2
Your letter suggests to me that somewhere in your being there is a born "Pilgrim of Pondicherry" as well as "Initiate of Poetry" - and perhaps the former will fully emerge through the development of the latter. It is remarkable that the reading of my sonnet "Mukti" should have left so deep an impression on you. The fact that not just the sense but also the sound of it means so much proves to me that my second description of the potential you is quite correct. For, contrary to the general notion, it is the sound that is the soul of poetry and it is the sense that is the body. By "sound" I mean the inner subtle life-throb of the vision or experience that articulates itself through the intelligible words. The poet's depths swim up in the rhythm. And the finer the poetry the more crucial are the details of the rhythmic interrelations of a line. This involves a quick response to the word-order and its suggestive concords. Thus there is a world of difference in inner suggestion between the form:
The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind -
and the possible alternative:
The spaces of her mind, unshadowed, mute.
It is not only the changing of places by the two adjectives that counts: the termination of the line by the adjective "mute" lays a special stress on muteness, as if that were the critical quality above everything else. Besides, one is left a little unsure whether the two epithets refer to "spaces" or to "mind". Finally, the freely sweeping sound of the earlier form has yielded place to one Which has a staccato movement and a sort of added-on effect at the close. Even without all these alterations an unnatural effect would be there if one wrote:
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The spaces, mute, unshadowed, of her mind.
The line would lack the touch of inevitability which gives the original version an extraordinary spontaneous profundity making our being vibrate in some visionary dimension beyond the thinking brain's noises and ingenuities - vibrate to a reality far other than our life's usual tenor. Even a phrase like
Mute and unshadowed spaces of her mind,
which should theoretically not make any difference that matters is yet a definite a peu pres. Again an unnecessary emphasis is laid on muteness, all the more because of the marked trochaic rhythm of the word-order at the start. Perhaps a still more delicate yet equally decisive shift of inevitable profundity in the suggestion comes if a couple of words stand in the same order at the end rather than in the middle of a certain line. Here is the line in its latter avatar:
A cry to clasp in all the one God-hush.
There is a well-rounded mystical effect of a fairly high order. But compare it to the strange sense of an interminable passage into wideness after inner spiritual wideness if we read:
A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all.
Though the verbal significance may be taken to be the same as before, the overall resonance confers on it a greater authenticity, an ultimate authority. Possibly we may go a step further in regard to the significance itself.
Examined sensitively, this version seems to impart even a different shade by its variation of sound fused with another word-order. Now the one God-hush is not to be discovered with an effort at the close of a search. It is to be realised in a
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natural way as a secret wonder which is self-revealed everywhere to the intense ardour of a rapt inwardness.
I am glad you have invested in my Talks on Poetry. The book is meant not only to make poetry come alive but also to make life catch something of poetry's perfection of revelatory rhythm on the diverse planes of our consciousness.
(28.4.1990)
The exchange of calm and unrest is nothing peculiar to you: it is part of the general human condition. What you have to do is to let the spells of calm outnumber the moments of agitation. You will ask: "How?" The sole fully effective mode is Yoga. In the practice of Yoga we try to vivify in ourselves the sense of the Infinite, the Eternal and we turn constantly towards the Divine and increase more and more our intuition of His imperturbable Presence. Then at the moment of agitation something will touch us from within and draw us away from the ruffled surface of our being. There won't be success each time, but failures will grow less and less.
"Things like anger, resentment, etc." are difficult moods to manage - even people who have lived in the Ashram for many years are not free from their occasional visits. But the right course is always to reject the suggestion that you are justified in having them. On the other hand, you must not indulge in too much remorse. Don't brood over your past but be ready for the future. Just catch these moods whenever they come and, without thinking anything more, offer them to the Mother and keep offering them until you feel clear and calm. You must also learn to look at the cause of them - which is, in your own words, "not having things the way I had wanted" -as carrying secret messages to you from the Divine. I have always held that we can let the Divine reach us through everything. And if we look for the Hand of Grace in even adverse circumstances it will extend to us and bring us benefits we have never dreamt of. I don't say that we must never want circumstances to be other than they are. We may
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work towards a different denouement and yet reap profit from a situation that seems to cut across our plan. Everything becomes a gift of God in one manner or another when we offer it to Him and await in our heart His contact through it. This is one of the great lessons I have learnt and it is one of the paths to permanent peace. You have a deep sincere aspiration to live quietly and joyously as the Mother's child. It will carry you safely through all the ups and downs of earthly days. Have faith in your destiny of inward light.
(5.11.1988)
Your letter brought excellent news. We are happy that the Ticker is pretty sound or makes a pretty sound and the period of the little cacophony has passed, proving the little caco to be phoney.
