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
1933?
Each has his own periods of fulfilment and difficulty, his own distinct course and times and seasons of the sadhana.
(Dilip had written that Jyoti was constantly shocked that people should lie, "But while we all agree that we all lie she seems to think that she is incapable of lying!")
Lies? Well, A Punjabi student at Cambridge once took our breath away by the frankness and comprehensive profundity of his affirmation: "Liars! But we are all liars!" It appeared that he had intended to say "Lawyers," but his pronunciation gave his remark a deep force of philosophic observation and generalisation which he had not intended! But it seems to me the last word in human nature. Only the lying is sometimes intentional, sometimes vaguely half-intentional, sometimes quite unintentional, momentary and unconscious. So there you are!
No, certainly not. If you gave my name, it would be as if I were advertising myself in your book. I did not care to have anything of the kind written,; as I told you, because I do not think these things are of any importance. I merely wrote, in the end, a brief summary of the most outward facts, nothing inward or personal, because I have seen that many; legends and distortions are afloat, and this will at least put things in the straight line. If you like you can mentions that it is brief statement of the principal facts of Sri Aurobindo's public life
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from an authoritative source.
Necessarily I have mentioned only salient facts, leaving out all mere details. As for an estimate of myself I have given none. In my view, a man's value does not depend on what he learns or his position or fame or what he does, but on what he is and inwardly becomes, and of that I have said nothing. I do not want to alter what I have written. If you like you can put a note of your own to the "occidental education" stating that it included Greek and Latin and two or three modern languages, but I do not myself see the necessity of it or the importance.
Yes, you can take the morning tea as you propose with Saurin and the others. You need have no scruples about that.
There is no harm in the vital taking part in the joy of the rest of the being; it is the participation of the vital that makes it dynamic and communicates it to the external nature.
I shall certainly reply about Madame Gold, but these two days I could not as there were too many letters asking for an immediate answer.
I suppose you can publish the two letters, with the omission you have marked in one of them; I had some hesitation about the passage on Russell, as it is rather personal, but I suppose it does not matter. Your book will at least be striking by variety—apart from the merit of your poems—with all these things in it—including the Rishi and its translation, which must make a rather big morsel.
Keep out the intruder! And let the star of Truth and Bhakti grow in you.
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As yesterday in spite of the new arrangements was almost a typical Monday, I could not do anything—today I have read the second instalment of your poem and part of the third,—up to now it amply fulfils the first promise—but could not finish, unless I chose to gallop through, which would not be a pleasant haste—so I prefer to make you wait. Even as it is, I would have preferred to read more slowly, because going quickly I miss many things. Nolini has given me the typed draft of "Nirvana"—I shall correct it as soon as I have finished your poem and shall complete "Harmony" —it may take me two or three days—for nowadays I am writing slowly.
(...) Murala has written accordingly to us asking for permission to come in a mood of effervescent joy and expectation. This is the deuce of a fix. Apart from all other awkardnesses, the Mother has no place to put them in—not a place anywhere that is suitable. In fact it is likely that the whole Ashram will be occupied this time. Dr. Mandal and his family are coming and will take the Cocotiers and so on. If we give permission, it means that Maya and they will have to take a separate house—with all that that means—supposing a suitable house is available anywhere near. To refuse is difficult, to permit is difficult. It is the position of the cleft stick—and there we are!
I suppose the English and French1 can go side by side—but the French should be revised by someone who knows
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1. The French original and English translation of Mother's Prayers and Meditations, some of which Dilip translated into Bengali and published in his book Anami.
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how the language is printed—otherwise the divisions of words/ etc. will be all wrong. If you send your proof copy here, the Mother will get it done by Pavitra. Yes Anjali is a very good heading for the translations.
I have read today along with the original your translation of the prayer in Page 373. It is a very fine poem, but it seems to me there are several touches which are more buoyant and hopeful and confident than the atmosphere of the original would tolerate. That atmosphere is one of abandonment, darkness, where all the circumstances justify despair—with it resignation, faith in the eventual utility of it all, a stoic-spiritual courage to go through, but all these like a flame burning under the weight of the thick darknesses—not the sense of an immediate help or even prayer or call for it or of any unsparing victory [shata jay] as in the translation. I mention this because it seems to me to give a less powerful, sombre and grandiose note to the mood expressed in the poem than that expressed in the original prayer.
Herewith your proofs. Truly a fine and masterly achievement!
I send you back your father's poem in the translation with a closer rendering of the cloud and grove lines to replace my sublimation of Fried Das. Khitish Sen's renderings of Mirabai are very good and I have only made a few verbal alterations.
You have made a very fine and true rendering of the "Vedantin's Prayer".1 Perhaps so high and rocky a person as
1. A poem by Sri Aurobindo (Collected Poems, 5:49).
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the Vedantin, who is very much of a converted Titan, would not have thought of such a sweet and luxurious word as kusumi [flowering] in the midst of his ascent and struggle, but these few alterations do not make any real difference to the spirit. There is quite sufficient nobility and power in your translation. With that, it seems to me as literal as it can be.
I enclose the Mother's chit for the pillow-cases.
By the way, I forgot to say anything about the Conversations for Harin,—Mother will send a copy... [incomplete].
Khitish Sen's translation of the opening lines of the Vedantin's Prayer is magnificently done. He has quite caught the tone of the original, its austerity and elevation of thought and feeling and severe restraint of expression with yet a certain massiveness of power in it,—these at least were what tried to come out when I wrote it, and they are all unmistakably and nobly there in his rendering. If he can complete it without falling from the high force of this opening, it will be a chef d'oeuvre. I notice he has got the exactly corresponding verse movement also. Yours is a fine poem, but I agree with you that this is at once poetic in a high degree and renders more closely the innate character of the... [incomplete].
Khitish Sen's translation is indeed a very good poem—and the more remarkable as an achievement because he renders, except in one or two places, with a great closeness. How is it that with such a gift he does not write more in Bengali?
A copy of the Conversations can be given to your young friend, S. Pradhan, but the Mother would prefer to do it not
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now, but as soon as he comes out from prison. Since he has gone there for civil Disobedience, it must be for a fixed time I suppose, not for this life and a little longer, like a détenu [prisoner]? For how long?
(...)
January 1933 ?
I return Ashalata's letter–certainly there seems to be a strength and substance in her intelligence which has an extraordinary promise for the future. I don't know what were Lawrence's ganglionic theories, but I am afraid the tangle of ganglia exist and are a more tragic obstacle to the human being than is realised by Aldous Huxley. His own famous novel (I have read only one) is really without his knowing it full of the tangle—so perhaps was the life of Lawrence.
As for your question about the relative value in work, it is not easy to make the overmind view of these things comprehensible in mental language... [incomplete].
January 1933?
Surely something is being done and the consciousness will emerge. The third eye takes time to open, but the opening must come.
Ashalata indeed writes well. But her thesis seems a little doubtful when we have so many cases crowding on us (Maya's and others) which do not at all square with it. That without internal change external freedom is inutilisable is one side of the matter... [incomplete].
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January 5, 1933
I cannot say that I follow very well the logic of your doubts. How does a brilliant scholar being clapped into prison invalidate the hope of the Yoga? There are many dismal spectacles in the world, but that is after all the very reason why Yoga has to be done. If the world were all happy and beautiful and ideal, who would want to change it or find it necessary to bring down a higher consciousness into the earthly Mind and Matter? Your other argument is that the work of the Yoga itself is difficult, not easy, not a happy canter to the goal. Of course it is, because the world and human nature are what they are. I never said it was easy or that there were not obstinate difficulties in the way of the endeavour. Again, I do not understand your point about raising up a new race by my going on writing trivial letters. Of course not—nor by writing important letters either; even if I were to spend my time writing fine poems it would not build up a new race. Each activity is important in its own place—an electron or a molecule or a grain may be small things in themselves, but in their place they are indispensable to the building up of a world,—it cannot be made up only of mountains and sunsets and streamings of the aurora borealis,—though these have their place there. All depends on the force behind these things and the purpose in their action—and that is known to the Cosmic Spirit which is at work,—and it works, I may add, not by the mind or according to human standards but by a greater consciousness which, starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using "a tangle of ganglia," can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet either made up only of magnificent and important things? How many "trivial" things had to be dealt with and done before there could be produced a "King Lear" or a "Hamlet"? Again, according to your own reasoning, would
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not people be justified in mocking at your pother—so they would call it, I do not—about metre and scansion and how many ways a syllable can be read? Why, they might say, is Dilip Roy wasting his time in trivial prosaic things like this when he might have been spending it in producing a beautiful lyric or fine music? But the worker knows and respects the material with which he must work and he knows why he is busy with "trifles" and small details and what is their place in the fullness of his labour.
As for, faith, you write as if I never had a doubt or any difficulty. I have had worse than any human mind can think of. It is not because I have ignored difficulties, but because I have seen them more clearly, experienced them on a larger scale than anyone living now or before me that, having faced and measured them, I am sure of the results of my work. But even if I still saw the chance that it might come to nothing (which is impossible), I would go on unperturbed, because I would still have done to the best of my power the work that I had to do and what is so done always counts in the economy of the universe. But why should I feel that all this may come to nothing when I see each step and where it is leading and every week, every day—once it was every year and month and hereafter it will be every day and hour —brings me so much nearer to my goal? In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and has its value and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be.
As for your own case, it comes to this that experiences come and stop, there are constant ups and downs, in times of recoil and depression no advance at all seems to have been made, there is as yet no certitude. So it was with me also, so it is with everyone, not with you alone. The way to the heights is always like that up to a certain point, but the ups and downs, the difficulties and obstacles are no proof that it is a chimera to aspire to the summits.
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January 6,1933
Yes, the metre is very successful and the poetry very fine. I do not find any substantial departure from the original1 in your version. I compared the other translation also with the original today and that too is admirable. At the end of the third stanza there, only, you indicate (if I mistake not) as the supreme grace the joy of a heart touched by the divine, while in the Prayer the supreme grace is that of seeing or being the cause of another heart awaking to the Divine's touch. But perhaps it is not necessary to stress it here as it is brought out in the second stanza.
Krishnaprem has been crowded out (and still is) by so many other things! It is not forgetfulness, but absorption and burial under Kanchenjungas that has prevented me from writing him up as yet.
January 12,1933
I am afraid I cannot endorse your reading of the situation, at least so far as the Mother and myself and the prospects of the work are concerned. I can agree only that we have had a heavy time of it recently and that there has been a strong attack on the plane of the physical and material—but that (heavy attacks) is a thing we have been accustomed to for the last 30 years and it has never prevented us from making any necessary advance. I have never had any illusions about the patli being comfortable and easy—I knew all along that the work could only be done if all the essential difficulties rose and were faced—so their rising cannot tire or dishearten me, whatever obstinacy there may be in the difficulties, whether our own or in the Sadhaks or in Nature.
About the correspondence, I would be indeed a brainless
1. One of Mother's Prayers and Meditations.
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fool if I made it the central aim of my life to [?] an absurd mountain of letters and leave all higher aims aside! If I have given importance to the correspondence, it is because it was an effective instrument towards my central purpose—there are a large number of sadhaks whom it has helped to awake from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience, others whom it has carried from a small round of experience to a flood of realisations, some who have been absolutely hopeless for years who have undergone a conversion and entered from darkness into an opening of light. Others no doubt have not profited or profited only a little. Also there were some who wrote at random and wasted our time. But I think we can say that for the majority of those who wrote, there has been a real progress. No doubt also it was not the correspondence in itself but the Force that was increasing in its pressure on the physical nature which was able to do all this, but a canalisation was needed, and this served the purpose. There were many for whom it was not necessary, others for whom it was not suitable. If it had been a mere intellectual asking of questions it would have been useless, but the substantial part was about Sadhana and experience and it was that that proved to be of great use.
But as time went on the correspondence began to grow too much and reached impossible proportions—yet it was difficult to stop the flood or to make distinctions which would not have been understood—so we have to seek a way out and as yet have only found palliatives. The easy way would be if those who have opened would now rely mainly on the inner communication with only a necessary word now and then—some have begun to do so. I suppose in the end we shall be able to reduce the thing to manageable proportions.
I do not see how the method of faith in the cells can be likened to eating a slice of the moon. Nobody ever got a slice of the moon, but the healing by faith in the cells is an actual fact and a law of Nature and has been demonstrated often enough even apart from Yoga. The way to get faith and
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everything else is to insist on having them and refuse to flag or despair or give up until one has them—it is the way by which everything has been got since this difficult world began to have thinking and aspiring creatures upon it. It is to open always, always to the Light and turn one's back on the Darkness. It is to refuse the voices that say persistently, "You cannot, you shall not, you are incapable, you are the puppet of a dream,"—for these are the enemy voices, they cut one off from the result that was coming by their strident clamour and then triumphantly point to the barrenness of the result as a proof of their thesis. The difficulty of the endeavour is a known thing, but the difficult is not the impossible—it is the difficult that has always been accomplished and the conquest of difficulties makes up all that is valuable in the earth's history. In the spiritual endeavour also it shall be so.
No, I am not tired or on the point of giving up. I have made inwardly steps in front in the last two or three months which had seemed impossible because of the obstinate resistance for years together and it is not an experience which pushes me to despair and give up. If there is much resistance on one side, there have been large gains on the other—all has not been a picture of sterile darkness. You yourself are kept back only by the demon of doubt which bangs on you each door as you are opening it—you have only to set about resolutely slaying the Rakshasa and the doors will open to you as they have done to many others who were held up by their own mind or vital nature.
January 14,1933
(from Mother)
I am very sorry you did not come yourself with the money, as I would have had an opportunity to tell and show you that your impression of this morning was mere imagination and
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a bad one too. I can assure you that I have been at pranam time exactly as I am every day, but I noticed sadness and unsatisfaction in your eyes, so it must be the very expression of your own eyes which you saw reflected in mine,—but it was not mine.
You ought to drop altogether and once for all this idea that I get displeased—it sounds to me so strange! If I could get thus displeased in presence of the human weaknesses, I would certainly not be fit to do the work I am doing, and my coming upon earth would have no meaning.
Do give up once for all this idea of defeat and this gloom which is so contrary to the inner truth of your being. I want you to pick yourself up and be perfectly cheerful and confident for your coming birthday.
I hope to see you entirely yourself again this evening from the roof and tomorrow at pranam and to have a happy and intimate talk with you on Monday.
January 24, 1933
I am not quite clear about what you exactly want me to do or yourself want to do with Humanity. I think you spoke of some tail to it (to replace the one it lost when it came down from the trees?)—but exactly what kind of tail? It seems complete without any... [incomplete].
January 27, 1933
I have read Prabodh Sen's letter. I do not think anybody can read the poem Āgamani without coming to the same conclusion. His suggestion about sowing rhymes in suitable places is probably a good hint, but I doubt whether the omission of the terminal rhyme would be successful.
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As for the question you put about easy rhythms and easy poetry, I will try to answer these tomorrow—as it is too late tonight to weigh and consider—and I don't want to evade the question be taking refuge in Einsteinian relativity.
January 28,1933
It is certainly not true that a good metre must necessarily be an easy metre—easy to read or easy to write. In fact, even with old-established perfectly familiar metres, how many of the readers of poetry have an ear which seizes the true movement and the whole subtlety and beauty of the rhythm—it is only in the more popular kind of poems that it gets in their hearing its full value. It is all the more impossible when you bring in not only new rhythms but a new principle of rhythm—or at least one that is not very familiar—to expect it to be easily followed at first by the many. It is only if you are already a recognised master that by force of your reputation you can impose whatever you like on your public—for then even if they do not catch your drift, they will still applaud you and will take some pains to learn the new principle. If you attempt to bring in the principle of laghu guru metres, you are imposing a principle not only of rhythm but of scansion to which the Bengali ear in spite of past attempts is not trained so as to seize the basic law of the movements in all its variations. A fair amount of incomprehension, some difficulty in knowing how to read the verse is very probable. A poem like Āgamani, it seems to me, everybody ought to be able to catch on its movement,—even if some will not be able to scan it; but other difficult forms may give trouble. All that is no true objection, novelty is difficult for the human mind— or ear—to accept, but novelty is asked for all the same in all human activities for their growth, amplitude, richer life.
