TALK FIVE
March 3, 1971
I am afraid that last time I again left a lot of loose ends. I don't quite know where to pick up the thread of discourse. But, first, can a talk of mine be at all designated a discourse? Discourse implies acting the philosopher. In that respect I seem to resemble Dr. Jonathan whom Samuel Johnson once asked: "Have you tried being a philosopher?" Dr. Jonathan replied: "Sir, I have tried several times, but always cheerfulness keeps breaking in." (laughter)
Well, the mention of "philosopher" gives me a sort of clue where to begin: the factor which would most seem to accord with the serious look, the grave air, the philosophic posture — I mean the beard I had in the old days. And perhaps the matter of loose ends is quite appropriate to the beard because a beard appears to be a formation of hanging loose ends, (laughter) But whether my beard was appropriate to me is another question. I said I wanted to look like Bernard Shaw. Undoubtedly Shaw's beard was very expressive of him, particularly by its colour. A wit has said, "When Shaw was young, his beard was red with anger, and when he became old it grew white with rage." (laughter) My beard was not white at that time, it was fairly blackish and in any case even if it had been red it wouldn't have exactly suited me, because I don't think I am prone very much to angry explosions. As far as I can recollect, I was angry only twice in my first ten years and that too for a moment. I am unfortunately not so Yogic now, since I find that every year I once lose my temper for a second and I feel so ashamed not only because of the loss of control but also because the occasion is so tremendously trivial.
Talking of loss of temper, I think the most anger-prone sadhak I have seen was one who once confessed to the Mother: "If I had a pistol in my hand I would shoot the labourer with whom I am angry." Actually the anger back-fired — all the more because he was a true and sincere aspirant who had, in addition, a phenomenal capacity to give himself to the Mother's work. I have rarely seen a worker of that kind, ready to spend every ounce of energy day
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and night if need be. But those fits of anger used to play havoc with him. He had horrible reactions: fits of vomiting, as though something nasty had come into the being which could not be assimilated and had to be thrown out. Towards the end of his life I think he arrived at some control over his excitable nature.
Another thing fairly infrequent with me by the grace of God is that very upsetting movement called jealousy. People think jealousy is a most human and natural feeling — but, if they are right, it makes one lament the human and natural, for it is one of the most dangerous responses in a life of Yoga. One may digress from Yoga in various directions and still be able to come back to the straight path; but if jealousy takes possession of one in regard to the Mother's relations with the sadhaks, I am sure that one digs one's own spiritual grave. When one goes wrong in other ways, one doubts one's own capacity to do Yoga: one does not doubt the Mother's capacity to be one's Guru. But when jealousy overwhelms one, one thinks in terms of favouritism on the Mother's part. We start saying: "Oh she is all smiles to this sadhak but doesn't even look at me! She gives such a lot of attention to that sadhika, but completely ignores my needs." Such a critical view leads to a fundamental misgiving about the Guru's own status and the Guru's right to be a guide. This misgiving is, in my opinion, absolutely disastrous.
I once acutely realised what a disaster it can lead to. I was sitting at the top of the staircase outside the Mother's door. She used to open that door sometimes and glance at the people sitting. There was a girl next to me. I think it was Chinmayi who is no more with us. I had been waiting and waiting while she had just come. Suddenly the Mother opened the door, did not even look at me but just called Chinmayi in. Chinmayi went behind the Mother and I was left with the door practically shut in my face. I was terribly upset and a great surge of jealousy swept over me. Wave after hot wave struck against me and I was totally submerged. I felt extremely uncomfortable because it was a most unusual phenomenon with me. But I think the extreme form of my experience was secretly a gift of the Mother's grace, for it broke open an inner vision. When I hung my head down and looked between my legs at the stairs, I did not see the stairs but a black abyss, a bottomless black abyss. At once I was shocked into saying: "Ah, so this is what jealousy is! It is a pit of darkness unfathomable which tries to suck us in irrevocably." And since that moment — except for
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minor twinges of envy when somebody or other has written good poems more often than I — I don't think I have had any invasion of jealousy.
