Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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It gratifies me indeed that you have given so fine a response to my poetry at even the first reading.

Poetry of the sort I write - seeking to be in tune with the Aurobindonian Muse - is not always easy to enjoy immediately: one has to live with it for a while, listen to it intently with the inner ear, brood on it with a hushed mind, before it yields fully both its meaning and its vision. One must do these things in reading it because I have done them in writing it. Not that it has not flowed through, spontaneously and rapidly - some of it has come with a rapturous rush while some came slowly, bit by ecstatic bit, but even when there was a rush I have had to do what I may call aesthetic Yoga in order to get it, for there are various types of spontaneity or, rather, various levels of spontaneity and the levels that give birth to mystical poetry are not easy of access - especially mystical poetry that is not content to mentalise the inner or higher light. To mentalise is not to lessen the poetic quality - it is not the same as intellectualising; it is only to give the substance a particular atmosphere. There can be a great glory of wings in the mental air; however, though the pure poetic quality may be extreme, the spiritual quality is not equal to what is caught direct from the atmosphere where the spiritual reality has its natural home. To draw straight from this ether one has to practise a discipline of "aesthetic trance".

The "aesthetic trance" does not make one a Yogi in the full sense of the word: what it does is to turn the face of the artist in a man towards the Yogic realms by a sort of intense and sustained sympathetic imagination. It does not enable so much the poet to acquire a spiritual halo as the poem to get drenched concretely in

The light that never was on sea or land.

(27.3.1945)

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From what you write I feel that you have a receptivity not only to the poetic afflatus but also to the mystical breath. Your enjoyment of my poems is so intense because you respond to the state of soul that is in each of them and not just to their aesthetic posture.

It would indeed be a pity to take mystical poems in no other way than aesthetically, though it would be also a pity to take them mystically without getting the aesthetic delight of them. Most readers fail to combine the two ways. In thus failing, they fail as well to get the most out of either, since in art - as we have often been told - the matter and the manner are indissolubly one and to miss the aesthetic - the "beauty-taste" - is also to miss certain subtle shades of mysticism which cannot be expressed except through certain nuances of aesthesis. It is possible perhaps to give mystical "ideas" in plain language, but the shades I speak of are not merely "ideas": they are states of soul - intuitions, experiences, realisations - and they cannot be expressed without aesthetic modes: that is, modes creating vision, emotion and rhythm. So, if the vision, the emotion, the rhythm do not go home to one, the matter too, as living stuff, remains outside one's consciousness. Similarly, to be dense to mystical nuances is to be at the same time dense to many aesthetic shades of soul-poetry. Consider these two lines of mine, which are some of my best according to Sri Aurobindo:

Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,

The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind...

The whole mystic-ram-aesthetic effect here depends on a few special points. Perhaps the most telling is the present participle "Flickering" rather than any possible equivalent like "Quivering" or "Wavering" being used and made to stand at the very start of the first line. A most vivid note is struck, almost making us hear the disturbing effect which "the cry of clay" might have had. The anticipation and preparation of the hard double c are perfectly achieved and the crackling

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sound which a fire would make is introduced at an impressive length before it is immediately counteracted by "no longer". This living suggestion would be absent if the line commenced with these two words:

No longer flickering with the cry of clay.

Even more would the suggestive life go out on our transferring the present participle to the line's end, and beginning the phrase with the last three words:

With the cry of clay no longer flickering.

Thus not only the original words but their original order too cannot bear to be touched. Without them we would fail to see, feel and hear the mystic phenomenon to the full extent in terms of poetic beauty. Conversely, nothing short of the deep sense of that phenomenon would call forth the precise form of expressive aesthesis. Here the second line is of prime importance. For it is the "distance-haunted" character of the mystic mind - the inner consciousness's straining ever beyond the apparent and the immediate - that tends to free it from disturbance by the bodily life's claims and clamours.

In the creative field of art with which I am dealing, there is one important thing to remember: every level of consciousness has its own pitch to confer on the aesthetic faculty. And if the soul is not awake, the reader will not be able to have aesthetic appreciation at the soul's pitch. The art will be perceived with just a mental-vital sensitivity instead of a spiritual or "soulful" one. I am sure a man who has lived with poetry of all kinds and is alert to various types of vision, emotion and rhythm will get a pretty keen perception of beauty from the two lines I have quoted without his having an awakened mystical sensitivity. All the same I am sure too that, since the lines are spiritual or "soulful" to an extreme degree, the sense of beauty will be much keener if the soul acts directly rather than from behind the veil and confers on

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the aesthetic elements the pitch necessary to make them yield their full value to our consciousness. Their full value consists in their being an intense poetic embodiment of the mystical intuition, experience or realisation present in the lines. Only when the aesthetic faculty works at the soul-pitch will the elements I have exhibited in some detail burn within our perception as such an embodiment. Till then they will attain for us diverse degrees of heat, so to speak - heat enough to make us recognise high poetic quality - but the sheer incandescence will not take place. And without that incandescence we shall never know how high exactly this quality is.

