Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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As a certain theme has once again come up for discussion after a lapse of more than a dozen years and there is a degree of uncertainty in people's minds I am sending you a copy of a letter I wrote at the earlier time to a friend. Here it is, dated 7.3.1982:

You have declared yourself in full accord with the statement that the Ashram was for the Mother a mere scaffolding for bringing about the Supramental Manifestation of 29 February 1956 and that therefore it is now useless, especially as it has a fair number of faults like any non-Yogic institution.

I believe there are several reasons why the statement cannot be accepted.

(1)Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not need an Ashram if their job was merely to bring the Supermind to the earth. They could very well have done it on their own. The Ashram was an organic part of the mission they explicitly set to themselves of taking the whole of common humanity along with them instead of doing their Integral Yoga all by themselves. Perhaps their Yoga could not even be called Integral if it did not integrate us with them?

(2)The Mother never thought of disbanding the Ashram after the Supramental Manifestation. She looked forward not only to the Ashram's continuation as a focal point of her work but also to the continuation of the Centre of Education - and this she did even when envisaging the possibility of her own departure, as can be seen from a passage in her Collected Works.

(3)The Supramental Manifestation was in the subtle-physical of the earth, in what the Mother called "the earth's atmosphere". Surely the aim of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was not just the establishment of the Supermind there? They aimed at its manifestation in the gross-physical. Not to realise this is to mis-see their mission, or rather to see it

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in its incipience and not in its completion.

(4) Even in the subtle-physical of the earth the whole Supermind did not manifest. Only the Light, the Consciousness and the Force came. The Mother said that the Supramental Ananda had not come. Without the Supramental Ananda a new creation cannot take place, for Ananda is always the creative principle, using the organising principle -Supermind or Overmind - to put forth, or give birth to, a cosmos. As far as I can gather, the Supramental Ananda has not manifested up to now even in the subtle-physical. Besides, the very elements that have manifested there were said by the Mother to have been swallowed up by "dark blue waves of the Inconscient" - all the entrenched darkness of the ages - so that the new powers would have to fight their way through. Their future success is certain but the path to it may not be all smooth and to think that already the work is done is not to think far enough.

(5)Even if all of the Supermind had manifested in the subtle-physical and its action had been unimpeded, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's purpose would not have been served without a collective Yoga going on under their inspiration. For, that manifestation by itself can do no more than ensure a future evolution beyond Mind in the long march of time. What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wanted was not a slow evolution but a swift accelerated evolving movement by means of a direct Integral Yoga. If so, the Ashram had an inevitable part to play from the beginning - for, where else could such a Yoga be practised on the collective scale on which they insisted as much as they insisted on the individual scale?

(6)The assumed deterioration of the Ashram at present is certainly exaggerated. For one thing, there was plenty of deterioration even when the Mother was there. She was quite in the know of it but she did not consider it an ultimate bar; and she and Sri Aurobindo never thought that to take humanity forward with them - centrally in the shape of the Ashram - rather than to do the Yoga by themselves was a

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mistake. Defects and shortcomings were always expected by the Mother, and Sri Aurobindo has said that she never put any stress on them: positive qualities were her main concern -and I am sure they are to be found even now. To condemn the Ashram as hopeless because of certain errors and deviations is to lack sufficient insight into the very nature of such an experiment as the Mother dared - an experiment in which the outer life and its interrelations and its affairs (not necessarily in the sexual sense) pose a constant problem which the Mother was well aware of and quite patient with. The attitude needed in us is not to look upon the Ashram as hopeless but to regard it still as a promising field of the Mother's work. Her uplifting radiance definitely persists in concentrated power where her physical embodiment established the starting-point of a golden future. If complacence is out of place, so too is pessimism, and if one criticises, one would have the right to do it only if, instead of looking down on people, one feels that things are rotten not because others are rotten but because one is oneself such. Furthermore, who is ready to deem his own self irremediable? Why, then, indulge in a sense of hopelessness about others and about this collectivity of us and them, which we term the Ashram?

No doubt, physical transformation, in the way Sri Aurobindo and the Mother conceived it, is impossible without the Mother's physical presence. Hence the acute need of her return. All this talk, - fashionable with some deserters of the Ashram - of reprogramming the cells and bringing about their divinisation is, to my mind, bunkum and a wasteful sidetracking of our energies which should be concentrated on psychic and spiritual unfolding and calling, if possible, the Supramental Consciousness into our inner being and letting it have a general influence on the outer being. 1 know that some people believe that they are undergoing the Supramental change in their bodies. A professor at Kuruk-shetra University insists that his body is being supramental-ised, starting with his feet! I expressed scepticism because I

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saw no sign of his mind or vital receiving any illumination - a great sine qua non, I am sure, before something so stupendous can happen to the body. I share with Nolini the sense, to which he gave expression long ago, that physical transformation has been postponed. But that does not mean we have nothing to do now. A lot of leeway has to be made up and our sadhana can continue quite intensely and the Ashram has still a fine role to enact in the world. The idea that it is played out hits really not at "illusions" but at "realities" which are not always on the surface to see. Although self-censure at several points is certainly salutary, to say that the Ashram has already served its purpose and is now superfluous is to overlook the complex, many-sided, long-spanned vision within which the Integral Yoga was conceived.