Before proceeding further I may hark back for a minute to my blessed beard. Although I have said it was not expressive of any indignation a la Shaw at the follies of the age (least of all at my own follies), it did play a certain expressive role. On the one side it mildly suggested what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother thought was quite evident — namely, that I had been an ancient Athenian in one of my past lives. On the other it conjured up, in the overall look of the face, the early Christian. The early Christians used to retire to the desert — in order to avoid the temptations of the world and wrestle with the Devil in private. And quite a wrestle they did have with the Devil, for after all the Devil is inside us as much as in the world. I am sure the wrestling took perverse forms because there was also the unnatural pressure of solitude and they could not distract their minds with anything even innocently improper. They had to concentrate all the time on their souls and that can be a very difficult job. It was the Mother again who marked the look of the early Christian in me. She glanced at a photograph of mine and pointed out the resemblance. I believe part of the resemblance lay in a certain fear in me at that time, fear of relapsing into the ordinary life. I would keep away from crowds, not be a good mixer, avoid even going to a shop, run to my room every now and then — and, with the Darshan in the offing, there would be almost a retirement for a week or so. The Mother doesn't care for a spirituality which is full of fear. I remember we had a French class taken by a very kind French lady, Madame Gaebele, whose Ashram name is Suvrata, and once at the end of a course she invited all her students to her place for tea, cakes, ice-cream and such things. I was very trepidant: "Should I go? Should I not go? What should I do? Would my Yoga be completely overturned if I went?" (laughter) I was in two minds and I asked the Mother: "Do you think I may go?" She replied in effect: "If you don't, won't you feel sorry afterwards? To have a regret that you have missed something would not be healthy. As a rule we don't encourage parties, but there must be no fear on your side. On this occasion I think you can go; but go quite calmly."
Now I would like to come to more serious topics: phases and phenomena of the Ashram which were contemporaneous with the career of my beard. By the way, my beard did not last all my
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life, as you can see for yourselves. Actually the first shaving of it marked the first spiritual fall I had, because after a year and a half my people from Bombay came on a visit and they brought the Bombay atmosphere. Although I agreed to see them only twice a week, I was yet afraid I might lose or spoil my Yogic halo. And those few meetings made me open myself to the Bombay atmosphere and I said: "Why should I not shave off my beard? I'll be better-looking without it!" My brother had no beard, the friend accompanying my family had none, either. So one morning I just cleared mine away. But when I looked in the mirror it seemed as if half my face had been cut off! (laughter) So much removed from under the chin so suddenly made the face look horribly small. And it was with this face that I went to the Darshan of Sri Aurobindo. He was a little puzzled: "Who is this funny-looking fellow with a face familiar but inexplicably halved?" (laughter) Then he concentrated a little and recognised that here was Amal Kiran. Seeing his expression, I on my return home wrote at once to him: "How did you find me?" He replied: "Grow back your beard as fast as you can!" (laughter) And I started re-growing it by whatever means I could — even watering my face at times in my desperation, (laughter) In a fortnight there was some result to show of all my pains and prayers.
