The Sun and The Rainbow

A DREAM AND AN ATTEMPT

AT ITS READING

"I had a dream some days back. I am in a shop to buy

an umbrella. I ask for the colours. I pick up an emer-

ald-green umbrella from those set before me. It is very

fine but somehow has marks of birds' droppings on

it! Still, I decide to take it. Then suddenly I am by the

Pondicherry sea. Many Ashramites are there. Some are

sitting on rocks in the water. All of them are children

— except Lalubhai. I ask why all are there and am told

that the Mother is coming and it is best to be in or near

the water. I wonder why then people are not in the

water. That is the end of the dream. I wake up feeling

full of expectancy."

I don't know what Freud or Jung would say, but here is a poet's interpretation. Your dream is an interesting mixture of several consciousness-levels and symbol-layers. The emerald-green of the umbrella in a shop seems at the same time to represent the vital plane characteristic of the life in the West, amidst which you outwardly are, and the Universal Consciousness of the Divine that is a Super-Life all about your inner being and that can extend anywhere, even to the farthest West and its vitalistic existence. I put together the pretty triviality of that umbrella and the Divine Universality because of the way the dream develops.

The first connecting point is the marks of birds' droppings on the umbrella. They are at once a bit of scorn from on high and a touch of Divine Grace: the droppings suggest the former

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and the birds the latter. But as the droppings come from birds, the scorn and the Grace play into each other, and Mahakali the falsehood-smiter and Mahalakshmi the love-showerer are two simultaneous and identical gestures from a single source that is Maheshwari, the all-comprehending all-enveloping "Wisdom supernal". And the double gesture I would imagine as ultimately issuing into the worldward creative dynamism of Mahasaraswati, the Mother-Power of harmony and order, missioned to change turbulent Sansara (World-existence) into blissful Brahman.

Here your "Pondicherry sea" comes in as the next link. Indian spiritual symbology discerns in the sea-vision both the emerald-green vitalism of world-existence and the emerald-green vastitude of Brahmic Bliss in its manifested conscious universality living deep within that world-existence itself. So the Pondicherry sea is our Mother's Cosmic Presence as an earth-transformative love and force, with the centre of her all-circling light in a little town on the eastern coast of South India. Your mind and heart have floated to this Presence and wait with the others who are on the rocks lapped by the sea — rocks that are emblems of a firm soul-stand within the "innumerable laughter" (a la Aeschylus though in a super-Aeschylean sense) of the waves of Infinity. The rock-supported Ashramites are all in the form of children because the psychic being that turns towards the Divine Mother is always a seer-child. But Lalubhai, who is found among them, does not need to have a child-form since very much of him is an unpretentious though wisdom-seeking child. Perhaps the name I gave him, following his own queer "creative" reading of words, caught a hint of this side of him: you know that 1 have dubbed him "Lullaby".

Now for the problem: If the Universal Consciousness of the Mother is already there in the Bliss-sea, what are all of you waiting for? Your dream is definitely charged with an expectancy. The Mother has still to appear. I believe the waiting is for the personal, the individual aspect of her. And perhaps it will

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be poetically in tune with the vibration of the dream to say: "The Mother-Power of harmony and order, the Mahasaras-wati-aspect, the infinite transformative force turned personal and individual for the Divine's delight in perfection of detail in earth-life, is the object of the waiting." I have referred to Mahasaraswati as descending from above: now to meet this descent I would imagine an emergence of the same Goddess-presence from the sea, as if in answer to the reflection of the descending divinity in the vast waters. And what, from the viewpoint of India's spiritual visionary tradition, could be more apt? Does not this tradition speak always of Saraswati rising on a lotus-throne, with her various instruments of inspired concord, from the depths of the ocean?

You write: "I...am told that the Mother is coming and that it is best to be in or near the water." I should like to comment on the last part of your phrase. Now that the Mother has left her body a certain emphasis falls upon her universal aspect: to stress this aspect is one of the lessons we have to learn from her departure. And the more we feel as if we were in wide water the more we are likely to come into rapture-rhythmic touch with the Mother's divinity. At least to be near such a vastness is necessary. Most vividly and rapidly we shall approach the individual Mother whom we knew and loved if we put ourselves in contact with the inner universality and move towards being — to quote Sri Aurobindo —

A heart that has grown one with every heart

and

An unwalled mind dissolved in the infinite.

Out of the inner universality will the intimate intense communion arise with the truth of the Incarnation by whose daily nearness we were so long blessed.

I may add that this truth is indispensable for the transformation of the individual and the person that we are in our psyche and in our embodied nature. That is why in your

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dream there is the expectation of the Mother we were familiar with. Yes, what was shown in the Incarnation is ultimately needed, but we used to be too occupied with the "form" and "name" and these even engendered in us a competition and a grasping and a jealousy, a forgetting of what was within and around and above: we tended even to forget that the "form" and "name" before us had a within and around and above of its own being. We have to develop a detachment from the small self, we have to expand inwardly into a universal and transcendent tranquillity. Then alone can we reach most profoundly, most abundantly, the soul-power to unite with the Supreme Person in a blaze of devotion and delight and thus transmute all our outer being into God-gold.

Your dream ends with the question: "I wonder why then we are not in the water." It is a question that faces us acutely at present. Our progress in Yoga towards the Mother depends on how we reply to it.

PS. I have mentioned Lalubhai and my calling him "Lullaby" because of his own "creative" reading of words. Let me give you some instances. When reading with me Sri Aurobindo's comments on the Mahabharata, Lalubhai stopped and asked me: "Why does the poet say that King Yudhish-thir's crown was full of germs?" I said, "Lullaby, look again at the text." He looked and exclaimed: "Oh, it is 'gems', not 'germs'.'" Later he read out as Arjuna's apostrophe to Krishna: "O thou beast among men!" When I burst out laughing, he looked again and said: "I'm sorry. It was "best'." Somewhere else he turned the poetic phrase "Starry eyes that falter not, set in an exalted visage" into the champion distortion: "Staring eyes that flatter not, set in an exhausted village." Once he asked me: "Isn't the hero of Homer's epic Odious?" I said: "Lullaby, many people have thought that, but nobody before you uttered such an apt thing about Odysseus." On another occasion he informed me in Nirod's office-room upstairs: "The latest number of the New Testament is waiting for you

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on Nirod's table." It proved to be the recent issue of the London Weekly, The New Statesman'.

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