This second volume of correspondence spans the years 1934-1935. Sri Aurobindo’s immense love and patience guides Dilip through his difficulties and nurtures his latent talents with tender care.
Sri Aurobindo : corresp.
THEME/S
1934?
I made no mistake at all. Your inner being is quite capable of Yoga and in your experiences there were plenty of proofs of it.
It is your outer being that is making all the trouble and putting up a big fight against the inner destiny. But that hap- pens to many people who turn out very good Yogis in the end. So that is no ground whatever for your not staying here. What I have written before was written on the basis of what I saw and still see. If I thought there was no chance for you I would tell you so.
January 2, 1934
There is no other cause of these fits of despair than that you allow a certain kind of suggestions to lay hold of you instead of rejecting them and, once they get in they rage there for a time. Why not, instead of indulging and entertaining them, recognise that they are inimical to your aim, things that rush on you from outside, and refuse to give them hospitality—as you would treat now a strong sex attitude or other disturbing force? It is precisely because it is foreign to your real tem- peramnent and nature that you ought to recognise it as an enemy attack and repulse it.
You need not imagine that we shall ever lose patience or give you up—that will never happen. Our patience, you will find, is tireless because it is based on an unbounded sympathy and love. Human love may give up, but divine love is stable and does not falter. We know that the aspiration of your psychic being is sincere and the falterings of the vital cannot affect the support that we shall always give to it. It is because the sincere aspiration is there that we have no right and you have no right to disbelieve in your adhikara [fitness] for the Yoga.
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To stop coming to Pranam would be quite the wrong thing _it is a suggestion that always comes to push people away from the helping Force. Do not yield to it.
These difficulties do not last for ever—they exhaust them- selves and disappear. But to reject them always when they come is the quickest way to get rid of them for ever.
January 4, 1934
Laboured again a little at the ass, but could not finish him. Very sorry, but my Sunday this time was hardly a day of rest—all arrears, urgent questions, problems to solve—more interesting than daily correspondence, but very time-taking. Don't fear, however, I shall be obstinate as the ass myself this time and resolutely toil to the finish.
January 6, 1934
There is no reason why the passage about Buddhism should be omitted. It gives one side of the Buddhistic teaching which is not much known or is usually ignored, for that teaching is by most rendered as Nirvana (sunyavada [nihilism]) and a spiritualised humanitairianism. The difficulty is that it is these sides that have been stressed especially in the modern interpretations of Buddhism and any strictures I may have passed were in view of these; interpretations and that one-sided stress. I am aware of (course of opposite tendencies in the Mahayana and the Japanese cult of Amitabha Buddha which is a cult of bhakti. It is now being said even of Shankara that there was another side of his doctrine—but his followers have made him stand solely for the Great Illusion, the inferiority of
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bhakti, the uselessness of Karma—jaganmithya [the world is a lie].
The review is a very good one and the account of the aims of the Yoga quite sufficient for the purpose.
January 14, 1934
I do not find any difficulty in the flow of the poem—it seems to me to proceed throughout with a very harmonious ease. The poem is fine and original and the management of the metre seems to me very successful.
I had too much to do today in spite of it being Sunday—so I have not yet been able to read the other poem; I have to reserve it.
January 26, 1934
The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another or from a Guru to his disciple or from myself to my disciples is possible. It is therefore not really a doubt arising from the reason but one that comes from the vital and physical mind that is troubling you. The physical mind doubts all that it has not itself experienced and even it doubts what it has itself experienced if that experience is no longer there or immediately palpable to it—the vital brings in the suggestion of despondency and despair to reinforce the doubt and prevent clear seeing. It is therefore a difficulty that cannot be
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effectively combated by the logical reason alone, but best by the clear perception that it is a self-created difficulty—a self-formed or mental formation which has become habitual and has to be broken up so that you may have a free mind and vital, free for experience.
As for the help, you expect a divine intervention to destroy the doubt, and the divine intervention is possible, but it comes usually only when the being is ready. You have indulged to a great extreme this habit of the recurrence of doubt, this mental formation or samskar, and so the adverse force finds it easy to throw it upon you, to bring back the suggestion. You must have a steady working will to repel it whenever it comes and to refuse the tyranny of the samskar of doubt—to annul the force of its recurrence. I think you have hardly done that in the past, you have rather supported the doubts when they come. So for some time at least you must do some hard work in the opposite direction. The help (I am not speaking of a divine intervention from above but of my help and the Mother's) will be there. It can be effective in spite of your physical mind, but it will be more effective if this steady working will of which I speak is there as its instrument. There are always two elements in spiritual success—one's own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of the endeavour.
I will do what is necessary to give the help—you must receive. To say you cannot would not be true, for you have
received times without number and it has helped you to recover.
Your idea that the Mother was displeased with you was an idea and nothing more. "Probably she has looked upon my sadness as a delinquency"—well, that is just the thing I want you to get rid of—imaginations like these which have no
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shadow of foundation whatever and which you yet persist in indulging each time you get out of wits—spiritually. What I want of you besides aspiring for faith? Well, just a little thoroughness and persistence in the method! Don't aspire for two days and then sulk into the dumps, evolving a gospel of earthquake and Schopenhauer plus the jackal and all the rest of it. Give the Divine a full sporting chance. When he lights something in you or is preparing a light, don't come in with a wet blanket of despondency and throw it on the poor flame. You will say, "It is a mere candle that is lit—nothing at all!" But in these matters, when the darkness of human mind and life and body has to be dissipated, a candle is always a beginning—a lamp can follow and afterwards a sun—but the beginning must be allowed to have a sequel—not get cut off from its natural sequelae by chunks of sadness and doubt and despair. At the beginning, and for a long time, the experiences do usually come in little quanta with empty spaces between—but, if allowed their way, the spaces will diminish, and the quantum theory give way to the Newtonian continuity of the spirit. But you have never yet given it a real chance. The empty spaces have been peopled with doubts and denials and so the quanta have become rare, the beginnings remained beginnings. Other difficulties you have faced and rejected, but this difficulty you have dandled too much for a long time and it has become strong—it must be dealt with by a persevering effort. I do not say that all doubts must disappear before anything comes—that would be to make sadhana impossible, for doubt is the mind's persistent assailant. All I say is, don't allow the assailant to become a companion, don't give him the open door and the fireside seat. Above all, don't drive away the incoming Divine with that dispiriting wet blanket of sadness and despair!
To put it more soberly—accept once and for all that this thing has to be done, that it is the only thing left for yourself or the earth. Outside are earthquakes and Hitlers and a collapsing civilisation and, generally speaking, the jackal in the flood. All the more reason to tend towards the one thing to
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be done, the thing you have been sent to aid in getting done. It is difficult and the way long and the encouragement given meagre ? What then ? Why should you expect so great a thing to be easy or that there must be either a swift success or none? The difficulties have to be faced and the more cheer- fully they are faced, the sooner they will be overcome. The one thing to do is to keep the mantra of success, the determination of victory, the fixed resolve, "Have it I must and have it I will." Impossible? There is no such thing as an impossibility—there are difficulties and things of longue haleine [long haul], but no impossibles. What one is deter- mined fixedly to do, will get done now or later—it becomes possible.
There—that is my counter blast to your variation on Schopenhauer. To come to less contentious matters—of course Bindu can come—he will always be welcome; there is a good downstairs room—he might take that? I will consider the application of force to your tenant and your (or your father's) translator. Tough things though—tenants and [?] translators (I suppose too both in these days of depression are short of cash)—but, well there is nothing impossible!!
Your fable and your transformation of the Sanskrit apophthegm are entertaining. I conclude—drive out dark despair and go bravely on with your poetry, your novels—and your Yoga. As the darkness disappears, the inner doors will open.
January 29, 1934
Once upon a time. Guru, there was a foolish ass who lived in the neighbourhood of a wise Yogi. One day a sudden flood burst the banks of a river nearby and flooded the countryside. The wise Yogi, being wise, ran up till he reached the safe top of a hill at the foot of which he used to meditate day and night in a cave. But the ass—being foolish, not to say unmeditative—was swept away by the
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rushing tides. "Alas!" he brayed, "the world is being drowned!" "Don't be an ass," reprimanded the Yogi in high scorn from up the hill-top. "It's only you who are being drowned—not this big world." "But Sir," argued the idiot, "if I myself am drowned how can I be sure that the world will survive ?" And the Yogi was struck dumb and wondered, for the first time, which was the deeper wisdom—the human or the asinine! And I too have started wondering on my own. Guru! So I appeal to you to adjudicate: tell me whose is the more pitiable plight: the Yogi's or the ass's? And incidentally, tell me also if my mind is going off the handle because I find the foolish ass's argument nearly as rational as the wise Yogi's?
Your wise but not over-wise ass has put a question that cannot be answered in two lines and today is Monday when people take their revenge for Sunday's forced abstinence. So I postpone the reply till tomorrow. Let me say however in defence of the much maligned ass that he is a very clever and practical animal and the malignant imputation of stupidity to him shows only human stupidity at its worst. It is because the ass does not do what man wants him to do even under blows that he is taxed with stupidity. But really the ass behaves like that first because he has a sense of humour and likes to provoke the two-legged beast into irrational antics and secondly, because he finds that what man wants of him is quite a ridiculous and bothersome nuisance which ought not to be demanded of any self-respecting donkey. Also the ass is a philosopher. When he hee-haws, it is out of a supreme con- tempt for the world in general and for the human imbecile in particular. 1 have no doubt that in the asinine language "man" has the same significance as ass in ours. These deep and original considerations are however by the way—merely meant to hint to you that your balancing between the wise man and the wise ass is not so alarming a symptom after all.
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February 11, 1934
Krishnaprem's letters as usual are interesting and admirable in substance and expression—and, in addition, there is an immense increase in comprehensiveness and wideness. His point about the intellect's misrepresentation of the Tormless7' (the result of a merely negative expression of something that is inexpressibly intimate and positive) is very well made and hits the truth in the centre. No one who has had the Ananda of the Brahman can do anything but smile at the charge of coldness; there is an absoluteness of immutable ecstasy in it, a concentrated intensity of silent and inalienable rapture that it is impossible even to suggest to anyone who has not had the experience. The eternal Reality is neither cold nor dry nor empty—you might just as well talk of the mid- summer sunlight as cold or the ocean as dry or perfect fullness as empty. Even when you enter into it by elimination of form and everything else, it surges up as a miraculous fullness that is truly the Pūrmam—when it is entered affirmatively as well as by negation, there can obviously be no question of emptiness or dryness! All is there and more than one could ever dream of as the All. That is why one has to object to the intellect thrusting itself in as the sab-janta [all-knowing] judge; if it kept to its own limits, there would be no objection to it. But it makes constructions of words and ideas which have no application to the Truth, babbles foolish things in its ignorance and makes its constructions a wall which refuses to let in the Truth that surpasses its own capacities and scope.
(This is but a part of Krishnaprem's letter to Dilip, dated February 1st, 1934. We hope this is enough to give the reader an insight into Sri
Aurobindo's remarks.)
You raise some interesting points in regard to "expression"
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and "silence," but at the same time., you seem to have slightly misunderstood me. I was urging that poetic expression can sometimes deal with realms in which philosophy cannot breathe. To me, at least it is a necessity which I can scarcely avoid. But I did want to emphasise that our philosophic dialectic, logic etcetera are far too coarse to deal with the higher levels of Reality. It is easy to cut things with the snip-snap of one's philosophical arguments, but too often we are merely cutting the air. Even the scientists are now finding that reality eludes them. And what is the significance of the square root of minus one which plays so essential a part in modern physics? To my mind it suggests most emphatically that there is a fundamental supra-rational element that enters in at the conversion or zero point between appearance and reality or, to be more exact, between appearance on this level and one level "higher up". I make this last qualification because I do not believe that the absolute Reality lies, as it were, next door to the world—except in a certain very ultimate sense, but there are many grades of "reality" (or appearance) in between. To the intellect the square root of minus one has no meaning (at least none to my intellect) but certainly it must have a meaning or it would not be as useful as it is to modern physics.
You speak of the "silence" of the Buddha which you contrast with "expression". But if Buddha had not "expressed", then we should not have five hundred million (or whatever it is) Buddhists living today. In truth he expressed a great deal and it was only on certain ultimate problems that he remained silent because they cannot be expressed in words—not at least in logical words. Symbolism is an- other matter. You say: "Suppose Buddha were a formless being under a formless tree in a formless Gaya; would we feel the same thrill at his silence?"
Well, in reality, that is just what He is m one aspect. This is the meaning of the doctrine of the Dharmakaya and of the "docetism" that marked so many Mahayana and also
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Christian Gnostic schools. But for most this Formless remains a mere matter of words and is, consequently, a falsity. Without experience, the "formless" is an empty abstraction, cold like all such, and sot through with the falsity and unreality that pervades all our purely intellectual concepts. We must use them but thy only gain significance when life flows into them. In reality, they are neither cold nor abstract. It is our process of acquiring and using them that makes them so. We abstract by a process of negation and then wonder that the results cold and negative. Our whole process stays on the purely intellectual level. When we say that Krishna is nirākāra we have only said what He is not. But our positive statements are equally delusive. When we say that He is ānadamaya we equally miss the reality because most men do not know what ananda is. They only know pleasure They try to under- stand ananda in terms of pleasure and hence you get the materialising of the spiritual that mark so much of ordinary Vaishnava thought just as from the misuse of negation you get the coldness of so much Vedantic thought. The root of the trouble is just the mistaking of intellectual concepts for reality. When a man has seen something even of the Reality—call him Krishna or Buddha or Brahman—he then knows what is meant. He knows how He is nirākāra but not cold and how He is ānandanaya but not mere pleasure. Till we get experience and knowledge we shall always be in unreality however lofty our conceptions may be. The Vedantin despises the Vaishrava for the tatter's concreteness and the Vaishnava spits it the Vedantin saying it is all cold. One says "I don't want" and the other says "I want." Damn all their "wants" and "don't wants"; they are quite irrelevant. These "wants" and "don't wants" do all the damage. It is not what we want that matters but what He wills, which is quite a different thing. All these concepts are so many suits of clothes. unless we reach up to the Reality and fill them, they only serve for endless debate. What did the Rishi mean by saying He is nirākāra ?
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What did the Buddha mean by anātman ? What did the Vaishnavas mean by saying He is nikhilarasāṃrta mūrti ?4 The answer to this question must be sought in experience, not in mere dialectic. When the light of experience streams in and fills the empty concepts, then and then only does recognition flow in like a sea and we can know why the above words are used. āścaryavat paśyati kaścidenam [as wonderful, few see Him. Gita 2.29]. Then we can know why the atma of the Upanishad means the same thing as the anātma of the Buddha and in a flash be free from the empty scholastic disputes that have filled the millennia. "Oh, but these are contradictions"—peevishly explains the intellect to which the only answer is: "Very likely they are, but you have dam' well got to put up with them!"
I don't mean at all to urge the contempt for the intellect which most Christians and some Vaishnavas have taught, but I do mean to say that the intellect is in itself a sort of formative or shaping machine. It can only work if it is supplied with material to shape and that material must come either from the sense-world below or from the spiritual world above.
In the meanwhile it seems to me as foolish to lose one's emotion in the coldness of abstract negation as to fuddle one's mind in the warmth of a (fundamentally) sensuous Goloka.5
These thoughts were suggested to me by the contrast you drew between the emotional singing pf Chaitanya Deva and the silent meditation of the Buddha. Needless to say that the remarks in the paragraphs immediately above do not apply to these great Teachers but only to some of their followers.
You speak of a certain "shakiness at the idea of being immersed in a Timeless mute Aksara Brahman" 6; but surely that is only because of our ignorance of what is meant by that experience and of a consequent misconception in terms of worldly experiences. That is where so many Vaishnavas as well as Vedantins go wrong. They quarrel
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furiously about words, about the expression, instead of bending their whole energy on an attempt to realise what is meant by the expression. In the words of an old Buddhist writer, "that is called confusing the moon with the finger that points to it." (...)
In the last resort, this whole cosmos is but expression— Divine Expression, and in proportion as He, the kavih puranah7 is able to manifest in us, we shall ourselves automatically become centres of expression. Till then, our productions whether in the realm of poetry, philosophy or art, are but the play of children, funerals where none is dead and marriage where there is no bride. (...)
February 13, 1934
I saw a strange dream last night. First I dreamed a nice dream about you and Mother, which I remembered on waking up at 2 a.m. but can't remember now. But the second was very fine and made a great impression on me. It was due I suppose to Mother's telling me about Krishna's hands offering her the "sun-flower" for me which of course overjoyed me (that even Krishna took some notice of the poor fellow). I saw I was praying fervently with tears in my eyes for Krishna; asking him to show himself for once and not remain unconvincingly invisible (through grace or not) when my eyes were concentrated on the sky (I think) and first a spot of light appeared, next lo! the silhouette of a fine figure on a horse flashing past the sky. I remember its dark silhouette made a great impression on me—particularly as it looked so fine on the horse. I take it to be some shadow of Krishna maybe—or perhaps it is too much to expect even Krishna's silhouette even in dream ? Anyway the impression it gave me in the dream was that it was Krishna's head that appeared in response to my
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prayer—for it appeared just when I was on the verge of despondency that the Divine never heard our prayers and we deluded ourselves (wish-fulfilment?) that He did.
It was obviously an answer to the prayer—such dream- experiences always are and the impression of the inner being in the dream is not usually mistaken.
February 17, 1934
I had no intention of sarcasm or banter, but simply meant to say that such deprivations can be used as opportunities for evolving the necessary capacity of the inner being.
I have not wantonly stopped the books8 or free letter-writing nor have I become impatient with you or anyone. I am faced with a wanton and brutal attack on my life-work from out- side9 and I need all my time and energy to meet it and do what is necessary to repel it during these days. 1 hope that I can count not only on the indulgence but on the support of those who have followed me and loved me, while I am thus occupied, much against my will.
I do hope you will not misunderstand me, I have not altered to you in the least and if I wrote laconically it was because I had no time to do otherwise.
My prohibition of long letters was of a general character and I had to issue it so that the stoppage of the books might not result in a flood of long letters which would leave me no time for making the concentration and taking the steps I have to take. I have said that you can send your poems and write too when you feel very urgent need—1 had no feeling to the contrary at all.
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March 13, 1934
But why be overwhelmed by a wealth of any kind of experiences? What does it amount to after all? The quality of a sadhak does not depend on that; one great spiritual realisation direct and at the centre will often make a great sadhak or Yogi—a host of intermediate yogic experiences will not, that has been amply proved by a troop of instances, I refrain from giving names. You need not therefore compare that wealth to your poverty. To open yourself to the descent of the higher consciousness (the true being) is the one thing needed and that, even if that comes after long effort and many failures is better than a hectic gallop leading nowhere.
You have missed my rather veiled hint about wealth of "any kind of experiences" and the reference to the intermediate zone which, I think at least, I made. I was referring to the wealth of that kind of experience of which Govindabhai's MS abounds and of which Bejoy, to give only one example, had some hundred every day. I do not say that these experiences are always of no value, but they are so mixed and confused that if one runs after them without any discrimination at all they end by either leading astray—sometimes tragically astray—or by bringing one into a confused nowhere.10 [There have been so many instances in the Ashram itself that I would have only the embarras du choix 11 if I wanted to give examples.] That does not mean all experiences are useless or without value. There are those that are sound as well as those that are unsound; those that are helpful, in the true line, sometimes sign-posts, sometimes stages on the way to realisation, sometimes stuff and material of the realisation. These
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naturally and rightly one seeks for, calls, strives after—or at n t one opens oneself in the confident expectation that they ea sooner or later arrive. Your own main experiences may have been few or not continuous, but I cannot recollect any that were not sound or were unhelpful. I would say that it is better to have a few of these than a multitude of others. My only meaning in what I wrote was not to be impressed by mere wealth of experiences or to think that that is sufficient to constitute a great sadhak or that not to have this wealth is necessarily an inferiority, a lamentable deprivation or a poverty of the one thing desirable.
There are two classes of things that happen in Yoga— realisations and experiences. Realisations are the reception in the consciousness and the establishment there of the fundamental truths of the Divine, of the Higher or Divine Nature, of the world-consciousness and the play of its forces, of one's own self and real nature and the inner nature of things, the power of these things growing in one till they are a part of one's inner life and existence. As for instance, the realisation of the Divine Presence, the descent and settling of the higher Peace, Light, Force, Ananda in the consciousness, their workings there—the realisation of the divine or spiritual love, the perception of one's own psychic being, the discovery of one's own true mental being, true vital being, true physical being, the realisation of the overmind or the supramental consciousness, the clear perception of the relation of all these things to our present inferior nature and their action on it to change that lower nature. The list, of course, might be infinitely longer. These things also are often called experiences when they only come in flashes, snatches or rare visitations; they are spoken of as full realisations only when they become very positive or frequent or continuous or normal.
Then there are the experiences that help or lead towards he realisation of things spiritual or divine or bring openings or progressions in the sadhana or are supports on the way. Experiences of a symbolic character, visions, contacts of one kind or another with the Divine or with the workings of
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higher Truth, things like the waking of the Kundalini, the opening of the chakras, messages, intuitions, openings of the inner powers, etc. The one thing that one has to be careful about is to see that they are genuine and sincere and that depends on one's own sincerity—for if one is not sincere, if one is more concerned with the ego or being a big Yogi or becoming a superman than with meeting the Divine or get- ting the Divine consciousness which enables one to live in or with the Divine, then a flood of pseudos or mixtures comes in, one is led into the mazes of the intermediate zone or spins in the grooves of one's own formations. There is the truth of the whole matter.
Then why does Krishnaprem say that one should not hunt after experiences, but only love and seek the Divine? It simply means that you have not to make experiences your main aim, but the Divine only your aim—and if you do that, you are more likely to get the true helpful experiences and avoid the wrong ones. If one seeks mainly after experiences, his Yoga may become a mere self-indulgence in the lesser things of the mental, vital and subtle physical worlds or in spiritual secondaries, or it may bring down a turmoil or maelstrom of the mixed and the whole or half-pseudo and stand between the soul and the Divine. That is a very sound rule of sadhana. But all these rules and statements must be taken with a sense of measure and in their proper limits—it does not mean that one should not welcome helpful experiences or that they have no value. Also when a sound line of experience opens, it is perfectly permissible to follow it out, keeping always the central aim in view. All helpful or supporting contacts in dream or vision, such as those you speak of, are to be welcomed and accepted. I had no intention of discouraging, nor do I think Krishnaprem had any idea of discouraging such things at all. Experiences of the right kind are a support and help towards the realisation; they are in every way acceptable.
P.S. I fear this is as illegible as ever—especially as the ink turned confoundedly faint which I did not notice in the heat of composition and the haste of finishing in time. I shall get
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Nolini to type it, so as to save as much bewilderment as possible.
March 15, 1934
Please don't be nervous about encouraging me in a new role. Je ne le jouerai point une autre fois, je vous assure [ I won't play it another time, I assure you]. But once a part is played it ought to be offered to the Divine in the Guru as I thought of you both devoutly while cooking.
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The content of such an unheard-of adventure: the adventure of a poet-musician suddenly cooking? Well, Bindu challenged me I couldn't cook and he could—because I have never cooked in my life. So I have cooked. (Confidentially, between you and me, Amiya12 gave me a few whispering directions, but don't divulge it.) It tastes—well, it behoves me not to opine about my own handiwork. But I will assure you simply—the experience of cooking has not been quite as delectable as doing justice to it invariably is to me.
Your cooking is remarkable and wonderful—if you had not disclosed the secret about Amiya's whispers, I could have been inclined to claim it as a Yogic miracle. Even with the whispers, it is an astonishing first success, āścaryavat paśyati kaścidenam! My palate and stomach as well as my pen have done full justice to the event.
March 23, 1934
I have just received a letter from Biren Roy Chowdhuri13 who had a talk with Tagore in which he told him a good many things about you and his conception of you. Briefly it is this, Biren writes, "Rabindranath has a strand of atheism in his composition: he admits the nirākār brahma [formless Brahman] on the one hand and this material world of forms on the other. Beyond this nothing. It is true his verses depict some ideas and perceptions in between, but he himself looks upon these as creations of his imagination—phantasy that is. His religious belief is powerfully tinged by Brahmoism (or rather brahmo-prabhāv). The result is that he finds himself unable to admit the Devas and their worlds which are supraphysical relative to our world of the senses."
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What do you think of this? Is Biren's impression correct? Tagore is a humanitarian but I didn't take him to be atheistic?
I suppose he is not an atheist; Brahmo-prabháv [influence of brahmoism] and Nirākār Brahma [Formless Brahman] are not atheism—but I suppose his beliefs are rather thin and vague. His idealism even is just idealism—it is good for the mind and soul to have "spiritual" ideas, but this cannot be put into concrete practice. I am told that he once expressed that idea.
But Tagore is I think fairly right in looking upon his spiritual poems not born of realisation but kalpanā jagater [the world of imagination]. It is interesting to know that he admits this. For Nolini told me this long ago that his so-called spiritual poems were more imaginative and colourful than psychic. What do you say to this?
Well, yes, he mentalises, aestheticises, sentimentalises the things of the spirit—but I can't say that I have ever found the expression of a concrete spiritual realisation in his poetry— though ideas, emotions, ideal dreams in plenty. That is some- thing, but—
Biren writes, "About Sri Aurobindo Tagore said that it has lately seemed to him that Sri Aurobindo-was steadily delving deeper and ever deeper into the strata of the inner realms, and added that probably his nature was responsible for this. He wound up by saying that it was probably a mistake to claim him for our world of action. In a word, Tagore and the Tagorians have, by now, all but given up Sri Aurobindo for lost—as one irreclaimable. They have got this idée fixe now rooted in their minds that 'Sri Aurobindo's wings have become atrophied by his protracted seclusion in his meditative cage'—to quote Tagore—so that they have no longer the faith they once
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had that Sri Aurobindo was going to inaugurate a new era of creation in this world of fact."
Just think of Tagore saying this in his similesque way!
I feel Tagore has come to this conclusion after reading your "Riddle of this World" which must have appeared to him more of a riddle than of an explanation. For formerly he wrote to me about you enthusiastically as a creator— sab shrishtikartāi eklā—Sri Aurobindo o tai [All creators are lonely, so is Sri Aurobindo], etc.
I suspect also that Romain Rolland's retraction has some- thing to do with Tagore's retraction—albeit private now, but I expect sooner or later he will write somewhere about your becoming a thorough introvert. There of course the whole Bengal intelligentsia (such as it is) will agree with him. Are you staggered at such a lugubrious prospect?
I cannot find any symptom of a stagger in me, not even of a shake or a quake or a quiver—all seems quite calm and erect, as far as I can make out. And I don't find the prospect lugubrious at all—the less people expect of you and bother you with their false ideas and demands, the more chance one has to get something real done. It is queer these intellectuals go on talking of creation while all they stand for is collapsing into the Néant without their being able to raise a finger to save it. What the devil are they going to create and from what material? and of what use if a Hitler with his cudgel or a Mussolini with his castor oil can come and wash it out or beat it into dust in a moment?
I felt all day a tinge of regret re. Tagore—though I had all but expected it—knowing his positivistic rationalistic sceptical (and what not) intellectualism. Still, I had a regard
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for him and his views and his scepticism has, I suppose, some similarity with mine. So I ruminated a little pensively on his retraction of you. But what hurt me most is that other people should be sceptical about what I find myself doubting, e.g. the subjective and elusive and vague character of spiritual experiences and their seeming so far away to us mortals. When I think on these lines (the physical mind alas!), I justify such doubts and think it legitimate to have some translation of these in the world of hard reality. But when I find Tagore and Rolland and Russell express the same kind of doubts I feel I love you very much and all that you stand for, however doubtful validity your claim of the Supramental Reality might have seemed to me, before. Yes, it is strange but true. Nevertheless I feel a tinge of regret, even of sadness, that others don't realise how great you are and are so impatient— even though I happen to be more impatient than they....
Russell has his doubts because he has no spiritual experience. Rolland because he takes his emotional intellectuality for spirituality; as for Tagore—if one is blind, it is quite natural for the human intelligence which is rather an imbecile thing at its best—to deny light; if one's highest natural vision is that of glimmering mists, it is equally natural to believe that all high vision is only a mist or a glimmer. But Light exists for all that—and for all that spiritual Truth is more than a mist and a glimmer.
March 24, 1934
I am not sure that it is very discreet to send these obiter dicta [incidental remarks] outside; I think it would be better keep these up your sleeve as an indiscretion would very y set them rolling till they got a semi-public character.
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While such obiter dicta are all right with regard to poems and problems and happenings, they can only be passed under seal of privacy on persons, most of all persons in public view. So, let the seal be there. Obiter dicta of this kind are after all only side-flashes—not a judgment balanced and entire.
I don't think we should hastily conclude that Tagore is passing over to the opposite camp. He is sensitive and perhaps a little affected by the positive robustuous, slogan-fed practicality of the day—he has passed through Italy and Persia and was feted there. But I don't see how he can turn his back on all the ideas of a life-time. After all he has been a wayfarer towards the same goal as ours in his own way—that is the main thing, the exact stage of advance and the putting of the steps are minor matters. So let there be no clash, if possible. Besides he has had a long and brilliant day—I should like him to have as peaceful and undisturbed a sunset as may be. His exact position as a poet or a prophet or anything else will be assigned by posterity and we need not be in haste to anticipate the final verdict. The immediate verdict after his death or soon after it may very well be a rough one—for this is a generation that seems to take a delight in trampling with an almost Nazi rudeness on the bodies of the Ancestors, especially the immediate ancestors. I have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and self-important nincompoop all whose great achievements were done by others, that Shakespeare was "no great things" and that most other great men were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore?14
As for your question, Tagore of course belonged to an age which had faith in its ideas and whose very denials were creative affirmations. That makes an immense difference. Your strictures on his later development may be correct, but this mixture even was the note of the day and it expressed a tangible hope of fusion into something new and true—there- fore it could create. Now all that has been smashed to pieces and its weaknesses exposed—but nobody knows what to put
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in its place. A mixture of scepticism and slogans, "Heil-Hitler" and the Fascist salute and Five-Year Plan and the beating of everybody into one amorphous shape, a disabused denial of all ideals on one side and on the other a blind "shut-my-eyes and shut-everybody's-eyes" plunge into the bog in the hope of finding something there, will not carry us very far. And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no big creation is possible.
March 25, 1934
The first step is a quiet mind—silence is a further step, but quietude must be there; and by a quiet mind I mean a mental consciousness within which sees thoughts arrive to it and move about but does not itself feel that it is thinking or identifying itself with the thoughts or call them its own. Thoughts, mental, movements may pass through it as wayfarers appear and pass from elsewhere in a silent country—the quiet mind observes them or does not care to observe them but does not become active or lose its quietude. Silence is more than qui- etude; it can be gained by banishing thought altogether from the inner mind keeping it quite outside; but more easily it comes by a descent from above—one feels it coming down entering and occupying or surrounding the personal consciousness.
As for the subconscient that is best dealt with when the opening of the consciousness to what comes down from above is complete. Then one becomes aware of the subconscient as a separate domain and can bring down into it the Silence and all else that comes from above.
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April 1934
But after all, without putting forth eighteen visible arms, (perhaps, since it is a symbol, by putting them forth internally) I hope to become one day so divine even in the body consciousness that I shall be able to satisfy everybody! But you can't hurry a transformation like that. I must ask for time.
Why do you always insist on cherishing the idea that I refuse all human love? I have surely written to you to the contrary. I don't reject it, neither human nor vital love. But I want that behind the vital there shall be the constant support of the psychic human love (not all at once the divine), because that alone can prevent the movements which make you rest- less, obscured and miserable. In asking this I am surely not asking anything excessive or beyond your power.
It is only divine love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine. The Galileo-like "je m'en fiche"-ism [I do not care] would not carry me one step; it would certainly not be Divine. It is quite another thing that enables me to walk unweeping and unlamenting towards the goal.
