8
I am deeply touched by the agony of your whole being at the murder of one who was markedly a devotee of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. The bewildered cry that has arisen from your heart and mind repeats a question that has been flung at the heavens century after century - a question all the more acute because we have had a living sense of the light and love with which the Divine has met us again and again.
I have been asked by many from Orissa: "Why has the Mother's Grace not saved this Oriya child of hers? Why was he not protected by her from those dacoits?" No perfect answer has ever been given to such perplexities. So you can't expect me to outshine the great doctors of theology. 1 can only put down some thoughts that do not seem to be skimmed from the mere surface consciousness.
First of all, service of the Mother's cause has not to be done with the hope that one will be always immune to what a poet has called "crass casualty" - the uncertain and apparently unheeding process of events in the natural world where either a hidden determinism or else utter chance could be at play. We must carry out our work without expectation of rewards. To serve the Divine is a joy sufficient in itself if the soul is behind the service. Even otherwise one can be happy through the action of the idealistic mind to devote oneself to a great cause. Of course, it is hardly unnatural to expect the Divine's Grace again and again during the execution of the Divine's work, and indeed its intervention is seen quite often, but one cannot count on one's safety and security being assured just because of one's devotion to the Divine. In a deep sense the Divine's true servitor always gets the Divine's Grace, but it is not possible to sit in judgment on the mode in which this Grace comes. It may come in a most paradoxical form for the sake of some future good - even good in a future birth! Even death by murder may prove to be such a form.
There is the further fact that we live in a world of Ignorance and none of us is cut off from the general drift of world-
Page 84
happenings. There is a collective Karma no less than an individual Karma. As a part of a common humanity, along with being a part of the Divine's followers, we have to be ready for failures and mishaps along with successes and windfalls. The universe we live in is too complex for cut-and-dried solutions of the problems it poses to each individual. What we have to do is to keep the firm faith that the Divine's servitor will never be without the Divine's Grace, but we must not prejudge how this Grace will show itself. Until the Supramental Force which Sri Aurobindo has invoked is in full sway, there is bound to be the play of untoward possibilities getting realised. However, our confidence should remain intact that whatever the look of things the Divine Mother will never fail to use it for the benefit of her devotee-children.
At the same time we must bear in mind her statement that her blessings are basically for the soul's good, the soul's progress through prosperity or adversity. They are not for worldly success as such, though success in the world's affairs is never ruled out where it serves the soul's good or is not detrimental to it.
Ultimately, either we accept the Divine to be by very definition above the human intellect's power to understand the ways of Supernature and yet hold them to be more truly good than this intellect can conceive - or else we turn away from the Divine and take the world's course to be a witless dance, haphazardly destructive or constructive, of Democri-tus's or Rutherford's atoms. But how can we adopt the negative attitude, we who have looked at Sri Aurobindo's eyes of All-Knowledge and upon the Mother's smile of All-Love?
I'll close with some lines from Savitri:
Whatever the appearances we must bear,
Whatever our strong His and present fate,
When nothing we can see but drift and bale,
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.1
(22.1.1993)
1. SABCL, Vol. 28, p. 59.
Page 85
It is only last evening that I heard of the accident. I felt extremely concerned. Has any diagnosis been made, enlightening us about the cause of the sudden black-out? A blackout means the blotting of the ordinary outward-looking consciousness. Such a blotting is not undesirable in itself, but there have to be the proper time and place. Besides, what should bring it about is not a sudden blackness but a surprising whiteness as in Aswapati's experiences: .
Caught by a voiceless white epiphany...
He neared the still consciousness sustaining all -
or
A skyward being nourishing its roots
On sustenance from occult spiritual founts
Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.
Here are glimpses of an ascent, a rising, but Sri Aurobindo also visions an advantageous downward movement. He tells us that our "dim being" must
Look up to God and round at the universe.
And learn by failure and progress by fall.
There is also his line about "the supreme Diplomat":
He makes our fall a means for a greater rise.
Finally, we get the picture of an extreme possibility:
A god come down and greater by the fall.
Of course, all these are not physical tumbles, but a physical tumble due to a black-out can be symbolic of a plunge of the Yoga-power into the subconscious, preliminary to a penetration of the utter abysm of the Inconscient to realise the state of existence at the very beginning of things, the buried God-state spoken of at the start of the Rigveda's Hymn of Creation and at the end of Sri Aurobindo's poem "Who":
Page 86
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.
My latest news about you is that your injuries - particularly those on the face - are fast healing. I am very happy to hear this.
