient course

The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.

A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,

A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,

A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.

(Part One, p. 50)

 

The final secret reality of this Earth-Goddess or Earth-Spirit may be the one whose "mighty musings" are in "shut heavens". But then what is the relationship of that reality with the invoked "Truth" and "Wisdom-Splendour" and "the Eternal's artist Bride" who is the "Mother of the universe"? Is the former the supreme unmanifest Shakti-essence whose divine revelation is the latter and whose cover down below in the evolving world is the Earth-Goddess, the Earth-Spirit?

 

Is any light- shed on my conjecture by the several later references to the ancient Mother in Savitri? -

 

Abandoning man's loud drama he had come

Led by the wisdom of an adverse Fate

To meet the ancient Mother in her groves.

 

(Part Two, p. 393)


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The ancient Mother faces all with joy,

Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill;

 

(Ibid., p. 444)

 

The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast

Pressing her close in her environing arms,

 

(Ibid., p. 551)

 

The ancient Mother offered to her child

Her simple world of kind familiar things.

 

(Ibid., p. 578)

 

I will bear with him the ancient Mother's load,

I will follow with him earth's path that leads to God.

 

(Ibid., p. 590)

 

It appears to me that the ancient Mother's identity with the "Earth-Goddess" is briefly flashed out in the lines of scornful Yama to Savitri:

 

What shall the ancient goddess give to thee

Who helps thy heart-beats? Only she prolongs

The nothing dreamed existence...

 

(Ibid., p. 586)

 

In spite of all this argument I feel I am basically swimming in conjectures. I wish I could have posed my question to Sri Aurobindo when he was still at the other end of a correspondence. Your frustrated feeling, however, is uncalled for. You can always write to me: you can even run down to Pondicherry. That's why you need not be woe-begone for having forgotten at any time to tap your old friend - tottering in his lower half but very far still from doddering in his upper.

 

Question No. 4 touches on a universal poignancy. We take life too much for granted and don't take all the opportunities possible to give love enough. At some place Sri Aurobindo has written to a disciple about this kind of sorrow added to the sheer sorrow for death. It is easy to lose one's


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equanimity In such a situation, but it is not by losing it that we can make amends. If the dead person has loved us he or she is not likely to be happy over our wretchedness. The only way to make amends is to give love to the departed person. Never think that the passage to the dead is blocked. As long as they are accessible to the living - and surely up to a certain time they are - the best course is to attend to the Mother's words in the set of question and answer I am quoting below:

 

Q:Sweet Mother, how should the news of death be received, especially when it is someone close to us?

A: Say to the Supreme Lord: "Let Thy will be done", and remain as peaceful as possible.

 

If the departed one is a person one loves, one should concentrate one's love on him in peace and calm, for that is what can most help the one who has departed.

 

(16 January 1970)

 

The subject of suicide which your fifth question raises is a complicated one. We look in a confused manner at the act of killing oneself. We think of it as being in the same category as murder - only it is taken to be murder of oneself instead of somebody else. No doubt, we pity the person who has committed such violence against himself, but we still consider it a crime. The common law persists in this view and therefore seeks to punish the one who has attempted suicide. Actually the punishment is for the failure to commit the so called crime. The idea is to frighten the criminal off from attempting to repeat the act. But surely one who is bent on ridding himself of his body cannot be frightened: he will only take care to be more efficient in the next experiment. But of course the initial failure may make him change his mind and see differently the tangle of things which drove him to the drastic method of extricating himself from it. The attitude of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is not the conventional one. The notion of criminality is far from it. Hence too the idea that here what is within the rights of an individual is


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trespassed. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother point out certain unfavourable psychological and evolutionary circumstances resulting from an abrupt exit due to desperation. Their calm, clear, compassionate analysis of the complex problem involved is before us in two letters written to Huta by the Mother dated 21.12.1960 and 16.3.1961 {White Roses in facsimile, pp. 122 and 130).

 

. My dear little child,

It is your full right to refuse to live in this world if you do not like it.

 

But to get out of it, is not so easy as you think. Death is not the solution, far from it. Death is a clumsy and mechanical return to the endless round of existences and what you have not achieved in one life, you have to do in the second, generally in much more difficult circumstances. The feelings that are weighing upon you now are surely the result of a previous failure and if, once more, you accept the defeat, next time it will surely be still worse.

 

There is only one way of getting free from life altogether, it is to go to Nirvana, and this can be obtained only by a very strict tapasya of complete detachment.

 

There is also another and more simple way of getting out of trouble, it is to take refuge in the Divine's love.

With my blessings.

 

*

 

... Death is not at all what you believe it to be. You expect from death some neutral quietness of an unconscious rest. But to obtain that rest you must prepare for it, When one dies, one leaves or loses only one's body and, at the same time, the possibilities of relation with and of action on the material world.

