Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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Apropos of the topic of people doing pranams to sadhaks and receiving their blessings, a number of points have been raised for consideration. The most significant of them is: "A sadhak may not desire pranams, but if somebody on his own wants to do them, the sadhak does not interfere: he allows them. There is no desire or wish involved. Is there anything here to find fault with?"

The situation presented in the question is not quite as simple as it looks. The person who allows pranams on the terms mentioned may be perfectly honest and unassuming and have a genuine consideration for the psychological needs of those who want to do pranams to him. But what may start as a harmless and even benevolent affair may develop certain kinks and complexities. These may not always come to the surface in the consciousness of the sadhak concerned but may gradually go to the making of a particular constant attitude in him which may not be to his own good or other people's.

First of all, pranams repeated day after day are bound to set up a mechanism of expectation. They become a part of the sadhak's habitual relationship with others and there lies the danger of a desire or wish germinating. Here is a very natural psychological process. From this desire or wish a slowly and subtly gathering sense is likely to arise of what is due to one. And from that sense the step to a feeling of one's implicit superiority to others and of a general guruship is easy. The urge of benevolence and helpfulness to people could still be authentically there. But the movement of doing good may not now be from the same level as at the beginning; it may be from a slight self-elevation and this new poise may keep on increasing until one comes to have the established impression of an acknowledged guru's gadi under one.

Secondly, although one does not ask anybody to do pranams, one sets by accepting them an example to those who have not done them yet. These people may be wondering

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what they should do. They come with admiration and even reverence to whoever has been long in Yoga and is really in a position to give help both by his words and by his presence. They do not know what their approach as seekers should be and what outward relationship they should have with the object of their admiration and reverence. Especially in India, where a variety of approaches and relationships on the outer plane is possible, the question becomes more pointed. The point becomes still more keen when Westerners come here and' sincerely want to be Indianised in order to make the spiritual life more concrete and quick-moving. Seeing others easily go down on their knees and marking no reluctance at all in the one to whom this gesture is made, all these people get encouraged to respond with the same gesture. This effect on them amounts to their being tacitly invited to do pranams.

All the circumstances involved would tend to turn pra-nam-making into what, if we rightly interpret certain statements of Sri Aurobindo, would be disapproved by him -namely, a kind of cult and a shadow of the Mother's role vis-a-vis the sadhaks. Such a result cannot but be a hindrance to the Motherward development in both the sides concerned in this particular spiritual exchange. The receiver of the pranams would interfere in the continuity he has inwardly to maintain of surrender to the Mother and self-effacement before her. He may sincerely try to invoke her presence and offer up to her the gesture addressed to him; but if the latter has become part of a habitual, repeating, cultic process, such an attitude of consciousness is practically impossible and the element of personal self mostly replaces the sense of being a medium. As for the pranam-makers, the frequent recurrence of the gesture is bound to focus the consciousness on the pranam-receiver rather than on the Mother whose disciple they know him to be. As the physical act of going down on their knees concentrates and culminates the movement of devotion, the inner side-tracking and substitution run the risk of being firmly established. Not that they will derive no spiritual benefit from what they do, but they will not, on the whole, put themselves

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into the full direct contact with that unique creative fountain of the infinite supramental light that is the Mother.

Finally, there are certain dangers or at least challenges for the pranam-receiver, attendant on his getting into a cultic stream. By the momentum of this stream many movements in the beings of the pranam-makers begin naturally to flow out into him. Of course, something of him will flow out into them. This may mean their getting a strong touch of his qualities and his getting a strong touch of their defects. More probably what would happen is that a sort of mixture is created of the two consciousnesses and there will be again and again an activation of this ever-present pull in two directions with a little yet not very significant variation. After a while a stagnancy, merely surface-stirred, of spiritual life comes about - unless the pranam-receiver is able to make a great deal of inner progress by a supernormal self-purification in the intervals between the pranam-periods. Such a refreshing of one's being at the secret sources of light is not very likely because the cultic rhythm usually becomes dominant, and the melange produced by it will not allow an easy break-away towards those deeper springs. In order to remain unaffected by the haunting influence of that rhythm, one has to be very powerfully above the general psychological level of the people one accepts into one's consciousness.