As you say, the ear has to be educated—once it is trained, familiar with the principle, what was a difficulty becomes
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easy, the unusual, first condemned as abnormal or impossible, becomes a normal and daily movement.
As for the charge of being cryptic, that is quite another matter. On what does it base itself? Obscurity due to inadequate expression is one thing, but the cryptic may be simply the expression of more than can be seized at first sight by the ordinary mind. It may be that the ideas are not of a domain in which that mind is accustomed to move or that there is a new turn of expression other than the kind which it has been trained to follow. Again the ordinary turn of Bengali writing is lucid, direct, easy—in that it resembles French. If you bring into it a more intricate and suggestive manner in which the connections or transitions of thought are less obvious, that may create a difficulty. To which of these causes is the accusation of being cryptic due? Certainly not the first, since you are accused of having too adequate and not too inadequate a vocabulary. If it is any of the others, then the objection has no great force. One can be too easy to read, because there is not much in what one writes and it is exhausted at the first glance,—or too difficult because you have to burrow for the meaning. But otherwise it makes no difference to the excellence of the work, if the reader can catch its burden at the first glance or has to dwell a little on it for the full force of it to come to the surface. One has perhaps sometimes to do the latter in your poems, but I do not find anything unduly cryptic—certainly there is nothing that can be really called obscure. The feeling, the way of expression, the combinations of thought, word or image tend often to be new and unfamiliar, but that seems to me a strength and a merit, not an element of failure.
January 30,1933
I return Buddhadev's letter. I am afraid he is somewhat under the grip of what I may call the illusion of realism.
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What all artists do is to take something from life—even if it be only a partial hint—and transfer it by the magic of their imagination and make a world of their own; the realists, of various kinds, Zola, Tolstoi, etc. do it as much as anybody else. Each artist is a creator of his own world—why then insist on this legal fiction that the artist's world must appear as an imitation of the actual world around us—for it is only an appearance? It may be constructed to look like that—but why must it be?1
As to your metres, it seems to me that in such cases as ānmane [in absent-minded state] and e bandhane [in this bondage] it depends on how the line is read. It is safer no doubt to effect a secure regularity in the metre, one takes less risks; but the chance of staking and revealing rhythmical effects is lessened—of course also the chance of disputable movements or evident stumbles.
February 1933?
(About a translation of Lawrence's prose poem in Suryamukhi)
A very fine translation. What a pity that Lawrence did not give his poetry a rhythmic form, that would have given it its full sound and sense-value and make it sure of immortality.
1. The published version of this letter (in The Future Poetry) continues with the following passage (probably added later by Sri Aurobindo):
"The characters and creations of even the most strongly objective fiction, much more the characters and creations of poetry live by the law of their own life, which is something in the inner mind of their creator—they cannot be constructed as copies of things outside."
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February 9, 1933
Very glad the dragons of the pressure are turning round and becoming lambs of docility and angels of blessings.
I have been glancing at odd times at Pansies.1 Flashes of genius, much defiant triviality of revolt-stuff, queer straining after things not grasped, a gospel of "conscientious sensuality' rushing in at favourable opportunities—all in a formless deliberate disorder, that is the impression up till now—I shall wait to see if there is something else....
I return the extracts from Bijoychandra's letters; they are certainly very interesting. The meed (or seal) of praise from minds of such ripe judgment is of a value that outgrows all incomprehension or objection by lesser minds.
February 11, 1933
I am glad to hear that your condition is shaping so well under the stress. Yes, Mother had a good impression both of your Chotamāsimā [aunt] and Maitreyi and she was pleased also about Nalina.2
As to Asuras I don't know. Not many of them have shown signs of repentance or possibility of conversion up to now. It is not surprising that they should be powerful in a world of Ignorance, for they have only to persuade people to follow the established bent of their lower nature, while the Divine calls always for a change of Nature. It is not to be wondered at that the Asura has an easier task and more momentary success in his combinations. But that temporary success does not bind the future.
1. A collection of poems by D. H. Lawrence (1929).
2. Sahana's elder sister.
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February 15, 1933
I don't think Rs.75 is a bit too much to ask for. As for the Hindi affair, it is worth while trying but—. Well, I suppose you know Byron's verdict on publishers?
Your experience about the meditation is common enough. I used to have it or analogous things hundreds of times. I suppose it is to teach us first that grace is more effective than tapasya and, secondly, that either equanimity or a cheerful spontaneous happy self-opening is as effective, to say the least, as the grimmest wrestling for a result. But it would be dangerous to assume from that that no tapasya and no endeavour is needful—for that might very well mean inertia. I have seen too that very often a long tapasya with doubtful results prepares the moment of grace and the spontaneous downflow. All which seem to be contradictions, but are not in a whole view of things.
Mother will see about the time to be fixed for the music.
February 18, 1933
At least the inner being, the psychic, is nowadays sufficiently awake not to acquiesce in the "reasonings" of the vital—your dream was the voice of the inner being, its reply showing you the truth within you and the real demand of the spirit. It was the dissatisfaction of the soul with the superficial vital life that brought you away from the outer world and it is the same dissatisfaction a hundred times increased and accompanied with an intense psychic sorrow that would come on you if you went away from the Yoga.
Your vital mind (which is the one which revolts and doubts) has strange misconceptions about the spiritual state. There is no grimness in being an instrument of the divine Will—it is the happiest and most joyous condition possible—it brings
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not only peace but an intense Ananda. Anyhow, the hold of the Yoga-force is increasing in spite of everything and you have only to go on for it to solve the struggle between the outer man and the inner spirit.
P.S Murala's son has an interesting face and must have capacities, but he is not likely to have yogic tendencies just now.
It is well that you found it out, but don't let it depress you. It is by such flashes of clairvoyance that the remnants and hidden survivals of old habit and nature get exposed and have to leave. So you must not let it spoil this darshan. Also why give up music? It will be better to be more sparing of the soirées [evening gatherings]—Mother noticed that they often upset you or preceded an upsetting, that was why she asked you to tell her when they came.
I had just half an hour, so I send you the corrections of the poems.
February 20, 1933
Yes, you can send the flowers and the wire to Subhash. I note the names of those for whom you make the pranam the second time.
As for the doubts of which you have written, I cannot write much today for obvious reasons and in any case writing is not the remedy, though it may help and encourage— for these doubts rise not from the intellect but from the vital mind which sees things according to its condition and mood and needs something else than what the mind asks for to satisfy it. It is perfectly true that these reasonings have no force when the vital is in its true poise of love or joy or active
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and creative power, and when the vital is depressed then it is hard and seems sometimes impossible so long as the depression is there, to surmount the trouble. But still the clouds do not last for ever—and even one has a certain power in the mind to shorten the period of these clouds, to reject and dissipate them and not to allow them to remain until they disappear in the course of nature.
By all means use the method of japa and bhakti. I have never insisted on your using the method of dry or hard tapasya—it was some idea or feeling in your own mind that made you lay so much stress on it. There are some to whom it is natural and necessary for a time, but each ought to move in his own way and there is no one rule for all—even if the objective is and must be the same, contact and union and opening to the Divine.
In the end these doubts and depressions and despairs must cease. When the call of the soul perseveres, the response of the Divine must come.
Nahi kalyānakrt kascit durgatim Pārtha {tata) gacchati 1
February 23, 1933
The question as it is put can admit of only one answer. I am not aware that nursery rhymes or folk songs take any important place or any place at all in the history of the prosody of the English language or that one starts the study of English metre by a careful examination of the rhythm of "Humpty Dumpty, " "Mary, Mary, quite contrary" or the tale of the old woman who lived in a shoe. There are many queer theories abroad nowadays in all the arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to turn to "Who killed Cock Robin?" for the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or
1. "Never does anyone who practises good come to woe" (Gita, 6.40).
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Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign influence or seek for his models in popular songs or the products of the cafe chantant in preference to Hugo or Musset or Verlaine.
But perhaps something else is meant—is it that one gets the crude indispensable elements of metre better from primitive, just-shaped or unshaped stuff than from more perfect work in which these are overlaid by artistic developments and subtle devices—an embryo or a skeleton is more instructive for the study of men than the developed flesh-and-blood structure. That may have a certain truth in some lines of scientific research, but it cannot stand in studying the technique of an art. At that rate one would have to go for the basic principles of musical sound to the lullaby or the jazz or even to the hurdy-gurdy and for the indispensable rules of line and colour to the pavement-artist or to the sign-board painter. Or perhaps the suggestion is that here one gets the primary unsophisticated rhythms native to the language and free from the artificial movements of mere literature. Still, I hardly fancy that the true native spirit or bent of English metre is to be sought in
"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall"
and is lost in
"Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight."
Popular or nursery verse catches the child's ear or the common ear much more easily than the music of poetry because it relies on a crude jingle or infantile lilt—not because it enshrines in its movement the true native spirit of the tongue. There seems to be the fallacy to think that the real spirit and native movement of a language can be caught only in crude or primitive forms and that it is disguised in the more perfect work in which it has developed its own possibilities to their full pitch, variety and scope.
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As for foreign influences, most of the elements of English prosody, rhyme, foot-scansion, line-lengths, stanza-forms and many others have come in from outside and have altered out of all recognition the original mould, but the spirit of the language has found itself as much in these developments as in the first free alliterative verse—as much and more. The spirit of a language ought to be strong enough to assimilate any amount of imported elements or changes of structure and measure.
February 1933 ?
... However. Let it ebb off and be stilled at that. I am now the soul of gentility once more—limpid like the Ganges water in winter, though not so cold.
I suppose it is all right now. All seems to have come back to poise. As for Nalina's husband I dare say he is a good and righteous man, but I have noticed him as a signal example of how blind and ego-centred a good and righteous man can be. Of course I knew it before, but an example makes knowledge more living. However this is strictly between you and me.
A letter from Vidya this morning. I suppose you have no time still. No wonder—with all these goings-on!
You are right. I loaded [with trouble?] already, but with this [?] shower of letters!
Worked hard today: another long article—fairly. To revise it still tonight. Three long articles in four days, what? Energetic, no?
Tremendous!
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February 26, 1933
I return you Buddhadev's and Ashalata's letters. Evidently peace is a very great desideratum for all these people. It may be that poets and literary creators need to have a bad time and sensitive nerves and things and people grating on them in order to create? But after all there were some who took hold of life in a more masterly fashion. Why does Buddhadev allow himself to be so much upset by the attacks upon him?—it is a thing every rising genius has to face at one time or another, in one form or another. He should remain calm and live down the jealousy and enmity that well up from human nature around an increasing fame.
February 28, 19331
Your wail does not seem to me to have strong grounds for existence. You were beginning to go on very well with a turn towards a more consistent progress; at such periods suggestions like these come to interrupt the progress. One ought not to listen to them at all; they serve merely as disturbing factors. If the reasons alleged were sufficient to be a just ground for failure, all Yoga would be impossible for you or anybody. The persistence or the obstinate return of the old Adam is a common experience: it is only when there is a sufficient mass of experience and a certain progression of consciousness in the higher parts of the being that the lower can be really transmuted. It is that that one must allow to develop. It is quite out of place to worry about your continued predilection for Maya's vegetables or teas or [?] laughter and thence deduce your incapacity for Yoga. It is
1. Sri Aurobindo dated this letter February 29, but 1933 not being a leap year, we assume the date to be February 28.
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not on these things that we have asked you to concentrate. It is the pressure of the Yoga shakti and the increase of the experiences that is wanted in your case, not this preoccupation with an external "grim" tapasya. It was coming—why stop it with these inopportune regrets and reasonings?
March 1933?
Buddhadev can come; but you speak of a room. In the Ashram? That would hardly be possible, since he is neither a sadhak nor an intending sadhak, nor even an embryonic sadhak. Perhaps you hope he will tumble into Yoga or Yoga will tumble into him? but these are things possible but not to be counted on beforehand. If your description of him is accurate, he must be a complex nature and not prone to tumble.
Buddhadev has certainly remarkable powers; there are only two things that he has to acquire still, if he is to fulfil your prophecy, more of the "inevitable" in his language and rhythm, a greater power of what has been called architectonics in poetry—something that corresponds to design in painting and the arrangement of masses in architecture... [incomplete].
March 9, 1933
The translation seems quite feasible—at sight. But the points you mention may present difficulties; I think they can be overcome. One or two of your lines in the English version are too metaphorical for an occidental tongue. I shall see to all that—these things are never insuperable difficulties, one can either dynamite them, cut through or go round them or over.
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March 10, 1933
Mother,
A registered envelope came in which there was a receipt for the last quarterly tax of one of the houses which amounts to about Rs. 60 and Rs. 70 in banknotes, which makes Rs. 130. May I see you tomorrow for a minute to offer at your feet this Rs. 70?
Yes, just a little before [?].
The other tenant has suddenly promised to send me a big cheque. I am glad for the rent has been steadily running into arrears.
Could you send me a chit for Sarala1 You see the silk my sister bought for me has more than sufficed for one punjabi, so that a little remains over, with which a simple cap could be made, of a very simple sort and shape. I will send this shape or rather send Sarala a cap of mine so that she can make one exactly similar with the little piece that is left over.
Yes, a chit is enclosed.
Today I meditated well too, besides working rather hard. I am in good spirit. Only a slight granule still remains, it lessens but again grows big. No pain. I expect it will be all right in a few days. I am very careful.
I am translating the song on Saraswati and also writing its music as I want Nandini2 to play the accompaniment with Sahana, Maitreyi and Nalina who three will sing it
1. Sarala, a good tailoress, lived with her husband Suchi. This French couple were given Indian names in the Ashram.
2. Nandini, an English lady, played cello wonderfully well. Mother loved it tremendously. And Sri Aurobindo said that she was a "born musician."
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together. They are singing it exquisitely. You will be pleased, I am sure.
I am looking forward to see the corrected version of the translation of my song on Shiva. I hope I'll get it tomorrow. Then I will send my translation of Saraswati.
I will see tonight but I have my doubts whether I can finish.
March 20, 1933
Dilip, (I almost feel inclined to add: big child!)
You are quite mistaken. I enjoyed your music very much; indeed it was quite beautiful. But as I am to see you tomorrow, I was keeping the subject for then—as I have some rather interesting details to give which, I think will please you, but would be somewhat too long to write. I can also explain better these things orally, give them with the voice a life that the pen can't give. But I never expected that you would take such a short silence for a sign of indifference—as this was extremely far from my consciousness! À demain donc, joyeusement [Tomorrow then, happily].
P.S I leave to Sri Aurobindo to answer for himself—but meanwhile I can tell you that he praised your music very much.
Your sadness is without any real cause. Far from being without interest in your music, my interest was so great that I sat up during my time of sleep translating the "Saraswati" so that it might be in time for the occasion—as I could not make any time for it in my working hours. And I had already
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written to someone who asked the question that the music yesterday (your song especially and Sahana's) had even exceeded in feeling and significance anything we had yet had and that he was right in feeling in it the effective invocation of the earth-consciousness for the Divine's descent. As for our expression to you of our appreciation, it was delayed—for the reason the Mother has told you—not denied. Written words are pale and lifeless things when one has to express the feelings raised by superb music and seem hardly to mean anything—not being able to convey what is beyond word and mere mental form—that is, at least, what I have felt and why I always find it a little difficult to write anything about music.
March 25, 1933
Up till now we know nothing of what happened at the music party except what you have told us in your letter. Nolini came to ask from Sahana whether she could sing or not before Charu Bose for which she seemed to be unwilling, but at the same time we heard that the matter was over—he had been sent away and she had been called back to the party. Anyhow Mother will see what he is like tomorrow at Pranam and his status will be decided.