 

All that belongs to the vital plane does not disappear with the material substance, and all the desires, attachments, cravings, persist with the sense of frustration and disappointment, and all that keeps you restless and


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prevents you from getting the expected peace.

 

To enjoy a peaceful and eventless death you must prepare for it. And the only effective preparation is the abolition of desires, a steady detachment from the fruit of action.

 

So long as we have a body, we have to act, to do something, to work; but if we work simply because it has to be done, without seeking for the results of our action or wanting it to be like this or like that, little by little we get detached and prepare ourselves progressively for a truly restful death.

 

In fact, if you do not expect any satisfaction from physical life, you are no more tied to it and get above all sorrows.

 

I may add that the Mother, elsewhere in her writings, has discerned the play of a dramatic impulse in the self-destructive move, which may be contributing a tinge of self-satisfaction to it. I am also told that somewhere Sri Aurobindo says that when one after a long eventful life feels a rounding-off to it one may, in view of the uselessness of further prolonging it, opt for a voluntary departure.

 

Here there would be no association of despair. And this fact brings me to instances of suicide beyond the run-of-the-mill kind. There can go with self-destruction a truly high drama and not the self-satisfying dramatic impulse which the Mother has seen in the ordinary suicide. The high drama would be born from a blend of courage and duty. Thus, during World War II, the captain of the German pocket battleship "Bismarck", after his charge had been destroyed by the British Navy in the Atlantic and he had been taken captive, took advantage of a solitary spell in his room to spread the German flag on the floor, stand in the middle of it and fire a pistol into his head. The code of military honour demanded such an end and we cannot help admiring it. On a grand scale we have the historical (and far from hysterical) self-immolation of the Rajput women by fire to avoid falling


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into the hands of Muslim conquerors. Even a rare genuine case of sati, as in ancient times, has a halo about it, a soul-splendour whose outer aspect has been poetically visioned in those Lines in Butler's Hudibras:


Indian widows gone to bed,

In flaming curtains, with the dead.

 

Then there are the great scenes of Antony and Cleopatra, as Shakespeare has intuited them. Hating the idea of being captured by the victorious Octavius Caesar and heart-broken on hearing the report, which later turned out to be false, of Cleopatra's death, Antony runs upon his sword which he makes his attendant hold straight before him and hurts himself fatally, his life lasting only up to the time he is carried to Cleopatra's side. After his death, Cleopatra, scorning the prospect of being made prisoner by Octavius, applies an asp to her breast and addresses it:

 

Come, thou mortal wretch.

With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

Of life at once untie; poor venemous fool,

Be angry and despatch....

 

Sri Aurobindo, discussing "nobility" of poetic style with me, wrote: "Cleopatra's words are an example of what I mean: the disdainful compassion for the fury of the chosen instrument of self-destruction which vainly thinks it can truly hurt her, the call to death to act swiftly and yet the sense of being high above what death can do, which these few simple words convey has the true essence of nobility. 'Impatience' only! You have not caught the significance of the words 'poor venemous fool', the tone of the 'Be angry, and despatch', the sense and noble grandeur of the suicide scene with the high light it sheds on Cleopatra's character. For she was a remarkable woman, a great queen, a skilful ruler and politician, not merely the erotic intriguer people make of her." .

 

So much for remarks in a broad vein on the subject. You


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couldn't have bargained for them, but I just wanted to put before you my understanding of it. And 1 shall end with two personal opinions. One is a deduction from the Mother's first letter. The Mother seldom commits herself to absolute statements and I would like to cast a passing glance at the adverb "generally" when she says: "...what you have not achieved in one life, you have to do it in the second, generally in much more difficult circumstances." Evidently, the disciple who is said to be in a despairing and desperate condition because of "a previous failure" - that is, a past shirking of the problem by the same means of self-undoing as thought of now - the disciple cannot be conceived to be in much more difficult circumstances when the problem is confronted within the benevolent helpful presence of the incarnate Divine Mother. But, doubtless, if even now, "once more", the "defeat" is accepted as in the past, then "next time it will surely be still worse". Mark the "surely" in contrast to the earlier "generally". The actual presence of the Supreme in a physical form makes all the difference. If such an act of Grace is wasted, the consequences are bound to be severe.

 

My next personal opinion is on a matter of psychology. I cannot daub with a sweeping brush as "cowardly" anyone who commits suicide. Self-preservation is the strongest instinct in each of us. To go against it must call for a lot of courage. But 1 do grant that here is a desperate courage - a courage to which one is, as it were, driven, but the mood cannot in my eyes be painted as cowardly in any sense.

 

Your question is not connected with all these issues. It bears on how one is to face the event of a friend putting an end to his or her life. You speak of one's being "shaken" by it. Let me remind you of what I wrote to you as well as to some others about the death of a young and very dear relative by his own hand two years ago.

