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
The German translation of your poem is very well done. As for Frau Füllöp Miller1 whose judgement on men is as unanswerable as yours on European women. We will follow the profound Asquithian policy which is good throughout the ages: "Wait and see".
1932 ?
... PS. Did you read Cromnur Byng's compliments on my poems (I had sent him about a dozen of my latest) that he "greatly admired my beautiful poems ?" What would Thomson say to that? If even my beginner's poems are so appreciated (for I would not think he was insincere here—Englishmen are very chary of praise in such matters) how would he respond to the magnificent mature poems of Harin ? By the way please send us a version of your Thomsonian letter to Nirod so that we may ponder over and grow wiser at leisure. I really need some polite version thereof. Also did you note Saratchandra's high praise (on back of Dola) calling me a "great writer?" You are bound to note it—please.
I did not notice Saratchandra's praise—as I only looked at the first and second pages and not at the back. I shall see now. I read Cromnur Byng's letter in a hurry and did not quite seize about the beautiful poems. I should very much like to know which poems they were.
I have been too dreadfully busy to get together the new version of my random and violent remarks (it was not a letter but scattered comments) on the subject of English poetry by Indians. [?] wrote Thompson has pronounced I didn't know English. Perhaps Cromnur Byng doesn't know English
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1. Heddy Miller, Dilip's friend from Vienna, a famous opera-singer.
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either! That would explain everything.
Harin's metres
(1) "Drowse Deeps"
This metre could be taken as iambic with occasional [?] lines such as the first or trochaic with an occasional excess syllable at the beginning. But the first seems to me obviously the right thing, since several of the "iambic" lines are plainly iambic in movement and can hardly be "excess syllable" trochaic, e.g.
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"Reflexed" as a past participle = recurved has its stress on the last syllable but Harin must have used in the sense of "becoming a reflex", that is carrying in it the reflected image of my dreams. "Reflex" the noun (or adjective) is accented on the first syllable.
I am glad you are taking up writing again. I always think that it is a mistake at this stage to give up mental activity— that it should be done as the exercise of a god-given talent to be used for the true purpose is quite the right thing and my experience is that it can help rather than hinder the purification. Fame you already have and that need no longer attract or divert you.
The softness is the sign of the coming to front of the psychic being and it brings with it the plasticity of the mind and vital to a truer working.
1932?
( About a letter from the Carey-Perry School of the Chemistry of Life, Los Angeles)
I think this will amuse you; it is an unexpected comment on Krishnaprem's scepticism about science + Yoga—or should it be, science = Yoga. Here there is both the addition and the equation. "The great plan of salvation for man,—it is truly a physico-chemical process" seems hard to beat, but "The Second Period of the Divine Outpouring, symptoms due to Natrum Sulph1 need" does, I think, beat it. And there are many others.
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1. A homoeopathic medicine.
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I have read the book1 which I return. The part about the changed attitude of modern Science to its own field of discovery is interesting, and the other book in which, I suppose, he deals at more length with this subject, ought to be worth reading. The latter part of this book about religious experience I find very feeble; it gives me the impression of a hen scratching the surface of the earth to find a scrap or two of food—nothing deeper.
The translation is very successful.
I don't know whether "marmatale... parbata-guhāy" will convey the right meaning to the Bengali reader; but if it does, then it is certainly more poetic than the alternative.
(On Sri Aurobindo's translation of Dilip's poem, "Priestess of the Unseen Light" reproduced on the facing page.)
This is the best I could make of it; I think it ought to do. K. Sen's translation is far from bad, but it is not perfect either and uses too many oft-heard locutions without bringing in the touch of magic that would save them. Besides, his metre in spite of his trying to lighten it, is one of the common and obvious metres which are almost proof against subtlety of movement. It may be mathematically more equivalent to
1. Eddington's book. Science and the Unseen World.
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yours, but there is an underrunning lilt of celestial dance in your rhythm which he tries to get but, because of the limitations,. of the metre, cannot manage. I think my iambic-anapaestic choice is better fitted to catch the dance-lilt and keep it.
Your translation1 is admirable. I like it very much and fully appreciate the beauty of the phrase you have discovered to translate mine—they are much better and nearer to the power and spirit of the original than the mere literal variants you cite. Durlabha naksatra-dīksā is very good, but not so good as asānga ingit tara [?].
Nishikanto's poem in laghu-guru [Sanskrit metre of short and long syllables] is splendid. But perhaps Girija would say that it is a pure Bengali rhythm, which means I suppose that it reads as well and easily in Bengali as if it were not written on an unusual rhythmic principle. I suppose that must necessarily be the aim of a new metre or metrical principle; it is what I am trying to do with quantitative efforts in English.
I shall go through Prabodh Sen's letter, but it may take me some time. What is the exact scope of the discussion with Anilbaran,2 is it that he does not recognise the reality of the
1. Probably of Sri Aurobindo's poem "Trance" (see Collected Poems).
2. Anilbaran Roy (3 July 1890 - 3 November 1974), a professor of Philosophy. At the call of Deshbandhu C. R. Das he joined politics and became one of the leaders of the Freedom Struggle as waged by Mahatma Gandhi, and went to jail. Later on he gave up Gandhi's ideal and turned to Sri Aurobindo. He joined Sri Aurobindo on May 24 1926.
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mātrā vrtta1 as a separate principle of Bengali metre? That I suppose was the position before. Originally, indeed there was only one stream recognised,—that I remember very well for it was the time when I was learning and assiduously reading Bengali literature; at that time what you now call svara vrtta2 was regarded as mere popular verse or an old irregular verse form. Afterwards with the advent and development of Tagore's poetry, one began to hear of two recognised principles of Bengali metre, svara (I was going to say ksara) and aksara.3 Is it Anilbaran's contention that only these two are real and legitimate? Whatever it be Anilbaran is a born fighter and if you tell him that all the Mahârathis4 are against him and his smashing defeat a foregone conclusion, he will only gallop faster towards the battle. My own difficulty is that I have not yet grasped the principle of the mātrā vrtta—what is it that determines the long or the short mātrā in Bengali? Satyen Dutta's dealings with it I can follow (...)
I don't think I can suggest any corrections in Suhrawardy's letter, except perhaps that "awe-struck importance" ought strictly to be "awe-striking", since it is not the importance but the people who feel it who are awe-struck or want to be. The rest I find perfectly correct and well-written.
The "symbol" explanation is certainly one of the weakest of the many weak concessions that have been made to "Western rationalism" by Indian apologists who try to save their case by giving away nine-tenths of it. In a certain sense the
1. System of metrical measure depending on differentiating alphabetical letters into long and short.
2. System of versification measured by the number of letters in each foot.
3. System of versification in which the number of letters and not the sounds is taken into account.
4. Great fighters.
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gods are symbols, I suppose, but in that sense everything and everybody is a symbol, including the said surrenderful apologists themselves (...)
January 4,1932
I am not competent in respect to the technique of Bengali poetry. I can only follow my feeling, what I call the inner ear —so on this point I can say nothing beyond my own feeling. In your first poems written here I thought that your rhythmic movement departed sometimes from the norm—I suppose that is what they mean by chhanda bhanga [a break in the metre] ?—but on a second reading my impression was, more often than not, that there was a (rhythmic) justification for the departure. I do not know whether Buddhadev is referring to these poems or to others written before the opening of your poetic faculty here, which were poor both in expression and in rhythm. In any case, there can surely be no exception taken to your rhythm now; your mastery seems to me complete. I suppose in this province Tagore's verdict can be taken as final.
On the general question the truth seems to me to be very simple. It is quite true that fine or telling rhythms without substance (substance of idea, suggestion, feeling) are hardly poetry at all, even if they make good verse. But that is no ground for belittling beauty or excellence of form or ignoring its supreme importance for poetic perfection. Poetry is after all an art and a poet ought to be an artist of word and rhythm, even though necessarily, like other artists, he must also be something more than that, even much more. I hold therefore that harshness and roughness, karkaśatā, are not merits, but serious faults to be avoided by anyone who wants his work to be true poetry and survive. One can be strong and powerful, full of sincerity and substance without being harsh, rough or aggressive to the ear. On one side
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Swinburne's later poetry is a mere body of rhythmic sound without a soul, but what of Browning's constant deliberate harshness and roughness which deprives much of his work of the claim to be poetry—it is already much discredited and it is certain that posterity will carefully and with good reason forget to read it? Energy enough there is and abundance of matter and these carry the day for a time and give fame, but it is only perfection that endures. Or if the cruder work lasts, it is only by association with the perfection of the same poet's work at his best. I may say also that if mere rhythmic acrobacies of the kind to which you very rightly object condemn a poet's work to inferiority and a literature deviating on to that line to decadence, the drive towards a harsh strength and rough energy of form and substance may easily lead to another kind of undesirable acrobacy and an opposite road towards individual inferiority and general decadence. Why should not Bengali poetry go on to the straight way of its progress without running either upon the rocks of roughness or into the shallows of mere melodies ? Austerity of course is another matter—rhythm can be either austere to bareness or sweet and subtle, even luxurious— perfection can be attained in either of these extreme directions if the mastery is there.
As for rules—rules are necessary but they are not absolute; one of the chief tendencies of genius is to break old rules and make departures which create new ones. English poetry of today luxuriates in movements which to the mind of yesterday would have been anarchic license, chhanda bhanga, yet it is evident that has led to discoveries of new rhythmic beauty with a very real charm and power and opened out possible lines of growth,—however unfortunate many of its results may be. Not the formal mind, but the ear must be the judge.
I do not think the appreciation of poetry like yours is dependent on a new technique; it is as you say, something in the composition of the nature which responds or does not respond to the new note that determines the rejection or the
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acceptance. At the same time the development of this new note—the impression of a deeper yogic or mystic experience in poetry—may very well demand for its fullness new departures in technique, a new turn or turns of rhythm, but subtle in their difference rather than aggressive.
January 12,1932
Your poem is very melodious and beautiful. I will explain it to the Mother this morning. It does not quite coincide with the scheme of the dance suggested by the Mother, as I heard it from her; but I have yet to ask her.
I did not receive the poem of Buddhadev you mention, but you sent me some before in which certainly there was no harshness. I was answering to what his karkaśatā might mean; to austerity (in its place, not as a general rule) I have no objection.
My letter to you is finished in a way, but still to be revised and copied.
January 12, 1932
It is indeed a very fine stanza in which you have embodied what the Mother wrote.1 I will ask her about the translation in French.
There is just one point left. The greater part of your song— which, I prefer to say, the Mother finds very good,—expresses the seeking, but there were in the Mother's scheme certain things that had to happen after that finding. (1) the immobility of wonder and ecstasy at the first revelation, (2) the first adoration (prostration), (3) the offering—of flowers,
1. Probably a letter about a "Radha-dance" which Sahana was preparing and which Dilip was to accompany. Mother encouraged and helped Sahana.
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jewels, (4) the chant or expression of adoration, (5) the realisation that enough has not been done and the entire selfgiving. To put all that verbally into the song would make it too long; but can the music be so arranged that Sahana can go through the indication of these movements leading up to the close in that magnificent last stanza?
January 1932
("Radha's Prayer," composed by Mother for Sahana.)
La prière de Radha à Krishna
"Ô toi quej'ai, à première vue, reconnu comme Ie Seigneur de mon être, comme mon Dieu, accepte mon offrande!
"À Toi toutes mes pensées, toutes mes émotions, tous les sentiments de mon cœur, toutes les sensations, tous les mouvements de ma vie, chaque cellule de mon corps, chaque goutte de mon sang. Je suis tienne, absolument, intégralement tienne, tienne sans réserve. Ce que tu voudras de moi, je Ie serai. Que tu décides ma vie ou ma mort, mon bonheur ou ma peine, mon plaisir ou ma souffrance, tout ce qui me viendra de toi sera Ie bienvenu. Chacun de tes dons sera toujours pour moi un don divin apportant avec lui la Félicité Suprême."1
1. Translation (the second paragraph is in Mother's translation):
Radha's Prayer
"0 You, whom at first sight I recognized as the Master of my being, as my God, accept my offering!
"Every thought of my mind, each emotion of my heart, every movement of my being, every feeling and every sensation, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood, all, all is Yours, Yours absolutely, Yours Without reserve, You can decide my life or my death, my happiness or my sorrow, my pleasure or my pain; whatever You do with me, whatever comes to me from You will lead me to Divine Rapture."
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January 14, 1932
I send you the promised letter today;1 you will see that it is less a reply to the exact terms of your letter than a "defence
of the gospel of divinisation of life" against the strictures and the in comprehensions of the mentality (or more often the vitality) that either misunderstands or shrinks from it—or perhaps misunderstands because it shrinks, and shrinks too because it misunderstands both my method and my object. It is not a complete defence, but only raises or answers a main point here and there. The rest will come hereafter.
But all language is open to misunderstanding; so I had better in sending on the letter make or try to make certain things clear.
1. Although I have laid stress on things divine in answer to an excessive (because contrary) insistence on things human, it must not be understood that I reject everything human,— human love or worship or any helpful form of human approach as part of the Yoga. I have never done so, otherwise the Ashram could not be in existence. The sadhaks who enter the Yoga are human beings and if they were not allowed a human approach at the beginning and long after, they would not be able to start the Yoga or would not be able to continue it. The discussion arises only because the word "human" is used in practice, not only as identical with the human vital (and the outward mind), but with certain forms of the human vital ego-nature. But the human vital has many other things in it and is full of excellent material. All that is asked by the Yoga is that this material should be utilised in the right way and with the right spiritual attitude and also, that the human approach to the Divine should not be constantly turned into a human revolt and reproach against it. And that too we ask only for the sake of the success of the approach itself and of the human being who is making it.
1. This is the next letter of 14 January.
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2. Divinisation itself does not mean the destruction of the human elements; it means taking them up, showing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purification and perfection to their full power and Ananda. And that means the raising of the whole of earthly life to its full power and Ananda.
3. If there were not a resistance in vital human nature, a pressure of forces adverse to the change, forces which delight in imperfection and even in perversion, this change would effect itself without difficulty by a natural and painless flowering—as, for example, your own powers of poetry and music have flowered out here with rapidity and ease under the light and rain of a spiritual and psychic influence—because everything in you desired that change and your vital was willing to recognise imperfections, to throw away any wrong attitude—e.g., the desire for mere fame, and to be dedicated and perfect. Divinisation of life means, in fact, a greater art of life; for the present art of life produced by ego and ignorance is something comparatively mean, crude and imperfect (like the lower forms of art, music and literature which are yet more attractive to the ordinary human mind and vital), and it is by a spiritual and psychic opening and refinement that it has to reach its true perfection. This can only be done by its being steeped in the divine Light and Flame in which its material will be stripped of all heavy dross and turned into the true metal.
4. Unfortunately, there is the resistance, a very obscure and obstinate resistance. That necessitates a negative element in the Yoga, an element of rejection of things that stand in the way and of pressure upon those forms that are crude and useless to disappear, on those that are useful but imperfect or have been perverted to retain or to recover their true Movement. To the vital this pressure is very painful, first, because it is obscure and does not understand and, secondly, because there are parts of it that want to be left to their crude motions and not to change. That is why the intervention of a psychic attitude is so helpful. For the psychic has
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the happy confidence, the ready understanding and response the spontaneous surrender; it knows that the touch of the Guru is meant to help and not to hurt, or, like Radha in the poem, that whatever the Beloved does is meant to lead to the Divine Rapture.
5. At the same time, it is not from the negative part of the movement that you have to judge the Yoga, but from its positive side; for the negative part is temporary and transitional and will disappear, the positive alone counts for the ideal and for the future. If you take conditions which belong to the negative side and to a transitional movement (like the drawing back of the Mother), as the law of the future and the indication of the character of the Yoga, you will commit a serious misjudgement, a grave mistake. This Yoga is not a rejection of life or of closeness and intimacy between the Divine and the sadhaks. Its ideal aims at the greatest closeness and unity on the physical as well as the other planes, at the most divine largeness and fullness and joy of life.
I shall perhaps—I am not quite sure yet of the time—be able to put at your disposal before very long something in writing which will indicate, not in the very inadequate form of intellectual explanation, but in a way more vivid and convincing especially for a poet and artist, what is really the positive aim and experience of a changed being under the Divine touch in this Yoga.1
Even if things were as bad as you say, I don't see how going away would help you in the least—(it would certainly not make you non-human); some have tried before this device of progress by departure and it has never succeeded, they have had to come back and face their difficulty. Your
1. Sri Aurobindo is perhaps alluding here to Savitri.
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other suggestion is even more irrational—what you propose would not happen and the only result would be hard labour or detention which would be both unpleasant and unprofitable to you and useless to the country. Why do you always come back to this notion of going away or entertain it at all? It is quite meaningless from any rational point of view; it only encourages the adverse Force which wants to take you away from the path to return to the attack, and it prevents the speedy conversion of that dissatisfied part of your vital which is kicking against the pricks—the pricks of your soul and of your spiritual destiny. However sad the prospect may seem to this dissatisfied vital fragment, your destiny is to be a Yogi and the sooner it reconciles itself to the prospect the better for it and for all the other personalities in you. Your alleged or inferred unfitness is a delusion, an imagination of this vital part; it doesn't exist. If persistence of difficulties is a proof of unfitness, then there is nobody in this Ashram who is fit for the Yoga. We would all have to pack to the ordinary world or en route for the Himalayas.
You describe the rich human egoistic life you might have lived and you say "not altogether a wretched life, you will admit." On paper it sounds even very glowing and satisfactory, as you describe it. But there is no real or final satisfaction in it, except for those who are too common or trivial to seek anything else, and even they are not really satisfied or happy,—and in the end, it tires and palls. Sorrow and illness, clash and strife, disappointment, disillusionment and all kinds of human suffering come and beat its glow to pieces— and then decay and death. That is the vital egoistic life as man has found it throughout the ages, and yet it is that which this part of your vital regrets? How do you fail to see, when you lay so much stress on the desirability of a merely human consciousness, that suffering is its badge? When the vital resists the change from the human into the divine consciousness, what it is defending is its right to sorrow and Offering and all the rest of it, varied and relieved no doubt by some vital or mental pleasures and satisfactions, but very
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partially relieved by them and only for a time. In your own, case, it was already beginning to pall on you and that was why you turned from it. No doubt, there were the joys of the intellect and of artistic creation, but a man cannot be an artist alone; there is the outer, quite human lower vital part and, in all but a few, it is the most clamorous and insistent part. But what was dissatisfied in you? It was the soul within, first of all, and through it the higher mind and the higher vital. Why then find fault with the Divine for misleading you when it turned to the Yoga or brought you here? It was simply answering to the demand of your own inner being and the higher parts of your nature. If you have so much difficulty and become restless, it is because you are still divided and something in your lower vital still regrets what it has lost or, as a price for its adhesion or a compensation—a price to be immediately paid down to it—asks for something similar and equivalent in the spiritual life. It refuses to believe that there is a greater compensation, a larger vital life waiting for it, something positive in which there shall not be the old inadequacy and unrest and final dissatisfaction. The foolishness is not in the Divine guidance, but in the irrational and obstinate resistance of this confused and obscure part of you to the demand, made not only by this Yoga, but by all Yoga—to the necessary conditions for the satisfaction of the aspiration of your own soul and higher nature.
The "human" vital consciousness has moved always between these two poles, the ordinary vital life which cannot satisfy and the recoil from it to the ascetic solution. India has gone fully through that seesaw, Europe is beginning once more after a full trial to feel the failure of the mere vital egoistic life. The traditional Yogas—to which you appeal—are founded upon the movement between these two poles. On one side are Shankara and Buddha and most go, if not by the same road, yet in that direction; on the other are Vaishnava or Tantric lines which try to combine asceticism with some sublimation of the vital impulse. And where did these lines
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end? They fell back to the other pole, to a vital invasion, even corruption and a loss of their spirit. At the present day the general movement is towards an attempt at reconciliation, and you have alluded sometimes to some of the protagonists of this attempt and asked me my opinion about them, yours being unfavourable. But these men are not mere charlatans, and if there is anything wrong with them (on which I do not pronounce), it can only be because they are unable to resist the magnetic pull of this lower pole of the egoistic vital desire-nature. And if they are unable to resist, it is because they have not found the true force which will not only neutralise that pull and prevent deterioration and downward lapse, but transform and utilise and satisfy in their own deeper truth, instead of destroying or throwing away, the life-force and the embodiment in matter; for that can only be done by the supermind power and by no other.
You appeal to the Vaishnava-Tantric traditions, to Chaitanya, Ramprasad, Ramakrishna. I know something about them and, if I did not try to repeat them, it is because I do not find in them the solution, the reconciliation I am seeking. Your quotation from Ramprasad1 does not assist me in the least—and it does not support your thesis either. Ramprasad is not speaking of an embodied, but of a bodiless and invisible Divine—or visible only in a subtle form to the inner experience. When he speaks of maintaining his claim or case against the Mother until she lifts him into her lap, he is not speaking of any outer vital or physical contact, but of an inner psychic experience; precisely; he is protesting against her keeping him in the external vital and physical nature and insists on her taking him on the psycho-spiritual plane into spiritual union with her. All that is very good and very beautiful, but it is not enough: the union has indeed to be realised in the inner psycho-spiritual experience first,
l. " Māye poye mokaddamā dhum habe Rāmprasād bale, āmi khānto habo Jskhan āmāy shanto kore labe kole" ["There will be a sensational legal battle between the Mother and the son, says Ramprasad, I shall relent only when you take me on your lap."]
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because without that nothing sound or lasting can be done but also there must be a realisation of the Divine in the outer consciousness and life, in the vital and physical planes on their own essential lines. It is that which, without your mind understanding it or how it is to be done, you are asking for and I too; only I see the necessity of a vital transformation while you seem to think and to demand that it should be done without any radical transformation, leaving the vital as it is. In the beginning, before I discovered the secret of the supermind, I myself tried to seek the reconciliation through an association of the spiritual consciousness with the vital, but my experience and all experience show that this leads to nothing definite and final,—it ends where it began, midway between the two poles of human nature. An association is not enough, a transformation is indispensable.
The tradition of later Vaishnava bhakti is an attempt to sublimate the vital impulses through love by turning human love towards the Divine. It made a strong and intense effort and had many rich and beautiful experiences; but its weakness was just there, that it remained valid only as an inner experience turned towards the inner Divine, but it stopped at that point. Chaitanya's prema was nothing but a psychic divine love with a strong sublimated vital manifestation. But the moment Vaishnavism before or after him made an attempt at greater externalisation, we know what happened—a vitalistic deterioration, much corruption and decline. You cannot appeal to Chaitanya's example as against psychic or divine love; his was not something merely vital-human; in its essence, though not in its form, it was very much the first step in the transformation, which we ask of the sadhaks, to make their love psychic and use the vital not for its own sake, but as an expression of the soul's realisation. It is the first step and perhaps for some it may be sufficient, for we are not asking everybody to become supramental; but for any full manifestation on the physical plane the supramental is indispensable.
In the later Vaishnava tradition the sadhana takes the form
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of an application of human vital love in all its principal turns to the Divine; viraha [separation], abhimāna [hurt love], even complete separation (like the departure of Krishna to Mathura) are made prominent elements of this Yoga. But all that was only meant—in the sadhana itself, not in the Vaishnava poems—as a passage of which the end is milana or complete union; but the stress laid on the untoward elements by some would almost seem to make strife, separation, abhimāna, the whole means, if not the very object of this kind of premayoga. Again, this method was only applied to the inner, not to a physically embodied Divine and had a reference to certain states and reactions of the inner consciousness in its seeking after the Divine. In the relations with the embodied Divine Manifestation, or, I may add, of the disciple with the Guru, such things might rise as a result of human imperfection, but they were not made part of the theory of the relations. I do not think they formed a regular and authorised part of the relations of the bhaktas to Chaitanya or of the disciples at Dakshineswar towards Ramakrishna. On the contrary, the relation of the disciple to the Guru in the Guruvāda is supposed always to be that of worship, respect, a complete happy confidence, an unquestioning acceptance of the guidance.1 [It is only in this Ashram that another theory has sometimes been advanced and reached its height as a result of the misapplication or wrong extension of the relation with the human Mother, (which in itself, rightly understood, was not to be discouraged as a phase), and also of certain other misunderstood notions, not only abhimāna, but egoistic unspiritual demand, hostile criticism, revolt, anger and other still more undesirable vital reactions (usually supposed to be foreign to the spiritual consciousness) have been put forward by some, admitted by many in practice, as a part of the Yoga! I do not see how such a method can lead to any good results in the spiritual life. But of this
1. The following passage within brackets has been omitted from the version published in the Centenary Edition (1972).
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hereafter. All I want to say for the moment is that the application of] the unchanged vital relations to the embodied Divine may lead and has led to movements which are not conducive to the progress of the Yoga.
Ramakrishna's Yoga was also turned only to an inner realisation of the inner Divine,—nothing less, but also nothing more. I believe his sentence1 about the claim of the sadhak on the Divine for whom he has sacrificed everything was the assertion of an inner and not an outer claim, on the inner rather than on any physically embodied Divine: it was a claim for the full spiritual union, the God-lover seeking the Divine, but the Divine also giving himself and meeting the God-lover. There can be no objection to that; such a claim all seekers of the Divine have; but as to the modalities of this divine meeting, it does not carry us much farther. In any case, my object is a realisation on the physical plane and I cannot consent merely to repeat Ramakrishna. I seem to remember too that for a long time he was withdrawn into himself, all his life was not spent with his disciples! He got his siddhi first in retirement and when he came out and received everyone—well, a few years of it wore out his body. To that, I suppose, he had no objection; for he even pronounced a theory, when Keshav Chandra was dying, that spiritual experience ought to wear out the body! But all the same, when asked why he got his illness in the throat, he answered that it was the sins of his disciples which they threw upon him and he had to swallow! Not being satisfied, as he was, with an inner liberation alone, I cannot accept these ideas or these results; for that does not sound to me like a successful meeting of the Divine and the sadhak on the physical plane, however successful it might have been for
1. Ramakrishna's sentence: " Bhagabāner opor jor chale jadi tār janye sangsār-tyag karā jāy. Je meye tār pranayeer janye ghar tyāg korlo se, bolbe nā ô tui khete dibi ne? Ami tor buker opor boshe khābo"[You can dernand from the Divine only when you can leave everything for Him. The woman who has left her home for her lover has the right to say, "Won't you provide for me? I shall make you provide for me"?]
