First of three volumes of correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and Dilip Kumar Roy, singer, musician, poet and writer. Sri Aurobindo explains his Yoga, guiding Dilip in his inner life.
Sri Aurobindo : corresp.
THEME/S
1931?
T send you back the photos. The Mother says she does not find the Russian actress worse than others of her type, it is always from self-interest that they act and if a man like Suhrawardy1 allows himself to be tempted they will necessarily exploit him and think themselves justified in doing it. His photograph is that of a man imaginative and ardent and emotional, too passionate, excessively candid, and no doubt he has high sentiments and generous impulses. But he was likely to make mistakes in life and not to perceive the actual values or to keep his steps in the right measure. I don't know the details of his story, but, from what you say, it seems to be a common one—a confusion between the true emotional life and the sensational vital movements which were all that this woman could give, and therefore a gâchis [waste] of the life's possibilities. Is it that he has not discovered what she is like or he still clings to her in spite of it?
The verse translations from Nietzsche are very successful, some of them quite admirable, and the poem on Mahakali combines the sublime and the lyrical in a perfect fusion.
Suhrawardy's1 poem is exceedingly beautiful, sentimental Perhaps, but he has succeeded in transmuting the sentiment
__________________
1. Sahid Suhrawardy, a Bengali poet and Dilip's friend. He graduated from the Calcutta University with honours in 1910 and from Oxford in 1914. He became secretary to the artistic section of the League of Nations. Later on he became Nizam professor of Indian Studies at Vishwa Bharati, then Bageswari professor of Comparative Arts at Calcutta University. He gave brilliant lectures from 1923 to 1943. After India's partition he went to Pakistan and became Pakistan's ambassadorr to Spain in 1955.
Page 55
into a very poignant emotion and, once that is done, there can be no farther objection from the standpoint of poetic truth. There are just two or three places where the rhythm stumbles. "On those that irrevocably late"—"that" which clashes in sound with late, should be changed to "who"; and "0 Lord, shower thy grace" is not rhythmic at all—it should be, "0 Lord, shower down thy grace". Again "0 Lord, rain pity" though not unrhythmic and otherwise (emotionally) effective, breaks the movement which is sustained throughout the rest of the poem. Here, however, opinions may differ. But all the rest is admirably done.
1931 ?
Fragment of a letter
... The presence whose fading he regrets can only be felt if the inner being continues to be consecrated, and the outer nature is put into harmony or at least kept under the touch of the inner spirit. But if he does things which his inner being does not approve, this condition will be inevitably tarnished and, each time, the possibility of his feeling the presence will diminish. He must have a strong will to purification and an aspiration that does not flag and cease, if the Mother's grace is to be there and effective.
January 25, 1931
I like your new poem immensely—it seems to me that you have achieved in it a largeness and depth of thought and an ample harmony of expression and rhythm which mark a new and remarkable advance in your poetic development. Here at least there is no lack of progress—and a very rapid progress.
Page 56
Harin's1 poem ["The Cycle"], though beautiful in expression and good in rhythm, is, as often, fanciful in parts and I do not like the tag about God and clod—it sounds almost silly, but the last two lines (no matter about the flaw in their philosophy) are poetically magnificent. Your translation seems to me excellent; it has got rid of most of the fancifulness and your version of the God-clod lines is preferable to the original. It is only the close that fails to render the power of the text; but it may not be possible in Bengali.
The translation of Suhrawardy ["Some Day"] is also good; only the stormy night gives it a quite different atmosphere which is not that of the original poem. Whatever merit the original has depends upon its quiet and subdued tones and the very slightness of the figures and details of the cadre for the light memory of another's deep and tragic sorrow,— purposely, everything loud, emphatic or dramatic is avoided. But in the translation the stormy night brings in this very element of something emphatic and dramatic. I do not say that the translation is not poetic and harmonious,—it is, but in a different tone altogether and with a different suggestion, a graver emotion, but a less subtly pathetic power of contrast. ,
The rendering of "Revelation" [Sri Aurobindo's poem] is even better than the two others, well inspired from beginning to end; the colouring is not quite the same as in my poem, but that is hardly avoidable in a poetic version in another language. To alter it, as you propose, would be to spoil it. There is no point in rendering literally "wind-blown locks", and it would be a pity to throw out dīptimayī [lustrous, radiant], for it is just the touch needed to avoid the suggestion of a merely human figure. It is needed—for readers are often dense. An Indian critic (very competent, if a little academic) disregarding all the mystic suggestions and even the Plain statement of the closing couplet, actually described the
________________________________
1- Harindranath Chattopadhyay, a poet and cinema actor, brother of Mrinalini Chattopadhyay and Sarojini Naidu. Husband of Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay.
Page 57
poem as the poet's memory of a girl running past him on the seashore!!
I refuse to fall into your trap about Tagore. In vain is the net spread openly in the sight of the bird by the fowler.
... I am very glad; you will certainly have our blessings in the carrying out of your resolve. Mother did not mean quite what you thought. She was thinking of certain others who had been much more unfortunate than you, their way quite barren in spite of their demand—by their own fault of course, but still—and without any experience or signs of possible progress, and she was thinking that after all you had some things given they had not, experiences, that were not without significance in dream or meditation, beginnings and promises only but still promises which show that the capacity was there once you could reject the impediments. That was all.
I started to read your poem and at first found myself at sea, but I realised it was a mind jaded with correspondence that was responsible. Afterwards I took it up again and found it sufficiently easy except that here and there one has to read twice before catching the full sense. I can see however that the mode of expression would be difficult to many. I can hardly answer your question about the few and many. Clarity is a great power—on the other hand subtlety has its charms too and what is not clear to the first generation of readers seems quite clear to those who come after. On the whole one must write in one's own way—provided there is no excess as with certain poets who can only be read by the few because they wrote for themselves only and not even for a chosen audience. But you are not any way near that, so that is only by the way. (...)
Page 58
February 2,1931
Of course you can write to Bijoy, if you like. I doubt whether his intervention will have any effect on your Toku Mama [maternal uncle] who, if he is not bad in essence, seems certainly to have become tortuous in practice—I suppose, by influence and example.
Your friend Marthe Vanek has very good aspirations, but her mind seems to go many ways at once. What does she want exactly? A Guru? You know what this path is and how exclusive and exacting. "Unity" of Kansas city, Charles Fillmore's Christian Healing and supramental Yoga pulling the same chariot would be a picture!
I have not forgotten my promise to explain the sparkles to you. Free Will is still "under consideration."
February 7,1931
Certainly, firmness and a little pbons kora [hiss] (of course, a quiet and courteous hiss) seem the best way of getting your money, if it is at all possible.1
As for the "urge", if you resist the inspiration, the chances are that you will lose both the urge and your meditation. So it is better to let the flood have its way—especially in this case, of course, for there is no harm in this kind of urge.
March 7, 1931
Another very beautiful poem, perfect in inspiration and Measure.
______________
1. From Dilip's Toku Mama.
Page 59
I do not think you are right in attributing Chadwick's1 migration to any friction with you. His main inconvenience was the clash between the often animated conversation of those who gathered there (some of them have, as we know, very hearty voices) and his hours of sleep. He said that he had no right to object to people with a strong vitality from giving it vent in spirited conversation, but he was feeling more and more an inner need for quiet and solitude, and he thought it would be better for him to have other arrangements made for him than to act as a stopper upon others. His letter to the Mother asking for the change was in a very good tone and quite free from ill-will or personal feeling. So you need not be troubled in mind about it.
I do not think there has been any deterioration in your character. There may have been some nervous sensitiveness and perturbations due to the pressure on the nervous being to change its poise, but that is all; it is a thing almost inevitable and sure to pass when the right poise has been taken. It is of no great importance.
March 13, 1931
Your bells etc., mentioned by you as recent experiences were already enumerated as long ago as the time of the Upanishads as signs accompanying the opening to the larger consciousness, brahmanyabhivyaktikarāni yoge. If I remember right your sparks come in the same list. The fact has been recorded again and again in Yogic literature. I had the same experience hundreds of times in the earlier part of my Sadhana. So you see you are in very honourable company in
__________________________
1. John Chadwick, an English poet who came to the Ashram in 1930 from Lucknow where he was a lecturer in Philosophy. Sri Aurobindo named him "Arjava" (meaning "simplicity," •"straightforwardness").
Page 60
this matter and need not trouble yourself about the objections of physical science.
March 21, 1931
I see from your letters that you have not at all understood what I meant to say in mine,1—which shows that I failed to make my meaning clear. I have therefore to write again about the Ananda and the conditions under which it can come. But there is a good deal of confusion here to be disentangled and I may not be able to finish tonight. In the meanwhile I think it better to make certain things clear.
First, it is a great exaggeration to deduce from your difficulties any idea of unfitness or of going away or being sent away or giving up the Yoga. I am certainly not going to pronounce you unfit because you want the Ananda; on such grounds I would have to pronounce myself unfit, because I have myself wanted it and many other things besides. And if I were to send you away because you are not entirely disinterested in the approach to the Divine, I should have, to be consistent, to send practically the whole Ashram packing. I do not know why you are allowing yourself to indulge in such black and despondent thoughts—there is no ground for them at all and I do not think I gave any ground for them in my letter. Whatever your difficulties, the Mother and I have every intention of seeing you through them, and I think that you too, whatever suggestions your vital depression may make to you at the moment, have every intention of going through to the end of the Path. I imagine you have gone too far on it to go back and, if you wanted to, your Psychic being which has persistently pushed you towards it, Would not allow such a retreat.
Next, it was not my intention to say that it was wrong to aspire for the Ananda. What I wanted to point out was the
____________
1. Possibly a lost letter.
Page 61
condition for the permanent possession of the Ananda (intimations, visits, downrushes of it one can have before); the essential condition for it is a change of consciousness, the coming of peace, light, etc., all that brings about the transition from the normal to the spiritualised nature. And that being so, it is better to make this change of consciousness the first object of the sadhana. On the other hand, to press for the constant Ananda immediately in a consciousness which is not yet able to retain it, still more to substitute for it lesser (vital) joys and pleasures may very well stop the flow of these spiritualised experiences which make the continuous ecstasy eventually possible. But I certainly never intended to say that the Ananda was not to be attained or to insist on your moving towards a nirānanda [blisslessness] Brahman. On the contrary, I said that Ananda was the crown of the Yoga, which surely means that it was part of the highest final siddhi [realization].
Whatever one wants sincerely and persistently from the Divine, the Divine is sure to give. If then you want Ananda and go on wanting, you will surely have it in the end. The only question is what is to be the chief power in your seeking, a vital demand or a psychic aspiration manifesting through the heart and communicating itself to the mental and vital and physical consciousness. The latter is the greatest power and makes the shortest way—and besides one has to come to that way sooner or later.
I may observe also that, from your own account, it was the psychic aspiration that began your push towards the Yoga.
Evidently, the condition into which you have fallen is due to an upsurging of suppressed elements in the lower vital nature. It has been compelled by the mind and the higher vital part in you to give up the little "joys and pleasures" to
Page 62
which it was habituated, but it—or at any rate the subconscient part of it which is often the most powerful—did that without entire conviction and probably with "reservations" and "safeguards" and in exchange for a promise of compensations, other and greater joys and pleasures to replace all it was losing. This is evident from what you write; your description of the nature of the depression, the return of what you call impure thoughts which are merely indices of the subconscient lower vital desire-complex, the doubt thrown upon the generosity of the Divine, the demand for compensation for losses, something like striking a bargain with the Divine, a quid pro quo pact, are all unmistakable. Latterly, there has been a combination of circumstances (Sahana's1 turning inwards, Chadwick's emigration, etc.) which have rather suddenly increased the deprivation of its former outlets; this attack is its way of non-cooperation or protest. There is only one way to deal with it,—to cast the whole thing away, depression, demands, doubts, sex-thoughts, the whole undesirable baggage,—and have in its
_______________________________
1. "Sahana" is the name of one of the thirty-six melodies of classical Indian music. Our Sahana (17 May 1897 - 6 April 1990) was that melody incarnate. Born with a golden voice she could also faultlessly pick up a song just hearing it once. A niece of Deshbandhu C. R. Das, Sahana was born in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh). Her pet name was Jhunu, and that is how Rabindranath always addressed her affectionately. He was extremely fond of her and lent her a helping hand when she was in dire need of it. T
Married on 18 February 1916, she found life pretty dry. Then, later on, for the sake of Dilip, she left her husband. And she was sick with tuberculosis. She was cured, but that was the occasion for turning inward—her life of fame and celebrity palled on her.
Then it was that Sahana turned to Mother and Sri Aurobindo. From Bangalore she took a train to Madras. There she joined a group from Bengal, in which was Moni. Strangely enough, Dilip had an experience in Lucknow on November 15, 1928, which decided him to take the plunge; he reached Madras (via Bombay) on the same day as the others. All of them reached Pondicherry on November 22. Sahana never left, and breathed there her last on April 6,1990. She was such a wonderful person! Full of affection for us all. She sang till the end.
Page 63
place the one true movement, the call for the consciousness and the presence of the Divine.
