Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER XIIl

Messenger of the Incommunicable*

The Gita says that everything that has a beginning must have an end. After Gurudev had assured me that he loved me not a whit less because of my insistence on the unique epiphany of Krishna, things returned slowly to normal and the imbroglio ended.

But woe is me! The respite was as short-lived as it was delectable. For, I had hardly begun to have a glimpse of what Gurudev called the "sunlit path" when a sudden thunder-storm burst and, once more, my horizon grew darker than ever.

And it happened like this:

In 1946, in East Bengal, thousands of Hindus were massacred, their women raped, houses burnt and girls abducted. I felt depressed, the more so as many of my friends kept on writing to me about the urgent need of relief-work for the bereaved Hindus. "Why not let me join the relief-workers, Guru?" I wrote to him
after giving him a long account of the fallow land of my heart:

"I will have little to lose as I feel I have not been getting on famously in your Supramental Yoga and so am often reminded, now-a-days, of Tagore's remark in 1938: 'You and I are artists, Dilip, not Yogis by temperament'. So will you permit me to go?" — and so on.

To that Gurudev wrote back:

"After receiving your account of your present condition
which I understand perfectly well, my advice remains the same:

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* / saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers-

Messengers of the incommunicable,

The architects of immortality'. SAVITRI III. IV.

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to stick on persistently till the dawn comes which it surely will if you resist the temptation to run away into some outer darkness which it would have much more difficulty in reaching. The details you give do not at all convince me that Tagore was right in thinking that your sadhana was not at all in line with my Yoga or that you are right in concluding that you are not meant for this line. On the contrary, these are things which come almost inevitably in one degree or another at a certain critical stage through which almost everyone has to pass and which usually lasts for an uncomfortably long time but which need not be at all conclusive or definitive. Usually, if one persists, it is the period of darkest night before the dawn which comes to every or almost every spiritual aspirant. It is due to a plunge one has to take into sheer physical consciousness
unsupported by any true mental light or by any vital joy in life, for these usually withdraw behind the veil, though they are not, as they seem to be, permanently lost. It is a period when doubt, denial, dryness, greyness and all kindred things come up with a great force and often reign completely for a time. It is after this stage has been successfully crossed that the true light begins to come, the light which is not of the mind but of the spirit. The spiritual light no doubt comes to some to a certain extent and to a few to a considerable extent in the earlier stages, though that is not the case with all — for some have to wait till they can clear out the obstructing stuff in the mind, vital and physical consciousness, and until then they get only a touch now and then. But even at the best, this earlier spiritual light is never complete, until the darkness of the physical
consciousness has been faced and overcome. It is not by one's own fault that one falls into this state; it can come when one is trying one's best to advance. It does not really indicate any radical disability in the nature but certainly it is a hard ordeal and one has to stick very firmly to pass through it. It is difficult to explain these things because the psychological necessity is difficult for the ordinary human reason to understand or to accept. I will try to have a shot at it, but it may take some days.

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Meanwhile, as you have asked what is my advice, I send you this brief answer."

This I sent to Krishnaprem who wrote to me:

"I am so sorry that you are not well and still more so to see the nature of the troubles you refer to. Set your teeth and stick it out as best you can: the darkness will pass if you keep facing it. Never mind what happens: keep your mind on Sri Krishna's feet, remember always that you belong to Him and not to yourself and just go on whether in light or in darkness, in joy or in sorrow as He wills. But stick to it. Since your Gurudev sanctions, take a holiday, go to Raman Asram or Ramdas or anywhere else but do not for one moment entertain the thought of ever going back to your old life....

"There can be no going back for us, Dilip: that which we have left behind us has perished and it is a sheer illusion to think that we can recover it. It has gone and whether we like it or not, in sorrow or in joy, we must push on. Don't try to look back even: it only makes us giddy and what we see are only deceitful phantoms. "Rather we should look to the future with its promise of something quite different from what now is. Now at this moment we should seize the eternal feet of Krishna. Not hope to seize them at some future date — 'if we are good' as they used to say when we were children. Now, now, now! Let the past go and the future take care of itself.

"It is natural that you should be painfully affected by the horrors of Bengal but that too is in Krishna's hands. He who has given himself to Krishna must keep his eyes on His feet, irrevocably, though the triple world fell into ruin."

Upon this Gurudev finally commented:

"Krishnaprem's letter is admirable from start to finish and every sentence hits the truth with great point and force. He has evidently an accurate knowledge both of the psychological and the occult forces that act in Yoga: all that he says is in agreement with my own experience and I concur. His account of the rationale of your present difficulties is quite correct and no other

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explanation is needed — except what I was writing in my unfinished letter about the descent of the sadhana into the plane of the physical consciousness and that does not disaccord with but only completes what he says. He is quite right in saying that the heaviness of these attacks was due to the fact that you had taken up the sadhana in earnest and were approaching, as one might say, the gates of the Kingdom of Light. That always makes these forces rage and they strain every nerve and use or create every opportunity to turn the sadhaka back or, if possible, drive him out of the path altogether by their suggestion, their violent influences and their exploitation of all kinds of incidents that always crop up more and more when these conditions prevail, so that he may not reach the gates. I have written to you more than once alluding to these forces, but I did not press the point because I saw that like most people whose minds have been rationalised by the modem European education you were not inclined to believe in or at least to attach any importance to this knowledge. People, now-a-days, seek the explanation for everything in their ignorant reason, their surface experience and in outside happenings. They do not see the hidden forces and inner causes which were well-known and visualised in the traditional Indian and Yogic knowledge. Of course, these forces find their point d' appui in the sadhaka himself, in the ignorant parts of his consciousness and its assent to their suggestions and influences; otherwise they could not act or at least could not act with any success. In your case the chief points d' appui have been the extreme sensitiveness of the lower vital ego and now also the physical consciousness with all its fixed or standing opinions, prejudices, prejudgments, habitual reactions, personal preferences, clinging to old ideas and associations, its obstinate doubts and its maintaining these things as a wall of obstruction and opposition to the larger light. This activity of the physical mind is what people call intellect and reason although it is only the turning of a machine in a circle of mental habits and is very different from the true and free reason, the higher buddhi, which is capable of enlightenment and still more from the higher

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spiritual light or that insight and tact of the psychic consciousness which sees at once what is true and right and distinguishes it from what is wrong and false. This insight you had very constantly whenever you were in a good condition and especially whenever bhakti became strong in you. When the sadhaka comes down into the physical consciousness leaving the mental and higher vital ranges on which he had first turned towards the Divine, these opposite things become very strong and sticky and, as one's more helpful states and experiences draw back behind the veil and one can hardly realise that one ever had them, it becomes difficult to get out of this condition. The only thing then, as Krishnaprem has told you and I also have insisted, is to stick it out. If once one can get and keep the resolution to refuse to accept the suggestions of these forces, however plausible they may seem, then either quickly or gradually this condition can diminish and will be over passed and cease. To give up Yoga is no solution; you could not successfully do it as both Krishnaprem and I have told you and as your own mind tells you when it is clear. A temporary absence from the Ashram for relief from the struggle is a different matter. I do not think, however, that residence in the Raman Ashram would be eventually helpful except for bringing back some peace of mind; Raman Maharshi is a great Yogi and his realisation very high on its own line; but it does not seem to me that it is a line which you could successfully follow as you certainly can follow the path of bhakti if you stick to it, and there might then be the danger of your falling between two stools, losing your own path and not being able to follow the path of another nature.

