TALK FOUR
February 27, 1971
Last time I gave a somewhat unpleasant if not gruesome description of myself as a being full of holes — not only the seven physiological holes but also seventy-seven or more psychological ones! Keenly conscious though I have always been of the multiple character of His Holeyness Amal Kiran, I did not realise that I had some holes in my brain through which many things slipped out. I don't mean only things which I should not have spoken, yet unfortunately blabbed, but also several which I should have said, yet somehow let go.
I have to remedy the defects. This business may come in the way of my saying on the present occasion a number of things I have in mind about the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Perhaps I should start with them, but then I may get launched on a course which might again make many matters slip out of those holes in my brain. It seems that whatever I do I shall have to deliver a third talk, which may not be such a calamity after all — except for the talker, because he feels terribly nervous until he forgets himself and says things which may need forgiving! (laughter)
I'll begin with remedying some of my oversights before endeavouring to pass on any more insights. But even prior to doing that I have to do something in response to my friend Nirod. He has made an earnest plea that I should rid your minds of the delusion that the doctor I spoke of last time was he. (laughter) It seems many of you carried away that impression, though I wonder how.
Nirod can hardly be described as a person of one dimension attached to a thin beard, (laughter) But, of course, in this place there are all kinds of miracles occurring and you may have thought he might have been like that. Well, one example of the unexpected to be expected here is the look of my own self 43 years ago. Can you imagine me, when I first came here, to have started growing long hair and sprouting a far from wispy beard? And yet I did so. No doubt, I always had the ambition in my younger days to look like Bernard Shaw whom I admired a great deal. But when I was in Bombay I could not grow a beard — beards at that time were
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not in fashion for people who were rather young and perhaps inclined to be romantic, {laughter) Even when I returned to Bombay after a six and a half years' stay here and met my future wife Sehra, whom I had known earlier, she was indignant on seeing me bearded, though not long-haired any more. She made a disgusted face and said: "What is this?" Then I very calmly explained to her: "You see, I am a Yogi, (laughter) God thrust on me the spiritual favour of a lame leg so that I might not run after anybody glamorous (laughter) and I have spiritually favoured myself with a beard so that nobody glamorous may run after me!" (laughter) Well, I am rather running away from my friend Nirod and after my own unglamorous self. So let me finish what I started saying.
Nobody should have imagined Nirod to be the person I had described — nor do I think that Nirod ever had sufficient confidence in his own meditation to substitute it for medicine, (laughter) The person in question was somebody quite different and I don't think any of you will recognise him now because he has been dissociated from medicine completely for almost the last four decades — just as I myself have been dissociated from drawing and painting for nearly as long a period.
In those days in the Ashram there was a scarcity of specially qualified people. Now we have a dozen doctors, each diagnosing a different disease for the same patient, (laughter) In those days we had only one doctor and he always diagnosed a spiritual illness, though, I suppose, he did not have a cure for it. In that period, I was a sort of Raphael and Rembrandt and Whistler rolled into one, because there were no real artists about, and the Mother somehow picked me out for drawing-jobs. I am not quite sure how she came to the conclusion that I could draw or paint. But I have two tentative clues.
Once I drew a series of somewhat irreverent sketches of people meditating. In those early times we used to have meditation at 7.30 a.m. in the long room where the Mother, after the passing away of Sri Aurobindo, gave darshan on the four big days of the year. Of course, on those big days she used to sit in a chair, but in the old period she sat on a big seat meant for herself and Sri Aurobindo. During the morning meditation she would be alone there — and Sri Aurobindo was in the background, supporting the meditation going on in the front room. The Mother, wearing a sari, would sit cross-legged, looking radiantly beautiful. She was a picture of supreme repose, but a repose in which there was
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a great deal of held-in power, as if she had come and sat there after having gone on a journey through the centuries and finished her job of finding what she had wanted to find. All journeys seemed to come to an end in her, and when we went and knelt down at her feet all journeys of ours also seemed to end there. All our difficulties vanished — except the difficulty of going away and leaving the Mother's feet!
