Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

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I welcome your warning against what you think to be "a growing trend of Mother India to devote more and more pages and attention to its Editor". I endorse your remark: "Self-praise is a slow poison that can kill a soul. Please shake up yourself and free yourself from this slow poison." Yet I must echo the old cry of Themistocles: "Strike, but hear!"

Your expression - "self-praise" - has to be understood, I suppose, in a special sense. Surely you cannot mean that there is any article by me praising myself? Perhaps you intend the expression to signify that I have let admiration of me by my friends find a place in the very journal I edit? Well, I have edited Mother India from February 1949. For nearly 46 years nobody has said a word about K. D. Sethna or Amal Kiran. Only the fact that he happened to be in the saddle even in the forty-fifth year of the journal's existence and that this year coincided with his own ninetieth which is considered rather a memorable milestone - only that fact has loosened the tongues of his friends in appreciation of his work and his own personal being. He had no control over them. What he could control were the pages of Mother India. But you have to understand the situation in which he got placed.

Two articles which had been meant for the souvenir volume generously edited almost behind my back by Nirodbaran and R. Y. Deshpande arrived too late either to be included in it or to go with the long article by Jugal Kishor Mukherjee which came out as a booklet soon after. Where were they to appear? Persuaded by the wish of my friends I made room for them in Mother India. Not by an act of planning but by a stroke of fate they happened to hit you in the eye and irritate your grey cells and turn them black with indignation at my supposed conspiracy with my friends to put me in the limelight.

There is also a subtle factor to be borne in mind. You have pictured me as gleefully swallowing the praise in spite of its

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being "a slow poison". I first came to Sri Aurobindo's Ashram on December 16,1927, spent nine and a half years at a stretch except for two short visits to Bombay. Later I was in Bombay for a number of years, but finally came to settle down here and have been in the Ashram for the last 41 years. Surely something of the normal ego has dropped off? Would you believe the fact that it's only now when you have brought the topic of my ego into my thought-range that 1 had the curiosity to look with some attention into the souvenir volume, wondering what might have been penned in praise of one who has never longed for praise except from Sri Aurobindo as critic of the poems sent up to him time and again? A few articles had been sent to me for a general "look-over" and possible correction and all made me wonder how whatever I had been or done could have struck anybody as extraordinary. However, I shall not try overmuch to convey to you what long years of Yoga may have tended to do to me. It is always salutary to be put on one's guard against complacency about one human frailty or another. Thank you.

(7.5.1995)

You have asked me to write in some detail on the "emptiness" which I recently felt on a wide scale. The feeling had more than one shade. It was not only that everything had lost its importance and vanished from the centre-stage of consciousness. This vanishing is significant enough: issues that once struck me as vital to the world's intellectual vision receded into a dim distance. Thus the historical question'of whether a Dravidian India was invaded by Aryan foreigners in a less civilised state in c. 1500 B.C., had loomed large to me at one time and drawn a voluminous treatment. Now I did not care a rap for it. The inner space stood completely clear of such "burning issues". Scientific controversies like the apparent incompatibility between point-events in the Einstei-nian Space-time continuum on one hand and, on the other, the discontinuous leaps of energy in quantum mechanics

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turned into will-o'-the wisps not worth pursuing. Even day-to-day affairs of practical interest - for instance, my work on future publications of Mother India - assumed a far-away look and I had to compel myself to keep them in near-focus, reminding myself that it was a responsibility given by Sri Aurobindo and continued by the Mother.

The sage-king Bhartrihari reduced life's many-sidedness to a single bifurcation by saying: "For a wise man there are only two choices worth considering - the ascetic's forest and a woman with large hips." This is a raising to the nth degree of simplification the typical possibilities of the Indian genius. India concentrated either on spiritual escapism, involving the shedding of all holds by earth on the adventuring soul, or on full vitalism keeping in sharp sight the pleasures of the senses and the fervours of the body, as evidenced by the famous Kamasutra. A mental existence, rejoicing in sheer philosophical castles in the air, does not seem to have ever been a great draw - in spite of such examples of elaborate logic-chopping as Shankara's argumentative thinning away, layer after layer, of the phenomenal world to reach the bedrock of the single Self of selves replacing every appearance of solid existence. Indeed Mayavada itself was meant to serve a purpose beyond philosophy: sheer spirit-consciousness. For me in my "empty" state, an all-swallowing vacuum appeared to be the sole lure. Not only substantial female hips but also the deep recesses of lonely woods as the milieu of an inward-going mind faded into insignificance and inconsequence. What then survived? Surely not mental pursuits - nor the explorations of inner spaces, the discovery of visionary worlds. Physical death could be a candidate - but that too was not satisfying enough. What seemed the master-attraction was, in the words of an old poem of mine, "The Kailas of Night", some supreme mystery, infinite and eternal, in which the obscuration and absence of all conceivable things and activities would lead to the emergence and presence of a plenitude from which, as the Upanishads say, all speech falls off as totally inadequate. My poem runs:

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A mount keeps vigil here beneath vague skies,

A throne of shadow: claim it with closed eyes.

Grow deaf to your heart, the brain's hot hunger still.

To catch the curbed omnipotence of this hill,

This sovereign height of sleep-intensity

Where the universe is lost without one sigh -

Secret of deathless self-do minion

Waiting for evermore yet calling none,

A vast withdrawal from our transient sun!

(20.12.1994)

To most people sexual pleasure is the intensest self-fulfilment. I have heard a highly cultured man - one deeply interested in the world of the mind - say: "If there was no sex-act, life would not be worth living." One may understand this "self-fulfilment" to consist in two things: first, a raising of the sense of bodily existence to a piercing pitch, as it were, of pleasure, and in its wake a dissolving of what Wordsworth would call the world's heavy and weary weight in a thought-escaping rest of the whole physical system. But Wordsworth's own experience of the lifting of this weight had a quite different source: an entry into an interior life beyond the senses. It was a state of trance in which one became a sort of bodiless soul. But in the waking state too one can get beyond the hold of the sensational nature and its attendant sex-clutch if one brings forward what Sri Aurobindo terms the psychic being - a condition of consciousness in which there emerges from some secret depth in the heart-region - from behind the middle of the chest - a quietly keen delight, a rarefied intensity of joy, entirely different from any pleasure one has known, yet holding an essence of all pleasure in a profound purity.

In the moment of that emergence one tells oneself: "How inadequate are all attempts by lyrical poets like Jayadeva to symbolise this mysterious inner intoxication by thrilling pictures of romantic sensuality!" The "feel" of the psychic experience is worlds apart from anything connected with sex.

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What has led poetry to see love of God through sexual spectacles is the failure to distinguish between the sensuous and the sensual: the sensuous comes to us through line and curve, texture and colour, form and movement, the sensual hears through these appeals a call to possess, devour, penetrate - a stirring of frenzy. The frenzy itself has two parts - we may style them public and private. The former covers eyes, lips, hands: the latter extends below the waist. The two parts can combine but can also exist and function independently. Yet even in what is above the waist there is a tinge of turbidity which is always liable to make one slip down. At times a sense of escape comes when somehow one is pulled, as it were, to the top of one's head by some radical stroke of circumstance demanding a resort to a haven of spiritual safety where one can hold aching thoughts at bay.

Thus I remember two years of complete rest from the pull of sex when I had to pass beyond the memory of the tragic way a dear one had died. Here was not the old control so much as a constant breathing of an air of freedom. However, the area of consciousness below was lit up by an alien light and not by its own inherent radiance. I have known an inherent radiance only once - for a few minutes. One evening, after the old soup-distribution by the Mother, I was going towards the main Ashram building. In those days a number of short tunnel-like passages connected the several buildings rented to form the Ashram. Crossing one such passage I suddenly found my body translucent, as it were, felt it crystalline and knew it inherently devoid of all sexual presence. The whole self of sex seemed thrown out, leaving the body in a state which I can best describe as ready to be uplifted into its own free unsullied original divinity which may be suggested by a phrase like Savitri's

A crystal of the ultimate Absolute... (38:21)

An alternative to the "crystal" imagery is the "diamond"-metaphor as in the Ilion-line:

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Ida rose with her god-haunted peaks into diamond lustres.

A body, liberated from all load of common life and awaking into its own higher self-sense just by being swept clear of sexuality in a radical manner, appears to be an important part of the vision of the human soul straining towards complete self-consummation -

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest....

(Collected Poems, 575: 45-48)

The first line assumes that an ineffable rapture awaits the experience of having a body and that this experience can be reached when there is an ultimate love-gesture by the body towards an ideal of itself - a full resort by the limbs to the greatest self-fulfilment possible by means of a quest to realise their own substance and shape in the Bliss of an archetypal existence - the karana sarira, the Causal Sheath, revealed by the seers of the Upanishads. The descent of this Causal Body and its merging with our own flesh which is heir to a thousand natural shocks, as Hamlet tells us, would be, to my understanding, the fullest form of what Sri Aurobindo calls physical transformation.

