Sri Aurobindo's Humour

APPENDIX

A TALK

Friends, you will excuse me for the flashy tide I have given to my talk, but I hope to justify it.

I begin with some unpublished portions of my correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, sometime in 1936, when an unaccountably good relation, was established between the 'Supramental Godhead and the mental doghead that was still the former's own human portion.

At the time of the following exchange, I was in charge of the dispensary:

QUESTION: My big photo requires Sanjiban's treatment. Granted permission?

SRI AUROBINDO: What? which? where? how? what disease? what medicine wanted?

The next day I had to give Sri Aurobindo a little more light on my cryptic language:

QUESTION: I send you your big photo, it is your photo that would be drawn by Sanjiban.

SRI AUROBINDO: You are always plunging me into new mysteries. If it is a photo, how can it be drawn by anybody? And what is the tense connotation and psychological and metaphysical connotation of "would be" here?

You will mark two things: the looseness of my expression and the tone of Sri Aurobindo's reply, which are signs testifying to our good relation. As time passed this good relation increased little by little until one day it became

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familiar—all good relations take this turn—and I heard a thundering from him: "Why the devil do you want to know of my life?" Well, instead of being intimidated, my heart leaped for joy and almost popped out of its chamber! Because the thunder had no edge, it was full of sweetness. Then followed a series of such members of the nether family of terms as "damn", "hell", "deuce", etc., along with their higher counterparts "Eternal", "Jehovah", "Shobhan Allah", "Good Heavens", "Good Lord", and so on. So you can ascertain from these ejaculations the depth, the intensity, and. the extent of the good relation between us. Not only doghead, but many other epithets he hurled on this head—wooden-head, blockhead, ass, idiot. I took them all with a good face, wailing for the day when I could pay him back with quip and jibe at his Supermind. The day did arrive. But the verbal looseness did not end there, certainly— I had committed quite a bit of it, and he had to pull me up again and again.

These few snatches of correspondence should convince you of the appropriateness of my title, for Sri Aurobindo is a modern Avatar. He may be viewed from various angles; but my own point of view is this: only because Sri Aurobindo is a modern Avatar am I here, A materialist such as myself could have no place in a spiritual institution unless it was a modern Ashram and the Guru was modern too, in the form of Sri Aurobindo. And I am happy to say that there are many others who share this opinion. So from this proof, I am sure everybody will acclaim with one voice that there can be no other Ashram more modern than this one. Place it side by side with Raman Maharshi's Ashram or Sri Ramakrishna Mission—our modernity will be too patent a fact. Take the Mother playing tennis, for example. And yet, when Annie Besant's Messiah, Krishnamurti, started playing

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tennis, we laughed at him. Or take Sri Aurobindo's correspondence—the voluminous correspondence that he carried on from year to year; day by day, explaining the same subject at length to various people—trying to persuade them, to argue with them point by point, to bring them to his point of view. Some people, such as myself, were attacking his Yoga and denying his Avatarhood, and yet with infinite patience he tried to understand the modern mind and the modern spirit; and explained things to us until we were convinced. Or if not able to convince us, he tolerated us until one day he wrote in one of his letters about the sadhaks in his Ashram: "It is as it were a favour is being granted to us by their remaining here!" At another time, in a fit of self-revealing jocularity or whatever it was, he wrote: "The very fact that I am carrying on a correspondence with the sadhaks for eight or nine hours every night should be enough to prove that I am an Avatar."

Then there was the case of a sadhak who, in the early days of the Ashram, was given charge of gate-keeping. Instead of keeping the gate, he was always busy reading and, when he wasn't reading, he slept. He didn't bother about who came and went. The fact was reported to the Mother, who sent someone to inquire: "It seems you are reading instead of doing your duty?" The gate-keeper replied, "Well, I can't help it, it is my weakness." There the matter ended. And I have even seen one or two instances of sadhaks abusing the Mother to her face—which staggered us all, but she kept quiet, digesting all the insults hurled at her.