I wonder if I have made myself understood, and I wonder if I have seemed to digress unnecessarily if not boringly from the job of answering the questions you had asked me.

You want to know if being an "unclogged medium" of inspiration does away with the necessity of the intellect's supplying any materials and tools for inspiration to work upon and work with. Well, often one thinks of writing a poem on this or that subject that has held one's attention or stirred one's feeling and then proceeds to explore intellectually the depths of its implications as well as its associations round about until the actual rush of inspiration comes and picks up the prepared material and fills it out with shining surprises and sweeps into triumphant harmony all that one has laboured at. At other times, inspiration comes on a sudden, without one's consciously thinking of writing a poem and then various bits, lying in one's mind, of thought and imagery and reminiscence and velleity are attracted to the creative process and used through a sort of swift thinking that beats and burns instead of moving barely, slowly and laboriously. In both the cases there is a supplying of materials by the intellect - but it is not the same as the work one puts in when one is not a clear medium: there is no pained pausing in the midst of the creative process, there is no anxious fumbling for the right suggestion and the right word while the poem is being composed. Nor is always a supplying of materials, such as I have described, indispensable to the clear or unclogged

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medium: occasionally, everything seems to drop from the blue or emerge from the subliminal either in a form which the habitual intellect can grasp or in a form that is occult, cryptic, "surrealistic".

As for the tools, no exact technical knowledge is required if one is swiftly "spontaneous". What one requires is a general sense of poetic form. I almost believe that this sense is something innate in us and that, even if we knew absolutely nothing about the form of poetry, inspiration could rush through in metrical rhythm. Metrical rhythm, in its origin, is the natural body of expression when that expression is at a certain intensity, an intensity of the heart of things, the central fount of things. That is why the mantras of the Rigveda were supposed to be not the Divine Spirit clothed in a form invented by human prosodists but that Spirit clothed in a form native to it and intrinsically connected with its act of manifestation. No doubt, prosody is there in all verse and we do count syllables and dispose stresses or measure quantities and we can metricise a piece of inspiration that has come without the correct metre. The essential fact still is that metrical rhythm is part and parcel of the direct word from our intuitive depths, the depths that are in close touch with the creative process giving birth to the cosmos: the cosmos is a play of diversity on a basis of uniformity, a sort of metrical base of being upon which various modulations take shape, introducing a significant individuality which saves the dance of being from monotony without destroying the foundational pattern. Where the modulation and the base are both intensely active, there results a phenomenon which is the most revelatory of the creative force behind - and what is metrical rhythm except the base and the modulation reaching their acmes of intensity? In the domain of speech, therefore, metrical rhythm is the nearest to the creative centre of being -and the innermost utterance of that centre is naturally cast in it.

If we were ideal mediums, poetry would pour through in perfect metrical rhythm, even though we knew no jot about

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iamb and trochee and anapaest and what not! Of course, metrical rhythm is not of only one fixed type: a number of types are possible and some are adapted to one language, some to another. The amount of modulation varies, the foundational fact varies. But the essence of metrical rhythm is the same - and this essence is discovered by man not invented by him: it belongs to the beyond-human, it belongs to the very core of cosmic creativity. That is the reason why not only the Vedic Rishis but all ancient peoples used to regard poetry as the expression of the Gods. Such a belief, however, did not debar them from making a science of prosody: in fact, it was just because a Godlike character was felt in poetry that a certain difficulty too was felt in receiving the message of the deific regions and the need arose for helping out the message when it got hindered: the better one knows prosody the better one can help "the music of the spheres" to get through if that music is likely to be interfered with by one's clogged condition. Since one is more liable to be clogged than clear, it is advisable to have sharp technical tools at hand. But they only aid the Master Craftsman that is Inspiration to deal more easily with our minds: they prove our own disability and not the Master Craftsman's lack of power to use his fiery fingers more skilfully than our tools.

