Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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The Gods and Goddesses are emanations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. So their connections in some way or other with the work of our Gurus, according to the choice of our Gurus, are natural. But the question is whether the disciples are encouraged to have connections with the Gods and Goddesses. Here, as elsewhere in the Integral Yoga, there are no hard-and-fast rules and several things are not objected to if they serve as temperamental aids. Yet the general stand is clear. Has not the Mother emphatically said that those who want to worship Gods and Goddesses may do so but such worship has nothing to do with the Supramental Yoga of Sri Aurobindo?

You make much of Sri Aurobindo's "sending his blessings on the occasion of 'Upanayanam' (Investiture of Sacred Thread as a symbol of spiritual initiation) and on one occasion blessing the person concerned as well as the whole world with his 'Gayatri Mantra' ".

The fact that Sri Aurobindo has given a new Gayatri replacing the famous old one is quite meaningful in the context we are discussing, its divergence from the latter shows the novel dynamic world-transforming drive of the Aurobindonian Yoga as distinguished from the Rigvedic drive which had as its goal - its very grand goal, no doubt -the impelling of our thoughts by the light of the Divine Sun of Truth, the deity Surya-Savitri. Surely the Vedic revelation is not rejected, its Gods and Goddesses can serve Sri Aurobindo's ends but we are not encouraged to move directly in their great ranges. "We do not belong to the dawns of the past but to the noons of the future." Surya-Savitri as representing the godhead of what Sri Aurobindo has termed Supermind, Truth-Consciousness, Gnosis, Vijnana is indeed the presiding Power and Presence of the Yoga whose guides are Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but with an orientation beyond the vision, far-flung though it was, of Vishwamitra, the seer of the old Gayatri.

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The moment we see the new core of spirituality in the message of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother we shall gain the right perspective of all their gestures. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not refuse to bless various functions in the lives of their disciples, especially those living outside the Ashram. I say "especially" because even within the Ashram they have blessed a few marriages. In the instance of my niece, an Ashramite, the Mother not only blessed her marriage with an Ashram boy in the sense of companionship but also at one stage wrote wanting the boy, in view of the girl's psychological need, to give her a child: the sole proviso made was that the child should be conceived and given birth elsewhere than in the Ashram. All this does not signify that investitures of the sacred thread among non-Ashramites or even an Ashram-marriage like the one to which I have alluded can be made a rule of the spiritual life according to the Integral Yoga. The Aurobindonian spirituality, in the Ashram version, goes fundamentally beyond sacred threads and procreative marriages and indeed looks upon such things as what I have dubbed "old-world foibles".

As for your allegation of my partiality for the Parsis, the relevant point is whether 1 am a practitioner of the Parsi religion or linked with it by any representative sign. 1 am sure you know that the Parsis too have a sacred thread (kusti): it is worn around the waist over a sacred shirt (sudra). Even before I joined the Ashram I had given up wearing the sacred thread no less than the sacred shirt of the Parsis. Both these characteristics are more a sign of the Zoroastrian religion as distinct from the Aurobindonian path than the Hindu sacred thread which Champaklal kept wearing. For the latter is exclusive to the Brahmins among the Hindus and does not have the universal sweep of the pre-Aurobindonian as does my long-discarded Parsi symbols of religious commitment. As for the Parsi religion, I gave it up long ago and the pursuit of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga has rendered any return to it impossible.

My so-called partiality for the Parsis can only be considered "communal" in an innocuous sense and no more de-

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Indianises me than any resident of India who would find it pertinent or piquant to describe himself as a Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Tamil or Telugu with no desire to be regarded as provincial rather than national. We must not make all-obscuring mountains out of mole-hills meant for specific harmless purposes.

(12.6.1993)

Thanks for wanting to send whatever I may like to have. But surely you will be here in person soon enough? At that time you may bring whatever occurs to you as necessary to my rather unusual mode of life - confined to a wheelchair, facing a chaos of papers on my writing table, with bookcases around packed with information on a variety of subjects "from cabbages to kings" and challenging the mind on the one hand with expositions of the world's teeming manifold quest across the labyrinths of time and on the other hand with

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity.

