Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

28

Let me hurry up to wish you a birthday which will be - in some words from Savitri -

A golden temple-door to things beyond.

The "things beyond" are the holy presences in the inmost sanctuary to which the temple-door leads and of which the goldenness of that entrance is the promise, A soul-state of intense yet steady luminosity revealing the Supreme Lord and the Divine Mother as the immortal In-dwellers of our being is the best birthday-realisation I can wish you.

I am sure that nothing less than this can meet the needs of your nature. You are a bom devotee of the Eternal and the Infinite. I think you belong to that rare company to whom instinctive or intuitive movements deep within make, as Wordsworth puts it, .

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence,

and for whom the long littleness of the ordinary life is never final, feeling as they do, with Wordsworth again, that

Whether we be young or old,

Our destiny, our being's heart and home

Is with infinitude, and only there.

Of course, the perception of a Splendour in our depths, which is beyond our small outer existence and is yet our own self's secret truth - such a perception does not necessarily mean a neglect by us of all passing and finite matters, for it is in them that the inmost verity's radiance has to be shed. So I should not sound unnatural if from the subject of Spirit and Soul connected with your birthday I make a transition to the theme of the history you have given me of your food-intake

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down the years. Each one has to adjust his food according to his body's reactions. What you have settled upon seems to me a good diet. I don't know why you object to eggs. One egg a day could be a substantial aid to strength, provided you with your slightly uncertain stomach can digest it. I can understand your objection to onions and garlic, but they are not, as you say, "tamasic" or inertia-causing food: they are rajasic or excitement-producing stuff. I personally don't fancy them in general because they affect one's breath and sometimes even one's sweat. This applies to onions only when they are taken raw. My constitution accepts all kinds of food. I don't particularly go after any kind, but welcome whatever is given - and everything is inwardly offered to the Divine Mother with the prayer: "May it all go to the growth of your divinity in me!"

(20.2.1992)

I arrived at my flat on March 17 after five months at the Ashram Nursing Home. Physiotherapy has started in right earnest to make me cope more efficiently with the problems left by the fracture of last October 15. I have renewed my old rhythm in general. The most important note recurring is my daily afternoon-visit to the Samadhi, albeit now in a wheelchair. It's glorious to be there again. In the old days I felt I was inwardly embracing the Samadhi. Now it is as if the Samadhi were inwardly embracing me. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother seem overjoyed to find me back "home" and they press their light upon my head and their love upon my heart without ceasing.

The Divine appears to be more happy in gaining poor infinitesimal Me than I could be in plunging into the inexhaustible splendour of His beatific immensity. The Divine's Grace has always puzzled me at the same time that it has enraptured me. It is as though to get one little kiss from me God enfolds me with a whole cosmos of sunlike warmth and moonlike tenderness and innumerable star-touches of

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thrilling intimacy. I have always felt myself a most unlikely explorer of the mystic consciousness, ever a stranger to the art of detached God-dedicated action, a self-doubter even as a devotee at a Guru's feet and yet all my wandering world-tempted wits have somehow been drawn to Yoga, Turn as often as I may my ears to the song of the sirens, my face has been pulled away again and again in the opposite direction by the strains of a far flute throbbing in earth's air from Brindavan's woods thousands of years ago. I am amazed at this phenomenon.

Not that I am materially minded in contrast to the spiritual temper. 1 am no worshipper of shekels but, as I have often declared, I am by nature a dweller on the left bank of the Seine, the Latin Quarter, the resort of beauty-drunk artists and endless chasers of ideas. The world visible to the sharpened senses, the vast field of the mind's manifold review of things - these were the lures to me. Through curious circumstances I was thrown into a search for the invisible, a grope for the unthinkable. Luckily, they brought me before Sri Aurobindo and face to face with the Mother. Here were beings of flesh and blood, concretely on earth, who yet stood for the Beyond and the Boundless. Because of them I could turn to the spiritual life.