(20.12.1992)
You have asked me to write out for you what I told you briefly this evening after returning from the Ashram. I shall try to set it down in as much detail as I can.
I was sitting quietly facing the joint Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Suddenly a voice within me addressed it: "All of me belongs to you." The voice seemed to pervade the whole being and express every part of me. But was every part of me really speaking? I did not feel sure because 1 knew that much of me remained which could not be considered to have made a total surrender.
When I concentrated on my condition I discovered that the voice had a centre from which it radiated. The centre was the inmost heart. The true soul, the psychic being, was spontaneously making that statement. It was its natural joyous cry. The rest of the being was evidently fully conscious of its soul. To put it otherwise: the soul was completely aware of being a child of the Divine and its awareness flowed out and flooded every corner of the composite creature that I was. But every corner was essentially a medium for the soul's self-giving gesture, the soul's self-given existence. Something of every corner vibrated in unison while serving as a channel. But it was not saying, on its own, as an inherent law of itself, the simple yet wonderful words with which it was filled.
I felt somewhat concerned that this should be so - but I soon realised that concern was out of place: I should just sit calmly without any thought and feel blessed with the soul's awakening and allow its sweetness to keep streaming forth up and down and on all sides of the bodily life.
Page 87
If such a state could go on at all hours in an utter intensity of what I can only call a serene strength of love, at once soft and irresistible, the future would indeed be an unperishing thousand-petalled "Rose of God."
(2.1.1993)
Your short note of yesterday about a dream in which we made contact has sent me looking for the envelope in which I had preserved the letters from you I had been answering before my fracturing fall on October 15, 1991. 1 find that I stopped short of your dream of 8.5.91.
This dream is indeed queer. Not that my appearing again when you had prayed for a meeting with Nolini has anything strange about it: now he and I seem to have made a composite personality in your consciousness and I wouldn't be surprised if on your calling for me he showed himself. What is odd is your riding a bicycle stark naked in search of the house in which I was staying - a house specifically understood to be not my present residence but quite another place. This place, when pointed out to you, "was a huge structure but built of clay with a thatched roof". The time was evening when 1 usually return from my visit to the Samadhi. You were quite alert that you might meet me on the way and you did not bother at all about your lack of clothes. At long last you decided to go back home and put on some clothes. But again you lost your way. Then suddenly you woke up from the dream. Your concluding words are: "I felt quite care-free and there was no heaviness in my mind and heart."
.
Your being in your birthday-suit suggests that in all your dealings with me you cast off every outer barrier and come in your "naked truth". There is no attempt to put on any appearances: there is a soul-to-soul meeting. The bicycle symbolises a swift yet simple mode of sadhana-locomotion and at the same time an eager as well as unassuming movement of the sadhak in you towards me. The building which is taken to be my residence has two striking aspects.
Page 88
One is its imposing hugeness and the other the primitiveness shown by its clay-substance and its thatched roof. I can read its symbolism only by saying that it represents what Sri Aurobindo has made out of the poor stuff that I am: a figure of some literary greatness expressive of the spiritual heights and breadths that are Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's, a greatness born of their Grace but not covering up the fact that this figure has still feet of clay and a head not yet radically changed from its common all-too-human nature. Within this variously composite structure is, of course, the soul that has chosen to be a child of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, a basic primal entity away from all that greatness no less than away from all that weakness and infirmity. It is the entity which is in close touch with you, and I am sure that if you had found me in the strange structure you would have seen Amal in his birthday-suit matching your own. And it is because these two birthday-suit-wallahs are basically dealing with each other that you woke up without any care, a mind and heart free of
the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.
Your letter of 29.5.91 is both practical and poetic or rather poetically practical. It says:
"Does any Ashramite suffer from insomnia? Then I have a prescription - let him sing in chorus with Savitri's Satyavan:
The moonbeam's silver ecstasy at night
Kissed my dim lids to sleep....
Let him also repeat in his inmost heart that Mantra from the same poem:
He is silence watching in the stars at night.
Your apt quotations put me in mind of a snatch from Wordsworth which could also serve to transport one to an
Page 89
inner state which would be at once slumber and spiritual upliftment:
The silence that is in the starry sky.
