LIFE-POETRY-YOGA
Life - Poetry -Yoga
PERSONAL LETTERS
by
AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA)
Vol. 1
The Integral Life Foundation
P.O. Box 239
Waterford CT. 06385
USA
First published 1994
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)
© Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)
Published by
The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A.
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicheny
PRINTED IN INDIA
The "personal letters" which started appearing fourteen years ago in Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, published from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, have proved to be a popular feature. A large number of readers from all over the country and even some from abroad have expressed their gratitude for helpful treatment of a lot of problems which aspirants to the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother meet on their way. Repeated suggestions have also come to collect the series of "Life-Poetry-Yoga" in book-form so that it may be easily available for consultation.
These suggestions have now been taken up and the project is to divide the letters into a row of volumes of convenient length brought out from time to time at convenient prices. The initiative for the project is due to a group of well-wishers from the U.S.A. belonging to an organisation which they title "The Integral Life Foundation." I am deeply indebted to these splendid friends.
The dates of the letters do not follow any fixed order. They jump back and forth through months and years. They were collected according to the occasions on which their copies were found in old or recent files. This vagary does not matter because the questions dealt with have no special chronological relevance. The dates could have been omitted, but certain allusions in the letters called, now and then, for accurate time-pointers to give them definite significance.
In the present volume the issues of Mother India in which the correspondence originally found a place run from July 1980 to March 1990. Some changes have been introduced to clarify certain points. A few omissions have been made to avoid repetitions which did not matter much when they appeared at long intervals and not in serial reading such as a book provides. Some omissions are due to the fact that the writing has found its slot in another book of correspondence, the exchanges that took place between Miss Kathleen Raine and me over nearly three years and is now being published
under the caption, Indian Poets and English Poetry in succession to the earlier exchanges which have come out as The English Language and the Indian Spirit.
It is hoped that the first volume of Life-Poetry-Yoga will prove welcome not only to old readers but also to new ones into whose hands it may chance to fall - fellow-souls who are on a path of the inner life in the midst of worldly concerns and literary interests.
1994
Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)
1
Your letter has saddened me a great deal. But I don't feel that, you have reached the rock-bottom of hopelessness. To lose your health - getting spells of dizziness and weakness, not feeling like eating, etc. - is not what the Mother expects of you. Our central joy is that we are deeply and inalienably related to her. Whether we always experience the relation or not is a secondary matter: the primary truth of our lives is that the Mother has accepted us and that, sooner or later, we shall know her living presence in us at all times. We have to learn to seek our raison d'etre in this glorious act of grace. It is an irrevocable act and nothing should make us despair or enter a physico-psychological decline. Circumstances can occasionally be very drastic - but I remember the Mother saying that when all material props appear lost we have a clear sign that we are meant for self-dedication to the Lord. How much are we nearer to the Lord at every step? - this is our principal concern. We may do our best to better our circumstances: the Mother never discouraged efforts in this direction. But failures and buffets are intended to push us more and more into the Lord's arms. They must have such a result while they last. And what you have to do to counteract your depression is to make an offering of the problems to the Mother and obtain an inner freedom from distressing preoccupation with them. Ask for guidance with intense faith and wait quietly for the answer. I am sure that you will not only gain inner peace - and, in consequence, better health -but also come into touch with the right parties. Keep an eye open for them and do whatever you can with those you already know — the people immediately involved in paving the way towards your pension and gratuity.
This is all I can say at present. In one word, my advice is: take yourself in hand like a true child of the Divine and let the deepmost things come first and, from that starting-point, go all out in the external field to meet the challenges.
(1980)
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You have sent me a quotation from Sri Aurobindo which most of us have forgotten:
For a sincere sadhaka it is necessary to be exceedingly careful about his company and environments. You can lose in a few minutes what has taken you months to gain. Contact with hostile and undesirable persons and even people of spiritual influence foreign to the integral yoga, holy places, temples and churches have an influence adverse to the working of this yoga and are a hindrance to progress.
The words were more apt when the Ashram had not expanded and variegated itself, so to speak, and started dealing more and more with the common world. But in essence they are still worth attending to and convey an important truth in all circumstances, especially for situations where we have an amount of choice.
You want me to tell you how best we can live up to this truth and what criteria we have to follow in deciding about persons and places. I shall touch on the problem as briefly and pointedly as I can.
People with ideas very different from ours and eager to change our outlook and mode of life - people who are immersed in the ordinary life of the senses and carry an atmosphere full of worldly desires — places that have marked old-world religious associations or are charged with the presence of a spiritual figure whose sadhana diverges very forcefully from the Aurobindonian Yoga - all these are to be avoided. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish such people and places. Then we have to use our own inner feeling. If you are left in peace after contact with people or places, you may be sure that your protective zone has not been pierced. If you become aware of subtle uncertainties about your usual attitudes and movements, it may be better to cut down the contact or strengthen your own powers of resistance.
A time may come when you have so strong a protective
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zone around you that nothing will affect you. You will be conscious of undesirable influences hovering at the periphery of your being, but you will remain untouched and serene. However, it is not advisable to go on testing your own strength and safety. Keep away from whatever you clearly perceive to be out of tune with the Aurobindonian harmony of spirit and life, no matter how distantly.
When you can't avoid a certain environment, stay calm, invoke the Mother's Force and be confident of its action. 1 may add that at no time should there enter into your attitude any sense of egoistic superiority or any excited urge of hostility. These things are not Aurobindonian. In peace we avoid what is incongenial and in peace we face it if we must.
Your information that "incarnadine" can be an adjective as well as a verb is welcome. It extends the possibilities of this splendorous vocable. I have learnt something.
But your assertion that Sri Aurobindo has used "incarnadine" as an adjective is unacceptable. If he had done so, would I not have known and therefore refrained from criticising the phrase in your poem where the word occurs? Surely you may credit me with acquaintance with his usage. The lines of Sri Aurobindo you have alluded to, without quoting them, run:
The soul could feel into infinity cast
Timeless God-bliss the heart incarnadine.
Merely the fact that "incarnadine" comes immediately associated with a noun does not render it adjectival. I have marked only two earlier employments of the word in English poetry and, according to me, Sri Aurobindo's is in accord with them.
The first occasion is in Shakespeare's Macbeth:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
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Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
(II.2, lines 61-64)
Here also the word follows immediately a noun. But it actually goes with "will rather" and the object of "incarnadine" precedes the verb - a grammatical construction which is common to older poetry, where inversions are frequent, and which even now is legitimate for a special effect. The last half-line gives the certainty of the verb-form, proving the sense of the word to be "make red".
The next instance is in Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam. Quartrain VI ends:
'Red Wine!' - the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That yellow Cheek of hers t'incarnadine.
Here "to" with its "o" elided leaves us in no doubt of the verb-character of the word.
Now for Sri Aurobindo's sonnet "Evolution",1 the two closing lines of which, as already quoted, are our bone of contention. The construction is difficult. The phrase "into infinity cast" is a passive past participial one, going with "soul". The sentence can only be construed as follows if it is to have grammatical shape: "The soul, cast into infinity, could feel timeless God-bliss incarnadine the heart." In English, after "feel", as after words like "see" and "hear", one can use a present participle or simply the present-tense verb-form which is really the infinitive with "to" understood: that is, either "incarnadining" or "incarnadine" in the sentence concerned.
The line just preceding our two illustrates the present-participle use after "see":
I saw Matter illumining its parent Night.
1. Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Fondicherry 1972), p. 157.
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The present-tense verb-form may be noted with "hear" in Wordsworth's "Immortality" Ode:
I hear the Echoes thro' the mountains throng...
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2
TO DILIP KUMAR ROY
The terms "saint" and "saintly" are used very loosely in English, just as "spiritual" and "mystical" are applied to anybody who believes in and thinks about supernormal and supernatural things and experiences. But we must take the English language in hand and chisel the meaning of its great words to represent precisely the inner life. I suppose French is worse stilt: spirituel means in it "mentally sparkling" - even an atheist and materialist and sensualist can be spirituel!
The Protestant Reformation had much to do with befogging the English language in regard to the inner life. The Roman Catholics had more or less accurate notions about the difference between ethical goodness and saintly radiancy -though I dare say that in some instances they reduced the difference to a crude presence of what were called miraculous phenomena. But the canonisation of a man came about after much scrutinising of his life and its sources of activity, a careful study of the subjective as well as objective quality of his being. That is why even the Pope who is the head of the Church is not by virtue of his mere moral and religious eminence called a saint. Among the Protestants, whoever lives a life of sexual abstinence and charity and service is a saint: often the sexual desideratum is dropped altogether and a "saintly" prelate or missionary can have his bellyful of wedded licence without the least tarnishing of his halo!