Sitting in the midst of profuse reading-matter and absorbed in the craft of endless writing and turned as much as his numerous human weaknesses allow towards the all-healing and all-fulfilling infinity of that dual divine presence: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - such is Amal Kiran to whom you are stretching friendly hands which he is willing to clasp. What gifts these hands should bring is quite a problem. But I may add that there is a more approachable side to this fellow. He can smile and laugh and respond to warm touches and has an appreciative eye for exquisite or piquant faces and gracefully moving or strikingly stepping bodies. For, within the scholar, the scribbler and the sadhak, there is the poet and there is the artist and perhaps there lingers also the ghost of the lover.

It is not always easy to know my attitude towards things. Thus I feel misrepresented when you write: "X tells me that

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you do not like people who are undecisive and sit on the fence." First of all, there is a difference between not liking the act of sitting on the fence and not liking the people who do the fence-sitting. Up to now, you, according to yourself, have been a sitter on the fence. Can you tell me that I haven't liked you? I am sure my liking you has been splashed all over my letters. If I have wished you to get off the fence, it is not in order to make you more likable: it is simply in order to make you more happy - to save you from useless prolonged hurt to your beautiful bottom - I mean the bottom of your heart from which you have loved X.

Even if you continued in that uncomfortable posture you would not cease to be congenial and delectable to me. I have no partiality for "strong silent" people of radical decisions as against frail ones asking themselves, "Shall I or shall I not?" In most if not all matters I have a free mind. Like the Roman poet Terence I can say: "Humanus sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto" - "I am human and nothing human do I consider alien to me," Not only is there in me a link of common humanity in general, I have also gone through a large variety of human experiences. All the follies and failings, miseries and sufferings of the race have been part of my life, just as, on the other hand, all the powers and splendours and felicities have been. I have known exultation and heartbreak equally.

In the ordinary round of life I have as close friends those who are eminent in intelligence and those who are quite simple-minded, men and women with shining eyes along with men who are dull and women who are drab. No doubt some people are dearer to me than others, but I shut out none as despicable, or perhaps I should make a small exception: I have a special admiration for and affinity with living vessels of courage and generosity. Broadly speaking, what appeals to me is not this or that characteristic but the basic substance of which a person is constituted. I remember the Mother saying something like: "I don't care for a person's ideas and opinions, intellectual convictions or conventional beliefs. Even if

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someone was an atheist and a materialist in his mental outlook but was made of really fine stuff, capable of disinterested action and sensitive to life's beautiful movements, I would find him akin to my work and I could do something with him." On a much inferior scale, my natural turn is like the Mother's.

(6.10.1993)

You want to know what exactly is meant by "fine stuff" and how you could be a person possessing it. I have given two examples of the proof of such stuff: disinterested action and sensitiveness to life's beautiful movements. You want me to clarify what is meant by these two characteristics, so that you may bring yourself nearer to what the Mother can work upon. Not to be locked up in one's own interests and satisfactions but to be able to give oneself to activities that are undertaken without the desire for fame or power and people's admiration

-at the same time to keep away from being caught too much in outward occupation and develop the capacity of being alone with one's own depths and with the widenesses of the universe, so to speak, as well as with the heights of literature and art and far-ranging thought and still not grow too serious and solemn but have the appetite for laughter and fun and perhaps even a bit of frivolity, remembering that

A little nonsense now and then Is relished by the wisest men.

-such in general and in a broad connotation I would picture the "fine stuff" come alive. This stuff can be met with on a less comprehensive scale too. A person essentially good-natured and generous and forbearing - with a courageous outlook and a humble inlook - can be designated as being fine in stuff.

