Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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You are a very brave and generous woman. Few people would undergo so cheerfully the trouble to which you have been put - and in the thick of it feel concerned about other people's needs. I am proud to have you as my friend - and I am proud also of your life's partner, who is inseparable from you in my thoughts, and who would not be so, either in my thoughts or in real life, if he did not respond in every fibre to the same ideals of courage and generosity.

Courage and generosity - these have been my own guiding stars too, though I cannot say I have succeeded so well in living according to their light. Of course, when I use these words I mean much more than physical courage and material generosity. The latter are great and rare things - but they are most precious when they are reflections of qualities which hold on many planes. Courage involves the readiness to face criticism for one's principles - to stand solitary on a dangerous height - to sacrifice comfort, reputation, happiness for the sake of one's friends. The last-named movement shades courage off into generosity. And, after all, the two qualities cannot really be separated. For courage necessarily implies the capacity of self-giving - and all giving is generosity, I would add that generosity means also the capacity to understand others, put oneself in their shoes and in their minds, make room for their viewpoints and claims, see even their case against oneself. Ultimately, the highest courage and generosity are to live for the Unknown, to love the Invisible, to launch out on an unchartered quest for the Infinite, the Divine, to lay the whole of one's time-existence at the service of the Eternal.

My friend who has come to you - as well as all who are intimately connected with him - is a devotee too of courage and generosity. I am happy that his stay has been indefinitely prolonged. The American Government can have no objection to his continued stay: they take no adverse account except of

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crime - and my friend is guilty only of what the Younger Pitt, in his maiden speech in Parliament, called "the atrocious crime of being a very young man". But he is a young man belonging to the rare category described by R.L. Stevenson (another adherent to the ideals of courage and generosity): "We want young men who have brains enough to make fools of themselves!" Evidently, he means those who possess not only enthusiasm and energy but also the intoxicating vision of something new that is true beyond the fixed ways of the world - something for which they are ready to look rash and unwise in the view of the safely-settled rut-followers. Here we may have in mind those who go

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone -

no less than such as fare forth in quest of a new passage to the Indies across the untravelled Atlantic.

(3.2.1970)

It is most interesting that in my letter of the 4th I referred to the need for you to be in harmonious relationship with all around you, whether at the hospital or at home, besides feeling the Mother's presence all the time within you. A radiation of that presence towards whoever you work with, whoever you live with is very necessary for one who aspires to be the Mother's true child. Your letter of the 1st is accompanied by a prayer to her in which occurs the appeal: "Correct still more my attitude towards work, studies, towards my parents and other people." It is clear that our minds and hearts are interlinked with each other through the Mother's gathering of both of us into her single light.

Ups and downs of the sadhak in us are natural. Don't worry about them. The progress towards perfection is never uniform until the whole of our being has been unified. The unification takes long but it is certain if the central self, the innermost psyche, grows more and more active in all our

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movements. It has the master-key to open every part of us to feel what Wordsworth calls

A greatness in the beatings of our heart.

To aim at this unification is our immediate concern - the pervasive sense of the Divine within us. And as we move towards such pervasion an automatic concord gets created with our surroundings. But we must be patient. It takes long for the grand finale to be struck. With as much equanimity as we can muster we have to meet whatever wrong notes ring inwardly or outwardly. If we do this, they turn into stepping-stones towards the ultimate harmony. Of course, our equanimity has to be, as a phrase in Savitri goes,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy.

For we are offering our unwounded poise to the Holy Feet that are leading our pilgrimage to the satyam-ritam-brihal - the True, the Right, the Vast, the ideal set before the world from the beginning of our history by the Rigvedic Rishis. And we are doing the offering with a rush of rapture born of love -"hands of joy". Our equanimity is not of an intellectual Stoic: it is that of a spiritual Epicurean. An Eternal Face whose eyes are depths of immutable bliss and whose mouth is a moulder of ever-new beauty is our goal.

Don't tax yourself with the problem whether bodily divinisation will take place in this very life. Let all your inner self be a constant remembrance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and let that remembrance shape your outer life to a consecrated strength which is at the same time a dedicated sweetness. Thus you will lay the foundation of a future, whether in this life or another, of a divinised body.

