TALK TWO
August 29, 1970
During the last talk I realised that the subject was as much myself as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but I could not really help it and I hope you will forgive me if I repeat the folly. I even made the claim that in Savitri Sri Aurobindo had referred to me twice because twice he has mentioned lameness symbolically. I might take a cue from that procedure and complete the count by giving you some more lines from Savitri, which bring in the same characteristic. Only here the reference seems to be more general than particular. It is part of an occult vision of this enigmatic world of ours with all its play of contraries and its internal paradoxes. Sri Aurobindo figures it in the form of a strange bird which is hanging in the sky and disclosed to the eye of yogic vision. The lines run:
All things hang here between God's yes and no,...
The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,
The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken
Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,
A great surreal dragon in the skies.
It's a tremendous vision. As the lame foot is there you might hold the passage to be a covert allusion which could again be considered unmistakable. But the wingedness gives one pause, until one remembers my versifying tendencies and Plato's idea that a poet is a winged creature who has no power over himself but sort of lives in the air of the mind blown by various forces good or otherwise. In any case it is difficult to think how so grandiose and dreadful a figuration as the dragon could be applied to a person, whether he be a versifier or not! I myself wondered until I suddenly realised what a tremendous drag on the Mother and Sri Aurobindo I had been! (laughter)
In fact most of us are so. And in that way the whole passage refers to the generality of the sadhaks who have come here. And if the central point can be taken to be Amal, well, then I can say, "Am all!" (laughter) representing everyone, and of course the first
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instinct of the poet would be to rhyme with "Am all!" "Damn all!" (laughter) But you cannot really damn all, all are lumped together and all are a huge brake, a massive retardation, on the yogic process carried on here with so much patience by our Gurus.
Last time I referred to my arrival in Pondicherry and my first Darshan. Perhaps it may be interesting to sketch the background of the life here before I came. Of course, it didn't make much difference, my coming here; the same thing went on, perhaps a little worse, but still it did. The background was just a year earlier — the descent of what Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind. The Overmind, as you all know, is the world of the Great Gods and also the unity of these Gods in an all-covering Godhead. Sri Aurobindo says that so far all the spiritual inspirations have had their source in the Overmind, which is a plane of infinite diversity. Though always its basis is unity, the unity is not in the forefront, the diversity is the prominent feature. And hence there have been innumerable religions throughout history, each one making an absolute of one aspect or another of the Supreme Reality. The consciousness known as Krishna's is also said by Sri Aurobindo to have been — at least in its dynamic aspect — a manifestation of the Overmind in a concrete and personal way. So this occasion of the descent of the Overmind was, as it were, an extension of what Krishna had achieved — that is, the Overmind Consciousness coming down right to the most physical. We may question whether Krishna brought it down even to the external physical, because if we understood the story of his death symbolically we would see why he died by an arrow shot into his foot: the foot is the symbol of the most material consciousness. That part, we may conclude, had remained vulnerable. Anyway, here was a great occasion on which a power, not unheard-of but unrealised in its fullness, had come down in its fullness, though perhaps not in all its details yet. As a result of this the Ashram as such could be started. Sri Aurobindo was always reluctant to start an Ashram. When disciples wanted to come to him, either he asked them not to do so or it was as if he felt like running away from them! I remember Purani telling me that when, on his arrival here, he first fell at Sri Aurobindo's feet and then raised his head there was no Sri Aurobindo! (laughter) He had quietly vanished into his room. And you may have known from his letter to C. R. Das how very careful he was to secure his base, his ground, and be absolutely sure
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before launching out on anything. So there had been no Ashram as such.