At Subhash's conscientious hesitations between Krishna and Shakti and Shiva I could not help indulging in a smile. If a man is attracted by one form or two forms only of the Divine, it is all right,—but if he is drawn to several at a time he need not torment himself over it. A man of some development has necessarily several sides in his nature and it is quite natural that different aspects should draw or govern different personalities in him—he can very well accept them all and harmonise them in the One Divine and the One Ādyā Śakti [original Power] of whom all are the manifestations.
Buddhadev's poem is very fine poetry—the thought forceful though in places a little raw and confused, as is natural
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at so early an age, but phrase and rhythm are magnificent and very powerful. He certainly stands head and shoulders above the ordinary run of facile verse-makers.
P. S. I will look up Buddha dev's letter and send it to you.
March 30, 1933
I trust that the rafale [gust] is practically over and we can now have the sunlight or at least some sunlight on the scene. As for the disproportion between cause and effect, that is part of the mathematics of this astonishing universe. You kick a little harmless stone and a mountain descends on your head in answer—although you never thought you were inviting such an avalanche. You have either to learn how to duck a descending mountain—which is not safe or easy,—or be careful about kicking stones. This of course is only a parable.
I am glad to see that your metrical gambols with Tagore (pulling his solemn throne of reputation as a prosodist from under him) has not come in the way of his expressing his appreciation of your poetry.
I have only had just time to read the first stanza of your poem but I see it is in your finest manner.
April 1933 ?
Tagore's Man about to leave Heaven for Earth (in Ta gore's "Farewell to Heaven") said to the former in his valedictory jeremiad: "Now at the term of my stay in your hospitable abode I had hoped that you would shed one tear for me: but alas, you. Celestials, are heartless. You don't seem to miss me even so much as a dry leaf is missed by the parent branch when the former falls to the ground. So—" (I give you the original below) "Ibid you adieu as Heaven
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wants no one"—etc. Qu'en dites-vous? Re what the Mortal says to the Immortals.
Very good poetry, but very bad psychology and no common sense! In the first place, because sorrow being alien to Heaven by the poet's own statement, no one who was still there could talk in this strain: even going out of it he would still carry the atmosphere and would have to wait till he was born on earth to emit his first wail. In the second because, no one, who had been strong enough to reach Heaven and be a comrade of the Gods, would separate from them in this lachrymose spirit. What he would be likely to say is this: "\ depart earthwards since that is the law. One boon only I ask of you, if I merit it, that something of your Light, Strength, Joy and Peace shall be in touch with my mind and treasure in my heart in the midst of Earth's sorrows and dangers, so that I may bear myself as one who was the companion of the Immortals and rise again to higher and higher Heavens till I touch the feet of the Divine." As for the question whether Heaven wants Man, the answer is that if Heaven did not want him, he would not want Heaven. It is from Heaven that the longing and aspiration for Immortality have come, and it is the Godhead within him that carries it as a seed.
April 1, 1933
I have read the two poems—they are both exceedingly beautiful. But I should like to read them again before saying anything more.
As for the controversy about Art—I have been churning off a huge mass of arrears of correspondence, and under that burden to think of anything like Art was impossible. But I hope to be able to take it up now.
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April 3, 1933
I am feeling fairly well—though not on the top of the weather. I have just finished a fairly long poem, a little in the sad vein, though not melancholy which I'll send you. I am much encouraged by your approval of yesterday's poem. My gratitude.
In the meanwhile please read the letter enclosed. The context: I had sent to Tagore my translation of one of Mother's prayers. He praised the translation (he genuinely praised three others too I sent him: "Tears," "Discipline," "Chaque fois un cceur tressaille,' suggesting the alteration of just a word or two which I thankfully accepted) but wrote to me that in "tomar puraskar" I have committed chhanda patan [break in metre] as gurha = gu-ra-ha = three syllables [?] whereas I have given it the value of two beats only. [...] However that may be, he could not refrain from praising my translations of Mother's Prayers and A. E.'s "Krishna" and this poem on Shiva, for which I am rather joyous as these must have moved him a little genuinely—otherwise he would not have gone out of his way to bestow me a compliment which naturally I greatly value if it comes from his real appreciation of my achievement. [...] However I am glad Tagore is gradually relenting towards me.
(Sri Awobindo's reply:)
Tagore's mistake
It is really astonishing and enough to make one gasp. I suppose he wanted to have three syllables from a sense of the length possibilities of the vowel gūrha and invented this hair-raising theory to justify his preference.
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April 5, 1933
There is no doubt about the beauty of the poems you have written. But if sometimes—not by any means always—our sweetest songs sprang from saddest feelings, there is a quite different rule both for life and for Yoga. For the life in its progress, for the soul in its ascendance, grief and suffering should be only an incident on the way and the vision look always and steadily to a joy and a glory beyond it—let the gloom pass and look beyond it towards Light.
There is no taboo in the Yoga on any feeling that is true and pure, but all the feelings undergo the stress of a pressure from the spiritual consciousness and whatever there is that is mixed, impure, egoistic or the feeling itself if it is fundamentally self-regarding, either disappears or, if it remains, becomes an obstacle to the progress. In the ascetic Yoga all human feelings are regarded as illusory and have to disappear—"the knots of the heart are cut"—so as to leave only the one supreme aspiration. In this Yoga the emotional being has not to be got rid of, but to undergo a transformation; the shortest way of transformation is to turn all the being to the Divine. But when that is done, then it is found that what is pure and true in any human relation survives, but with a rich and subtle change, or else new relations are established that come straight from the Divine. If, however, something resists the change, then it is quite possible that there may be an oscillation between blank indifference or vairāgya [disgust with the world] and the indulgence of the untransformed feeling—the human vital on one side, the disillusioned Vairāgi [renunciate] on the other side. Some even have to pass through this vairāgya in order to reach the possibility of a divinised emotional nature, but that is not the normal
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movement of this Yoga.
As for being self-centred, it is obviously not the right thing for Yoga to be centred in the ego and revolving round it; one has to be centred in the Divine with all the movements turning round that centre—until they can all be in the Divine. One has naturally to think much of one's own nature and its change, but that is inevitable for the sadhana—to prevent its turning into a self-centred condition, the aspiration to the Divine, vision of the Divine everywhere, the surrender to the Divine have to be made the main objective of the sadhana.
April 8, 1933
I must ask you not to act precipitately like this, but to wait for my answer. I have never got tired or given you up and there is no reason why you should think I am doing so now. If I did not answer immediately, it was because I had to consider what was the best to do—it did not mean any acquiescence in your proposal to give up and go away. I have never assented to that and I cannot do so.
You must give me a little time to see how matters can be set right. I don't think you can really mean to desert us in this precipitate way because of a hard and difficult moment.
April 1933 [?]
In your letter today there are some things that I would find a little astonishing if I did not know that when the vital mind which indulges in these depressions is predominant anything however contrary to the facts may be put forward as true. But I should like to put one or two of them right, all the same. For you say that it is clear that I want you to be indifferent (like Nolini) to be indifferent to everyone else but the Mother and you make us responsible for your becoming a stranger
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to Arjava, Moni1 and Khirode,2 for a feeling of rancorous aversion that has come between you and Sahana—and you express an apprehension that the same development may come on your still existing friendship with Subhash and Harin and others, evidently as the result of my yogic influence or my demand upon you. And finally you expect me to turn upon you and reject and hate you because in spite of all I find you unworthy of the Yoga. First of all, I am utterly at a loss to imagine how I can be responsible for your becoming a stranger to Arjava, Moni and Khirode. I never asked you or them to break or get remote from each other, I never put any pressure for that or desired it—on the contrary I greatly regretted your getting estranged with Arjava, for Arjava's sake as well as for your own; I never appreciated what good reasons there could be for the cooling down between you and Moni—as for Khirode I have still to learn why there should be any distance between you. Nobody would be more glad than myself and the Mother if there is a rapprochement between them and you. As for the other friends, well, when and where have I interfered with and discouraged your friendships with Subhash and the others ? I consented to your sending my blessing to Subhash and the extracts or letters, not for his sake—for I never met him—but for yours and because of your friendship with him; I welcomed Harin as much for your sake as his. I have admitted Bindu, Pratap and others because of your love or friendship or appreciation of them; in all cases, I believe I can say, I have given my blessings to your friends Buddhadev, Ashalata, your friends in Europe because they were your friends and
1. Moni or Suresh Chandra Chakraborty (12 December 189? – 28 April 1951) was a revolutionary from Bengal. He came to Pondicherry in 1910 with a letter from Sri Aurobindo to arrange a residence for him. He then stayed with Sri Aurobindo and Mother.
2. Khirode was headmaster of a school before he came to the Ashram. There he was in charge of the Building Department. About him Sri Aurobindo said, "He is one of the ablest and most quietly successful 'men of work' I have come across."
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for the sake of your friendship. And I have never asked or desired you to break with a single one of them at any time. There remains the case of Sahana. I know nothing of this rancorous aversion of which you speak—there is nothing of the kind in the mind of Sahana. When she broke out against you, it had nothing to do with Yoga—she had forgotten everything about Yoga at the moment—but was an outbreak of the vital being in its crudest from and she was at the same time as angry with us as with you because we had supported you in the Maitreyi affair and taken your side. As soon as we brought her back to her proper consciousness, all that fell away from her and she has no rancour or aversion or anger against you. Is there any rancour or aversion against her in your mind? I see no good reason why these should be— if there is any, it ought not to be there and should fall away from you at once. There remains your not seeing each other for a time. What you say about all ending in a quiet friendship, is what we have always told her that we wished—but the fact remains that she has not been able to achieve it and that what does come on her after a time of reconciliation is a relapse into old passions and fierce attacks of the Adversary shaking her very body and life—not because she is separated from you but because you are going with another woman even after the old relation was practically over! Is it so utterly unreasonable of us to desire a cessation of this kind of attack and is it so difficult for you to realise that it is not from attachment to yogic principles that we are against it but out of solicitude for Sahana. Or is it not worthwhile to try what separation for a while can do since the attempt at a quiet friendship had led to results so unquiet and adverse? If we were aloof in Yogic indifference—as you say the Yogi must be—we would not care, but leave each to fight out his or her own destiny with a calm indifferent gaze upon it from the heights of Nirvana. It seems to me that it is obvious that if we do try to help and save, it is because care and love are not absolutely foreign to our nature or to the Yogic nature or to the Nature of the Divine. I do not see anything that is
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so cold and grim and stern in our dealings—did you really see no love or tenderness in the Mother's attitude and dealings today with Maya and the little child (who is not a Yogi or a disciple) Esha?
As for Nolini and what he said to you, it is Nolini's own movement, the need he feels, not something we have dictated to him—we have certainly not forced it on others. There are over a hundred disciples in the Ashram—how many follow such a principle or have no personal relation with any but the Mother? And if some have the aspiration, if they feel the necessity of turning to the Divine alone in a passion of love or surrender and if they feel that they can find that Divine in or through the Mother, what is there in that spontaneous movement that is grim and stern and cruel? Are there not people who have left all other ties for the love of a man or a woman and been glorified for it; and why should it be so harsh and bad if it is for the Divine and such a movement is welcome by the Divine? But we do not force it on anybody—there are on the contrary friendships here that we not only allow but welcome.
In fact all these ideas are the creations of your mind because you are struggling between two opposite tendencies, the vital human and the ascetic indifference and Vairagya—the old oscillation, sea-saw, tug of war which, I have told you, is not the principle of our Yoga. Ours is a third way— murārestu tritīyah panthā.1 All for the Divine, but all one in the
1. Thereby hangs a tale. Jaimini was an important disciple of Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata. Among other works he authored the Mimamsa Sutra, a Vedic exegesis. Over the centuries people forgot the meaning of the Vedas, and the meaning of the commentaries as well. Then around 4 BC one Shabara wrote his Bhasya (commentaries) on Jaimini's Mimamsa. Then in the seventh century AD Kumarila Bhatta, a little older than Shankaracharya, wrote a commentary on Shabara's Bhasya. His disciple Prabhakara took a different line of interpretation from Kumarila. That is how two main schools of Mimamsa came into being. A while later, one Murari Misra took an independent line from his predecessors. So, murārestu tritīyab panthā, Murari's third way, became a proverb among scholars.
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Divine—that is indeed the final realisation at the end of our endeavour. But we do not expect the sadhak to reach at one bound to that perfection.
P. S. There is more that I should have written, but my time is over. I have tried to remove the misconceptions by which you have supported your sadness—I trust that some of them at least will fall for good away from you.
April 10, 1933
My full blessings on your aspiration and resolution. For when you accomplish that, you will have taken a very big step towards what one might call "a state of grace" in which the Divine force can manifest directly in you and not as now indirectly in the midst of violent perturbations. It would be the first step towards a settled fundamental peace and inner happiness and, what is most important of all, an ability to believe in and perceive the Divine Will in things which men cannot perceive—nor the meaning in them—because they are perplexed not so much by their mental limitations—though that is one cause—but by the claims and recoils of the vital ego. The mental difficulty would become much less if the vital mind were once pacified, submitted, attentive to the intimations of a higher Light. So I wish you all success in this endeavour.
About the Grace itself I have not been able to write much today—but I shall pursue it tomorrow.
I was overjoyed to read your letter—first because it relieved me from the anxiety which your persistent trouble had given and, most because of the clarity of consciousness which has
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liberated you. Yes, that was the main difficulty—that and the clinging to wrong ideas which it had created. You should never doubt about the reality and sincerity of our feeling towards you, mine and the Mother's—for it creates a veil and separates, where there should be no separation, and it is a first barrier against that openness which is necessary if one is to receive fully or even at all from the Guru. Of course, I say that something had blinded you and was keeping you unconscious of the source of the trouble, but there was needed a certain clarity of the soul to remove it. Now that it has come, I trust that it will keep the mind clear and free the ways of the spirit.
The bhakta-poet in you has always been thoroughly sincere; there there is no cloud of the vital ego.
April 12, 1933
It is certainly to be expected that Prabodh Sen will be overjoyed by his suggestion having borne such good fruit. You have succeeded in making an extraordinary success of felicitously combined opposites, a long sweep of gravity and intensely vibrating power with a melodic dance—the very movement ofNataraja. Only I doubt if it could become a feat for others to imitate; perhaps it was only one who is at once a musician and a poet who could have done it.
April 15, 1933
I return your cutting of Subhash—a monk-like Subhash who might have come out of a math or a monastery rather than the Calcutta Municipality and the B.P.C.C.!
My comments on Art for Art are finished but I added so much in recasting that I have to revise again and can send for
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typing only tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon—but I suppose so small a delay will not matter.
April 17, 1933
(The following are Sri Aurobindo's comments on Art.)
Art for Art's sake? But what, after all, is meant by this slogan and what is the real issue behind it? Is it meant, as I think it was when the slogan first came into use, that the technique, the artistry is all in all? The contention would then be that it does not matter what you write or paint or sculpt or what music you make or about what you make it so long as it is beautiful writing, competent painting, good sculpture, fine music. It is very evidently true in a certain sense,—in this sense that whatever is perfectly expressed or represented or interpreted under the conditions of a given art proves itself by that very fact to be legitimate material for the artist's labour. But that free admission cannot be confined only to all objects, however common or deemed to be vulgar,—an apple, a kitchen pail, a donkey, a dish of carrots, —it can give a right of citizenship in the domain of art to a moral theme or thesis, a philosophic conclusion, a social experiment; even the Five Years' Plan or the proceedings of a District Board or the success of a drainage scheme, an electric factory or a big hotel can be brought, after the most modern or the still more robustious Bolshevik mode, into the artist's province. For, technique being all, the sole question would be whether he as poet, novelist, dramatist, painter or sculptor has been able to triumph over the difficulties and bring out creatively the possibilities of his subject. There is no logical basis here for accepting an apple and rejecting the Apple-Cart. But still you may say that at least the object of the artist must be art only,—even if he treats
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ethical, social or political questions, he must not make it his main object to wing with the enthusiasm of aesthetic creation a moral, social or political aim. But if in doing it he satisfies the conditions of his art, shows a perfect technique and in it beauty, power, perfection, why not? The moralist, preacher, philosopher, social or political enthusiast is often doubled with an artist—as shining proofs and examples there are Plato and Shelley, to go no farther. Only, you can say of him on the basis of this theory that as a work of art his creation should be judged by its success of craftsman ship and not by its contents; it is not made greater by the value of his ethical ideas, his enthusiasms or his metaphysical seekings.