Gradually as I grew out of the complex of fear I felt that the beard which formed part of the early-Christian ensemble of my face did not fit in with the new look I was acquiring. But now I was wiser by that first abrupt change from hirsute to clean-shaven: so I began to trim my beard. Every month it became shorter and shorter, (laughter) Finally, on the eve of my third visit to Bombay during the first ten years of my Ashram-life, I asked the Mother: "What shall I do? Do you think I could shave off my beard?" She said: "There is hardly any beard left. You might as well shave off what you call a beard. Do what you like; it won't make any difference." (laughter) So that was the end of the beard. And since then I am afraid to grow it because now I think most of it will come out white and make me look even more old than I am. (laughter)
To go back to the old days when I was young: the most important things then were the Pranam and the meeting with the Mother in various ways. There was at that time not only, as I said, a meditation in the early morning at 7.30 but also a night meditation to which I was not admitted because I was a mere novice and the
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Mother must have thought I would fall asleep. Even now she thinks that people on the whole can really meditate only for three minutes: afterwards there are diverse states of sleep, (laughter) When somebody asked her how long a man could sit in Sri Aurobindo's room for meditation, she said: "It can't be for more than three minutes, for soon after that he will fall asleep." And actually even the older sadhaks seemed to be falling asleep, for Sri Aurobindo shortly after I came to Pondicherry put a dead stop to the night meditation, saying: "I don't care for a snoring concert." (laughter)
The morning meditation went on and a little later there was started an evening meditation. It was extremely exalting because everything was dim and the Mother used to come and sit in a trance and all of us would try to do the same. I believe there were good results for all of us, except that every day there was one little odd occurrence, a disturbance, due to a South Indian Yogi who had become a sadhak here. He was supposed to be a great doer of tapasya — one who could carry on austere meditation. He told me once that before he came here he had thought he was the Avatar of the age. (laughter) After he saw Sri Aurobindo he developed some misgiving about himself and was inclined to think that perhaps Sri Aurobindo was the Avatar! Now, he would first sit in his room to meditate and then when he had got into the full swing of the inner consciousness he would come to the general meditation of the evening. In order to keep his room-meditation going he would open only one eye and keep the other shut and come like that all the way so that all of the inner consciousness might not escape, (laughter) With one eye shut, naturally several sorts of disasters could take place. The catastrophe that did frequently happen was that on his passage into the hall he put one of his feet right into the capacious lap of a fat lady named Mridu who used to sit just at the entrance, (laughter) She was outraged and indignant, but it was impossible to make any protest when the Mother was deep in trance.
In the period of Ashram history somewhat earlier than that of this evening function we had what I may call the Soup Ceremony. I referred to it in my last talk. It was a very important function every evening. It impressed one like a snatch of the Ancient Mysteries. The atmosphere was as in some secret temple of Egyptian or Greek times. In subdued light people would sit on mats in the hall which is now the Reception Room. At about 8 the Mother
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would come down from the Prosperity Room upstairs and take her seat near the shaded lamp. Champaklal brought down a big cauldron of hot soup and placed it in front of her on a stool. Then the Mother would go into a trance. In the course of her trance her arms would stretch forward over the soup-cauldron. For a minute they would remain there as if she were pouring something of her subtle-physical spirituality into the liquid. The idea must have been to give her own luminous subtle-physical substance and energy — a most concrete transference of spirituality into physical stuff. Then the Mother would open her eyes and Champaklal would remove the cauldron to one side and give her a big spoon. Each of us in turn would go and kneel before her and offer her our cup. The cup used to be called in the Ashram lingo "the animal cup": really it was "the enamel cup" mispronounced! (laughter) Perhaps the mispronunciation was quite appropriate: what we had to give the Mother was really an animal emptiness after all. (laughter) The Mother used to take the animal cup and pour divine soup into it; and sometimes in the middle of the pouring she would again be lost in meditation and we had to kneel there for even three or four minutes. Suddenly she would open her eyes and smile in a little shy or embarrassed way. After filling the cup she would take a sip from it. You see, that was the further and final touch of the transference of her subtle-physical force to something we could materially take into ourselves.
The Soup Ceremony was a very solemn one; but I am afraid the fundamental thing that was required of us was not fulfilled: there was no exchange of energy between the Mother and us. When the Mother gives and gives we should not just gobble up her gifts: on our part we should make an offering too because unless we give ourselves or whatever is in us, we cannot make room for what she gives: otherwise what she gives is grabbed as it were by some sort of spiritual greed. Not an unresponsive vacuity — an animal emptiness — but a receptive vacancy made by a self-purifying consecrated inner gesture is the need. Such a gesture doesn't appear to have been sufficiently made by us. Owing to the oneway traffic of the spiritual process, there was an enormous drain on the Mother and after some months of the Soup Ceremony she fell terribly ill and it was stopped. I can't quite vouch for the words but I have the impression that Sri Aurobindo's comment ran somewhat like: "These fellows are brutes." We did not realise
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what the Mother was doing: she was as if playing with her own life for our sake.