It may be that behind this persistence of the lower vital demand for satisfaction there was something not quite clear —in the obscurer part of the physical mind—in your mental attitude towards the Yoga. You seem to regard this demand for the replacement of the old lower vital satisfactions by other joys and pleasures as something quite legitimate; but joys and pleasures are not the object of Yoga and a bargain or demand for a replacement of this kind can be no legitimate or healthy element in the sadhana. If it is there, it will surely impede the flow of spiritual experience. Ananda, yes; but Ananda and the spiritual happiness which precedes it (adhyātma-sukham) are something quite different from joys and pleasures. And even Ananda one cannot demand or make it a condition for pursuing the sadhana—it comes as a crown, a natural outcome and its true condition is the growth of the true consciousness, peace, calm, light, strength, the equanimity which resists all shocks and persists through success and failure. It is these things which must be the first objects of the sadhana, not any hedonistic experience even of the highest kind; for that must come of itself as a result of the Divine Presence.
I would rather like you to tell me what, precisely, you do in your hours of meditation, how you do it and what happens within you.
Meanwhile, the first thing you must do is to throw out this perilous stuff of despondency and its accompaniments and recover a quiet and clear balance. A quiet mind and a quiet vital are the first conditions for success in sadhana.
April 7, 1931
I suppose I am silent, first, because I have no "free-will" and, secondly, because I have no Time.
Page 64
Less metaphysically and more yogically, there are periods when silence becomes imperative, because to throw oneself outward delays the "work that has to be done."
I suppose some day I will write about Free Will, but for the moment there is no effective will, free or otherwise, to do it. There is no niyoga [appointment] from "Hrishikesh", I am afraid your uncle will have to wait till it comes.
... It is the old trick of despondency trying to come up again and have its spell or its gloomy innings—that is why it is trying to persuade you that truth is on its side, that you have never had the least shadow of any inner experience and especially that Yoga must be a grim affair in which there is no place for music or literature. The first thing to do is not to open the door to these old visitors.
It is better often to offer one's work to the Divine in an atmosphere of peace and joy and gratitude, feelings which are helpful to Bhakti than to have a gloomy or struggling meditation. The first thing to get in meditation is a quiet mind and if possible a happy, at least a quiet vital. You have certainly had better things in meditation than groping or barren darkness—and there is no reason why it should not bring these better things. It is a question of getting the right poise.
April 11, 1931
Yes, you can send the half-dozen prayers. I shall make time to read your new old poem. I see from a glance at it that you are spreading yourself out. Remember that in lyrical poetry this is a difficult process—one is apt to beat out the gold wire
Page 65
too thin, to replace it where it fails by apparent gold only. Shelley, Swinburne and many others fail by diffusion, except in a very few long poems—and are at their best when they are more brief. So, if you go in for lyrical lengths, much care will be needed—the principle must be to make each verse the best.
April 20, 1931
I think the best thing I can write to you in the circumstances is to recommend to you Nolini's1 aphorism, "Depression need not be depressing; rather it should be made a jumping-board for the leap to a higher and happier poise."
The rule in Yoga is not to let the depression depress you, to stand back from it, observe its cause and remove the cause; for the cause is always in oneself, perhaps a vital defect somewhere, a wrong movement indulged or a petty desire causing a recoil, sometimes by its satisfaction, sometimes by its disappointment. In Yoga a desire satisfied, a false movement given its head produces very often a worse recoil than disappointed desire.
What is needed for you is to live more deeply within, less in the outer vital and mental which is exposed to these touches. The inmost psychic being is not oppressed by them; it stands in its own closeness to the Divine and sees the small surface movements as surface things foreign to the true being.
_________________________
1. Nolini Kanto Gupta (13 January 1889 - 7 February 1984), a revolutionary. He was arrested and tried in the Alipore Bomb Case, and freed after one year. He worked with Sri Aurobindo for the magazines Dharma and Karmayogin. Six months after Sri Aurobindo's arrival at Pondicherry, Nolini joined him. From Sri Aurobindo he learned Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, etc. Apart from articles in magazines, he published books in Bengali (52), English (38) and French (5). He was Sri Aurobindo's "postman."
Page 66
Your poem1 is a very moving one,—delicate, true and beautiful in every line.
April 22, 1931
To live within does not mean to give up reading and writing or other external activities; I shall try to explain to you what I meant. I had in fact started to do so when you had your last fit of despondency, but stopped when you recovered, thinking it was not after all necessary and supposing besides that the essential in what I was about to write must already be known to you. Now, however, that the despondency has returned and you put the question, I will this time try to explain the whole matter.
It is evident that you still cherish some misunderstanding about peace and joy and Ananda. (Peace, by the way, is not joy—for peace can be there even when joy is quiescent.) It is not a fact that one ought not to pray or aspire for peace or spiritual joy. Peace is the very basis of all the siddhi in the Yoga, and why should not one pray or aspire for foundation in the Yoga? Spiritual joy or a deep inner happiness (not disturbed even when there come superficial storms or perturbations) is a constant concomitant of contact or union with the Divine, and why should it be forbidden to pray or aspire for contact with the Divine and the joy that attends it? As for Ananda, I have already explained that I mean by Ananda something greater than peace or joy, something Aat, like Truth and Light, is the very nature of the supramental Divine. It can come by frequent inrushes or descents, Partially or for a time even now, but it cannot remain in the astern so long as the system has not been prepared for it. Meanwhile, peace and joy can be there permanently, but the condition of this permanence is that one should have the
______________________
1. This poem is Tamisrāya meaning "In the darkness," in Anāmī. [Dilip's note.]
Page 67
constant contact or indwelling of the Divine, and this comes naturally not to the outer mind or vital but to the inner soul or psychic being. Therefore one who wants his Yoga to be a path of peace or joy must be prepared to dwell in his soul rather than in his outer mental and emotional nature.
I objected in a former letter not to aspiration but to a demand, to making peace, joy or Ananda a condition for following the Yoga. And it is undesirable because if you do so, then the vital, not the psychic, takes the lead. When the vital takes the lead, then unrest, despondency, unhappiness can always come, since these things are the very nature of the vital—the vital can never remain constantly in joy and peace, for it needs their opposites in order to have the sense of the drama of life. And yet when unrest and unhappiness come, the vital at once cries, "I am not given my due, what is the use of my doing this Yoga?" Or else, it makes a gospel of its unhappiness and says, as you say in your letter, that the path to fulfilment must be a tragic road through the desert. And yet it is precisely this predominance of the vital in us that makes the necessity of passing through the desert. If the psychic were always there in front, the desert would be no longer a desert and the wilderness would blossom with the rose.
A propos, if your despondency has lasted so long this time, is it not because something in the vital has been clinging to it, justifying it on one ground or another ? That at least is what I have felt, every time we have tried to remove it.
April 26, 1931
I do not find any pity for my loneliness in Tagore's letter,1 only his own explanation of my secrecy and solitude. Why should you think the Mother does not approve of
____________________
1. Tagore had written, "All creators are lonely—so is Sri Aurobindo."
Page 68
pxnression,—provided it is the right expression of the right thing,—or suppose that silence and true expression are contradictory? The truest expression comes out of an absolute inner silence. The spiritual silence is not a mere emptiness; nor is it indispensable to abstain from all activity in order to find it.
April 29, 1931
Yes, your new poem is a chef-d'œuvre. It seems to me the best you have yet done—even better than some of the lyrics that came from you in your first inspiration, and yet one or two of these were in their own kind perfection itself.
May 13, 1931
I read the German of myself before reading your letter and was cast into an astonished perplexity by its warmth and cold for a long moment. I certainly think, if they translate, they should be assisted by an expert in English to keep the right temperature—otherwise there may be some other hair-raising effects of the kind.
Tagore's appreciation is indeed a confirmation worth having of your poetic achievement—there could not be a surer seal upon it.
May 17,1931
I am afraid Kiran De is not at all ready for Yoga—as the Mother saw on the first day. Your own observations confirm this view of him and his letter shows that even mentally he cannot rise to the height—how can this Yoga be given to one
Page 69
who understands only the ethical life and not at all what the divine life can be? Temperamentally he is too weak and depressed to put the burden of Yoga on him—it might result in a breakage. But I don't want to depress and discourage him still farther—so please do not tell him what I write—give him my written answer (enclosed) and let that speak for itself... It seems from your condition "plied with questions" that you can now form some idea of what the Romans meant when they described as "putting to the question" their legal process of cross-examination under torture. I have no objection to your calling Nolini au secours if he is ready for the operation in your place. But I suppose you will get relief soon.
May 18, 1931
Khitish Sen's1 enthusiasm seems rather to be for Pondicherian poetry than for Pondicherian Yoga—the latter shines for him only by the reflected light of the former. I will try to glance through his translations if you send them, in spite of the desperate shortness of time at my disposal just now.
May 22, 1931
Udayshankar2 must certainly be a great artist in his line; the photographs are admirable.
Suhrawardy has imagination and occasionally a subtle
1. Justice Khitish Chandra Sen, a poet and litterateur. He translated into English Rabindranath Tagore's famous poem to Sri Aurobindo.
2. Udayshankar (8 December 1900 - 26 September 1977), a renowned dancer and choregrapher. He joined London's Royal College of Arts and completed the five-year course in three years, obtained ARCA degree and diploma in composition. He met Anna Pavlova and at her request composed two pieces on Indian themes. He shared the stage .....
Page 70
felicity of feeling, language and rhythm; but his technique is chaotic and his execution very unequal. There are lines in this poem that sound like flimsy sentimental album verse and there are others that have a strange and fine originality, as in the fourth verse.
Older than the moon or forest she is,
Yea, older than the gray slow winding brook,
A picture of one that tangs have loved
Fallen from a curious book
That is as fine in execution as conception; in the rest the execution does not equal the conception. I liked better the little poem you translated—that was perfect in its own kind.
"Bindsome" is, I suppose, an invention on the lines of "tiresome" and "winsome"; a poet is entitled to invent such words at his own risk and peril. Brocade is extraordinarily daring—unless he means "brocaded" dressed in brocade, and then he ought to have said "brocaded"; but otherwise it is a trouvaille [coinage] of audacious felicity, provided he can make the English language absorb so violent a turn given to the word. There is no reason why the poem should not be published in the Orient.
May 26, 1931
Your poem is very pretty in feeling and music, but is it not rather long for a song?
with her. She inspired him to follow Eastern tradition of dance and not Western. He rediscovered India's richness, learned Kathakali with Shankaran Namboodiri and adapted Western theatrical techniques to traditional Indian dance. He did several tours in Europe and America in the early 1930s with famous musicians, among them his younger brother Ravi Shankar, Allauddin Khan and Ali Akbar Khan along with Timirbaran. In 1939 he founded the Udayshankar Cultural Centre in Almora.
Page 71
I will answer you about doubt and dance and Suhrawardy, but time lacks tonight.
May 29, 1931
I have no objection to your sending my comment to Udayshankar, although it seems to me of a too slight and passing character to be of any importance. Still, if you think he will really value it so much, you can send it. But surely it is rather too slight for Bharatavarsha.
I do not quite catch the sense of your proposal that I should see his dancing from the next room. It looks as if you thought I had acquired the siddhi of seeing through walls and doors. I assure you that I have not got so far. If he were to dance in the court downstairs, it would be different, but then what would he do with the palm and other plants?—even if Timirbaran1 like another Orpheus were to make them move and join the troupe, I fear he would find them rather cumber- some. However, I suppose neither his visit nor Suhrawardy's is for tomorrow, so we will leave these things where they belong—on the lap of a shadowy and uncertain future.
As for Suhrawardy, you can if you like send the complimentary portion of my remarks with perhaps a hint that I found his writing rather unequal, so that it may not be all sugar. But the phrases about "album poetry" and chaotic technique are too vivid—being meant only for private consumption—to be transmitted to the writer of the poems criticised; I would for that have expressed the same view in less drastic language. As I have already said once, I do not like to write anything disparaging or discouraging for those whom I cannot help to do better. I received much poetry
1. A famous Bengali musician, who headed a troupe in Calcutta. He was the conductor of the orchestra that accompanied Udayshankar's dance.
Page 72
from Indian writers for review in the Arya, but I always refrained because I would have had to be very severe. I write only about Harindranath because there I could sincerely and I think justly write unqualified praise.
It was, by the way, rather paradoxical or epigrammatic— I don't know which—to write of Suhrawardy at once that "he was in Paris" and that he "ended his life in a tragedy"— it sounded like a new version of "He, being dead, yet liveth." I presumed you meant a moral, not a physical ending; but if he is coming to India to give University lectures, there must be also morally something that survives. It is only when the soul is lost—or all the faculties—that it can be said of a man yet living that his life is ended. However, I see that you propose to throw light on the mystery hereafter.
Poetry can start from any plane of consciousness, although like all art—or, one might say, all creation—it must always come through the vital if it is to be alive. And as there is always a joy in creation, that joy along with a certain enthousiasmos1—not enthusiasm, if you please, but ānandamaya āveśa [blissful inrush of the creative force]—must always be there, whatever the source. But your poetry differs from the lines you quote. Suhrawardy writes from a purely vital inspiration, Shakespeare ditto (though he puts a vital feeling in the form of a passionate thought), Tagore in these lines ditto, and in the last case from a rather light and superficial vital. Your inspiration, on the contrary, comes from the linking of the vital creative instrument to a deeper psychic experience, and it is that which makes the whole originality and peculiar individual power and subtle and delicate perfection of your poems. It was indeed because this linking-on took Place that the true poetic faculty suddenly awoke in you; for it was not there before, at least on the surface. The joy you feel, therefore, was no doubt partly the simple joy of creation, but there comes also into it the joy of expression of the Psychic being which was seeking for an outlet since your
_____________________________
1. The Greek word means "to be inspired or possessed by a god."
Page 73
boyhood. It is this that justifies your poetry-writing as a part of your Sadhana.
