Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER VII

Guru, The Transformer

The more I brooded over man's utter helplessness when he is at odds with his own human nature, the less hopeful I felt about my prospective ability to make good in such a difficult undertaking as Yoga, that is, to effect a junction with the Divine Grace to be able to surmount Destiny. At such times, I bitterly complained to Gurudev: why, oh, why had he dragged me to such a path.. . .But since the milk was split, alas, the sooner I was allowed to graze on other fields the better for all... I must not waste his time any more ... no wonder he had been growing cold and so on and so forth.

But if Dilip was Dilip, Gurudev also was Gurudev: so he wrote back to me as tenderly as ever: "You need not think that anything can alter our attitude towards you. That which is extended to you is not a vital human love which can be altered by external things: it remains and persistently we shall try to help you and lift you up and lead you towards the Light."

But I stayed unconvinced and wrote back again insisting that I had possibly bitten off more than I could chew. "I send you a poem entitled, In the Thrall of Gloom (Tamisrai) because I see no way out: you cannot possibly leave your ivory tower of aloof contemplation to come to the help of the likes of us. Probably you find the earth a little too incorrigible and distracting. Anyway, you, in your cloistered seclusion, are too far away from us mortals to be hailed as a real helper, still less a kin or a friend. Only I do wonder why you must go on advertising holy heaven as the next-door neighbour to our awful earth, repeating ad nauseum that Love Divine can be induced to flower on the soil of our undivine earth and make it a peer of paradise in the

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foreseeable future! Really, Master mine, you are nothing if not baffling, since this Divine Love of yours does look like something to swear by — not something to lean on! But as I do not claim that my findings are right, I shall wait till I have some clarification on this point, to use a banal political word in a blissful spiritual context, which, I trust, will be deemed pardonable.

"I will conclude with a few words about my poem Tamisrai. I had first thought of not sending it up to you because as I read it now, I feel that it seems, somehow, to give the lie to my present mood which is one of unrelieved gloom and pessimism. Is that sincerity, or may I venture to defend myself with the plea that something in me, deep down at the bottom of the abyss, seems determined not to admit defeat, even when the gloom is impenetrable? In other words, as my aspiration here — or, prayer if you like — is for strength and courage and the will to win through to the Light at the far end of the tunnel, so I find myself refusing to be vanquished, bent on plodding on till the gloom silvers into gleam. That is the poem — which says that one can be optimistic enough while the going is easy, but it is only when darkness seems endless and all-powerful, when you traverse wearily a mocking desert or an alien wilderness that your faith in and loyalty to the memory of Light is tested." To that he wrote back:

"I objected in a former letter not to aspiration but to a demand to make peace or joy or Ananda a condition for following the Yoga. And it is undesirable because if you do so, then not the psychic but the vital takes the lead and then unrest, despondency, unhappiness can always come, since these things are the very nature of the vital — the vital can never remain constantly in joy and peace, for it needs their opposites in order to have the sense of the drama of life. And yet when unrest and unhappiness come, the vital at once cries: 'I am not given my due, what is the use of my doing Yoga?' Or else, it makes a gospel of its unhappiness and says that the path to fulfilment must be a tragic road through the desert. And yet, it is precisely this predominance

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of the vital in us that makes the necessity of passing through the desert. If the psychic were always there in the front, the desert would be no longer a desert and the wilderness would blossom with roses." And he went on to add:

"I think the best thing I can write to you in the circumstances is to recommend to you Nolini's aphorism: 'Depression need not be depressing; rather it should be made a jumping-board for the leap to a higher poise'. The rule in Yoga is not to let the depression depress you, to stand back from it, observe its cause and remove the cause; for the cause is always in oneself, perhaps a vital defect somewhere, a wrong movement indulged or a petty desire causing a recoil, sometimes by its satisfaction, sometimes by its disappointment.

