Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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You have written: "Am I right in thinking that given the defects of timidity, vanity, jealousy, shyness, possessiveness 1 am supposed to represent the exact opposite of these in my spiritual life? If it is so, I can draw some solace from the fact." I suppose by "solace" you mean not being in the dumps, overwhelmed by one's defects. It must never imply complacence, saying: "I have a great saintly future to be reached despite these shortcomings. Let me not mind them too much." What is required is the refusal to be upset by them. Look at them steadily, without moaning and groaning -rather seeing through their thick hides the future glory which exemplifies the conquest of them instead of feeling them to be the devil's indelible hallmark (hellmark). The devil would like you to regard them as a dark terminus: the Divine reveals them to be nothing more than a tunnel and across them the Divine shows courage and judgment and poise and generosity waiting to be realised in forms that are superlative by being the absolute reverse of these deficiencies. How are the superlative forms to be reached? The first thing to do is to step back for a moment when the troublesome movements occur so that their headlong course is broken. Then offer them to the Mother, while exercising some control over them. It is because of the offering act that through the tunnel the distant splendours make their presences felt. For you are appealing to the ultimate creative and transformative power to bring forth the truths that have got misshaped in the jumble and tumble of ordinary life.

You have raised the question of the ego and what you call the ego's tangled weft. The ego-nature is so clever that one can be fooled into an illusion of unselfishness while remaining subtly in that nature. Thus the urge to help people may have behind it the desire to appear good in their eyes or else a sense of one's special capacity to benefit them. Not that the urge is always to be avoided, but a deep quiet self-conse-

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oration is to go along with it and the prayer to be the Divine's instrument. Here my favourite formula - "Remember and Offer" - is very appropriate. So too is my emphasis on Equanimity. Neither blame nor praise should bring either down-heartedness or euphoria. Sensitiveness is another form of the ego's activity. It will often create an impression that people are inconsiderate when really they are inattentive. Again, one's constant criticism of people would be a sign of the egoistic feeling that one is superior to them. The Mother never supported passing judgment on people's actions or motives, though a clear calm perception of what goes on was never discouraged: what was discouraged was getting excited over the faults of others. We must try to get into the minds of people before putting them into an unfavourable category. The best thing is to have no reaction. When it is pointed out to you how mean towards you somebody has been, you should feel nothing. If any protective step needs to be taken, take it without the least upset or resentment. Your equipoise should remain unbroken. Absence of emotional reaction does not necessarily imply inertia or inefficiency in you. Emotion is not the sole motive-power. Man's characteristic in general is the intelligent will. And the intelligent will makes a dispassionate inquiry before taking whatever step may be required. Sri Aurobindo puts a stress on this part of our psychology when he wants us to practise "equality" and avoid the inner disturbance that stems from "desire". He says that people think we shall be inert if desire is lacking. This, to him, is a mistake; for desire is not the sole source of dynamism: man is a mental being and his typical activity is the buddhi, the intelligent will. Buddhi looks around, is far-visioned, tries to be impersonal, just and fair. Of course, beyond the buddhi is the immanent Divine, the ideal guide to be consulted and followed. But the intelligent will is one of the two passages towards that guide: the other passage is the devotional heart. Combined, they best carry you past the ego.

You have asked me whether you should consciously try to feel "vast", like the sky with its immense multitude of stars

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and its space beyond space without end. Certainly the practice of imaginatively widening yourself thins the sense of ego - if at the same time you can feel how infinitesimal you are at the imagined feet of the Divine. Or else your wideness itself should be pictured as offered to those feet. Perhaps the immediate need is to let your imagination break the usual sense we have of being confined within our skull, our rib-box, our pelvic cavity. Think that you stretch beyond your body and hold it in a subtle spreadout of consciousness rather than that you function consciously within its boundaries. Naturally, then, the all-too-personal reactions and responses will diminish. The idea that your mental capacity is poor will also fade away, for your mind will lose its identification with your brain and its supposed weakness and lumpishness. I say "supposed", because I have never had the impression that you are intellectually a minus quantity. You have a penetrative mind with a profusion of ideas and an expressive ability beyond the common. What seems lacking at times is a driving power, a vital self-confidence. Give up the feeling that others are better equipped than you and that you can't cope with the call to be a good M.D. in pediatrics. Besides, you have invoked the Mother's Grace and thus opened yourself to potentialities beyond your own: you are in contact with reservoirs of ultra-human forces and can tap them much more than those who are not doing constant sadhana.