 

I have passed through many deaths, but nobody's caused me such difficulty as this in practising one of the major guide-lines of my sadhana:


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A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest.

 

When I got the news on the phone, there were no tears but deep within was a terrible wrench and I turned to the photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in front of me and there went out from my heart an appeal of such intensity as I had never felt in my life before in turning to them. All my being swept towards them with but one cry: "O take our laved one and your own child to yourselves!"

 

Trying to hold the heart-wrench within the mass of peace which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had packed into me and to keep the thought of the lost loved one moving towards the Divine on the constant flow of my feeling towards them which has been going on for years - in trying to do this from hour to hour an extreme withdrawnness and depth-exploration took place, I plunged into a dimension so profound that whatever was still enmeshed in the human, the all-too-human, was pulled out. The ancient Upanishad has said: "When the knot of the heart-strings is rent asunder, then even in this body the mortal enjoys immortality." The "immortality" spoken of is not just the soul's survival of death after death in the course of its many births; it is the never-born and never-dying state which is intrinsically vast and free, luminous and blissful. The way to it is barred by that knot of the heart-strings by which the Immense becomes the little and the Eternal grows bound to the tremors and tensions of life's run from instant to passing instant, the small fluctuations from one transience to another. I can hardly say yet that the Upanishadic Immortality is my glorious home, but a powerful draw in that direction occurred. In the past, in spite of the tranquil background in which the being had stood with the self-offered soul in front facing the personal Godhead, there had been vaguely, dumbly, a sense still of something missing, the lack of a finishing touch, haunting me and often a prayer had arisen: "Make me completely free!" The prolonged inward-going for days and days brought a quietly and effortlessly keen knife to


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the entanglements that had lingered in the diminishing heart-knot. It is as if in a fundamental manner the abrupt end of a cherished one's life had freed me from my old self with a certain finality. I was not rendered cold or self-centred. How can it be so when coldness and self-cenrredness are qualities of the separative ego which is part of the complex formed by that knot? Once that knot is cut, the ego disappears and the true soul behind can find an outlet keeping a touch between the finite world and the unbound Spirit. What happened was that in the midst of all relationships and all commerce with common things there was felt an enormous liberty which the very body had the sensation of distantly sharing. In a most basic manner that tragic death made me die into a new life. .

 

If such an excruciating event as a dear one's death at quite a young age, all the more excruciating because it is desperately voluntary, if an event so life-shaking does not send us deeper into the Divine, the beloved one has died in vain. Let us not allow a death of this kind to be just a useless calamity. Let it lead us to some great Light and not leave us in a no-man's-land of misery and mystery.

 

Now a few words on your last "How?" The nervousness in face of the future, the fear that the veil across the time to come would part to disclose some huge undreamed-of disaster, can, in my opinion, be best removed by reading passages from Savitri aloud. The audible reading is necessary in order to set up vibrations in the being. The place where you have the dread of the unknown is the solar plexus and this sensitive mass of nerves is all the time resonating to thoughts, feelings, sensations. Give it the grand rhythms of Sri Aurobindo's "overhead" inspiration to resonate to. When I was in Bombay years ago and was continuing my out-of-body experiences which had developed in Pondicherry after one pre-Pondi surprise, once I was very badly attacked from behind by hostile forces of an occult plane. I felt as if my whole spine had been broken and an indescribable malaise suffused my entire system, I wondered what to do. I recollected that certain passages in Savitri had distinctly - as Sri


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Aurobindo had confided to me - what he had termed the Overmind accent, which is the power of the sheer Mantra. Particularly so was the group of lines which described Savitri herself. It begins at nearly the bottom of p. 14 (Centenary Edition) with the line

 

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven

and closes in the opening part of p. 16 with the phrase

In her he met his own eternity.

 

The "he" is the God of Love whom Savitri came on earth to manifest against the power of Death. I started reading this passage in a clear tone to myself, giving full scope to its sound-suggestion. When I came to the line -

 

For even her gulfs were secrecies of light -

 

I suddenly found myself cured of the pervading malaise and the sense of the broken backbone was totally gone. I may add that A.E. Housman used to say that he knew he was in the presence of poetry when what he read brought tears to his eyes, made his hair stand on end and his solar plexus felt pierced. Sri Aurobindo, after reading Housman, referred to the solar plexus apropos of his process of getting the correct version in his epic and removing defects by "a word or phrase substitute that flashes - with the necessary sound and sense". He went on to say: "These things are not done by thinking or seeking for the right thing - the two agents are sight and call. Also feeling - the solar plexus has to be satisfied and, until it is, revision after revision has to continue." So I beheve that the mantric intensities of Savitri will deal successfully with your nervous trouble "round or above the navel". To meet your "fear of the unknown", what can be a better remedy than this revelatory poem which may be best summed up in one of its own lines as being

 

A message from the unknown immortal Light?

 

(25.5.1990)


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