"As regard Bengal, things are certainly very bad; the condition of the Hindus there is terrible and they may even get worse inspite of the interim manage deconvenance at Delhi. But we must not let our reaction to it become excessive or suggest despair. There must be at least 20 million Hindus in Bengal and they are not going to be exterminated — even Hitler with his scientific methods of massacre could not exterminate the Jews who are still showing themselves very much alive and, as for

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the Hindu culture, it is not such a weak and fluffy thing as to be easily stamped out; it has lasted through something like five millenniums at least and is going to carry on much longer and has accumulated quite enough power to survive. What is happening did not come to me as a surprise. I foresaw it when I was in Bengal and warned people that it was probable and almost inevitable and that they should be prepared for it. At that time no one attached any value to what I said although some afterwards remembered and admitted, when the trouble first began, that I had been right; only C.R. Das had grave apprehensions and he even told me, when he came to Pondicherry, that he would not like the British to go out until this dangerous problem had been settled. But I have not been discouraged by what is happening, because I know and have experienced hundreds of times that beyond the blackest darkness there lies for one who is a divine instrument the light of God's victory. I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world — I am not speaking of personal things — which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster. There was a time when Hitler was victorious every where and it seemed certain that the black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nurenberg have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human History. Other blacknesses threaten to Overshadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended."

"Guru", I pursued again. "I cry like the gasping Goethe: 'more light'! For I miss it today as never before. I have heard so much about the Divine Grace and seen so little of it so far! But I am dead sure you'll silence me by saying that in a brighter mood I will contradict myself again for the hundredth time, and you will be right. Nevertheless, do tell me what one is to do when, even after being convinced of the advisability of faith — blind, one-eyed, or fully vigilant — one finds that it is as good as nonexistent in one's composition? Was not faith essentially a seal of Krishna's call, a pledge as it were that one was elected

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by Him? What has surprised me all along the line is that despite my deficiency in faith I should be almost inexhaustibly rich in vairagya! But, alas, vairagya unlike the positive bhakti or knowledge, is essentially negative and faith I lack, although both you and Krishnaprem have driven me to the wall with unanswerable arguments in its favour. In my presentstate, however, I often catch myself thinking, ruefully, that the man of faith — like his polar opposite, the sceptic — is born, not made. Otherwise why does my faith play truant so persistently?"

To this Gurudev replied once more with a patience as inexhaustible as my capacity for questioning spiritual truth and yet accepting, paradoxically, the stand-point of vairagya that without the light of the spirit, life must remain a dismal grasping at phantoms.

"In your case faith is there, not in your mind, not in your vital but in your psychic being. It was this faith that flung you out of the world and brought you to Pondicherry; it is this faith that keeps you to what the soul wills and refuse to go back on what it had decided. Even the mind's questionings have been a groping after some justification by which it can get an excuse for believing in spite of its difficulties. The vital's eagerness for realisation and its vairagya are shadows of this faith, forms which it has taken in order to keep the vital from giving up in spite of the pressure of despondency and struggle. Even in the mind and vital of the men of the strongest mental and vital faith there are periods when the knowledge in the psychic gets covered up — but it persists behind the veil. In you, in spite of your difficulties there is always the knowledge or intuition in the soul that started you on the way. I have been pressing on you the need of faith because the assent has again to take a positive form (vairagya is but the negative form of this assent in you) so as to give free way to the Divine Force; but the persistent drive in the soul (which is hidden behind an exteriorly-suppressed faith) is itself sufficient to warrant the expectation of the Grace to come."

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I have published these letters because although they were written in a personal context they are bound, I am persuaded, to raise echoes in the heart of many a truth seeker in all climes. It cannot be otherwise in-as much as he — to put it in Biblical language — "spoke with authority" — the compelling authority of a Seer-poet hymned in the Vedas as the Kavih, that is, an authentic Singer who is also the Harbinger of a new Sunrise of the Spirit. That is why he won to the mantric accent which throbs out through his prophetic utterances in ever so many of his poems, and preponderantly in his masterpiece, SAVITRI (Book of Everlasting Day):

A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world.

On Nature's luminous tops, on the Spirits ground,

The superman shall reign as king of life,

Make earth almost a mate and peer of heaven
And lead towards God and Truth man's ignorant heart

And lift towards godhead his mortality.......

Or, to put it in the vibrant language of his Essays On The Gita:

"We of the coming day stand at the head of a new age of development which must lead to such a new and larger synthesis. We are not called upon to be orthodox Vedantins of any of the three schools or Tantrics or to adhere to one of the theistic religions of the past or to entrench ourselves within the four
corners of the teaching of the Gita. That would be to limit ourselves and to attempt to create our spiritual life out of the being, knowledge and nature of others, of the men of the past, instead of building it out of our own being and potentialities. We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future."

A call such as this does, indeed, appeal to something in one's heart, but more because its ring is authentic than because its tone is hortatory. At the same time, its very authenticity will not allow us to rest on our laurels. Timid conservatism, vowed to

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playing safe, shies at such an invitation which it confounds with iconoclasm. But Sri Aurobindo could never be an iconoclast:he had too deep a reverence for Truth by which he had been called and chosen. He loved Truth as he loved nothing else in life and counted no cost too great in his sleepless quest for its Light which brooked no barriers. This he had come to realise when he was still a householder and a husband, forty years ago, when he wrote to his wife about his three "madnesses."

."..... The second madness that has taken hold of me is that, come what may, I must see God face to face somehow — anyhow... .If God exists then there must be some way which takes one to His presence. It is this path I am set on treading no matter what the odds may be against me."*

But his insatiable spirit trod many paths or rather any path . that opened before him — as he wrote to me in one of his long letters which I quoted in a previous chapter; he had to, because he had never been parochial in his adhesion. His light-avid soul bowed to Truth wherever its sunrise challenged the mists of human ignorance and he loved to recognise all aspirants through whom it manifested in any age or clime, however distant. It could not be otherwise, as he had drunk deep at the fount of Perennial Wisdom, the eternal heritage of Universal Man. Or, to put it in his own words, his soul lived "as eternity's deligate, affiliated to cosmic Space and Time." "He was," writes one of his eminent biographers, "One of those giant spirits that on occasion bestride this world of pigmies, shedding fresh light, giving new life and expanding the frontiers of human vision and consciousness." And he achieved this because of his oceanic largeness which could receive the waters of all the rivers of the

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'Translated from one of his three famous letters written in Bengali, to his wife Mrinalini Devil. These were confiscated along with his other belongings by the C.I.D. Police of Calcutta in 1908 when he was arrested and produced in the Alipore court as evidence against him.

†Quoted from the Introduction to a biography of Sri Aurobindo entitled, Mahayogi, written by Sri R. R. Divakar, (Bhavan Publication).