"If the Mother and I want you to progress and to accept the divine love we give you, it is for your own sake and precisely because in that love there is constant peace and joy and adoration and causeless sorrow of this kind will disappear altogether. Our love is there for you and has always been there. I cannot believe that you will reject it. For God's sake throw aside these misunderstandings and these movements, recover your true self and face out firmly, with the Mother's help and mine, the difficulties of the Yoga.

"Your poem entitled 'In Darkness' is a very moving one — delicate, true and beautiful in every line."

On another occasion, however, I was not so brave, when I discovered, to my utter humiliation, that it was not that I could not change but that I would not. "This," I wrote to him, "makes me feel convinced that I am a misfit here, that I am, as Tagore said to me once, an artist first and last — not a Yogi. But the trouble is, Guru, that though I loved art passionately once upon. a time, I failed to find it satisfying. Besides, I believed sincerely that if I wanted the Divine, He would make it possible for me to climb up to Him however hard and steep the path may prove: in other words, He would help me to change. But alas, I find that He is anything but responsive, or, maybe He would rather have me try my luck elsewhere, who knows? So, perhaps I had better

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give up such a hopeless endeavour and try something more practicable. Why not allow me to — say, court prison patriotically as Subhas and Jawahariaiji are doing? For you must admit at least that I am not very receptive to your helping Force, which shows (does it not?) that I am essentially unfit for your Yoga which aims at making us non-human?

"Only", I wrote in a sudden revulsion from self-pity, "you will have to concede, Guru, that I did not come here an utter failure, frustrated by life, a useless floatsam, stranded by tides of circumstances on the shoals of your Yoga. I was wanted by a great many, admired by a good many and am wanted still by so many. I had money, gifts, health and a social standing and then I could have founded a Musical Academy and developed my own new style of music and flowered into a poet too — not altogether a wretched life you will admit." And so I ranted on in my impetuous folly and concluded thus: "Why then did your Supramental Divine uproot me from my native soil if He wanted only to disqualify me finally as a Yogi?" But he did not give me a rating or pull me down to pieces. He descended to my level and answered my charges one by one with the deep understanding and superhuman patience of which he alone was capable.

"Dilip," he wrote, "even if things were as bad as you say, I don't see how going away would help you ... .some have tried before — this device of progress by departure but it has never succeeded, they have had to come back and face their difficulty. Your other suggestion (of courting prison patriotically) is even more irrational: what you propose would not happen and the only result would be hard labour or detention which would be both unpleasant and unprofitable to you and useless to the country. Why do you always come back to this notion of going away or entertain it at all? It is quite meaningless from any rational point of view; it only encourages the adverse Forces which want to take you away from the path, to return to the attack, and it prevents the speedy conversion of that dissatisfied part of your vital which is always kicking against the pricks —

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the pricks of your soul and of your spiritual destiny. However sad the prospect may seem to this dissatisfied vital fragment, your destiny is to be a Yogi and the sooner it reconciles itself to the prospect the better for it and for all the other personalities in you. Your alleged or inferred unfitness is a delusion, an imagination of the vital part; it doesn't exist. If persistence of difficulties be a proof of unfitness, then there is nobody in this Ashram who is fit for the Yoga. We would have to pack up our belongings or give them away and start either to get back to the ordinary world or en route for the Himalayas.

"You describe the rich human egoistic life you might have lived and you say 'not altogether a wretched life, you will admit'. On paper it sounds even very glowing and satisfactory, as you describe it. But there is no real or final satisfaction in it, except for those who are too common or trivial to seek anything else, and even they are not really satisfied or happy and, in the end, it tires and palls. Sorrow and illness, clash and strife, disappointment, disillusionment and all kinds of human suffering come and beat its glow to pieces and then decay and death. That is the vital egoistic life as man has found it throughout the ages, and yet is it that which this part of your vital regrets? How do you fail to see, when you lay so much stress on the desirability of a merely human consciousness, that suffering is its badge? When the vital resists the change from the human into the divine consciousness, what it is defending is its right to sorrow and suffering and all the rest of it, varied and relieved no doubt by some vital and mental pleasures and satisfactions, but very partially relieved by them and only for a time. In your own case, it was already beginning to pall on you and that was why you turned from it. No doubt, there were the joys of the intellect and of artistic creation, but a man cannot be an artist alone; there is the outer, quite human, lower vital part and, in all but a few, it is the most clamourous and insistent part. But what was dissatisfied in you? It was the soul within, first of all, and through it the higher mind and the higher vital. Why then find fault with the Divine for misleading you when it turned you to the Yoga or