(9.10.1991)

Last evening I told you: "While corning home from the

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Samadhi I looked at the clear blue sky and the rich green trees and knew how much I loved them and I thought of all the people who were dear to me. There was no dryness within me, no bare aloofness. And yet I was aware that all ties had been cut: no lingering attachment to anything or anyone remained: I felt completely free, ready to leave all behind without the slightest regret. If I had to die that very minute, I would do it with a quiet happiness." You remarked: "This should mean almost oneness with the Divine Mother." I answered: "No, it may imply getting nearer to her, but in itself it was just a glad freedom from earth and life." I have more than once quoted to you the Upanishadic rending of the knot of the heartstrings, by which the mortal enjoys immortality even in this body. My state was nothing so grand. There was no sense of liberation into the Supreme Self above both birth and death -the eternal One beyond space and time. Not the realisation of immortality, the entry into the Unborn and the Undying, but simply a smiling aloofness from the affairs of the world, an utterly painless readiness to give up everything. There was no desire left even to finish a number of literary schemes I had in hand. Not that they seemed worthless but the sense that they could fulfil anything in me was absent.

I may say I needed no fulfilment. No matter how many loose ends may quiver before my eyes, I was not conscious of any need in me to bind them together. A tranquil completeness, independent of any call of the world, pervaded my mind and heart. It was as if everything had already been accomplished somewhere and as if those whom I loved and valued could never be really lost to me but were essentially treasured up in some unknown depth of being. Would these people miss me? There was so much peace in me that I thought I would leave a mass of it behind to fill whatever gap might be caused by my departure. I had the expectation that they would calmly take my absence. In any case I am standing at a distance from all concerns while at the same time stretching my arms across the intervening vacancy to touch gently everything far away to show that I am not pushing anything

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off: only living with no hold upon me of any hope or fear of what is to come in the course of the world's wayfaring. But I have the feeling of waiting for my painless death-in-life to fill - one day - with some felicity that will be a permanent poise in Sri Aurobindo's eternity which is all-transcending yet denies nothing, the Divine Mother's infinity which is all-accepting yet with nothing binding it.

(24.4.1992)

Nirodbaran has shown me your latest letter to him, raising a point which you consider legitimate apropos of some statements by the Mother whose drift had not struck home to you earlier. The point in general is whether one could do Yoga without a Guru: it becomes particularly acute when her discussion "goes on to specifically include even the ultimate experience, 'le yoga du corps' - 'the yoga of the body'."

According to you, the Mother's position may be summed up as follows. She does not deny that doing Yoga, including the Yoga of divinising the body, is possible without a Guru but her own experience has been always with a Guru and she can give only her own experience. She repeats that it is possible and when conceding others the possibility of even the culminating experience - physical divinisation - without a Guru she adds that if such an experience comes "as a necessity" it is "all right" ("c'est bien").

In your view, this conversation of May 26, 1971 - which you quote to me from the Agenda - with "M, a young disciple, professor of Mathematics at the Centre of Education" (evidently Manoj Dasgupta) entitles you to tell Nirod to think of a supplementary comment on what was to be concluded from his correspondence with Sri Aurobindo on April 11, 1937 -namely, that physical transformation would not be possible except in the physical presence of himself and the Mother -that is, under the direct bodily guidance by the Gurus of the Integral Yoga. You are asking Nirod: "Could something new have intervened since the Master's departure to make the

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Mother - especially in consideration of" her September 1973 decision to withdraw, as reported by her son Andre - leave things more open than before?"

I am inclined to think that you are mistaken in putting this question to Nirod - mistaken because of two reasons. First, the Mother's decision to leave her body was taken nearly two and a half years after the talk with M; so it is not proper to see any relation between it and that talk. She cannot be seen as weighing so much in advance the possibility of others doing what she herself would decide to leave uncompleted. Secondly, this very talk has shades which are not marked by you and which give on the whole a rather negative slant to her words. When she first says that it is possible, she adds: "But 1 don't know under what conditions" ("Mais dans quelles conditions, je ne sais pas"). This implies that the conditions for the possibility are hardly imaginable by her. "It is possible" seems to be merely theoretical - not anything coming as a real concession by her. And such a situation is confirmed by her later declaration: "I don't know, I can't say, since I can speak only from personal experience - all else has no value" ("je ne sais pas, je ne peux pas dire parce que je ne peux que parler d'experience personnelle - ca n'a pas de valeur"). Finally, we have to be sensitive to the note almost of irony when she says: "I ought to say that if it comes to you like that, like a necessity, it is all right, but one must not seek to do it... It is not very pleasant!" ("Je dois dire que si cela vient sur vous comme cela, comme une necessite, c'est bien, mais il ne faut pas chercher a le faire... Ce n'est pas tres agreable!"). The sense here is: "This work of physical transformation is extremely difficult and very far from being enjoyable. Don't be so foolish as to go in for it - it's not something that all can do or should think of doing. But if it gets just imposed on you by any chance, if it comes as a sheer unavoidable necessity, as though willy-nilly you were chosen to do so nasty a job, then of course it's OK, it's destiny."

