Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER XI

The Seer-Poet

I have quoted earlier a letter Sri Aurobindo wrote to me vindicating the attitude of a seer which might well look like self superiority to others. But appearances are not always a reliable guide to reality. For instance, many may call his answer to a gibe of mine over-assertive. (I had asked whether the Supramental could really be true? Did it not look very much like a juggler whose legerdemain left us eventually high and dry in 'the land of nowhere?):

"There is no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One gets it even on the level of the Higher Mind which is the next, above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908 twenty-seven years ago, and I can assure you they were solid and marvellous enough in all conscience without any need of Supramentality to make them more so. Again, 'a calm that looks like action and behaves like motion' is a phenomenon of which I know nothing. A calm or silence, that is what I have had — the proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for four months and wrote six volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters, messages et cetera I have written since. If you say that writing is not an action or motion but only something that seems like it — a jugglery of the consciousness — well, still out of that calm and silence I conducted a pretty strenuous political activity and have also taken my share in keeping up an Ashram which has at least an appearance to the physical senses of being solid and material! If you deny that these things are material or solid (which, of course, metaphysically you can) then you land

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yourself plump, into Shankara's Illusionism, and there I will leave you".

Or let us take his statement: "My experience is not limited to a radiant peace. I know very well what ecstasy and ananda are from the Brahmananda down to the sharira ananda (Physical bliss) and I can experience them at any time. But of these things I prefer to speak only when my work is done — for it is in a transformed consciousness here and not only above where the ananda always exists that I seek their base of permanence."

Or his rejoinder to my charge about his readiness to answer mental questions while denying the mind even a Lebensraum on God's good earth:

"But I do not understand how all that can prevent me from answering mental questions. On my own showing, if it is necessary for the Divine purpose it has to be done, Sri Ramakrishna himself answered thousands of questions, I believe. But the answers must be such as he gave and such as I try to give answers from a higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to co-ordinate its ignorance; still less can there be a placing of the Divine Truth before the judgments of the intellect to be condemned or acquitted by that authority — for the authority here has not sufficient jurisdiction or competence."

Now such statements, when torn out of their context and presented baldly, are liable to be misunderstood by the man in the street who, arguing from his lesser platform — or shall I say, abyss of no-vision — may well dismiss the vista that opens on the higher as chimerical or unreal. Some others, who are even more dogmatic in their ignorance, may go a step further and scotch all such claims as pretentious.

But he was nothing if not unpretentious and truthful. In fact it was his meticulous regard for truth that made people misunderstand him so often. He would never pay a conventional compliment or make overstatements to which lesser men are so prone. Not that he was unsocial or aloof by nature: he could laugh and joke and, aye, give as much as he got in badinage. But he was

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not what is called bluff or expansive. He could love and love deeply, but never to court popularity or expect recognition of his heart's gifts. It was always difficult to label him or measure him with our social yardsticks. For while, on the one hand, he was unaggressive by temperament, on the other, he was too farseeing a realist to endorse unqualifiedly ahimsa or the gospel of non-resistance. He was wont to say that life was too complex to be plumbed with a doctrinaire precept. Ours is an age of fast happenings and the tempo of activity is increasing daily, hourly so, one must be prepared to change one's focus constantly if one wanted to see life for what it is at any given moment, and still more so if one wished to act on life and initiate changes. He loved to have flings at muddle-headedness and sloppy sentimentality. His scintillating mind gave one the impression of a self-luminous intelligence which he has himself characterised as pashyanti-buddhi, when speaking of Krishnaprem's perspicacity, that is, an intellect that sees. Whenever I have talked with him face to face, I have had the feeling that his penetrating gaze was entering me through and through and turning me inside out. His analytic power was like a scalpel and yet it was not a cruel scalpel that bit into one's flesh but rather a healing shaft of light that restored tissues beyond redemption — like radium.

All this I felt over and over again and yet such is the immense power of human cussedness which stems from self-love that I misunderstood him every time I failed to have things my own way. To give an instance in point. One day it so happened that one of his dignified disciples praised to the skies his "wonderful Yogic gravity" just after I had cracked a joke and laughed aloud with a few other festive friends. As my dignified friend's comment was aimed at me, I decided to vent it on the one who had inspired it, as I inferred. So I wrote to Gurudev protesting against my friend's frontal attack on my "vital cheerfulness" as many people called it and added that I doubted whether the dehumanised psychic gravity which he sponsored could ever be as warm and living as the