But then, the theory itself is true only up to a certain point. For technique is a means of expression; one does not write merely to use beautiful words or paint for the sole sake of line and colour; there is something that one is trying through these means to express or to discover. What is that something? The first answer would be—it is the creation, it is the discovery of Beauty. Art is for that alone and can be judged only by its revelation or discovery of Beauty. Whatever is capable of being manifested as Beauty is the material of the artist. But there is not only physical beauty in the world—there is moral, intellectual, spiritual beauty also. Still, one might say that "Art for Art's sake" means that only what is aesthetically beautiful must be expressed and all that contradicts the aesthetic sense of beauty must be avoided. Art has nothing to do with Life in itself, things in themselves, Good, Truth or the Divine for their own sake, but only in so far as they appeal to some aesthetic sense of beauty,—and that would seem to be a sound basis for excluding the Five Years' Plan, a moral sermon or a philosophical treatise. But here, again, what after all is Beauty? How much is it in the thing itself and how much in the consciousness that perceives it? Is not the eye of the artist constantly catching some element of aesthetic value in the plain, the ugly, the sordid, the repellent and triumphantly conveying it through
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his material,—through the word, through line and colour, through the sculptured shape?
There is a certain state of Yogic consciousness in which all things become beautiful to the eye of the seer, simply because they spiritually are—because they are a rendering in line and form of the quality and force of existence, of the consciousness, of the Ananda that rules the worlds,—of the hidden Divine. What a thing is to the exterior sense may not be, often is not beautiful for the ordinary aesthetic vision, but the Yogin sees in it the something more which the external eye does not see, he sees the soul behind, the self and spirit, he sees too lines, hues, harmonies and expressive dispositions which are not to the first surface sight visible or seizable. It may be said that he brings into the object something that is in himself, transmutes it by adding out of his own being to it—as the artist too does something of the same kind but in another way. It is not quite that, however; what the Yogin sees, what the artist sees, is there, his is a transmuting vision because it is a revealing vision; he discovers behind what the object appears to be, the something More that it is. And so from this point of view of a realised supreme harmony all is or can be subject-matter for the artist, because in all he can discover and reveal the Beauty that is everywhere. Again, we land ourselves in a devastating catholicity; for here too one cannot pull up short at any given line. It may be a hard saying that one must or may discover and reveal beauty in a pig or its poke or in a parish pump or an advertisement of somebody's pills, and yet something like that seems to be what modern Art and Literature are trying with vigour and conscientious labour to do. By extension one ought to be able to extract beauty equally well out of morality or social reform or a political caucus or allow at least that all these things can, if he wills, become legitimate subjects for the artist. Here, too, one cannot say that it is on condition he thinks of beauty only and does not make moralising or social reform or a political idea his main object. For if with that idea foremost in his mind he still produces a
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great work of art, discovering Beauty as he moves to his aim, proving himself in spite of his unaesthetic preoccupations a great artist, it is all we can justly ask from him, whatever his starting-point, to be a creator of Beauty. Art is discovery and revelation of Beauty, and we can say nothing more by way of prohibitive or limiting rule.
But there is one thing more that can be said, and that makes a big difference. In the Yogin's vision of universal beauty, all becomes beautiful, but all is not reduced to a single level. There are gradations, there is a hierarchy in this All-Beauty and we see that it depends on the ascending power (Vibhuti) of Consciousness and Ananda that expresses itself in the object. All is the Divine, but some things are more divine than others. In the artist's vision too there are or can be gradations, a hierarchy of values. Shakespeare can get dramatic and therefore aesthetic values out of Dogberry and Malvolio and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or Lear. But if we had only Dogberry or Malvolio to testify to Shake speare's genius, no Macbeth, no Lear, would he be so great a dramatic artist and creator as he now is ? It is in the varying possibilities of one subject or another that there lies an immense difference. Apelles'1 grapes deceived the birds that came to peck at them, but there was more aesthetic content in the Zeus ofPheidias,2 a greater content of Consciousness and therefore of Ananda to express and with it to fill in and intensify the essential principle of Beauty, even though the essence of beauty may be realised perhaps with equal aesthetic perfection by either artist and in either theme.
And that is because just as technique is not all, so even Beauty is not all in Art. Art is not only technique or form of Beauty, not only the discovery or the expression of Beauty— it is a self-expression of Consciousness under the conditions
1. Greek painter (fourth century BC).
2. Pheidias or Phidias (fifth century BC): Greek sculptor, famous in antiquity for colossal statues of gold and ivory which have not survived.
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of aesthetic vision and a perfect execution. Or, to put it otherwise, there are not only aesthetic values, but life-values, mind-values, soul-values that enter into Art. The artist puts out into form not only the powers of his own consciousness, but the powers of the Consciousness that has made the worlds and their objects. And if that Consciousness according to the Vedantic view is fundamentally equal everywhere, it is still in manifestation not an equal power in all things. There is more of the Divine expression in the Vibhuti than in the common man, prākrito janah; in some forms of life there are less potentialities for the self-expression of the Spirit than in others. And there are also gradations of consciousness which make a difference, if not in the aesthetic value or greatness of a work of art, yet in its contents-value. Homer makes beauty out of man's outward life and action and stops there. Shakespeare rises one step further and reveals to us a life-soul and life-forces and life-values to which Homer had no access. In Valmiki and Vyas there is the constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements which were beyond the scope of Homer and Shakespeare. And beyond the Ideals and Idea-Forces even there are other presences, more inner or inmost realities, a soul behind things and beings, the spirit and its powers, which could be the subject-matter of an art still more rich and deep and abundant in its interest than any of these could be. A poet finding these and giving them a voice with a genius equal to that of the poets of the past might not be greater than they in a purely aesthetic valuation, but his art's contents-value, its consciousness-values could be deeper and higher and much fuller than in any achievement before him. There is something here that goes beyond any consideration of Art for Art's sake or Art for Beauty's sake; for while these stress usefully sometimes the indispensable first elements of artistic creation, they would limit too much the creation itself if they stood for the exclusion of the something More that compels Art to change always in its constant seeking for more and more that must be expressed of the
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concealed or the revealed Divine, of the individual and the universal or the transcendent Spirit.
If we take these three elements as making the whole of Art, perfection of expressive form, discovery of beauty, revelation of the soul and essence of things and the powers of creative consciousness and Ananda of which they are the vehicles, then we shall get perhaps a solution which includes the two sides of the controversy and reconciles their difference. Art for Art's sake certainly; Art as a perfect form and discovery of Beauty; but also Art for the soul's sake, the spirit's sake and the expression of all that the soul, the spirit *wants to seize through the medium of beauty. In that selfexpression there are grades and hierarchies, widenings and steps that lead to the summits. And not only to enlarge Art towards the widest wideness but to ascend with it to the heights that climb towards the Highest is and must be part both of our aesthetic and our spiritual endeavour.
April 26, 1933
I simply cannot resist the temptation of sending you first of the pages I wrote this afternoon appertaining to my novelette (it will be a long story rather of about 200 pages in print) in which I have put in the form of a dialogue what I have felt about music versus poetry. Probably I am wrong—yet there may be some core of truth in what I intuited. Apart from the style of the dialogue I draw your attention to the matter. I wonder if you could throw, say, half a dozen lines at me regarding this aspect? It will be so valuable for me to know how you feel about music. Harin was telling me the other day: "Dilip, music is greater than poetry when all is said." But I wonder if all has been said of either or even can be? Anyway I am finding [great?] joy in my novel particularly [because?] my novels too are much in demand—I enclose just a
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sentimental note of a young man whom I do not know; just glance through it in three minutes if you can find time. It is this [way?] he speaks about Ranger Parash.
I saw you this afternoon when I meditated for nearly two hours. I am trying to offer my writing work. But I can't do so always. I pray to you to send force to enable me to.
I do not know what to say on the subject you propose to me—my appreciation of music is bodiless and inexpressible, while about poetry I can write at ease with an expert knowledge. But is it necessary to fix a scale of greatness where each has its own greatnesses and can touch in its own way the extremes of aesthetic Ananda? Music, no doubt, goes nearest to the infinite and to the essence of things because it relies wholly on the ethereal vehicle, śabda [sound], (architecture by the by can do something of the same kind at the other extreme even in its imprisonment in mass); but painting and sculpture have their revenge by liberating visible form into ecstasy, while poetry though it cannot do with sound what music does, yet can instead make a harmony of sound revelation, creation by the word, suggestion of form and colour that gives it in a very subtle kind the combined power of all the arts. Who shall decide between such claims or be a judge between these gods?
April 29, 1933
It is very good news. The peace settling into the system and with it a happy activity—that is the basis for your Yoga which I always wanted you to have—a sunny condition in which what has to come in will come in and expand like a bud into flower and what has to fall off will fall off in its time like a slough discarded.
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April 30, 1933
Emotion alone is not enough for producing anything that can be called creation, at best it can give form to something lyrical and passionate or to something charming or appealing. For any considerable creation there must be a background of life, a vital rich and stored or a mind and an imagination that has seen much and observed much or a soul that has striven and been conscious of its strivings. These are needed, or one or other of them, but the purdah is not likely to produce them, though there may be a lucky accident in the worst circumstances, but one can't count on accidents. A George Eliot, a George Sand, a Virginia Woolf, a Sappho, or even a Comtesse de Noailles grew up in other circumstances.
May 1933?
It is true that the removal of the sex-impulse in all its forms and, generally, of the vital woman-complex is a great liberation which opens up to the Divine considerable regions of the being which otherwise tend to remain shut up. These things are a degradation of the source in the being from which bhakti, divine love and adoration arise. But the complex has deep roots in human nature and one must not be disappointed if it takes time to pull them up. A resolute detachment rejecting them as foreign elements, refusing to accept any inner association with them as well as outer indulgence even of the slightest kind is the best way to wear out their hold upon the nature.
May 1933
My point about my Sadhana was that my Sadhana was not done for myself but for the earth-consciousness as a showing of the way towards the Light, so that whatever I
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showed in it to be possible: inner growth, transformation, manifesting of new faculties, etc. was not of no importance to anybody, but meant as an opening of lines and ways for what had to be done. The question of degree of greatness does not come in at all.
The terrestrial sex-movement is an utilisation by Nature of the fundamental physical energy for purposes of procreation. The thrill of which the poets speak, which is accompanied by a very gross excitement, is the lure by which she makes the vital consent to this otherwise unpleasing process— whatever Tagore or others may feel, there are numbers who experience a recoil of disgust after the act and repulsion from the partner in it because of the disgust, though they return to it when the disgust has worn off for the sake of this lure. The sex-energy itself is a great power with two components in its physical basis, one meant for procreation and the process necessary for it, the other for feeding the general energies of the body, mind and vital,—also of the spiritual energies of the body. The old yogis call these two components retas and ojas. The European scientists generally pooh-poohed the idea, but now they are beginning to discover the same fact for themselves. As for the thrill, it is simply a very gross distortion and degradation of the physical Ananda which by the Yoga can establish itself in the body, but this it cannot do so, so long as there is the sex-deviation....
As for the Force I use to cure people I shall see also whether I can explain what I mean by Force (the one I refer to is neither supramental nor omnipotent nor guaranteed to work like Beecham's pills in every case) and how it acts and in what conditions. I have tried it in hundreds of cases besides Dayakar's1 (on my own body first and always) and I have no doubt of its efficacy or reality under these conditions.
1. A young child of five-six from Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh, his parents were land holders; mother Krishnamma, father Rama Reddy, renamed Satyakarma, became the treasurer of the Ashram.
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May 1933 ?
The crystallising of the concentration is a good sign. As a matter of fact all these things depend upon perseverance. With a long perseverance a little result comes, with more perseverance a bigger result comes, then with a little more perseverance the big result comes. Concentration or even the effort at concentration is like a constant pressure which wears away the obstacle until, before one well knows, one finds it breaking or broken.
I know very well these pressures of a mental Power or creative formation to express itself and be fulfilled. When it presses like that there is nothing to do but to let it have way, so as to leave the mind unoccupied and clear; otherwise it will be pushed two ways and not in the condition of ease and clearness necessary for concentration.
There is nothing sentimental in the true weeping that comes from the soul. All that you feel now is the blossoming of the psychic being in you and the growth of a real bhakti.
It is always better not to judge others in the sense of condemning them. One need not be blind to their movements, but one should observe them as the movement of Nature blinding the light in them, for which they are less responsible than the mind thinks. It is true that your attitude was quite right and the vital ego put its intensity on the right side; for that very reason the egoistic elements which rose up were able by this contact with the psychic in you, both in arms together for the inner Truth, to dissolve themselves quickly. That is how the psychic leading always works in one way or another to transform the movements of the other parts of the nature.
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May 5, 1933
[...] This second fast of Mahatma Gandhi of three weeks has disquieted me a little.' 1 There seems to be no way out, for Gandhi asserts that he can break his irrevocable fast only if he is persuaded that the inner voice which enjoins the fast on him is the voice not of God but of the Devil. I wonder whose voice it is though ? Can it be of anything but disastrous augury? I would like to have your verdict....
Very glad you have recovered your position. Let it be a firm terrain on which the rest can come.
I don't think it was the voice of God that raged and thundered till Gandhi decided to starve himself on to the danger line—it looks as if it were the other fellow. One can only hope that he will scrape through somehow and that the doctors are wrong as they most often are when they opine in the plural; but the last experiment was not encouraging. And as this time there seems to be no reason whatever for this inspired procedure and no practical or practicable object set before it, there is no tangible means either of bringing it to a timely close. What an extraordinary ignorance of spiritual things to take any inner shout for the command of the Supreme!
May 13, 1933
In these moods the thoughts that assail you are so much out of focus! The essence of surrender is not to ask the Mother before doing anything—but to accept whole-heartedly the influence and the guidance; when the joy and peace come
1. Gandhi had been in jail since January 1933. He announced a 21-day fast "in connection with the Harijan cause." Gandhi was released a few days later, and asked the Congress to suspend the Civil Disobedience Movement.
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down to accept them without question or cavil and let them grow, when the Force is felt at work, to let it without opposition, when the Knowledge is given, to receive and follow it, when the Will is revealed, to make oneself its instrument. It is also, no doubt, to accept the guidance and control of the Guru who is at least supposed to know better than oneself what is or is not the Truth and the way to the Truth. All that is nothing very terrible, it is simple common sense. As to the particular kind of control you speak of, it is not imposed on anybody; it is only a few in the Ashram who at all follow any such rule. Amrita1 whom you mention would not have dreamed a year or two ago of asking the Mother before doing anything; if he does so now, it is not because the Mother told him to do so or "imposed" it on him, but because he felt the need for it for his sadhana. The Mother never imposed any rule on Anilbaran; he made his own rule of life of his own accord according to his own perception of the best way for him to concentrate and took the sanction of the Mother. You yourself were told by the Mother that you had no need to do what Sahana was trying to do in this respect at that time of her own motion—that for each it was only when he felt the need that he should do it. I do not see therefore why you should fear so much for your liberty—when in the whole Ashram of hundred and twenty people there are hardly half a dozen who follow any such rule of strict external surrender. And I cannot understand what you mean by the reproach that we have made some people stiff and speechless. Who are they? Amrita, Anilbaran, Dutta. As far as I know, they are quite adept in [?] and eloquent or fluent talkers. I am guiltless of the crime you charge against me.