At that time people were staying in various houses and the Mother too was one of the residents, though a very looked-up-to resident. But on this day of the Overmind's descent Sri Aurobindo is said to have called the Mother to his side and made her the head of the Ashram, telling his would-be disciples that henceforth she would be the active Guru in front and he would be in the background. Now, I have learnt that in the months soon after this Overmind manifestation, there was an unimaginable play of extraordinary Force resulting in what you may call minute-to-minute miracles. Everything in our Ashram-life, I believe, is miraculous but it often wears the guise of a natural event. Only when you think of it deeply you see the miraculous power behind it. But here it was an open display of extraordinary phenomena, because at that time the process of sadhana, according to the information I have gathered, was to bring down the Great Gods of the Overmind into human receptacles. And when such a constant descent takes place all kinds of wonderful things occur. The only wonderful thing the Mother and Sri Aurobindo had not quite foreseen was that the human receptacles would digest the Gods (laughter) and think they were themselves the Gods instead of being their instruments! (laughter) And this bit of surprise, of course, could never be accepted.
But the most astonishing result of the descent was — as the Mother once related to me — that she got what is called the Word of Creation. Yes, the Word of Creation — just as the God Brahma is supposed to have created the universe by his Word. Now a Power came to the Mother to create as it were a new world by the mere Word: whatever she would say would come true. And a whole new World of Light was ready for precipitation: she had just to say the Word and that World would come and take possession of the earth. So she went to Sri Aurobindo and told him, "I have the Word of Creation. What is to be done?" It seems Sri Aurobindo, as usual, kept quiet for some time, did not give any kind of response immediately, but finally said, "This Word of Creation is of the Overmind and we do not want it. We want the Supermind." The Overmind is so marvellous that if it were established here nobody would look beyond it, nobody would want anything more. It is so dazzling that everybody would think the ultimate had come. Actually what the ultimate would have
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brought was a new religion, because, as I have said, the Overmind is the source of all religions. This would have swamped all the existing religions, but it would itself have been still like them. And it would have stood in the way of greater manifestations. So the Mother says she went back to her room, concentrated for some hours and dissolved the whole World which was ready for precipitation. I think this was the greatest renunciation the earth's spiritual history knows of. A Power, such as had not come to anyone, had come and was ready to be put into effect; but, at a short "No" from Sri Aurobindo, the Mother blew it away as if it were a bagatelle!
And, once it was stopped, the entire process of sadhana seems to have undergone a change. Instead of bringing down the Great Gods, the effort now was to start from the bottom, not from the top — to dig, as it were, into the subconscient and gradually prepare the purification of the human consciousness and nature and bring out what Sri Aurobindo has called the psychic being — the Divine's representative in the very midst of the natural formation. Thus the evolutionary creature would develop slowly, gradually with a lot of hardships but still with a sure footing.
So that was the condition, the spiritual condition of the sadhana into which I happened to stumble.
At that time there were only about 40 people here — just a handful, and the life here was much more quiet, and people at least looked much more serious, and they were supposed to be concentrating much more on their inner development than on any outer action. I cannot give you an idea of what all the 40 people looked like or acted like, but I have memories of some of them who could not be bypassed. Of course, Nolini was there, quite a young man but more or less the same. He used to go about with his eyebrows high up as if in concentration on some Beyond, not paying much attention to outer things. When we were standing together and talking he would pass along, stand, look with a very interested air and say "What?" and just walk away, (laughter) We tried to give some answer but before that he was gone! (laughter) Amrita was there also — more impulsive, more easy to get at. He used to come to my room pretty often, I remember. In fact he learned typing on my typewriter, in my room. And he was in charge, at that time, of our milking department, (laughter) Cows were actually brought into the Ashram (laughter) — into the courtyard there, because when they were milked outside there
