Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

18

Two letters of yours have been lying before me, constantly crying to be answered. They carry something of your magical presence and have tried hard to lift the heavy hand of indolence that has recently been weighing down the "man of letters" in me. I say "magical" about your presence because that is what I have always felt in all the years I have known you. One aspect of you seemed always to be looking out of "magic casements", so that there is an expression in your eyes at once of reverie and wonder as if they reached forth from a strange inwardness to some enchanted secret behind the commonplaces and familiarities of the outward world. And what is that secret? Here 1 am reminded of seven lines from Savitri which have been your favourites:

 

A magic leverage suddenly is caught

That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will:

A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.

Then miracle is made the common rule,

One mighty deed can change the course of things;

A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

The enchanted secret you are ever looking for is this "magic leverage" and the anticipation of it brings a light into your being and a lightness in your body, making you a magical presence all the more.

 

Now let me come down to earth. When D'Annunzio was introduced to Eleonara Duse, he stepped back a little and looking at her exclaimed: "Splendid! Magnificent! D'Annun-zian!" Then he said: "Madame, how do you do?" Having uttered my little panegyric on you, I'll deal with your request whether you could freely quote me and even reproduce whole articles of mine. Of course! I

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Most happy too am I to learn that The Adventure of the Apocalypse especially appeals to you from among all my collections of poems. The piece you like very much - "Words" - is also one of my own pets. I still remember the thrill that ran through my whole body when I wrote the end of its concluding paragraph. Here is the paragraph:

Words are the shadows of enhaloed hawks:

The shadows cling to clay and seem clay-born,

But he who marks their moving mystery

Feels how a strange spontaneous quiver wings

Their passage here and how intangible

They float for all their close and massive shapes.

Alone the poet looks up to the Inane,

Sees the gold wanderers of the boundless blue,

Catches the radiant rhythms each burning heart

Puts forth in every line of the wide form

Spanning the silences with pinion-song.

Thus in his scheme of shades from the vast throng

Haunting the earth-mind he shows across brief thought

Glimmers immortal, throbbings of the bliss

That reels through heaven a drunkard of Truth's sun.

Or, in rare moments quick with dawn and noon

And eve at once, our little human dreams

Love with such far-flung eyes the undying birds

That the large lust comes swooping down for prey

And, where the shadows mystically shone,

Falls - crushing, piercing, ravishing every sense -

The Living body and beauty and blaze of God!

Now to your main problem. You write:

 

"A question has arisen, that I would like your help with. I've been asked to speak - one of five people representing different organisations — on the subject of 'gurus'. Not a subject I would have chosen for myself! However, I do not want to misrepresent Sri Aurobindo's teaching. What did he say about the need for - the desirability of - a guru? I have

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always had the impression that he himself did not want to be anyone's Guru, in the traditional Indian sense. At the same time I remember reading somewhere that he had said that 'at a certain stage of a Yoga, the presence of a living Guru is indispensable' (not in those exact words, but something along those lines). If this is so, how are we who came to Sri Aurobindo's Yoga after the Mother had left her body to pass that 'certain stage'? Can anyone be sure that he has been accepted? (For myself, the answer to the latter question - the only answer I shall ever have! - came to me in a dream, but I don't feel I can offer dreams to my audience, they will surely look for something more substantial!) Can you help?"

 

I should say that, according to Sri Aurobindo, in his Yoga as in all Indian spiritual disciplines it is advisable to have a Guru in physical form. Behind this general advice there is the fact that people who claim to be inwardly guided at all times and don't care for a physical Guru are frequently lured by the unacknowledged realisation that such a Guru can be a damned nuisance - ready to contradict the often convenient deliverances of the exclusively inward guide! I know from experience what a wonderful help, both prescriptive and restrictive, the embodied Guru can be. But, of course, Yoga can go on in the absence of a living Guru, though it is best to put oneself as much as possible in touch inwardly with a Guru who has once lived. Outwardly one would do well to avail oneself of whatever help a sincere disciple of such a Guru can offer when asked. The stage at which, in Sri Aurobindo's view, an embodied Guru is indispensable is when the bodily supramentalisation, which is the ultimate crown of his Yoga, has begun. At that stage there are extremely grave dangers which only the physically present Guru can save one from. Such a stage is indeed a far cry for all of us - and it is my conviction no less than it was Nolini's that bodily supramentalisation has been postponed now. I have written somewhere about man reaching this condition either in a revolutionary or in an evolutionary way. The revolutionary way was envisaged originally for Sri Aurobindo and the

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Mother in the first place and for their close disciples in the second. Even I was once told by the Mother orally - and my report of her statement was confirmed by Sri Aurobindo in writing - that I would undergo "the Great Transformation", meaning bodily supramentalisation, in this very life. Knowing my own weaknesses I found this double assurance breathtaking, but there it was. When both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother gave up - for reasons of their own - the grand experiment with their own bodies, the hope of any of their disciples doing it faded. But what is called "the Supramental Manifestation" on February 29, 1956 has made the evolutionary achievement by mankind in some future age certain, for now the Supermind's "light, force and consciousness" which manifested are a part of the earth's future history and from their subtle-physical presence as of today they will become more and more directly physical in the course of time, helped by the action of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who have taken their station as concrete beings on the subtle-physical plane for their divine work to continue on earth. As for acceptance by them of people as disciples now, there can be no doubt if the aspirants are sincere and turned towards them. One's sincerity is the sign that they have put their golden seal upon one.