(6.5.1945)

Thanks for your letter which is so warm and revealing -revealing because it is the deep heart speaking and warm because the revelation came from that heart straight, untouched by the circumspect mind. Not that the mind has no role to play in matters of the depths. Sometimes what hails from them is interfered with by the dramatising vital being so that the psychic form does not emerge in all its truth. Then the mind, if it has been well trained, gets the authentic sense of that form and cuts away the excrescences. Occasionally, even the emergent from the depths arrives a little nebulous, the supernormal feeling surges up slightly unfocused, as it

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were, and the trained mind discerns the hidden outlines and releases the secret shape. We can see what role the Rigveda allots to the mind. It speaks of the luminous word arising at the same time from the satyam rtam brhat - "the True, the Right, the Vast" - which is above and from the hrdaya samudra - the "heart-ocean" - which is the profundity within, and then passing through the silent mind of the seer to be rid of all ambiguity and be disclosed in the original contours so as to become a golden chariot for the Gods to ride forth into the common world of men.

What you say about our relationship is perfectly true. From the start there has been an inner intimacy which no distance can diminish. For we have met in the aura of a Presence which is not affected by space and time, an aura which is to either of us no goal laboriously to be reached but as natural as the very air we breathe. We are born Aurobindo-nians and on top of that there is a special soul-rhythm in common: our pursuit of the Eternal Beauty. The Divine comes to people in various aspects - glorious Wisdom, supreme Power, master Skill, transcendent Loveliness. I feel that both of us have been caught up in an ineffable enchantment. No doubt, the other aspects are also there, and one or another of them comes close on the heels of that enchantment: master Skill, for instance, is very much of a goddess in your nature. But the main magnet for both of us appears to be what St. Augustine hailed as the Beauty of ancient days that is ever new, with its summoning up from our depths the flow of wonder, the surge of love. Perhaps what I have called "glorious Wisdom" is in my being the nearest attendant to the forefront deity of Loveliness transcendent. And this you may have felt as your subtle "guide", a special grace from Sri Aurobindo. The dream-vision you have recounted seems to me a very concrete contact between us on the subtle-physical plane, the one immediately behind our world. Some of our physical characteristics tend to continue there. My slight "limping" is a sure sign of our meeting on that plane. And to meet there is to have a very keen sense of reality and if our

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inmost selves carry on their friendship on this plane, it is no wonder that there is always so vivid an interchange of mind and heart. In the context of your dream-vision you have spoken of Krishna guiding you. Of course there can be no comparison between that incarnate Lord and tiny and puny Amal, a poor pallid mortal. But do you know that the flower the Mother chose as representing me happens to carry in her vision the significance: "Krishna's Light in the Mind"?

To be more precise, there was once a scheme set for me by the Mother to paint flower-pictures for the rooms of the sadhaks, suggesting the spiritual forces specially at work on them. The couple of rooms given to me in what was called the Guest House, which I occupied for nine and a half years, were those which Sri Aurobindo had occupied for over six years before he moved first to the "Library House" and then to the quarters he stayed in till the end of his life. Before 1 came to them, Purani had lived in them for a time. During my stay the flower representing them was, according to the Mother, what is botanically labelled "Thunbergia kirkii", a small lavender-blue salverform flower with a cream-yellow throat. The Mother's felicitous gloss on its meaning ("Krishna's Light in the Mind") was: "A charming way of being intelligent." The epithet "charming" is apt in view of the winsome personality traditionally attributed to Krishna. Sri Aurobindo has characterised Krishna as the Avatar who came from the plane of Divine Ananda and manifested through the Overmind, the top cosmic consciousness just next to the Supermind, the transcendent arch-creator. That is to say he was the Divinity of Bliss, who gave the world a manifold vision - the vision typical of the Gita in which Sri Aurobindo has discerned several interwoven strands - a Yoga of Works (Karma), a Yoga of Knowledge (Jnana), a Yoga of Devotion (Bhakti) and a final hint of something that would include all of them by going beyond them to an abandoning of all set dharmas (life-rules) and surrendering oneself to the Supreme Beloved who is also the Supreme Teacher and the Supreme Leader.

(24.1.1991)

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You have asked me what my meditation was between 10 and 10.30 a.m. on February 21. A general account would be: "It was all joy." But it was not just a state of being deeply happy during those thirty minutes. It was a happiness shot through and through with the Mother's Presence. Rather, it was her Presence that made up the happiness. And that is why the happiness was so special. For, her Presence was at once most intimately near and most alluringly far. It seemed to reach depth after depth within me and simultaneously drew me on and on into mysterious distances. An all-giving love tended to envelop and permeate my whole being, while something in me was called out incalculably afar to meet, as it were, the still unmanifested truth of my being - a divinity which was as yet a wondrous dream. But strangely somewhere within the dreamer the dreamer was himself the dream. And the Divine Presence, when posed in front of me, seemed to wear my own face in a fusion with the face of the Mother or the face of Sri Aurobindo or else with an etherealised combination of their faces.