Your friend's second note has reached me. Yes, she is a fine rare person. To my mind a person is more than a mere individual. An individual tends to be locked in his own unity. A person is an individual flowering out - because he has also flowered inly beyond himself, reaching or at least touching the spontaneous sweetness and light of the soul - the soul which is never bound to its own oneness.
(24.10.1990)
I was simply delighted to see what was inside the packet. What love and care have gone into collecting and preserving all that I have written to you! Even the insignificant notes scribbled in haste have found a cherished place in the file. The file itself is of an outstanding quality. Nothing but the best for your friend. Precious indeed is your heart to me for such a "crimson-throbbing glow" it has at the slightest touch of affection from me. It is as if Amal could say: "Am-all to my hand-in-hand aspirant companion on the inward and upward Path."
Glancing through the contents of the file, I am amazed at
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the amount of my correspondence and at the variety of topics it deals with - or, rather, the various ways in which it approaches one sole Topic - better still, the one Soul-topic -the discovery of our true self which is a child of the Divine Mother, implicitly, intrinsically, inherently. Ever since I came here I have tried to find that self whose love for the Divine is spontaneous and unconditional. I don't remember whether 1 have quoted to you the letter I wrote to the Mother after some years in the Ashram. Here it is, along with the answer it got from our Gurus:
Pardon my writing to you without any specific reason; but 1 felt like telling you that you are my darling. In spite of my thousand and three imperfections, this one sense remains in me - that you are my Mother, that I am born from your heart. It is the only truth I seem to have realised in all these years. A very unfortunate thing, perhaps, that I have realised no other truth; but I deeply thank you that I have been enabled to feel this much at least.
Sri Aurobindo replied: "It is an excellent foundation for the other truths that are to come - for they all result from it."
The Mother added: "My blessings are always with you."
I am sure something in you will respond at once to the expression in that old letter; for I feel you to be unmistakably a psychic personality. There are several people whose psychic beings came out in relationship to the Mother - I have watched this happening time and again. But I have also known that these same people could be rude and crude'in their daily behaviour - some were even quite pestiferous to their neighbours. There was no persisting undercurrent of the psyche in their day-to-day life. It is the presence of this undercurrent in all one's doings that makes one a psychic personality. A psychic personality feels not only the Divine in oneself but also the Divine in others.
Apropos of your file of my letters, your "Treasure" as you have called it, I would like to cite three lines from Savitri
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(Centenary Edition) for you to fancy in what sense, if at all, you can be taken to have used this term:
The treasure was found of a supernal Day... (4:34)
A treasure of honey in the combs of God... (49:8)
A growing treasure in the mystic heart... (674:33)
The third lint- breathes of some sweet and luminous inferiority gradually unfolding, the second catches sight of a secret fullness of delight, the first conveys the thrill of entering a rapt vastness of God's glory. Of course, I am taking the lines more by themselves than in their actual contexts. All of them have a consummate rhythm running through words that are rich with spiritual significance. Each line, speaking of a wonderful wealth of experience or realisation, is in its own individual manner a poetic treasure.
(12.12.1988)
The dream, which you have recounted in your letter of 12.10.89, was quite prophetic. What I was showing you while taking you round was really there - my flat was in a bad state, needing repairs. And now repairing has started. It's been going on for the last four days, reducing the flat to even a worse state - temporarily. Things are being knocked down, things have been shifted, and after 8.30 a.m. I can't go to the back of the flat, or shall I commit the Indianism of saying the flat's "backside"? I well might, for the prohibited area contains conveniences for my daily relief. Only at 5.30 p.m., after returning from the Samadhi can I find relief possible with the pre-repairs ease and comfort. Till then it's best for my spiritual life to be true, in a most physical mode, to the last word in King Manu's apostrophe to an exalted personage in a poem of Sri Aurobindo's:
Rishi who trance-held on the mountains old
Art slumbering, void
Of sense or motion...
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You write: "I felt that you had an impression that I had something to do with the repairs." Well, although I had applied for repairs, nothing was being done. Only after your dream - almost immediately after - did the people appear with their tools and materials. On a subtle plane your realisation that my flat seriously needed a new look seems to have awakened the powers-that-be to take action.
Your "looking for a book" in my fiat is, of course, most appropriate. The first thing one notices on approaching my front room is two book-packed cupboards - one a huge double-winged structure given me by the Mother and the other a comparatively smaller piece left by an American woman who had visited the Ashram in the '50s. Quite like a miniature public library the room looks. And actually the fellow who comes every month to read my electric meter reported once to the authorities that my place was not a private residence but a public library! His impression was all the stronger for seeing me every time reading. So to my surprise my electric bill mounted up. I questioned the meter-reader and he said, "We have to charge this place more because this is a public library." I I had to take him round the flat, show him my bedroom and my dining room to convince him that I was residing here and very privately re-living the life of Robert Southey:
My days among the dead are passed;
Around me I behold,
Where'er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old.
