APPENDIX II
We often say, in common parlance, that so and so is (or was) a great man. It is not easy to define what we mean by this epithet. But the feeling — or shall I say, the conviction — is not misty any more than the impression of beauty is. Sri Krishnaprem is an instance in point. He impinged on the heart with a force that told. Of course this applies only to those whose hearts have a —sense of spiritual values. For politicians or materialists may not react favourably to such personalities. For them, therefore, Sri Krishnaprem may exist merely as the memory of a robust man — intelligent, indeed, but too much of a day-dreamer to be taken seriously. But my humble tribute to him, now that he is no more, is not meant for such appraisers: for they will persist, alas, in being too sensible to credit the reality of the things of the spirit — values to be dismissed simply with a sceptic shrug. Fortunately for us, however, believers are born and, once born, do grow in faith, responding progressively to mystical fervour and spiritual consciousness. It is for these that I write — or rather, all believers write — firmly persuaded that the sceptic must stay recalcitrant to the light of mystic wisdom for which great souls like Krishnaprem stake their all and win. The reason is that the doubting Thomas not only shuts out the light he wants to perceive to be convinced, but actually plumes himself on the void he prefers to the plentitude of the spiritual life. To each his Eden, as Sri Aurobindo was wont to say, whenever the ignorant eschewed the heights in favour of the abyss of darkness they cherished.
Personally, I came to profit most from the mystic wisdom of two persons I had come to know intimately through the love
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and admiration they inspired in me from the first: to wit, Sri Aurobindo and Sri Krishnaprem. When I say this I do not, of course, include the great saints and sages of the past who had won me over to their light long before I met these two great personalities. I only stress hereby the sense of blessedness that accrues to us when we have actually communed with the spiritual figures we have adored. This was borne home to me more and more as I grew to love them more and more, because, among other things, each in turn buttressed as it were my love for the other. But that is not the whole story; for I must add here that I felt not only refreshed but fortified by Krishnaprem's bowing down to Sri Aurobindo. Happily, I was instrumental in bringing them into direct contact again and again through the letters they went on writing to me which, by and large, served as the bridge between them ever since I had built it accidentally to draw them closer to each other, even though there could be no question of Krishnaprem's accepting Sri Aurobindo as his Guru. In fact, once, from Almora, he wrote to me, years ago, in reply to my invitation, that although he had the deepest reverence for Sri Aurobindo, he did not feel like coming to Pondicherry since he could get all the inspiration he needed from his own Guru. A little hurt by this, I went to the Mother with his letter. To my surprise, she not only supported him but actually praised him to the skies and told me: "That is the ideal attitude for any aspirant who has already accepted a Guru: to wit, to stick to him, refusing to turn to any other Master for Guidance." Sri Aurobindo also wrote to me when Krishnaprem contended that all true Gurus were the same.
"All true Gurus are the same, the one Guru, all are the one Divine. That is a fundamental and universal Truth which justifies Krishnaprem's statement. But there is also a truth of difference; the Divine dwells in different personalities with different minds, teachings and influences so that He may lead different disciples with their special need, character and destiny by different ways to the realisation: that justifies Krishnaprem's own action. Because all Gurus are the same Divine, it does not follow
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that the disciple does well if he leaves the one meant for him to follow another. Fidelity to the Guru is demanded of every disciple, according to Indian tradition. Krishnaprem has that fidelity; he feels the spiritual tie holding him to his Guru in life and even after her departure; that is why he cannot think of going to someone else. 'All are the same' is a spiritual truth, but you cannot convert it indiscriminately into action; you cannot deal with all persons in the same way because they are the one Brahman: if one did, the result, pragmatically, would be an awful mess. You yourself have always in your heart laid stress on the principle of fidelity; Krishnaprem does the same so you ought to find it easy to understand his standpoint. It is a rigid mental logic that makes the difficulty, but in spiritual matters mental logic easily blunders; intuition, faith and a plastic spiritual reason are here the only guides."
A few years later Krishnaprem visited our Ashram at Pondicherry and he responded warmly to Sri Aurobindo's spiritual touch and blessings. And he made a very characteristic gesture which I shall never forget, a gesture of simple sincerity with a charm all his own. It was in November, 1948.1 took him up to the Mother and introduced him to her. He said that he had come for her blessings that he might give himself without re serve to his Guru and Krishna. Mother held his eyes for nearly a minute, then said:
"But you have given yourself."
"Not enough," he answered.
Mother told us subsequently that his words had made a deep impression on her; and yet he had spoken but a few words!
He then went to tour South India and visited the famous temple of Srirangam where he had a marvellous experience amounting to a revelation. Meanwhile I appealed to Gurudev to write to me in a few lines his impression of Krishnaprem when he had come to pay his respects to him at darshan. He wrote back.
"I do not quite know what to write in the few lines you asked from me nor how to write it. Perhaps I could only repeat from my side what he himself said about 'establishing a contact'. But
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a spiritual contact cannot be easily defined in mental terms, they are usually insufficient to express it. If it is some impressions about himself or his spiritual person or his more outward personality that you are thinking of, there too I find it difficult to put it into language; these things in a moment like that are felt rather than thought out and it may not be easy to throw them into mental terms at once. Perhaps the only thing I could say is that they have confirmed and deepened and made more living the impressions I had already formed about him from his letters to you and what came through them and from such psychical contact as I had already made from a distance, for the contact itself is not distant. You know very well the value I have always put upon his insight into spiritual things, the brilliance and accuracy of his thought and vision and expression of them (I think I described it once as pashyanti vak) and on as much as I knew of his spiritual experience and constant acquisition and forward movement and many-sided largeness. A closer perception of the spiritual person behind that is something more than a mental impression. I think this is all I can write at present and I hope it will be enough for you."
I showed this letter triumphantly to many of my friends who admired Krishanaprem and posted copies of it to many more even though I knew that he would never approve of such publicity. But I, in my turn, having an equal, almost congenital, aversion to being gagged, had to fight for my raison d'etre. So I used to quote for his edification the great simile of Sri Ramakrishna: 'There are two types of men: one goes to a mango grove and comes back happy but keeps his own counsel; the other comes back and directs all and sundry to the matchless orchard." I belong to the second category, that is why I tell you that I have tasted God and as such can testify to His matchless savour which you too, can verily if only you will.
"So", I would plead, "I can't help but tell those who long to meet an authentic devotee — but meet, alas, only mountebanks — that the twenty four carat gold of spirituality does obtain even in our age of loud politics and materialism, though not in
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the open shop-windows which catch the eyes of all and sundry."
It was, I think, about the beginning of 1923 — when I was staying in Lucknow with Prof. Dhurjati Mukherji — that we were asked to tea by the famous poet-composer, Atul Prasad Sen. I can still recapture in my memory the radiant face of a young Englishman (of about my age) seated, a pipe in his mouth, on a sofa. The poet said to me: "This is Ronald Nixon, Dilip, our brilliant Professor — an English Hindu or a Hindu English- man, if you like."
We laughed and the person at whose expense we made merry out laughed us all. I fell in love with him at first sight and, on my return home, told Dhurjati, the bibliophil, that I had recalled his favourite Marlowe's: "who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"
We met here and there. I used to sing everywhere and Nixon (as we called him then) loved my songs, especially my hymns to Krishna. I visited Lucknow once or twice a year and felt so happy because he was there. His contact was delightful, conversation illuminating and faith in Hinduism inspiring. I was wont to listen with rapt attention when he discussed the Vedas, the Gita, the Tantra etc. — notably with a savant, Sri Jagadish Chatterji. When the "intellectuals" were not there, I put questions to him which he answered with his luminous clarity and charm. I often kept notes of these talks. Once he said:
"Europe never forgets, Dilip, that bread is necessary; only she forgets, too easily, that man does not live by bread alone. But you, as a Hindu, should not adopt the European as your Guru for showing you the way, since it has been shown you by your own great ancestors ages ago. Remember Krishna:
Manmana bhava madbhaktah madyaji mam namaskuru
Mamevaishyasi satyam te pratijane priyosi me.
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This he translated himself in his Yoga of Bhagavadgita thus:
"Fix thy mind on Me, give thy heart's love to Me, consecrate all thy actions to My service, hold thine own self as nothing before Me. To Me then shalt thou come, truly I promise for thou art dear to Me."
He used to be a great admirer in those days of Buddha, Krishna, the mystic in Lawrence, the Tantras, the Gita (he read the Bhagavat years later) and the Upanishads. One day, when our talk centred round Sri Aurobindo, he said in passing, that Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita had made the deepest impression on his mind and that he had never come across a better exegesis of Krishna's Triune path. It was this casual remark which came in the course of the next few years, to revolutionize my life. But the great call to Sri Aurobindo, the Seer-poet, was yet to come. Meanwhile I toured India, "hunting for music in the heart of din," learning new styles of our classical music, writing travelogues etc., and wrote to Krishnaprem from time to time telling him all about my thrilling discoveries as a musicologue.
The only letter of his I still have of this period (I regret I have lost the rest) is from Lucknow dated January, 1927. I will only quote here the closing paragraph:*
"For myself, Dilip, though I can be tolerant to all countries, I have only one, and that, strange to say, is not England but India. What I feel is that the wealth of tradition which is a nation is too precious a thing to be merged into a common hotchpotch from London to Yokohama. If we confine ourselves to Europe (at least Western Europe) the case is somewhat different as the traditions are more or less common; but can England and India, say, be mixed so philanthropically without doing vital injury to both? When the traditions of a nation die, then the nation is dead, and even if it persists as a great Power in the world, yet it is nothing but an aggregate of meaningless individuals determinedly
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*The full letter is printed in Part III of "Yogi Sri Krishnaprem" — D.K.R.