All these, of course, are general observations. There is bound to be exceptional circumstances in certain respects and some modification may have to be made of my line of thought. But, by and large, the picture presented here is likely to stand and may serve as a broad guide to both the receiver and the maker of pranams.

(1976)

Your bringing up an old though very important spiritual issue for fresh discussion is welcome, for I have chanced upon a statement by Sri Aurobindo which clearly and conclusively reinforces the stand I have taken along with Nolini that bodily

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transformation is postponed, though not cancelled.

.

Before I exhibit my trouvaille let me touch on the old bones of contention you have dug up. There are four points here from my side:

(1)Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were to be the first to achieve bodily supramentalisation. Here Sri Aurobindo's declaration to me to the effect that if supramentalisation is not done in him it cannot be done in others is the central truth. Of course, we could substitute the Mother when Sri Aurobindo for reasons of his own pulled his body out of the transformative process.

(2)If the Mother also withdrew from her body the immediate individual process of transformation of the body came to a halt. No doubt, a lot of Yogic progress was still possible, but the final leap to the transformation of the gross-physical substance, ensuring freedom from disease, ageing and death, was rendered impossible at the present stage of mankind.

(3)Since the Supermind began to manifest on a universal scale on 29 February 1956 in the subtle-physical layer of the earth, the ultimate evolution of a new race at a future time when the Supermind would emerge into the earth's gross-physical stuff is a certainty. This future evolutionary certainty coupled with the present individual impossibility is what i mean when I support Nolini's dictum.

(4)The postponement is in force not only because Sri Aurobindo and the Mother left the transformative process uncompleted in their own bodies. It is in force also because of the fact driven home in several pronouncements to the effect that without the Guru's physical presence the advanced stages, the crucial and even dangerous turning-points in this process, cannot be achieved.

Against all this you trump up one phrase of the Mother's in a talk with Manoj Dasgupta, where on being asked whether bodily transformation could be done by oneself she does not deny the possibility but at once adds that in her experience the Guru's working has always been necessary for spiritual turning-points. You try to make out that such working where

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people other than the Mother are concerned has not been needed and you add that the silent mind came to the Mother from Sri Aurobindo whereas others have had it on their own. You are right in the one example you give - Sri Aurobindo's silent mind, though it followed his carrying out of Lele's instruction to feel thoughts as corning from outside and to repulse them, was not transmitted by Lele, unlike the Mother's complete silence of mind which was gifted at one sitting by Sri Aurobindo. From this you seem to conclude that, whatever be the Mother's outlook on gifts from the Guru, spiritual results like the silent mind can come without the Guru's direct agency. Ergo, Guruless bodily transformation must be possible.

This is a non-sequitur. First of all, silence of the mind cannot be put on a par with transformation of the body. What Sri Aurobindo calls in Savitri

The breathless might and calm of silent mind

is nothing supremely exceptional. Techniques to obtain it have existed in India and elsewhere from ancient times. The very first surra of Patanjali's Raja Yoga asks for it: chitta-imtti-nirodha ("subdue the quiverings of the consciousness"). The transformation of the body which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were after has never yet been done. The Mother said that hers was the first human body to undertake on Sri Aurobindo's command this radical experiment. May I request you to consider the implications of what the Mother's body was meant to be and to do? Let me remind you of my report of a half-whispered semi-soliloquy by the Mother as once she passed by me in the afternoon on her way to her brief siesta. Its gist was the supreme importance of keeping one body somehow going. Surely the implication was that everything hinged on what her body alone could or would do in the matter of physical supramentalisation. If everything depended on only her body, how could anyone else's be meant in the quote you offer of the Mother's declaration to Cham-

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paklal soon after the supramental manifestation on February 29, 1956, that "she was now free to go and to make way for another body to complete the transformation"? You argue that she meant someone else's body; I that she had in view a future body of her own on earth to complete the individual body's transformation within the context of the universal manifestation which was evidently a further step in the general history of earthly evolution. My argument is: "If everything hung on the unique body that was hers, the body that was to be kept going, 'another body' could only mean a body she would have to take up in the future by rebirth to replace the present one which might not prove adequate."