Another thing let me correct. It is not at all correct to say
1. K. Amrita (19 September 1895 - 31 January 1969) was born as Aravamuda lyengar in a village near Pondicherry. He was very much attracted by Sri Aurobindo from his youth and met him in 1912. Later on, after studying in Madras, he came and stayed permanently with Sri Aurobindo. Pleasant and humorous, he was a delightful man. He became the manager of Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
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that we—in this instance the Mother—never warned Suchi and Sarala of their deterioration—they were warned and plainly warned and also of the influences from outside the Ashram to which they were succumbing. The Mother had even foreseen from the beginning that this might happen and put them on their guard in due time. If they fell, it was because they preferred to follow their lower nature and side with the lower forces. The Divine can lead, he does not drive. There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called man to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading: how else can any real spiritual evolution be done?
If there is so serious an obstacle to your going forward, it consists only of two things, your vital depressions and your mental doubts which make you challenge even the experiences you have and belittle any progress you make. Never have we told you to be stiff and gloomy and speechless—on the contrary we have pressed upon the other side. Other obstacles or difficulties there are, but they could be overcome if these two things were out of the way or rejected and inoperative.
If I constantly encourage you, it is not because I see you deteriorating and want to hide it—1 see nothing of the kind, —but because I have faith in your capacities and see the nobler Dilip behind all outward weakness. I would not speak what I know to be false—that much credit you can give me.
P. S. What put this into your head that you are regarded as an untouchable and a bad influence? If every man who had difficulties were so regarded, the whole Ashram would be an asylum of untouchables.
What I meant about the experiences was simply this that you have erected your own ideas about what you want from the Yoga and have always been measuring what began to
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come by that standard and because it was not according to expectation or up to standard telling yourself after a moment, "It is nothing, it is nothing". That dissatisfaction laid you open at every step to a reaction or a recoil which prevented any continuous development. The yogin who has experience knows that the small beginnings are of the greatest importance and have to be cherished and allowed with great patience to develop. He knows for instance that the neutral quiet so dissatisfying to the vital eagerness of the sadhak is the first step towards the peace that passeth all understanding, the small current or thrill of inner delight the first trickling in of the ocean of Ananda, the play of lights or colours the key of the doors of the inner vision and experience, the descent that stiffens the body into a concentrated stillness the first touch of something at the end of which is the presence of the Divine. He is not impatient, he is rather careful not to disturb the evolution that is beginning. Certainly, some sadhaks have strong and decisive experiences at the beginning, but these are followed by long labour in which there are many empty periods and many periods of struggle. You speak of Barin,1but Barin's experiences were like all he did brilliant but unsound in method and only bright beginnings without any conclusion and it was all on the surface, mental and vital fireworks. There was never any receding of the ego, any fundamental bases of ultimate realisation, any transformation of the nature. There he is a little hunting and experimenting in the vague.
May 16, 1933
I have no time to write a long letter. I can write only this. You are not to leave Pondicherry by this morning's train or at all. You have to come and see the Mother at 9.30 and speak to her heart to heart. Both the Mother and myself
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1. Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's younger brother.
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have lavished much love and care on you and you are certainly not going to make a return like this—it is impossible. Do not believe all you hear or allow yourself to be driven off your balance by falsehoods of the kind that have been retailed to you. You do not belong to yourself and have not the right to do what you propose to do: you belong to the Divine and to myself and the Mother. I have cherished you like a friend and a son and have poured on you my force to develop your powers—until the time should come for you to make an equal development in the Yoga. I claim the right to keep you as our own here with us. Throw away this despair—rise above the provocations of others—turn back to the Mother.
June 1933
It is not possible that your dream of Girish Ghose1 should be only a memory of childhood's thoughts. There are such dreams shaped by old impressions arising out of the subconscient, but they have a different character. This must be a contact with Girish Ghose somewhere in another world or plane—such contacts are frequent when one has become consciously active in dream on supraphysical planes.
June 15, 1933
The other day at pranam the Mother saw in me the great Latin poet Horace as one of my former incarnations, and what surprised her more was, she said, that Horace, a moment later, brought along Hector,2 the Trojan King
1. Girish Ghose, a Bengali dramatist and actor, disciple of Sri Ramakrishna.
2. Trojan warrior, son of Priam and Hecuba, brother of Paris and Cassandra (who was loved by Apollo). Hector was killed by Achilles, who dragged his body three times round the walls of Troy.
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telling Mother that the latter was one of his previous incarnations—consequently one of mine too. She told me that they had, both, some distinct resemblance to my humble physiognomy, and that their psychic being was identical with mine. What, in the name of all that is wonderful, is the import of it all? I hope it's of delectable augury? My misgivings on this score are due to my surmise that they (Hector and Horace1) don't seem to posterity as outstandingly psychic beings, do they? Nevertheless, I am glad that Horace was one of my refreshing ancestors, though I would have preferred to have been Catullus,2 the philosopher poet. But I fondly trust that Horace was not simply a poet but a man too, worth the name. But somehow I am sorry I was the hectoring Hector once, in my previous birth. And then didn't Hector abduct Helen and caused the destruction of Troy? How dreadful!
I must first get the facts right for you have rolled people into each other with an almost divine vigour. It was Paris if you please who made the disreputable false step which led to the destruction of Troy. To put the blame on the shoulders of poor Hector who was not only a fervent patriot and a "bonny" fighter but blamelessly moral in all his family and social relations is really a scandal for which you deserve to be hauled up before the Law-courts of the Beyond. Hector, I may say, has been slandered in another way—for he was really not in the habit of "hectoring," but really quite reasonable in his talk which was much to the point and full of excellent thoughts and sentiments and he had some perspicacity also. Only his magnanimity and courage often led him into a rash enthusiasm and exaggeration of hardihood which had its recoil reactions of depression and self-blame leading to another kind of rashness, that of despair. This is how Homer depicts him and we can take it at that.
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1. Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC). Latin poet.
2. Gaius Valerius Catullus (87-54? BC). Roman poet and epigrammatist.
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Next Horace. You prefer Catullus because he was a philosopher? You have certainly rolled Lucretius1 here into Catullus—Lucretius who wrote an epic about the "Nature of Things" and invested the Epicurean philosophy with a rudely Roman and most unepicurean majesty and grandeur. Catullus had no more philosophy in him than a red ant. He was an exquisite lyrist—much more spontaneous in his lyrism than the more sophisticated and well-balanced Horace, a poet of passionate and irregular love, and he got out of the Latin language a melody no man could persuade it to before him or after. But that was all. Horace on the other hand knew everything that was to be known about philosophy at that time and had indeed all the culture of the age at his fingers' ends and carefully put in its place in his brain also—but he did not make the mistake of writing a philosophical treatise in verse. A man of great urbanity, a perfectly balanced mind, a vital man with a strong sociability, faithful and ardent in friendship, a bon vivant fond of good food and good wine, a lover of women but not ardently passionate like Catullus, an Epicurean who took life gladly but not superficial—that was his character. As a poet he was the second among the great Augustan poets, a great master of phrase—the most quoted of all the Roman writers—a dexterous metrist who fixed the chief lyric Greek metres in Latin in their definitive form, a style and rhythm in which strength and grace were singularly united, a writer also of satire2 and familiar epistolary verse as well as a master of the ode and the lyric—that sums up his work.
But you must avoid a common popular blunder about reincarnation. The popular idea is that Titus Balbus is reborn again as John Smith, a man with the same personality, character, attainments as he had in his former life with the sole
1. Latin poet and philosopher (c. 94-55 BC).
2. Yes, he wrote a series of satires in verse—he ranks among the greatest satirists, but without malice or violence, his satire is good-humoured but often pungent criticism of life and men. [Sri Aurobindo's note]
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difference that he wears coat and trousers instead of a toga and speaks in cockney English instead of popular Latin. That is not the case. What would be the earthly use or the unearthly use of repeating the same personality or character a million times from the beginning of time till its end? The soul comes into birth for experience, for growth, for evolution till it can bring the Divine into Matter. It is the central being that incarnates, not the outer personality—the personality is simply a mould that it creates for its figures of experience in that one life. In another birth it will create for itself a different personality, different capacities, a different life and career. Supposing Virgil is born again, he may take up poetry in one or two other lives, but he will certainly not write an epic but rather perhaps slight but elegant and beautiful lyrics such as he wanted to but did not succeed in writing in Rome. In another birth he is likely to be no poet at all, but a philosopher and a yogin seeking to attain and to express the highest truth —for that too was an unrealised trend of his consciousness in that life. Perhaps before he had been a warrior or ruler doing deeds like Aeneas or Augustus before he sang them. And so on—on this side or that the central being develops a new character, a new personality, grows, develops, passes through all kinds of terrestrial experience.
As the evolved being develops still more and becomes more rich and complex, it accumulates its personalities, as it were. Sometimes they stand behind the active elements, throwing in some colour, some trait, some capacity here and there,—or they stand in front and there is a multiple personality, a many-sided character or a many-sided, sometimes what looks like a universal capacity. But if a former personality, a former capacity is brought fully forward, it will not be to repeat what was already done, but to cast the same capacity into new forms and new shapes and fuse it into a new harmony of the being which will not be a reproduction of what was before. Thus you must not expect to be what Hector and Horace were. Something of the outer characteristics may reappear, e.g. the lyrist, prosodist, social writer,
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thinker on life that was in Horace—but very much changed and new-cast in a new combination. Nor must you expect to find in Horace poetry like your own as it is in a new direction that the energies will be guided to do what was not done before.
Another thing. It is not the personality, the character that is of the first importance in rebirth—it is the psychic being who stands behind the evolution of the nature and evolves with it. What the Mother said was not that Hector and Horace were psychic beings—which neither of them predominantly were, but that she saw in you the psychic being that had stood behind the personalities of Horace and Hector. The psychic when it departs from the body, shedding even the mental and vital on its way to its resting place, carries with it the heart of its experiences,—but not the physical events, not the vital movements, not the mental buildings, not the capacities or characters, but something essential that it gathered from them, what might be called the divine element for the sake of which the rest existed. That is the permanent addition, it is that that helps in the growth towards the Divine. That is why there is usually no memory of the outward events and circumstances of past lives—for this memory there must be a strong development towards unbroken continuance of the mind, the vital, even the subtle physical; for though it all remains in a kind of seed memory, it does not ordinarily emerge. What was the divine element in the magnanimity of Hector, that which expressed itself in his loyalty, nobility, high courage, what was the divine element behind the harmonious mentality and generous vitality of Horace and expressed itself in them, that remains and in a new harmony of character may find a new expression or, if the life is turned towards the Divine, be taken up as powers for the realisation or for the work that has to be done for the Divine.
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June 22, 1933 ?
My experience shows me that the human beings are less deliberate and responsible for their acts than the moralists, novelists and dramatists make them and I look rather to see what forces drove them than what the man himself may have seemed by inference to have intended or purposed— our inferences are often wrong and even when they are right touch only the surface of the matter.
June 23, 1933
I wired to Sisir Bhaduri "Don't know your pro fits, suggest your terms reasonable." Also I wired to my publisher Haridas Chatterji also a director of the Star Theatre, "Sisir wants Chandragupta Talkie. Wire how much I should charge." Grant now that I may extract a goodly sum to be able to offer the same at Mother's feet. The Hindi people gave (disgraceful) only Rs.250 when I had expected at least Rs. 750.
P. S. What is the meaning of your "Unheard is the valued"? I ask again for this and enclose the paper.
1... by "valued" that that is what is good for. Of course, it is only an extreme way of putting the idea of that Supreme Affirmation as against that of the Supreme Negation. For the Mayavadin the Brahman is not only an Unheard but an Unbearable; it is an indeterminate X out of which nothing but illusion can come though itself is nothing but Reality, only a Reality without anything in it—except itself and what itself is one can be but never know as it has neither content nor feature. So you get lost in it not so much like a star as like a fire of damp wood that contentedly fizzles out. From
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1. The first page of Sri Aurobindo's reply is missing.
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the other point of view the Divine is Absolute Bliss, Consciousness, Force, Light, Truth and everything else divine and you can not only lose yourself in it like a star or rather plunge into it as your own perfect element but come out from it like a sun with all that in you. It is an Unheard in which are all divine hearings.
June 30, 1933
The wild elephants (Mother saw you taming) mean the untamed forces and potentialities that are to be controlled....
July 15, 1933
The poem is beautiful and the metre is beautiful. As for the rest, there are two golden rules. (1) Never be depressed or upset by difficulties or stumbles. (2) Press always quietly forward, then however long it seems to take, always progress will be made and one day you will be surprised to find your self near the goal. It is like the curves followed by the train in the ascent of the mountain—they circle round but always nearer and nearer to the goal.
July 17, 1933
I had thought of asking Mother, but somehow didn't: what was the matter last evening with Purushottam ?1 Champaklal2 says there was nothing wrong there. Others
1. A Gujarati disciple. He was put in charge of "Prosperity."
2. Champaklal Purani (2 February 1903 – 9 May 1992) came from Gujarat and had joined the Ashram in 1923. He was a painter and Sri Aurobindo and Mother's faithful attendant.
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say it was a possession. I trust my appeal to Krishna hadn't reached other quarters than that of the Benign Evergreen ? It is rather disquieting that's why I ask.
There was no misdirection of your appeal to Krishna; if there was anybody responsible it was Anilkumar with his tabla. But there was nothing wrong and no "possession" in the evil sense of the word; nothing hostile. The beat-beat of the tabla more than anything else created a vibration which was caught hold of by some rhythmic material Energy and that in its turn caught hold of or was caught hold of by Purushottam's body which considered itself under a compulsion to "execute" the rhythm by a dance. There is the whole (occult) science of the affair, Purushottam thought he was inspired and in a trance, Ambu1 thought Purushottam was going to break his head and other people's legs, a number of others thought Purushottam was going cracked or already cracked, some thought Purushottam was killing Ambu which Ambu contemptuously rejects saying he was able to hold Purushottam all alone, and out of these conflicting mental judgments—if they can be called so—arose the whole row. A greater quietude in people's minds could perhaps have allowed the "incident" to be "liquidated" in a less uproarious fashion—but the Mother was absorbed in the music and could only intervene later when Champaklal consulted her. That is all.
July 26, 1933
I enclose the book of verse of Buddhadev just out which he has presented to you, I am so glad, as his poetry is immensely superior to his stories, etc. Please read at least the poems marked √ thus, particularly the poem tathapi banchiya rabe [still it will live] whose chhanda [metre] is
1. Ambu, a Gujarati young man, expert in Yogic asanas.
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extremely fine and throbbing with life and gāmbhirjya [gravity or solemnity], also the fine poem Pāpī ["Sinner"] you had read. He is now 25 only and it is surprising to find such a perfection of form and a genuine poetic inspiration, is it not? What I regret is that he should be writing so many bad stories instead of writing more good poems. But he says he has to live on his writings and so—
I agree. I once made a struggle to read a story or two of his but failed.
Could Mother possibly remind Chandulal that the bathroom was to have been ready in ten days—it is more than two weeks—perhaps more and I fear he does not quite realise how inconvenient it is for me etc. etc. If Mother gives him a slight hint he will I know be galvanised into promptness, it is no use my reminding him.
It is not Chandulal's fault but Fate's. They had more joints to renew than they expected, so the wood failed in the middle and they had to wait for more to come. However Mother is reminding him.
August 10, 1933
I cannot persuade myself that all the things that are happening—including the triumph of the British policy and deterioration ofGandhi's intellect are meant for the best. On top of it my noble-hearted friend Sengupta [...] is carried off. Bengal is now benighted and there is no sign of light anywhere.
Tagore too has just written an article of despair in which he forebodes gloomily an end of the world pralay-kalpanta as perhaps the quickest and most satisfactory solution to the mess we are in. Add to this my own lack of devotion
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and faith—as a result of which I thirst for something concrete to feel that the Divine is after all caring for the like of us. I do sometimes even feel that in the end you will give up this wicked world and wish with Tagore for the pralay [universal dissolution] and retire into extracosmic samadhi.
