Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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I found your letter very enjoyable. I am never tired of reading whatever expresses sincere deeply-felt convictions - especially when the writer realises that feeling should never be gush and that one must be deep without being ponderous. You have put many things eloquently - but you have imagined me standing up for ideas and attitudes which are not truly mine. Having stayed for years in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram and known intimately the ways of the Mother and the mind of the Master, how could I ever make a fetish of the cleavage some yogis drive between the normal consciousness and the aloof Atman?

The intransigent leap into the Atman is not Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and I do not for a moment countenance the view that to withdraw or escape into the Atman and regard the world as meaningless and untransformable is the solution of life's problem. No doubt, for genuine Yogic attainment, the peace of the Atman can never be dispensed with - it has to form a sort of bedrock, but there are many other things of immense value, without which the bedrock would remain bare and onesided. The inner withdrawal towards the still spirit is an important part of yoga, but so also is the opening of the heart and the mind and the bodily consciousness to the soothing calm of the Divine Grace, the tranquillising tenderness of the Divine Love. The gradual natural evolving method lit up by the truth-instinct of that spontaneous sweetness and light and strength within us which is our individual soul - this is for us who follow Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the most desirable and fruitful yoga. We must join with it the pressing inward towards the still infinity of the Atman and the surging upward towards the opulent and dynamic immensity of the Overhead Divine, but our daily staple has to be the soul's bliss-radiating, all-purifying, one-pointed aspiration. In fact, such an aspiration will of itself bring in the long run the liberating largeness of the Atman, though a conscious urge

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for the latter would establish it in us sooner. The sine qua non of the Integral Yoga is that aspiration. And I surely cannot pit Buddha's path or the old Vedantin way against the Aurobindonian ideal: I should be not only going against the vision I have had of Truth but also contradicting whatever little experience I might have had of Yoga.

The psychic peace beautifully flowering in us and slowly lifting our whole nature to the Divine is not something I depreciate in favour of the sudden chasm which the Atman magnificently creates between the Divine and the undivine. What I could not regard as of lasting worth was the ordinary sense of calm and repose which is got often from Nature and at other times from a temporary feeling of self-fulfilment through "what men call love", as Shelley puts it, or through some fine work accomplished. This sense can be a preparation for higher things, but one can't put a crown on its head and bend down at its feet, as certain poets and idealists do. The direct touch of the Divine is the sole experience capable of giving basic satisfaction, radical peace - and what best constitutes that touch is the process of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga with its blend of the psychic, the spiritual and the supramental, and its special insistence on the whole being moving forward by degrees, in an intimate rapture which is at the same time intense and calm.

I should be the last one to run down human love. I see with clear eyes its insufficiency, but, when deep and sincere, it has an idealism which breaks open many closed chambers of our being. Let me plod on to my realisation of this truth.

In my late teens and early twenties I experienced a great upsurge of intellectual power and vital energy, which swept into my consciousness various aspects of life - I felt numerous personalities coalescing within me and a capacity to deal like a master with the common vicissitudes of time. Please don't suspect I am boasting. Allow me to set down some surprising personal facts as accurately as I can. In those early days, there was nothing I could not take by the throat, so to speak, and subdue to my mind and zest. Weariness, disap-

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pointment, confusion seemed alien to me - I had a crystalline clear-headedness, the courage to face everything and a bounding vitality which was like laughter. Having a lame leg, I was not physically very strong, but my nerves were like tempered steel and, where physically stronger men got exhausted, I still felt on top of the world. I accomplished feats of intellectual activity and nervous endurance and sexual stamina. For five years I moved in a crescendo of keenness and power, until in my twenty-third year I acquired a sense of completion at the centre: that is to say, I found my individuality possessed of a roundness, a crystallised many-sidedness, an assured versatility. The mind was able always to bring a teeming wideness to a brilliant penetrating point, the life-force knew a gusto that could taste and swallow and assimilate a throbbing multitude of experiences both pleasurable and painful, voluptuous and ascetic. I felt that, as the years rolled on, I would enrich my individuality but its essential form would remain the same - a work of art whose main outlines were already chiselled out though details could be added everywhere. Thus I stood in the pride of a precocious youth..

Suddenly a force I had never met made its assault on me. I had known and enjoyed the wrestle of sexual desire and the poetry of the loins caught up in imaginative passion - but I had never been in love. For the first time the heart was flung open. And together with it there arose a hunger for the magnitudes with which my mind had so far only juggled as ideas. A poignant idealism took hold of the heart, I yearned for an inconceivable perfection through the beauty of one woman's face, I built up a whole mystical inner world whose vastness I sought to enter through the doorway of one intensely loved body, that body itself became subtilised by a certain direct intimacy with the emotional and mental personality behind it, and- in that personality I contacted a glimmer of the true psyche. All this happened because the woman 1 loved had passed once through a psychic phase and still bore its after-glow. The mystic in me awoke to the mystic

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in her - and the whole glittering universe I had constructed for myself and of which I had felt the master shook and tumbled and broke into irreparable ruins.

In the void thus created I experienced a huge capacity of self-surrender, an outrush of the heart helplessly towards a Perfection intuited as half-human half-divine. God who had been just a phosphorescent shadow in my philosophical mind turned real, stretched strange hands to grip me, drew me on and on across vistas I had never imagined, plunged me at moments into seas where thought foundered, raised me for a flash into ethers where sex dissolved into nothing. Not that the intellect and the sex-desire failed to return - they were too urgent to be set aside for long, they often made counterattacks and obscured the inner world; but something in me had got out of them and stood in glorious defeat in the presence of the Divine. There were many false strains in my mysticism, innumerable defects and blind spots, an army of romantic perversions. These brought upon me acute suffering and depression, and a sharp feeling of failure. But the trend towards the spiritual was set and through long labyrinths of darkness shot with flashes of hurting ecstasy I came at last to the feet of Sri Aurobindo.