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the inner life. Krishna did great things and was very clearly a manifestation of the Divine. But I remember a passage of the Mahabharata in which he complains of the unquiet life his followers and adorers gave him, their constant demands, reproaches, their throwing of their unregenerate vital nature upon him. And in the Gita he speaks of this human world as a transient and sorrowful affair and, in spite of his gospel of divine action, seems almost to admit that to leave it is after all the best solution! The traditions of the past are very great in their own place,—in the past; but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future.
There is the rub that you seem all to ignore entirely the difficulties of the physical embodiment and the divine realisation on the physical plane. For most, it seems to be a simple alternative; either the Divine comes down in full power and the thing is done, no difficulty, no necessary conditions, no law or process, only miracle and magic,—or else, well, this cannot be the Divine! Again you all (or almost all) insist on the Divine becoming human, remaining in the human consciousness and you protest against any attempt to make the human Divine; on the other hand, there is an outcry of disappointment, bewilderment, distrust, perhaps indignation, if there are human difficulties, if there is strain in the body, a swaying struggle with adverse forces, obstacles, checks, illness—and some begin to say, "Oh, there is nothing Divine here!" As if one could remain vitally and physically ln the untransformed individual human consciousness, in unchanged contact with it, satisfy its demands, and yet be immune under all circumstances and in all conditions against strain and struggle and illness. If I want to divinise the human consciousness, to bring down the supramental, the Truth-Consciousness, the Light, the Force into the physical to transform it, to create there a great fullness of Truth and Light and Power and Bliss and Love, the response is repulsion or fear or unwillingness—or a doubt whether it is
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possible. On one side there is the claim that illness and the rest should be impossible, on the other a violent rejection of the only condition under which these things can become impossible. I know that this is the natural inconsistency of the human vital mind wanting two inconsistent and incompatible things together; but that is one reason why it is necessary to transform the human and put something a little more luminous in its place.
But is the Divine then something so terrible, horrible or repellent that the idea of its entry into the physical, its divinising of the human should create this shrinking, refusal, revolt or fear? I can understand that the unregenerate vital attached to its own petty sufferings and pleasures, to the brief ignorant drama of life, should shrink from what will change it. But why should a God-lover, a God-seeker, a sadhak fear the divinisation of the consciousness? Why should he object to become one in nature with what he seeks, why should he recoil from saddrśya-mukti [liberation by likeness to the Divine]? Behind this fear there are usually two causes: first, there is the feeling of the vital that it will have to cease to be obscure, crude, muddy, egoistic, unrefined (spiritually), full of stimulating desires and small pleasures and interesting sufferings (for it shrinks even from the Ananda which will replace them); next there is some vague ignorant idea of the mind, due, I suppose, to the ascetic tradition, that the divine nature is something cold, bare, empty, austere, aloof, without the glorious riches of the egoistic human vital life. As if there were not a divine vital and as if that divine vital is not itself and, when it gets the means to manifest, will not make the life on earth also infinitely more full of beauty, love, radiance, warmth, fire, intensity and divine passion and capacity for bliss than the present impotent, suffering, pettily and transiently excited and soon tired vitality of the still so imperfect human creation!
But you will say that it is not the Divine from which you recoil, rather you accept and ask for it (provided that it is not too divine), but what you object to is the supramental–
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grand, aloof, incomprehensible, unapproachable, a sort of austere Nirākāra [formless] Brahman. The supramental so described is a bogey created by this part of your vital mind in order to frighten itself and justify its attitude. Behind this strange description there seems to be an idea that the supramental is a new version of the Vedantic featureless and incommunicable Parabrahman [supreme Brahman], vast, grand, cold, empty, remote, devastating, overwhelming; it is not quite that, of course, since it can come down, but for all practical purposes it is just as bad! It is curious that you admit your ignorance of what the supramental can be, and yet you in these moods not only pronounce categorically what it is like, but reject emphatically my experience about it as of no practical validity or not valid for anybody but myself! I have not insisted, I have answered only casually because I am not asking you now to be non-human and divine, much less to be supramental; but as you are always returning to this point when you have these attacks and making it the pivot—or at least a main support—of your depression, I am obliged to answer. The supramental is not grand, aloof, cold and austere; it is not something opposed to or inconsistent with a full vital and physical manifestation; on the contrary, it carries in it the only possibility of the full fullness of the vital force and the physical life on earth. It is because it is so, because it was so revealed to me and for no other reason that I have followed after it and persevered till I came into contact with it and was able to draw down some power of it and its influence. I am concerned with the earth and not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other Yogas regard this life as an Elusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive Manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object. The supramental is simply the Truth-consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter. One
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has indeed to rise to high summits to reach it, but the more one rises, the more one can bring down below. No doubt, life and body have not to remain the ignorant, imperfect, impotent things they are now; but why should a change to fuller life-power, fuller body-power be considered some thing aloof, cold and undesirable? The utmost Ananda the body and life are now capable of is a brief excitement of the vital mind or the nerves or the cells which is limited, imperfect and soon passes: with the supramental change all the cells, nerves, vital forces, embodied mental forces can become filled with a thousandfold Ananda, capable of an intensity of bliss which passes description and which need not fade away. How aloof, repellent and undesirable! The supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the presence of the Beloved in every part, in every cell of the body. Is that too something aloof and grand, but undesirable? With the supramental change, the very thing on which you insist, the possibility of the free physical meeting of the embodied Divine with the sadhak without conflict of forces and without undesirable reactions becomes possible, assured and free. That too is, I suppose, something aloof and undesirable? I could go on—for pages, but this is enough for the moment.
You will say, "But at present the Mother has drawn back and it is the Supramental that is to blame, because it is in order to bring down the Supramental into Matter that she retires." The Supramental is not to blame; the Supramental could very well have come down into Matter under former conditions, if the means created by the Mother for the physical and vital contact had not been vitiated by the wrong attitude, the wrong reactions in the Ashram atmosphere. It was not the direct supramental Force that was acting, but an intermediate and preparatory force that carried in it a modified Light derived from the Supramental; but this would have been sufficient for the work of opening the way
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for the highest action, if it had not been for the irruption of these wrong forces on the yet unconquered lower (physical) vital and material plane. The interference was creating averse possibilities which could not be allowed to continue. TheMother would not have retired otherwise; and even as it is, it is not meant as an abandonment of the field but is only (to borrow a now current phrase from a more external enterprise) a temporary strategic retirement, reculer pour mieux sauter.1 The Supramental is therefore not responsible; on the contrary, it is the descent of the Supramental that would end all the difficulties.
I have written interminably at a terrific speed and yet I have not finished. There is still something to be said about the Guruvāda (of which I wholly approve), the Yoga by quarrelling with the Divine—about which I make express reserves, your old question about the illness of the Mother (which involves the nature and modalities of the divine manifestation on the physical plane). So this letter must not be regarded as finished, but
To be continued
January 14,1932
I am not posted in musical technique, but I imagine I understand; in any case the Mother does and she finds the solution all right. But she does not take to the idea of an outside flutist.
No, you are not dwarfs or you would not be here; but you have all still to grow before you reach your full spiritual stature.
I shall have to take a little rest before going on with the "to be continued"; rest, of course, means doing other things that are pressing to be done! As for the other affair, you must not expect it all at once as there is something still to be
1. In French: "to step back the better to leap forward."
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done to make it presentable and it depends on my finding the time. But anyhow time will be made for both.
January 31,1932
I suppose the footnote can be there.
There can be no objection to the inclusion of your poems in the Patna anthology of Bengali poets—or even to your being tortured in Hindi prose, if you do not find it objectionable. Who knows, the supramental might even work a premature miracle and your poetry transform the Hindi prose instead of the Hindi prose deforming your poetry!
The photographs you sent at first were rather bewildering, not to say startling. The earlier one of Mrs. Fülöp Miller seemed to indicate an almost alarming vital nature, the second was vital controlled and toned down but not reassuring. I was relieved to get your note saying that they were bad photographs and along with it the real photo of her which shows her as very near to what I saw of her through your letters. What has happened to Rene Fülöp Miller is more deplorable than surprising. People are living now so much in the vital when they do not live in the intellect, and so unguardedly and without restraint, the old mental conventions and restraints being in a state of deliquescence that catastrophes of this kind are likely to be common. The disappearance of conventions and the urge to a larger life are in themselves good things, but on condition that a greater control and a truer harmony are discovered. At present people are going about it in the wrong way—hence the perilous condition of Europe and of the world. Nor are these convulsed and insecure conditions a very favourable environment for the development of a spiritual life either. But it seems that it is in the midst of difficulties that it is destined to come.
You speak of "the photograph" which you ask the Mother
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to sign. Does that mean you are sending a photo for her to sign or shall we send you one?
January 1932 ?
The poem is very good,—harmonious and delicate. I just glanced at one or two of Buddhadev's poems— excellent in form, but rather trifling in substance. I prefer his deeper note.
The meditation experience seems to be developing in the right direction. Before it was only an opening; but to get something settled, there must be this assimilation and the growth in stability in peace. Peace is the basis of the spiritual change,—all the rest falls into the peace and is sustained on it as on a sure foundation.
February 1932
I do not think Suhrawardy's poem can bear correction— any alteration (from another) would probably spoil it. There might be an objection to the repetition "night" "night" in the second verse, but I do not see how to alter the first line of it without diminishing the force, and perhaps after all the objection would be hypercritical in a poem of this intense and simple character. Your translation is admirable.
The door is coming off because the sill has been removed, for it was only the sill that upheld it.1 Chandulal's dealings with the door qua door were scientifically impeccable—the only thing he forgot was that one of the uses of a door is that people (of various sizes) should pass through it. If you regard
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1. Dilip had banged his head against the upper sill of the door of his room.
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the door from the Russellian point of view as an external thing in which you must take pleasure for its own sake, then you will see that it was quite all right; it is only when you bring in irrelevant subjective considerations like people's demands on a door and the pain of stunned heads that objections can be made. However, in spite of philosophy, the Mother will speak to Chandulal in the morning and get him to do what has (practically, not philosophically) to be done.
February 1, 1932
I don't care for the idea of sending one of Purani's1 records2 to Hungary. Besides, those records belong to ancient history. In the modern world it is only the up to date that is true.
I have read the letter with interest. What a world! Disorder,
1. Ambalal Balkrishna Purani was born (26 May 1894) in Surat, Gujarat. Revolution and Yoga were in his nature. His elder brother C. B. Purani became a revolutionary in 1907 under Barindra Kumar Ghose. With his brother, our Purani formed a secret revolutionary cell in Gujarat. He had seen Sri Aurobindo and heard his two lectures in Baroda in 1908. From then on he considered himself a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. When the Arya began publication in 1914, with Sri Aurobindo's permission, Puraniji began translating into Gujarati some of its articles.
The British occupation of India was giving him sleepless nights, so in 1918 he finally went to Pondicherry. There Sri Aurobindo assured him that revolutionary activities were not necessary as the British would leave India on their own. That night, after two years, Puraniji slept
He settled in Pondicherry in 1923. From then on he took notes of Sri Aurobindo's informal talks with his disciples: Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo is a priceless document.
A dynamic personality, after 1950 he did a lot of research on Sri Aurobindo's life, and procured many documents. Sri Aurobindo in England, Sri Aurobindo in Baroda, The Life of Sri Aurobindo are proofs of his hard labour.
He was unsparing of his energies, and his tours to the U.K., U S. A., Africa, etc. took toll of his body. His heart failed him on 11 December 1965.
2. Probably one of the Evening Talks, first published between 1959 and 1966.
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thy name is modern life! It reads like a Russian dance of lêtre nerveux [the nervous being].
P. S. We send you the photograph signed.
February 3, 1932
I would have been surprised to hear that I regard (in agreement with an "advanced" Sadhak) Ramakrishna as a spiritual pigmy if I had not become past astonishment in these matters. I have said, it seems, so many things that were never in my mind and done too not a few that I have never dreamed of doing! I shall not be surprised or perturbed if one day I am reported to have declared, on the authority of "advanced" or even unadvanced Sadhaks, that Buddha was a poseur or that Shakespeare an overrated poetaster or Newton a third-rate college Don without any genius. In this world all is possible. Is it necessary for me to say that I have never thought and cannot have said anything of the kind, since I have at least some faint sense of spiritual values? The passage you have quoted1 is my considered estimate of Ramakrishna.
It is also a misunderstanding to suppose that I am against Bhakti or against emotional Bhakti—which comes to the same thing, since without emotion there can be no Bhakti. It is rather the fact that in my writing on Yoga I have given Bhakti the highest place. All that I have said at any time which could account for this misunderstanding was against an unpurified emotionalism which, according to my experience,
1- This probably refers to the following passage from The Synthesis of Yoga: "... In the life of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, we see a colossal spiritual capacity first driving straight to the divine realisation, taking, as it were, the kingdom of heaven by violence, and then seizing upon one Yogic method after another and extracting the substance out of rt with an incredible rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the realisation and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn spirituality into various experience and by the spontaneous play of an intuitive knowledge."
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leads to want of balance, agitated and disharmonious expresion or even contrary reaction and, at its extreme, nervou disorder. But the insistence of purification does not mean that I condemn true feeling and emotion any more than the insistence on a purified mind or will means that I condemn thought and will. On the contrary, the deeper the emotion, the more intense the Bhakti, the greater is the force for realisation and transformation. It is oftenest through intensity of emotion that the psychic being wakes and there is an opening of the inner doors in the Divine.
It is very insincere for anyone to claim prematurely to have possession of the supermind or even a taste of it. Such claim is usually accompanied by an outburst of superegoism, some blunder of perception or wrong condition or wrong movement. A certain spiritual humility, a serious un-arrogant look at oneself and quiet perception of the imperfection of one's present nature, and instead of selfesteem and self-assertion a sense of the necessity of exceeding one's present self, not from egoistic ambition, but from an urge towards the Divine, would be, it seems to me, for this finite [?] terrestrial and human composition better conditions for proceeding towards its supramental change.
Yes, you should learn not to be perturbed by talk of this kind from whomsoever it proceeds; I think I have already tried to put you on your guard against listening to "advanced sadhaks" or taking these pronouncements of theirs as authoritative statements of the aims and conditions of the Yoga. Why this claim to be an advanced sadhak and what is the sense of it? It resolves itself into an egoistic assertion of superiority over others which is not justified so long as there is the egoism and the need of assertion accompanied, as it always is, by a weakness and turbid imperfection which belie the claim of living in a superior consciousness to the "unadvanced" sadhaks. It is time these crudities disappeared from the Ashram atmosphere.
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I do not think Harris' attack on Shaw as you describe it can be taken very seriously any more than can Wells' jest about his pronunciation of English being the sole astonishing thing about him. Wells, Chesterton, Shaw and others joust at each other like the kabiwalas1 of old Calcutta, though with more refined weapons, and you cannot take their humorous sparrings as considered appreciations; if you do, you turn exquisite jests into solemn nonsense. Mark that their method in these sparrings, the turn of phrase, the style of their wit is borrowed from Shaw himself with personal modifications; for this kind of humour, light as air and sharp as a razor-blade, epigrammatic, paradoxical, often flavoured with burlesque seriousness and urbane hyperbole, good-humoured and cutting at once, is not English in origin; it was brought in by two Irishmen, Shaw and Wilde. Harris' stroke about the Rodin bust and Wells' sally are entirely in the Shavian turn and manner, they are showing their cleverness by spiking their Guru in swordsmanship with his own rapier. Harris' attack on Shaw's literary reputation may have been serious, there was a sombre and violent brutality about him which makes it possible; but his main motive was to prolong his own notoriety by a clever and vigorous assault on the mammoth of the hour. Shaw himself supplied materials for his critic, knowing well what he would write, and edited this damaging assault on his own fame, a typical Irish act at once of chivalry, shrewd calculation of effect and whimsical humour. I should not think Harris had much understanding of Shaw the man as apart from the writer; the Anglo-Saxon is not usually capable of understanding either Irish character or Irish humour, it is so different from his own. And Shaw is Irish through and through; there is
1. Kabiwalas: Bengali debaters who used to compete with each other trough poems; their debates were eagerly followed by the common people.
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nothing English about him except the language he writes and even that he has changed into the Irish ease, flow, edge and clarity—though not bringing into it, as Wilde did, Irish poetry and colour.
Shaw's seriousness and his humour, real seriousness and mock seriousness, run into each other in a baffling inextricable mélange, thoroughly Irish in its character,—for it is the native Irish turn to speak lightly when in deadly earnest and to utter the most extravagant jests with a profound air of seriousness,—and it so puzzled the British public that they could not for a long time make up their mind how to take him. At first they took him for a jester dancing with cap and bells, then for a new kind of mocking Hebrew Prophet or Puritan reformer! Needless to say, both judgments were entirely out of focus. The Irishman is, on one side of him, the vital side, a passionné, imaginative and romantic, intensely emotional, violently impulsive, easily inspired to poetry or rhetoric, moved by indignation and suffering to a mixture of aggressive militancy, wistful dreaming and sardonic extravagant humour; on the other side, he is keen in intellect, positive, downright, hating all loose foggy sentimentalism and solemn pretence and prone, in order to avoid the appearance of them in himself, to cover himself with a jest at every step; it is at once his mask and his defence. At bottom he has the possibility in him of a modern Curtius leaping into the yawning pit for a cause, a Utopist or a Don Quixote,— according to occasions a fighter for dreams, an idealistic pugilist, a knight-errant, a pugnacious rebel or a reckless but often shrewd and successful adventurer. Shaw has all that in him, but with it a cool intellectual clearness, also Irish, but not often put to such use, which dominates it all and tones it down, subdues it into measure and balance, gives an even harmonising colour. There is as a result a brilliant tempered edge of flame, lambent, lighting up what it attacks and destroys, and destroying it by the light it throws upon it, not fiercely but trenchantly—though with a trenchant playfulness—aggressive and corrosive. An ostentation of
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humour and parade covers up the attack and puts the opponent off his defence. That is why the English mind never understood Shaw and yet allowed itself to be captured by him, and its old established ideas, "moral" positions, impenetrable armour of commercialised Puritanism and self-righteous Victorian assurance to be ravaged and burned out of existence by Shaw and his allies. Anyone who knew Victorian England and sees the difference now cannot but be struck by it, and Shaw's part in it, at least in preparing and making it possible, is undeniable. That is why I call him devastating,— not in any ostentatiously catastrophic sense, for there is a quietly trenchant type of devastatingness,—because he has helped to lay low all these things with his scythe of sarcastic mockery and lightly, humorously penetrating seriousness— effective, as you call it, but too deadly in its effects to be called merely effective.
That is Shaw as I have seen him and I don't believe there is anything seriously wrong in my estimate. I don't think we can complain of his seriousness about pacifism. Socialism and the rest of it; it was simply the form in which he put his dream, the dream he needed to fight for, needed by his Irish nature. Shaw's bugbear was unreason and disorder, his dream was a humanity delivered from vital illusions and deceptions, organising the life-force in obedience to reason, casting out waste and folly as much as possible. It is not likely to happen in the way he hoped; reason has its own illusions and, though he strove against imprisonment in his own rationalistic ideals, trying to escape from them by the issue of his mocking critical humour, he could not help being their prisoner. As for his pose of self-praise, no doubt he valued himself,—the public fighter like the man of action needs to do so in order to act or to fight. Most, though not a!!, try to veil it under an affectation of modesty; Shaw, on the contrary, took the course of raising it to a humorous pitch of burlesque and extravagance. It was at once part of his strategy in commanding attention and a means of mocking at himself—I was not speaking of analytical self-mockery,
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but of the whimsical Irish kind—so as to keep himself straight and at the same time mocking his audience. It is a peculiarly Irish kind of humour to say extravagant things with a calm convinced tone as if announcing a perfectly serious proposition—the Irish exaggeration of the humour called by the French pince-sans-rire [dead pan]; his hyperboles of self-praise actually reek with this humorous savour. If his extravagant comparison of himself with Shakespeare had to be taken in dull earnest without any smile in it, he would be either a witless ass or a giant of humourless arrogance,— and Bernard Shaw could be neither.
As to his position in literature, I have given my opinion; but more precisely, I imagine he will take some place but not a very large place, once the drums have ceased beating and the fighting is over. He has given too much to the battles of the hour perhaps to claim a large share of the future. I suppose some of his plays will survive for their wit and humour and cleverness more than for any higher dramatic quality, like those of three other Irishmen: Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde. His prefaces may be saved by their style and force, but it is not sure. At any rate, as a personality he is not likely to be forgotten, even if his writings fade. To compare him with Anatole France is futile—they were minds too different and moving in too different domains for comparison to be possible.
February, 1932
I have been unable to progress with the Lawrence books for sheer want of time and till I have gone through them I can write nothing worth saying about Lawrence. You must wait till I have got through them. On the other hand, I seized a few minutes to run through Russell—a few minutes were enough. It is just as I expected it to be. I have no doubt that Russell is a competent philosophic thinker, but this might have been written by an ordinary tract-writer of the [?]
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publication (I don't remember its proper name any longer). The arguments of the ordinary Christian apologists to prove the existence of God are futile drivel and Russell in answering them has descended to their level. He was appealing to the mass mind, I suppose, but that is enough to deprive the book of any real thought-value. And yet the questions raised are interesting enough if treated with true philosophic insight or from the standpoint of true spiritual experience. It is queer that the European mind, capable enough in other directions should sink to so much puerility when it begins to deal with religion and spiritual experience. All the same I shall see if there is anything that can be said in the matter.
You expect some sort of conversion of Toku Mama? Nothing is impossible—for miracles do happen and curiously considered, the existence of this world and of Toku Mama in it is itself a miracle. Let us then wait and see the result of the thunder.
By the way your proposal about the servant would involve another miracle. It is true he reaches you with your tiffin carrier in one hand, but he starts with three, I hear, in all his hands and unless he imitates Shaw's Methuselah and finds some more arms, your proposal is impracticable. If the food is so bad, it is surprising: they have all the materials to give it taste except the more palate-exploding spices—and these we can't put because there are so many livers and stomachs that go wrong with these spices [?].
February 11,1932
This poem ["Warning" by A. E. or George Russell] I liked so much because it tallied so surprisingly with yogic aspiration. I have perhaps been forced to make it a little free in consequence ? But hope not too free ?
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It is a good translation reproducing the spirit and movement and manner of the original—exact correspondence of the words does not matter.
The substance of A. E.'s poetry is always very good—he is one of the two or three whose poetry comes nearest to spiritual knowledge and experience. He has too a very fine and subtle perception of things—a little more vital élan (of what he seems to have had abundance in his life but not so much in his poetry) and he would have been not only a fine but a very great poet.
February 13, 1932
Yes, you can include the letter [of 27 December 1930] on Russell's external man and the two last paragraphs of that on Yogic powers. But do you not think that to speak of chef, chauffeur and day-labourer in this way might be taken as throwing a slur on three very estimable classes? After all, a chef, a chauffeur or a day-labourer may have an inner life and it would not do to appear to suggest otherwise. I don't quite know what to put—for the names would suggest nothing to the general reader. Perhaps something like "Ramaswamy the chef or Joseph the chauffeur" and "Cheloo the day-labourer," indicating a reference to individuals would half get us out of the difficulty.
Certainly, you can send for the Kaviraji oil. Rheumatism is not a thing to be encouraged and would not be even if it brought rapture. There was nothing wrong in your letter about the door-sill, nothing to which Chandulal or anybody could take exception.1 Obviously Chandulal's inspiration was not a happy one in this instance. Perhaps he measured things by his own head and forgot that there were in the Ashram and in the Tresor house higher heads on broader
1. This refers to a door frame in Dilip's house, Tresor. which was made too low for his height.
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shoulders. Samatā [equanimity], I suppose, is a counsel of perfection, even when one breaks one's head, but it cannot be expected from everyone in all circumstances only perhaps from those who are sitting on the "hill-top"—so that is not a "transgression". As for divine rapture, a knock on head or foot or elsewhere can be received with the physical Ananda of pain or pain + Ananda or pure physical Ananda—for I have often, quite involuntarily, made the experiment myself and passed with honours. It began, by the way, as far back as in Alipur jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses. But I do not expect that unusual reaction from others. And I suppose there are limits, e.g. the case of a picketer in Madras or Dr. Noel Paton. In any case, this way of having rapture is better off the list and the Lilliputian doorway was not a happy contrivance.
I am not surprised by what you tell me of the method of advertisement to which even great names have succumbed; it is the age of advertisement and America and this kind of thing is, I suppose, universal nowadays. But I agree with you that it is not pretty.
February 16, 1932
Yes, the attitude of Shankar is pitiable but all too human. "Not for the wife's sake, but for oneself's sake is the wife dear."1 Let Maya come in August; the future will look to the future. The attitude towards Esha2 is also very parent-like: the child is the parents' property, to be brought up according to his own ideas, not according to her need, her powers, her
1. An ironic variation on Yajnavalkya's "one loves the wife not for the sake of the wife, but for the self's sake" (as quoted by Sri Aurobindo in his own letter to Dilip of 27 December 1930).
2. Dilip's niece, Shankar's and Maya's daughter.
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nature. Let us hope he will yet wake and change.
I have suggested some retouches in the two poems you sent me. It is a matter of details of language, but such details have their importance.... I have explained the reason for the other changes.
"Krishnaprem"1 has been snowed under for the last two days. I will see if I can extricate it. But at this rate your "Appendix" will become as long as Sheshnāga [the king of snakes].
