Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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You have asked me only two questions, but they have set up quite a world of cerebral coruscation. You will have to be patient and tolerant with me, for I am answering in the manner of a wind which "bloweth where it listeth".

Your first question is: "How should one react to circumstances until the Psychic Being takes over? Should we live entirely within and ignore events, or observe all without evaluating?"

We certainly can't ignore events altogether. One may shut out some aspects of the outer world, but one shouldn't take the attitude of that line of Keats's - "Standing apart in giant ignorance". I for one actually stood thus in the early days of my stay in the Ashram. I would go to the Ashram's Reading Room every morning to pick up only the "Literary Supplements" of the Hindu or the Amrita Bazar Patrika. I used to see the race of the sadhaks, with Nolini generally first at the winning post, when the bag of dailies from the GPO was emptied on the mats. I was placidly unaware that Hitler had come to dangerous power and that Stalin was unleashing his reign of terror - until on October 12,1936, nine years after my arrival in Pondy, there was put on the Ashram library table a typed copy of a poem by Arjava (originally John Chadwick) entitled "Totalitarian", dated October 11 of the same year and accompanied by Sri Aurobindo's comment: "Exceedingly original and vivid - the description with its economy and felicity of phrase is very telling." The term "Totalitarian" was a prodigious poser to me and seemed to be such also to the librarian, my diminutive friend Premanand, Our situation was comparable in puzzlement more than in wonderment to that of Keats's "stout Cortez" and "all his men" when with "a wild surmise" they first gazed at the Pacific, standing

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Silent upon a peak in Darien.

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Our stunned silence did not last long. We remembered Arjava's own admonition to one of his students face to face with an unknown word: "God may not have given you brains but surely He has given you a Dictionary!" We resorted to the "Concise Oxford" and its equivalents and found that "totalitarian" denoted a dictator who wanted everybody to be stamped with his own mind or a State perrmtting no rival loyalties or parties and demanding the entire subservience of the individual to it - a State headed by such a dictator. 1 took the poem to have a topical air and my inquiries brought to light for me for the first time the darknesses that were National Socialism in Germany and Marxist Communism in Russia.

Though my 9-year long ignorance was quite blissful, I cannot dangle before you my example. You have to keep abreast of events, both domestic and extramural (pedantic term, meaning "outside the walls", for happenings beyond the Ashram's "charmed circle"). Even Sri Aurobindo, in his roomy cave of tapasya, used to cast a glance at newspapers no less than at literary journals such as the New Statesman, which Arjava regularly sent him and which our Lalloobhai, born malapropist, called the New Testament. Arjava also sent the Manchester Guardian, apropos of which Premanand and I speculated a little lewdly about a companion weekly, Woman-breaster Guardian. So sustaining a touch with the current world-chaos along with the ups and downs of Ashram-life is quite de rigueur. But, as you rightly guess, it should be free of evaluation - that is, favourable or unfavourable personal judgment. I have put in the adjective "personal" because some kind of evaluation cannot be helped. We are not a scientific instrument of "pointer-readings": some implicit or explicit standard comes into play. However, I would say that an initial stage of "pointer-readings" has to be there: we have to get our facts right. After this stage an assessment is in order. But how shall we start assessing? If the Psychic Being is in action we shall automatically arrive at the correct evaluation. Here I may remark that the psychic evaluation - the sheer soul's estimate - is not in terms of truth-knowledge but