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
A double mystery is evoked here - at the same time far above and near at hand below. Not only are the two locations linked by the in-drawing words "silence" and "sleep". What is below is also affined to what is above by the image of upward rising earth: "hills". But the double mystery remains unresolved, unidentified. To whom does the twofold state belong? The first mode of it -
The silence that is in the starry sky -
gets a revelatory answer in Sri Aurobindo's suggestion of a supreme Being in the nocturnal darkness with the line:
Immediately we are led to intuit that the entrancing Anon here of Wordsworth is the same "Presence" who is elsewhere said by him to be "interfused" with all things and
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
Your last letter - 8.9.91 - of the old bunch ends with the words: "I am going to finish 'Savitri'." Well, can we ever do such a thing? There are various senses in which Savitri can never be finished. My mind harks back to Sri Aurobindo's letter to Nirodbaran (29.3.36): "Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative." Before this statement we read: "I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level,
Page 90
each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover 1 was particular - if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint." I am sure that if Sri Aurobindo had not left his body on December 5, 1950, he would have gone on revising his epic or at least adding to it. Both procedures would have been followed in regard to the part with which you will be finishing your reading of Savitri - namely, "Epilogue: The Return to Earth." A good portion of it comes from an early draft. And a few things in it pose problems which I would like to set before you.
But first let me dwell a little on the fact that we are driven by the very nature of Savitri to read it again and again, never getting finished with it. Sri Aurobindo sought to make it a creation of the highest plane of inspiration available to man: what he termed the Overmind, home of the poetry that embodies a seeing and a hearing which, whatever be the subject, reveals in all images and rhythms subtly or openly a sense of the Infinite, the Eternal, the Divine. To share in this sense the reader has to develop his consciousness. The practice of Yoga is, of course, the most direct means, but it is also a rather difficult process. We Aurobindonians have to essay the difficulties. Still, it is not necessary to complete our Yogic careers before we can take advantage of a literary Yogic masterpiece like Savitri. Savitri offers the chance for a course of what I may call "aesthetic Yoga". If we hush the ordinary noises of our brains, imagine that we have no top to our heads but are open to a vastness above them, and then read the epic audibly so as to allow its sound to aid what our sight takes in from the printed page, then we shall be on the way to doing "aesthetic Yoga". The spiritual visions and vibrations caught by Sri Aurobindo in his pentameters which seek to bring
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge
or convey
Page 91
A wisdom-cry from rapt transcendences
refine, deepen, widen our beings more and more with each new reading of
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face.
Now to the Epilogue's problems. A dictated passage - a speech of Savitri to Satyavan - has the verses:
Look round thee and behold, glad and unchanged
Our home, this forest, with its thousand cries
And the whisper of the wind among the leaves
And, through rifts in emerald scene, the evening sky,
God's canopy of blue sheltering our lives.... (pp. 717-18)
It is possible that what has been taken as a noun - "scene" - is the past participle "seen" mis-heard during the dictation. Then the sense would be: "the evening sky seen through rifts in emerald." The noun "emerald" would stand for "greenness" (here the "leaves" which form a network with "rifts" in it). Interestingly, Sri Aurobindo has such a usage elsewhere in Savitri. On p. 390 he speaks of the various moods in which "Earth" shows herself. One of them is her woodland aspect -
The shaggy emerald of her centaur mane -
followed by her aspect of sky:
The gold and sapphire of her warmth and blaze.
The poem has also another instance of "emerald" as a noun in a context of woods and grasses. Satyavan cries to Savitri on their first meeting:
Come nearer to me from thy car of light
On this green sward disdaining not our soil.
Page 92
For here are secret spaces made for thee
Whose caves of emerald long to screen thy form...
Led by my hushed desire into my woods
Let the dim rustling arches over thee lean... (p. 408)
The likelihood of "seen" rather than "scene" seems enhanced by some lines at the very start of the Epilogue where the word "Peering" suggests an equivalent of the former reading:
Peering through an emerald lattice-window of leaves
In indolent skies reclined, the thinning day
Turned to its slow fall into evening's peace, (p. 715)
But, admittedly, here the adjectival "emerald" lends some credence to the alternative reading.
A little before the "scene/seen" passage we have another bit of ambivalence. Look at the end of this passage, spoken by Satyavan:
"Whence hast thou brought me captive back,
love-chained,...
For surely I have travelled in strange worlds
By thee companioned, a pursuing spirit,
Together we have disdained the gates of night;
I have turned away from the celestial's joy
And heaven's insufficient without thee."