 

(17.7.1993)

 

Your friend's observation is unusual and worth pondering. It is true that people living in great comfort and with money in full flow tend to be drawn outward. But, with so much natural beauty around, it is hard to think that one would tend to lose touch with one's inner being. What your friend is driving at is something like the following. The utterly beautiful forests and gardens and hills with a clean finely appointed cottage nestling among them make one content and happy to spend one's days in such a setting and keep away from physically poor and noisy Pondicherry. The urge to go back to the Ashram which is located in this town gets extremely weakened

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and one is apt to lose touch with what is at present the soul's material home. One inclines to lose sight of the intense inwardness one has experienced in the Pondicherry-surrounded Ashram-atmosphere and one is satisfied with whatever comfortable in-feeling one gets amidst the scenic beauty before one's outer eyes.

 

I remember the joy I used to experience on the "hill-station" of Matheran where I felt that, instead of my having to move towards Yoga, Yoga was coming on its own towards me in sight of the mountains and the thick woods and with fresh unpolluted air steeped in silence all about me. Pondicherry was almost forgotten.

 

But when I compare the in-feeling there with that which was mine in the proximity of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother I realise that the master-point of inner intensity was absent. Of course this holds only for those who have deeply breathed the Ashram-atmosphere. For those who live outside, places like Matheran would mean the ne plus ultra of spiritual encouragement. A response or reaction has to be considered in this light.

 

(6.8.1993)

 

I haven't written to you for a long while, nor have you been deluging me with letters as before. In one of your wisely spaced-out trickles an apparent contradiction between two statements by the Mother was posed to me for a solution. In one you report the Mother as saying that when difficulties come we may be sure that the Grace is present to act. In the other she is said to declare that the Grace is present and active all the time.

 

I don't think the first statement negates the ever-active play of Grace. It draws attention to the truth which is liable to get ignored that difficulties are not a sign of the Grace's withdrawal. They may simply have been inevitable, as some things are bound to be in a world which lives in the reign of Ignorance - a cosmic phenomenon. Even so, the Grace is

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ready to tackle them: it does not give one up. Possibly the difficulties are themselves an act of Grace, a secret spur to the soul in us to emerge and take charge of the outer life which may be threatening to get out of hand. We are asked by the Mother not to fall under the shadow of the suspicion that the Divine has forsaken us.

 

The other statement serves to assure us that even if we withdraw from the Divine, the Grace will never leave us -only it is often obstructed by our denials from acting. The Mother also forewarns us that adverse circumstances do not mean that the Grace has bidden us adieu. The Divine is always there to pull us out of the deepest hole as well as to lift us up from height to greater height. Especially a Yoga like ours which calls for self-surrender because its sights are trained on super-Himalayan realisations which no human power on its own can attain, the Grace has automatically to be there to clap wings on to our sagging shoulders.

 

(27.9.1993)

 

Here are your questions and my answers

.

1.What is the unifying relation between the Supermind and Divine Grace?

The Divine Mother who is the Supermind's eternal gesture of Light and Love to our fumbling and stumbling world,

2.What should be our attitude towards the Supermind?

Self-offering to Sri Aurobindo who has offered the Supermind to us.

3.How do I live in the Supreme Consciousness? Before you

4.If all is Grace-ordained, where can be any cause for delay in our sadhana?

Your question seems to be just clever words meant to do away with some inconvenient uneasiness about your own role as a sadhak.

5.Should 1 at times invoke Mother Mahakali?

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Better not at present. You are not God's Warrior enough.

 

6.Of the two - an ardent desire for one's personal progress and not having any concern for it - which is better?

 

The former - with no special sense of self-importance.

 

7.Should I adopt a mantra ? And which ?

 

If the heart's cry is for a mantra in the times when a deep silence is not speech enough to join you to the Supreme Beloved, you may adopt what has appealed to me the most: Ma-Sri Aurobindo sharanam mama ("Mother-Sri Aurobindo are my refuge").

 

8.Can I be of any help to you ?

 

Join me in a poised intensity of aspiration for the Divine - and let your handwriting be less nervously twisted. In Q.6 I could read "progress" only by intuition (a sign of my own progress?). The same holds for "between" in Q.l. To scribble like this is no help to me - nor, I am afraid, will it be to you in your coming M.D. examination. You must prepare yourself all round to consummate your professional career by becoming M(other's) D(octor).