I have no intention of doing so—even if all smashed; I would look beyond the smash to the new creation. As for what is happening in the world, it does not upset me because I knew all along that things would happen in that fashion. I never had any illusions about Gandhi's satyagraha—it has only fulfilled my prediction that it would end in a great confusion or a great fiasco and my only mistake was that I put an "or" where there should have been an "and"—and as for the hopes of the intellectual idealists I have not shared them, so I am not disappointed.
As for yourself, it seems to be a fit of the blues—not the spiritual brilliant, but the dark blue; there is only one thing to do with them, to throw them away and let the true blue shine out on you. Whether the harbour is nearby or further off is not the main thing—the one need is to go on with the eyes fixed on the guiding star—then today or tomorrow or afterwards one arrives at the goal.
P. S. Your metre is a lyric discovery and the poem is very beautiful.
August 13, 1933
Your poetry is not an infliction but a relief. Amid a surging ocean of polyglot letters it is a welcome islet of rhythm and style. So far as I have read is very fine. But I have yet to read the whole.
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August 15, 1933
There are artists and artists. A real artist with the spirit of artistry in his very blood will certainly be artistic in everything. But there are artists who have no taste and there are artists who are not born but made. Your example of Tagore is a different matter. A mastery in one department of art does not give mastery on another—though there may be a few who excel equally in many arts. Gandhi's phrase about asceticism is only a phrase. You might just as well say that politics is an art or that cooking is the greatest of arts or apply that phrase to bridge or boxing or any other human field of effort. As for Tolstoi's dictum it is that of a polemist, a man who had narrowed himself to one line of ideas—and such people can say anything. There is the same insufficiency about the other quotations. An artist or a poet may be the medium of a great power but in his life he may be a very ordinary man or else a criminal like Villon1 or Cellini.2 All hands go to make this rather queer terrestrial creation.
August 16, 1933
Today as usual I lay down and was doing japa of Mother's name after having read for some time Gita and a novel of Dostoievsky. Suddenly I found myself in the state I used to be long ago. The body was immobile, the currents were passing from head downwards, etc.—all that. I need not therefore go over it all again. Enough to say that I felt very joyous that this experience recurred after a long time. I am trying to keep my consciousness turned
1. Francois Villon (1431-c. 1463). French lyric poet, author of ballades and rondeaux.
2. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), Italian goldsmith and sculptor. His sculpture Perseus is famous.
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towards you and Mother. I suspect I received something yesterday. Anyhow I will try to welcome devoutly more if it comes.
Very glad to hear it. Mother remarked and myself was pleased to see the signs of a marked progress in you on the 15th. Yes, you received something within which has yet fully to come out.
August 17, 1933
I am afraid I don't see how I can see William Arthur Moore—how can I extend to him so extraordinary a privilege (since I see nobody) which I would not have conceded to Sarat Chatterji? You say Barin certifies him as a bhakta—but Barin's language is apt to be vivid and exaggerated; he probably means only an admirer. I think he must be answered that certainly he would [have] been allowed a meeting with me if I had been coming out but the entire seclusion has been taken as a rule for Sri Aurobindo's sadhana and it may not be subjected to exception so long as the rule is in force. If he is really a bhakta that will give him a ray of distant hope and if he isn't, the impression made does not very much matter. Barin surely exaggerates the power of the publicist—after all he is only the editor of the Statesman—but even otherwise that is not the main consideration. By the way why have you transmogrified Moore into Jones ?—there was a Jones there but he has departed and yielded the place to Moore.
As for this Paresh, he wants to be in the Ashram, it would appear (yogāshrame yābār ichchhā1), but I don't see how that can be conceded. If it is merely darshan in November he wants it can be granted. I don't remember his letter—I suppose Nolini may—and don't know what he wrote or
1. "He wants to be in the ashram."
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asked for. You might fish it out from Nolini if he can find it. I probably paid no attention to it as mere Paresh could have conveyed no meaning to my mind. Very glad of the success of your metres but that was sure.
August 26, 1933
I suppose I shall take much time to read this affair of Moni's. The simplest solution will be to stop this discussion which is degenerating into a controversy or dispute.
I have not seen what Moni says, but if it is that you have narrowed or deteriorated because you no longer sing erotic songs, I do not see how that can be. One is not narrowed if one loses taste for jazz and can hear with real pleasure only the great masters or music like theirs; it is not deterioration when one rises from a lower to a higher plane of thinking, feeling or artistic self-expression. I used to write poems on vital love. I could not do it now (for if I wrote of love, it would be the psychic and spiritual feeling)—not because I have narrowed or deteriorated, but I have centred myself in a higher consciousness and anything merely vital would not express me. It must be the same with anyone who changes his level of consciousness. Can one say of the man who has grown out of childishness and no longer plays with nursery toys that he has narrowed and deteriorated by the change?
August 28, 1933
I am afraid it is hardly possible to have Saratchandra with these habits of his residing in the Ashram itself. It would be a serious shock to the discipline of the Ashram to have someone in it—the more illustrious and eminent, the worse it will be—drinking and taking opium with the sanction of the Mother! You should know by this time how the mentality of
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the sadhaks works, and we have had trouble enough, e.g. in the smoking affair before because of Puran Mull and other examples. If it were not for these things we would have consented at once.
It is he himself who has suggested the hotel, but if an arrangement can be made for a room outside we have no objection. But it is not perhaps easy to get a room here. It should be understood that the room is not engaged by the Mother or under her control—otherwise the same difficulty will arise.
It is, no doubt, a very tempting catch in prospect for the propagandist in you and I fully appreciate your feelings. But—well, you know we are not very ardent fishers of men and our principle is to let those who are destined for the Great Emprise come of themselves, not go out of our way to seek them. All who have the finger of the Golden Light pointing to them are welcome, and if Sarat Chatterji is one of them, he will find himself perforce in spite the triple charm of alcoholism, opium and tobacco. But it is too early to anticipate.
August 30, 1933
I try to reply [. ..]1 be brief in my answer.
I fear in this case as in some others you and the others who shared your opinion judged too much from the outside appearance. A man is not sexually pure only because he does not flirt with women nor free from ambition, vanity and pride because he is outwardly humble and gentle. I do not usually care to reveal the weaknesses of one sadhak to the others—as you can understand, it would not be right for me to do so, so these wrong notions about people become current. Durgadas was hot at all an ideal sadhak, he had the same weaknesses as other men, but for a long time he kept them very much shut up in himself and he followed his own
1. The manuscript is mutilated here and four or five words are illegible.
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ways in dealing with them which were not very safe. His meditations were silent and secret and he did not tell them to us as he should have done. He had ambitions and violent jealousies and a wish to occupy the first place. These things he did not exclude from his sadhana, but rather indulged them and allowed formations about them to take hold of his mind when he concentrated. For his sexual difficulty he used methods which in the opinion of the doctor (not Upen dranath) who saw him in his illness were the cause of his first upsetting. The one thing that kept him right for a long time was his work which was the one way that he found for trying to form the habit of selfless surrender. But in the end he got weary of his work and wished to give it up and serve no longer. These are the facts and you will see they are very different from your idealised picture. All the theories about his breaking down under the pressure of being near the Mother, etc. are beside the mark. He broke down like Putu and Nolinbehari because he preferred to follow his own way, his own desires and imaginations instead of obeying the guidance and heeding the warnings of the Mother. He became enamoured of his own formations, allowed any Force that flattered them to take hold of him and put that up as the Mother refusing to obey or accept the guidance of the actual Mother here. If he had not done that, there is no reason why he should not have set himself right and gone straight. He had not in him the makings of a great Yogi, certainly, but he had a certain capacity for devotion and intensity o£ aspi ration, and if he had used that for a true self-offering and surrender and if he had confided in the Mother and followed her guidance, he could have realised and come to some thing. But he did just the opposite and the result was as with Putu and Nolinbehari, a disaster.
I have explained the case of Durgadas, but I have no time to answer your general questionings—if this letter is to go at once—I will try to make time tonight or tomorrow.
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To answer the one question in your last letter would need a Mahabharata—for you raise at one fell swoop the whole problem of life along with the whole problem of Yoga. But you have more faith than you imagine, otherwise you would not be so hard on the Divine. I did not, by the way, mean this kind of formation when I spoke of Durgadas but formations of a false value in Yoga. Doubts are an obstacle, sometimes a serious obstacle, but false values in Yoga which the sadhak is not willing to correct are a danger.
I may say about the doubts that one cannot be free from them easily so long as one judges by the intellect alone or by the appearances of things without appeal to that which is behind appearances. The very fact that one comes to Yoga is an admission that there must be something other than the appearances, a deeper and greater Truth behind. It is an admission that there is a Divine Someone or Something behind, and if so, then life simply cannot mean only what it seems to be on the surface. The surface meaning cannot be ignored—I have never ignored it and the Mother has never ignored it—the riddle, the obscurity, the suffering, the tight hold of the Asura,—but that is neither the whole nor the ultimate truth of existence. It is that one must bend one's whole effort to get at and not dwell always in the aspects of the surface.
I must remind you that I have been an intellectual myself and no stranger to doubts—both the Mother and myself have had one side of the mind as positive and as insistent on practical results and more so than any Russell can be. We could never have been contented with the shining ideas and phrases which a Rolland or another takes for gold coin of Truth. We know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outward-going and realising Force. So although we have faith,—and who ever did anything great in the world without having faith in his
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mission or the Truth at work behind him?—we do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse Forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer down to the field of earth and Matter.
If I believe in the probability and not only the possibility, if I feel practically certain of the supramental Descent—I do not fix a date,—it is because I have my grounds for the belief, not merely a faith in the air. I know that the supramental descent is inevitable—I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later age.
But even if I knew it to be for a later time, I would not swerve from my path or be discouraged or flag in my labour. Formerly I might have been, but not now after all the path I have traversed. When one is sure of the Truth, or even when one believes the thing one pursues to be the only possible solution, one does not stipulate for immediate success, one travels towards the Light taking as well worth while and facing every risk of the adventure. Still, like you, it is now in this life that I insist on it and not in another or in the hereafter.
August 31, 1933
This afternoon I was more than all right. I was doing japa as usual and dropped off to sleep. When I saw a curious dream. Maya was sitting by me and a few others equally fond of music asked me to sing. You and Mother were listening. I sang and the song was on Shiva—and was so ecstatic that you got up and blessed me—joining in the hymn. But what was more curious was that as you did
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this I saw the Shiva in you and I was delighted. This I remember vividly. The rest I don't, so I won't risk [describing it?]. I remember bowing to you—falling at your feet in great devotional fervour. All were so moved by the [dignity of?] your rising to bless me and joined in singing the chorus with me. Was it not curious—you who never sing? Tell me however, do you ever sing—I don't mean music of the spheres but our mortal songs with musical intervals as we understand? As for instance Mother does ?
No—I don't sing on the physical plane. My education in England was badly neglected—though people say to the contrary. I filled in most of the lacunae afterwards, but some remained of which the musical gap is one. But that is no reason why I should not sing on the supraphysical plane where you saw me! There is no exact correspondence between the formation here and the formations there—on the contrary on these inner planes the subliminal as they call it in Europe —that is to say, our inner selves are full of powers which have not emerged—yet at least—in the physical consciousness. And especially as I was full of Shiva in your experience there is no reason why I should not have sung for I suppose Shiva sings as well as dances?
With great difficulty I have just taken quarter of an hour from other work to read the story of Sarat Chatterji's book. Evidently a wonderful style and a great and perfect creative artist with a profound emotional power!
September 7, 1933
As to the rest, I think there is still a misunderstanding in your mind about the demands of the Yoga. The Divine does not demand a complete solitude, aloof and lonely—it is only a few whose nature needs such concentration within to find
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themselves who have to do that and even for them a complete segregation is not likely to be helpful except perhaps for a time. All that is necessary is a total turning of the life to the Divine and it can be done by degrees without too much forcing of the nature. Literature, poetry, music can be as much a part of Yoga as anything else.
One can meet the Divine in speaking as well as in silence, in action as well as in physical solitude and quietude. An entire retirement can only be a personal case—and as a condition for an inward or outward work, but it is no general rule indispensable for the sadhana. In many cases, most indeed, it would do more harm than good as has been seen in many cases where it has been unduly attempted. A cheerful and sunny life is as good an atmosphere for Yoga as any the Himalayas can give.
Why then this depression and despair?
Why didn't you come yourself with the money? I would have seen you for a few minutes and told you something interesting and helpful as an answer to your letter of this morning. For in speaking it would have been better than anything I could write. At pranam time I felt that you were still depressed and I thought that I would try to pour on you some of the Divine forces. I was looking at you for such a long time and it was Divine love that I was pouring on you with a strong will that you should become conscious of the Divine Presence in you and see all your sorrows turn into Ananda. I saw to my great joy that you were very receptive to all these Divine forces and absorbing them without resistance as they were pouring down! When I read your letter and saw that you thought you had received only some human
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kindness it struck me that it was only a misunderstanding of the mind, almost a question of vocabulary that was standing in the way, and if you could see this all or most of your doubts would disappear for ever and with them your painful difficulties. For what I was pouring in you was not merely human kindness—though surely it contained all that human kindness can be at its best—but Mahalakshmi's love, Mahasaraswati's care, Maheswari's embracing and enveloping light. Do not think of Divine Love as something cold or impersonal or distantly high—it is something as warm and close and tender as any feeling can possibly be. It does not abolish whatever is pure and sweet in human love, but intensifies and sublimates it to its highest. It is this love that the Divine has to give and that you must open yourself to receive. I think if you realise this, it will be easier for you to pierce through the mental veil and receive what you are longing to receive.
I can only say that Imagination when a little wildly active can be a Shakespeare and create in real life a new Much Ado about Nothing!
But why suppose that when I send the Doctor to see somebody it is with full instructions what to say and what to recommend? I don't. I send him in his medical capacity to find out what is wrong, report to me and make recommendations which we accept or reject according to our lights. I sent him because vivid reports were sent to me by Nolini and Amiya herself about her bad condition of health and nocturnal sufferings. I knew of course that it was the nerves but for the physical mind the appearance of medical Authority on the spot is sometimes indispensable. Nothing was recommended about any maunavrata [vow of silence] being necessary, nor had I any intention of imposing anything of the sort. As for the recommendation of quiet and the opening to the Force,
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the first is always recommended in cases of nervous strain or weakness, for the second the Doctors of the Ashram, especially Upendranath and Becharlal, always recommend because they have seen its effects and believe in it.
I do not understand about this fear. The Mother has never been severe with either Amiya or Nalina,1 but always kind, patient and indulgent. If it exists it must be the child of imagination or of Ashram gossip or a prolonged echo of the theories of Barin and others. Obviously it is by love or faith that one opens to the Divine, not by fear.
I do not understand either about this bathroom affair. The Mother naturally does not care to spend money on this house for which we have no lease nor any hope of one at present. But she did not refuse Amiya's request about cementing—it was only postponed because the B.D. [Building Department] was full of work elsewhere. I think I myself wrote to that effect—then why these ideas about it?
Your idea of exchange of houses if carried out, could not be done till the repairs are over—a delay of two months. But for you also and Anilkumar some arrangement seems urgently necessary till then. Mother suggests that Amiya and Nalina should shift temporarily to Cocotiers upstairs—that being the only possible other place now—and you and Anilkumar should go to Vigie. When the Tresoris ready, we can see what decision is to be finally made. What do you all say to that?
September 9, 1933
The Mother does not wish Anilkumar to go to the Cocotiers. In fact, the upstairs rooms are so interdependent that two people who are not accustomed to live together would be always in each other's way. Her idea was that you should both be in the Vigie House.
1. Sahana's elder sisters. They had arrived in January 1932 and were living in a rented house, Budi, on the seashore.
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In respect to that Nalina and Amiya have both written that they are quite willing to go to Cocotiers if it is the Mother's will—they only objected to the idea that they were dissatisfied with V. H. [Vigie House] and on that ground invited to go elsewhere. That again leaves the choice open to you, either to take V. H. with its terrace and nearness to the sea or the Cocotiers with its interior comfortableness. Amiya and Nalina seem to be attracted by the general report of the Cocotiers and other considerations so that you need have no scruple in making your choice.
