Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER XIV

Sri Aurobindo's Message

Sri Aurobindo was not a man easy to fathom, nor were his breathtaking messages all easy to understand. I remember once he wrote to me years ago, in 1928: "Nobody except myself can write about my life because it has not been on the surface for man to see." Nevertheless, since then, a few notable biographers have written about his life as it has come within their purview and, within limits, they are good — that is, as far as they go. Only they do not — cannot — go far enough. I remember: in 1949, under a huge pandal in Calcutta, lecturer after lecturer spoke eloquently about his great gifts and achievements. Most of them spoke about his revolutionary zeal; a few about his deep erudition; some about his academic attainments, blaring flamboyantly that he stood first in Latin and Greek in Cambridge; some others dilated on his great sacrifice, courting prison and braving the hangman's noose (one of them quoted Kazi Nazrul Islam's famous poem "phansir manche geye gechejarajibanerjoygan" — those who on the scaffold sang lone paeans to deathless life): some panegyrised his articles in the revolutionary days galvanising his frustrated countrymen out of their torpor of inactivity and despair; a sombre, whiskered professor recited menacingly Rabindranath's famous poem "Salutation"* — Probably the finest tribute that has been written about him so far; a

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*This magnificent poem, entitled Namaskar, was written by Rabindranath in Bengali in 1907, when Sri Aurobindo was arrested on 'a charge of sedition. To quote a few lines from Sri Khitish Chandra Sen's translation published later in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry:

"Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee!

O friend, my country's friend, 0 voice incarnate, free,

Of India's soul!....

When I behold thy face, 'mid bondage, pain and wrong

And black indignities, I hear the soul's great song

Of rapture unconfined....." etc.

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high brow scholar enlarged on his greatness as a master of English prose and verse; but nobody except Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Motilal Roy spoke about the Seer who sang of Man's power and dare to conquer grim Fate and, dying to his human ego, to be reborn to claim his lost heritage of Godhood. But how far have even they, his dear disciples, seen into the heart of the divine rapture or the import of the momentous vision of Krishna which had transformed him and made him write in 1939 (Krishna, Last Poems):

I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,

And heard the passion of the Lover's flute,

And known a deathless ecstasy's surprise

And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.

Nearer and nearer now the music — draws;

Life shudders with a strange felicity;

All Nature is a wide enamoured pause :

Hoping her Lord to touch, to clasp, to be.

So I have often wondered whether we can ever possibly win even a clue to what he aspired to achieve through his breath-taking sadhana of Supramental extending over four decades or the nature of the tremendous urge which had made him stake everything to attain what he told me in 1943 he ha d "come for". (I have written about this in my book Among the Great, P. 359) Some armchair critics, alas, have raised their eyebrows and said: "Well, why gush over one who, after all, didn't achieve anything very tangible?" But I have often marvelled whether we can possibly assess today the full impact on us and posterity of the light he had achieved and constantly radiated — the light which made Rabindranath write after his interview with him in 1928: "At the very first sight I could realise that he had been seeking for the soul and had gained it ...His face was radiant with an inner light and ... I felt that the utterance of the ancient Hindu Rishi spoke from him of that equanimity which gives the human soul its freedom of entrance into the All. And I said to Him: You have the Word and we are waiting to accept it from you. India will speak through your voice to the world: 'Hearken to me!'" (Shrinvantu vishve amritasya putrah — Shvetashvatar Upanishad).

I had a talk about the great Sage with Rabindranath at his Calcutta residence directly after his return from Pondicherry. He said that he

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had been deeply moved by his personality and spoke to me with bated breath about the "light" on his face (he used the word dipti in Bengali) and added with a smile: "I am also thinking of going into seclusion like him for some time." I laughed and said: Don't be carried away Poet. We will rout you out of your cloister."

I refer to this lightly, but I don't mean to be flippant; I have mentioned it only to emphasize that no perceptive person who has seen Sri Aurobindo even once can have failed to be startled by something in him which cannot be put into words. When, in 1924,1 first saw his self-luminous face, it just took my breath away and I wrote, describing my impression — to quote from my Among the Great (p.204): '" A radiant personality!', sang the very air about him. A deep aura of peace encircled him, an ineffable yet magnetic peace that drew you almost at once into its magic orbit."

Thereafter, every time I saw him my blood broke out into song. Once, as I felt a rapturous heave in my heart, having glimpsed what he had come for, I sang:

Thou comst to announce: "Man must regain

The heritage he's born to win

Soul, pent in matter, shall attain

Through aspiration the Evergreen."