Closely connected with the Soup Ceremony was a series of meetings between the Mother and a few sadhaks in the Prosperity Room before she went down. If the Soup Ceremony had an air of Divine Gravity, the Prosperity Meeting may be considered to have had about it a breath of Divine Levity. It was enjoyable beyond description. The Mother came an hour before the Soup and sat down and attended first to the chits submitted for articles from the Stores. The man in charge was the one who bore the all-overtopping name: Purushottam ("Supreme Being"). Our present Porsperity-chief, Harikant, was just a baby at that time. Besides Purushottam there were two or three people sitting there. Champaklal was always the Mother's attendant in those days, just as he has been in recent times. The Mother says she keeps some lions about her: they belong to the occult planes — but Champaklal looks almost like a physical lion guarding her — a faithful vehicle, vāhana, of her Power. In the course of time more and more people gathered around the Mother in the Stores. But it was not because they chose to do so: the manner in which the group grew was incalculable and depended on the Mother alone. I remember how I happened to be in the group. I once went up to collect a writing pad I had asked for. The Mother was sitting in her usual place. I was at the door and Purushottam came and gave me the pad. Then the Mother just said: "Would you like to sit here?" I replied: "Of course, of course." Most happily I went in and sat down. In a more or less similar fashion hardly preplanned, each of the others got a place. The total number stayed fixed at the end. I think it was 24. Like 6, 24 has a special value. 6 is the half and 24 the double of Sri Aurobindo's number — 12 — which represents "The New Perfection". Sri Aurobindo has said that there are 12 powers or vibrations seen from the beginning above the Mother's head: these are indicated in the outermost circle of the Mother's symbol. Sri Aurobindo has also observed that there are really 12 planets in our solar system. 9 have already been discovered but 3 still remain. If you can manage to get this widely proclaimed, you will be hailed as a prophet when the tally is at last made. According to Sri Aurobindo, 12 rays (creating colour-effects) come from the sun, not 7 as we believe. I may note that the Greeks seem to have seen only three: they discerned nothing more than red, blue and yellow in the rainbow. We have obviously
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developed more colour-sight. Do you realise that the name "Sri Aurobindo" has itself 12 letters? And, surely, you know, as I once related, that a succession of 12 years marks the most momentous spiritual events in Sri Aurobindo's life. The double of 12 — 24 — has a personal association for me in connection with Savitri. When the first one-volume edition of the poem was to be brought out and I was set to look after it, I thought of ascertaining the exact number of lines. Being absolutely incompetent at the counting job, I put our best calculator, Girdharlal, to work. In practically no time he announced the number: 23,814. Then I submitted it to the Mother. At once she said: "There should have been 24,000 lines." This meant, to my mind, that Sri Aurobindo had left some lines uncomposed. One or two parts of the poem did not receive the full final recast — particularly the Epilogue. Perhaps many of the missing lines would have come in there. By the way, the complete title of the epic — Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol — makes 24 letters!
To each of us sitting with the Mother in the Prosperity Room she gave a number. I have the impression that Doraiswamy who used to be in the group whenever he came down from Madras had the last number. The first number was of Dara's youngest brother, Rene. My own was 15, which adds up its numerals to 6: 6 is the number of what is called "The Divine Creation", of which indeed I am very badly in need all the time!1
We sat before the Mother in a rough semi-circle. But there was one exception. At the Mother's feet was a stool, and Chan-dulal, our Ashram engineer, somehow got to lie flat in front of the Mother with his head resting against the stool, and the soles of his feet displayed to us. (laughter) "Bite-bite", the cat, often came and made herself comfortable on Chandulal's chest and he would try to talk to her in the endearing way the Mother used to address cats. His attempts were extremely funny to hear. All of us and the Mother herself laughed heartily. Chandulal was full of humour and sometimes of unconscious humour, odd turns of speech, strange combinations of words. Some of his pronouncements were quite memorable. I'll give a few examples. Once we had been waiting a long time in silent suspense for the Mother to come down to the room where the evening meditation took place. The effect which
1 It may be noted that the numerals of 24, the sum of letters in the title of Sri Aurobindo's epic, add up also to 6 — a fact most gratifying to a Savitri-maniac like me!