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brought you here? It was simply answering to the demand of your inner being and the higher parts of your nature. If you have so much difficulty and become restless, it is because you are still divided and something in your lower vital still regrets what it has lost, or, as a price for its adhesion or a compensation — price to be immediately paid down to it — asks for something similar and equivalent in the spiritual life. It refuses to believe that there is a greater compensation, a larger vital life waiting for it, something positive in which there shall not be the old inadequacy and unrest and final dissatisfaction. The foolishness is not in the divine guidance, but in the irrational and obstinate resistance of this confused and obscure part of you to the demand, made not only by this Yoga, but by all Yogas — to the necessary conditions for the satisfaction of your aspiration of your own soul and higher nature."

Then after giving a summary review of the past Yogas which would be too long to quote, he pointed out the foolish inconsistencies of the human vital and wrote: "I know that this is the natural inconsistency of the human vital mind wanting two incompatible things together; but that is why it is necessary to transform the human and put something a little more luminous in its place."*

I must pause here and point out that during those early years of-our sadhana we often expressed our misgivings about his "thesis of the Supramental", as we called it. I often wrote to him (half in jest, no doubt, but the other half clung impenitently to its scepticism) that the supramental seemed too good to be true. Once I wrote to him what Chadwick remarked casually about the Supramental: "Sri Aurobindo takes one's breath away, Dilip! Will it, can it, really happen?" I often conveyed to Gurudev such titbits to draw him out if I could and, as I generally succeeded, I grew bolder and went the length of equating the Supramental with something grim and withering like a ruthless

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* The entire letter has been published in Letters of Sri Aurobindo 2nd series in Section XI, entitled "Difficulties of Transformation".

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Dictator out to do good but with a devastating velocity, riding roughshod over all our cherished ideals of a sweet and liberal living and perhaps making us despise this beautiful earth as an utterly unsuitable place for its Kingdom of thunder and lightning.

He must have smiled indulgently when he commented on my flings and, coming down to my level once again, ran full tilt into me:

"It is curious that you admit your ignorance of what the Supramental can be, and yet in these moods you not only pronounce categorically what it is like, but reject emphatically my experience about it as of no practical validity or not valid for anybody but myself! I have not insisted, I have answered only casually because I am not asking you now to be non-human and divine much less to be supramental; but as you are always returning to this point when you have these attacks and making it the pivot — or at least a main support — of your depression, I am obliged to answer. The Supramental is not grand, aloof, cold and austere; it is not something opposed to or inconsistent with a full vital and physical manifestation; on the contrary, it carries in it the only possibility of the full fullness of the vital force and the physical life on earth. It is because it is so, because it was so revealed to me and for no other reason that I have followed after it and persevered till I came into contact with it and was able to draw down some power of it and its influence. I am concerned with the earth and not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object. The Supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter. One has indeed to rise to high summits to reach it, but the more one rises, the more can one bring down below. No doubt, life and body have not to remain the ignorant, imperfect, impotent things they are now; but why should a

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change to a fuller life-power, a fuller body-power be considered something aloof, cold and undesirable? The utmost ananda the body and life are now capable of is a brief excitement of the vital mind or the nerves or the cells which is limited, imperfect and soon passes; with the supramental change all the cells, nerves, vital forces, embodied mental forces can become filled with a thousand-fold ananda, capable of an intensity of bliss which passes description and which need not fade away. How aloof, repellent and undesirable! The Supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body-consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the presence of the Beloved in every part, in every cell of the body. Is that too something aloof and grand and undesirable? With the supramental change, the very thing on which you insist, the possibility of the free physical meeting of the embodied Divine with the sadhaka without conflict of forces and without undesirable reactions becomes possible, assured and free. That too is, I suppose, something aloof and undesirable? I could go on — for pages, but this is enough for the moment."