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pursuing their contemptible aims. History is a symbol, and what that symbol signifies is something infinitely more precious than a mere peddling adherence to so called facts. There is only one root fact anywhere, and that is the Eternal One. Whatever helps to reveal Him is a fact, and whatever helps to hide Him is a lie even if all the fools in the world affirm it."
After that he turned more and more towards Krishna till he came to accept Him as his Ishta (Lord) — about the middle twenties, I believe, when he took initiation form his Guru, Yasoda Ma. I may be wrong here about the date, but I do remember having heard from him once that he had turned first towards Buddha, then towards the Vedanta till, in the end, he surrendered— to quote his own words — "at the feet of his Guru the burden of all that the world counts valuable in order to find the hidden treasure for which most men have no eyes." And it came about like this.
He had confided to me that he had taken a Guru, but as he seemed rather reticent, I left it at that. But the professors wagged their tongues freely, the more so as many a rich father with nubile daughters went on inviting him under all sorts of transparent pretexts which could fool nobody. They did think him eccentric, but his bright personality and brilliant lectures attracted many a lady student and so Dame Gossip had a field day with her speculations. I remember how we chaffed him about his 'intentions' and how heartily he laughed it all away, till, one day, he threw a bomb-shell, announcing, at a tea-party, that he had accepted a lectureship in English at the Hindu University, Varanasi. It was then that his learned friends conferred together and decided that it had ceased to be a laughing matter.
"You must persuade him, Dilip, at any cost," they appealed to me in a deputation, in deep alarm. "A professor of the Hindu University gets only about Rs.300/- per month, whereas he is getting here already Rs.800/- and it will increase, in due course, to Rs.1,200/- or even more. He may even come to flower out into a Vice-Chancellor with his brilliant gifts, not to mention his popularity ......"
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"You never once told me that you had definitely decided to bid good-bye to Lucknow!" I complained to him that evening when I had him to myself at last.
"Who told you?" he returned, with a half-smile.
"Who but your colleagues — the lecturers and professors. And they are rather offended because you never thought fit to consult them even once."
He gave me an affectionate pat on my shoulder. "Don't take it amiss, Dilip," he said "The fact is, I was thoroughly sick of Lucknow and its gossips and didn't feel the least urge to stimulate the tongue-waggers any further. But why on earth should I consult them? For what? Their advice? Oh, what do they think I came here for? To build a career and ripen into a model pedagogue with a fat income and a glib tongue which lectures on things that don't matter and baulks at those which do? They are aghast, are they because my pay in Benares is going to be a bare three hundred rupees? But I don't need even that much. Anyway, what have I to do with the blessed flesh-pots and academic honours? I came here to win something, you know, but that something is not affluence, career or splendiferous doctorates so dear to the go-getters and fame-hunters."
Inveighing against the worldly-wise, he would often get worked up and roundly castigate prudence, erudition, arrivisme and what not. On that evening he wound up with a stinging remark which I shall never forget.
"They say, these impeccable oracles of wisdom," he said with a flushed face, "that since the World-maker is invisible and unknowable, therefore the wisest thing is to make the most of our world we can know and rely on as real. But the world minus its Maker, I say can be made the most of only in one way and that is bloody."
And so he gave up his lecturership at Lucknow and went to Varanasi to follow the lead of his guru, Yasoda Ma, whom he called his Ma, that is, mother. When, subsequently in 1927, she retired to a temple-retreat, he accompanied her to her sanctuary to become once and for all, a true mendicant in Krishna's Name.
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I am not quite sure about the details of his final conversion but I can clearly recall that on my next visit to Lucknow in 1928 an admirer of his gave me a bad jolt (so bad that I could not sleep that night) when he told me bluntly that Krishnaprem had "gone the whole hog and actually taken to begging for his food in Almora!"
"It affected me so vitally because it involved a kind of psychological shame of feeling that, do what I would, I dare not go to this length. And yet surely it was not un-heard-of, especially in India where countless spiritual seekers and wandering mendicants lived on alms from day to day. I could not, indeed, help admiring his courage and audace, but nevertheless I felt sad to imagine him actually going a begging for his daily food. Neither could I dismiss from my mind his young wistful face which shone, mirroring his luminous soul. To think that the robust intellectual who used only the other day to drive on a motor-cycle at a break-neck speed through the streets of Lucknow, with me in his side-car, should be literally going about now from house to house begging for a bare handful of rice and possibly turned away by some irate householders who looked upon such vagrants as definitely harmful parasites of society! And then, everything in Lucknow reminded me of him: his friends and mine, the University grounds where we had strolled together arm-in- arm, the tea-parties which I had to attend now without him, the musical soirees where I had to sing without his dear, eager presence – in short, every scene rebuked me sternly for having stopped short where he had taken a leap into the dark, trusting to the Divine compassion alone to see to his safe landing. In the end, his absence began to haunt me so much that it would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that what he had achieved at one bound gave me just that decisive push which I needed to go over the edge staking everything that does not matter for the one thing which does.*
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* I have described at some length in Part II of my book Yogi Sri Krishnaprem how effectively his uncompromising renunciation of the world came to give me the decisive push.
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From November 1928 till March 1937, I lived in seclusion in our Yoga Ashram at Pondicherry. During this time he wrote to me scores of letters. Quite a few of these I published without his express permission. I feared of course that he would mind, but I implored him, when my fears had proved true, to consider my standpoint, namely, that the world often does not know its greatest men, thanks first, to a fundamental confusion of values and secondly, to a lack of discernment. I told him about an apposite remark of Aldous Huxley in his Along the Road: "That it is difficult to tell the genuine from the sham is proved by the fact that enormous numbers of people have made mistakes and continue to make them. Genuineness always triumphs in the long run, but at any given moment the majority of people, if they do not actually prefer the sham to the real, at least like it as much, paying an indiscriminate homage to both." I wrote to him also what the Mother had told us one day in passing: that most people who called Sri Aurobindo great based their estimate on data which could not reveal the moral core of his greatness. "That is why," she had added, "a true vision of what is the essence of greatness is indispensable, especially to the pilgrims of the Spirit — if only to obviate lamentable mental muddles." About Krishnaprem's greatness I had never had a vestige of doubt, though my appreciation of him certainly deepened when Sri Aurobindo himself, subsequently, put his mighty seal on his sincerity, courage and seeing intelligence and wrote to us again and again giving him unstinted praise. To Chadwick he wrote once: "It was Krishnaprem's power to withdraw so completely from current thoughts and general tendencies and seek (for him) a new and abiding source of knowledge that impressed me as admirable. If he had remained interested and in touch with these current human movements, I do not suppose he would have done better with them than Romain Rolland or another.
"But he has got to the Yogic view of them, the summit view, and it is the readiness with which he has been able to do it that struck me as remarkable.
"I would explain his progressing so far by the quickness and
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completeness with which he has taken inwardly the attitude of the bhakta and the disciple. That is a rare achievement for a modern mind, be he European or educated Indian; for the modem mind is analytic, dubitative, instinctively independent even when it wants to be otherwise, and holds itself back and hesitates in front of the light and the influence that comes to it; it does not plunge into it with a simple directness, crying: 'Here I am ready to throw from me all that was myself or seemed to be, if so I can enter thee; remake my consciousness into the Truth in thy way, the way of the Divine!' There is something in us that is ready for it but there is this element that intervenes and makes a curtain of non-receptivity; I know by my own experience with myself and others how long it can make a road that could never perhaps for us who seek the entire Truth have been short and easy but still plight have spared us many wanderings and standstills and recoils and detours. All the more I admire the ease with which Krishnaprem seems to have surmounted this formidable obstacle."
But though I often wondered whether I admired him more than I loved him, neither my love nor admiration could possibly persuade me to fall in with his desire that I should not pay the tribute due to his greatness simply because he himself disliked publicity. So in my Bengali book entitled Abar Bhramyaman (A Wanderer Again) I published a long article of about fifty pages on him. In this I gave a brief account of my talks with him in Almora (where I was his guest) as well as excerpts from his letters and wound up with a long poem on his deep spirituality. To conciliate him, however, I took good care to omit certain supraphysical happenings in his Ashram; but, alas, he was not to be conciliated, which made me wish, indeed, that I had published what I kept back, seeing that he came down on me like a ton of bricks utterly failing to appreciate the mischief I might have done but had refrained only for his sake.* But, once again, alas, he betrayed a heart of adamant.
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* I filled up the gap subsequently, after his passing, in 1965. See Part II, the Mirtola Chapter of my book Yogi Sri Krishnaprem.
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"My dear Dilip," he wrote, "thanks so much for the book Abar Bhramyaman and also for the beautiful record of your Bhagavat hymn. But 0 Dilip, why did you write about me and, if at all, why so much? It's ill, I fear, will be the result for me in the shape of letters and people wanting to visit such a 'curiosity! What good will it do to you? Above all, you should not have hinted at the 'happenings'. All these things only attract the mind of the foolish. I warn you that I shall deny it outright and say that it was just your eloquence! 0 Dilip, Dilip! I meant to go on scolding you for a dozen pages! But the milk is spilt and it is useless so I will say no more. I begged you not to write about us but you just print my request and leave it at that! You are incorrigible and if you were anyone else I should hate you, but I can't!"