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was a lot of dilution of the milk (laughter); so they had to keep a close watch; 2 or 3 cows were brought into the courtyard near the Reading Room, and Amrita would sit there, supposed to keep an eye on things. But unfortunately he had a companion — it was a man named Dara, now dead. You might have seen him, a huge man from Hyderabad, a very aristocratic Mohammedan. And he was an incurable chatterbox, (laughter) So all the time he was talking with Amrita and poor Amrita could hardly attend to what was going on with the milking. Once I happened to come into the courtyard and found Dara holding his hands up and saying something and Amrita listening to him very raptly and the milkman doing something hurriedly with two cans. It struck me afterwards that he must have been pouring water into the milk! (laughter) Indeed Dara was quite a character — a very extraordinary character with a lot of eccentricity. He was also a poet, of course: at that time poets were budding all over the place. But he was a very original kind of poet. His themes always used to be like how he sat in his canvas chair and the canvas tore apart, (laughter) Such exciting events became the subject matter of his poetry. On another occasion, as you might have heard, he exhausted his stock of tea, so he penned a furious poem to the Mother:
Mother Almighty,
I have finished all my tea. (laughter)
Among the others who were present, there was Champaklal, young but an old hand. He had come* fairly early and he was one of the few, if not actually the only one, who from the beginning addressed the Mother as "Mother". Many were a little bit averse to accepting her; the chief argument was that she was not an Indian — how could there be a Divine Representation in a non-Indian? (laughter) All the Avatars had been Indians, so the Mother could not be an Avatar, she being French! But Champaklal had no such inhibition. And I believe Dyuman was there, too, though I am not very sure. He may have come a little later; at least he was later than Nolini, Amrita and Champaklal; but I think his devotional face was there when I arrived.1 And on my arrival I found
1 It is strange that in my talk I missed mentioning the one person who had impressed me the most by his dynamic character and who, as the first talk recounted, had been the Ashramite I came the earliest to know, next to Pujalal who had appeared at the station to receive me: I mean Purani. Another sadhak I should have
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two Americans in the Ashram. They were the first Westerners to reach the Ashram in its initial period of 1926-27. Pavitra1 was already present, he had been settled for a few years, and we had an English lady named Datta — Miss Hodgeson — who had been associated with the Mother in France. But after the early settlement these two Americans were the first to come from the West. They were an old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mcpheeters — the man was named Vaun and the lady Janet, and they had come just a month or perhaps not even that long before I arrived. So they too were preparing for the Darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
I happened to be just behind them in the queue and I couldn't help overhearing their agitated conversation. It seemed a big problem had arisen at the last minute: to whom to bow first, the Mother or Sri Aurobindo? (laughter) Vaun told his wife: 'if we bow to Sri Aurobindo first, the Mother will feel insulted; (laughter) if we bow to the Mother first, Sri Aurobindo will get offended. (laughter) So what should we do?" I too was very much intrigued by this almost insoluble problem! (laughter) But they had remarkable ingenuity. Their solution was: not to bow to either of them (laughter) — but to put their heads, one after the other, in the empty space between the two! (laughter) Of course they had the unique privilege of having blessings from both Gurus at once (laughter) but they missed the feet of either! For the likes of me it was no problem because Sri Aurobindo was quite new and unknown to us, while the Mother had become familiar; and while Sri Aurobindo was sitting very gravely the Mother was all smiles to set us at ease, (laughter) So we went straight to her, got soothed by her, gained some moral courage, then proceeded to Sri Aurobindo and looked at him. I told you last time how I had looked. (laughter)
Now to come back to the people, all — the undamned all who were there in the Ashram. Very soon after my coming Dilip Kumar Roy came with Sahana Devi. They came and settled down. And, soon after that, I saw the face of my friend Nirod. It was of course an unforgettable face, (laughter) I think he had come straight from England or via some place in Bengal, but he carried something of the air of England, (laughter) He had passed out as a doctor
mentioned was the then librarian of the Ashram — Premanand — with whom I came to be associated very closely after a while. Both have passed away.
1 Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire.