Which brings me right to the heart of the problem of transformation of our nature into what it aspires to be and yet refuses to accept when it has, perforce, to put its shoulder to the wheel. It acts in this anomalous way because it is driven by diverse forces warring in its own territory for mastery, because it has, as it were, wheels within wheels. But here I will have to revert to my past to be intelligible — the more so as I myself found it not a little difficult to understand what was expected of us as well as what they, our guides, were up against in their sadhana.

When one puts it in words simply, as an abstract thesis, it sounds indeed feasible and laudable enough to be attempted. Has it not been claimed by all the great seers, mystics and prophets down the ages that our intellect can be a help only if it agrees to serve the spirit — that it is a good orderly but a bad commandant? Or to put it in the deeper accent of the great Seer:

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The intellect is not all; a guide within

Awaits our question; He it was informed

The reason, He surpasses; and unformed

Presages of His mightiness begin. *

True Yogis have unanimously claimed, however, that these "presages" cannot become clear messages to help us slay the darkness unless and until either the mind is stilled or reason taught its place in the scheme of things. I had once an interesting talk with the saint, Sri Ramdas, in his Ashram. He related to me the following incident:

He was then living on the top of a hill, in a small hut when, one evening, an intellectual friend sought him out. He had a great many questions seething in his mind, he said, to which he could find no satisfactory answers. Ramdas was scared stiff since he had never cared for those who love to cross-examine from the dais witnesses who stand in the dock deposing for the Divine. So he put off the discussion somehow and retired for the night. But as the ghost had only been warded off for the nonce, not laid, he had to appeal to his one Extricator, Ram. To his amazement, in the dead of night Ram Himself formulated questions and answered them back, point by point, of which he kept a record. Next morning he showed these to his intellectual friend who found it all but incredible: the very questions he wanted to ask had been answered by Ram, the questions which he had not even hinted at to Ramdas.

These questions, with the answers, are given by Ramdas in his book, At the Feet of God. I shall only select a few from the sheaf:

Question: What is the result of self-surrender?

Answer: Everlasting bliss.

Question: How?

Answer: When the human will is given up for the Divine Will, all the responsibility of the instrument, the devotee, ceases

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* Quoted from Sri Aurobindo's poem "In the Moonlight".

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and the consciousness of the individual ego is merged in the Divine consciousness. Then all his actions, thoughts and words emanate from the divine source, leaving him entirely free from all doubts, desires and bonds....

Question: How is it you allow your child's mind to wander? Answer: All, all is myself, 0 child! Wherever your mind wanders, it wanders in me and rests in me.... You cannot reason why it is so; but it is the one great Truth. You cannot comprehend it, but you can realise it.

Question: Why should Ramdas not comprehend it? Answer: Because it is a thing beyond the range of the intellect. Question: Then explain, why should there be an intellect at all and what are its functions?

Answer: The intellect exists only to help you know that you do not know anything.