Perhaps we could validly ask here why the Mother suggested that she had done what had been necessary and her present body was no longer needed. Undoubtedly, both she and Sri Aurobindo had been working for the supramentalisation of their individual bodies and not just for the manifestation of a general supramental consciousness, light, force, etc. and that too in the earth's subtle-physical layer. Could she have felt or intuited that the full individual work would not be accomplished by her in this life of hers? Your reply, in spite of all that I have already urged, will be that, for whatever reason, she was ready to give up her body and had in mind the body of Nolini or Champaklal or Dyuman or Pavitra or Amrita or Satprem to fulfil the work Sri Aurobindo had assigned to her: namely, "our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation."

Now is the moment for me to set forth my discovery to drive home my long-held conviction that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother insisted that their bodily presence - or at least the presence of one of the two bodies - was a sine qua nort for the ultimate transformation of any disciple of theirs.

On p. 505 of Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953 edition), I found the following:

Q, Is there any special effect of physical nearness to the Mother?

A. It is indispensable for the fullness of the sadhana on

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the physical plane. Transformation of the physical material being is not possible otherwise.

Sri Aurobindo's answer should put a finis to all talk of anyone undergoing the physical and material being's transformation on his own. Even by itself the talk appears to be no more than "sounding brass or tinkling cymbal" without the necessary background being perceived - in the person you refer to - of a supramentalised mind and vital force led by the inmost soul permeated by the supramental divinity. Is there any sign of such a background in this person whose claim for his body's progress you are inclined not to brush aside in spite of your saying: "Normally I have little sympathy for him and his often aggressive self-assertion"? I don't think there is any other claimant in the field. What you write seems to want a rival to him. You have a strangely prophetic paragraph, beginning:

"... there is a surprising further possibility. It is that of the extraordinary prediction concerning your own body..."

I may mention that neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother made "the extraordinary prediction" as an unconditional bonus, though the Mother always said it would anyhow be fulfilled. However, her departure renders its ultimate terms unfulfillable, while leaving the future open about the intermediate ones. Even the latter have to be set in the context of the extreme locomotive disabilities obtaining at present.

(29.4.1994)

I am glad we have reached agreement about the impossibility of physical transformation without the Guru's embodied presence guiding and guarding the process. In a tit for my tat of convicting you of a non-sequitur you have brought up my speaking in the same breath of the silent mind experienced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and "the mind from thought released" achieved by several spiritual aspirants. Though my comparison was mistaken it was in the same universe of dis-

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course: your lumping together an almost initial thing like mental silence with a supreme and ultimate, hitherto-unaccomplished thing like bodily supramentalisation was like comparing "a Hyperion to a satyr", as your favourite store of quotations would say. However, I have no mind particularly to decide who should be chosen to wear the crown of a dunce's cap in the realm of irrelevance. There are more important matters to dwell upon.

The impression I get from your letter is that, according to you,' the most important matter is the prolongation of life at will. Since the final transformation cannot be done unless the Mother is again on the earth, the power of life-prolongation in a spiritually developing sadhak would enable him to wait, "perhaps for centuries, for the Mother's return to make possible the ultimate step". Here, I think, we have to distinguish between some sort of ability to carry on for a long time in a state of tolerable health and the confident mastery over the body's functions on the way to a change into a physical condition immune to disease, degeneration and death. I am afraid the latter is beyond any attainment short of physical supramentalisation. Sri Aurobindo has summed up the attainment in question: "Naturally, the release from subconscient ignorance and from disease, duration of life at will, and a change in the functionings of the body must be among the ultimate elements of a supramental change..." (Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, 1953 ed„ p. 382). It seems that nothing short of the process of supramentalisation of the body can lead to "duration of life at will".

Since such duration hinges on immunity in the body, let me cite another passage: "As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. We have not sought perfection for our own separate sake, but as part of a general change - creating a

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possibility of perfection for others. That could not have been done without our accepting and facing the difficulties of the realisation and transformation and overcoming them for ourselves. It has been done to a sufficient degree on the other planes - but not yet on the most material part of the physical plane. Till it is done the fight continues and, though there may be and is a force of Yogic action and defence, there cannot be immunity. The Mother's difficulties are not her own; she bears the difficulties of others and those that are inherent in the general action and working for the transformation. If it had been otherwise, it would be a very different matter." (Ibid., pp. 390-91).