You don't appear to realise this edge you have over the general run of your fellows: you only wonder why people "more sattwic, balanced, intelligent and dynamic" than you have not been chosen for Yoga. Here is a question we can never answer. The Divine does not act haphazardly, but our reason can't fathom His ways in this matter as in so many others. It is best to rest deeply grateful and set yourself in quiet rhythm with the movements of the Grace. It is also unwise to ask yourself anxiously what would happen if what you take as another stroke of God-given good luck for you gets withdrawn: namely, my popping off suddenly one day as Dyuman did recently. In the September Mother India (p. 613)

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you must have seen how I inwardly stand vis-a-vis the possibility of my exit from the earth-scene: free from attachment yet never cut off from affectionate and helpful sympathy with those who hold me dear. Nor does the detachment involve any death-wish. I am glad to live trying to be Sri Aurobindo's disciple and the Mother's child and the odds don't seem to be against my going on for an appreciable length of time." In any case you should allow no anxiety to enter your mind. One who has a background of the "fear-complex" must avoid any greying of his look ahead. Continue happily and confidently to fare forward.

(15.9.1992)

In the life here one rarely has the sense of wasting one's time. Even if one does practically nothing, there is the feeling that something momentous is happening. For there is no end to the inner work which goes on - the Mother's refining, deepening and widening of one's consciousness. In a transfigured version I can repeat Mark Twain's famous joke: "O I love work, I can sit for hours watching it being done!"

Of course the super-Twainian state can be practised anywhere - its secret name is "meditation" - but here the atmosphere is conducive to it in the most natural way. One does not have to strain for spirituality: spirituality comes to one on its own. The only place where something of this Grace I have found is the hill-station of Mather an in Bombay's vicinity. My grandmother had a cottage there, almost on the verge of a precipice, and day in day out I had before me the spectacle of Matheran's sister hill - Purbal - with the valley stretching for miles and miles beyond with little villages dotting it and rivulets crossing it. At night, at the farthest end, I could see the lights of Bombay's suburb Punvale twinkling. At Matheran a vastness seemed to invade our being whether we asked for it or not. In Pondicherry there is the possibility of an inner Matheran all the time in a superlative degree.

It has been of great personal interest to me that the view of

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Purbal presented a long straight expanse of basalt rock terminating in a dip from which rose two companion peaks. had the sense of an endless infinite presence projecting for our sake a pair of communicative summits which we know as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

What I have written above is of life here at its best and as it should be. There are difficulties and dry spells, but with a little inner opening, my picture tends to be realised.

(3.10.1992)

My mention of some messages I feel I have received from the Mother should supply concrete ground for your compliment to me: "One thing 1 admire about you is that nowhere have you relied on messages received by X, Y or Z from Mother and Sri Aurobindo regarding treatment, etc. I wonder how far one can rely on such messages." Here is not a very simple situation. There have been cases where misguiding messages have been heard by people. I have come across some rather fantastic instances. A visiting sadhak who was very fond of eating ghee and who bore a striking resemblance on a slightly . fat scale to H.G. Wells and whom I had nicknamed H. Ghee Wells was found missing one evening at the Mother's Soup Distribution. His friends were worried and after the Distribution they went to the house where he was staying. On entering it they heard faint cries for help from him. After looking up and down they realised that H. Ghee Wells's voice was coming (appropriately I may say) from a well in the compound! With some difficulty they managed to haul him up. On asking him why he had jumped into the well, they got the answer: "I heard Sri Aurobindo telling me to do so, and I instantly obeyed." Although Sri Aurobindo was surely aware of the saying, "Truth is to be found at the bottom of a well", I can't believe he could have played such a joke on my friend.

A still more queer case is of another sadhak in the early days of Sri Aurobindo's life in Pondicherry. He used to see a black Sri Aurobindo in his visions and get commands from

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him. When he reported them to the physically visible and not occultly visioned Sri Aurobindo, he was clearly told that he was being misguided. But he was so lured by the black Sri Aurobindo that he refused to believe what his not-so-black master told him. His strange conclusion was that the Master was jealous of the disciple because the latter was receiving direct messages from his Master and out of jealousy Sri Aurobindo was forbidding him to have extraordinary inner experiences of Sri Aurobindo!

Apart from such aberrancies, it is not always easy to decide whether to depend or not on one's messages, leave aside other people's messages. But with a bit of sincerity and humility one can distinguish between genuine stuff and stuff which is simply wishful. As for other people's voices bearing on one's problems, there could be occasions when something meaningful may come through, especially if somebody is genuinely concerned about one or about some acute situation of one's life. By and large, one should prefer to go by the guide in one's heart. When no guidance is found from there, one may seek the advice of whoever one trusts the most.

