34
You have asked how lines 5 and 6 are to be interpreted in the following passage in Savitri, pp. 34-35:
This too the supreme Diplomat can use,
He makes our fall a means for greater rise.
For into the ignorant nature's gusty field,
Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life
The formless Power, the Self of eternal light
Follow in the shadow of the spirit's descent;
The twin duality for ever one
Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.
You have quoted Madhav Pandit's Readings in "Savitri" as saying:
"In the very process of its descent from the heights of the Spirit, the Divine has followed and involved itself in the movement in two poises that are necessary for working out its intention in Creation.... This is the dual status taken by the Divine in the Creation - Soul and Nature, Purusha and Prakriti - in order to build it in the full figure of the Truth to be manifested."
Here it would appear that "the spirit's descent" is interpreted as the descent of the Spirit during the process of creation by the Divine and the "twin duality" to mean the dual status of Soul and Nature. You comment: "I beg to submit that in view of the lines that precede and follow the passage quoted, 'the spirit's descent' would mean the pulling down of the individual soul by the 'subconscient cords' or the 'dull gravitation' and the formless Power following in the shadow is the supreme Diplomat coming down in the wake of our fall - the individual fall - to convert it into a means for 'greater rise'. In other words, the whole passage relates to the happenings in an individual mould and cannot therefore refer, just in a couple of lines in the middle, to the universal mould or
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Creation. It is significant that Shri Pandit also, except for the lines under consideration, interprets the whole passage as relating to Man and not to creation in general. I shall be highly obliged if you will send your illumined comments to clarify the whole thing."
In my opinion, the passage refers only to the individual's rise and relapse in the course of his spiritual experience. The "descent" here is the opposite of the individual being's ascent, spoken of earlier, to the "heights" of "heavenlier states". And the "twin duality for ever one" does not refer to Purusha and Prakriti in the usual sense but to
The formless Power, the Self of eternal Light.
A reference to the original creation, the primal descent into the Inconscient, would be an anomaly, a sudden unprepared intrusion in this context. Also, the mention of "the twin duality" choosing its home amid "the tumults of the sense" would be pointless because "the tumults of the sense" are surely part of Prakriti. We can't speak of Purusha and Prakriti descending into Prakriti itself! Again, the mention of "He" in the line just following our passage -
He comes unseen into our darker parts -
would be impossible to account for. In the ordinary Purusha-Prakriti universe of discourse it would signify Purusha alone. Where then would Prakriti be gone? Here "He" covers "the twin duality" and harks back to "the supreme Diplomat". It is the supreme Diplomat who is "the twin duality". We may equate this duality to Ishwara identical with his own Shakti.
(1954)
As far as I know, it is indeed "a new feature" - the opening of the chakras by the Force from above, as in our Yoga, instead of the Kundalini rising from below to open them. The divine
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"overhead" Force will do the opening job far more safely, far more fruitfully. But I may add that quite an amount of creative spiritual development can take place - a good deal of psychlcisation and spiritualisation can occur - without the chakras being felt opening in any concrete sense.
1 remember two secrets of success in Yoga mentioned by Sri Aurobindo. One is to regard Yoga not as a part of life but as the whole of life. I understand this to mean that we do not just set aside certain hours of meditation or japa or whatever else but practise at all times remembering the Mother and offering our activities to her and preserving under all circumstances an inner poise, a sense of tranquil wideness in our being. The second secret is to surrender oneself to her and appeal to her to take up our defects and by her Force free us progressively from them. The core of this movement is devotion and love on our part, invoking and drawing her love and grace, instead of relying on our own supposed strength, our capacity of tapasya, of intense concentrated effort. But, as you rightly say, we must not believe that no effort is called for on our side. Some aspiration and rejection by us have to accompany our surrender. What is undesirable is a violent fight with our weaknesses. A patient persuasion of them to disappear is required, along with a quietly persistent cry from the heart to the Mother to intervene with her light and chase them away. If things do not happen soon, we must avoid depression like poison. The Mother is well aware that human weaknesses don't vanish like morning mist. She expects us to keep confident and cheerful - confident because her power is limitless, and cheerful because she is always with us.
As for the "overhead" Force, we can't say that it was never at work before in the history of Yoga. But we can say that there was no fully realised embodiment of it to channel it to us before the Avatarhood of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
(1993)
The "chronological puzzle" about the date of the great
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Shankara, over which many scholars have pondered, can be much simplified if we approach it through a less complicated time-problem: the date of Kumarila Bhatta, a notable contemporary of Shanikara's, with whom that eminent Adwaitin had a famous debate.
