Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

19

On November 25,1993, my eighty-ninth birthday, I visited Sri Aurobindo's room after nearly fourteen years. My physical disability had deterred me from becoming a burden to friends who would have had to carry me in a chair. They said it would be a pleasure, but I had no heart to impose on them such pleasure. Now my young friend Saurav, who is one of a small group of youngsters most willing to help me and who often goes out of his way to make life easy and interesting for me, pleaded that I should go to the Room of rooms. I just could not disappoint him. So he took me in my wheelchair to the Ashram's ground-floor-space outside Nolini's room. Then he and others helped me transfer myself to an ordinary chair. This chair was carried upstairs and put in Sri Aurobindo's room near the door which is close to Nirodbaran's office "den".

When I reached the Holy of Holies, there was a rush of delightful memories. This was the unforgettable room whose every aspect had been so familiar to me in those days when, along with a few other people, 1 would spend my time from nearly 8.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. in its proximity. From 12.30 to 1,40 I would be alone nearby waiting for the Mother to finish her lunch with Pranab and go to her bathroom and then meet me before going for her short siesta.

As soon as my chair was placed in the sanctum I became keenly aware of the Presence that had lived there in an embodied form for twenty-three years. Again and again during those years I had touched his feet in the darshan-room while he would be sitting on a couch with the Mother on it to his right - the beautiful executive and manifesting Tight of him, armed with his full power_vIt is worth noting that in all sacred sculpture of India, Ishwari, "the Eternal Feminine", is shown always to the Ishwara's left. Even in the grandiose representation where the God and the Goddess are fused as one supreme Entity in a single form - ardhanariivara - the left

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half expresses her. But Sri Aurobindo has created a new age of spiritual dynamism in which the Divine Mother shines forth with the total force of the Lord. Symbolic indeed is her position in a world-work which is figured not only as an aeonic many-featured sustainment of her original creative activity but also as the source of a novel era in which the foundation is laid of an ultimate all-round divinisation of the human being, down to the very body. In that era the final salvation is not a rapturous resort to the Beyond: it is an ecstatic establishment here on earth of the entire contents of that glorious Otherwhere. In that superb Secrecy awaits, according to Sri Aurobindo, the godlike original of every part of us. Not merely are an ideal mind and life-force there, ready to descend, but a perfect body exists as well - a super-physicality which will transfigure the present "vesture of decay" in which the soul has had to play its role on the terrestrial stage in life after life for millennia.

While I sat-in Sri Aurobindo's room, the Master of the Integral Yoga was an intense presence all around me, a large enfolding power which seemed to surround me and permeate me and - wonder of wonders! - have its most living centre in my own heart. It was as if he were filling-the room with a starting-point deep within me. It must have been a supreme act of Grace that gave me this feeling, a special boon to one who had come as a sort of prodigal son after a long exile. Or was it a lesson brought home to me that, after all, the real place of Sri Aurobindo at his most Avataric was not in any particular physical spot but in the profundity of love in a devotee's being?

On one side of me was Saurav and on the other my friend Ruth who had asked for the favour of accompanying me as a permitted associate. At first we three were alone. After a while the whole room filled up. At the end of the time allotted for meditation I asked to be ' taken to the other parts of the first floor with which I had been familiar in the past. My chair was carried into the room where the Mother used to sit every morning with her secretaries in a semicircle in front of her,

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discussing matters of the day before or of the day ahead. At one end of this room was the easy-chair in which the Mother used to sit every afternoon to eat her lunch. Here Kumud now put some special blessing-packets for me on the cushion of the chair along with some flowers. I took them all with happy gratitude.

At the other end of this room was the entrance facing across a little space the room which at one time had served as the Mother's dressing-room. Here every afternoon she would be seated in a chair and sip her glass of fruit-juice. Those who were to meet her would be squatting opposite her in the room from which I was now viewing her dressing-room. On rare occasions I would come up in the afternoon to have a few words with her on some urgent matters. I well remember how once I, kneeling before her, reported the latest news I had heard from "home". Sharply the Mother said: "I have caught you out. Where is what you call 'home'? Is it still in Bombay or is it here?" I was shamefaced and blurted out: "I am sorry, Mother. Of course my home is with you." She made a glad forgiving gesture with her eyes and lips.