What Nirod meant in his article by referring to the occult significance of physical problems affecting the older sadhaks - problems like my fall and femur-fracture and his own operation for an enlarged prostate - I have no precise idea .(I may guess that the hostile forces are eager to get rid of the sadhaks who had a direct prolonged contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and so carry some of their light more substantially into the present period than those who did not enjoy such Grace. These forces perhaps believe that the removal of the old-timers would affect the Ashram's future. But they overlook the fact that several of those who were children in the past had significant contact with our Gurus and carry the aroma of the Divine Presence into their adult life today. After their generation has passed, what would happen? I would say that the Gurus have charged the Ashram's atmosphere in such a way that they subsist subtly amongst us - especially with their double Samadhi serving as an occult radiating

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centre. I have also the conviction that even beyond the Ashram there is a strong magnetic Aurobindonian milieu. After all, the Supramental Manifestation of February 29, 1956 is a universal phenomenon and is now ineradicable part of the earth's future evolution. We need have no fundamental fear of our Gurus' work fizzling out under any circumstances.

The question of anybody getting physically supramen-talised in our own time is a different matter. In one of the recent issues of Mother India I have amassed sufficient pronouncements of Sri Aurobindo to show that such an extreme change cannot take place in the absence of his physical presence or the Mother's, in our midst. The revolutionary transformation of individuals once hoped-for in our own day is now out of the question, but bodily supramen-talisation is assured in general for the race in the course of its evolution through the coming centuries.

The experience I record on p. 613 of the September Mother India and which you admire and envy so much is a settled affair. Although it seemed to come suddenly I am sure it was prepared in a subtle manner over a space of time. The habit of as much equanimity as possible and of continual "remember and offer" laid the ground for the wonderful freedom it brought in the individual life-sense. Mind you, there is no death-wish associated with it nor is there a docile contentment with things as they are. It may have something to do with the "hiatus" in my life which I declared the moment I had the fall on October 15, 1991. It snapped some inner attachment but it has not curbed the old adventurous spirit.

I am extremely sorry to read your list of bodily troubles. The sleeplessness on top of everything must indeed have been awful. Perhaps the nausea came as a side-effect of the sleeping pills not taking effect. We don't know why all these troubles occur. I am glad you pray to Sri Aurobindo, irrespective of whether your troubles lessen or not. To keep in touch with his divine glory is its own reward. We may also remember what the Mother has recorded on his Samadhi - the suffering he underwent for the world's sake. He has himself

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written to Dilip that it was only divine love that made him go on and on working for the world without weeping and lamenting - so great was the suffering because of his struggle with what he called the Abyss. Without the suffering being less real, it is the inner consciousness that keeps one's life sweet. And we have to find the Aurobindonian glory somewhere in us and carry on as best we can.

I am glad your Eco-cardiogram finds your heart in good condition. But as it also shows a past silent attack you can't be quite nonchalant about the ticker.

You are asking me how I "cope up" with my infirmities. Well, first of all 1 simply "cope" without the "up". "Coping up" is an Indianism we must avoid. Mention of Indianism reminds me that at the end of the para before the last you must have raised your eyebrows on reading my "as best we can". You may have muttered: "The old fogey is slipping up. He has forgotten the necessary 'as' after 'best'." The "old fogey" is not yet too "foggy". That "as" would have been an Indianism. If I had written "as well" instead of "as best", an "as" would certainly have been necessary if Nesfield was not to get shocked. But with "as best" nothing more is called for. It is equal to "in the best way". Another Indianism universally prevalent is to take "vouchsafe" as equal to "vouch". Actually, it means "condescend to give or to do". Finally, I have heard even Oxford-educated Indians say: "May I take your leave now?" It is the person about to go who is leaving. He can take his leave and not that of the person who is sitting at home. I believe the mind here mixes up two locutions: "May I have your leave for me to leave?" or else it means "May I take leave of you?" Let me end with a final shot. Everyone here says, "I'll go to your house." If the owner of the house is expected to be elsewhere than at his own place, you can "go" there, but if he will be at home you can only "come" to him, to receive his "welcome".

Now to my infirmities. My existence now is in either wheelchair or bed. I practise a bit of walking with the help of a "walker" (unfortunately not "Johnny Walker") but it is a

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caricature, what with my right leg's lower half at a slight angle to its upper and my right shoe's sole two inches thicker than my left one's. An operation is said to give hope of righting the right leg's wrongness so that no disparity with the left leg may be left. Don't feel anxious about me. I am well taken care of and I both eat and sleep normally. And at the Samadhi I shall appeal to our Lord and the Divine Mother to help my deeply cherished friend.

(23.10.1992)

As regards a photo of you which I have requested, it is all right if you have shunned being snapped for several years lest a picture should show the fulfilment of the poet's prophecy:

Beauty is a flower

Which wrinkles will devour.