About the bulk of your letter I shall try to reply—not at the same length, you will understand that—tomorrow as today I am terribly overburdened with arrears of unanswered letters and other documents of great importance—at least to their writers. I hope you won't mind the delay.
P. S. I have written to Nolini to show you the Cocotiers in the evening.
September 10, 1933
It is the depression and despondency itself that have no real meaning in the truth of things—for they started from the mistake about Amiya's segregation and, when that was corrected, they ought to have disappeared. But they have persisted—why? For no tangible and ascertainable cause. Before this happened, you were going on admirably well, expanding rapidly your instrumental capacities, purifying slowly but still steadily the vital weakness, getting much more frequent experiences than before with very promising signs of a stronger entry into the inner consciousness. Here there was no true reason for depression or despair. The reason you now allege are purely mind-made. There is the intellectual doubt about the Divine mingled with the Christian-antichristian conception of an arbitrary God who acts in the world according to his caprice and must be therefore either
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Jehovah or a monster. There is the difficulty of seeing the Divine in the human and the human in the Divine. There is the difficulty that the Divine has not answered to your call. Old reiterances, all these, and of no fundamental or final value.
The whole world knows, spiritual thinker and materialist alike, that the world for the created or naturally evolved being in the ignorance or the inconscience of Nature is neither a bed of roses nor a path of joyous Light. It is a difficult journey, a battle and struggle, an often painful and chequered growth, a life besieged by obscurity, falsehood and suffering. It has its mental, vital, physical joys and pleasures, but these bring only a transient taste—which yet the vital self is unwilling to forego—and they end in distaste, fatigue or disillusionment. What then? To say the Divine does not exist is easy, but it leads nowhere—it leaves you where you are with no prospect or issue—neither Russell nor any materialist can tell you where you are going or even where you ought to go. The Divine does not manifest himself so as to be recognised in the external world-circumstances—admittedly so. These are not the works of an irresponsible autocrat somewhere—they are the circumstances of a working out of Forces according to a certain nature of being, one might say a certain proposition or problem of being into which we have all really consented to enter and co-operate. The work is painful, dubious, its vicissitudes impossible to forecast? There are either of two possibilities then, to get out of it into Nirvana by the Buddhist or the illusionist way or to get inside oneself and find the Divine there since he is not discoverable on the surface. For those who have made the attempt, and there were not a few but hundreds and thousands, have testified through the ages that he is there and that is why there exists the Yoga. It takes long? The Divine is concealed behind a thick veil of his Maya and does not answer at once or at any early stage to our call? Or he gives only a glimpse uncertain and passing and then withdraws and waits for us to be ready? But if the Divine has any value, is it not worth some trouble and time and labour to follow after him and must we
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insist on having him without any training or sacrifice or suffering or trouble ? It is surely irrational to make a demand of such a nature. It is positive that we have to get inside, behind the veil to find him—it is only then that we can see him outside and the intellect be not so much convinced as forced to admit his presence by experience—just as when a man sees what he has denied and can no longer deny it. But for that the means must be accepted and the persistence in the will and patience in the labour.
As for the Divine and the human, that also is a mind-made trouble. The Divine is there in the human, and the human fulfilling and exceeding its highest aspirations and tendencies becomes the Divine. That is what your silly Upen could not understand—that when the Divine descends, he takes upon himself the burden of humanity in order to exceed it— he becomes human in order to show humanity how to become Divine. But that cannot be if he is himself a weakling without the Divine Forces behind—he has to be strong in order to put his strength into all who are willing to receive it. There is therefore in him a double element—human in front. Divine behind—and it is that which gives the impression of unfathomableness of which Upen complained— indulging in that the iconoclast in him who cannot bear anything he feels to be superior to himself. If you look upon the human alone, looking with the external eye only and are not willing or ready to see anything else, you will see a human being only—if you look for the Divine, you will find the Divine. That has been always your difficulty—but it can only be solved by inner experience which will open the external eye also. You were actually heading that way before this crisis disturbed you.
But it is really an unnecessary crisis that you have created by indulging this depression after its outward cause had been removed. It is because you did not reject it at once, but came back to your former habit of indulging it and feeding it with "reasons". There is a development which takes place through crisis and one cannot always escape them, but it
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seems to me a wasteful process and not one I could recommend to anyone. It comes like that because some vital part in you opens to a force which wants it like that—even though your own mind does not want it. If it had been only your own difficulty, it would not have been so violent, it would have been solved long ago; but by assenting to the depression you make yourself a sort of representative of the World-vital or that part of it which is dissatisfied with life and attached to it, seeking for Yoga or spiritual release and yet revolting against it; finally crying in bitter vairāgya against both the Divine and world existence.
There is no reason at all why you should fail in this Yoga. Defeat is not truly in your nature, success and victory are in your nature. But you must lose this habit of indulging depression, of making yourself the mouthpiece for the painful feelings and defeatist reasonings of this sorrowful and dangerous World-Vital. You must give a real chance to the capacity within you to come out as it did in poetry in spite of the first outward incapacities and failures. It has shown itself whenever you got an experience and it has only to gather strength enough to push down the screen for good. But it can't be done by the method of seeking a mournful solitude or an imitation of Bejoy's retirement. Bejoy has made a theory of taking upon himself all the imperfections and struggles of everybody in a recurrent mass in order to digest and destroy or else transform them. I could not recommend to you his theory or the example of his solitude.
As you have decided to get over the [a word crossed out] decide also to get rid of this depression trouble. You were on the way to do it and the fits were becoming less in duration and power. Do not allow this relapse—for which there was no true rational reason—to overcome your resolution or throw you back. Attacks and crises come and they go, but the goal and the Ideal remain—for that is the Eternal.
P. S. I never thought that I would be able to write so long a reply, but by good fortune, almost a miracle, I was able to
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finish the regular work for the day at 3 a.m. instead of the usual 5.30, so I have put in two hours writing this letter. I could not find time to read the Sylhet letter you sent me, so I keep it and will send after reading.
September 15, 1933
I stand rather aghast at your summons to stand and deliver the names of the ten or twelve best prose styles in the world's literature. I had no names in mind and I used the incautious phrase only to indicate the high place I thought Bankim held among the great masters of language. To rank the poets on different grades of the Hill of Poetry is a pastime which may be a little frivolous and unnecessary, but possible and permissible. I would not venture to try the same game with the prose-writers who are multitudinous and do not present the same marked and unmistakable differences of level and power. The prose field is a field, with eminences no doubt, much more than a mountain. The tops if there are any are not so high, the drops not so low as in poetical literature.
Then again there are great writers in prose and great prose writers and the two are by no means the same thing. Dickens and Balzac are great novelists, but their style or their frequent absence of style had better not be described; Scott has a style I suppose, but it is neither blameless nor has distinguishing merit. Other novelists have a style and a good one but their prose is not quoted as a model and they are remembered not for that but as creators. You speak of Meredith, and if Meredith had always written as he did in Richard Feverel he might have figured chiefly as a master of language, but the creator got the better of the stylist in the bulk of his work. I was writing of prose styles and what was in my mind was those achievements in which language reached its acme of perfection in one manner or another so that whatever the writer touched became a thing of beauty—no matter
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what its substance—or a perfect form and memorable. Bankim seemed to me to have achieved that in his own way as Plato in his or Cicero or Tacitus in theirs or in French literature, Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole France. I could name others, but especially in French which is the greatest store-house of fine prose among the world's languages—there is no other to match it. Matthew Arnold once wrote a line that runs something like this:
"France great in all great arts, in none supreme,"
to which someone very aptly replied, "And what then of the art of prose-writing? Is it not a great art and what other country can approach France there? All prose of other languages seems beside its perfection, lucidity, measure, almost clumsy."
There are many remarkable prose-writers in English, but that essential or fundamental perfection which is almost like a second nature to the French writers is not so common. The great prose-writers in English seem to seize you by the personality they express in their styles rather than by its perfection as an instrument—it is true at least of the earliest and I think too of the later writers. Lamb whom you mention is a signal example of a writer who erected his personality into a style and lives by that achievement—Pater and Wilde are other examples.
As for Bengali, we have had Bankim and have still Tagore and Sarat Chatterji. That is achievement enough for a single century.
I have not answered your question—but I have explained my phrase and I think that is all you can expect from me.
September 25, 1933
Last night till 2 a.m. I composed this song in laghu guru chhanda: seven mātrās to the bar à la mātrā-vrtta. Nishikanto has liked this chhanda so much that he has composed a
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sister song to this poem. I am sure this chhanda will be pronounced by the prosodists as original and full of power which laghu guru only can inspire. I felt a sense of great power—a sense of upsurge of the vital. lama little uneasy on that score, as I have no desire to let my poetry become what you call "vital poetry". Please let me know if I truly run that risk. The tune I set it to is also very powerful and I felt a vivid thrill of power as 1 sang it last night in the dhrupad dhamar style.
The laghu guru here is quite obviously triumphant—it flows without any difficulty. What I mean by vital poetry is that in which appeal to sense or sensation, to the vital thrill, is so dominant that the mental content of the poetry takes quite a secondary place. Either word and sound tend to predominate over sense or else the nerves and blood are thrilled (as e.g. in war poetry) but the mind and soul do not find an equal satisfaction. This does not mean that there is to be no vital element in poetry—without the vital nothing living can be done. In this respect I do not find your poem at all defective so the fear is without foundation. When you write the psychic being is always behind it—even when you are in the depths of mental and vital despondency, as soon as you write the psychic being intervenes and throws its selfexpression into what you write. It is that, that has made people with some inner life in them, those who have some touch of the spiritual, feel these poems of yours so much. That too is the main reason (there are others) why I have given unstinted encouragement to your poetry, because it is the psychic means of self-expression in you—there you are at once open.
September 29, 1933
I don't see why there should be any dispute about the matter. A good novel is a good novel—whether it is all head and
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no heart or all heart and no head makes no essential difference. Only the vitalist has this advantage that if it is all story and no idea it can run, but if it is all idea and no story it is more difficult [...]
October 1933
We quite approve of your resolution about propaganda, etc. But at any rate this has helped your sadhana which is an example of how the cosmic spirit sometimes, at least, extracts good out of evil.
What you say about the ahamkār [ego-sense] of the instrument is true—it is one of the most sticky of the ego's self-deceptions and there are few who can detect it soon or get early clear of it. I think I can congratulate you on your becoming aware of it at so early a stage. There are some who do not discover it even after ten or twenty years of sadhana....
October 10, 1933
I am feeling as well as well can be. I enclose herewith Tagore's translation of Harm's poem with his letter. You will note his apology: Tagore had rendered Shelley's "I cannot give thee what men call love" which was very mediocre. This poem I think you will find good, but surely Tagore's powers are on the wane/ don't you think. His contention that he could not keep any rhymes is a confession of his failure: but he makes no ado: he confesses he has no power to translate poetry into poetry.
I am afraid his powers are very much on the wane, but let us not whisper it too loud. The setting of a great genius and one that after all, created on a very high level for a very long time.
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But that does not mean that I am not grateful to him for his great favour. I want to do my little best with your and Mother's grace to publish a number of Harm's translations in the prospective anthology and for that Tagore's favour cannot be prized too much. I am sure Harm too will appreciate it. Tagore was unwilling to translate: in another letter which 1 did not send you, as I was disappointed by his refusal, he paid a tribute to Harm's verse but declined to translate any—very politely. So I strategically sent him just this poem with a request on the margin. My importunity has been crowned with success: so your prophecy is fulfilled: that I am not cut out for defeat. But jokes apart, this is a victory for Harin's verse: that he could by the compelling beauty of his poems extort a translation of an unwilling Tagore who reasonably fears that qua translation Buddhadev's rendering will be adjudged as superior. 1 will send you tomorrow his translation of Shelley. But I don't mean, mind you, that this translation is as indifferent as the former: only I had expected a better achievement at the hands of Tagore. But please send me back this letter of mine with Tagore's translation I will show it to Harin. If possible send me your verdict. Of course I won't tell it to Tagore. Tagore's translation of Shelley was not liked by Nolini either, but this one is likeable—but far from achievement. Anyway I will be grateful for your verdict.
It is good, of course, but I am bound to say I miss the rhymes. In order to make up for their absence he has had to replace Harm's lyrical grace and charm of simple delicate emotion by a gravity and power in the diction which has its value but is not the same thing. However, a translation by Tagore is in itself an éclatant homage.
So rippling along once more on the waters of Poesy! There is really no holding me, don't you think?
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I hope so—why should the divine waters be held?
October 27, 1933
Yes, there is a thread in the meander [?]. I find also that you are succeeding very well in your object—now that you have the full mastery over metre and language, to use it for the perfect and precise poetic expression of what you feel and need to say—a move from brilliance and colour to a maturer power of utterance. Needless to say, it is very fine poetry throughout. I shall await the second half with interest.
October 30,1933
Why is there the sadness? If it is due to difficulty in the Yoga, you should not yield to it. Reject all doubt about the issue and proceed with a steady perseverance and unfailing will that success, however long the resistance, shall be yours.
Yes, the solution is certainly the Divine Grace—it comes of itself intervening suddenly or with an increasing force when all is ready. Meanwhile, it is there behind all the struggles, and "the unconquerable aspiration for the light" of which you speak is the outward sign that it will intervene. As for the two natures, it is only one form of the perpetual duality in human nature from which nobody escapes, so universal that many systems recognise it as a standing feature to be taken account of in their discipline, the two Personae, one bright, one dark, in every human being. If that
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were not there. Yoga would be an easy walk-over and there would be no struggle. But its presence is not any reason for thinking that there is unfitness; the obstinacy of the worldly element is also not a reason, for it is always obstinate in its very nature. It is like the Germans in their trenches, falling back and digging themselves in for a new mass attack, every time they are baffled. But for all that, if the bright persona is equally determined not to be satisfied without the crown of light, if it is strong enough to make the being unable to rest content in lesser things, then that is the sign that the being is called, one of the elect in spite of outward appearances and its own doubts and despairs—who has them not, not even a Christ or a Buddha is without them—and that the inner spirit will surely win in the end. There is no cause for any apprehension on that score.
I have read the continuation of your poem; they maintain as high a level as the first half.
November 5, 1933
I have read the last pages and have no words to praise their perfection of feeling and expression, their restrained power and beauty. You wrote some wonderful lyrics with the psychic note when the poetic faculty first opened in you, but this I think is your high water-mark—though I have no doubt you will surpass it hereafter, even if that does not look an easy thing to do. I will read the whole over again once more—time or no time.
Go on the path of Yoga without doubt of the ultimate success—surely you cannot fail! Doubts—they are nothing; keep the fire of aspiration burning, it is that that conquers.
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November 15, 1933
No, the supramental has not descended into the body or into Matter—it is only at the point where such a descent has become not only possible but inevitable—I am speaking, of course, of my own experience. But as my experience is the centre and condition of all the rest, that is sufficient for the promise.
I am not able to answer your letter just now for it is full of bristling questions, but I shall do it today—in the course of the day. Only my difficulty is that you all seem to expect a kind of miraculous fairy-tale change and do not realise that it is a rapid and concentrated evolution which is the aim of my sadhana and that there must be a process for it, a working of the higher in the lower and a dealing with all the necessary materials—not a sudden feat of the Creator by which everything is done on a given date. It is a supramental but not an irrational process. What is to be done will happen—perhaps with a rush even—but in a workmanlike way and not according to Faerie.
However I will try to explain all that as far as possible— in principle only of course—as far as it can be explained to the physical mind which has not yet any vision of what the supramental is. For the rest, I will try to meet the points you make.
I find there is no chance of finishing any long letter on the Supramental today—for the Overmind has heaped Andes on Himalayas and the Alps on the Andes (paper of course) and buried me underneath the mass. So I shall only pen a few passing answers to details today.