Not I alone, but all who came to him with an open mind had a glimpse, like Rabindranath, of the Rishi in him, the great seer who had announced in the Upanishad:

Vedaham etam Purusham mahantam

Adityavarnam tamasah parastat

I know the One,

Great and effulgent like the sun,

Stationed beyond

The ambit of dark despond

This is not an overstatement. For I know of no true seeker who, after having received his hand-touch of blessing on his head, did not come back with a heave in his heart, his blood tingling. Even those who have had a speck of faith felt somewhat like the Jews who had

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marvelled about Christ and said that "he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes" — the authority that accrues to one who has seen the One stationed beyond our global gloom. That is why when we read his poems we cannot help but feel that it is not a mere work of art but the compelling vision of a Rishi or, shall we say, a seer-cum-minstrel, who cannot help but sing of what he has seen as for instance when he writes in his heart-warming poem. Who:

"The Master of man and his infinite Lover,

He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see''

We are blind with our pride and the pomp of our passions.

We are bound in our thoughts where we hold ourselves free.

I say "compelling" because vision of Beauty at a certain intensity does create faith — only, may I add, that by beauty here I do not mean that purely formal loveliness which a mere artist fashions with his native gift or admirable skill. I speak here of that apocalyptic Beauty which, once glimpsed by the soul, confers on the seer the power to convince as e.g. it did on Sri Aurobindo when he wrote in the same poem:

"We will tell the whole world of His ways and His cunning:

He has rapture of torture and passion and pain;

He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping,

Then lures with His joy and His beauty again

And is not such Beauty, His beauty, all-pervasive?—

"All music is only the sound of His laughter'

All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss''

Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal

Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss."

Unfortunately, however, those who have not been accorded even a fugitive glimpse of what a Rishi has envisioned are apt to dub him a visionary, a dreamer. But those who have seen him and thrilled to his love's contact must feel they are blessed for having seen what so few have glimpsed: to wit, the love divine that flowers in him through Heaven's magic touch — the love about which he wrote to me in a letter, in 1934: "It is only divine love which can bear the burden I have

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to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine."

It is this love — not the purely human love we humans know of, a blend of gold and alloy, but the inviolate love purged of its dross — which has inspired his epic poem, Savitri, wherein he has limned his breath-taking Realisation of Divine Love with a convincingness which though our intellect cannot comprehend, our hearts cannot help but accept as the last pinnacle of Attainment.

I know, of course, that those who long to soar to the Empyrean on reason's feeble clay-wings will fail to endorse his Experience as valid. But those who have nursed even a spark of that flame-aspiration which is native to the soul will be moved by the flame-accent of the Vision of the Supramental Descent as portrayed in his Savitri. So, knowing full well how "our blind thoughts" must constantly "refuse what our souls 'accept,"* he came to show us how we may grow to see with the soul's third eye that "Heaven's touch fulfils but cancels not our earth," as he has stressed through his mouthpiece Savitri. Apropos, I am reminded of a question I once put to him when I was in the doldrums. He wrote back: "As for your question whether Heaven wants Man, the answer is that if Heaven did not want him he would not want Heaven." (April, 1936)

Years later, he improvised on this theme with the deeper suggestiveness of poetry (Savitri I. IV):

"A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:

His nature we must put on as He put ours."

which is the reason why (ibid. II, I):

"Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield, The forge where the Arch-mason shapes his works"

Then, as though to bring out the full import of Krishna's famous dictum:

No sincere endeavour ever peters out

To leave things where they were; aye, even a spark

Of aspiration. silvers clouds of fear, (Gita, 2.40)

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*Our hearts accept what our blind thoughts refuse - Savitri

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he exhorted us to hark back to the eternal values as against the temporal and disown the besetting fear of failure, assuring us (Savitri 1.2)

"A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force."

and so, it is not an overstatement that

"One mighty deed can change the course of things."

Thus he vindicated his deep vision of the Soul's insistence on ultimate victory over Fate's "iron law" and Matter's downpull (Savitri 2.4)

"The life that wins its aims asks greater aims,

The life that fails and dies must live again....

Till it has found itself it cannot cease."

And he cannot halt or rest in a half-way house because (ibid 1.4):

"We are sons of God and must be even as He:

His human portion, we must grow divine,

Our life is a paradox with God for key"

The time-old "paradox" has its roots in the deep hiatus between Matter and Spirit in that if one denied a superconscient Spirit sustaining earth-life on the ground that nothing unattested by one's mind and senses can be accepted as 'real' then one must land plop in rank materialism and repudiate any divine purpose in life. One must, because such a purpose being beyond the mental comprehension, one cannot help but dub the world an impossible creation which has, somehow, been fathered by blind chance. But no seer worth his salt can accept such a solution because he has seen what the Sage Narad asserts (ibid. 6.2.):

This world was not built with random bricks of chance,

A blind God is not our destiny's architect:

A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,

There is a meaning in each curve and line.