Love worked this miracle. It was indeed an unusual passage through love, since the psyche was so strongly involved. It seems to me that here love was just a mask worn by the psyche to carry out the Divine's decree that I should be drawn to the Truth. Most love-experiences are very far from what happened to me. Yet the fact that love was chosen as the best instrument to prepare me for Yoga shows that there is something akin in it, no matter how crudely, to the spiritual urge. I cannot, therefore, undervalue the idealistic help true love can give to the soul.

However, there is one element of love which is the most tremendous obstacle to Yoga: vital attachment. To say that true love is devoid of vital attachment is to talk of abstractions: in actual practice there is no true love without the entangling of the entrails. The beloved's fascination holds us

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by innumerable ties, not always openly sexual - and sometimes one acutely agonizes under its pull Two powers alone can snap the bonds - a common, ideal of Yoga kept by both the parties and the constant personal contact of a Guru. Of course the faithlessness of a lover is like a sword cutting the Gordian knot and at times turning one sharply to the Divine -but this help cannot be ascribed to any merit in human love -it is a stroke of fate manipulated secretly by the Divine. Love's merit lies only in making delightfully devastating inroads on the ego's hard self-sufficiency - it makes the being leap out of itself; but in escaping one prison it gets trapped in another: the being of the beloved. And really I don't know which is the more formidable. Vital attachment is not blind to the beloved's defects, it often sees them and yet cannot rise above the glamour that camouflages them. A hundred voices within one rise and justify the attachment - they sing of tenderness, constancy, guardianship, completion of personality, soul-affinity. Beautiful and poetic are these voices and by themselves they make life for brief snatches a garden of wonders. Suffering and misfortune only increase at times the sharp sense of love's preciousness and poetry and the transfiguring light it casts on the earth. Yet, beheld from a Yogic standpoint, there is behind all that inspiration the black magic of vital attachment; love's spell prefigures spiritual light but can block its authentic arrival. Nothing except the combined discipleship of the lovers to a genuine Guru can gradually dissolve the spell. It is rarely that one, after plumbing the deeps of passionate tenderness in human relationship, is strong enough to track to its true home'the radiance that on occasion plays about the beloved's visage. When this is done, the experience one has passed through will serve as a great impetus inward and upward: the self-giving emotions will come to the fore most easily and sweep one into the core of the Mystery -

Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast.

(23.4.1942)

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Your card of good wishes from far America and the concrete expression of your helpfulness and your delightful picture and, above all, your deeply moving letter are the best things I have received to start off a happy new year. Thanks for all these gifts. Mother India also appreciates your gesture of assistance to it.

Your picture tells me a great deal. First of all, there is the charming resemblance between you and your little cousin, whom you are carrying in your arms. Even the expression on the two faces is essentially the same - an innocent wisdom smiling in the one case and a wise innocence a trifle mischievous in the other. This is a photograph as if of one Soul in two phases or at two stages. Could it be that by some chance your cousin is about six years old - the very age at which, as your letter says, you knew yourself as at once vanishing point and infinity?

I have called your letter "deeply moving". I say "deeply" because what comes through is from far beyond the merely human surfaces that usually communicate with each other. And I say "moving" because the touch of depth on depth is a living one and brings some fundamental Reality home to the heart of our passionate palpable smallness and gives it an ultimate value and a golden hope. This hope I may best express by saying that in the experience you have recounted there is the promise that one day each of our tiny lives may be like a star

Tingling with rumours of the infinite.

Having had that experience in your childhood, you figure in my fancy, during all your years of a mail-man, as just such a star though in disguise, carrying news from everywhere to each place. Hardly could these places have realised that letters from far away passing through your hands came with a breath of unknown distances - no matter if these hands made no claim and were those of a simple person always aware of

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our common humanity.

I am so glad that you are just what you are - never thinking of yourself as anything other than a retired mailman. This proves to me that your child hood-experience came to you through the right channel - the channel of the inmost heart, the true centre of our being. Perhaps it could not be otherwise since you were so very young and the parts in us that get puffed up with knowledge or with power had no time yet to develop and all that was there was but the soul's simplicity and spontaneity and self-forgetfulness. When extraordinary experiences pass through the mind or the life-force, there is always the danger of what the Greeks called hubris (towering pride) or of what the French term "la folie de grandeur" (delusion of greatness). Our superficial being is on the alert to catch hold of all divine largesse and divert it to egoistic uses. Not that the superficial being is to be thrown away: it has also a high destiny but it has to let itself be seized by the Spirit instead of seizing it. And it can take the right turn only if the inmost heart, the soul-centre in us, takes the lead in all our self-exceeding ventures. When what Sri Aurobindo names our "psychic being" is in the forefront, the surface man ceases to be a grasper and becomes a serene messenger, a smiling mail-man, of the Spirit's sweetness and light and strength.

You write that you are unable to have a repeat of your experience, but the very fact that it is "what makes life bearable or unbearable, whatever way you look at it", shows that it is still a reality every moment or rather it is at all times a subtle presence by being a tremendous haunting Absence. I am sure everything has taken a value for you, gained a fullness, by your memory of that illimitable Emptiness which was yet a strange all-sufficiency and the sole existence. What you went through on that first school-day of yours, sparked off by the words of the first chapter of Genesis, was an experience older than the Bible. The atmosphere of the ancient Upani-shads enveloped you, setting apart the child that you were as

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the child that you would be of one who fulfilled and out-Upanishaded all the Upanishads: Sri Aurobindo. In the profoundest sense of the word, Sri Aurobindo has made you his child - and I cannot be grateful enough to him for letting me come to know you and love you.

(29.1,1975)

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