February 19, 1932
Last evening I just wanted to dojapa concentrating on the star Venus. I just tried trataka f= fixing the gaze on a point steadfastly) and took your name along with Mother's and Sri Krishna's. I did this just because the spirit moved me thus. I have tried this before many times, but with no tangible result or effect, so I didn't expect any this time either. But somehow last evening there was a most curious effect—and beautiful at that! I had a sense of deep peace and round the Venus a green disc developed which gave place to blue and then to violet which deepened to a self-luminous brightness and suffused the whole western sky—almost. I wondered if it was an optical illusion or hallucination, as the whole thing though it lasted for nearly a quarter of an hour vanished just as I closed my eye for a second after gazing steadfastly for about twenty or twenty-five minutes (at the very least). I dismissed auto-suggestion as an explanation, as I had never even dreamed of seeing any such colour, to say
1. Krishnaprem (Ronald Nixon) was professor at Lucknow University where Dilip met him in 1922. A few years later he gave up his lectureship for a post in Benares where he went with his Guru, Yashoda Ma. When the latter retired to a temple-retreat in Almora, he accompanied her and became a Sannyasin in the name of Krishna. Dilip had sent Sri Aurobindo a few letters from Krishnaprem.
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nothing of suggesting it. The phenomenon developed as unexpectedly as had my seeing of those sparks or hearing of those bells and flute notes. But I was sceptical and curious. So I tried it this evening too and with exactly similar results. The only difference was that the colour developed much sooner—in about ten minutes or so and lasted even after I had let my eyelids fall. And my consciousness too, was fully wakeful—I was in no condition of devotional fervour or trance—in fact I was conscious of everything, e.g. of somebody—Bula—passing behind me and sitting down to meditate on the sand. Then I lay down, closed my eyes and, opening them after a short meditation, concentrated on a star in the zenith. The first time I didn't see anything and was disappointed. Why should only Venus be fruitful of colour and no other star—1 asked myself. But the next time the same result. Then every star responded similarly—with an explosion of violet whose diameter grew. I don't know if this has any meaning, though I feel there is. But even if it isn't significant certainly it is curious as I am convinced it isn't optical illusion or hallucination. The reason is, not only was I in perfectly normal consciousness but I never see visions or things. Only sparks a few times—though the bells ring all the time—from year's end to year's end. But the colour was beautiful and persisting. How was it?
No, it was neither optical illusion nor hallucinatipn nor coincidence (chromatic) nor auto-suggestion nor any of the other ponderous and vacant polysyllables by which physical science tries to explain away or rather avoid explaining the (scientifically) inexplicable. In these matters the scientist is always doing what he is always blaming the layman for doing when the latter lays down the law on things about which he is profoundly ignorant, without investigation or experiment, without ascertained knowledge—simply by Solving a theory or a priori idea out of his own mind and Plastering it as a label on the unexplained phenomena.
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There is, as I have told you, a whole range or many inexhaustible ranges of sensory phenomena other than the out ward physical which one can become conscious of sep hear, feel, smell, touch, mentally contact—to use the new established Americanism—either in trance or sleep or an inward state miscalled sleep or simply and easily in the waking state. This faculty of sensing supraphysical things internally or externalising them, so to speak, so that they become visible, audible, sensible to the outward eye, ear even touch, just as are gross physical objects, this power or gift is not a freak or an abnormality; it is a universal faculty present in all human beings, but latent in some, native rarely and as if by accident in others, frequent or normally active in a few. But just as anyone can, with some training, learn science and do things which would have seemed miracles to his forefathers, so anyone, if he wants, can with a little concentration and training develop the faculty of supraphysical vision. When one starts Yoga, this power is often, though not invariably—for some find it difficult—one of the first to come out from its latent condition and manifest itself, most often without any effort, intention or previous knowledge on the part of the sadhak. It comes more easily with the eyes shut than with the eyes open, but it does come in both ways. The first sign of its opening in the externalised way is very often that seeing of "sparkles" or small luminous dots, shapes, etc., which was your first introduction to the matter; a second is, often enough, the seeing of circles of light or colour around objects, most easily round luminous objects like a star; seeing of colours is a third initial experience—but they do not always come in that order. The yogis in India very often in order to develop the power use the method of trātak concentrating the vision on a single point or object—preferably a luminous object. Your looking at the star was precisely an exercise in trātak and had the effect which any yogi in India would have told you is normal. For all this is not fancy or delusion; it is part of an occult science which has been practised throughout the historic and prehistoric ages
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in all countries and it has always been known to be not merely auto-suggestive or hallucinatory in its results, but, if one can get the key, veridic and verifiable. Your first scepticism may be natural in a "modern" man plunging into these lasting things of the past, present and future—natural but not justifiable, because very obviously inadequate to the facts observed; but once you have seen, the first thing you should do is to throw all this vapid pseudo-science behind you, this vain attempt to stick physical explanations on supraphysical things, and take the only rational course. Develop the power, get more and more experience—develop the consciousness by which these things come: as the consciousness develops, you will begin to understand and get the intuition of the significance. Or if you want their science too, then learn and apply the occult science which can alone deal with supraphysical phenomena.
As for what showed itself to you, it was not mere curious phenomena, not even merely symbolic colour, but things that have a considerable importance. The green circular disc you saw round Venus must indeed have been the aura of Venus which is of that colour; but this was only an introduction, a first application of the suddenly developed power of vision. Afterwards, what came, the blue and the violet were another kind of seeing more important for your Yoga; both are clearly associated with Krishna. Blue is his special and significant colour, the colour of his aura when he manifests, —that is why he is called Nīl Krishna; the adjective does not mean that he was blue or dark in his physical body whether in Brindavan or Mathura or Dwarka! Violet is the radiance of Krishna's protection—that is why it brought to you a sense of peace. The Mother says that she always saw it when she was in communion with Krishna and now too constantly sees it enveloping the Ashram. That this should be the first tiling when the power of vision broke through its state of latency is very significant; it proves that you are in contact, tile touch already there in your inner being and this force of presence and protection is already around you or over you
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as an environing influence.
Develop this power of inner sense and all that it brings you. These first seeings are only an outer fringe—behind lie whole worlds of experience which fill what seems to the material man the gap (your Russell's inner void) between the earth-consciousness and the Eternal and Infinite.
P. S. I remember when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images—these are only after-images! I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time—he said/ "no", to his knowledge only for a few seconds; I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth, since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values—he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so-called scientific explanations break down as soon as you pull them out of their cloudland of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend to decipher.
... P. S. Colour and light are always close to each other,— colour being more indicative, light more dynamic. Colour incandescent becomes light. Gold-green: gold indicates at its most intense something from the supramental, otherwise overmind truth or intuitive truth drawing ultimately from the supramental truth-consciousness. Green has much to do with the vital and indicates here, I think, the emotional forces in their outpouring. The play of the emotional forces in the divine Truth is, obviously very pertinent to the working of the Krishna light.
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February 25, 1932
If it is a translation of the poem ("Vichitra") that you want me to correct, then I can easily do it, for that kind of work takes practically no time. Krishnaprem's affair I have not been able to pursue further, because of the vast amount of current correspondence I have to answer every night. I think the only chance is for me to recast it into a very brief answer —or as brief as the subject will allow—in that way it might be possible to finish it.
It is only at the beginning that concentration is necessary to see these colours, afterwards it comes of itself. There was a long time when I used to see colours spontaneously or wherever I cast my eyes, just as you do now, and at every time of concentrated meditation they used to fill the room. Many, indeed, begin to see them spontaneously without any concentration at all, first with closed eyes, afterwards with the eyes open. Seeing them with the eyes .closed happens often enough to people who have never practised or even heard of Yoga; but in such cases it proves that there is some kind of occult vision there very near to the surface.
I do not know why you and Amal find so much difficulty with Yeats' lines; they seem to me quite clear. "Wintry mould" is the clay of the field in the form it takes in winter. "Blossoms a rose" must mean "blossoms as a rose, in the form of a rose"; the other sense seems to me inadmissible. "A casket for my dreams" can only mean "a casket (meant) to hold my dreams"—at least, for the moment I cannot think of any other sense.
February 27, 1932
It is the darkest nights that prepare the greatest dawns— and it is so because it is into the deep inconscience of material life that we have to bring, not an intermediate glimmer,
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but the full glory of the divine Light.
I can take no stock in your friend's theories—at that rat half the world's poetry would have to disappear. And what is meant by philosophy—there is none in your poem, there is only vision and emotion of spiritual experience, which is a different thing altogether. Truth and thought and light, cast into forms of beauty cannot be banished in that cavalier wav Music and art and poetry have striven from the beginning to express the vision of the deepest and greatest things and not the things of the surface only, and it will be so as long as there are poetry and art and music.
Three-three are all right as an element, but why impose them to the exclusion of less complete but delicate sound-returns. Such rules are too absolute.
March 1932 ?
No, you need not send the review to me—a review of Galsworthy ought to be the most innocuous thing in the world: I shall read it in the facile ease of print. By the way, it is curious but true that one can often get a more final judgment of a thing written when one surveys it in print or even typescript than in manuscript. Perhaps in the letter what is active but irrelevant in the personality of the writer comes in and evokes the personal response of the reader and so prevents detachment?
As they stand, there would be the same objection to the publication of my letters on A. E.'s criticism as to sending them to A. E. But I have cut out or modified the too personal passages and like that they can go. I have also made some verbal alterations; writing hurriedly, as I have always to do now, there were defects in the language or in the expression of the thought which I have tried to correct or smooth over.
I have not forgotten the "positive side"—but I have had no chance recently to do the needful. Krishnaprem has been
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progressing slowly and by spasms, but is approaching completion—only it is at once too short and too long, too long for your purpose, too short for mine. It ought to be ready before the week is out.
March 16, 1932
I have read your last and also your positively last translations for your book Anamī By coincidence I have given today my last and positively last hammerings to get out from myself the letter about Krishnaprem's letters and you will have the result, I suppose, some time tomorrow.
Your translations are very good, but much more poetic than the originals: some would consider that a fault, but I do not. The songs of these Bhaktas (Kabir and others) are very much in a manner and style that might be called the "hieratic primitive," like a picture all in intense lines, but only two or three essential lines at a time; the only colour is the hue of a single and very simple strong spiritual idea or emotion or experience. The Urdu poems are still more so. It is hardly possible to carry that over into modern poetry; the result would probably be instead of the bare sincerity of the original some kind of ostensible artificial artlessness that would not be at all the same thing.
I have no objection to your substituting Krishna for Ram, and if Kabir makes any, which is not likely, you have only to sing to him softly, "Rām Shyām judā mat karo bhai," [Don't separate Rām and Shyām, 0 brother] and he will be silenced at once.
The bottom reason for the preference of Krishna or Rama is not sectarian but psychological. The Northerner prefers Rama because the Northerner is the mental, moral and social man in his type, and Rama is a congenial Avatar for that type; the Bengali, emotional and intuitive, finds all that very dry and plumps for Krishna. I suspect that is the whole Mystery of the choice. Apart from these temperamental
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references and turning to essentials, one might say that Rama is the Divine accepting and glorifying a mould of the human mental, while Krishna seems rather to break the human moulds in order to create others from the higher planes; for he comes down direct from the Overmind and hammers with its forces on the mind and vital and heart of man to change and liberate and divinise them. At least that is one way of looking at their difference.
By the way, why should the joy of creation be unyogic? every creator feels the joy of creation—including the Divine Creator.
The music is not on the 28th—it is on the 27th, Easter Sunday.
March 17, 1932
It was a great refreshment to read the letters of Krishnaprem—one feels there a stream from the direct sources of Truth that one does not meet so often as one could desire. Here is a mind that can not only think but see—and not merely see the surfaces of things with which most intellectual thought goes on wrestling without end or definite issue and as if there were nothing else, but look into the core. The Tantriks have a phrase paśyantī vāk to describe one level of the Vāk-Shakti, the seeing Word; Krishnaprem has, it seems to me, much of the paśyanti buddhi, a seeing Intelligence. It might be because he has passed beyond thought into experience, but there are many who have a considerable wealth of experience without its clarifying their eye of thought to this extent; the soul feels, but the mind goes on with mixed and imperfect transcriptions, blurs and confusions in the idea. There must have been the gift of right vision lying ready in this nature.
It is an achievement to have got rid so rapidly and decisively of the shimmering mists and fogs which modern intellectualism takes for Light of Truth. The modern mind has so long
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In later years, Dilip (centre) with Krishnaprem and Motirani, daughter of Yashoda Ma.
and persistently wandered—and we with it—in the Valley of the False Glimmer that it is not easy for anyone to disperse its mists with the sunlight of clear vision so soon and entirely as he has done. All that he says about modern humanism and humanitarianism, the vain efforts of the sentimental idealist and the ineffective intellectual, about synthetic eclecticism and other kindred things is admirably clear-minded it hits the target. It is not by these means that humanity can get that radical change of its ways of life which is yet becoming imperative, but only by reaching the bed-rock of Reality behind,—not through mere ideas and mental formations but by a change of the consciousness, an inner and spiritual conversion. But that is a truth for which it would be difficult to get a hearing in the present noise of all kinds of many voiced clamour and confusion and catastrophe.
A distinction, the distinction very keenly made here, between the plane of phenomenal process, of externalised Prakriti [Nature-force or Nature-soul], and the plane of Divine Reality ranks among the first words of the inner wisdom. The turn Krishnaprem gives to it is not merely an ingenious explanation; it expresses very soundly one of the clear certainties you meet when you step across the border and look at the outer world from the standing-ground of the inner spiritual experience. The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge Science organises takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external knowledge, gives you only truth of process. I would add that it cannot give you even the whole truth of process; for you seize some of the ponderables, but miss the all-important imponderables; you get, hardly even the how, but the conditions under which things happen in Nature. After all the triumphs and marvels of Science the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance of the whole is left as dark, as mysterious and even more mysterious than ever. The scheme it has built up of the evolution not only of this rich and vast and variegated material world, but of life and consciousness and mind and their
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workings out of a brute mass of electrons, identical and varied only in arrangement and number, is an irrational magic more baffling than any the most mystic imagination could conceive. Science in the end lands us in a paradox effectuated, an organised and rigidly determined accident, an impossibility that has somehow happened,—it has shown us a new, a material Maya, aghatana-ghatana-patīyasī, very clever at bringing about the impossible, a miracle that cannot logically be and yet somehow is there actual, irresistibly organised, but still irrational and inexplicable. And this is evidently because Science has missed something essential; it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and in a way how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust of manageable and utilisable appearance. It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila. I say "begin" because, as you suggest, the Divine Reality is not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is Infinite and opens before you an infinite knowledge to which all Science put together is a bagatelle. But still you do touch the essential, the eternal behind things and in the light of That all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible.
I have once before told you what I think of the ineffective peckings of certain well-intentioned scientific minds on the surface or apparent surface of the spiritual Reality behind things and I need not elaborate it here. Krishnaprem's prognostic of a greater danger coming in the new attack by the adversary against the validity of spiritual and supraphysical experience, their new strategy of destruction by admitting and explaining it in their own sense, is interesting enough and there is strong ground for the apprehension he expresses.
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But I doubt whether if these things are once admitted to scrutiny, the mind of humanity will long remain satisfied with explanations so ineptly superficial and external, explanations that explain nothing. If the defenders of religion take up an unsound position, easily capturable, when they affirm only the subjective validity of spiritual experience, the opponents also seem to me to be giving away without knowing it, the gates of the materialistic stronghold by their consent at all to admit and examine spiritual and supraphysical experience. Their entrenchment in the physical field, their refusal to admit or even examine supraphysical things was their tower of strong safety; once it is abandoned, the human mind pressing towards something less negative, more helpfully positive will pass to it over the dead bodies of their theories and the broken debris of their annulling explanations and ingenious psychological labels. Another danger may then arise,—not of a final denial of the Truth, but the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake, on one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual—mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the past and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the intervening country between the material darkness and the perfect Splendour. In spite of all, the victory of the supreme Light even in the darkened earth-consciousness stands as the one ultimate certitude.
Art, poetry, music are not Yoga, not in themselves things spiritual any more than philosophy is a thing spiritual or Science. There lurks here another curious incapacity of the modern intellect—its inability to distinguish between mind and spirit, its readiness to mistake mental, moral and aesthetic idealisms for spirituality and their inferior degrees for spiritual values. It is mere truth that the mental intuitions of the metaphysician or the poet for the most part fall far short o a concrete spiritual experience; they are distant flashes,
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shadowy reflections, not rays from the centre of Light. It is pot less true that, looked at from the peaks, there is not much difference between the high mental eminencies and the lower climbings of this external existence. All the energies of the Lila are equal in the sight from above, all are disguises of the Divine. But one has to add that all can be turned into a first means towards the realisation of the Divine. A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience: yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite. Or you stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what?—a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother. Similar touches can come through art, music, poetry to their creator or to one who feels the shock of the word, the hidden significance of a form, a message in the sound that carries more perhaps than was consciously meant by the composer. All things in the Lila can turn into windows that open on the hidden Reality. Still so long as one is satisfied with looking through windows, the gain is only initial; one day one will have to take up the pilgrim's staff and start out to journey there where the Reality is for ever manifest and present. Still less can it be spiritually satisfying to remain with shadowy reflections; a search imposes itself for the Light which they strive to figure. But since this Reality and this Light are in ourselves no less than in some high region above the mortal Plane, we can in the seeking for it use many of the figures and activities of life; as one offers a flower, a prayer, an act
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to the Divine, one can offer too a created form of beauty, a song, a poem, an image, a strain of music, and gain through it a contact, a response or an experience. And when that divine Consciousness has been entered or when it grows within, then too its expression in life through these things is not excluded from Yoga; these creative activities can still have their place, though not intrinsically a greater place than any other that can be put to divine use and service. Art, poetry, music, as they are in their ordinary functioning, create mental and vital, not spiritual values; but they can be turned to a higher end, and then, like all things that are capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine, they are transmuted and become spiritual and can be admitted as part of a life of Yoga. All takes new values not from itself, but from the consciousness that uses it; for there is only one thing essential, needful, indispensable, to grow conscious of the Divine Reality and live in it and live it always.
March 27,1932
I send you back the translation of your poem, partly corrected, partly rewritten. It is not equal to the original but still I think it is not bad, as I have made it on Sen's traces.
Your Radha song is very fine indeed; it makes a pair with the dance of Mahakali—a superb pair.
April 1, 1932
As to the "anti-climax", I will get it out of the way first by protesting that I had not in the least your case in mind when I wrote the "message" about the food-greed in the atmosphere, and I have no grudge against your mohan-bhog [a kind of porridge made by boiling corn flour in milk]. I have myself
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consumed a fair quantity of it, not only in ancient days,—if it then existed,—but in modern times. You certainly need not renounce it—unless you feel an urgent and spontaneous call to do so for a time; and that is only if it is a grande passion which you feel ought to cool down a bit! But I suppose things have not gone so far as that and it is only a flirt or a sentimental preference.
As to your demand for a suggestion about the Dance of Krishna, it is a little out of my accustomed line, for I am a poet but not in the least a musician and how then can I draw out a suggestive scheme for music? Still I will see what comes—if anything comes. AE.'s lines on Krishna are a magnificent poem; of course, it gives only one side of the Krishna idea as it is in the Puranas and the Gita.
I never met Chakrabarti1 personally and know nothing about Krishnaprem's Guru. Chakrabarti's father came here to see me, but even that I hid forgotten till the Mother reminded me of it. I know Chakrabarti only through the Mother, but that is better than any personal acquaintance. The Mother met him in Paris when he was there once with his sons on his way to England; it was before the deluge, in pre-war days. She meditated with him and they were able inwardly to meet each other with a brief but living spiritual interchange. He told her that he had an extraordinary meditation which was entirely due to her, and she was aware of his state of consciousness and discovered in him a remarkable spiritual realisation and a considerable insight on the inner plane. It was the realisition of the Gita or part of it which he had built up in himself, peace, equanimity, the sense of the Divine within, and the atmosphere of peace was so strongly formed and living and real in him that he would convey it to others. On the other hand, he was externally a very worldly man, accepting the not very exalted outward
1. J. N. Chakravarti was vice-chancellor of Lucknow University. His wife, Monika Devi, took Sannyasa as Yashoda Ma. Krishnaprem was her disciple.
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personal life and surroundings he had as the milieu given him and not in the least wishing to change it. It was his theory that this was the teaching of the Gita—to feel Krishn within, to have the inner spiritual life and realisation —the rest was the Lila and could be left as it was unless or untill the Divine himself in the automatic movement of his play chose to change it. This explains the double character of the impression he conveyed to others, which so much surprised you. Those who had themselves some development or aspire to it could, I suppose, feel the sadhak in him; others might see only the worldly man, able, strong, rich, social, successful, accepting, even perhaps drawing to himself enjoyment of riches and power. Others felt both sides, but could understand neither, like your friend in Geneva. Your account of him interested myself and the Mother greatly; it was so evidently the same man, even if the external facts were not there to identify the husband of Krishnaprem's Guru with the spiritual-worldly Chakrabarti of Paris. Not a complete spiritual hero, no doubt, but a remarkable sadhak all the same.
P. S. Shuyi demands to sing two Gujarati songs on the next music day! He refers to you—or did in his first application which was rejected on the plea of "too late"—as the guarantor of his musical abilities!! I wait anxiously for your word upon this ticklish matter.
April 6, 1932
Your poem is very fine in language and perfect in rhythm; it seems to me to rise more and more as it proceeds and ends in a very high strain. I find it also well planned. I take it that it shows first the descent of the Divine Krishna in the power of his light and the sweetness of love into the sorrowful and darkened world for a new manifestation and creation; then the storm and lightnings of his power sweeping away a
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that veils and obscures, troubles and oppresses, last the enthronement, in the heart, of love and the Lord of love; that is a very good architecture.
If you like you can use the passage about Rama and Krishna for your book; I have inserted one or two alterations to make my meaning more precise and clear.
Krishnaprem's letter is as refreshing as its predecessors; he always takes things by the right end. And his way of putting them is delightfully pointed and downright, as is natural to one who has got to the root of the matter. But I find it difficult to take Jung and the psychologists very seriously [when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights],1 though perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. No doubt, they are very remarkable men in their own field, but this new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their. first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t = cat, t-r-e-e = tree) is the foundation of all knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of things is above and not below, uparibudhna esām [their foundation is above]. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor and dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the province of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing.
1. The phrase within brackets was added later by Sri Aurobindo.
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If Aruna's voice is good, all the more reason why she should develop her potentialities first and not spoil them by a premature performance. The consciousness is too unripe at this age and she must not be pushed in front.
April 10, 1932
The "Balagopal" is very beautiful; you have done evi better on the "Lullaby".
By the way, this is not the first work the Mother has directly given you, but the second. You have already been appointed Head of the Board of Musical Examiners to the Ashram and now you have an infant class in French with your "youthful" grand-uncle as the sole but venerable infant in the class!
P. S. I had forgotten to return the Rumanian article in which there seem to be fearful and wonderful but unintelligible statements about myself and Buddha and "Krishnamurti"— what a collocation!
April 27, 1932
You have certainly done something like a miracle. It hardly seemed to me possible that the Sanskrit metre in its exactitude could be reproduced in Bengali. I thought it could only be by the fiction of the mora =guru [long vowel], which may be all right in Bengali itself but does not produce the same modulation as in Sanskrit. And it is a beautiful poem too, not colourless and poetically wooden like Satyen Dutt's lines. As for the inner rhythm it is surely the Mandakranta rhythm,— more lyrical, less elegiac than the movement of the Meghaduta, but still the same. Your statement of true distinction —in the spirit of the movement as opposed to its body or rather an immobile clay figure representing the mobile body,
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for that is what Satyen Dutt's reproduction comes to,—is, I believe, quite accurate.
April 29, 1932
I suppose I ought to have written moras, if that is the proper plural of mora—I meant to refer to the general principle by which the indubitable quantitative long syllable of classic metres is represented by a constructive length—not always of two heard short sounds equivalent to one long, for sometimes it is one short syllable with a pause after it, sometimes two, and even in some languages in certain conditions three very short syllables can be treated as equivalent to one long.
Harin's poems sent by you are really very beautiful. In the first verse he seems to be seeking his inspiration and not yet to have quite found it, but the rest is admirable. These are among the best things he has written.
I cannot speak with the same unqualified praise about his translation of your "Descent of Krishna." It is no doubt very well done, but one feels that it is "done." There is language, there is rhythm, there are fine lines, e.g.
"Let laughter bear the dusk of centuries,"
but, unlike his original poetry, it has not been felt or has not sprung spontaneously out of himself as a result of a full transfer of the bhāva [mood, feeling] of the original poem into his own consciousness. That is where your translations excel. I am balancing about your new metre. It is very welldone and successful and the music is beautiful and unexceptionable. But can you carry on this triple rhyme for many verses without forcing the lilt? I say that because in the fourth verse there seems to me to be some suspicion of this forcing, and yet the fourth verse is indispensable, for otherwise the poem does not come to an end, it hangs suspended. But perhaps this impression is due to the repetition of the la sound in the rhymes in two successive verses tutla [broken]
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series, kātla [severed] series, and it may wear off after another reading with a fresh ear.
P. S. I really don't think the mātrā-vrtta principle stands in the natural rhyme of this metre, even though it is a possible recension [?] of it. Your objection to the double trick stands in spite of your own performance of the feat.
Harin's translation of your poem is good but not good enough for the original.
May 1932 ?
The two sonnets are very good—especially the first is perfection as a sonnet in the rounded unity of its thought-construction and development. As to the moral, there is no moral; but a sonnet is either a thought-sequence or a sight-sequence or both and it always mounts or should mount to a strong conclusion expressing the result or finale of all that has gone before. But that cannot be called drawing a moral.
Yes, it is a profound truth that you have expressed here—the supreme difficulty which stands in the way of the vital in human nature opening to its own longed for privilege of full joy and force and Ananda.
Harin's poetry, I find, is always beautiful and striking in its images, but sometimes ... [incomplete],
May 5, 1932
Why on earth allow yourself to be carried away by self-torturing imaginations ? You ought to know by past experience that I am not likely to be "fed up with you" or give you up even in your most unreasonable fits. I told you I had to revise my letter and get it typed. I have had in fact to rewrite parts of it and add here and there—and all that takes time. I
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shall finish it tonight and you will get it in the course of tomorrow.