I don't know what exactly to say about the term "rishi". Sri Aurobindo has explained its root-meaning and applied it to Bankim Chandra Chatterji for his discovery of the mantra of India's renascence in "Bande Mataram" ("I bow to you, O Mother!"). In its highest connotation, "rishi" means one who brings about the creative expression of the secret divine spirit of things, either in word or action, preferably in both, as the composers of the Veda did. You have asked about Tagore. If
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he attained, on the plane proper to him, a supreme creative pitch in his poetry of the inner life or of mystical and spiritual realities, he could be hailed as a rishi. In a general sense, the poet who gives sovereign expression from the inside, so to speak, to any plane becomes a rishi, no matter if he does not touch the mystical and spiritual aspect of things. Thus I suppose Shakespeare can be described as the rishi of the plane of the Life-Force. I myself, however, prefer to give a mystical and spiritual tinge to the term - so that the profound Mother-worshipping fervour of Bankim Chandra would make him a rishi in his vivid and visionary national anthem while the emotional patriotism of Iqbal in his richly imaginative "Hindustan Hamara" wouldn't. So too would I deem Tagore a rishi in his intensest ecstasy of utterance only where he reveals, in the light of his own word-plane, realities of the inner being or of Super-Nature. And here I should like to point out that in all true rishi-poems there is illumination as well as rapture, a seerhood no less than the soul's lyricism. Certain parts of Gitanjali have this double quality - so do others that are not devotional at all. Devotionalism is not the sine qua non. I don't think one could designate Tagore's "Urvasie" devotional, but I am inclined to rank it among his finest rishi-creations.
It is necessary to say, however, that the poet in one could be on many occasions a rishi but as a man one might be very far from it. To be a rishi as a man one must be something much more than intellectually wise and culturally accom-'plished. One's judgments and actions must spring from some divine depth.
*
Few artists are on a par with the height and depth of consciousness opening up before us in their works. It would be crass folly for anyone to charge a spiritual poem with being pretentious, should the poet not be a practising saint twenty-four hours of the day. A good poem stands by itself:
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if it has inspiration it fulfils itself and is perfectly sincere. A poem's sincerity or "truth" lies in its being a faithful transcription of something fine in the heights and depths of our consciousness, regions that are mostly far away and hidden from our normal state - its truth or sincerity does not consist in whether its revelation agrees altogether with the poet's day-to-day outer life or even with the actual experience with which the poem began. That is the first thing to understand about art.
If people want to measure one's outer life entirely by one's poetry and vice versa, they are going the wrong way about a most delicate business. It is their fault and not the poet's or his poetry's. Great poetry does not pose: the simple reason is that it is truly inspired. In art, mere intellectual ingenuity, mere rhetoric, mere artifice of word and rhythm are the only poses. So true is this that if a man leading an unspiritual life were in a spell of inspiration to dash off some perfect pieces of spiritual moods he would nowise stand condemned as hypocritical. It is not in the least beyond possibility that such a phenomenon should take place. As Whitman said, each of us contains multitudes, and a personality at once poetic and mystical can very well appear in brief flashes among the jostling crowd within us of egoist and altruist, fool and philosopher, solitary and society-hunter. The man and the artist do not always coincide; art is often, if not at all times, an outrush of hidden splendours of the subliminal and the supraliminal through one side of the man, the side that is afire with a sense of beauty and quick with creative genius. Provided this particular side serves as a transparent medium, a work of art can be held as authentic, with no stain of pose upon it.
Your letter reached me this morning, setting right the peccant line in Hymn to Grace, setting right also your rather exaggerated depreciation of X as well as of yourself. You are
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writing finely at present in English - some of your stuff being more than fine - excellent and splendid. Your Bengali work I am unfortunately unable to savour, but I can guess that if you could write so well in English you must be superb in Bengali. Of course, I cannot say I like your English work everywhere. I am, I fear, much harder to please than your friend whose opinion on your Serpent-poem you quote. At the same time I hope I am more catholic in my tastes than most critics and more alert to detect shades of beauty. By the way, why do you talk of "leaving" some good work in Bengali? The word "leaving" suggests that you have made up your mind to kick the bucket sooner or later. Why this easy knuckling-under to Pallida Mors? Why this unwillingness to accept the beautiful burden of the Aurobindonian immortality by way of physical transformation as an ideal?
As regards AE and Yeats, I don't see what makes you think I do not find the former splendid. I like him very well; only, I cannot say he is a greater poet than Yeats. I surmise Sri Aurobindo will be much astonished if you tell him that Yeats is not a great poet. AE was by far the more luminously greater man and there were some traits in Yeats which were repellent - arrogance, pontificality, acidity - but these traits were the defects of a certain type of rigid greatness and though repellent in themselves they formed part of a personal whole which was very impressive because they were all the time accompanied by the positives of which they were the negatives - proud unbreakable fighting will, occult or wizard sight, contempt of pretentious mediocrity and refusal to suffer fools gladly. Even if they had been cheap or common instead of impressive, his poetry would not have become less great in our eyes any more than the few ugly traits in Beethoven's character make his music less grand for us or the best work of Wordsworth the poet less wonderfully seerlike because of the massive stupidity that in the man Wordsworth was the reverse of what in the obverse was a profound wisdom. Yeats's verse is most enchanting, most haunting - exquisite in suggestion, exquisite in rhythm. His
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suggestion is not always strictly formulable but has on our inner being an impact which thrills and illumines in an unforgettably subtle way.
I remember a chorus in one of his dramas: the refrain is -"God has not appeared to the birds"- and it seems to mean that all creatures except man have a sort of fullness and finality and contentment because they are fixed types, as it were, in their outer conscious being and do not have man's restless aspiration, an aspiration rendered unbearable to himself no less than disturbing to the world in general by his inkling of the Divine Presence that turns all natural life unsatisfying for him. Two verses have stuck in my mind out of that chorus:
The gier-eagle has chosen his part
In blue deeps of the upper air
Where one-eyed day can meet his stare:
He is content with his savage heart.
God has not appeared to the birds....
And where are last year's cygnets gone?
The lake is empty. Why do they fling
White wing out beside white wing?
What can a swan need but a swan?
In my opinion, this, though not Yeats at his most Celtic, is poetry of a marvellous beauty - extremely suggestive, moving and musical. To get into the spirit of its vision and word and vibration is to enter a rare world of revealing intensity and, if one is a poet, to subtilise and enrich one's expressive possibilities as one can scarcely do with the help of any other contemporary poet except Walter de la Mare in some of his finest lines.
AE at his highest is as great as Yeats but he hasn't Yeats's
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subtly rich incantation-effect. AH is a much greater poet than Walter de la Mare - yet there is at times a certain depth of magical sound in the latter which is usually absent from AE. This does not cast any slur on AE's inspiration or art, but it points to a special quality of incantation which, without being at all complex and purple in language, is packed with shade upon shade, tone behind tone, of beauty. Take this simple-worded stanza from de la Mare's All that's past:
Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break Out of the brier's boughs,
When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are -
Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
1 believe AE in his own way enters a neighbourhood of this depth of magical sound on a few isolated occasions - one is perhaps the poem Germinal which is different in theme-spirit but not quite different in tune-spirit. Does he ever break into the Yeatsian charmed circle? (Of course I have mostly the early Yeats in mind.) AE's remaining outside it does not, I repeat, diminish his worth as a poet. He has his own music even as he has his own moods. But there is a spell-binding by words, which Yeats commands very often and AE very seldom. AE can be delicate and intuitive, colourful and revelatory: what he does not have as a rule is that verbal spell-binding - an art which to those who are sensitive to the soul of words is most precious.
It is Harindranath Chattopadhyaya's not possessing this art in the large majority of his work that drew from Krishna-prem [Ronald Nixon] an unfavourable comparison of him with Yeats. Krishnaprem, like Arjava [J.A. Chadwick] and unlike you, is intoxicated with Yeats - and rightly so. Yet to make Yeats the touchstone of poetry is misguiding; for the
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spell-binding art of subtly rich incantation is one of the rare modes of poetry and does not comprise all the poetic modes. We might as well judge poetry by Sri Aurobindo's "overhead" tones: these tones make a still rarer mode and if we set up the unfathomable responses they create in us as the criterion of art we shall entirely miss the value of the large bulk of the world's poetry. I recollect Sri Aurobindo's saying, when you showed him Krishnaprem's verdict on Harindra-nath, that to condemn the latter because he was not Yeatsian was unfair. Take Sri Aurobindo himself in his early vital-mental work like Love and Death. There is a passage in that blank-verse narrative, the speech of the Love-God Kama or Madan, to which I had somewhat failed to respond, preferring the long haunting passage on Ruru's descent into the Underworld through the rush of the Ganges into ocean-depths. Our friend Arjava (John Chadwick) had considered it one of the peaks in that poem. I asked Sri Aurobindo what his own private opinion was. He wrote back:
"My own private opinion agrees with Arjava's estimate rather than with yours. These lines may not be astonishing in the sense of an unusual effort of constructive imagination and vision like the descent into Hell; but I do not think I have, elsewhere, surpassed this speech in power of language, passion and truth of feeling and nobility and felicity of rhythm all fused together into a perfect whole. And I think I have succeeded in expressing the truth of the godhead of Kama, the godhead of vital love (I am not using 'vital' in the strict Yogic sense; I mean the love that draws lives passionately together or throws them into or upon each other) with a certain completeness of poetic sight and perfection of poetic power, which puts it on one of the peaks - even if not the highest possible peak - of achievement. That is my private opinion - but, of course, all do not need to see alike in these matters."