I find I have left myself no place or time in this letter for doubt and scepticism. You have not lightened my task by throwing Julian Huxley's ingeniously worded absurdity at me. What I wanted to point out was that what you seem to mean by scepticism is something quite different from what the Mother meant when she spoke to you about it. However, that must wait for another spare half-hour.
June 2, 1931
It was not half sleep or quarter sleep or even sixteenth sleep that you had; it was the going inside of the consciousness, which in that state remains conscious but shut to outer things and open only to inner experience. You must distinguish clearly between these two quite different states, one is nidrā [sleep], the other the beginning at least of samādhi (not nirvikalpa, of course). This drawing inside is necessary because the active mind of the human being is at first too much turned to outward things; it has to go inside altogether in order to live in the inner being (inner mind, inner vital, inner physical, psychic). But with training one can remain outwardly conscious and live in the inner being and has at will the indrawn or the outpoured experience; you will then have the same experience of dense immobility and the inpouring of a greater and purer consciousness in the waking state as in what you erroneously call sleep.
As for working, it depends on what you mean by the word. Desire often leads either to excess of effort, meaning often much labour and a limited fruit with strain, exhaustion and in case of difficulty or failure, despondence, disbelief or revolt; or else it leads to pulling down the force. That can be done, but except for the yogically strong and experienced, it is not always safe, though it may be often very effective;
Page 74
not safe, first, because it may lead to violent reactions or it brings down contrary or wrong or mixed forces which the sadhak is not experienced enough to distinguish from the true ones. Or else it may substitute the sadhak's own limited power of experience or mental and vital constructions for the free gift and true leading of the Divine. Cases differ, each has his own way of sadhana. But for you what I would recommend is constant openness, a quiet steady aspiration, no over-eagerness, a cheerful trust and patience.
June 8, 1931
It is true I read through Aldous Huxley's monster, but it took me several months to finish it. This is not because I object to "light" literature, but because I find only an occasional quarter of an hour in three or four days to glance at it. If Sarat Chatterji1 does not mind my treating his book to the same tortoise dharma, I will undertake to read it; but I can make no promises as to time etc. Possibly it will take less time than the Round Table Conference.2 As to giving him a new turn, that, I fear, is beyond me; besides, in this field I was once a voracious reader, but never a critic or creator.
June 21, 1931
Three poems marked (1, 4, 6). Letter follows.
1. Sarat Chandra Chatterji (15 September 1876 - 16 January 1938), a top Bengali novelist and short story writer. He is ranked just after Rabindranath in Bengali literature. Some of his books are based on his own adventures of which he had plenty. He had also joined several Political movements, and written articles on politics which are scattered in various periodicals.
2. A conference held in London in 1930-32 to draw up a new Constitution for India.
Page 75
Excuse telegraphic style—it is because of the return of post.1
June 22,1931
I kept Khitish Sen's translations with the idea of toning down some of the rather effete archaisms and other inelegances with which he unfortunately strews or rather peppers his work; but I renounce the endeavour, it would take too much of my time. I have marked the three poems which seem to me the best; they achieve something, in spite of some glaring faults of detail, are fairly equal and make something like a harmonious whole. There is a certain beauty of thought and expression kept up throughout. The other translations have lines and passages of merit, but fail as a whole.
The poetry of your friend is rather irritating, because it is always just missing what it ought to achieve,—one feels a considerable poetic possibility which does not produce work of permanence because it is not scrupulous enough or has not a true technique. The reasons for the failure can be felt, but are not easy to analyse. Among them there is evidently the misfortune of having passed strongly under the influence of poets who are quite out of date and learned a poetic style and language full of turns that smell of the schoolroom and the bookworm's closet. Such awful things as "unsoughten," "a-journeying," "a-knocking," "strayed gift" and the constant abuse of the auxiliary verb "to do" would be enough to down even the best poem. If he would rigorously modernise his language one obstacle to real poetic success would perhaps disappear,—provided he does not, on the contrary, colloquialise it too much—e.g. "my dear" etc. But the other grave defect is that he is constantly Composing
1, I.e. when every morning the disciples' letters or notebooks would be returned to them with Sri Aurobindo's answers.
Page 76
out of his brain, while one feels that a pressure from a deeper source is there and might break through, if only he would let it. Of course, it is a foreign language he is writing and very few can do their poetic best in a learned medium— but still the defect is there.
As to the novel, perhaps I simply meant that I was unwilling to exercise my critic's scalpel on a living master of the art. In poetry it is different because I am there both a critic and a creator.
Yes, the mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads) as I have tried to describe it in the Future Poetry is what comes from the Overmind inspiration. Its characteristics are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing it speaks of, but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these. The passages you mention (from the Upanishad and the Gita) have certainly the Overmind accent. But ordinarily, as I have said, the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry—it has to take hold of something that was meant to be a mental, vital or other utterance and lift it by a seizure and surprise from above into the overmind largeness. But in doing so there is usually a mixture of the two elements. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level. But to write of these things would need a greater length of exposition than I can give you at present.
But how then do you expect a supramental inspiration to come down here when the Overmind itself is so rarely in human reach? That is always the error of the impatient Spirant, to think he can get the Supermind without going through the intervening stages or to imagine that he has got
Page 77
it when in fact he has only got something from the illumined or intuitive or at the highest some kind of mixed Overmind consciousness.
As for your last question you are not likely to get any answer until the thing attempted (supposing it is being attempted) is accomplished.
June 27, 1931
It is not surprising that you could not find out what you had done to make the Mother change her attitude towards you, and this for two good reasons,—first, that you had done nothing, and, second, that the Mother's feeling for you and her attitude had not changed at all—not in any smallest respect, not in the least shadow of a degree. She has the same care and love as she always had and during the last few days of which you speak they were not clouded for a moment.
Then you ask, if so, why do I feel like this or like that? I can only answer that, in their origin, they were not your own feelings at all, but rather ideas, impressions, impulses pushed into your lower vital from outside; your mistake has been to admit them and identify them as your own—from want of knowledge and experience in these matters. There are certain vital forces of this lower vital plane that are constantly wandering about the Ashram and trying to push their movements now on one, now on another, now on several at a time. Theprocessus is always the same. First, suggestions, —the Mother has done this or not done that, she has said this or not said that, she has had this or that thought about me or feeling towards me, she is displeased with me, unfair to me, partial to others, etc. etc. etc.; next, discouragement, wounded feelings, jealousy, despondency, revolt or any other kindred vital downfall or upheaval; result, the impulse to withdraw from the Mother, not to give her flowers or take
Page 78
flowers, to go away from soup1 or pranam, not to come there, to shut oneself away from her altogether, to give up the Yoga, to go away or worse. I give you the whole round in its ground plan, omitting many variations, so that you may be on your guard the next time these suggestions try to come. If you don't want to be misled by them and to go through such quite groundless and unnecessary disturbance and trouble, you must recognise them immediately they come, cast them out by the neck or break their backs as you would a snake's.
For they are in their nature not only irrational, but strongly mechanical. Irrational, because they have no true ground in reality. They are ready enough to seize in some (usually trifling) outward appearances and twist them this way or that in order to convince the easily deceived physical mind; they will even create circumstances and make them appear to have that colour. But if they cannot find or create, they will go on just as merrily with no other ground than imaginations or impressions which they persuade their victims to take for realities. And they are mechanical because, once they can make the mind their field, they always recur with the same inevitable round of suggestions, the same ideas, the same feelings, the same impulses, the same actions in consequence. It is like a recurrent illness with always the same series of symptoms and the same "course." And the object is always the same, to create a distance between the sadhak and the Mother and so to break the sadhana. It is a great mistake to think, as some do, that the Mother in such cases pushes the sadhak away from her; on the contrary, it is he who pushes her away from him under the influence of these forces and believes all the time—for they have a great Power of blinding the mind and clouding the judgment— that she is to blame.
1. Mother used to distribute soup every evening. She would first meditate while keeping her hands extended over the container. Meditation over, one by one the disciples approached with an empty cup Which Mother filled with the hot soup.
Page 79
To show how these suggestions mislead once one starts listening to them, I may instance the matter of your sister's letters. The Mother and I have always accepted without reservation your sister's coming and neither today nor at any other time had she the least idea in her mind against it. On the contrary, when you came in the midst of a hard and trying morning, she gave you full time, heard all you had to say, made her own suggestions and gave her full acquiescence. What more could she have done? And yet you have this suggestion made to you that she does not really want, that she is not frank, that she is cold to you about the matter. Why? Precisely because there was this predisposing influence at work on the lookout for any pretext to mislead you, —any, even less than a shadow's shadow.
I must ask you therefore to dismiss this kind of suggestion, these feelings and all the cycle in future the moment they try to come. Never mind, what circumstances or justifications they may allege. Nothing is more dangerous than the inferences of the physical mind trying to build up conclusions upon outward appearances—they have nine chances out of ten of being false. One must learn to distrust hasty conclusions from surface appearances—is not that the first condition of true knowledge?—and learn to see and know things from within.
You ask how to stem these movements? To begin with, observe three rules:
(1) Keep always confidence in the Mother's care and love —trust in them and distrust every suggestion, every appearance that seems to contradict.
(2) Reject immediately every feeling, every impulse that makes you draw back from the Mother—such as that about the Pranam—from your true relation with her, from inner nearness, from a simple and straightforward confidence in her.
(3) Do not lay too much stress on outward signs—your observation of them may easily mislead you. Keep yourself open to her and feel with your heart—the inner heart, not
Page 80
the surface vital desire, but the heart of true emotion,—there you are more likely to find her and be always near her in yourself and receive what constantly she is working to give you.
June 28, 1931
I think Abhipsa does very well for aspiration. I don't recollect just now any Vedic word for it.
The attitude you describe is just what it should be—there is nothing wrong in it,—nor in your reading or letter-writing etc. There can be no objection to these activities in themselves, for the Yoga; only they must be done with the right attitude and spirit and as part of the sadhana—because the whole life has to become a sadhana, until it is able to become, the whole life, an embodiment of the siddhi.
If Sahana gives up music,—I presume it is only a temporary stop—I suppose it must be for a reason personal to her sadhana. There is no incompatibility in principle between music and sadhana.
Of course I heard your music. I am no judge of technical merit in that field, but it seems to me that in the inner element and the psychological source of your singing and its music, if I may so express it, there has been a great deepening and change, a true advance, and that here also your Yoga is justified by its fruits.
July 2, 1931
Yes, your poem is very good, as usual; and the metre is very beautiful. I admire, admire.
I took drishtihārā as "blind"; I am not versed enough in the subtleties of the language to pronounce whether the average reader would find it ambiguous; perhaps he would. But if
Page 81
alakshita [unnoticed] is clearer, it is less vividly poetic.
July 7, 1931
I return Pratibha's1 poems. Yes, they are indeed full of promise, there is a sweetness in the rhythm and a sincerity of poetic style which, if developed, may come to something of very real value.
I shall comment on your translations (Baudelaire and Shelley) tomorrow; as it is already 2.30 a.m., I have no time just now.2
I hope the undesirable feeling of which you speak will have disappeared by tomorrow—you ought certainly not to give it a full week's life! If the cause is only what you state, there is no rational or irrational reason why it should last so long.
July 11, 1931
Your translations.
1. Translation of Baudelaire,3 very good, third and fourth verse superb. Literalness here does not matter so long as you are faithful to the spirit and the sense. But I don't think you are justified in inserting jndriyer [of the senses]—volupté here means a bold and intense pleasure of the higher vital, not the lesser pleasure of the senses,—it is the volupté you do actually get when you rise, whether inwardly or outwardly like the aviators into the boundless heights.
1. Wife of famous Bengali writer Sri Buddhadev Basu, herself an eminent writer of Bengali novels.
2. Sri Aurobindo spent most of his nights answering the disciple's letters.
3. Baudelaire's poem, "Elevation."
Page 82
2. Shelley.1 Good poetry, but as a translation vulnerable in head and the tail. In the head because, it seems to me 1 . your se dhan [that treasure] and tā bali [that's why] lays or may lay itself open to the construction that human love is a rich and precious thing which the poet unfortunately does not possess and it is only because of this deplorable poverty that he offers the psychic devotion, less warm and rich and desirable, but still in its own way rare and valuable! I exaggerate perhaps, but, still if it is at all open to a meaning of this kind, then it says the very reverse of Shelley's intended significance. For in English "What men call love" is strongly depreciatory, and can only mean something inferior, something that is poor and not rich, not truly love. Shelley says in substance, "Human vital love is a poor inferior thing, a counterfeit of true love, which I cannot offer to you. But there is a greater thing, a true psychic love, all worship and devotion, which men do not readily value, being led away by the vital glamour, but which the heavens do not reject, though it is offered from something so far below them, so maimed and ignorant and sorrow-vexed as the human consciousness which is to the divine consciousness as the moth is to the star, as the night is to the day. And will you not too accept this from me, you who in your nature are kin to the heavens, you who seem to me to have something of the divine nature, to be something bright and happy and pure far above the "sphere of our sorrow?" Of course all that is not said, but only suggested, but it is obviously the spirit of the poem. As to the tail, I doubt whether your last
1. This refers to Shelley's well-known poem:
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
Page 83
line brings out the sense of "something afar from the sphere of our sorrow." If I make these criticisms at all, it is not because your version is not good, but because you have accustomed me to find in you a power of rendering the spirit and sense of your original while turning it into fine poetry in its new tongue which I would not expect or exact from any other translator.