April 9, 1934
I spoke of a strong central and, if possible, complete faith because your attitude seemed to be that you only cared for the full response—that is, realisation, the Presence, regarding all else as quite unsatisfactory, and your prayer was not bringing you that. But prayer in itself does not usually bnn9
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that at once—only if there is a burning faith at the centre or complete faith in all the parts of the being. That does not mean that those whose faith is not so strong or surrender complete cannot arrive, but usually they have at first to go by small steps and to face the difficulties of their nature until by perseverance or tapasya they make a sufficient opening. Even a faltering faith and a slow and partial surrender have their force and their result, otherwise only the rare few could do sadhana at all. What I mean by the central faith is a faith in the soul or the central being behind, which is there even when the mind doubts and the vital despairs and the physical wants to collapse, and after the attack is over reappears and pushes on the path again. It may be strong and bright, it may be pale and in appearance weak, but if it persists each time in going on, it is the real thing. Fits of despair and dark- ness are a tradition in the path of sadhana—in all Yogas oriental or occidental they seem to have been the rule. I know all about them myself—but my experience has led me to the perception that they are an unnecessary tradition and could. be dispensed with if one chose. That is why whenever they come in you or others I try to lift up before them the gospel of faith. If still they come, one has to get through them as soon as possible and get back into the sun. Your dream of the sea was a perfectly true one—in the end the storm and swell do not prevent the arrival of the state of Grace in the sadhak and with it the arrival of the Grace itself. That, I suppose is what something in you is always asking for—the supramental miracle of Grace, something that is impatient of the demand for tapasya and self-perfection and long labour. Well, it can come, it has come to several here after years upon years of lank failure and difficulty or terrible internal struggles. But comes usually in that way—as opposed to a slowly developing Grace—after much difficulty and not at once. If you go asking for it in spite of the apparent failure of response, it is sure to come.
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April 10, 1934
Why should earthquakes occur by some wrong movement of man? When man was not there, did not earthquakes occur? If he were blotted out by poison gas or otherwise, would they cease? Earthquakes are a perturbation in Nature due to some pressure of forces; frequency of earthquakes may coincide with a violence of upheavals in human life but the upheavals of earth and human life are both results of a general clash or pressure of forces, one is not the cause of the other.
April 11, 1934
I am very glad to know that the energy has come in a full flow and I look forward to its results. I have observed that under your tuition15 Jyotirmayi has arrived at much ease and mastery of language and metre—Nirod also is writing well. They are getting the vehicle, the person to ride in it must arrive. Nirod has still too much of the traditional Bengali poet (modern) in his measure—he must get out of that. We want a new style and spirit—that is what I have hinted to him. I suppose it will come. I believe Sahana has the stuff in her, after she has got over the difficulty of the transit.
April 15, 1934
I have not read Ramdas's16 writings nor am I at all acquainted with his personality or what may be the level of his experience. The words you quote from him could be expressions either of a simple faith or of a pantheistic experience;
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evidently, if they are used or intended to establish the thesis that the Divine is everywhere and is all and therefore all is good being Divine, they are very insufficient for that purpose. But as an experience, it is very common thing to have this feeling or realisation in the Vedantic sadhana—in fact without it there would be no Vedantic sadhana. I have had it myself on various levels of consciousness and in numerous forms and I have met scores of people who have had it very genuinely—not as an intellectual theory or perception, but as a spiritual reality which was too concrete for them to deny whatever paradoxes it may entail for the ordinary intelligence.
Of course it does not mean that all here is good or that in the estimation of values a brothel is as good as an Ashram, but it does mean that all are part of one manifestation and that in the inner heart of the sage or saint there is the Divine. Again his experience is that there is One Force working in the world both in its good and in its evil—one Cosmic Force; it works both in the success (or failure) of the Ashram and in the success (or failure) of the brothel. Things are done in this world by the use of the force, although the use made is according to the nature of the user, one uses it for the works of Light, another for the work of Darkness, yet another for a mixture. I don't think any Vedantin (except perhaps some modernised ones) would maintain that all is good here—the orthodox Vedantic idea is all is here an inextricable mixture of good and evil, a play of the Ignorance and therefore a play of the dualities. The Christian missionaries, I suppose, hold that all that God does is morally good, so they are shocked by the Taoist priests aiding the work of the brothel by their rites. But do not the Christian priests invoke the aid of God for the destruction of men in battle and did not some of them sing Te Deums over a victory won by the massacre of men and the starvation of women and children? The Taoist who J^Yes in the Impersonal Tao is more consistent and the Vedantin who believes that the Supreme is beyond good and evil but the Cosmic Force the Supreme has put out here
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works through the dualities, therefore through both good and evil, joy and suffering, has a thesis which at least accounts for the double fact of the experience for the Supreme which is All Light, All Bliss and All Beauty and a world of mixed light and darkness, joy and suffering, what is fair and what is ugly. He says that the dualities come by a separative Ignorance and so long as you accept this separative Ignorance, you cannot get rid of that, but it is possible to draw back from it in experience and to have the realisation of the Divine in all and the Divine everywhere and then you begin to realise the Light, Bliss and Beauty behind all and this is the one thing to do. Also you begin to realise the one Force and you can use it or let it use you for the growth of the Light in you and others—no longer for the satisfaction of the ego and for the works of the ignorance and darkness.
As to the dilemma about the cruelty of things, I do not know what answer Ramdas would give. One answer might be that the Divine within is felt through the psychic being and the nature of the psychic being is that of the Divine light, harmony, love, but it is covered by the mental and separative vital ego from which strife, hate, cruelty naturally come. It is therefore natural to feel in the kindness the touch of the Divine, while the cruelty is felt as a disguise or perversion in Nature, although that would not prevent the man who has the realisation from feeling and meeting the Divine behind the disguise. I have known even instances in which the perception of the Divine in all accompanied by an intense experience of universal love or a wide experience of an inner harmony had an extraordinary effect in making all around kind and helpful, even the most coarse and hard and cruel.17 Perhaps it is some such experience which is at the base of Ramdas's statement about the kindness. As for the Divine Working, the experience of the Vedantic realisation is that behind the con- fused mixture of good and evil something is working that he realises as the Divine and in his own life he can look back and see that each step, happy or unhappy, [was?] meant for his progress and how it led towards the growth of his spirit.
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Naturally this comes fully as the realisation progresses; before that he had to walk by faith and may have often felt his faith fail and yielded to grief, doubt and despair for a time.
As for my writings, I don't know if there is any that would clear up the difficulty. You would find mostly the statement of the Vedantic experience, for it is that through which I passed and, though now I have passed to something beyond the most thorough-going and radical preparation for what- ever is beyond, though I do not say that it is indispensable to pass through it. But whatever the solution, it seems to me that the Vedantin is right in insisting that one must, to arrive at it, admit the two facts, the prevalence of evil and suffering here and the experience of that which is free from these things—and it is only by the progressive experience that one can get a solution—whether through reconciliation, a conquering descent or an escape, if we start from the basis taken as an axiom that the prevalence of suffering and evil in the present and in the hard, outward fact of things, disproves of itself all that has been experienced by the sages and mystics of the other side, the realisable Divine, then no solution seems possible.
April 29, 1934
I return you the cheque because if you want the Mother to take it, you will have to endorse it! The Bank has its own tax, but that is only Rs.2.8; the only disadvantage is that they won't cash it, but put the money straight into Mother's account.
I see you have let the demons of self-doubt and doubt in 9eneral and melancholy get inside again and sit down at your table. There is no other reason for your troubles than this readiness to listen to their knock and open the door. You speak of Harin,18 but that is why Harin gets on because when they knock, he turns them out at once. If you resolutely do
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that, you will arrive also at security and perfect ease—for there are only two things that create insecurity—doubt and desire. If you desire only the Divine, there is an absolute certitude that you will reach the Divine. But all these questionings and repinings at each moment because you have not yet reached, only delay and keep an impeding curtain before the heart and the eyes. For at every step when one makes an advance, the opposite forces will throw the doubt like a rope between the legs and stop one short with a stumble—it is their métier to do that. One must not give them that advantage. Instead of saying "I want only the Divine, why is the I Divine not already here," one must say, "Since I want only the Divine, my success is sure, I have only to walk in all confidence and his own hand will be there secretly leading me to him by his own way and at his own time." That is what you must keep as your constant mantra and it is besides the only logical and reasonable thing to do—for anything else is an irrational self-contradiction of the most glaring kind. Any- thing else one may doubt: whether the supermind will come down, whether this world can ever be anything but a field of struggle for the mass of men, these can be rational doubts— but that he who desires only the Divine shall reach the Divine is a certitude much more certain than that two and two make four. That is the faith every sadhak must have in the bottom of his heart, supporting him through every stumble and blow and ordeal. It is only false ideas still casting their shadow on your mind that prevent you from having it. Push them aside for good and see this simple inner truth in a simple and straightforward way—the back of the difficulty will be broken.
May 1934
The English language is not naturally melodious like the Italian or Bengali—no language with a Teutonic base can
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but it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can by a skilful handling be made to give out the most beautiful melodies. Bengali and Italian are soft, easy and mellifluous languages—English is difficult and has to be struggled with in order to produce its best effects, but out of that very difficulty has arisen an astonishing plasticity, depth and manifold subtlety of rhythm. These qualities do not repose on metrical structure, but on the less analysable elements of the rhythmic. The metrical basis itself is a peculiar combination by which English rhythm depends without explicitly avowing it on a skilful and most extraordinarily variable combination of three elements—the numeric foot dependent on the number of syllables, the use of the stress foot and a play of stresses, and a recognisable but free and plastic use of quantitative play (not quantitative feet), all three running into each other.
I am afraid your estimate here is marred by the personal or national habit. One is always inclined to make this claim for one's own language because one can catch every shade and element of it while in another language, however well- learned, the ear is not so clairaudient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyricists. Shakespeare, Swinburne's best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody but not inferior.
Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily than English, it has a freer variety of melodies now, for formerly as English poetry was mostly iambic, Bengali poetry used to be mostly aksaravrtta.19 (I remember how my brother Manmohan would annoy me by denouncing the absence of melody, the featureless monotony of Bengali rhythm and tell me how Tagore ought to be read to be truly melodious—like English in stress, with ludicrous effects. That however is by the way.) What I mean is that variety of melodic bases was not conspicuous at that time in Bengali poetry. Nowadays this variety is there and undoubtedly opens
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possibilities such as perhaps do not exist in other languages.
I do not see, however/ how the metrical aspect by itself can really be taken apart from other more subtle elements—I do not mean the bhāva [feeling] of the sense only, though without depth or adequacy there metrical melody is only a melodious corpse, but the bhāva or subtle (not intellectual) elements of rhythm and it is on these that English depends for the greater power and plasticity of its harmonic and even to a less extent of its melodic effects. In a word, there is truth in what you say but it cannot be pushed so far as you push it.
I may say that purely vital poetry can be very remarkable. Many nowadays in Europe seem even to think that poetry should be written only from the vital (I mean from poetic sensations, not from ideas) and that that is the only pure poetry. The poets of the vital plane seize with a great vivid- ness and extraordinary force of rhythm and phrase the life-power and the very sensation of the things they describe and express them to the poetic sense. What is often lacking in them is a perfect balance between this power and the other powers of poetry: intellectual, psychic, emotional, etc. There is something in them which gives an impression of excess—• when they are great in genius, splendid excess but still not the perfect perfection.
May 4, 1934
(...) a bad headache—and can't work much, which makes it sadder still with me. However, no more of that. If possible
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help me i will try my best not to complain henceforward and pray to believe that it is all for the best and that the Divine has not abandoned me—though the prospects portend that.
Nishikanta has written a prarthana [prayer] to-day which is very beautiful and I will send it to you tomorrow. He was asking me to remind you of him and to tell you that he somehow consoles himself with poetics and thus divert his growing melancholy. I let you know this as he prayed to me to do so.
I had put to you in my yesterday morning's letter some questions on Vairagya20 to which I had expected an answer. If you should have mislaid the letter it is thus:
Amal21 told me Vairagya was morbid and a friend of mine wrote to me in Yogic Sadhan you strongly disapproved of Vairagya. But I marvel how one could stick to spiritual life without an intense Vairagya. In my own case I find I have been favoured with not more than one concrete spiritual realisation: that is, Vairagya. But I believe it is this that has been my saviour, otherwise with my weak faith I would have run away like a shot. But it is this intense dislike of outside and the world that prevents. So how can I say it is undesirable—which is implied by Amal's "morbid"?
As to Amal, a little bit of Vairagya on his part might have been very useful to him in getting rid of the vital bonds of K-D. Sethna which still cling around him and prevent his Psychic being from occupying these fields of his nature. As to Yogic Sadhan, it is not my composition nor its contents the essence of my Yoga, whatever the publishers may persist in saying in their lying blush in spite of my protests.
I have objected in the past to Vairagya of the ascetic kind the tamasic kind and by the tamasic kind I mean that spirit which comes defeated from life, not because it is really disgusted with life, but because it could not cope with it or conquer its Prizes; for it comes to Yoga as a kind of asylum for the maimed or weak and to the Divine as a consolation
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prize for the failed boys in the world-class. The Vairagya of one who has tasted the world's gifts or prizes but found them insufficient or finally tasteless and turns away towards a higher and more beautiful ideal or the Vairagya of one who has done his part in life's battles but seen that something greater is demanded of the soul, is perfectly helpful and a good gate to the Yoga. Also the sattwic Vairagya which has learned what life is and turns to what is above and behind life. By the ascetic Vairagya I mean that which denies life and world altogether and wants to disappear into the Indefinite— I object to it for those who come to this Yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life—so Vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and even in a certain sense indispensable for my Yoga.
May 6, 1934
(...) As for his writing his poetry from the vital, he does it because it is his nature. He has been all his life the vital and sensational man, even his experiences and manner of seeking have been of that plane. That does not mean that he cannot do Yoga—many who are accounted great yogis never rise beyond that plane—but here it is not sufficient—even if the vital were to remain the leader, it would not be safe. He must make an outlet for his psychic being to manifest or at least to enlighten and purify this vital from behind so that to rise to a higher Consciousness will be no longer too difficult. How he is to do it I cannot tell him. If he has the sincere sincerity (not merely the vital eagerness) he will find the way.
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May 8, 1934
Mother knew nothing about the occurrence regarding Nishikanta. Nolini acted on his own initiative, assuming I suppose that since he was allowed to come only once a week, he could not come two days running without express sanction.
But why allow anything to come in the way between you and the Divine, any idea, any incident; when you are in full aspiration and joy, let nothing count, nothing be of any importance except the Divine and your aspiration. If one wants the Divine quickly, absolutely, entirely, that must be the spirit of approach, absolute, all-engrossing, making that the one point with which nothing else must interfere.
What value have mental ideas about the Divine, ideas about what he should be, how he should act, how he should not act—they can only come in the way. Only the Divine Himself matters. When your consciousness embraces the Divine, then you can know what the Divine is, not before. Krishna is Krishna, one does not care what he did or did not do, only to see Him, meet Him, feel the Light, the Presence, the Love, the Ananda is what matters. So it is always for the spiritual aspirations—it is the law of the spiritual life.
Don't waste time any longer in these ideas of the mind or in any starts of the vital—blow these clouds away. Keep fixed on the one thing indispensable.
I should like to say something about the Divine Grace—for u seem to think it should be something like a Divine Reason ^mg ^"H lines not very different from those of human 9ence. But it is not that. Also it is not a universal Divine
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Compassion either acting impartially on all who approach it and acceding to all prayers. It does not select the righteous and reject the sinner. The Divine Grace came to aid Saul of Tarsus the persecutor, to St. Augustine the profligate, to Jagai and Madhai of infamous fame, to Bilwamangal and many others whose conversion might well scandalise the puritanism of the human moral intelligence. But it can come to the righteous also—curing them of their self-righteousness and leading to a purer consciousness beyond these things. It is a power that is superior to any rule, even to the Cosmic Law—for all spiritual seers have distinguished between the Law and Grace. Yet it is not indiscriminate—only it has a discrimination of its own which sees things and persons and the right times and seasons with another vision than that of the Mind or any other normal Power. A state of Grace is pre- pared in the individual often behind thick veils by means not calculable by the mind and when the state of Grace comes then the Grace itself acts. There are these three powers: (1) The Cosmic Law of Karma or what else; (2) the Divine Compassion acting on as many as it can reach through the nets of the Law and giving them their chance; (3) the Divine Grace which acts more incalculably but also more irresistibly than the others. The only question is whether there is some- thing behind all the anomalies of life which can respond to the call and open itself with whatever difficulty till it is ready for the illumination of the Divine Grace—and that something must be not a mental and vital movement but an inner some- what which can well be seen by the inner eye. If it is there and when it becomes active in front, then the Compassion can act, though the full action of the Grace may still wait attending the decisive decision or change, for this may be postponed to a future hour, because some portion or element of the being may still come between, something that is not yet ready to receive.
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May 20, 1934
If I have to answer fully all the points in your long letter, I fear it will take me until Doomsday—though that, according to some calculation is not far off. I will try to do it in a comparatively brief and unsatisfactory way. I have indeed written a good deal already. But as it may take me time to finish, I send an interim note.
I do not know why you should be suddenly bewildered by what I wrote—it is nothing new and we have been saying it since a whole eternity. I wrote this short answer in reference to a question which supposed that certain "perfections" must be demanded of the Divine Manifestation which seemed to me quite irrelevant to the reality. I put forward two propositions which appear to me indisputable unless we are to reverse all spiritual knowledge in favour of modern European ideas about things.
First, the Divine Manifestation even when it manifests in mental and human ways has behind it a consciousness greater than the mind and not bound by the petty mental and moral conventions of this very ignorant human race—so that to impose these standards on the Divine is to try to do what is irrational and impossible. Secondly this Divine Conscious- ness behind the apparent personality is concerned with only two things in a fundamental way—the Truth above and here below the Lila and the purpose of the incarnation or manifestation and it does what is necessary for that in the way its greater than human consciousness sees like the necessary and intended way. I shall try if I can develop that when I write about it—perhaps I shall take your remarks about Rama and Krishna as the starting point—but that I shall see hereafter.
But I do not understand how all that can prevent me from answering mental questions. On my own showing, if it is necessary for the divine Purpose, it has to be done. Rama-Krishna himself whom you quote for a capability of asking s ions answered thousands of questions, I believe. But the
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answers must be such as Ramakrishna gave and such as I try to give, answers from a higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to co-ordinate its ignorance; still less can there be a placing of the Divine or the Divine Truth before the judgment of the intellect to be condemned or acquitted by that authority—for the authority here has no sufficient jurisdiction or competence. This also I shall try to explain— it is what I have started to do in a longer letter.
May 21, 1934
What astonished me in the review in Parichay22 was that they should have given the book for criticism to someone who evidently has very little knowledge of poetry. Such reviewers have always a tendency to condemn and belittle so as to justify to themselves their claim to criticise.
These disappointments from friends can all the same be steps to a deeper source of happiness—when there is in the psychic being an aspiration for the Divine. Even if the steps are painful the end they lead to is, as one afterwards finds,
well worth the cost.
June 1934
It is gratifying that Anilkumar should rank me with Rama- Krishna and Chaitanya, but however gratified I may be, 1 cannot help saying that his remark takes the first prize for absurdity and ignorance. As if thousands of Yogis, saints and mystics had not realised God and only three people had done it! Why do people go out of their way to make such sily;
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pronouncements, I wonder! But perhaps it was merely a rhetorical flourish or rather a way of hinting that although Sri Aurobindo may have had some realisation (perhaps) of the Divine, he was unable to communicate anything of it to any- body else. I had thought differently, but that must have been an imagination of my ego—for Anilkumar surely must know —and also the Doctor.
Saurin's omniscience, so far as it is true, announces nothing of new—I suppose his omniscience simply amounts to the hearing of much gossip perhaps through the channel of the Doctor. The Doctor's sexuality, domesticity, love of bourgeois comfort are as ancient as Methuselah—they took him away from here once in chase of these vital satisfactions, but he found them not so satisfactory after all and fled to some mountain, found the mountain also deficient and pleaded for several years to come back to this detestable and uncomfortable Ashram. The only new news in Saurin's lot is that he proposes to go for good—his own version is that he is coming back in August as early as possible and is leaving his worldly goods here in the meantime. However Saurin may know his mind better, as they are intimate.
About the depressions, the first question is whether they are the temporary depressions which everyone almost has on the way or are they, as you seem to suggest, an increasing and in a way depletive thing, a good bye to hope and sadhana. It is quite possible that there is a wide-spread attempt to press depression on the sadhaks, for depression is the obstacle natural to this stage of the struggle with the subconscient Ignorance out of which the external human nature is a for- mation and the roots of' its unwillingness to change are there. But you speak of the depression as if it were not only definitive and absolute but universal ("the other sadhaks"). If so, a retreat to Kashmir in the wake of Anilkumar would be imperative. Kashmir is a magnificent place, its rivers unforgettable andon one of its mountains with a shrine of Shankaracharya on it I got my second realisation of the Infinite (long before I started yoga). But I seem to know that a few at least of the
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sadhaks are making a progress with which they are well satisfied, that some have what appears to them a concrete realisation and others have experiences which are leading them forward and do not complain because they have not yet the one definitive thing. And their number seems to me to increase rather than decrease. Even those who grumble, some of them, do not seem inclined to take their flight to other climes, but, after delivering their souls by a good grumble, return to the endeavour at Yoga. As long as it is so, I see no necessity for a débandade [headlong flight].
I am rather astonished at your finding Wordsworth's realisation, however mental and incomplete, to be abstract and vague or dictated by emotional effervescence. Wordsworth was hardly an emotional or effervescent character. As for an abstract realisation, it sounds like a round square; I have never had one myself and find it difficult to believe in it. But certainly a realisation in its beginning can be vague and nebulous or it can be less or more vivid. Still, Wordsworth's did not make that impression on me and to him it certainly came as something positive, powerful and determinative. He stayed there and went no farther, did not get to the source, because more was hardly possible in his time and surroundings, at least to a man of his mainly moral and intellectual temper.
In a more deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation is that which makes the thing realised more real, dynamic, intimately present to the consciousness than any physical thing can be. Such a realisation of the personal Divine or of the impersonal Brahman or of the self does not usually come at the beginning of a sadhana or in the first years or for many years. It comes so to a very few; mine came fifteen years afte1' my first pre-Yogic experience in London and in the fifth year" after I started Yoga. That I consider extraordinary quick, an express train speed almost—though there may no doubt have been several quicker achievements. But to expect and demand it so soon and get fed up because it does not come and declare Yoga impossible except for two or three in the ages would
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betoken in the eyes of any experienced Yogi or sadhak a rather rash and abnormal impatience. Most would say that slow development is the best one can hope for in the first /ears and only when the nature is ready and fully concentrated towards the Divine can the definitive experience come. To some rapid preparatory experiences can come at a combatively early stage, but even they cannot escape the labour of the consciousness which will make these experiences culminate in the realisation that is enduring and complete. It is not a question of my liking or disliking your demand or attitude. It is a matter of fact and truth and experience, not of liking or disliking, two things which do not usually sway me. It is the fact that people who are grateful and cheerful and ready to go step by step, even by slow steps, if need be, do actually march faster and more surely than those who are impatient and in haste and at each step despair or [murmur?]. It is what I have always seen—there may be instances to the contrary and I have no objection to your being one— none at all. I only say that if you could maintain "hope and fervour and faith," there could be a much bigger chance, that is all.
This is just a personal explanation—a long explanation but which seemed to be called for by your enhancement of my glory—and it is dictated by a hope that after all in the long run an accumulation of explanations may persuade you to Prefer the sunny path to the grey one, the one thing wanted ^ that you should push through and arrive. '
June 1934?
(About Nishikanta's translation of Sri Aurobindo's
poem "Nirvana".)
(Nishikanta's version. think you wm ^d the translation fairly good, but I am
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far from satisfied myself. Not that it isn't Bengali or poetical, but it has no resilience, it has no force, sounds too much like a string of words aesthetically built up without any real vivid urge.
Your "Nirvana" breathes an atmosphere so wonderful of calm and peace and realisation. But [who ?] can expect that of course de n'importe qui [from just anybody]?
I fear it is not successful—your criticism is quite correct— it is the life that is absent. The octet can pass; but the sextet fails completely.
June 3, 1934
Your translation of "Shiva" is a very beautiful poem, combining strength and elegance in the Virgilian manner. I have put one or two questions relating to the correctness of certain passages as a translation, but except for the care for exactitude it has not much importance.
Anilbaran's translation pleased me on another ground—he has rendered with great fidelity and, as it seemed to me, with considerable directness, precision and force the thought and spiritual substance of the poem—he has rendered, of course in more mental terms than mine, exactly what I wanted to say. What might be called the "mysticity" of the poem, the expression of spiritual vision in half-occult, half-revealing symbols is not successfully caught, but that is a thing which may very well be untranslatable; it depends on an imponderable element which can hardly help escaping or evaporating in the process of transportation from one language to another. What he has done seems to me very well done. Questions of diction or elegance are another matter.
There remains Nishikanta's two translations of "Jivanmukta." I do not find the mātrā-vrtta23 one altogether satisfactory' but the other is a very good poem. But as a translation! Wel1'
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there are some errors of the sense which do not help, e.g., māhima for splendour; splendour is light. Silence, Light, power, Ananda, these are the four pillars of the JTvaiimukta24 consciousness. So too the all-seeing, flame-covered eye gets transmogrified into something else; but the worst is the divine stillness surrounding the world which is not at all what I either said or meant. The lines:
Revealed it wakens, when God's stillness
Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature,
express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and itself rendered calm and motionless by that over-vaulting influence. Nothing of that appears in the translation; it is a vague mental statement with an ornamental metaphor.
I do not stress all that to find fault, but because it points to a difficulty which seems to me insuperable. This "Jivanmukta" is not merely a poem, but a transcript of a spiritual condition, one of the highest in the inner Overmind experience. To express it at all is not easy. If one writes only ideas about what it is or should be, there is failure. There must be something concrete, the form, the essential spiritual emotion of the state. The words chosen must be the right words in their proper Place and each part of the statement in its place in an inevitable whole. Verbiage, flourishes there must be none. But how can all that be turned over into another language with-out upsetting the applecart? I don't see how it can be easily avoided. For instance in the fourth stanza, "Possesses," "sealing ," "grasp" are words of great importance for the sense. The feeling of possession by the Ananda rapture, the pressure by the Ananda rapture, the pressure of the ecstatic force sealing the love so that there can never again be division between the lover and the All-Beloved, the sense of the grasp of the All-Beautiful are things more physically concrete to the experience ("grasp" is especially used because it is a violent, abrupt, physical word—it
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cannot be replaced by "In the hands" or "In the hold") and all that must have an adequate equivalent in the translation. But reading Nishikanta's Bengali line I no longer know where I am, unless perhaps in a world of Vedantic abstractions where I never intended to go. So again what has Nishikanta's translation of my line to do with the tremendous and beautiful experience of being ravished, thoughtless and wordless, into the breast of the Eternal who is the All-Beautiful, All-Beloved?
That is what I meant when I wrote yesterday about the impossibility—and also what I apprehended when I qualified my assent to Nolini's proposal with a condition.25
June 8, 1934
"I will try again" is not sufficient; what is needed is to try always—steadily, with a heart free from despondency, as the Gita says, anirvinna cetasā. You speak of five and a half years as if it were a tremendous time for such an object, but a yogi who is able in that time to change radically his nature and get the concrete decisive experience of the Divine would have to be considered as one of the rare gallopers of the spiritual Way. Nobody has ever said that the spiritual change was an easy thing; all spiritual seekers will say that it is difficult but supremely worth doing. If one's desire for the Divine has become the master desire, then surely one can give one's whole life to it without repining and not grudge the time, difficulty or labour.
Again, you speak of your experiences as vague and dream' like. In the first place the scorn of small experiences in the inner life is no part of wisdom, reason or common sense. is in the beginning of the sadhana and for a long time, the small experiences that come on each other and, if given the full value, prepare the field, build up a preparatory consciousness and one day break open the walls to big experience But if you despise them with the ambitious idea that you must
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have either the big experiences or nothing, it is not surprising that they come once in a blue moon and cannot do their work. Moreover, all your experiences were not small. There v pre some like the stilling descent of a Power in the body— what you used to call numbness—which anyone with spiritual knowledge would have recognised as a first strong step towards the opening of the consciousness to the higher Peace and Light. But it was not in the line of your expectations and you gave it no special value. As for vague and dream-like, you feel it so because you are looking at them and at everything that happens in you from the standpoint of the outward physical mind and intellect which can take only physical things as real and important and vivid and to it inward phenomena are something unreal, vague and truthless. The spiritual experience does not even despise dreams and visions; it is known to it that many of these things are not dreams at all but experiences on an inner plane and if the experiences of the inner planes which lead to the opening of the inner self into the outer so as to influence and change it are not accepted, the experiences of the subtle consciousness and the trance consciousness, how is the waking consciousness to expand out of the narrow prison of the body and body-mind and the senses? For, to the physical mind untouched by the inner awakened consciousness, even the experience of the cosmic consciousness or the Eternal Self might very well seem merely subjective and unconvincing. It would think, "Curious, no doubt, rather interesting, but very subjective, don't you think? Hallucinations, yes'." The first business of the spiritual seeker is to get away from the outward mind's outlook and to look inward phenomena, with an inward mind to which they soon become powerful and stimulating realities. If one does truth one begins to see that there is here a wide field of truth and knowledge in which one can move from discovery to discovery to reach the supreme discovery of all. But the outer physical mind, if it has any ideas about the Divine and spirituality at all, has only hasty a priori ideas miles away e solid ground of inner truth and experience.
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I have not left myself time to deal with other matters at any length. You speak of the Divine's stern demands and hard conditions—but what severe demands and iron conditions you are laying on the Divine! You practically say to Him, "I will doubt and deny you at every step, but you must fill me with your unmistakable Presence; I will be full of gloom and despair whenever I think of you or the Yoga, but you must flood my gloom with your rapturous irresistible Ananda; I will meet you only with my outer physical mind and consciousness, but you must give me in that the Power that will transform rapidly my whole nature." Well, I don't say that the Divine won't or can't do it, but if such a miracle is to be worked, you must give him some time and just a millionth part of a chance.
June 12, 1934
St. Augustine was a man of God and a great saint, but great saints are not always—or often—great psychologists or great thinkers. The psychology here is that of the most superficial schools, if not that of the man in the street; there are as many errors in it as there are psychological statements—and more, for several are not expressed but involved in what he writes. I am aware that these errors are practically universal, for psychological enquiry in Europe (and without enquiry there can be no sound knowledge) is only beginning and has not gone very far, and what has reigned in men's minds up to now is a superficial statement of the superficial appearances of our consciousness as they look to us at first view and nothing more. But knowledge only begins when we get away from the surface phenomena and look behind them for their true operations and causes. To the superficial view of the outer mind and senses the sun is a little fiery ball circling in mid air round the earth and the stars twinkling little things stuck in the sky for our benefit at night. Scientific enquiry
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comes and knocks this infantile first-view to pieces. The sun is a huge affair (millions of miles away from our air) around which the small earth circles, and the stars are huge members of huge systems indescribably distant which have nothing apparently to do with the tiny earth and her creatures. All Science is like that, a contradiction of the sense-view or superficial appearances of things and an assertion of truths which are unguessed by the common and the uninstructed reason. The same process has to be followed in psychology if we are really to know what our consciousness is, how it is built and made and what is the secret of its functionings or the way out of its disorder.
There are several capital and common errors here:—26
1. That mind and spirit are the same thing.
2. That all consciousness can be spoken of as "mind"
3. That all consciousness therefore is of a spiritual substance.
4. That the body is merely Matter, not conscious, therefore something quite different from the spiritual part of the nature.
First, the spirit and the mind are two different things and should not be confused together. The mind is an instrumental entity or instrumental consciousness whose function is to think and perceive—the spirit is an essential entity or consciousness which does not need to think or perceive either in the mental or the sensory way, because whatever knowledge it has is direct or essential knowledge, svayamprakāśa [self- luminous].
Next, it follows that all consciousness is not necessarily of spiritual make and it need not be true and is not true that the thing commanding and the thing commanded are the same, are not at all different are of the same substance and therefore are bound or at least ought to agree together.