(10.2.1932)
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3
FROM LETTERS TO FLORENCE RUSSELL
Your gift for June [1976] cheered up both the 27-year old Mother India and its 72-year young editor "Amal Kiran" (according to Sri Aurobindo's renaming of K.D. Sethna), "the Clear Ray", who, while appreciating Anatole France's advice to writers, "Clarity first, clarity again and clarity always", has in his role as poet preferred in consonance with Sri Aurobindo's own insight the injunction of Havelock Ellis: "Be clear, be clear, be not too clear." For, in poetry there must be around a core of distinct brightness a halo of radiant mystery extending far into the depths of the ineffable. To play a variation on the metaphor: one must be like a clear-cut star but all a-twinkle, all aquiver as if charged with a unknown message, as if
Tingling with rumours of the infinite.
Forgive this little sidetrack. Let me come to your letter. One point in it makes my "sidetrack" not quite irrelevant. It is your reference to Sanskrit words. These words, especially when plucked from the Veda, the Upanishads or the Gita, carry the double aspect which I have spoken of, for they have what Sri Aurobindo calls "undertones" of the inner being and "overtones" of the higher, or, as a line from Savitri about the Mantra puts it in a Mantric way:
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's
great deeps.
The unfathomable suggestions, the "rumours of the infinite", are so strong that even if one does not know the meaning of the words they invade one's consciousness and reverberate there with a sense of revelation. As you have
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yourself said, one can "grasp some meaning without any vocal interpretation".
I must one day get together all my poems and send them to you. The immediate packet due to you is, of course, the coming July issue of Mother India: "Spiritual India and Bicentennial America" - which will be out in a few days and wing its way to you so as to reach you by the fourth of the month, the date of the great occasion.
I had a mind to include in it some tidbits about the War of Independence and Washington. Perhaps the most interesting is the following. When King George realized the ghastly mistake he was making, he instructed Lord Howe to take a letter to George Washington, granting pardon for the revolt and desiring complete reconciliation. But the British did not recognise Washington as the American General, the rebel Commander-in-Chief. So Lord Howe addressed the letter to Mr. Washington. The American army sent it back, saying, "There is no such person here." Later, Lord Howe tried again, this time addressing George Washington Esq. Again, the letter was returned with the same comment. Then Lord Howe gave up, because British prestige would be injured if he changed the tune of the address. Thus the war was allowed to continue for many more miserable months, proving the truth of Einstein's remark at a later date: "There are only two things that are limitless - the universe and human stupidity."
Your mention of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony brings back to me the feeling I have always had about all art. 1 find art to divide roughly into two kinds - the one that humanly ascends in a way that makes us sing paeans of praise and the one that divinely descends to leave us absolutely dumbfounded. The first kind admirably embodies the life-force heroically striving towards the heights, the dreamer mind winging luminously to the empyrean, the soul of idealistic
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love rising in fire and frankincense in answer to some eternal noonday. Here is an inspired effort to seize what St. Augustine calls the Beauty of Ancient Days that is forever new. The other kind is not an act of seizing but an act of being seized. No inspired effort meets us now: we are face to face with the condition which Sri Aurobindo once put before me as the prerequisite of the Mantra: "the hushed intense receptivity of the seer." There is a waiting and watching in the wideness of the life-force or on the pinnacles of the mind or amid "the soul's great deeps". Responding to this visionary vigil a glory comes down from the Unknown, an utterance of the Supreme in the tongue proper to it and not in a translation in terms of the human. No doubt, mingling with the human consciousness at the other end, it has a touch not quite alien to us; but the quiet with open arms, that receives it, allows the divine tone to keep ringing over every other note. Both types of art are precious, yet this is indeed a ram avis - Sri Aurobindo's
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering
winged through the universe, .
Spirit immortal!
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is an example of the second type of art and what you have described as "the final outburst of inexplicable joy" is one of the world's master-movements of it. Among European achievements 1 would incline to couple with it the whole last canto of "Paradiso" in Dante's Divina Commedia, closing on that unforgettable note which one may venture to English, a little freely, thus:
Then vigour failed the towering fantasy;
Yet, like a wheel whose speed no tremble mars.
Desire rushed on, its spur unceasingly
The love that moves the sun and all the stars.
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Reading your latest letter I remembered Sri Aurobindo's line to Ahana, the Dawn Goddess -
Trailing behind thee the purple of thy soul and the
dawn-moment's glamour....
What a magical world, at once inner and outer, you have conjured up with that violet script on special paper! This line of Sri Aurobindo's is indeed a vision of the real Florence - I mean you, not the city, though I am sure the city anticipating your name had in times past all the wonder our imagination wraps it in.
When I look at the soul your letter unveils, I see in a single unifying flash the three goddesses I have always worshipped: Beauty, Generosity, Courage. To me Beauty is a Platonic presence, the fugitive yet unforgettable reflection of eternal Forms in the flux of time - thrilled super-realities which I have tried to echo in a couplet much appreciated by Sri Aurobindo:
Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line
Where passion's mortal music grows divine.
And Beauty is not only an outward marvel: it is also the mind's exalted attitude, the heart's exquisite gesture. With this inwardness of enchantment, Beauty merges in those two other goddesses. For, Generosity and Courage are a high and wide, intense and powerful as well as sweet and radiant self-giving of a mind that seeks to lose its being in the Infinite, a heart that yearns to contain the whole world and warm it with its deepest life, two movements that are fearless barrier-breakers, two laughing enemies of all that twists the large lines of existence into ugly imprisoning fences of the small and the self-centred. It is this Beauty, outward-inward and never separated from Generosity and Courage, which evokes immortal music from the true poet. It is this Beauty which is the fount of all great art. It is this Beauty which stirred within
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Florence to make that city memorable - and it is this Beauty which I see in you when you kindle up in response to my letter about Florence.
"The dawn-moment's glamour" - that also is to be remembered together with the soul's purple which is the innermost being's royalty of grace and graciousness. What is that glamour? Every day there is a moment between darkness and brightness when some mysterious perfect world seems to peep out and our world appears to tremble delicately on the verge of a miraculous new-birth, a psychic "renaissance", as if some everlasting glory of colour and shape were about to be revealed as the truth of the on-going time- process. The opening Canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is an enchanting hint or glint of this phenomenon. The ineffable moment passes and we have again common daylight. But that moment is a promise and a presage: its transitory touch is the seed repeatedly sown in earth-life, serving as the secret source of all its evolutionary aspiration and endeavour. I have a clear sense of this seed stirring within your words.
I am a little late in replying. Quite a heap of work suddenly descended upon me, submerging the letter-writer out of sight. The work sometimes becomes a heap just because, like you, I am a variety of beings - and that too not in succession as with most people but simultaneously. So a great number of things lure me at the same time and it's a job dealing with all of them almost together. One of the results in the past of this multitude of me's is that I have 23 unpublished books on subjects fairly wide apart: poetry, literary criticism, philosophical thought, scientific perspectives, history, archaeology, scriptural exegesis, translation from the French. On top of all the author-characters jostling one another, there is the sheer human diversity such as you speak of, a collection of contradictory pieces: "some say yes - some say no - do this or do that." The consolation that manifold people like us can
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take from our present perplexity is that the greater the crowd to be organised the greater the ultimate richness of unified being! To get to this richness we have to practise assiduously the Aurobindonian command:
"All life is Yoga."
The command does not, of course, mean that everything constituting what passes for life, in the world as it is, can be accepted straight away as Yoga. What is meant is: nothing in life should be considered as lacking a spiritual possibility, a spiritual truth hiding behind or within it. The old ascetic habit of cutting out whole chunks of common existence and confining oneself to a few bare necessities - preferably in a forest or a cave - has now to be itself cut out on the whole, though now and then a bit of withdrawing in order to leap forward better will not be quite out of place. But, by and large, we must live in the midst of the teeming vicissitudes of the world and, rejecting the spurious shape of things, try to evoke the authentic one.
This does not always imply a mere refining of habitual movements: it occasionally implies a complete substitution of them by the Divine Originals - the Archetypal Truth, Force, Bliss that may have got distorted and not simply diminished here. A re-creation may be needed through the pure light and strength and sweetness that reside in our inmost soul.
You have raised the question: "What is life?" Arthur Symons, with a dignified Stoic pessimism, says:
Life is a long preparedness for death.
Shakespeare, in the role of a disgruntled Macbeth, cries out, as everybody knows;
Life's but a poor player
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more...
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Shelley, idealistic visionary that he was, declares as also most people are aware:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments....
A French poet, with a resigned attitude of humble yet happy faith sings:
La vie est telle-
Quelle Dieu la fit,
Et, telle-quelle, E
lle suffit.
The lines may be freely rendered in English:
Life is such
As God devises,
And, little or much,
Life suffices.
A deeper sense of the Divine in the vibrant beauty of time's passage comes home to us in Vaughan's intuition of life:
A quickness that my God hath kissed.
This is one of my two favourite definitions. It suggests at the same time the fleeting, fast-vanishing character of human existence and the blessedness which it can still carry because it is a gift from God, because it can feel constantly the warm presence of the Divine's care and because the Supreme Himself, out of His deep affection and compassion for man, became incarnate, took on the brevity of the human condition and filled it forever with His undying love.
The co-favourite definition is my friend Nirodbaran's phrase, a fusion of the simple with the subtle in word as well as rhythm:
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Life that is deep and wonder-vast.
Here we are not only given the glimpse of a rich meaning behind the surface, a meaning opening up happy surprises. We also get the sense of a more-than-earthly truth silently at work within the many-motioned vital force to reveal through the play of this force a secret splendour whose power of transfiguring earth overpasses our largest dreams.