During these early meditations, each of the old sadhaks had his turn to sit throughout with his head on one of the Mother's feet — profoundly surrendered to the foot and profusely perspiring on it! (laughter) I may make a small digression here. The old sadhaks had an affectionate way of referring to one another. They called one another "Old Bandicoot", (laughter) Why exactly longstanding sadhana resembled the movements of a rather obnoxious-looking big rat of Pondicherry, I cannot precisely say. But my ingenious mind conjectures that it may have been in accordance with the goal of Yoga as expressed in Sanskrit and as mispronounced by a non-Sanskritist like me. The goal of Yoga in India, as stated in Sanskrit, is self-mastery, "Swarat" (laughter) and world-mastery, "Samrat". (laughter)
Well, to come back to our situation. While one of the old bandicoots sat at the Mother's feet, the rest of us sat at some distance from her. As I was new, I did not know properly how to meditate. I thought the best procedure was to keep my eyes open and watch the others getting into meditation, (laughter) That would be one of the first lessons of my Yoga. And I kept on watching and saw a lot of things which I put into a series of cartoons, (laughter) I don't remember all of them, but I hope that when I describe some, those who are concerned will excuse me — well, it will be a test of their Yogic equanimity, (laughter)
To begin with, there was the first American here, old Vaun McPheeters — quite a hulk of a man, over 6 foot tall. He used to meditate as if by closing his eyes and going inward he were trying to hypnotise the Absolute into submission, (laughter) He knitted his brows, set his jaws and looked most aggressively concentrated. I should say somebody looking as resolute though in a different way was Purani — as you might expect. He had the habit of making a movement with his mouth all the time, as if trying to swallow the nectar of the Divine Bliss, (laughter) And his determined look seemed to say: "No fooling with me! I shall drink all heaven up, no matter how large the quantity!" And, strange to say, his neck
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used to become stiff and straight and expand enormously: the weight of the descending nectar must have been immense. Nolini with the thumb and fingers of his right hand held his impressive forehead, as if his brain needed support when the Light plunged in and filled it to overflowing. Then there was our Ashram engineer, Chandulal — the only engineer then just as there was the only doctor and the only artist. He sat stretched out, almost sprawling, with his features somewhat intent — he appeared to be inwardly calculating — and with his two arms planted behind, palms flat upon the floor, to support his stretched-out posture like a pair of pillars. It was as though he was trying to throw a bridge between earth and heaven with his own body, (laughter) A Mohammedan sadhak, brother of the great Dara, sat with a very prayerful expression but with his head hanging loose to one side in a state of what I called dislocated devotion (laughter) — that is, the consciousness forcibly pulled away from ordinary objects of desire and helplessly bent towards the Divine. Dara himself was like a baby elephant, his curved aristocratic nose — or shall I say, his thoroughbred trunk? — working vigorously its nostrils and breathing hard to get a whiff of the invisible but evidently not unsmellable Beloved of the Sufis. Near the two brothers was Amal Kiran. He bore a rather sad look on his long-nosed face, moving his open eyes over people while straining his thin neck upward to touch as best he could the "sky-lucent bliss" towards which his all-too-errant life wished to soar as you know from the poem I recited on the last occasion. Not the least spectacular and cartoonable was a sadhak with the grandiose name of Purushottam, meaning "Supreme Being". He sat with quite a soulful countenance but with a constant jerk in one leg. He sort of kicked out at unYogic things every two or three minutes. My caption for his speciality of meditation was: "Purushottam striving to achieve the psychic."1 (laughter) Then there was Champaklal. As soon as he shut his eyes he would start swaying a little — obviously in response to some inner rhythm. It was a fine sight — that gentle semi-circular swaying with a deeply absorbed face. The moment his eyes were closed, his consciousness seemed to get outside the fixed poise of the common physical mind. Perhaps the most dynamic meditation was of a person who did not sway in a semi-circle but who, losing
1 It is now many years since Purushottam kicked off the dust of the Ashram and sought for a spiritual achievement on his own with no Guru supervising his progress.
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outer consciousness, would nod forward — not only with his head but with his whole body. And the nodding kept increasing in tempo until his head either went bang into the back of whoever was in front of him or, if there was nobody near enough to cushion the blow, fall with a terrific thud upon the floor, (laughter) The Mother would open her eyes wondering what had been the cause of the sudden explosion (laughter) and the exploder would himself wake up and look all around in extreme astonishment, (laughter) But I really admire the simplicity, the sincerity, the lack of self-consciousness which this sadhak had and also the sense of humour which enabled him to laugh at himself afterwards when his friends poked fun at him. His case was outstanding enough for Nirod to ask Sri Aurobindo once what exactly was happening. Sri Aurobindo explained that Rajangam's consciousness completely left his body during meditation.