As this reassurance was rather heartening, I made venture to quote his letter in full since, on his own showing, the milk had been spilt and that irretrievably. After commending me to the Bhagavat he gave me a support I needed rather badly at the time. What happened was this. I had always been a worshipper of Krishna since my boyhood days, and my subsequent study in the Ashram of the Bhagavat in Sanskrit gave a fillip to this old devotion. Now, a number of ardent aspirants disapproved of my 'medievalism' and frowned on my disloyalty to Sri Aurobindo whose stature (they contended) was much greater than that of Krishna — a claim I could not concede. So I went on writing to Sri Aurobindo, soliciting repeatedly his verdict on my ineradicable penchant for that 'archaic' God, as these Aurobindonians dubbed Him. Fortunately for me, he adjudicated in my favour as will be attested by his letters which I give below:
18-6-1943
"I thought I had already told you that your turn towards Krishna was not an obstacle. In any case I affirm that positively in answer to your question. If we consider the large and predominant part he played in my sadhana, it would be strange if the part he has in yours could be considered objectionable. 'Sectarianism' is a matter of dogma, ritual etc., not of spiritual experience;
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the concentration on Krishna is a self-offering to the Ishta Deva. If you reach Krishna you reach the Divine; if you can give yourself to Him you can give yourself to me. In any case it does not very much matter. We have accepted your loyalty and devotion, your work and service. All else that is needed can come of itself afterwards. There is nothing wrong in your self-offering in works and service; it is quite as it should be; you have no reason to feel worried about it. Don't be diffident and don't be too easily discouraged. More resistance in difficulties and more faith in your spiritual destiny."
16-9-1944
"As regards Krishna and devotion, I think I have already answered that more than once. I have no objection at all to the worship of Krishna or the 'Vaishnava' form of devotion, nor is there any incompatibility between the Vaishnava bhakti and my Supramental Yoga.
"There is in fact no special and exclusive form of Supramental Yoga: all ways can lead to the Supermind, just as all ways can lead to the Divine.
"Certainly I will help you and am helping you and will always help you; the idea that I can stop doing it or will send you away ( because of my ineradicable thirst for Krishna — D.) has no sense in it. If you persevere you cannot fail to get the permanent bhakti and the realisation you want but you should learn to nut an entire reliance on Krishna to give it when he finds all ready and the time come. If he wants you to clear out imperfections and impurities first, that is after all understandable. I don't see why you should not succeed in doing it, now that your attention is being constantly turned on to it. To see them clearly and acknowledge them is the first step."
17-9-1944
"Certainly Krishna is credited with much caprice, difficult dealings and a playfulness (lila!) which the played-with do not always immediately appreciate. But there is reasoning as well a hidden method in his caprices and when he does come out of it and takes a fancy to be nice to you, he has a supreme attractiveness,
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charm and allurement which compensate for all you have suffered. Of course your decision to continue the solitude has our full approval,"
2-10-1944
"What is there to comment on foolishness? It is a universal human failing. Your remark about Krishna was not so much foolish as desperately illogical. If Krishna was by nature cold and distant (Lord, what a discovery — Krishna of all people!) how could human devotion and aspiration come near him — he and it would soon be like the North and South pole, growing icier and icier, always facing each other but never seeing because of the earth's bulge? Also if Krishna did not want the human bhakti as well as the bhakta wanting him, who could get at him? He would be always sitting on the snows of Himalayas like Shiva!"
But the climax came when, to cap my discomfiture, a loyal adherent of Gurudev wrote me a letter gently admonishing me on my wrong mood. He advised me — doubtless with the friendliest of motives — to worship Sri Aurobindo and not Krishna. His reason was that if I approached Sri Aurobindo I could get Krishna easily en route for the Supramental, but if I worshipped Krishna, he could only lead me to Overmental as against the still higher Supramental plateau because Krishna could only attain the Overmental but not the Supramental which only Sri Aurobindo could bring down.
The long letter my friend penned wound up with a portentous warning to the effect that though Krishna was "included" in the Supramental, He could not include the Supramental in Himself! Duly I sent that letter up to Gurudev who wrote back to me:
"I am puzzled and perplexed by this affair of Krishna and the Supermind. A.B.C.D.E.F.etc., of Bombay, Nagpur and Delhi and P.Q.R.up to X.Y.Z.of Calcutta and Pondicherry will all be able to catch hold of its tail and 'include' it in themselves, only poor Krishna can't do it? He can only be himself 'included' in it! Hard lines on Bhagavan Vasudeva! What I said was the Krishna in his incarnation brought down the Overmind into
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human possibility, because that was his business at the time and all that could be done then; he did not bring down the Supermind, because that was not possible or at least not intended at that stage of the human evolution. I did not mean that he could not have brought down the Supermind if that had been willed at the time. You listen too easily to anybody, G.H. or Q. let us say, and treat their ingenious hair-splitting or unduly authoritative ideas as if they were gospel truths; that causes mental confusion. I believe Krishna's intentions are to remain with us and he won't run away when the Supermind comes down; so why should Mother and I send you away on his account? It would be a most illogical procedure. So that is that."
But as I dreaded nothing more than disloyalty, I asked Krishnaprem (to whom I was duly sending Gurudev's letters on Krishna) whether it would be disloyal or unwise on my part to want to realise Krishna through the Guru in the traditional Vaishnava way as this sadhana made a powerful appeal to my temperament. To that he wrote back:
"I think I said before but anyhow I repeat that when your Guru allows and, more encourages your bhava towards Krishna, there is no need whatever to worry about what others say or feel. All this talk of 'others' about your not being able to get this or that if you go that way is nonsense. There is nothing whatever that cannot be had at Krishna's feet. If your Guru did not support you I might hesitate to say this, as a path that is not sanctioned by one's Guru could never lead to success: however good in itself, it is paradharma. But in your case there is no question of that. It is clear from what he wrote to you that he was entirely satisfied with what you are doing. I may have said all this in my letter just after 'Ma' withdrew, but I cannot remember what I wrote then and if so you must excuse the repetition.
"Doubtless there are many ways of getting beyond the mind because that is just where all ways that are ways have to go. I will speak of only two. One is to use the mind to negate the mind and so force the soul to pass beyond. That is the way of
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Nagarjuna and, though less unmixedly, of Sankara. It is a straight path but rather, like a path ruled out straight on a map, it takes no account of natural obstacles and so is very hard. In any case it is certainly not anukula (beneficial) for you. The other is by love and surrender. The contemplation of Krishna leads straight beyond the mind. I only realised the other day during a talk with a Vedanti friend, a very good sannyasi who is here now-a-days, how entirely beyond the mind the contemplation of Krishna is. To his arguments and questions as to how such and such could be true I could only reply that it undoubtedly was so. Everything about Krishna is beyond the mind's grasp and I found that I could not accept any of the rational accommodations and compromises that his mind suggested. They were just inadequate. He too wanted to go beyond the mind but only in his own sober philosophic way. But why? There is nothing sober about Krishna. He maddens where He touches and so his worshippers lead where others — at least some others — can only walk, a dignified cap-and-gown sort of walk!
"But really what is all this fuss about? Some people disapprove of you? Well, let them. Even if they are advanced sadhakas, why should you care? You have no business with any approval or disapproval but that of the Guru and Krishna. 'But', you may say, 'they are my gurubhais.' Let them be. Gurus teach different things to different disciples. Never mind what he may have taught others you do who he has taught you — Yours Krishnaprem."
I have quoted his letters without remorse or fear of hell (for betraying confidences) first because these, I felt, would help many a seeker to appreciate better the greatness of Gurudev, and secondly because Krishnaprem's devotion to his Guru could not but prove a flickerless beacon to hundreds who still grope in the dark in this age of barren scepticism. Also, I shall add that he has helped me and many another by not only instilling courage in our hours of despair but also by shedding on our waverings some glow of the steadfast flame he had in his heart by dint of his one-pointed sadhana and loyalty to his Guru. But there is still something else which I am simply unable to keep to
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myself: the high praise Gurudev has bestowed on his outlook on things of the spirit. To illustrate what I mean I will now buttress my (tribute with a few of Krishnaprem's letters with Gurudev's comments thereon. These cannot but interest all genuine spiritual seekers who will, I hope, agree with me that it would have been utterly wrong to keep lights such as these under a bushel. I need only say by way of preface that as he knew I was bent on publishing these letters, he gave me once a grudging permission with a half-hearted grace.
"My dear Dilip," he wrote in January 1934, "I received your affectionate letter and enclosure. As for revising or supplementing my previous letters for the second edition of your Anami — I will see. I make no promise. For your remarks about the success of my scrappy letters (the casual impromptus of an unknown man) leave me cold. Let them read the Gita, or, if they have a taste for these things in letter form, the 'Friendly Epistle' of Nagarjuna, thie letters of Plato, or even the Epistles of St. Paul which should afforad sufficient variety. The semi-private-wholly- public letter is a form that does not suit me. It resembles too much those cinema-cameras in front of which you not only have to stand still and look dignified, but also to gesticulate and be animated, to walk and talk and be yourself with the devastating knowledge that the damned thing will appear, large as life, upon innumerable amateur screens until it, too, finally achieves the Nirvana of all created things. It is unfortunately true that my letters are inadequate. All the same they represent what I felt when I wrote them, and even if I wrote more now they would still be inadequate. So why not leave it at that?
Your affectionately,
KRISHNAPREM."