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world with the explorer's passion which thirsts to trace each to its origin. It was in this spirit that he had meditated for long years on the mystic lore of the world till he could attest the universality of its wisdom in his luminous appraisements. To give but an instance:

"There was indeed, almost everywhere an age of the Mysteries," he wrote, "in which men of a deeper knowledge and self-knowledge established their practices, significant rites, symbols, secret lore within or on the border of the more primitive exterior religions. This took different forms in different countries: in Greece there was the Orphic and the Eleusinian Mysteries, in Egypt and Chaldea the priests and their occult lore and magic, in Persia the Magi, in India the Rishis. The preoccupation of the Mystics was with self-knowledge and a profounder world knowledge; they found that in man there was a deeper self and inner being behind the surface of the outward physical man, which it was his highest business to discover and know. 'Know thyself was their great precept, just as in India to know the Self, the Atman, became the great spiritual need, the highest thing for the human being.' *

Years ago, when I used to write to Romain Rolland about him and sent him some of his messages of flame he was moved to his depths and felicitated me that I had been fortunate enough to be accepted by such a Guru. And he wrote subsequently:

"Aurobindo has realised the most complete synthesis achieved up to the present between the genius of the East and of the West. He is seeking to harmonise the spiritual striving of India and the activities of the West and in pursuance of that aim he is training all the forces of the spirit towards an ascendancy of action."

I cannot, however, claim that I had grasped at the time the full import of statements such as these. For although I was not by nature recalcitrant to Western ideas and influences I could

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*Quoted from the Foreword to Sri Aurobindo's translation of a part of Rig Veda, entitled. Hymns To The Mystic Fire.

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not quite make up my mind in those days whether an ideology foreign to our own could be successfully assimilated by the Indian outlook on life. I read once, for instance, in his Essays on the Gita: "A mass of new material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modem knowledge and seeking; and beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the consciousness of mankind but now breaking out again from behind the veil. All this points to a new, a very rich, a very vast synthesis; a fresh and widely embracing harmonisation of our gains is both an intellectual and a spiritual necessity of the .future."

I did, indeed, read with genuine admiration luminous thoughts such as these. Only I did not at the time clearly see how they were going to be translated into a philosophy of action in the field of Karmayoga. Did not the Gita itself, I argued, enjoin us to beware of the vitiating influences of worldly preoccupations and human motives? And might we not, I wondered, forfeit much that is of the highest value in our uncompromising spiritual outlook if we allowed it to be modified if not warped by the secular outlook of what Sri Aurobindo called "modern knowledge and seeking"? "Synthesis" was all right but could there be an amalgam of oil and water?

I knew of course that do what we would we could never shut the world out and yet keep on growing. For when all is said and done, the world being one, nothing on earth could sunder and contain the East and the West everlastingly in watertight compartments. But the paradox is that we want to grow and yet dread to change. So, what I admitted in theory I came to repudiate in practice when the acceptance demanded a modification of the status quo to which I had been bred. That is why so many of us chafed at what we called "the tyranny of the imposed discipline." We wanted to be masters in our own houses. But

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this often becomes impossible in a Yoga-ashram where one had to subordinate one's will to that of the Guru. So what else could we do but call the outer discipline suspect, contending that it was hardly distinguishable from authoritarianism if not despotism? Why, indeed, must an occidental interior-decorator, an interloper, be invited into the cosy parlour of our self-will and laissez-faire"! Discipline was boosted in the West but look at what is happening there: men and women are getting more and more unhappy and cramped, slaving day and night like lifeless robots in a soulless manufactory deified as the State. India cherished individuality as sacrosanct and our spiritual men set store by the guidance of the inner beacon within as against the red lights of the outer policeman. Did not the Gita counsel following one's native dharma} Discipline of the outer kind may be play to the Westerners but beware! it may well prove death to us Indians'...And so on.

To that he replied, in 1945: "Discipline in itself is not something Western; in oriental countries like Japan, China and India it was at one time all-regulating and supported by severe sanctions in a way that Westerners could not tolerate. Socially, whatever objections we may make to it, it is a fact that it preserved Hindu religion and Hindu society through the ages and through all vicissitudes. In the political field there was on the contrary indiscipline, individualism and strife; that is one reason why India collapsed and entered into servitude. Organisation and order were attempted but failed to endure. Even in the spiritual life India has had not only the free wandering ascetic, a law to himself, but has felt impelled to create orders to sannyasins with their rules and governing bodies and there have also been monastic institutions with a strict discipline."

No one who truly loves India could possibly demur at this, least of all a spiritual seeker because, clarity of vision being incumbent on him, he must see clearly how insidiously indiscipline betrays the aspirant into the slough of tamas of the worst kind —a fact which made the great Vivekananda inveigh so often against our vital lethargy and mental somnolence

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masquerading as sattwic spirituality. "These tamasic people," he wrote scathingly in a letter, "will pass their lives in wrong actions or sloth and then run helplessly to us. Yogis, in the expectation that we shall redeem their misery with miracles of Yoga. They will persevere in nothing... nor undertake any serious sadhana. My campaign is against such jniracle-mongering pseudo spirituality."

Sri Aurobindo had all along concurred with Vivekananda in denouncing lethargy and sloth stalking the land masquerading as spirituality and sattwic vairagya. In point of fact, it was because he saw the blasting effect of tamas on the aspiration of the spiritual seeker that he, like the great Vedantin, condemned inertia unqualifiedly and held karma — works — undertaken in the spirit of the Gita as of the essence of his Integral Yoga.

But he had accepted works primarily because without works not only must our nature remain unredeemed, but no real acceptance of life could follow. Also, since life must, in the end, include the body as well as the mind, so he unhesitatingly lifted the time-old ascetic ban on the body which he did not equate with a pitiful mass of flesh and bone but rather as a divine gift which could, in the last analysis, he wrote, "become a revealing vessel of a supreme beauty and bliss — casting the beauty of the light of the spirit, suffusing and radiating from it as a lamp reflects and diffuses the luminosity of its indwelling flame, carrying in itself the beatitude of the spirit, its joy of the seeing mind, its joy of life and spiritual happiness, the joy of Matter released into spiritual consciousness and thrilled with a constant ecstasy." That was his view of the human body in a full and rich life guided by the spirit and surrendered to the Divine who answers when, it is so consecrated, by transforming the seemingly dread dungeon of the sorrowing soul into a veritable temple of delight. Had it been otherwise he would not have written in the same message (on the perfection of the body): "If our seeking is for a total perfection of the being, the physical part of it cannot be left aside: for the body is the material basis... Shariram khalu dharmasadhanam...the means

of fulfilment of dharma and dharma means every ideal which we can propose to ourselves and the law of its working out and its action."

But altogether there was nothing in all this that my mind could object to since his contention was not essentially incompatible with our Indian ideal of spirituality, yet my heart misgave me again and again whenever somebody in the Ashram lamented that we were drifting away from our hoary Indian moorings and falling under the spell of the Western cult of idolising physical pleasures or life's instincts, as against the treasures of the spirit.