I have intentionally laboured this point as I found myself very reluctant to accept in practice, if not in theory, the mystic's position that the intellect could help us best by exposing its untenable pretentions. My own upbringing has been — like that of most of my "educated friends" — an intellectual one, in the main. I do not mean that I could have lived cheek by jowl with them accepting all their hypotheses. (I should never have left them and turned to the mystic lead of Yoga had I regarded Reason as the last arbiter of Truth and ultimate wisdom.) But I do mean that I had come to believe that our intellect, grounded in sense- perception, had, in the last resort, the right to adjudicate on what we call things of the spirit. Sri Aurobindo, in unison with the other great gnostics, repudiated this claim out of hand, which made me suffer in practice even though I had from the start acquiesced, in theory, in their nonconformist aloofness from the Church of the Intellect. I did not fully understand why I made such a to-do when I had to translate in practice what I had admitted so willingly in theory, till one day, when I asked Mother, she told me with her smile of sympathy, that those who live in the intellect cherish their intellectual preconceptions as they cherish their limbs, so that a blow on their darling ideas about

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right and wrong makes them literally wince as a blow on the body. The mystery became clear to me in a flash. But I felt a pang in my heart at the prospect of being forced now, once and for all, to part company with my intellectual postulates even when I came to be persuaded now that they were but phantom glimmers of make-believe not steadfast beacons when the storm is abroad. Again and again I quoted with sad approval Milton's famous jeremiad:

"For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being?"

And the pain, alas, brought in its train my old monitor and sentinel, Doubt, who, keen as a spear, stabbed me with bitter reproach for having forced its dear Lord, Mind, to pay such an exorbitant tax to idolatry. I wrote to Gurudev innumerable letters asking him how to wheedle this sceptic into believing when it only ached to probe, weigh and, lastly, hold suspect everything that defied its scrutiny. He wrote a long letter on doubt in which he opened his indictment of doubt with:

"I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the 'doubt' whether any amount of writing or of anything else can persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would mean anything from sixty to six hundred pages, but not even six thousand convincing pages would convince Doubt."

And, indeed, his letter gave me at best a consolation, not comfort — so, the prospect appeared far from heartening, for his contention amounted, in the last analysis, to an exhortation to change. I must indeed change, I agreed sadly, and throw clean overboard the compass of the4ntellect. His stinging sarcasm at the end of his letter hit the target:

"I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the divine something less than Mind or is He something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping

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enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal, then spiritual experience is quite superfluous. But if it is inferior, how can it challenge, judge, make the Divine stand as an accused or a witness before its tribunal, summon it to appear as a candidate for admission before a Board of Examiners or pin it down like an insect under its examining microscope?"

I have said that his exhortation gave me only consolation, not comfort because although I could honestly say that I had accepted from the start the mystic's position that the Divine was not to be sounded with the mental plummet, I could not say, with an equal honesty, that till a superior plummet came within my reach, I would gladly do without what equipment I had. I had, indeed, found our mental ideas and intellectual conceptions to be inadequate direction-posts in that they never succeeded in leading us out of the wood. But I had also expected that I would ¦ have such apocalyptic visions of Truth as would make the little lights of mind pale into insignificance which, alas, did not happen in the spectacular manner I had imagined! The result: I moped and brooded, asked and doubted, complained and whimpered ^ till at last I arraigned the divine for not playing the game, for leaving me, in fact, in a deeper quandary than his predecessor, Intellect, the false prophet had, and so, the only solace left to Dilip was to blame the whole thing on the Guru.

I have put it somewhat crudely, but I do not think I have drawn a false picture of the quandary in which we — or at least a good many of us — found ourselves.

But of course this was by no means the whole story. On the positive side we gained a good deal not only in terms of joy and day-to-day assurance that we were being sustained by and through the Guru we had accepted, but also in terms of those concretely assessable dividends of faith and strength out of the investment of even our somewhat crude obedience and inchoate loyalty. As the days glided by, and hurdles of the ego we had to

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cross increased, we came to realise more and more, to our shame and sorrow, how crude and unsatisfactory had been our self- giving. One feature of this deepening realisation I may well refer to, as a mouthpiece again of the rest, to wit, that even when, in my moments of depression, I underrated the spiritual value of the dividends that accrued to me, I grew progressively conscious of the utter inadequacy of my total investments. What was it after all that I had invested, I came to ask myself in my tranquil moments? A will undermined with vacillations; a faith riddled with doubts; a pledge to obedience equipped with all sorts of safety valves to let out waste fumes of reluctance; an undertaking of loyalty so flawed as to desert its post again and again even though there was little hope of relief in the offing and, lastly, a love that bargained all along the line and baulked at surrender of its cherished self-will knowing full well — in the words of A.E. — that

We must rise or we must fall Love can know no middle way If the great life do not call, There is sadness and decay.