Your reference to horse-racing has stirred me a great deal. Did I ever tell you that I am a horse-worshipper? I rode horses for 20 years before I joined the Ashram, but I had to do it with certain limitations because of a bad left leg, legacy of infantile paralysis. The Mother once told me that one day she hoped to cure it. Do you know the first thought that flashed across my mind? It was: "I'll get hold of a grand big horse and start riding it all over Pondicherry!"
Yes, I have looked adoringly at the great Secretariat's picture. He was indeed an extraordinary racer - well suited to the traditional Persian hero Rustum, under whose weight the legs of every horse buckled except those of the one named Ruksh. "Ruksh" is the later Persian form of the ancient Aryan word "Rakshasa", meaning "Giant" and denoting a type of what Sri Aurobindo would call a Vital Being. The Rakshasa is the violent devourer as distinguished from the Asura who is the cold-blooded scheming destroyer and dictator, as well as from the Pishacha, who is the foul-minded perverted filth-fiend and torturer. Ruksh in the Rustum-legend would represent the gigantic power of self-assertive vitality coming under the control of the mind in its heroic ventures.
I have always regarded Sri Aurobindo as Kalki, the last Avatar of Hindu tradition, who has been figured as coming to the world riding a white horse. Perhaps the same symbolic horse arrives at the end of India's spiritual history as that
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which at its beginning the Vedic Rishis visioned as galloping ever towards the Dawn - Dadhikravan, image of the purified and mastered Life-Force moving with the Immortal Light of Truth in his heart and eyes.
In connection with Sri Aurobindo, there is an interesting fact to note in his Savitri. The achievement of the heroine's father - the long manifold Yoga and detailed exploration of the various ascending planes right up to the highest, from which the Divine Mother emerges to meet him - represents the long spiritual labour of Sri Aurobindo himself. The name of this Aurobindonian "thinker and toiler in the Ideal's air" is Aswapati, "Lord of the Horse".
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4
You are right in seeing a clear sign of the luminously unexpected - that is, of the "Hour of God" - in certain world-events where parties that had looked absolutely irreconcilable have come together to create a new harmony. But much in the world still remains untouched by the breath of the Spirit blowing from - to quote a Wordsworthian expression -
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
which betokens the subtle presence of Sri Aurobindo within our gross-physical space. The Hour of God has indeed struck - in fact it struck quite a time ago - but the ears of most men are closed. The only thing that somehow has sounded on their dull tympanums is that there should be no third world-war. But it needed the terrific blasts of the Atom Bomb to get this message in. I suppose the Divine could only be declared by such blasts which represent the utmost of sound matching the utmost of silence that is the natural atmosphere of the Supreme Reality. Has not Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri that mantric line? —
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.
The word "omnipotent" is deeply significant here, pointing to the spiritual depth of warning that has lain behind the outbreak of the threat haunting the world with its "mushroom cloud".
You have written: "I wish you would tell me what you call surrender of the ego." I would answer that there are four phases of it.
First, a calm has to be cultivated so that the usual out-leaping reactions gradually diminish until they hardly take
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place - the reactions of strong like and dislike, pleasure and pain, desire and disgust, self-exaltation and self-abasement. Secondly, these reactions whenever they occur have to be inwardly offered to the Divine: the cultivation of the calm and the offering of the reaction to the Divine have to go on side by side. Thirdly, a call has to go forth to the Supreme to bring His presence into you in answer to the offering. This presence would consolidate the calm you have cultivated and slowly convert it into the spontaneous self-existent peace that belongs to the inmost soul and to the highest spirit. Fourthly, in place of the non-reaction that got rid of the old outleapings of the limited ego positively or negatively, there will come a new activity of the nature. This activity will be one of varicoloured delight: every occasion that once caused a positive or negative play of the limited ego will now become an interplay of the Divine with Himself. There will be no disturbance of any sort m the being but a smiling search for the Divine's progressive purpose in whatever situation stands before you. The outward aspects of the situation would not seem all in all; they would be merely the channels through which the Divine would work upon your inner self instead of upon your surface ego. Nothing will disturb you - what caused "irritations" and "disappointments" will be the Divine's strange touches - paradoxical happinesses, because your whole attitude, your entire pos-ture of confrontation has changed. Most probably, even those forces that attempted to irritate and disappoint you will give up their game and change their dealings with you.
♦
What a question to ask - whether you should humbly bow to me or humbly bow out!I have never desired to assume the guru's grandeur nor aspired to stand in any sort of unique splendour. You are always welcome to be by my side on an admired equal footing and if you wish to bring in anything like "bow", you can exercise the right to "bow-wow" at me
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whenever I myself seem a little dog-matic.
Your Catholic friend who read my letter to you and was astonished that a heathen from India could write like a Catholic - your friend is not to be blamed too much as an ignoramus. The usual impression people get of India is as of a land where all kinds of funny or weird creatures are taken as deities - say, an elephant-headed pot-bellied Ganesh riding on a mouse or a hanging-tongued fierce-eyed Kali with a necklace of skulls or a Hanuman with a monkey's face and tail. At a little less fantastic-seeming level, there is a Shiva with matted hair and a bull for his mount or else an Ardhanarishwara whose body is male on one side and female on the other.
Of course there is a symbolic imagination at play in these figures, not to speak of subtle actualities inspiring that imagination to perceive a many-sidedness in the unitary Divine Being who is at the same time an impersonal infinity of omnipotent peace self-multiplied endlessly and a super-personal eternity of omniscient love with innumerable soul-forms of his own to be interrelated. The experience of this Divine Being, even the vivid concept of it, give not only a proper meaning to the diversity of religious modes in India but also a true sense to the variety of religions in the world. One comes to see Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Zoroastria-nism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in their specific qualities as well as in their combinations, in a way that none of them by itself can see its own attributes. For, here is an all-inclusive harmonising vision instead of an outlook which sees itself in opposition to other outlooks.
I would expect none of these single-truth religions to even arrive at an adequate idea of the Indian spiritual phenomenon - except where a particular facet of the latter's complex Kohinoor corresponds to its own slanted seizure of the inner light. What I wrote struck a sympathetic chord in your friend's mind. If I had dilated on the six-armed dancing Nataraja or on Vishnu reclining upon the Snake Ananta and watching a blue lotus springing out of his navel, the good
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chap would have goggled.
Perhaps you will say that I am so enthusiastic about the Indian spiritual phenomenon because I am an Indian born to it. Actually I am not such a dyed-in-the-wool Indian: I was born a Parsi Zoroastrian, brought up in a single-truth religion like any Christian or Muslim or Jew. I arrived at the Indian synthesis by a partly natural and partly willed process. And, having been single-truthed for nearly 20 years, I am not oblivious of the several fine attributes of an early creed like mine. Each of the non-Indian religions develops to an exquisite point one or another aspect of the Universal Reality. These points are worth appreciating but their essence can be caught without our being limited to them. To go beyond them is not to run them down. To run them down would signify that one has not genuinely gone beyond them, since running down any religious outlook is precisely a defect of the single-truth creeds. All the less would I be out of tune with a western creed like Christianity. I have been enormously westernised and my whole education took place in a Roman Catholic school and college run by European Jesuits.
More and more people are being "Indianised" in the higher sense of the word - I say the higher sense because everything in the outer India is not desirable, nor has it been desirable at all periods of the past.
We have heard of the fall of Rome starting the Dark Ages, and the Fall of Constantinople beginning the Renaissance, and the Fall of Paris commencing the horror of the Hitlerite Festung Europa. But nothing has moved me so much as the Fall of Florence a few weeks before, initiating God-knows-what new era of inner history and soul-development. It needs a never-forgetting Florentine like Dante to plumb with the triple rhymes of his Divina Commedia the profound cadence of this unexpected movement from vertical through
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slanting to horizontal. Corresponding to his terza rima, there is his threefold adventure in the Beyond: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Face to face with the recent catastrophe in Chicago, perhaps he would pen a Divina Tragedia and trace not an ascent but a descent from Florence's paradisal straight posture to a purgatorial downward bending and then the infernal nuisance of a thump on terra firma.
Not being as open to inspiration, whether soaring or plummeting, I can only mumble in plain as well as pained prose my grief at the thought of a most valued friend suffering "a sprained left ankle and a long gash in the right leg". But your saying that you imitated me makes my heart less sore, for a great feeling of being near and dear to you sweeps over me. And when you write that you are "happier over things" as a result, I mark the Divine's Hand using every fall in life to carry us higher than before — by a short cut through "a long gash" and by a sudden turn of the path through the surprise of a sprain.
I am not such a big Yogi as you think, but Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have lifted me a wee bit above the deceptive exteriors of life. Sri Aurobindo has put a little light into my mind so that I may see beyond the surface of things and catch an ecstatic glimpse of the Divine's subtle significances and symbols. The Mother has instilled into my heart a little sense of secret sounds enabling me to seize enchanted whispers of the Mantras that lie behind people's lives and seek expression through their hopes and reveries and loves. That is why I could recognise in you from almost the start a dreaming and a daring which were affined to my own inner self.
I might say that while Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aimed at making a great Yogi out of a budding poet they succeeded only in making a wide-eyed poet out of a tyro Yogi. But this success, though falling short of what should have been, was sufficient to clap a pair of pinions, small yet sure-beating, onto my far-from-Atlantean shoulders - and it has freed me from the superficial as well as from the humdrum.