(24.1.1995)

While there is universal condemnation of terrorism, a good deal of confusion exists regarding its essential nature, the means to meet it, and its implications as between State and State. A cool and clear look is required.

First of all, terrorism is not a matter of stray murders: it is systematised killing. Nor is it to be equated with guerilla warfare. A body of opponents to a regime is a military organisation with military targets. Though it may at times

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attack officials directly upholding that regime, it does not deliberately and indiscriminately kill civilians, including women and children. The terrorists do so.

Secondly, they cannot be met by an attitude which pictures them as wronged parties whose cause justifies the means adopted. The means are too blind and brutal to help the cause: even those who have some sympathy with it do not excuse them and the professed goal will never be achieved by the chosen means unless civilised countries lose their nerve. Terrorists cannot be taken as fighting for any cause conceived as legitimate. They must be seen as bent simply on destabilising civilised life - and it may be noted that their activities are directed against such life in democracies and grossly misuse the freedom of individual movement permitted there.

On recognition of the true nature of terrorism, fitting steps have to follow. There cannot be any accommodating parley with people who hold innocent lives to ransom - as in the cases of "hostages" - in order to collect inordinate sums of money for their activities and, as part of the bargain, to free fellow-criminals from legal custody. With the needed skill and strategy they have to be attacked, the attackers taking as much care as possible not to endanger the lives of the hostages, but refusing to be handicapped by some risk being involved. If this risk is shirked, greater peril is invited in the future: more lives will be put at the mercy of the terrorists because hesitation now will encourage them to go on playing the game of hostage-taking. The choice of right action against this game is a delicate and difficult and sometimes heart-searing matter, but the general principle of no intimidated concession has to be observed.

Apart from the concern to save lives, there is the commercial motive. A country may have trade-relations with a country whose nationals happen to be the terrorists requiring to be countered. It is a base argument that if a fair amount of trade is going on with a country secretly supporting these nationals we must be restrained. Under no circumstances

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should commercial considerations hinder firm treatment of terrorists.

Finally comes up the question of the direct ways to deal with terrorism-supporting countries. Economic sanctions on a concerted scale against them is one way. It is, however, a slow process and never leak-proof. While the sanctions are being tried out, terrorist acts may continue and innocent lives be lost. More stringent measures may be called for, and here the issue of a suspected State's sovereignty has to be faced.

Can any State's sovereignty be regarded as absolute and unconditional? Take the famous case of Israel's "Operation Jonathan" to rescue over a hundred hostages held in a hijacked plane which had landed in Idi Amin's Uganda. Idi Amin refused to free the hostages. Israel flew 2000 miles to take by surprise the airport at Entebbe, killed the terrorists concerned and freed the hostages, at the cost of one life of her own - unfortunately the heroic leader Jonathan himself. The whole world applauded Israel's enterprise: a daring humanitarian adventure had been carried out. But the sovereignty of Uganda had been violated.

Every civilised country accepted the violation as justified, thus granting that no sovereignty is absolute and unconditional. Even under circumstances other than those that spurred "Operation Jonathan" but sufficiently barbarous, restricted military action may prove to be legitimate. One could perhaps go so far as to argue: "After all, terrorism by one country's nationals or by its stooges is practised on several other countries' soil. Bombs and other weapons of war are repeatedly employed there without any heed to these countries' sovereignty. So a retaliatory violation of the offending State's sovereignty cannot be ruled out." Anyway, respect for the principle of sovereignty depends on circumstances. No doubt, the principle cannot be lightly set at nought. But if one has refrained for a long time from retaliation because incontrovertible evidence of guilt was lacking and if at last such evidence comes to hand, there is no reason why punitive

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military measures within defined limits should not be undertaken against terrorist headquarters or training camps on foreign soil. Some civilian casualties may occur, but they will be accidental and unavoidable, quite unlike those which are intentionally brought about by the machinations of the terrorist organisation on soil over which other countries are normally sovereign.

Whether or not the retaliatory act is to be committed hangs on many factors: every wronged country may not be in a position to exercise its right. What should not be denied with pious platitudes is the right itself.

(1993)

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