As these lines too were dictated, it is, in the first place, doubtful whether the apostrophe in "celestial's" is properly put. Shouldn't it be after the s, thus: "celestials' joy"? The change would be easily granted, but a real crux comes with the next apostrophe - in "heaven's". With the apostrophe retained, we have two possible readings. One would take "joy" as understood after the word, giving us the meaning: "I have turned away from the celestials' joy and heaven's joy (which is/are) insufficient without thee." But this seems rather forced and far-fetched. The alternative reading would
Page 93
make "heaven's" a contraction for "heaven is". This would make the expression extremely romantic. One would hesitate to see anything possibly replacing it. But two points face the romantic interpretation. The entire passage before the last line has the present perfect tense: "Whence hast thou brought me" - "I have travelled" - "We have disdained" - "I have turned away". Grammatically, the present tense is not out of accord with it. But there is in our context a sense of completed action in the present perfect, so that the pure present after it is a bit of an intrusion. Add to this small "jerk", as it were, in the situation the rather odd "And". At the beginning of the line it is surely loose and inconsequential. As a summing up of Satyavan's mind and heart after his turning away from "the celestials' joy" we would expect "For". What may seem romantically felicitous may not be dramatically so. To endow the line with dramatic relevance we would have to drop the apostrophe altogether and make the line a continuation of what has gone before, thus:
And heavens insufficient without thee.
Then there is a turning away by Satyavan from all celestials' joy and all paradisal states which are insufficient without Savitri. Essentially, this does not negate the romantic touch but, instead of letting it stand forth, it weaves it as a natural element into the general trend of the discourse. That way the mind has more satisfaction because of a sense of consistency, but to the heart there is a loss and the sheer poetic thrill of love gets subdued.
On p. 719 comes a challenge in dictation which most readers of Savitri would try to avoid. We have the lines, addressed by Savitri to Satyavan:
"Heaven's touch fulfils but cancels not our earth:
Our bodies need each other in the same last;
Still in our breasts repeat heavenly secret rhythm
Our human heart-beats passionately close."
Page 94
The "last" has no meaning in this context. The only possible correction is "lust". The general support is in the next two lines which, by the way, are to be construed with an eye to the plural verb "repeat": "Still our human heart-beats passionately close repeat in our breasts heavenly secret rhythm." But how shall we reconcile ourselves to that word which occurs fifteen times before in Savitri and everywhere with a vicious meaning? I believe we have to remember what Sri Aurobindo replied to Dilip Kumar Roy when the latter asked how Rama couid be an Avatar when Valmiki attributes kama (lust) to him. Sri Aurobindo pointed out that an Avatar need not come as a Yogi. Rama was an exemplar of the enlightened ethical mind and he functioned as an ideal son, an ideal brother, an ideal husband, an ideal warrior and finally an ideal king. As an ideal husband he must necessarily have kama, for no sexual relationship between him and his wife would be possible without it. Just because in their relevant contexts the word "lust" occurring fifteen times earlier had evil associations, it is not inevitable that the identical word in relation to Savitri and Satyavan should have the same bearing. They being physical wife and husband with passionately close human heart-beats would naturally experience lust but with new associations proper to the wonderful woman and the marvellous man that they were.
Now I come to a challenge in verbal construction on p. 722. Satyavan's parents have arrived with a royal retinue in search of the missing son and daughter-in-law. They rush first to the former:
And the swift parents hurrying to their child, -
Their cause of life now who had given him breath, -
Possessed him with their arms....
How would you explicate the second line? What does the relative pronoun "who" refer to? Here is a Latinised construction. "Their"="Of them". The relative pronoun "who" goes with the understood "them". And the sense is, in
Page 95
reference to Satyavan, that the thought of him as dead had drained life out of his mother and father but the discovery of him as not dead has saved them from their death-like condition. And the complicated line - "He is now the cause of the life of them who once gave him life's breath."
One more question and I am done. Before the whole party wend their way home from the forest, one who seemed a priest and sage wants to draw from Savitri, for the good of the world's future, some guide-lines won by her from her wonderful experiences. She, longing to mother all souls by uniting their life with her own, replies:
"Awakened to the meaning of my heart,
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change
Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage."
What does the past participle "Awakened" go with? Who has had the awakening? Surely the "I" of the last line and surely the truth known or sought is couched in the second line. So I am inclined to reduce the statement thus to prose order: "All the truth that I, awakened to the meaning of my heart, know or seek, O sage, is that to feel love and oneness is to live and this (is) the magic of our golden change."
Perhaps I should terminate my letter by telling you that you have come to the termination of Savitri in the Centenary Edition by having read 23,803 lines.
(30.9.1992)
Page 96
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.