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vital joie de vivre — and so on. (I may add that many a time did I attack what he called the "psychic" and ended by calling the Supramental suspect — whenever somebody or other nagged at my social light-heartedness.) To that he wrote back: "Something else in you was inclined to see as the only alternative some hard grim ascetic ideal, the blank featureless Brahman and imagined that the Supramental was that; something in the vital looked on the conquest of wrong movements as a hard desperate tapasya, not as a passage into the purity and joy of the Divine — even now something in you seems to insist on regarding the psychic attitude as something extraordinary, difficult, unhuman and impossible! There were these and other lingerings of the mind and the vital; you have to tear them out and look at the simplicity of the Truth with a straight and simple gaze. The Russellian fear of emptiness is the form the active mind gives to Silence. Yet it was on what you call emptiness, on the silence that my whole Yoga was founded and it was through it that there came afterwards all the inexhaustible riches of a greater Knowledge, Will and Joy, all the experiences of greater mental, psychic and vital realms, all the ranges up to Overmind and beyond. The cup has often to be emptied before it can be new-filled; the Yogin, the sadhaka ought not to be afraid of emptiness or silence. It is not that there is anything peculiar to you in these difficulties; every sadhaka entering the way has to get over similar impediments. It took me four years of inner striving to find a real way, even though the Divine help was with me all the time, and even then it seemed to come by an accident; and it took me ten years more of intense Yoga under a supreme inner guidance to trace it out and that was because I had my past and the world's past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found the future."

But the old Adam in me was not to be appeased so easily in those days — the early thirties. So I wrote back to him:

"O Guru,

You do disconcert country innocents like us even as Krishna did his contemporaries with his vyamishrcmi vakyani (contradictory

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statements). For in one mood you say that the Divine must answer all sincere aspirations and then, in the very next, bewilder us by your enigmatic statement that even the 'Divine help' seemed to come to you by an 'accident'. But at least do have a little commiseration for us humans who long to take you at your word if only you will be so kind as not to make it impossible. Also, Guru, how can we get on with this 'Divine of yours if even His help on which so much eloquence has been spent down the ages has to be waited for in stupefied passivity since it can only come 'by an accident'?"

Imperturbable as ever, he wrote back:

"I think you have made too much play with my phrase 'an accident', ignoring the important qualification, 'it seemed to come by an accident'. After four years of pranayam and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased , health and out flow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without fame whom I did not know, a bhakta with a limited mind but with some experience and evocative power. We sat together and I followed with an absolute fidelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the least understanding where he was leading me or where I was myself going. The first result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness which he had never intended — for they were Advaitic and Vedantic and he was against Advaita Vedanta — and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman. The final upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its will — a principle or rather a seed force to which I kept unswervingly and increasingly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no

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single rule or style or dogma or shastra to where and what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter. Yet he understood so little what he was doing that when he met me a month or two later, he was alarmed, tried to undo what he had done and told me that it was not the Divine but the Devil that had got hold of me. Does not all that justify my phrase 'it seemed to come to me like an accident?' But my meaning is that the ways of the Divine are not like that of humans or in accord with our pat terns so that it is impossible to judge them or to lay down for him what he shall or shall not do, for the Divine knows better than we do. If we admit the Divine at all, then the true reason and bhakti seem to me to be at one in demanding implicit faith and surrender. I do not see how without them there can be avyabhicharini bhakti (one-pointed adoration)."

With time this spontaneous self-revealing became almost habitual with him, and along with it his friendly argumentativeness with me, so much so that he almost seemed like taking my cussedness seriously as it were. Not that he did not know or that there were any lacunae in his understanding of our human nature. He knew very well how oddly it acted especially when it was, as it had to be, lured off the track by its perverse moods. He came down to us merely because he had felt a simple impulse of generosity guided by his profound wisdom. To give a convincing instance, he wrote a long letter which moved me deeply because I had carped at what I called his fundamental incapacity to understand the mentality of the average man as against those who are spiritual giants like himself. That is why, I had whimpered, he always went on talking so glibly about rejecting all doubts or treading the pure sunlit path. As I went on, I gathered further momentum till I broke out into a passionate indictment:

"You write calmly. Guru, that we have only to withdraw from all egoistic movements. I can but smile sadly. For don't you veritably rejoice in assuring us placidly that we can't get rid of the tyranny of pain because we won't — being in love, congenitally, with the drama which the tyrant brings in its wake.

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Such statements do baffle us, poor humans! For if what you say be true, it would follow (would it not?) that all suffering must be a make-believe, a may a, since we like it so much? — ergo, why not welcome it sportingly, taking it all as a joke? That is why I often wonder whether the Supramental consciousness of your ideal stratospheres can ever feel at home in this our world of mental humans! For I can tell you that we — common mortals, constituted as we are — resist nothing as stubbornly as suffering and agony, self-pity, and despair. For I have noted times out of number, that my mind experiences only a deep discomfort to see anybody suffer or groan or writhe in agony. How can I then help wondering whether your ascending peak of Yogic consciousness has not made you somewhat aloof, perforce, from what really happens down in our plains of blood and sweat .and tears? And then it is not just for the fun of doubting either. For diagnose as you will, I defy you to convince me that I derive any real pleasure in heckling you at every turn — you whose message made me cut away from my dearest moorings and plunge for the unknown! It is only because I find your prescription too outlandish that I have to bandy words with you even when I know, alas, that I cannot possibly cope with your resplendent intellect. But, Guru, what do you come to gain by winning in the lists of wordy arguments? For have you not yourself said again and again that arguments, however weighty, can never do duty for Yogic joy and peace and love — the goods we came for, trusting that you would be able to deliver us if only we followed your lead. But then — and here is the crux of the problem — how can a human, being human, follow such an utterly divine lead as yours so disconcertingly alien to reason and far from feasible, besides? There is a saying in English that you can catch a swallow if you put salt on its tail. You seem to prescribe similarly: 'detach yourself, don't lend your ears to hostile suggestions, open yourself and go on doing it all the time sleeplessly till, one fine morning, you will find your ship simply haled into the harbour of bliss beyond the dark storms!' But how to detach oneself, how to open oneself— how to think