 

(7.10.1993)

 

Believe it or not, the shock of the recent earthquake in Maharashtra was felt by many people in Pondicherry. My own experience was rather queer. All of a sudden, a big hard pillow which I keep as a support to my right knee near the site of the fracture moved forward on its own! I looked around to see if anybody had shifted it. The young man who was in my room as a possible help at night was fast asleep. The pillow's autonomous movement would have remained a mystery, a miracle, if I had not heard the news of the far-off earthquake in the morning.

 

During the last two days I have been feeling - more than before - a deep inadequacy in the course of my sadhana, a kind of quaking of my settled earth. So much seems still unrealised! An act of warm self-giving, bringing a sense of mingling with the hushed heaven, as it were, of the ever-near

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presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is there hour after hour. It lends a meaning to all activities beyond their immediate and apparent usefulness, a meaning that seems to point both inward and upward to some everlasting Perfection, This Perfection, which is at the same time far away and plays like an aura around the sublime yet intimate closeness that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are through the earthly hours, serves as a reminder that an infinity of more-and-more is beckoning us and that the sweet proximity of Grace brought by our two Gurus is a call to experience even in the midst of a profound happiness an immense dissatisfaction. Along with being like a home of fulfilling rest for the soul's long search for the Divine through the True, the Good, the Beautiful, they reveal themselves as doorways for that soul to pass beyond its own ken, so to speak, and reach some endless mystery and magnificence of its own existence in harmony with our Gurus' transcendent counterparts. The difficult task to plunge into those doorways is before me, a challenge that sets an ache of aspiring uncertainty behind all the joy of "the Immortal in the mortal" the long years of the integral Yoga have managed to gather bit by bit.

 

(13.10.1993)

 

What pleased me greatly in your letter is your feeling that I am helping to maintain you in your inmost aspiration. Perhaps you are upheld in your own quest of spiritual fulfilment by the thought that the person who is so close to your soul is one who has pledged his whole life to the great Beyond and the deep Within and longed to live in the wide Without with the ego-swamping light from on high and the ego-refining warmth from the secret psyche. I have said "longed to live", for the goal is still far ahead. What has been done is no more than- the taking of a few toddling steps towards it - even if those steps never halt, much less turn backward. The progress is rather slow, but I have the conviction that I am in omnipotent hands which at any moment will

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lift me out of myself and carry me where Time neighbours Eternity.

 

(22.10.1993)

 

How shall I repay your love and generosity? All I can do is to keep you in the very core of my heart.

 

Perhaps you will want to know what sort of place this core is. Here the feeling of time is charged with a secret transcendence of the hours. Being within the complex of body, life-force and mind, it is necessarily aware of the passage of the moments, and the pains no less than the pleasures, the travails as well as the triumphs of that passage are experienced. They are steadily held in this mysterious domain but along with their earthly character a strange essence of them is distilled like a divine nectar which invigorates and delights, as if I were a warrior who would exult in all the vicissitudes of a battle under the banner of some great cause. Every movement of this warrior is a strain in both the senses of that term. There is an exertion, an expenditure of arduous energy and simultaneously the to-and-fro, the rise and fall of musical notes, the fluent building of poetic stanzas, the silent singing that is woven by varied dance-rhythms. The meeting and parting of earth's ways are reflected here, but all of them bear like an inner light the trend towards a single goal: either a deathless face of utter peace with infinite pity in its eyes or an immortal face of bliss whose eyes brim with love unending -twin aspects of one divinity with arms offering eternal rest and feet tracing for us an enchanted pilgrimage. The part of me that lives in the depth of this magical world is at once aloof from all my friends and yet intimate with their own depths and through these profundities gives the joys and sorrows of their surface selves an intense warmth of sympathy which still leaves him free from the shallowness of those feelings on the surface and unshadowed by their transiency.

 

Aside from the small bit of Amal Kiran that, by the

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compassion of Sri Aurobindo and by the grace of the Mother, is held by them in this ever-sunlit realm which is constituted by their presence and whose similitude is hidden within each human being - barring the tiny portion of Amal Kiran which inhabits this blessedness all of him is one in substance with common humanity though always aspiring that that sparkling Seed within him, that wonderful Much-in-little, may sprout and flower in the outer self with its fragrance of the Infinite and its flame of the Unerring.

 

I have written in terms of images. The being's core is not known immediately in a burst of imagery. But there is no beatific blankness, either. Everything is concretely experienced just as one grows aware of the outer world by sight and sound and touch. The only difference is that here this sense-knowledge is not always explicit. When one dwells on what is present in this inmost dimension of one's being, a self-created picture forms in consonance with the way one's imagination is usually apt to work. An inspiration seems to guide its activity so that spontaneously the Real gets a revelation in terms of the visible, the audible, the tangible, and "unknown modes of being" take strange yet convincing shapes.

 

(16.11.1993)

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