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So why give in to despair or depression bred by failures when the

ultimate victory is certain, because (ibid. 6.2):

"The spirit rises mightier by defeat;

Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall,

Its splendid failures sum to victory."

They must, because (ibid 3.4):

"The high gods look on man and watch and choose

Today's impossibles for the future's base."

And so, Sri Aurobindo, the born missionary of the spirit, with the light of morning in his eyes, teaches us every time through his life and words, his acts and withdrawals — aye, even through his gesture and long spells of silence — that when one is called by God one must leave aside all other calls — of lesser loves. Which is why he declined when adjured by his countrymen, to come out of his seclusion to resume his political leadership. He had to, as a man must die to his old self of personal ambition and desires before he can be reborn to the creative freedom of the divine life:

"All that denies must be torn out and slain And crushed the many longings for whose sake We lose the One for whom our lives were made."

(ibid 3.2)

Is this not a noble commentary on India's hoariest wisdom:

Twameva viditwa ati mrityum eti

Nanyah pantha vidyate ayaynaya (Shvetashvatar)

Only when man has known the One, he wins ,

To Immortality; there is no other

Short cut to the radiant pinnacle salvation.

It is not possible here even to touch on all that he taught us through what he had become. (He wrote to me once: "The ultimate value of a man is not to be measured by what he says nor even by what he does, but by what he becomes") But I feel that his greatest message was the one which, when he was in the Alipore jail, Krishna had so thrillingly

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missioned him to convey to us all. There, just when his faith had wavered, the Lord of the Gita had come to him in person and revealed to His "rare greati-souled devotee that all was Vasudeva"* and (to quote his own resonant words):

"... His strength entered into me. I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me His shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayan who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arm of Sri Krishna around me — the arms of my Friend and Lover." (Uttarpara Speech)

And the Friend and Lover said to Him: "I have given you a work and it is to help and uplift this nation...... lam raising up this nation to send forth My word. This is the Sanatana Dharma, this is the eternal religion which you did not really know before, but which I have now revealed to you. The agnostic and the sceptic in you have been answered, for I have given you proofs within and without you, physical and subjective, which have satisfied you. When you go forth, speak to your nation always this word, that it is for the Sanatana Dharma that they arise, it is for the world and not for themselves that they arise. I am giving them freedom for the service of the world. When, therefore, it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists**

So he concluded his momentous speech with: "I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatana Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows.

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* Vasudevah sarvam iti sa mahatma sudurlabhah (The Gita, 7.19).

** Na jatu kaman na bhayan na lobhat

Dharmam tyajet jeevitasyapi hetoh

Nityo dharmah sukha-duhkhe anitye

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When the Sanatoria Dharma declines, then the nation declines and if the Sanatoria Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatana Dharma it would perish. The Sanatana Dharma, that is nationalism.

This is the message that I have to speak to you."

Thereafter he stayed loyal all his life, for well over four decades, to this mission of his which he expressed afterwards so vibrantly in his Savitri (Book of Everlasting Day):

/ lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,

I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,

I yoke thee to my power of work in Time.

Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,

Because thou hast chosen to share earth's struggle and fate

And leaned in pity over earth-bound men

and turned aside to help and yearned to save.

I bind by thy heart's passion thy heart to mine

And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.

Now will I do in thee my marvellous works.

I will fasten thy nature with my cords of strength,

Subdue to my delight thy spirit's limbs

And make thee a vivid knot of all my bliss,

And build in thee my proud and crystal home."

And then:

"Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,

My garden of life to plant a seed divine.

When all thy work in human time is done,

The mind of earth shall be a home of light,

The body of earth a tabernacle of God."

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Jeevo nityo hetur asya tvanityah.

Thou shall not disown dharma on earth, impelled

By greed, concupiscence or fear, for know

That dharma is eternal, whereas joy

And pain are transient; the soul is everliving,

Although its basis in the world's unstable.

—Cf. Mahabharat — Last Canto.

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Till gradually:

"A heavenlier passion shall upheave men's lives,

Their mind shall share in the ineffable gleam,

Their hearts shall feel the ecstasy and the fire,

Earth's bodies shall be conscious of a soul;

Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds,

Mere men into spiritual beings grow And see awake the dumb divinity...

And, lastly:

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act.

A sudden bliss shall run through every limb

And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.

Thus shall the earth open to divinity

And common natures feel the wide uplift,

Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray

And meet the Deity in common things.

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine."

Then the gulf between Matter and Spirit shall be finally bridged, and:

"The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze

And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's Face."

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