only the right thoughts?? We ask such questions again and again -- only to receive the same answers, everlastingly! Well, Guru, there you have in a nutshell my difficulty, or rather the typical impasse of an average aspirant. But you seem very much like those great doctors who go to a pauper and prescribe remedies which only a prince can procure. No wonder we do not recover from our ailments —have little progress to show, alas!"

After despatching the letter I felt even worse — more depressed than ever which, in its turn, made me fear that this time he might be forced, at last, to dismiss me; for hadn't I transgressed the limit and invited dismissal by my virtual refusal to recognise him even as a competent guide, not to mention a God realised Guru? But there again he came out once more, unperturbed, with his balm of sympathy which only a truly understanding Guru could offer too one who had failed him utterly and deliberately.
"I never said," he wrote back, "that to overcome doubts was easy, it is difficult because it is the nature of something in the human physical mind to cling to doubt for its own sake. It is not easy to overcome gloom, depression, grief and suffering because something in the human vital clings to it and almost needs it as part of the dramas, of life. So also, I have never said that sex, anger, jealousy etc. were easy to overcome. I have said it was difficult because they were ingrained in the human vital and even if thrown out were always being brought back into it either by its own habit or by the invasion of the general Nature and the resurgence of its old response. Your idea that my difficulties were different from those of human nature is a mental construction or inference without any real basis. If I were ignorant of human difficulties ad therefore intolerant of them how is it that I am so patient with them as you cannot deny that I am? Why for years do I go on patiently arguing with your doubts, spending so much of my time, always trying to throw light on your difficulties, to show how things stand, to give reasons for a knowledge gained by long and indisputable experience? Am I writing these letters to you every night because I have no under-

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standing, no sympathy with you in your doubts and difficulties? Why do I tolerate and help and write soothing and encouraging letters to these women who break out into hunger-strike and threaten suicide once a fortnight? Why do we bear all this trouble and tracas and fracas and resistance and obloquy and hard criticism from the sadhakas, why were we so patient with men like B and H and others if we had no understanding and no sympathy with the difficulties of human nature? Is it because I press always for faith and discourage doubt as a means of approach to the spiritual realisation? But what spiritual guide with a respect for truth could do otherwise?"

Then with regard to his diagnoses and prescriptions about pain he went on to argue with me once again for the hundredth time:

As to the statement about drama and something in you liking . to suffer, nobody doubts that your external consciousness dislikes suffering. The physical mind and consciousness of man hates its own suffering and, if left to itself, dislikes also to see others suffer. But if you will try to fathom the significance of your own admission of liking drama or of the turn towards drama — from which very few human beings escape — and if you go deep enough, you will find that there is something in the vital which likes suffering and clings to it for the sake of the drama. It is something below the surface, but it is strong, almost universal in human nature and difficult to eradicate unless one recognises it and gets inwardly away from it. The mind and the physical of man do not like suffering, for if they did it would not be suffering any longer, but this thing in the vital wants it in order to give spice to life. It is the reason why constant depressions can go on returning and returning even though the mind longs to get rid of them, because this penchant in the vital responds and goes on repeating the same movement like a gramophone as soon as it is got going and insists on turning the whole round of the oft-repeated record. It does not really depend on the reasons which the vital gives for starting off to the round, these are often of the most trivial character and wholly insufficient to justify it. It is only by a strong will to detach

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oneself, not to satisfy, to reject, not to welcome, that one can get rid of this most troublesome and dangerous streak in human nature. When therefore, we speak of the vital comedy, of the vital drama, we are speaking from a psychological knowledge which does not end with the surface of things but looks at these hidden movements — it is impossible to deal with things for the purpose of Yoga if we confine ourselves to the surface consciousness only. It is also according to the rule of these reactions that your despondence should have come immediately after considerable progress in bhakti and the will to surrender in the inner being — for it comes from the spirit of darkness which attacks the sadhaka. whenever it can and that spirit resents fiercely all progress made and hates the very idea of progress and its whole policy is to convince him by his attacks and suggestions that he has made none or that what progress he has made is after all null and inconclusive."

To drive my charge home I had in my letter referred to the failure of his superhuman prescription with a gifted human whom I will call Mr. Philo (abbreviated from philosopher) who had to be sent away from the Ashram because he refused to give up drink. What about his view, I asked, about God himself being as much bound by his own laws as his creatures by their own karma?