3. Amal. I think here you have not so much rendered the English lines into Bengali as translated Amal into Dilip. is not that the sense of your plea for Bengali colour and simile? Amal's lines are not easily translatable, least of all, I imagine into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather a fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading intense sweetness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one—no [overtones?], no ornamentations, but a sort of suppressed burning glow; no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling—the thought itself perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. It is high poetic style in its full perfection and nothing of all that is transferable. You have taken his last line and put in a lotus face and made divine love bloom in it,—a pretty image, but how far from the glowing impassioned severity of phrase, "And mould thy love into a human face"! So with your madhura gopane [in sweet secrecy] and the "heart to heart words intimate." I do not suppose it could have been done otherwise, however, or done better; and what you write now is always good poetry —which is what I suppose Tagore meant to say when he wrote " Tomār ār bhay nāi." [You have no more fear.]
And after all I have said nothing about Huxley or Baudelaire !
Page 84
July 25, 1931
Your poem is magnificent in energy and beauty. Only, comparing its flame-force with the moth-like fragility of the little piping love-piece that provoked it, this poor Annada might perhaps complain that you are guilty of crushing a butterfly with a thunderbolt. However, the complaints of the victim do not count in these cases; the gods probably hold that he ought to consider himself happy to be the occasion for so fine an outburst.
P. S. By the way is it true that there is an article by Tagore in one of the Bengali magazines in which he praises your poetry?
July 31, 1931
I renounced the attempt to read Bijoychandra's highly decorative Bengali handwriting—there are problems that are interesting but for which one has no time. I fell back on your letter, but I am at a loss about B's genealogical tree. I presume however that the two chiefs are the chief of the Big Side and the Little Side respectively, and that that is the Rajbangsha. But who or where is the Raja? Is he also of the Big Side? or does he form a super-Big Side all by himself? It does not seem to me that B. has shed any further light on her reasons for embracing or dallying with Yoga.
As for Sarat Chatterji you know the difficulty with me is time and just now before the 15th I have less time than ever. But if you like to take the chance, you can send me the small story of which you speak. As for writing anything in appreciation, I don't know; we will leave it for fate to decide. Meanwhile he ought to find your musical tribute sufficiently satisfying.
By the way, what on earth is yati bhanga [metrical fault or breach] ? I have been wondering off and on since I read the
Page 85
(sufficiently patronising) criticism in the often defunct Bijali.1 Congratulations on the sparkles and the dreams. Are they dreams, though, or experiences on one of the inner planes? I think I have told you that the sparkles usually indicate an opening of the doors of the inner consciousness.
August 3, 1931
There can be no objection to your going to your sister's place for meals; the point in the notice was aimed at quite another target. If you observe its language you will see that its intention was not palatal, or anti-palatal, but hygienic. It was meant to discourage the habit (of some) of buying from a nasty shop unhealthy food and worm-ridden betel-nuts— these very people afterwards being those who complain frequently of stomach disorders. Or if they choose to defy both Yoga and common sense, they must be prepared to take their karmaphala [fruits of works].
There is no objection, either, to your butter and cheese provided the butter is not bad or old or rancid as bazaarbought butter so often is! If you require it for yourself alone, then instead of buying it, you could have some from the butter the Mother receives from the Bombay Dairy.
You can bring your sister and brother-in-law2 for the flower-distribution tomorrow as you propose, if they want to come.
August 7, 1931
It is not your sister and brother-in-law who are responsible but the wave of old life consciousness which came in
1. A journal published by Barin.
2. Sister Maya and brother-in-law Bhavashankar, son of Surendranath Banerji, the well-known Moderate Congress leader.
Page 86
their wake that has thrown up old associations and stirred these reactions from their subconscient quiescence.
I do not at all accept Tagore's dictum—neither the Mother or myself would have accepted you here if you had not capacity for Yoga as great as for art—and greater. And the experiences you have had—however intermittent—would not have come at all in an unfit ādhār [vehicle, vessel].
The facts or arguments you put forward to support your diffidence or depression cannot stand in the light of the Yoga experience of others—if they were enough to justify discouragement, how many would have had to turn back from the way who are now far on towards the goal ? I cannot now deal into them in detail, but they do not any of them, justify your inference.
Also, your psychic being does not deserve the censure you have bestowed upon it. What prevents it from coming out in its full power is the crust of past habits formations, active vibrations of the mind-stuff and vital-stuff which come from a mind and life which have been more creative and outgoing and expansive than indrawn and introspective. In many who are like this—active men, intellectuals—the first stage of Yoga is long and difficult with slow development and sparse experiences, most of the work being done in the subliminal behind the veil—until things are ready.
When the time comes for the definite opening and removal of the purdah between the inner and the outer being, I think I can promise you that you will find your power of Yoga and yogic experience at least as unexpectedly complete as you, and others, have found your power for poetry —though necessarily its working out will take time because it is not a detail but the whole life and the whole nature in which there must be the divine victory.
Page 87
August 10, 1931
Your experience marks a very important step forward in your Yoga, it is necessary for me to give you a full and clear idea of what it implies—which I shall do. For the moment I will only say that it is a very decisive step towards the movement of which I spoke—the throwing down of the purdah between the inner and the outer being, which is the first crucial change in Yoga.
August 11, 1931
I have started the letter, but I doubt if I shall be able to finish it tonight; therefore it will be better to answer at once the points submitted by you.
You can send the flower to the Pali professor, but it is too early in the day to speak of Yoga and acceptance. It is necessary to know more of him first—and at first hand–Yoga is too serious a thing to be lightly taken up, or given. If he has a call and is sincere in following after it, his time will come.
As for your niece, Uma,—if we take the photograph and its evidence at their "face value", one observes that the upper part of the physiognomy is good, especially the eyes, the lower from the Yogic point of view is faulty. That would indicate a possibility of spiritual aspiration and psychic opening, but also great vital obstacles and difficulties. But it is not safe to generalise from a photograph for even if externally accurate, it may express only one part of the nature,—and this one, you say, is not reliable. The best thing would be for her to write to you the letter she proposed to write—"at length about her inner life and spiritual seeking." That might give better grounds for judging whether she can or cannot undertake this kind of Yoga.
Page 88
Yes, certainly, I liked your poem immensely. It is very well sustained throughout and there is no pedantry, no intellectual heaviness anywhere in it; with such a constant succession of beautiful images and perfectly expressive turns of language —still more with so unfailing a flow and depth and power of emotion, that defect could not creep in for a moment.
P. S. My answer about your experience may take me a little time to write, because I want to explain to you not only the experience itself, but what lies behind it. Otherwise you will be quite at sea, as your letter shows, in the new world you are exploring.
August 16, 1931
The Mother will see Bhavashankar tomorrow. The idea of the refrigerator is, she says, an excellent one; she has long wanted it, but a big "frigidaire", as that alone would serve the purpose.
Never mind the lower vital, it is not so dreadful as you think, if one can take hold of it by both ends and keep it in its place. It is the same as with the other instruments, body, mind, higher vital, even the overmind powers,—they are good as instruments, but bad as masters.
I am accustomed to Biren's1 handwriting, and can read it with little difficulty. But I am surprised at Tagore's remark2 about the two years; he must have greatly misunderstood or misheard me. I did tell him that I would expand only after making a perfect (inner) foundation here, but I gave no date. I did give that date of two years long before in my letter to
1. Birendra Kishore Roy Chowdury, Zamindar of Gouripur, East Bengal. A veteran sarod player and very close friend and admirer of Dilip. He became a disciple of Sri Aurobindo at the instance of Dilip.
2. Dilip's note: Birendrakishore had written to me a letter in which he reported Tagore as having said to him with a sigh that Sri Aurobindo had told him in 1928 that he would "expand" after two years.
Page 89
Barin,1 but I had then a less ample view of the work to be done than I have now—and I am now more cautious about assigning dates than I was once. To fix a precise time is impossible except in the two regions of certitude—the pure material which is the field of mathematical certitudes and the supramental which is the field of divine certitudes. In the planes in between where life has its word to say and things have to evolve under shock and stress. Time and Energy are too much in a flux and apt to kick against the rigour of a prefixed date or programme.
August 19, 1931
Apart from the considerations you urge in your letter, the acceptance of your grand-uncle was a foregone conclusion; the considerations only make it, so to speak, more foregone.
The letter I was to write to you has by no means sunk into oblivion or any other limbo. But it was physically and psychologically impossible to complete it before the 15th, and things have not been much better since. Meanwhile I am glad to see from your reception of your "dream" that you are beginning to realise not only the reality but the importance of the inner planes of experience.
August 27, 1931
The calumnies don't really matter. What Tagore says about gossip and rumours is quite right, not only of Bengal, but everywhere. It is part of average human nature (the lower vital again!) to take pleasure in scandal, nindā [criticism], believing and reporting anything against people, and
1. In his well-known letter of 7 April 1920 to his younger brother Barin, Sri Aurobindo wrote : "These past ten years He has been making me develop it [the body of this Yoga] in experience, and it is not yet finished. It may take another two years...."
Page 90
if nothing true or half true can be found, inventing or reporting inventions. The best thing is not to pay any attention— !,,.. .g forced on one, then a quiet correction or contradiction ! enough. And for the rest to go straight on one's way, casting these saletés behind you.
I am afraid Pramatha Chowdhuri1 is asking from me a thing psychologically impossible. You know that I have forbidden myself to write anything for publication for some time past and some time to come—I am self-debarred from press, platform and public. Even if it were otherwise, it would be impossible under present circumstances to write at a week's notice. You will present him my excuses in your best and most tactful manner.
P. S. I take Pramatha Chowdhuri's remark as a complimentary hyperbole. The Golden Book will be as golden and Tagore's work and fame as solid without any lucubration from me to gild the one or to buttress the other.
August 29,1931
I return your correspondence. I see you threaten me with a world-wide publicity agent; I face the menace with equanimity. Remain Rolland has already done his best or his worst—Herr Miller can try his hand at doing one better— if or when he comes here. His wife's letter is interesting, because it is evidently very sincere. As for Bahadur he has still some way to go before your wish for him can be fulfilled —there is no hurry.
1. Pramatha Chowdhuri (7 August 1868 - 2 September 1946). In 1899, he married Indira Devi, daughter of Satyendranath Tagore, an elder brother of Rabindranath. He knew thoroughly English and French literatures. He founded the magazine Sabuj Patra and wrote under the Pseudonym Birbal. A powerful group of new writers gathered around Sabuj Patra and gave a new direction to the Bengali language.
Page 91
September 1931 ?
It is good news that the energy has returned—let it be soon complete. About your uncle and predestination, my difficulty is that it is almost impossible to answer without going into the whole question which bristles at every step with the most tangled dualities and oppositions—it is the most perplexing problem in philosophy except that of the existence of pain and evil and cannot be cut with the stroke of a single trenchant affirmation or denial. My own answer would be a tangle to the ordinary mind, for it proceeds on a very complex basis and how to put that in a few words without being misunderstood or not understood? I will see if it can be done, but I cannot promise to be able to do it.
September 1,1931
Yes, your poem is full of sweetness and beauty alike of rhythm, expression and feeling—one among your best.
Nandalal's1 "transformation" is very good and will make a charming frontispiece for your book.
Your surprise at your cousin H. L. Roy's behaviour shows as did your dealings with your Toku Mama that you do not yet know what kind of thing is the average human nature. Did you never hear of the answer of Vidyasagar when he was told that a certain man was abusing him,—"Why does
1. Nandalal Bose (3 February 1883 -16 August 1966), the great artist. "Transformation" is the meaning given by Mother to Millingtonia hortensis, the flower of the Indian cork tree.
Page 92
he abuse me? I never did him a good turn (upakāra)." The unregenerate vital is not grateful for a benefit, it resents being under an obligation. So long as the benefit continues, ,t is effusive and says sweet things, as soon as it expects nothing more it turns round and bites the hand that fed it. Sometimes it does that even before, when it thinks it can do it without the benefactor knowing the origin of the slander, fault-finding or abuse. In all these dealings of uncles and cousins with you there is nothing unusual, nothing, as you think, peculiar to you. Most have this kind of experience, few escape it altogether. Of course, people with a developed psychic element are by nature grateful and do not behave in this way. But I do not think there is much more of the psychic element in your Hemendra than in your Toku Mama. Don't let these things worry you.
September 2,1931
It is certainly possible to have consciousness of things going on at a distance and to intervene—you will hear from the Mother one or two instances from her own experience. In this instance we had no such knowledge of the actual accident. When Bhavashankar was about to return to Bengal, both the Mother and myself became aware, independently, of a danger of death overhanging him—I myself saw it as connected with the giddiness from which he suffered, but I did not look farther. If this extraordinary combination of the giddiness with the boat and the river had been foreseen by ^s, the accident itself would not have happened, I think; for against something specific one can always put a special force which in most cases of the kind prevents it from happening,—unless indeed it is a case of irresistible predestination, utkata karma, as the astrologers call it. Actually, we did &s we always do when we see anything of the kind, we put a strong screen of protection around him. A general protection
Page 93
of that kind is not always unfailing, because the person may push it away from him or go out of its circle by some thought or act of his own; but usually we have found it effective. In this case there were two persons, Maya and your grand-uncle, who were open to the Mother and called her in the moment of danger; and Bhavashankar himself had been at least touched. To that I attribute their escape.