They also showed through their spirituality a firm clasp on the world of form and rhythm that is the delight of the born artist and an equal grip on the sphere of multitudinous interlinked ideas that is the passion of the insatiable thinker. If the Mother had not been a painter and a musician, if Sri Aurobindo had not philosophised and written poetry of both vision and reflection, I would scarcely have made the Ashram my permanent home. And once I chose to live there, they with an incalculable love kept a hold on me. It was a hold I desired because it-was so warm and rich -1 asked for it to continue even if I were to feel Like drifting away to the old non-Yogic life. And now at the Samadhi after five months of absence I experienced once more the sweet eagerness of the Divine to lock me up in His lavish affection as if I were a

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Koh-i-noor, "a mountain of light", instead of being a mere pebble of a disciple whom strange forces had kicked into His courtyard.

Now enough about me. Your news is very cheering. To dip into Savitri anywhere as if it were a book of oracles and read two or three pages with intense pleasure at "the word-music and the tremendously beautiful English" is a great move forward in the re-creation of your inner being. And a step forward too is your trying to add to what you call your "repertoire of heart-sadhana" that dictum of Sri Aurobindo's: "Love the Mother. Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present." Whatever renders the Mother an increasingly vivid reality to us is a step ahead on the Aurobindonian path. Your new moves make you a more congenial companion to me in the spiritual search. For, most of my Yoga boils down to conjuring up the Mother before my eyes and steeping myself in the keen memory of that atmosphere of warm wideness and holy soul-building silence which I always felt in her presence.

(26.3.1992)

You say: "I am convinced that your prayers can reach the Mother more easily than mine. So always I have been asking you to give just two minutes for me." I don't understand why you should attach special merit to my prayers. Isn't everybody capable of doing what I do? My method is very natural and simple. Whatever is to be put before the Mother I just carry as if in a void crystal to a great Void beyond my head and there I am lost with it in the Mother's presence for a few minutes. I feel an intense reaching out to her benevolent hands and nothing exists for me then except those hands, all-receiving, all-granting. I do not imagine any answer but wait in a prolonged concentrated hush into which something takes shape at her touch. I don't try to "read" what she has put there. The trying would break the spell. I wait for the end

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of the meeting between my void and her Void. When I am back to myself her reply casts a sort of image on my mind. Sometimes it is very clear and detailed - on other occasions it is rather general but some sort of drift is usually caught. The secret of the prayer is the utter absorption in the appeal, the utter lack of preconception as to the response, the utter undemanding joy in the communion with the supreme Beauty and Beatitude, the utter openness to whatever comes out of their incalculable Grace. The prayer is no casual act. Something goes forth from deep down within, as if one's whole self were gathered into it for a while. What is done is a part of the sadhana and when it is over I am myself a little nearer the Divine at the same time that I have striven to take my friend a bit closer to that inexhaustible Sweetness.

The dream you have recounted is surely not just a throw-up of the subconscient. A few confused elements may be there but by and large it is an experience on an inner plane with a psychic light playing on it. If you found no trace at all of your physical disability, the plane could not be merely the subtle-physical. There, in the midst of a substantial change, some sign however faint of our physical condition is usually present. You were certainly meeting our Gurus and your soul was full of gratitude: that is why you wanted to offer to them the flower signifying Grace in recognition of the great benefit conferred on you, but it is rather a mystery why you could not directly make the offering and had to do it through somebody else. Perhaps a part of you was not wholly given to the opportunity you had been granted. Some hint of this part appears at the end of the dream when comes "the idea of returning home immediately as the train-time was so close". However I feel that the somebody else was not really a non-you. You write that "he accepted" your "request" "with a smile". It seems that he was your own soul which had been slightly separated from your inner state by the lurking anxiety about missing your train - the link with your outer being. The "smile" was a psychic signal, a reassurance that nothing was truly lost. Have I not spoken of your

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"smiling face" as something most characteristic of you the sadhak? Surely it can only be your soul that wears so natural a smile in spite of your terrible handicaps?

(15.4.1992)

Your letter asks me: "What has changed during all these eight years since we last met. You can say: 'Well, I have grown older and more experienced.' Yes, but what does your experience say about supramentalisation and divinisation of the body? How far have we gone in the direction calculated to make us achieve those things - for the rest is all un-important?"