Pat came his answer the next morning.

"As to Philo." he wrote, "the Mother and I have always thought poorly of his thinking mind: he was never able to understand with the mind anything but the orthodox Adwaitic ideas in their most general and popular form. As for his idea of the Divine being bound, being a hostage to law as much as Philo himself or his cat, that was an old pet idea of his...an idea that can be accepted only by those who are unable to think philosophically or make the necessary spiritual distinctions. The laws of this world as it is are the laws of the Ignorance and the Divine in the world maintains them so long as there is the Ignorance; if he did not, the universe would crumble to pieces — utsideyur ime lokah, as the Gita puts it. There are also, very naturally, conditions for getting out of the Ignorance into the

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Light. One of them is that the mind of the sadhaka should co-operate with the Truth and that his will should co-operate with the Divine power which, however slow its action may seem to the vital or to the physical mind, is uplifting the nature towards the Light. When that co-operation is complete the progress can be rapid enough; but the sadhaka should not grudge the time and the labour needed to make that cooperation fully possible to the blindness and weakness of human nature.

"All this call of yours for faith, sincerity, surrender is only an invitation to sake that co-operation more easily possible. If the physical mind ceases to judge all things including those that it does not yet know or are beyond it, like the deeper things of the spirit, then it becomes easier for it to receive the Light and know by illumination and experience the things that it does not yet know. If the mental and vital will place themselves in the Divine Hand without reservation, then it becomes easier for the Power to work and produce tangible effects. If there is resistance then it is natural that it should take more time and the work should be done from within or, as it might appear, underground, so as to prepare the nature and undermine the resistance Read the letter of your friend professor Mohinimohan on Yoga and the spiritual life. Beautifully idealistic, but it does not make allowance for the hard struggle of the spiritual emergence and leaps to fulfilment with too radiant and ethereal a sweep."

"Struggle for spiritual emergence," — the phrase has indeed, often recurred to me in my dark hours of stress and tension, but perhaps never with the same revealing force as when I learnt my first deep lesson in spiritual humility. The occasion, in the context of my humiliation, will stand out as a landmark in the history of my Yogic evolution in retrospect. I may as well relate it here as the experience did border on the miraculous and I have witnessed very few miracles uptil now.*

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*That is, till the end of 1950, for during the next decade I bore witness to almost a procession of miracles; only a few of these I have recorded in my novel,
Miracles Do Still Happen.

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It happened in May, 1936. I had been in the Ashram since November, 1928, and now longed to go out for a while to seek a little respite from my exhausting wrestles with my ego. But it hurt my pride to be forced to go out for a temporary relief. I wanted to achieve something durable before seeking diversion. I knew that the only way to achieve anything worth while was to surrender one's self-will to the Guru's will. But I wished to dismiss this knowledge as hearsay. "What nonsense!" rebuked my mental vital. "What you need is a strong tonic — a bout of heart-warming, virile sadhana: in other words, doing it. But this surrender of yours is a myth — synonymous with undoing it, and all resignation is a mere camouflage, a respectable name for indolence. Remember the Upanishad's exhortation: 'Nayam atma valahinena labhyah.' (None but the strong wins to the Kingdom of the Soul!)"

Not that I was unaware in my heart of hearts that I was merely temporising to put off the inevitable, that in the end I would have to surrender my self-will. But the more I ached to surrender the less I favoured the prospect. Was there no other way — I asked myself in sheer agony till, desperately, I decided on the alternative: the path of tapasya. If I persevere, the Divine is bound to respond, so why must I know to a will other than my own? I questioned the very basis of Guruvada as unmitigated authoritarianism. No wonder my untamed vital jumped to exploit the convenient sophism: "No more bowing," it roared, "to what is imposed from without: the only deity is the Resident within — Him alone worship, 'break alt other idols'." Thus I borrowed the great Vivekananda's mantra without stopping to ask myself whether I was cast in his heroic mould! "To tread the austere path, the manly path!" — I goaded my drooping spirits in order to be a master in my own house.

So, I withdrew from all social pleasures and went into a seclusion, increasing, day after barren day my hours of meditationand prayer to the exclusion even of reading and writing, This was the most difficult of all feats, but the more difficullt I found it the less I liked to scotch the project; the more I was

coaxed by Gurudev to take 'the sunlit path of the psychic," the more I repeated to myself a famous Yoga-vashistha couplet which said:

Rely on thine own strength and, grinding thy teeth Defy the heroic deeds the Tyrant, Fate. *

But alas, 'Krishna" say the Rishis, "assays you by your attitude, not deeds. '"'Nor is God mocked. So the more I shut myself in, vowed to plucking the stars from on high by dint of my Herculean japa and meditation, the more receded from me all joy or life and zest for sadhana till I found myself groping in a veritable catacomb as it were. Life seemed dismal beyond endurance and I did not know where to turn now, having ruled out the Guru's help as hearsay. But it was not even the gloom that mortified me most, but its stark irrelevance in the context of my hardour and inspiration. I could neither understand why my heroic attempt to soar should have been rewarded by clipped wings nor explain how a march towards the east could have pushed me back to the sunset of the last gleam of hope. Alas now there was nothing for it but to grind my teeth harder still, but the more I persisted the less I succeeded in penetrating the mystery of my dire pain which only deepened till — it happened, the great miracle i What it was — let the good reader judge from the correspondence which passed between us.