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.
Yes, books have been a major part of my life - and as if there were not enough of them in the world I have been destined to increase their number. Perhaps by the time my 18 still unpublished books see the light of day I may have to my credit or discredit about 36 in all since already 18 or so have
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come out,1 And if by any chance I go on to the year 1998 which Sri Aurobindo clearly inscribed at the head of an early letter to me I may add to this tally before the fumbling being whom Sri Aurobindo wanted to be "The Clear Ray" ("Amal Kiran") and who has aspired, however vainly, to make true his master's vision -
A ray of the timeless Glory stooped awhile -
and to be
A ray revealing unseen Presences
feels that his time is up and, living in the sense of the "up"-ness, becomes
A ray returning to its parent Sun,
The parallel case you cite to the suggestion of my 1998 -the Mother telling you, apropos of your "difficulties of dreams on the vital plane", "You are not alone. There are hundreds like you. Try, try for one hundred years if necessary" - this parallel case makes me very happy, especially as after your prayer "Please bless me, Mother" she gave you her blessing and later looked intently into your eyes. All this seems to me to presage most graciously as well as forcefully a very long life for my bosom-friend. Both of us may have our life's length, but what about our life's depth? I believe it will be easier to have it if we have each other's enkindling company.
Now to your dream of September 28. The date is very likely to have been one of those nights when I was typing away till nearly 3 a.m., the hour at which you went to sleep again after a brief awaking. The "countryside" in which "we were moving about intimately" is rather apt,for my thoughts
1. Editor's Note: At the present moment (October 1992), 23 published and 22 unpublished.
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often fly to scenes of mountains and greenery and winding rivers,but your finding that the countryside's "path was uneven, broken at places" and that "there were pits and holes here and there" shows in a small symbolic form our general field of endeavour - as put by a Savitri-line -
In the green wonderful and perilous earth.
Your trying to take care of me even in your sleep points to the psychic profundity in which your relationship with me has birth. And I seem to be wanting to be thus taken care of because it is indeed fine to feel the helping hand of a warm friendship. Actually, as you found out, I could walk "with ease", needing no "Canadian canes". For, from a figuration of the earth's beauty and bale, we had passed into a domain beyond the body's hold. Properly speaking, I should say "the physical body", for there is an embodiment on all the planes, but the stuff is not physical. Even on the subtle-physical plane something of the earth's characteristics linger. There I may not be tottering, yet I would limp a little. Though no sticks might be necessary I would still have a halting gait. We must have been in a dimension which I would call the mental-psychic. All our inner and outer movements were charged with the soul's spontaneity of sweetness and light, but it was at play through an atmosphere of mind. The hint of this atmosphere comes through your telling me in your letter that you handed a dictionary to me because I wanted to look up a word. In the sheer psychic, I should think words have no raison d'etre - hearts mingle and know each other directly. In the mental-psychic, the mingling of hearts also takes place, but the joy is not complete without an exchange of lyric language and sometimes the mot juste, the felicitous expression, has to be sought out in a super-Chambers' colourful lexicon instead of the consciousness living, silently fulfilled, in
White chambers of dalliance with eternity.1
1. Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 28, p. 91.
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The little incident you recount of you offering me some snacks and I proposing that you should share them with me and you doing so - all this suggests the intimacy between us deriving from our inner recesses and not floating merely on the day-to-day surface. The fact which you mention, that you "took a piece of sweet" from me, indicates not only our intimacy but also the quality of the substance, as it were, of all interchanges in that inner plane: sweetness in addition to light.
'Your dream was indeed a many-aspected pointer to the basis of the happy communication, both written and thought-wafted, going on between us within the enfolding presence of the Divine Mother.
(21.10.1989)
Speech is the usual mode of communication and togetherness. But silence need not be self-enclosed and separative. When it is full of memories and anticipations it is no more than a formative pause between past utterance and future word, an active potentiality of communication, a warm preparation for being together again. Such has been my state when no letter passed from me to you. Last night the call suddenly came to write to you and the subject is one of the strangest that can be associated with me.
A number of nights back I had a dream in which I exclaimed: "Oh I am so unhappy, so unhappy!" It was a surprise and yet a tinge of recognition mixed with it. At once - in the dream itself - there was a quiet pressure on the inner being to divulge the reason for this cry from some depth of discontent. And the answer arose like a far phantom trying to take shape. When I looked into the distance I read the words: "There is some coldness between you and the Mother" - and behind this immediate disclosure I discerned a vast tract of the still unrealised dimensions of the Divine.