The peculiarities of some others have been left out. I think there were only three or four people whom I could not particularly characterise in my sketches because they meditated more or less in a normal fashion. For instance, Pavitra, sitting perfectly straight and looking very calm and pure. I may mention Lalita too, quiet and refined and childlike. Amrita looked the picture of meekness, the Divine's obedient and ever-ready servitor with just a faint forward and backward movement of the head at times. Dyuman too sat unobtrusively though not unimpressively, with a dedicated visage that appeared incapable of ever saying "No" to anything the Mother might order.
I hope none of the objects of my cartoons will get angry with me now. At the time the sketches were made very few saw them. I showed them to Purani who enjoyed them immensely. One or two others were a bit peeved. Some got the wind of them but never saw them. I think Amrita heard about them and maybe he spoke of them to the Mother. He used to give her a lot of news. But the Mother never spoke to me about this adventure of mine. What she did was to ask me unexpectedly one day: "Will you draw and paint the flowers I give all of you at Pranam?" I said: "How do you know that I can do such a thing?" She answered: "It is very easy. Hold up your right hand." I held it up. "There! you have the hand of an artist." Well, that was that. There was no question of disputing anything with her or of going against her wish. But I surmise that apart from her reading the potentiality of my hand or having heard a rumour of those cartoons, there might have
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been some memory of a past life. Just as I pestered Sri Aurobindo about his own past lives, I once put an exploratory question to him on myself. I wrote: "Certain poets very strongly appeal to me and their minds and characters seem to have strong affinities with mine in different ways. Have you any intuition in the matter of my past lives? The Mother once saw Horace (as well as Hector) behind Dilip; but she has told me nothing about myself except that she is positive I was an Athenian." Sri Aurobindo replied: "A strong influence from one or more poets or all of them together is not sufficient to warrant a conclusion that one had been those poets or any of them in former lives. I have myself no intuitions on the subject of your past lives, though from general impressions I would be inclined to wager that you were not only in Athens (that is evident) but in England during the Restoration time or thereabouts, in Renaissance Italy etc.: these, however, are only impressions." So it may be that I was a footling of a painter tutored by the great Leonardo who, we are convinced, was an emanation of Sri Aurobindo's. I may have handed him brushes when he was doing the portrait of Mona Lisa whom we take to be an emanation of the Mother in that period. At least once I confronted the Mother with the question of Mona Lisa. Just as she had asked me to hold up my hand I held up her hand on one occasion after a private meditation with her, and said: "See! your fingers, when curved like this, look exactly like Mona Lisa's as Leonardo has painted them." She didn't confirm or deny but looked pleased. Is it impossible that she faintly recollected a poor assistant of Da Vinci when she saw my hand?
Anyway, I began my career in the Ashram not only as a furniture-keeper, as I have told you several times, but also as a flower-painter — and as a budding poet. Here I think I must remedy a gap I have left in regard to furniture-keeping. It is in connection with somebody who was in charge of the carpentry department at that time. Nirod was in charge of the timber godowns; so don't mix him up with this person. I had often to go to the carpentry department to pick up things to supply sadhaks' rooms with. Once a shelf and table had been demanded; so I had told my friend the carpentry-manager to have them made. After a few days, I passed along the road and saw that they were lying ready. I went in to inquire. Well, I must tell you, before I come to the incident proper, that this friend of mine had a remarkable faith in the Mother—especially in the Mother within his own being. You know that there are two
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Mothers who are ultimately one — the Mother inside us and the Mother outside. Of course, the aim in general of the Mother outside — the Mother who is in a body as our Guru — is to make us aware of herself within our being. But she is there also as a check on our imagination of what she is within us. The Divine Presence within, if properly found, is the most wonderful discovery; but, if improperly found, it is the most marvellous invention! Oh, it is ever so kind, so accommodating, so convenient — indeed it might as well be no other than ourselves in disguise. The ego in us is very clever and finds all sorts of ways to justify what it wants to do, and again and again the Mother outside us has to contradict the Mother inside before we are guided to the true Light within. And these contradictions are pretty unpleasant at times. The Guru in front of us can often be a damned nuisance or, if we must be reverent, a blessed annoyance, (laughter) This Guru won't let our pet desires and favourite proclivities skip and hop and have a holiday. The one who is a fountain of delight can frequently be such a kill-joy to the ego. Yes, the Mother is there before us to test, times without number, whether we have truly found the Mother inside us. I have learnt this truth, not always pleasurably but, I hope, always gratefully.