Then, as I had sent him a few of his letters printed in my book, Anami,. he wrote:
"Looking at my own letter in your Anami, I cannot help
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resetting that they have been preserved like flies in amber. In so many ways they now seem to me inadequate. Their only merit is that they were sincerely felt, but some points such as the relation of the abstract to the concrete have been bungled badly. This relation is far too subtle a thing to be dismissed in a few phrases and, though I had a meaning in my mind, I have thoroughly mishandled it. I find I have done little but reverse the ordinary commonplace identification of the 'spiritual' with due 'abstract.' Such an obvious, almost Shavian, reversal of values is far too coarse to be the truth and though it does all right for letters, it will not stand the strain of print. Enough, however, of ephemera never meant to stand the strain to which they have been subjected.
"The more one goes on in this path, the more one feels the limitations not only of speech but of thought. The mind is too heavy, too coarse. It will not respond, or responds but imperfectly, to the subtle vibrations that as it were come to it from alcove. The highest truth must needs be presented in symbols. Fichte, the German philosopher, said that if he had to live his life over again the first thing he would do would be to invent a new set of symbols, but alas, it is not so easy. Symbols are born, not made. They descend from above and cannot be artificially manufactured. In this matter you, poets, have an advantage over philosophers like myself who try to use what is so ludicrously miscalled 'exact thought.' From below one can compile only allegories: real symbols are given from above. But when given, one can learn far more from them than from words. The symbol (or image if you like) of the seated Buddha, for instance, taught me far more than I was able to learn from my assiduous study of the Buddhist texts. In fact, the mental concepts — miscalled knowledge — derived from the latter did much to obscure the real knowledge (derived from the former and it was only as I learnt to pass beyond the words and 'thoughts' that the true knowledge originally given by the 'symbol' was able to shine forth once more and to some extent irradiate even the (dead conceptual knowledge.
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'True learning is unlearning....
"I am glad to learn that Sri Aurobindo found my review of The Riddle of This World satisfactory. I tried as far as possible to give the reader an account of what he would find in the book and not merely to use it as a peg on which to hang my own virtuosity a la Macaulay. I think at least that it should serve to indicate to all who care for such things that here is a book not to be missed.
"You raise some interesting points in regard to 'expression' and 'silence', but at the same time you seem to have slightly misunderstood me. I was urging that poetic expression can sometimes deal with realms in which philosophy cannot breathe. To me, at least, it is a necessity which I can scarcely avoid. But I did want to emphasise that our philosophic dialectic, logic, etcetera are far too coarse to deal with the higher levels of Reality. It is easy to cut things with the snip-snap of one's philosophical arguments, but too often we are merely cutting the air. Even the scientists are now finding that reality eludes them. And what is the significance of the square root of minus one which plays so essential a part in modern physics? To my mind it suggests most emphatically that there is a fundamental supra-rational element that enters in at the conversion or zero point between appearance and reality or, to be more exact, between appearance on this level and one level 'higher up.' I make this last qualification because I do not believe that the absolute Reality lies, as it were, next door to the world except in a certain very ultimate sense, but there are many grades of 'reality' (or appearance) in between. To the intellect the square root of minus one has no meaning (at least none to my intellect) but certainly it must have a meaning or it would not be as useful as it is to modern physics.
"You speak of the 'silence' of the Buddha which you contrast with 'expression' But if Buddha had not 'expressed,' then we should not have five hundred million (or whatever it is) Buddhists living today. In truth, he expressed a great deal and it was only on certain ultimate problems that he remained silent because they cannot be expressed in words — not at least in
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logical words. Symbolism is another matter. You say: 'Suppose Buddha were a formless being under a formless tree in a formless Gaya; would we feel the same thrill at his silence?'
"Well, in reality, that is just what He is in one aspect. This is the meaning of the doctrine of the Dharmakaya and of the 'docetism' that marked so many Mahayana and also Christian Gnostic schools. But for most this Formless remains a mere matter of words and is, consequently, a falsity. Only experience can give us the truth. Without experience, the 'formless' is an empty abstraction, cold like all such, and shot through with the falsity and unreality that pervades all our purely intellectual concepts. We must use them but they only gain significance when life flows into them. In reality, they are neither cold nor abstract. It is our process of acquiring and using them that makes them so. We abstract by a process of negation and then wonder that the result is cold and negative. Our whole process stays on the purely intellectual level. When we say that Krishna is nirakara we have only said what He is not. But our positive statements are equally delusive. When we say that He is anandamaya we equally miss the reality because most men do not know what ananda is. They only know pleasure. They try to understand ananda in terms of pleasure and hence you get the materialising of the spiritual that marks so much of ordinary Vaishnava thought just as from the misuse of negation you get the coldness of so much Vedantic thought. The root of the trouble is just the mistaking of intellectual concepts for reality. When a man has seen something even of the Reality — call him Krishna or Buddha or Brahma — he then knows what is meant. He knows how He is nirakara but not cold and how He is anandamaya but not mere pleasure. Till we get experience and knowledge we shall always be in unreality however lofty our conceptions may be. The Vedantin despises the Vaishnava for the latter's concreteness and the Vaishnava spits at the Vedantin saying it is all 'cold., One says: 'I don't want' — and the other says: 'I want.' Damn all their 'wants' and 'don't-wants: they are quite irrelevant. These 'wants' and 'don't-wants' do all the damage.
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It is not what we want that matters, but what He wills, which is a quite different thing. All these concepts are so many suits of clothes. Unless we reach up to the Reality and fill them, they only serve for endless debate. What did the Rishi mean by saying He is nirakarat What did Buddha mean by anatmani What did the Vaishnavas mean by saying He is nikhila-rasamrita murti? The answer to this question must be sought in experience, not in mere dialectic. When the light of experience streams in and fills the empty concepts, then and then only does recognition flow in like a sea and we can know why the above words are used. Ascharyavat pashyati kashchidenam (as wonderful, some, few, see Him). Then we can know why the atma of the Upanishad means the same thing as the anatma of the Buddha and in a flash be free from the empty scholastic disputes that have filled the millennia. 'Oh but these are contradictions' — peevishly complains the intellect, to which the only answer is: 'Very likely they are, but you have damn well got to put up with them!,
"I don't mean at all to urge the contempt for the intellect which most Christians and some Vaishnavas have taught, but I do mean to say that the intellect is in itself a sort of formative or shaping machine. It can only work if it is supplied with material to shape, and that material must come either from the sense- world below or from the spiritual world above.
"In the meanwhile it seems to me as foolish to lose one's emotion in the coldness of abstract negation as to fuddle one's mind in the warmth of a (fundamentally) sensuous Goloka.
"These thoughts were suggested to me by the contrast you drew between the emotional singing of Chaitanya Deva and the silent meditation of the Buddha. Needless to say that the remarks in the paragraph immediately above this do not apply to these great Teachers but only to some of their followers.
"You speak of a certain ' shakiness at the idea of being immersed in a Timeless mute Akshara Brahman', but surely that is only because of our ignorance of what is meant by that experience and of a consequent misconception in terms of worldly experiences. That is where so many Vaishnavas as well
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as Vedantins go wrong. They quarrel furiously about words, about the expression, instead of bending their whole energy on an attempt to realise what is meant by the expression. In the words of an old Buddhist writer, 'that is called confusing the moon with the finger that points to it.'
"Books are after all just words, but these words fall into two categories — words used to express worldly experience and words used to express transcendental experience. (Perhaps there is also an intermediate class which are just words!) When there is any reason to suppose that words are being used to express transcendental experience, it becomes of the utmost importance how we try to read them. The wrong way is to fasten on the words themselves and find fault with them because they are not the same words as we find in some other book. The right way is to try with all one's might to find out what the words mean: to find out why those particular words were chosen by the writer to express his vision and just in proportion as we succeed in this attempt, we shall gain a new insight into Him 'from whom words together with the mind fall back baffled' (Yato vacho nivartante aprapya manasa saha).
"So you see that in my previous letter I was not deprecating expression but only lamenting the inadequacy of it. In the last resort, this whole cosmos is but expression — Divine Expression, and in proportion as He, the kavih puranah, is able to manifest in us, we shall ourselves automatically become centres of expression. Till then, our productions, whether in the realm of poetry, philosophy or art, are but the play of children, funerals where none is dead and marriage where there is no bride.
"Talking of poetry brings me to the poem you sent me (Transformation of Consciousness). I like it very much and think it is perhaps the best of all those that you have translated."
On this Gurudev commented:
"Dilip,
Krishnaprem's letters, as usual, are interesting and admirable in substance and expression and, in addition, there is an immense increase in comprehensiveness and wideness. The point about
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the intellect's misrepresentation of the Formless (the result of a merely negative expression of something that is inexpressibly intimate and positive) is very well made and hits the truth in the centre. No one who has had the ananda of the Brahman can do anything but smile at the charge of coldness; there is an absoluteness of immutable ecstasy in it, a concentrated intensity of silent and inalienable rapture that is impossible even to suggest to any one who has not had the experience. The eternal Reality is neither cold nor dry nor empty; you might as well talk of the midsummer sun-light as cold or the ocean as dry or perfect fullness as empty. Even when you enter into it by elimination of form and everything else, it surges as a miraculous fullness — this is truly the Purnam — when it is entered affirmatively as well by negation. There can obviously be no question of emptiness or dryness! All is there and more than one could ever dream of as the All. That is why one has to object to the intellectual thrusting itself in as the subjanta (all-knowing) judge; if it kept to its own limits, there would be no objection to it. But it makes constructions of words and ideas which have no application to the truth, babbles foolish things in its ignorance and makes its constructions a wall which refuse to let in the Truth that surpasses its own capacities and scope."
