Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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I am always very pleased to read of your meditative experience: "At will 1 am able to step back and offer myself to the Mother and consequently I feel a kind of presence around my head." You also write apropos of your Physics examination: "This time while taking the test I feel as if all this is happening outside me." In tune with these words are the later ones: "I seem to be always a bit lost. All the activities appear to be happening outside me. I don't feel interested in anything; everywhere around I find things so obstinate, rigid. The sole solace I get is to watch the gentle sway of tall trees in the breeze, to watch the movements of small leaves as if giggling with joy, to sit in my room alone with the lights off and listen to the Mother's music, and dream..."

The presence around your head is the two hands of Sri Aurobindo on either side of it, blessing you in response to your stepping back at will and offering yourself to the Mother. Sri Aurobindo has blessed me like that. It was a way of his when he saw that one had moved close to the Mother in one's heart.

You have also passed beyond your outer self: hence the feeling that everything is happening outside yourself. There is a detachment from the mundane routine, and there is a lack of interest in common affairs and a pull only towards Nature's beauty and the beauty of the new world the Mother is striving to manifest - a new world whose rhythm of being is caught in the mystic depth and magic movement of her music. A little more inward development and you will cross from the stance of non-interestedness to the attitude of disinterestedness. In that stance you have separated yourself from the flow of time, feeling that flow to be insignificant and even misdirected. The attitude towards which you will move is one in which the importance of your very self will be lost and you will turn to the flow of time in order to help it in its difficult passages without any thought of how things will

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affect you. You will act with an impersonality, but this impersonality will not be cold: it will be warm with the soul's love of the divinity that dwells in all things. Indeed, the Divine beyond one's own small self will act for the Divine who lives in others, though unknown to them. Disinterestedness does not always have this spiritual awareness, but it tends towards it and ultimately discovers its source in that secret splendour.

(10.5.1993)

The sight of your epistolary diarrhoea (at least one letter every day) makes my present constipation in the same line a little ashamed. So I am letting myself go just a little.

You ask me: "Should I do something specific to ensure and hasten my walking on the sunlit path? For that matter, is it at all in my hands even in a small measure?"

All Yoga is a transaction between God in quest of man and man in search of God or, if you like a somewhat paradoxical turn, God from beyond man pulling him and God from behind and within man pushing him. Perhaps the most Chestertonian way of putting the matter would be: the archetypal Man who is God is at hide-and-seek with the evolving God who is Man. The long and short of the Yogic situation in your context is that you have to make a movement towards the Divine at the same time that you appeal to the Supreme Grace to move in your direction faster than you find it doing.

What should be your movement? The cultivation of an even temper in relation not only to the various personalities you meet but also to the various personalities in yourself. The central you who has to be poised in peace has to face undisturbed the peripheral entities whom you also accept as parts of your being. The central you is the one who wants to do Yoga as well as to raise to its finest pitch the career you have chosen. Perhaps the vague urge to be a polymath, mastering many fields of knowledge, is also organic to the centre but belongs to what I may dub the periphery internal

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to the centre itself. Try to bring the several 'you's of the real periphery, who hover round the Yogic you, into harmonious affinity with the latter. Let them not tug you this way and that but turn to wherever they are drawn in a condition of tranquil strength. The Yogic you should have a hold on them, not complete at the moment yet proceeding towards completeness. And when there is an increasing tendency not to run away from the centre, the aspiration that is in you to give yourself to the Mother will light little candles, as it were, in all your peripheral parts and in the midst of that ring of soft illumination the Yogic you will break into a finer, an intenser flame. This will be the signal of your entering the sunlit path.

You complain and regret that "Remember and Offer" is not as frequent an act as it should be. Perhaps you are making it too mental an affair. Of course to stop at times and talk to the Mother, "Here I am offering to you what I am doing so that you may turn it into a further step closer to you," is a good practice. Especially good it is when something hurtful impinges on you and, instead of directly reacting to it in a personal manner, you divert it in the Mother's direction so that it gets lost in her all-transmuting vastness and becomes for you a blessing in disguise at a near or distant point in the future. But one is not at all times in a state of leisure, as it were, to receive such unpleasant guests: one is often at work. Then the question is: how, after initially offering the affair in hand to the Mother, is one to keep up the offering-gesture while the mind is occupied? Of course one can stop the work now and again and repeat the offering. But I am thinking of a long-term solution. And this solution can come only by practising the presence of God - an interiorisation of the consciousness until the deep heart opens and one grows aware of oneself as a being that has been put forth by the Divine - and this Divinity is a constant Presence by the side of that being and the very essence of oneself is love and worship of the Greatness and the Grace ever before one in the deep heart's temple.The best way I know of in order to enter this temple is to visualise Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as they

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used to sit together on the Darshan days or else to visualise one or the other of them and imagine one's head bowed to him or her for the touch of their benediction. As a result of this practice of their presence, all one's moments will be a flow of one's depths towards them without any effort no matter what one may be doing. Then there is no call for deliberate dedication or consecration. No room is left for praying or praising. Just to breathe is to remember the Mother: just for the heart to beat is to offer everything to her.