Now I come to my confrontation with my friend. I said: "The table and shelf are ready. May I pick them up and have them carried away?" He said: "No." I looked a little puzzled and must have struck him as rather foolish since he had said "No" with such assurance. I asked: "Why?" He replied: "I have received an order from the Mother that every piece of furniture should be coated with chocolate paint." I countered: "Really? I have never heard of such a thing and I have often taken furniture from you without any chocolate paint." He explained: "Yes, that was formerly. But now the order has come and I have to obey it." I questioned: "Has the Mother written it to you?" "Written?" he rather contemptuously repeated my word, and added: "I don't need written orders. The order has come from here" — and he thumped the middle of his chest, (laughter) I was a little stunned. He saw that my ears were not tuned enough to hear the voice coming from his hairy bosom. So he continued: "You will learn about these things as you get on in Yoga. The Mother will teach you."
I saw there was nothing for me to do except report the enlightening dialogue to the Mother herself. I asked her whether she had
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really instructed so-and-so to chocolate-paint every piece of furniture. She wrote back in an emphatic hand: "I have given no order of the kind, and it would be too expensive to chocolate-paint everything!" I took the note to the preacher of the new gospel. He was very displeased, but being a good sadhak at heart he admitted the voice from within to have been mistaken or rather to have been mistakenly heard. It must have spoken "No chocolate paint" but he, in his unprepared state, missed the first word. (laughter)
The universal chocolate-painting was halted and my friend learnt a lesson. But now look at the sequel. It made me sorry I had found fault with his inner voice. Soon after the incident, he was promoted from the carpentry to the smithy. He worked so hard there that he felt terribly hungry at the end of the working hours and ate the food meant for three or four people and became huge and muscular. He was so full of irrepressible energy that he would not merely walk: he ran all the time and very fast indeed as if he were racing with somebody. I told all my friends that the vision in Nolini's first book, written years ago, on the future evolution of man was getting materialised — the book which he had entitled "The Coming Race", (laughter)
One day the giant smith was summoned late in the evening to the door of a house. As usual he came galloping. He was interested to find that an old lady was yelling like mad inside, "Open the door, open the door!" It seems she had mistakenly been locked in and badly needed to be let out. In those days we used to have the Soup Ceremony. I shall come to that subject if I have time and talk to you of it because it is long forgotten and many things connected with it are important. All the inmates of that house had gone to the Soup. But some passerby — an Ashramite — who was late in going heard the yelling from inside. I too happened to be hanging about by chance. A few people had gathered at the door and they asked the smith to force the lock open. He firmly replied: "I can't do anything without a chit from the Mother, our Guru." (laughter) Now the Mother was in the Soup Hall and could not be approached. We tried to explain to the smith that it would be quite all right to proceed without consulting the Mother. But he was adamant. "My God!" I said to myself. "What have I done — by discrediting the inner guide?" The old lady increased her yelling. Suddenly something got into the smith's head or, more appropriately speaking, his heart — and the Guru inside gave the decision: "If you
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can't get a chit from the Mother, get it from someone who is next to her." We eagerly asked: "Who will do for you?" According to him, the deputy avatar would be the Ashram engineer under whom he had once worked. So people had to run about and find the engineer. Luckily he had not yet gone to the Soup. He hurriedly scribbled a note: "Please let the lady out." (laughter) Then the lock was forced and the imprisoned lady emerged into freedom and, without giving thanks to the smith, rushed away to the Soup.
The incident taught me a lesson. There must be a sort of compromise between the Guru inside and the Guru outside. The former should sometimes be able to decide whether the latter is to be consulted or not. We should not proceed too mechanically. A hint on the correct compromise is given by the Mother herself when she says that the first thing people surrender to her when they come here is their common sense!
