Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

17

Your experience of being transported to another time or life seems to be a happy mixture of present and past, the reminiscence of a contact with the Mother in a bygone life mingling with the memories and hopes relating to her Ashram of today. Your red sari in the vision is symbolic of the living expression you are seeking of your inmost heart - that "crimson-throbbing glow" (your fellow-Catholic Coventry Patmore's words) in which dreams of the Ideal bum and beat. Your meeting your brother William in this vision is not surprising, for behind his physical and mental limitations in the present life is his evolving soul which must have grown not only in spite of but also because of the unusual state in which it outwardly found itself. The soul's ways are strange and often inscrutable. Before it leaves a body it chooses its own next incarnation, the nature of which would answer to the need felt by the departing soul for a certain kind of new experience. Of course there are Karmic effects too of one's doings, but the ordinary idea that good fortune now means reward for past good deeds and current misfortune spells punishment for old wickedness is too schoolmasterly and superficial. At times the soul accepts difficulties to serve as a short-cut to its progress.

I saw the film Gandhi. It was extremely well acted and produced, driving home very vividly the extraordinary moral force of the man. Some telling incidents of his life were somehow left out. Some blunders of his, too, didn't figure, the greatest being the rejection of the Cripps Proposals which, according to Sri Aurobindo, had come on a wave of divine inspiration and on behalf of which Sri Aurobindo sent a special message to Cripps and a personal emissary to the Indian Congress. If accepted, they would have brought about a united front by the Hindus and the Muslims and, by a firm co-operative experience in government, tended to prevent the fissure which led to the tragic break-up of the country into

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Bharat and Pakistan some years later.

What you write about yourself and me is full of inner truths. That "beautiful white glow or flame" in the centre of your forehead each time I was in your thought images the true Amal who has to manifest some day the reality caught in those two verses in a poem of his -

Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,

The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind -

the reality at which Sri Aurobindo hinted when he gave me my Ashram name "Amal Kiran" meaning "The Clear Ray". I picture this ray to be something like that streak of all-penetrating white light which Indian spiritual mythology sees issuing from Shiva's "third eye" in the centre of his forehead. It is natural that you should feel the Mother smiling, for surely it is the true Amal that the Mother kept always in gracious sight, overlooking all the obscurities which were present in me but which I never sought to hide from her and tried my best to submit to her for dispersal.

I am glad you have qualified for intenser care as well as for greater understanding of the ailing who come to the emergency department. Most probably your new job reveals a field for which your new name - "Kripa" - has acted like an "Open Sesame". "Kripa" in place of the old "Catherine" is what has come through me from the Mother's overflowing love and compassion not only to kindle in you her true child but also to act through you to spread her warm wide being to the world you live in and kindle everywhere happiness and harmony and health and holiness.

These four h's are things that are modes of the Mother's "warm wide being" already present in the world's depths. The Divinity high above in the Transcendent is also there within us and within the universal existence. That is what is implied by the phrase you have quoted from Sri Aurobindo: "... this consciousness, this supreme reality which is behind all existence, which is the source and the substance of all." To

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bring forward the Wonder which is "behind'' - the stuff of the Spirit from which all has come and of which all is secretly made: that is the great task, and the metaphysical basis of the vision inspiring such a task is what you "don't so readily find in Christianity" or rather in your "history of religious pursuit". Teilhard de Chardin was born with an intuition of Indian spirituality that he called "pantheism" and grossly misunderstood because of the Western pantheistic philosophy that excludes the Transcendent. He always fought with himself because of conventional Catholic scruples and never achieved the synthesis of the true Indian spirituality which, from the time of the Rigveda, held that the Supreme Being kept three-fourths of Himself above and sent one-fourth below to make the cosmos. Conventional Catholicism makes out the cosmic one-fourth to be merely a creation "out of nothing", a product which does not have the very substance of the Supreme Being in a temporarily covered and gradually manifesting form: there is a rather confused understanding of the Pauline affirmation of Him "in whom we live and move and have our being".

(14.9.1983)

From the tone as well as the contents of your letter I can judge that you and your wife are going on steadily forward. There is a poise full of a quiet happy receptivity - a sure sign of a touch on you from both the infinite Self of all and the true individual soul, the Divine Immense and the Divine Intense, the peace of the Beyond and the joy of the Within. The Beyond tends to put an end to what Sri Aurobindo calls "time's unrest" and to bring an unshakable freedom as if one stood out of the universe in a vast background. The Within does not break away from the heart's pulsations: it counts, as it were, the moments of time but through them it listens to the magically changing rhythm of a secret flute and echoes the ever-nearing footsteps of some Perfect Form whose beauty does not belong to us yet but still gives us the feeling that we

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have always belonged to it.

Your dream-experience carries the stamp of this Within. The car of a special type which you never saw before and which was coloured blue and white is the movement of Yoga assimilating the passage of time and representing by its colour Krishna's light which Sri Aurobindo has also termed his own light - a whitish blue. No wonder the "heart-stirring music" that came out of it bore the mantra "Rama...Krishna" and, by that soul-intimate sound, cut you away from your ordinary relationships and through a snatch of trance brought you the sense of your being's truth, your most real You-ness which is dedicated to the Perfect Form I have spoken of and by this self-giving shares in its blissful beauty.