Kumarila Bhatta is known to have quoted in his Tantra-vartika a verse from Kalidasa's Abhijnana Sakuntalam: Satam hi sandehapadesu vastusu pramanam antahkaranapravrttayah. So he must be later than the great playwright whose time is invariably taken to be associated with a King Vikramaditya. Indian tradition puts him in the reign of the legendary founder of the Vikram Samvat of 57 B.C. Modern scholars mostly connect him with the third of the Imperial Guptas -Chandragupta II, titled Vikramaditya, who is generally dated to 380-414 A.D. R. C. Majumdar admits that there is no decisive reason why Kalidasa should be at the end of the fourth century A.D. rather than in the first century B.C. Thus we get a fixed span of about four hundred years within which or after which to place Kumarila Bhatta and hence Shankara.
On this view the frequent contention that Shankara who is said to have brought about the decline of Buddhism could not have come after the reign of Chandragupta II which historians acclaim as "the Golden Age of Hinduism" cannot stand. Besides, the Imperial Guptas, true to the typically tolerant spirit of the Hindu religion, are known to have partly patronised both the Buddhist and the Jain faiths. Perhaps we should give up the role popularly ascribed to Shankara as one who effectively uprooted Buddhism from India. It seems more true to hold that the tide of Muslim invasion submerged Buddhism. Such an opinion would untie our hands a good deal and what would be ruled out is the earliest date mentioned by some traditional-minded Indian scholars - 509508 B.C. - and just as radically any period preceding 367-368 B.C., the date given in A Short History of Kashmir by P. Gwashalal who observes that Copaditya (the seventeenth king of Kashmir) built the temple of Shankara on the Takht-i-Suleiman hill in this year.
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If we are to pass beyond the first century B.C. for Kalidasa, we would have to entertain the theory sometimes submitted that the Indian adventurer named by the Greek historians Sandrocottus, who was a contemporary of Alexander the Great and flourished as a king in the immediate post-Alexandrine epoch was not Chandragupta Maurya but Chandragupta I, founder of the Imperial Gupta dynasty. Then Chandragupta II Vikramaditya would mount the throne around 260 B.C. and Shankara, along with Kumarila Bhatta, might have lived not long after that monarch's contemporary Kalidasa. This would extend Shankara's possible antiquity but it would still exclude any time before c. 260 B.C.
Whatever the historical framework we may adopt, the "chronological puzzle" would be comparatively simplified by our approach through Kumarila Bhatta in the sense that a too ancient Shankara would necessarily fade out.
(15.6.88)
I have just received your present for my birthday. There had to be a Herculean struggle with the tight cloth-wrapping and the wooden box before I could get on to the cardboard box and, opening it, face the beauty and wonder of a most elegant wristwatch. I can well believe that, as you say, you personally went to the bazaar and chose it, for it shows the true poetic taste or rather the authentic spiritual vision inspiring that taste. With the black dial and bright hour-points, the vision is of a deep mystery out of which twelve stars prick their way into our ken. Here is a symbolisation of varied multiple Time emerging from a single Secrecy beyond in which all count is lost and an unfathomable silence reigns. Looking at the chain, 1 might intuitively take that silence to be golden, carrying the possibility of an expressive unfoldment of supreme value.
By now the operation -on your right eye for the cataract must have been successfully over. Do drop me a line whenever convenient. I am sure an intra-ocular lens has been implanted. I wish such a technique had been available when
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my cataracts were removed; then my "beauty" might not have been spoiled by these focussing appurtenances from outside! But I must remember that they suggest the wisdom of God if some philosophers of the Middle Ages are to be believed. For surely in anticipation of the need of specs God created the bridge of the human nose! The pantheist thinker Spinoza may have been particularly struck with this wisdom, for he was by profession a grinder of lenses for spectacles and even had a name whose last half (...noza) may serve to suggest to us what a "Nosey Parker" of speculative thought he must have been to poke as he did into the secret of the world's basic substance and make sweeping postulates about it.
Please forgive me for straying into recondite realms and making you strain not only your eyes but also your brain.
Before I close I am tempted to one more gymnastic with words. May the cataract-removal usher in for you an era in which there will be no cause for any cataract in the sense of waterfall in your life, no reason for tears to drop!
(14.11.1994)
You have been most efficient. The Bio-zincs reached me as if transmitted instantaneously from Singapore by sheer thought-power. Now no fear of any surgery in a delicate region. Our play on "prostate" and "prostrate" reminds me of a line in Savitri which brings in an antonym of "prostrate" and reads a bit oddly. It's in the passage (p. 392, lines 16-18):
And slowly a supine inconstant breeze
Ran like a fleeting sigh of happiness
Over slumberous grasses pranked with green and gold.
should I take " supine" to mean " low, close to earth, nearly level with the ground" or to signify'' indolent, lethargic'' ?