Third, it is not even true that it is the mind which is commanding the mind and finds itself disobeyed by itself. First, there are many parts of the mind, each a force in itself with its formation, functionings, interests, and they may not be Part of the mind may be spiritually influenced and
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like to think of the Divine and obey the spiritual impulse another part may be rational or scientific or literary and prefer to follow the formations, beliefs or doubts, mental preferences and interests which are in conformity with its education and its nature. But quite apart from that, what was commanding in St. Augustine may very well have been the thinking mind or reason while what was commanded was the vital, and mind and vital, whatever anybody may say, are not the same. The thinking mind or buddhi lives, however imperfectly in man, by intelligence and reason. Vital, on the other hand, is a thing of desires, impulses, force-pushes, emotions, sensations, seekings after life-fulfilment, possession and enjoyment; these are its functions and its nature—it is that part of us which seeks after life and its movements for their own sake and it does not want to leave hold of them if they bring it suffering as well as or more than pleasure; it is even capable of luxuriating in tears and suffering as part of the drama of life. What then is there in common between the thinking intelligence and the vital and why should the latter obey the mind and not follow its own nature? The disobedience is perfectly normal instead of being, as Augustine suggests, unintelligible. Of course, man can establish a mental control over his vital and in so far as he does it he is a man—because the thinking mind is a nobler and more enlightened entity and consciousness than the vital and ought, therefore, to rule and, if the mental will is strong, can rule. But this rule is precarious, incomplete and held only by much self-discipline. For if the mind is more enlightened, the vital is nearer to earth, more intense, vehement, more directly able to touch the body. There is too a vital mind which lives by imagination, thoughts of desire, will to act and enjoy from its own impulse and this is able to seize on the reason itself and make it its auxiliary and its justifying counsel and supplier of pleas and excuses. There is also the sheer force 01 Desire in man which is the vital's principal support and strong enough to sweep off the reason, as the Gita says, "like boat on stormy waters," nāvamivāmbhasi [Gita, 2.67].
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Finally the body obeys the mind automatically in those things in which it is formed or trained to obey it, but the relation
of the body to the mind is not in all things that of an automatic perfect instrument. The body also has a consciousness, of its own and, though it is a submental instrument or servant consciousness, it can disobey or fail to obey as well. in many things, in matters of health and illness for instance, in all automatic functionings, the body acts on its own and is not a servant of the mind. If it is fatigued, it can offer a passive resistance to the mind's will. It can cloud the mind with tamas, inertia, dullness, fumes of the subconscient so that the mind cannot act. The arm lifts, no doubt, when it gets the suggestion, but at first the legs do not obey when they are asked to walk; they have to learn how to leave the crawling attitude and movement and take up the erect and ambulatory habit. When you first ask the hand to draw a straight line or to play music, it can't do it and won't do it. It has to be schooled, trained, taught, and afterwards it does automatically what is required of it. All this proves that there is a body-consciousness which can do things at the mind's order, but has to be awakened, trained, made a good and conscious instrument. It can even be so trained that a mental will or suggestion can cure the illness of the body. But all these things, these relations of mind and body, stand on the same footing in essence as the relation of mind to vital and it is not so easy or primary a matter as Augustine would have it.
This puts the problem on another footing with the causes ore clear and, if we are prepared to go far enough, it suggests the way out, the way of Yoga.
P.S. All this is quite apart from the contributing and very important factor of plural personality of which psychological enquiry is just beginning rather obscurely to take account. at is a more complex affair.
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(Two letters about Sahana's bengali translation of Sri Aurobindo's poem "In Horis Aeternum" .)
I feel the last verse makes very clear meaning anyway, but since Sahana is not pleased with it and she has been labouring at it for days, I think I may have mistaken your meaning. Doubtless, the "Something" I could not keep as I took it to mean that the passing moment reflects the Eternal when "caught by the spirit in sense". Tell me there- fore—0 Lord I must stop.
I think it is a very fine rendering. In line 4 however I would not say that there is no reference to day as a movement of time but only to the noon, the day as sunlit space rather than time, it is the fixed moment, as it were, the motionless scene of noon. The eye is of course the sun itself, I mark by the dash that I have finished with my first symbol of the gold ball and go off to the second quite different one.
In the last line your translation is indeed very clear and precise in meaning, but it is perhaps too precise—the "something" twice repeated is meant to give a sense of just the opposite, an imprecise—unseizable something which is at once nothing and all things at a time. It is found no doubt in the momentary things and all is there, but the finding is less definite than your translation suggests. But the expression nāstirupe chhila je sarbbāsti is very good.
One point more. "Caught by a spirit in sense" means "there is a spirit in sense (sense not being sense alone) that catches the eternal out of perishable hours in these things."
June 18, 1934
Yes, I think it will do very well as a rendering, now. As for what you say about the rhythmic movement and the stresses,
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that is something new (I believe) in this form in English even. It is an attempt to combine—avoiding the chaotic amorphous- of free verse—a system of regular metrical measures . With the greatest possible plasticity and variety whether as the number of syllables, management of feet, if any, distribution of stress beats or changing modulation of the rhythm. "In Horis Aeternum" is merely a first essay, a very simple and elementary model for this endeavour. How far it can go in one direction or another has yet to be seen; but I don't very well see for the moment how that is to be got into a Bengali cadence.
P.S. I struggled to get time to reply on your book and read Nishikanta but could not. Monday! I keep the book.
In Horis Aeternum
A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea,
A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly;
Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play
Follows its curve,—a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.
Here or otherwhere,—poised on the unreachable abrupt snow-solitary
ascent
Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent,
Or in the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert's hungry
soul,—
A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity's face, in a fragment the mystic
Whole.
Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,
Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in ,
sense,
In the greatness of a man, in music's outspread wings, in a touch, in a
smile, in a sound,
Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a Nothing
that was all and is found.
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June 28, 1934
First of all, why get upset by such slight things, a phrase in a poem, a tap on the head of doubt? I do not see at all why you should take it as a personal assault on yourself. It is clear from the poems themselves that they are not an assault but a riposte. Some have been criticising and ridiculing his faith and his sadhana, there have been criticisms and attacks on the Mother indicating that it is absurd to think her of as divine. Harm justifies his faith in his own way—and in doing so hits back at the critics and scorners. No doubt, he ought not to do so, he ought to disregard it all, as we have [hinted?] more than once. But it is a hard rule to follow for a militant enthusiasm endowed with a gift of expression. But what is there in all that to affect you who do not gibe at faith, even if you yourself doubt, and do not attack or criticise the Mother.
As for the sense of superiority, that too is a little difficult to avoid when greater horizons open before the consciousness, unless one is already of a saintly and humble disposition. There are men like Nag Mahashoy 27 in whom spiritual experience creates more and more humility, there are others like Vivekananda in whom it erects a great sense of strength and superiority—European critics have taxed him with it rather severely; there are others in whom it [fixes?] a sense of superiority to men and humility to the Divine. Each position has its value. Take Vivekananda's famous answer to the Madras Pundit who objected to one of his assertions saying: "But Shankara does not say so." To which Vivekananda replied: "No, Shankara does not say so, but I, Vivekananda, say so," and the Pundit sank back annoyed and speechless. That "\, Vivekananda," stands up to the ordinary eye like a Himalaya of self-confident egoism. But there was nothing false or unsound in Vivekananda's spiritual experience. This was not mere egoism, but the sense of what he stood for and the attitude of the fighter who, as the representative of some- thing very great, could not allow himself to be put down or belittled. This is not to deny the necessity of non-egoism and
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of spiritually humility, but to show that .the question is not so of easy as it appears at first sight. For if I have to express my spiritual experiences, I must do that with truth—1 must record them, their bhāva, the thoughts, feelings, extensions of consciousness which accompany it. What am I to do with the experience in which one feels the whole world in oneself or exp force of the Divine flowing in one's being and nature or 1 certitude of one's faith against all doubts and doubters one's oneness with the Divine or the smallness of human thought and life compared with this greater knowledge and existence? And I have to use the word "I"—I cannot take refuge in saying "This body" or "This appearance,"—especially as I am not a Mayavadin28 Shall I not inevitably fall into expressions which will make Khitish Sen shake his head at my assertions as full of pride and ego? I imagine it would be difficult to avoid it.
Another thing, it seems to me that you identify faith very much with the mental belief—but real faith is something spiritual, a knowledge of the soul. The assertions you quote in your letter are the hard assertions of mental belief leading to a great vehement assertion of one's creed and goal because they are one's own and must therefore be greater than those of others—an attitude which is universal in human nature. Even the atheist is not tolerant, but declares his credo of Nature and Matter as the only truth and on all who disbelieve it or believe in other things he pours scorn as unenlightened morons and superstitious half-wits. I bear him no grudge for thinking me that; but 1 note that this attitude is not confined to religious faith but is equally natural to those who are free from religious faith and do not believe in Gods or Gurus.
29[I don't think that real faith is so very superabundant in this Ashram. There are some who have it, but for the most part I have met not only doubt, but sharp criticism, constant Questioning, much mockery of faith and spiritual experience, violent attacks on myself and the Mother—and that has been going on for the last fourteen years and more. Things are not so bad as they were, but there is plenty of it left still, and I
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don't think the time has come when the danger of an excessive faith is likely to take body.]
You will not, I hope, mind my putting the other side of the question. I simply want to point out that there is the other side, that there is much more to be said than at first sight appears, [and the moral of it all is that one must bear with what calm and philosophy one can the conflicts of opposing tendencies [or?] this welter of the Ashram atmosphere and wait till the time has come when a greater Light and with it some true Harmony can purify and unite and recreate.]
I have had a very heavy mail today and had no time to deal with the metre. I trust I shall be more free tomorrow—I will do my best, but I fear it is again a problem, too many longs together, too many shorts together for the English tone Never mind, we will see.
July 2, 1934
After two days wrestling, I have to admit that I am beaten by your last metre. I have written something, but it is a fake. I will first produce the fake:
A gold moon-raft floats / and swings / slowly
And it casts / a fire / of pale / holy / blue light
On the dragon tail/ aglow/ of the/ faint night
That glimmers far—/ swimming,
The illumined shoals/ of stars/ slamming,
Overspreading earth / and drowning the / heart in sight
With the / ocean-depths / and breadths / of the / Infinite.
That is the official scansion, and except in the last foot of the two last lines it professes to follow very closely the metre of Nishikanta's poem. But in fact it is full of sins and the appearance is a counterfeit. In the first line the first foot 1 really an anti-bacchius:
"A gold moon/-raft floats..."
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and quantitatively, though not accentually, the second is a spondee which also disturbs the true rhythmic movement. "Slowly" and "holy" are in truth trochees disguised as pyrrhics, and if "slowly" can pass off the deceit a little, "holy" is quite unholy in the brazenness of its pretences. If I could have got a compound adjective like "god-holy," it would have been all right and saved the situation, but I could find none that was appropriate. The next three lines are, I think, on the true model and have an honest metre. But the closing cretic of my last two is nothing but a cowardly flight from the difficulty of the spondee. I console myself by remembering that even Hector ran when he found himself in difficulties with Achilles and that the Bhāgavat30 lays down palāyanam [flight] as one of the ordinary occupations of the Avatar. But the evasion is a fact and I am afraid it spoils the correspondence of the metres. I have some idea of adding a second stanza—this one will look less guilty perhaps if it has a companion in sin—but if you use this at all, you need not wait for the other as it may never take birth at all.
Nishikanta's poem on the Bazaar is very good work admirably done—he is evidently a craftsman in language and rhythm. I cannot go so far as to subscribe to your epithet great." There is however some power of developing a poetic subject which is full of promise. The thought-side of the development is not quite flawless—the emergence out of the ethical into the spiritual-philosophical standpoint in the speech of the Man of the Market is rather awkward; the transition from the sordid to the sublime jars a little. As for the culminating gospel of "Nothing good, nothing evil" it is a rather dangerous truth, unless it is balanced by admitting the [?] antinomy of the higher and the lower into the ecstatic uniqueness of the Brahman. "This which they worship here is not that Brahman" is a truth as much as "All this is the Brahman."
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July 19, 1934
All right. I will try to answer these two great conundrums of the Mind—Nirvana and the Disharmonies of Earth. I have almost finished the first, but it is an awful scribble and I don't know if Nolini will be able to read it. Perhaps I shall have to copy it out.
As for the other question—where do you find in "The Life Heavens" that I say or anybody says the conditions on the earth are glorious and suited to the Divine Life? There is not a word to that effect there! The Life Heavens are the heavens of the vital gods and there is there a perfect harmony but a harmony of the sublimated satisfied senses and vital desires only. If there is to be a Harmony, it must be of all the powers raised to their highest and harmonised together. All the non- evolutionary worlds are worlds of a type limited to its own harmony like the life-heavens. The Earth, on the other hand, is an evolutionary world, not at all glorious or harmonious even as a material world (except in certain appearances), but rather most sorrowful, disharmonious, imperfect. Yet in that imperfection is the urge towards a higher and more many- sided perfection. It contains the last finite which yet yearns to the supreme infinite (it is not to be satisfied by sense-joys precisely because in the conditions of earth it is able to see their limitations); God is pent in the mire (mire is not glorious, so there is no claim to glory or beauty here), but that very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison to a consciousness which is ever rising towards the heights. And so on. That is "a deeper power"; not a greater glory or perfection. All that may be true or not to the mind, but it 1s the traditional attitude of Indian spiritual experience. Ask any yogin, he will tell you that the Life Heavens are childish things; even the gods, says the Parana,31 must come down to earth and be embodied there if they want mukti, giving up the pride of their limited perfection—they must enter into the last finite if they want to reach the last infinite. A poem is not a philosophical treatise or a profession of religious faith—it is
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the expression of a vision or an experience of some kind, mundane or spiritual. Here it is the vision of the life heavens, its perfection, its limitations and the counter-claim of the Earth or rather, the Spirit or Power behind the earth-consciousness. it has It has to be taken at that, as an expression of a certain aspect of things, an expression of a certain kind of experience, not of a mental dogma. There is a deep truth behind it, though it may not be the whole truth of the matter In the poem, also, there is no question of a divine life here, though that is hinted at as the unexpressed possible result of the ascent—because the Earth is not put aside ("Earth's heart was felt beating below me still"); nevertheless the poem expresses only the ascent towards the Highest, far beyond the Life Heavens, and the Earth-Spirit claims that power and does not speak of any descent of a Divine Life.
I say so much in order to get rid of that misconception so as not to have to go back to it when dealing with Earth's disharmonies.
The Life Heavens
A fife of intensities wide, immune
Floats behind the earth and her life-fret,
A magic of realms mastered by spell and nine,
Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate.
A music there wanders mortal ear
Hears not, seizing, intimate, remote,
Wide-winged in soul-spaces, fire-clear,
Heaping note on enrapturing new note.
Forms deathless there triumph, hues divine
Thrill with nets of glory the moved air;
Each sense is an ecstasy, love the sign
Of one outblaze of godhead that two share.
The peace of the senses, the senses' stir
On one harp are joined mysteries; pain
Transmuted is ravishment's minister,.
A high note and a fiery refrain.
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All things are a harmony faultless, pure;
Grief is not nor stain-wound of desire;
The heart-beats are a cadence bright and sure
Of Joy's quick steps, too invincible to tire.
A Will there, a Force, a magician Mind
Moves, and builds at once its delight-norms,
The marvels it seeks for surprised, outlined,
Hued, alive, a cosmos of fair forms.
Sounds, colours, joy-flamings. Life lies here
Dreaming, bound to the heavens of its goal,
In the clasp of a Power that enthrals to sheer
Bliss and beauty body and rapt soul.
My spirit sank drowned in the wonder surge:
Screened, withdrawn was the greatness it had sought;
Lost was the storm-stress and the warrior urge,
Lost the titan winging of the thought.
It lay at ease in a sweetness of heaven-sense
Delivered from grief, with no need left to aspire,
Free, self-dispersed in voluptuous innocence,
Lulled and borne into roseate cloud-fire.
But suddenly there soared a dateless cry,
Deep as Night, imperishable as Time;
It seemed Death's dire appeal to Eternity,
Earth's outcry to the limitless Sublime.
"0 high seeker of immortality,
Is there not, ineffable, a bliss
Too vast for these finite harmonies,
Too divine for the moment's unsure kiss ?
"Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest?
"I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,
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A red and bitter seed of the rapturous seven;—
My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.
"By me the last finite, yearning, strives
To reach the last infinity's unknown,
The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives
And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone."
Dissolving the kingdoms of happy ease
Rocked and split and faded their dream-chime.
All vanished; ungrasped eternities
Sole survived and Timelessness seized Time.
Earth's heart was felt beating below me still,
Veiled, immense, unthinkable above
My consciousness climbed like a topless hill,
Crossed seas of Light to epiphanies of Love.
July 22, 1934
I have not had time yet to read the whole poem—only the first instalment—but if the rest is as fine as this, it will be indeed a magnificent poem. I hope to finish it tomorrow and will then write.
July 26, 1934
I have read your poem32 through this time. I quite agree that you have surpassed yourself. For one thing, at one stride you nave reached an astonishing architectonic perfection. Most poets can go on writing beautifully and well—they can flow from a beginning to an end; but few know how to build well. to have a beginning, a middle and an end is not enough; all parts must be in their place and the whole and the parts in the whole must be a palm of harmony. Here some builder
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Muse has come to your help and put everything in its place. There is a remarkable power and beauty in the development of the subject. The dramatic turns are very finely done and the correspondence of the rhythm with the thing it has to express and the felicity of its changes seem to me admirable. This alternation of grave and lyric meters is a very difficult thing to do well, but you have succeeded in putting them together with much skill. Your style and way of expression also, I think, have reached a maturity or say a consistent and continuous ripeness which they had not before. The poetry rises to a still higher perfection as it proceeds and the end is surprisingly beautiful. You have found there also I think for the first time, after much poetry of initial struggle and psychic hope, the feeling and music of Ananda—exaltation you may have sometimes reached before, but not this deeper spontaneous flute note of Ananda.
August 1934
Merci. Je comprends Ie sens maintenant parfaitement. Voyons! [Thank you. I now understand the meaning perfectly. Let's see!] I suppose now there is no hitch and it 'runs with a real Wordsworthian rhythm with the authen tic Wordsworthian significance packed therein. The scene of my novel is in Grasmere where I went to see the poet's cottage—lovely Grasmere. So there are some other citations too from the poet. These I will send you by and by. All in good time—in proper sequence. There is a deal of such poetic passages in my novel. C'est pourquoi [That is why].
Harin has given me some exquisite poems'. What a poet —really mon maitre—il y a quelque chose même dans la poésie pure a proprement parler [there is something in pure poetry strictly speaking]. What a poem on A.E., the poet I loved best in the West. With all your enthusiasm for
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Yeats Guru, Yeats has meant very little indeed to me, I have never been able to warm up to him, but A.E.—yes. I have often been more deeply moved by A.E. than I could account for—his note rang tome so [true ?]. That was why I have been so deeply stirred by Harm's on A.E. Do write a sonnet at least on him Guru—don't you think he deserves it—in these days when people pooh-pooh mystic poetry (as Thomson wrote to me) when A.E. still stood to his guns on his lonely heights. Why you really set so much store by Yeats I can't gather—he is often so impossibly obscure. But A.E. is never so. His has been a note of calm grandeur to me. And it is significant that a poet of Harm's genius regards him as the greatest poet of this age—bar- ring you. I agree with him. But it seems to me there has always been some diffidence in you. Will you let me know why? Amal also mentions him passingly in his Notes on Poetry for which 1 groaned to him, for he is in ecstasies over Yeats. Please write on back—also a sonnet if you have time. If not some éclaircissement [clarification] at least. A letter from you has been long overdue to me in reward of my hermit-like dove-like purity anyway if not for my romantic speed in romance-writing.
I do not think I was ever enthusiastic over Yeats, but I recognise his great artistry in language and verse in which he is far superior to A.E.—just as A.E. as a man and a seer was far superior to Yeats. Yeats never got beyond a beautiful mid- world of the vital antariksa [mid-world]—he has not penetrated beyond to spiritual-mental heights as A.E. did. But all the same when one speaks of poetry, it is the poetical element to which one must give the most importance. What Yeats pressed, he expressed with great poetical beauty, perfection and power and he has, besides, a creative imagination while A.E. had only a certain though considerable interpreatlve power. A.E.'s thought and way of seeing and saying things is much more sympathetic to me than Yeats' who only touches a brilliant floating skirt-edge of the Truth of things—
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but I cannot allow that to influence me when I have to judge of the poetic side of their respective achievements. I hope that will be éclaircissement enough for you—for I have no time for more—certainly none for writing sonnets—my energy is too occupied in very urgent and pressing things (quite apart from "correspondence") to "dally with the rhythmic line".
August 1, 1934
Don't indulge in gloomy forebodings. What one fears does not always happen, though it is true that fears and forebodings are mental formations and that such mental formations can give a fillip to the [imps?] of mischief. For my part I propose to make the opposite formation that nothing will happen of importance, even while trying to guard against possibilities. If anything does happen, you will tell me at once and I will try to set it right. This seems to me the thing to be done. I don't see the necessity of a circuit to the Himalayas.
August 4, 1934
Very glad that the reconciliation has proceeded all right and I am glad too that your tendency is so readily towards "harmony" and away from "disharmonies" that have been too rife. As for Moni he is very stiff in a quarrel and to make him ease his backbone when he has once straightened it to1' a fight is not easy.
Your strictures on Mom's present tendencies in poetry are largely correct, but although he always had a flow of language and flow of verse—and when he has the right subject and substance he can do something very fine—I have never put so high a value on his poetry—it is his prose which at its
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best seemed to me remarkable Nishikanta's poem is very d indeed. But the parallel or rather contrast between them from the Ashram residence point of view is not very much to the point. Moni comes in from a mental and vital past with Nishikanta the question is whether he has stuff enough , not poetic or artistic—for he is a good poet and clever painter—but Yogic to stand the spiritual future.
I have read your preface and have some idea of reading your mammoth suffix in some [aeonian?] future—I will try to read also the pages you point out at the same time. But what strange ideas you have about the relative intensities of the vital joys and the psychic joy or the spiritual peace!
Glad to hear about the appreciation of O.C. Ganguli33—and OK about the singing.
P.S. I was forgetting about Harmony. After a forced halt of several days it has started again and is proceeding with a grim tortoise-like determination to its goal.
I have read your letter of explanation of the "strange" ideas but cannot answer it now because I am busy with the harmony affair and don't want to discontinue. I still maintain that your views on the lack of all intensity in the psychic things or in the spiritual or their inferiority to vital pleasure are strange, because they contradict all psychic and spiritual experience except that of the mere vairāgis [renunciates] and the choice of the spiritual life itself (Nirvana seekers excepted) quite inexplicable. Your arguments are not convincing. what have Ramakrishna's cancer or the fluctuations of Vivekananda's vital receptivity between exaltation and depression or Chaitanya's viraha34 to do with the question issue? These are difficulties of the body and the vital. The question was of the intensity of psychic and pure spiritual experience--psychic devotion and love, peace, Ananda. You
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cannot base a general denial on your own particular experience; because you have only the initial experiences of cairn etc. and have not got to the intensities as I have done and others before me have done. It is only when one lives centrally in the psychic with the mental, vital and physical experiences held under its rule that one knows what psychic intensity is It is only when the higher consciousness comes down in its floods that one can know what can be the intensities or ecstasies of spiritual peace, light, love, bliss. You can say "I have not yet had these intensities," but you cannot say in a sweeping way, 'They do not exist and I shall never have them," or 'They are only tepid quiet little things soothing and more capable of lasting, but not intense and glorious like the vital joys and pleasures." Don't cling to these notions born of the first limitations, but keep yourself open and plastic to greater possibilities in the future.
My own experience is not limited to a radiant peace; I know very well what ecstasy and ananda are from the Brahma- nanda35 down to the śārābgtyy76ra ananda36 and can experience them at any time. But of these things I prefer to speak only when my work is done—for it is in a transformed consciousness here and not only above where the Ananda always exists that I seek their base of permanence.
I had forgotten one thing about the Fenêtres37 room. When Sada went there, we made it a rule that there should not be too much "receiving" of friends, etc. (Sada has an array 01 them); but I think this will not incommode Nishikanta, as he is of the quiet type, I understand, and will besides be seein9 much of his friends over there. If he prefers that room, he ca have it as soon as it is repaired and everything ready.
I was relieved to get a more cheerful letter from Mays; , appears that to stop her hunger strike She. has promised
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D.L. Roy with Dilip and Maya
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positively (?) to let her come here in February. I only hope the fellow won't find another trick to prevent her then!
I am rather perplexed by your strictures on Rama. Cowardice is the last thing that can be charged against Valmiki's Rama; he has always been considered as a warrior and it is the "martial races" of India who have made him their god. Valmiki everywhere paints him as a great warrior. His employment of ruse against an infrahuman enemy does not prove the opposite—for that is always how the human (even great warriors and hunters) has dealt with the infrahuman. I think it is Madhusudan who has darkened Valmiki's hero in Bengali eyes and turned him into a poor puppet, but that is not the authentic Rama who, say what one will, was a great epic figure—Avatar or no Avatar. As for conventional morality, all morality is a convention—man cannot live without conventions, mental and moral, otherwise he feels himself lost in the rolling sea of the anarchic forces of the vital Nature. Even the Russells and Bernard Shaws can only end by setting up another set of conventions in the place of those they have skittled over. Only by rising above mind can one really get beyond conventions—Krishna was able to do it because he was not a mental human being but an overmental godhead acting freely out of a greater consciousness than man's. Rama was not that, he was the Avatar of the sattwic mind-mental, emotional, moral—and he followed the Dharma of the age and race. That may make him temperamentally con- genial to Gandhi and the reverse to you; but just as Gandhi's temperamental recoil from Krishna does not prove Krishna to be no Avatar, so your temperamental recoil from Rama does not establish that he was not an Avatar. However, my main point will be that Avatarhood does not depend upon these questions at all, but has another basis, meaning and purpose.
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August 23, 1934
Yes I read your poem which is a very fine one and I have told Mother about it. As for the lines you quote from me, I am unable to give their meaning, because the subject of the rest ["^]") and the context are not there. I had forgotten to finish nut the "Songs to Myrtilla" and in the night it is impossible. I will see tomorrow.
No, I have no intention of entering into a supreme defence of Rama—I only entered into the points about Ball etc. because these are usually employed nowadays to belittle him as a great personality on the usual level. But from the point of view of Avatarhood I would no more think of defending his moral perfection according to modern standards than I would think of defending Napoleon or Caesar against the moralists or the democratic critics or the debunkers in order to prove that they were Vibhutis.39 Vibhūti, Avatar are terms which have their own meaning and scope, and they are not concerned with morality or immorality, perfection or imperfection according to small human standards or setting an example to men or showing new moral attitudes or giving new spiritual teachings. Those things may or may not be done, but they are not at all the essence of the matter.
Also, I do not consider your method of dealing with Rama's personality to be the right one. It has to be taken as a whole in the setting that Valmiki gave it (not treated as if it were the story of a modern man), with the significance that he gave to his hero's Personality, deeds and works. If it is pulled out of 1 s setting and analysed under the dissecting knife of a modern ethical mind, it loses all its significance at once. Krishna so treated becomes a [mere?] debauchee and trickster who no doubt did great things in politics—but so did Rama in war. Achilles and Odysseus pulled of their setting become one furious egoistic savage and the other a cruel and cunning the savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into the spirit, significance, atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, a and identify myself with their time-spirit before I
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can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer actions.
As for the Avatarhood, I accept it for Rama first because he fills a place in the scheme—and seems to me to fill it rightly —and because when I read the Ramayana I feel a great afflatus which I recognise and which makes of its story—mere faery-tale though it seems—a parable of a great critical transitional event that happened in the terrestrial evolution and gives to the main character's personality and action a significance of the large typical cosmic kind which these actions would not have had if they had been done by another man in another scheme of events. The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary actions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what he is—any of these or all—a significance and an effective power that are part of something essential to be done in the history of the earth and its races.
All the same, if anybody does not see as I do and wants to eject Rama from his place, I have no objection—I have no particular partiality for Rama—provided somebody is put in who can more worthily fill up the gap his absence leaves. There was somebody there, Valmiki's Rama or another Rama or somebody else not Rama.
Also I do not mean that I admit the validity of your remarks about Rama, even taken as a piecemeal criticism; but that I have no time for today. 1 maintain my position about the killing of Ball and the banishment of Sita—in spite of Ball's preliminary objection to the procedure, afterwards retracted, and in spite of the opinion of Rama's relatives. Necessarily from the point of view of the antique dharma—not from that of any universal moral standard—which besides does no exist, since the standard changes according to clime or age.
August 24, 1934
No, certainly not—an Avatar is not at all bound to be a
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spiritual prophet—he is never in fact merely a prophet, he is realiser, an establisher—not of outward things only, though does realise something in the outward also, but, as I have said of something essential and radical needed for the terrestrial evolution which is the evolution of the embodied spirit through successive stages towards the Divine. It was not at all Rama's business to establish the spiritual stage of that evolution—so he did not at all concern himself with that. His business was to destroy Ravana and to establish the Ramarajya—in other words, to fix for the future the possibility of an order proper to the sattwic civilised human being who governs his life by the reason, the finer emotions, morality, or at least moral ideals, such as truth, obedience, co-operation and harmony, the sense of honour, the sense of domestic and public order, to establish this in a world still occupied by anarchic forces, the Animal Mind and the powers of the vital Ego making its own satisfaction the rule of life, in other words, the Vānara and the Raksasa.40 This is the meaning of Rama and his life-work and it is according as he fulfilled it or not that he must be judged as Avatar or no Avatar. It was not his business to play the comedy of the chivalrous Ksatriya4'1 with the formidable brute beast that was Ball, it was his business to kill him and get the Animal Mind under his control. It was his business to be not necessarily a perfect, but a largely representative sattwic Man, a faithful husband and a lover, a loving and obedient son, a tender and perfect brother, rather, friend—he is friend of all kinds of people, friend of he kinds of people, friend of the outcast Guhaka, friend of the Animal leaders, Sugriva, Hanuman, friend of the vulture Jatayu, friend even of the Rāksasa Vibhisana. All that he was in a brilliant, striking but of this note or that like Harishchandra 42 or Shivi,43 but with a certain harmonious completeness. but most of all, it was his business to typify and establish the things on which the social idea and its stability depend, truth and honour, the sense of the Dharama, public spirit and sense of order. To the first to truth and honour, much more than to his filial love and
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obedience to his father—though to that also—he sacrificed his personal rights as the elect of the King and the assembly and fourteen of the best years of his life and went into exile in the forests. To his public spirit and his sense of public order (the great and supreme civic virtue in the eyes of the ancient Indians, Greeks, Romans, for at that time the maintenance of the ordered community, not the separate development and satisfaction of the individual was the pressing need of the human evolution) he sacrificed his own happiness and domes- tic life and the happiness of Sita. In that he was at one with the moral sense of all the antique races, though at variance with the later romantic individualistic sentimental morality c the modern man who can afford to have that less stern morality just because the ancients sacrificed the individual in order to make the world safe for the spirit of social order. Finally/ it was Rama's business to make the world safe for the ideal of the sattwic human being by destroying the sovereignty of Ravana, the Rāksasa menace. All this he did with such a divine afflatus in his personality and action that his figure has been stamped for more than two millenniums on the mind of Indian culture, and what he stood for has dominated the reason and idealising mind of man in all countries—and in spite of the constant revolt of the human vital, is likely to continue to do so until a greater Ideal arises. And you say in spite of all these that he was no Avatar? If you like—but at any rate he stands among the few greatest of the great Vibhūtis. You may dethrone him now—for man is no longer satisfied with the sattwic ideal and is seeking for something more—but his work and meaning remain stamped on the past of the earth's evolving race.
When I spoke of the gap that would be left by his absence, I did not mean a gap among the prophets and intellectuals, but a gap in the scheme of Avatarhood—there "was somebody who was the Avatar of the sattwic Human as Krishna was the Avatar of the overmental Superhuman—I see no one but Rama who can fill the place. Spiritual teachers and prophet (as also intellectuals, scientists, artists, poets, etc.)—these a
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at the greatest Vibhūtis, but they are not Avatars. For at that rate all religious founders would be Avatars—Joseph Smith (I think that is his name) of the Mormons, St. Francis of Assisi Calvin, Loyola and a host of others as well as Christ, Chaitanya or Ramakrishna.
For faith, miracles, Bejoy Goswami,44 another occasion. I wanted to say this much more about Rama—which is still only a hint and is not the thing I was going to write about the general principle of the Avatar. Nor, I may add, is it a complete or supreme defence of Rama. For that I would have to write about what the story of the Ramayana meant, appreciate Valmiki's presentation of his chief characters (they are none of them copy-book examples, but great men and women with the defects and merits of human nature, as all men even the greatest are), and show also how the Godhead, which was behind the frontal and instrumental personality we call Rama, worked out every incident of his life as a necessary step in what had to be done. As to the weeping of Rama, I had answered that in my other unfinished letter. You are imposing the colder and harder Nordic ideal on the Southern temperament which regarded the expression of emotions, not its suppression, as a virtue. Witness the weeping and lamentations of Achilles, Ulysses and other Greek, Persian and Indian heroes—the latter especially as lovers.
