Our Light and Delight

20

Lights and Shades of the Yogic Life

An elderly lady who had come to the Ashram through me and stayed here for several years went back to Bombay because of some dissatisfaction with her lodgings as well as in response to a call from her family. She must have thought Bombay-life would be a bit of a relief after the rigours of Yoga. But she was soon disillusioned. A lot of suffering had to be undergone and she was very anxious to return. The Mother, however, did not encourage her. Time and again her request went unheeded. I was again in Bombay at the time. So she visited me with a plea to recommend her to the Mother. She said she was prepared to accept any condition of life in Pondicherry. As I was shortly to make a trip to the Ashram I agreed to take up her case. I told the Mother: "X is frantically eager to come back. Won't you let her do so?" The Mother answered: "When she was here she was always complaining." I urged: "She will accept whatever condition you keep her in." The Mother smiled and said: "They all say that. But once they are settled they make demand after demand." I persisted in my brief, and ultimately the Mother said "Yes". The lady lived up to her promise and the rest of her days in the Ashram were peaceful.

I have mentioned her because we are inclined to forget what a blessing it is to be allowed to stay in the Ashram and breathe its purifying and uplifting atmosphere. We should be ready to put up with a few inconveniences, especially if they keep recurring in spite of efforts to remove them, for then they assume the role of challenges to our nature and press upon some part or other of our being which refuses to change. Frequently the advice proffered to bear them is disliked but the excuse to dislike it would be valid only if those who are comfortably off and do not know where the shoe pinches start a spiritual discourse for our soul's benefit. Even so, while perceiving the hollowness of the discourse, we

Page 194

should not fail to realise in our recurring disadvantages the possibility of Sri Aurobindo's finger falling on the obscure spots of our psychology.

The lady whom I have brought into my narrative had a vein of maternal solicitude and as a nurse she could be very helpful if occasionally a little nagging with her over-attentions. There was also a streak of simplicity, almost of naivety, in her mind which was pleasing and gave a chance now and again to a mischievous person of my type to play a prank. Even if a trifle irrelevantly (or irreverently) I cannot resist a small anecdote connected with her.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had come on a visit to Pondicherry and the Ashram. After he had gone I met my friend in the Dining Room and told her: "From the pavement outside my house I saw Nehru's car slowly pass and I had a very good look at him." She said: "I had much better luck. He was at the Samadhi at a distance of only a few feet from me. I could see him clearly from top to bottom." The imp in me put the question: "How was the bottom?" At once she lit up and answered: "Very fair." The people around us burst into laughter, but the poor lady could not understand why and seemed to think them rather silly.

My impish strain surely needed control at times but it cannot be declared quite inconsistent with a Yogic life led under the Master's lavish humour and the Mother's keen wit. The humour of Sri Aurobindo was indeed so ready to cover any aspect of life and could so easily turn even upon himself that one had to exercise a certain censorship in print lest the public should misunderstand his temper. With a view to inclusion in the periodical I was editing, I remember submitting to the Mother a snatch of conversion reported by Nirodbaran. She enjoyed it but shook her head.

*

On page 96 of Champaklal Speaks it is recorded on December 15, 1949 that to meet the demand for bonus by the employed workers of the Ashram — Rs. 20,000 in that year — the Mother was thinking of selling some of her jewellery. As the expense on the workers kept increasing with the

Page 195

years, the need to sell her jewellery also increased. As far as I know, the Mother sold it in batches on several occasions. Luckily there was a very generous man connected with the Ashram, who bought it up two or three times and each time gave it back to her. After he died, the situation changed. Finally, I believe the jewellery had to go out of her hands. On the last occasion she gave a choice to many of us to buy what we wanted. When my turn came to take something, she said: "You are poor. You can't buy anything, I'll give you a tie-pin which I used to wear at one time." It was a gold tie-pin with a small gem in its head.