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in those of truth-feeling. Truth-knowledge is a gift of the planes of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo labels as "overhead": it is a knowledge reached not by discursive thinking but by illumination and intuition or at the least by a large spontaneous many-sided unifying play of ideas, the work of the overhead plane nearest to our intellect and named by Sri Aurobindo "Higher Mind". This knowledge percolates into our mind with a sudden sense of wideness and peace accompanying it. The soul's truth-feeling brings a sense of depth which at the same time holds delight and strength and a love which I can only describe as a quiet intensity or a passionate purity. Short of the Psychic Being's intervention, we have to go in for a detached mind which, for all its aloofness, is yet ever sympathetic, ready to understand all human movements without being caught up in any. I may add that the detached mind can be not only receptive, helpful to people who come in for advice: it can also be active on its own and, as you put it, "interfere in what is happening around one in the Ashram". Of course, there are limits to one's sphere of action and there are ways and ways of acting. Furthermore, every way of acting has to be first dedicated to the Mother and sought to be infused with her consciousness by being inwardly uplifted to her. One must also know where to stop acting. Beyond a certain point one's outspreading action is liable to slip into an enthusiastic egoism: one may develop the notion that one alone is right in every sphere.

By the way, it may be worth while to distinguish between egoism and egotism. In practical matters, egoism connotes selfishness whereas egotism signifies a too frequent use of "I" and "me", the practice of talking about oneself. I know people who are egotists while being the opposite of egoists. There can be a curious blend of the two: one may be naturally inclined to be unselfish, go out of one's way to help and serve others and at the same time be disposed to tomtom one's good deeds. People are complex, we must know how to sort out their intricacies. This can be best done when we stand aloof without getting wrapped up in ourselves.

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You write: "The more I step back, the more things I can laugh at. What does that mean? Logically, then, the Divine must be laughing at the entire universe. What is the significance of this entertainment? Surely the Divine does not need entertainment. So why put all that entertainment in? Is it just incidental or what?"

You have touched on a big theme here - I may dub it the Big Bang of philosophers, the problem of world-manifestation. The Big Bang of the physicists has always left me dissatisfied. Things within the universe have their start but to say that the universe itself started raises a host of questions. St. Augustine was once asked by a sceptic: "What was God doing before he made the world?" The Bishop of Hippo smiled off this hippopotamus of a query by saying: "Preparing hell for sceptics like you!" St. Aquinas in the course of his Summa Theologica (or was it Contra Gentiles?) answers that philosophically we can think of God the Creator as perpetually putting out his Will-force to manifest Nature: there need be no beginning and no end. The great Schoolman believed in a beginning only because scripture taught it. Stephen Hawking in his recent best-seller gloats over the idea that if science could show a perpetual cosmos there would be no call to introduce God. Of course, the argument for God's existence does not confine itself to this line of discourse, but narrowly speaking Hawking cannot be easily faulted. What he does not realise is that God is not incompatible with such a cosmos: as Aquinas reasoned, God's creative power is not tied down to projecting a universe with a starting-point. However, Hawking may pull out "Occam's Razor": Entia non sunt multiplicands ("Entities are not to be multiplied"). This means: why drag in God if science can do without Him by positing an ever-existing cosmic process? Hawking does not seem to have wakened up to the question: "How from a neutral purposeless cosmic process can -a figure like Hawking with a keen purposive intellect - even if it be anti-God by purpose -arise?" Surely there are paradoxes lurking about us? Even if we postulate a transmogrified divine Hawking ultimately

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behind the human specimen, we do not reach the end of the road. There has been throughout philosophical history the spectre of the problem of Evil in the world. It has led the human mind to spawn Hormuzd and Ahriman, Jehovah and Satan and, in less starkly ethical and more comprehensive terms, Brahman and Maya. The ingenious Indian mind got round the glaring antithesis further by declaring that Maya is really a non-existence that appears to exist. Sri Aurobindo does not gloss over the riddle of this world but says that the only answer that can be offered to the limited instrument of knowledge that is the human mind is, in effect: "In the endless range of possibilities of manifestation, the possibility had to come up of a world starting from the very opposite of the divine existence, consciousness-force and bliss and such a possibility was accepted as a challenge to this existence, consciousness-force and bliss to develop out of it with a rare richness the original perfection in the very milieu of this perfection's contrary." Here we might say that there is no escapism which would leave the earth-field ultimately unfulfilled in itself as it would be if it were merely a passage to something beyond it. Again, here the very perfection to be evolved is latent: the dark contrary is divinity's own self in disguise. Here alone the presence of Evil in the world gets, in both the initial and the final prospect, irradiated, as it were.