I was in the grip of just such a mood when I wrote to him once, in 1948: "Tell me, Guru what exactly are you expecting us to achieve at this stage of our (or your) sadhanal Could it possibly be that you have had a new revelation again which has decided you to scotch India's advocacy of vairagya and other worldliness and have it replaced in toto by the Western outlook on life, which refuses to look beyond our present horizon? It is not I alone who am at sea here, but Duraiswami also — a man we all revere and love — who confesses that in spite of his great reverence for your wisdom he has been finding it a little difficult of late to understand your growing stress on this-worldliness and diminishing approval of other-worldliness. I have, hitherto, given you my loyal adhesion (such as it is) in the belief that you, the modem Messiah, are going to deliver the goods, justifying the ways of earth to heaven. You have sung of a harmonisation of seemingly incompatible elements of life so that human culture may achieve, at long last, its final "unity in diversity". But in this new synthesis, to be achieved by you,' what, exactly, is going to be the contribution of India? I ask this with deep misgivings today as it seems to me that the Indian traditions are some what unlikely to have any Lebensraum in the new Supramental Millennium you are going to inaugurate."

And duly, after my irreverent fling, I let my despondence get the better of me for the joy of venting my sorrow. "And since I cannot help doubting and brooding like this," I added, "tell me frankly, once and for all, whether, believing as I do in the spiritual

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traditions of India whose soul I adore, I can still serve you as a loyal disciple when your ideal seems to me to be receding rather fast from the Indian?"

After despatching the letter in haste I rued my impulsiveness in leisure, the more so because I feared that my downright attitude would now leave him no alternative but to call me a "misfit" in his Ashram which stood for ideals other than the ones we had grown to cherish since our childhood. In a word, I felt like a suicide who, after digging his own grave, stands aghast at the prospect of having to descend into it alive. So, my exuberant joy may be imagined when, next morning, I received his letter dripping tenderness and solicitude. Patiently and laboriously as ever, he answered me once again, point by point.

"One thing I feel I must say," he wrote "in connection with your remark about the soul of India and Duraiswami's observation about my stress on this worldliness to the exclusion of other-worldliness. I do not quite understand in what connection his remark was made or what he meant by this worldliness, but I feel it necessary to state my own position in the matter. My own life and my Yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side. All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered into my mental field and some, like politics, into my life, but, at the same time, since I set foot on the Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time, I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere. Everyone has the right to throw away this-worldliness and choose other-worldliness only, and if he

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finds peace by that choice he is greatly blessed. I, personally, have not found it necessary to do this in order to have peace. In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my view — the spiritual and the material — and to try to establish the Divine Consciousness and the Divine Power in men's hearts and earthly life, not for a personal salvation only but for a life divine here. This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any, and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been my view and experience of the reality and the nature of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me as nearly as possible the integral truth about them and I have therefore spoken of the pursuit of it as the Integral Yoga. Everyone is, of course, free to reject and disbelieve in this kind of integrality or to believe in the spiritual necessity of an entire other-worldliness altogether but that would make the exercise of my Yoga impossible.

"My Yoga can include indeed a full experience of the other worlds, the plane of the Supreme Spirit and the other planes in between and their possible effects upon our life and the material world; but it will be quite possible to insist only on the realisation of the Supreme Being or Ishwara even in one aspect, Shiva, Krishna as Lord of the world and Master of ourselves and our works or else the Universal Sachchidananda and attain to the essential results of this Yoga and afterwards to proceed from them to the integral results if one accepted the ideal of the divine life and this material world conquered by the Spirit. It is this view and experience of things and of the truth of existence that enabled me to write The Life Divine and Savitri. The realisation of the Supreme, the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing; but to approach Him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve Him with one's works and to know Him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience is also essential in the path of Integral Yoga. If you accept Krishnaprem's insistence that this and no other must be your path, that it is this you have to attain and realise, then any

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exclusive other-worldliness cannot be your way. I believe that you are quite capable of attaining this and realising the Divine and I have never been able to share your constantly recurring doubts about your capacity and their persistent recurrence is not a valid ground for believing that they can never be over come. Such a persistent recurrence has been a feature in the sadhana of many who have finally emerged and reached the goal; even the sadhana of very great Yogis has not been exempt from such violent and constant recurrences, they have sometimes been the special objects of such persistent assaults, as I have, indeed, indicated in Savitri in more places than one, and that was indeed founded on my own experience. In the nature of these recurrences there is usually a constant return of the same adverse experiences, the same adverse resistance, thoughts destructive of all belief and faith and confidence in the future of the sadhana, frustrating doubts of what one has known as the truth, urgings to the abandonment of the Yoga or to other disastrous counsels of decheance. The course taken by the attacks is not indeed the same for all but still they have a strong family resemblance. One can eventually overcome if one begins to realise the nature and source of these assaults and acquire the faculty of observing them (without being involved or absorbed into their gulf), finally becoming their witness of the phenomena and understanding them and refusing the mind's sanction even when the vital is still tossed in the whirl or the most outward physical mind still reflects the adverse suggestions. In the end these attacks lose their power and fall away from the nature; the recurrence becomes feeble or has no power to last; even, if the detachment is strong enough, they can be cut out very soon or at once. The strongest attitude to take is to regard these things as what they really are: incursions of dark forces from outside taking advantage of certain openings in the physical mind or vital part, but not a real p art of oneself or spontaneous creation in one's own nature. To create a confusion and darkness in the physical mind and to throw into it or awaken in it mistaken ideas, dark thoughts, false impressions is a favourite method of these

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assailants, and if they can get the support of the mind from over confidence in its own correctness or the natural lightness of its impressions and inferences, then they can have a field day until the true mind reasserts itself and blows the clouds away. Another device of theirs is to awake some hurt or rankling sense of grievance in the lower vital parts and keep them hurt or rankling as long as possible. In that case one has to discover these openings in one's nature and learn to close them permanently to such attacks or to throw out the intruders at once or as soon as possible. The recurrence is no proof of a fundamental incapacity; if one takes the right inner attitude it can and will be overcome. One must have faith in the Master of our life and works, even if for a long time He conceals Himself, and then in His own right time He will reveal His Presence."

In my unutterable relief I took his tolerance and forgiveness for granted once again and wrote back: "How I wish, Guru, you could persuade this 'Master of our life and works' to reveal to us mortals a little more of His Grace doing a few miracles? I have read and heard so much of the Lord of miracles in repose, but when shall I see him in action for a change?"... And so I went on and on, little dreaming how promptly my prayer was going to be granted and in what inconceivable a context! It is not easy to describe the miracle I saw but I will do my best hoping that a few at least will understand.

It so happened that a few months after this, an avowed disciple of mine, Janak Kumari Malhotra (alias Indira), fell seriously ill. Were I free to write about her in detail, I could make her story more gripping than a first class fiction, but as she is utterly opposed to my making public her spiritual experiences (including her samadhi, clairvoyance, clairaudience etc.), I must confine myself to relating here how Sri Aurobindo began to take interest in her first for my sake and then for her own, so much so that he was partly instrumental in saving her life at the eleventh hour. (I must, however, warn the reader at the very outset that it is not part of my purpose to try to prove this, nor do I need to, since he assured me more than once that he had directed his Yogic power

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to save her life, and the miracle happened in that he succeeded when it was a case of "touch and go", as her doctors had said.) But here I must pause to introduce her briefly.