My aim through day after day has been for years a quiet joy emanating from the heart because of a constant contact
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with the Mother's presence within - a contact which brings about a radiant sense of her presence all around. A glory and a greatness and a grace wake in the inmost to meet the light, the power, the love that are, as the Mundaka Upanishad says of Brahman, "before us and behind us, to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere". But after the dream-discovery a few nights ago I see at the same time the need to repair the slight sinking of the Motherward flame and to widen the receptivity to her manifold mystery. The living touch with her is so important - so much the all-in-all - that even a slight slackening of it makes all life dust and ashes and wrings from the whole being a note of utter tragedy. What the slight slackening brought about along with this note is the accentuation of something I have felt for a long period. I remember writing to my sister many years ago and I have repeated it to friends intermittently that 1 have been waiting eagerly for a certain breakthrough. The fire of loving and self-giving aspiration has often burned intensely and yet failed to pierce some barrier that hangs between the luminous yet limited Here of God-intimacy and a multi-layered Beyond of plenary God-realisation.
When both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were physically with us this hunger for the Infinite was never so acutely felt -or rather it was not felt as an ardent ache. Their presence and their ambience gave, as it were, a constant promise of that Fullness. Perhaps it is more true to say that the Fullness itself appeared to come towards us on their earth-treading feet and with their earth-illumining faces. Even when Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body the Mother's incarnate divinity was an assurance that the entire infinite would be ours and that to look into her eyes and receive her smile and be made by them her own thrice-blessed children was to be brimmed with a bliss that seemed to encompass everything. The sense of what Nirodbaran in a poem has termed with a felicity of revelatory expression
Life that is deep and wonder-vast
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is still with us as a legacy of the Mother's light and love from her physical past amongst us. Indeed that physical past is still with us in a subtle enveloping form, but the unrealised dimensions of the Divine which were not acutely felt when to see and touch her was to feel that nothing was lacking have haunted me ever since her departure from her body. It is not as though the vivid conjuring up of her subtle reality were not sweet and sublime enough: what is wanting is the surety of receiving those dimensions as a straight gift from her some time or other. This may be due to my own shortcoming in receptivity. Others may not yearn as I do for the immense Unexplored. They may be content with having arrived through
an aureate opening in Time
Where stillness listening felt the unspoken word
And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change,
at
A spot for the Eternal's tread on earth.1
The dream of my secret extreme unhappiness has made me keenly aware of chasms within me that long to be appeased with more and more of the Mother's empyreans. Not that I disvalue the precious opening and widening my Gurus have made in me. I cannot be sufficiently grateful for the freedom and the joy and the release from self that they have given the thought-hemmed desire-ridden groper after spiritual silence and psychic purity that I was. But oh so happy, so happy indeed will I be if I can break into the endlessness of Sri Aurobindo's Truth, the boundlessness of the Mother's Beauty!
(3.7.1992)
I have your two letters - of 13 and 16 August. The former date is the Rakhi day and the beautiful golden chain you had sent in advance was put on my wrist. As I looked at it I had the
1. Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 28, p.
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feeling that this shining band was symbolic of a deeply delicate bond between us. I say "delicate" because there is not the slightest compulsion in it nor any gross element. I might even say it is airy-fairy, but in no vapid sense. The lack of heaviness is due to the source of its delicacy - the depth of being from which it derives its exquisite loveliness. Nothing short of the true soul in us forms the link between a fifty-seven-year old who is still a spontaneous child wrapped in heaven-touched dreams and one who is nearing his eighty-eighth year and yet has the joyousness and impetus of seeking endlessly the Perfect, the Ideal, the Eternal Beauty that never ages.
Yes, I am a seeker of the Supreme but am personally very far from attaining anywhere near Him. So your phrase in connection with your projected visit to Pondicherry in mid-October - "I will take prasad by your holy hand" - is rather puzzling, all the more because it implies on my part some proficiency in cooking. I think I once recounted to you my only feat of cookery. Let me refresh your memory by referring to this feat again. A bag of flour had come and my wife and her sister made chapartis. I said, "Why not give me a little flour?" They gave it and I made a chapatti on the table where I had been working on an article for Mother India. This table was a big round one and served many purposes. So it had an assortment of bottles or cans on it. I got the brilliant idea to add to my chapatti a drop from whatever stood there. So I put on it a drop each of ink, eau de cologne, machine oil and a cough mixture. My wife and her sister were simply aghast at my conception. When cooked, it was sure to be wonderful, something never created before, compared to which what they had prepared would be absolutely insipid. So if I give prasad of my own making, you will have to face it with a hero's heart and not only the heart of a devotee.
(22.8.92)
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