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her appearance produced on us was summed up by Chandulal in the sentence: "We were all aghast." How the Mother enjoyed this freakish expression! His character-reading of the first American lady to come to the Ashram — Janet McPheeters, renamed Shantimayi, who formed part of the Prosperity group — ran: "Frivolous in the eyes- but serious in the back." (laughter) She was puzzled as well as amused, until in less original English it was explained to her that he saw a seriousness of temper behind her apparent light-heartedness. On another occasion, he was discussing the repair of the ceiling of the room below the one across whose floor Sri Aurobindo used to walk vigorously, as he had done in the room of the old "Guest House", where I later stayed for 10 years. Chandulal explained to the Mother in technical language that, if he used beams of a certain thickness, they would bear the moving load only of such and such a weight! (laughter) The Mother felt very tickled and Chandulal did not know why she and all of us laughed. At last it dawned on him that he had unwittingly referred to Sri Aurobindo!
Various things were done in the Prosperity soirees. The Mother answered all sorts of questions and gave many talks. I would jot down her words in abbreviated long-hand and later reconstruct them. My transcriptions have appeared as the third series in Words of the Mother. At times there would be readings from the works of Sri Aurobindo. We would thrust a finger or a paper-cutter into the pages of a book and read out the passage on which we would thus alight. The Mother herself took part in this game. At other times she invented games to test or develop our faculty of intuition. She would arrange some flowers to make up a sentence according to the significances allotted by her to them. We had to guess what she had in mind. It so happened — most interestingly — that everyone of us had on at least one occasion the correct sentence implanted into our heads by her! What was thus demonstrated was not exactly our intuitiveness but her power to make us intuitive when she wanted. There were other games too. I don't remember all the details. Whenever we succeeded in scoring a hit we got a material reward. A slab of French chocolate was the usual gift. Only I went after an unusual prize: a box of French cough-pastilles named Fiamma. I preferred their taste to the chocolate's. All the time there would be joking among us or with the Mother. We were quite uninhibited and the laughter was sometimes uproarious. Many of the over-serious sadhaks in the Soup
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Room, waiting for the Mother to come down, were rather disturbed and did not at all approve of the bursts of Ananda upstairs! (laughter) It went on like this for an hour every evening.
There were two sights most deeply engraved on my memory. Both relate to the Mother. Once there was a meditation and, as was my wont, I kept opening my eyes and looking around. After the meditation had progressed for some minutes they fell on the Mother. Well, I have never seen the Mother as I saw her then. She was no longer human. Her whole body appeared to have become magnified and there was a light pervading her and the face was of a Goddess. I can only say that it was the face of Maheshwari. Sri Aurobindo has written of this aspect of the Divine Shakti: "Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother's eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever...." This was the first time I realised that when the Mother wants she can put forth the Divine Presence and Power completely into the physical being and manifest it. My wife Sehra has seen light coming out of the Mother's whole body and, as it were, assimilating the physical substance or else getting assimilated into it and making it radiant. I have never witnessed such a phenomenon, but here before me was indeed a superhuman being without any veils. I said to myself: "How much I would have lost if I had meditated!" (laughter) And, if the Mother showed herself like that all the time, we would not require even to meditate, because all the human part in us, all the mortality in us would be absolutely quelled.
This concrete vision of mine was one peak of the memorable sight-seeing I had in the Prosperity Room. The other peak, which I might call just the opposite but equally divine, was when we were playing a certain game with big lemons. Each of us was trying to balance one of these fruits on our head. And then the Mother herself did the same and sat steady, most unself-consciously. It was a revelatory spectacle, showing how one whom we considered the Supreme Divine incarnate could come down to a funny game like this — I mean something which might look even ridiculous. The Mother sitting with a big yellow lemon on her head! Can
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you imagine anything more unexpected? But whenever I recollect the sight I think of the mighty fourth line in the second stanza of Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God. Here is the stanza:
Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!
Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden Mystery, flower,
Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous
Hour.
A figuration of Maheshwari, the Goddess of my first vision, seems also in these lines, and the last of them —
Hour —
calls forth from me, as an equally profound disclosure of the sheer Divine, a new phrase, now too about a "golden Mystery":
Lemon on the head of the Mother, our host of the marvellous
When the Mother, as a gracious host, entertained us in those sixty minutes in the Prosperity Room, we saw not only her utter height but also her complete refusal to put on any airs. Perhaps "refusal" is not the right term because any airs would be unnatural to her and she does not have to make ah effort against them. But we have to be on guard against taking her for granted. She comes so close to our beings, acts so familiarly with us, as though she were one of us, that unless we keep our minds and hearts open we shall be in danger at times of missing to realise what she is.
I am sure Sri Aurobindo behaved in the same natural manner. From Nirod's accounts we see him overflowing with humour, cracking all kinds of jokes. Some of the jokes were even unreportable! (laughter) When editing Nirod's accounts, I submitted a few of Sri Aurobindo's jokes to the Mother for approval and she said: "No, no, you can't publish that in Mother India."
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not deliberately keep any barriers between themselves and their disciples. I have found the Mother behaving without the slightest sense of the gulf separating her in quality of consciousness from us. The Divine Shakti, I have
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learnt, does not go on thinking of her own greatness, does not stand on her supreme dignity as human V.I.P.'s do. Once I found the Mother come very sweetly in search of me all the way from her lunch-corner to the farther of the two doors of Sri Aurobindo's room. In those years after Sri Aurobindo's passing away, some of us used to gather on the first floor and receive flowers and blessings from her or be near her for some reason or other until her lunch-hour. Then everybody would go away. But, by an inexplicable stroke of Grace, I was allowed to remain waiting in the passage room outside her bathroom. I would sit there until she finished her lunch and came out to go to the bathroom. On occasion I would not quite know what to do and so I would walk into Sri Aurobindo's room, sit there for a while and then return to my usual station and meet the Mother. One day I oversat in Sri Aurobindo's room. And what did I see? The Mother had crossed all the way through the passage-room right to the end of the long room outside Sri Aurobindo's, wondering where the waiting fellow had disappeared. When I saw her I got up with a start, feeling ashamed that I had made her take all that trouble to come and look for someone utterly unimportant, just to give him the blessing he hardly deserved but keenly desired.
The manner in which the Mother deals with children is another eye-opener. I recall how she once handled a little girl who was brought to her as having fever. The Mother put her hand gently over the girl's head, moved it slowly to the back of the head, then slid it right down the spine in the same caressing way, and at the end lightly kissed the child on her forehead. The little patient, I am positive, went away as good as cured. I wish everybody could receive such doctoring. The Mother has told me that she used to cure her son Andre, when a boy, of all his illnesses without ever calling a doctor. She has an extraordinary healing power. Most of us have had plenty of experiences of it. I would like to tell you some of mine, but where's the time today? I shall close this part of my talk on the theme of the Mother's coming intimately near to us and making the Integral Yoga so very easy and lavishing her love on us without reserve — I shall close this part of my talk by quoting, if you will excuse me, two poems of my own. One is concerned with the time of Pranam. I have entited it Grace:
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Take all my shining hours from me,
But hang upon my quiet soul's
Pale brow your dream-kiss like a gem.
Let life fall stricken to its knee,
If unto lone-faced poverty
You give your blessing's diadem.
Make of these proud eyes beggar-bowls,
But only drop your smile in them.
The other poem, named O Silent Love, reads:
Because you never claim of us a tear,
O Silent Love, how often we forget
The eyes of countless centuries were wet
To bring your smile so near!
Forgive if I remember not the blaze,
Imperishable, perfect, infinite,
Of far omnipotence from which you light
Your lamp of human face.
Make me a worship-vigil everywhere,
Slumber and wakefulness one memory
That you are God. O let each pore of me
Become a mouth of prayer.
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