And Krishnaprem went on evolving — gaining not only in "comprehensiveness and wideness" but also in human sympathy which endeared him to all who came in contact with him. I would gladly give many instances of this growing power of his to enter at once into other people's points of view. But as I have to put it briefly, I will end with one more letter which he wrote in reply to some questions I had put to him in 1934.1 had written, among other things, that although he had followed a path very different from ours, I believed that the more we would progress in our spiritual quest the less must our paths diverge, that is to say, beyond a certain level (underlining the last phrase). To that he replied: "You are quite right. Beyond a certain level the experiences along different paths are the same. In the first place, this is a bare fact as you can find by a study of genuine mystical
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experience all the world over. It is the mental interpretations which cause the apparent differences. Secondly, it is so because there is in reality only one path (above a certain level again) though the terminology, which really belongs to a lower level, may easily vary. There are two eternal paths: the path of Light and the path of Darkness, as the Gita says. One and only one is the path of Light' but the descriptions may vary infinitely. The Grand Trunk Road is one only, though one may go along it on a push bike or a motor bike. The difference in speed may inspire a different description, but the road is the same and even then the extra horse-power of which the motor cyclist is so proud is based on the same plodding man power in the end and in this too he will have to face God's inexorable 'stand and deliver,' and give an account of how he used the extra horse-power which he, perhaps, took for granted.
"Your ideas about doubts however strike me as rather confused. Doubt is quite proper and inevitable on the intellectual plane. Poking your finger in (or its 'scientific' equivalent) is a perfectly proper means of physical investigation and has to be used, but it is quite out of place in dealing with intellectual problems. Similarly doubt is a most useful intellectual tool but it is quite inapplicable to spiritual problems. Do not confuse spiritual truth with the intellectual expression of it. The latter may and, often should, be doubted, because by that we come to a more adequate expression. You ask how I 'dismiss' my doubts. I don't. I solve tern as far as possible and only dismiss them when I see that the solution is not available at the present moment or with my present range. But I don't let them trespass where they have no right, namely, in the spiritual realm. There they are sheer irrelevancies. I don't doubt my bottom: I am sitting on it. This isn't a mere vulgar metaphor but sheer fact. The spiritual reality is that which is the very support of all other activities;
without it they couldn't be. 'I say unto thee that thou art Peter and upon this rock I will found my Church'. Just try and find out what that 'rock' really is. Many people confuse beautiful poetry or profound philosophy with spiritual fact. But these are
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but the garments which can, and often should, be changed. None lasts, for I am prepared to change my intellectual formulations ten times in a day, provided I find each time better cones. So don't go about setting me up as an apostle of blind faith, because I am not. Now, as always, I hold to the phrase of the Buddha, Atma-dipa atma-sharanam, the light of truth is within ms and it is -no good looking for it elsewhere. No teacher can do more than just push you over the edge if you are standing on it. You can retain your private judgement as long as you like provided you only apply it within the sphere to which it is applicable. You can't keep gold fish in a bird cage.
"If you haven't the light you want but believe that others have it, stick to them for all you are worth till you get it. If you have light yourself but your mind gets in the way, then treat it as you would your motor: clean it, over haul it, rebuild the damned thing, but don't cut your own throat because your car doesn't run properly.
"But you won't get rid of doubts by dismissing them. They will work all the more underneath. You must solve them or, at least, see why a solution is impossible at present and patiently wait. Yes, I am convinced of the gospel of faith but not: of faith in some intellectual phrase or other which may be adequate or may not. Not of faith in any external thing (and even the intellect is external, a little less so than the body, that is all) but; faith in the reality that I call Krishna, whom you can call by any name you please. Faith, however, does not mean turning your back on the intellect. Use your intellect for all it is worth in its own field. At any rate I use mine. From the point of view of the lower personality, faith means the subordination of the lower to the higher. In actual fact faith is the light which the higher sends down to the lower (as far as the lower will let it!) In any case it doesn't mean 'believe all that you are told.' I refer you to my previous letter to see what should be done with regard to words (written or spoken) which you have reason to think enshrine spiritual experience. I am sure you are not asked to aspire to an undiscerning faith. Few things are more stupid. What one is asked for is to have faith in one's Guru and in one's own
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discernment when it is encouraged by the Guru. It would be best, if one could, to cling to the memory of this discernment even when the tamasic tide flows in and temporarily covers up the landmarks.
"You talk of humility, but I don't know whether humility is the truest test of spirituality or not. All spiritual men I know are profoundly humble because they know their true position. But humility does not consist in the damnable deprecatory rubbing of the hands that is so fashionable among some Vaishnavas. That is only an inverted conceit. True humility is an absence of egoism. It comes from realising that one is an entirely insignificant phenomenon in the cosmos; even if his capacities and messages shake the stars in their courses he is a transient phenomenon. He had a beginning and he will have an end. He is, essentially, a horse for someone else to ride, that is his own importance. But if a horse spends his whole time bucking up his heels in the jungle and won't bear the saddle, then his owner 'disposes him off' as the students say.
" 'But I am an immortal soul, I beg your pardon!' Did the horse say he was? If he has identified himself with his Rider then his asseveration is true, but otherwise I fear the sleekest of horses is nothing but a mass of carrion sewn up in a flimsy skin bag! And not only his body but also his unconquerable horsey mind with all its doubts and private neighings.
"If one realises this fact, real humility follows as a matter of course, but if one doesn't then all the 'miserable sinners,' naradham and all that kind of rot had better be dropped down the water-closet where they belong. 'Miserable sinners' cancanter to Hell and probably will anyway! As for the sceptics, if I were your Guru I would have told you long ago to 'dispose them off' in the manner suggested above. Damn their noble scepticism and sceptical nobility and all that kind of stuff:
Yada charmavadakasham veshtayishyanti manavah
Tada devam avijnaya dukhasyanto bhavishyati. *
* Sri Aurobindo translated this at my request: "This means that when men shall be able to fold the sky round them like a skin, then only will it be possible to put an end to
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The sceptics don't know that Deva, so let them just shut up. No doubt they are this and that and the other thing, but one day they will themselves know that all this and that and the other thing are only to be offered at the feet of their Deva. No, I am not being intolerant, but there is such a thing as moderation in all things or, at least, there should be.
"As an instance in illustration of my previous remarks I may say that I am distinctly occupied (though not sorely troubled as the phrase goes with doubts whether there is a personal God. (So you see your sceptical friends needn't be so proud of their doubts). Don't get alarmed either. The doubts refer to the meaning and adequacy of the terms employed and have reference to such questions as whether it is permissible to put new wine in old bottles, to call old things by new names, to disregard associations etc. If I say I believe in a personal God, a lot of fools will suppose I mean someone like the Lord God Jehovah on His throne, and if I say I don't believe, others will suppose that I believe in abstraction — a sort of 'Space, Time and Deity' kind of thing. This is merely by way of illustration of the function of doubt. I keep a whole collection of doubts; grow them in fact like mustard and cress and when they are ripe I eat them up....
"Many thanks for sending me Sri Aurobindo's unpublished poem in Alexandrines: 'I walked beside the waters in a world of light.' I loved it, particularly where he describes the vision of the Cosmic Ignorance:
But there came
A dire intrusion wrapped in married cloud and flame,
Across the blue-white moon-hush of my magic seas,
A sudden sweeping of immense peripheries
Of darkness ringing lambent lustres shadowy — vast,
A nameless dread, a Power incalculable passed
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put an end of grief without knowing the Divine. It simply means that the two things are equally impossible. " (This quotation is from the Svetashvatara Upanishad).
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Whose feet were death, whose wings were immortality.
Its changing mind was time, its heart eternity.
All opposites were there, unreconciled, uneased,
Struggling for victory, by victory unappeased.
All things it bore, even that which brings undying peace
But secret, veiled, waiting for some supreme release.
I saw the spirit of the Cosmic Ignorance;
I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance."
I sent up the letter to Gurudev, giving him an account of how I was hard-pressed by doubts and misgivings. He commented:
"I agree with most of what Krishnaprem says, though one or two things I would put from a different angle. Your reasonings about faith and doubt have been of a rather extravagant angle because they come to this that one must either doubt everything or believe everything, however absurd, that anybody says. I have repeatedly told you that there is not only room for discrimination in Yoga, but a need for it at every step — otherwise you will get lost in the jungle of things that are not spiritual — as for instance the tangle of what I call 'the intermediate Zones.' I have also told you that you are not asked to believe everything told by anybody and that there is no call to put faith in all the miraculous things narrated about Bijoykrishna or another. That, I have said, is a question not of faith but of mental belief — and faith is not a mental belief in outward facts but an intuition of the inner being about spiritual things. Krishnaprem means the same thing when he says that faith is the light sent down by the higher to the lower personality. As for the epithet 'blind' used by Sri Ramakrishna, it means, as I said, not ignorantly credulous, but untroubled by the questionings of the intellect and unshaken by outward appearances of fact; e.g. one has faith in the Divine even though the fact seems to be that the world here or at least the human world is driven by undivine forces. One has faith in the Guru even when he uses methods that your intellect cannot grasp or affirms things as true of which you have as yet no
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experiences ( for if his knowledge and experience are not greater than yours, why did you choose him as a Guru?). One has faith in the path leading to the Goal even when the Goal is very far off and the way covered by mist and cloud and smitten repeatedly by the thunderbolt and so on. Even in worldly things man can do nothing great if he has no faith — in the spiritual realm it is still more indispensable. But this faith depends not on ignorant credulity, but on a light that burns inside though not seen by the eyes of the outward mind, a knowledge within that has not yet taken the form of outer knowledge.