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Now a halt to digression, however fruitful.

When Paul Richard was in Pondy during his second visit, accompanied by his wife who was then known as Mirra, an early bone of intellectual contention with Sri Aurobindo was: "Did the world originate in Ananda (Bliss) or in Desire?" Richard argued for Desire. This is in essence the view of Buddha. The Buddhist term is tanha, "thirst". As long as there is tanha in the world-stuff of which we are made, world-existence continues with its load of duhkha, "suffering". Buddha has struck upon a basic truth. Desire, in the Buddhist sense, implies an endless need, a perpetual emptiness calling to be filled, a movement of grabbing at things transitory and therefore never satisfying. The result of recurring dissatis-

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faction is suffering. To get beyond such a result we have to renounce the world, the time-process in which we are immersed and enter that indescribable illimitable void transcending all temporary being: Nirvana. In contrast, a world originating in Bliss is secretly sustained by Bliss and meant to attain Bliss across the trials and tragedies of common living. Well has Sri Aurobindo said in his Savitri: .

Bear: thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss:

Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.

Not that Sri Aurobindo was at any time an ever-chuckling optimist. He was Virgilianly sensitive enough to say:

We feel the touch of tears in mortal things.

Aware that terrestrial evolution starts from the "Inconscient", he must know the tremendous barriers through which the evolving soul has to break towards self-affirmation on earth. But cognisant also that the Inconscient is of the Supercon-scient's own making he has the certitude of its occult challenge -

The joy that beckons from the impossible.

The ultimate fulfilment of all the heart-broken cries of earthly life was the prospect that glowed always before Sri Aurobindo's eyes - a fulfilment on this earth itself, because there is nothing ultimately in the very nature of earthly reality which needs to be escaped from. And we may discern a further vista in the Aurobindonian vision. If all that lives has bliss as its secret stuff and if that secret stuff is meant to manifest, then there must be the possibility of a manifesting power in earth's history. No such power has been in sight, though the dream of it has persisted through the ages. Because of its absence we have had on one side "the denial of the materialist" and on the other "the refusal of the ascetic". Sri Aurobindo, with the throb of a mysterious world-bliss in

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his heart - say, his spiritual heart's systolic beat - intuited in its diastolic counterpart the presence of a hitherto-hidden plane of the Spirit which is not only an all-creative but also an all-transformative Consciousness-Force: what he has designated as Truth-Consciousness and Supermind. Only because the Supermind can transform into a many-sided perfection the Gita's anityam asukham lokam - "transient and unhappy world" - can the final affirmation be made of the old Upanishadic insight that from bliss the world was bom, by bliss it is supported and into bliss it shall merge. With the Supermind secretly haloing him Sri Aurobindo could oppose Richard.

So, to employ your term, the world is an "entertainment" for God, but not in any light-hearted way unless we understand "light-hearted" as meaning a way in which the heart is full of light. Perhaps the most telling word would be "delight" which can contain the suggestion of illumination within its significance of rapture. It is entertainment with a purpose and with an earth-fulfilling goal. Nor is it exclusive to the Supreme Consciousness in its aspect of unity which is usually in our mind. This Consciousness has to be viewed as multiple too. For it cannot be conceived to manifest the multiplicity that is our world unless there is a basis for it in its being. Each one of us has his or her celestial counterpart in that basis "high above". When the Supreme hid Himself as the Inconscient, forming the nether pole to His Supercon-science, not only His unity but also the haloed crowd of our counterparts in Him got precipitated with a myriad-rhythmed "Hurrah!" We have forgotten that heavenly hellward cry and are disposed again and again to bewail our lot and question or deny the Divine for projecting a world of transiences and tears. But let us not forget that deep within us dwells a memory of that "Hurrah!" and the moment we get into contact with our inmost self, our true soul, "the immortal in the mortal", we cannot help smiling psychically at all times until the day we can laugh supramentally for ever.

(28.7.1994)

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