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You need not feel sorry for having written to me of your Catholic friend's comment. I have not misjudged his intentions at all. Perhaps my analysis sounded as if I had suspected a condescending attitude in him. But I can well believe that there was no such thing and he was merely happy to find a clear Christian note in my Indian utterances.
Your gift is most welcome at the moment, though I'm not yet en route to the gloriously tragic stage of which Wordsworth speaks -
And mighty poets in their misery dead.
Maybe I have escaped that fate because of not being "mighty" enough - and thank God for that, for our aim is not to be mighty in the traditional way but to be a channel for - to quote Wordsworth again -
The light that never was on sea or land.
To attempt a paradox, I may say that in however obscure a manner we are meant to be mirrors of a luminosity that has not yet established its reign on earth, a supreme radiance that has never come down so far and whose one spark would be more precious, more potent than the most wide-spreading fame and name and flame the world has known. What I speak of is the transcendent Truth of things the Mundaka Upanishad dazzlingly glimpses in the Mantra as rendered by Sri Aurobindo:
There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but a shadow of that brightness and by its shining all this shineth.
If one can catch even in a single short poem the full force of
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this unmanifest grandeur, one would be more loyal to one's soul than if one out-Shakespeared Shakespeare and knocked Homer into a cocked hat.
I'm sorry I have been somewhat carried away into a bit of highfalutin'. Old Bill of Stratford, from whatever heaven to which his "poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" may have carried him, will send Amalward a sceptical smile, and the "blind bard of Scio's rocky isle" may thunder down from his empyrean a peal of Jovian laughter on my upstart head.
Your fantasy of striding life's stage - which the author of the famous speech beginning "All the world's a stage" would have read with interest - made exhilarating matter for me also. Both my mind and heart accompany your various roles: that's the artist in me speaking. But my soul is there too - and it is there to tell you that the rift you imagine between Yooga and the life you would like to lead through so many characters ranging from Brunhilde to L'Aiglon doesn't really exist. I mean the Aurobindonian Yoga of the Supermind. Don't you know that Supermind is Super-Brunhilde, Super-Duse, Super-Bernhardt, Super-L'Aiglon, Super-Mozart and what is most vitally important - Super-Florence? It is not the denial of passion and colour and music, but, as some Super-Amal hidden within this poor aspirant has written in lines which I have already quoted to you once and which Sri Aurobindo considered revelatory,
This is what Sri Aurobindo calls us to, for the goal he sets before us is not Divine Indifference but the kind of divini-sation my couplet sings out. And remember that it is a couplet - it is no lonely line, it is two rhyming and chiming dancers, a pair of inseparable inspired companions across whose being there is the play of a heat that is heavenly. Yes, a "play" which does not cast away the stage over which you would stride with "fury and fervor" but lifts it to a height
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where Godhead is just the last stage of Man being truly himself.
The two cheques to Mother India which you had to cancel are still wanderers like Demeter searching for the lost Persephone - the latter's role in this case being played by a less gorgeous personage, though one may not go so far as to dub this personage Parsi-phoney, a sheer contrast to that gatherer of flowers, herself, as Milton says,
the fairest flower, by gloomy Dis
Gathered.
Yes, I am a Parsi, as you already know, but not too much of a phoney - except in the sense that my ancestors have been in India for the last 1200 years and so may be said to have got their origin from the Iranian province of Parsa fairly rubbed off. Actually, barring distinctly Indian signs like the women's sari and a certain degree of browning of the men's skin, the Parsis of India, while never being stand-offish from the rest of the country's population, have retained their communal individuality more markedly than any other ingredient of India's multifarious inhabitants. I am tempted to write at some length on this fast-disappearing little group of a bare 100,000 members in the whole world, but I shan't let myself go at the moment. Let me touch on some matters you have alluded to.
"Dante Gabriel Rossetti" - I was delighted to see that name blaze out of your letter. Like his greater Florentine namesake, he and his work have attracted me ever since my late school-days. I have conned his House of Life as devotedly as La Vita Nuova and relished that peculiar blend of earthly and ethereal in it which would illustrate in a special manner the definition the Mother once gave of Poetry: "the sensuality of the spirit." I have enjoyed also in his verse the quest of
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unusual verbal artistry in the service of a happy ingenuity of impassioned idea. The sonnet to which you refer is an apt example of what I mean. In the early stage of my own poetic development I often found myself so "kindred to some phases of his pictorial poetry and poetic painting that I occasionally wondered whether he and I were not emanations of the same soul. A strange light was shed on my wondering when Sri Aurobindo remarked apropos of an early poem by my sister Minnie that she was surely a bom poet, although here and there were some gleams from Heine and Christina Rossetti. Minnie had not read either of these poets. But I made an astonishing discovery. I came upon a portrait of Christina done by her brother Dante Gabriel, which bore an extraordinary resemblance in facial feature, mood-expression and head-posture as well as hair-do to a photograph of Minnie at the time this poem had been written. I made a copy of Dante Gabriel's sketch and sent it along with that photograph of Minnie to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, They too were extremely struck. The likeness seemed certainly past all coincidence - and I, who had in early life asked myself whether I should concentrate on poetry or on painting, the two arts to which I had been naturally drawn by my own abilities, suddenly felt as though that pair of brother and sister, shining in the art-world of the later nineteenth century England and never quite discovering the true form of the Idea] after which they had strained, had entered earth-life again in the fulfilling time of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
Maybe you too belonged to that same England and shared in the soulful aestheticism which came to what 1 may call flaming flower in the vision and work of the two Rossettis as well as Walter Pater, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.
I feel rather worried about the condition of your eyes. I can't quite make out what exactly is wrong. It seems sometimes
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you can read and sometimes you can't. Why this fluctuation? Cannot some expert opthalmologist handle your peculiarity and give you the type of glasses you need? Surely, being a sexagenarian doesn't make your case hopeless?
You speak of a "vision-problem" which does not appear to refer altogether to your physical eyes. But surely, as far as I can see into you, your inner vision is absolutely unblurred. It is more clear than that of most people connected with the Ashram. In all that you write I can feel your love for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and your soul's sight of them as the Incarnate Divine. You are a wonderful and inspiring individual. It is great luck to be in touch with you. At the moment you are in a bit of the blues because all around you is so much ignorance, so much preoccupation with sheer Matter. But you have sufficient strength inside you not to let this darkness sweep over you. It can never put out the light within, but even the outer mind need not get depressed because of the encroachment of these shadows. Really they are shadows and not substances, however solid they may look. And if you glow with the conviction that the Mother's Grace is operative all the time not only will you withstand the clutching approaches of ignorance but you will also suffuse the surrounding blindness with a scatter of stars lit from the sun that is your soul. Just think that you are in the midst of all this gloom because this gloom requires your presence. Once you feel that destiny, the gloom itself will start feeling the real You. And remember that all of us here with whom you share the eternal sense of the Mother are with you in the in-world. You are never alone and can never be defeated. I am reminded of a stanza in a poem of mine entitled 'Triumph is All". The lines run:
Forever in my heart I hear
A time-beat of eternal bliss.
White Omnipresence! where is fear?
The mouth of hell can be thy kiss.
The "immovable rock" within you of which you speak has
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two faces: one is a reflection of the inertia of matter, the other a reflection of the Spirit's changeless eternity. Within the former the latter is latent. When the latent becomes manifest you'll be able to say what a poem of mine on the Himalaya makes that mountain say:
I have caught the Eternal in a rock of trance.
Sri Aurobindo considered this line "superlative". Brood on it, let it live within you, evoke in yourself the truth of it, and soon you will feel not that you "can't budge" but that the Himalayan Sri Aurobindo will never budge from you.
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5
TWO LETTERS TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND
I've received two Sister Americas as against your receipt of one Mother India. This is a rather idiotically ingenious way of saying that you have written me two letters while I have sent you one copy of our periodical. But today I am in a somewhat ingeniously idiotic mood and this very frame of mind eggs me on to hair-split between being idiotically ingenious and being ingeniously idiotic! Perhaps I may best illustrate the former by the "famous" lines of Eliot:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table....
Here the stress falls upon ingenuity and the idiot-element grins from the background. But the grin, like that of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, is all over the place and drowns the ingeniousness when Wordsworth's straightforward paradox -
The Child is father of the Man -
is metagobrolised into the ridiculous riddle spun out by Swinburne:
The manner of man by the boy begotten
Is son to the child that his sire begets
And sire to the child of his father's son.
On a higher plane - the Chubbian plane, I might say where at present you are floating since you are now studying philosophy under my friend Dr. Chubb, I may cite as a magnificent example of the first category Shankara's theory of the world as Maya, Illusion, and his call upon an unreal individual to effect an unreal escape from an unreal bondage
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into the one and only Reality that is never either bound or individualised and is too static even to effect the most unreal of escapes!
Of course, by "the Chubbian plane" I mean simply a generality: the philosophical field of thought. I do not equate Dr. Chubb's philosophical position to Shankara's.
In this field, the second category may be piquantly exemplified by the theory known as Solipsism. Here the philosopher, sitting face to face with his students in a classroom, energetically argues to convince those students that since all he can know is his own perceptions the students have no existence outside the teacher's own mind and that the classroom is another construction of his mental consciousness which is roomy enough to hold everything in heaven and earth and is the sole subject-object deserving to be classed and studied as "existence"!