What makes you suspect Nirod and I were likely not to be pleased with your choosing to admire a poem which Sri
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Aurobindo had not directly praised? I mean "Seated Above", the opening piece in The Adventure of the Apocalypse. I think you have exaggerated to yourself the somewhat humorous remarks Sri Aurobindo has made. What he means to illustrate is the most probable reaction of "some critics". He says that he mentions the likely reaction "without supporting it" and begins by calling the poem "striking".
I like your stand for your supposedly heretical liking for the poem and the spirited way you have brought in Luther. But you have got a trifle mixed up as regards the doings of that founder of Protestantism. He did not utter those words you cite - "I could do no other" - when "nailing his fateful thesis to the door". What door? His own house's? Surely not. It was of the church in Wittenberg and the words came out of him at the funny-sounding Diet of Worms where he had been summoned to recant or, to use a more appropriate phrase, "eat his own words".
Your implied admiration for Luther shows very pleasantly to my mind that official Roman Catholicism sits lightly on you. One of my tutors - Father Gense (a Dutchman) at St. Xavier's School - called Luther "a pig". I was happy to read Chesterton styling him "a great man". Maybe this compliment was possible to G.K.C. because he was a convert and not a born Catholic. You, in spite of being a Catholic by birth, have emerged into
An ampler ether, a diviner air
and found in our Ashram's Mother a living culmination of the most precious and profound truth of the Roman Church -the vision and worship of the Divine Mother through the figure of the Virgin Mary. Of course, this is not the only source of soul-fulfilment for you. The Himalayan presence of Sri Aurobindo has given you the sense of reaching the end of all journeys. Your inmost being catches him saying (in words from a poem of mine where the Himalaya is vocal):
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Here centuries lay down their pilgrim cry,
Drowsed with the power in me to press my whole
Bulk of unchanging peace upon the eye
And weigh that vision deep into the soul.
(30.12.1994)
The topic of Dante is very welcome to me. I have only a smattering of Italian but my keen interest in all things Dantesque Has made me feel conversant with his many-sided nature and art. Sri Aurobindo's greater knowledge has helped me considerably. There is no doubt that Dante belongs to the top class of poets, but here we have to mark gradations and see how a poet stands with regard to the several abilities we should expect in the top class. According to Sri Aurobindo, they cover "supreme imaginative originality, supreme poetic gift, widest scope and supreme creative genius". These factors should include what I would call "quantity of quality", the abundance of the work. Thus Sri Aurobindo has said about Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth: "their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators." Among the latter, Sri Aurobindo makes three rows:
First row - Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa.
Second row - Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton.
Third row - Goethe.
In Sri Aurobindo's view, Dante and Kalidasa would rank beside those in the first row except that they do not have enough of "a kind of elemental demiurgic power". Each of the others "has created a world of his own. Dante's triple world beyond is more constructed by the poetic seeing mind" than by such power.
Coming to "style", Sri Aurobindo distinguishes five kinds: the adequate, the effective, the illumined, the inspired, the inevitable. The last has to be understood in a special way. All the four preceding it can attain their inevitability but there
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is a category which falls outside all classification: one may dub it poetry in its sheer essence: this style is inevitability par excellence. When I once asked Sri Aurobindo how he would define Dante's style and I suggested the description "forceful adequate" because of "a certain simplicity mixed with power", he replied: "The 'forceful adequate' might apply to much of Dante's writing, but much else is pure inevitable; elsewhere it is the inspired style as in that reference to the result of Marsia's competition with Apollo:
Si come quando Marsia traesti
Delia vagina delle membre sue.1
I would not call the other line -
E venni del martirio a questa pace -2
merely adequate; it is much more than that. Dante's simplicity comes from a penetrating directness of poetic vision, it is not the simplicity of an adequate style."
Discussing poetic austerity and exuberance, Sri Aurobindo sets Dante between the two extremes of stringent bareness and colourful sumptuosity - extremes that also are capable of yielding first-rate poetry. Poised midway, Dante combines "the most sustained severity of expression with a precise power and fullness in the language which gives the sense of packed riches - no mere bareness anywhere".
You may be interested to know that I have translated into English terza rima the whole last canto of Paradiso as well as part of the fifth canto of Inferno telling the story of Francesca of Rirruni, and a passage from Canto XXX of Purgatorio recounting Dante's meeting Beatrice. About the Francesca-rendering Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The translation is very good - though not Dantesque at all points." His comment on the last canto of Paradiso, as couched in a note to Dilip Kumar Roy,
1.As when he plucked Marsias out of the sheath of his limbs.