(15.9.1983)

As soon as I received your letter I fished out the issue of Mother India in which I had published from the Times Literary Supplement an article just right for soothing your wife's nerves and yours. As the book reviewed in it has been published from the States I would advise you to buy it to get a fuller treatment of the viewpoint sketched in the article. Nostradamus has become a sensational theme, just as the Revelation of St. John has been. All kinds of terrifying prophecies are sought to be read in the latter, especially in America. One of the most fantastic interpretations is about the Anti-Christ. Poor John Carlos of Spain is cast in that role by one school of interpreters. The whole scheme is connected with the biblical vision of the Second Coming of Christ. I have studied this question very closely and can prove that Jesus prophesied his own return to take place fairly soon after his death. In the Gospels as well as in the Epistles of Paul we have the suggestion that in the first century A.D. itself the Second Coming will be experienced and the resurrection of all the believers will occur. Paul adds that those who are alive from the generation contemporary with him will also be transformed in the twinkle of an eye and be lifted up into the

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heavens in the wake of the dead who will arise in new spiritual bodies. Paul at first believed that the great event would be witnessed in his own lifetime: later, owing perhaps to a decline in his health, he held that it might happen soon after his death. No doubt, Jesus says in the Gospels that nobody, not even he, knows the exact day and hour: only God the Father knows them. But this in no way contradicts the declaration on several occasions that they would be in the very near future.In the latest book in the New Testament - II Peter - which assuredly belongs to the first half of the second century A.D. there is a lament that the unbelievers mock the believers because the prophecy has not yet come true. And a defence is attempted with an Old-Testament saying that to God a day can be like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day, implying that any delay cannot be used to give the lie to the prediction. But there is no going back on the prediction in its essence - namely, that the Second Coming will be soon. The delay is surmised to be giving the unbelievers the full chance to voice their derision triumphantly and thus be wholly ripe for the punitive divine wrath. Thus there is not a shred of scriptural support for the various modern scenarios of doomsday. People who have not unprejudicedly studied the New Testament indulge in all those semi-science-fiction predictions. Similar seems to have been the case with the students of Nostradamus. The author of the book reviewed in the article "Oracle to the Cock of France" has given the most dispassionate and penetrating look at the verses of Nostradamus and made them applicable only to his own time.

What is said about the west coast of America by Nostra-damus's interpreters is not quite inaccurate in general. This part of America rests on a geological "fault" and the possibility of an earthquake at some time in the future is there but the utterly catastrophic view which has been put forth Nostradamusly is, without doubt, sensation-mongering. The same holds for the prediction of a 27-year war in the near future. I would attach no importance to this bit of futurology.

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I don't say the future is bound to be all smooth, but no passage of time throughout history has ever been such What we have to cling to and what should give us an optimistic vision is the Mother's assurance that a luminous spiritual age awaits us and all that happens before it will be turned in the best way possible towards its arrival. Now that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are not in their physical forms, the age spoken of may be far, but it will certainly come and nothing like a Third World War will be able to prevent it. I even question the possibility of such a war. The most dangerous time, according to the Mother, for a world-wide conflagration was before what she has called the Supramental Manifestation in the earth's subtle-physical layer came about on the 29th February 1956. After this manifestation the history of the world underwent a change and the direction was set for a grand progression towards the evolution of the Superman. Perhaps the Mother has to be reborn in order to accelerate things, but her work and Sri Aurobindo's will go on in any case. The very fact that nobody has read in Nostradamus any hint of this work shows that he could not be a genuine prophet - and even if there be frightening prospects in a world which has acquired nuclear power without a deepening or heightening of consciousness, it is perfectly true, as said in Savitri, that

One man's perfection still can save the world.

Your wife and you should live calmly and courageously, have whatever children you want without the fear that you would be ushering them into a disastrous world, choose whatever location suits you and keep your faith in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ever bright and inwardly dedicate to them all that you do.

The dream you had in early August this year figures the dangers of an inwardly "unprepared mankind possessing - in words again from Savitri -

The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force

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and at the same time discloses the knowledge-illumined saviour Shakti of the Mother. The dreamer in you has been more like the Nostradamus pictured by his commentators than the real 16th-century chap whose predictive eyes did not in fact range beyond the circumstances of the France of his day.

At your mention of "the learned Parsi Behramji Pitha-walla" I could not help smiling. Where has this person picked up something from the Parsi scriptures relating to Bombay? These scriptures date from the B,C-period and can have no reference to any modern city unless fanciful conversions are made, as in Nostradamus's text, of old terms into new significances. Even the latest traditional glosses on the scriptures like the Dinkard, go back to the early centuries of the Christian era, the Arsacidian or Sassanian times. Behramji Pithawalla's information seems to have flowed out of a Pitha (wine-shop) rather than from the Avesta.