Well, I don't want to go into a deep philosophy of Avatarhood to show that Sri Aurobindo is an Avatar, or to fix his place on the list of Avatars; or demonstrate the modern character of his Yoga. All this is not my domain, I am a humble man and I deal with humble things. What I have

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invited you for is to share and enjoy with me a feast of Supramental Levity in our correspondence, which ranges over various topics—spiritual, medical, poetic; etc. The portions I have chosen are short, sharp like jets of water) and sparkling, scintillating with humour. We shall be reminded of one mighty pen in this context—that of Shakespeare. Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me: "It is not every spear that shakes!" I would venture to say that Sri Aurobindo's spear shook even more than Shakespeare's! I would go even further and say that Sri Aurobindo surpassed his own self; for it is my firm belief that Sri Aurobindo was Shakespeare, It has also been said of Shakespeare that he never blotted a line. The same may be said of Sri Aurobindo with more justice and accuracy, and greater credit to him, because the entire volume of his correspondence was written with a lightning spontaneity, sometimes coming in a flood like the Ganges or the Brahmaputra, There is one modern trait, which our friend Purani has noted. During the early years of the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo's foot once touched Amrita's inadvertently. Sri Aurobindo sat up in the chair and said, "I beg your pardon." Well; the Guru telling a shishya "I beg your pardon"—if that's not modern, I don't know what is!

To further demonstrate the looseness of my expression, I offer the following: "The word 'focus' was unintelligible? But you understand all right. I adopt the device and 'your attention' to save your time and mine as well, as is obvious."

Sri Aurobindo wrote in reply: "Good Lord! Is this Hebrew or Aramaic or Swahili? I can't understand a word. Which device? which attention? Some reference to something I wrote? If so, it has clean gone out of my head. That, by the way, is a manner of speaking, for I never have anything in my head."

The next day I wrote him an apology: "I am sorry for the

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last elision. I wanted to write—'I adopted the device' and dropped "your attention'" to save time. I find I have chopped the word 'dropped' altogether, so it has become Hebrew, Aramaic or—? I can't read this last word."

His reply: "Swahili. African language, sir, somewhere in West Africa."

So much for my slips. One day I found a slip in his writing. I wrote to him: "What, Sir! 'Expect' has become 'except'? Is it a supramental slip? Hurrah!"

Sri Aurobindo answered: "Do you mean to say this is the first you have met? I used to make ten per page formerly in the haste of my writing. Evidently I am arriving towards a supramental accuracy - spontaneous and careless in spite of the lightning speed of my epistolary movement."

One day I sent him a pen and wrote: "You will find something in my famous bag, Sir, which may startle you .the size will suit you best though the nib may not; I am sending the pen to you so that your writing in my notebook may flow in rivers from it, not in a few stingy lines."

SRI AUROBINDO: "Good Lord! What a Falstaff of a fountain pen! But it is not the pen that is responsible for the stinginess; the criminal is Time and with a fat pen he can be as niggardly as with a lean one."

* * *

Now we come to the subject of Pranam. I am sure many of you are familiar with the numerous letters that Sri Aurobindo has written on the abuse and misuse of Pranam committed by the sadhaks and sadhikas. In a recent issue of Mother India there is a letter on this very subject. Instead of Pranam Instead of Pranam being a spiritual function we made it, to our shame, a dramatic function. Far from absorbing what the Mother was giving

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us, we tried to watch her movements vis-à-vis each sadhak and sadhika - whether she was smiling at a sadhak or was not smiling at all; how much she smiled; if she touched a sadhak with one finger or two, or with only the tip of a finger; if she didn't touch him at all; if she looked at me; why she didn't look at me, what crime had I done? etc. And the whole function and the entire day were spoilt. I was no exception, and here is a letter that proves it:

QUESTION: Guru, I don't know why Mother looked at me like that. Was I anywhere in the wrong?

SRI AUROBINDO: Mother knows nothing about it.

QUESTION: I went over the whole incident and didn't find anywhere that I have misrepresented facts in the Dispensary.

SRI AUROBINDO: No.

QUESTION: ...Or was it because I was bothering myself and you over a trifle?

SRI AUROBINDO: No.

QUESTION: It was not an illusion. Some meaning was there.

SRI AUROBINDO: Yes? But then it must have been a meaning in your mind and not the Mother's. So only you, its mother, can find it out.

Another excerpt follows on the same subject:

QUESTION: Today Mother looked at me in such a way at Pranam as though she 'said' something.

SRI AUROBINDO: She didn't; she only looked at you a little longer than usual.

QUESTION: Ah! there you are then! Mother did look longer—that's a point gained!

SRI AUROBINDO: Just Jehovah, man! What of that ? Can't Mother look longer without being furious?

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QUESTION: There must have been something. I can take any amount of thrashing with grace, even with good grace, as you know, but to take it without knowing the why or the how of it, that goes a little too deep, Sir.

SRI AUROBINDO: No thrashing at all—not even the natural yearning to thrash you.

QUESTION: For an earthly reason, I found that I had accepted an invitation for lunch. Is that the reason then why Mother focussed her fury on my dreadful soul?