She had come to our Ashram for the first time in February, 1949 and stayed with me. She had wanted a Guru's spiritual help. I suggested the name of Sri Aurobindo. She answered, to my astonishment, that she could accept no Guru but myself. I pleaded my inability and tried to make her see the greatness of Sri Aurobindo. She smiled and said that nobody who had eyes could ever dispute the light of the sun but, at the same time, she added, a Guru was not taken but given. In my extremity, I referred the matter to Sri Aurobindo. He replied at once that she had been right and I was not to persuade her to accept any Guru other than myself because, he wrote: "She feels that it is you who have brought her to us and helped her and guided her; us she looks upon as your Gurus." I should perhaps have still refused to comply had I not been deeply impressed by her sincerity, truthfulness, intelligence, poetical gift, capacity for spiritual experience and, above all, her incredible purity of character. She was noble and generous to a fault, utterly indifferent to wealth, though born to wealth, and social without being attached to society. But, as it often happens with such highly evolved natures, she was exceedingly reticent and sensitive, besides. As a result, she had suffered much and long which had all but ruined her health. Still she had put up a brave front and never told anybody till, finally, she broke down — in November, 1949 — in Jubbulpore where she lived with her husband. At first he had not taken her illness seriously but when her condition deteriorated alarmingly, an appeal was sent to Sri Aurobindo and I received a telegram to the effect that the doctors had all given up. At this time I made a serious blunder (ignoring Gurudev's advice) and wrote to her insisting that she accept him as her Guru as, obviously, I had no mystic power to heal, a power he had and could wield to save her. This she misinterpreted as my repudiation of her as my disciple and wrote to me that she did not choose to be saved by anybody other than the Guru of

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her heart. "Something has snapped within me," she wrote, "all the warmth is gone; I can't feel anything; my heart is frozen and can no longer respond to anything." Deeply alarmed, I confessed to Gurudev that I had, impulsively, perpetrated just what he had warned me against so categorically. The soul of compassion
and understanding, he wrote back instantly, advising me to proceed at once to Jubbulpore promising to do his best to save her. "I hope," he wrote, "that it is a passing depression created by her misunderstanding of what you wrote to her and that the elasticity of her psychic temperament and aspiration will help her to recover from it rapidly, if not at once. Still, wires and letters may not help her to recover her natural condition
immediately and your presence there may be necessary and is certainly advisable, since it will set things right at once. So you can start tonight as you propose and our blessings will go with you.

With love and blessings, Sri Aurobindo (21.12.49)." So I started the same afternoon and was by her bedside the next evening, hoping against hope that Gurudev's Yogic force would work the miracle. But when I saw her my heart misgave me, for although I knew for certain (from all that Sri Aurobindo had written about her to me and her ) that she had been both called and chosen, I did not see how her terrible convulsions were going to be remedied. So, I took my courage in both hands and risked enjoining her to dismiss all the doctors who were attending on her. She readily agreed and told them that she would leave it all to the Lord who (and not the doctors) must prescribe for her hence forward. Her people were aghast, but when I wrote to Gurudev about her resolution (I was writing to him daily about her symptoms ?and experiences) he wrote to me endorsing my advice and belauding her faith warmly. (Apropos, a few days before I started for Jubbulpore he had written to me — in December, 1949, to be more precise — explaining much about what had been happening to her "because of her advanced spiritual consciousness" and had added that her samadhi was of the "savikalpa kind.")

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Lastly, in a letter which I received in Jubbulpore he wrote: "Of course I will try to the end; for my experience is that even a hopeless effort in the fields of the working of the spiritual force is often better than none and can bring in the intervention of the miracle."

I shook my head ruefully and wrote back: "But alas, Guru, I have never had a congenital weakness for what we, Indians, so wistfully call 'faith in miracles.' So if you will pardon me, I can only hope, against hope, that its agency may come to our rescue before it is too late." Then after giving him a long account of her ailments I added: "From the doctors here I have gathered — what has fairly staggered me — that Indira has been suffering from cardiac asthma, coronary thrombosis, dilatation of the heart, osteoarthritis, low blood-pressure, utter lack of appetite, anaemia and God knows what else, still undiagnosed., So I am afraid you will have to invoke a major miracle if you really mean business."

But the major miracle did happen after all at the eleventh hour, when all seemed lost and people had started crying, she recovered after having obstinately continued to refuse all medicines for well over three months.

This made a difference even to my sceptic mind in that I won here a point d'appui for my faith in Yogic powers achieving results which I can only describe as too incredible to be discredited. But I prefer to close this episode with a relevant letter which Gurudev wrote to me in reply to some questions which I had to discuss with Indira during her illness about the application of spiritual force to preserve health or cure physical ailments. I had asked him in my letter, among other things, how far he undersigned Sri Ramakrishna's condemnation of utilisation of spiritual force to keep the body in health.

"I might say a word about Sri Ramakrishna's attitude with regard to the body," he wrote. "He seems to have regarded it as a misuse of spiritual force to utilise it for preserving the body or curing its ailments. Other Yogis — I do not speak of those who think it justifiable to develop Yogic siddhis — have not had this

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complete disregard of the body: they have taken care to maintain it in good health and condition as an instrument or a physical basis for their development in Yoga. I have always been in agreement with this view: moreover, I have never had any hesitation in the use of a spiritual force for all legitimate purposes including the maintenance of health and physical life in myself and in others .... I put a value on the body first as an instrument, dharmasadhana, or, more fully, as a centre of manifested personality in action, a basis of spiritual life and activity as of all life and activity upon earth, but also because, for me, the body as well as the mind and life is a part of the Divine Whole, a form of the Spirit and therefore not to be disregarded or despised as something incurably, gross and incapable of spiritual realisation or of spiritual use. Matter itself is secretly a form of the Spirit, and has to reveal itself as that, can be made to wake to consciousness and evolve and realise the Spirit, the Divine within it. In my view the body as well as the mind and life has to be spiritualised or, one may say, divinised so as to be a fit instrument and receptacle for the realisation of the Divine. It has its part in the Divine lila, even according to the Vaishanava sadhana in the joy and beauty of Divine Love. That does not mean that the body has to be valued for its own separate sake or that the creation of a divine body in a future evolution of the whole being has to be contemplated as an end and not as a means — that would be a serious error, which would not be admissible."