But I am sure that a beauty such as you would have, a beauty which is not skin-deep, cannot be destroyed. Can anything touch eyes that have dreamed of Arch-images, a nose waiting to catch a whiff of some lost Eden, a mouth about which one can say.

The name of God, no more a name,

Sat, a heaven-taste, upon my lip?

The beauty which has come in a face from loving St. Augustine's Pulchritudo antiqua sed semper nova - "Beauty of ancient days .yet ever new" - cannot be eaten up by any wrinkles.

From where I am sitting - at my typing table - I look up every now and again at a window from which a prospect of the outside world enters my room. Through the well-spaced bars and the thin netting I see a tree with slim branches and a spread of green-gold leaves dancing gently in the breeze and letting small spangles of sunlight fall upon my table. Beyond its slender swaying is the far-away sky, soft blue crossed by little

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clouds. A great peace seems to send out its message to me across a translucent distance, carried at the last stage as if by hundreds of tiny leaf-hands softly and intimately to my little human self dreaming of a divine destiny, Remembrances of all my dear friends hover in this reverie and just now you are very much in the forefront.

(2.11.1992)

The memory of the warm sweetness of you and your brother during your stay here is still fresh and will remain vibrant always. Now comes a massive reminder of the deep friendship in the form of a birthday present flown by courier service - a swift flight bearing a recorder of irresistibly flying Time: a beautiful wall-clock! It is something realty necessary in my room. My chums have been thinking of getting one for me for long and they no less than myself are very glad to see it hung up in front of me.

There cannot be a finer calling of my attention to the truth that the relentless run of Time is meant to give us an opportunity to make the most of our lives. Its running without end in contrast to the end awaiting our careers on earth should make us aware not only of the need to hurry up to build a worthwhile structure of our thoughts, feelings, desires, energies but also of the need to charge this structure with the sense of something beyond its brevity. The very fact of Time's endlessness from past through present to future should awake in us the consciousness of an everlasting phenomenon pulsing across the brevity of our existence. We have a natural instinct to fight against this brevity: we seek to perpetuate ourselves through our children, hoping to win thus an indirect immortality. But such an instinct should point to something hidden within us which we commonly miss, a secret Reality waiting to be found as our deepest self. The Rigveda named it "Agni", hymning it as "the immortal in the mortal", a being of fire leaping always upward, towards some eternal Vast, an entity of light revealing our own

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mysterious continuity from a far past to a remote future and disclosing in us a gradually unfolding godhead. The Rishis also designated Agni as jatavedas, "knower of births". By "births" they indicated two things: (1) a series of life after life upon earth with a "soul", a divine spark, growing through them wider and brighter by means of various experiences undergone by assuming diverse personalities across the ages; (2) a process of realising our existence on plane after plane beyond the earth, a higher and still higher self of our own in superhuman regions culminating in the world of a supreme "Surya", a divine Sun of Knowledge and Bliss where all things are unified and harmonised.

See what your big and beautiful clock has driven home to my heart and evoked from my mind! It has been a good stimulus. Thank you for your timely gift.

(11.11.1992)

You have written with sincerity of your puzzlement and pain. 1 have given due consideration to the problem you have posed. An Englishwoman who comes from the Quaker group of Christians and is now residing in Pondicherry with a dear mutual friend in relation with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has written for me what strikes me as the best answer possible to your query.

Before 1 quote her I may point out that in the Hindu scriptures food like meat is not labelled as "tamasic", as you say, but classed as "rajasic". Even certain vegetarian items are so classed: e.g. onions.

Now to the central topic of your letter: "The Mother whom we see as the Mother of the universe - how could she give permission to the late Bhai Dyuman to prepare chicken soup on the doctor's advice? Was that poor animal not a child of hers?" I may add that in the article Dyumanbhai is quoted as saying that he himself tasted the soup before giving it to the Mother - as was his custom for the sake of the Mother's safety.

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My English friend has written:

"There are four factors/participants in this situation for the puzzled soul of your correspondent:

(1)The Mother

(2)The chicken

(3) Dyuman

(4) The correspondent himself,

and the law of respect for life as expressed in Vegetarianism.

(1) and (2): The Mother was not ignoring or flouting the law, but had moved through and beyond that law to a higher law. As it is clear that she was in tune and contact with all living things, it is probable that she was in contact and harmony with the world and spirit of chickens and they were agreeable to nourishing her body.

(3) Dyuman: In tasting the chicken soup, as in the other things he experienced as recounted in the article (brandy, etc.) he was also obeying a higher law - the law of total love and self-surrender.

(4) The correspondent himself: There is no suggestion that he should give up vegetarianism. Vegetarianism may well be contributing to his sadhana if it leads him towards reverence for and harmony with all created things and so to greater realisation of the Divine."

(23.11.1992)

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