August 25, 1934
But, great snakes ! when did I ever tel1 you that faith in poetry an and his statements and the greatness of his ,__as a Ending part of the Divine Law? Or that to
_________
(Sri Aurobindo's Note :) Haradhan owes nothing to me except his "philosophy" - in his faith in himself etc., he is his own creator—a self-made man. and do you mean to say that because faith is misused by Haradhan or others electricity is bungled by an ignoramus, must electricity be rejected from use?
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believe every blamed thing that is said by every blessed body is a necessity of sadhana? Or that if you don't have an implicit a total and dogged faith in all the marvellous and miraculous things related by Bejoy Goswami's disciples about their master you will be shut out for ever from the Divine Grace? I am not three-fourths insane, par example, nor four-fourths either'
I ask you to have faith in the Divine, in the Divine Grace in the truth of the sadhana, in the eventual triumph of the spirit over its mental and vital and physical difficulties, in the Path and the Guru, in the existence of things other than are written in the philosophy of Haeckel or Huxley or Bertrand Russell, because if these things are not true, there is no meaning in the Yoga. As for particular facts and asseverations about Bejoy Goswami or anybody else, there is room for dis- crimination, for suspension of judgment, for disbelief where there is good ground for disbelief, for right interpretation where the facts are not to be denied or questioned. But all that cannot be for the sadhak as it is for the materialistic sceptic founded on a fixed pre-judgment that only what is normal, in consonance with the known (so-called) laws of physical nature is true and that all which is abnormal or supernormal must a priori be condemned as false. The abnormal abounds in this physical world; the supernormal is there also. In these matters, apart from any question of faith, any truly rational man with a free mind (not tied up like the rationalists or so-called free thinkers at every point with triple cords of a priori irrational disbelief) must not cry out at once "Hum bug! falsehood!" but suspend judgment until he has the necessary experience and knowledge. To deny in ignorance is no better than to affirm in ignorance. If your method h saved you from quack gurus, that shows that everything this world has its uses, doubt and denial also, but it does prove that doubt and denial are the best way of discover the Truth. One can apply here the epigram of Tagore a the man who shut and locked up all the doors and win of his house so as to exclude Error—but, cried Truth, by way then shall I enter?
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The faith in spiritual things that is asked of the sadhak is n ignorant but a luminous faith, a faith in light and not in darkness . It is called blind by the sceptical intellect because !" fuses to be guided by outer appearances or seeming ' facts—if looks for the truth behind—and does not walk on the crutches of proof and evidence. It is an intuition—an intuition not only waiting for experience to justify it, but leading wards experience. If I believe in self-healing, I shall after a +'me find out the way to heal myself. If I have a faith in trans- formation, I can end by laying my hand on and unravelling the whole process of transformation. But if I begin with doubt and go on with more doubt, how far am I likely to go on the journey?
However, this is only a retort, not my reply for which I have no time tonight. My reply will come lengthier and later.
August 26, 1934
I had written the explanation of the cryptic lines, but wrote it in the wrong place, so I did not send it. I do it now. It means—"Her name sweeter to speak (repeat) than the sweetness of pastoral poetry could make the white hand when writing it as if brighter than its wont and gave a deeper colour to the lips that uttered it (then, in these past days), but it is now a dead and forgotten thing no longer loved, unknown to men of this later time."
I could not finish anything today, but propose to approach Bejoy Goswami and the general question of occult phenomena miscalled "miracles" shortly.
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August 28, 1934
Yes, that is quite the right attitude, the one I want you to take I am very glad that you resolved to take it. I shall certainly write about Bejoy Goswami and the miracles and I hope to explain also, always from the point of view of reason, certain other points, e.g. the exact nature and action of psychic and spiritual faith and the reason for faith in the Guru and how it works. Not tonight though—for I nave had too much to do tonight
The lines about which you- ask have this meaning. The lover is thinking what happens after death, when love and life are over. He first thinks of the Christian myth of Hell—the first four lines refer to that and to Dante's description of Paolo and Francesca and other guilty lovers blown round in one of the circles of Inferno—in the smoke and gurge of hell by violent winds—that is the relucent (shining back to the light of the fires) gyres [over?] a circle [sud?] of fires. Next he passes to the Greek ideas of the after-death, according to which the dead go down into the dim, lifeless underworld of Hades, lightless graves, fields no sunlight visits, alleys without any glad murmurs, waters with no flowers. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Hades from which the shades of the dead have to drink so as to forget their earthly past. Lethe, he says, could [rust] their minds (had its will), but still in the soul ' memories of love survive and cannot be utterly abolished. Then he returns to the obvious fact of death. "Beauty pays th6 gift given-to her of life into the credit column of Death—she disappears leaving a brief perfume behind her, etc."
You need not send the book any longer. I have miraculously fished out my copy.
I have written to Nalina to set right any misunderstanding—if there is really a misunderstanding—about our consent
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to her going. That consent I consider as forced from me by her own insistence that she could not stay—the pull was too great —she must go. I reminded her of what I told her before that the only true way was to stay and fight out the difficulty —the only justification for going would be if her call was cu p to the family life than to the spiritual life. I have told her we keep to that and the Mother and I do not like her going—and asked her to reconsider her decision. For it is . g not mine. You know that I dislike anyone who has a psychic call going away from here, because it is throwing away their spiritual destiny or at least postponing it. For I don't suppose Nalina, if she persists in going, will remain always under the illusion of the family bonds—but the risk is there and the postponement is there. Mother has called her tomorrow morning and she will see what she decides.
As for the faith-doubt question, you ardently give to the word faith a sense and a scope I do not attach to it. I will have to write not one but several letters to clear up the position. It seems to me that you mean by faith a mental belief which is in fact put before the mind and senses in the doubtful form of an unsupported asseveration. I mean by it a dynamic intuitive conviction in the inner being of the truth of supersensible things which cannot be proved by any physical evidence but which are a subject of experience. My point is that this faith is a most desirable preliminary (if not absolutely indispensable for there can be cases of experiences not preceded by faith) to the desired experience. If I insist so much on faith— but even less on positive faith than on the throwing away of a priori doubt and denial —it is because I find that this doubt have denial have become an instrument in the hands of the obstructive forces and clog your steps whenever I try to push to an advance. if you can't or won't get rid of it, ("won't" out of respect for the reason and fear of being led into believing things that are not true, "can't because of country experience) then i shall have to manage for you without it, only it makes a difficult instead of a straight and comparatively easy process.
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Why I call the materialist's denial an a priori denial is because he refuses even to consider or examine what he denies but start's by denying it, like Leonard Woolf with his quacks: quack on the ground that it contradicts his own theories, so it can't be true. On the other hand, the belief in the Divine and the Grace and Yoga and the Guru etc. (not in Bejoy Krishna or his miracles, hang it!) is not a priori, because it rests on a great mass of human experience which has been accumulating through the centuries and millenniums as well as the personal intuitive perception. Therefore it is an intuitive perception which has been confirmed by the experience of hundreds and thousands of those who have tested it before me-
I do not ask you to believe that the Divine Grace comes to all or that all can succeed in the sadhana or that I personally have succeeded or will succeed in the case of all who come to me. I have asked you if you cannot develop the faith that the Divine is—you seem often to doubt it—that the Divine Grace is and has manifested both elsewhere and here, that the sadhana by which so many profit is not a falsehood or a chimera and that I have helped many and am not utterly powerless—otherwise how could so many progress under our influence? If this is first established, then the doubt and denial, the refusal off faith boils itself down to a refusal of faith in your own spiritual destiny and that of Nalina and some others—does it not? I have never told you that the power that works here is absolute at p resent, I have on the contrary told you that I am trying to make it absolute and it is for that that I want the supermind to intervene. But to say that because it is not absolute therefore it does not e seems to me a logical inconsequence.
There remains your personal case and you may very well tell me, "What does it matter to me if these things are true when they are not true to me, true in my own experience?" But it does make a difference that they are true in themselves. for if your personal want of experience is held as providing that it is all moonshine, then all is finished —there is no hope for you or me or anybody. if on the other hand these these things are true but not yet realised by you, then there is hope, a
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possibility a1 least From the Point of reason you may be right in thinking that because you have not realised yet, you can never realise—though it does not seem to me an inevitable conclusion. From the same point of view I also may be right co concluding from my experience and that of other Yogin that there is no such inevitability and that with the persistent aspiration in you and the Vairagya we have the conditions for a realisation that must come—sooner, for there are sudden liberations, or later.
In all this I have touched nothing fundamental on the question of faith—it is only a preliminary canter trying to remove certain points that are in the way. There are several others in your letter of today which I shall try to take up in my next letter. Afterwards I shall attack Bejoy Goswami, the nature of faith and the limits of its field (why it does not include B.G's miracles, etc.) and other central matters.
August 31, 1934
(Dilip received a letter from Dr. Sarvepalli Radha- Krishnan of Andhra University asking Sri Aurobindo to write a statement for a book on "Contemporary British Philosophy.")
"My dear Dilip Kumar Roy,
"I am sending the enclosed to Sri Aurobindo Ghose. You can easily understand my anxiety to have a contribution
contra J hope he wil1 be kind enough to oblige me by contributing a statement.
"How are you getting on?"
(Dilip's note:) What to answer?
(Sri Aurobindo wrote the following on the front Page of the letter:)
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Great Scott!
(For the explanation of this agonized ejaculation see the back!)
(And on the back:)
Look here! Do these people expect me to turn myself again into a machine for producing articles? The times of the Bande Mataram and Arya are over, thank God! I have now only the Ashram correspondence and that is "overwhelming" enough in all conscience without starting philosophy for standard books and the rest of it.
And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher—although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry—I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher! How I managed to do it? First, because Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review—and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily .and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!
I don't know how to excuse myself to Radhakrishna—for I can't say all that to him. Perhaps you can find a formula for me? Perhaps: "So occupied, not a moment for any other work, can't undertake because he might not be able to carry out his promise." What do you say?
I send the last but one instalment of Nishikanta's translation. The next portion will be completed, I hope, by
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tomorrow evening. This portion had to be perhaps a little , free according to your explanation—as it was a little condensed. But I think it will please you nevertheless.
(....) But your "Night by the Sea" is congenial to the temper of Bengali and I feel everyone will agree that Nishikanta's translation is very melodious and though your subtlety one misses then it reads like an original beautiful poem. it will I feel, remain in our language by virtue of its atmosphere of "poeticalness."
But what about Bejoy Krishna and the māyāmrga45 of Rama? Let B.K. come first, māyāmrga next week? Qu'en dites-vous ? [What do you say?]
Well, I thought I had finished with Rama who after all belong to the past. The māyāmrga was an absolute necessity for removing Rama from the Ashram, otherwise Ravana could not have been able to carry Sita off, so the Divine or Valmiki (to whichever you like to give the credit of the incident) arranged it in that way (a very poetic way, you must admit) and the instrumental Personality accepted the veiling of the consciousness so that his work might be done, just as Krishna clean forgot all he had said to Arjuna in the Gita so that he might teach him something else. You must expect such things from the Avatar! However, Nolini has sent me all the correspondence for treatment, so I suppose I shall finish my unfinished letter soon to deal with certain points and also write something about Avatarhood in general—that means two productions. But not now, I have Bejoy Goswami in my mind and I am continually being whipped from within to complete the Harmony affair which August and Rama and
Bejoy Goswami have kept in a state of uneasy and dissatisfied swoon. I shall see Nishikanta's translation today or on av-1 am rather overwhelmed today.
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September 2, 1934
But krodha [wrath] also? Says not the Gita, Sattvatātsañjāyate Jñānam (from the Sattvaguna46 arises wisdom) And Rama's wrath is of the most unwise, nay puerile brand, pardon me. Take for instance his insulting Sita the second time (after Valmiki's testimony at that) by commanding her to give more proofs of her chastity before the rabble whereupon she seeks shelter into the earth. Instantly Rama's love which was conspicuous by its absence a moment ago, becomes flamboyant avyavasthitachittasya prasādopibhayankara [even the grace of the volatile is catastrophic, says the sage] and he shouts krodhaśokasamāvista [overpowered with anger and grief] (a quizzical Avatar that!) to Mother Earth, "Anaya tvam hi tāmsītām mattoham maithilīkrte" [Restore that Sita of mine for I am out of my senses]. Qu'en dites-vous? Can a truly sāttvik man be in the throes of such an insane passion of rage? Also I find myself in a typhoon of confusion to puzzle over your admission of such a thing as an unconscious avatar. For that to me seems a contradiction in terms—an impossibility: that of an Avatar being blind! Good Lord, then the Upanishad was wrong after all in ridiculing the trustful- ness of the "blind who are led by the blind"!
Then why does the Gita praise the sattvik so enthusiastically? I should have supposed that a sattvik man could not behave as insanely as a tāmasik type? Also I do not quite follow your analogy about the normal moments of Sri Chaitanya. For it is a fact that he had his super-normal (or superconscient if you will) moments too and it was that which made all the difference in the world, did it not?
Why should not Rama have kāma [lust] as well as prema [Love] ? They were supposed to go together as between husband and wife in ancient India. The performances of Rama in the viraha of Sita are due to Valmiki's poetic idea which was
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also kalidasa's and everybody else's in those far-off times about how a complete lover should behave in such a quandary. Whether the actual Rama bothered himself to do all that is another matter.
As for the unconscious Avatar, why not? Chaitanya is supposed to be an Avatar by the Vaishnavas,47 yet he was conscious of the Godhead behind only when that Godhead came in front and possessed him on rare occasions. Christ said "I and my father are one/' but yet he always spoke and behaved as if there were a difference. Ramakrishna's earlier period was that of one seeking God, not aware from the first of his identity. These are the reputed religious Avatars who ought to be more conscious than a man of action like Rama. And supposing the full and permanent consciousness, why should the Avatar proclaim himself except on rare occasions to an Arjuna or to a few bhaktas or disciples ? It is for others to find out what he is—though he does not deny when others speak of him as That, he is not always saying and perhaps never may say or only in moments like that of the Gita, "I am He."
September 3, 1934
No time for a full answer to your renewed remarks on Rama tonight. You are intrigued only because, you stick to the standard modern measuring rods of moral and spiritual perfection (introduced by [?] and Bankim) for the Avatar—while start from another standpoint altogether and resolutely refuse these standard human measures. The ancient Avatars except Buddha were not either standards of perfection or spiritual teachers—in spite of the Gita which was spoken, says Krishna, in a moment of supernormal consciousness which he lost immediately afterwards. They were, if I may say so, representative cosmic men who were instruments of a divine Intervention for fixing certain things in the evolution of the
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earth-race. I stick to that and refuse to submit myself in this argument to any other standard whatever.
I did not admit that Rama was a blind Avatar, but offered you two alternatives of which the latter represents my real view founded on the impression made on me by the Rarnayana that Rama knew very well but refused to be talkative about it—his business being not to disclose the Divine, but to fix mental, moral and emotional man (not to originate him for he was there already) on the earth as against the Animal and the Rāksasa demoniacal forces. My argument from Chaitanya (who was for most of the time first a pandit and then a bhakta, but only occasionally the Divine himself) is perfectly rational and logical, if you follow my line and don't insist on a high specifically spiritual consciousness for the Avatar. I shall point out what I mean in my next.
By sattwic man I do not mean a moral or an always self- controlled one, but a predominantly mental (as opposed to a vital or merely physical man) who has rajasic emotions and passions, but lives predominantly according to his mind and its will and ideas. There is no such thing, I suppose, as a purely sattwic man—since the three gunas go always together in a state of unstable equilibrium—but a predominantly sattwic man is what I have described. My impression of Rama from Valmiki is such—it is quite different from yours. I am afraid your picture of him is quite out of focus—you efface the main lines of the characters, belittle and brush out all the lights to which Valmiki gave so much value and prominence and hammer always at some details and some parts of shadow which you turn into the larger part of Rama. That is what the debunkers do—but a debunked figure is not the true figure.
By the way, a sattwic man can have a strong passion and strong anger—and when he lets the latter loose, the normally violent fellow is simply nowhere. Witness the outbursts o1 anger of Christ, the indignation of Chaitanya—and the general evidence of experience and psychology on that point. AU this however by the way—I shall try to develop later.
P.S. The trait of Rama which you give as that of an undeveloped
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man, viz., his decisive spontaneous action according to the will and the idea that came to him, is a trait of the cosmic man and and many Vibhūtis, men of action of the large Caesarean or Napoleonic type. That also I hope to develop some time.
September 4, 1934
When I said, "Why not an unconscious Avatar?" I was taking your statement (not mine) that Rama was unconscious and how could there be an unconscious Avatar. My own view is that Rama was not blind, not unconscious of his Avatar-hood, only uncommunicative about it. But I said that even taking your statement to be correct, the objection was not insuperable. I instanced the case of Chaitanya and the others, because there the facts are hardly disputable. Chaitanya for the first part of his life was simply Nimai Pandit and had no consciousness of being anything else. Then he had his con- version and became the bhakta Chaitanya. This bhakta at times seemed to be possessed by the presence of Krishna, knew himself to be Krishna, spoke, moved and appeared with the light of the Godhead—none around him could think of or see him as anything else when he was in this glorified and transfigured condition. But from that he fell back to the ordinary consciousness of the bhakta and, as I have read in his biography, refused then to consider himself as anything more. These, I think, are the facts. Well, then what do they signify? Was he only Nimai Pandit at first? It is quite conceivable that he was so and the descent of the Godhead into him only took place after his conversion and spiritual change. But also afterwards when he was in his normal bhakta-consciousness, was he then no longer the Avatar? An intermittent Avatarhood? Krishna coming down for an afternoon call into Chaitanya and then going up again till the time came for the next visit? I find it difficult to believe in this phenomenon. The rational explanation is that in the phenomenon of
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Avatarhood there is a Consciousness behind at first veiled or sometimes perhaps half-veiled which is that of the Godhead and a frontal consciousness, human or apparently human or at any rate with all the appearance of territoriality which is the instrumental Personality. In that case, it is possible that the secret Consciousness was all along there, but waited to manifest until after the conversion; and it manifested intermittently because the main work of Chaitanya was to establish the type of a spiritual and psychic bhakti and love in the emotional vital part of man, preparing the vital in us in that way to turn towards the Divine—at any rate, to fix that possibility in the earth-nature. It was not that there had not been the emotional type of bhakti before; but the completeness of it, the élan, the vital's rapture in it had never manifested as it manifested in Chaitanya. But for that work it would never have done if he had always been in the Krishna conscious- ness; he would have been the Lord to whom all gave bhakti, but not the supreme example of the divine ecstatic bhakta. But still the occasional manifestation showed who he was and at the same time evidenced the mystic law of the Immanence.
Voila for Chaitanya. But, if Chaitanya, the frontal consciousness, the instrumental Personality, was all the time the Avatar, yet except in his highest moments was unconscious of it and even denied it, that pushed a little farther would establish the possibility of what you call an unconscious Avatar, that is to say, of one in which the veiled Consciousness might not' come in front but always move the instrumental Personality from behind. The frontal consciousness might be aware in the inner parts of its being that it was only an instrument of something Divine which was its real Self, but outwardly would think, speak and behave as if it were only the human being doing a given work with a peculiar power an splendour. Whether there was such an Avatar or not is another matter, but logically it is possible.
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September 5, 1934
I am very glad of what you have written. I would very much a liked all along if your path had been painless and sunlit, have it was not to be the next best is that the clouded and stormy path should lead you towards the Light. I have no s M_-and never doubted—that it will and I trust that a sunnier (transit) is now not far off.
As for perversity—well, I fear it is an element of human nature present in almost all; it is nothing but the vital—not the bigger and nobler part of it, but the smaller wanting to get its own way and twisting about to justify its refusal to change.
I leave Rama then and turn to Harmony and Bejoy Goswami?
September 6, 1934
I agree with most of what Krishnaprem says, though one or two things I would put from a different angle. Your reasonings about faith and doubt have been of a rather extravagant kind because they come to this that one must either doubt everything or believe everything however absurd that anybody says. I have repeatedly told you that there is not only room for discrimination in Yoga, but a need for it at every step—otherwise you will get lost in the jungle of things that are not spiritual—as for instance the tangle of what I call the to intermediate zone. I have also told you that you are not asked no believe everything told you by anybody and that there is no call to put faith in all the miraculous things narrated about of Bejoy Krishna or another. That, I have said, is a question not in of but of mental belief—and faith is not mental belief in outward facts but an intuition of the inner being about
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spiritual things. Krishnaprem means the same thing when hp says that faith is the light sent down by the higher to the lower personality. As for the epithet "blind" used by Ramakrishna, it means as I said, not ignorantly credulous, but untroubled by the questionings of the intellect and unshaken by outward appearances of fact, e.g. one has faith in the Divine even though the fact seems to be that the world here or at least the human world is driven by undivine forces. One has faith in the Guru even when he uses methods that your intellect cannot grasp or affirms things as true of which you have yet no experience (for if his knowledge and experience are not greater than yours, why did you choose him as a guru?). One has faith in the Path leading to the goal even when the goal is very far off and the way covered by mist and cloud and smitten repeatedly by the thunderbolt. And so on. Even in worldly things man can do nothing great if he has not faith—in the spiritual realm it is still more indispensable. But this faith depends not on ignorant credulity, but on a light that burns inside though not seen by the eyes of the outward mind, a knowledge within that has not yet taken the form of an outer knowledge.
One thing however—I make a distinction between doubt and discrimination. If doubt meant a discriminative questioning as to what might be truth of this or that matter, it would be a part of discrimination and quite admissible; but what is usually meant now by doubt is a negation [positive?] and peremptory which does not stop to investigate, to consider in the light, to try, to enquire, but says at once, "oh, no, I am never going to take that as possibly true." That kind of doubt may be very useful in ordinary life, it may be practically useful in battering down established things or established idea or certain kinds of external controversy to undermine a position that is too dogmatically positive; but I don't think it is of any positive use in matters even of intellectual inquiry. There is nothing it can do there that impartial discrimination c not do much better. In spiritual matters discrimination has huge place, but negating doubt simply stops the path to Turn
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with its placard "No entry" or its dogmatic "Thus far and no farther."
As for the intellect it is indispensable to man up to a certain point ; after that it becomes an inferior instrument and often misleading and obstructive. It is what I meant when I wrote "Reason was the helper, reason is the bar."48 Intellect has many things for man; it has helped to raise him high above the animals, at its best it has opened a first view on all great fields of knowledge. But it cannot go beyond that; it cannot get at Truth itself, only at some reflections, forms, representations of it—I myself cannot remember to have ever arrived at anything in the spiritual field by the power of the intellect—I have used it only to help the expression of what I have known and experienced, but even there it is only certain forms that it provided, they were used by another Light and a larger Mind than the intellect. When the intellect tried to decide things in this field, it always delayed matters. I suppose what it can do sometimes is to stir up the mind, plough it or prepare—but the knowledge comes only when one gets another higher than intellectual opening. Even in Mind itself there are things higher than the intellect, ranges of activity that exceed it. Spiritual knowledge is easier to these than to the reasoning intelligence.
September 7, 1934
The faith is there, not in your mind, not in your vital, but in your psychic being. It was this faith that flung you out of the world and brought you to Pondicherry; it is this faith that keeps you to what the soul wills and refuses to go back on what it has decided- Even the mind's questionings have been a groping after some Justification by which it can get an excuse for believing in spite of its difficulties. The vital's eagerness and its Vairagya are shadows of this faith, forms
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which it has taken in order to keep the vital from giving up in spite of the pressure of despondency and struggle. Even in the mind and vital of the man of strongest mental and vital faith there are periods when the knowledge in the psychic gets covered up—but it persists behind the veil. In you the eclipse has been strong and long because owing to certain mental and vital formations, the assent of the mind and vital got clouded over and could only take negative forms. But there is always the knowledge or intuition in the soul that started you on the way. I have been pressing on you the need of faith because the assent has again to take a positive form so as to give free way to the Divine Force; but the persistent drive in the soul (which is a hidden and externally suppressed faith) is itself sufficient to warrant the expectation of the Grace to come.
September 11, 1934
I have said that the most decisive way for the Peace or the Silence to come is by a descent from above. In fact, in reality though not always in appearance, that is how they always come;—not in appearance always, because the sadhak is not always conscious of the process; he feels the peace settling in him or at least manifesting, but he has not been conscious how and whence it came. Yet it is the truth that all that belongs to the higher consciousness comes from above, not only the spiritual peace and silence, but the Light, the Power, the Knowledge, the higher seeing and thought, the Ananda come from above. It is also possible that up to a certain point they may come from within, but this is because the psychic being is open to them directly and they come first there and then reveal themselves in the rest of the being from the psychic or by its coming into the front. A disclosure from within or a descent from above, these are the two sovereign ways of the Yoga-siddhi. An effort of the external surface mind or
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emotions, a Tapasya of some kind may seem to build up some of these things, but the results are usually uncertain and fragmentary, compared to the result of the two radical ways. That is why in this Yoga we insist always on an "opening"—an opening inwards of the inner mind, vital, physical to the inmost part of us, the psychic, and an opening upwards to what is above the mind—as indispensable for the fruits of the sadhana.
The underlying reason for this is that this little mind, vital and body which we call ourselves is only a surface movement and not our "self" at all. It is an external bit of personality put forward for one brief life, for the play of the Ignorance. It is equipped with an ignorant mind stumbling about in search of fragments of truth, an ignorant vital rushing about in search of fragments of pleasure, an obscure and mostly subconscious physical receiving the impacts of things and suffering rather than possessing a resultant pain or pleasure. All that is accepted until the mind gets disgusted and starts looking about for the real Truth of itself and things, the vital gets disgusted and begins wondering whether there is not such a thing as real bliss and the physical gets tired and wants liberation from itself and its pains and pleasures. Then it is possible for the little ignorant bit of personality to get back to its real Self and with it to these greater things—or else to extinction of itself. Nirvana.
The real Self is not anywhere on the surface but deep within and above. Within is the soul supporting an inner mind, inner vital inner physical in which there is a capacity for universal wideness and with it for the things now asked for—direct contact with the truth of self and things, taste of a universal bliss, liberation from the imprisoned smallness and sufferings of the gross physical body. Even in Europe the existence of something behind the surface is now very frequently admitted but its nature is mistaken and it is called subconscient or subliminal, while really it is very conscious in its own way and not subliminal but only behind the veil. It is, according Psychology, connected with the small outer personality
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by certain centres of consciousness of which we become aware by Yoga. Only a little of the inner being escapes through these centres into the outer life, but that little is the best pan of ourselves and responsible for our art, poetry, philosophy ideals, religious aspirations, efforts at knowledge and perfection. But the inner centres are for the most part closed or asleep—to open them and make them awake and active is one aim of Yoga. As they open, the powers and possibilities of the inner being also are aroused in us; we awake first to a larger consciousness and then to a cosmic consciousness; we are no longer little separate personalities with limited lives but centres of a universal action and in direct contact with cosmic forces. Moreover, instead of being unwilling playthings of the latter as is the surface person, we can become to a certain extent conscious and masters of the play of nature—how far this goes depending on the development of the inner being and its opening upward to the higher spiritual levels. At the same time the opening of the heart centre releases the psychic being which proceeds to make us aware of the Divine within us and of the higher Truth above us.
For the highest spiritual Self is not even behind our personality and bodily existence but is above it and altogether exceeds it. The highest of the inner centres is in the head just as the deepest is the heart; but the centre which opens directly to the Self is above the head, altogether outside the physical body, in what is called the subtle body, sūksma śarira. This Self has two aspects and the results of realising it correspond to these two aspects. One is static, a condition of wide peace, freedom, silence: the silent Self is unaffected by any action or experience; it impartially supports them but does not seem to originate them at all, rather to stand back detached or unconcerned, udūsina. The other aspect is dynamic and that is experienced as a cosmic Self or Spirit which not only supports but originates and contains the whole cosmic action- not only that part of it which concerns our physical selves but also all that is beyond it—this world and all other worlds, the supraphysical as well as the physical ranges of the universe.
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Moreover, we feel the Self as one in all; but also we feel it as above all, transcendent, surpassing all individual birth or cosmic existence. To get into the universal Self—one in all— is to be liberated from ego; ego either becomes a small instrumental circumstance in the consciousness or even disappears from our consciousness altogether. That is the extinction or Nirvana of the ego. To get into the transcendent self above all makes us capable of transcending altogether even cosmic consciousness and action—it can be the way to that complete liberation from the world-existence which is called also extinction, laya [dissolution], moksha. Nirvana.
It must be noted however that the opening upward does not necessarily lead to peace, silence and Nirvana only. The sadhak becomes aware not only of a great, eventually an infinite peace, silence, wideness above us, above the head as it were and extending into all physical and supraphysical space, but also he can become aware of other things—a vast Force in which is all Power, a vast Light in which is all knowledge, a vast Ananda in which is all bliss and rapture. At first they appear as something essential, indeterminate, absolute, simple, kevala : a Nirvana into any of these things seems possible. But we can come to see too that this Force contains all forces, thus Light all lights, this Ananda all joy and bliss possible. And all this can descend into us. Any of them and all of them can come down, not peace alone; only the safest is to bring clown first an absolute calm and peace, for that makes the descent of the rest more secure; otherwise it may be difficult for the external nature to contain or bear so much force Light Knowledge or Ananda. All these things together make what we call the higher spiritual or Divine Consciousness. The psychic opening through the heart puts us primarily into connection with the individual Divine, the Divine in his inner relation with us; it is especially the source of love and bhakti. . This upward opening puts us into direct relation with whole Devine and can create in us the divine consciousness and a new birth or births of the spirit.
When the place is established, this higher or Divine Force
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from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres the into the heart centre and liberates fully the psychic and emotional being, then into the navel and other vital centres and liberates the inner vital, then into the Muladhara and below and liberates the inner physical being. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the who) nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonises, establishes a new rhythm in the nature. It can bring down too a higher and yet higher force and range of the higher nature until, if that be the aim of the sadhana, it becomes possible to bring down the supramental force and existence. All this is prepared, assisted, farthered by the work of the psychic being in the heart centre; the more it is open, in front, active, the quicker, safer, easier the working of the Force can be. The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana. For the descent and transformation imply at the same time an increasing contact and union with the Divine.
That is the fundamental rationale of this sadhana. It will be evident that the two most important things here are the opening of the heart centre and the opening of the mind centres to all that is behind and above them. For the heart opens to the psychic being and the mind centres open to the high611 consciousness and the nexus between the psychic being and the higher consciousness is the principal means of the siddhi. The first opening is effected by a concentration in the heart' a call to the Divine to manifest within us and through the psychic to take up and lead the whole nature. Aspiration prayer, bhakti, love, surrender are the main supports of this part of the sadhana—accompanied by a rejection of all the stands in the way of what we aspire for. The second opening is effected by a concentration of the consciousness in the head (afterwards, above it) and an aspiration and call and a sustained will for the descent of the divine Peace, Power,
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Light Knowledge, Ananda into the being—the Peace first or the peace and Force together. Some indeed receive Light first and first or some there is first or some sudden pouring down of Knowledge . With some there is first an opening which reveals to edge vast infinite Silence, Force, Light or Bliss above them a vast infinite silence, force either they ascend to that or these things begin to descend into the lower nature. With others there is either the descend , first into the head, then down to the heart level, then to the navel and below and through the whole body, or else an inexplicable opening—without any sense of descent—of peace, light, wideness or power, or else a horizontal opening into the cosmic consciousness or in a suddenly widened mind an outburst of knowledge. Whatever comes has to be welcomed—for there is no absolute rule for all—but if the peace has not come first, care must be taken not to swell oneself in exultation or lose the balance. The capital movement however is when the Divine Force or Shakti, the power of the Mother comes down and takes hold, for then the organisation of the consciousness begins and the larger foundation of the Yoga.