I have a special purpose in quoting this letter. Paradoxical though it may sound, I have all along had a marked streak of the other-worldly vairagya in my composition which was not a little responsible for my protracted struggles in the Ashram. Yet when I saw my own disciple in the throes of death I could not help but pray for her recovery, as much to save her life as to get rid of my own pain. And it was only when she recovered that I realised anew, as it were, that no Yoga could be held to be truly satisfying to sensitive, refined souls if it despised Matter as incompatible with the spirit or belittled the place of the body in spiritual life. For although Sri Aurobindo admitted that "that body is the

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creation of the Inconscient," he declined to accept it at its face value because "what we call Inconscient" he held, "is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe. Matter is the field and the creation of the Inconscient and the perfection of the operations of inconscient Matter, their perfect adaptation of means to an aim and end, the wonders they perform and the marvels of beauty they create, testify, in spite of all the ignorant denial we can oppose, to the presence and power of consciousness of this Superconscience in every part and movement of the material universe. It is there in the body, has made it and its emergence in our consciousness is the secret aim of evolution and the key to the mystery of our existence."*

Today his messages such as these seem to win to a new and far deeper significance. Why — since Indira had not even accepted him as her Guru — did he write to me when I felt like giving up: "So long as there is the slightest shadow of a hope we must fight to the end to save her"? And why did he enjoin me at this time to act as her Guru when I had decided that I had no right to accept anybody as my protege at that crucial stage of my sadhana

Not that my self-love had not been substantially tickled at being authorised to take in tow so evolved a soul; but then I felt even more dismayed at the prospect of guiding a disciple when I saw myself stumbling so often on the way. Could such a tyro venture to lead another and yet keep faith with his conscience? And lastly — to cap my discomfiture, as it were — Indira testified again and again that she had received my help, even though I was not conscious of having given any!

Duly I wrote to him about it all soliciting his explanation and opinion.

And he replied at once and categorically.

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*Perfection of the Body, an article by Sri Aurobindo Published in Bulletin of Physical Educiation, April, 1949.

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"You can help and have helped others," he wrote, "and drawn them to the spiritual path and you have made many turn towards us who of their own motion would not have thought of doing so. There is a power in you to draw others like that and it seems that not only nature but the Divine has put it in you for this service and that it is quite right that you should use it for Him as you have done. There can be no harm in using His gifts for Him when it is done in the right spirit."

I .was deeply moved, once again, by his unfailing understanding and compassion which prompted him to lavish so much tenderness on a refractory disciple who, thanks to his recalcitrance, found it so difficult to accept his lead and profit by his constant encouragement. I recall how I had been so depressed once as to doubt his love (even after he had called me a friend and a son") and wrote regretting his "aloofness from us all, possibly wanting to shine almost like a mythical figure in a crystal tower inaccessible to mortals stifled by dusty life?" I had expected a rebuke this time but he, being what he was, answered with one of the sweetest letters I have received. He wrote:

"It is a strong and lasting personal relation that I have felt with you ever since we met and even before and 'it is only that that has been the base of all the outward support, consideration, care and constant helping endeavour which I have always extended towards you and which could not have arisen from any tepid impersonal feeling. On my side that relation is not likely to change ever."

And he went to add, explaining: "Even before I met you for the first time, I knew of you and felt at once the contact of one with whom I had that relation which declares itself constantly through many lives and followed your career ( all that I could hear about it) with a close sympathy and interest. It is a feeling which is never mistaken and gives the impression of one not only close to one but a part of one's existence.... The relation that is so indicated always turns out to be that of those who have been together in the past and were predestined to join again

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(though the past circumstances may not be known ) drawn together by old ties. It was the same inward recognition (apart even from the deepest spiritual connection) that brought you here. If the outer consciousness does not fully realise this, it is because of the crust always created by a new physical birth that prevents it. But the soul knows all the while." (28,2,1935).

In another letter her wrote with the same simplicity to remove a misunderstanding for which my self-love alone was responsible:

"I was taken aback by your letter, for my remarks about X had been perfectly casual... I would certainly not have written them if I had had thought they were of a kind to cause trouble to you. In scribbling them I had no idea of imposing my views about X on you — I had no idea or writing as a Guru to a disciple or laying down the law, it was rather as a friend to a friend expressing my views and discussing them with a perfect ease and confidence... because we feel close to your psychic being always and that is the relation which we have quite naturally with you .... I do not believe in human judgments because I have always found them fallible — also perhaps because I have myself been so blackened by human judgments that I do not
care to be guided by them with regard to others. All this, however, I write to explain my own point of view: I am not insisting on it as a law for others. I have never been in the habit of insisting that every-body must think as I do — any more than I insist on everybody following me and my Yoga." (December, 1934)

But even such letters, while they consoled and chastened me only deepened my gloom. That he, a being of light and vision and tolerance should go on writing so humbly to one so flawed and obstinate and presumptuous as myself! Why should he have loved me as he did when I was weighed so often and found worth dismissing? What, indeed, had I brought him except loads of worry and trouble — and not only on my own account but also on that of so many I cared for? It was well-known in the Ashram that he would take no end of pains to help any one "recommended by Dilip." I remember, in particular, how much

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of his time he had spent to save a beloved pupil of mine, Srimati Uma Bose (given the title of "the Nightingale of Bengal" by Mahatma Gandhi) who died at twenty-one and, when I felt bereaved, how tenderly he consoled me! I asked him (8.2.42):

"But why did such a lovely flower have to fade away prematurely before blossoming — casting a gloom on all who had known and cherished her for her exquisite singing and snow- pure character? And then look at the lengthening shadows all over the world, brothers killing brothers! I do believe in Grace, Guru, but it acts, I take it, only under certain conditions which are, to put it mildly, unlikely to be fulfilled by recipients such as we. So why waste your precious time and energy on such a world where the Divine guidance looks almost out of place?" And so on.

He was not writing at all in those days. In fact, since the beginning of world War II (1939) he had been engrossed in directing all his Yogic powers against the hounds of hell which the rise of Hitler had unleashed.*

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*on September 3, 1943 he wrote to me a long letter which I might as well quote here in part because it is relevant. After explaining what the spiritual issue was and why the World War II should not be looked upon "as a fight between nations and governments — still less between good people and bad people — but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric (Diabolic)," he went on to add: "What we have to see is — on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once make themselves instruments of the Divine purpose in spite of all defects, errors, wrong movements and actions which are common to human nature and all human collectivities. The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side (the Axis) would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished. That is the whole question and all other considerations are either irrelevant or of a minor importance. The Allies at least have stood for human values, though they may often act against their own best ideals (human beings always do that); Hitler stands for diabolical values or for human values exaggerated in the wrong way until they become diabolical (e.g. the virtues of the Herrenvolk, the master race). That does not make the English or Americans nations of spotless angels nor the Germans a wicked and sinful race, but as an indicator it has a primary importance."

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Nevertheless as soon as he saw how urgently I needed the balm of his spiritual solace he answered — in February, 1942 — and an answer of light it was to my soul groping in darkness.