SRI AUROBINDO: Know nothing about it. Never dreamed even of the lunch—was thinking of B,¹ not of any delinquency of yours.

QUESTION: As I was positively conscious that there was something, you can't say there was nothing.

SRI AUROBINDO: I can and do.

QUESTION: I was positively conscious that there was something and I only want to know it so that I can rectify the error.

SRI AUROBINDO: Only fancy, sir, dear delightless fancy. Nothing more deceiving than these pseudo-intuitions of Mother's displeasure and search for their non-existent reasons. Very often it comes from a guilty conscience or a feeling that one deserves a thrashing, so obviously a thrashing must be intended. Anything like that here?

QUESTION: It may be the thing about which I wrote to you long ago and got a smack!

SRI AUROBINDO: Consider yourself smacked this time also.

QUESTION: Thrashing, fury, I accept all if that was what it was for.

SRI AUROBINDO: It was not. As there was no thrashing and no fury, it could not be for that.

You cannot fail to notice throughout this passage the disciple's

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dog-headedness and the Guru's inexhaustible patience. Any other Guru, ancient or even modern, would have cut me short!

* * *

Now for something about Darshan. Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me about "exceptional circumstances"; so quoting his phrase; I opened our discussion:

QUESTION: "Exceptional circumstances"! Whatever they may have been have now disappeared.

SRI AUROBINDO: Make them re-appear.

QUESTION: Expected many things, or at least something from the Darshan, but don't see anywhere any sign of it!

SRI AUROBINDO: Many Americans at least, what was not expected. It is always the unexpected that happens, you see.

(By the way, at one Darshan, an American had a vision of the whole of America lying at the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's feet. I heard of it and, as was my wont, I wrote asking Sri Aurobindo for confirmation. He replied, "Yes, Mother expects much from America." This was in 1936. Those friends who come from America will be glad to learn this.) The next day, I wrote:

QUESTION: The result; of Darshan in some other quarters leaves me staggered and staggered! I can't imagine such an incident taking place in the Ashram as N's gripping M's throat. It makes me rather aghast. Coupled with that incident of R rushing to shoe-beat P. Good Lord! but I suppose they are all in the game!

SRI AUROBINDO: You seem to be the most candid and ignorant baby going. We shall have to publish an "Ashram News and Titbits" for your benefit. Have you never heard of N's going for K' s head with a powerfully brandished

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hammer? Or of his howling challenges to C to come out and face him, till Mother herself had to interfere and stop him? Or of his yelling and hammering in a rage at C's door till D came and dragged him away? These things happened within a short distance of your poetic ears and yet you know nothing??? N is subject to these fits and always has been so. The Darshan is not responsible. And he is not the only howler. What about M herself? and half a dozen others? Hunger-strikes? Threats of suicide?...to leave the Ashram, etc., etc. All from the same source, sir, and, apparently, part of the game

* * *

Then there is Depression, which used to come over me very often. To quote a line from Savitri:

'I sat with grief as with an ancient friend.'

In such a mood I once wrote: "I realise every moment that I am not made for the path of the Spirit, not for any big endeavour in life."

Sri Aurobindo wrote back; "Man of sorrows! man of sorrows! knock him off, man, knock him off!"

At another time I wrote:

QUESTION: Wretched, absolutely done for.

SRI AUROBINDO: Why? Disburden yourself!

QUESTION: Disburden? You mean Throw off' the burden or place .the burden at your door?

SRI AUROBINDO: Both!

On another occasion:

QUESTION: I am thrown, out of joint, Sir. Madam Doubt still peeps from behind. Anyhow no chance for me! Kismet, Sir! What to do?

SRI AUROBINDO: Why out of joint? It ought to strengthen

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your joints for the journey of Yoga. Not at all, sir. Mind, sir, mind. Madam Doubt, sir. Madam Doubt! Miss Material Intellectualism, sir! Aunt Despondency, sir! Uncle Self- distrust, sir! Cousin Self-depreciation, sir! The whole confounded family, sir !

QUESTION: Please ask Mother to give some blessings to this hopeless self.

SRI AUROBINDO:

R/

Twelve doses every hour.

(Signature)

QUESTION: What's this second item in your prescription, Sir? Too Latinic for my poor knowledge.

SRI AUROBINDO: Chlorate of Receptivity.

QUESTION: And I would put Aqua at the end to make it an absolutely pucca academic prescription.

SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, but I thought of the two last ingredients afterwards.

QUESTION: And 12 doses every hour—these tinctures and vinums?