As now I looked around, the old days were getting revived in my mind. Now the presence of the Mother began to fill the space upstairs with a smiling centre in my heart.

What most struck me was that there was no sense of emptiness anywhere - no sense of departure by Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. They have left their own luminous atmosphere as a living legacy to the Ashram.

(24.12.1993)

Your present state has only one solution. Of course, it is, as you say, "Offer, offer everything, every act, every thought as soon as possible." But there is a slight slip in the last phrase. "As soon as possible" is not soon enough. No talk of possibility should be there. You must not wait a single fraction of a second. You must not start thinking about your thought and wondering whether you can sweep it away

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towards the Mother quickly enough.

I am glad your son has been watching sunrises. To get a spur for a better day there is nothing to match this act. What you say about the Gayatri is very true. The sun spoken of in it is the Supermind, the Creator, the Re-creator, the Transformer, whose representative symbol in the physical universe is the luminary that makes our day. The Gayatri may be considered the key to "the Secret of the Veda", for clearly the sun addressed is not just this luminary. The power that can impel our thoughts must be something psychological and spiritual which the sun we behold shadows forth. "Shadows" must strike you as a peculiar word to use about the brightest thing we know. But it is appropriate, as a line by a poet well known to you reminds us by addressing the Supreme Light:

Lustre whose vanishing point we call the sun,

or again:

Truth-pulsing gold to which the sun were black.

(21.9.1982)

I know that the day of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri hasn't yet come. The Symbol Dawn in which its truth and beauty will be seen by all hasn't broken in people's consciousness. But here and there we shall find inner wakers. They have to be people with a wide sense of poetry and not sticklers after one kind or another and they must be ready to feel and see and hear even when they can't quite grasp. By sensitive feeling, penetrative seeing and sympathetic hearing they will begin to make out the substance and realise the traffic of the gods both as they move in their own empyrean and as they cast their shining shadows on the earth. A profound aesthetic approach is demanded by all poetry, for here is an art and, although art should not be cut off from life nor meaning be a matter of indifference, it is by a receptivity to form, a response to the

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gesture made to the sensuous heart by the suggestive way the words are linked, the images interplay, the sounds get woven together to evoke by the vivid expression a sense of the inexpressible, that poetry is meant to go home to us. The epithet I have prefixed to "aesthetic approach" is important: the approach, for all its aestheticism, has to avoid being superficial - else we have only a preoccupation with the technique. I have spoken of "the sensuous heart" and my epithet "profound" points to it. What I am trying to say with regard to Savitri is that if one searches the art of it with no fixed ideas as to what a poem should convey and how it should do so, one is bound to be touched by it.

I cannot pronounce anything definite on the line you have quoted from Rilke:

Da stieg ein Baum, O reine Ubersteigung,

for I am almost at sea in German. What Stephen Spender seems to have tried by his translation which you quote from memory -

A tree arose, O pure transcension -

is to get a polysyllable word at the end in English to match the original's "Ubersteigung". His "transcension" is rather abstract: its sole merit is its being a coinage of his own on the analogy of "ascension". Your observation strikes me as appropriate: "A tree cannot transcend anything. And 'reine' has more of 'clear' ('it got clear away') or 'clean' (in the sense of something coming away clean), than 'pure'." From what I have heard, "reine" translates most commonly "pure", but ultimately the significance would depend on the particular drift of the poetic vision and emotion. Do you think "sheer" would go beyond Spender's sense sufficiently to catch yours without straining the general usage? I agree that non-Latin words would be best in rendering Rilke, for a German polysyllable is quite likely to be concrete in its evocation and

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need not be echoed by a similar vocable in English from a Latin origin which would lack concreteness. If I may take Spender as a point de depart, I may venture on something like:

A tree rose up, O sheer soar-away.

Perhaps my ignorance is flying away with me?