Your letter to me showed that you had passed into an entire misunderstanding of what the Mother said to you. I say "passed" because at the time you showed that you understood her perfectly well. But you must have gone home and brooded in the old way until the light got clouded and you began to infer this and imagine that until you have accumulated the clouds around your head. The Mother never said that you were receiving nothing or that she could not work in you; she said just the opposite, that the force was working and that you had always been receptive. It was the reason for your being unconscious of the working that she was trying to explain to you and at the same time precisely to give you the "key" you were asking for. I am trying in my letter to put the whole thing in its right light so that you may know what to do and be able to do it. If the letter is not sufficient, we will try again and again till you have got the trick and are able to turn the key in the door. I absolutely refuse to accept your plea of inability or admit any ground for outcry and despair. You have got to root out this self-discouraging attitude from your vital and to succeed.
You have been allowing yourself to get upset and depressed again and, as usual, this unhelpful condition has clouded your mind and under its influence it has been twisting things, getting them all awry and taking them by the wrong end altogether. The Mother protests against the affirmations you Put into her mouth in your letter to me and I must first clear up this tangle.
The Mother did not say that whenever you meditated with her she had felt this stiffness in you, this closeness (closedness?) and she could not work. On the contrary, last time
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she told you you had made a great progress in receptivity which meant that you had been receptive all along and were now much more so. This time also she remembers to have told you that in meditating with you she had always found the force there and found you receptive. It would therefore be quite contrary to the truth to say that she could not work because of non-receptivity in you and she did not say that at all. On the contrary, she said the force had always been at work even when you were not conscious of it and had had its results, and you yourself admitted that it was so and that you had felt the results afterwards, even though not aware of the working at the time.
It is also quite unwarranted to say that you have been going in the wrong direction for three and a half years– going west when you thought you were going east. The Mother said nothing of the kind. You were not going in the wrong direction; there was nothing wrong in praying or in calling on the Mother or concentrating within, there is nothing wrong in meditating with ardour—provided it is a confident and happy ardour. You were going towards the east all right, but what the Mother said amounted to this that you were going along as if with a chain on your ankles and the chain was a certain tension and stiffness in your endeavour. This was what she found to have been wrong in your way of meditation. Therefore there is no need to lament that you have been going in the wrong direction all the time— for that is not the case; what is needed is to profit by the discovery and get rid of the impediment. The Mother did not merely point out the impediment, she showed you very expressly how to get rid of it and at that time you understood her, though now (at the time of writing your letter to me) the light which you saw seems to have got clouded by your indulging your vital more and more in the bitter pastime of sadness. That was quite natural, for that is the result sadness always does bring. It is the reason why I object to the gospel of sorrow and to any sadhana which makes sorrow one of its main planks (abhimāna [hurt love], revolt, viraha [separation])
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For sorrow is not, as Spinoza pointed out, a passage to a greater perfection, a way to siddhi; it cannot be, for it confuses and weakens and distracts the mind, depresses the vital force, darkens the spirit. A relapse from joy and vital elasticity and Ananda to sorrow, self-distrust, despondency and weakness is a recoil from a greater to a lesser consciousness,—the habit of these moods shows a clinging of something in the vital to the smaller, obscurer, dark and distressed movement out of which it is the very aim of Yoga to rise.
It is, therefore, quite incorrect to say that the Mother took away the wrong key with which you were trying to open the faery palace and left you with none at all. For she not only showed you the true key but gave it to you. It was not a mere vague exhortation to cheerfulness she gave you, but she described exactly the condition in the right kind of meditation—a state of inner rest, not of straining, of quiet opening, not of eager or desperate pulling, a harmonious giving of oneself to the Divine Force for its working, and in that a sense of a force working and a restful confidence and allowing it to work without any unquiet interference. And she asked you if you had not experienced that condition and you said you had and you knew it very well. Now that condition is the psychic opening and, if you have had it, you know what the psychic opening is—of course there is much more that afterwards comes but this is the fundamental condition in which it can most easily come. What you should have done was to keep the key the Mother gave you present in your consciousness and apply it—not to go back and allow sadness and the repining view of the past to grow upon you. In this condition, which we call the right or psychic attitude, there may be call, prayer, aspiration; intensity, concentration will come of themselves, not by a hard effort or tense strain on the nature. Rejection of wrong movements, frank confession of defects are not only not incompatible, but helpful to it; but this attitude makes the rejection, the confession easy, spontaneous, entirely complete and sincere and effective. That is the experience of all who have consented to take this attitude.
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Now as to the tension and stiffness, the Mother saw it this time in your meditation with her, because she had to look for the impediment. You told her that in meditating with her you never felt conscious of anything—and yet it ought not to be so since your receptivity was beyond doubt and you yourself say that you have always found the personal contact helpful. I may say in passing that consciousness and receptivity are not the same thing; one may be receptive, yet externally unaware of how things are being done and of what is being done. But for such an external consciousness there must be a reason, and she looked in the meditation with you and saw (not with the mind but by concrete experience) that it was this stiffness created by a tension and straining which made the consciousness rigid and closed it up. She did not mean that it closed you to the force or that it took away the inner receptivity, but that it closed you to the surface of what is being done. When that happens/ the Force works, as I have repeatedly written, behind the veil; the results remain packed behind and come out afterwards, often slowly, little by little, until there is so much pressure that it breaks through somehow and forces open the external nature. There is the difference between a mental and a vital straining and pulling and a spontaneous psychic openness, and it is not at all the first time that we have spoken of the difference. The Mother and myself have written and spoken of it times without number and we have deprecated pulling1 and straining and advocated the attitude of psychic openness. It is not really a question of the right or the wrong key, but of putting the key in the lock in the right or the wrong way,—whether, because of some difficulty, you try to force the lock turning the key this way and that with violence or confidently and quietly give it the right turn and the door opens.
It is not that the pulling and straining' and tension can do
1. There is a steady drawing of the Force possible which is not what I mean by pulling—drawing of the Force is quite common and helpful. [Sri Aurobindo's footnote]
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nothing; in the end they prevail for some result or another, but with difficulty, delay, struggle, strong upheavals of the Force breaking through in spite of all. Ramakrishna himself began by pulling and straining and got his result, but at the cost of a tremendous and perilous upsetting; afterwards he took the quiet psychic way whenever he wanted a result and got it with ease and in a minimum time. You say that this way is too difficult for you or the likes of you and it is only "avatars" like myself or the Mother that can do it. That is a strange misconception, for it is on the contrary the easiest and simplest and most direct way and anyone can do it, if he makes his mind and vital quiet; even those who have a tenth of your capacity can do it. It is the other way of tension and strain and hard endeavour that is difficult and needs a great force of Tapasya. As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to conquer—a work such as I am certain none else had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent or embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience not in a mere play or lila but in grim earnest all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path. But it is not necessary nor tolerable that all that should be repeated over again to the full in the experience of others. It is because we have the complete experience that we can show a straighter and easier road to others—if they will only consent to take it. It is because of our experience won at a tremendous price that we can urge upon you and others, 'Take the psychic attitude; follow the straight sunlit path, with the Divine openly or secretly upbearing you—if secretly, he will yet show himself in good
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time,—do not insist on the hard, hampered, roundabout and difficult journey."
You say that you were never pointed out all this before. But it is what we have been saying in season and out of season to everybody for a long time past! But you were not inclined to regard it as feasible or at least not ready to apply it in the field of meditation, because your consciousness by tradition, owing to past lives and for other reasons, was clinging to former contrary conceptions. Something in you was harking back to the Vaishnava sadhana, and that tended to bring in it its pain-giving feeling elements of abhimāna, revolt, suffering, the Divine hiding himself ("always I seek but never does he show himself), the rarity of the unfolding and the milana [union]. Something else in you was inclined to see as the only alternative some harsh, grim, ascetic ideal, the blank featureless Brahman and imagined that the supramental was that; something in the vital looked on the conquest of wrong movements as a hard desperate tapasya, not as a passage into the purity and joy of the Divine; even now something in you seems to insist on regarding the psychic attitude as something extraordinary, difficult, unhuman and impossible! There were these and other lingerings1 of the mind and the vital; you have to clear them out and look at the simplicity of the Truth with a straight and simple gaze. It is not that there is anything peculiar to you in these difficulties; every sadhak entering the Way has to get over similar impediments. It took me four years of inner striving to find a real Way, even though the Divine help was with me all the time, and even then it seemed to come by an accident; and
1. E.g. the Russellian fear of emptiness which is the form the active mind gives to Silence. Yet it was on what you call emptiness, on the Silence that my whole Yoga was founded and it was through it that there came afterwards all the inexhaustible riches of a greater Knowledge, Will and Joy—all the experiences of greater mental, psychic and vital realms, all the ranges up to Overmind and beyond. The cup has often to be emptied before it can be new-filled; the yogin, the sadhak ought not to be afraid of emptiness or silence. [Sri Aurobindo's footnote]
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it took me ten more years of intense Yoga under a supreme inner guidance to find the Way and that was because I had my past and the world's past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found the future.
But for you the remedy we propose, the key we offer to you ought not to be so difficult to apply as you imagine. After all, it is only applying in "meditation" the way that has been so successful with you in your music and poetry. There is a way of producing poetry by strain and tension, by breaking of the brain, by hard and painful labour—often the passage clogged and nothing coming or else coming only in return for a sort of intellectual tapasya. There is the other way in which one remains quiet and opens oneself to a power that is there behind and waits for inspiration; the force pours in and with it the inspiration, the illumination, the Ananda,—all is done by an inner Power. The flood passes, but one remains quiet for the next flood and at its time surely it comes. Here too all is not perfect at once, but progress comes by ever new waves of the same Power. It is the same method that the Mother proposed to you for your meditation—if meditation it must be called—not a strain of mental activity, but a restful opening to the Force that is there all the time above and aroundbyou, so that it may flow freely and do its work in peace and illumination and Ananda. The way has been shown to you, you yourself have had from time to time the true condition; only you must learn how to continue in it or recover it and you must allow the Force to do its work in its own way. It may take some time to take entire hold of it, get the other habit out and make this normal; but you must not start by deciding that it is impossible! It is eminently possible and it is that which everyone will have to do sooner or later; for this is the door of the definitive entrance. The difficulty, the struggle were only for the period of preparation necessary to get rid of or to exhaust the obstruction in the consciousness which was a thorn-hedge round the faery palace.
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May 1932
I think you have made too much play with my phrase "an accident", ignoring the important qualification, "it seemed to come by an accident." After four years of prānāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without fame whom I did not know, a bhakta with a limited mind but with some experience and evocative power. We sat together and I followed with an absolute fidelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the least understanding where he was leading me or where I was myself going. The first result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness which he had never intended—for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and he was against Adwaita Vedanta—and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman. The final upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its will—a principle or rather a seed-force to which I kept unswervingly and increasingly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no single rule or style or dogma or shastra to where and what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter. Yet he understood so little what he was doing that when he met me a month or two later, he was alarmed, tried to undo what he had done and told me that it was not the Divine but the devil that had got hold of me. Does not all that justify my phrase "it seemed to come by an accident?" But my meaning is that the ways of the Divine are not like those of the human mind
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or according to our patterns and it is impossible to judge them or to lay down for Him what He shall or shall not do, for the Divine knows better than we do. If we admit the Divine at all, both true reason and bhakti seem to me to be at one in demanding implicit faith and surrender. I do not see how without them there can be avyabhichārinī bhakti [one-pointed adoration].
May 8, 1932
I am afraid in this question about the cinema you are putting to me something which I am unable to answer. It is not a question of willingness or unwillingness, but the thing itself is quite outside the province in which I can make or give decisions. On all matters concerning the sadhana or life in the sadhana I can or may recommend or say Yes or No,— your poetry or your music I regard as part of the sadhana, part of your own and the collective Yoga life, but Charlie Chaplin and the City Lights are so outside it that I am unable to say anything about it whatever.
I find it rather surprising that you should regard what the Mother said to you or what I wrote as a recommendation to relax aspiration or postpone the idea of any kind of siddhi till the Greek Kalends! It was not so intended in the least nor do I think either of us said or wrote anything which could justly bear such an interpretation. I said expressly that in the way of meditating of which we spoke, aspiration, prayer, concentration, intensity were a natural part of it; the way was put before you because our experience has been that those who take it go quicker and develop their sadhana, once they get fixed in it, much more easily as well as smoothly than by a distressed, doubtful and anxious straining with revulsions of despondency and turning away from hope and endeavour. We spoke of a steady opening to the Divine with a flow of the force doing its work in the ādhār [vessel], a poised opening with a quiet mind and heart full of trust and the
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sunlight of confidence; where do you find that we said a helpless waiting must be your programme?
As for light-heartedness and insouciance, the Mother never spoke of insouciance—a light don't care attitude is the last thing she would recommend to anybody. She spoke of cheerfulness, and if she used the word light-hearted, it was not in the sense of anything lightly or frivolously gay and careless—although a deeper and finer gaiety can have its place as one element of the yogic character. What she meant was a glad equanimity even in the face of difficulties and there is nothing in that contrary to yogic teaching or to her own practice. The vital nature on the surface (the depths of the true vital are different) is attached on the one side to a superficial mirth and enjoyment, on the other to sorrow and despair and gloom and tragedy,—for these are for it the cherished lights and shades of life; but a bright or wide and free peace or an ānandamaya intensity or, best, a fusing of both in one is the true poise of both the soul and the mind— and of the true vital also—in Yoga. It is perfectly possible for a quite human sadhak to get to such a poise, it is not necessary to be divine before one can attain it. All this is nothing new and original; I have been saying it ever since I began speaking at all about Yoga and I cannot see anything in it resembling a gospel of helpless waiting or of careless insouciance or anything contrary to our own practice. I do not think that we have either of us become relentlessly grim and solemn or lacking in humour or that the Mother has lost her smile! I am afraid you are looking at her and things as through a glass darkly and seeing them in too sombre colours. As for instance what you say about the music—she came up straight to me from it and spoke at once about your music and the presence of Krishna there and she was in a very different mood from what you describe.
I have read your poem; it is very beautiful, but also too sombre in colour. Do throw off this mood and become yourself once more!
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May 10, 1932
Your credo cannot be a reason for your not remaining here.
There are very few among the sadhaks here who at all concern themselves with the supermind or know anything about it except as something which the Mother and I will bring down some day and establish here. Most are seeking realisation through meditation, through love and worship or through activity and work. Meditation and silence are not necessary for everyone; there are some, even among those spoken of by you and others as the most advanced sadhaks who do their sadhana not through meditation, for which they have no turn, but through activity, work or creation supported or founded on love and bhakti. It is not the credo but the person who matters. We impose no credo; it is sufficient if there is an established and heartfelt relation between ourselves and the disciple.
If it is the way of ahaitukī bhaktī [motiveless devotion] that you count to follow, that can be no obstacle; for there can be none better. For in that way everything can be made a means—poetry and music for instance become not merely poetry and music and not merely even an expression of bhakti, but themselves a means of bringing the experience of love and bhakti. Meditation itself becomes not an effort of mental concentration, but a flow of love and adoration and worship. If simply and sincerely followed, the way of ahaitukī bhaktī can lead as far as any other.
On our side, therefore, there cannot be on this ground any incompatibility or any reason why you should not be here. But on yours you must remember that this is for the Mother and myself a tense and difficult period in which we cannot expand our energies as we would wish to do—for the natural tendency of the Mother was always to throw out her energies largely in every way by means externally vital and Physical as well as inward, psychic and spiritual and
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multiply rather than reduce contacts. If we have been obliged to do otherwise for a time, it was not from preference. It will not do therefore to get impatient with us because of this difficult period or to misunderstand the concentrated pressure towards a new basis for expansion which it imposes on us. For that impatience can alone create a stumbling-block— not on our side, but on yours.
For on our side there can be none. Your credo can make no difference to the true basis of our relationship which is something personal and living.
It is quite impossible for me to dismiss you or to consent to your going away like this from us. If the idea of this kind of separation is possible to you, for us it is inconceivable that our close relation should end like this. I had thought that the love and affection the Mother and I bear to you had been made evident by us. But if you say that you cannot believe in it or cannot accept it with the limitations on its outward manifestation that not our choice but inexorable necessity imposes on us for a time, I do not know how to convince you. I could not believe that you could really find it in your heart to go or take such a step when it came to the point. As it is, I can only appeal to you not to allow yourself to be swept away by this attack, to remain faithful even in suffering to your soul that brought you here and to believe in our love that can never waver.
May 31, 1932
This question of quantity is one in which I find it difficult to arrive at a conclusion. You can prove that it can be done
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and has been successfully done in Bengali, and you can prove and have proved it yourself over again by writing these poems and bringing in the rhythm, the kallol [great joy or delight], which is absent in Satyen Dutta. It is quite true also that stylisation is permissible and a recognised form of art—I mean professed and overt stylisation and not that which hides itself under a contrary profession of naturalness or faithful following of external nature. The only question is how much of it Bengali poetry can bear. I do not think the distinction between song and poem goes at all to the root of the matter. The question is whether it is possible to have ease of movement in this kind of quantitative metre. For a few lines it can be very beautiful or for a short poem or a song—that much cannot be doubted. But can it be made a spontaneous movement of Bengali poetry like the ordinary mātrāvrttas or the others, in which one can walk or run at will without looking at one's steps to see that one does not stumble and without concentrating the reader's mind too much on the technique so that his attention is diverted from the sense and bhāva? If you can achieve some large and free structure in which quantity takes a recognised place as part of the foundation,—it need not be reproduction of a Sanskrit metre,—that would solve the problem in the affirmative.
Yes, this poem ["Bahurupi"] seems to me to be a very victorious acclimatisation of the principle of quantity (true quantity) in a free and large and flowing movement, a beautiful and natural and plastic rhythm and no suggestion of difficulty or carefully picked steps anywhere. It is an entire success.
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I am, as you know quite in agreement with you as regard the principle. At the same time there is a greater difficulty in Bengali than in Hindi and Gujarati. For in these languages the stylisation is a long-accepted fact and the ear of the writer and reader are trained to appreciate it, but in Bengali the trend has been on the contrary to more and more naturalism in metre and such stylisation as there was was not quantitative. Now the writer has the double difficulty of finding out how to stylise successfully in detail and of getting the ear of the public to train itself also. That is no reason ... [incomplete].
June 1932?
The last sonnet is improved by the changes.... I have as yet only had time to glance through your poem, but it seems to me one of the most beautiful you have written.
I don't think I was ill-pleased with Anilbaran's article on Tagore as a poet of suffering—though that is not perhaps the whole of Tagore. But the poet is sensitive to criticism and he took Anilbaran's stricture on this part of his poetry rather ill, a controversy threatened that was likely to be a little acrimonious—especially as I think he was hurt by the criticism coming from here. That is why I asked Anilbaran not to reply to Tagore's retort—thinking it more important to preserve kindliness of feeling between him and us than to stress a point that was already sufficiently clear. There was a great necessity for Bengali poetry finding an escape out of the Tagorean atmosphere—that I had always felt—but that was already coming. I agree with... [incomplete].
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June 2, 1932
[...]! can't agree with your statement about Sanskrit ā, e, o that they are long by stylisation only! In fact, I don't quite understand what this can mean, for in Sanskrit ā at least is the corresponding long to the short vowel a and is naturally as long as the devil—and the other two are in fact no better. The difference between e and ai and o and au is the difference between long and ultra-long, not between short and long. Take for instance the Sanskrit phrase yena kena prakārena [done in slapdash manner]; I can't for the life of me see how anyone can say that the ye, te, re or the kā they are naturally short to the ear, but long by stylisation. The classical languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) are perfectly logical, coherent and consistent in the matter of quantity: they have to be because quantity was the very life of their rhythm and they could not treat longs as shorts and shorts as longs as it is done, at every step, in English. Modern languages can do that because their rhythm rests on intonation and stress, quantity is only a subordinate element, a luxury, not the very basis of the rhythmic structure. In English you can write "the old road runs" pretending that "road" is short and "runs" is long, or "a great hate"—where the sound corresponding to Sanskrit e (great hate) or that corresponding to Sanskrit o (old road) is made short or long at pleasure; but to the Sanskrit, Greek or Latin ear it would have sounded like a defiance of the laws of Nature. Bengali is a modern language, so there this kind of stylisation is possible, for there e can be long, short or doubtful.
All this, not to write more about stylisation, but only as a protest against foreign modern ideas of language sound on an ancient language. Bengali can go on its way very freely, without that, Sanskritising when it likes, refusing to Sanskritise when it doesn't like.
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June 9, 1932
I can only say that whether by tapasya or surrender does not matter, the one thing is to be firm in setting one's force to the goal. Once one has set one's feet on the way, how can one draw back from it to something inferior? If one keeps firm, falls do not matter; one rises up again and goes forward. If one is firm towards the goal, there can be on the way to the Divine no eventual failure. And if there is something within you that drives, as surely there is, falterings or falls or failure of faith make no eventual difference. One has to go on till the struggle is over and there is the straight and open and thornless way before us.
June 10, 1932
I don't think you need fear that my patience will be exhausted —for it is founded upon something else that is inexhaustible.
Of course the Mother was right; she always is when she sees things, though people take a long time sometimes to recognise it. But what has been put into the vital receptacle by life can be got out by reversing it, turning it towards the Divine and not towards yourself. You will then find that the vital is an excellent instrument as it is a bad master.
I fully agree with Anilbaran's estimate of your poem, but I do not quite see the necessity of making it an exact replica of the Mayavada [illusionist] philosophy according to Shankara. It is the bhāva of the Maya conception of the universe and the thought and vision supported by the bhāva that you
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are expressing, not the set metaphysical concepts of the Adwaita.
Of course if you set out to poetise Shankara, there is much in the poem that would have to be barred out. Priya [beloved] and nāth [lord] would not do. On the other hand antaryāmi [inner guide] and prabhu [master] could remain; Shankara himself would not have avoided these two words, I believe. Not love exactly, but bhakti is permissible even for the Mayavadi at a certain stage before he has become too impersonal, too identified with the Paramātma [the Supreme Soul] for any duality to exist just as till then a restricted karma is also admissible. It is allowed as a means of turning away from the world to the Supreme. The Ishwara [the Lord] is there as a projection of the Brahman into Maya and as such you can use him as a bridge to cross from the darkness into the Light. At least that, I think, is the doctrine, though perhaps an extreme and very aggressive Mayavadi might object to it as too lenient a compromise.
As for the considerable touches of my "philosophy" which have got in there, I don't think they affect the main strand of the poem which is expressive of the illusory character of this world and not of the entire negative absoluteness of the Absolute. But they do colour the conception of the Divine in the poem and make it other than the bare and quite featureless Parabrahman of Shankara.
I think you are right in your plea that you are expressing the view and feeling of an aspirant to Nirvana, not one who is already "extinguished" but one who is turning away from the world to the Beyond. There is another thing to be said that the Maya concept is not the exclusive property of the Shankara credo and elsewhere it has a more emotional and religious form than it has there, not so sternly intellectual and severe.
I have not yet had time to compare your new Vaishnav with the old one. I will see tomorrow.
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June 14, 1932
It would be a mistake to silence the poetic flow on principle—the creative habit is a tonic to the vital and keeps it in good condition and the practice of sadhana needs a strong and widening vital for its support. There is no real incompatibility between the creative power and silence; for the real silence is something inward and it does not or at least need not cease when a strong activity or expression rises to the surface.
Your Tantrik was too big for me to swallow and digest him in a day, but he is as remarkable as he is big; I don't know whether he is not the best of the three. I have not yet been able, as I hoped, to make a comparative study of the two Vaishnavs; I shall let you know my opinion when I have done it.
I had always the regret that the line of possibility opened out by Michael [Madhusudhan] was not carried any farther in Bengali poetry; but after all it may turn out that nothing has been lost by the apparent interruption. Magnificent as are the power and swing of his language and rhythm, he was rather empty in substance, and a development in which subtlety, fineness and richness of thought and feeling could learn to find a consummate expression was very much needed. More mastery of colour, form, design was a necessity—and this has now been achieved and added to the ojas [essential energy] can fulfil what Madhusudhan left only half-done. I think these new poems of yours promise to make that fusion, and indeed there is more than the promise. It is good that your poetic energy has turned in that direction.
June 16, 1932
I have not read anything of Lawrence, but I have recently seen indications about him from many quarters; the impression
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given was that of a man of gifts who failed for want of vital balance—like so many others. The prose you have turned into verse—very well, as usual—has certainly quality, though there is not enough to form a definite judgment. A seeker who missed the issue, I should imagine—misled by the vitalistic stress to which the mind of today is a very harassed captive.
I have read your correspondence with Subhash Bose.1 Your main point is of course quite the right thing to answer; all this insistence upon action is absurd if one has not the light by which to act. "Yoga must include life and not exclude it" does not mean that we are bound to accept life as it is with all its stumbling ignorance and misery and the obscure confusion of human will and reason and impulse and instinct which it expresses. The advocates of action think that by human intellect and energy making an always new rush, everything can be put right; the present state of the world after a development of the intellect and a stupendous output of energy for which there is no historical parallel is a signal proof of the emptiness of the illusion under which they labour. Yoga takes the stand that it is only by a change of consciousness that (the true basis of life can be discovered; from within outward is indeed the rule. But within does not
I. Subhash Chandra Bose (23 January 1897 - 18 August 1945), the well-known Nationalist leader. Dilip knew him from their student days in England. He was an admirer of Sri Aurobindo's revolutionary action. Resigning from the I.C.S., Subhash Bose entered the freedom movement and joined the Congress soon after his return to India in 1921. He worked with Chittaranjan Das, was imprisoned many times, and tried to orient the Congress towards firm action. In 1939, he fell out with Gandhi and the Congress, escaped in 1941 from house arrest, fled to Europe and stayed for a while in Germany, trying to muster support for an attack on British India. In 1942, Subhash Bose, reached Japan, then Singapore, and developed the "Indian National Army," which was to join Japan in its campaign against British India. In 1944, the I.N.A. launched its offensive from Burma, but could not proceed beyond Assam as the Japanese forces became increasingly engaged elsewhere. Subhash Bose disappeared in a plane accident in 1945.