Sri Aurobindo: Twelve doses—every hour (one each hour. Plagiarised from your language, sir).

QUESTION: And where is the cost to be supplied from?

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SRI AUROBINDO: Gratis—for the poor.

You can't beat him!

* * *

Then there was our correspondence about writing and poetry:

QUESTION: But do you really mean that till 7 a.m. your pen goes on at an aeroplanic speed? Then it must be due more to outside correspondence. I don't sec many books or envelopes now on the staircase. Is the Supramental freedom from these not in view?

SRI AUROBINDO: Your not seeing unfortunately does not dematerialise them! Books are mainly for the Mother and there is sometimes a mountain, but letters galore. On some days only there is a lull and then I can do something.

I wrote to him, "My nights are again becoming heavy; I don't know how to deal with them." He replied, "So are mine, with a too damnably heavy burden of letters to write."

Then once I warned him: "Tomorrow, by the way, I am going to burst. ATTENTION!" "Eh, what! Burst?" He replied, "Which way? If you explode; fizz only—don't blow up the Ashram."

The next day I wrote; "I am sending my explosion—the result of Darshan!" He responded: "Man alive (or of Sorrows or whatever may be the fact), how is it you fell on such a fell day for your burst? There has been ah explosion, as X merrily calls it, beginning in the...* but reaching now its epistolary climax and have been writing sober letters to Y for the last few hours. Solicit therefore your indulgence for a

* Word indecipherable (Editor).

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guru besieged by other people's disturbances (and letters) until tonight. Send back the blessed burst and I will try to deal with it."

That reminds me of something else he once wrote to me, when one day in a fury I attacked his Yoga—"Karmayoga is all bosh," etc. He wrote: "You will excuse the vein of irony or satire in all this—but really, when I am told that my own case disproves my own spiritual philosophy and accumulated knowledge and experience, a little liveliness in answer is permissible."

I often corresponded with him on the subject of poetry. Here is one occasion.

QUESTION: By the way, you didn't like my Bengali poem, or you hesitate to call it mine because of so many corrections by Nishikanto?

SRI AUROBINDO: It was very good; mixed parentage does not matter, so long as the offspring is beautiful.

Here is another:

QUESTION: It seems I am not very rich in the faculty of image-making. And without that hardly any creation worth the name is possible.

SRI AUROBINDO: What is this superstition? At that rate Sophocles, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth are not good poets because their poetry is not full of images? Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is full of images?

Then on April 1st he wrote something about Virgil and myself, so I asked him:

QUESTION: I hope you didn't intend to make me an April fool. Otherwise Virgil and Nirod to be mentioned in the same pen-stroke!

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But I couldn't read his answer to this., so I wrote:

QUESTION: Absolutely illegible, Sir. Even Nolinida could not read the words.

SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other.

QUESTION: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional" as regards my early success in English versification. But how are they exceptional?

Let me know
How 'tis so
A dullard like me
Bursting like the sea
With the heart of the Muse
Makes his rhythm fuse?

SRI AUROBINDO:

You are opening, opening opening
Into a wider, wider scopening
That fills me with a sudden hopening
That I may carry you in spite of gropening
Your soul into the supramental ropening.

N.B. Surrealist poetry.

QUESTION: You have delighted my soul with surrealist poetry but not my intellect—"widening, widening" is not the cause, but the effect.

SRI AUROBINDO: Well, but that's just it—Widen, widen, scopen, scopen. and the poetry may come in a torrent roaring and cascading through an enlarged fissure in your and the world's subtle cranium.

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QUESTION: Now I don't see poetry anywhere on the horizon.

SRI AUROBINDO: How do you know? It may be hiding behind a cloud.

QUESTION: The. tragedy is that I know nothing of Inspiration's reasons for arrival and departure.

SRI AUROBINDO: Only unreason or super-reason. Keep your end up and it will arrive again and some day perhaps, after Jack-in-the-boxing like that sufficiently, will sit down and say, "Here I am for good. Send. for the priest and let's be married," With these things that is the law and the rule and the reason and the rhyme of it and everything.

QUESTION: At times I wonder why the devil I bother my head with poetry? Have I come here for blessed poetry?

SRI AUROBINDO: You haven't. But the poetry has come for you. So why shout?

* * *

Here are some excerpts from our medical correspondence:

QUESTION: X has phimosis, Sir.

SRI AUROBINDO: What kind of medical animal is this? My dear sir, if you clap a word like that on an illness do you think it is easy for the patient to recover?