The result of the concentration is not usually immediate— though to some there comes a swift and sudden outflowering; but with most there is a time longer or shorter of adaptation or preparation, especially if the nature has not been prepared already to some extent by aspiration and Tapasya. The coming of the result can sometimes be aided by associating with the concentration one of the processes of the old-Yoga. There is he Adwaita process of the way of knowledge—one rejects
from oneself the identification with the mind, vital, body, saying continually "I am not the mind," "I am not the vital," ,"I am not the body," seeing these things as separate from s real self—and after a time one feels all the mental, vital, physical processes and the very sense of mind, vital, body becoming externalised, an outer action, while within and detached from them there grows the sense of a separate self-existent being which opens into the realisation of the cosmic and transcendent spirit. There is also the method—a very
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powerful method—of the Sankhyas, the separation of the Purusha and the Prakriti. One enforces on the mind the position of the Witness—all action of mind, vital, physical becomes an outer play which is not myself or mine, but belongs to Nature and has been enforced on an outer me. I am the witness Purusha; I am silent, detached, not bound by any of these things. There grows up in consequence a division in the being; the sadhak feels within him the growth of a calm silent separate consciousness which feels itself quite apart from the surface play of the mind and the vital and physical Nature Usually when this takes place, it is possible very rapidly to bring down the peace of the higher consciousness and the action of the higher Force and the full march of the Yoga. But often the Force itself comes down first in response to the concentration and call and then, if these things are necessary, it does them and uses any other means or process that is helpful or indispensable.
One thing more. In this process of the descent from above and the working it is most important not to rely entirely on oneself, but to rely on the guidance of the Mother and myself and to refer all that happens to us. For it often happens that the forces of the lower nature are stimulated and excited by the descent and want to mix with it and turn it to their profit. If there is the assent of the sadhak to the Divine working alone and the submission or surrender to the guidance, then all can go smoothly. This assent and a rejection of all egoistic forces or forces that appeal to the ego are the safeguard throughout the sadhana. This is the reason why in this Yoga we insist so much on what we call Samarpana—rather inadequately rendered by the English word surrender. If the heart centre is fully opened and the psychic is in control, then the is no question; all is safe. But the psychic can at any moment be veiled by a lower upsurge. It is only a few who are exempt from these dangers and it is precisely those to whom surrender is easily possible. The guidance of one who himself 1s identity or represents the divine is in this difficult endeavour imperative and indispensable.
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In suggesting to you to concentrate in the head and heart, I have really been asking you to take up this central method of the yoga . What I have written may help you to get some clear idea of what I mean by this process. I have written at some length but, naturally, could cover only the fundamental things. Whatever belongs to circumstance and detail must arise as one works out the method or rather as it works itself out—for the last is what usually happens when there is an effective beginning of the action of the sadhana.
September 13, 1934
Very grateful. I meditated as usual before pranam. But after, I had a lot of correspondence etc. to attend to and am going to quote the following from a long letter of a Professor whom Saratchandra49 has asked to convey to me the following (he is very unwell, so can't write):
"Sarat Chandra has requested me to write to you his opinion about your novel 'Ranger Paras'. Again and again he was telling: "It is a wonderful book from the point of view of literary language, idea and also as a novel. I urge all aspiring authors to study this book carefully and with patience. You will be benefitted and will learn a lot about many things from this book. This book is much superior than those books which are generally published now-a-days in Bengali literature and receive praises. This is no doubt a wonderful piece of literature.´
"He (Sarat Chandra) has no doubt that this book will get a special place in modern Bengali literature. On the whole the book is a masterly creation."
This is no formal praise as you can see. So can't help a little unyogic joy to hear such lavish encomium bestowed on my novel by the greatest novelist of Bengal (of India that is) and one of the greatest novelist of all ages. Your blessings!
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It is indeed very high praise, as high as any man can give to another's work and coming from Saratchandra it would exalt anybody. Congratulations!
September 19, 1934
The Mother understood that it was for the difficulty of concentration that you wanted to see her, but that is not a thing which can be dealt with in five minutes and she had no time before one o'clock today, so she fixed tomorrow. I am certainly not helping you only with letters, but doing it whenever I get some time for concentration and I notice that when I can do it with sufficient energy and at some length there is a response. But this habit of sadness of yours is very much in the way—- you ought to take it by the neck and throw it out of you altogether. How on earth can there be a steady progress when at every second moment you are telling yourself or letting something tell you that there is no hope for you in Yoga. A steady will and perseverance in face of all difficulties is surely a proper condition for success—even if you think peace and cheerfulness are obstacles. What a strange idea! And it is not 'easy to have a steady will and perseverance if you are always listening to these voices of discouragement and even taking that as the best condition for getting the Divine! You speak of the impossibility of being cheerful when you don't immediately get what you want, but what then do you make of Ramakrishna's story of Narad and the yogi ascetic and the Vaishnava bhakta—which I suppose you know? Surely Ramakrishna knew something about Yoga and what was possible there.
You can send our blessings to Miss [Tyabji?]. I suppose she is not the one I used to see in Baroda—at a distance, for I ha no personal acquaintance with her. Her father I met often and knew very well. .
I don't think the Nirvana letter will help you very much, but I will see about it. I have to make some last corrections.
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September 23, 1934
To Mother
Today I have had a most vivid dream which is almost unique in a way as it was full of not only devotion but ananda from the start. It was like this: I had it just now about 3.30 p.m. I think. It is now 4.
After my midday meal I read for a while Jules Romain's famous novel Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté and then read a little Gita and Bejoy Krishna and began to do japa of your name, but not concentration properly speaking. I did japa and prayed to you for quite an hour perhaps before 1 fell asleep. I dreamed this:
I was singing. Suddenly I felt a devotion and sang a song of my father's composition which I seldom sing, curiously, as it is more a joy of vivid ananda than of aspiration and ananda I seldom feel, if at all. It runs like this
Ebār tore chinechhi Mā ār ki Shyāmā tore chhāri
Bhāber dukhah bhaber jwālā pathiye dichchi jamer bāri
which maybe translated thus:
"I have come to know Thee (0) Mother mine never more
shall let Thee part
Now is gone for ever all sorrow of the earth and shadowing
afflictions dark."
In the original the song is extremely beautiful both as a Poem and as a musical composition of joy.
As I was Singing voice became so thick with ecstasy (in the dream I mean- as I could hardly sing it and was technical point of view. It is strange that even then I was appreciating my musical technique and execution when
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tears were flowing fast! But it was extremely vivid! Ann my whole being was invaded by a sweetness and joy (not waves of any sort as I have before had without peace or joy) and love and ananda that it was difficult not to rnelt in gratefulness to you.
Suddenly I felt it must be told you. And you appeared and sat on my cot where I was singing. I then fell on your feet and told you all that weeping profusely. You caressed me sweetly and then I dreamed of Sri Aurobindo too (helping Rameshwar De of Chandernagore with a letter etc.—queer!—and all sorts of confidential questions he was asking me thereanent!!) and it was most delectable and lovely. Then you said to me: "Now don't indulge your movements of dark despair and keep your promise in the song." It is a most cogent song, a cogent weeping and cogent advice and last though not least a most cogent joy!! N'est-ce pas? [Isn't it?]
A very good dream and true. It is something that has happened in the vital and a very good happening.
As for Rameshwar, it is very likely that communication takes place in the vital, for there he has an aspiration and has made some progress there, not exactly Yogic, but of the preparatory kind.
After reading Krishnaprem´ exposition, I saw what might be said from intellectual point of view on this question so as to link the reality of the supreme Freedom with the phenomenon of the Determination of nature — in a different way from his, but to the same purpose. It would be a little long and I had no time. In reality, the freedom and the determination are only two sides of the same thing — for the fundamental
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truth is self-determination of the cosmos and in it secret self-determination of the individual. The difficulty arises from the fact that we live in the surface mind of ignorance, do not know what is going on behind and see only the phenomenal process of Nature. There the apparent fact is an overwhelming determinism of Nature and as our surface consciousness is part of that process, we are unable to see the other term of the biune reality . For practical purposes on the surface there is an entire determinism in Matter—though this is now disputed by the latest school of science. As life emerges a certain plasticity sets in, so that it is difficult to predict anything exactly as one predicts material things that obey a rigid law. The plasticity increases with the growth of Mind, so that man can have at least a sense of free-will, of a choice of his action, of a self-movement which at least helps to determine circumstances. But this freedom is dubious because it can be declared to be an illusion, a device of Nature, part of its machinery of determination, only a seeming freedom or at most a restricted, relative and subject independence. It is only when one goes behind away from Prakriti to Purusha and upward away from Mind to spiritual Self that the side of freedom comes to be first evident and then, by unison with the Will which is above Nature, complete. But to show and elaborate that would take much space.
September 27, 1934
(A letter from Dr. S. Radhakrishnan of Andhra University , again asking Sri Aurobindo for a statement to be included in a volume on "Contemporary British philosophy". Sri Aurobindo's annotations were written on the letter.)
"My dear Mr. Dilip Kumar Roy,
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"Your letter of the 9th instant. I realise that Sri Aurobindo will be very much pre-occupied with other things, but may I impose on you the real importance of a specific contribution from him for purposes of this volume. You are possibly aware that for the volume on Contemporary British Philosophy, men like Bossanquet, Bertrand Russell Haldane and McTaggart, among others, made their contributions. The volume on Contemporary Indian Philosophy will not be worth the name without a statement from Sri Aurobindo. I feel that he will realise the enormous importance of a special contribution for this volume, not for my sake or for his sake, but for the sake of our country. If you do not have a copy of the Contemporary British Philosophy there, on hearing from you, I will send you a volume from which you will get a general idea.
Let him send the volume—in God's name—let us see face to face what kind of public enormity we are up against.
"Interesting as this letter to Mr. Chadwick is, I am afraid it will not do as a statement of Sri Aurobindo's convictions on the central problems of God, Man and his Destiny. If he sets down his thoughts on these problems, we will be able to put it in. You may put a series of questions asking him to state in a summary form his views on God, the nature of the Human Soul, its Destiny, and if you get rounded answers to them, we may possibly use that as his contribution.
O Lord, Lord, Lord! the very idea leaves me in a state of petrified horror! Rounded answers indeed! Pills for the Public!
"I hope you at least realise my anxiety in this whole matter.
I at least do. I wish to god he were less anxious. He is constantly after me and determined to have my scalp.
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"I m returning the paper and shall be delighted to see the other thing on the Avatarhood of Rama.
"With kind regards,
"Yours sincerely,
S. Radhakrishnan"
This sort of thing makes me wish I had lived in the times of Krishna and not reproduced myself now. There were no beastly publications then.
(Dilip's note:) I had sent him what you wrote on McTaggart50 etc. suggesting if that were suitable, well you might— qui sait [who knows]—permit. But now—qu'en dites-vous [what do you say] ? An. emphatic no—toujours [always] ?
What on earth made you send McTaggart? He is after bigger fish than that.
(Dilip's note:) If you want a volley of questions on God ou bien n'importe quoi, vous n'avez qu'a me Ie suggérer [or whatever else, you only have to suggest it to me]. You know in this province Dilip is entirely your man, if in nothing else through the silence of the Supramental.
An inspiration! Eureka. Why not predestination of my uncle brand? Or if that is tough—the Nirvana and Harmony think- And apropos do send Nirvana anyhow
Nirvana as I have written if is too Personal and Harmony is only half written . Besides It is not a philosophic view.
I am iced up today under a huge glacier of correspondence ! Nothing doing. So I reserve this [?] of the musician for u and considerate treatment.
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September 30, 1934
I am sorry to have to thrust upon you something, it is rather urgent for the Art Book of Haren Ghosh51 you know: Prithwi Singh's friend. He has asked me to contribute an article. I have written half of the article "Modem Bengali Music and Classicism." There my father's music naturally comes in he having been one of the greatest of modem composers if not the greatest. So this song I have had to translate for the article. Please correct. I have been fairly faithful I think? But what about my rendering? Will it do ? If not, with your corrections it must. So please correct without truth—please do.
This song is one of his most lovely ones in poetry, rhythm, melody, tune and substance, I believe it is some- what psychic ? Anyway it is very lovely in its melancholy and delicacy, is it not? If possible please read it out to Mother after your corrections.
P.S. Apropos strength and perseverance, the other day Prithwi Singh was discussing with Anilkumar before me (I didn't join, simply listened) and said that effort was not needed for us except only to open ourselves, that outsiders have to make effort etc. but we have nothing to do.
I know it all in my own way. Surrender, I do pray font with all my heart you can believe me. But I am under a great difficulty: I feel surrender comes after a lot of effort —at least for the likes of me. I feel this surrender just now after six years, you know how I dreaded the very idea of surrender once. But effort I always liked as I am not conscious, in life, of having achieved anything without effort But then Prithwi Singh is also right perhaps in a way that effort presupposes egoism and surrender, since y say so, must be easier. But to whom ? Not to all. To a man like Dilip effort is perhaps easier, is it not? (I ask to learn not to state my opinion, I have no opinion now I obstinately cling to and state them to be corrected.)
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And then opening oneself. Does it not come after a great , of effort and struggle as I know from experience. So e has can open spontaneously without effort are surely Messed, it "needs no Holy Ghost to tell us that" but to those who cannot, who struggle and writhe and doubt and weigh and analyse and last though not least, want to retain their self-will?
In the early part of the sadhana—and by early I do not mean a short part—effort is indispensable. Surrender of course, but surrender is not a thing that is done in a day. The mind has its ideas and it clings to them—no human vital but resists surrender, for what it calls surrender in the early stages is a self-giving with a demand in it—the physical consciousness is like a stone and what it calls surrender is often no more than inertia. It is only the psychic that knows how to surrender and the psychic is usually very much veiled in the beginning. When the psychic awakes, it can bring a sud- den and true surrender of the whole being, for the difficulty of the rest is rapidly dealt with and disappears. But till then effort is indispensable. Or it is necessary till the Force comes flooding down into the being from above and takes up the sadhana, does it for one more and more and leaves less and less to individual effort—but even then, if not effort, at least aspiration and vigilance are needed till the possession of mind , will life and body by the Divine power is complete. I have this subject, I think, in one chapters of the Mother.52
On the other hand, there are some people who start with a genuine and dynamic wm to surrender; it is those who are
governed by the psychic or are governed by a clear and enlightened mental will which , having once accepted surrender as the law of the sadhana will stand no nonsense about it and insist on the other Parts of the being following its direction. Here there is still effort , but it is so ready and spontaneous and has no much the sense of a greater force behind it that the sadhak hardly feels that he is making an effort at
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all. In the contrary, case of a will in mind or vital to retain the self-will, an unwillingness to give up the independent movement, there must be struggle and endeavour until the wall between the instrument in front and the Divinity behind or above is broken. No rule can be laid down which applies without distinction to everybody—the variations in human nature are too great to be covered by a single trenchant rule
October 1934
The other day Prithwi Singh said that Tagore has said your "Life Heavens" [is] not poetry proper. It then occurred to me that I must challenge Tagore who calls you not a poet proper to translate a bunch of your secular sort of poems—say about twenty of them and publish in a small book of about eighty pages with the original on one side. But now that Prithwi Singh is come, we can undertake a mightier task to prove home your sheer poetry. So we propose to do a few of your secular sort of poems like "Night by the Sea" and the whole of "Love and Death," an ambitious endeavour but worth it. lam fired. Must take up the gauntlet and show these blind people who you are. I propose to take up this task for a month with Nishikanta and Prithwi Singh. Apropos I send you Nishikanta's translation of your first verse of "Night by the Sea." I am greatly struck by its beauty and melody and faithfulness and except for "censored honeysuckle guessed by the fragrance o her breast" which we could not quite catch, I believe you will be satisfied . Please explain those two lines. What does mean? I leave space . Tell me also how you like Nishikanta's rendering—and if you want improvements anywhere. We will try.
On back please.
I am very much intrigued by Tagore's dictum. I am always
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ready to admit and profit by criticism of my poetry how ever adverse , if it is justified —but I should like to understand it first ,why is it not poetry proper? Is it because it is not good poetry —the images, language, are unpoetic or not sufficiently poetic, the rhythm harsh or flat? Or is it because it is too intellectual, leading in ideas more than visions and feelings ? Or is it that the spiritual genre is illegitimate—spiritual subjects not proper for poetic treatment? But in that case much of Tagore's poetry would be improper, not to speak of Donne (now considered a great poet), Vaughan, Crashaw, etc., Francis Thompson53 and I don't know how many others in all climes and ages. Is it the dealing with other worlds that makes it not proper? But what then about Blake,54 whose work Housman declares to be the essence of poetry? I am at sea about this "poetry proper." Did he only use this cryptic expression? Was there nothing elucidatory said which would make it intelligible? Or has Tagore by any chance thought that I was trying to convey a moral lesson or a philosophical tenet—there is nothing of the kind there, it is a frequent experience on the spiritual path that is being described in its own proper, one might almost say, objective figures—and that is surely a method of poetry proper. Or is it that the expression is too hard or clear-cut for the soft rondos of Poetry proper. I swim helplessly in conjectures.
But where the deuce is the back?
Prithwi Singh will do very well in blank verse I think if we work together for a month or so. I mean to take it up as a sadhana with your blessings and will bring out a book like a shot you'll see .I am extremely annoyed and fired up. And as I have done a whole page almost , see . I will give one third to Prithwi Singh (of "Love and Death") and one third Nishikanta . After his render [ing?] of "Night by the Sea" You will agree I hope that he is not likely to fail—If You bless him . Prithwi Singh is also willing to do this, as he too is hurt that Tagore should be so limited.
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But if three people write, will not the style of the poem be a little disparate?
Apropos I threaten you with a long letter after the 15th doubting your line, "Tagore is on the same path as ours " I think that this doubt at least will be healthy as Prithwi Singh also was telling me that Tagore is aesthetic and not spiritual—so how in the name of thunder and hailstorm is he on the same path as you—your kindred by blood of Yoga. Qua poet—perhaps but qua spiritual seeker—how? But I will formulate my attack on your contention for all I am worth later—so don't answer this question now and vanquish me ahead. Wait.
Day after tomorrow I want to pranam you a second time for Subhash, Niren, Maya and Esha55. A minute only—or half-a-minute.
Yes, half a minute is best.
I will examine the translations more closely afterwards. Have had the most cataclysmal two [ ? ] of all my experience— and I have besides to fish out "Songs to Myrtilla." I have no idea where it is.
What about Nishikanta's painting? How did you and Mother find it? Has he improved? I find he has greatly improved as a translator by the [?]—but about painting?
Yes, there is progress. It is a very good painting especially from the decorative point of view—a little lacking in charm but full of strength. He has evidently a great talent.
October 2, 1934
Sorry about Niren, but que voulez-vous? [What would you?] Men were like that ever; the little ego first and the rest
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nowhere. Not all of course—but still . However , Your novel seems to have been a great success in spite of all the Parichits [acquaintances] in Calcutta.
As Radhakrishna, I don't care whether he is right or wrong in his eagerness to get the blessed contribution from nr Rut the first fact is that it is quite impossible for me to write philosophy to order. If something comes to me of itself, I can write, if 1 have time. But I have no time. I had an idea of writing to Adhar Das56 pointing out that he was mistaken in . criticism of my ideas about consciousness and intuition and developing briefly what was my idea about these things. But 1 have never been able to do it. I might as well think of cutting the moon under my arm, Hanuman like—though in his case it was the sun—and going for a walk. The moon is not available and the walk is not possible. It would be the same if I promised anything to Radhakrishna—it would not get done, and that would be much worse than a refusal.
And the second fact is that I do not care one button about having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British Government that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known as a "leader". I don't believe in advertisement expect for books and in propaganda except for politics and Patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom—and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere—or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the "religions" and the reason of their failure . If I tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counter-weight in
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that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat that object. I am perfectly "rational", I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed on a mere personal dislike of fame.57
This "Contemporary Philosophy," British or Indian, look to me very much like book-making and, though the "vulgarisation" of knowledge—to use the French term—by bookmaking may have its use, I prefer to do solid work and leave that to others. You may say that I can write a solid thing in philosophy and let it be book-made. But even the solid tends to look shoddy in such surroundings. And, besides, my solid work at present is not philosophy but something less wordy and more to the point. If that work gets done, then it will propagate itself so far as propagation is necessary—if it were not to get done, propagation would be useless.
These are my reasons. However, let us wait till the book is there and see what kind of stuff it is.
October 4, 1934
It is evident that X put his own interpretation on his conversation .with the Mother; the wish was father to the thought He was excited, although usually he takes things with much coolness and was proposing all sorts of prospects on which the Mother was throwing repeated bucket of very cold water Finally, it narrowed at a hypothetical possibility of Uday shankar coming back alone and without troupe or fuss— even so the Mother made no promise and she was very particular that no one should invite him to return. We hear he spoke to several people about coming for darshan but it is to be hoped he will drop the idea, if he seriously has it , out of the train window on his way to Travancore. Not that we have
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any personal objection to him , but there seems no very solid reason for his returning and we do not appreciate all this excitement created by his presence . Ana over what? A man who dance? but he did not even dance—the performer was performed to instead of performing . Queer ! It sounds like much Ado About Nothing with the Ashram for stage.
I have not had time to read Girija's58 article and see what kind of mouse has been born out of the labour of this particular mountain. So comment is as yet impossible.
In regard to Tagore, I understood from Prithwi Singh that his objections to "The Life Heavens" were personal rather than in principle—that is he himself had no such reference and could not take them as true (for himself), so they aroused in him. no emotion—while "Shiva" was just the contrary. I can't say anything to that, as I could not say anything if some- body condemned a poem of mine root and branch because he did not like it or on good grounds—such as Cousins' objection to the inferiority of the greater part of "In the Moonlight" to the opening stanzas—I learned a great deal from that objection; it pointed me the way I had to go towards "The future poetry "Not that l did not know before, but it gave precision and point to my previous perception . But still, I do not quite understand Tagore's objection. 1 myself do not take many things as true in poetry e.g. Dante's Hell , etc of which I yet feel the emotion . It is surely part of power of poetry to open new worlds to us as well as to give a supreme voice to our own ideas , experiences and feelings . The "Life Heaven s" may not do that for its readers, but, if so, it is a fault of execution, not of principle. As to the theory You spoke of, I fail still clearly subjective and objective? If so, that is a very old
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quarrel, but one that I thought nobody bothers about n Tagore's Gitanjali is itself subjective and was hailed by the world as a new revelation because of that , not because of its objective power. However—. There remains the question poetic criticism, but that I must postpone as the night's brief [?] is out.
October 5, 1934
I have read Girija, but cannot say I understand him very well. His point seems to be that which would I suppose be urged by all who object to laghu guru59 that you have to read with an intonation which is not natural to Bengali rhythm. But I do not see how he makes the existing laghu guru poems pure Bengali in rhythm. If they are, that seems to me to give away the case against the introduction of Sanskrit laghu guru. However of these things I am no judge. (Where was your answer to him? I seem to have missed it.)
All criticism of poetry is bound to have a strong subjective element in it and that is the source of the violent differences of appreciation of any given author by equally "eminent critics. All is relative here. Art and Beauty also, and our view of things and our appreciation of them depends on the consciousness which views and appreciates them. Some critics recognise this and go in frankly for a purely subjective appreciation—"this is why 1 like this and disapprove of that, I gave my own appreciation". Most however try to fit their personal likes and dislikes to some standard of criticism which conceive to be objective; this need of objectivity, of the support of some impersonal truth independent of our personality, is the main source of theories, canons, standards of art. But the theories, canons, standards themselves vary and are set up in one age only to be broken in another. Is there then beauty of art independent of our varying mentalities, is beauty
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a creation of our minds , a construction of our sense , But not existent otherwise ? In that case Beauty is non-existent in Nature , it is put upon Nature by our minds through adhyāropa [mental imposition] . But this contradicts the fact that is in response to an object and not independently of it that the idea of beautiful or not or not beautiful originally rises within us. Beauty does exist in what we see, but there two aspects of it, essential beauty and the forms it takes. Vernal beauty wandering on her way" does that wandering by a multitudinous variation of forms appealing to a multitudinous variation of consciousness. There comes in the difficulty. Each individual consciousness tries to seize the eternal beauty expressed in a form (here a particular poem or work of art), but is either assisted by the form or repelled by it, wholly attracted or wholly repelled, or partially attracted and partially repelled. There may be errors in the poet's or artist's transcription of beauty which mar the reception, but even these have different effects on different people. But the more radical divergences arise from the variation in the constitution of the mind and its response. Moreover, there are minds, the majority indeed, who do not respond to "artistic" beauty at all—something inartistic appeals much more to what sense of beauty they have—or else they are not seeking beauty, but only vital pleasure.
A critic cannot escape altogether from these limitations. He can try to make himself catholic and objective and find the merit or special character of all he reads or sees in poetry and art, even when they do not evoke his strongest sympathy or deepest response . I have no temperamental sympathy for much of the work of Pope and Dryden, but I can see their extraordinary perfection or force in their own field, the masterly conciseness, energy, point, metallic precision into which they cut their thought or their verse ,and I can see too how that can with a little infusion of another quality be the basic of a really great poetic style , as Dryden himself has shown in his best work . But there my appreciation stops; I can not rise to the height of admiration of those who put them on a level
a creation of our minds, a construction of our ideas and our senses, but not existent otherwise? In that case Beauty is non-existent in Nature, it sis put upon Nature by our minds through adhyāropa [mental imposition]. But this contradicts the fact that it is in response to an object and not independently of it that the idea of beautiful originally rises within us. Beauty does exist in what we see, but there are two aspects of it, essential beauty and the forms it takes. "Eternal beauty wandering on her way" does that wandering by a multitudinous variation of forms appealing to a multitudinous variation of consciousness. There comes in the difficulty. Each individual consciousness tries to seize the eternal beauty expressed in a form (here a particular poem or work of art) , but is either assisted by the form or repelled by it, wholly attracted or wholly repelled, or partially attracted and partially repelled. There may be errors in the poet's are artist's transcription of beauty which mar the reception, but even this have different effects on different people. But the more radical divergences arise from the variation in the constitution of the mind and its response. Moreover, there are minds, the majority indeed, who do not respond to "artistic" beauty at all-something inartistic appeals much more to what sense of beauty they have-or else they are not seeking beauty, but only vital pleasure.
A critic cannot escape altogether from these limitations. He can try to make himself catholic and objective and find the merit or special character of all he reads or sees in poetry and art, even when they do not evoke his strongest sympathy or deepest response. I have no temperamental sympathy for much of the work of Pope and Dryden, but i can see their extraordinary perfection or force in their own field, the masterly conciseness, energy, point, metallic precision into which they cut their thought or their verse, and I can see too how that can with a little infusion of another quality be the basis of a really great poetic style, as Dryden himself has shown in his best work. But there my appreciation stops; I cannot rise to the heights of admiration of those who put them on a level
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with or on a higher level than Wordsworth, Keats or Shell —I cannot escape from the feeling that their work, even though more consistently perfect within their limits and in their own manner (at least Pope's), was less great in poetic quality These divergences rise from a conception of beauty and a feeling for beauty which belongs to the temperament Housman's60 exaltation of Blake rises directly from his feel ing and peculiar conception of poetic beauty as appealing an inner sensation, an appeal marred and a beauty deflowered by coherent intellectual thought. But that I shall not discuss now. This however does not mean that all criticism is with- out any true use. The critic can help to open the mind to the kinds of beauty he himself sees and not only to see but to appreciate at their full value certain elements that make them beautiful or give them their peculiar beauty. Housman, for instance, may help many minds to see a beauty in Blake which they did not see before. They may not agree with him in his comparison of Blake and Shakespeare, but they can follow him to a certain extent and seize better that element in poetic beauty which he overstresses but makes at the same time more vividly visible.
October 6, 1934
Yes, of course there is an intuition of greatness by which the great poet or artist is distinguished from those who are less great and these again from the not-great-at-all. But y are asking too much when you expect this intuition to w with a mechanical instantaneousness and universality so all shall have the same opinion and give the same values. greatness of Shakespeare, of Dante, of others of the rank is unquestioned and unquestionable and the recogn1 of it has always been there in their own time and afterwards. Virgil and Horace stood out in their own day in the first rank
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among the poets and that verdict has never been reversed since. The area of a poet's fame may vary; it may have been seen first by a few then by many , then by all. At first there see he adverse critics and assailants, but these negative voice die away. Questionings may rise from time to time— e.g. as to whether Lucretius was not a greater poet than Virgil—but these are usually from individuals and the general verdict abides always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in its of fluctuations of their fame. You speak of the discrediting of some and the rehabilitation of the discredited. That happened to Pope and Dryden. Keats and his contemporaries broke their canons and trampled over their corpses to reach romantic freedom; now there is a rehabilitation. But all this is something of an illusion—for mark that even at the worst Pope and Dryden retained a place among the great names of English literature. No controversy, no depreciation could take that away from them. This proves my contention that there is an abiding intuition of poetic and artistic greatness.
The attempts at comparison by critics like Housman and Eliot? It seems to me that these are irrelevant and otiose. Both Dante and Shakespeare stand at the summit of poetic fame, but each with so different a way of genius that comparison is unprofitable. Shakespeare has powers which Dante cannot rival; Dante has heights which Shakespeare could not "each; but in essence they stand as mighty equals. As for Blake and Shakespeare, that opinion is more a personal fantasy than anything else. Purity and greatness are not the same thing ; Blake's may be pure poetry in Houseman's sense and Shakespeare is where and Blake nowhere. These are tricks of language and idiosyncrasies of preference. One has only to put each thing in its place without confusing issues and one can see that Houseman's praise
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of Blake may be justified but the exaltation of him above Shakespeare on the whole is not in accordance with the abiding intuition of these things which remains undisturbed h any individual verdict.
The errors of great poets in judging their contemporaries are personal freaks—that is to say, failures in intuition duet the mind's temporary movements getting in the way of the intuition. The errors of Goethe and Bankim were only an overestimation of a genius or a talent that was new and there- fore attractive at the time. Richardson's Pamela was after all the beginning of modern fiction. I don't know anything about Sarajubala. As I have said, the general intuition does not work at once and with a mechanical accuracy. Over-estimation of a contemporary is frequent, under-estimation also. But, taken on the whole, the real poet commands at first the verdict of the few whose eyes are open—and often the attacks of those whose eyes are shut—and the few grow in numbers till the general intuition affirms their verdict.61
As for the verdict of Englishmen upon a French poet or vice versa, that is due to a difficulty in entering into the finer spirit and subtleties of a foreign language. It is difficult for a Frenchman to get a proper appreciation of Keats or Shelley or for an Englishman to judge Racine, for this reason. But a Frenchman like Maurois who knows English as an English- man knows it, can get the full estimation of a poet like Shelley all right. These variations must be allowed for; the human mind is not a perfect instrument, its best intuitions are veiled by irrelevant mental formations; but in these matters t truth affirms itself and stands fairly firm and clear in essence through all changes of mental weather.
October 8, 1934
(...) Suhrawardy's62 opinion about Harm's poetry does not surprise me. The latest craze in English is either for intellectual
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quintessence or sensation (not creations) of life, while any emotional and ideal element in poetry is considered as a deadly sin. But beautiful poetry remains beautiful poetry even if it is not in the current style. And after all Yeats and A.E. are still there in spite of this new fashion of the last one or two decades.
October 9, 1934
I repeat what I said about the Mother: when you were with her, especially in the midst of the concentration she felt a flow of sympathy and love for you far greater than ever before. You have been badly treated by your friends and the Mother feels much for you on that account. But believe this that our friendship, our affection for you will not fail you or falter.
All are not indifferent in this Ashram to each other, nor is friendship or affection excluded from the Yoga. Friendship with the Divine is a recognised relation in the sadhana. Friend- ships between the sadhaks exist and are encouraged by the Mother. Only we seek to found them on a surer basis than that on which the bulk of human friendships are insecurely founded. It is precisely because we hold friendship, brotherhood, love to be sacred things that we want this change— because we do not want to see them broken at every moment by the movement of the ego, soiled and spoiled and destroyed pro passions' Jealousies, treacheries to which the vital is prone—it is to make them truly sacred and secure that we Divine. our Yoga is not an ascetic Yoga: it aims indeed at purity, but not at a cold austerity .Friendship and love are indispensable notes in the harmony to which we aspire. It is not a vain dream, for we have seen that even in imperfect conditions when a little of the indispensable element is there at the very root the thing is possible. It is difficult and the old
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obstacles still cling obstinately. But no victory can be won without a fixed fidelity to the aim and a long effort. There i no other way than to persevere.
October 10, 1934
Nishikanta's translation.