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mean some quarter inch behind the surface. One must a deep and find the soul, the self, the Divine Reality within us and only then can life become a true expression of what we can be instead of a blind and always repeated confused blur of the inadequate and imperfect thing we were. The choice is between remaining in the old jumble and groping about in the hope of stumbling on some discovery or standing back and seeking the Light within till we discover and can build the Godhead within and without us.
June 24, 1932
I am sending you the translation of your poems; they were a little difficult, because of the compactness of the expression in the original, to get into an acceptable English form that was why it took me some time. But I had not neglected either it or you, only I could not finish the second before last night; you have not been out of my thoughts at any time, nor am I growing cold to you. You should have more confidence in me after so long an experience than to imagine anything so incredible and impossible.
Of course you are not going tonight nor any night. You are going to remain and fight out this over-sensitiveness of yours and get a true balance of the vital nature. That is what you have pledged yourself to and you will keep your soul's pledge. The obstacle is not so great as it looks to you when you are in these fits of depression; but even if it were, you can and will overcome it.
In fact this sensitiveness in itself is nothing; it is the depression, the exaggerated importance you give to it, the train of despondent suggestions you allow to come and overpower you that makes the whole difficulty. If you could resist that and refuse to entertain it, these defects of your vital are small things, little difficulties that cannot in themselves be a serious obstacle to your progress. If you would
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only so learn to regard them and not be over impressed by them, it would make the path so much easier and smoother!
The exacerbation of certain vital movements is a perfectly well-known phenomenon in Yoga and does not mean that one has degenerated, but only that one has come to close grips instead of to a pleasant nodding acquaintance with the basic instincts of the earthly vital nature. I have had myself the experience of this rising to a height, during a certain stage of the spiritual development, of things that before hardly existed and seemed quite absent in the pure yogic life. These things rise up like that because they are fighting for their existence—they are not really personal to you and the vehemence of their attack is not due to any "badness" in the personal nature. I dare say seven sadhaks out often have a similar experience. Afterwards when they cannot effect their object which is to drive the sadhak out of his sadhana, the whole thing sinks and there is no longer any vehement trouble. I repeat that the only serious thing about it is the depression created in you and the idea of inability in the Yoga that they take care to impress on the brain when they are at their work. If you can get rid of that, the violence of the vital attacks is only the phenomenon of a stage and does not in the end matter.
June 25, 1932
One is not to cure oneself of one's sensitiveness, but only acquire the power to rise to a higher consciousness taking such disenchantments as a sort of jumping-board. One way is not to expect even square dealing from others no matter who the others are. In your case you might have expected such denials from your "famous" uncle. So why on earth do
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you cherish a hurt? Surely you should have known better than to expect straight dealings from your Toku Mama! And besides, it is good to have such experiences of the real nature of some people to which a generous nature is often blind; for that helps the growth of one's consciousness. The blow you wince at seems to you so hard because it is a blow the world of your mental formation has sustained. Such a world often becomes a part of our being. The result is that a blow dealt to it gives almost physical pain. The great compensation is that it makes you live more and more in the real world in contradistinction to the world of your imagination which is what you would like the real world to be. But the real world is not all that could be desired, you know, and that is why it has to be acted upon and transformed by the Divine Consciousness. But for that, knowledge of the reality, however unpalatable, is almost the first requisite. This knowledge often enough is best brought home to us through blows and bleedings. True, idealistic people, sensitive people, refined natures smart under such disillusionments more than do others who are somewhat thick-skinned, but that is no reason why fine feelings should be deprecated and the keen edge of fine susceptibilities be blunted. The thing is to learn to detach oneself from any such experience and learn to look at such perversions of others from a higher altitude from where one can regard these manifestations in the proper perspective— the impersonal one. Then our difficulties really and literally become opportunities. For knowledge, when it goes to the root of our troubles, has in itself a marvellous healing-power as it were. As soon as you touch the quick of the trouble, as soon as you, diving down and down, get at what really ails you, the pain disappears as though by a miracle. Unflinching courage to reach true Knowledge is therefore of the very essence of Yoga. No lasting superstructure can be erected except on a solid basis of true Knowledge. The feet must be sure of their ground before the head can hope to kiss the skies.
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There is much in your letter that would need long explanation for an adequate reply—but I want to say something about the faith which you say you don't have and can't have in the absence of experience. First of all, faith does not depend upon experience; it is something that is there before experience. When one starts the Yoga, it is not usually on the strength of experience, but on the strength of faith. It is so not only in Yoga and the spiritual life, but in ordinary life also. All men of action, discoverers, inventors, creators of knowledge proceed by faith and, until the proof is made or the thing done, they go on in spite of disappointment, failure, disproof, denial, because of something in them that tells them that this is the truth, the thing that must be followed and done. Ramakrishna even went so far as to say, when asked whether blind faith was not wrong, that blind faith was the only kind to have, for faith is either blind or it is not faith but something else—reasoned inference, proved conviction or ascertained knowledge.
Faith is the soul's witness to something not yet manifested, achieved or realised, but which yet the Knower within us, even in the absence of all indications, feels to be true or supremely worth following or achieving. This thing within us can last even when there is no fixed belief in the mind, even when the vital struggles and revolts and refuses. Who is there that practises the Yoga and has not his periods, long periods of disappointment and failure and disbelief and darkness—but there is something that sustains him and even goes on in spite of himself, because it feels that what it followed after was yet true and it more than feels, it knows. The fundamental faith in Yoga is this, inherent in the soul, that the Divine exists and the Divine is the one thing to be followed after—nothing else in life is worth having in comparison with that. It was this faith growing in you that made you come for Yoga and this faith has not died or diminished—
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to judge from what you say in your letter, it has become more insistent and abiding. So long as a man has that, he is marked for the spiritual life and I will say that, even if his nature is full of obstacles and crammed with denials and difficulties, and even if he has many years of struggle, he is marked out for success in the spiritual life.
What you really have not yet a fixed faith in is the guidance of the Divine, his will to manifest to you or your capacity to receive him. It is this that the adverse attacks which began when you were on the threshold of the inner experience— as so often happens in the Yoga,—try constantly to fix in your brain. They want to have a fixed mental formation there, so that whenever you make the attempt there will be in the physical mind an expectation of difficulty, a dwelling on the idea of difficulty and unsuccess and incapacity, if not always in the front of the mind, yet at the back and by that they hope to prevent the experience from coming. It is these mental formations that you must reject, for they are a much greater obstacle than the vital feelings to which you give such an exaggerated importance. It is not a fact that you have not had experiences—you had them but you did not give them their full value, because you were expecting something else. Otherwise the sense of the Divine Guidance and the faith in attainment would have formed in spite of difficulties and relapses such as every one has in the Yoga. It is this faith that you need to develop,—a faith which is in accordance with reason and common sense—that if the Divine exists and has called you to the Path, as is evident, then there must be a Divine Guidance behind and that through and in spite of all difficulties you will arrive. Not to listen to the hostile voices that suggest failure or to the voices of impatient vital haste that echo them, not to believe that because great difficulties are there, there can be no success or that because the Divine has not yet shown himself, he will never show himself, but to take the position that everyone takes when he fixes his mind on a great and difficult goal, "I will go on till I succeed and I will succeed—all
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difficulties notwithstanding." To which the believer in the Divine adds "The Divine exists, he is there, and since he exists, my following after the Divine cannot fail. I will go on through everything till I find him."
July 1932?
I return the photograph of the Hungarian lady; there is evidently something in her which she can develop into a capacity for Yoga. The meaning of her dream is evident and her experience about the star is a common initial experience in Yoga. The star is always a promise of the Light to come; the star changes into a sun when there is the descent of the Light. It is not possible to fix the actual value of these signs for the future; they indicate a turn or a possibility, but everything depends on herself and the future orientation she gives to her being.
Do not allow yourself to admit any movement of vital depression, still less a depressed condition. There can be no good reason for it, since the Mother found in the meditation with you an immensely increased receptivity and a free and unhampered descent of herself into you. As for... [incomplete].
July 1932
(Commenting on a Bengali translation of Sri Aurobindo's poem, "God")
Why niyama? "rule" does not mean that here. It is the master of those who govern. Some word conveying the idea of power would be more in place.
The translation of the second verse seems to me to take away the force and idea-substance of the original and to
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substitute a sentimental pseudo-Robindrian half-thouqht without much meaning in it. He who is the greatest of the great, mahato mahīyān,, does not disdain to dwell in the clod and the worm, and the vast impartiality shown in this humility is itself the very sign of the greatness of the Divine,—that was the idea behind this verse. Does your rendering convey it?
As to Nixon, the matter is of no great importance. But if a mistake of the kind was made either by Nixon or by the Gujerati, it must have been because something of the "old (musical) Adam" got through subconsciously into your letter. Every artist almost (there are rare exceptions) has got something of the "public" man in him, in his vital-physical parts, the need of the stimulus of an audience, social applause, satisfied vanity or fame. That must go absolutely if he wants to be a yogi and his art a service not of man or of his own ego but of the Divine.
July 10, 1932
Yes, you can print the letter. I have gone through the translations and made one slight alteration.
Your solo was truly wonderful. The Mother asks me to say that there was a strong white light and a great power coming down while you sang1—that was expressed in your singing. The other songs also were very good. It was a very successful day of music.
1. Under its pressure there was proceeding from you a very generous distribution of vital force—in the best sense of this term—all around you. And the resolution of the conflicts into the chords of Victory was remarkable. Even, above some of the notes you sang the Mother contacted a vast Peace and Ananda. (Added by Sri Aurobindo on July 12 while revising Dilip's reproduction of what Mother said regarding the song, and written out by Dilip.)
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July 12, 1932
I have made a few alterations in the first page so as to make it represent more precisely what Mother said and I am getting this page retyped by Nolini before returning the whole to you.
The white light is the light of the Divine Consciousness and specially of the Mahashakti. The golden light is closely connected with the supermind, though of course it is not the only supramental light. Kali's light in the material is red, but when it comes from the supramental it is golden in hue.
July 14, 1932
I quite agree with you. This new translation of "God" is quite inferior to the first. Improvements often deprave. On the other hand the opening of "Rishi" is very fine. A style at once severe and strong and lofty seems best to suit his genius.
It is rather an innovation to send the "Conversations" to one not interested at all in Yoga; but we can make an exception in this case.
July 18, 1932
I think there can be only one solution of Maya's affair. It is hardly possible to tell her (just now) to leave everything and come here; that might have been done if she had been alone in question and not drawn back by other considerations. Esha's presence makes a great difference; for she is very evidently marked out for a higher life, the psychic being in her is already awake even at this early age. Nothing should be done which would either prevent or make difficult the Possibilities other spiritual fulfilment. It seems to us the only
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thing to be done is for Maya not to break with Shankar, but to insist on coming here for a stay every year with Esha There ought not to be any difficulty, for she says that Shankar admits the idea of her coming, though he refuses to come himself, and if he finds her determined, he may be glad to accept it as a compromise. There are two possibilities one is that she should come here every year for three or four months, the other that she should come twice or even thrice, if possible, on the occasion of the anniversaries for a shorter time. A system of more frequent visits would keep up the influence of the atmosphere for her throughout the year and might for that reason be preferable, if it is otherwise possible.
You will get a copy of the Conversations for your friend Ronald Nixon [Krishnaprem]. The case of Jane F. is different. Her photograph does not show any readiness for a spiritual life; she is living entirely in the outward. If she wants to come here, it must surely be because you are here and I don't think she would have been interested in the life here if it had been someone else than you who had written about it. But you must admit that that is a very poor foundation for taking such a step and not a sufficient reason for one accepting it. If there had been a predisposition in her own way of thinking or feeling or in her character or otherwise, it would have been different,—for where the soul is working from behind, it makes use very often of very slight circumstances to push the mind and vital into the way. But here there is nothing visible. To send the Conversations would be to put a pressure on her which is not advisable in these cases.
Yes, I will write about the Divine and the Supramental. For the moment I need only say that the Divine can be and is everywhere, masked or half-manifest or beginning to be manifest, in all the planes of consciousness; in the Supramental it begins to be manifest without disguise or veil in its own svarūpa [true form].
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July 25, 1932
I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the "doubt" whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would mean anything from sixty to six hundred pages, but not even six thousand convincing pages would convince Doubt. For Doubt exists for its own sake; its very function is to doubt always and, even when convinced, to go on doubting still; it is only to persuade its entertainer to give it board and lodging that it pretends to be an honest truth-seeker. This is a lesson I have learnt from the experience both of my own mind and of the mind of others; the only way to get rid of doubt is to take Discrimination as one's detector of truth and falsehood and under its guard to open the door freely and courageously to experience.
All the same I have started writing, but I will begin not with doubt but with the demand for the Divine as a concrete certitude, quite as concrete as any physical phenomenon caught by the senses. Now, certainly, the Divine must be such a certitude not only as concrete but more concrete than anything sensed by ear or eye or touch in the world of Matter; but it is a certitude not of mental thought but of essential experience. When the Peace of God descends on you, when the Divine Presence is there within you, when the Ananda rushes on you like a sea, when you are driven like a leaf before the wind by the breath of the Divine Force, when Love flows out from you on all creation, when Divine Knowledge floods you with a Light which illumines and transforms in a moment all that was before dark, sorrowful and obscure, when all that is becomes part of the One Reality, when it is all around you felt at once by the spiritual contact, by the inner vision, by the illumined and seeing thought, by the vital sensation and even by the very physical sense, when everywhere you see, hear, touch only the Divine, then you can
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much less doubt it or deny it than you can deny or doubt daylight or air or the sun in heaven—for of these physical things you cannot be sure but they are what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete experience of the Divine, doubt is impossible.
As to permanence, you cannot expect permanence of the initial spiritual experiences from the beginning—only a few have that and even for them the high intensity is not always there; for most the experience comes and then draws back behind the veil waiting for the human parts to be prepared and made ready to bear and hold, first its increase and then its permanence. But to doubt it on that account would be irrational in the extreme. One does not doubt the existence of air because a strong wind is not always blowing or of sunlight because night intervenes between dawn and dusk. The difficulty lies in the normal human consciousness to which spiritual experience comes as something abnormal and is in fact supernormal. This weak limited normality finds it difficult at first even to get any touch of that greater and intenser supernormal or it gets it diluted into its own duller stuff of mental or vital experience, and, when the spiritual does come in its own overwhelming power, very often it cannot bear or, if it bears, cannot hold and keep it. Still once a decisive breach has been made in the walls built by the mind against the Infinite, the breach widens, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, until there is no wall any longer, and there is the Permanence.
But the decisive experiences cannot be brought, the permanence of a new state of consciousness in which they will be normal cannot be secured if the mind is always interposing its own reservations, prejudgments, ignorant formulas or it it insists on arriving at the Divine certitude as it would at the quite relative truth of a mental conclusion, by reasoning/ doubt, enquiry and all the other paraphernalia of Ignorance feeling and fumbling around after Knowledge; these greater things can only be brought by the progressive opening of a consciousness quieted and turned steadily towards spiritual
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experience. If you ask why the Divine has so disposed it on these highly inconvenient basis, it is a futile question,—for this is nothing else than a psychological necessity imposed by the very nature of things. It is so because these experiences of the Divine are not mental constructions, not vital movements, but essential things, not things merely thought but realities, not mentally felt but felt in our very underlying substance and essence. No doubt, the mind is always there and can intervene; it can and does have its own type of mentalising about the Divine, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, mental reflections of spiritual Truth, even a kind of mental realisation which repeats as well as it can some kind of figure of the higher Truth, and all this is not without value, but it is not concrete, intimate and indubitable. Mind by itself is incapable of ultimate certitude; whatever it believes, it can doubt; whatever it can affirm, it can deny; whatever it gets hold of, it can and does let go. That, if you like, is its freedom, noble right, privilege; it may be all you can say in its praise, but by these methods of mind you cannot hope (outside the reach of physical phenomena and hardly even there) to arrive at anything you can call an ultimate certitude. It is for this compelling reason that mentalising or enquiring about the Divine cannot by its own right bring the Divine. If the consciousness is always busy with small mental movements, —especially accompanied as they usually are, by a host of vital movements, desires, prepossessions and all else that vitiates human thinking, even apart from the native insufficiency of reason,—what room can there be for a new order of knowledge, for fundamental experiences or for those deep and tremendous upsurgings or descents of the Spirit? It is indeed possible for the mind in the midst of its activities to be suddenly taken by surprise, overwhelmed, swept aside while all is flooded with a sudden inrush of spiritual experience. But if afterwards it begins questioning, doubting, theorising, surmising what this might be and whether it is true or not, what else can the spiritual Power do but retire and wait for the bubbles of the mind to cease?
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I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the Divine something less than Mind or is it something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status ? If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal, then spiritual experience is quite superfluous. But if it is inferior, how can it challenge, judge, make the Divine stand as an accused or a witness before its tribunal, summon It to appear as a candidate for admission before a Board of Examiners or pin It like an insect under its examining microscope? Can the vital animal hold up as infallible the standard of its vital instincts, associations and impulses, and judge, interpret and fathom by it the mind of man? It cannot, because man's mind is a greater power working in a wider, more complex way which the animal vital consciousness cannot follow. Is it so difficult to see similarly that the Divine Consciousness must be something infinitely wider, more complex than the human mind, filled with greater powers and lights, moving in a way which mere Mind cannot judge, interpret or fathom by the standard of its fallible reason and limited mental half-knowledge? The simple fact is there that spirit and mind are not the same thing and that it is the spiritual consciousness into which the yogin has to enter (in all this I am not in the least speaking of the supermind) if he wants to be in permanent contact or union with the Divine. It is not then a freak of the Divine or a tyranny to insist on the mind recognising its limitations, quieting itself, giving up its demands, and opening and surrendering to a greater Light than it can find on its own obscurer level.
This doesn't mean that the Mind has no place at all in the spiritual life; but it means that it cannot be even the main instrument, much less the authority to whose judgment all must submit itself, including the Divine. Mind must learn
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from the greater Consciousness it is approaching and not impose its own standards on it; it has to receive illumination, open to a higher Truth, admit a greater power that doesn't work according to mental canons, surrender itself and allow its half-light half-darkness to be flooded from above till where it was blind it can see, where it was deaf it can hear, where it was insensible it can feel, and where it was baffled, uncertain, questioning, disappointed it can have joy, fulfilment, certitude and peace.
This is the position on which Yoga stands, a position based upon constant experience since men began to seek after the Divine. If it is not true, then there is no truth in Yoga and no necessity for Yoga. If it is true, then it is on that basis, from the standpoint of the necessity of this greater consciousness that we can see whether Doubt is of any utility for the spiritual life. To believe anything and everything is certainly not demanded of the spiritual seeker; such a promiscuous and imbecile credulity would be not only unintellectual, but in the last degree unspiritual. At every moment of the spiritual life until one has got fully into the higher Light, one has to be on one's guard and be able to distinguish spiritual truth from pseudo-spiritual imitations of it or substitutes for it set up by the mind and the vital desire. The power to distinguish between truth of the Divine and the lies of the Asura is a cardinal necessity for Yoga. The question is whether that can best be done by the negative and destructive method of doubt, which often kills falsehood but rejects truth 190 with the same impartial blow, or a more positive, helpful and luminously searching power can be found which is not compelled by its inherent ignorance to meet truth and falsehood alike with the stiletto of doubt and the bludgeon of denial. An indiscriminateness of mental belief is not the teaching of spirituality or of Yoga; the faith of which it speaks is not a crude mental belief but the fidelity of the soul to the guiding light within it, a fidelity which has to remain firm till the light leads it into knowledge.
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July 31, 1932
I am glad you have told me what the thoughts are that are passing through your mind; but I am hardly prepared to accept the general facts alleged by you as an abdication or as defeats of the Divine. I am ready to regard them as defeats of Inge and Tagore and Russell and Huxley and Rolland and old-world Islam; but I never expected—outside their special province—any of these people or causes to conquer. As for Biren and Maya,—well, for Biren, I told him practically (it was no doubt a long time ago), that the time had not come for him to come here, and even now according to his own admission in one of his recent letters to the Mother he is still divided and that means that he is not yet ready. It is also clear that Maya is not yet free inwardly from the hold of Shankar—so! It is quite possible for the Divine to have defeats —the Bhagawat Purana even enumerates running away from battle, palāyanamani, as one of the usual incidents in the life of the Avatar; only there is usually a method or at least a meaning in his flight, and what matters is the future and not the difficulties of the present. As for Gandhi, why should you suppose that I am so tender for the faith of the Mahatma? I do not call it faith at all, but a rigid mental belief, and what he terms soul-force is only a strong vital will which has taken a religious turn. That, of course, can have tremendous force for action, but unfortunately Gandhi spoils it by his ambition to be a man of reason, while in fact he has no reason in him at all, never was reasonable at any moment in his life and, I suppose, never will be. What he has in its place is a remarkable type of unintentionally sophistic logic. Well, what this reason, this amazingly precisely unreliable logic brings about is that nobody is even sure and, I don't think, he is himself really sure what he will do next. He has not only two minds, but three or four minds, and all depends on which will turn up topmost at a particular moment and how it will combine with the others. There would be no harm in
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that, on the contrary there might be an advantage if there were a central Light somewhere choosing for him and shaping the decision to the need of the action. He thinks there is and calls it God—but it has always seemed to me that it is his own mind that decides and most often decides wrongly. Anyhow I cannot imagine Lenin or Mustapha Kemal not knowing their own minds or acting in this way—even their strategic retracts were steps towards an end clearly conceived and executed. But whatever it be it is all mind action and vital force in Gandhi. So why should he be taken as an example of the defeat of the Divine or of a spiritual Power? I quite allow that there has been something behind Gandhi greater than himself and you can call it the Divine or a Cosmic Force which has used him, but then there is that behind everybody who is used as an instrument for world ends,— behind Kemal and Lenin also; so that is not germane to the matter.
Of course I shall try to write about this matter of the Divine and Power—only, you want me to answer to the mind and, if so, we must know on what ground to stand. There is a vital mind which judges all things by its own hopes and despairs, preferences, expectations, feelings and makes its conclusions according as these are satisfied or dissatisfied—and there is the true reason, the thinking or scientific mind that takes its ground carefully and tries to see clearly and judge. It is to the latter that an answer can be attempted, for the former accepts only its own answer. There must be move clear understanding as to what we mean by the Divine, or by Power or by the spiritual Power, if it exists—and also what this Divine Power is supposed to do and under what conditions, the world being what it is, it is to be expected to work. So it is not a simple task to give a clear and full answer!
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August 1, 1932
I so much enjoyed Anatole France's joke about God in the mouth of the arch-scoffer Brotteaux in his book Les Dieux ont soiff [The Gods Are Thirsty] that I must ask you to read it.
He addresses Father Longuemarre thus: "Ou Dieu veut empêcher le mal et ne le peut, ou il le peut et ne le veut, ou il ne le peut ni ne le veut, ou il le veut et le peut. S'il Ie veut et ne le peut, il est impuissant; s'il le peut et ne le veut, il est pervers; s'il ne Ie peut ni ne Ie veut, il est impuissant et pervers; s'il le peut et le veut, que ne le fait-il mon Père?"
"Either God would prevent evil, but could not, or he could but would not, or he neither could nor would, or he both could and would. If he would but could not, he is impotent; if he could but would not, he is perverse; if he neither could nor would, he is impotent and perverse; if he both could and would, why on earth doesn't he do it Father?"1
I wonder what God might answer to it supposing he should have ever felt inclined to ?
Anatole France is always amusing whether he is ironising about God and Christianity or about that rational animal Humanity (with a big H) and the follies of his reason and his conduct. But I presume you never heard of God's explanation of his non-interference to Anatole France when they met in some Heaven of Irony, I suppose,—it can't have been in the heaven of Karl Marx, in spite of France's conversion before his death. God is reported to have strolled up to him and said:
"I say, Anatole, you know that was a good joke of yours; but there was a good cause too for my non-interference. Reason came along and told me: Look here, why do you pretend to
1. This translation of Anatole France is Sri Aurobindo's, made a few days later on Dilip's request.
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exist? You know you don't exist and never existed or, if you do, you have made such a mess of your creation that we can't tolerate you any longer. Once we have got you out of the way, all will be right upon earth, tip-top, A-l: my daughter Science and I have arranged that between us. Man will raise his noble brow, the head of creation, dignified, free, equal, fraternal, democratic, depending upon nothing but himself, with nothing greater than himself anywhere in existence. There will be no God, no gods, no churches, no priestcraft, no religion, no kings, no oppression, no poverty, no war or discord anywhere. Industry will fill the earth with abundance. Commerce will spread her golden reconciling wings everywhere. Universal education will stamp out ignorance and leave no room for folly or unreason in any human brain; man will become cultured, disciplined, rational, scientific, well-informed, arriving always at the right conclusion upon full and sufficient data. The voice of the scientist and the expert will be loud in the land and guide mankind to the earthly paradise. A perfected society; health universalised by a developed medical science and a sound hygiene; everything rationalised; science evolved, infallible, omnipotent, omniscient; the riddle of existence solved; the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world; evolution, of which man, magnificent man, is the last term, completed in the noble white race, a humanitarian kindness and uplifting for our backward brown, yellow and black brothers; peace, peace, peace, reason, order, unity everywhere.' There was a lot more like that, Anatole, and I was so much impressed by the beauty of the picture and its convenience, for I would have nothing to do or to supervise, that I at once retired from business,—for, you know that I was always of a retiring disposition and inclined to keep myself behind the veil or in the background at the best of times. But what is this I hear?—it does not seem to me from reports that Reason even with the help of Science has kept her promise. And if not, why not? Is it because she would not or because she could not? or is it because she both would not and could not, or because she
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would and could, but somehow did not? And I say, Anatole these children of theirs, the State, Industrialism, Capitalism' Communism and the rest have a queer look—they seem very much like Titanic monsters. Armed, too, with all the powers of Intellect and all the weapons and organisation of Science And it does look as if mankind were no freer under them than under the Kings and the Churches! What has happened —or is it possible that Reason is not supreme and infallible even that she has made a greater mess of it than I could have done myself?" Here the report of the conversation ends; I give it for what it is worth, for I am not acquainted with this God and have to take him on trust from Anatole France.