The idea that true yogins do not or ought not to use such powers, I regard as an ascetic superstition. I believe that all yogins who have these powers do use them whenever they find that they are called on from within to do so. They may refrain if they think the use in a particular case is contrary to the Divine Will or see that preventing one evil may be opening the door to worse or for any other valid reason, or simply because it is outside the scope of their action, but not from any general prohibitory rule. What is forbidden to anyone with a strong spiritual sense is to be a miracle- monger, performing extraordinary things for show, for gain, for fame, out of vanity or pride. It is forbidden to use powers from mere vital motives, to make an Asuric ostentation of them or to turn them into a support for arrogance, conceit, ambition or any other of the amiable weaknesses to which human nature is prone. It is because half-baked yogins so often fall into these traps of the hostile forces that the use of yogic powers is sometimes discouraged as harmful to the user. But it is mostly people who live much in the vital that so fall; with a strong and free and calm mind and a psychic awake and alive, such pettinesses are not likely to occur. As for those who can live in the true Divine Consciousness, certain powers are not "powers" at all in that sense, not, that is to say, supernatural or abnormal, but rather their normal way of seeing and acting, part of the consciousness—and how can they be forbidden or refuse to act according to their consciousness and its nature?
I suppose I have had myself an even more completely European education than you, and I have had too my period of agnostic denial, but from the moment I looked at these
Page 94
things I could never take the attitude of doubt and disbelief which was for so long fashionable in Europe. Abnormal, otherwise supraphysical experiences and powers, occult or yogic, have always seemed to me something perfectly natural and credible. Consciousness in its very nature could not he limited by the ordinary physical human-animal consciousness; it must have other ranges. Yogic or occult powers are no more supernatural or incredible than is supernatural or incredible the power to write a great poem or compose great music. Few people can do it, as things are,—not even one in a million; for poetry and music come from the inner being and to write or to compose true and great things one has to have the passage clear between the outer mind and something in the inner being. That is why you got the poetic power as soon as you began Yoga,—yogic force made the passage clear. It is the same with yogic consciousness and its powers; the thing is to get the passage clear,—for they are already there within you. Of course, the first thing is to believe, aspire and, with the true urge within, make the endeavour.
I do not know why you should deduce from my not yet having written about your experiences the strange conclusion that they were worth nothing. It is rather from the opposite cause that it is not written, because I considered a full explanation not only of the experience itself but of what lay behind it to be demanded by its importance, and I have had time only for short things that could be written off easily on the spur of the moment. However, since my silence is acting as a damper upon you, the best thing will be for me to explain the experience first and comment on the rationsle of it afterwards. I told you from the first that it was of 9reat importance and value, and I repeat it now, and add that when you have had an experience like that, you must ^cept it as a sign of destiny from within you and ought not to be discouraged even if it takes time for it to return or enlarge its scope.
Page 95
P. S. The explanation of your experience is already half written, so with good luck you may expect it on Friday or Saturday at the latest.
September 4,1931
I have said already that your experience was, in essence the piercing of the veil between the outer consciousness and the inner being. This is one of the crucial movements in Yoga. For Yoga means union with the Divine, but it also means awaking first to your inner self and then to your higher self,—a movement inward and a movement upward. It is, in fact, only through the awakening and coming to the front of the inner being that you can get into union with the Divine. The outer physical man is only an instrumental personality and by himself he cannot arrive at this union,—he can only get occasional touches, religious feelings, imperfect intimations. And even these come not from the outer consciousness but from what is within us.
In your former experiences the inner being had come to the front and for the time being impressed its own normal motions on the outer consciousness to which they are unusual and abnormal. But in this meditation what you did was,—for the first time, I believe,—to draw back from the outer consciousness, to go inside into the inner planes, enter the world of your inner self and live for a while in the hidden parts of your being. That which you were then was not this outer man, but the inner Dilip, the Yogin, the bhakta. When that plunge has once been taken, you are marked for the Yogic, the spiritual life and nothing can efface the seal that has been put upon you.
All is there in your description of this complex experience—all the signs of this first plunge. First, the sense of going a little deep down which was your feeling of the movement towards the inner depths; then, the stillness and
Page 96
pleasant numbness and the stiffness of the limbs. This was the P. of the consciousness retiring from the body inwards under the pressure of a force from above,—that pressure stabilising the body into an immobile support of the inner life in a kind of strong and still spontaneous āsana. Next, the feeling of waves surging up, mounting to the head, almost, as you say, making you unconscious. This was the ascendinq of the lower consciousness in the ādhara to meet the greater consciousness above. It is a movement analogous to that on which so much stress is laid in the Tantrik process, the awakening of the Kundalini, the Energy coiled up and latent in the body and its mounting through the spinal cord and the centres (chakras) and the Brahmarandhra to meet the Divine above. But in our Yoga it is not a specialised process, but a spontaneous uprush of the whole lower consciousness in currents or waves (or otherwise) and on the other side a descent of the Divine Consciousness and its Force into the body. This descent is felt as a pouring in of calm and peace, of force and power, of light, of joy and ecstasy, of wideness and freedom and knowledge, of a Divine Being or a Presence—sometimes one of these, sometimes many of them or all together. The movement of ascension has different results: it may liberate the consciousness so that one feels no longer in the body, but above it or else spread in wideness with the body either almost non-existent or only a point in one's free expanse; it may enable the being or some part of the being to go out from the body and move elsewhere, and this action is usually accompanied by some kind of Partial samādhi or else a complete trance; or it may result in empowering the consciousness, no longer limited by the body and the habits of the external nature, to go within, to enter the inner mental depths, the inner vital, the inner (subtle) physical, the psychic, to become conscious of its inmost psychic self or its inner mental, vital and subtle physical being and, it may be, to move and live in the domains, the planes, the worlds that correspond to these parts of the nature. This is what happened in your case. It is the repeated
Page 97
and constant ascent of the lower consciousness (not always translated by these signs) that enables the mind, the vital the physical to come into touch with the higher planes un to the supramental and get impregnated with their light and power and influence. And it is the repeated and constant descent of the Divine Consciousness and its Force that is the means for the transformation of the whole being and the whole nature. Once this descent becomes habitual, the Divine Force, the Power of the Mother begins to work, no longer from above only or from behind the veil, but consciously in the ādhāra itself, and deals with its difficulties and possibilities and carries on the Yoga.
Last, but not clearly indicated in your account, because not seized by you, comes the crossing of the border. You say rightly that you did not fall asleep or lose consciousness, for the consciousness was there all the time; only, it had shifted from the outer and physical and become closed to external things and gone into the inner psychic and vital part of the being. It was just when you crossed the border that you came into touch with the vital presence of Sahana and Sachin, two who had been most nearly connected with you on the vital plane. It was there in your inner vital self and on its plane that all happened of which you speak, the peace and the ecstasy, the vyākulatā [passionate eagerness] and the tears, the talk of Sahana and Sachin and the rest, and it was not your waking self, but the inner being—or part of it, the inner or true vital moved by the psychic consciousness,— that wept these tears and had this experience of ecstasy and peace. In your former experiences you felt it in the waking state; for both movements are necessary, the coming out of the inner being to the front as well as the going in of the consciousness to become aware of the inner self and nature. But here what was done, initially at least, was to break or at least to open and pass the barrier between this outer or instrumental and that inner which it very partially strives to express and to make possible in future a conscious awareness of all the endless riches of possibility and experience and
Page 98
new being and new life that lie untapped behind the veil of this small and very blind and limited material personality which men erroneously think to be all of themselves. The "coining to" of which you speak was simply the return from this inner world to the waking state.
You write in your letter that the tears were not real because your eyes were dry when you woke. The epithet shows the survival of a Russellian bias in your physical mind,—as if the physical were the only reality! They were perfectly real, only it was the reality of the inner self and the inner plane; for it was the inner being that shed these tears of ecstasy and bhakti. So too your meeting with Sahana and Sachin was a real experience, but real on the vital plane—and one sign of the reality was the way in which they acted, each with an exact fidelity to the vital state, Sachin ignorant and unable to understand and upset, Sahana who is awake within at once understanding what had happened and doing the right thing by leaving you to your experience. So too what happened in your dream about the Mother was real, but real on the vital plane, an experience of things that take place in the inner domains. It is a mistake to think that we live physically only with the outer mind and life. We are all the time living and acting on other planes of consciousness, meeting others there and acting upon them, and what we do and feel and think there, the force we gather, the results we prepare have an incalculable importance and effect, unknown to us, upon our outer life. Not all of it comes through, and what comes through takes another form in the physical—though sometimes there is an exact correspondence; but this little is at the basis of our outward existence. All that we become and do and bear in the physical life is prepared behind the veil within us. It is therefore of immense importance for a Yoga which aims at the transformation of life to grow conscious of what goes on within these domains, to be master there and be able to feel, know and deal with the secret forces that determine our destiny and our internal and external growth or decline.
It is equally important for those who want that union with
Page 99
the Divine without which the transformation is impossible. It is not less indispensable for one whose aim is the union through love and bhakti which is your aspiration. The aspiration could not be realised if you remained bound by your external self, tied to the physical mind and its petty movements. It is not the outer being which is the source of this spiritual urge; the outer being has only undergone the inner drive from behind the veil. You saw in this experience whence it came. It is the inner psychic being in you that is the bhakta the seeker after the union and the Ananda, and what is difficult for the outer nature will become perfectly easy when the barrier is down and the inner self in the front. For you have seen yourself in your experiences that the moment this comes to the front or draws the consciousness into itself, peace, ecstasy, bhakti are natural, spontaneous, immediate.
This is the importance of your experience. It shows that all the processes and movements necessary to the Yoga are within your reach and not as you think in your outer mind difficult or impossible. It shows that the inner self in you is already a Yogin and bhakta and since that is so and it has shown itself, the spiritual turn of your outer life too is predestined and inevitable. It shows also that you have already a deep inner life, Yogic and spiritual, which is veiled only because of the strong outward turn your education and past activities have given to your thinking mind and lower vital parts. It is precisely to correct this outward orientation and take away the veil that you have to practise the Yoga. And that it will be done is sure—for this having once happened, the inner self is bound to renew its pressure, to clear the passage and finally come by its kingdom. A beginning of this kind is the indication of what is to happen on a greater scale hereafter.
There is much more that has to be said, but I will say it later. In this letter I can only give you the exact explanation and immediate significance of your experience.
Page 100
September 8,1931
Yes, it is a very fine and powerful poem. There was no reason why you should stop the inspiration when it came.
But what precisely do you mean by sending the inspiration? The inspiration comes from above—through your inner being who, very evidently, is not only a Yogin and bhakta but a poet of Yoga and bhakti. The Yoga-force which woke up the power in you came from me. It was when you were translating my poems that you got into touch and the power woke in you because you came inwardly into my Light. Since then I have been acting on you to develop this poetic power, .and as there is a large opening there it has been an easy matter. As for the Power itself that works, that gives words and rhythms, you ought to know or at least your inner being knows very well that all divine powers are the powers of the Mother. But the way in which these things work is the occult and not the physical (not the crudely mediumistic) way, and it works in each according to his nature and the material and capacities actual or latent it finds there.
I doubt whether I can give you a more explicit explanation without entering into things for which an occult knowledge is needed which you have not yet. That will come hereafter.
Did you not write to Pramatha Chaudhary? Why then do they still insist? Apart from my rule of which I told you, I am not at all inclined to write anything merely complimentary and conventional, and for anything more than that have not the time.
September 10, 1931
In your friend's1 English poem there are the signs of
1. Buddhadev Basu (30 Nov. 1908 - 18 March 1974), poet (in Bengali and English), novelist, dramatist, literary critic. Author of Bandir Bandana, and other works. He received the Sahitya Academy Award in 1967 and Padmabhushan in 1970. Pratibha Basu, his wife, is also a writer.
Page 101
poetical power but there is not a sufficient technique. I have marked the best lines. It will do for the Orient.
Bandir Bandana is certainly remarkable for so younq a poet. There is an extraordinary power of language and a great force in the writing and a strong flow in the verse. The thought-substance I find a little deficient, less mature, rather crude in places. This kind of God baiting, owing I suppose to Russian influence, seems to be now popular in the "advanced" minds of the East—but it is childish and out of date. Russia is still in the nursery in these matters, but I don't see why millennial India and China should want to prelude their new life by a second childhood. This kind of thing was done and done with in Western Europe fifty years ago and done too in a much more profound and, as I may say, grown-up manner.
Apart from that, the gifts he begins with are considerable and, if he develops and achieves depth and subtlety as well as power—for power is not enough—may lead to something very great. The great danger for him arises from his early facility—for that sometimes stands in the way of the arduous growth that can alone raise the poetic stature to the level of the highest summits.
September 11,1931 ?
The translations from Goethe are excellent. You are certainly quite right in varying the answers in N0 3; even in the German there is some monotony felt in the form,—a monotony, I would suggest, Shakespeare would have avoided. By the way, what is the meaning of "aus unseren Stall" in the poem "of lighter vein?" I could not quite equate it with your rendering.
Goethe certainly goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect that the English poe1 and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a
Page 102
greater poet—I cannot either admit that he was an equal. He "rote out of his intelligence and his style and movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice rather than by the very necessity of his being. He wrote his poetry gs he did everything else with a great skill and effective genius, but it was only part of his genius and not the whole. And there is a touch wanting—the touch of an absolute inevitability; this lack leaves his poetry on a lower level than that of the few quite supreme poets.