Here we have more than one issue involved. It is suggested that if the Mother were not loaded with others' impediments she could compass complete immunity - that is, easily acquire supramentalisation of the body. It is also suggested that none of her disciples has been or will be capable of going on in the transformative Yoga without her aid. The further suggestion is that, unlike the situation on the subtle planes, immunity to the full on the most material plane is still lacking. The overall suggestion we catch is that bodily sup ramentalisation alone canconfer total immunity.Soyouridea that one may spiritually continue immune for centuries until such supramentalisation is bestowed by the physical return of the Mother in a far future is Utopian: it is self-contradictory.

Evolutionary supramentalisation in the course of thousands of years, with the help of the supramental manifestation that has already laid its base in the earth's history through the earth's subtle-physical layer on 29 February 1956, seems now to be the only thing possible.

I say "now", meaning a point of time with an extensive vista ahead, in a distant part of which the Mother will make her presence physical again. You are sceptical of her comeback because you can't think of her starting life again under all the petty circumstances of childhood and school-life due to ignorant parents and silly tutors. According to me, rebirth

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need not be a degrading process. The Mother's own childhood and girlhood as well as her womanhood were fairly radiant. But for her to return to earth-life she need not go through all these stages. She has posed as a possibility her merger with a finely developed body already existing. A great, even radical change would then take place in the life of that body, along with its consciousness, and the Mother who has worked in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram in our day would stand before the world to carry on her mission of physical supramentalisation using fully the general influence of the universal Supermind that has already manifested as a background power. Because of this supporting light mankind would be more receptive and her toil towards total transformation of not only her own new embodiment but also, along with it, that of her followers' bodies would be like sun and rain bringing about the opening of flowers instead of the hard labour it has been during her recent life-span in our Ashram - our ''blooming'' Ashram as a sour critic might sav, keeping up the floral imagery.

In such a role she would prepare our own reborn selves as well as others for the time when, according to the promise given to her during the days Sri Aurobindo's body was lying in state, he would come back in a supramental body built in a supramental way. That hour would mark the two greatest victories of terrestrial history: the Mother sitting as the pioneer of the human supramentalised side by side with Sri Aurobindo as the initiator of the supramental humanised.

(28.5.1994)

Your vision of me is essentially the vision of the god hidden in man and waiting to be brought forth from behind the veil. It goes far beyond the day-to-day Amal with all his deficiencies. Somehow you have seen the luminous secrecy already in the midst of things mortal. No doubt, I aspire at all hours to manifest the divine truth which is the supreme ideal behind the evolving real. As a result, these all-too-fallible eyes reflect

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on occasion some lustre of the Impeccable. But oh so far still is the reflection from the actual splendour-source!

Yours is a peep into the future - and so forceful is the peep that I feel the future hastened. The dreamer in me is activated beyond his usual capacity and stirred to wake into the daylight of divinity as soon as possible. Thanks for your deep faith in my endeavour to draw within our hazy human formula the sheer purple of the Sovereign and the Perfect.

One must guard against getting puffed up with a dear friend's high estimate, but if humbly received, with an awareness of the Infinite which can never be compassed, no matter how lofty our climb, such an estimate can serve to pull one nearer

The joy that beckons from the impossible.

.

(18.5.1994)

I am sure you have a mind of a really good quality, with a capacity to enhance its natural talent with a golden touch from the Mother. Don't waste the gift the Divine has graced you with. With a calm, poised, inwardly dedicated attitude go ahead with your studies, so that your MD may mean at the same time Medicinae Doctor and "Mother's Devotee". If you neglect your talent, you won't be serving the Divine as the Divine wishes you to do. You'll finally stultify the light that has been placed in your brain: then you will achieve another sort of MD, standing for "Mentally Deficient".

It is an error to believe that true sadhana can't go on side" by side with solid work - intellectual or physical. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is a dynamic one, not one whose object is omphaloskepsis, "navel-gazing". Channelling your mental energy into useful learning, with a consecrated temper which keeps Yoga running alongside one's studies: that seems to me the career marked out for you. Then even the hostile attacks will diminish. They find easy entry into your mind at present because it is not fruitfully directed and occupied.

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Thanks for occasionally praying for me. I am certain I'll benefit by every sincere and affectionate prayer on my behalf. I shall on my side make it a point to offer you to the Mother at the Samadhi.

(1989)

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