I have looked through the translation of 'The Rishi"; it seems to be a fine performance, but I shall keep it and read more carefully.
I shall evolve the Divine and Power very soon, but before I can work it out I have to comment on some points in your letters—famous Yogis with their "prophetic" powers and childish minds, advanced sadhaks and their convulsions, the comparative powerlessness of Buddha and Christ etc. These things are not central to the subject, but they cumber the way and it will be easier to proceed when they are put in their proper place.
August 1932
[...] As for the rest of your letter, I shall try to write something tomorrow; today I have been really too much besieged even to have time to attempt an answer to so long a letter. I do not think desultory remarks about doubt would be of any use. To say something about the nature, origin, function and limits of Doubt might be of use but it must be said in a coherent way and as a whole which I will do in later letters. I may say, however, at once one or two things by the Way.
1, A poem by Sri Aurobindo.
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First, I have already said that I do not ask "undiscriminating faith" from anyone, all I ask is fundamental faith safeguarded by a patient and quiet discrimination—because it is these that are proper to the consciousness of a spiritual seeker and it is these that I have myself used and found that they removed all necessity for the quite fortuitous dilemma of "either you must doubt everything supraphysical or be entirely credulous" which is the stock-in-trade of the materialist argument. Your Doubt, I see, constantly returns to the charge with a repetition of this formula in spite of my denial —which supports my assertion that Doubt cannot be convinced because it cannot in its very nature want to be; it keeps repeating the old grounds always.
Next about Russell—I have never disputed his abilities or his character; I am concerned only with his opinions and there too only with those opinions which touch upon my own province—that of spiritual Truth. In all religions, the most narrow and stupid even, and in all non-religions also there are great minds, great men, fine characters. I know little about Russell, but I never dreamed of disputing the greatness of Lenin, for instance, merely because he was an atheist—nobody would, unless he were an imbecile. But the greatness of Lenin does not debar me from refusing assent to the credal dogmas of Bolshevism, and the beauty of character of an atheist does not prove that spirituality is a lie of the imagination and that there is no Divine. I might add that if you can find the utterances of famous Yogis childish when Aey talk about marriage or on other mental matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting ln light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question, and till you do, I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth of their spiritual experience. But of that, hereafter, when I get a chance of an hour or two to write on it.
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August 2, 1932
Yes, if you wish, you can include the letter on Doubt and the repartee in your book—but I am afraid it will make it very miscellaneous!
The invisible Force producing tangible results both inward and outward is the whole meaning of the yogic consciousness. Your question about Yoga bringing merely a feeling of Power without any result was really very strange. Who would be satisfied with such a meaningless hallucination and call it Power? If we had not had thousands of experiences showing that the Power within could alter the mind, develop its powers, add new ones, bring in new ranges of knowledge, master the vital movements, change the character, influence men and things, control the conditions and functionings of the body, work as a concrete dynamic Force on other forces, modify events, etc., etc., we would not speak of it as we do. Moreover, it is not only in its results but in its movements that the Force is tangible and concrete. When I speak of feeling Force or Power, I do not mean simply having a vague sense of it, but feeling it concretely and consequently being able to direct it, manipulate it, watch its movement, be conscious of its mass and intensity and in the same way of that of other perhaps opposing forces;—all these things are possible and usual by the development of Yoga.
It is not, unless it is supramental Force, a Power that acts without conditions and limits. The conditions and limits under which Yoga or sadhana has to be worked out are not arbitrary or capricious; they arise from the nature of things. These—including the will, receptivity, assent, self-opening and surrender of the sadhak have to be respected by the Yoga-force—unless it receives a sanction from the Supreme to override everything and get something done—but that sanction is sparingly given. It is only if the supramental Power came fully down, not merely sent its influences through the Overmind, that things could be very radically
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altered in this respect—and that is why my main effort is directed towards that object—for then the sanction would not be rare! For the Law of the Truth would be at work, not constantly balanced by the law of the Ignorance.
Still the Yoga-force is always tangible and concrete in the way I have described and has tangible results. But it is invisible—not like a blow given or the rush of a motor car knocking somebody down which the physical senses can at once perceive. How is the mere physical mind to know that it is there and working? By its results? But how can it know that the results was that of the yogic force and not of something else? One of two things it must be. Either it must allow the consciousness to go inside, to become aware of inner things, to believe in the experience of the invisible and the supraphysical, and then by experience, by the opening of new capacities, it becomes conscious of these forces and can see, follow and use their workings, just as the Scientist uses the unseen forces of Nature. Or one must have faith and watch and open oneself and then it will begin to see how things happen, it will notice that when the Force was called in, there began after a time to be a result, then repetitions, more repetitions, more clear and tangible results, increasing frequency, increasing consistency of results, a feeling and awareness of the Force at work—until the experience becomes daily, regular, normal, complete. These are the two main methods, one internal, working from in outward, the other external, working from outside and calling the inner force out till it penetrates and is visible in the exterior consciousness. But neither can be done if one insists always on the extrovert attitude, the external concrete only and refuses to join to it the internal concrete—or if the physical mind at every step raises a dance of doubts which refuses to allow the nascent experience to develop. Even the Scientist carrying on a new experiment would never succeed if he allowed his mind to behave in that way.
When the Mother said that it was just a trick of reversing the consciousness, she meant that: that instead of allowing
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always the external mind to interfere and assert its own ordinary customary point of view, it should turn itself round admit that things may work from in outwards, and keep itself sufficiently quiet to see that developing and being done. For then an inner mind shows itself which is capable of following and being the instrument of the invisible Forces.
It is not that you are incapable of it, for it was several times on the point of being done. But your external mind has interfered, always, questioning, doubting, asking for something more external, not waiting for the movement to continue, for the inward to externalise itself and make itself concrete. That is why I object to this worship of Doubt. It is not that I used not to have doubts myself more formidable than any you have ever thought of—but I did not allow them to interfere with the development of my experience. I let it continue until it had sufficient body for me to know what it was and what it could bring me.
August 5, 1932
The way, the attitude you suggest would indeed be the right one; but you must be able to keep it, not allow doubt to torment or impatience for results to disturb you. Impatience only hinders the result from coming or even upsets the apple-cart just when it is turning into the right lane. However, if you can take this course and keep it, it is the true preparation for the mind and vital to admit of the psychic being's emergence to the front. Intensity of aspiration can do it also, no doubt, but a quiet steady intensity, not the impatient eagerness which, when it is disappointed or the fruit delayed, calls in doubt to upset the aforesaid apple-cart.
About asking us about small things, I should hesitate to advise it if it needs on your part a heroic resolve. It is important that the vital nature should not feel a constraint, a sense of parting with its liberty under compulsion from the mind
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when this kind of step is taken; it is hard enough to get it to admit the more immediately needed control of its major impulses (sex, etc.) without coercing it in "small" things also,—at least those it feels to be small. If at any time the vital feels the need or feels this to be the natural way to a deeper soul intimacy, then the step will be of great use.
To reject doubts means control of one's thoughts—very certainly so. But the control of one's thoughts is as necessary as the control of one's vital desires and passions or the control of the movements of one's body—for the Yoga, and not for the Yoga only. One cannot be in fully developed mental being even, if one has not control of the thoughts, is not their observer, judge and master,—the mental Purusha, manomaya purusa, sāksi, anumantā, īswara [the mental Being, the witness, the giver of sanction, the Master]. It is no more proper for the mental being to be the tennis ball of unruly and uncontrollable thoughts than to be a rudderless ship in the storm of the desires and passions or a slave of either inertia or the impulses of the body. I know it is more difficult because man being primarily a creature of mental Prakrit] identifies himself with the movements of his mind and cannot at once dissociate himself and stand free from the whirl and eddies of the mind whirlpool. It is comparatively easy for him to put a control on his body, at least a certain part of its movements: it is less easy but still very possible after a struggle to put a mental control on his vital impulsions and desires; but to sit, like the Tantrik Yogi on the river, above the whirlpool of his thoughts is less facile. Nevertheless it can be done; all developed mental men, those who get beyond the average, have in one way or other or at least at certain times and for certain purposes to separate the two parts of the mind, the active part which is a factory of thoughts and the quiet masterful part which is at once a Witness and a Will, observing them, judging, rejecting, eliminating, accepting, ordering corrections and changes, the Master in the House of Mind, capable of self-empire, svarājya.
The Yogi goes still farther; he is not only a master there,
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but even while in mind in a way, he gets out of it, as it were, and stands above or quite back from it and free. For him the image of the factory of thoughts is no longer quite valid; for he sees that thoughts come from outside, from the universal Mind or universal Nature, sometimes formed and distinct, sometimes unformed and then they are given shape some where in us. The principal business of our mind is either a response of acceptance or refusal to these thought-waves (as also vital waves, subtle physical energy waves) or this giving a personal-mental form to thought-stuff (or vital movements) from the environing Nature Force. It was my great debt to Lele that he showed me this. "Sit in meditation," he said, "but do not think, look only at your mind; you will see thoughts coming into it; before they can enter throw them away from you till your mind is capable of entire silence." I had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside, but I did not think of either questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit and then I saw a thought and then another thought coming in a quite concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire.
I mention this only to emphasise that the possibilities of the mental being are not limited and that it can be the free Witness and Master in its own house. It is not to say that everybody can do it in the way I did it and with the same rapidity of the decisive movement (for, of course, the later fullest developments of this new untrammelled mental Power took time, many years); but a progressive freedom and mastery of one's mind is perfectly within the possibilities of
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anyone who has the faith and the will to undertake it. The rest hereafter.
August 8, 1932
It is a question of standard and emphasis, is it not? Maya did her best, I think, but that does not mean that somebody else in her position might not have done better. Maya was divided, so she could not put everything aside, explore every avenue, come in disregard of every obstacle. That would have been an absolute sincerity, if you like, and it is what one would expect from someone not divided, wholly fixed on the spiritual life. But Maya is not that yet, nor have we yet asked it of her, because it would have been beyond her present power. I take it that she badly wanted to come and made a real effort against Shankar's opposition—therefore we cannot say that she was insincere; but she could not carry through to the end and entirely because she was divided, as she admits. As to the other things you tell, well—they are what they are,—your view of them is right.
Khitish Sen's lines are very fine. If he had to struggle, at least he strove to some purpose! I will keep the whole still for more leisurely examination.
August 12, 1932
The rhythm of your Sarasvati is very luminously sweet and attractive, I observe that while in the beginning you moved with careful and exact steps in the Sanskritic meters you now have a light and masterly ease there.
We have taken note of the five pranams,—five in essence?
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August 16, 1932
Anyhow, do not allow yourself to be overborne by the dejection; it can only be an incident in the ups and downs of the sadhana, and, as an incident, it should be made as short as possible. Remember that you have chosen a method of proceeding in the sadhana in which dejection ought to have no place. If you have a growing faith that all that is happening has somehow to happen and that God knows what is best for you,—that is already a great thing; if you add to it the will to keep your face always turned towards the goal and the confidence that you are being led towards it even through difficulties and apparent denials, there could be no better mental foundation for sadhana. And if not only the mind, but the vital and physical consciousness can be imbued with this faith, dejection will become either impossible or so evidently an outer thing thrown from outside and not belonging to the consciousness that it will not be able to keep its hold at all. A faith of that kind is a very helpful first step towards the reversal of consciousness which makes one see the inner truth of things rather than their outward phenomenal appearance.
As for the causes of the dejection, there were causes partly general in the shape of a resistance to a great descending force which was not personal to you at all, and, so far as there was a response to it in you, it was not from your conscious being, otherwise you would not have had it in this way, but from the part in us which keeps things for a long time that have been suppressed or rejected by the conscious will. It is the conscious will that matters, for it is that [which] prevails in the end, the will of the Purusha and not the more blind and obstinate parts of Prakriti. Keep the conscious will all right and it will carry on to the goal,—just as the resistance in universal Nature will yield in the end before the Divine Descent.
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August 18, 1932
(from Mother)
I have felt and been moved by the sincerity of your letter. Do not be too sorry. In a way what has happened was for the best since it has led you to take a firm and decisive resolution which must help you greatly to get rid of this trouble. Be sure of all the help I can give you.
I will call you again as soon as this flood of departing people has diminished a little. Meanwhile, "bon courage!"
August 19, 1932
The Rishi like everything else was drowned in the flood; I have looked through it today and return it. It is a great success, the high level kept throughout; certainly you must encourage him to finish it. I take note about the "Bairagi" [?].
The Mother was very pleased to get your letter and to know that you had conquered the attack from these unpleasant forces of Nature. It is perfectly sure that you can conquer —and therefore you will.
August 22, 1932
If you can feel the Name bringing you peace, it should be able to bring everything else, bhakti, joy, the revelation of the Power and the Presence and the full feeling and consciousness of it to you. That is indeed the process of the Vaishnava sadhana and the power of the Name in it. Only keep your poise and persevere.
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August 28, 1932
I am feeling to-day an altogether new kind of peace and a surge of devotion. When I looked at Mother this evening, a prayer came up to my lips to cure me effectively of the last traces of selfishness and clamouring and what not and make me humble—really humble, not the modesty of social manners which is often worse than Shavian assertiveness (which is more sincere). I want to feel I am superior to none and can pray for love as a grace not because I am so worthy of it. I have a feeling (1 hope it is true) that my difficulties are at long last about to melt away through Mother's grace and yours. Make me pure at heart and sincere and one-pointed in my aspiration.
The Shavian assertiveness is not offensive (as the Hugoesque1 tends to be) because it is full also of a smiling self-mockery, an irony that under a form of deliberate self-praise Cuts at itself and the world in one lump. It is curious that so many people seem to miss this character of Shaw's self-assertiveness and self-praise, its essential humour.
It is very good indeed. Keep this and you cannot but progress.
September 8, 1932
I have made some slight corrections, that is all—especially in eliminating your "fancys" which seem to me to introduce too contemptuous a note. I do not agree that Wells and others are more serious than Shaw—if by seriousness is meant earnestness of belief in one's ideals and sincerity in the intelligence. These can exist very well behind a triple breastplate of satire and humour. Shaw's merits are surely
1. After Victor Hugo, the famous nineteenth-century French writer.
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greater than you seem disposed to admit in your letter. The tide is turning against him after being strongly for him— under compulsion from his own power and will, but nothing can alter the fact that he was one of the keenest and most powerful minds of the age with an originality in his way of looking at things which no one else could equal. If what was original in him has become the common stock of contemporary thought, it was his power and forcefulness that made it so—it is no more to be counted against him than the deplorable fact that Hamlet is only a "string of quotations" is damaging to Shakespeare! I do not share your exasperation against Shavianism—I find it a delightful note and am thankful to Shaw for being so refreshingly different from other men that to read even an ordinary interview with him in a newspaper is always an intellectual pleasure. As for his being one of the most original personalities of the age, there can be no doubt of that. All that I deny to him is a constructive and creative mind—but his critical force, in certain fields at least, as a critic of man and life was very great and in that field he can in a sense be called creative—in the sense that he created a singularly effective and living form for his criticism of life. It is not drama, but it is something original and strong and altogether of its own kind—so, up to that limit, I qualify my statement that Shaw was no creator.
As to the others, I do not feel inclined to be drawn in at present; I would have to say too much, if I started saying anything at all. Galsworthy I have not read—as to the/others, all I can say is that I do not share the contemporary idea about them—so far as I have read their work. Contemporary fame, contemporary opinion are creations of the hour and can die with the hour. I fail to see in many of the much praised writers of the time either the power of style or the power of critical mind or creative imagination that ensures survival. There is plenty of effective writing or skilful workmanship, but that is not enough to make literary immortals.
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September 9, 1932
I am sending you the letter which was forgotten (I intended to send it and took the intention for the act) and also the printed poems. I am quite convinced of the possibilities of the mātrā-vrtta— which would exist even if Anilbaran is right in insisting that it is the sagotra [kindred] of the aksara-vrtta. Two people may be conscious and yet have different characters, possibilities and destinies—and so may two metres.
Why do you want Shaw to be tied to some intellectual dogma and square all his acts, views and sallies to it? He is too penetrating and sincere a mind to be a stiff partisan— when he sees something which qualifies the "ism"—even that on whose side he is standing—he says so; that need not weaken the ideal behind, it is likely to make it more plastic and practicable. However, enough of Shaw, I have to answer Amal's question and that ought to finish with him. I will only add that whatever his manner, it does not appear to me that he writes merely to shock but to expose in a vivid way the stupidity of the human mind in taking established things and ideas for granted. If he does it in a striking and amusing way, why so much the livelier and the better!
I do not say anything about your poems because I have nothing new to say. You seem to have arrived at a complete command over rhythm and metre and a complete plasticity of expressions. All the rest depends upon the depths and widenesses you command and the heights you scale in the future.
September 14, 1932
I am glad to have your letter, because it makes clear to me what the decision should be. It was not from sentimental but from deeper considerations—my language was probably opaque—that I put in the balance the possibility of your
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satisfying the request in the telegram. But your letter has shown me very clearly what your inner being demands of me and also that your going now would not be desirable from the point of view of your spiritual life. That for me must be the first consideration. So, since it is left to my decision, I think it must be "no."
September 21,1932
No, what you write in your letter was not at all what the Mother was trying to tell you. The question of ahaitiikī bhakti and its opposite was settled long ago and the Mother did not intend to return upon it; it is understood that whatever the motive immediately pushing the mind or the vital, an asking for Ananda or knowledge or power, yet if there is a true seeking for the Divine in the being, it must lead eventually to the realisation of the Divine. The soul within has always the inherent (ahaitukī) yearning for the Divine; the hetu or special motive is simply an impulsion used by it to get the mind and the vital to follow the inner urge. If the mind and the vital can feel and accept the soul's sheer love for the Divine for His own sake, then the sadhana gets its full power and many difficulties disappear; but even if they do not, they will get what they seek after in the Divine and through it they will come to realise, even perhaps to pass beyond the limit of their original desire. I may say that the idea of a joyless God is an absurdity, which only the ignorance of the mind could engender. The Radha love is not based upon any such thing, but means simply that whatever comes on the way to the Divine, pain or joy, milana [union] or viraha [separation], and however long the sufferings may last, the Radha love is unshaken and keeps its faith and certitude pointing fixedly like a star to the supreme object of Love.
All this, however, has nothing to do with what the Mother wished to say in the morning. What she told you was that you seemed to have a fixed notion about the Divine, as of a
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rather distant Being somewhere whom you expect to give you an article called Ananda, and, when there is some prospect of his giving it to you, you are on good terms with him, but when he doesn't, you quarrel and revolt and call him names! And she said a notion of the kind was in itself an obstacle, because it is rather far from the Truth, in the way of realising the Divine. What is this Ananda that you seek, after all? The mind can see in it nothing but a pleasant psychological condition,—but if it were only that, it could not be the rapture which the bhaktas and the mystics find in it. When the Ananda comes into you, it is the Divine who comes into you; just as when the Peace flows into you, it is the Divine who is invading you, or when you are flooded with Light, it is the flood of the Divine Himself that is around you. Of course, the Divine is something much more; many other things besides, and in them all a Presence, a Being, a Divine Person; for the Divine is Krishna, is Shiva, is the Supreme Mother. But through the Ananda you can perceive the ānandamaya [all-blissful] Krishna; for the Ananda is the subtle body and being of Krishna; through the Peace you can perceive the śantimaya [all-peaceful] Shiva; in the Light, in the delivering Knowledge, the Love, the fulfilling and uplifting Power you can meet the presence of the Divine Mother. It is this perception that makes the experiences of the bhaktas and mystics so rapturous and enables them to pass more easily through the nights of anguish and separation; when there is this soul-perception, it gives to even a little or brief Ananda a force or value it could not otherwise have and the Ananda itself gathers by it a growing power to stay, to return, to increase. This was what the Mother meant when she said, "Don't ask the Divine to give you Ananda, ask Him to give you Himself—signifying that in the Ananda and through the Ananda it would be Himself that He would give you. There would then be no cause to say, "\ don't know the Divine I have never felt or met Him"; it would be a gate for other experiences and make it easier to see the Divine in the material object, in the human form, in the body.
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It was not a condition that the Mother was laying down when she said this; it was simply a suggestion which, if something in you could seize and profit by it, would make things less slow and difficult than they actually are.
September 22,1932
I do not know why you concluded from my letter that I was displeased or had lost patience. I was answering two letters of yours in which there was nothing that could dis please. I used the phrase about "calling the Divine names" very lightly and with no conscious intention in it; it was not meant in the least to convey displeasure or a reproach to you. It was used simply to point the description of a concep tion of the Divine, too external and summary, which seems to us to be an obstacle rather than a help to realisation. We saw that you had misunderstood what the Mother said and had taken it for an objection to your seeking for Ananda,— but it was not that at all, it was only a suggestion that in the Ananda itself when it came it was possible to feel the Divine and so open the gates to a concrete and rapturous experience. However, as I said, it was not her intention when she spoke or mine when I wrote to put it as a condition or impose it upon you. As for calling the Divine names I suppose most people have done it at one time or another and the Divine has not resented it nor has it stood in the way of His manifesting Himself to those when they were ready to receive. But I know from my own experience that the conception on which it rests belongs to a stage of misunderstanding and ignorance which one outgrows with the widening of the mind and the spirit. It was the conception as a whole which I was speaking of and this phrase was merely an ornamental detail—I never meant to lay stress on it or to suggest that it was something seriously condemnable or a cause of resentment or displeasure.
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I cannot very well answer the strictures of Russell or Vivek ananda (in one of his moods) for the conception of the Divine as an external omnipotent Power who has created the world and governs it like an absolute and arbitrary monarch. The Christian or Semitic conception, the popular religious notion, has never been mine; it contradicts too much my seeing and experience during forty years of sadhana. When I speak of the Divine Will I mean something different,—something that has descended here into an evolutionary world of Ignorance, standing at the back of things, pressing on the Darkness with its Light, leading things presently towards the best possible in the conditions of a world of Ignorance and leading it eventually towards a descent of a greater Power of the Divine which will be not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the Law of the world as it is, but a full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty and Ananda, for these are the Divine Nature. The Divine Grace is there, ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the law of the Ignorance into the Law of Light and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers. If we take the facts of the world as they are and the facts of spiritual experience as a whole, neither of which can be denied or neglected, then I do not see what other Divine there can be. This Divine may lead us often through dark ness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else.
September 23, 1932
A very fine poem this new one. The metre is a great success. I return you the former letter from Prabodh Sen which I managed to find time to read only today. He has a most acute, ingenious and orderly mind and what he says is always
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thought-provoking and interesting; but I am not persuaded that the form of Bengali mātrā-vrtta and Sanskrit laghu-guru is really and intrinsically the same. Equivalent, no doubt, in a way,—if we substitute Bengali metre for Sanskrit quantity; but not the same because Bengali metre and Sanskrit quantity are two quite different things. It is something like the equivoque by which one pretends that an English iambic metre or any other with a Greek name is the same as a Latin or Greek metre with that name—an equivoque based on the fiction that a stressed and an unstressed English syllable are quantitatively long and short. There is a certain kind of general equivalence but a fundamental difference—as those who have tried to find an equivalent in the English stress system to the quantitative Latin or Greek hexameter, alcaic or sapphic metres have discovered—they could not be trans planted, because it is only on true quantity that they can live.
As to Jyotirmayi's cousin, I don't know quite what to say. If he is not interested in Yoga, there seems to be no ground for his staying in the Ashram or for seeing the Mother—that is for the Mother receiving him. If he only wants to come to Pondicherry, visit you, see the Ashram, that would be a different thing—or he might even be allowed to come once to pranam and so see the Mother.
September 25,1932
So far as the photograph of which you speak can be taken as showing the man, it is that of a nature of which the chief character is intensity, but in a very narrow range. There is here no wide range of ideas or feelings; a few ruling ideas, a few persistent and keenly acute feelings. The face of a man whose vital is also intense, but without strength and therefore over sensitive. There may well be a strong idealistic tendency—but there is not likely to be much power to carry out the ideals. This is the character; as for the genius, if there is
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any, it will depend on other things which may not find positive expression in the outward appearance; for the external man is often the medium of a Power that is beyond him.
I shall keep the book, for a few days—if you don't need it— just to glance through it; it is too big to read in detail. I know nothing of Lawrence; I shall see if I can pick up something from here.
October 1,1932
I am still at a loss what to answer about uchchvās [exuber ance], because I still don't understand exactly what Suhrawardy is aiming at in his criticism. There is not more uchchvās in Bengali poetry than in English, if by the word is meant rhetoric, free resort to imagery, prolific weaving of words and ideas and sentiments around what one has to say. Most Indian poetry in the Sanskritic languages—there are exceptions of course—was more restrained and classic in taste or else more impressionist and incisive than most English poetry; the qualities or defects noted above came into Bengali under the English influence. I don't see therefore the point of his remark that the English language cannot express the Indian temperament. It is true of course to a certain extent, first, because no foreign language can express what is intimate and peculiar to a national temperament, it tends at once to become falsified and seems exotic, and especially the imagery or sentiment of one language does not go well with that of another; least of all can the temperament of an oriental tongue into a European tongue—what is perfectly simple and straightforward in one becomes emphatic or over-coloured or strange in the other. But that has nothing to do with uchchvās in itself. As to emotion—if that is what is meant—your word effusiveness is rather unfortunate, for effusiveness is not praiseworthy in poetry anywhere; but vividness of emotion is no more reprehensible in English than in Bengali poetry. You give as examples of uchchvās
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among other things Madhusudan's style, Tagore's poem to me,1 a passage from Govindadas. I don't think there is any thing in Madhusudhan which an English poet writing in Bengali would have hesitated to father. Tagore's poem is written at a high-pitch of feeling perfectly intelligible to anyone who had passed through the exaltation of the Swadeshi days, but not more high pitched than certain things in Milton, Shelley, Swinburne. In Govinda Das's lines,—let us translate them into English—
Am I merely thine ? 0 Love, I am there clinging
In every limb of thine—there ever in my creation and my dissolution,
the idea is one that would not so easily occur to an English poet, it is an erotic mysticism, easily suggested to a mind familiar with the experiences of Vedanta or Vaishnava mystics; but this is not effusiveness, it is intensity—and an English writer—e.g. Lawrence—could be quite as intense, but would use a different idea or image.