(1) I agree that kallolita sounds more poetic than chhalita [two words meaning "billow"], but Nolini's objection is probably that it says too much—more than the "subtle rhythms" of the English want to say. (2) I would rather something of the "great" idea were kept, if it can be. Is asurer surā [the asura's wine] bound to give the impression of something anti-divine? It is the idea of vastness, massiveness, immense intensity that I wanted to give. (3) I cannot judge about am [atom]. It is not absolutely necessary to translate cells, if atoms will do as well. It seems to me that projjwal [luminous] is rather needed and the line is weaker without it. (4) I am doubtful too about māngsha pinda [a lump of flesh]. It is brutal but vivid—stbūla shankā [coarse doubt] avoids the brutality, but loses the vividness. In English "flesh" is vivid and concrete without being brutal.
The translations are very good indeed—only the last two lines of the octet are not up to the mark because, I suppose they can't be. "Opal and hyaline" (hyaline unlike "glossy" or "vitreous") give a sense of a subtle supraphysical glow and light which the Bengali words, I imagine, can't do. Also Unknown and the Supreme are mostly indefinite while s se sarbeswar [unknown is that Lord of everything] in s? his being unknown is much too definite and familiar a gentleman for any such effect. However! .
Nishikanta's poetry has undergone a great change. I did not appreciate it very highly because it was too vital and turbid, but on his sonnets he has acquired a power of substance,
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clarity and order which raises his work to a much higher level. He has certainly justified himself as a poet.
The proper rule about literalness, I suppose, is that one should keep as close as possible to the original provided the result does not read like a translation but like an original r m in Bengali, and, as far as possible, as if it were the original poem originally written in Bengali. Whether that •deal is always realisable is another matter. When it can't be done one has to dodge or deviate.
I admit that I have not practised what I preach—whenever I translated, I was careless of the feelings of the original text and transmogrified it without mercy into whatever my fancy chose. But that is a high and mighty criminality which one ought not to imitate. Latterly I have tried to be more moral in my ways, I don't know with what success. But anyhow it is a case of "Do what I preach and avoid what I practise."
October 17, 1934
I did not write because I had absolutely no time—I could not have answered either of your letters and it could not be done in a short note.
It is Perfectly possible to change one's nature. I have proved that in my own case, for I have made myself exactly the opposite in character to what I was when I started life. I have seen one in many and I have helped myself to do it in many. But certain conditions are needed. At present in this Ashram there is an obstinate resistance to the change of nature—not so much in the inner being , for there are good number who accept change there, but in the outer man which repeats its customary movements like a machine and refuses to budge out of its groove. Purani's case does not matter—his vital has always wanted to be it self and follow its own way and his mental will can not prevail over it . The difficulty is far more general than that.
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That however would not matter—it would be only a question of a little more or less time, if the divine action were admitted wholeheartedly by the sadhaks. But the condition6 laid down by them and the conditions laid down from above seem radically to differ. From above the urge is to lift every thing above the human level, the demand of the sadhaks (not all, but so many) is to keep everything on the human level But the human level means ignorance, disharmony, strife' suffering, death, disease—constant failure. I cannot see what solution there can be for such a contradiction—unless it be Nirvana. But transformation is heavily more difficult than Nirvana.
Your attitude towards any divine manifestation in the Mother's external consciousness is illuminating, "terrifying not only to the Asuras, but to the sadhaks." As yet it was only a limited and particular force—the Durga power! Others did not go so far as that, but they found her high, far-away, aloof, severe—asked what was the cause of her displeasure against them. And that comes to the same—to be severe against the Asuras is also to be severe against the sadhaks. A few struck a different note, delight at the greatness of the Power they felt, or, even when feeling nothing of that, a sense of the sudden lifting of obstacles. But that is not the general tone. It follows that the Mother cannot manifest anything in her external material because she has to keep on a level with the sadhaks. And what then? If she is not to be allowed to protect herself, the work, the sadhaks against the attacks of the Asuras on the physical plane—for it is there that there is the who question—then what is to be done? what can be done? Nothing. We can only wait for the supramental descent—and descent is methodical but slow, for the opposition to that is obstinate in the material Nature.
However, we must go on and do what can be done under these difficult conditions. I do not know how far it is wise not
to come to pranam—the result in others has not been brilliant—but if it is only for a few days and you insist, I shall not refuse . The real thing is however a change of the mental.
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attitude —getting out of the world of ideas and feelings built by your mind which is a prison into a free turn and openness to the Divine that would be the most helpful to you. There to id soon then be a compass and a rudder.
October 18, 1934
You may be sure that we shall not desert you and that we would never dream of doing so. You say truly that what drives you into these moods is the Asuric Maya or a goad from the Asura—it is what we speak of as the hostile Force. What answers to it is a part of the human vital that has an attraction or habit of response to suffering, self-torment, depression and despair. But in itself what comes is from out- side and not from within you. It is, as I have more than once told you, a formation that has been made and repeats itself and this is shown by the fact that once it starts it goes round always in the same curve of ideas, suggestions and feelings. The first thing you have to do is to recognise it for what it is. It was not, for instance, "all your nature" that advised you not to write to the Mother, but it was the suggestion of this Force. If You recognise these things as suggestions—and of a Force adverse to you and your sadhana, it is easier to meet and answer than if you see it as something in yourself. The second thing is to take refuge in your better and higher self against that vital part which respond of these suggestions. You must not regard this part as all your nature , but only a part of your vital which has taken an exaggerated prominence. Even in the vital the larger part by far was that which had high ambition , generous feelings, a large heartedness which everybody was obliged to recognise . That is what you must regard as your real self and you must believe that the Devine has a use for that and for the faculties that have been given you —believe not in a rajasic or egoistic spirit but in the spirit of the instrument called and chosen to purity itself and
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be fit for its work and service—and because of that you h no right to throw it or yourself away, but have to right to throw quietly till you are rid of the lower nature and the Asuric Maya. And, last but not least, you have to develop the power and the habit of taking refuge in the protection of the Mother and myself. It is for this reason that the habit of criticising and judging by the outer mind or cherishing its preconceived ideas and formations must disappear. You should repeat always to yourself when it tries to rise, "Sri Aurobindo and the Mother know better than myself—they have the experience and knowledge which I have not—they must surely be acting for the best and in a greater light than that of ordinary human knowledge." If you can fix that idea in yourself so that it will remain even in clouded moments, you will be able to face much more easily the suggestions of the Asuric Maya.
The idea of suicide is always a sign of these Asuric formations. Like all the rest it is perfectly irrational—for the suicide after death goes through a hell of misery far worse than was possible in life and when he is reborn he has to face the same problems and difficulties he fled from, but in an acuter form and in much less favourable circumstances. The other justifying suggestions were equally irrational and untrue. Wherever you went, the blow would always fall on ourselves and the Ashram, for you are and would remain too intimately identified with us for it to be otherwise and distance would make no difference. And certainly the verse in the Gita does no cover a case of suicide, but refers to the consciousness an concentration of the Yogi in his departure.
When I wrote in my letters about the Supermind and obstinate resistance, I spoke of course of something already spoken of before. I did not mean that the resistance was of an unexpected character or had altered anything essential. But in its nature the descent is not something arbitrary and miraculous, but a rapid evolutionary Process compressed into a few years which proceeds by taking up the present nature into its Light and pouring its Truth into the inferior planes. That cannot be done in the whole world at a
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time, but it is done like all such processes, first through selected Adharas and then on a wider scale. We have to do it through
ourselves first and through the circle of Sadhaks gathered around us in the terrestrial consciousness as typified here. If a few open, that is sufficient for the process to be possible. on the other hand, if there is a general misunderstanding and resistance (not in all, but in many), that makes it difficult and the process more laborious, but it does not make it impossible. I was not suggesting that it has become impossible, but that if the circumstances are made unfavourable by our being unable to concentrate enough on this thing of capital importance and having too much work to do of an irrelevant kind, the descent was likely to take longer than it would do other- wise. Certainly, when the Supramental does touch earth with a sufficient force to dig itself in into the earth-consciousness, there will be no more chance of any success or survival for the Asuric Maya. The rest that I spoke of about the human and the divine had to do with the intermediate period between before it is done. What I meant was that if the Mother were able to bring out the Divine Personalities and Powers into her body and physical being, as she was doing for several months without break some years ago, the brightest period in the history of the Ashram, things would be much more easy and all these Dangerous attacks that now take place would be dealt with rapidly and would in fact be possible. In those days when or ,other was either receiving the sadhaks for meditation or otherwise working and concentrating all night and day without sleep and with very irregular food, there was no ill health and no fatigue in her and things were proceeding with proceeding with a lightning swiftness- The Power used was not that of the supermind, but of the Overmind, but it was sufficient for what was that of the overmind but lt was sufficient for what was being done. Afterwards, because the lower vital and the physical of the sadhaks could not follow , the mother had to push the Devine personalities and Powers through which she doing the action behind a veil and come down into the Physical human level and act according to its
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conditions and that means difficulty, struggle, illness, ignorance and inertia . All has been for long, slow, difficult, aim sterile in appearance. Nevertheless our work was going on behind that appearance and now it is again becoming possible to go forward. But for the advance to be anything like general or swift in its process, the attitude of the sadhaks not of a few only, must change. They must cling less to the conditions and feelings of the external physical consciousness and open themselves to the true consciousness of the Yogin and sadhaka. If they did that, the inner eye would open and they would not be bewildered or alarmed if the Mother again manifested externally something of the Divine Personalities and Powers as she did before. They would not be asking her to be always on their level, but would be glad to be drawn swiftly or gradually up towards hers. The difficulties would be ten times less and a larger easier securer movement possible.
This was what I meant and I suppose I manifested some impatience at the slowness of so many to realise what is after all a logical conclusion from the very principle of our Yoga which is that of a transformation, all that is disharmonious in human nature being enlightened out of existence, all that makes for harmony being changed into its divine equivalent, purer, greater, nobler, more beautiful and much being added which has been lacking to the human evolution. I meant that things could move more swiftly towards this if the sadhaks had a less ignorant attitude, but if they could not yet reach that, we had of course to go on anyhow until the supramental descent came down to the material level.
Finally, you must get rid of this gratuitous tendency despair. The difficulty for you has been created by the indulgence given to the formation I speak of; that finally dismissed, the difficulty would disappear. Progress might be slow first, but progress would come; it would quicken a you and, with the supramental force here, there would as for others the full speed and certitude.
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October 24, 1934
I enclose Barada Babu's postcard—whom you remember. He is a remarkable yogi—very sincere, intelligent with running powers (he stunned me anyway as I related), can meditate for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, a great bhakta f yours. But to him I was indebted as he prophesied I would be accepted by you,63 etc. I had told you all that. He was dubious of Mother formerly, but now he speaks of "Mother Mira", you will see, and that with reverence. Formerly he wrote to me that Mother he does not see in his meditations, but you he does—often.
I wonder if he truly sees Mother or sees some form whom he so styles or identifies with her. Can one see someone whom one has never seen ? I mean, do you know it from experience which you verified later on—for the stories to that effect are galore of course. However his letters are very interesting illustrating his difficulty re. surrender. But he is humble as he wants to keep in touch with you, etc. He is very sincere as all who know him say.
I suppose that is why he has had experiences of Mother too at long last.
He of course mates a mental mistake by attributing parts of my novel to Supramental inspiration, confusing it with psychic as physic it undoubtedly is which moved so many—I mean by Psychic a deep emotion m the heart which a delight to the heart even in sorrow. But doubtless of supermental he has a mental conception which is therefore wrong...
Yes, of course , I remember about Barada Babu—I can't say I remember him because I never saw him' at least m the flesh. What he probably means by the Supermental is the Above Mind—what I now call illumined Mind—Intuition-Overmind. I used to make that confusion myself at the beginning.
There is not enough to go upon to say whether he really
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sees the Mother or an image of her as reflected in his own mind. But there is nothing extraordinary, much less improbable in seeing one whom one has never seen—you are thinking as if the inner mind and sense, the inner vision, were limited by the outer mind and sense, the outer vision, or were a mere reflection of that. There would be not much use in an inner mind and sense and vision if they were only that and nothing more. This faculty is one of the elementary powers of the inner sense and inner seeing, and not only Yogin have it, but the ordinary clairvoyants, crystal-gazers, etc. The latter can see people they never [knew?], saw or heard of before, doing certain precise things in certain very precise surroundings and every detail of the vision is confirmed by the people seen afterwards—there are many striking and indubitable cases of that kind. The Mother is always seeing people whom she does not know; some afterwards come here or their photo- graphs come here. I myself have had these visions, only I don't usually try to remember or verify them. But there were two curious instances which were among the first of this kind and which therefore [I?] remember. Once I was trying to see a recently elected deputy here and saw someone quite different from him, someone who afterwards came here as Governor. I ought never to have met him in the ordinary course, but a curious mistake happened and as a result I went and saw him in his bureau and at once recognised him. The other was a certain V. Ramaswamy whom I had to see, but I saw him not as he was when he actually came, but as he became after year's residence in my house. He became the very image that vision, a face close-cropped, rough, rude, energetic, the very opposite of the dreamy smooth-faced enthusiastic Vaishanava who came to me. So that was the vision of a I had never seen, but as he was to be in the future—a prophetic vision.
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October 1934?
I have never said that things (in life) are harmonious now— the contrary with the human consciousness as it is harmony is impossible. It is always what I have told you, that the n man consciousness is defective and simply impossible— that is why I strive for a higher consciousness to come and set right the disturbed balance. I don't want to give you Nirvana (on paper) immediately because Nirvana only leads up to Harmony in my communication. I am glad you are getting converted to silence, and even Nirvana is not without its uses—in my case it was the first positive spiritual experience and it made possible all the rest of the sadhana; but as to the positive way to get these things, I don't know if your mind is quite ready to proceed with it. There are in fact several ways. My own way was by rejection of thought. "Sit down," I was told, "look and you will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before they enter, fling them back." I sat down and looked and saw to my astonishment that it was so; I saw and felt concretely the thought approaching as if to enter through or above the head and was able to push it back concretely before it came inside. In three days—really in one—my mind became full of an eternal silence—it is still there. But that I don't know how many people can do. One (not a disciple—had no disciples in those days)—asked me how to do Yoga. I said, "Make your mind quiet first." He did and his mind became quite silent and empty. Then he rushed to me saying, "My brain is empty of thoughts, I cannot think. I am becoming an idiot." He did not pause to look and see where these thoughts he uttered were coming from! Nor did he realise that one who is already an idiot cannot become one. Anyhow I was not patient in those days and I dropped him and let him lose his miraculously achieved silence.
The visual e1 1way/ the easiest if one can manage it at all, is to call down from above you into the brain, mind and body.
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I think you need not be anxious about the approaching supramental Silence. That silence is likely to sing more powerfully than the voicefulness that preceded it. But your proposal has given me such a shock (moral or immoral, not physical) in the solar plexus that it almost reduces me to an astonished though still non-supramental silence.
I am afraid you are under an illusion as to the success of "Love and Death" in England. "Love and Death7' dates—it belongs to the time when Meredith and Phillips were still writing and Yeats and A.E. were only in bud if not in ovo. Since then the wind has changed and even Yeats and A.E. are already a little high and dry on the sands of the past, while the form or other characteristics of "Love and Death" are just the things that are anathema to the post-war writers and literary critics. I fear it would be, if not altogether ignored which is most likely, regarded as a feeble and belated Indian imitation of an exploded literary model dead and buried long ago. I don't regard it in that light myself, but it is not my opinion that counts for success but that of the modern high- brows. If it had been published when it was written it might have been a success, but now! Of course, I know there are many people still in England, if it got into their hands, who would read it with enthusiasm, but I don't think it would get into their hands at all. As for the other poems they could not go with "Love and Death." When the time comes for publication, the sonnets will have to be published in a separate book of sonnets and the others in another, separate book of (mainly) lyrical poems—so it cannot be now. That at least 1s my present idea. It is not that I am against publication for all time, but my idea was to wait for the proper time rather that do anything premature.
One thing however could be done. Prithwi Singh could send his friend "Love and Death" and perhaps the "Six Poems and sound the publishers as to whether the publication, in
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their eye, would be worthwhile from their point of view. That could at least give a clue. at least give a clue.
October 26, 1934
As regards Harin, I am concerned not with defending or condemning him, but only with ensuring so far as I can do it his spiritual welfare as with any other sadhak. To lay stress on the good side, on the hopeful things, to abstain from public condemnation, to stress with all my force the inner growth and development and to work silently and patiently and persistently for the elimination of all that stands on the way is a course 1 have followed not only with many of the sadhaks, but with most—though not with all. For a few made it impossible. I cannot act as a tribunal of justice in the quarrels and misunderstandings that rage in the Ashram; I can only try, when it is possible, to assuage or circumscribe as much as may be and, when it is possible, to reconcile. You cannot have forgotten that I have done that in your case when you were in trouble, so much so that I have always been accused of defending you, indulging you and protect ing you under all circumstances with an invariable partiality! I have protected Harin for the most part only by silence; it is only to you and one or two others that I have written about him and in your case my only attempt was to assuage in each the feelings that were rising against the other.
I know nothing about Nalineswar's retirement, he has not informed me. I know of Sahana's, but I am not aware that "there is anything sullen or sombre about it; what I understand about it is that she has got into a good and happy inner condition and she wants to confirm it before putting it to the test by
mixing freely with others. There is nothing unnatural g, out that I am not aware of any special treatment given to either Sahana or Nalineswar as a sign of approval of their retirement. Harm's attempt at retirement was not of that kind,
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but an attempt to escape from serious difficulties and, in the form he announced it, was not found practicable. It limits itself to going more inside and seeing less people than before The special [opportunity?] of pranam given to him was not personal privilege or answer for retirement—for we have not a prejudice in favour of retirement, but rather in most cases we have a feeling against it. It is only where it proves a spiritual success that we approve and that is rare, or where the sadhak is unable to keep his deep consciousness while mix- ing with others. The special pranam is simply a device to meet a special difficulty, since it has been shown from the beginning that it is through the pranam that Harin receives and to stop it is to risk stopping the sadhana; at the same time owing to a certain play of forces to continue as before was becoming impossible. The Mother gave the pranam elsewhere as the one device that occurred to her and, as it succeeded, thought of continuing it. That is all.
I have felt bound to explain so much though I would have preferred not to write about these things. I do hope you will throw all that behind you. I feel a great longing that the sadhaks should be free of all that. For so long as the present state of things continues with fires of this kind raging all around and the atmosphere in a turmoil, the work I am trying to do, certainly not for my own sake or for any personal reason, will always remain under the stroke of jeopardy and I do not know how the descent I am labouring for is to fulfil itself. In fact, the Mother and I have to give nine-tenths of our energy to smoothing down things, to keeping the sadhaks tolerably contented, etc. etc. etc. One-tenth and in the Mothers case not even that, can alone go to the real work; it is not enough. It is not surprising either that you should feel it difficult to get on in all this. But then why not push these things away from you and keep a clear field in you for the Divine. That, if everybody, or even a sufficient number could do would be the greatest help I could receive.
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I don't remember what I wrote to Krishnaprem, but I don't suppose I was referring to him and his "doubts" when I spoke of a ."negation positive and peremptory."
I can say little about the methods he speaks of for getting .rid of dead concepts. Each mind has its own way of moving. . my own has been a sort of readjustment or rectification of nations and I should rather call it discrimination accompanied by a rearrangement of intuitions. At one time I had given much too big a place to "humanity" in my scheme of things with a number of ideas attached to that exaggeration which needed to be put right. But the change did not come by doubt about what I had conceived before, but by a new light on things in which "humanity" automatically stepped down and got into its right place and all the rest rearranged itself in consequence. But all that is probably because I am constitutionally lazy (in spite of my present feats of correspondence) and prefer the easiest and most automatic method possible. I have a suspicion however that Krishnaprem's method is essentially the same as mine, only he does it in a more diligent and conscientious spirit. For his remark about the concepts as flags and not the means of advance seems to indicate that.
October 28, 1934
To be open is simply to be so tuned to the Mother that her force can work in you without anything refusing or obstruct- ing her action. If the mind is shut up in its own ideas and refuses to allow her to bring in the Light and the Truth, if the vital clings to its desires and does not admit the true initiative and implusions that the Mother's power brings, if the
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physical is shut up in its desire habits and inertia and do not allow the Light and Force to enter in it and work, the one is not open. It is not possible to be entirely open all at once in all the movements but there must be a central opening in each part and a dominant aspiration or will in each pan (not in the mind alone) to admit only the Mother's "working" the rest will then be progressively done.
November 3, 1934
But the letter on Nirvana ? Do see to it tomorrow. I just send you a short song I composed in my closing portion of the tragic novel Dola—to be sung by its heroine in an ecstasy of aesthetic emotional sentimental love—to be disillusioned shortly of course. I have not treated it a la mode or conventionally, but tried to depict the sense of illumination that comes of romance on moonlight nights or vis-á-vis a beautiful piece of scenery, which sort of shines with a kind of reflected luster of the romance. I have tried to depict it as I have myself felt it often, with a vividness that even I cannot doubt. I wonder if this sort of elation that one feels in front of a lovely vista (particularly the moon-flooded one to which I am particularly susceptible) and associates it with the reflection of the love felt—is at all psychic or purely vital ? But its glow is very warm and pervading and delicious and there can be hardly any doubt as to the sense [of?] illumination one is endowed with in such circumstances. May one take it that it is some form of sublimation of the physical love in imagination's sky—if you know what I mean ? I mean I felt very vividly there was an essential delicatesse, subtlety, etherealness in such a transcription of one's subjective feeling in the objective world of rude matter. Even dull inert things seem to be animate. Illusion ? soit—but is it
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not a beautiful illusion so long as it lasts? Or is such a feeling not an illusion at all but a reflection of some reality t falling on the material scenery transforms the whole j crape ? Poets feelings are often unreliable—I have a , p distrust of poet's hallelujahs—that is why I ask. But doubt whether I have expressed myself at all clearly. I trust however, that if you read my lyric carefully you will understand what I am driving at.
All these feelings or impressions are aesthetic and of the .vital—their imprints over the ordinary movements is that they belong to the inner vital, not to the cruder external life- movements. It is this character that gives them their sense of elevation, beauty, etc. Such movements can be taken up by the psychic when it is the soul in things behind the aesthetic and emotional that is felt and by the spiritual when they are made a means of coming in contact with the cosmic spirit or in any way with the Divine.
November 7, 1934
Day before yesterday I composed this poem. The first half I send today. The second half I will have to polish up a little before sending you tomorrow. You will find I have composed it in mātrā-vrtta chhanda [poetical metre]. I have felt a surge of power in mātrā-vrtta too as you will find. It is a duologue and I have ended on the note that the Rishi who is the ideal of the seeker is superior qua guide to the Poet. l have had some fresh inspiration this morning. I have not really belittled the poet but have only tried to give him his place as I have felt it: not as a guide but as an artist etc. etc. The other day a bhakta of Tagore wrote n "ichitra64 that "all the greatest sages and avatars would do well to sit at the feet of Tagore who as a poet is a far
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greater prophet than all the seers of the Upanishads put together!" Qu´en dites-vous ? It is a reply to that. In modern times, we have alas pampered the aesthetic poet too much, don't you think?
My pain in the neck is usually followed by a long poem. So should I cherish it? I wonder.
I suppose the utterance of the kavi-bhakta [devotee of the poet] must be taken as uchchwās [exuberance]—as a serious proposition it is too Himalayan even to look at. But why is he so moderate, after all? He could just as well have said, all the seers, all the poets, all the prophets of this world and all worlds put together cannot equal in wisdom any one letter of any one syllable in any one line of any one poem of Tagore;
that would have been some rhetoric and some affirmation too!
Of course the poet's value lies in his poetic and not in his prophetic power. If he is a prophet also, the worth of his prophesy lies in its own value, this poetic merit does not add to that in the least, only to its expression.
November 10, 1934
I see. It is quite natural for the poets to vaunt their meter as the highest and themselves as the top of creation and for the intellectuals to run down the Yogi and the Rishi who claim to reach a higher than intellectual consciousness. Moreover the poet who lives still in the mind and is not yet a spiritual seer-poet represents to the human intellect the highest point of mental seership where the imagination tries to figure and embody in words what can really be grasped only by spiritual experience. It is therefore natural for these intellectuals to exalt him as the real seer and prophet. There is always, of course, behind that the modern or European mentality which confuses the vital with the soul and the mind with
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spirituality . The Poet imaging mental or. physical beauty is for physical something more spiritual than the seer or the God lover experiencing the eternal peace or the ineffable ecstasy. The Rishi or Yogi can drink of a deeper draught of Beauty ri Delight than the imagination of the poet at its highest can conceive, but what does your friend with his idea of the raskānā 65 Rishi know of the things ? (raso vai sail—the Divine . Delight). And it is not only the unseen Beauty that he can see but the visible and tangible also has for him a face of the All-beautiful which the mind cannot discover. It does not matter really what they say; but if a counter-blast had to be, you have done it pretty well and forcibly!
November 1934
About Nirvana
When I wrote in the Arya, I was setting forth an overmind view of things to the mind and putting it in mental terms, that was why I had sometimes to use logic. For in such a work— mediating between the intellect and the supra-intellectual— logic has a place, though it cannot have the chief place it occupies in purely mental philosophies. The Mayavadin himself labours to establish his point of view or his experience by a rigorous logical reasoning. Only, when it comes to an explanation of Maya, he, like the scientist dealing with Nature, can do no more than arrange and organise his ideas of the Process of this universal mystification; he cannot explain how or why his illusionary mystifying Maya came into existence- He can only say, "Well, but it is there.
Of course, it is there. But the question is, first, what is it? really an illusionary Power and nothing else, or is the Mayavadin´s idea of it a mistaken first view, a mental imperfect reading, even perhaps itself an illusion? And next, "Is illusion the sole or the highest Power which the Divine
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Consciousness or Super consciousness possesses?" The Ah lute is an absolute Truth free from Maya, otherwise Uberati80' would not be possible. Has then the supreme and absolute Truth no other active Power than a power of falsehood and with it, no doubt, for the two go together, a power of dissolving or disowning the falsehood—which is yet there for ever? I suggested that this sounded a little queer. But queer or not if it is so, it is so—for, as you point out, the Ineffable cannot be subjected to the laws of logic. But who is to decide whether it is so? You will say, those who get there. But get where? To the Perfect and the Highest, pūrnam param? Is the Mayavadin's featureless Brahman that Perfect, that Complete—is it the very Highest? Is there not or can there not be a higher than that highest, parāt param? That is not a question of logic, it is a question of spiritual fact, of a supreme and complete experience. The solution of the matter must rest not upon logic, but upon a growing, ever heightening, widening spiritual experience—an experience which must of course include or have passed through that of Nirvana and Maya, otherwise it would not be complete and would have no decisive value.
Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and with- out thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world—only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental realisation nor something glimpsed somewhere above—no abstraction—it was positive. substantial, the only positive reality—it was here in this very so-called physical world, pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world ' leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allow"19 nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial- cannot say there was anything exhilarating or rapturous in
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the experience, as it then came to me—(the ineffable Ananda the I had Years afterwards)—but what it brought was an inexpressible peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release freedom . I lived in that Nirvana for many months day and night before it began to admit other things into itself modify itself at all, and in fact fundamentally it remained for Years and years together until in the end it began to disappear year slowly into a greater Super consciousness from above. meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of every thing that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always, with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.
Now, that is the whole trouble in my approach to Mayavada. Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale. It came unasked, unsought for, though quite welcome. I had no least idea about it before, no aspiration towards it, in fact my aspiration was towards just the opposite' Spritual power to help the world and to do my work in it, Yet it came—without even a "May I come in" or a "By your leave". It just happened and settled in as if for all eternity or
(Sri Aurobindo's note :) In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence.
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as if it had been really there always. And then it slowly grew into something not less but greater than its first self. Hr, then could I accept Mayavada or persuade myself to pit against the Truth imposed on me from above the logic of Shankara?
But I do not insist on everybody passing through my experience or following the Truth that is its consequence. I have no objection to anybody accepting Mayavada as his soul's truth or his mind's truth or their way out of the cosmic difficulty. I object to it only if somebody tries to push it down my throat or the world's throat as the sole possible, satisfying and all-comprehensive explanation of things. For it is not that at all. There are many other possible explanations; it is not at all satisfactory, for in the end it explains nothing; and it is— and must be unless it departs from its own logic—all-exclusive, not in the least all-comprehensive. But that does not matter. A theory may be wrong or at least one-sided and imperfect and yet extremely practical and useful. This has been amply shown by the history of Science. In fact, a theory whether philosophical or scientific, is nothing else than a support for the mind, a practical device to help it to deal with its object, a staff to uphold it and make it walk more confidently and get along on its difficult journey. The very exclusiveness and one-sidedness of the Mayavada make it a strong staffer a forceful stimulus for a spiritual endeavour which means to be one-sided, radical and exclusive. It supports the effort of the Mind to get away from itself and from Life by a short cut into superconscience. Or rather it is the Purusha in Mind that wants to get away from the limitations of Mind and Life in the superconscient Infinite. Theoretically, the way for that is for the mind to deny all its perceptions and all the preoccupations of the vital and see and treat them as illusions. Practically' when the mind draws back from itself, it enters easily into a relationless peace in which nothing matters—for in its absoluteness there are no mental or vital values—and from w the mind can rapidly move towards that great short cut to superconscient, mindless trance, susupti. In proportion to thoroughness of that movement all the perceptions it had
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once accepted become unreal to it—illusion, Maya. It is on its road towards immergence.
Mayavada therefore with its sole stress on Nirvana, quite from its defects as a mental theory of things, serves a apart spiritual end and, as a path, can lead very high and far. even, if the Mind were the last word and there were nothing beyond it except the pure Spirit, I would not be averse to accepting it as the only way out. For what the mind with its a perceptions and the vital with its desires have made of life in this world, is a very bad mess, and if there were nothing better to be hoped for, the shortest cut to an exit would be the best. But my experience is that there is something beyond Mind; Mind is not the last word here of the Spirit. Mind is an ignorance-consciousness and its perceptions cannot be any- thing else than either false, mixed or imperfect—even when true, a partial reflection of the Truth and not the very body of Truth herself. But there is a Truth-Consciousness, not static only and self-introspective, but also dynamic and creative, and I prefer to get at that and see what it says about things and can do rather than take the short cut away from things offered as its own end by the Ignorance.
Still, I would have no objection if your attraction towards Nirvana were not merely a mood of the mind and vital but an indication of the mind's true road and the soul's issue. But it seems to me that it is only the vital recoiling from its own disappointed desires in an extreme dissatisfaction, not the soul Taping gladly to its true path. This Vairagya is itself a vital movement; vital Vairagya is the reverse side of vital desire—though the mind of course is there to give reasons and say ditto. Even this Vairagya, if it is one-pointed and exclusive, can lead or point towards Nirvana. But you have y sides to your personality or rather many personalities in you; lt is indeed their discordant movements each getting thro e way of the other, as happens when they are expressed through the external mind, that have stood much in the way of your sadhana. There is the vital personality which was turned towards success and enjoyment and got it and wanted
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to go on with it but could not get the rest of the being follow. There is the vital personality that wanted enjoyment of a deeper kind and suggested to the other that it could very well give up these unsatisfactory things if it got an equivalent in some faeryland of a higher joy. There is the psycho-vital personality that is the Vaishnava within you and wanted the Divine Krishna and bhakti and Ananda. There is the personality which is the poet and musician and a seeker of beauty through these things. There is the mental-vital personality which when it saw the vital standing in the way insisted on a grim struggle of Tapasya, and it is no doubt that also which approves Vairagya and Nirvana. There is the physical-mental personality which is the Russellite, extrovert, doubter. There is another mental-emotional personality all whose ideas are for belief in the Divine, Yoga, bhakti, Guruvada. There is the psychic being also which has pushed you into the sadhana and is waiting for its hour of emergence.