It strikes me that the Mother is here suggesting two things. The original question was whether one can do the Integral

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Yoga without a Guru - a Yoga which goes so far as to include the body's divinisation. The Mother's words towards the end bring in the suggestion that the work of divinising the body is not anybody's job. Elsewhere she has told us in effect: "This work has never been done before. I am attempting it for the first time because my body has been marked out for the experiment - Sri Aurobindo has asked me to undertake it. And it is not something I would encourage anyone to take up, for it can hardly be called pleasant." In short, the Mother does not believe that anyone except herself is meant to try this terribly hard experiment for the first time. And as for doing, without an embodied Guru, anything in the Integral Yoga -most of all physical transformation - her own experience tells her that it can't be done. What worth is there in going outside her experience and granting the bare possibility of such an achievement and granting even this without being able to conceive of any conditions under which the possibility would arise?

To my mind, when everything is properly probed, the passages you have cited do not alter the situation envisaged in Nirod's correspondence.

I am showing this tetter to Nirod before posting it.

(26.4.1992)

I am glad that you have been moving further and further on the razor's edge which is the traditional description of the path of Yoga. Your steady eye on the two essentials I had marked out - equanimity and "Remember and Offer" - is bound to carry you far. Their special advantage is that they involve (or evolve) both the heart and the head. The offering is surely a movement as if of handing the Mother

...a red, red rose

That's newly blown in June -

the rose of one's love-thrilled devotion-dyed surrender-

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kindled heart every time the circumstances of one's life are laid at her feet. But remembering is bound to be - at least to an extent - a stirring of the head which brings up before one an image of the beatific face belonging to the figure at whose other end are those heaven-missioned earth-blessing feet. Similarly, equanimity is not only - as one of my favourite Savitri-lines has it -

A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest -

a calm controlled attitude of detached impersonality ruling out all individual reactions of thought and judgment. Equanimity is also a seeing of one's inner agitations which are as much part of "Time's unrest" as are the ups and downs of the outer world. Here the changing history of the heart is to be faced with unaltered peace and an even tenor sought to be infused into it. The emotions no less than the thinking processes have to remain unruffled.

There is another point to be noted. Equanimity is gained in two ways. First, by a stepping back into some tranquil Vast that is ever there behind our throbbing human smallness. Secondly, by catching all hurtful disturbing touches from the common world upon our heart before they pierce the surface and, without any attempt to think how to meet them, remembering the Mother and offering them to her. Thus at once we get free from them and some smiling Vast beyond us takes them up. This Vast and that tranquil Vast are two aspects of the same luminous Liberty that sets the stage for our self-transcendence into spirituality. But they don't coalesce in our experience from the start. The one seems to represent at its extreme realisation what the ancient seers called the Self of selves, an impersonal immobile common background to the varied flux of phenomena, the diverse play of personal lives. The other is a remote-appearing yet intimate creatrix of our souls, a super-Person from whom all personality emanates, a goddess-greatness immune to "the troubles of our proud and angry dust" but still concerned about them, quietly eager to

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help and resolve them. To the Self of selves the world is a sort of aching illusion; to this goddess-greatness whom we may designate the Soul of souls the world is a struggling evolution with deific possibilities of a manifold perfection. By constant reference to both by the Yogic formula I have suggested -which is really a putting together of Sri Aurobindo's recipes at work in most cases - the two super-realities enfold our lives as what I may dub a unified Power of Peace, a joint divine environment, as it were, calling forth, from behind, beyond, within us, a new superhuman manifestation. Gradually we are re-created by a distant yet receptive Silence and a transcendent yet responsive Vigilance alert to the rhythm of our human cry - serving by their combined or rather fused influences the cause of our sadhana.

(5.5.1992)

Thank you for your donation to Mother India. A regular generous feeding like that is good for a 43-year-old journal.