On another occasion;

QUESTION: A doctor says that one has to be firm, stem and hard with women. They may not like it superficially but they enjoy it and stick to the doctor who gives them hard knocks- Is it the cave-man spirit? Dr. Y seems no less a firebrand than myself, but women seem to like him.

SRI AUROBINDO: He must have been a he-man. She- women enjoy it from he-men. But all women are not she

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women and all men are not he-men. Moreover, there is an art as well as a nature in that kind of thing which you lack. He is a he-man. Even so the women have ended by saying, "No more of Y."

Once Sri Aurobindo sent me the following letter in which he gently hinted at my reputation as a doctor:

SRI AUROBINDO: Well; I don't know why but you have the reputation of being a fierce and firebrand doctor who considers it a sin for patients to have an illness! You may be right, but tradition demands that a doctor should be soft like butter, soothing like treacle, sweet like sugar arid jolly like jam.

QUESTION: If tradition demands it, we shall try to be softer than butter, but we may be too tempting and evoke a response from the patient's palate for making delicious toasts. Who will save us then?

SRI AUROBINDO: Of course, if you are too, too sweet. You must draw the line somewhere.

QUESTION: I wanted to be as soft as possible, but couldn't touch Z without making her shed tears. What heartless brutes, patients must be thinking now!

SRI AUROBINDO: Much safer than if they think, "What dears these doctors are, darlings, angels!"

We corresponded on the subject of medical tests:

QUESTION: We examine chemically first a sample of urine, i.e., by chemical reagents—which is called a qualitative test. You ought to know that from your English Public School chemistry, Sir.

SRI AUROBINDO: Never learned a word of chemistry or any damned science in my school. My school; sir, was too

aristocratic for such plebeian things.

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QUESTION: It is very strange, Sir, your school had no chemistry; but for I. C. S., you had no science? Perhaps these new-fangled things hadn't come down then?

SRI AUROBINDO: It (chemistry) may have been in a corner, but I had nothing to do with such stuff.... Certainly not. In I.C.S. you can choose your own subjects. They were new-fangled and not yet respectable.

Once I asked him about a patient of mine—an Englishman:

QUESTION: Why the devil does that patient write all these things to you? Are you prescribing medicines, or are we? And what is the use of his knowing the medicines and doses, pray? He could have asked me.

SRI AUROBINDO: Well, what about the free Englishman's right to grumble?

This is not London and, there is no "Times" to write to- So he writes a letter to me instead of to the "Times'".

QUESTION: Surely there is a twist somewhere.

SRI AUROBINDO: There always is a twist, sir, always.

QUESTION: Well, I won't fume any more or tear my hair.

SRI AUROBINDO: Don't. Losing one's hair is always a useless operation. Keep your hair on.

QUESTION: Only tell him, please, that he ought to let us know himself instead of sending a boy with an empty bottle.

SRI AUROBINDO: Dear sir, tell him yourself, tell him yourself. I will pat you on the back in silence from a safe distance.

I used to suffer from chronic boils, so I acquainted Sri Aurobindo with the fact:

QUESTION: Nose boil boiling down, terrible headache, fever, feeling fed up, Sir!

SRI AUROBINDO: Cellular bolshevism, probably.

QUESTION : What's this "cellular bolshevism" ?

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SRI AUROBINDO: Bolshevism of the cells surging up against the Tsar (yourself), also the Bolsheviks carry on their propaganda by creating communistic "cells" everywhere, in the army, industries; etc. You don't seem to be very much up on contemporary history.

"Contemporary history" reminds me of a different subject. A friend of mine working in a Corporation confessed to having tampered with the figures. I wrote about him to Sri Aurobindo: "Guru, C writes to me to ask your opinion on his tampering with the figures. I suppose in the worldly life such things are necessary?"

Sri Aurobindo replied: "Not in the worldly life, but perhaps in the Corporation life. All this promises a bad look-out when India gets Puma Swaraj. Mahatma Gandhi is having bad qualms about Congress corruption already. What will it be when Puma Satyagraha reigns all over India?"

In another letter written in 1935, I brought up a topic of great importance. It was after a reference to Hindu-Muslim riots going on at that time in Calcutta.

QUESTION: In your scheme of things do you definitely see a free India?

SRI AUROBINDO: That is all settled. It is a question of working it out only. The question is, what is India going to do with her independence? The above kind of affair? Bolshevism? Goonda-raj? Things look ominous.

Well, I don't need to tell you how Sri Aurobindo's prophecy came true. Neither need I point out wherein lies his modernity. If you have not discovered it, I hope at least you have enjoyed this feast of humour I have offered you.

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