"One thing however: I make a distinction between doubt and discrimination. If doubt meant discernment, questioning as to what might be the truth of this or that matter, it would be a part of discrimination and quite admissible; but what is usually meant by doubt is a negation positive and peremptory which does not stop to investigate, to consider in the light, to try, to enquire, but says at once: 'Oh, no, I am never going to take that as possibly true.' That kind of doubt may be very useful in ordinary life, it may be practically useful in battering down established things ,or established ideas or certain kinds of external controversy to .undermine a position that is too dogmatically positive; but I do not think it is of any positive use in matters even of intellectual enquiry. There is nothing it can do there that impartial discrimination cannot do much better. In spiritual matters discrimination has a huge place, but negating doubt simply stops the path to Truth with its placard 'No entry,' or its dogmatic 'Thus far and no farther,.*
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*Cf. (Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, II, 9):
Mental doubt alias sceptic thought he assimilates to:
A watch-dog of the spirit's sense-railed house
Against intruders of the Invisible,
Nourished on scraps of life and Matter's bones,
It keeps close guard in front of custom's wall,
And barks at every unfamiliar light
As at a foe who would break up its home.
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"As for the intellect it is indispensable to man up to a certain point; after that it becomes an inferior instrument and often misleading and obstructive. It is what I meant when I wrote: 'Reason was the helper, reason is the bar.' Intellect has done many things for man; it has helped to raise him high above the animals; at its best it has opened a first view on sail great fields of knowledge. But it cannot go beyond that; it cannot get at Truth itself, only at some reflections, forms, representations of it. I myself cannot remember to have ever arrived at anything in the spiritual field by the power of the intellect; I have used it only to help the expression of what I have known and experienced, but even there it is only certain forms that it provided, they were used by another Light and a larger Mind than the intellect. When the intellect tried to decide things in this field, it always delayed matters. I suppose what it can do sometimes is to stir up the mind, plough it or prepare — but the knowledge comes only when one gets another, higher than the intellectual, opening. Even in mind itself there are things higher than the intellect, ranges of activity that exceed it. Spiritual knowledge is easier to these than to the reasoning intelligence".
I enclosed a copy of Gurudev's letter in my reply to Krishnaprem and wrote:
"I am very grateful, Krishnaprem, for all that you have written to me which has been so very helpful. It is so like you, .and I am glad that Gurudev has once more commented so favourably on your views. But one thing: the other day M. wrote to me that you had asserted to him that true faith could never precede personal experience and so much of what is extolled! as faith was, in essence, pure dogma or something to that effect. Did you tell him all this?"
To which he replied:
"Now what is this 'faith and experience' business;? I can't remember any remarks on that subject. In fact the only thing I ever remember saying on the subject of faith was contained in a letter to you in which, as far as I remember, I said that faith was
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the light of the higher Self penetrating the lower or some words to that effect.
"Casting about in my memory I do seem to recollect some vague talk with M., but the remarks were no doubt ad hoc and probably were directed against the orthodox religious demand for a blind acceptance of dogmatic belief. Such belief or pseudo-belief (for it seldom, if ever, is real belief) has nothing to do with what I meant by faith in writing to you. This is not an intellectual assent to intellectualised propositions for which one has insufficient evidence, but an attitude of the soul which is based on a dim perception in the personality of something more clearly known on higher levels. That, at any rate, is what I meant by 'true faith' and I should have thought that your Gurudev would more or less agree with it. But at any rate that is my position at present;
I fancy that either you or M. must have garbled what I said.
"Certainly experiences are not the Goal but experience (in a way, at least) is, for by experience I mean living knowledge manifesting in one's being, and if that is not present, something is wrong or at least something has not started yet.
"Of course faith precedes experience on this level but it does so only because it is itself the Light from experience already present higher up.
"Do you know what is immortal or what is mortal? And do you know which of these you are?
' "Answer these questions and you will understand what I mean by faith. Incidentally, you also know what I mean by bhakti, the ahuti, —offering — of the mortal in the flame of the immortal. I say again:
I said it loud — said it clear;
I went and shouted in his ear.
"I am not in any way against emotion. That would be quite absurd. But I do criticise the current practice of weltering in emotion/or its own sake and for the sake of the pleasure attaching to it. That is like a man weltering in a hot bath.
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"Know Krishna, love Krishna, and work for Krishna. Then you can leave all the blisses to take care of themselves. You will certainly not find any shortage of them. Of course there is bliss experienced in self-offering but do not offer yourself in order to get the bliss butt offer yourself because He is Krishna and your being can only fulfil itself by being united to His Being.
"About bhakti – the word is ambiguously used. Some people mean by it an emotional rapture as such. (Don't ignore these two small words). In that case bhakti is not the highest thing. Others, including myself, mean by it self-giving to Krishna which is of course accompanied by emotional rapture but it is not performed for the sake of the rapture. In that case it is the highest or something like it at least, for I do not like to dogmatise about high, higher, highest. Loud applause from you at this point, I suppose? But be sure you don't misunderstand me. Before you can offer the oblation into the fire you have to know where the fire is and Krishrhna is in the light, in the light, in the light!
"Of course I have left out all sorts of qualifications. There is such thing as preliminary offering, or say, wish to offer, and much more, but I arm writing a letter, not a book.
"Disregard the Light at your peril, for He is in the Light and a light must mingle with Light. Fail to know the Light and you will helplessly tread the dark path of the dakshinayana, whirling helplessly, the sport but not the master of Karma.
"Everybody should strive to find out so that at death he may echo the cry of the Orphic initiate. 'From the Pure I go to the Pure.' All I can say is that the Light in which Krishna dwells is a light which sees, not a light which is seen and the voice of Krishna is a voice which speaks, not a voice which is heard.
"The point about concrete representation, images, myths etc., is simply that symbols which are known as symbols are sometimes less dangerous than symbols which are not recognised as such and it is impossible, however 'abstract' and philosophic one may be, to escape from symbols as all words are symbols."
This I sent up to Gurudev and wrote in my covering letter:
"I explained to Kirishnaprem how M. had misunderstood him
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and, incidentally, wanted to have a fling at 'the faithful' as he called them. Please tell me. Guru, whether he uses the phrase 'Krishna's Light' to imply knowledge. Please also note what he writes in the second paragraph about his own view of true faith and ventures: 'I should have thought your Gurudev would more or less agree with it'."
To this Gurudev wrote back: "I do, not only more or less but entirely." Then he went on to add: "I will write about Krishnaprem tomorrow, God willing. Not much to say though
— when one heartily agrees, what can one say except "hurrah' or 'ditto'?"
He did keep his promise. For the next day I received the following:
"I do not know that I can answer your question about what
Krishnaprem means by Krishna's Light. It is certainly not what is ordinarily meant by knowledge. He may mean the Light of the Divine consciousness, or the Light that comes from it or he may mean the luminous being of Krishna in which all things are in their supreme truth: the truth of knowledge, the truth of bhakti, the truth of ecstasy and ananda, everything is there.
"There is also a manifestation of Light — the Upanishads speak of Jyotibrahma, the Light that is Brahman. Very often the sadhaka feels a flow of light upon him and around him or a flow of light invading his centres or even his whole being and body, penetrating and illumining every cell and in that light there grows the spiritual consciousness and one becomes open to all or many of its workings and realisations. Appositely, I have a review of the book of Ramdas entitled 'Vision' before me in which he describes such an experience, got by the repetition of Rama mantra, but, if I understood rightly, after a long and rigorous self-discipline: 'The mantra having stopped automatically, he beheld a small circular light before his mental vision. This yielded him thrills of delight. This experience continued for some days, he felt a dazzling light like lightning flashing before his eyes, which ultimately permeated and absorbed him. Now an inexpressible transport of bliss filled every
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pore of his physical frame'. It does not always come like that— very often it comes like stages or at long intervals, at first, working on the consciousness till it is ready.
"We speak here also of Krishna's Light, Krishna's Light in the mind, Krishna's Light in the vital, etc. But it is a special Light — in the mind it brings clarity, freedom from obscurity, mental error and perversion; in the vital it clears all perilous stuff and where it is there is a pure and divine happiness and gladness.
"But why limit oneself, insist on one thing alone and shut out every other? Whether it be by bhakti or by Light or by ananda or by peace or by another means whatsoever that one gets the initial realisation of the Divine, to get it is the thing and all means are good that bring it. If it is bhakti that one insists on, it is by the bhakti that bhakti comes and bhakti in its fullness is nothing but an entire self-giving as Krishnaprem very rightly indicates. But then all meditation, all tapasya, all means of prayer or mantra must have that as its end and it is when one has progressed sufficiently in that that the Divine Grace descends and the realisation comes and develops till it is complete. But the moment of its advent is chosen by the wisdom of the Divine alone and one must have the strength to go on till it arrives, for when all is truly ready it cannot fail to come."