"O Guru," I wrote after giving him a full history of all that I had gone through, riding my folly, "I wanted to achieve it all by my unaided effort and so, meditated and concentrated as never before, for days and days. But the more I persevered, the deeper grew the gloom and the mental agony till, last evening, when I was utterly shut out from light and felt like one completely stranded, I preyed, in tears, upon my lonely terrace. 'O Krishna,'

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* "Param pourusham ashritya dantair dantan vichurnayan Shubhenashubhtamudyuktium praktanam pourusham jayet."
"Bhavagrafhi Janardana" — Janardana is a najne of Krishna.

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I said, 'you know I have only wanted you all my life, or at least aspired to want nothing but your Grace. You know also that I decided of late to arrive through tapasya because I was told that you never let a sincere prayer go unheeded. And yet how is it that the more I sue you the more you melt away like a shadow form to my eager clutch? I do not understand your lila. Lord, but have mercy on one who is at the end of his tether! I own at long last that my much-vaunted intelligence cannot find a key to the enigma. I have only learnt one thing: that there is no ignominy come only when one realises that one is completely impotent by oneself. In any event, I appeal to you in this deep impasse to respond to me — give me a sign that you are not a chimera.'

"O Guru, as soon as this prayer issued from my heart of humility I experienced a velvety softness within and a feeling of ineffable plasticity which rapidly grew into something so concrete that I felt almost as if I could touch it with my fingers! Bat even this was not all. As soon as my pride admitted defeat all my garnered gloom of despair and frustration vanished as though by magic: my restlessness was redeemed by peace and my darkness by a radiance which seemed too incredible to be true and yet too vivid to be dismissed as wishful thinking. And to me it seemed so utterly convincing because it seemed to descend, like an avalanche, from nowhere — to sweep me off my feet when I had least expected it. Kanai congratulates me and insists that I have had a real and important psychic experience without knowing it. What have you to say thereto, Guru? To think that even I should have had am experience and a psychic one at that!" — and so on.

His reply came,, duly, the next morning.

"It was certainly an experience," he wrote, "and as Kanai very accurately described it, an experience of great value: a psychic experience par excellence. A feeling of 'velvety softness' and an 'ineffable plasticity within,' is a psychic experience and can be nothing else. It means a modification of the substance of

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the consciousness especially in the vital emotional part, and a modification prolonged or repeated till it became permanent would mean a great step in what I call the psychic transformation of the being. It is just these modifications in the inner substance stance that make transformation possible. Further, it was a modification that made a beginning of knowledge possible — for by knowledge we mean in Yoga not thought or ideas about spiritual things but psychic understanding from within and spiritual illumination from above. Therefore the first result was this feeling of yours that 'there was no ignominy in not understanding it all and that the true understanding could come only when one realised that one was completely impotent by oneself.' This was itself a beginning of a true understanding: a psychic understanding — something felt within which sheds a light or brings up a spiritual truth that mere thinking would not have given, also a truth that is effective in bringing both the enlightenment and solace you needed, for what the psychic being brings with it always is light and happiness, an inner understanding and relief and solace.

"Another very promising aspect of this experience is that it came as an immediate response to an appeal to the Divine. You asked for the understanding and the way out and at once Krishna showed you both: the way out was the change of the consciousness within, the plasticity which makes the knowledge possible and also the understanding of the condition of mind and vital in which the true knowledge or power of knowledge could come. For the inner knowledge comes from within and above (whether from the Divine in the heart or from the Self above) and for it to come the pride of the mind and vital in the surface mental ideas and their insistence on them must go. One must know that one is ignorant before one can begin to know. This shows that I am not wrong in pressing for the psychic opening as the only way out. For as the psychic opens, such responses and much more also become common and the inner change also proceeds by which they are made possible."

Upon this I wrote to him once again asking whether a "feeling"

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could be called an "experience". Was not a mere feeling something too adventitious and subjective to be able to claim the status of an "experience"? To this again he replied promptly at once.

"I doubt", he wrote, "whether I am able to answer your question or whether even I quite understand it. There is no law that a feeling cannot be an experience. Experiences are of all kinds and take all forms in the consciousness. When the consciousness undergoes, sees or feels anything spiritual or psychic or even occult, that is an experience (in the technical Yogic sense), for there are of course all sorts of experiences which are not of that character. The feelings themselves are of many kinds. The word 'feeling' is often used for an emotion, and there can be psychic or spiritual emotions which are numbered among Yogic experiences, such as a wave of pure bhakti or the rising of love towards the divine. A feeling also means a perception of something felt — a perception in the vital or psychic or in the essential substance of the consciousness. I find, even often, a mental perception, when it is very vivid, described as a feeling. If you exclude all these feelings and kindred ones and say that they are feelings and not experiences, then you leave very little room for experiences.