It is probably modern (contemporary) English poetry of which Suhrawardy is thinking. Here I am no expert; but I understand that the turn there is to suppress emotion, rhetoric, colouring, sentiment and arrive at something very direct, expressive, recording either the thing exactly as it is or some intimate essential truth of the thing without wrapping it up in ideas and sentiments, superfluous images and epithets. It does not look as if all contemporary English poetry was like that, it is only one strong trend; but such as it is, it has not as yet produced anything very decisive, great or successful. Much of it seems to be mere flat objectivity or, what is worse, an exaggerated emphatic objectivity; emotion seems often to be replaced by an intensified vital-physical sensation of the object. You will perhaps understand what I mean if you read
1. Rabindranath Tagore's homage to Sri Aurobindo when the latter was arrested for the first time in the Bande Mataram sedition case in 1907. In this poem, Rabindranath saluted Sri Aurobindo as "the voice incarnate, free, of India's soul."
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the poem quoted on pages 316-17 of the Parichay (also made much of in a book on English modernistic poetry sent to me by Arjava)—"red pieces of day, hills made of blue and green paper, Satanic and blase, a black goat lookingly wanders"— images expressing vividly an impression made on the nerves through the sight by the described object. Admittedly it is— at least when pushed to such a degree, a new way of looking at things in poetry, but not essentially superior to the impressions created on the heart or the mental imagination by the object. All the same, there is behind, but still not successfully achieved, something real, an attempt to get away from ornate mental constructions about things to the expression of the intimate truth of the things themselves as directly seen by a deeper sight within us. Only it seems to me a mistake to theorise that only by this kind of technique and in this particular way can what is aimed at be done. I have to form my idea more fully when I have finished Arjava's book, but this is what impresses me at present.
I can understand very well what Suhrawardy objects to in Harin's poetry, though his expression of it is absurdly exaggerated ("trash"), and he may be right in thinking it an exotic [?] in English literature; but I am under the impression that Harin will stand in spite of that, though he has still to write something so sovereign in its own kind as to put all doubt out of court; but, even as it is, the poetic quality of his work appears to me undeniable.
October 8, 1932
It is not easy to say precisely what is austerity in the poetic sense—for it is a quality that can be felt, a spirit in the writer and the writing, but if you put it in the strait-waistcoat of a definition or of a set technical method you are likely to lose the spirit altogether. In the spirit of the writing you can feel it as a something constant, self-restrained, grave and severe;
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it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Words worth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express the thing of which you write, thought, object or feeling, in its just form and exact power without addition and without exuberance. The austerer method of poetry avoids all lax superfluity, all profusion of unnecessary words, excess of emotional outcry, self-indulgent daub of colour, over-brilliant scattering of images, all mere luxury of external art or artifice. To use just the necessary words and no others, the thought in its simplicity and bare power, the one occasional expressive or revealing image, the precise colour and nothing more, just the exact impression, reaction, simple feeling proper to the object,—nothing spun out, additional, in excess. Any rioting in words, colour, images, emotions, sound, phrase for their own sake, for their own beauty, attraction, luxury of abundant expression would, I suppose, be what your friend means by uchchvās. Even, an extreme contemporary tendency seems to condemn the use of image, epithet, colour, pitch or emphasis of any kind, except on the most sparing scale, as a vice. Length in a poem is itself a sin, for length means padding—Suhrawardy, if I remember right, echoes this view?—a long poem is a bad poem, only brief work, intense, lyrical in spirit can be throughout pure poetry. Milton, for example, considered austere by the common run of mortals, would be excluded from the list of the pure for his sprawling lengthiness, his epic rhetoric, his swelling phrases, his cult of the grandiose. To be perfect you must be small, brief and restrained, meticulous in cut and style.
This extremism in the avoidance of excess is perhaps itself an excess. Much can be done by bareness in poetry—a poetic nudism if accompanied by either beauty and grace or strength and power has its excellence. There can be a vivid or striking or forceful or a subtle, delicate or lovely bareness which
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reaches to the highest values of poetic expression. There can be also a compact or a stringent bareness—the kind of style deliberately aimed at by Landor;1 but this can be very stiff and stilted as Landor is in his more ambitious attempts— although he did magnificent things sometimes, like his lines on Rose Aylmer; you can see there how emotion itself can gain by a spare austerity in self-expression. It is doubtful whether all these kinds—Wordsworth's lyrics, for example, the Daffodils, the Cuckoo—can be classed as austere. On the other hand, there can be a very real spirit and power of underlying austerity behind a considerable wealth and richness of expression. Arnold in one of his poems gives the image of a girl beautiful, rich and sumptuous in apparel on whose body, killed in an accident, was found beneath the sumptuousness, next to the skin, an under-robe of sackcloth. If that is admitted, then Milton can keep his claim to austeity in spite of his epic fullness and Aeschylus in spite of the exultant daring of his images and the rich colour of his language. Dante is, I think, the perfect type of austerity in poetry, standing between the two extremes and combining the most sustained severity of expression with a precise power and fullness in the language which gives the sense of packed riches—no mere bareness anywhere.
But, after all, exclusive standards are out of place in poetry; there is room for all kinds and all methods. Shakespeare was to the French classicists a drunken barbarian of genius; but his spontaneous exuberance has lifted him higher than their willed severity of classical perfection. All depends on the kind one aims at—expressing what is in oneself—and an inspired faithfulness to the law of perfection in that kind. That needs some explanation, perhaps; but I have here perforce to put a dash and finish.
1. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), an English writer and poet.
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October 9, 1932
I said that Aeschylus like Milton was austere au fond [at bottom]—there is as in Dante a high serious restrained power behind all they write; but the outward form in Milton is grandiose, copious, lavish of strength and sweep, in Aeschylus bold, high-imaged, strong in colour, in Dante full of concise, packed and significantly forceful turn and phrase. These external riches might seem not restrained enough to the purists of austerity who want the manner and not the fond only to be impeccably austere. I did not mean that Dante reached the summit of austerity in this sense; in fact I said he stood between the two extremes of bare austerity and sumptuosity of language. But even in his language there is a sense of tapasyā, of concentrated restraint in his expressive force. Amal in his translation of Dante1 has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for eloquence and he uses also a mystical turn of phrase which is not Dante's—yet he has got something of the spirit in the language, something of Dante's concentrated force of expression into his lines. You have spread yourself out even more than Amal, but still there is the Dantesque in your lines also,—very much so, I should say; for instance:
apār alakh ālo-mandākim-banyādhāre abanī-ārtir andha bubhukkhā bināshi
Quench the blind hunger of this earth-despair
With flood of glory from the immense Unseen!2
is the Dantesque itself in its movement and peculiar quality of phrase,—with only this difference that Dante would have put it into fewer words than you do. It is the Dantesque stretching itself out a little—more large-limbed, permitting itself more space.
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1. Dante's poem. Paradise, translated into English by Amal and into Bengali by Dilip. See Anāmī, p. 210.
2. Amal's translation.
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Aeschylus' manner cannot be described as uchchvās, at least in the sense given to it in my letter. He is not carefully restrained and succinct in his language like Dante, but there is a certain royal measure even in his boldness of colour and image which has in it the strength of tapasyā and cannot be called uchchvās. I suppose in Bengali this term is used a little indiscriminately for things that are not quite the same in spirit. If mere use of bold image and fullness of expression, epithet, colour, splendour of phrase is uchchvās, apart from the manner of their use, I would say that austerity and uchchvās of a certain kind are perfectly compatible. At any rate two-thirds of the poetry hitherto recognised as the best in different literatures comes of a combination of these two elements. If I find time I shall one day try to explain this point with texts to support it.
I don't know the Bengali for austerity. Gāmbhirya and other kindred things are or can be elements of austerity, but are not austerity itself. Anuchchvās is not accurate; one can be free from uchchvās without being austere. The soul of austerity in poetry as in Yoga is ātmasamyama [self-discipline]; all the rest is variable, the outward quality of the austerity itself may be variable.
There is no reason why Dante should not be replaced by the earth in the translation or Beatrice remain in it. Even the last lines could be Indianised, if you wanted, with the exit of Beatrice.
October 10, 1932
Well, that is all right. If Sahana is a devotee of the great goddess "Cha-devi" [tea goddess], she will fly and throw herself on the altar without need of urging—if not, she will sit in tealess meditation invitation-free. It will be a test of her true orientation in this "to tea or not to tea" question. As for chivalry, it is more than a century ago that Burke lamented "The days of chivalry are gone!" And in the year 1932 with
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feminism triumphant—everywhere except in France and Bokhara—how do you propose to keep the cult going any longer?
October 17, 1932
I don't think it is at all owing to the suggestion from what I wrote in the letter that you got the experience. The fundamen tal reason of these things does not belong to the surface; it is in the depths—or on the heights; at any rate, in the inner being behind the veil of the frontal consciousness. The actual occasional cause of the spiritual experience,—the match that sets alight the fire, so to say—may be something very slight and looking accidental on the surface, a chance word or happening or something quite fortuitous in its appearance. The person also through whom it comes may seem very much like a fortuitous instrument. It is true that this is only in appearance; for even things slight and seemingly fortuitous have a reason for happening as they do, but that reason too is not on the surface.
Your meeting with Subhash [Bose] was not on the physical plane, nor was it with the physical Subhash. Although it was not a sleep in which we enter into other planes of being, it was in a concentrated state in which you had crossed or were crossing the border from the physical to a deeper con sciousness. The Subhash you met there was some part of him of which the external physical Subhash is probably not himself aware and there it is quite possible that there is a Shivabhakta who could speak in praise of Gauri-vallabh; it may be even from there that come the velleities of sadhana when he is in prison and the surface kinetic man discouraged and inactive. Or it may be the Subhash met in the concentration was only a mask or an instrument for a Power that spoke the word through his voice.
As for the experience itself it takes up the movement which had started in you a long time ago and was interrupted by
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the vital upheaval that brought you so much trouble and struggle. Only there has been since a widening of the consciousness and a step forward which made this form of the experience possible. At that time you had not much appreciation for calm and peace—you hankered only after bhakti and Ananda. But calm, peace, shanti are the necessary basis for any establishment of other things, otherwise if there is no solid foundation in the consciousness, if there is only unrest and movement, bhakti, Ananda and everything else can only come and go in starts and fits and find no ground to live on. It must, however, be not a mere mental quiet but the deep spiritual peace of the shantimaya Shiva. It was this that touched you (descending through the head) in this experience. For the rest it is a resumption of the piercing of the veil, the beginning of the power of inner experience as opposed to the lesser experiences of the surface, the opening of the inner being, which is necessary for the Yogic consciousness. A certain amount of vital purification has taken place which made the resumption of this kind of experience possible.
You certainly need not be afraid of going into unconsciousness, for it is not unconsciousness that you would go into, but simply the inner consciousness,—that going quite inward which is the result of intense dhyāna [meditation] and the beginning of a certain kind of samādhi.
October 1932 ?
What the Mother said was that a star [?] moving persistently from up below is frequently seen when there is a process going on of joining the inner consciousness and the outer together. It is the separation, the veil of non-communication between the two that is the chief difficulty of the early stages of the Yoga.
Green indicates vital force, a warm vital force, not exactly
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love—at any rate there is nothing of the sexual movement in it—but affection and a generous self-giving or self-spending power of the life-force....
October 18, 1932
I am sending you back the letters, etc. The long letter is absolutely unfit for publication, as I see on a final reading, except the first page—the rest won't do at all. To the others (even the door and head letter) I will not object, if you want them. As to Subhash, I would not advise you to send him this morning's letter as it would evoke your writing to him about your experience, which it is not good to do from the point of view of your sadhana; the other letter (about Shiva, Krishna, etc.) could be sent, but would it mean anything to him—I don't know.
I have not yet found a moment's time to go through Russell's book; as soon as I can do so I will let you know if I have anything to say about him. I have already said that I have no objection to anybody admiring Russell or Lowes Dickinson or any other altruist. Genius or fine qualities are always admirable in whomever they are found; all that has nothing to do with the turn of a man's opinions or the truth or untruth of atheism or of spiritual experience. Neither for that matter is the fact that there are people who believe out of fear or desire a valid argument against the existence of the Divine. I will read the book as soon as I can, but I do not expect to find anything very novel in it, as I am perfectly familiar with European atheism and it is for the most part a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish religionism—that of orthodox exoteric Christianity as it was believed and practised in Europe. Not much food on either side of the controversy either for the intellect or the spirit!
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October 20, 1932
I am glad you have made a (partial) conquest of Buddhadev. If you can establish laghu-gum as a recognised metrical principle in Bengali, you will fulfil one of my two previsions for the future with regard to the language. When I was first introduced to Bengali prosody, I was told that Madhusudan's blank verse was one of fourteen syllables, but to my astonishment found that sometimes ten syllables even counted as fourteen, e.g.
Rāvan swashurmama Meghnādswami
[Ravan is my father-in-law, Meghnad is my husband.]
Of course, it was afterwards explained to me that the syllables were counted in the Sanskrit system, and I got the real run of rhythmic movement; but I always thought, why not have an alternative system with a true sonant syllabic basis—and, finally, I saw the birth (I mean as a recognised serious metre) of the svara-vrtta. Afterwards I came across Hemchandra's experiments in bringing in a quantitative element—and fell in love with the idea and hoped somebody would try it on a larger scale. But up till now this attempt to influence the future did not materialise. Now perhaps in your hands it will—even apart from songs.
Sorry about your nose. But after all a nose cannot be like Tennyson's brook—"Gods may come and Gods may go but I run on for ever." A running nose is essentially a temporary phenomenon, its run [?] is brief—while Shiva is supposed to be immortal.
October 22, 1932
Absence of love and fellow-feeling is not necessary to the Divine nearness; on the contrary, a sense of closeness and oneness with others is a part of the divine consciousness
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into which the sadhak enters by nearness to the Divine and the feeling of oneness with the Divine. An entire rejection of all relations is indeed the final aim of the Mayavadin and in the ascetic Yoga an entire loss of all relations of friendship and affection and attachment to the world and its living beings would be regarded as a promising sign of advance towards liberation, moksa; but even there, I think, a feeling of oneness and unattached spiritual sympathy for all is at least a penultimate stage, like the compassion of the Bud dhist, before the turning to Moksha or Nirvana. In this Yoga the feeling of unity with others, love, universal joy and Ananda are an essential part of the liberation and perfection which are the aim of the sadhana.
On the other hand, human society, human friendship, love, affection, fellow-feeling are mostly and usually—not entirely or in all cases—founded on a vital basis and are ego held at their centre. It is because of the pleasure of being loved, the pleasure of enlarging the ego by contact and pen etration with another, the exhilaration of the vital inter change which feeds their personality that men usually love —and there are also other and still more selfish motives that mix with this essential movement. There are of course higher spiritual, psychic, mental, vital elements that come in or can come in; but the whole thing is very mixed, even at its best. This is the reason why at a certain stage with or without apparent reason the world and life and human society and relations and philanthropy (which is as ego-ridden as the rest) begin to pall. There is sometimes an ostensible reason—a disappointment of the surface vital, the withdrawal of affection by others, the perception that those loved or men generally are not what one thought them to be and a host of other causes; but often the cause is a secret disappointment of some part of the inner being, not translated or not well translated into the mind, because it expected from these things something which they cannot give. It is the case with many who turn or are pushed to the spiritual life. For some it takes the form of a vairāgya [disgust] which drives them
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towards ascetic indifference and gives the urge towards Moksha. For us, what we hold to be necessary is that the mixture should disappear and that the consciousness should be established on a purer level (not only spiritual and psychic but a purer and higher mental, vital, physical consciousness) in which there is not this mixture. There one would feel the true Ananda of oneness and love and sympathy and fellow ship, spiritual and self-existent in its basis but expressing itself through the other parts of the nature. If that is to happen there must obviously be a change; the old form of these movements must drop off and leave room for a new and higher self to disclose its own way of expression and realisation of itself and of the Divine through these things— that is the inner truth of the matter.
I take it therefore that the condition you describe is a period of transition and change, negative in its beginning, as these movements often are at first, so as to create a vacant space for the new positive to appear and live in it and fill it. But the vital, not having a long continued or at all sufficient or complete experience of what is to fill the vacancy, feels only the loss and regrets it even while another part of the being, another part even of the vital, is ready to let go what is disappearing and does not yearn to keep it. If it were not for this movement of the vital, (which in your case has been very strong and large and avid of life), the disappearance of these things would, at least after the first sense of void, bring only a feeling of peace, relief and a still expectation of greater things. What is intended in the first place to fill the void was indicated in the peace and joy which came to you as the touch of Shiva—naturally, this would not be all, but a beginning, a basis for a new self, a new consciousness, an activity of a greater Nature; as I told you, it is a deep spiritual calm and peace that is the only stable foundation for a lasting Bhakti and Ananda. In that new consciousness there would be a new basis for relations with others; for an ascetic dry ness or isolated loneliness cannot be your spiritual destiny since it is not consonant with your svabhāva [essential nature]
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which is made for joy, largeness, expansion, a comprehensive movement of the life-force. Therefore do not be discouraged; wait upon the purifying movement of Shiva.
October 29, 1932
I quite understood your main point to which I shall answer, but there were many sub-issues which obscure the main one in your letter and I took the occasion to try to get rid of one of them, at once. For the moment I am answering only to your question about the music. Let me say at once that all of you seem to have too great an aptitude for making drastic conclusions on the strength of very minor facts. It is always perilous to take two or three small facts, put them together and build upon them a big inference. It becomes still more dangerous when you emphasise minor facts and set aside or belittle the meaning of the main ones. In this case the main facts are (1) that the Mother has loved music all her life and found it a key to spiritual experience, (2) that she has given all encouragement to your music in special and to the music of others also. She has also made clear the relation of Art and Beauty with Yoga. It is therefore rather extraordinary that anyone should think she only tolerates music here and considers it inconsistent with Yoga. It is perfectly true that Music or Art are not either the first or the only thing in life for her,—any more than Poetry or Literature are with me,— the Divine, the divine consciousness, the discovery of the conditions for a divine life are and must be our one concern, with Art, Poetry or Music as parts or means only of the divine life or expression of the Divine Truth and the Divine Beauty. That does not mean that they are only "tolerated", but that they are put in their right place.
Then the minor facts and their significance.
The Mother limited the concerts to one hour because that was the utmost she could give to them in the afternoons for
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which they are fixed and that meant checking a very natural tendency to spread over a greater length of time. On this occasion she first wanted it to be a half an hour affair because the more important occasion was to be reserved for November. But it was found that certain very undesirable psychological movements were tending to appear which would turn the occasion not into a part of the preparation for true expression or a part of the Yoga, but an occasion for the exhibition of a very mundane, almost professional egoism, vanity, rivalry, anger and spite at one's talent being "neglected" etc. It was decided that this anti-Yogic stuff should not be allowed to mix with the atmosphere of the 24th November1 and therefore the Sunday concert could be lengthened out and the November one dropped—and this was what was written to Venkataraman. It is not an objection to music that the decision represented, but an objection to bringing into music here these very undivine and unyogic and, if human, yet not very reputably human elements and movements. The Mother said nothing to you about it because that thing did not directly concern you and she did not besides care to make the causes of the change public.
Let us have music by all means; but music of rhythm and harmony in the atmosphere!
Khitish Sen's sonnet is a good poem—he should write more Bengali poetry. As for the substance it expresses not so much a sign of the sceptic as the attitude of the vital man to whom unmixed happiness, joy, unity, a life without suffering, strife and unrest would seem quite unsatisfying;
he complains of pain and sorrow when they come and rages against God and Fate; but if they are not there with the
1. One of the three darshan days.
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excited joys that are their accompaniments, he feels life dull and neutral and pale—excitement is his only stimulus ena bling him to live, as the drunkard cannot do without wine.
It is not possible to answer immediately your long letter. But I do not find your argument from numbers very convincing. Your 999,999 people would also prefer a jazz and turn away from Beethoven or only hear him as a duty and would feel happy in a theatre dance-tune and cold and dull to the music of Tansen. They would also prefer (even many who pretend otherwise) a catching theatre song to one of Dwijendralal's songs and probably Satyen Dutt's verses to yours—which proves to the hilt that Beethoven, Tansen, Dwijendralal and yourself are pale distant highbrow things, not the real, true, human, joy-giving stuff. In the case of Yogic or divine peace, which is not something neutral, but intense, overwhelming and positive (the neutral quiet is only a first or preparatory stage), there is this further disadvantage that your millions minus one have never known Yogic peace, and what then is the value of their turning away from what they never experienced and could not possibly under stand even if it were described to them? The man of the world knows only vital excitement and pleasure or what he can get of it, but does not know the Yogic peace and joy and cannot compare; but the Yogin has known both and can compare. I have never heard of a Yogin who got the peace of God and turned away from it as something poor, neutral and pallid, rushing back to cakes and ale. If satisfaction in the experience is to be the test, Yogic peace wins by a hundred lengths. However, you write as if I said peace was the one and only thing to be had by Yoga. I said it was a basis, the only possible secure basis for a fulfilled intensity of bhakti and Ananda. This is all by the way only.
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November 1, 1932
Your dreams were very beautiful and, symbolically, very true. By the way, let me repeat, they were not really dreams;
the state between sleep and waking or which is neither sleep nor waking is not a dozing but an inward gathered consciousness, quite as much awake as the waking mind, but awake in a different plane of experience.
As for the dream of the cobra, it could be taken as an answer to your own plaints against the Divine being grim and solemn and refusing to play and your remark that if you could have the faith that the troubles were a part of the Divine plan leading you through them to the Divine, you would be more at ease. The answer of the symbolic experience was that the Divine can play if you know how to play with him—and bear his play on your shoulders; the cobras and the bite indicate that what seems to you in the vital painful and dangerous may be the very means of bringing you the ecstasy of the Divine Presence.
Less generally the cobras are the forces of the evolution, the evolution towards the Divine. Their taking the place of the legs means that their action here takes place in the physi cal or material consciousness, in the evolution of the external mind, vital, physical towards the experience of the Divine and of the Divine Nature. The bite of the cobras (Shiva's cobras!) does not kill, or it only kills the "old Adam" in the being; their bite brings the ecstasy of the presence of the Divine—that which you felt coming upon your head as trance waves. It is this trance ecstasy that has descended upon you each time you went inside or were even on the point of going inside in meditation. It is the universal experience of sadhaks that a power or consciousness or Ananda like this first comes from above—or around—and presses on or surrounds the head, then it pierces the skull as it were and fills first the brain and forehead, then the whole head and descends occupying each centre till the whole system is full
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and replete. (Of course there are or can be preliminary rushes occupying the whole body for a time or some other part of the system most open and least resistant to the influence.)
I repeat what I have said before (though your physical mind does not yet believe) that these experiences show at once that your inner being is a Yogi capable of trance, ecstasy, intensest bhakti, fully aware of Yoga and Yogic consciousness, and showing himself the very moment you get inside yourself, even as the outer man is very much the other way round, modernised, externalised, vigorously outward vital (for the Yoga is inward-vital and psychic) and knowing nothing of Yoga or the world of inner experience. I could see at once when I saw you that there was this inner Yogi and your former experiences here were quite convincing to anyone who knows anything at all about these things. When there is this inner Yogi inside, the coming to the way of Yoga is sure and not even the most externalised surface conscious ness—not even a regular homo Russellicus outside, and you are not that, only a little Russellicatus on the surface,—can prevent final success in the Yoga. But the tussle between the inward and the outward men can create a lot of trouble, because the inward man pushes towards the Divine and will not let go and the outward man regrets, refuses, pulls back, asks what is this shadowy thing to which he is being brought, this Unknown, this (to him) far-off Ineffable. That, and not merely sex, food or society, is the genesis of the struggle and trouble in you. And yet it is all a misunderstanding—for if the outer gave entirely to the inner Yogi, he would find that what he lost or thought he was losing could be repaid a hundredfold—though he would get it in another spirit and consciousness, not any longer the transient and deceptive delight of the world for its own sake, but the delight of the Divine in the world, a thousand times more intense, sweet and desirable.
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November 1,1932
You can be reassured—it is quite certain that Sri Aurobindo cannot make such a mistake! As he says that you are sure to succeed, it means that you will succeed and become quite a good yogi after all.
Don't let troubles and difficulties depress you. The greater the difficulties the greater the victory hereafter.
November 2,1932
I suppose your letter was written for relief more than for an answer; for it raises the whole question of the meaning of this creation which does not admit of a summary reply or solution! I will only say that it is not merely to encourage you that I speak of the Yogin within you or of your [?] in Yoga. I write according to my seeing and my experience and knowl edge,—which I think is not superficial or little. As for the rarity of these strongly indicative experiences, that makes no difference to their evidential value; it is the quality and force of meaning of the experience and not the quantity or number that matters. In the early stages, before the wall of the outer nature goes down under the inner pressure, strong experiences are apt to be espacées [spaced out] or rare.