When I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential poetic force and beauty—not of their work as a whole. The Mahabharata is a greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either reigns over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare—both are built on an almost cosmic greatness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in their scope and touch too the things which the Greeks and Elizabethan poets could not even glimpse. But as poets—as masters of rhythm and language and the expression of poetic beauty—Vyasa and Valmiki are not inferior, but also not greater than the English or the Greek poet. I leave aside the question whether the Mahabharata was not the creation of the mind of a people rather than of a single poet, for that doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer.
September 12,1931
Sri Aurobindo's comments on Dilip's translation into Bengali of three poems from James Cousins, Jehangir Vakil and Tennyson.
Page 103
The first translation is good, the second superb and the third (third version) superlative. Cousins' poem is very felicitous in expression—generally he just misses the best, but here he has done very well. Your translation is close and adequate.
I don't remember Vakil's poems very well, but they gave me the impression, I think, of much talent not amounting to genius, considerable achievement in language and rhythm but nothing that will stand out and endure. But how many can do more in a foreign language? Here the poem certainly attempts and almost achieves something fine—there are admirable lines and images; but the whole gives an impression of something constructed by the mind, a work built up by a very skilful and well-endowed intelligence. Your translation strikes me as surpassing greatly the original for this very reason—it gives the impression of a thing not merely thought out but seen within and lived, which is the first requisite for the best poetry.
Of the three versions of Tennyson's lines, the first is null, the second good as a translation but otherwise a leaden rather than a golden means; but your third version is admirable. Here too you have excelled the original. Don't think this is a hyperbole—for I suppose you know that I have no great consideration for Tennyson. I read him much and admired him when I was young and raw, but even then his In Memoriam style seemed to me mediocre and his attempts at thinking insufferably second rate and dull. These lines are better than others, but they are still Tennyson.
But truly you are a unique and wonderful translator. How you manage to keep so close to the spirit and turn of your originals and yet make your versions into true poems is a true marvel as usually faithful translations are flat and those which are good poetry transform the original into something else—as Fitzgerald did with Omar or Chapman with Homer.
Page 104
September 15,1931
A very charming lyric—but why Jātismar1 though it is a taking title?
Yes, I thought "aus unserem Stall" meant "from out of our stable" and could not see much point in it; I was not sure whether it meant that the dogs came from the stable or simply that they followed right all the way from the stable. In any case the turn you gave to it is at once more poetic and more meaningful.
Did I send you back the Hungarian article "Dilip Ray and hindu musjika?" If not it must have taken to itself wings and flown back to Buda-Pesth.
About your "grandfather" dream the Mother has said everything needful. I only want to add that all "dream- experiences" are coherent. Ordinarily dreams are incoherent because they are confused impressions surging from the subconscient, not true experiences. Dream-experiences are incoherent only when (1) they are badly transcribed in the recording consciousness or improperly remembered, (2) when they belong to a certain region of symbol occurrences in the vital to which the physical consciousness has no clue. But in the second case there is only an apparent incoherence, for once one gets the main clue, everything falls into its place and is full of a connected significance. At any rate these dreams show that you are now very much awake and active on the inner vital plane.
September 18, 1931
Your series of experiences are very interesting by the constant (though interspersed) development they illustrate. Here two new significant elements have been added to the
1. Who remembers his past birth.
Page 105
previous substance of the experience. The first is the very precise localisation of the uprush of the consciousness from the pit of the stomach—that is to say, from the navel or perhaps from just below it? The navel-centre (nābhi-padma) is the main seat of the centralised vital consciousness (dynamic centre) which ranges from the heart level (emotional) to the centre below the navel (lower vital, sensational desire centre). These three mark the domain of the vital being. It is therefore clear that it was your inner vital being which had this experience, and its intensity and vehemence was probably due to the whole vital (or most of it) being awake and sharing in it this time. The experience itself was psychic in its origin, but was given a strong emotional-vital form in its expression. I may add, for completeness, that the centre of the psychic is behind the heart and it is through the purified emotions that the psychic most easily finds an outlet. All from the heart above is the domain of the mental being—which also has three centres, one in the throat (the outward- going or externalising mind), one between the eyes or rather in the middle of the forehead (the centre of vision and will) and one above, communicating with the brain, which is called the thousand-petalled lotus, and where are centralised the thinking mind and higher intelligence communicating with the greater mind planes (illumined mind, intuition, overmind) above.
The second new significant feature is the self-manifestation of the inner mind; for it was your inner mind that was watching, observing and criticising the vital being's psychic experience. You found this clear division in you curious, but it will no longer seem curious once you know the perfectly normal divisibility of the different parts of the being. In the outer surface nature, mind, psychic, vital, physical are all jumbled together and it needs a strong power of introspection, self-analysis, close observation and disentanglement of the threads of thought, feeling and impulse to find out the composition of our nature and the relation and interaction of these parts upon each other. But when one goes inside as
Page 106
you have done, we find the sources of all this surface action and there the parts of our being are quite separate and clearly distinct from each other. We feel them indeed as different beings in us, and just as two people in a group can do, they too are seen to observe, criticise, help or oppose and strain each other; it is as if we were a group-being, each member of the group with its separate place and function, and all directed by a central being who is sometimes in front above the others, sometimes behind the scenes. Your mental being was observing the vital and not quite easy about its vehemence, for the natural base of the mental being is calm, thoughtfulness, restraint, control and balance, while the natural turn of the vital is dynamism, energy thrown into emotion, sensation and action. All therefore was perfectly natural and in order.
I have no time to write more. But note how entirely conscious your inner being is when it does come into action,— which perfectly justifies what I wrote to you about it at a time when you were in despair over your incapacity and unfitness for Yoga! You will see now that I was right and your fits of despondency had no true ground—and also that I knew what was in you better than you yourself knew it.
September 22, 1931
As regards the progress you have made, I do not think you have given us an exaggerated impression of it; it seems to be quite real. It is no part of the Yoga to suppress taste, rasa, altogether; so, if you found the ice-cream pleasant, that does not by itself invalidate the completeness of your progress. What is to be got rid of is vital desire and attachment, the greed of food, being overjoyed at getting the food you like, sorry and discontented when you do not have it, giving al! undue importance to it, etc. If one wants to be a Yogin, it will not do to be like the ordinary man to whom food, sex
Page 107
and gain are nine-tenths of life or even to keep in any of these things the reactions to which vital human nature is prone. Equality is here the test as in so many other matters. If you can take the Ashram food with satisfaction or at least without dissatisfaction, that is already a sign that attachment and predilection are losing their old place in the nature. It is also an excellent sign if empty social meetings are no longer attractive,—a sure sign that the psychic and the Yogic consciousness are gaining ground. As for sex, the progress you report is also excellent; sex is almost the strongest of human vital pulls and to master it altogether takes time, but here too a good beginning is half the battle.
For the rest, I had told you that even when people do not seem to be progressing outwardly a preparatory work is often being done behind the veil and that this was your case. When the preparation is complete, then one day one wakes up to find that, without having noticed it, a large stride forward has been made.
As for scepticism, that disease of the age that is passing away, it is another story and I will deal with it perhaps some other time. I will now only say that discrimination is an excellent element in Yoga, but scepticism is the reverse; it poses as an exacting discrimination, but is only an exaggerated caricature of the real thing. Samśaya [doubt], aśraddhā [lack of faith] are not viveka [discrimination, discernment],
September 23,1931
Mother,
This afternoon towards the end of meditation of about two hours the silence in me deepened and a curious feeling I had. My body became numb as usual but I had all the time a sort of divided consciousness. It is very difficult to describe it but you will understand even from my baffled attempt. I will try.
Page 108
I felt going deep and at a certain stage as though the consciousness changed suddenly. A relaxation set in and I took your name with an ease and rhythm which was delectable. No effort was needed. And yet I was conscious I could move my limbs at will even though they had become more numb than usual—so much so that even when I got up, they had a trace of the numbness. Is it because the force came down more or what? However, what I felt was very pleasurable. It was as I said as if my japa of your name got a sort of rhythmic flow with my breath. I had read about such an experience but had never yet felt it. Usually I take your name with effort— after every five minutes or so my mind wants to run off at a mad tangent—I fly after it and bring it back a prisoner. But as my meditation deepened I suddenly found your name had become sort of woven into my breathing which became very deep as the breath of a man under an anaesthetic. Of course all this happened spontaneously.
I think that what happened was simply this—that, just as before your inner vital and inner mental came to the front in the inward-going consciousness, so this time it was the inner (subtle) physical being that manifested itself. The outer body was numb, the inner body able to move; the breathing with the name flowing in it was the breathing of this inner physical being. Mark that all three (inner mental, inner vital, inner physical) immediately they appear, show themselves to be those of a born Yogin. For breathing with the name flowing in it is usually the result of a long practice of combined pranayama and japa: but to your inner physical being it comes spontaneously and at once, as if it were to the manner born.
N.B. I shall answer your morning's letter in due course. But you have misunderstood my aśraddhā which was not used in the popular (Bengali) sense [disrespectful distrust] but in its technical (Sanskrit) sense. I shall explain at length.
Page 109
October 11, 1931
I must have forgotten to send you my reply about O. C. Ganguli.1 I did not want to discourage his visit,—he can come, if he does not mind being uncomfortable, and you can so tell him.
Don't worry about the pressure; it is a good sign, not a bad one, and simply means that the Power is working to open that supremely important centre.
Also don't worry about the perspiration; it is a phenomenon we have all had at certain stages of the Yoga, the heat also. The old style would have said it was the Yoga fire waking to purify the body of obstructive impurities and incapacities, and it was after all not an incorrect explanation and a fairly adequate expression.
You must really get rid of this idea that you are imagining things like the silence and wideness; an experience is not untrue because it is vague. If it is vague at first, it will deepen and intensify afterwards; but it must be affirmed and accepted, not denied and doubted. The "Essay on Doubt" will be written, never fear; but I have no time for it just now.
Keep your waking consciousness as pure as possible; the dreams will then get discouraged in the end. The subconscious always takes time to clear altogether.
November 1931?
(...) such fuming helps not. But I have had enough fun over the income tax and now this! Qu'en dites-vous.2 Fine mess! I will have to pay lots [?] for a law-suit because my precious cousin has forgotten all along to pay the tax! 0 Lord!
1. A well-known critic of Indian art of the times.
2. French for "What do you say?"
Page 110
I send you three poems—parables rather, all from Sri Ramakrishna. I have written in all eighteen. The others will follow. Some comfort this at least. But I have had to write so many letters today over this mess!... Quite annoyed, truly!
Have worked all day,—quite solitary! So be pleased, please.
I am.
No use boiling over human ingratitude—it is too immense a thing to deserve a single boil. You know Vidyasagar's saying," āmar upar tānr eta rāg keno? āmi ta tānr kona-o upakāra kari ni!!" ["Why does he abuse me? I never did him a good turn!"] Of course all humanity is not like that—luckily, but it is a familiar tract in human nature and a large part of the average human act like that. You may say he might at least have paid the tax—but what human being will pay a tax when he can shove [?] it on to somebody else—especially a benefactor. A benefactor ought to benefact always—to the extent of paying any little tax that may be going about— otherwise where is the constancy in his character? Even your cousin may be thinking, "What a strange fellow to object to paying the tax on his own bungalow!" At least if he did, that would be the human mind all over.
November 2, 1931
In the first place why on earth do you put any belief in the Sports circulated in the Ashram" and, in the second, why on earth do you allow these to depress you? I thought you Knew the value or rather the entire absence of value of this kind of gossip and rumour? What about the "scepticism" which makes you unwilling to believe everything people tell you—why not make a useful use of it in refusing to believe these things? That would be better than to make a useless
Page 111
use of it in doubting the experiences of your own inner being which are a thousand times more reliable than this imaginative chit-chat built upon nothing. If the Mother makes you a communication when you are in your inner consciousness, why not put your faith in that and not in all this external noise and blather? And who, by the way, told you that the Mother is seeing those for whom she has love and confidence and that for others, like yourself, she has no love and confidence? The Mother has been "seeing" nobody and even now and for some time to come all visits and talk must be refused until she is stronger.1 Certain people come here for their usual work, or to do necessary things, or to bring food or letters, etc. (dealt by me, not by the Mother!) but the
1. This refers to Mother's illness, which she recounted to Satprem in Mother's Agenda, vol. 5, August 14, 1964:
"... I remember (Sri Aurobindo was here), I caught a sort of fever like influenza from contact with the workers, one of those fevers that take hold of you brutally, instantly, and in the night I had a temperature of more than 105. Anyway, it was ... And then I spent my night studying what people call 'delirium'—(laughing) it was very interesting ! I was explaining it to Sri Aurobindo (he was there: I was lying on the bed and he was sitting by the bedside), I told him, "This is what's going on, that is what's going on... and that (such and such and such a thing) is what gives people what doctors call 'delirium.' It isn't 'delirium'.... I remember having been assailed for hours by little entities, vital forms that were hideous, vile, and so vicious! An unequaled cruelty. They rushed at me in a troop, I had to fight to repel them: they retreated, moved forward, retreated, moved forward .. • And for hours like that. Naturally, at that time I had Sri Aurobindo's full power and presence, and yet it lasted three or four hours. So I thought, 'How terrible it must be for the poor devils who have neither the knowledge I have, nor the power I have, nor Sri Aurobindo's protective presence—all the best conditions.' It must be frightful, oh! ••• I have never in my life seen anything so disgusting. ,
"I had picked it all up in the workers' atmosphere. Because I hadn't been careful, it was the 'festival of arms' and I had been in 'communion' with them: I had given them some food and taken something they'd given me, which means it was a terrible communion. And brought all that back.