Now I shall close the chapter of my role as furniture-keeper and turn to myself as flower-painter. As the only artist or the sole apology for one, I got many favours from the Mother. She heaped me with drawing materials. She brought out the sketching-pads she had collected in Japan from a stationer with that most musical of names: "Bumpodo." (laughter) I got paint-brushes and, I think, crayons too. Every morning, after the Pranam, I had to hurry home and paint my flower while it was fresh. Every week the Mother inspected my drawing-book. Then I discovered an important thing. I suppose all of you know that what we have to do here is Yoga first and Yoga again and Yoga always. This makes a formula like the one on good writing which I quoted from a French critic last time and which I will not repeat in French now lest 1 should once more create comic complications. What I want to say now is that the Mother evaluates everything from the standpoint of Yoga. Of course she appreciates competent and skilful work of all kinds, but if she had to choose between great skill with no Yoga in it and smaller skill with a splash of the Yogic consciousness going with it, she would always tilt in favour of the latter. When she turned the pages of my drawing-book I found that she simply passed over paintings I had done with a great deal of cleverness but with a tinge of self-congratulation. But she paused and smiled and appreciated very much whatever I knew I had done with real remembrance of her and with an inner gesture of offering to her. I may add that, on many occasions, things done like that acquire even a finer artistic form than things done efficiently with an outside approach in order
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to impress the Mother with our own talents. A psychic delicacy or an inner sensitive strength enters the line and colour and composition. The same applies to the art of writing. Writing can be surfacy or it can be depth-revealing. Here I may pick up the thread where I dropped it last time in dealing with the problem of clarity in poetic expression.
The French critic's statement — on what good writing, prose or poetry, should be — ran: "Clear, again clear and always clear." But I argued that, while poetry should make an attempt at being clear, well-formulated, something you could catch, something you could visualise inwardly, it should combine with the clarity an element of mystery. So I would rather follow Havelock Ellis's dictum: "Be clear, be clear, be not too clear." What I infer from this is that we cannot do without clarity but that our clarity should lead on to a profundity beyond the mere mind — the profundity of the Divine's Being which to the Divine's Consciousness is a most blissful transparency — a colossal clarity of beatitude, but which to the mere mind is an ever-elusive secret. Mark the epithet I have employed: "ever-elusive". It does not mean that you are just stumped and dumbfounded: it means that you move onward, press forward, seeking as it were a shape and a substance but both of them refuse to be caught and pinned down, they overflow the words while yet filling them. Conceptual hints, imaginative suggestions, symbolic shadowings-forth are there, demanding an inner awareness for their comprehension — these are what poetry must have along with graspable and utterable matter. I might say that poetry should aim not so much at the clarity of the mind as at the clarity of what we may term with Sri Aurobindo the Overmind. The one is concerned with seeing faithfully the contour, the colour, the texture, so to speak, of the subject of a poem. The other does not stop with a limited observation. It passes from it to more and more subtle patterns and meanings. The beauty of contour, colour and texture — the loveliness of the finite — opens brightly into unknown dimensions: it is, like the body of Savitri in the passage from Sri Aurobindo I recited to you last time —
A golden temple door to things beyond.
The Overmind's clarity pierces from space to wider space, follows light upon deeper light, discerns truth after greater truth. It is an endless self-discovery of the Infinite. The true poet directly or in-
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directly goes after such revelation — directly when he not only deals with spiritual themes but catches the pulsation of an inner language without any admixture — indirectly when he handles themes that are secular or even profane, yet infuses into his language an inner turn and tone.
Let me give you an example which may be considered at the same time spiritual and secular. Most of you must have come across Wordsworth's line:
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
The line occurs in Wordsworth's famous Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which a British schoolboy made a memorable howler of by calling it Wordsworth's Ode on Intimate Immorality! (laughter) In this poem Wordsworth describes the landscape of a May morning in Cumberland, while bringing out the subtle feelings and impressions he had during childhood of a divine radiance everywhere, God's presence in all Nature — in flowers and streams and even rocks. These feelings and impressions he found dimming as he grew older and at times he lamented he had quite lost them. In the midst of one confrontation of landscape with a certain mood he has that, fascinating line. What does it mean? An Englishman would be disposed to equate it with:
The Winds come to me from the sleeping fields.
He would mean that as the earth had just emerged from darkness and was still covered with shadows the adjacent fields lay in a mist and seemed to be in a drowse lingering on from the night and so the breeze blowing from them came with a drowsing influence to the poet. As a result, the poet's heart was cooled and lulled and soothed. This interpretation sees the line as absolutely clear in its significance: it gives us a fair picture of finite things. But, if Wordsworth meant just this, why did he not say "sleeping fields" instead of "fields of sleep" and make the line akin, with a different atmospheric touch, to the start, breathing a reverent Nature-enjoyment, of the 1804-version of The Prelude:
Oh there is blessing in the gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields ...?