Maybe, philosophy sometimes falls into disrepute because of such gymnastics and people think it better to avoid grandiose problems and just stop with such popular questions and answers as: (I) "What is mind" - "No matter!", (2) "What is matter?" - "Never mind!".
Now for a spot of seriousness. Most philosophical problems arise from a lack of comprehensiveness in vision. The two questions and answers which I have quoted at the end of the last para seem often a necessity because of the exclusivist tendency in conceptual thought. To a comprehensive vision matter and mind are not opposites prompting a reductionist solution by which either the former is a mere sensation of the latter without having an existence of its own or else the latter is an epiphenomenon, a mere byproduct, a useless halo, as it were, of brain processes. Rather, mind and matter are both the aspects of a single reality which manifests itself through their opposition as well as interplay - a reality not "neutral" in its "stuff" a la Bertrand Russell but more luminous than mind and more substantial than matter: in short, a fundamental divine Existence variously creative of its own forms. It is indeed this Existence after which we Aurobindonians
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strive and by which we hope to change matter no less than mind to a perfect instrument of a Divine Life on earth.
I think your final impression of me from this letter will be that I am not quite unlike the first American woman to come to the Ashram, one Mrs. Macpheeters whom an Ashramite correctly hit off by a stroke of Indian English which mystified even that mystic-minded old lady. He characterised her as "frivolous in the face but serious in the back"!
(6.4.1974)
It was delightful to hear from you and to have the memory of you conjured up. Yes, those were indeed rich days in 1975 when you used to come and have a pretty pow-wow with Dr. Chubb and me.
Dr. Chubb seems to have given you a very vivid picture of me after my leg accident. The moving about by pushing a chair forward and being a six-legged creature safe from all tosses was so enjoyable that I sometimes thought I would adopt it even when my leg had recovered. Now I am out of plaster and practising again to be Plato's "featherless biped".
Mention of Plato brings me to your awe-inspiring programme of learning. With the subjects you have mentioned I'm sure you will soon be fit to rattle off a series of articles of your own on subjects like Teilhard de Chardin. I am glad you are following closely my own dissertations. If there is any point in them that specially makes your grey cells go radioactive, please do discuss it with me.
You have written of the ease in acquiring knowledge and the difficulty in acquiring wisdom. I suppose that when one goes on filling gaps in one's education and yet feels not only that gaps still remain to be filled but also that all knowledge is itself a big gap, one begins to be a little wise. One grows wiser and wiser as one more and more feels that this gap is a strange glow and that "a mystery we make darker with a name" (as Sri Aurobindo puts the situation) is trying to come through. Perhaps wisdom begins to grow really concrete
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when the gap is felt to be God-shaped and becomes a hushed expectancy and then an intense receptivity of the unknown Beauty which the heart must love before the eyes can see.
Things in Pondicherry are moving as usual. Does that amount to saying they are not moving at all? Perhaps the right way of putting it is that they are moving as if a stillness and an immobility were on the move. This reminds me of the Isha Upanishad's declarations:
."One unmoving that is swifter than Mind, That the Gods reach not, for It progresses ever in front. That, standing, passes beyond others as they run.... That moves and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That also is outside all this."
Yes, such would be the true report of the life here and of its seekings and its arrivals.
But let me whisper in your ear - or, as the Upanishad would say, in the Ear behind your ear - that life in the Ashram would be a little brighter if a certain face with a notable nose and a certain head with the surprising hair-do of a Roman Senator were to mingle as a foreground feature with that Aurobindonian vision:
Calm faces of the Gods on backgrounds vast,
Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes.
In passing, may I point out that the word "marvel" (singular) instead of "marvels" serves a fine poetic-spiritual purpose? "Marvels" would provide a general suggestion of great suprising features waiting to come out to us from the "infinitudes". It would not tell us what they are: it is not directly revelatory. The singular term reveals directly that the "infinitudes" themselves are a "marvel". Thus their presence goes home to us straight. Here is a masterly stroke of poetic-spiritual subtlety.
(23.1.1975)
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6
You have become a storehouse of creative life, fissioning the human to set free the divine within and fusioning the human and the divine to bring about the super-person ahead. Then there is the energy evoked - energy to go through a car-journey and, instead of resting, sitting down to type out a scientific passage and interspersing it with mystic hints and glints. I used to be like that once - coming to Bombay by train from Pondy after two and a half days' run and immediately getting busy penning a long letter to my associate editor and fellow sadhak in Pondy on the philosophical implications of modern physics.
What is this about it being "wonderful to be with you, near you, at your feet, just as the doctor ordered"? I think the extraordinary doctor must have read symptoms of "poetic pains" in you and recommended the metrical feet — the iambs, trochees, anapaests, dactyls, spondees, pyrrhics - on which I move towards the Master of the Mantra. But haven't I told you not to bother about prosody? Perhaps, as an orthopaedic surgeon, you are interested in the non-prosodic long-short, stress-slack, which my feet exhibit with their semi-paraplegic oddities?
Your scientific quotation interested me in parts, for the ultimate hang of it somewhat eluded me. Anyway, the most important bits were your occasional interpolations, your running off into "Hari-bolo" - "the God's name" - without landing in Hari-boloney as often happens with misguided modem enthusiasts. The suggestion of a hymn to Indra is a little opaque to me, but I appreciate the remark about Grace on why "transformation is so essential to contain 'Grace' ". I would put the matter thus: "Grace comes God-knows-why (the Rigvedic Rishi might have said 'Perhaps even He does not know!') but we must not receive it as merely an enrapturing freak: we must become gracious and graceful as a result of its bewildering visits, so that we become examples
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of its victory, forms of light and love chiselled to perfection by its sudden kisses and caresses."
Your next query is: "The nescience is nearest the Divine in the 'tail-in-the mouth' snake-analogy; why couldn't it go in reverse gear instead of 'evolving' and causing all this bother?" If the divine car could have been put in reverse gear it would have been only the positive Divine dealing with the negative Divine, and perhaps there wouldn't be much fun in that. All the fun seems to lie in masquerading as Dinkar and Amal and their likes, who don't know they are Parabrahman and Paramatman and Parameshwar and in whom the Supremos have to play all sorts of fumbling, stumbling, grumbling roles, not to mention all the teeming multitudes of prehuman parts we have played. Of course it is a strange kind of fun with mocks and knocks and shocks and blocks which the Divine alone can willingly accept, but anything that does not involve the One functioning as the Many is not in the Divine's line of action.
"Involve" is a good cue for a few further words. For it is by our being "involved" that the evolution so regretted by you has taken place. And it has taken place because the real you felt that it would never be regretted. All of us - the Many in the One - chose the arduous evolution with a grand "Hurrah" when the prospect of breaking out of the Divine's very opposite - the Inconscient - was offered to us with the lure of a darkness which was a locked light. In a freedom of soul-sight the great adventure was accepted.
A cosmological question arising here is one that does not appear to be finally settled by Sri Aurobindo's writings. Did the empyreal Superconscient project the abysmal Inconscient first and then build up the ladder of the intervening planes or did He descend step by step with those planes to reach at last the inconscient state? Possibly the solution lies in saying that this state along with the so-called intervening planes came into existence simultaneously and the ensemble allows us to regard it from two different points of view, both of which have their legitimate significances. The Superconscient imme-
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diately turning into the Inconscient and the planes taking shape to link the twins would represent the magic of the Infinite and Eternal. The Superconscient growing less and less super until it ends up as the Inconscient would represent the Infinite-Eternal's logic. Unless the Divine is at once magic and logic, He cannot be the Divine. And this combination coming into action is rendered possible by the simultaneity I have mentioned.
Maybe we are getting into too deep waters. And I will conclude with one more thought springing out of your long quotation. It is in relation to its starting-point: "A pail of water." Your parenthetical "except the Yogis and sadhaks" to the article's statement that "no-one is anywhere near getting out more energy than they put in" finds appropriate elucidation in Sri Aurobindo's remark "Aspiration and will of consecration calling down a greater Force to do the work is a method which brings great results.... 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."
By the way the reference to electrons and neutrons in the article reminds me of one of the startling enigmas of fundamental physics. Particles like protons and neutrons - broadly classified as "hadrons" - are made up of parts which are now known as "quarks". But their fellow particles like electrons and neutrinos, broadly termed "leptons", have not been found to be composed of parts. They seem to be ultimate, which looks like an impossibility.
Your beautiful last sentence - "O how I adore Her and how much more I have to learn to love Her" - sums up the whole glory and grope of our endless Yoga.
(21.4.1986)
Your quotation of the Savitri lines on the black Inconscient brought back to my mind one of my cheeky criticisms of Sri Aurobindo in my chosen role (quite understood by him) of a modern mind previewing the unusual poem before it would
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break into publication. I had jibbed at what struck me as abstractness in his
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscience to wake Ignorance.
When in the course of his reply he wrote of the Inconscient's being no abstraction for him and of its coming in persistently as a power in the cantos of the First Book of Savitri, and he referred to the four lines -
Opponent of that glory of escape.