I know there comes a turning-point in life when some mystery pressing obscurely from within has to be given a face and a form in day-to-day movements. I can only guess in rather vague terms at your predicament.{Of course I'll pray for you to choose the right path or, like Rilke's up-soaring tree, get clear away into a new dimension instead of wrestling with problems within the old. This would be a peaceful outlet following a peaceful "inlet", a smiling contact with that intrinsic freedom which is your soul. To help the contacting, just pull out "the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart" and, without trying to resolve it with the mind, offer it to the Mother. Don't offer it in a horizontal line but in a vertical one so as to pass the gesture through the mind and, clearing it of its perplexity, its tangle of thoughts, push everything towards the Divine with a silent plea to Her to make your problem Hers. When you have done this, it is very important that you don't dwell upon it any more. Be as if the question didn't exist. Let the Great Presence deal with it in Its own mystical masterly manner. Once this offering is done, the soul's innate liberty will be felt. The gesture I have spoken of may have to be repeated many times. Whenever the impulse to start thinking out your difficulty comes up, do again the heart-cleansing mind-numbing handing over of your situation to the All-knower, the All-lover, whose glance can pierce through every knot and work out the Will in which alone is our peace, as Dante knew long ago. 1 am telling you this method not merely out of any wise book but out of my own life which has realised on its pulses that

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

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Now a side-glance at your missionary friend Poh San, St. Paul and the question of translating him. I don't see how she can escape the literal rendering of Galatians 2:19: "Through the Law I die to the Law..." What she has to do is to make a comment on the paradox. The key is supplied in brief by what follows. I am quoting the Jerusalem Bible: "... so that now I can live for God. I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in this body I live in faith: faith in the Son'of God who loved me and who sacrificed himself for my sake." Yes, the key is here but it rightly deserves to be called a skeleton key. It needs to be fleshed out with the help of other passages in Galatians: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by being cursed for our sake, since scripture says: Cursed be everyone who is hanged on a tree" (3:13) - "God sent his Son, bom of a woman, born a subject to the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us to be adopted as sons" (4:4-5). I may add a passage from 2 Corinthians (5:21): "For our sake God made the sinless one unto sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God."

If Poh San would like me to elucidate the paradox in my own words, I would say: "We are all sinners and according to the Law of Moses we deserve to be punished, but Jesus got born like one of us and paid the full penalty on our behalf of a Law-transgressor, the penalty of the lowest of deaths, the death of a 'felon' who is crucified ('hanged on a tree'). Thus he brought it about that we can escape the rigour of the Law by means of faith in him which makes us one with him and hence die to the Law by sharing the sense of the utmost Lawful punishment that he underwent - the crucifixion - and, by so dying, be reborn as God's sons, filled with God's goodness and win salvation."

(4.12.1987)

Since you entered the Ashram atmosphere as a teenager and paid your respects to the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the

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Mother at that early period of your life - presumably your first contact with a spiritual power - the influence of these two Masters of Yoga is bound to have been basic. If afterwards you dabbled in other supposedly spiritual or occult influences, what can you expect other than a confusion in your being? Especially Krishnamurti, with his intellectual seductiveness, must have been a contra influence - he strives to strike at the very root of Indian spirituality which lays a stress on guidance by and devotion to a Gum.The Integral Yoga is a very positive power and the personal presence of its teachers, whether physical or subtle, has to be felt all the time with a consistent single-minded fervour.Also, you must plunge as much as possible into their writings. Read the Mother's Talks and Sri Aurobindo's Letters on Yoga.I would advise you to keep with you as a constant companion Sri Aurobindo's small book, The Mother and the Mother's Prayers and Meditations. I am enclosing a blessing-packet. By turning to the Mother you will surely get out of the mental and physical deterioration you have marked, particularly after taking a mantra from someone who has nothing to do with our Ashram.