I am glad my latest letter has proved a source of increasing guidance after each further reading. On my part I have tried to bring out a sense of the spiritual passive-active truth behind the poise of equanimity as well as the active-passive truth permeating the gesture of "Remember and Offer". The two are really complementary. The one involves a vast withdrawal into a background peace which when brought face to face with the common world becomes a spread-out of silent power whose very presence is a pressure on things to become harmonious or to disappear. The other involves a constant catching hold of things because its practitioner has to confront life and actively seek to change world-values, but by separating them from their common context and by lifting each event and its significance towards the Divine Mother who watches all and secretly pervades all. Thus one dynamically dissociates events from the run of daily time and refuses to deal with them from the human source of life-manipulation. Into the invisible hands of the ever-unforgot-

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ten Supreme Creatrix they are delivered with one's whole heart and then one stops worrying about them.

This shade of surrender is not usually read in the offering that is to go with remembering. Just the attitude of consecration is advised, bringing the feeling that every bit of work is done for the Mother. Then every bit grows a pleasure and one goes nearer and nearer to her and the work itself turns more efficient because her hidden omnipotence is tacitly invoked. What I have added to the meaning of the Auro-bindonian formula is the action of offering in order to lead to one's own inaction and to put all the initiative in the Divine's court, so to speak, so that both the decidedly more luminous judgment and the undoubtedly more competent power of the Divine are brought to bear upon life's vicissitudes. My addition too is Aurobindonian in essence but from another context of the Integral Yoga. Here one has deliberately to cease planning and shaping the course of things. Especially when an acute problem gets posed and hurtful circumstances tend to shake one's nerves, one has to stop figuring out one's response and, to save one from perplexity as well as from the possibility of wrong choice, one not only consecrates what is before one but also abdicates as thinker and doer. Thus a peaceful passivity results from the dynamic drive at the start.

(27.5.1992)

I have promised to tell you the inner story during the last phase of my recent illness. I had a hacking cough and along with it a daily rise in temperature during the afternoon and evening - generally 100 and once 101. This did not deter me from my usual typing work at home and my daily wheelchair-visit to the Samadhi from 4.30 to 5.30 p.m., during which hour the cough was surprisingly quiet, except for a slight outburst on rare occasions. Every third day I used to drop in at our Ashram dispensary which is on my way to the Samadhi. There Dr. Datta would solicitously examine my chest and lungs, put the thermometer in my mouth and give me the

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needed treatment for whatever bacterial complication accompanied the virus infection he had diagnosed. We have no remedy against viruses: they come and go at their own sweet will.

The illness went on for nearly four weeks. The repeating fever made the body rather uneasy and there seemed no definite end to it. One afternoon I suddenly had the feeling that what I needed was mountain-air to set me right. But how was I to get that refreshing atmosphere which, as I remembered, had once got rid of a troublesome fever. I was in Poona (now Pune) and had planned to go to the high plateau of Panchgani. Half way up in the bus I felt the changed air sweep the fever out and I was perfectly well thenceforward. After my fracture-accident I was in no state to catch any bus winding anywhere upward. Besides, I disliked the idea of leaving Pondicherry. What was then to be done?

A voice within commanded: "Read Savitri." Immediately I took hold of the volume, concentrated a little and opened it at random. I read two pages at a stretch, audibly, getting the full impact of the rhythm. At the end I realised that something had gradually stood back from the feverish Amal. The fever had not gone but the real I was free from it. Then 1 recalled Sri Aurobindo writing that mountains were a symbol of the Universal Consciousness. It also struck me that what he had called the "overhead" planes - planes of consciousness above the mind-level - would surely be inner heights in a spiritual wideness, from where Sri Aurobindo drew the inspiration of his Yogic poetry, especially of his epic Savitri. This immense creation was meant to have again and again the Mantric vibration of the top overhead plane, the Overmind which had been the source of the supreme moments in the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. The breath of inspiration blowing through Savitri was indeed the archetypal mountain-air.

Every morning, day after day, I listened to my lips spelling out Savitri, For a couple of days, while I stood inwardly aloof, the fever continued though at a lower pitch. Then it vanished completely and I inhaled the atmosphere of

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a super-Panchgani all the time. I informed Dr. Datta that I was quite well but I did not tell him how the virus infection had left me and the cough too had started subsiding. I was afraid he might think me too imaginative. If he happens to read this detailed account I am certain he will not shake his head. He is too much of a Yogi to do it and too trustful of "respected elders" to doubt them.

(25.6.1992)

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