Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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You have quoted from Savitri (Centenary Ed., p. 61) the lines -

The universe is an endless masquerade:

For nothing here is utterly what it seems,

It is a dream-fact vision of a truth

Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,

You have asked:

"Do lines 3 and 4  mean:

'It is a vision of a veridical fact seen as in a dream, which but for the dream would not be quite true'

or:

'it is a vision of a veridical fact such as happens in a dream'

or:

'it is a vision of a dream-happening that appears as a true fact'?"

Here is my answer:

The meaning seems to me rather complex, and all the interpretations you have suggested have their own shades to contribute to it. I should attempt something like the following as a total explanation.

The appearance of everything in our world is at the same time a covering up of the truth and a disclosure of it and also an ultimate enrichment of its substance. The disclosure intended is through the very terms of the covering up. It is as a phenomenon that the world is to be understood and completed. There is an eternal reality behind it, which is to be expressed here. But this reality is figured forth under condi-

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tions of space-time. These conditions make the figuring forth such as to be different from the original but this difference is exactly what should be there. The expression would not be authentic, would not conform to the divine purpose without that difference. Nor even would the original be totally fulfilled unless this phenomenon came out from it as its self-expression.

It is all as though a veridical fact would appear in a dream with a certain change in its reality, so that it became a dream-happening looking like a true fact while it is not so, and yet what appears is no mere phantom, no sheer falsehood, but on the contrary the veridical fact itself getting realised in the form meant for it if the medium of its realisation is to be the dream-state, the form which alone answers to the Divine's plan for His own truth and which is in addition a necessary mode for that truth's fullest and richest sense of its own non-phenomenal being.

(14.1.1975)

Yesterday I received six letters from you in 24 hours and each envelope contained more than two communications. For quite a long time you have been indulging in this occupation and much of it strikes me as unhealthy.

You seem to be dredging treacherous depths by harping upon your deficiencies and your doubts about your own aspiration to become the child of the Divine. I advise you to check this flood of letters that appear to take pleasure in making concrete to yourself the anxieties and uncertainties that flit across your heart now and then. Keep as quiet as you can your monkeying mind and write only when the soul in you commands.

There is danger here of slithering into a depression that will lead to a darkness through these endless uncontrollable self-scourings.

Some questions like "Who is Sri Aurobindo? Who is the Mother?" are puerile at the stage where you are; they are

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just due to the itch to scribble.

Letting your pen run loose is dangerously akin to automatic writing, giving charge of yourself to some imp within you or haunting you. This indulgence is likely to cover up your awareness of the Divine Presence in you. Attend to your studies and your medical work and to the calm sadhana to which I have always called you. The Hostiles are digging for you a path to their obscurities through these bouts of what I would term "logorrhoea".

Aren't you becoming too introvert? Introversion is quite different from inwardness. Inwardness is a going towards one's depths - a movement away from one's ego in the direction of one's soul. Introversion preoccupies itself with the concerns of the ego - its various moods, its complexities, its predominant interests, its differences from other egos. It can also turn into a pseudo-inwardness.

(17.8.1993)

You have mentioned two things bothering you. But one of them is due to an over-conscientious heart (Very few people can keep up a steady remembrance of Sri Aurobindo. Such remembrance calls for a condition of being in which one does not need to conjure up his presence by a conscious act, A constant flow from some deep inexhaustible source of devotion has to be found. When the Mother once put the question "What is Yoga?" to the small group which used to be with her before the Soup-distribution would take place, various interesting answers were given. Some replies were intellectual though life-experience lay behind them. For example, Nolini's definition; "To divinise life." Lalita's was an ideal deeply desired and pursued: "To live as if nobody and nothing existed except the Mother." Mine was based on a feeling which used to recur often: "A warmth and a glow in the heart when seeing or even remembering Sri Aurobindo and the Mother." As a result of long practice this warmth and glow becomes constant or else one experiences a spontaneous flow

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from the middle of one's chest when one turns one's consciousness towards our Gurusf This flow can grow a permanent sensation and even when one is busy with or attentive to any activity it goes on and one feels it like a soft but concentrated background music. Whenever I am asked how to cultivate and preserve this movement of the being I suggest two lines of sadhana. A wide equanimity facing alt situations. Along with it a seizing of every event and offering it to the Mother.

"These two lines of sadhana have to be followed in the instance of the financial loss you have suffered because of the irresponsible action of the share sub-broker. It is unlikely that she will return the money she has lost. I can well sympathise with your violent reaction. But this reaction can do nothing except sour your days. Here is a fine chance to develop and deepen your relationship with the Divine.