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force
Into the deep obscurities of form -
I protested that here was something vivid and visual and concretely suggested whereas the earlier instance left Inconscience no less than Ignorance unvitalised despite the concretely suggestive act of "teasing". Teasing here means insistently stirring, vexing, importuning. It is a memorable usage which can well bear comparison though not with the same shade of suggestion to the Keatsian apostrophe to a Grecian urn:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth Eternity.
Here the sense is that something exceedingly beautiful in its meaningful depictions without ever saying a word for thought to fasten on takes us beyond thinking just as the feeling aroused by the idea of eternity dumbs and numbs the brain. Keats has another moment too of Eternity's teasing, though without the actual term being employed. In an Ode to Pan woven into his Endymion, Pan's temple is addressed:
Be thou the unimaginable lodge
Of solitary thinkings such as dodge
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Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain....
Unformulable mysterious movements of the mind are said to take place exceeding the range and grasp of the physical conceiving consciousness. A sort of reverse movement, not anything arising from our life but visiting it from the Higher, the Illumined, the Intuitive Mind occurs when Savitri's future father Aswapati has returned from his supra-mundane travels:
Once more he moved among material scenes,
Lifted by intimations from the heights
And in the pauses of the building brain
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.1
I am afraid poetic associations have carried me far from the questions you have asked. Perhaps the questions are difficult to answer and so I have sidetracked into a domain where I am more at home. I suppose the Inconscient is no passive reality but an active adverse power by which the divine presence hidden in the cosmos - like "a slumberous Infinite" - is creatively bestirred into no more than forms ignorantly obscuring the soul which is born within them. Aswapati escapes from this world of living Death - "Death and his brother Sleep", as Shelley's phrase sums up. The terms in which Sri Aurobindo expresses Aswapati's breakthrough interest me very much because of the line -
A ray returning to its parent sun -
1. I am using in the third line the preposition "in" which appears in 13 versions before the very last which has "twixt" by what is to me an inexplicable oversight completely reversing the meaning of the preceding versions and contradicting. Sri Aurobindo's often-repeated advice to quiet the mind -make the building brain pause - in order to receive messages from beyond or behind our ordinary consciousness.
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which keeps me in mind of what the name given me by Sri Aurobindo - 'Amal Kiran (The Clear Ray)" - commands me to do. My destiny is to
Climb through white rays to meet an unseen sun.
But, to fulfil it, there must come the omnipotent Grace from beyond, such as Aswapati meets in those lines about "a strong Descent" which you feel to be from the Overmind plane:
As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure
A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, A Flame,
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
Indeed the lines are very powerful,not only luminously descriptive but penetratingly creative: the reality pictured in them takes hold of word and rhythm: the sheer stuff of their sense comes alive in their movement and vibration, and Aswapati's experience is so expressed as if it could seize the reader himself. A super-Shakespeare's vitality and vividness are here, revealing and communicating with the Overmind's blend of the immense and the intense the Divine as at once a vast Puissance and an intimate Person, bringing "stupendous limbs" and "the Unknown's grasp".
If we identify with the inspired energy of the passage, both illuminative and formative, we shall not merely feel tired of our all-too-human today but also bring closer our Aurobindonian "tomorrow".
(6.5.1986)
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It is not inconsistent with my image of you that you should have an illness of one sort or another but always I see you smiling. A perverse form of that smile is in your saying about your severe attack of sinusitis: "I suspect I even liked it." Of course you noticed the perversion and "came out of it". Still, behind it is the smile of the poet who can get the rasa, the enjoying taste, of the tragic and the terrible by his touch on the Divine's delight in all possibilities. Rembrandt's portrait of his mother in which wrinkled dejected old age is caught in a perfection of pose and pattern and pigment - Picasso's delineation of the manifold composite harmony of war's cut and slash and gruesome grotesquerie which we witness in his "Guernica": that is how the world comes to the rasa-drinker, or should I say rasa-Dinkar? And as long as you can keep a smile on your face in the midst of all sinusitis or even osteoarthritis you will not only have the artist's universal pleasure but also move towards the deep soul's unconditional bliss.
The joy that is known to giants,
The joy without a cause,
as G.K.C. puts it, not quite knowing what he was talking of, for the only giant who can have such joy is one hidden within the Divine Dwarf in our depths, the Upanishad's "Purusha no bigger than the thumb of a man", the true Soul or psychic being, who has the power to go towering towards heaven, at the same time his original home and destined goal.
Apropos of this reference I may quote to you a poem of mine which you will be the first to read. It expresses the culmination of a long-drawn-out experience and marks a crucial moment of the inner life. It was written on May 15 this year (1986) and looks as if only on that day what is said took place. Actually, it focuses with a finality a truth to which I have always been feeling my way with a wondrous warmth in the heart but had never fully realised before as the sole felicity:
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At Last
At last the unfading Rose -
Felt mine yet sought-afar
In the flowering of forms
That proved but surface-sheens.
Mirrors of a mystery
That never broke to a star.
Now wakes a sudden sky
In the centre of my chest.
Bliss-wafts that never die
Float from a petalled fire
Rooted in godlike rest.
They spread in the whole world's air,
Gold distances breathe close,
Worship burns everywhere,
Life flows to the Eternal's face.
Unveiled within, light's spire, At last the unfading Rose.
{18.5.1986)
Postscript
"Sole felicity" does not mean that one finds no happiness any more in the things of life. It means that all the other happinesses become transparent to the presence of the inner paradise, turn into aspects of it even while their individual lines are appreciated to the full and, in the process of their change, they lose their shortcomings, grow purified, allow the heart to remain free and, if they pass, there is no aching absence left.
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7
Quite a number of notes you have struck in your recent letters. But three in particular are felt as tones and undertones and overtones.
There are light and joy on the surface — that is the poet responding to the magic and mystery of the world, the touch of bright nearnesses, the call of hazy distances. All these are what I name "tones", the varied spectrum of waking life.
But at one end of the spectrum is the infra-red and at the other the ultra-violet. The former I point to as "undertones", the hidden cries and gropings, the restlessness of a dream-life which glimpses elusive idealities. You have caught a sense of it with impressive originality in the poem entitled "Lonely Restlessness". Usually the sea is described as full of turmoil and agitation on the surface and the depths are said to be calm. You have reversed the scene. A happy swaying rhythm rather than unrest is your sea's outer being, a kind of calm that is sun-shot and a-glimmer. Below is the great unease, the ever-searching solitariness. Not that pleasure is absent, not that the thrill of beauty is lacking. The Divine is felt here at diverse play no less than in the many-coloured outer appearance, but here are subtle and secret ways that do not lead to tangible goals, the lurings of what you designate "the touch that hurts and delights", the more-than-human which is not easy to bear because of its strange enrapturing excess of loveliness. You get scattered sips of nectar which set you always seeking: the full sweetness cannot be drained. The only solution is to go from the dreaming inner to the tranced inmost, where hides
a petalled fire
What I have labelled as "overtones" is not the Divine below or behind or within: it is the Divine beyond - to us a
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superconscious sleep, not just the sweet essence of things that is found in the soul but the vast heaven of honey overflowing to infinity. None of us has made his home there but all of us have known vague drippings, through some tremulous opening in our heads, from the golden charity pouring at all times out of the spiritual empyrean whose physical image is-d la Fitzgerald's Omar "-that inverted bowl we call the sky."
Now to your personal problem. It has two aspects. You are restless because you are lonely - a great gap made by the loss of a companion to your mind and heart not only on the human level but also on the level of the pilgrim of Eternity is still acutely felt. Then there is the second aspect. You are lonely because you are restless. The unrest comes essentially for a more fundamental reason than the loss you have suffered. It comes of not having found permanent habitation in - or at least lasting neighbourhood to - the tranced inmost which does not depend for its happiness on circumstances, objects, beings, but is pervaded, permeated, perfumed by an Ineffable which is simultaneously Person and Omnipresence. Often the human heart is taken up into that profound paradise when it echoes incessantly that Christian prayer:
Change and decay in all around I see —
O Thou who changest not, abide with me!
(3.6.1986)
You must be ready for the operation or else the operation has taken place and you are on the way to a painless-knee'd existence. Somebody should devise an operation to make all movement through life painless. In a fundamental sense it has already been devised by Sri Aurobindo M.D. (Master of Divinisation) and Mira M.R.C.S. (Mother of Rapturous Caressing and Smiling), but none of us wants to be "patient" enough for the long process of being re-made. Their ability for the all-changing operation is hampered by our inability for all-changeable co-operation.
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I suppose their supramental surgery has come to earth precisely to deal with people like us who lack the power to put ourselves in their hands and can only pray to them to exercise their power to pick us up. Your appeal at the Samadhi is characteristic of the practitioner of the Integral Yoga: "Make me surrender fully and make me quickly your excellent instrument." After all, this is a Yoga of Grace and what has been brought to us is the Supreme Light and Love, the Omnipotence of the Truth-Consciousness which is not only world-formative but also world-transformative. I remember what the Mother told me when, before going on a visit to Bombay for the first time after six and a half years, I said to her: "I have only one prayer - 'Never let go your hold on me' ". She answered, "I am like a fairy godmother. I can grant whatever you want. If you tell me, 'Let me go away', I can do so. But if you ask me never to let go my hold on you I shall hold you to myself always." And indeed she has done this and dragged me through hell and high water to her holy feet.