Here is a brief answer to the philosophical points you have raised. First, "what is the value of diversity?" I don't think any philosophy of unity-in-multiplicity ever posits "repetitions of one original pattern". Naturally, there has to be an essential oneness within the many if unity in the true sense is to be present. But multiplicity in the true sense would be otiose if there was not to be diversity. On a diabolical plane I can imagine a single pattern repeating innumerably - a kind of regimented prolificity expressing a universal totalitarianism. On a divine plane the delight would be not only in being oneself but also in being the other - a kind of ideal democracy in which liberty goes hand in hand with equality and both are harmonised by a spontaneous and inherent fraternity. There has, of course, to be a centre around which the divine democracy revolves, but there is no monolithic government and the central one who is infinitely diversified no less than multiplied all around is primus inter pares, a leader of equals. Behind this plane of what we might call archetypal manifestation - Sri Aurobindo's Supermind seen in one aspect - there is the Being and Consciousness and Bliss which is what you have termed "some primary and ultimate Unity" but which actually can be no other than a state where the

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democratic Divine is not annulled or contradicted but subsists in a hidden form. It is not that the multiplicity and diversity are obliterated by absorption but that the whole democratic Divine is indrawn and self-absorbed and all the manifested differences and distinctions remain unprojected and stay latent. To the mere mind which proceeds by its own light of analytic understanding, this state would seem a sheer loss of individual selves. To the Supermind where the apparent contradictions and contraries are simultaneous faces of the Real, so that we have a truth of existence such as figured in an Aurobindonian phrase like

Force one with unimaginable rest -

to the Supermind the unmanifest unity is not a pure opposite of its own play: it is only the vari-coloured spectrum withdrawn into a repose of white light without any ontological self-loss of the former.

Even in the orthodox Vedanta the final condition of the liberated soul is called lay a - "a quiescent abiding" in the Brahman so deeply that the soul is as good as indiscernible in the Absolute, the Unmanifest. If there is ontological self-loss, who is liberated and who realises liberation? The Mayavadin tries to evade this question by a super-subtle metaphysical logomachy, but the original Upanishadic Vedantin had no need for such sophistry as: "Ultimately there is none to be liberated and what seems liberation is itself an illusion - there being nothing except the One without a second, featureless, changeless, immobile." What you label as "a matter of dispute between East and West" stems only from the Western belief that Shankara - or in another shape Buddha - is the sum and substance of the entire spiritual experience and thought compassed in India's three or four millennia.

The point you make about a Primordial Unity expressing itself in the many and then a Consequent Unity which brings in something quite new as a result of the many actively complexifying their functions - your point here is not quite

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clear to me. Certainly some genuine novelty is realised wherever there is the time-process, whether in an archetypal or a phenomenal dimension. But, when in the Consequent Unity "the oneness and the manyness of the whole imply one another and depend on one another for their being and their meaning", aren't they creatively unfolding a truth already present in another manner in the Primordial Unity? Without the Primordial Unity having the potentiality or secret pre-existence of the Consequent Unity, the latter would not at all become actual. And if that is so, what appears as the One holding concealed within itself the multiple and diverse play of its own rich being would be logically prior to the other Unity in which the One and the Many are equally balanced and act as if constitutive of each other: in other words the Primordial Unity would be presupposed, as it were, by the Consequent.

(8.4.1987)

You have written of the close prospect of the surgeons opening you up. But from your account of the months before this prospect I can see that you had a long retrospect of having been variously opened up by the Mother. The inner discoveries you made were due not only - as you write - to the Divine taking you as seriously as you had taken yourself as a sadhak. They were due also to your having taken the Divine more seriously than before. Something of the angel in you woke to the Divine in an exceptional way and the Divine - paradoxically - rewarded you by waking you in an extraordinary manner to something of the devil in you. God's grace lies as much in making the darkness within us visible as in making the potentiality of light in us more and more an actuality. And the darkness becomes visible because a greater light from God has been shed on our human condition. Recently I had the occasion to write to a friend about the Yogic consequences to us when the Supermind manifested in the earth's subtle-physical layer on February 29, 1956. At the same time that our sadhana got eagle-wings to soar nearer the Sun of

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Truth we developed eagle-eyes to look deeper into what-adopting Coleridgean phraseology - I may dub strange regions.