What are you going to do with all these people? If you want Nirvana, you have either to expel them or stifle them or beat them into coma. All authorities assure us that the exclusive Nirvana business is a most difficult job (duhkham dehavadbhih, says the Gita), and your own attempt at suppressing the others was not encouraging—according to your own account it left you as dry and desperate as a sucked orange, no juice left anywhere. If the desert is your way to the promised land, that does not matter. But—well, if it is not, then there is another way—it is what we call the integration, the harmonisation of the being. That cannot be done from outside, it cannot be done by the mind and vital being—they are sure to bungle their affair. It can be done only from within by the soul, the Spirit which is the centraliser, itself the centre of these radii- In all of them there is a truth that can harmonise with the true truth of the others. For there is a truth in Nirvana— Nirvan is nothing but the peace and freedom of the Spirit which can exist in itself, be there world or no world, world order world disorder. Bhakti and the heart's call for the Divine Love and Ananda. The will
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for Tapasya has in it a a truth—it is the truth of the divine Love and Ananda. The Spirit's mastery over its members. The musician and poet stand for a truth, it is truth of the expression of the Spirit through a truth behind the mental Affirmer; even beauty. There is a truth behind the mental doubter, the Russellian, through far behind him—the truth of the denial of false forms. Even behind the two vital personalities there is a truth, the Even of the possession of the inner and outer worlds not by the ego but by the Divine. That is the harmonisation for which our Yoga stands—but it cannot be achieved by any outward arrangement, it can only be achieved by going inside and looking, willing and acting from the psychic and from the spiritual centre. For the truth of the being is there and the secret of Harmony also is there.
November 11, 1934
I see that your dreams are becoming more and more experiences, realities in the deeper being—it is a very good sign of progress in the inner consciousness. I thought it best to write myself to Harin—I have done so tonight. I have no doubt there will be no difficulty—for Harin has repeatedly written that his feelings towards others have entirely changed and he no longer feels any reaction of anger or resentment when criticisms or mockeries against himself are reported to him and that he has nothing but good wishes for those who make them as they are followers of the same path towards ."Nation. I don't think you need mind others knowing if there is a reconciliation. Venkataraman has long desired an understanding between you and Harin, Ambu hardly counts and Dara is not likely to be interested. But although there is not now any formal retirement, Harin is much absorbed now a days in his sadhana and not seeing many who ask to o him, so I don't know whether a visit or visits will be
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possible. However I will let you know what I decide when hear from him.
I have been reading your poem which is full of beauty and vigour. There is only one point, that you seem almost to say that the poet is necessarily not a seer or Rishi. But if the mere poet is not a Rishi, the Rishi after all can be a poet—the greater can contain the less, even though the less is not the greater.
November 15, 1934
If you truly decide in all your consciousness to offer your being to the Divine to mould it as He wills, then most of your personal difficulty will disappear—I mean that which still remains, and there will be only the lesser difficulties of the transformation of the ordinary into the yogic consciousness, normal to all sadhana. Your mental difficulty has been all along that you wanted to mould the sadhana and the reception of experience and the response of the Divine according to your own preconceived mental ideas and left no freedom to the Divine to act or manifest according to His own truth and reality and the need not of your mind and vital but of your soul and spirit. It is as if your vital were to present a coloured glass to the Divine and tell Him, "Now pour yourself into that and I will shut you up there and look at you through the colours," or, from the mental point of view, as if you were to offer a test-tube in a similar way and say, "Get in there and I will test you and see what you are." But the Divine is shy about such processes and His objections are not altogether unintelligible.
At any rate I am glad the experience has come back again-— it has come as the result of your effort and mine for the last days and is practically a reminder that the door of entry into yogic experience is still there and can open at the right touch
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you taxed me the other day with making a mistake about your experience of breathing with the name in it and reproached me for drawing a big inference from a very small phenomenon— a thing, by the way, which the scientists are doing daily with- out the least objection from your reason. You had the same idea, I believe, about my acceptance of your former experiences, this current and the descent of stillness in the body, as signs of the Yogi in you. But these ideas spring from an ignorance of the spiritual realm and its phenomena and only show the incapacity of the outer intellectual reason to play the role you want it to play, that of a supreme judge of spiritual truth and inner experience—a quite natural incapacity because it does not know even the A.B.C. of these things and it passes my comprehension how one can be a judge about a thing of which one knows nothing. I know that the "scientists" are continually doing it with supraphysical phenomena outside their province—those who never had a spiritual or occult experience laying down the law about occult phenomena and Yoga; but that does not make it any more reasonable or excusable. Any Yogi who knows something about pranayama or japa can tell you that the running of the name in the breath is not a small phenomenon but of great importance in these practices and, if it comes naturally, a sign that something in the inner being has done that kind of sadhana in the past. As for the current it is the familiar sign of a first touch of the higher consciousness flowing down in the form of a stream— like the "wave" of light of the scientist—to prepare its possession of mind, vital and physical in the body. So is the stillness and rigidity of the body in your former experience a sign of the same descent of the higher consciousness in its form or tendency of stillness and silence. It is a perfectly sound contusion that one who gets these experiences at the beginning has the capacity of Yoga in him and can open, even if open, if opening is delayed by other movements belonging to his ordinary nature. These things are part of the science of Yoga, as familiar as the crucial experiences of physical Science are to the scientific seeker.
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As for the impression of swooning, it is simply because you were not in sleep, as you imagined, but in a first condition what is usually called swapna-samādhi, dream trance. What you felt like swooning was only the tendency to go deeper in into a more profound swapna-samadhi or else into a susupti trance—the latter being what the word trance usually means in English, but it can be extended to the swapna kind also. To the outer mind this deep loss of the surface consciousness seems like a swoon, though it is really nothing of the kind— hence the impression. Many sadhaks here get at times or sometimes for a long period this deeper swapna-samādhi'in what began as sleep—with the result that a conscious sadhana goes on in their sleeping as in their waking hours. This is different from the dream experiences that one has on the vital or mental plane which are themselves not ordinary dreams but actual experiences on the mental, vital, psychic or subtle physical planes. You have had several dreams which were vital dream experiences, those in which you met the Mother and recently you had one such contact on the mental plane which, for those who understand these things, means that the inner consciousness is preparing in the mind as well as in the vital, which is a great advance.
You will ask why these things take place either in sleep or Hi an indrawn meditation and not in the waking state. There is a twofold reason. First, that usually in Yoga these things begin in an indrawn state and not in the waking condition— it is only if or when the waking mind is ready that they come as readily in the waking state. Again in you the waking mind has been too active in its insistence on the ideas and operations of the outer consciousness to give the inner mind a chance to project itself into the waking state. But it is through the inner consciousness and primarily through the inner mind that these things come; so, if there is not a clear passage from the inner to the outer, it must be in the inner states that they first appear. If the waking mind is subject or surrendered to the inner consciousness and willing to become its instrument, then even from the beginning these openings can
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through the waking consciousness. That again is a familiar law of the yoga
I may add that when you complain of the want of response, are probably expecting immediately some kind of direct manifestation of the Divine which, as a rule, though there are exceptions, comes only when previous experiences have prepared the consciousness so that it may feel, understand, recognise the response. Ordinarily, the spiritual or divine consciousness comes first—what I have called the higher consciousness—the presence or manifestation comes after- wards. But this descent of the higher consciousness is really the touch or influx of the Divine itself, though not at first recognised by the lower nature.
I shall write about the touch before belief and the taliye dekhā [go deep into] in another letter, I am obliged from tomorrow to suspend officially all but urgent or important correspondence till a week after the 24th. This is necessary as a respite at this period from the enormous mass of work which after August 15th has exceeded what I complained of before that date, and also that I may have time to carry on the invisible work which has been sadly hampered by the weight of the visible. But this need not interfere.
November 18, 1934
You ask me whether you have to give up your predilection for testing before accepting and to accept everything in Yoga a Priori—and by testing you mean testing by the ordinary reason The only answer I can give to that is that the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain and go according a law of their own, have their own method of perception, Criteria and all the rest of it which are neither those of the main of the physical senses nor of the domain of rational of scientific enquiry. Just as scientific enquiry passes beyond
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that of the physical senses and enters the domain of the infinite and infinitesimal about which the senses can say nothing and test nothing—for one cannot see and touch an electron or know by the evidence of the sense-mind whether it exists or not or decide by that evidence whether the earth really turns round the sun and not rather the sun round the earth as our senses and all our physical experience daily tell us— so the spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive discrimination which com- pares the experiences, see what they mean, how far and in what field each is valid, what is the place of each in the whole, how it can be reconciled or related with others that at first might seem to contradict it, etc., etc., until you can move with a secure knowledge in the vast field of spiritual phenomena. That is the only way to test spiritual experience. I have myself tried the other method and found it absolutely incapable and inapplicable. On the other hand, if you are not prepared to go through all that yourself—as few can do except those of extraordinary spiritual stature—you have to accept the leading of a Master, as in Science you accept a teacher instead of going through the whole field of Science and its experimentation all by yourself—at least until you have accumulated sufficient experience and knowledge. If that is accepting things a priori, well, you have to accept a priori. For I am unable to see by what valid tests you propose to make the ordinary reason the judge of what is beyond it.
You quote the sayings of Vivekananda and Kabiraj Gopinath.66 Is this Kabiraj the disciple of the [?] Sannyasi or is he another? In any case, I would like to know before assignning a value to these utterances what they actually did for the testing of their spiritual perceptions and experiences. How did
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vivekananda test the value of his spiritual experiences—some f them not more credible to the ordinary positive mind than the translation through the air of Bejoy Goswami's wife to lakes Manas or of Bejoy Goswami himself by a similar method to Benares? I know nothing about Kabiraj Gopinath, hut what were his tests and how did he apply them? What were his methods? his criteria? It seems to me that no ordinary mind could accept the apparition of Buddha out of a wall or the half hour's talk with Hayagriva as valid facts by any kind of testing. It would either have to accept them a Priori or on the sole evidence of Vivekananda, which comes to the same thing, or to reject them a priori as hallucinations or mere mental images accompanied in one case by an auditive hallucination. I fail to see how it could "test" them. Or how was I to test by the ordinary mind my experience of Nirvana? To what conclusion could I come about it by the aid of the ordinary positive reason? How could I test its validity? I am at a loss to imagine. I did the only thing I could, to accept it as a strong and valid truth of experience, let it have its full play and produce its full experiential consequences until I had sufficient yogic knowledge to put it in its place. Finally, how without inner knowledge or experience can you or anyone else test the inner knowledge and experience of others ?
I have often said that discrimination is not only perfectly admissible but indispensable in spiritual experience. But it must be a discrimination founded on knowledge, not a reasoning founded on ignorance. Otherwise you tie up your mind and hamper experience by preconceived ideas which are as much a priori as any acceptance of a spiritual truth or experience can be. Your idea that surrender can only come y love is a point in instance. It is perfectly true in Yogic experiences that surrender by true love, which means psychic and spiritual love, is the most powerful, simple and effective of all, but one cannot, putting that forward as a dictum arrived at by the ordinary reason, shut up the whole of possible experience of true surrender into that formula or announce on its strength that one must wait till one loves perfectly
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before one can surrender. Yogic experience shows that the surrender can also be made by the mind and will, a clear and sincere mind seeing the necessity of surrender and a clear and sincere will enforcing it on the recalcitrant members Also, experience shows that not only can surrender come by love, but love also can come by surrender or grow with it from an imperfect to a perfect love. One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one's ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater Knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great calm tranquil luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome. If one insists on one's own ideas and reasonings, the greater Light and Knowledge cannot come or else is marred and obstructed in the coming at every step by a lower interference; if one insists on one's own desires and fancies, that great luminous Will and Force cannot act in its own true power—for you ask it to be the servant of your desires; if one refuses to give up one's petty ways of feeling, eternal Love and the supreme Ananda cannot descend or are mixed and spilt from the effervescing crude emotional vessel. No amount of ordinary reasoning can get rid of that necessity of surmounting the lower in order that the higher may be there.
And if some find that retirement is the best way of giving oneself to the Higher, to the Divine by avoiding as much as possible occasions for the bubbling up of the lower, why not? The aim they have come for is that, and why blame or look with distrust and suspicion on the means they find best or daub it with disparaging adjectives to discredit it—grim, inhuman and the rest? It is your vital that shrinks from it and your vital mind that supplies these epithets which express only your shrinking and not what the retirement really is. For it
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is the vital or the social part of it that shrinks from solitude; the thinking mind does not but rather courts it. The poet seeks solitude with himself or with Nature to listen to his inspiration; the thinker plunges into solitude to meditate on things and commune with a deeper knowledge; the scientist shuts himself up in his laboratory to pore by experiment into the secrets of Nature; these retirements are not grim and inhuman. Neither is the retirement of the sadhak into the exclusive concentration of which he feels the need; it is a means to an end, to the end on which his whole heart is set. As for the Yogin or bhakta who has already begun to have the fundamental experience, he is not in a grim and inhuman solitude. The Divine and all the world are there in the being of the one, the supreme Beloved, or his Ananda is there in the heart of the other.
I say this as against your depreciation of retirement founded on ignorance of what it really is; but I do not, as I have often said, recommend a total seclusion, for I hold that to be a dangerous expedient which may lead to morbidity and much error. Nor do I impose retirement on anyone as a method or approve of it unless the person himself seeks it, feels its necessity, has the joy of it and the proof that it helps to the spiritual experience. It is not to be imposed on anyone as a principle, for that is the mental way of doing things, the way of the ordinary mind—it is as a need that it has to be accepted, when it is felt as a need, not as a general law or rule.
What you describe in your letter as the response of the Divine would not be called that in the language of yogic experience—this feeling of great peace, light, ease, trust, difficulties lessening, certitude would rather be called a response of your own nature to the Divine. There is a Peace or a Light which is the response of the Divine, but that is a wide Peace, a great Light which is felt as a presence other than one's Personal self, not part of one's personal nature, but something that comes from above, though in the end it possesses toe nature—or there is the Presence itself which carries with it indeed the absolute liberation, happiness, certitude. But the
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first responses of the Divine are not often like that—they come rather as a touch, a pressure one must be in a condition to recognise and to accept, or it is a voice of assurance sometimes a very "still small voice," a momentary Image or Presence; a whisper of Guidance sometimes, there are many forms it may take. Then it withdraws and the preparation of the nature goes on till it is possible for the touch to come again and again, to last longer, to change into something more pressing and near and intimate. The Divine in the beginning does not impose himself—he asks for recognition, for acceptance. That is one reason why the mind must fall silent, not put tests, not make claims—there must be room for the true intuition which recognises at once the true touch and accepts it.
Then for the tumultuous activity of the mind which prevents your concentration. But that or else a more tiresome, obstinate, grinding, mechanical activity is always the difficulty when one tries to concentrate and it takes a long time to get the better of it. That or the habit of sleep which prevents either the waking concentration or the conscious samadhi or the absorbed and all-excluding trance which are the three forms that Yogic concentration takes. But it is surely ignorance of Yoga, its processes and its difficulties that makes you feel desperate and pronounce yourself unfit forever because of this quite ordinary obstacle.
The insistence of the ordinary mind and its wrong reasonings, sentiments and judgments, the random activity of the thinking mind in concentration or its mechanical activity, the slowness of response to the veiled or the initial touch are the ordinary obstacles the mind imposes, just as pride, ambition, vanity, sex, greed, grasping of things for one's own ego are the difficulties and obstacles offered by the vital. As the vital difficulties can be fought down and conquered, so can the mental. Only one has to see that these are the inevitable obstacles and neither cling to them nor be terrified or over- whelmed because they are there. One has to persevere till one can stand back from the mind as from the vital and feel
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the deeper and larger mental and vital Purusha within one which are capable of silence, capable of a straight receptivity of the true Word and Force as of the true silence. If the nature takes the way of fighting down the difficulties first, then the first half of the way is long and tedious and the complaint of the want of the response of the Divine arises. But really the Divine is there all the time, working behind the veil as well as waiting for the recognition of his response and the response to the response to be possible.
November 20, 1934
I like very much both the feeling and the form of your poem. Of course when you are writing poems or composing you are in contact with your inner being, that is why you feel so different then. The whole art of Yoga is to get that contact and get from it into the inner being itself, for so one can enter directly into and remain in all that is great and luminous and beautiful. Then one can try to establish them in this trouble- some and defective outer shell of oneself and in the outer world also.
November 22, 1934
There is no doubt that a new kind of flow seems to have opened in the poetry you are now writing—there is a greater ease and spontaneity and the rhythm seems to come more of itself. I have not yet been able to read the new version carefully and throughout, but only glanced at it reading here and there. I shall see after the 24th when I can read it more coherently. (I read though the poem of the Poet and the Seeker; it
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seems to me a very strong and beautiful poem.) I am not enough of an expert in Bengali metre and rhythm to pronounce, but it seems to me that the metre you are writing has a flow and sweep which is very attractive.
As to the plane from which the poem is written, it is not so^ easy for me to say. In dealing with Amal's poetry, I can say¦ at once for there it is very clear; even when there is a mixture of several sources, the elements show themselves still. It would be more difficult for me to do the same with Harm's poems, for it is there more complex. In Bengali or any other language the difficulty increases; for the familiarity with the texture of the language is more of the mind and less of the inmost ear which at once catches these things. I should have to make a sort of comparative scrutiny of different Bengali styles to catch the different forms the influence of these different planes take there. For it is a matter of the inner [realms ?] of expression and rhythm, more than of the sub- stance. When I spoke of your poetry (not all but many of the poems) as psychic lyrical coming through the vital, I was speaking of the source of the substance rather than of the manner. However some day I will look at it from a deeper and completer point of view and try to tell.
I am very much encouraged by the development taking place in you. It is the mental change that is coming which will allow both mind and vital to become the instruments of the inner being. Let it go on now naturally and with an easy development. All the rest will follow.
December 1934
I got your first letter and as I always look at yours if there is any and leave the rest aside for later reading I sat down after my daily walk and concentration to answer it. I missed your second "urgent" letter altogether and came to know of
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it after I had seen the third—later in the night. If I had had it, I would of course have answered at once. I am sorry you have had to wait the whole night without an answer.
I was a little taken aback by the first letter, for my remarks about X had been perfectly casual and I attached little importance to them when I wrote them. I would certainly not have written them if I had thought they were of a kind to cause trouble to you. In scribbling them I had no idea of imposing my views about X on you—I had no idea of writing as a Guru to a disciple or laying down the law, it was rather as a friend to a friend expressing my ideas and discussing them with a perfect ease and confidence. Both the Mother and myself have a natural tendency to speak or write to you in that way, expressing the idea that comes without measuring of terms or any arrière pensee, because we feel close to your psychic being always and that is the relation which we have quite naturally with you. That was why I wrote like that and I had no other intention in me.
I do not believe in human judgments because I have always found them fallible—also perhaps because I have myself been so blackened by human judgments that I do not care to be guided by them with regard to others. All this however I write to explain my own point of view; I am not insisting on it as a law for others. I have never been in the habit of insisting that everybody must think as I do—any more than I insist on everybody following me and my Yoga.
All that to brush aside what is an evident misunderstanding. Now about XYZ you should remember that what I wrote about them was not an after invention or an idea formed as a result of their going—all that I wrote about X, for instance, I had written to him long before he went—and also with the others I had not refrained from letting them know what Was wrong with them, except for YZ with whom it was not necessary. I did not whole-heartedly assure and praise and encourage while they were there nor whole-heartedly damn When they were gone. Nor would I have said anything about them if I had not been questioned from every side. Why then
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should you think that I would attack you if you went away: you, to whom I have always spoken with encouragement and kindness, and never I think with severe disapprobation or warning as I did with XYZ? If you went away, I should write, if I had to write what I have always said to you: "Dilip had his difficulties, but he was gradually surmounting them, but his one great difficulty of doubt and self-distrust he did not meet sufficiently," and I would add, "and in a weak moment he has allowed it to carry him away. But he will find that he can discover his soul here alone and then he will return."
But all that is really unnecessary since you are not like the ( others consumed with the desire to go or feeling the call for action elsewhere. But why this constant slipping back to the ( idea of failure? Why this idea that I am offended? Have I ever taken offence or evinced any least idea of giving you up? How is it you still lend credence to a suggestion your whole experience of our relation contradicts. Your attacks of doubt and self-distrust are a weakness I have taken account of and I refuse to consider it as a bar to your arrival at the goal. It is in all sincerity that I affirm your possibilities.
Bidhur—is one of the most beautiful poems you have written ten—a psychic poem—sustained in its beauty throughout— an element of sadness also has a strong psychic tinge.
1934 ?
An admirer of yours has just sent me a poem which he requests me to sing to you without fail. But I wonder how
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you would take it if I really did, for he-has in effect sounded the death-knell of Rishihood as exemplified in calling you, virtually, the last of the Romans. I will only quote two lines from his poem. Qu'en dites-vous ?
Bhārater sesh rishi pushpānjali shrīcharane
Karma jnān bhakti yog nitya siddha bitarane
[0 India's last Rishi, I offer my tribute at your feet
Distribute karma, jnana, bhakti and Yoga, thou who art eternally perfect]
You don't understand. It means that all my shishyagan [group of disciples] will become supermen, so there will be no chance of any such small thing as a Rishi appearing again:
I am the last of that crowd. All the same you can send him my blessings—he deserves it for giving us such a gorgeous prospect.
December 2, 1934
Today I wrote a poem in the same chhanda: its developments and ramifications.
And what do you think of my handwriting—Bengali ? Everyone is aghast at its rapid supramentalisation! I mean in the direction of high-born legibility?
Marvellous and miraculous! How did you manage it. I read now with a sort of gasping ease—I mean an ease which gasps with astonishment at its own existence. I used formerly to ^op at every second line and wonder what the double deuce this or that word might be—but that is all over. Perhaps if you could communicate the secret of it by influence or otherwise, I might manage to make one-tenth of my own writing just barely legible—which would be at least a decimal relief to everybody.
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The metre is very pretty and the poem too.
December 5, 1934
Barinda 67 has just written me a letter which I have mislaid and will send you tomorrow. He has started a Yoga- school! Fancy that! A book also—to me, one for Library and one for yourself enclosed. He wants me to send him the addresses of some celebrities in Europe to whom this book will be sent. But why?
God knows! From what he writes it would appear that he wants certificates from them or advertisement-utilisable eulogies.
But what an idea, good heavens. A Yoga school—a class, a blackboard (with the gods on it?), "interesting cases"! a spiritual clinic, what? What has happened to Barin's wits and especially to his sense of humour? Too much Statesman^! marriage? writing for a living? age?
I open the book and come across a delicious misprint (page 60). "The wounded dear dripping blood passes its long and tortured path to escape the hunter which (?) is ever after it." It is humanity who is the "dear." Dear, dear! poor wounded darling!
May I see Mother tomorrow for a couple of minutes with the money? When?
Today there are birthdays and departures, so Mother will not be free till 12.30 or quarter to one. If it is not inconvenient for you, you can come at that time.
Now for the poems—the greater reality than Wounded Humanity, is it not ? Do you not find a new note of simplicity
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in them ? They are coming, coming—no "No admission" to them now. They are not humanity.
Yes, they are very lucid and flowing—you have got your boat into full stream.
(Written on Barin's letter)
Found the letter too. What do you think of it?
What do you think of his "world seething with gods and goddesses?" Does he still see the gods while we, alas,
don't? Then is he not better off than us ?
Kilbil korche [seething] is admirable—it reminds me of a satire I read somewhere that 1 lakh of gods, 2 lakhs of Asuras and 3 lakhs of Raksasas, Pisacas, Pramathas 68 et hoc genus omne69 are contained in a man's big toe. I may be out a little in the figures and the locality, I write from distant memory— it may have been the heel for instance, but big toe sounds more literary and more probable. So you see the divine killbillany (or should it be killbillitude) of this world of his (or hers? or theirs?) is not a patch on that of a human big toe. However, if the gods are so cheap and plentiful, it is no wonder they are seen so easily. Ours probably are a shyer and rarer breed—that's why they don't offer themselves to publicity with the same readiness. Seethe, godheads, seethe!
December 7, 1934
The three sonnets are indeed very fine. I have not yet gone through the more careful reading of the long poem which I
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intended—perhaps on Sunday if I can get rid of a number of unanswered letters by then; otherwise—. But it is certain that in these sonnets you have entered into a deeper inspiration, and I am glad also that you are making a conscious use of your poetry for your sadhana.
I have ground out a stanza (the rhymes are however on a different model) for the metre, but I am trying to grind out another which will give the first some meaning and, as soon as the labour is done, I will send it.
December 10, 1934
Yesterday afternoon Nirod read out your letter re. Poetry, etc. Then we wondered and wondered and wandered— till I said that I had all along thought so and that poetry, karma, etc. were not the thing—the thing was to seek puma saran [complete surrender] in dhyān [meditation] in the orthodox way—nānya panthāh vidyāte [no other path exists] etc. You know I have always been deeply uneasy about dhyān and it has always been a thorn in my side. Your letter therefore I supported wholeheartedly but interpreted it (because of this malaise-complex which has always made me dubious of my poetical activities as you know to your cost) as meaning that after all it was not much good all these things—as these were suffered more or less as concessions by the Divine who wanted only complete surrender and not such karma as poetry or music or well any other kind of work. Anilkumar + Nishikanta contradicted me. Anilkumar said: "If all such action were at bottom meaningless and merely fettered us, why on earth did Sri Aurobindo and Mother repeatedly lay such stress on work and approved of workers offering their work by way of sadhana ?" Nishikanta said: "If poetry etc., were so useless why does Sri Aurobindo take so much interest in
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poetry and besides at least a part of our consciousness is turned upwards, as I have felt always, when we write poetry." I said, "Yes, but a very small part, the bulk takes to poetry because it feels the delight of chhanda bhava [feeling of rhythm], expression, etc." etc., etc. Nishikanta was a little dismayed by my cogent arguments, and I clinched the matter by holding up dhyān as the summit of sadhana.
Then at night I felt very uneasy. I felt I was somehow fundamentally wrong. "Why indeed" I said to myself, "all this Herculean effort to master chhanda, etc. so much pains and meticulous attention to perfection of karma in detail, such order, precision, smoothness, etc., etc., etc., if karma is at bottom suspect in its very nature ? And then Sri Aurobindo has repeatedly said that he is not Mayavadi. If it be so then how can I say that karma is far less desirable that dhyān ? True poetry, etc. should all be dedicated—but because we have not been able to dedicate it as we would like to I had no right to dismay Nishikanta and -my own poetry-loving self that such love is all self- love. All I could say was that the motive of poetry in Yoga should be progressively changed from the human egoist artistic level to the Divine level in that it has to be dedicated as everything else so why say that dhyān alone is the way of wisdom and karma, art, etc. that of folly? Well I am illogical since this is the position of mayavad not of adhyātmayoga [spiritual Yoga] of Sri Aurobindo.
This morning I told Anilkumar I was wrong and I will tell Nishikanta also. Poor man! He is writing such lovely poetry which I cannot help delighting in—and yet I dismayed him so! He is dismayed enough surely by Mother's smilelessness as Sahana was telling me so yesterday) without my Pooh-poohing such lovely poetry whose gorgeousness and expression is at times simply dazzling to me and others too (Saurin, Nirod, Kanai, Sahana, all are marvelling at his Poetry nowadays—though formerly they didn't—even Moni who never praises anybody sought him out and
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lavished encomiums on his exquisite poems published lately in different journals!) And I was so chilling (bad— wicked, that!).
In sheer repentance I wrote a poem—and the inspiration welled up with all the more gusto by virtue of the remorse. Please read it, and tell me if my attitude is not righted now eventually. Not that I did not realise at all while I pooh- poohed poetry (my own most—as I said I loved poetry because it gave me ecstasy of expression not because it made me a bhakta) but my kshova [grudge] complex because of my inability to concentrate dhyān) came up topmost and I belittled all karma out of sheer impetuosity. Wrong. But the comfort is that I saw the wrong angle of my outlook. So that's that.
Apropos, I have often felt though that dhyān was a better way than karma, poetry, etc. to reach the Divine—a shorter cut I mean. Am I right?
Meditation is one means of the approach to the Divine and a great way, but it cannot be called short-cut—for most it is a most long and difficult though a very high ascent. It can by no means be short unless it brings a descent—and even then it is only the foundation that is quickly laid—afterwards meditation has to build laboriously a big superstructure on that foundation. It is very indispensable, but there is nothing of the short cut about it.
Karma is a much simpler road—provided one's mind is not fixed on the Karma to the exclusion of the Divine. The aim must be the Divine and the work can only be a means. The use of poetry, etc. is to keep one in contact with one's inner being and that helps to prepare for the direct contact with the inmost, but one must not stop with that, one must go on to the real thing. If one thinks of being a "literary man" or a poet or a painter as things worthwhile for their own sake, then it is no longer the yogic spirit. That is why I have sometimes to say that our business is to be yogis, not merely poets, painters, etc.
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Love, bhakti, surrender, the psychic opening are the only short-cut to the Divine—or can be; for if the love and bhakti are too vital, then there is likely to be a seesaw between ecstatic expectation and viraha, abhiman [hurt love], despair, etc., which make it not a short cut but a long one, a zigzag, not a straight flight, a whirling round one's own ego instead of a running towards the Divine.
December 12, 1934
This post-card from Subhash I received last mail. He had written it before starting for Calcutta by aeroplane. Now he is practically a prisoner—a home-internee really —at his residence. I wonder what work he will be doing now. In Europe he had been actively going about and wrote a book on Indian struggle. No doubt all is part of the lila [play] as says Krishnaprem and I wish him God-speed de tout mon coeur [with all my heart]. Only I wonder why he thinks that "okhāne thakiyā kāj hoy nā" [no work can be done by staying there] ? I only trust a time will come when he will be able to see that true kaj hoy [work is done] only when the Divine is realised. I am sorry he is not changed in his outlook. It is strange that in prison he always thinks much more differently than when he comes out and is active. Now he is a full-fledged activist de nouveau [again] —going about in a rush, seeing people, writing books, attending Patel's funeral, etc., etc.—instead of taking rest and curing himself of this malignant abdominal ulcer! He used once to meditate and see light and had a real bhakti —had turned a sannyasin even once. And now he says that seeking the Divine is useless inactive work!! Great snakes! (to quote your expletive) does he truly mean that all the people who are rushing about are doing great work?!! Some people may be doing something—may be even a thundering nincompoop does some good work
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sometimes in spite of himself, though after a lot of useless waste of precious energy—but to say sweepingly that "without personal contact no kaj hoy"—well—, it simply passes me. Qu'en dites-vous? I find, alas, there is a deeply disappointing element about my nationalist activist friend —much though I admire his strength of character and idealism, what?
I had never a very great confidence in Subhash's Yoga-turn getting the better of his activism—he has two strong ties that prevent it—ambition and need to act and lead in the vital/ and in the mind a mental idealism—these two things are the great fosterers of illusion. The spiritual path needs a certain amount of realism—one has to. see the real value of the things that are—which is very little, except as steps in evolution. Then one can either follow the spiritual static path of rest and release or the spiritual dynamic path of a greater truth to be brought down into life. But otherwise—
I have worked out the spondaic poem after much labour and anguish and tribulation of spirit. Glory be to Ganesh the obstacle-breaker for his heavy and forceful trunk-swinging— otherwise it could not have been done. But I want a day or two to see if it is all that at the moment it pretends to be.
December 13, 1934
I enclose your letter and my typescript of the same; at two or three places I have not been able to read. Please insert the "words" unsolved—but in a way that need not (I submit) necessitate head-shaking and magnifying glass and tapping the forehead.
I believe my corrections are irreproachably legible. If not, there is no help—tap, shake and magnify.
I will trouble you no longer (for the present) with the
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accentual metres. I have finished a dozen and no new inspiration has come to me in that direction. I have finished however twelve matra-vrtta sonnets (I have been working like a giant of late in spite of your dubiety of activism—and my own, to crown all) of which I send you two herewith. do you know in the last twenty-one days from 22nd November to 12th December I have written 63 poems ? Average 3 a day? My record anyway. I have never had my inspiration sustained so long. And what is more—would you believe it, great snakes!—my arch-friend doubt has not favoured me with any visit worth the name for this interval ? I wonder! I marvel! Nay, I gape—in astonishment— physically as well as spiritually!
Very good indeed. Both the quantity and quality of the work taken together are remarkable. These two sonnets are very good.
Yesterday a stream of new inspiration came to me and I wrote off a new page on Kavi versus Rishi (which by the way Parichand loved immensely, isn't he niceness incarnate ?) which also I enclose. The more I read this poem, the more I feel the poet does deserve every word of it— and it is high time he had a straight talking to—even I submit a little bit of emphasis on the other side of the medal. This inspiration Rishi contrasted with Poet I had principally from your line "The Rishi can drink of a deeper draught of Beauty and Delight than the imagination of the poet at its highest can conceive." It is marvellous how the inspiration simply pours. Last evening at meditation this line simply hammered at my brain and here's the result.
What you write in the lines you have sent is true as well as forcible—but what poet is going to admit it? Othello's occupation would be gone—unless he turned himself into poet and Rishi in one, but that is more easily claimed than done.