After writing all this I have concentrated on you and inwardly tried to lift you high up towards the Mother and to set you within her tight and love. I feel as if something opened up on the height and made room for you.

(10.12.1994)

I liked your talk very well. The idea of accompanying it with slides is rather original. Your audience must have greatly appreciated it. I look forward to seeing the script of your next lecture - the one on the life of Zarathustra. By the way, mention of Zarathustra sets me asking what the expert Mary Boyce thinks is the true significance of the name. The one connected with Old Camels is the present favourite with scholars, but the one bringing in a Golden Star appeals to me more. It has a poetic justice about it when one hears of the three Magi - Persian priests - guided by a star to the cradle of the infant Jesus - Jesus who was to start a religion so very much in tune with the doctrines of Zarathustrianism.

The only fault I can find in your paper is the practice of writing the Avestan for "Lie" as "Drug". One's mind at once

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goes to "pot" and "acid". I remember a similar side-tracking when Egyptian archaeologists spoke of having discovered a temple to Sin. "Sin" happens to be the Egyptian Moon-Goddess; but in English the name suggests all kinds of lascivious ritualism. My preference is for "Druj". I noticed also a slightly irregular construction on p. 13 when you present the slide "Priest offering wood to fire". I see the phrase: "...the fact that Asa - 'Truth' and 'Righteousness' are the highest ideals of the Zoroastrian." What is the subject of the verb "are"? It can only be Asa as the sentence stands.I would suggest a slight modification: "...the fact that 'Truth' and 'Righteousness', which are what Asa means, are the highest ideals of the Zoroastrian."

Your exposition of the Parsi religion is both simple and systematic. But I wish you would in the future pierce to the esoteric sense, the mystic kernel, which has been overlaid, though finely, by the ethical aspect accompanied by the formal or ritualistic procedures. Sri Aurobindo's seizing of "the Secret of the Veda" should be a guide to a similar grasping of the inner significance of what is plainly a similar religion, both the Vedic cult and Zoroastrianism being based on the symbolism of Fire and Sun, the sacred drink Soma or Haoma, the importance of the Cow as a sign of Rita or Arta (Asa), the fight between Truth and Falsehood, the Gods and the Demons. Even the shift of sense in the Vedic word Asura came, as you know, in the later hymns. In the earlier ones, the word is not the privative of "sura": it comes from the root as implying "force". The Gods in their aspect of power rather than of light or knowledge were Asuras rather than Dev'as. The supreme divinity, the One who manifests as the Many, is both Asura and Deva. There is an interesting mixture of senses in that phrase about the Angirasas, bringing them before us not merely as deified human fathers but also as heavenly seers, sons of the Gods, sons of heaven and heroes or powers of the Asura, the mighty Lord, devas putraso asurasva virah (III..53.7). Zoroastrianism has throughout a demonic meaning for Deva and a deitic significance for

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Ahura (=Asura). But all the rest of the Vedic cult continues in it and should be susceptible of elucidation if one applies to it the clues laid bare by Sri Aurobindo for reinterpreting the Rigveda.

Sri Aurobindo himself seems to suggest the possibility of such an application. He writes in his Essays on the Gita: "The fundamental idea of the Rig-veda is a struggle between the gods and their dark opponents, between masters of Light, sons of Infinity, and the children of Division and Night, a battle in which man takes part and which is reflected in all his inner life and action. This was also a fundamental principle of the religion of Zoroaster."

Again, in The Secret of the Veda, while referring to the contending powers on both sides, the gods and their enemies the demons, he says: "They represent the struggle between the powers of the higher Good and the lower desire, and this conception of the Rig-veda and the same opposition of good and evil otherwise expressed, with less psychological subtlety, with more ethical directness in the scriptures of the Zoroastrians, our ancient neighbours and kindred, proceeded probably from a common original discipline of the Aryan culture."

I may mention, in passing, that a certain quotation you have made from the Gathas reminds me directly of the Rigvedic vision. Yasna 43,16 reads: "Mazda inhabits in Paradise the Sun-beholding dominion Khsathra." The Rishis speak of the ideal end of their spiritual aspiration as the heavenly dominion Swar which lives forever under the light of the supreme Gnosis, Surya, the field or Kshetra of divinity. Of course, Swar in the outward or non-mystical connotation is only the highest part of the physical sky.

(1.10.1977)

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