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at Edinburgh. I saw him, we became friends and we have remained friends ever since. But when he came as a doctor he was not given doctoring work here. As far as I remember he was made the head of a timber godown! (laughter) All sorts of strange jobs were being given to people. Look at the first job I got. The Mother once told me, "I would like you to do some work." I said, "All right, I am prepared to do some work." Then she said, "Will you take charge of our stock of furniture?" (laughter) I said to myself, "By gosh! To manage furniture, it's something unthinkable!" (laughter) But I said to the Mother, "Very well, I'll take it up." It was really a stunning blow. But then I saw that it involved getting the Mother's signature on a chit every now and then. People would ask for a table, a chair or a rack or something and I would have to go to the Mother and get her signature. It was a great Grace that one could come in contact with her through such a job. There was no other job, I suppose, open at that time which could bring one in touch with her so much. And then I found that as I kept listing the tables and chairs and other uninteresting items I was full of happiness. I said, "Have I become so perverse as to derive pleasure from noting down chairs and cupboards and stools?" (laughter) But I realised that the Mother, when she gives any work, gives two things along with it: first, the Ananda of the thing because without that joy you couldn't carry on at all, and, secondly, the capacity — to some extent at least! I can tell you that I carried on this job of putting furniture into people's rooms and keeping an account, for about a year and a half, by which time I found it a pretty tough affair because things were not organised in those days as they are now. I had no servants under me, I had to hire the rickshaw-wallas from the street and tempt them to carry tables and chairs. Sometimes they would go on strike, asking for more payment, and I didn't know what to do. Occasionally I had to break the strike by showing them that I could shoulder furniture myself too. (laughter)
Then in the course of my duties I had my first serious fall — a physical fall — in Pondicherry. It was a toss on the road and my knee became swollen. Quite a big swelling it was. So naturally the question arose: "What to do about the furniture?" Well, Amrita was sent to me to break the sad news that now my job would be taken away from me. I was lying in bed and he came and very sweetly asked me how I was and all that. He was beating about the bush, (laughter) I knew why he had come, (laughter)
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I said: "Amrita, please come out with it. If you have come to tell me that I shall be deprived of this job and lose it, please say it at once, because I will thank you most heartily." (laughter) Then of course he came out with it and carried the report to the Mother that Amal had received the news like a yogi! (laughter)
To return to my friend Nirod — it was after some time that he got the dispensary. I don't know whether he wanted it, or liked it or not, but he established his reputation as the frowning physician, (laughter) People used to come to him with a cold and he would stand and glare at them, and say, "What? you have a cold!" Poor people, they would simply shiver (laughter) and this had a very salutary effect because they thought that it was better not to fall ill than face the doctor's drastic disapproval of any kind of illness which would give him any botheration, (laughter) But he did his job all right, and every time he frightened off a patient he went to his room and started trying to write poetry (laughter) — because that, he thought, was his most important job. And, whether he succeeded as a doctor or not, as a poet he has eminently succeeded. Sri Aurobindo has really made him a poet.
The doctoring as well as the poetry was a bond betwen us, because my father had been a doctor and medicine ran in my blood. We used to discuss medical matters sometimes, but more often the problems and pains of poetry.
Now I must go on to recount my own hardships. Before I come to them I might tell you that I gave up the house in which I had been staying for Rs. 12 a month; the whole house where Vasudha has been staying was in my hands. And, by the way, Vasudha arrived here not long after me. She was a girl of 15. She is now among the oldest Sadhikas in the Ashram — oldest not in the sense that they are the most advanced in years but as being the only ones out of the early Sadhikas, who have stuck on somehow or other. As soon as I left that house she was installed there. I had made an appeal to the Mother, saying: "The house is too big for me. So many rooms, and I don't know what to do with them and every night I have to shut so many doors and windows, it's a job (laughter) really beyond me. Give me just one room with one window from which I can watch the stars." (laughter) The Mother said: "I'll see about it." Very soon after, I got the room where Purani had been staying some years. It is the room in the Dortoir Annexe just opposite Pranab's place — the corner room up there. Now Purani was promoted to a room within the Ashram compound
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itself and I was put in his place — a promotion for me also. But it is interesting that it was the very room into which I had stepped first, because as soon as I came from the station Pujalal took me there. But this room had greater associations. It was the room where Sri Aurobindo had spent several years; so it was really a Godsend for me to live in it and what was most remarkable was that Sri Aurobindo had done his sadhana walking 6 to 8 hours a day in that room and the adjoining one leading to it. He had walked with such vigour that he had actually dug a path in the floor with his feet, and that path had been cemented over afterwards but could be seen clearly — from one end near the window to the other end — almost up to the small terrace on the south — this was Sri Aurobindo's Path to the Supermind. (laughter) O how many times I have tried to walk in his footsteps, (laughter) trying again and again to get some illumination! But I have a very sad fact to record: when I went back to Bombay the third time in the 10 years of my early stay here, and returned to this room, some fellow had got it into his head to renovate it and make it up-to-date. He had redone the whole floor, and Sri Aurobindo's Path to the Supermind was obliterated. I think it was one of the greatest pieces of vandalism that I can think of. The Path had been a veritable landmark; now there was a smooth red floor, which I think is there even today.