Broadly appropriate here is the feeling in a passage from Wordsworth which has been one of my favourites though it is not as well known as some others of a like tenor from the Tintern-Abbey poem or from The Excursion or The Prelude. I am referring to the lines that close the description of "the growing Youth" watching from the naked top of a bold headland the sun rise and bathe the world in light:

... Far and wide the clouds were touched,

And in their silent faces could be read

Unutterable love. Sound needed none.

Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank

The spectacle: sensation, soul and form,

All melted into him; they swallowed up

His animal being; in them did he live.

And by them did he live; they were his life.

In such access of mind, in such high hour

Of visitation from the living God,

Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;

Rapt into still communion that transcends

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,

His mind was a thanksgiving to the powers

That made him; it was blessedness and love!

One of your questions is: "What must be our attitude towards devotional songs outside the purview of Aurobindonian music, songs and other devotional music?"Behind all

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such expression, there are the Godward heart and mind of humanity, the religio-spiritual aspiration for a supreme Purity and Power and Perfection which has taken various names and forms in the life of mankind. If we pierce through the diversity and particularity to the basic Eternal and Infinite and Divine sinning through them, we need have no sense of differing or sidetracking from the Aurobindonian Presence. It is when we get the oppressive atmosphere of attitudes like "No salvation outside the Church" or "There is no god except Allah" that we have to be on guard. A single-tracked intolerance, deeming all creeds other than the one espoused to be false and pernicious, a fanatical religiosity whose motto is "Convert or kill or at least strike dumb" - a strain of this is what we have to fight clear of All religio-spiritual movements have their own particular emphasis. The Aurobindonian movement keeps in view a Divine Consciousness which holds the original models of mind, life-force and body, an ideal or archetypal mentality, vitality and physicality - a Supramental Consciousness which is not only a manifested Perfection beyond the mind-level but also a hidden Perfection in the very depths of Matter, gradually releasing by an evolutionary process life-force and mind and heading towards Supermind partly by its own push and partly by the pressure and pull of the veil-less glories beyond, with the result that the climax of world-existence will be in that existence itself, a fully transfigured terrestrial life in the end. Here is a radical divergence from the usual spiritual formula which takes the earth-scene to be merely an interim stage with possibilities of nothing else than attractive variations on the same theme of longing reveries at play around deplorably unchanging realities "Not here but otherwhere" - these words from a poem of Tagore sum up all past religion and spirituality's vision of soul-fulfilment. If there is a strong vein of this vision in the music you speak of, you have to guard against falling under its spell. But I must confess that any kind of music which reaches an acme of inspiration - however otherworldly its ostensible thrust -can serve us as a tremendous drive into the inner being, and to be drawn inward with such an extreme of felicitous force is

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a great gain to the soul practising any Yoga. Even if the motive of the music is not directly religious or spiritual, there could be a self-transcending ecstasy of human love in which the heart of insatiable desire loses its identity in a super-sleep, as it were, of a nameless night. I am thinking of both the prelude and the grand finale of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, exquisite with now poignant now defunctive music. To avoid yielding to such grandeurs and sonorities of artistic creation simply on the doctrinaire grounds that Sri Aurobindo is not for such romantic escapism would mean missing a mighty though indirect upliftment to the Yoga of Bhakti, of Devotion, seeking to merge the human spirit in the unknown Beloved. ;

I'll deal with one more question of yours today: "How does one manage to give one's composite self to the Mother? Gather all the movements in one large peaceful upward offering, or offer separately one's awareness of each of the movements and parts and traits - negative and positive - at the feet of the Mother? How does one prevent the consciousness from slipping off to one's old weak humdrum self?"

In self-offering, there seem to me to be two attitudes. In one we are a composite bundle, a whole of consciousness holding numerous movements and offering them as all being ourselves. In the other we take separately our defects and put each at the Mother's feet while dissociating it from our identity as the giver. The second way strikes me as being more systematic and also as involving in its very act a helpful detachment from the troublesome part or trait - for at least the time during which the offering takes place. We become the witness, free from the offending movement though 'still aware that this movement is our own. If the witness-poise is sustained for long and repeated often, the sense of ownership will weaken and even when the trait falls back into our nature it will seem to be not a member of the family but an unwelcome guest somehow lodging in our house. No doubt, there will be occasions when the undesirable part is too vehemently active to be pushed outward as an offering: on such occasions we should try to offer it along with ourselves as one whole. When the part is not so assertive and is just an

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unpleasant presence with no more than a threat to become assertive, we should make it a frequent practice to pull it out and hold it at arm's length as an object for the Mother to manage. I presume she would take away the particular stain of the movement while returning to us the energy as such which is behind it.