You seem to be getting most things wrong. About my age you say: "You were 29 in 1927 when you met Sri Aurobindo for the first time. So now you must be 94." I was just 21 days past my 23rd year when I reached the Ashram. I met Sri Aurobindo for the first time on February 21, 1928. Since my arrival here I have kept my eyes strained towards the great goal Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have set up as the culmination of their Integral Yoga: the supramentalisation and divinisation of the body. But I have never forgotten that this goal has been put by them in a far-away future and that the central object has always been the realisation of the Divine - and now that our Gurus have left their bodies it is idle to think that any of us is going to do in a lifetime what they themselves didn't. This does not mean we cannot move towards it with whatever speed an illumined snail can command. Don't be shocked at my irreverence. Indeed it is vain to imagine we can move fast in that direction. But the best means towards it is the deepening and widening and heightening of the realisation of the Divine, especially with the psychic being as the ever-smiling centre of our manifold mystic movement. Adopting your language I would say that all else is unimportant, and I would add: "In spite of physical supramentalisation having been postponed, things are going fairly well here."

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In this connection the topic you have raised of X is pertinent. He is claiming to be supramentalising his body. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have clearly said that the supramentabsation of the mind, the vital being and the physical consciousness have to precede the body's supramentalisation - and that there would be a failure in the Integral Yoga if the true soul has not emerged and taken charge of the sadhana with its constant spontaneous surrender to the Divine, its instinctive wide-spreading sweetness, its unfailing light of guiding truth, its poised intensity of tranquil strength. We have to look for signs of these spiritual states before we accept anybody's - yes, any body's - claim towards the ultimate supramentalisation.

Here is Sri Aurobindo writing to Sahana on 14.11.1933: "It is quite impossible for the Supramental to take up the body before there has been the full supramental change in the mind and the vital." And what has the Mother to say? "Before you take up the work of physical transformation, which is of all things the most difficult, you must have your consciousness firmly, solidly established in the Truth." (Bulletin, Vol. XV, No. 4, p. 52)

Besides, we have to remember what Sri Aurobindo has said from the beginning about the role of the Guru. I'll quote a few items:

"In this discipline the inspiration of the Master and, in the difficult stages, his control and his presence are indispensable - for it would be impossible otherwise to go through it without much stumbling and error which would prevent all chances of success. The Master is one who has risen to a higher consciousness and being and he is often regarded as its manifestation or representative. He not only helps by his Yogic teaching and still more by his influence and example but by a power to communicate his own experience to others." (Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram)

"Each man who enters the realms of yogic experience is free to follow his own way; but this yoga is not a path for anyone to follow, but only for those who accept and seek the

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aim, pursue the way pointed out upon which a sure guidance is indispensable. It is idle for anyone to expect that he can follow this road far - much less go to the end by his own inner strength and knowledge without the true aid or influence. Even the ordinary long-practised yogas are hard to follow without the aid of the guru; in this which as it advances goes through untrodden countries and unknown entangled regions, it is quite impossible." (Birth Centenary Edition Letters on Yoga, p. 1045)

"As for the letter, I suppose you will have to tell the writer that his father committed a mistake when he took up Yoga without a guru - for the mental idea of a Guru cannot take the place of the actual living influence. This Yoga especially, as I have written in my books, needs the help of the Guru and cannot be done without it." (Ibid., p. 1051)

Finally, there is Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (Vol. 2, p. 900), which I have already quoted in Mother India some time ago:

"Is it only for physical transformation that staying here is necessary? Otherwise sincere sadhana can be done elsewhere as well as here."