"The question you have put," he wrote, "raises one of the most difficult and complicated of all problems and to deal with it adequately would need an answer as long as the longest chapter of my Life Divine. I can only state my own knowledge, founded not on reasoning but on experience, that there is such a guidance
and that nothing is in vain in this universe

If we look only at the outward facts in their surface appearance or if we regard what we see happening around us as definitive, not as processes of a moment in a developing whole, the guidance is not apparent; at most we see interventions occasional or sometimes frequent. The guidance can become evident only if we go behind appearances and begin to understand ' the forces at work and the way of their working and their secret significance. After all, real knowledge — even scientific knowledge — comes by going behind the surface phenomena to their hidden process and causes. It is quite obvious that this world is full of suffering and afflicted with transience to a degree that seems to justify the Gita's description of it as this 'unhappy and transient world" — anityam asukham lokam. The question is whether it is a mere creation of chance governed by a mechanical inconscient Law or whether there is a meaning in it and some thing beyond its present appearance towards which we move. If there is a meaning and if there is some thing towards which things are evolving, then — inevitably — there must be a guidance — and that means that there is a supporting Consciousness and Will with which we can come into an inner contact. If there is such a Consciousness and Will, it is not likely that it would stultify itself by annulling the world's meaning or turning it into a perpetual or eventual failure.

"This world has a double aspect. It seems to be based on a material Inconscience and an ignorant mind and life full of that Inconscience; error and sorrow, death and suffering are the necessary consequences. But there is evidently, too, a partially

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successful endeavour and an imperfect : growth towards Light, Knowledge, Truth, Good, Happiness, Harmony, Beauty — at least a partial flowering of these things;,.*.The meaning of this world must evidently lie in this opposition; it must be an evolution which is leading or struggling towards higher things nut of a first darker appearance. Whatever guidance there is must be given under these conditions of opposition and struggle and must be leading towards that higher state of things. It is leading the individual certainly, and the world presumably, towards the higher state but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be, ordinarily, a guidance which at once rejects the darker terms, still less a guidance which brings us solely and always nothing but happiness, success and good fortune. Its main concern is with the growth of our being and consciousness, the growth towards a higher self, towards the Divine, eventually towards a higher Light, Truth and Bliss; the rest is secondary, sometimes a means, sometimes a result, not a primary purpose.

"The true sense of the guidance becomes clearer when we can go deep within and see from there more intimately the play of the forces and receive intimations of the Will behind them. The surface mind can only get an imperfect glimpse. When we are in contact with the Divine or in contact with an inner knowledge or vision, we begin to see all the circumstances of our life in a new light and observe how they all tended without our knowing it towards the growth of our being and consciousness, towards the work we had to do, towards some development that had to be made — not only what seemed good,

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*Cf. Savitri, Book VI, Canto I:

Through Nature's contraries we draw near to God;

Out of the darkness we still grow to light.

Death is our road to immortality.

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fortunate or successful, but also the struggles, failures, difficulties, upheavals. But with each person the guidance works differently according to his nature, the conditions of his life, the cast of his consciousness, the stage of his development, his need of further experience. We are not automata but conscious beings and our mentality, our will and its decisions, our attitude to life and demand on it, our motives and movements help to determine our course; they may lead to much suffering and evil, but through it all the guidance makes use of them for our growth in experience and consequently the development of our being and consciousness. All advance by however devious ways, even in spite of what seems a going backwards or going astray, gathering whatever experience is necessary for the soul's destiny. When we are in close contact with the Divine, a protection can come which helps or directly guides or moves us: it does not throw aside all difficulties, sufferings or dangers, but it carries us through them and out of them — except where for a special
purpose there is need of the opposite.

"It is the same thing though on a larger scale and in a more complex way with the guidance of the world movement. That seems to move according to the conditions and laws or forces of the movement through constant vicissitudes, but still there is something in it that drives towards the evolutionary purpose, although it is more difficult to see, understand and follow than in the smaller and more intimate field of the individual consciousness and life. What happens at a particular juncture of the world-action or the life of humanity, however catastrophical, is not ultimately determinative. Here, too, one has to see not only the outward play of forces in a particular case or at a particular time but also the inner and secret play, the far-off outcome, the event that lies beyond and the will at Work behind it all. Falsehood and Darkness are strong everywhere on the earth, and have always been so and at times they seem to dominate; but there have also been not only gleams but outbursts of the Light. In the maze of things and the long course of Time, whatever may be the appearance of

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this or that epoch or movement, the growth of Light is there and the struggle towards better things does not cease. At the present time False hood and Darkness have gathered their forces and are extremely powerful; but even if we reject the assertion of the mystics and prophets since early times that such a condition of things must precede the Manifestation and is even a sign of its approach, yet it does not necessarily indicate the decisive victory — even temporary — of the Falsehood. It merely means that the struggle between the forces is at its acme. The result may very well be the stronger emergence of the best that can be; for the world movement often works in that way. I leave it at that and say nothing more.

"Uma Bose had reached a stage of her development marked by a predominance of the sattwic nature but not a strong vital (which works towards a successful or fortunate life) or the opening to a higher light — her mental upbringing and surroundings stood against that and she herself was not ready. The early death and much suffering may have been the result of past (prenatal) influences or they may have been chosen by her psychic being as a passage towards a higher state for which she was not yet prepared but towards which she was moving. This and the non-fulfilment of her capacities could be a final tragedy if there were this life alone. As it is, she has passed towards the psychic sleep to prepare for her life to come."

Yes, he was always like that: so ready to comply whenever I invited him to help — no matter who it was. And it was with the same kind interest that he dealt with a genius or a multimillionaire as with a wastrel or an orphan. Also, he did it so spontaneously — almost as if it was the least he could do — that it was, indeed, sometimes difficult to be grateful to him or even to identify it as compassion. How often have I wondered whether this might not have been due to his way of giving: he made as though he simply had to come to people's help without criticizing them at all. I wrote to him once that his way of "reforming by love as against reprimand" did remind one of Vivekananda's famous dictum: "Every step that has been really

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gained in the world has been gained by love; criticizing can never do any good; it has been tried for thousands of years. Condemnation accomplishes nothing."*

And yet what was this love which he or Vivekananda had so vividly realised? Can we ever really know from our experience of love on the human level? What was the love which had made him stake everything dear to mortals for something we did not even understand — the Supermind, whose "advent" he foresaw and proclaimed as "inevitable"? Some of his critics blindly charged him with an inordinate ambition. Once I conveyed to him that these critics poohpoohed him because he was lusting for greatness and wanting to achieve something (the Supermind) which even Krishna did not succeed in establishing on earth. To that he wrote:

"It is not for personal greatness that I am seeking to bring 'down the Supermind. I care nothing for greatness or littleness in the human sense. I am seeking to bring some principle of inner Truth, Light, Harmony, Peace into the earth consciousness. I see it above and know what it is — I feel it ever gleaming down on my consciousness from above and I am seeking to make it possible for it to take up the whole being into its own native power, instead of the nature of man continuing to remain in half-light, half-darkness. I believe the descent of this Truth opening the way to a development of divine consciousness here to be the final sense of the earth-evolution. If greater men than myself have not had this vision and this ideal before them, that is no reason why I should not follow my Truth-sense and Truth vision. If human reason regards me as a fool for trying to do what Krishna did not try, I do not in the least care. There is no question of X or Y or anybody else in that. It is a question between the Divine and myself— whether it is the Divine Will or not, whether I am sent to bring that down or open the way for its descent or at least make it more possible or not. Let all men jeer at me if they will or all hell fall upon me if it will for my

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* Inspired Talks P. 75.