The trouble with me in those days was, as I have said in my first talk, that I was using my head too much. Of course there has always been a controversy down the ages among the philosophers and others whether the soul is in the head or in the heart. Man is called a mental being, a rational animal and hence most Western philosophers have believed that the characteristic human consciousness is up in the head. The heart has been often so capricious, so impulsive, so whimsical, so changing that people have not put much trust in it. There are four lines by a poet-lover which go:
I put my hand upon my heart
And swore that we should never part.
I wonder what I would have said
If I had put it on my head! (laughter)
But those who believe that their souls are somewhere higher betray their own cause if they are questioned suddenly. You ask a philosopher, "Who says that the soul is in the head?" He'll
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immediately answer, "I", pressing his hand firmly on his chest and giving himself away, (laughter) However, we must observe that it is not in the emotional heart that the real soul resides. The emotional heart seems to be, by its very impulsiveness, a kind of representative of the real soul which also is impulsive, but in a deeper way — spontaneous with a truth-feeling, self-guided by a Light. So I had learnt during the early part of my stay here that we must have the opening of the inner heart. But how the devil was I to have an opening there? (laughter) It was beyond my understanding. Naturally I asked the Mother what I should do. She said, trying to make things as easy for me to understand as possible: "Think that there is an open book lying there." I was a little disappointed: "What, again books? (laughter) Books are what I want to get away from and the Mother is asking me to think of a book lying open even in my heart and to concentrate on its openness!" Still, I said I would try to do this — though it was not a very pleasant job. Then as I went on doing it day after day I began to get an unnatural pain in the chest, as if something were resisting there. We don't realise what a wall there is in that region. We think that everything comes out of the human heart so very easily; but everything doesn't come out from the soul which is in the deep heart behind. As soon as I shut my eyes and tried to concentrate, there was a pain. I told the Mother about it. She said, "Don't worry about it, it will be all right after a while." And it was all right, because something like the breaking down of a wall took place and I felt that I was very free, I mean not shut up and cramped in a narrow ego or individuality. The sensation was something indescribable.
Many people have tried to give an idea of what the soul or, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, the psychic being, is like. He has himself quoted Matthew Arnold's words — "sweetness and light" — to convey the characteristics of the psychic being. And indeed they are quite apt because that sort of thing you do feel — the sweetness in the experience is of a bliss which has no cause; a self-existent bliss is there. It is not dependent on persons, occasions, circumstances, objects. To be there, deep within, to feel oneself there is to be perennially, and I might even say unbearably, happy. The light also is present, because some kind of natural truth-feeling is experienced, which guides you all the time. That is the positive side of the psychic being. On the negative side, in telling you what one does not do when one has some sort of psychic opening, I may
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hazard a punning paradox. First, I may say that one is not depressed, one does not bewail one's lot any more; secondly, one does not rebel, either against the Divine or against human beings. So I might state: "When you are psychic you neither sigh nor kick!" (laughter) That will perhaps sum up in a more intelligible formula this experience of the opening and the functioning of the deep heart.