You may address me by any affectionate form you like. I don't mind being "uncle". But along with it use my original name or my Ashram appellation without any honorific suffix: please don't append "ji" or "da". Don't let my ripe old age misguide you into making me ridiculously venerable. Rather than be considered venerable with "ji" or "da", I wouldn't mind the invariable malapropism of my erstwhile Bombay landlord, the late Ardaser Dubash - as when with a spontaneous consistency of verbal misapplication he referred to an honoured guest at one of his parties - Father Sola, the St. Xavier's College's Rector (Head) - as "That venereal old gentleman who is the rectum of St. Xavier's College."

(16.9.1983)

My inordinate delay in replying to you must have engendered all kinds of thoughts in your mind: "Amal is ill - or even gone permanently out of his body - or else he does not want to have any relation with me or, again, he is absolutely stumped by the dynamic doctor's arguments which I have relayed from here."

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In a general way the last idea is near the mark. Though "stumped" is not the mot juste, what the doctor has dynamically dosed you with is connected with a subject on which the wisest thing to do is to be driven into silence. Arguing will be of little use. Different points of view are possible - and the best resort is to take refuge in the words of somebody much more illumined than ourselves. If Sri Aurobindo and the Mother direct us or permit us to eat this or that kind of food, we must accept their guidance. Along with that guidance goes their advice not to be rigidly bound to any idea or develop doctrinaire fanaticism.

The general rule for the Ashram is vegetarianism as practised in our Dining Room. But the Mother freely allows eggs and even some meat at times, not to mention fish. We follow her wisdom and do not enter into controversies over these matters any more than over that other issue: service to society. We serve society to the extent that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wish. Surely they do not want us to live only for our own egos. While ultimately concentrating on self-dedication to the Divine by both an inner life and an outer one, we do works in the world involving benefiting our fellow-beings. Most of these fellow-beings are our fellow-sadhaks and working for their good is certainly tantamount to a kind of social service. The Mother always appreciated unselfish behaviour as well as the doing of a job for others as perfectly as possible. Those who practise slapdash work just because what they do is apparently for the egos of fellow-sadhaks forget the central truth of work here, the truth for which the Mother encouraged an active life, the truth that we serve' the Divine in a person and must therefore do our job for him or her sincerely and efficiently.

Our basic aim is not social service as such but to be more and more in contact with the Divine by Yoga. Since Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is integral, it must lead to living harmoniously and creatively in the midst of the world. In the manner and in the measure the Divine wants us to do so we must carry on and not bother about general theories of what

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man is born for. Similarly, in our eating modes we must attempt to live as the founder of the Integral Yoga ordains, and desist from discussing general attitudes such as the single-tracked mind of your medical disputant pushes upon you.

If somebody does not wish to follow Sri Aurobindo and the Mother because of some general attitude, leave him alone. Just say that you have offered your life to them and you will do as they direct, irrespective of whether your doings conform' to one or another position taken up by people. Only those who believe that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother possess a greater light than the mental consciousness will be real followers and they will not argue their heads off about subjects your friend is fond of fighting over. We are not there to make converts by entering into all sorts of controversies. We are willing to discuss broad philosophical issues but we must not get entangled in faddist problems.

(14.1.1984)

Quite a number of notes you have struck in the three letters I have with me. But three in particular are felt as tones and undertones and overtones. There are light and joy on the surface - that is the poet responding to the magic and mystery of the world, the touch of bright nearnesses, the call of hazy distances. All these are what I name "tones", the varied spectrum of waking life. But at one end of the spectrum is the infra-red and at the other the ultra-violet. The former I point to as "undertones", the hidden cries and gropings, the restlessnesses of a dream-life which glimpses elusive idealities. You have caught a sense of it with impressive originality in the poem entitled "Lonely Restlessness". Usually the sea is described as full of turmoil and agitation on its surface and the depths are said to be calm. You have reversed the scene. A happy laughing movement rather than unrest is your sea's outer being, a kind of calm that is sun-shot and a-glimmer. Below is the great unease, the ever-

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searching solitariness. Not that pleasure is absent, not that the thrill of beauty is lacking. The Divine is felt here at diverse play no less than in the many-coloured outer appearance, but here are subtle and secret ways that do not lead to tangible goals. The lurings of these ways you designate "the touch that hurts and delights", the more-than-human which is not easy to bear because of its strange enrapturing excess of loveliness. You get scattered sips of nectar which set you always seeking, the full sweetness cannot be drained. The only solution is to go from the dreaming inner to the tranced inmost, where hides .

the petalled fire

Rooted in godlike rest.

What I have labelled as "overtones" is, in my spectrum-image, the ultra-violet. It is not the Divine below or behind or within: it is the Divine beyond - to us a superconscient sleep, not just the sweet essence of things that is found in the soul but the vast heaven of honey overflowing to infinity. Perhaps none of us has made his home there but all of us have known vague drippings, through some tremulous opening in our heads, from the golden charity pouring at all times out of the spiritual empyrean whose physical image is - a la Fitzgerald's Omar - "that inverted bowl we call the sky".

(3.6.1986)

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