Yet how often have I not looked before and after and pined for the "pinnacle of plenitude" while refusing, in my blindness, the uplifting Light of Love every time it came down to help me climb the ascent following the call of the greater life!

I do not intend to convey that in this struggle there was no difference between one sadhaka and another. For although, I confess, I was at every step discovering anew that I was almost constitutionally incapable of aligning myself with those who would take everything on trust, at the same time I could not doubt but that there were among us a good many whose attitude was more correct, faith better grounded and insight into Yogic happenings appreciably deeper than mine. I was, indeed, critical and sometimes resentful, but not, I believe, undiscerning or unfair. So, I was genuinely impressed by many an individual instance of loyalty, sincerity, humility and, above all, hard

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ungrudging labour undertaken with no other motive than that of pleasing the Guru. I could see that they comported themselves as they did because they had accepted the nishkama karma of the Gita, fully conscious of the hurdles they would have to negotiate to translate the ideal into practice; for otherwise, human nature being what it is, it would have been humanly impossible for them to have gone on so bravely as they did with the dull routine of unremitting work which could hardly have been congenial to any of us.

And last, though not least, I must stress here one point which outsiders often lose sight of when they pronounce unkind verdicts on our sadhana. It is that although I admit, with due remorse, that many of us, including myself, often failed to fulfil even some of the major conditions without which no real transformation of the basic human impulses could be initiated, I cannot admit the right of any outsider to adjudicate on our net achievements, individual or collective, unless and until he himself faces up to what we were struggling against.

Which reminds me — let me add, parenthetically — of a remark of Tagore's about human judgements in general. He said, in his inimitable vein of irony: "Scientists, technicians, philosophers and skilled workers of various denominations, Dilip, are more fortunate than us, artists, in that Messrs. Everybody and Know-all will not dare brand their work off- hand with stigma; but just look, how quick he is to make up his mind whether our creative work is to be passed or damned!" Years later when I met him, I reminded him of his remark and added: "But sir, you ought to have classed us, Yogis, too, with you."

He understood and smiled.

"But then," he asked, "they don't see your work and sadhana as they see ours. So how can they judge?"

"By just dismissing as moonshine what they don't see."

And how he laughed!"

But I did not say this in mere jest. For I have seen many a

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critic actually pontificating complacently about what we were doing or leaving undone. To give just one instance.

An English friend of mine came to visit me. He was a well- known journalist and did not belong to that blatant type which, as Aldoux Huxley puts it, comes to India first, to air his superiority and lastly, "to have a good time." My friend was, in his own way, a thoughtful man and had a certain respect for India's wisdom. But although not quite self-complacent by nature, he had come to take it for granted that the Western outlook on life was essentially healthier and sounder than that of "the Oriental quietists", as he dubbed us, superiorly. I showed him round the Ashram. He appreciated much of what he saw. Nevertheless he stayed persuaded that we were too static, aloof and out-of-the-swim to be able to "act on the world". "And if you don't propose to act on the world," he asked me with an edge to his voice, "how do you think the world is going to be changed — reformed?"