It is one of my post precious possessions. Another gift from her is the typewriter I am using. The letters to her typed on my old machine taxed her eyes. She told me: "Your lines are wavy — they are like little curving snakes. I shall give you a new typewriter. I have ordered four Remingtons."

An object that had immense worth for me arrived from Sri Aurobindo one day in the 'thirties. Whenever I had anything I valued, I had the impulse to offer it to him or the Mother. I thought everybody felt the same. But I came to know that often good gifts to people were sent up to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo merely to be blessed. A fellow sadhak, of whom I had a high opinion, sent up a beautiful fountain-pen. When I saw it with the Mother, I took it to be a present. She said: "It is not a present. To give it would never even enter the head of this man." I was surprised and came to the conclusion that extraordinary experiences were not the master-clue to the spiritual status of a disciple: the master-clue was the capacity of self-giving, the flow of the being towards the Master and the Mother, the inner generosity forgetful of one's own importance and interests.

Either prompted by the sight of the pen of else independently, I remember writing to Sri Aurobindo for specifications — whether he liked a pen that was thin or substantial in body, one that wrote fine or thick. As I had expected from his usual writing, he preferred a fine point. I got my mother in Bombay to send me the best fountain-pen available with the characteristics liked by Sri Aurobindo. When it arrived I dispatched it to him with the words: "This pen is fit only for your aristocratic hand. It will go ill with my peasant paw. Please make use of it." Imagine my astonishment when he

Page 196

sent me in response the pen he had himself been working with. How happy I was, holding it in my fingers, the reddish-brown body of it a hint of some new earth-creation and the sharply pointed gold nib the spring-head of a divine outflow from the transformed terrestriality. All that I wrote with it carried for me the sense of the Master's hand subtly one with my own.

*

During the last visit of mine of the Ashram before I came back to settle in it at the beginning of 1954, the Mother said to me in effect:

"The mental plane is so vast and so varied that one can go on and on in it and be lost in its wonders and surprises, its vista upon vista of search and discovery. Feeling at home in it, one may never turn to the true spiritual realm.

"It has also a certain watery nature. It easily flows into any channel, any mould. It is open to infinite diversity and does not have the inherent strength to hold on to one life-theme. Nor can it be firmly caught — it keeps slipping away.

"In your instance, it is not, as you believe, your mind that has kept you on our Path. No doubt, Sri Aurobindo has paid an extraordinary compliment to your mental ability. I should not tell you this, it may make you proud. But what has supported you in your ideal of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, what made it possible for the inner psychic call to persist all along, and brought you safe to us through all dangers and deviations, is your vital being. It is the strength and loyalty of the Vital that has ensured your return in spite of numerous obstacles."

The Mother's speech was quite a startler to me. I had always blamed my Vital for all the difficulties I had had in Yoga, and I must have been right on many occasions, but I had never realised the positive contribution made by this part of my nature to my very adherence to Yoga. Now that I cast my mind back to a certain incident, I feel that it was my Vital that had made a pronouncement which must have astonished the Mother herself. When I was on the verge of a decision which she did not approve of, she remarked that I

Page 197

seemed to think this decision would make no difference to my spiritual future and to my relationship with her and Sri Aurobindo. I declared in reply: "Nothing can ever come in the way of my spiritual future, nothing can ever change my attitude to you and Sri Aurobindo. I don't accept from anybody that any difference to my destiny as your disciple can come about through whatever happens or is done."

It was evidently the inmost soul, eternal child of the Divine, speaking, but the words of indomitable strength, with an oddly arrogant accent, in terms of concrete life-values, life-situations, were shaped by the spontaneous collaboration of the Vital with that soul. The reasoning mind was not looking at the future: the unthinking life-force that had been gripped by the Divine was pushing with utter faith towards the time to come. It could dare anything, it was sure of its adherence and its ability to endure. I am reminded of some lines in one of my poems:

The exquisite heart, the delicate reverie gain

Miracled escape, but never the God-life's zest.