But while talking about the guidance I must add that one has to be on one's guard against various kinds of voices which come from within. There are many parts of us which are occult and of whose existence we hardly know, and they come forward and give promptings, and often if the promptings suit us we think it is the soul talking, (laughter) One or two very striking instances I have come across here, of being completely misguided by the inner voice. There was a Telugu gentleman whom I had come to know because he and I used to eat opposite each other at a small table outside the Reading Room. We would bring our food from the Dining Room which was where Prithwi Singh stays now. This chap used to bring with him some ghee every time and pour it on all that he ate. When I look at people I always try to fix them in my mind by comparing them to some author or other. And this person looked like the famous novelist H. G. Wells. So I began to call him H. Ghee Wells! (laughter) Now, he was a man who used to be very sensitive and very impulsive. One evening he was found missing. And people wondered where he had gone. Those who were staying in the same house as he — that is, in Tresor House — came home at about 8 o'clock and heard shouts and screams. They didn't know from where the sounds came, they could only recognise the voice. They looked in every room but couldn't find him. Then at last they found him sitting at the bottom of a well (laughter) and howling, "Please take me out!" "Why the hell did you get in there?" "I heard Sri Aurobindo's command and jumped into the well." (laughter) It was indeed very creditable that he had obeyed immediately, but it wasn't Sri Aurobindo telling him. Though proverbially Truth is found at the bottom of a well, (laughter) it cannot be the Supramental Truth; this Truth is to be found somewhere high up. (laughter) They had to haul him up. You see, these voices are dangerous and one has to be vigilant. Also I might say that even spiritual experience can be quite dangerous. One instance comes to my mind, of a friend who began to have extraordinary experiences. He wrote to Sri Aurobindo about them: he felt Light
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descending into his head, and he described its characteristics. Sri Aurobindo wrote back that this Light came from the Overmind. That simply went to his head — "I am getting Light from the Overmind, so I am something wonderful!" He wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "Now that this is happening the Victory is sure. You and I will do everything (laughter) and the Mother will surely help us." (laughter) Then Sri Aurobindo wrote to him that after all the Light from the Overmind was not anything very exceptional: it was remarkable enough, but so many sadhaks had got it and people in the past too had got it. My friend wouldn't believe this. "Sri Aurobindo is just trying to water down the uniqueness of my experience" — that is what he believed. So all the correspondence of Sri Aurobindo he used to carry with him and go about showing even outsiders the letters to prove how he had got the Light from the Overmind. Very soon after that, he became so side-tracked from the true Path that he had to leave the Ashram.
So you see how dangerous it is, not to understand what sort of experiences one gets and how necessary it is to be guided by the Guru. He went away and we framed his spiritual epitaph:
"Undermined by Overmind." (laughter)
This theme of the Overmind is a very seductive one, as my friend Arindam Basu must know, and I am very much tempted to make a little digression about this plane in its relation to the Supermind, but where is the time for it? So I won't do it. We'll come to some other topics.
I stayed on for about six and a half years at first, at one stroke. And during those years I asked Sri Aurobindo to give me a spiritual name. It seems it was very difficult to find that name. Somebody else had asked for a spiritual name and that person had got it almost the next day, but I got it only after a year. I must have been quite a problem: how to pin down something for me? But after a year Sri Aurobindo did pin it down. He sent me the name, on a very small card, in Sanskrit, with the transliteration in English, followed by the translation. The name, as you know, was "Amal Kiran" — which means, as he says, "A clear ray". It was a very tall order to live up to such a name. To be a clear ray when one is so full of confusion, and one is so dependent on one's own intellectual capacity, to become really luminous was quite a job — and still is. But it's very curious that this word "ray" should have come in, for it repeated itself a little later in a very important context. The very first time that I heard of Savitri from Sri Aurobindo was
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in connection with the mention of a ray. While critically commenting on a poem of mine, he referred to "the Ray from the transcendent penetrating through the mind's passive neutral reflection of the supreme quietude of the silent Brahman". To illustrate the point he cited two lines of poetry:
Piercing the limitless Unknowable,
Breaking the vacancy and voiceless peace.
The reverberations of these lines shook me so much that I asked Sri Aurobindo where they had come from. The reply was: "Savitri."