"Feeling and vision are the main forms of spiritual experience. One sees and feels the Brahman everywhere; one feels a force enter or go out from one; one feels or sees the presence of the divine within or around one; one feels the descent of peace or ananda. Kick all that on the ground that it is but a feeling, not an experience (what the deuce then is an experience?) and you make a clean sweep of most of the things that we call experience Again, we feel a change in the substance of the consciousness or the state of consciousness. We feel ourselves spreading in wideness and the body only as a small thing in the wideness (this can be seen also). We feel the heart-consciousness being wide instead of narrow, soft instead of hard, illumined instead of obscure, the head consciousness also, the vital, even the physical;we feel thousands of things of all kinds and why are we not

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to call them experience? Of course it is an inner sight, an inner feeling, not material like the feeling of a cold wind, or a stone or any other object but as the inner consciousness deepens it is not less vivid or concrete, it is even more so.

"In this case what you felt was not an emotion —.though something emotional came with it — you felt a condition in the very substance of consciousness — a softness a plasticity, even a velvety softness an ineffable plasticity. Any fellow who knows anything about Yoga would immediately say: What a fine experience — a very clear and spiritual and psychic experience!"

But, as Tagore used to say again and again, a boon can never be given, it has to be won, that is, one has to be mature enough to assimilate it. So, for years to come, the "fine experience" was not repeated — possibly because the prayer of humility did not issue straight from the heart's core with anything like the same intensity No wonder shadows fell on my path once more after the brief interlude of light, and the old anarchy of darkness and doubt resumed its sway till, sore and weary, I asked him, somewhat foolishly, whether the vicissitudes were imposed on me from without or by the Guru himself to keep his lila going. I complained also about his keeping silent when we wanted to be told of the working of occult forces. What on earth did he mean by

This earth alone is not our teacher and nurse,

The powers of all the worlds have entrance here. *

He replied tenderly as ever:

"For me the path of Yoga has always been a battle as well as a jonurney, a thing of ups and downs, of light followed by darkness, followed by greater light, but nobody is better pleased than myself when a disciple can arrive out of all that to the smooth and clear path which the human physical mind quite rightly yearns after."

And then to pacify me further he went on to add:

"If I write about these questions from the Yogic point of view,

_________________

* Savitri, Book II, Canto V.

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even though on a logical basis, there is bound to be much that is in conflict with the current opinions, e.g. about miracles, the limits of judgments by sense-data etc. I have avoided as much as possible writing about these subjects because I would have to propound things that cannot be understood except by reference to data other than those of the physical senses or of reason founded on these alone. I might have to speak of the laws and forces not recognised by reason or physical science. In my public writings as well as my letters to sadhakas I have not dealt with these because cause they go out of the range of ordinary knowledge and the understanding founded on it. These things are known to some but they do not usually speak about it,* while the public view of much of those that are known is either credulous or incredulous, but in both cases without experience or knowledge. The Yogi arrives at a sort of division in his being in which the inner Purusha, fixed and calm, looks at the perturbations of the outer man as one looks at the passions of an unreasonable child; that once fixed, he can proceed afterwards to control the outer man also; but a complete control of the outer man needs a long and arduous tapasya. But even from the siddha Yogi you cannot always expect a perfect perfection: there are many who do not even care for the perfection of the outer nature which cannot be held as a disproof of their realisation and experience. If you so regard it, you have to rule out of court the greater number of Yogis of the past and the Rishis of the old time also.

"I own that ideal of my Yoga is different, but I cannot bind by it other spiritual men and their achievements and discipline. My own ideal is transformation of the outer nature, perfection as perfect as it can be. But you cannot say that those who have not achieved it or do not care to achieve it had no spirituality. Beautiful conduct — not politeness which is an outer thing, however Suable — but beauty, founded upon a spiritual realisation of ________________

* Cf. Laotse's famous epigram:

The one who knows the Secret does not speak:

The one who speaks does not the Secret know.

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unity and harmony projected into life, is certainly part of the perfect harmony."

Whenever I felt depressed, or even restive, he wrote to me in this vein — patient and firm, tender and understanding. As days glide by, I cannot help but marvel more and more at his incredible capacity for getting under one's skin, as it were, to be able to diagnose every time the root of the trouble. I shall never forget get, to my last day, the deep debt I owe him because of the loving support he gave me unfailingly in a tussle I had with a few of my brother disciples about the interpretation of Yoga and Guruvad. It is too long and tangled a story to be related in full; nor is it necessary, because his letters I am going to quote are sure to prove as informative and revealing as the reader could wish. So I will try to be as brief as I possibly can.