It was often like this that it happened: sometimes he or a gurubhai would write something to me whereupon Sri Aurobindo would comment. I would then convey to Krishnaprem how things stood, and then he, as often as not came forward with his reactions to the verdict of Gurudev, upon which Gurudev would have something more to say by way of clarification, almost like a billiard ball bounding and rebounding again and again. Here I may as well give a typical example of the far-reaching repercussions of just one letter of mine
As the days went by, I discovered a curious trend in my own nature: whenever anybody tried to denigrate faith, my faith rose up resolutely to vindicate what I called sacrosanct; but the moment somebody declaimed too loudly that faith was the only
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passport to truth and reason was an outcast in the Holy of Holies, I would take up the challenge and defend reason with all sorts of reasonings. So it happened once that a gurubhai — whom I will call Staunch, to indicate one of the faithful brood — invaded my sanctum and said ecstatically that his faith had lately become all but unshakable that the atom bomb was a godsend and must chasten men into solid sanity. To that I demurred and wrote to our Arbitrator in despair:
"Gurudev,
"I admire Staunch's tender heart though I wish his brains had been a trifle less soft. Of course the atom bomb may, as he asserts, scare people into sanity, but how, in the name of sanity, is one to be sure of such a consummation devoutly to be wished? Staunch argues that his faith is built on a rock but doesn't explain on what , diamond plinth this blessed rock is built. But seriously, Guru, do tell me if you have a soft comer in your heart for such a touching faith. I can give it no other epithet than infantine. And if he feels that our present civilisation is going to be saved simply because his robust optimistic faith assures him to the effect, then why mustn't I retort, with equal conviction, that a civilisation which needs to be propped by such a puerile faith to be saved is hardly worth saving? Voila, qu'en dites-vous, 0 Guru?"
To that Gurudev wrote back:
"I do not feel armed to cut the Gordian Knot with a sentence and need not accept Staunch's or anybody else's proposition or solution. Man needs both faith and reason so long as he has not reached a surer insight and greater knowledge. Without faith he cannot certainly walk on any road, and without reason he might very well be walking, even with the staff of faith to support him, in the darkness. Staunch himself founds his faith if not on reason yet on reasons; and the rationalist, the rationaliser or the reasoner must have some faith even if it be faith only in reason itself as sufficient and authoritative, just as the believer has faith in his faith as sufficient and authoritative. Yet both are capable of error as they must be, since both are instruments of the human mind whose nature is to err, and they share that mind's
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limitations. Each must walk by the light he has even though there are dark spots in which he stumbles.
"All that is, however, another matter than the question about the present civilisation. It is not this which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine, or in the way that they imagine. The present must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater Truth is the issue. After all, the wise man, unless he is a prophet or a Director of the Madras Astrological Bureau, must often be content to take the Asquithian position. Neither optimism nor pessimism is the truth: they are only modes of the mind or modes of the temperament.
"Let us then, without either excessive optimism or excessive pessimism, wait and see."
I sent this to Krishnaprem who wrote back from Almora:
"About 'faith and optimism,' — well, you know who it is that rushes in where angels fear to tread. But still one fool may, I suppose, open his heart to another. Why do you worry over what you can't accept in your friend Staunch's robust faith? As I see it, it is not his faith which is the difficulty but the particular mental concepts in which he expressed it. True faith is naked. It is not belief in this or that: it has little, if anything, to do with 'this or that'. It is a naked smokeless flame that bums in the secret recesses of the heart, sustaining the soul and lightening it on its path. The true content of the Flame we cannot formulate in the mind and so we cover it with a painted lampshade and say we believe in this or that, the figures which our minds have painted on the shade. And that does not matter provided we really don't believe that the painted figures are the content of our Faith. They are symbols of it, for even the mind cannot draw a single line arbitrarily but they share in the mind's error and inadequacy.
"It is this that causes the rationalist to curse so. He is always active demolishing the painted figures of men's faith and then is astonished to find the faith still there clothed in new figures:
'Nainam chhindanti shastrani.'
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'"I have looked in when the weather was darkest and this is what I saw:
'I saw the deep undertone of thwarted desire running fiercely in the psychic sea. I saw it rise to the surface in great waves and the ship of the mind, with cables cut, running before the dark win-id. I saw the crew, their fears transformed into panic anger by the contact of the angry waves, seizing axes and hacking away at cordage and masts. I saw them aim their blows at the wonderful compass glowing with light in the centre of the ship but though they destroyed the card they could not touch the luminous needle. Finally they grew berserk and slashed away at the very timbers of the ship and when it sank they foundered in the water cursing and sobbing. And still the compass shone, a needle of flame, poised serenely in the dark void above the ' waters. And when they saw that, they swam towards it and laid hold of it and then I saw that, there around them was the ship once more, with all its masts and timbers intact and the dark storm had receded again far beneath the surface of a summer sea. But shame was in the hearts of the crew.'
"We should not be worried by the optimist-pessimist business. Optimism is the disposition to think that our wishes will realise and pessimism the disposition to think that most probably they will not. Neither of them is at all relevant. Not our wishes but Krishna's will is what matters — and that will be realised, make no mistake about that. How and when — is known to Him — not to us.
"The famous civilisation of ours with all its treasures of art and literature and science may vanish as did that of Atlantis and yet nothing will have gone, for He is there and all is in Him. As Christ said to the Jews, proud of their descent from Abraham: 'I tell you, God is able to raise up from these stones seed unto Abraham.'
Pralaya-payodhi-jale dhritavanasi vedam
'Vihita-pavitra-charitramakhedam
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Keshava! dhrita-mina-sharira !
Jay Jagadisha Hare." *
This, duly sent up to Gurudev, elicited the following comment:
"As for faith, Krishnaprem's meaning is clear enough. Faith in the spiritual sense is not a mental belief which can waver and change. It can wear that form in the mind, but that belief is not the faith itself, it is only the external form. Just as the body, the external form, can change but the spirit remains the same, so it is here. Faith is a certitude in the soul which does not depend on reasoning, on this or that mental idea, on circumstances, on this and that passing condition of the mind or the vital or the body. It may be hidden, eclipsed, may even seem quenched, but it appears again after the storm of the eclipse; it is seen burning still in the soul when one has thought that it was extinguished for ever. The mind may be a shifting sea of doubts and yet that faith may be there within, and, if so, it will keep even the doubt-racked mind in the way so that it goes on inspite of itself towards its destined goal. Faith is a spiritual certitude of the spiritual, the divine, the soul's ideal, something that clings to that even when it is not fulfilled in life, even when the immediate facts or the persistent circumstances seem to deny it. This is a common experience in the life of the human being; if it were not so, man would be a plaything of a changing mind or a sport of circumstances. I have, I think, more than once, written the same thing as Krishnaprem though in a different language.
*Krishnaprem quotes this first verse from Jayadeva's famous hymn to the ten Avataras of Narayana. This verse describes His coming to save the drowning earth (in the cataclysmic Deluge) as a vast Saviour Fish which took the earth on its back: I have translated it thus:
When the whole creation foundered in the vast
Deluge of Doom, Thou cam'st as a Fish, at last,
Riding the tidal waves to initiate
A new play, 0 Redeemer Inviolate,
Carrying in Thy Grace the Vedas eternal:
Hail, Hail to thee, 0 Lord of life, supernal!
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"If you understand this and keep it in mind, Krishnaprem's experience and the image in which he saw it should be sufficiently clear. The needle is this power in the soul and the card with its directions the guiding indications given by it to the mind and life. The ship is the psychological, structure of ideas, beliefs, spiritual and psychic experiences, the whole building of the inner life in which one moves onward in the voyage towards the goal. When the storm comes, a storm of doubts, failures, disappointments, adverse circumstances and what not, the crew — let us say, the powers of the mind and vital and the physical consciousness — begin to disbelieve, despond, stand aghast at the contradiction between our hopes and beliefs and the present facts and they even turn in their rage of disbelief and despair to deny and destroy the structure of their inner thought and life which was bearing them on, tear up even the compass which was their help and guide, even to reject the needle, the great constant in their spirit. But when they have come to the point of drowning, that power acts on them, they turn to it instinctively for refuge and then suddenly they find all cleared, all the destruction was their own illusory action and the ship reappears as strong as before. This is an experience which most seekers have had many times, especially in the earlier or middle course of their sadhana. All that has been done seems to be undone, then suddenly or slowly the storm passes, the constant needle reappears; it may even be that the ship which was a small sloop or at most a schooner or a frigate becomes an armed cruiser and finally a great battleship unsinkable and indestructible. That is a parable but its meaning should be quite intelligible, and it is a pragmatic fact of spiritual experience. I may add that this in most faith or fixed needle of spiritual aspiration may be there without one's clearly knowing it; one may think that one has only beliefs, propensities, a yearning in the heart or a vital preference which seem to be temporarily destroyed or suspended, yet the hidden constant remains, resumes its action, keeps us on a way and carries us through. It can be said of it in the words of the Gita that even a little of this delivers us from great danger,
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carries us to the other side of all difficulties, sarva durgani"
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 Yoga for some time past 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?"
"After receiving your account of your present condition which I understand perfectly well, my advice remains the same: to stick on persistently till the dawn comes — it surely will if you resist the temptation to run away into some outer darkness which it would have much 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 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 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 a certain extent
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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 stage; 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 accept. I will try to have a shot at it, but it may take some days. 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. Remember what I wrote to you about the ship and the compass. 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 Ramana Ashram or Ramdas or anywhere else but do not for one moment entertain the thought of ever going back to your old life: that is gone for ever and thoughts of it can only bring trouble. These things come sometime or other — sometimes again and again to most, in fact I suppose to all sadhakas. The form may vary but the cause is the same: the opposition of the powers which rule our 'lower natures' to the upward surging movement of the spirit. Naturally, it is only when that upward movement becomes real or promises to become real that those powers feel their dominions threatened or respond with storms and darkness in some form or other. Moreover they are only able to do it by working on some weakness in us, some
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inner resentment or despondency at thwarted desires. As the magician needs something belonging to his would-be victim — some lock of hair or fragment of clothing — before he can work his magic, so these powers need some weakness in ourselves before they can work their maya. Hold them at bay contemplating on Sri Krishna's feet, whenever such thoughts arise. Refuse them the more as your thoughts realise that they come from outside and let the Light that shines from His feet dispel and drive them away. Then try to find what it is in you that they made use of as a focus to act upon — nearly always it is some thwarted desire of the ego, often quite unacknowledged by the surface mind.