I made what reply I could to reassure him — quoting from Sri Aurobindo's Renaissance of India: "By spirituality we do not mean a remote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather that to act," because "to realise intimately truth of the spirit and to quicken and remould life by it" was the aim of his Yoga; but though he gave me a patient hearing, he remained unconvinced. Nor did I see how I was to bring home to his somewhat rigid, one-track mind the fact that he could not fully realise what we were up against: the inertia of the ego harnessed to the rebelliousness of our self-will. Still I endeavoured to explain to him, as best I could, why I had to repudiate the call of the world of clamorous and personal ambition. I quoted for his benefit a message of Gurudev's: "The liberated man has no Personal hopes; he does not seize on things as his personal Possessions; he receives what the Divine Will brings him, covets nohing, is jealous of none; what comes to him he takes without repulsion and without attachment; what goes from him he allows to depart into the whirl of things without repining or grief or sense of loss. His heart and self are under perfect control; they

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are free from reaction and passion, they make no turbulent response to the touches of outward things." But neither my ardour nor my arguments availed: he proved quite opaque. In fact he did remind me of Madame de Stael who, to quote from Schiller's famous letter to Goethe: "insists on explaining everything, understanding everything, measuring everything. She admits of no darkness, nothing incommensurable: where her torch throws no light Here nothing can exist.... She does not prize what is false but does not always perceive what is true!" That is why my English friend could never understand the Indian mind and condemned vairagya as "the sickly spawn of a morbid distaste for the world."

Luckily for me, Chadwick happened to be on the spot; so I brought the two together, I shall never forget the great encounter, the memorable "tug-of-war" that followed when "a Greek met a Greek" Were space at my disposal I would have loved to depict the whole duologue. But I must not omit the dramatic denouement.

I shall call my critical good friend by the name of Mr. Pontiff.

Mr. Pontiff: I know, Mr. Chadwick, that your Master has attracted a number of men and women of merit and mark. But that is just the reason why we expect them to do something.

Chadwick: But we are doing something.

Mr. Pontiff: I will ask you a simple question: What on earth are you doing? — And, please don't hedge.

Chadwick (smiling): Surely, Mr. Pontiff, as a man of the world, you cannot be unaware that a question may often be simple to ask but not easy to answer.

Mr. Pontiff: I know that. But still?

Chadwick: Supposing i said: each of us here has to come to grip with his ego?

Mr. Pontiff: And when he wins?

Chadwick: The Kingdom of Heaven begins — for him, at all events.

Mr. Pontiff: But for the rest of us?

Chadwick (smiling): Why not "wait and see", like Mr. Asquith?

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Mr. Pontiff (looking at him intently): Don't you think we have been waiting long enough without seeing, anything?"

Chadwick: Is that a charge framed against us, the quietists,

as you love to put it?

Mr. Pontiff: Well, partly. But look here, Mr. Chadwick. Let's be frank and not go on stalling to no purpose. I have not come all this way just to pick holes in your Master's way of doing things. I admire him because he professes to believe in our terrestrial evolution. But, after all, you must admit that in spite of our recurring failures and grievous stumblings it's we, the scientific activists of the West, who dominate the world, and not the passive contemplatives of the East. These can indeed point out to us some of our wrong moves and mistakes; outsiders often can, like the bystanders who watch a game of chess. Don't misunderstand me. I would be the last person to say that the East has nothing to teach us. But then her prophets must become a little more dynamic and come out to voice it instead of staying immured in their ivory towers of peace and meditation and self- conquest. The great big world moves forward propelled by the law of give and take if you have nothing to give, you are as good as lost, if not dead, to the rest. For, when all is said and done, the world your Master wants to create can only come into being when its best spirits work for all under the broad light of the sun — and not in the dim dusk of a dream seclusion.

Chadwick (after pause): You have put your case rather ably, Mr. Pontiff, I will freely allow. But let me ask you a counter question in my turn. You firmly believe (don't you?) that the world can only be bettered if and when its best spirits work outside on a vocal platform and not, like the silent Orientals, in peaceful Ashrams?

Mr. Pontiff: That's right.

Chadwick: You claim also (do you not?) that the best spirits of the West have not made the mistake of the East, in that they have, by and large, worked outside on the noisy platform of activism — at any rate since the advent of science and industrialism?

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Mr. Pontiff: That's right.