First, what is a perfect technique of Yoga or rather of a world-changing or Nature-changing Yoga? Not one that
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takes one man by a little bit of him somewhere, attaches a hook and pulls him up by a pulley into Nirvana or Paradise? The technique of a world-changing Yoga has to be as multiform, sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself—has it not? If it does not deal with all the difficulties or possibilities and carefully deal with each necessary element, has it any chance of success? And can a perfect technique which everybody can understand do that? It is not like writing a small poem in a fixed metre with a limited number of modulations. If you take the poem simile, it is the Mahabharata of a Mahabharata that has to be done. And what, compared with the limited Greek perfection, is the technique of the Mahabharata?
Next, what is the use of vicārabuddhi in such a case? If one has to get a new consciousness which surpasses the reasoning intellect, can one do it on lines which are to be judged and understood by the reasoning intellect, controlled at every step by it, told by the intellect what it is to do, what is the measure of its achievements, what its steps must be and what their value? If one does that, will one ever get out of the range of the reasoning intelligence into what is beyond it? And if one does, how shall others judge what one is doing by the intellectual measure? How can one judge what is beyond the ordinary consciousness when one is oneself in the ordinary consciousness? Is it not only by exceeding yourself that you can feel, experience, judge what exceeds you? What is the value of a judgment without the feeling and experience?
What the Supramental will do the mind cannot foresee or lay down. The mind is Ignorance seeking for the Truth, the supramental by its very definition is Truth-Consciousness, Truth in possession of itself and fulfilling itself by its own power. In a supramental world imperfection and disharmony are bound to disappear. But what we propose just now is not to make the earth a supramental world but to bring down the supramental as a power and established consciousness in the midst of the rest—to let it work there
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and fulfil itself as Mind descended into Life and Matter and has worked as a Power there to fulfil itself in the midst of the rest. This will be enough to change the world and to change Nature by breaking down her present limits. But what, how, by what degrees it will do it, is a thing that ought not to be said now—when the Light is there, the Light will itself do its work—when the Supramental Will stands on earth, that Will will decide. It will establish a perfection, a harmony, a Truthcreation—for the rest, well, it will be the rest—that is all. This is only a preface—the book follows.
November 16, 1933
My poem—the duologue between Cloud and Earth—I send herewith. Please tell me the difference between allegory and symbolism so that I may classify this poem.
There is a difference between symbolism and allegory. Allegory is when a quality or other abstract thing is personalised—symbolism is when a living truth is given an image or figure—in mystic poetry a living truth is a living image or figure. Allegory is an intellectual form for nobody believes in the personalisation of the abstract quality, it is only a poetic device. Symbolism supposes that both the truth and the symbol are living powers.
In this duologue I have imagined the Earth and the Cloud as conscious sentient entities. True, I have made each the mouth-piece of my own feelings and intuitions, but while I expressed these I was struck by a profound inarticulate stirring within me which suggested to me that my attribution of consciousness to them was perhaps not entirely fanciful as physical science would, doubtless, opine. I mean, I felt as though the Earth too had a concrete sentient rhythm of its own and could aspire for the Descent of the
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Supramental (of which I have written in her own words) thereby preparing herself more and more to receive it. But what about the Cloud, and shall we say Fire? Is my feeling true that they also count as sentient entities ?
Entirely true as far as the Earth is concerned and true not so much for the cloud as for the Cloud-Power or Cloud- Spirit. The Earth is a conscious being and the globe is the form in which it manifests—behind the Cloud or Fire etc. there are Fire and Cloud Spirits of which the action of cloud or fire is a manifestation. This is an ancient knowledge which Science began to pooh-pooh, but anyone who passes the physical barrier can find it out for himself.
While I wrote this duologue the similes and images all but poured into me! And I marvelled where they came from! Evidently not from the intellect, for I was myself sceptical or rather intellectually unconvinced of the validity of what I wrote and was, as it were made to write it all—propelled by my irresistible groping intuitions. Besides, the images and symbols etc. came to me intermittently as though by flashes, if you know what I mean. This preface is only to ask you about their origin, that is, to know where the images come from, as also to ascertain what value they have here. Has it merely a poetical, that is beauty-value or is there truth-value also? What I mean is this (and you will please tell me if I understand rightly?) that expression per se has a worid of its own and value as well, so that an idea or an image beautifully expressed need not be true in the last analysis, and may live by virtue of its beauty-value even if what is represented as true maybe miles away from the real reality. But nevertheless—(though this might sound as paradox, but then paradoxes are often true)—the shock of delight arising out of the creation of anything beautiful but unreal, may come from some region of Truth—living Truth, may it not be so?
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There are truths and there are transcriptions of the truths. The transcriptions may be accurate or may be free and imaginative. The truth behind a poetic creation is there on some plane or other, supraphysical generally—and from there the image too comes. So there is a transcription partly contributed from there, partly by the external mind's faculty of imagination. Poetic imagination in the external mind is satisfied with beauty of idea and image only and the Ananda of it, but there is something behind it which supplies the Truth. When Shelley made the spirits of Nature speak, he was using his imagination, but there was something behind in him which felt and knew and believed in the truth of the thing he was expressing. Symbolic poems always come from a mystic region—the allegorical may come from the intellect, but often the allegory itself rests on a concealed symbol and then there is a mystic element.
Anyway please tell me where does the inspiration of such allegorical poems come from as I know it is not from the intellect. But does it come from any mystic region ?
Am I right in assuming that this poem is somewhat more mystic that any I have yet written ?
Yes. I shall have to read it again in detail before I can tell you how far and in what way. I am superminding the letter on the supramental."
November 18, 1933
But your definition of allegory and symbolism leaves me somewhat at sea. Please let me know clearly what the type of my poem is, in essence. Is it allegorical or symbolic? Also I have a feeling it is in a sense truly mystic, properly speaking; at any rate, more mystic than many that I have hitherto written. Am I right?
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I return the poem. I need not I think say anything about the poem as a poem—it rises to your full standard in rhythm and language.
It is a little difficult to fix its type, because it starts as a kind of allegory and merges into the symbol. I mean in the details —for the cloud is evidently a symbol, while the earth is neither allegory nor symbol, but simply the earth—or the earth-consciousness, if you like, which comes to the same thing. If you intended it for an allegory throughout, I do not think it keeps its character. For an allegory must be intellectually precise in its basis however much adorned with imagery and personal expression, but in each case the interlocutors express not the play of abstract things or ideas put into imaged form, but the experience, one of the earth as consciousness in its blind feeling for something it cannot reach and which it yearns after while not even sure of its existence the other of the seeking Intermediary which seeks and finds and brings down to the earth what the Vedas call the Rain of Heaven. It should therefore be called a symbolic poem rather than an allegorical poem. The poem is in its nature a first step between the poetic mental treatment of these mystic subjects as in one or two of the earlier poems (not the more lyrical ones, for those were psychic) and the sheer mystic— a step from thought towards sight.
November 20, 1933
There is no obligation on European visitors to make the pranam—very few have done so, none perhaps. Even from those who have stayed here, it was not asked—they were left free to abstain unless they asked for it—e.g. [Maitland?], Nandini, Von [?] and Shantimayi. Moore must not get the impression that we exact it from anybody. I do not know whether a mere "look" at us will help him—it is only in some cases that that happens, and there usually when there was
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a previous disposition or habit of response to supraphysical Light or Power as in the case of Demarquette. These days have been arranged with a view first to their main object, viz. for myself to give the darshan and blessing to the disciples, and the form of it is designed for that—visitors first came in as a superfluity, though now except in November they are more than half the crowd. But as they are mostly Indians accustomed to this form of the spiritual contact and aware of its meaning, it does not usually matter. It is only when a European comes that this difficulty arises—but it need not be any as he is not asked to make the pranam.
As for the rest, there is nothing much to say. The distance between the man and the Power manifesting through him is not an idea that can trouble the eastern mind, to which the gulf does not exist, but it is natural to the modern intelligence.
In any case since he is coming only in the evening of the 24th—is that what he means?—the question of the darshan no longer arises, I suppose.
I shall deal with your translation as soon as possible.
November 23, 1933
It (the third eye) is sure. There has been a remarkable change in you recently as the Mother has several times seen in these days—and even others who have accurate vision have seen the descending light upon you.
November 1933
But I thought that X might not be encouraged so hastily by our ever-encouraging Mother (albeit a charming assurer of lost souls but maybe only till the day of collapse —if such encouragement is given to a life of wine and
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women) as the value of encouragement is somewhat diminished when what is encouraged—as X maintained his outside life of reckless war—is not so thrilling a life after all?
Encouragement, yes, but not false encouragement—especially on such egregious, hair-raising, thunder-striking and flabbergasting grounds!
November 25, 1933
[...] Mr. Moore asked me whether after doing Yoga life and things appeared to me to be instinct with a significance they had not had before, whether I reacted to the world of senses in a more vivid way. I had to say no to his question, and I feel depressed I had to say it. For I realised once more as I answered thus that Yoga had not made any fundamental change inside me which I could pronounce desirable or enviable as for instance the change that Moore implied must be adjudged. I see of course that life disgusts me far more than it ever did before—which we call vairāgya, but vairāgya of itself is not a "consummation devoutly to be wished," unless and until it leads to a positive realisation, let us say, of the kind Moore suggested. For without a higher compensation the falling off of the capacity for comparatively sublunary joys must be reckoned a dead loss, must it not? So I begin to distrust myself again alas! I also doubt whether I have progressed in bhakti....
Why do you believe everything that people tell you? What I told Puranmull was that he had once progressed greatly, he had afterwards allowed himself to yield to the bad habits that rose from his lower nature and fallen from the psychic contact and that until he got rid of these things which were
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the cause of all his sufferings he would not progress or recover his contact with the Mother. We never told him that he was making progress now or that his coarse indulgence was a sign of (no doubt, miraculous, godlike and amazing) progress. God in Heaven, what things people put in my mouth and the Mother's!
I see that Moore has put you out of condition, the only thing to be done is to shake off the Moorish touch and get back into the condition of preparation for opening of the consciousness which was forming and had already begun. I need not, I think, deal specifically with the forms your self-distrust has taken. They crop up whenever you allow these forces of depression to come in—forces of mental and vital tamas of which self-distrust and self-depreciation (which is different from spiritual humility) are the most recognised forms. When you are in the right condition, you do not complain of absence of bhakti or general deterioration and retrogression and a black gulf of unprogress. You recognise where you have progressed and where the preparation is still deficient—this doubt about your soul is of course the chief stumbling block in your way, but it has to be faced and got rid of or reduced to a minimum like the others.
The view of the world of which Moore possibly spoke (he may have meant something more superficial and trivial) cannot come from the mind, still less from the vital expecting something from life as it is. Life as it is has nothing to give except to those who are satisfied with surface pleasure. The inner view can only come from a change of consciousness which sees the deeper inner life behind appearances—and it is that change of consciousness which was preparing in you because you were drawing back from the vital view of things—the vairāgya was only an outward and negative sign of that withdrawal. It is not a time to fall back into the clutches —of this harpy of self-distrust. Get back into the light of the coming dawn which was upon you—above your head still, but there!
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November 29, 1933
I am very glad to get your letter and the beautiful poem and know that the disturbance is over. These things come across, but they cannot prevent the destined fulfilment. Let the mind fall quiet and the higher Mind come down into you with its light, peace, wideness and openness direct and large to the Divine.
December 1933
I don't belittle intelligence at all. It is the claims of the intellect to judge what is beyond itself that I belittle. Intelligence properly used is an excellent thing; everything is excellent in its own place.
December 19, 1933
I am sorry you spoke to Venkataraman instead of speaking to Chandulal as I had suggested. Chandulal said and repeated that there is no true objection at all to your going back to the Trésor from this very day if you like. It seems that there had been already a discussion of the subject between Chandulal and Venkataraman before you came to me; C. saying that you could very well move in and V. making all sorts of objections.
This quarrel is most regrettable; I have never given authority to V. to decide when you can or cannot go back to your rooms, and when I have said that you can go I do not see how anybody can say a word to the contrary.
I agree with you that too much money has been spent on that house, and it is Chandulal's opinion also. He was telling me that very thing no later than yesterday; but you will allow
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me not to follow your reasoning about princes. A house is made nice not for the sake of its occupants but for its own sake, and those who are to live in it have no reason to feel shy or uncomfortable about it.
So I hope you will brush aside this unpleasant happening and take all measure to move tomorrow to the Trésor as you told me you would do.
December 25, 1933
This afternoon after my mid-day meal I meditated in the smaller new room (qui est une chambre très sympathique, il n'y a pas un mot pour sympathique en anglais1) after about an hour or so suddenly the current started at the head after a long time and the waves through the body as before. Only my body was less numb than before. There was also the difference that while doing japa of Mother's name I feel the current giving me much more pronounced peace and a feeling of being soothed (formerly the peace was not so pronounced) and I felt really happy thanks to Mother's grace.
It is very good. The increase of peace whether in intensity or solidity is always the first tangible result of the descent. It is very necessary because it is in the consciousness at peace that either the Power can work at ease or the Presence manifest itself.
December 26, 1933
I did not write to you because writing especially on these things, your poetry and your music, seemed to me superfluous
_____________________
1. "Which is a very pleasant room, there is no word for sympathique in English."
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—your success in these things has become a chose acquise [acquired thing]. I told Sahana because she asked the question and in doing so I indicated that the whole concert had been a success—and I praised the Radha song specially because it was the best, not only because of her singing but the song and music were so admirably beautiful—a compliment which was meant as well for you as for her. In fact the whole thing was very successful and admirably organised from beginning to end, each item a success in its place. So I don't see why you should feel like that. Perhaps I should have written, but there is always at night the overwhelming press of work to be done and in the evening I was trying to finish the translation of your poem1 which I am trying to make as perfect as possible. Of course I would have written if I had thought you could have any doubts about our appreciation of your music. As for Harin, I don't know whether his abstention was due at all to his not having been encouraged by the Mother to sing himself before a large audience, but he put it on the ground of sadhana and it was on the ground of sadhana that Mother said he need not come. To ask to be left out of the music2 is to ask for the music to be left out, for these things would be impossible without you,— you know very well that no one else would be able to do it rightly and that the development in this part of our life here rests on you and you alone.
For the rest, the difficulty of getting the perfect equanimity is a fact, but not for you alone—it has been so for all of us—it is too universal for you to make it a legitimate ground of discouragement. Nothing is more necessary, but nothing is more difficult. So there is no reason why you should discount my encouragement. My encouragement is given in spite of difficulties and not because I think there are none.
1. "Transformation of Consciousness."
2. (Dilip's handwritten note on his transcription of Sri Aurobindo's letter:) "I had written since I am so easily upset about the music etc. and stand in need of appreciation I had better be left out in future musical soirées."
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Never mind these momentary mishaps—shake off the mood and once more en avant.
What can be stranger than this idea of yours that Mother likes only European music and does not like or appreciate Indian music—that she only pretends to do it or that she tolerates it so as not discourage people! Remember that it is the Mother who has always praised and supported your music and put her force behind you so that your music might develop into spiritual perfection and beauty. In your poetry it was I that supported you most, in detail, the Mother could only do it with a general force, because she could not read the original (though she found them in translation very beautiful) but in the music it has been just the other way round. You surely are not going to say that all that was unfelt? And the development of Sahana ? That too was Indian music, not European. And then when I write to you in praise of your music, do you think it is only my opinion that I am transmitting? Most often it is her words that I use to express our common feeling.
December 27, 1933
I read your dream with great interest. It seems to me that it was, as the Mother told you, one part of your physical mind (your grandfather's part, so to speak) conversing with another part of the physical mind, your original own—the turn of the conversation being conditioned by the sorrowful mood in which you were. Dreams of this kind are sometimes, if properly used, luminous guides to a certain kind of self-knowledge.
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I am sorry to hear that your cold has developed an unnecessary adjuvant of fever. I hope the health habit in your vital will shake it off without delay.
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End of Volume I
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