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December 18, 1934
I enclose the four last sonnets in the matra-vrtta. From tomorrow I will send you laghu guru sonnets which will complete my cycle of five chhandas (mātra-vrtta, aksaravrtta, svara-vrtta, laghu guru and praswāni).70 This will prove to you, I trust that it was not out of a provincial-parochial- national-jingoistic view that I admired the great and increasing potentialities of Bengali metres. Here you see are five distinct principles of unit-counting which is no joke, I hope you will admit volontaire ?... I don't know how on earth I discovered this. But that it (praswānī) is a new and major chhanda there can't be the shadow of a doubt and I am doubly sure of this as Prabodh Sen71 not only agrees with me but has warmly congratulated me. There are still two other minor varieties (upachhanda) which make seven in all—fancy that!
These sonnets by the way have brought into relief (in a sort of similar conditions as it were) the varieties of Bengali metres. And I do feel all this would have been impossible of attainment by one like me had it not been for your guidance, constant encouragement and yogic force. And to write so many sonnets—I—who have never up till now felt quite reconciled to the sonnet form—being too sombre and terse for me. But you will see that the laghu guru sonnets are more lyrical than the others, in fact the praswānī and laghu guru are hardly sonnets being at least seventy per cent lyric.
You have certainly, it seems to me, been very successful in your sonnets—the lyrical sonnets, if one may so call them, included. As for the five forms, I am quite ready to admit the opulence of metrical possibility in Bengali—I hope that Prabodh's approval will be the forerunner of a general assent to the praswānī .
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December 23, 1983
I thought I had intimated that the sragdhara72 was a great success—so why conclude that I did not appreciate it?
I do not understand also why you shall assume that I am displeased with the karma-questioning. I castigated or fustigated Nirod not from displeasure, not even "more in sorrow than in anger," but for fun and also from a high sense of duty; for that erring mortal was bold enough to generalise from his very limited experience and impose it as a definite law of Yoga, discrediting in the process my own immortal philosophy. What then could I do but jump on him in a spirit of genial massacre?
I am afraid your letter does very much the same thing. In spite of your disclaimer you practically come to the conclusion that all my nonsense about integral Yoga and karma being as much a way to realisation as jnana and bhakti is either a gleaming chimera or practicable only by Avatars or else a sheer laborious superfluity—since one can bump straight into the Divine through the open door of Bhakti or sweep majestically in him by the easy high road of meditation; so why this scramble through the jungle of karma by which nobody ever reached anywhere ? The old Yogas are true, are they not? Then why a newfangled more difficult Yoga with unheard talk about the supramental and god knows what else? There can be no answer to that; for I can only answer by a repetition of the statement of my own knowledge and experience—that is what I have done in today's answer to Nirod—and that amounts only to a perverse obstinacy in . riding my gleaming and dazzling chimera and forcing my nuisance of a superfluity on a world weary of itself and anxious to get a short easy cut to the Divine. Unfortunately, I don't believe in short cuts—at any rate none ever led me where I wanted to go. However, let it rest there.
I have never disputed the truth of the old Yogas—I have Myself had the experience of Vaishnava bhakti and of Nirvana. I recognise their truth in their own field and for their own
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purpose—the truth of their experience so far as it goes—. though I am in no way bound to accept the truth of the mental philosophies founded on the experience. 1 similarly find that my Yoga is true in its own field—a larger field, as I think— and for its own purpose. The purpose of the old is to get away from life to the Divine—so, obviously, let us drop Karma. The purpose of the new is to reach the Divine and bring the full- ness of what is gained into life—for that. Yoga by works indispensable- II seems to me that there is no mystery about that or anything to perplex anybody—it is rational and inevitable- Only you say that the thing is impossible; but that is what is said about everything before it is done-
1 may point out that Karmayoga is not a new but a very old Yoga: the Gita was not written yesterday and Karmayoga existed before the Gita. Your idea that the only justification in the Gita for works is that it is an unavoidable nuisance, so better make the best use of it, is rather summary and crude, If that were all, the Gita would be the production of an imbecile and I would hardly have been justified in writing two volumes on it or the world in [admiring?] it as one of the . greatest scriptures, especially for its treatment of the problem of place of works in spiritual endeavour. There is surely more in it than that. Anyhow your double whether works can lead to realisation or rather your flat and sweeping denial of the possibility contradicts the experience of those who have achieved this supposed impossibility. You say that work lowers the consciousness, brings you out of the inner into the outer —yes, if you consent to externalise yourself in it instead of doing works from within; but that is just what one has to learn not to do. Thought and feeling can also externalise one in the same way; but it is a question of linking though!', feeling and act firmly to the inner consciousness by living there and making the rest an instrument. Difficult? Even bhakti 1s not easy and Nirvana for most men more difficult than all.
You again try to floor me with Ramakrishna. But one thing puzzles me, as Shankara's stupendous activity of karma puzzles me in the apostle of inaction—you see you are not the
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only puzzled person in the world. Ramakrishna also gave the image of the jar which ceased gurgling when it was full. Well, but Ramakrishna spent the last years of his life in talking about the Divine and receiving disciples—that was not action, pot work? Did Ramakrishna become a half-full jar after being a full one or was he never full? Did he get far away from God and so began a work? Or had he reached a condition in which he was bound neither to rajasic work nor to mental prattling nor to inactivity and silence, but could do from the divine realisation the divine work and speak from the inner consciousness of the divine word? If the last, perhaps, in spite of his dictum, his example at least is rather in my favour.
I do not know why you drag in humanitarianism, Subhash's activism, philanthropical sera [service], etc. None of these are part of my Yoga or i-n harmony with my definition of works, so they don't touch me. I never thought that Congress politics or feeding the poor or writing beautiful poems would lead straight to Vaikuntha or the Absolute. If it were so, Romesh Dutt on one side and Baudelaire on the other would be the first to attain the Highest and welcome us there. It is not the form of the work itself or mere activity but the consciousness and God ward will behind it that are the essence of Karmayoga; the work is only the necessary instrumentation for the union with the Master of works, the transit to the pure Will and power of Light from the will and power of the Ignorance.
Finally, why suppose that I am against meditation or bhakti? I have not the slightest objection to your taking either or both as the means of approach to the Divine. Only I saw no reason why anyone should fall foul of works and deny the truth of those who have reached, as the Gila says, through works Perfect realisation and oneness of nature with the Divine, samsiddhim, sādharmyam, as did "Janaka and others", simply because he himself cannot find or has not yet found their deeper secret—hence my defence of works.
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December 24, 1934
I must again point out that I have never put any ban on bhakti, so there is no meaning in saying that I have lifted a ban which never existed. Also I am not conscious of having banned meditation either at any time—so the satirical praise of my mercifulness is out of place. I imagine I have stressed both bhakti and knowledge in my Yoga as well as works, even if I have not given any of them an exclusive importance like Shankara or Chaitanya- Also I think I have not imposed my own choice unduly upon anyone in the matter of sadhana. Those who wanted to go wholesale for works or wholesale for bhakti or japa or wholesale for meditation, I have left to do so without any interference,, though not without any help I could give. I have latterly sometimes discounselled entire retirement, but that was because 1 did not want a repetition of the cases of Nalinbehari and others who, in spite of my warning, went in for it and came Lo grief-1 have written what I thought when people asked me; but if they had no use for my ideas about things, why did they ask me?
My remarks about being puzzled were, by the way, mere Socratic irony. Of course, I am not in the least puzzled by the case either of Shankara or of Ramakrishna.
The difficulty you feel or any sadhak feels about sadhana is not really a question of meditation versus bhakti versus works, it is a difficulty of the attitude to be taken, the approach or whatever you like to call it. Yours seems to be characterised on one side by a tremendous effort in the mind, on the other by a gloomy certitude in the vital which seems to watch and mutter under its breath if not aloud, "Yes, yes, go ahead, my fine fellow, but—kiclihui kakhana hay ni, kichhui hachcbey na, kichbui habay na " [nothing has ever happened, nothing Is happening and nothing will ever happen] and at the end of the meditation, "What did I tell you, kichhui holo nā [nothing happened]". A vital so ready to despair that even after a "glorious" flood of poetry, it uses the occasion to preach the
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gospel of despair. I have passed through most of the difficulties of the sadhaks, but I cannot recollect to have looked on delight of poetical creation or concentration in it as something undivine and a cause for despair- This seems to me excessive. Even Shankaracharya .
If you can't remember the Divine all the time you are writing, it does not greatly matter. To remember and dedicate at the beginning and give thanks at the end ought to be enough. Or at the most to remember too when there is a pause. Your method seems to me rather painful and difficult—you seem to be trying to remember and work with the same part of the mind. I don't know IP that is possible. When people remember all the time during work (it can be done), it is usually with the back of their minds or else there is created gradually a double consciousness—one in front that works, one within that witnesses and remembers. But this is only a comment—I am not asking you to try that. For usually it does not come so much by trying as by a very simple constant aspiration and will of consecration—which does bring its results, even if in some it lakes a long time about it. That is a great secret of sadhana, to know how to get things done by the Power behind or above instead of doing all by the mind's effort. Let me hasten to say, however, that I am not dogmatising—I don't mean to say that the mind's effort is unnecessary or has no result—only if it tries to do all by itself, that becomes a laborious effort for all except the spiritual athletes. Nor do I mean that the other method is the longed-for short cut; the result may, as i have said, take a long time. Patience and firm resolution are necessary in every method of sadhana-
Strength is all right for the strong—but aspiration and the '-'race answering to it are not altogether myths. Again, you see, I am muddling the human mind—like Krishna of the gita—by supporting contrary things at the same time. Can't help it—if is my nature.
But I am unable to explain farther today—so I break "Work" these divagations. I am rather too overburdened with Work" these two days to have much time for the expression
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of "knowledge". This is simply a random answer.
It won't do to put excessive and sweeping constructions on what I write, otherwise it is easy to mi sunders Land its sense. ¦ I said there was no reason why poetry of a spiritual character (not any poetry like Verlaine's or Swinburne's or Baudelaire's) should bring no realisation at all. That did not mean that poetry is a major means of realisation of the Divine. I did not say that it would lead us to the Divine or that anyone had achieved the Divine through poetry or that our "new" poetry can lead us straight into the sanctuary. Obviously if such exaggerations are put into my words, they become absurd and imbecile. But did I ever say anything of all that? Your difficulty in understanding me comes from this habit of putting into my mouth things which are not actually there in what I write,
My position is perfectly clear and there is nothing in it against reason or common sense. The Word has a power— even the ordinary written word has a power. If it is an inspired word it has still more power. What kind of power or power for what depends on the nature of the inspiration and the theme and the part of the being it touches. If it is the Word itself—as in certain utterances of the great Scriptures—Veda, Upanishads, Gila—it may well have a power for a spiritual impulse, uplifting, even certain kinds of realisation: to say that it cannot contradicts human experience.
The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as mantras, they were the vehicles of their own realisations and could become vehicles of realisation for others. Naturally, these were illuminations, not the settled and permanent realisation that is the goal of Yoga—but they could be slops on the way or at least lights on the way. I have had in former times many
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illuminations, even initial realisations while pondering verses "of the Upanishads or the Gita.73 Many of Harin's poems have been of immense help to persons here who were floundering and unable to progress—also to others who had begun to progress. You yourself know that your poems deeply moved people who had the tendency towards spiritual things. Many have got openings into realisation while reading passages of the Arya—which are not poetry, have not the power of spir- itual poetry—but it shows all the more that the word is not without power even for the things of the spirit. In all ages spiritual seekers have expressed their aspirations or their experiences in poetry or inspired language and it has helped them and others. Therefore there is nothing absurd in my assigning to such poetry a spiritual or psychic value and effectiveness of a psychic or spiritual character,
There is nothing unintelligible in what I say about strength and Grace. Strength has a value for spiritual realisation, but to say that it can be done by strength only and by no other means is a violent exaggeration. Grace is not an invention, it is a fact of spiritual experience. Many who would be considered as mere nothings by the wise and strong have attained by Grace; illiterate, without mental power or training, without "strength" of character or will, they have yet aspired and suddenly or rapidly grown into spiritual realisation, because they had faith or because they were sincere-1 do not see why these facts which are facts of spiritual history and of quite ordinary spiritual experience should be discussed and denied and argued as if they were mere matters of speculation. Strength, if it is spiritual, is a power for spiritual realisation; a greater power is sincerity; the greatest power of all is Grace, ] have said times without number that if a man is sincere, he will go through in spite of long delay and over- whelming difficulties. I have repeatedly spoken of the Divine Grace. I have repeatedly any number of times to the line of the Gita: Aham tvā sarvapāpehhyo moksayisyāmi ma śucah. ["I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve." Gita, 18.66] I do not remember what I said about Vivekananda. If I said
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he was a great Vedantist, it is quite true. It does not folio,,, that all he said or did must be accepted as the highest truth or the best. His ideal of sevā was a need of his nature and must have helped him—it does not follow that il must hp accepted as a universal spiritual necessity or ideal. Whether in declaring il he was the mouthpiece of Ramakrishna or not I cannot pronounce. It seems certain that Ramakrishna expected him to be a great power for changing the world- mind in a spiritual direction and it may be assumed that the mission came to the disciple from the Maser. The details of his action are another matter. As for proceeding like a blind man, that is a feeling that easily comes when a Power greater than one's own mind is pushing one to a large action; for the mind does not realise intellectually all that it is being pushed to do and may have its moments of doubt or wonderment about it—and yet it is obliged to go on, Vedantic (Adwaita) realisation is the realisation of the silent static or absolute Brahman—one may have that and yet not have the same indubitable clearness as to the significance of one's action— for even action for the Adwaitin is the shadow of Maya. I hope all that is clear.
December 25. 1934
The poetry, even if it does not lead to any realisation— though there is no reason why it should not, since it is not mundane is yet a link with the inner being and- expresses its ideal. That is its value for the sadhana. That cannot be said of [?] ananda or acting ananda. I can say nothing about spiritual clinic ananda—that must be decided by the clinical sadhak.
It is not indispensable that the Grace should work in a way that the human mind can understand, it generally doesn't it works in its own "mysterious" way. At first usually it works behind the veil, preparing things, not manifesting. Afterwards it may manifest, but the sadhak does not understand very
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well what is happening. Finally, when he is capable of it, he both feels and understands or at least begins to do so. Some feel and understand from the first or very early; but that is not the ordinary case.
I have already spoken about the bad conditions of the world; the usual idea of the occultists about it is that the worse they are, the more is probable the coming of an intervention or a new revelation from above. The ordinary mind ran not know—il has either to believe or disbelieve or wait and see.
As to whether the Divine seriously means something to happen, I believe it i? intended. I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as lo the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces- For in the terrestrial world the predetermined result is hidden and what we see is a whirl of possibilities and forces attempting to achieve something with the destiny of it all concealed from human eyes. This is however certain that a number of souls have been sent to see that il shall be now. That is The situation. My faith and will are for the now. I am speaking of course on the level of the human intelligence—mystically-rationally, as one might put it. To say more would be going beyond that line. You don't want me to start prophesying, I suppose? As a rationalist, you can't.
I don't think the White Paper has anything to do with the matter. It belongs to a different bundle of potentials.
Member 27, 1934
There can be no doubt about the Divine Grace. It is perfectly true also that if a man is sincere, he will reach the Divine. But
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it does not follow that he will reach immediately, easily and without delay. Your error is there, to fix for God a term, five years, six years, and doubt because the effect is not yet there A man may be centrally sincere and yet there may be many things that have lo be changed in him before realisation can begin. His sincerity must enable him to persevere always—. for it is a longing for the Divine that nothing can quench neither delay nor disappointment nor difficulty nor anything else-
You have got troubled again because you have allowed your mind to become active again in its ignorance, questioning, trying Lo refute the simplest and moat established spiritual truths, trying to decide without waiting for the inner knowledge. Throw all that away and go on in quietude not minding if it takes short or long for things to open up. That was what you had undertaken to do. Keep to it and, however slowly, the consciousness will open and light come.
I send you the force—but quiet your mind to receive it. II you learn to receive inwardly and feel it as you will [in time?]—the path will open.
I was not in the least pained or hurt by your letters and I did not take them as an intentional challenge from Krishnaprem or anybody else, I look at these things from a more impersonal or, if you like, personal-impersonal point of view. There is on one side my effort at perfection, for myself and others and for the possibility of a greater perfection in a changed humanity: on the other side there is a play of forces, some favouring it but more trying to prevent it. The challenge ; speak of comes from these forces. On one side it is a pressure from the pro-forces saying "Your work is not good enough; learn to do better;" on the other it is a pressure from the
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contrary forces saying "Your work ? It is a delusion and error poor mediocre thing, and we will trample and trash it to pieces." part of the work was an attempt to inspire a poetry which would express first the aspiration and labour towards the spiritual or divine and afterwards its realisation and manifestation. There are many who write poetry in the Ashram under this impulse but in the languages which I know best (English perfectly—at least I hope so—Bengali a tittle) there were four here whose work seemed to me to contain already on a fairly ample way the ripe possibility of the thing I wanted —yourself. Arjava,74 Amal, Harin. (I do not speak of Nishikanta and others because they are new or emergent only.) There are some Gujarati poets but I do not know the poetic language and technique in that tongue well enough to form an indubitable judgment. These four then I have encouraged and tried to push on towards a greater and richer expression. I have praised hut there was nothing insincere in my praise. For some time however I have received intimations from many quarters that my Judgment was mistaken, ignorant, partial and perhaps not wholly sincere. It began with your poetry even at the time of Anami73 and the forces at play spoke through some literary celeries of Bengal and reached here through reviews, letters, etc. There has been much inability to appreciate Arjava's poetry, Yeats observing that he had evidently something to say but struggled to say it with too much obscurity and roughness. Amal's work is less criticised, but A.E.'s attitude towards it was rather condescending to an Indian who writes unexpectedly well in English. Finally, there is the ignoring or rejection of Harin's work by this army of authorities—there arc as good authorities on the Other side, a lot that is irrelevant. That makes the issue complete and clear. If I have made so big a mistake, then the Whole thing is a hallucination—I am an incompetent critic of Poetry, at least of contemporary poetry, and my pretension Aspire cannot stand for a moment. Personally that would not matter to me, for personally I have my own feeling of these things and what it may be in the eyes of others makes
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no difference—just as it makes no difference to me if my own, poetry is really no poetry, as [Annadashekar?] and so many others think and may Form their own viewpoint—there are a million possible viewpoints in the world—be justified y thinking. But for my work it does mailer. I recognise in it the challenge of the forces and, once I recognise that in whatever field, I never think myself entitled to ignore it. IF it is a challenge lo do better (from the favourable forces), 1 must see the and get it done. If it is a challenge from the other forces, must see that too and know how far it is justifiable or else what can be put against it. That is what I have always don't both in my own Yoga looking carefully Lo see what was imperfect in the instrumentation of my own consciousness a; a vehicle of the manifestation and working to set it right it else maintaining what was right against all challenge. So began to do it here. Instead of reading rapidly through Harm's poems every day, I began to weigh and consider looking to see what could be justly said from Krishnaprem's viewpoint and what could be fairly said from mine. I took Krishna? rein's criticism because it is the only thing I have that is definite and, though his technical strictures are obviously mistaken, the genera] ones have to be weighed even though they are far from conclusive. But [his is a work for my personal use—its main object is not a weighing of Harm's work but of my own capacity and judgment and that is too personal in scope for me to lay before others- That is why said I was not writing it to circulate.
I have written all this to explain to you that you have not pained or hurt or displeased me, nor has Krishnaprem either It would be childish to be displeased with someone because his opinions on literature or a particular piece of literature are not identical with my own at every point. I may also say that I was not displeased with you for your letter. I was a little disappointed that you should have gone back to mental doubts or to vital Feelings after you had started so well for something else. But these temporary recessions are too common in the path to the Divine for me to be displeased or discouraged.
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The work I have to do for myself or for the world or for you others can only be achieved if I have love for all and faith for all and go firmly on till it is done. It is why I urge you to the same, because I know that if one does not give up, one is sure to arrive. That is the attitude you had started to take, to go Quietly on and give time for the right development, however slow. I want you to return to that and keep to it
By the way, what I have written about the poetry is [just?] for yourself because it is too personal to me to be made general.
December 29, 1934
It was not with any intention of bringing in personal matters that I mentioned names and examples in my letter. The personal merits or demerits of the external human instrument— the frail outer man—are irrelevant and have no importance when one considers the value or power of the Word. What matters is the truth of the Inspiration and the power of what it utters. I was not saying either that this poetry—I try to avoid names this time—appeals to everybody; I was referring to those whom it did touch and especially to certain incidents within my personal observation and knowledge.
I am keeping Krishnaprem's letter. I don't know that it is very advisable for me to give my view: if I do so I will try to restrict myself to general considerations about poetry and literature.! will only say that my opinions about [his?] poetry or yours or Amal's or Arjava's are personal to myself and nobody need attach any value to them if his own do not agree. As they are persona!, what others think, however Eminent they may be, cannot make any difference, 1 experience a certain beauty, power or charm, an expression of things I feel and know in the occult or spiritual province with that seems to me a great or a sufficient breath of poetry in
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it. I do not expect all or many to share my feeling and I do not, need it. I can understand Krishnaprem's strictures or his revervation (without endorsing, refuting or qualifying them) but I have had the same view about very great poets like Shelley or Spenser at one time, so that does not seriously touch my feeling that this is poetry of beauty and value- Also I do no make comparisons—I take it by itself as nothing apart on it own province- I know of course that my old school-fellow Binyon and others in England have spoken in this connection of Keats and Shelley; but! do not myself feel the need of the comparative valuation. After all one can only give one's own view of contemporary poetry; we must leave it to Tagore' viśva-mānava [the universal man] (posterity?) to decide.
As to the extract about Vivekananda,76 the point I make ' there does not seem to me humanitarian. You will see that I emphasise there the last sentences of the passage quoted from Vivekananda, not the words about God the poor and sinner and criminal. The point is about the Divine in the world, the All, sarva-bhūtām77'' of the Gita. That is not merely humanity, still less, only the poor or the wicked; surely, even the rich or the good are the part of the All and those only who are neither good nor bad nor rich nor poor. Nor is there any question (I mean in my own remarks) of philanthropic service; so neither dandrer nor sevā78 are the point. I had formerly hot the humanitarian but the humanity view—and something of it may have stuck to my expressions in the Arya. But I had already altered my viewpoint From the "Our Yoga for the sake of humanity" to "Our Yoga for the sake of the Divine," The, Divine includes not only the supracosmic but the cosmic anal the individual—not only Nirvana or the Beyond but Life and the All. It is that I stress everywhere. But I shall keep the extracts for a day or two and see what there is, if anything that smacks too much of a too narrow humanistic standpoint I stop here for today.
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December 30, 1934
I did not answer that long letter of yours because I could see that an answer would be at all helpful. I have more and more ceased to discuss things like this, for discussion only prolongs them and makes them worse: they belong to the vital plane and the vital does not follow reason in its movements but obliges reason to follow them and support them. The only way to get rid of them is to refuse always to indulge them in their play or to justify them by the reason- to refuse on the ground that, whether justified or not, they are wrong and not wanted by the higher Truth and Light and Love we are seeking after.
I suppose I have nothing much to learn about the outer being of this or that sadhak—even in the best it is faulty enough from the spiritual point of view. If insincerity means the unwillingness of some part of the being to live according to the highest light one has or to equate the outer with the timer man, this part is always insincere in all. I do not see any use in dwelling on that: the only way, according to my view of it, is to lay stress on the inner being and develop in it the psychic and spiritual consciousness till that comes down in it which pushes out the darkness in the outer man also.
I have never said that the vital is to have no part in the love of the Divine, only that it must purify' and ennoble itself in the light or the true psychic feeling. The results of self-loving love between human beings are so poor and contrary in the end (that is what I mean by the ordinary vital love] that I want something purer and nobler and higher in the vital also for the movement towards the Divine.
I am keeping Krishnaprem still as I want to write something on it, not for circulation, but for my own use. As all my Judgments about poetry (whether about yours or Harm's or Arjava's or Amal's) are so much challenged by the contrary °Pinion of others, I would like to have before me in black and white my own view on the strictures made. It may be of use "hereafter.
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Arjava
Sahana
Harin
Amal
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P.S. The Mother expects you on Monday as usual. I am sending completion of the four line sample I gave you for your Bengali metre.
1934
The main obstacle in your sadhana has been a weak part in the vital which does not know how to bear suffering or disappointment or delay or temporary failure. When these things come, it winces away from them, revolts, cries out, makes a scene within, calls in despondency, despair, unbelief, darkness of the mind, denial—begins to think of abandonment of the effort or death as the only way out of its trouble. It is the very opposite of that equanimity, fortitude, self- mastery which is always recommended as the proper attitude of the Yogi. This has been seized upon by the forces adverse to the sadhana with [heir usual cleverness to prevent you from making the steady and finally decisive progress which would put all the trouble behind you. Their method is very simple. You make the effort and get perhaps some of the experiences which are not decisive but which if continued and followed up may lead to something decisive or at least you begin to have [hat peace, poise and hopefulness which are the favourable condition for progress—provided they can be kept steady, immediately they give a blow to that part of the vital—or arrange things so that it shall get a blow or what it . think to be a blow and sets it in motion with its round of sadness, suffering, outcry and despair. It clouds the mind with its sorrow and then gets that clouded mind to find justifications for its attitude—It has established a fixed Formation, a certain round of ideas, arguments, feelings which It always repeats like a mechanism that once set in motion goes its round till it stops or something intervenes to stop it. This Justification by the mind gives it strength to assert itself and
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remain or, when thrown back, to recur. For if these reasonings were not there, you would at once see the situation and disengage yourself from it or at any rate would perceive that such a course of feeling and conduct is not worthy of you and draw back from it at its very inception. But as it is you have to spend days getting out of the phase and getting back into your normal self. Then when you are back to your right walk and stature they wait a little and strike again and the whole thing repeals itself with a mechanical regularity. It takes time, steadfast endeavour, long continued aspiration and a calm perseverance to get anywhere in Yoga; that time you do not give yourself because of these recurrent surging away from the right attitude- It is not vanity or intellectual questioning that is the real obstacle—they are only impediments—but they could well be overcome or one could pass beyond in spite of them if this part of the vital were not there or were not so strong to intervene. If I have many times urged upon you equanimity, steadfast patience, cheerfulfness or whatever is contrary to this spirit, it is because I wanted you to recover your true inner vital self and get rid of this intruder. If you give it rein, it is extremely difficult to get on to anywhere. It must go—its going is much more urgently required than the going of the intellectual doubt.
How you get to this condition is another matter. When you came it was not apparent and for a long time did not manifest itself. When Mother first saw you in the verandah of the old house79 she said "That is a man with a large and strong vital," and it was true, nor do I think it has at all gone, but you have pushed it to the back and it turns up only when you are in good condition. The other, this small vital which is taking so much space now, must have been there but latent, perhaps because you had had a strong and successful life and it had no occasion to be active. But at a certain moment here it began to be impatient for immediate results, to fret at the amount of tapasya or effort to control its habits and indulgences and the absence of immediate return for the trouble, At a later stage it has tried to justify and prolong itself by
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appealing to your penchant for the Vaishnava attitude. But the emotional outbreaks of the Vaishnava—or such impulses as Vivekananda's prāyopavesan80—spring from a tremendous one-minded, one-hearted passion for the Divine or for the goal which tries to throw itself headlong forward at any cost. It was another part of your vital that would have liked to take that attitude, but this smaller part prevented it and brought in a confusion and a mixture which was rather used by the adverse forces to turn you away from belief in or hope of the goal. This confusion of mind and vital you must get rid of— you must call in the true reason and the higher vital to cast out these movements. A higher reason must refuse to listen to its self-justifications and tell it that nothing, however plausible, can justify these notions in a sadhak; your higher vital must refuse to accept them, telling it, "I do not want these alien things; I do not recognise them as part of myself or my nature,"
P.S. About Khitish Sen Mother says that he is all brain, that is predominantly strong in the mind, a mental man par excellence. Extremely self-confident, sure of his ideas and his intelligence and looking at the world from the heights of his mental vision. He has some weak points, but they are hidden behind this bright shield of self-confident intelligence
I am afraid it would be quite impossible for me to give an adequate answer without speaking in detail about everything that has recently been happening in Harin and what happened before. It was because i could not do that or unveil the special circumstances that compelled me not to send your letter that I spoke indefinitely of "other reasons" and appealed you to believe that I was acting for the best and had no her choice. If l had been able to say more, I would have
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done so at once and any such appeal would have been unnecessary. I fear I can do little more now than repeat that appeal, Many times difficult circumstances have arisen in the Ashram;
I have always tried to act for the best that could be under the circumstances. I had to do so in this case also.
When Harin first came here and began writing his poems, It was the Mother's strong feeling that they should not be published now, but only when certain things inner land?] outer had happened, and even then only when we felt that it should be done. Harin agreed and it was at this time and I suppose for this reason that he asked you not to publish them. Since then we bad thought of publishing one book, but a choice had to be made and through want of time, etc. I failed lo do it and the matter dropped for a long time. I know nothing about the poems you speak of beyond what Harin wrote to us. He said that he wanted now to publish his poems and we said he could do so. I gather that it is in certain magazines that he wished to publish. I believe that about publication of books the original understanding remains still. More than this I do not know and cannot say on this subject.
Harin's estrangement is not due to the report about the sonnets, but began, I believe, because all sorts of things were reported to him about you and your comments on him, his capacities and his character. Whatever was unfavorable came to his ears, no doubt with exaggeration and distortions; what was favourable did not, I suppose, reach him. My impression is [hat this has been going on steadily, almost, though slightly, from the beginning, much more seriously later on, I have told you already that I tried to remedy matters and was on the point of succeeding. But another spate of reports came and made a new mess. I hope for better things hereafter, but I have to wait for it as I had to wait for the ending of the estrangement between you and Saurin. You may remember that on that matter too I asked you not to send your proposed letter of reconciliation to him and it was only because I wanted things to be ripe on the other side for which I was putting pressure.
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How on earth you jumped to the conclusion that I wanted Harin to break with you I cannot imagine. Merely from the poem? 1 had no reason to suppose that it was an attack on you (I think he had no anger against you then) and not an [?] of himself against a criticism on his ignorance of technique, especially as he named to me the person who had urged him to learn it. My "very beautiful" referred to the language and form of the poem; it was not an approval of any attack upon anybody or even of all the state of mind that was or might be behind the poem. And what a queer idea that we do not mind how people are dead against each other, provided they are , sweet to us? That would mean, apart from the egoism of the attitude, that we put a sanction of acquiescence on all the ; quarrels, rivalries, antipathies in the Ashram! There are surely plenty of wrong things in the Ashram whose existence does not prove that they are a part of our Yoga or approved by us.
No man is perfect; the vital is there and the ego is there to prevent it. It is only when there is the total transformation of the external and the internal being down to the very subconscient, that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain our common heritage.
A possibility in the soul or in the inner being generally remains always a possibility—at the worst, its fulfilment can be postponed, but even that only if the possessor of the possibility gives up or breaks away from the true spiritual path with out probability of early return, because he is in chase of the magnified and distorted shadow of his own ego or for some other distortions of the nature produced by a wrong egoistic misuse of the Yoga. A mere appearance of inability or obstruction of progress in the outer being, a covering of
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the inner by the outer, even if it lasts for years, has no privative value, because that happens to a great number, perhaps to the majority of aspirants to Yoga. The reason is that they take somehow the way of raising up all the difficulties in their nature almost at the beginning and tunnelling through the mass instead of the alternative way of going ahead, slowly or swiftly, and trusting to time. Yoga and the Force Divine to clear out of them in the proper [?] what has to be eliminated. It is not of their own deliberate choice that they do it, some- thing in their nature draws them. There arc many here who have had or still have that long covering of the inner by the outer or separation of the inner from the outer consciousness. You yourself took that way in spite of our expostulations to you advising you Lo take the sunlit road, and you have not yet got out of the habit. But that does not mean that you won't get out of the tunnel and when you do you will find your inner being wailing for you on the other side—in the sun and not in the shadow. I don't think I am more patient than a guru ought to be. Anyone who is a guru at all ought to be patient, first because he knows the difficulty of human nature and, secondly, because he knows how the Yoga force works, in so many contrary ways, open or subterranean, slow or swift, volcanic or coralline—passing even from one to the other— and he does not use the surface reason but the eye of inner knowledge and Yogic experience.
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