Blind hungers alone draw down transcendent things...

It is such hungers — the vital impulses in a super-state, as it were — that are responsible for all massive creations giving from to the Spirit's vision: a Pyramid of Gaza, a Borobudur temple-complex, a King Lear, a Ninth Symphony, a Sistine-Chapel-ceiling. And the supramentalisation of matter depends essentially on the reckless self-abandonment of man's vital being to the Divine's call. The Mother once told me: "When the Vital surrenders to the Divine we have a marvellous event. Something indescribably beautiful and grand takes place — the absolute sweep of the Vital's throwing itself at the Divine's feet is incomparable." The Mother also observed that the true joy of the sadhana comes when the Vital co-operates. Till then all happiness of Yoga comes and goes, and there is no fixity, no planting of it down into the earth — into our physical existence.

*

Page 198

Talking of adherence to the Divine, I recall the Mother's comment on a sentence which I once approvingly quoted to her from George Meredith. Meredith had written to the effect: "Men fall from God's Grace because they cling to God not with their strength but with their weakness."

The Mother's instant reaction was: "That is rubbish!"

I was taken aback and from her attitude I understood what she meant. Let me explain.

Meredith's is nothing more than a clever contrived statement with no real insight into the critical situation it flashes out. If the Grace is to respond and lift man up, man has to feel his weakness before the Divine, develop a sense of dependence on Him and make a self-surrender. To have a feeling of strength before the Divine is egoism: the true feeling of strength comes when one has clung to the Divine with all one's natural weakness offered to Him — the strength comes from the Divine, it is not something one has to boast of, independently of Him.

The Mother's infallible inner perception of the truth in words and things and persons came home to me also when she told us what she had seen in regard to a Frenchman who had landed in Pondicherry and suddenly got interested in the Ashram's doings and as suddenly ran away. He was given quarters in Budy House on the beach-road. Recalling the interview she had given him, the Mother said:

"He told me a very remarkable incident. While shaving himself one morning here, he saw in the mirror a ball of light entering his head from above it. Although the account looked unbelievable I could see at once that he was speaking the truth. For when he told me some other things, I could perceive immediately that he was making them up. A sort of shadow came over his face and I knew the presence of falsehood."

It would indeed be a helpful development on our part to acquire a little bit of her truth-sense. A general danger to which a lack of such a sense would expose us is hit off very pointedly by some words of the Mother. On one occasion she said: "I had two visions. In one, while I was walking at 6 p.m., I saw children rushing to hear a humbug ! I thought: What will happen in my absence?"

Of course the first step is to be able to catch all that goes

Page 199

humbugging within our own selves — all the pretensions, all the self-satisfactions, all the sense of superiority, all the manoeuvre to be impressive Yogis, as if an infinite of the unachieved did not stretch before us, the supreme egoless soul-sweet spirit-wide range after range of evolutionary possibility to which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother constantly beckoned us. But there is also the second step — to be on guard against other people's pretensions.

Either we are too important in our own eyes or else we cast about for spiritual excitement from whatever direction, groping for gurus and seeking substitutes for the Mother. We forget the special Light and Force she and our Master brought down for earth-use and fixed it in the earth's subtle being for all future. While we have to respect spirituality whenever it genuinely occurs, while we should be ready to profit by every authentic aspiration around us, we must cling centrally to the Great Presence that has been granted to our souls and never strive to find somebody to stand in the Mother's place. We must also guard against being swept off our feet by glittering shows and high-sounding claims — the fanfares of what the Mother bluntly designated as "a humbug".

No matter what may have attracted us in our days of ignorance, the moment the immaculate Himalaya of Sri Aurobindo rose up before us and the silvery Ganges of the Mother flowed down from it to our lowlands, all our work in the world should lie in giving ourselves to that Guardian Peace of the Eternal and that Gracious Power of the Infinite.

Page 200