I may say also that I did not leave politics because I felt that I could do nothing there; such an idea was very far from me. I came away because I did not want anything to interfere with my Yoga and because I got a very distinct ādesa [command] in the matter. I have cut connection entirely with politics, but before I did so I knew from within that the work I had begun there was destined to be carried forward on lines I had foreseen by others and that the ultimate triumph of the movement I had initiated was sure without my physical action or presence. There was not the least motive of
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despair or sense of futility behind my withdrawal. For the rest I have never known any will of mine for one major event in the conduct of world affairs to fail in the end, although it may take a long time for the world-forces to fulfil it. As for the possibility of failure in my spiritual work I shall deal with that another time. Difficulties there are, but I see no cause for pessimism or for the certification of failure.
November 3,1932
I can only repeat for the moment that the capacity, not the faint possibility is there in you in spite of the strong resistance. As for sending you away, there is no fear of that, it is quite impossible. And since you are yourself determined to remain and see it through, success is sure whatever the difficulties or their source. If the opening does not come to you from within by your own effort, it will come to you, as it is coming to others after a long sterility, of itself from above.
November 1932 ?
You need not be anxious; Shiva won't mind at all. He butted in quite benevolently and disinterestedly in order to remove obstacles that were proving too obstinate—probably the stiff neck was only the "tautness" getting 'thrown out into the external nature from inside.
I agree that the "Bairagi" is the most finished and richest of the series—a consummate achievement.
November 4,1932
A new birth to fearless equanimity—it is a very good idea. Why so much nervousness about a wrung neck—a neck
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wrung by Shiva ought afterwards to be as strong as the neck of Atlas or even of Sheshnaga [the king of snakes].
I am reading your printed poems and notice the devilries of the printer. There is one in the English translation—for I stood aghast before a "hand of empty dreams"—and this singular hand was plural! It took me a minute to discover that the Devil's own had turned a collective band into a plural hand. "A hand of empty dreams"—how gloriously poetic and modernistically full of a meaningless significance!
The Mother says that, if you want, you can come to her for a short time tomorrow morning at 9.15 (Saturday).
P. S. Of course, Prabodh Sen is right. I suppose what Buddhadev means is that none of the very great poets invented a metre—they were all too lazy and preferred stealing other people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from whoever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace? They did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can't spot a precedent in modern European literature but there must be some. And after all, hang precedents! A good thing—I mean, combining metre invention with perfect poetry—would be still a good thing to do even if no one had had the good sense to do it before.
November 5, 1932
Yes, you can put in the Peace letter.
After all, you have at least one poem in laghu-guru sufficiently long and with a sufficiently plastic flow to test the question whether the quantitative movement can be applied in Bengali to other than songs and short lyrics. It seems to me that the answer must be in the affirmative.
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November 6,1932
I was not thinking of Tagore's lyrics from the point of view of their music, but as poetry—that is why I used the word "lyrics" which can refer to a poem as poem only. However, if there is likely to be a misunderstanding, you can substitute Dwijendralal for Tagore. Your remark on Bengali musical taste is gratifying to me personally, for I always had an idea that it was like that; Bengali music of the day—1 was told it was the new style—seemed to me flat, empty and unprofitable; but I kept my impression to myself, as I had no knowledge of music and doubted my possession of that useful appendage, an ear. I began to think, however, that I had at least an instinct in its place.
November 7,1932
It is very good. Shiva has a reason for all he does and a good (beneficent) reason even when one can't make out what he is doing and why. He is generally too busy to stop and explain as Krishna sometimes (but not by any means always) takes the trouble to do. It is true he is said to have spouted out the greater part of the Tantras to Parvati, but that was probably when he had nothing else to do.
I am glad to see that this working repeats itself—for behind it is a great preparation of the consciousness which Is quite indispensable.
November 13, 1932
It is a very successful rhythm indeed and, as far as I can judge solves the question—for it is not a Sanskrit metre transfused into Bengali, but something that sounds like a natural and native movement throughout. It looks to me as if you had done the trick!
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As to Aurobindo Bose, I am doubtful. One would judge him from his letter to be a man vitally divided and unstable. And this allusion to a mess from which suicide seemed for a time the only issue is not very encouraging. It seems to me that you could write to him that coming here and staying in the Ashram is a step that should not be taken lightly and that, for that reason, permission is not given as a rule unless one is already a disciple or strongly called to the Yoga. (I would rather not have doubtful or complicated people just now—this November we are drawing a limiting circle for the darshan.)
November 16, 1932
Yes, the poem is a great success both in poetry and rhythm —the new version of the last stanzas is an improvement.
To get rid of the random thoughts of the surface physical mind is not easy. It is sometimes done by a sudden miracle as in my own case, but that is rare. Some get it done by a slow process of concentration, but that may take a very long time. It is easier to have a quiet mind with things that come in passing on the surface, as people pass in the street, and one is free to attend to them or not—that is to say, there develops a sort of double mind, one inner silent and concentrated when it pleases to be so, a quiet witness when it chooses to see thoughts and things,—the other meant for surface dynamism. It is probable in your case that this will come as soon as these descents of peace, intensity or Ananda get strong enough to occupy the whole system.
November 19, 1932
I really don't know, my dear Dilip, why you read into what I have written such extravagant things which I certainly
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never intended to be there. I was trying to explain in one letter why, practically, the Mother could not see anyone until she was strong enough; why should you deduce from it a principle intended to govern her action for all the future? I did not at all mean that you were henceforth to be con founded in the mass and never see the Mother in private! I have not, I think, anywhere insisted on "a silent expression less love" and I cannot even remember having used the phrase. On the contrary, I thought I had made it clear, first that divine love and psychic love both needed a complete expression and that vital and physical love were their necessary complements and were both a part of that complete expression. At any rate, if that was not clear in my letter, I want to make it clear now,—as also that physical darshan, etc. are quite legitimate means of expression of the psychic love itself and, a fortiori, of the complete love which embraces all the parts of the nature. Therefore, you were never asked to stop seeing the Mother and to give up all personal private contact with her; on the contrary when from some misunderstanding you made the proposal, both the Mother and myself strongly objected and said it would be a wrong movement. How then can you imagine that I wanted you to do anything of the kind? As for killing the vital, that would be an absolute contradiction to the whole principle of the sadhana and we would never dream of asking anybody to do such a thing. We have always said that the vital was absolutely indispensable to any realisation and without it nothing,—neither the Divine nor anything else—could be established in life. All that I ventured to suggest was that the vital movements which lead to trouble and suffering and disturbance should be eliminated or transformed as soon as possible, and even this I would not have stressed in your case if you had not had these violent fits of misery and despondency and what seemed to me unnecessary suffering. You can surely under stand that I do not like to see you suffer and, knowing from long experience that it is the cravings and imagination of the lower vital consciousness that cause men needlessly to torture
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themselves, wanted you to get free from the cause. It was not the joy of seeing and talking with the Mother that I wanted you to suppress but this contrary element in you that makes you think she does not love you, does not want to see you or to smile on you, prefers others to yourself, etc., etc. However, I will not insist; I will wait for these disturbances to pass away from you in the due course of the Yoga, as the inner being develops and takes charge of the lower vital nature.
May I put in a plea for my poor Supramental against which you seem to have something like a grudge? I should like to say that the supramental is not something cold, distant and remote; on the contrary, when it descends into the physical, it will mean the full outflow and full completeness and expression of love on the vital and physical as well as on every other plane. And it is because I know it means this and many other desirable things that I am so insistent on bringing it down as soon as possible.
And let me say also that, as regards human love and divine love, I admitted the first as that from which we have to proceed and to arrive at the other, intensifying and transforming into itself, not eliminating human love. Divine Love in my view of it, is again not something ethereal, cold and far, but a love absolutely intense, intimate and full of unity, closeness and rapture using all the nature for its expression. Certainly, it is without the confusions and disorders of the present lower vital nature which it will change into something entirely warm, deep and intense; but that is no reason for supposing that it will lose anything that is true and happy in the elements of love.
Finally, I will call your attention to what I have said very plainly that you have in no degree contributed to bring about the Mother's illness; why then persist in thinking that you have done so or may do it? As for my dark hints about the necessity of a radical change in the sadhana—I spoke, in fact, of a needed change in the inner attitude of the sadhaks, —it was not a reference to you, but to much that had been going wrong within the atmosphere. You yourself speak of
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certain persons shaping funnily before the eyes of all, especially during the Mother's illness; there is nothing unreason able in our wanting to make the inner mistakes to cease which cause such funny shapings to be possible. There is nothing in that that touches you or need alarm you.
I have not yet said anything about the Mother's illness1 because to do so would have needed a long consideration of what those who are at the centre of a work like this have to be, what they have to take upon themselves of human or terrestrial nature and its limitations and how much they have to bear of the difficulties of the transformation. All that is not only difficult in itself for the mind to understand but difficult for me to write in such a way as to bring it home to those who have not our consciousness or our experience. I suppose it has to be written, but I have not yet found the necessary form or the necessary leisure.
November 22, 1932 2
I shall certainly do what I can to help you but it will be easier if you do what the Mother asked you to do—to "efface all that" from your mind instead of letting it return constantly upon it. It is no use making [a serious?] obstacle out of a passing trifle. As for the rest, I do not know that I can say anything new; I have tried to explain what was the difficulty in your way, but my explanations do not amount to much; one must see for oneself. You are right in praying to realise that difficulty, but if you could realise it without being carried away by the movement of depression, see it with calm and detachment, standing back from it,—it would be easier for you to get out of it or at least prevent it from recurring
1. About your dream I think I have already intimated that you could accept it as true. (Sri Aurobindo's note)
2. One side of the manuscript of this letter is torn, leaving many words missing.
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violently each time there is a movement towards experience. But the despondency, the depression which takes hold of you and finds its own justifications for lasting comes [?] of your realising with the necessary calmness and detachment.
You know very well that I am not going to [send?] you stinging letters or take your name off the list. On our side our relation with you remains firm and you will always find from us an unwavering help and affection. I expect you to throw off these black clouds and [pass?] quickly into the sunlight. The road may be long and more difficult than you ever expected, but there is no true reason for despair.
November 24, 1932
The Mother has given "Bindu" his permission. For the moment I say nothing about him, for although one may form a fundamental impression for oneself in a moment's contact amid a rush or stream of two hundred people, a deliberate judgment to be put on paper is quite another matter.
Of course Tagore's worshippers will go for Prabodh Sen, what did you expect? Literary nature (artistic generally, or at least very often) is human nature at its most susceptible— genus irritabile vatum.1 And besides where is the joy of literature if you cannot use your skill of words in pummelling some opposite faction's nose? Man is a reasoning animal (perhaps?), but a belligerent reasoning animal and must fight with words if he cannot do it with fists, swords, guns or poison gas. All the more, I applaud your decision not to pursue farther the trairath [triple chariot].
I quite agree about the metre and its success. In this form the poem is still better than it was before.
1. Words from Horace, meaning "the irritable race of poets."
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December 1932
When the colours begin to take definite shapes it is a sign of some dynamic work of formation going on in the consciousness—a square, for instance, means that some kind of creation is in process in some field of the being; the square indicates that the creation is to be complete in itself. While the rectangle indicates something partial and preliminary. The waves of colour mean a dynamic rush of forces and the star may in such a context indicate the promise of the new being that is to be formed. The blue colour must here be the Krishna light—so it is a creation under the stress of Krishna light. All these are symbols of what is going on in the inner being, in the consciousness behind, and the results well up from time to time in the external or surface consciousness in such feeling as the awareness of a softening and opening which you had, devotion/joy, peace, Ananda, etc. When the opening is complete, there is likely to be a more direct consciousness of the working that is going on behind till it is no longer behind but in the front of the nature.
The child is a very beautiful child and full of life, that is all that can be said for the moment.
I have read again the message of the yogi quoted in Madame Gold's letter but apart from the context nothing much or very definite can be made out of it. There are two statements which are clear enough: .
'In silence is wisdom"—it is in the inner silence of the mind that true knowledge can come; for the ordinary activity of the mind only creates surface ideas and representations which are not true knowledge. Speech is usually only the expression of the superficial nature—therefore to throw oneself out too much in such speech wastes the energy and prevents the inward listening which brings the word of true knowledge.
"In listening you will win what you are thinking of means probably that in silence will come the true thought-formations
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which can effectuate or realise themselves. Thought can be a force which realises itself, but the ordinary surface think ing is not of that kind, there is in it more waste of energy than in anything else. It is in the thought that comes in a quiet or silent mind that there is power.
'Talk less and gain power" has essentially the same meaning. Not only a truer knowledge, but a greater power comes to one in the quietude and silence of a mind that, instead of bubbling on the surface, can go into its own depths and listen for what comes from a higher consciousness.
It is probably this that is meant—these are things known to all who have some experience of Yoga.
The Synthesis of Yoga is being revised and largely rewritten for publication; so I don't think it is possible to send out copies of it like this. For the moment the revision has been stopped, because I have not a moment free, but I hope to resume it shortly; the publishers are in fact pressing for the book. It was why I wrote to Jyoti that it could not be sent outside.
Your poem and its metre are very fine. The rhythm has to my ear a truly inspired long and wide and full movement, with an organic harmony which is admirable.
Depreciation of Bankim is absurd; he is and will always rank as one of the great creators and his prose stands among the ten or twelve best prose-styles in the world's literature.
December 2, 1932
The difficulty of getting the inner being out on the surface is no doubt very strong as is usually the case with all who have lived very much in the active mind and in outward
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things. There are other here who are considered good sadhaks who are or were in the same case. But that can be overcome only by a long and patient pressure. The more important thing for you is to refuse to be overcome by the reaction that comes after an experience—to take it as a sign of hope rather than meet it with a reaction of disappointment and sense of failure.
As to Putu's1 collapse, I did not intend to say anything about it just now,—for mental discussion of causes and con sequences is not of much help at this juncture. I must say however that it is not the push for union with the Divine nor is it the Divine Force that leads to madness—it is the way in which people themselves act with regard to their claim for these things. To be more precise, I have never known a case of collapse in Yoga—as opposed to mere difficulty or negative failure,—a case of dramatic disaster in which there was not one of three causes—or more than one of the three at work. First, some sexual aberration—I am not speaking of mere sexuality which can be very strong in the nature with out leading to collapse—or an attempt to sexualise spiritual experience on an animal or gross material basis; second, an exaggerated ambition, pride or vanity trying to seize on spiritual force or experience and turn it to one's own glorification—ending in megalomania; third, an unbalanced vital and a weak nervous system apt to follow its own imaginations and unruled impulses without any true mental will or strong mental will to steady or restrain it, and so at the mercy of the imaginations and suggestions of the adverse vital world when carried over the border into the intermediate zone of which I spoke in a recent message. All the causes of collapse in this Ashram2 have been due to these three causes—to the first two mostly. Only three or four of them have ended in madness—and in these the sexual aberration was invariably
1. A Bengali sadhika, Anilbaran's relative.
2. "In this Ashram" was omitted from the excerpt from this letter that was published in Letters on Yoga (24:1766).
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present; usually a violent fall from the Way is the consequence. Putu's is no exception to the rule. It is not because she pushed for union with the Divine that she went mad, but because she misused what came down for a mystic sexuality and the satisfaction of megalomaniac pride, in spite of my repeated and insistent warnings. For the moment that is all the light I can give on the matter—naturally I generalise and avoid details.
December 13, 1932
Krishnaprem's letter is quite sound throughout as usual as he has evidently a living knowledge about the spiritual con sciousness and spiritual experience. I return the manuscript page—the word is "adhyatmikisers", those who adhyatmik ise, the theorists of the philosophico-spiritual Abstract. (Naturally, those who "kise" or "cise" too much about things, the doctrinaires, are always falling into absurdities like the one he notes.) I keep the typescript as I have still to read the letter to the Mother and I shall comment further when I return it.
December 14,1932
Herewith the photos and correspondence. It is certainly better not to dwell on the difficulties or give them too much force, because, our experience shows us, to do so helps to make them return like a recurring decimal. The Coue formula1 is too crude and simple to be entirely true in principle, but it has a great practical force and behind it there is a very great truth in a world and a consciousness governed by the Overmind Maya: it is this that what we oppose
1. A method of autosuggestion in vogue in the early twentieth century, named after the French psychotherapist Emile Coue, which consisted in repeating to oneself that one is fine, getting better all the time, etc.
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strongly gets power to persist in the consciousness and experience and calls circumstances to its support, what we deny and reject and refuse to support by the power of the Word, tends, after a time and some resistance, to lose force in the consciousness and the circumstances and movements that support it tend also to recur less often and finally disappear. It is fundamentally the principle of the mantra. On that ground I approve of your resolution not to give any more the avalambana [support] of the written word to these things. A constant affirmation from within on the other side—of that which is to be realised—brings always in the end a response from above.
December 17,1932
Yes, I propose to comment on Krishnaprem's letter because what he says is not only true but very much to the point and needs stressing.
The depression of the vital you feel is a continuation of the old feeling in the struggle, but you must reject it and make of it a diminishing movement. The past in Yoga is no guide to the future. For what happened in the past was due to temporary and not permanent causes and to eliminate them is the very purpose of the sadhana.
There is no reason why you should stop writing letters— it is only one kind of letter that is in question and that is not a very good means of contact; you yourself felt the reaction was not favourable. I asked you to write because your need of unburdening the perilous matter in you was very great at the time and, although it did not relieve you at once, it kept me exactly informed of the turns of the fight and helped me
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to put a certain pressure on the attacking forces at a critical moment. But I do not believe any of these necessities now exists. It is rather a discouragement from within yourself of the source of these movements that is now the need; but putting them into words would tend, as I have said, to give them more body and substance.
It is an undoubted fact proved by hundreds of instances that for many the exact statement of their difficulties to us is the best and often, though not always, an immediate, even an instantaneous means of release. This has often been seen by sadhaks not only here, but far away, and not only for inner difficulties, but for illness and outer pressure of unfavourable circumstances. But for that a certain attitude is necessary—either a strong faith in the mind and vital or a habit of reception and response in the inner being. Where this habit has been established, I have seen it to be almost unfailingly effective, even when the faith was uncertain or the outer expression in the mind vague, ignorant or in its form mistaken or inaccurate. Moreover, this method succeeds most when the writer can write as a witness of his own movements and state them with an exact and almost impartial precision, as a phenomenon of his nature or the movement of a force affecting him from which he seeks release. On the other hand, if in writing his vital gets seized by the thing he is writing of and takes up the pen for him,— expressing and often supporting doubt, revolt, depression, despair, it becomes a very different matter. Even here some times the expression acts as a purge; but also the statement of the condition may lend energy to the attack, at least for the moment, and may seem to enhance and prolong it, exhaust ing it by its own violence perhaps for the time and so bring ing in the end a relief, but at a heavy cost of upheaval and turmoil—and the risk of the recurring decimal movement, because the release has come by temporary exhaustion of the attacking force, not by rejection and purification through the intervention of the Divine Force with the unquestioning assent and support of the sadhak. There has been a confused
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fight, an intervention in a hurly-burly, not a clear alignment of forces—and the intervention of the helping force is not felt in the confusion and the whirl. This is what used to happen in your crises; the vital in you was deeply affected and began supporting and expressing the reasonings of the attacking force,—in place of a clear observation and expression of the difficulty by the vigilant mind laying the state of things in the light for the higher Light and Force to act upon it, there was a vehement statement of the case for the Opposition. Many sadhaks (even "advanced") had made a habit of this kind of expression of their difficulties and some still do it; they cannot even yet understand that it is not the way. At one time it was a sort of gospel in the Ashram that this was the thing to be done,—I don't know on what ground, for it was never part of my teaching about the Yoga, —but experience has shown that it does not work; it lands one in the recurring decimal notation, an unending round of struggle. It is quite different from the movement of self-opening that succeeds, (here too not necessarily in a moment, but still sensibly and progressively) and of which those are thinking who insist on every thing being opened to the Guru so that the help may be more effectively there.
It is inevitable that doubts and difficulties should arise in so arduous an undertaking as the transformation of the normal nature of man into the spiritual nature, the replacement of his system of externalised values and surface experience into profounder inner values and experience. But the doubts and difficulties cannot be overcome by giving them their full force; it can be rather done by learning to stand back from them and to refuse to be carried away; then there is a chance of the still small voice from within getting itself heard and pushing out these louder clamorous voices and movements from outside. It is the light from within that you have to make room for; the light of the outer mind is quite insufficient for the discovery of the inner values or to judge the truth of spiritual experience.
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December 18 1932
In the typed letter1 I have tried to explain the rationale of this matter of expression or non-expression of the difficulties that assail one in the Yoga. I don't know whether I have been able to make it clear. But in any case it is not really a matter of principle, but of the needs of the case and the moment. You had to write at that time and to have been silent would have been more prejudicial than writing all that was coming up in you. But now I feel that you are right in not doing so any longer. It is necessary to establish in its place a habit of conscious inner response, that is really the thing truly helpful —and if you silence the itch of the outer reason, as you say you feel now disposed to do, and count upon a more inner development, that can be done. It is not that you do not respond, I have seen that you do, but the activity of the mind struggling to solve its own difficulties and the vital's has stood a good deal in the way both of the quickness of the response and of your being conscious of it on the surface. What I want to say is that there is a deeper Light than the outer reasons in yourself, and it is getting access to that that is the most important thing for you to do. With this Light open in you, love and bhakti and Ananda will be more easy to feel and retain, for it is this that creates their needed atmosphere.
December 24, 1932
Today a Kanchenjungha of correspondence has fallen on my head, so I could not write about humanity and its progress. Were not the later views of Lowes Dickinson greyed over by the sickly cast of a disappointed idealism? I have not myself an exaggerated respect for humanity and what it is—but to say that there has been no progress is as
____________
1. The preceding letter.
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much an exaggerated pessimism as the rapturous hallelujahs of the nineteenth century to a progressive Humanity were an exaggerated optimism. However of that later, if it may be; if I don't get on my head too persistent an avalanche of Kanchenjungas.
I shall manage to read through the chapter you sent me, though how I manage to find time for these things is a standing miracle and a signal proof of a Divine Providence.
Yes, the "progress" you are making is of the genuine kind, —the signs are recognisable. And after all, the best way to make Humanity progress is to move on oneself—that may sound either individualistic or egoistic, but it isn't: it is only common sense.
Yadyadācarati śrestastattadevetaro janah.
[Whatever the best do is put into practice by the rest (Gita, 3.21).]
December 24,1932
I had already read most of the article in the magazine—I read the whole or rather rushed through it this time; it is clear enough, I find. Who by the way are the friendly people who find your poems trashy and my approval partial— is it our dear X of Saturday fame? It sounds like his style. Such appreciations are after all part of the familiar savour of life and we should perhaps miss them if they were not there! It is argued by the philosophers that everything that exists has a use, so why not Sajani also ?
December 26,1932
I read in the papers a recent letter published from Subhash to a friend of his wherein he writes his prayer is "Let thy will be done." I was anxious to read this—as a surgeon from Calcutta suggested an operation for application of
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oxygen whatever that might mean. I will pray. But in the meanwhile could you possibly make an excep tion in his case ? I want to send him the Chapter I Saurin typed. It will, I am sure, be just the aliment for his soul and may work a sort of miracle as it did in me (combined with Krishnaprem's letter—what about comments thereon though ? Pardon me for reminding in spite of my knowl edge thatyou have a Kanchenjunga of correspondence!) He will return it if you wish it to be returned and I think it is extremely beautiful as it is. So unless you have a particular reason you could see your way to allowing me to send him this Chapter by tomorrow's post.
I saw the star and colours all right and the bells are loud. I am feeling joyful only Subhash's case has countered it somewhat. I owe such a lot to him in life. How I wish sometimes or rather imagine sometimes my tending him by his sickbed. Please excuse me if I speak a bit too much of him. But you will surely understand and allow for my human tenderness for him. I can't contemplate his death yet à la Gita.
I am not sure that Subhash is prepared to receive any effect from it—it is only because your inner preparation had proceeded to a point at which you could feel something of what was behind the words that it had an effect upon you. All the same—you can send it, if you like.
December 28, 1932
The desire for the Divine or for bhakti for the Divine is the one desire which can free one from all the others—at the core it is not a desire, but an aspiration; a soul need, the breath of existence of the inmost being, and as such it cannot be counted among desires, kamanār madhye nay.
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December 30, 1932
I have compared your translations with the original; you have taken the sense and put it into the poetic form in Bengali with your usual combination of fidelity and felicity. Very well done indeed!
No, I don't think there is too much uchchvās.
As for the "spectator" and the coils of the dragon, it is the Chino-Japanese image for the world-force extending itself in the course of the universe and this expresses the attitude of the witness seeing it all and observing in its unfolding the unrolling of the play of the Divine Lila [play]. It is this attitude that gives the greatest calm, peace, samatā [equanimity] in face of the riddle of the cosmic workings. It is not meant that action and movement are not accepted but they are accepted as the Divine Working which is leading to ends which the mind may not always see at once, but the soul divines through all the supreme purpose and the hidden guidance.
Of course, there is afterwards an experience in which the two sides of the Divine Whole, the Witness and the Player, blend together; but this poise of the spectator comes first and leads to that fuller experience. It gives the balance, the calm, the increasing understanding of soul and life and their deeper significances without which the full supramental experience cannot come.
Mahalakshmi
(Sri Aurobindo's translation of Dilip's poem)
At the mobile passion of thy tread the cold snows faint and fail,
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Hued by thy magic touches shimmering glow the horizons pale
The heavens thrill with thy appeal, earth's grey moods break and die,
In nectarous sound thou lav'st men's hearts with thy voice of Eternity,
All that was bowed and rapt lifting clasped hands out of pain and night,
How hast thou filled with murmuring ecstasy, made proud and bright!
Thou hast chosen the grateful earth for thy own in her hour of anguish and strife,
Surprised by thy rapid feet of joy, O Beloved of the Master of Life.
To the above this reply came to me Man has tested Divine grace most-in order to bring into boldest relief its marvel and miracle. I wonder if my answer is true?
Your answer is not only fine poetry but it is a true explanations of the descent of the soul into the Ignorance. It is the adventure into the Night (the introduction of the Light, Joy, Immortality) to see whether they cannot be established there -so that there may be a new experience of the Divine and joy of the Divine through separation and union (or reunion) on a new basis. It is what I have hinted at in the Riddle of This World.
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