(3.11.1993)

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How far have you gone on the Inner Path? Krishna Prem (Ronald Nixon) has written: "For the Great Ones no obstruction can exist. Christ appeared suddenly in the midst of closed doors. Apollonius of Tyana removed his limbs from chains to show a doubting disciple that it was but his own will that kept him in Domitian's prison, and similar events have been recorded even in recent times, - e.g., Trailanga Swami of Benares within living memory. Those who have gone far enough on the Inner Path know with a certainty beyond all cavil that this 'too too solid earth' can and does 'thaw and resolve itself into a dew' and that nothing in it can obstruct even for an instant the passage of the free soul."

I am travelling on this Inner Path myself. Hence the query: "How far have you, my dear friend, gone on it?" Sri Aurobindo also has written:

"These things are impossible without an inward living...."

"This movement of going inward is a difficult task to lay upon the normal consciousness of the human being; yet there is no other way of self-finding."

I have great respect for Krishna Prem's spirituality and intuitive insight, but here is not one of his most felicitous moments. First of all, his eloquent passage is based on plausible legends, not unmistakable history. Don't you know that the "resurrection" of Jesus is still a controversial topic among biblical scholars? We need not dispute what are called his "appearances" after death, but St. Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament and the only writer affirming first-hand experience of the "raised" or "risen" Jesus, has drawn so sharp a contrast between what he terms the "physical body" and the "spiritual body" of the "resurrection", that a critical student may well ask: "Can the sudden appearance of Jesus in the midst of closed doors which two out of the four later-written Gospels report on hearsay be attributed, as these Gospels claim, to his physical body?" An occult phenomenon may strike one as the most likely event, a powerful materialisation of a non-physical form after death for a short time.

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What is said about Apollonius of Tyana dates to over a hundred years after his death, even a longer period than that between the crucifixion of Jesus and the composition of the Gospels ascribed to Luke and John, and thus has no historical force. I don't know what to say about Trailanga Swami, but the report about him could be on a par with several reports current about Sri Aurobindo during his very lifetime - for example, that he used to go out bodily through the ceiling of his room every night to visit various places. The Mother has referred to them and laughed, saying that Sri Aurobindo himself told her of the ceiling-report and informed her of its having been actually put in writing by someone. (By the way, Krishna Prem's quotation from Hamlet is slightly off the mark: Shakespeare uses the word "flesh" and not "earth" in the first part of it.

Secondly, the phrase Krishna Prem employs and you endorse - "Those who have gone far enough on the Inner Path" - mixes up with the true spiritual progress certain abnormal phenomena which, even if authentic, have essentially nothing to do with spirituality. What he recounts are, if historical, feats of "siddhis", operations of special miraculous powers. The Mother, when referring to the ceiling-story, was speaking in the context of similar tales of miracles, including the one about the South-Indian saint Ramahngam's bodily disappearance from the earth. Here two observations by the Mother are to be noted.

One is that, though these phenomena are not impossible, she personally was not inclined to believe the stories in question to be true: all sorts of legends grow up around prominent spiritual figures. The other is that merely miraculous acts are no indications of a spiritual state. She cites a phenomenon said by her to have been attested under strict conditions - a phenomenon, I may say, more wonderful than anything related about past or present masters of spirituality - namely, the feat of dematerialisation and rematerialisation by "mediums" in our own day. Her comment is to the effect that the "mediums" concerned had nothing spiritual about

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them - in fact, they were people of a fairly undeveloped character.

Please disabuse your mind of the delusion that "the Inner Path" consists of or is proved by such spectacular and sensational achievements. As I have "no comparable feats to my credit I should be, by the suggested criterion, outside this Path altogether and I may add that even if I perform them in the future I may still be as little spiritual as those "mediums". Of course, these feats can go along with spiritual development too, but they are not necessarily spirituality.

Sri Aurobindo never meant such wonders to be our objective when he wrote of "an inward living" or of "going inward". As your second quotation from him shows, he was pointing to "self-finding".

Let us devote our time to the quiet business of living in the sweetness and light and strength of the inmost psychic being, to the secret task of experiencing the peace and wideness and force of the one universal Self of selves, to the absorbed labour of invoking the nature-transformative power of the transcendent Divine which Sri Aurobindo calls "Supermind" or "Truth-Consciousness".

(1992)

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