"Anyway, by whatever means, stick it out, don't even think of turning back. The moment you have done it, that moment those powers, having gained their end, would leave their maya and you would be bitterly repenting.
"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 no, 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
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with my own experience and I concur. His account of the rationale of your present difficulties is quite correct and no other explanation is needed — except what I was writing in my unfinished letter about the descent of sadhana into the plane of the physical consciousness, and that does not disaccord with but 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 are rationalised by the modem European education you were not inclined to believe in or at least attach any importance to this knowledge. People, now-a-days, seek the explanation for every thing 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 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,
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the higher buddhi which is capable of enlightenment and still more from the higher 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 overpassed 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 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 Rarnana Ashram would be eventually helpful except for bringing back some peace of mind; Ramana 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 regards Bengal, things are certainly very bad; the condition of Hindus there is terrible and they may even get worse inspite of the interim mariage de convenance 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
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who are still showing themselves very much alive; and, as for 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 everywhere 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 Nuremberg have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history. Other blacknesses threaten to over-shadow 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 know you will effectively silence me by saying that in a brighter mood I will contradict myself again for the hundredth time, and you will be right. But, alas, what is a helpless mortal to do when, even after being persuaded that one should be well-advised to have faith — blind, one-eyed or fully vigilant — he discovers that it is as good as non-existent in his composition? (Was not
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faith essentially a seal of Krishna's call — or, shall I say, a convincing insignia to signify that one was sponsored by Him?) What has surprised me all along the line is that despite my lamentable deficiency in faith I should be almost inexhaustibly rich in vairagya! But, alas, vairagya, unlike 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 present state, 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 capacitty for questioning spiritual truth (and yet accepting, paradoxically, the; standpoint of vairagya that, without the light of the Spirit, life must remain a dismal grasping at phantoms):
"In your case faith is there, not inn 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 refuses 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 inspite 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 inspite of the pressure of despondence 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 soul 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 as exteriorly-suppressed faith) is itself sufficient to warrant the expectation of the Grace to come."
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But life not only founds a strange school but teaches it lessons through a strange curriculum. I have often wondered what would have happened to me had I never met Krishnaprem in Lucknow in 1923. Would I have been drawn so early to Sri Aurobindo? That is perhaps not so inconceivable seeing that the seeds of the traditional vairagya had been sown in the soil of my early childhood. But what would have happened to me in my spiritual crises in those novitiate days when I wavered so often? Who would have given me, time and again, just that steadying handclasp to help me regain my self-poise when it was a case of touch and go with me on the precipice of despair? I do not say this to put it dramatically — as anybody who has practised Yoga will agree — still less to express a conventional type of gratefulness; but perhaps I will sound more convincing if I contend that I have often felt that Gurudev welcomed Krishnaprem's wise exhortations to me for a twofold reason. In the first place because, being, as I have stressed before, an incredibly tolerant Guru who aimed only at "awakening" rather than "instructing" his disciples, he welcomed every impetus that would help me realise my spiritual potentialities. (This he made clear to me once in a beautiful letter which only he could write with his infinite understanding and compassion: "I have not the slightest idea of disowning you or asking you to go elsewhere or giving you up or asking you to abandon the Yoga or this Yoga. It is not that I insist on your finding the Divine through me and no one else or by this way and no other. I want you to arrive and would be glad to see you do it whatever way or with whatever help. But even if you followed another way, your place with me would remain, inwardly, physically and in every way. Even if you walked off to the Himalayas to sit in seclusion till you got something, as I think you sometimes wanted to do, your place would remain waiting for you here. I want you to understand that clearly, and not imagine all sorts of things about cutting off or displeasure or abandonment and the rest of it. Nothing could be further from our minds or from our feeling for you.") And, in the second place, because he had seen from the
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start that Krishnaprem's exhortations to me would make his own guiding wisdom more acceptable to me. I employ the word 'acceptable' advisedly, since I have been so often both unable and unwilling to see my way clear, when faced by Gurudev's findings, till Krishnaprem came down on me thundering at my irresolution and vacillation. I cannot help marvelling at the strangeness of such a phenomenon — or shall I say providential dispensation — because obviously, I could never look upon Krishnaprem as Gurudev's equal in mystic wisdom or Yogic stature. Yet why was it that I needed the elucidations of the lesser to appraise better the clarity of the greater? I know some of my gurubhais looked askance at Krishnaprem's hold over me. It is understandable. For they might well argue (as in point of fact they did) that Sri Aurobindo had never approved of any outside influence acting on his disciples. But then why did he put his seal on Krishnaprem's influence over myself, knowing full well that the latter would never accept his direction or even outlook if it ever ran counter to his Guru's lead? Only one explanation occurs to me: that he had faith not only in the spiritual wisdom of Krishnaprem but also in the purity of his love for me. In other words, he knew that Krishnaprem would not misuse the influence he wielded over me precisely because Krishnaprem loved something in me which turned to him in simple trust to be led to the One to whom he himself had given his soul in keeping, prompted by a similar simple confidence.
That is why he once told me in clear terms: "If your Guru, Dilip, should ever think that you had better have no truck with me any more, please remember that I would not only not mind your steering clear of me, but insist on it." I do not think such love has anything in common with what we are accustomed to panegyrise as 'love.' I need hardly emphasise the unique elements of a love such as this, the less so because the true value of such boons can be assessed by experience alone. I will therefore only touch on one last point — to end on a cheerful note: his sense of humour and love of laughter. I have often wondered whether I would have been able to profit so much by
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his guidance or even appreciate his "British doggedness he brought to bear on his sadhana" as Gurudev once put it, had I not loved his simple cheerfulness which mocked at the sententious and the solemn and insisted on laughter and gaiety, first and last, and exhorted the grave to "save our Yoga from degenerating into that over-conscientious scrupulosity which makes life a hell for many 'religious' people and not only sicklies o'er the native hue of resolution, but more serious still, dries up the healing springs of laughter. Once that occurs disaster is certain. Laughter was given by the Gods to man and it was one of their choicest gifts. No animal can laugh nor does it need to, since it lives in the harmony of the purely instinctive life. It is only Man whose possession of an ego introduces stresses and Strains which cannot be avoided and for the healing of which, therefore, the Gods gave him this supreme gift. Time and again it will save us when otherwise all would be lost. He who cannot laugh, he whose devotions are too serious for the healing waves of laughter, had better look out: there are breakers ahead."*
I admired whole-heartedly his most mature work and master piece, The Yoga of Kathopanishad, in which he sounded this warning. Nevertheless, once it so happened that I just could not face the music; it seemed as though the odds were hundred to one against me and so, in sheer despair, I wrote to Krishnaprem that I had finally decided to call it a day, admitting defeat. In explanation, I added that I had made up my mind to retire into a complete seclusion where I must henceforward stay in sombre silence, bidding good-bye to laughter and the merry-go-round of social life.
To that he wrote back with alacrity:
"But what is this awful news about your giving up laughter? Give up anything else you like: arguing, visitors, reading, writing, — but if you give up laughing, I, for one, shall weep. I read it out to Mod and she, too, was quite horrified! If you don't at once forswear such an awful heresy I shall never dare to meet
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* The Yoga of Kathopanishad, Chapter V, Sri Krishnaprem.
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you again. It would really be too awful! You would come silently into the room, perhaps brushing away a tear from your eye, and say to me in a solemn tone: 'Brother! shall we meditate together a little?' Appalling! And then we should look at each other surreptitiously from downcast eyelids to see whose meditation was deepest! And then: 'Shall we have a little holy talk together, brother?' Ghastly! I don't really believe you can be contemplating anything so dreadful!"
I sent this letter up to Gurudev inviting his opinion: Was sense of humour as welcome to Yoga as it was to life? He wrote back the next morning with his radiant assurance: "Sense of humour? It is the salt of existence. Without it the world would have got utterly out of balance — it is unbalanced enough already — and rushed to blazes long ago."
Doubtless, to walk in cheerfulness is not easy in this our "vale of tears" where the brightest laughter is fraught with the shadow of pain. Only the bravest among us can achieve it, transmuting, by their courage, the heart's pining for what might have been into a living faith that since His Grace on high is the Pilot, our life's bark shall come to Port. Fortunately, such blessed spirits are still born to our dismal planet— self-luminous souls who can walk in the light of their own faith and shed it on others as well. It is in this virgin light of the soul that Krishnaprem has soared skyward on the twin wings of love and loyalty, with a song on his lips. laughing death away, repeating as it were on a rosary:
Nabhinandeta maranam nabhinandeta jivanam
Kalam eva pratiksheta nidesham bhritako yatha. *
Dark death nor life I hymn, but wait
Like time upon His guidance still:
I bow to what He would dictate,
Like servants doing their masters' will.
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* Mahabharata, Shanti Parva.
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