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presumption — I go on till I conquer or perish. This is the spirit in which I seek the Supermind, no hunting for greatness for myself or others."

Unfortunately, human nature has a penchant for sectarianism which seems to be all but ineradicable. That is why even so soul-stirring and unexceptionable a letter was misinterpreted by some who accused him of belittling Krishna's greatness. But though by nature unpretentious and pacifist,* he would, if his vision demanded it, ruthlessly sweep aside everything and cut away from his moorings of tradition and custom to answer the call of his soul of flame. But alas, we, who have learnt to idolize reason, have grown a little too prone to regard faith somewhat à a Don Quixote who may, on occasions, be lovable and entertaining, but is, by and large, too simple to be taken seriously. When, however, we choose thus to let reason deride faith we forget that two can play at that game, Faith being able to retort that Reason, too, may sometimes behave as that knight of famous folly when it

Sets on a high horse-back of argument

To tilt for ever with a wordy lance

In a mock tournament where none can win

(Savitri II. X).

But although his faith appealed to us, modems, because it originally emerged like fecund fire out of an impact between his heart's vision and mind's doubt, I must still confess that I myself never found it easy to keep faith with faith. But, after his passing I began dimly to see something which I can only ask those to accept who knew him for what he was. It is nothing, I repeat, but a homecoming to simple faith. For it began to dawn

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* He wrote to me in a letter somewhat light-heartedly (26.10.34) :"But all that is probably because I am constitutionally lazy (in spite of my feats of correspondence) and so prefer the easiest and the most automatic method possible.

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on me now after I had turned the full circle, that man must, at the culmination of his vision, revert to the simple child who lives by and grows in faith alone. To put it differently, we who have, by now, become all but distracted by the wordy inconclusiveness of reason must hark back again to faith — not, indeed, in rum our and hearsay but in what no babel of words can muffle: the mystic Flute-call heard by the highest spirits of every age. To us, who have heard his clarion, there can be no question of following a lesser call: we must consecrate all we have and are to achieve what he left unaccomplished (Savitri XI. I):

"To raise the world to God in deathless Light...

To change the earthly life to life divine,"

. fortified by our faith that

"Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God,

What hides within her breast she must reveal."

In my loneliness, as I pondered this — the dominant message of his Yoga and refrain of his poetry — I realised as never before how self-willed we, his disciples, had been, how recalcitrant and unhelpful, more or less! and a remark of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov recurred to me that each of us must be held partly responsible for the total misery and suffering of the world. I found it impossible now to dismiss this disquieting thought because I could no longer, alas, disclaim my own share of the responsibility: Did I not, I asked myself, follow my dark self-will every time he came to me with his lead of light? I cannot even now fully understand, far less explain, why I had gone on taking the stand I did against his gospel of faith when I had been persuaded at the very start that reason by itself could never deliver us out of the deep maze of the unenlightened ego, the primal parent of global misery! But now that he has departed, let us no more waste our time on idle brooding but hark back to the Gita's assurance that no living fire of aspiration can peter out in ash. And has there ever breathed in these Godless days a

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fierier aspirant, a purer poet of the Spirit, a more musical "Messenger of the communicable" than he? This thought lashed me as with a scourge in Varanasi (where I was collecting funds for the Ashram) on the 5th of December when I heard over the radio the news of his withdrawal. For I realised then, with a pang, how : grievously even we had failed him — we, his disciples who, instead of lightening his burden had only rendered it heavier by our constant refusal to accept his message of the "greater Light above" — the Light he had followed with such a Godly ardour in a. world where Grace is dismissed as a myth and faith derided as a cliche. But now that he has left us, it is idle to rue our past delinquencies and sigh over what might have been. Let us rather strive to accept his message in the firm faith that what he achieved and realised remains true for all times and for all aspirants, as he himself wrote to me once in one of his most moving letters containing perhaps the kernel of his faith and the guiding mantra of his life.

"As for faith," he wrote, "you write as if I never had a doubt or any difficulty. I have had worse than any human mind can think of. It is not because I ha e ignored difficulties, but because I have seen them more clearly, experienced them on a larger scale than any one living now or before me, that having faced and measured them, I am sure of the result of my work. But even if I still saw the chance that it might come to nothing I would go on unperturbed, because I would still have done to the best of my power the work that I have to do and what is so done always counts in the economy of the universe. But why should I feel that all this may come to nothing when I see each step and where it is leading and every week and every day — it was every year and month and hereafter it will be every day and hour — brings me so much nearer to my goal? In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and has its value and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be

I do not claim that we can hope to emulate him. But we shall be utterly false too him if we now assume an attitude of false

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humility pleading that we cannot possibly count. For it is because each of us, however small and insignificant, does count "in the economy of the universe", that he counted no cost in slaving for us sleeplessly to "bring the Immortal's knowledge into man's cave of birth."* To be called by him is to be chosen as his instruments, however inconspicuous, for his divine work, the task for which he sacrificed everything and dedicated all he had and was. I cannot honestly say, alas, that to me, personally, he is as good as living (as some others claim he is to them); but I do believe that what he achieved was for all times and all aspirants the world over, as otherwise one would have to conclude that he has failed, in the last analysis. To believe that would be disbelieving him since he asserted that he could not possibly fail. But not to disbelieve is not enough: we must, each of us, follow his lead with an one-pointed ardour which admits of no discouragement — that is the call of the hour. In other words, we must live up to his exhortation. But, for that to be possible, we must first claim the legacy of his vision that destiny's iron law can be changed by the human will and indomitable aspiration because, Ito quote his words (Savitri III. IV):

The high gods look on man. and watch and choose
Today's impossibles for the future's base.

A new faith burgeoned deep down in my core and a new vista opened when I beheld, for the last time, his statuesque face of bliss lying in regal repose of Yoganidra conscious sleep

________________________

*Quoted from a poem of his published posthumously in LAST POEMS:

/ have sailed the golden ocean

And crossed the silver bar;

I have reached the Sun of knowledge

The earth-self's midnight star...
The Light was still around me

When If came back to earth
Bringing the Imnmortal's knowledge

Into mean's cave of birth.

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with an aureole around him which seemed reluctant to depart. The Goal is, indeed, still far and the path remains steep and strait. For all that, in rare moments one does still feel, even in this stifling world, a sense of vast release accruing through the strange dispensation of a Wisdom too far to be hailed as kin and, withal, too vivid to be dismissed as mere fantasy of a chance mood. And this can become more than a fugitive glimpse only if we aspire after it as single-mindedly as he did. For then alone shall it be given to us to break the bars of the cage against which the prisoned Bird of Fire must go on beating its bleeding wings till the cage is transmuted by Divine Grace into a Temple of Love claiming kinship with the skies of Light — when

A greater truth than earth's shall roof-in earth

And shed its' sunlight on the roads of mind;

A power infallible shall lead the thought...

In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal 's fire,

A soul shall wake in the Inconscient's house,

The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle,

The body intuition's instrument,

And life a channel for God's visible power.

And in that hour

And all the earth become a single life

Even the multitude shall hear the Voice...

Humanity awake to the deepest self. *..

_____________________

* Savitri... The Book of Everlasting Day.

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