Savitri has been very closely linked with my life here, as you perhaps know. That is also why I have been quoting Savitri at the start of each talk. Naturally after those lines, I was goaded on to make more and more inquiries. And in the course of my poetic aspirations I was all agog to get the inspiration which Sri Aurobindo had called Overhead Poetry. Overhead Poetry is poetry which passes over everybody's head! (laughter) But how is one to receive an inspiration entirely new which comes from the planes which Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind? So I once got the idea to make a very direct appeal to Sri Aurobindo. I pressed on him a singular request, emboldened by his innumerable favours of tutorship. I wrote to him:
"I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity
or Wordsworth's
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone,
which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary. I want to steep my consciousness in its rhythm and its revelation. It will be a most cherished possession. Please don't disappoint me by saying that, as no English writer has a passage of this kind, you cannot do anything for me."
He wrote back in his characteristic vein:
"Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the
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only possible answer — at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things yet to come — the 'future poetry' perhaps, but not the past."
With the familiarity — almost the impudence — he permitted us, I replied:
"I think the favour I asked was expressed in perfectly clear language. If no English poet has produced the passage I want, then who has done so in English? God alone knows. But who is capable of doing it? All of us know. Well, then why not be kind enough to grant this favour? If difficult metres could be illustrated on demand, is it impossible to illustrate in a satisfying measure something so naturally Aurobindonian as the Overmind? I am not asking for hundreds of lines — even eight will more than do — all pure gold to be treasured forever. So please .. . Perhaps it is possible only on Sunday — the day dedicated to golden Surya and rich for you with leisure from correspondence: I can wait answerless for 24 hours with a sweet samatā."
The answer came the very next morning:
"I have to say Good Heavens again. Because difficult metres can be illustrated on demand, which is a matter of metrical skill, how does it follow that one can produce poetry from any blessed plane on demand? It would be easier to furnish you with hundreds of lines already written, out of which you could select for yourself anything Overmindish if it exists (which I doubt) rather than produce 8 lines of warranted Overmind manufacture to order. All I can do is to give you from time to time some lines from Savitri, on condition you keep them to yourself for the present. It may be a poor substitute for the Overmental, but if you like the sample, the opening lines, I can give you more hereafter — and occasionally better."
And then with an "E.G." there followed in his own fine and sensitive yet forceful hand 16 lines of the very first Canto of Savitri as it stood then.
It was the hour before the Gods awake....
Below the quotation were the words: "There! Promise fulfilled for a wonder."
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This day was October 25, 1936 — I would say one of the most important days, if not the most important, of my life here. But the matter of keeping Savitri a secret was a difficult job. In those days Nolini was Sri Aurobindo's postman. He used to bring the letters for everyone; we used to wait for him in the morning. And he knew that some special correspondence was going on between Sri Aurobindo and me, because the Mother might have been giving him the folded letters to put into the envelopes. Each time he handed me my letter he lifted his eyebrows, {laughter) I looked very innocent (laughter) and took it and waited for him to go away (laughter) before opening it. He would hesitate for a minute or two and then go away, (laughter) It happened like that 3 or 4 days, and then it got on my nerves, (laughter) so I wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "What should I do? I think Nolini is going to ask me." (laughter) Then Sri Aurobindo very blandly replied, "Let us hope he won't." (laughter) But still the silent inquisition of the lifted eyebrows did not cease! Then I wrote in desperation to Sri Aurobindo: "I am sure it is going to happen now. Please tell me what to do. Can I take him into the secret or not?" (laughter) Then Sri Aurobindo said: "All right but only him." (laughter) So this secret remained a secret between Nolini and me for 10 years. Only in 1946, when I began to write a book on Sri Aurobindo's poetry, I divulged Savitri to the world — with Sri Aurobindo's approval. Savitri came out in excerpts for the first time in that book of mine, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. Afterwards the Ashram published it in fascicles and then as a volume.
I think we can stop at this climactic point, though unfortunately I haven't finished and I think I'll never finish at this rate, (laughter) I thank you all very much.
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