(28.2.1995)

The point you have raised is not really concerned with a living issue but rather a verbally technical one. You say: "We meet again and again with these words of Sri Aurobindo: 'Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you because she is, indeed, always present.' Now, why did Sri Aurobindo choose to use 'as if instead of saying: 'with the Mother felt as looking at you'? There must be some significance in it."

The answer is very simple. Sri Aurobindo is employing the grammatical form classed as "the subjunctive mood", the mood of a verb used especially to denote what is imagined or wished or possible. Here the "imagined" is in function -though afterwards the "imagined" is said to be a reflection of the real. No opposition is intended between imagination and reality. We sadhaks do not always have the inner eye to see the Mother in a concrete though subtle form everywhere: that

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is why we are not told: "Always behave with the Mother felt as looking at you."

The Mother has told us that when she comes into contact with a follower of Sri Aurobindo and her she does two things. One - she builds a bridge between his outer self and his inmost being. Two - she makes an emanation of herself to go with the follower at all times. This emanation answers all his needs and acts as his guardian angel. Only in moments of extreme crisis it harks back to headquarters, so to speak, and consults the central Presence. Often we ourselves get into touch with this Presence. That is when we most intensely call her to our aid or desire to have her decision for us. Thus, when I was in Bombay in 1939 she wrote to me on April 24: "Just received your letter of 21st, it came to me directly (without the written words) three days ago, probably when you were writing it, and my silent answer was categorical: 'remain there until the necessity of being here will become so imperative that all else will completely lose all value for you.' My answer now is exactly the same. I want only to assure you that we are not abandoning you and that you will always have our help and protection."

(3.3.1995)

Before trying to interpret your vision, let me set your letter forth as briefly as possible: "A desert-like place. While running in it for some time I saw floods of river-water coming towards me. With increasing fear I ran in another direction. To my surprise, this time I saw in front of me floods of sea-water coming. With great fear I began to run in a new direction. On my way I saw a sturdy white horse. I sat on it and started riding it. After some time I saw a hut from which light was emerging, making the surroundings full of light. When I saw this light a torchlike light emerged immediately from my forehead. I rode up to the hut and got down from the horse and went into the hut. There 1 saw a Divine Mother

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sitting in the lotus-pose. She was full of light. 1 offered my pranam to her and she blessed me and advised me to study medicine. After more than twelve years I came to Pondicherry and had darshan of the Ashram's Mother. She had an aura of light surrounding her head. I came to the conclusion that our Mother was the same Mother who had appeared in my dream. Will you please explain my dream?"

The river-floods and the sea-floods seem to symbolise difficulties from the "vital" plane, the unspiritual "desires" sweeping over it. But the vital plane has also features that can be of help to spirituality. Such is the "sturdy white horse" that meets you while you are running away from the floods. Here is a representation of the purified vital force. Your mounting it proves that you are not a helpless being but have a will-power which can bring about a change in your life. In the dream the resultant change draws you near that part of your being which has come to be impoverished and unpromi-nent, a hut, but which is really the secret source of guidance. That is why light is streaming out from it. In response to this sudden call or pull from a hidden and neglected depth in you, your mind catches fire, as it were, and you discover an illumination in the conscious part of you: a torchlight emerges from your forehead. Urged by it, led by it you reach your soul's "cave", as the Upanishads would designate your inmost and there in what has seemed an obscure place you come upon the Divine Mother, formed of light and the source of all radiance. She is waiting for you and at once accepts you with her gesture of blessing.

Thus long before you came to the Ashram, you had been chosen for the spiritual life. And the reality of the choice was confirmed when the Ashram Mother whom you met twelve years later gave you a signal of the old light by manifesting to you "the aura surrounding her head".

Your other dream brings in the horse too. Evidently you live very much in your vital nature, but even in this domain where there are the greatest number of occasions for deviation

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from spirituality you have a Saving Grace present always.

So I see no cause for you to despair. Light can always come up. Keep appealing to the Divine Mother and she will give you the boon of her blessing. And he who has that boon must carry ever a smile on his lips.

(13.3.1995)

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