2.And came from that martyrdom into this peace.
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ran: "Amal in his translation of Dante has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for eloquence and he has used also a mystical turn of phrase which is not Dante's - yet he has got something of the spirit in the language, something of Dante's concentrated force of expression into his lines."
A word now on Beatrice. We all are inclined to rave romantically about her and Dante. I wrote to Sri Aurobindo long ago: "I am drawn to Dante especially by his conception of Beatrice which seems to me to give him his excellence. How would you define that conception?" The answer was: "Outwardly it was an idealisation, probably due to a psychic connection of the past which could not fulfil itself in that life. But I do not see how his conception of Beatrice gives him his excellence - it was only one element in a very powerful and complex nature." I remember the Mother once telling me that what Dante wrote in connection with Beatrice in La Vita Nuova struck her as an imaginative reconstruction of his experience rather than a direct transcript of it. On the other hand, her impression of his account of Inferno was that there was much accuracy in the general vision of it.
I'll close with a remark apropos of the line which forms the grand finale of the Divine Comedy:
L'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
Translated into English -
The love that moves the sun and the other stars -
it sounds like a medieval anticipation of Shelley's insight into the universal movement while poring over the death of Keats and feeling the dead young poet to have been "made one with Nature":
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
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Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own,
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from below and kindles it above.
A Shelleyan understanding of Dante's line may make its "amor" akin to
the one Spirit's plastic stress
which
Sweeps through the dull dense world...
Here we have the intimation of a Divine Power and Love overarching the world and at the same time looking after it and guiding it onward. In Dante we have the Aristotelian notion transmitted by Thomas Aquinas to the Middle Ages that all creation moves towards its Creator - who is Himself unmoving - by a love born in all things because of His transcendent Beauty. Dante is not figuring God's love as urging onward the sun and the rest of the stellar world - the whole universe with all its living and non-living contents: he . is imaging the whole universe as being attracted towards the Divine Reality by a spontaneous love in its heart for that Supernal Perfection.
(29.10.1994)
You have asked me to say a few words on the subject of "friendship". Just the other day I myself got a spurt to reflect on it. A friend of mine whom I value greatly and who is staunch at heart had a half-minute argument with me on a certain minor theme while I was at my dining-table. Before I could realise what followed, the person disappeared from my sight. I thought there was only a walk-out into the front room towards which I had my back. After a minute or two 1 called
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out the name of my friend. As there was no answer I took my wheelchair to the front room. To my surprise I found that my friend had simply walked away!
It has been part of my Yogic practice neither to be disappointed nor to pass judgment. So I sat quietly facing the blank friendless-seeming space in front of me and let a "vision", as it were, of the nature of true friendship take shape. What should I expect a friend to be like? The immediate answer was: "Nothing." To make a formation and then try to fit people into it is folly. Human affairs are all the time in a flux because human nature itself is a constant movement, changing from minute to minute. However, there is a background of continuity, uniformity, constancy - the feeling that the same person persists behind all the variations of psychological weather - all the whims and moods and temperamental reactions rising and falling, turning this way and that, taking one colour or another. This feeling implies some measure of standing apart, an opportunity to weigh and decide, give a directive touch to the flying moment. Herein lies, I believe, what we sense to be our "freewill", from which arises our sense of responsibility for our actions. And it is the influence of the watcher hovering, as it were, over the surface of the heaving and plunging career of our fluctuant human nature, that made my friend behave the next day with the usual warm intimacy as if nothing had happened the night earlier. It was a case of the thoughtful "\" getting the better of the impulsive "ego". Of course I received the return of the usual warmth with a happy glow which had actually undergone no dimming, for I knew that my friend's heart was as genuinely drawn into relationship as my own. But I knew also that the future might hold other brief erratic turns basically signifying nothing yet capable of leaving a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth of anyone who was not calmly prepared for small zigzags.
Unpreparedness on one's part and zigzagging on the other's would both be due to their not going past the usual experience of the hovering watcher. Friendship - or, for that
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matter, the experience of being in love - cannot do what my fellow-scribbler Srinivasa Iyengar would neologistically dub "beyonding" unless there is an inward penetration through that watcher to a self of peace which is not linked to the general flux of our life. No doubt, it is hardly felt at first as standing quite aloof, but there comes gradually the realisation of a depth and a silence within. There the usual motivations drop away, the common responses and refusals are absent and in their place a calm compassionate smile, full of understanding and tolerance, pervades all outward-looking states of mind.
(28.11.1994)
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