"I was ill for a long time, several days."
Page 112
Mother has not been wasting her strength in receiving them or in chatting with anybody, I can assure you. I do not think I need say more about all that you have built on what "they say"; you ought to see that the foundation is unsubstantial' mist and that therefore the structure you have built on it has no right to exist. As for my not answering questions, I have naturally been too busy all these days, but I thought everyone would easily understand that; I did not expect that a theory would be built on it that I was "disappointed", had turned tail and was running away from my work. At any rate, since they say so, please reassure them and tell them that such is not the case. For yourself, cheer up and throw sadness to the dogs. How can you be sad when you have such beautiful dreams and messages from the Mother?
I am glad to hear all you have written about Pratap. He may have been unlucky to come just at this moment, or rather it may seem so on the surface; but things are not always what they seem, and now he is here he had better remain until he has secured the object of his coming.
Your translation of Shakespeare is excellent, the less literal version is certainly much better than the other. Only, I am not quite sure that the last six lines are quite equal to the first eight; perhaps a retouching of the tenth and fourteenth lines would remove the inequality. Shakespeare's last line is perhaps a little too intellectual and ingenious, the play of words exceeding the sense, but I find the last but one rather fine and effective. '
I have only had time to glance at the poem; I shall read it again before I pronounce on it, but the first effect is very favourable.
P. S. I have since read the poem and I see that it is very beautiful poetry.
I send you back the German article; I made something out of the first paragraph, but had no time to labour through the est. Perhaps you could make a translation for me as you propose. But he starts with a queer proposition—Aurobindo
Page 113
Ghose is a new Buddha! By the way he refers to Romain Rolland, but Rolland, I hear, is sadly disappointed with me! It was to be expected, after all; I rather thought it could be the result of closer acquaintance.
November 4,1931
The new version is much better; it now reads as an even whole.
Please send the money on to me. Pondicherry houses are not safe and it is no use tempting the Dasyus—even when Indra is coming down with the rain in seven rivers.
P.S. Can you send me back the German article? I shall read it with the half of your translation, it may bring back some of my forgotten German. I don't think habitus is habitat, but what it is is more than I can tell you.
November 12,1931
I think we will keep to the refrigerator. Your information about our food-measurements is inaccurate. I am taking the same quantity of food always. The Mother, of course, for some days took nothing and is still taking very little, but more and more rather than less every day; but the diminution was due to temporary incapacity and not to any set purpose. So there is no ground of that kind for changing what was settled. On the contrary the experience of these days shows that the refrigerator would have been of immense use and saved much time and trouble. The refrigerator is not going to be in the stores, except for a short time; it will be put on our floor as soon as the new rooms are ready; so there Shankar will have full satisfaction. All machines have to be carefully kept and handled if they are to remain in good
Page 114
order,—the motor cars are a proof of that,—but that is not a reason for machinelessness; the necessary care will have to he taken, that is all. And we have electricians and mechanics here, so it ought not to be impossible to repair any slight harm done.
As for Pratap, the Mother intends, if all goes well, to give a short meditation daily at Pranam time to the sadhaks for some days before the 24th, and if this can be done, he can come to the meditation. After the 24th she will see him privately; meanwhile he will have at least met her and received her touch: I hope that will satisfy him and keep him to his soul's purpose in coming here. Please do not speak to others of this intention of the Mother's, as that would raise a riot of comment, discussion, interpretation and gossip which would disturb the atmosphere altogether. It is better that it should not be known till the Mother is ready to make it public.
As for all the rest you write, you should realise that the Mother has had a very severe attack and that she must absolutely husband her forces in view of the strain the 24th November will mean for her. It is quite out of the question for her to begin seeing and receiving them meanwhile—a single morning of that kind of thing would exhaust her altogether. You must remember that for her a physical contact of this kind with others is not a mere social or domestic meeting with a few superficial movements which make no great difference one way or the other. It means for her an interchange, a pouring out of her forces and a receiving of things good, bad and mixed from them which often involves a great labour of adjustment and elimination and, in many cases though not in all, a severe strain on the body. If it had been only a question of two or three people, it would have been a different matter; but there is the whole Ashram here ready to enforce each his claim the moment she opens her doors. You surely do not want to put all that upon her before she has recovered her health and strength! In the interests of the work itself—the Mother has never cared in the least
Page 115
for her body or her health for its own sake and that indifference has been one reason, though only an outward one for the damage done—I must insist on her going slowly in the resumption of the work and doing only so much at first as her health can bear. It seems to me that all who care for her ought to feel in the way I do.
The weakness in yourself of which you speak is there, as the persistency of these movements show but it is not in the heart —your heart is all right—but in the lower vital nature. All your weaknesses are there; the rest of your being is quite strong enough for the spiritual life. But this inadequacy of the lower vital is not peculiar to you, it is in almost every human being. This tendency to irrational sadness and despondency and these imaginations, fears and perverse reasonings—always repeating, if you will take careful notice, the same movements, ideas and feelings and even the same language and phrases like a machine—is a characteristic of the lower vital nature. The only way to get rid of it is to meet it with a fixed resolution of the higher vital and the mind and psychic being to combat, reject and master it. As you were determined to master the desire of the palate, so you must determine to master this "irrational knot" of despondency in the lower vital nature. If you indulge it and regard it as a natural part of yourself with good causes for existence or if you busy yourself finding this or that justification for it when it comes, there is no reason why it should let go its unpleasant grip upon you. Be firm and courageous here, as you have learnt to be with other movements of your lower vital; you will then, I think, find less difficulty in your meditation and your general sadhana.
November 16, 1931
I am feeling very restless and miserable. All sorts of doubts are assailing me. I know you are very busy. But I don't know whom else to approach.
Page 116
I don't know what I'll do if I have to pass the whole night in such misery.
P. S. Most likely I won't go to see Mother to-morrow morning. But I am afraid lest my misery should then increase. And then if I don't feel like going to pranam her in the mechanical way what use is my going particularly since I feel I may contaminate the atmosphere.
All this is quite groundless as usual—I don't know why you insist on putting yourself to self-torture in this way. The misery and doubts are in all probability due to your having made a wrong movement in determining not to come to pranam. I have never said or written that you were in any degree the cause or the sadhaks generally were the cause of the Mother's illness. It is nonsense to talk of your contaminating the atmosphere. You will get a letter from me in the morning; meanwhile throw all this out of your head and go to the pranam in a spirit of quiet and confidence.
I hope that you have acted according to my note on your letter written an hour or two ago and thrown away this wrong idea and wrong movement of yours about the Pranam and the Mother's illness. What you have written in these last letters including the one in which you strangely suggest that the best way to progress in sadhana might be to cease loving the Mother because you love her in the human way, proceeds from wrong notions generated by a confusion in your vital mind misinterpreting things we may have said or written to you. I will try to set them right as clearly as possible.
And first about human love in the sadhana. The soul's lurning through love to the Divine must be through a love that is essentially divine, but as the instrument of expression at first is a human nature, it takes the forms of human love
Page 117
and bhakti. It is only as the consciousness deepens, heightens and changes that that greater eternal love can grow in it and openly transform the human into the divine. But in human love itself there are several kinds of motive-forces There is a psychic human love which rises from deep within and is the result of the meeting of the inner being with that which calls it towards a divine joy and union; it is, once it becomes aware of itself, something lasting, self-existent, not dependent upon external satisfactions, not capable of diminution by external causes, not self-regarding, not prone to demand or bargain but giving itself simply and spontaneously, not moved to or broken by misunderstandings, disappointments, strife and anger, but pressing always straight towards the inner union. It is this psychic love that is closest to the divine and it is therefore the right and best way of love and bhakti. But that does not mean that the other parts of the being, the vital and physical included, are not to be used as means of expression or that they are not to share in the full play and the whole meaning of love, even of divine love. On the contrary, they are a means and can be a great part of the complete expression of divine love,—provided they have the right and not the wrong movement. There are in the vital itself two kinds of love,—one full of joy and confidence and abandon, generous, unbargaining, ungrudging and very absolute in its dedication and this is akin to the psychic and well-fitted to be its complement and a means of expression of the divine love. And neither does the psychic love or the divine love despise a physical means of expression wherever that is pure and right and possible; it does not depend upon that, it does not diminish, revolt or go out like a snuffed candle when it is deprived of any such means; but when it can use it, it does so with joy and gratitude. Neither of us ever said that darshan and touch in the Pranam were given as a concession to human weakness and that in the psychic way there is no place for such things. un the contrary they were given as means of approaching the Divine and receiving the Light and materialising the psychic
Page 118
contact, and so long as they are approached in the right sprit and used for the true purpose they have their place. It is only if they are misused, not rightly approached or approached with indifference and inertia, or revolt or hostility or some gross desire, that they are out of place and can have a contrary effect—as the Mother has always warned people and has assigned it as the reason why she does not like lightly to open them to everyone.
But there is another way of vital love which is more usually the way of human nature and that is a way of ego and desire. It is full of vital craving, desire and demand; its continuance depends upon the satisfaction of its demands; if it does not get what it craves or even imagines that it is not being treated as it deserves—for it is full of imaginations, misunderstandings, jealousies, misinterpretations—it at once turns to sorrow, wounded feeling, anger, all kinds of disorder, finally cessation and departure. A love of this kind is in its very nature ephemeral and unreliable and it cannot be made a foundation for divine love. There has been too much of this kind in the relations of the sadhaks with the Mother in approaching her, I suppose, as a human mother with all the reactions of the lower vital nature. For a long time it was per force tolerated—and this was the concession made to human weakness—even accepted in the beginning as a thing too prominent in the human being not to be there to some extent but to be transformed by degrees; but too often, it has refused to transform itself and has made itself a source of confusion, disorder, asiddhi, sometimes complete disaster. It is for this reason that we discourage this lower vital way of human love and would like people to reject and eliminate these elements as soon as may be from their nature. Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda,—but this is only a source of Snoring, trouble, disappointment, disillusion and disunion. Even a slight element of it shakes the foundations of peace and replaces the movement towards Ananda by a fall towards sorrow, discontent and nirānanda [blisslessness].
Page 119
In your own case you often write in your wrong moods as if human love, even with some of these lower ingredients, were the only thing possible to you. But that is not so at all, for it contradicts your own deepest experiences. Always what your inner being has asked is Love, Bhakti, Ananda and whenever it comes to the surface it is, even if only in a first elementary form, the divine love which it brings with it. A basis of deep and intense calm and stillness, a great intensity of emotion and bhakti, an inrush of Ananda, this is in these moments your repeated experience. On the other hand when you insist too much on the love which exists by continual cravings, what comes is the other movement—fits of despondency, sorrow, nirānanda. In stressing on the psychic basis, in wishing you to conquer this other movement, I am only pointing you to the true way of your own nature— of which the psychic bhakti, the true vital love are the real moving forces, and the other is only a superficial immixture.
I had hoped to write shortly, but I have not been able to do so. Therefore, for the moment since I have promised you this letter in the morning, I can only repeat, on the other matter, that I have not said that you in any degree or the sadhaks generally were the cause of the Mother's illness. To another who wrote something of the kind from the same personal standpoint I replied that the Mother's illness was due to a struggle with universal forces which far overpassed the scope of any individual or group of individuals. What I wrote about the strain thrown on the Mother by the physical contacts was in connection with her resumption of work —and it concerns the conditions under which the work can best be done, so that these forces may not in future have the advantage. Conditions have been particularly arduous in the past owing to the perhaps inevitable development of things, for which I do not hold anyone responsible, but now that the sadhana has come down to the most material plane on which blows can still be given by the adverse forces it is necessary to make a change which can best be done by a change in the inner attitude of the sadhaks, for that alone
Page 120
now can make—until the decisive descent of the supramental Light and Force—the external conditions easier. But of this I cannot write at the tail end of a letter.
November 17,1931
(A letter from Mother.)
For God's sake come back to your common sense!
I never said that I would see you no more. Sri Aurobindo asked you only to be a little patient, as for the "silent expressionless love" He is not conscious of having written to you anything of the kind.
Now, about my "grudging" smile—I will tell you what I said to Sri Aurobindo when I met Him to-day at 1.30. Relating what happened in the morning at pranam, I told Him, concerning you: "There is a letter of Dilip to you and I do not know what he writes, but I can assure you that when he (Dilip) came to me this morning, I gave him a good, long blessing and my best smile."
You can understand that I felt somewhat astonished when I heard that my best smile was a grudging one. Are you quite sure that you did not look in your head at what you imagined would be, instead of looking at my face?...
Your going away is quite out of question. I want you to remain here because I know that it is here—and here only— that you can and will be happy.
Why do you ask for my love? Is it not long since you have it already?
November 20, 1931
It is not surprising that your poem should draw so much admiration,—it is a magnificent poem and you have made of
Page 121
it a magnificent translation. I read it to the Mother and she was very much struck by its beauty and power and also its depth of psychological and spiritual feeling and knowledge.
I have made only a few alterations where it seemed to me necessary in order to satisfy the turns of the English language. For instance "spicy urge broken by mortification" "azure melody of attainment" "peak roots the gloom" are in English a little strange and forced; I have substituted turns which ran better into the mould of the language,—in the first two instances approaching, I think, nearer to the original. "Filth" is rather violent; I have substituted a milder phrase. Expressions like "your peak it is that" "your clarion it is that" are a little awkward in a poetic prose style: "he will seek" "he will look" etc. sounds stiff, the directness of the present tense gives a better effect. Your "Aurora" can hardly be said and is besides too classic and academic for present-day language; I substitute "Dawn-Goddess". The three or four other corrections are for nicety of phrase and rhythm.