"I don't suppose the later stages of the transformation including the physical would be possible elsewhere. In fact in those outside none of the three transformations - psychicisa-tion, spiritualisation, supramentalisation — seems to have begun. They are all preparing. Here there are at least a few who have started one or two of them. Only that does not show outside. The physical or external alone shows outside." (April 11, 1937)

Sri Aurobindo is talking of the Ashram. But surely no mere locality in Pondicherry is meant? What is meant is the place that has the physical presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This presence is the sine qua non for the divinisation or supramentalisation of the body. Without it the last stage of the Aurobindonian Yoga can be reached not by what 1 have termed in my letters to friends a concentrated and accelerated process - a spiritual revolution, as it were in the present

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lifetime - but only by a process of spiritual evolution through life after life. It is postponed and not cancelled, because the Supramental Light, Consciousness and Force manifested in the subtle-physical layer of the earth on February 29, 1956 and became secretly an active evolutionary factor in earth's history. With their manifestation the Mother has assured humanity's future supramentalisation beginning, of course, with a nucleus of "supermen". She was attempting also the spiritually revolutionary process - the supramental transformation of her own body, to be followed by the same change in her disciples provided they were thoroughgoing and psychically wide-open. This, for some reason of her own, did not work out. So we are left with the slow march of evolution. Even the pace of the spiritual revolution was never considered to be a super-swift one. The Mother has declared on Sri Aurobindo's authority that, after all the inner Yogic realisations had been compassed, it would take three hundred years for the physical transformation to be accomplished. Of course, the accomplishment would be preceded by the power to prolong one's life. And the accomplishment would be in the wake of the Gurus' own bodily supramentalisation, Sri Aurobindo wrote to me long ago that he was not working for physical supramentalisation for his own self alone and added: "But if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others." Of course he never put the Mother on a par with "others". When he left his body he told the Mother: "You have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation." If it was not fulfilled in the Mother, it cannot be fulfilled in any of us.

In Nirodbaran's Correspondence (October 7, 1937, Vol. 2, p. 704), we also get a glimpse of two fundamental themes: (1) the central achievement in the supramental Yoga, (2) the ultimate result of it. Sri Aurobindo writes:

"What is vital is the supramental change of consciousness - conquest of death is something minor and, as 1 have always said, the last physical result of it, not the first result of all or the most important - a thing to be added to complete the

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whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values - it would mean that the seeker was actuated, not by any high spiritual aim but by a vital clinging to life or a selfish and timid seeking for the security of the body - such a spirit could not bring the supramental change.

"Certainly, everything depends on my success. The only thing that could prevent it, so far as I can see, would be my own death or the Mother's."

You have not faced - nor have many of us here faced - all these truths. Hence your questions and the eagerness to meet X. You tell me that you tried to "ferret" him out when you were in the USA but failed. Now you are appealing to my supposed "sixth sense" to give you his "exact address". I am sorry I don't have this sense on tap - and even if I had I would not waste it on what you desire.

You have another question too: "Have you visited Auroville lately? Or are you still allergic to go to the wonder city of the future?" Well, in the early years after its foundation I went to Auroville a number of times. I gave a couple of talks to it and even spent a night there. I have had no general allergy - only a few aversions to particular aspects of it in the past.

(8.4.1992)

I have not come across any specific and detailed pronouncement by Sri Aurobindo or the Mother about the Resurrection of Jesus which the new Testament speaks of. But I have gathered from their writings or talks two points that can bear upon it. The kind of risen body which Christians claim for Jesus is not what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother call the transformed supramentalised body which they have as the ultimate goal for humanity. Sri Aurobindo has clearly said that a body which by its alleged divinity does not remain on the earth as a tangible lasting presence cannot answer to his view of the supramental physical. Once when the Mother's

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attention was drawn to the resurrected body attributed to Jesus, she exclaimed: "but this body went to heaven!"

The second point is that the supramental physical is the result of an evolutionary development of matter's own intrinsic dharma (or law) of "involved" Supemind: it is not the outcome of a miraculous superimposition from the Beyond by means of a siddhi (special power). The Beyond, in Sri Aurobindo's vision, descends into a mould prepared by the upward thrust of the concealed or covered within, which holds the same divinity as makes the down-thrust. The Integral Yoga in its fullness is meant to concentrate the evolutionary process into an accelerated revolutionary move-ment. It is not something achieved, as St. Paul says, "in the twinkling of an eye" during the hoped-for Second Coming of Christ at the world's end and taken up into the Beyond. A new gradually divinised life upon the earth and not a sudden transfiguration breaking with it and passing away from it: such is the Aurobindonian spiritual vision for the future.

(1988)

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