Where Alph the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

All that we may consider our Godwardness seemed lost there and hideous appetites, distorted desires, perversely grinning Pishachas appeared as parts of ourselves. Many sadhaks were appalled by the sudden disclosure of unsuspected depravities. The Mother explained it as the work of the new illumination which was more penetrating than anything brought so far to bear on the double nature of man.

I have written of Pishachas no less than perversities. You too have mentioned "creatures... within us, hissing, squeaking, chirping, roaring, grunting or growling" - "creatures who had once crawled in the primeval slime" and "who continue to live" in our being because "we have emerged" from them. You are speaking metaphorically, but actually we have sub-beings in us with a semi-human form. In the days when I used to get out of my body and explore subtle non-material planes I once saw getting out at the same time a most silly-looking person with an awkward gait and literally "squeaking" voice. I felt so ashamed to know that he was a part of my complex make-up. Surely he was not the central Me but some identification with him must be taking place when a markedly silly impulse rises in me and luckily gets curbed and rejected before I make a fool of myself.

You have written of "a great love for Sri Aurobindo which unaccountably wells up apropos nothing at all and brings tears to my eyes". And you add: " I don't know what is happening to me." Further you express your wonder whether the "psychic" has anything to do with it. This "emotion" which has come "on a number of occasions" and leaves you "surprised" marks in my view the supreme seal on your

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sadhana. The true, the quintessential "You" has not only made his presence felt but also recognised himself for ever as linked in deepest love to Sri Aurobindo the Source of your soul, the Lord of your life. You have unmistakably found your destiny and the discovery has expressed itself in what a poem of mine has called.

The longing of ecstatic tears

From infinite to infinite.

It is true, as you say, "that the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was, truly speaking, the Yoga of the world" and indeed there is "an entire universe of sadhana contained in seven simple words of Sri Aurobindo: 'Nobody is saved unless all are saved.'" It is this truth at work in the dream and the deed of our Gurus that makes their Ashram so different from the other Ashrams in India. The latter welcome choice seekers: the former throws its doors wide open to seekers of diverse kinds. Once the Mother was asked if she would accept a scoundrel in the Ashram. She said "Yes" - and meant that if a particular scoundrel had a tiny bit of turning towards Sri Aurobindo and her, she could work through that slit for the inner being to peer out, not only for his good but also upon the whole world of scoundrelism and create slit after slit in that multitudinous darkness. Sri Aurobindo has said too that if he accepted none save developed souls the entire purpose of his mission would be foiled, for his work is universal and every type of human being is needed for such a work Just as he and the Mother were not content to embody the Supramental Consciousness in themselves but wanted it embodied in others as well, so too they did not envisage a limited circle of disciples: they were set on creating a new race out of the stuff which all humanity is made of. And this venture had its spiritual logic in their realisation that the Supermind was at the bottom of the cosmos no less than at its top: there is an evolution towards the top because there is an involution at the bottom and it is inevitable for Nature to grow into

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Supernature. To put it another way: spiritual attairvment represents not a pulling down of superior powers to hold the lower faculties in abeyance but an evoking of a divine light inherent, though deeply hidden, in what seems an intractable undivineness. God is the secret dharma, intrinsic law, of Matter and not merely a siddhi, a spiritual acquisition foreign to Matter to be imposed on it. In harmony with this basic truth the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moves towards its fulfilment, taking into its scope the involved universal Godhead calling out to be set free in every man.

In response to this movement of the Integral Yoga each of us who is devoted to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother should give himself up to them as a centre of manifestation at the same time that he is a centre of concentration. Of course, ambition to be a divine instrument must be completely avoided: we are not meant to be Guruhngs under our Gurus, What is to be developed in us centrally is that Presence which, while being given whole-heartedly to the Divine, is a portion of the Divine come down as part of the evolving cosmos, as the head and front of the cosmic evolutionary process. The adverb I have used - namely, "whole-heartedly" - is not just a literary sign for "complete self-giving": it is also a psychological pointer suggesting what in us is to be the principal motive-power of our sadhana: the heart in its wholeness - the heart which in its innermost recess knows itself to be a child of the Divine Mother and in its outermost aperture feels a spontaneous affinity to all the other children of the same Supreme Creatrix. This twofold heart, with its rapturous root within and its felicitous flower without, is to be the chief guide in the Aurobindonian Yoga - at once luminously individual and radiantly communal - surrendered altogether in the first place to the One above all and, because this One is also all, surrendered unambitiously in the second place to the One's multiple self-expression of collective movement.

Thus the heart with its twofold function - more accurately its double unfoldment - is what had a sudden quickening in

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that experience of yours. No doubt it was always behind your devotion to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but now it appears to be corning into the forefront to move you rapidly forward after moving you to tears of dedicated love. Lucky guy to have the Rose of God blooming so close even in far-off Bloomington, U.S.A.!

(7.11.1990)

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