I am glad to hear that your friend in Germany is already benefiting inwardly by turning here. The Mother can think of nothing from Vienna except the "Largo" of Hendel; she intended to speak to you about it (or perhaps she spoke?) just before she fell ill.
November 22, 1931
The Mother always intended to see you after the 24th, so you need have no scruple about coming to her on the 25th. It will not be at all extorting anything or forcing yourself upon her.
What I want of you is not to love the Mother from a distance, but to become accustomed to feel her presence, her help, the working of her forces even when she is not physically present and this not only in your sleep or inward drawn condition (which seems to be sufficiently easy for
Page 122
you) but in your waking consciousness whether in meditation or in ordinary hours. And this I want because it would give a great push to your Yoga. It would besides give a deeper meaning and power to your physical contact with her. I am sure that all this will come fully in time.
For Pratap, you could perhaps bring him with you on the 25th. He could see her for five minutes or so and then leave you. It is not necessary for him to speak of family etc., as she already knows through you. His seeing her Should be rather as a help in deeper things and to give a push to his spiritual growth and establishing the connection between him and the Mother.
November 27,1931
It is good to hear that you have had this experience, the beginning surely of a new progress. "A concrete feeling with a realisation of truth" would seem to show that it was mental and psychic at the same time—and that is all right. For it is not only the soul but the instrumental nature also (in the end down to the most material and external) that must feel the divine union.
Your translation of Amal's poem is at once astonishingly close and exquisitely beautiful. As to the others, you are quite right in using this freedom when translating from Prose into poetry; to be literal or too close to the original hampers one in finding the full poetic turn and expression. Be as free as you like; fidelity to the idea is the only thing needful. As a result of the freedom, these two translations, are much more poetic and convincing than those you sent me before.
Page 123
December 1, 1931
The translation of Wordsworth is very good. That of Nolini's sonnet perhaps fails a little in the eighth line (the finest in the original)—and it may be in the twelfth and the last, but of that I am not quite sure; the rest is admirable.
The experience of the "solid block" feeling indicates the descent of a solid strength and peace into the external being —in the vital-physical most, I suppose. It is this always that is the foundation, the basis into which all else (Ananda, light, knowledge, bhakti) can descend in the future and stand or play safely. The numbness is there in the other experience because the movement is inward; but here the Yogashakti is coming outward into the fully awake external nature,—as a first step towards the establishment of the Yoga and its experiences there. So the numbness which is a sign of the consciousness tending to draw back from the external parts, is not there.
December 5, 1931
I am finding nowadays a sense of power deepening in me when I translate these for my [?] of translations in my book. I feel almost sure the public will take very kindly to these. Besides, these will introduce a novelty and departure (particularly the prose to poem translations). I will send the book to the press in a fortnight or so. I pray in humility for the continuance of my inspiration which comes from you and Mother.
Both the translations are extremely good. The Miltonic one is very fine and truly Miltonic. I have noted one mistake as to the sense of a word; I think "grateful" here does not mean krtaghna, it is used in its oldest sense "pleasing" which is still preserved in such phrases as "ungrateful task."
Page 124
My opinion of Browning has been expressed, I think in the Future Poetry. I had a fervent passion for him when I was from seventeen to eighteen, after a previous penchant for Tennyson; but like most calf-love both these fancies were of short duration. While I had it, I must have gone through most of his writings (Fifine at the Fair and some others excepted) some half dozen times at least. There is much stuff of thought in him, seldom of great depth but sometimes unexpected and subtle, a vast range not so much of character as of dramatic human moods, and considerable power and vigour of rough verse and rugged language. But there is little of pure poetic quality in him, or sheer beauty of expression, no magic; he gets the highest or finest inspiration only in a line or two here and there. His expression is often not only rough and hasty but inadequate; in his later work he becomes tiresome. Not one of the greater poets, but still a great creator.
December 7, 1931
I am rather shaky sometimes about philosophy in poems. My friends Niren and Annada are down on it. But how can I help it? I have to be true to myself, isn't it? And besides, why must I agree with them about this dictum of theirs that a poem must have no philosophy? And why must philosophy be a taboo in a poem if it comes in a musical garb ? Please let me have a few lines from you on this point. Isn't this musical ? By the way I am not at all depressed or anything. The poem, I hope, doesn't suggest that? I am in a delightful mood as Mother will have told you ?
It is a very beautiful poem and the poeticisation of Anatole France is very well done.
What do they mean by "philosophy" in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument or treatise
Page 125
in verse like the Greek Empedocles1 or the Roman Lucretius2 it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose' And also one has to be very careful, when philosophising in a less perilous way, not to be flat or heavy. It is obviously easier to be poetic when writing about a skylark than when writing about the attributes of the Brahman! But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to 'philosophise'. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman. "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass," is as good poetry as "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit." And there are flights of unsurpassable poetry in the Gita and the Upanishads. These rigid dicta are always excessive and there is no reason why a poet should allow the expression of his personality or the spirit within him or his whole poetic mind to be clipped, cabined or stifled by any theories or "thou shalt not"-s of that character.
December 13, 1931
Yes, I had forgotten to answer about the Prayers and remembered only afterwards. I think for Anilkumar to approach his friend would be the best, if he thinks it a likely source. I hesitate to ask Biren for anything—for his position is awkward, surrounded by fathers, Dewans and other guardian angels, and he wrote some time ago that he finds it difficult to get his own allowance regularly because the estate is in a bad way—depression, I suppose, and non payment of rents.
1. Greek philosopher, statesman and poet known for his cosmological writings.
2. Latin poet and philosopher known for his single, long poem "De rerum Natura" [On the Nature of things] in which he tried to show that the course of the world can be explained without postulating divine intervention.
Page 126
I got your letter only at 10 o'clock and in any case your Questions cannot be lightly or too briefly answered. They are pot quite rightly put—the true question for us could not be to love or not love the Mother—that is already settled—but ,n what spirit to make the physical approach to her so as to avoid the mistakes of the past (the general mistake, not yours personally) and get the most spiritual benefit from her contact. However, there are various points of great importance behind your questions and I shall answer them; if I have not dealt with some of them before it is because I feared my answers would be gravely misunderstood by the [?] minds of the sadhaks.
December 15,1931
I return your MS. I have made some alterations here and there (very few, I believe) to make the thought more clear or to suppress too vivaciously uncomplimentary phrases about loving people, permissible in a private letter but not in a criticism made public.
In one or two places I have corrected at a guess what seem to be mistakes in the typewritten copy—I could not remember what I exactly wrote. In the letter dated 8.12.31 (last page) there are obviously some words omitted; I have put a query in the margin; here you will have to restore from the original letter.
One letter (copied in handwriting, not typed) dated 8.9.31 cannot be published, it is too personal and touches matters which are not for the general public.
December 16,1931
We don't object to the photograph being published, but—. The Poem is très joli (the English word "pretty" is a little
Page 127
deprecatory or at least too diminutive and does not express its quality); but is the photography worthy of it? It impresses me more like an illustration of a magazine article (in a popular magazine) or an institution prospectus. It is too glossy and ostentatious; but perhaps it will be turned down in the block of the Bharatavarsha press? If so, the objection may disappear.
December 20, 1931
Tagore is always Tagore (I hope you won't find this saying too cryptic). As for the pictures, if people are pleased with them, (as they are by Tagore's music), they serve the purpose of their existence, and what more can be said for any of the creations of this Prakriti ?
December 26, 1931
I should like—and the Mother asks me—just to express a word of appreciation of the music yesterday. Your song to Mahakali was superb—full of a fine variety and great power. The Mother came up enthusiastic and said it was filled with a most wonderful life, energy and movement; one could feel the universal forces pouring themselves through it. Truly, you have opened your wings and soared into a larger ether.
December 28, 1931
It is regrettable that this attack should recur. Perhaps it was a little my fault—you were or seemed to me [to be] going on so well that I was not on my guard against its possible recurrence. During the last two or three days the
Page 128
suggestion did come to me that there might be a turn of that kind, but I was so much in the joy of your music that I did not give it credence.
It is certainly not the answering of questions that will remove the underlying cause of the recurrence. Even if the answers satisfy, it could only be for a time. The same questionings would rise either in a mechanical reiteration—for it is not truly the reason from which they arise, it is a certain part of the vital consciousness affected by the surrounding atmosphere—or else presented from a shifted ground or a somewhat changed angle of vision. The difficulty can only disappear if you remain resolute that it shall disappear—if you refuse to attach any value to the justifications which the mind is made to put forward for your "sadness" under this atmospheric influence and, as you did in certain other matters, stick fast to the resolution to make the yogic change, to awake the psychic fully, not to follow the voices of the mind but to do rather what the Mother asks of you, persisting however difficult it may be or seem to be. It is so that the psychic can fully awaken and establish its influence, not on your higher vital where it is already awake and growing through your poetry and music and certain experiences so that whenever your higher vital is active you are in good condition, full of delight and creativeness and open to experience; but it is the influence on the lower vital, for it is there as I have already told you that your difficulties are and that this vital depression recurs.
For the rest, it is not a fact that the Mother is retiring more and more or that she has any intention of going inside entirely like me. Your remarks about the privileged few are incomprehensible to me; we are not confiding in a few at the expense of others or telling them what is happening while keeping silent to you. I have, I think, written more to you than to anybody else about these matters and the Mother has not been confiding to anybody anything in that field which has been held back from you. This—about the privileged few—is an old complaint of yours and it has no foundation.
Page 129
If anybody claims to have the special confidence of the Mother, he is making an egoistic claim which is not justifiable. Your real point seems to be about the Mother's not taking up the soup [distribution] and its accompaniments again. I have told you already why she was compelled by the experience of her illness to stand back from the old routine —which had become for most of the sadhaks a sort of semi-ecclesiastical routine and nothing more. It was because of the mistaken attitude of the sadhaks which had brought about an atmosphere full of movements contrary to the Yoga and likely to lead to disaster—as it had already begun to do. To resume the soup on the old footing would be to bring back the old conditions and end in a repetition of the same round of wrong movements and the same results. The Mother has been slowly and carefully taking steps to renew on another footing her control of things after her illness, but she can take no step which will allow the old dark movements to return—movements of some of which I think you yourself were beginning to take notice. The next step is for the sadhaks themselves to take; they must make it possible (by their change of attitude, by their resolution to rise on the lower vital and physical plane into the true consciousness) for a union with the Mother on that plane in the right way and with the right result to become possible. More I cannot say just now; but I fully intend to be more explicit hereafter— so far as I can without special reference to individuals; for there are things personal to people's Yoga that can often be spoken of only to themselves and not to others.
As for your other questions I shall consider them in another letter; it is too late tonight. It is already 3.30 p.m1 I will only say that what happens is for the "best" in this sense only that the end will be a divine victory in spite of all difficulties—that has been and always will be my seeing, my faith and my assurance—if you are willing to accept it from me. But that does not mean that your sadness and depression are necessary
1. Sri Aurobindo means "a.m."
Page 130
to the movement! The sooner they disappear never to recur again, the more joyously the Mother and I will advance on the steep road to the summits, and the easier it will be for you to realise what you want, the complete Bhakti and Ananda.
December 29, 1931
(from Mother)
Dilip,
Why do you speak of "the ultimate human disappearance of the Mother?" I have—I assure you—not the least intention of disappearing or vanishing, humanly or otherwise; and those who care to see me with their physical eyes can feel quite at ease on this point.
If you permit, I would advise you never to listen to what sadhaks say—especially advanced sadhaks ...
December 30, 1931
I have looked at your "questions" (not already answered directly), but I find that most of them are implicitly solved in my letter. The others (two only) are difficult to answer without going into the whole question of the Yoga and its condition and everything else and writing a chapter or perhaps a volume of the Arya. A shorter reply might lead to misunderstanding or perhaps merely non-understanding. I will consider however whether I can fit what I have to say into an expression which will be at once short and enlightening and not needing a commentary like the aphorisms of the Brahmasūtras.' 1
Brahma-sūtras, also known as Vedanta-sūtras, is one of three
Page 131
There is only one answer to Sachin's question—marriage and Yoga are two different movements going opposite ways; if he follows one, he will be moving away from the other. So if he marries, either of two things will happen—he will sink into the ordinary life and go far away from us in spirit or he will find married life unsatisfactory, renounce his wife and return to the path that leads towards the Divine. Marriage with the first result would be only a stupidity; marriage for the second result would be irrational inconsequence. So in either way—As for the withdrawal of Grace, it might be said that few are those from whom the grace withdraws ...
fundamental treatises of Vedantic thought, the other two being the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. Together they are known as Prasthāna Trayī
. The Brabma-sūtras are terse aphorisms composed by Veda Vyasa to expound the knowledge of Brahman.
The various schools of Vedanta—Advaita, Vishishta Advaita and Dvaita—are based on differing interpretations of the Prasthāna Trayī
as expounded by the Vedantic teachers Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva respectively.
Shankara was the first to comment upon the Brahma-sutras, his interpretation known as the Brahma-sūtra bhāsya is considered as a masterpiece in Vedantic literature.
Page 132
Home
Disciples
Dilip Kumar Roy
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.