I have been a worshipper of Krishna since my adolescence. The famous saying of the Bhagavat: "Anye chamshakalah pumsah Krishnastu Bhagavan svayam: all other avatars are but partial incarnations, while Krishna is the Lord Himself found a permanent niche in my plastic heart when I was barely fifteen years of age. But this does not happen with every aspirant. So quite a few of my brother disciples, who had never heard His mystic Flute-call, looked askance at my fervour for such an old world "mythical" figure. These must have been a trifle embarrassed to read, after Gurudev's passing, in one of his posthumous sonnets, entitled Krishna (LAST POEMS)

At last I find a meaning of soul's birth

Into this universe terrible and sweet,
I who have felt the hungry heart of earth

Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna's feet....

For this moment lived the ages past,

The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last. *

________________

* Quoted from his posthumous book of poems entitled Last Poems, published
in 1952. This poem was dated September 15,1939.

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I say "embarrassed" advisedly; because in those days none of us knew that Gurudev could have possibly "aspired to Krishna's feet" to attain to the last fulfilment. All that we knew was that he had a very high regard for Krishna. Had he not written to me in a letter (dated, 4.1.36) comparing Krishna and Christ: "The two stand in two different worlds. There is nothing in Christ of the great and boundless and sovereign spiritual knowledge and power of realisation we find in the Gita, nothing of the emotional force, passion, beauty of the Gopi symbol and all that lies behind it, nothing of the many-sided manifestation of the Krishna figure." In another long letter he wrote to me on 2.12.46 (in answer to a question posed by a very dear friend of mine, Sri Sanjiv Rao, who had asked me "whether the Krishna of Brindaban and the details of His lila, divine play, are to be accepted as literally true or merely as beautiful symbols of deep spiritual realities"): "These questions and the speculations to which they give rise have no indispensable connection with spiritual life. There what matters is the contact with Krishna and the growth towards the Krishna-consciousness, the presence the spiritual relation, the union in the soul and, till that is reached, the aspiration, the growth in bhakti and whatever illumination one can get on the way. To one who has had these things, heard the voice, known Krishna as Friend, Lover, Guide, Teacher, Master or, still more has had his whole consciousness changed by the contact, or felt His presence within him, all such questions have only an outer and superficial interest. So also one who has had contact with the inner Brindaban and the lila of the Gopis, made the surrender and undergone the spell of the joy and the beauty or even only turned to the sound of the flute, the rest hardly matters. But from another point of view, if one can accept the historical reality of the incarnation (I have always regarded the incarnation as a fact and accepted the historicity of Krishna as I accept the historicity of Christ), there is this great spiritual gain that one has a point d' appui for a more concrete realisation in the conviction that once at least the Divine has visibly touched the earth, made the complete manifestation possible and made it possible for the divine supenature to descend in to this evolving but still very imperfect terrestrial nature."

age- 201

But although those who were students of his great exegesis knew how deeply he had admired Krishna all along, the rank and file talked crudely of his superiority to all other saints, sages and even past avatars. The idea was abroad that he was assuredly superior to Krishna as the latter was but an avatar of the Overmental plane whereas he (Sri Aurobindo) belonged to the still higher, Supramental, plane. This kind of crude and blatant gossip often got on my nerves and made me repeat sturdily the Bhagavat pronuciamento about Krishna being the ultimate Divine buttressed by Gurudev's endorsement which I have just cited, but it was all to no purpose; my eloquence only made my critics more vocal still till I came to be regarded almost as a black sheep. Some of my brother disciples openly said that to go on worshipping Krishna as the ultimate Divine even after having known Sri Aurobindo amounted to disloyalty. As this shocked me to the soul, I declared stoutly in self-defence that it was impossible for me to resile from my stand that I regarded Krishna as the Divine Incarnation and my Guru as His human deputy, and that although I worshipped him in my heart's temple not only as the greatest seer-poet of our time, but the wisest Sage (Rishi) of our age. "But there I must draw the line," I added animatedly, "and I do not envy those who want to deify him at the expense of Krishna, the peerless. My die is cast," I proclaimed sententiously, "and my position is that I can accept my Guru only as Krishna's resplendent representative but not as His, double, still less as His superior."

"For all that, Guru," I wrote to him more than once improvising freely as my spirit moved me, "I have loved and worshipped you with all my heart and felt thrilled to the soul to accept your lead. If, nevertheless, I fail to get rid of certain reservation in my acceptance of your guidance, please do not take it amiss. For, honest to God, I do not know how on earth I can possibly subscribe to what my soul rebels against, namely, that you are greater than Krishna. But as they assert that it is your considered

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opinion and therefore I must bow to it, I am forced to ask you if it is really incumbent on a disciple to follow his Guru blindly, mouthing the slogans sung by the herd? O Guru, forgive me: but how can I say yes if and when every fibre of my being says no? God being Truth, how can I hope to attain His Grace through pledging myself to falsehood? Lastly," I wrote in a letter when at last I could bear it no more, "will you grant me an interview when I feel all but lost in this darkness when I am being branded by many as disloyal, cut dead by a few as an infidel, and castigated by a pillar of your Ashram as ' doomed' ?"