I remember consulting the Mother as to how to throw the undesirable qualities in me into the soul's purifying fire. Should I try to feel this fire to be within me or see it as an upward-rising glow in front of me? My aversion to seeing it inside was due to my feeling that the very defects I wanted to be free from were still being thrown back within me in the very process of my wanting to be rid of them! If I visualise Agni, the Fire-god, in his role of all-refiner as a splendour in front of me, I thrust my dross out of my body and feel liberated from it. As a Parsi, dubbed "fire-worshipper" in religious classification, I had been accustomed to face in temple or at home the urn bearing the golden bouquet of flames flying up, sustained by logs of fragrant sandalwood. This fire, addressed as "Son of God" in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture, symbolised the Divine Presence in the midst of the world, in the midst of each living creature, an "objective correlative" of the ineffable secrecy in the human heart. The sandalwood signified the concentrated prayer-perfumed dedication of the soul in us.) This dedication would cover every kind of matter we may set before God and give it a sanctified air in spite of some materials being our baser characteristics. It would be natural to the Parsi in me to project the process of purification instead of introjecting it. The Mother said to me that it was all the same whether I acted one way or the other. I took her answer to be on a par to what she would have said if I had asked her: "Should I think of the Divine as within my heart or as standing before me?" The Divine as an omnipresence could be situated anywhere. Indeed, the very fact of our two Gurus living as Divinity incarnate outside us and satisfying our urge to worship what is greater than we are, an Other reminding us of our need to outgrow our own smallness and yet figuring what is hidden

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deep within us as our own true reality - verily, the existence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as Avatars amongst us to whom we daily related our little selves, laying both our virtues and vices at their feet, would justify my disposition to see the soul-fire without rather than within as the all-purifying Power.

As regards the danger of the consciousness slipping down, it is often there as long as the Yoga is done principally by the mind. If the deep heart is awakened, a spontaneity comes into play and one is not called upon to make an effort. The mind too can get into a habit of keeping itself uplifted, but some slight strain will be experienced now and again, whereas the heart's turning of the consciousness towards the Divine can go on as effortlessly as its own beating. I know that the Yogic heart too can get veiled by what are termed "lower vital movements", but these can stand also in the way of the Yogic mind. The difference is that as soon as they cease the Yogic heart's spontaneity breaks forth easily whereas the Yogic mind takes time to set its course again. This advantage of the former should not lead us to take those upsurges of the lower vital lightly. A habitual recurrence of them can seriously block our psychic depths.

Among these upsurges I include, as Sri Aurobindo himself has done, not only the drive towards the sex-act but also the itch to masturbate. In contrast to the grim warnings by the old school of doctors, the modern medical view is pretty lenient about that itch. And 1 dare say that for somebody striving to do Yoga outside the Ashram masturbation may not assume a particularly grave aspect any more than would the normal sex-act, since the Yoga is not necessarily whole-hearted. But, from the strict viewpoint of Ashram life as well as of a wholehearted Yoga outside, it cannot be looked upon with the levity of the modern-minded medico. Let me quote a correspondence I had with Sri Aurobindo.' It was in connection with a visiting aspirant who was an extreme and chronic mastur-bator. He was a good man but with a terrible twist in his vital

1. Life-Literature-Yoga; Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo. Revised and Enlarged Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1967), pp. 27-28.

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nature. A number of times he had come to my room for a chat and each time I had got a severe headache by his very presence. Though his visits to the Ashram were well-meant they could not be sustained for long. I wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "For my work I had to go to X's room after one of his flights from here and I found several scraps of writing by him scattered all over. Out of curiosity I read some of them. They were desperate cries of one caught in the masturbation-complex. I felt very uncomfortable later as if the imp or imps responsible for his aberrancy had clung on to me or come close on my heels." Sri Aurobindo replied: "Evidently it must have been like that, for with the masturbation there is always some clinging influence of this kind which can become a sort of possession as in X's case who is hagridden by this thing and helpless to shake it off. The only thing is to give it no hold at all by an immediate refusal and turning away of the mind from the suggestions which usually come with the impulse."

This was written on 27,4.1937. It was soon followed by another note from Sri Aurobindo: "Never yield to that. It would mean allowing a possession of certain centres or movements by a very low kind of elementals and a serious detraquement in your sadhana hereafter."

Almost everybody at one time or another has slid into the practice of what used to be called "self-abuse". And I have learned that the impulse to it is naturally accompanied by a vague erotic imagination. If one stops this imagination from becoming particularised, if one fends off its tendency to acquire concrete name and form, one can shove the impulse aside. Up to a certain point the impulse is not irresistible. One must have the wish and the will not to overstep that point. And, along with them, one must seek some kind of diversion. Of course, for those who are on the spiritual path the best way is to superimpose on the incipient erotic imagination the remembrance of the compassionate face of our Lord Sri Aurobindo and the affectionate countenance of our Divine Mother,

(18.5.1993)

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