(29.9.1993)

You say you are torn between two pulls. On the one side you are "career-minded" and on the other you feel "the intense need to give myself away to something higher and bigger than myself". You ask me to steady you and help you "to have a single orientation in life". I am sure that basically you are cut out for the spiritual life or rather for a self-dedication to the Divine which will yet leave room for a deeply idealistic love-relationship with a fellow-aspirant. But the push in you towards careerism is also an undeniable element of your nature and it is all the more strong because you have a sharp intelligence and an amiable disposition which easily makes friends and wins people over. I don't think it will ever do to suppress this element. It is common sense to equip yourself, as you are doing at present, to carry it to success. And there is

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no reason why you should not go ahead nor is there any reason why at the same time you should fail to practise genuine spirituality. The conflict in you arises because you are under the impression that genuine spirituality can be practised only within the confines of the Ashram at Pondicherry. But remember that the Ashram too is a hive of activity. We are not reclusive navel-gazers or preoccupied with "sacred" ceremonies. We work in the Ashram variously as non-Ashramites do in the outside world: the only difference is that our activities are geared to help the Ashram become the centre of a new humanity. What, however, may prove missing for you if you settle down here and seek some sort of scope for your special skills is "rising in life", moving to a more and more effective position, a greater managerial post or a field in which a wider influence and power can be exercised. If this is your aim when you call yourself "career-minded", the Ashram is not the place for you to opt for your future. Besides, not all workers for the Ashram can become officially Ashramites - that is, get supported wholly by the Ashram Trust. One may require to have the wherewithal for one's day-to-day sustenance.

If one does not have the necessary means, what is one to do if one longs to lead the spiritual life? First of all, one must get over the idea that while pursuing a career one gets debarred from spirituality. Essentially, if one can practise spirituality in the midst of the work all Ashramites do, why can't one do the same along with one's activity outside? To attempt such a venture is no chase of a mere will-o'-the-wisp. I know of several cases in which the Mother has asked aspiring Aurobindonians to keep working outside and help the Ashram in any capacity open to them. So there can very well be a class of authentic aspirants who carry on their Yoga with the Mother's own approval in Madras or Bombay or Calcutta or even in England, France, Switzerland or the USA. With the Mother quitting her body, this line of Yoga approved by her does not cease to be eligible. Whether it is meant for one or not has now to be decided by one's inmost

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instinct. But even if one decides to be an outsider Ashramite, so to speak, one must now and again come into the in-drawing atmosphere that plays about the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Those who live outside India can't do it often. Those who live within our country should drop in as frequently as they can to drink at the fountain-head.

(1993)

The question you have put me is based on silly ideas about Yoga in general and Sri Aurobindo's Yoga in particular. You think that to be a yogi means to neglect everybody and attend only to one's own good. Yoga essentially means giving oneself wholly to the Divine. All pampering of one's ego, all selfish absorption in oneself is taboo. One has to stop thinking of one's own self and one's ordinary habits and indulgences. God should be all in all to one, in preference to one's attachment to ways conducive to one's egoistic interests. It is true that a good part of one's ego-serving life is attachment to "family, parents, friends, companions" (to employ your own list). This attachment has to go but its going is purely an internal affair: one is not asked to be harsh to anyone. In the old world-renouncing Yogas, there had to be a breaking of ties in a very external way, because one became a sannyasin or at least a kind of recluse. Yet even there the separation or aloofness was done in order to give oneself wholly to God. Surely the old-time life of the sannyasin or the recluse was a difficult life devoid of comforts and conveniences. How could such sacrifice of the props of ordinary existence be dubbed selfish? In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga one does not resort to a forest or a cave or break away altogether from relatives or friends. This Yoga is also a collective process. One does not plough a lonely furrow. One has to work co-operatively with people and there has to be mutual consideration. Naturally if one's family is far from Pondicherry, one lives separately here, but there is no bar to the family and friends coming

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here. This Ashram is also an international centre of education. Hence a lot of youngsters are present. We are one big family. However, there is a good deal of freedom for the individual. Ordinary social norms and constraints fall away. But in the midst of all individual or social life the central concentration is on the Divine, never on oneself as you imagine.

Picking out lines at random from Savitri and applying them to your own situation is not wise. When it is said, "Pain is the signature of the Ignorance", you can't take it as an indirect message for you, dubbing you an ignorant fool because you have been suffering. Sri Aurobindo means that as long as one lives without God-realisation - that is, without transcending the state of Ignorance in which people ordinarily live - they are bound to undergo pain in one form or another. Sri Aurobindo's term - "the Ignorance" - denotes the common consciousness in which the majority of people live: it does not cover only you and your heart-aches.

(27.8.1993)

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