The Ashram buzzed ... but lo, to the shocked surprise of the hundred-per-cent "faithfuls" he granted me the interview on February 4,1943. As I have recorded my conversation with him in my Among the Great (pp.331-342) I will quote here only a few lines:

"But you need not be alarmed," he put in placidly. "For Yoga has for its ultimate object the realisation of the Divine and achieving the divine life. These are side-issues and as such need not be looked upon as germane to spiritual experience. So belief in them is not necessary, far less indispensable for realisation. You have the right of private judgments in matters such as these."

My heart-beat abated "I am relieved," I said. "For I did fear that my inability to accept the Guru's view in every instance might be looked upon by the Guru as a sure sign of my unfitness to profit by your guidance."

"You may be reassured once more," he said kindly. "For you can take it from me that when I say or write anything, it's only to state my findings or else explain my point of view: I don't insist on it as law for others. And can you imagine, knowing me as you do all these years, that I should impose my outlook on others? I have never cared to be a dictator; neither do I insist that everybody's views must be modelled by mine, any more than I insist that everybody must follow me or my Yoga."

(I may quote here a passage, very germane to my theme, from his Synthesis Of Yoga: "But the wise Teacher will note seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the

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receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct. His work... is a trust from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative. He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a light kindling other lights, an awakened soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine.")

And the most convincing proof that he had meant every word of it is that, far from being dismissed out of hand, my "recalcitrance' brought me closer to him alas, to the scandalised surprise of the hundred-percent zealots of our Ashram.

All this, as it often happens in Yoga, stimulated me in a strange way, in the sense that I had feared just the reverse, to wit, I had simply dreaded that Gurudev would grow cold towards me after my all-too-candid confession that I could not dream of ranking him with Krishna as a Messiah or a God-man, playing at hide and seek with us mortals.

And it was because he was truly great that he could go on lavishing on me the largess of his delectable intimacy even after my sturdy refusal to deify him as the others did so blindly. I cannot help but regret that ever so many in our Ashram insisted on thrusting on him the crown of Avatarhood even after he had written to Nirod (8.3.35): "Let me make it clear that in all I wrote I was not writing to prove that I am an Avatar! You are busy in your reasonings with the personal question; I am busy more with the general one. I am seeking to manifest something of the Divine that I am conscious of and feel — I care damn whether that constitutes me an Avatar or something else. That is not a question which concerns me. By manifestation, of course, I mean the bringing out and spreading of that Consciousness so that others also may feel and enter into it and live in it."

But all this is by the way. If A B C ...X Y Z are fully persuaded that he was an Avatar of greater stature than Krishna, that is their affair and I concede they have every right to proclaims claim their conviction from the housetops. All I want to submit

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is that they should not, rationally, condemn me as disloyal if I voice my conviction which is not on all fours with theirs. And my chief reason for recounting all this is not to belittle Sri Aurobindo but to underline the greatness of his incredible tolerance and understanding which made it possible for me to tell him after all this to-do everything that I felt about him and his mission as I envisaged it, asking him at every turn to give me his support in every tussle I had with my adverse critics. So I will end this chapter with a few extracts from his letters bearing on the imbroglio. For an imbroglio it was, so much so that my gloom impelled Krishnaprem — to whom I wrote about it — to laugh it away with the sunshine of his radiant laughter:

"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 laughter, I, for one, shall weep. If you don't forswear such a frightful heresy I shall never dare to meet you again. 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 eye- lids 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: Had sense of humour any place in Yoga at all? He wrote back the next morning: "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."

May this much suffice as a prelude to his letters on Krishna which will, doubtless, be welcome to all Krishna-lovers.
18-6-43

"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.

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'Sectarianism' is a matter of dogma, ritual etc. not of spiritual experience; 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."

16-9-44

"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 put 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.

17-9-44"

"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 as 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

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attractiveness, charm and allurement which compensate for all you have suffered. Of course your decision to continue the solitude has our full approval."

2-10-44

"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 (I wrote to Gurudev that I discovered de nouveau that I was foolish plus sensitive.) 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 the 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 ray 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 the Overmental and not 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 clude the Supramental in Himself! Duly I sent that letter up to Gurudev who wrote back to me (10.12.44):

"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 the supermind by the hair of the head or "te end 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

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on Bhagavan Vasudeva! What I said was that Krishna in His incarnation brought down the Overmind into 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 that 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 will 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 can't 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 Nagarjuna and, though less unmixedly, of Shankara. 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 advisable 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 leap 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 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 what 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 seccondly because Krishnaprem's devotion to his Guru could not but prove a flickerless beacon to hundreds who still groped in the dark in this age of barren scepticism. Also, shall I add that he had 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 has lit in his heart by dint of his one-pointed sadhana and loyalty to his Guru,

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