Chadwick: Well then, answer my question as man to man: is the Western civilisation rising on the upward- curve or falling on the downward?

Mr. Pontiff (startled): You mean — Chadwick: You know perfectly well what I mean. Why do you come to the East to sound her wisdom if all is essentially well with the occidental outlook on life? So, please answer me:

do you still really believe that the rose of the Western civilisation can possibly flower till we find out how to settle our score once and for all with the deadly canker that is eating into its core? Mr. Pontiff: And suppose I asked you — what is that canker? Chadwick (smiling): Suppose I told you it's made up of diverse "isms" presided over by your fanatic itch to rush about doing something convincing when you are far from convinced yourselves about the rightness of your vision or the correctness of your method? Yes, I do claim one has to win the right vision first before one can find a clue to the right action. Mr. Pontiff (with a lowered head): I apologise. . .. because.... Chadwick: Because —? Mr. Pontiff (after a hesitant pause): I begin to understand.

I have intentionally given the duologue a dramatic turn but it is not all invention: they did joust at each other with animation as well as sincerity and the substance of the debate, as I have given it, is authentic. I can still remember how impressed I was when Chadwick drove Mr. Pontiff to the wall and how the latter admitted his defeat like a sportsman and apologised. After his departure Chadwick told me, with his characteristic British irony, how grievously Westerners misunderstand the time-old spiritual impulse of the God-mooded Indian (who has experienced the Divine Reality) to aspire to bring the Divine Grace to bear on the din and dark discord of dismal life in order to resolve it all into harmony — the impulse which had made him pray so

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beautifully to the World-Mother overarching our gloom-ridden earth-life:

On this dark spirit-main

Rise as a full-orbed moon,

Transform the murk of pain

To fleckless silver boon.

Out from a planet's gloom

All aspects call to Thee, —

Life in our stirless tomb,

Light on our darkened sea.

I sent a full account of it to Gurudev at the time, and a smile of irony must have hovered round his lips when he commented on the scene which I had reconstructed from memory:

"The view of the world of which Pontiff possibly spoke (he may have meant something more superficial and trivial) cannot come from the mind, still less from the vital expecting something from life as it is. For life as it is has nothing to give except to those who are satisfied with surface pleasures." Then, fully endorsing Chadwick's view, he went on to add: "The inner view can come only from a change of consciousness which sees the deeper inner life behind appearances and it is that change of consciousness which was developing in you because you were drawing back from the vital view of things — the vairagya was only an outward and negative sign of that withdrawal."

Naturally, I did not expect Mr. Pontiff to understand all this, any more than I expected him to understand what Gurudev wrote to me in another letter explaining how far he could endorse what was dubbed vairagya and just where he drew the line.

"I have objected in the past to vairagya of the ascetic and the tamasic kind," he wrote. "The vairagya of one who has tasted the world's gifts or prizes but found them insufficient or finally tasteless and turns away towards a higher and more beautiful ideal, or the vairagya of one who has done his part in life's battles but seen that something greater is demanded of the soul, is perfectly helpful and a good gate to the Yoga....By ascetic

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vairagya I mean that which denies life and world altogether and wants to disappear into the Indefinable — I object to it for those who come to yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life. So vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and, in a certain sense indispensable for my Yoga."

I do not know whether Mr. Pontiff will ever chance upon my estimate of his short-sighted pragmatism. But in case he does and decides (as is not unlikely) that I have failed to understand him, I would only say this in self-defence that I have railed at him not as an individual but as a type of that mentality which judges even of the occult things from a surface-view If I may use a hackneyed proverb to make my point. I will hazard that not only is it true that none but the wearer knows where the shoe pinches but also that one cannot claim to have stepped into the Yogic shoes till one keeps them on even when they make one bleed, as nothing less can bring home to one the deep maladjustment between one's self-will and the Divine Will, a maladjustment that warped even some gods into rebels, as the sages say.

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