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One may answer: "In the passage concerned there is the word 'steep' at the end of a nearby line and Wordsworth has to rhyme with it: so he puts 'fields of sleep' here rather than 'sleeping fields'. That is all the reason." But surely Wordsworth was enough of a master of language to rhyme "steep" with some other line-ending and get the proper rhyme for "fields" by another verse. Even if he could not, what prevented him from writing not what he actually wrote but simply:
The Winds come to me from the fields asleep ?
The rhyme remains, yet does it say what Wordsworth wanted? Of course the shade of sense in "the fields asleep" is not quite the same as in "the sleeping fields". The emphasis has shifted from the "fields". The qualifying word "asleep", placed after the noun and then also at the end of a line where a greater or smaller pause is always made, takes up our attention rather than the word "fields" The activity — or, if you like, the passivity — of sleeping is now in the forefront. A greater interiority is indicated, but we do not go very far except by way of something in the rhythm and in the indefinable suggestion of a particular word-order. However, we fall between two stools. We miss the surface clearness, the clearness that is a nearness, and we yet do not get any clearness of the depth, of the distance. There is neither the mind's admirable clarity nor the amazing clarity of the overmind. The final fulfilled poetic effect has not been reached and we are more tantalised imaginatively than satisfied intuitively. The intuitive satisfaction arrives only with the line Wordsworth actually penned. There "sleep" assumes the centre. We are face to face with a state of in-drawn consciousness, what seems a blank to the surface mind but is really a new dimension of being. Now it is the presence, the power, of "sleep" that has fields of its own: "sleep" is now a plane, a hidden world, a mysterious existence. Modern psychology would call it the Subliminal or else the Collective Unconscious. But such labels do not carry us sufficiently into the poetic mystery here. It is only the ancient Mandukya Upanishad that supplies the right clue. There we have three stages of consciousness described: the waking stage, jāgrat, which looks outward on the physical cosmos, the dream stage, svapna, which looks inward on subtle universes, and the sleep stage, susupti, in which everything is gathered into a divine concentration, a spiritual seed-form. Wordsworth's "fields
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of sleep" conveys the life-sense of the superconscious unknown that is the Mandukya Upanishad's susupti: these fields are the hidden height of our inmost being, from whose recesses of eternal bliss and rapt truth-sight the most profoundly re-creative inspiration wafts into us.
Note how well the spiritual mystery pressing upon the poet from across in-drawn distances is prepared by the three preceding lines in the passage:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong:
I hear the Echoes thro' the mountains throng,
The physical reality imaginatively caught up into the semi-symbolic meets us in the opening line: the trumpet-metaphor affines the cataracts to invisible high-poised archangels. A subjective turn enters the next line, putting the poet's grief into relation with something living and vocal in the season, something against whose secret burden of self-existent bliss all expression of grief would be an ungrateful rebellion. Then the physical sounds from the steep, descending and spreading in space, are mentioned in a rarefied form as "Echoes" gathering in lofty places, hovering for the poet like a remote remembrance of some looming range and recess of reality, both without and within. Then we get the last movement with its leap beyond all Nature-hints of the spiritual into sheer mysticism and Mantra. Not that Nature is annulled — the fields of Cumberland on "a sweet May morning" are still there, but the breath, simultaneously vague and powerful, of Supernature has broken across them and wakened in the poet the thrill of some ultimate soulscape. There we have the divine clarity I have spoken of, shining through the human clarity and giving us the mystery that makes meaning a gesture of ecstasy and, whether colourful or delicate, sweeps us from the finite concrete object into illimitable vistas. In the words of Meredith,
its touch is infinite and lends
A yonder to all ends.
A long time ago — in 1934 — I submitted Wordsworth's line to Sri Aurobindo, asking what plane exactly it had hailed from. He
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replied that it was very high in the "overhead" inspiration but lacked the precise overmind note and had only the note of the intuition-plane in an intense form. Afterwards, in 1946, Sri Aurobindo sprang a surprise on me with the declaration that the line was one of the seizures from the overmind itself. Naturally I questioned him: "What you write now means a crucial change of opinion — but how and why?" He replied: "Yes, certainly my ideas and reactions to some of the lines and passages about which you had asked me long ago, have developed and changed and could not but change" — and he added: "I have since then moved in those fields of sleep and felt the breath which is carried from them by the winds that came to the poet, so I can better appreciate the depth of vision in Wordsworth's line."
Well, we have come back to Sri Aurobindo, but our time is up and a lot of things I had wished to tell you have got left out. We shall have to meet again, since there seems to be a yonder to all my ends.
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