I remember also what I said to her when there was a talk of the Supermind's descent: "I want to know only one thing. When the Supermind descends, can it transform us in spite of ourselves?" The Master replied: "I should think so." I cried out: "Then there is hope for me!" The Avatars of the Supermind have come with hope for all of us weaklings. Paradoxically, they want us to be weak - to be soft wet clay in their hands to be moulded as they wish. Somebody once said to the Mother: "How wonderful it would be if a Yogi like Vivekananda could come to you instead of poor stuff like us!" She paused for a moment and said: "People like Vivekananda would come with strong moulded beings. I may not be able to do anything with them. I want people who are not formed at all - whom I can turn into any form I like."
Down memory-lane comes another occasion to my mind. I quoted to the Mother with great admiration an epigram of Meredith's: "Men fall from God because they cling to Him
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not with their strength but with their weakness." She exclaimed: "This is clever rubbish. It is egoistic to think that one can show strength to God. One has to go to Him with one's weakness, with one's dependence on Him."
Now a last reminiscence. There was a complaint to the Mother that enough justice was not done in the Ashram: that is, the strength of people's merits was not fully attended to. The Mother remarked: "The Ashram is not a place of Justice, It is a place of Grace. If justice were done, who would deserve to be kept here?" All of us are allowed to be in the Ashram because the Divine Love overlooks our weaknesses. There can be no claim in this Yoga: we have to surrender ourselves to gain everything. Hasn't the Mother often declared: "Let me do your Yoga for you. All I am asking is: 'Don't stand in my way. Give up and I shall do all that is needed.' " The only thing we have to do is to open ourselves to the Grace constantly - a persistent attitude of being a simple child in the arms of the Divine Mother. From the little that I know of practical sadhana I would call this attitude a state of never-stopping flow of spontaneous warmth from the heart-centre to the Truth that is Sri Aurobindo and the Beauty that is the Mother.
All this should throw some light on the inner meaning of your son's cryptic-mystic rejoinder to the Catholic Sister's sympathetic observation that patients in European hospitals are very alone and that he should go with you to talk to you. His words - "Someone will always be with my father" - must have meant to the Sister that you were a very chummy sunshiny fellow who would surely attract friendly contacts. What the Sister must have understood is true, but does your son or, for that matter, do you realise that what is wanted goes beyond even his meaning of the words? The Mother is always with us and in that sense we are never alone. But are we always with her? This is the heart of the issue. We have to see that she is never left alone. Unfortunately, the Divine, in spite of his omnipresence, is generally left thus because the world forgets him and is preoccupied with other faces than
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those into which he has moulded his formless glory time and again. Not that we should shut our eyes to other faces, but we should have both sight and insight. Let the Divine look out at us from these faces and let us not be over-attached to their aspect of sur-faces. Human exchanges of affection and understanding we all require, but a glow in our depths should lead us to see - as that famous Yeatsian couplet wants -
In all poor foolish things that live a day
Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.
Your estimate of my poem "At Last" is very gratifying, but I am unable to pin down its "plane". Perhaps I am too close to it for critical appraisal. Apart from the metaphors it is a straight transcript of an inner condition and its antecedents. So at a venture I should say that it breaks out from the psychic realm through the inner mind which gives it most of its expression with just a halo of the source haunting the words. The metaphors are partly traditional partly imaginative but selected by a spontaneous sense of the details of the pervasive experience.
Your tracing of "disharmony-restlessness" to various centres is good Yogic analysis. I suppose you go by the nature of the state as felt at different places. From the solar plexus would come a powerful ache which is often at a loss"to know why the knife is turning and turning there. No rasa-taking of the pain and the turmoil in that spot, no glint of insight except rarely the feeling of inevitable fate and dumb resentment, a la Housman in a rebellious mood, against
Whatever brute or blackguard made the world.
When the heart-centre is pierced, there is either the exquisite Virgilian cry, as passed through Amal Kiran's translation (or transcreation):
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Haunted by tears is the world and our hearts by the
touch of things mortal -
or else the melancholy-mystic profound truth-seizure by St. Augusdne, which is the motto of my labyrinthine life: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." With the forehead-centre involved, Housman's mood of noble-practical stoicism is at play:
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity and shall not fail.
Bear them we can and, if we can, we must:
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
A more visionary stoicism too can find voice, I think it is best caught in a juxtaposition I once made of lines culled from two contexts in Savitri to make a sequence in which the last word of each line is picked up by the beginning of the next:
To know is best however hard to bear.
Bear: thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.
The centre at the top of the head is, as you say, incapable of restlessness. The utterance that comes from there is that superb invocation by Sri Aurobindo:
Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits
of being,
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing! Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden
Mystery, flower. Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the
marvellous Hour.
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wholly through the mind but to a considerable extent through the psychic presence at the back of the mind. That is why you experienced, along with the sense of fullness, "a kind of soft play of Her fingers". The combination of the full and the soft is typical of the Inmost transmitting the Upmost:
A flame that is All,
Yet the touch of a flower -
A sun grown soft and small.
I shall end with these lines which are themselves the end of a poem of mine.
(4.7.1986)
1 quite understand your dichotomous condition - the inner being clear and calm and enveloped by the Mother, the outer being confused, hurt and restless. As long as the inner is not lost in the outer's turmoil, you are basically safe and the shore is in sight across the swirling surge. But a quicker home-coming is promised by the fact that side by side with the inner's prayer for the outer's safe arrival the outer itself desires to be prayed for. There is no real conflict in you. There is only a passing disturbance. Within the heart of the disturbance is a smile, a faint upward curving of the lips answering to the broad Godward grin of the soul secure in Sri Aurobindo's hands. A game is being played with the mobile, many-turned, sensuous, imaginative, love-hungry, liberally self-giving, dream-pained, reality-searching Dinkar of day-to-day by the Dweller of the Depths in order to shape him into a true image of the Aurobindonian soul. You may ask: "Why is the game necessary?" The answer is simple: "The slow, intricate process of evolution." A comparative short-cut is possible if, instead of the outer self merely desiring to be prayed for, this self takes to praying on its own. When we turn to the Divine in that act of self-consecration which is Yoga and even the body seems to pray, it is not
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actually the body's prayer that goes forth; it is the inner being who is praying through the body and not only for the body. The outer self is affected, even occasionally pervaded in the midst of its frailties by the inner's light: it joins its palms in supplication to the Supreme, but what it is doing is transmitting the inner's appeal. This is indeed fine, but there comes a phase when the palms grow aware of their intrinsic existence and want to let it stream out like rays through their ten fingers to touch the Invisible and draw aside its veil and caress the immortal Beloved. That is what I understand by the opening line of Sri Aurobindo's Mantra of mantras:
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.
When the arms are not transmitters but originators, the hidden psychic element in matter has awakened. The awakening is not always a very pleasant one. A great disturbance seems to happen to the equilibrium one has attained by the co-operation of the outer with the inner. One often feels at a loss, as if one's contact with the free-flowing psyche of the depths is endangered and one is thrown out on the outer's own resources, but if one persists in the new consciousness and lets the awakened "material" psyche take its course all difficulties in the way of the Yogic life get fundamentally solved and one's home of perennial happiness is in the deep heart. This is a subject not easy to write about, but the key to a spontaneous God-centred living is there.
(14.8.1986)
Your letter of 13th August is a very significant one. You have passed through the abyss of pain and found the Mother even there. That is why you have come out of the darkness with a
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command from the Divine ending in a way which goes most home to me because 1 have always tended to do what the Mother says in it:
Feel yourself within me,
Live contentedly within my heart.
You may remember how I once told the Mother: "When I kneel at the Samadhi, I feel that Sri Aurobindo is too big to be kept in my heart. I feel that I am within him. His immense heart holds tiny me. People always talk of his being in their hearts. What do you say?" The Mother answered: "Both the experiences are valid, but perhaps yours corresponds more to the truth of things." The advantage of my experience is that one can never lose the Divine. Even if one's heart is clouded over and does not sense the Divine within it, one is still aureoled with the Divine, the whole circumambient universe is the embrace of the Supreme. Sri Aurobindo sky-high, the Mother horizon-wide enfold atomic Amal and, however blindly, he has the sense of being carried along their path of secret light to the hidden gold of their future.
Of course, this sense of their enveloping largeness does not fill the need which both of us very acutely have for the Divine's "eyes and lips and face". Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, having taken particular names and forms, can never lose them for us; but these are what Sri Aurobindo describes in his account of the young Savitri as being
A golden temple-door to things beyond.
Your other poem is full of the double aspect of the Divine, though with a greater stress on the individual side. From this stress the ending again' fans out, as it were, into a sort of saviour largeness, the small Dinkar himself flowering forth into a universal radiance, with his own personal pain turned into a Christ-like sacrifice:
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Let the flame of my pain
Warm all hearts
And remove darkness from everywhere.
A very original, even if a slightly abrupt and unprepared, close.
(17.9.1986)
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8
Your whole Holland-experience - a varied bitter-sweet -strikes me as an inevitable phase in your development, carefully planned in all its kaleidoscopic complexity by the Divine. 1 don't think anybody could have prevented it. You have grown considerably - numerous eyes have been opened. Some of them forcibly, others flowerily: you appear to be like a little Argus, half interested in the hundred directions suddenly shining into view, half bewildered by their seemingly different calls. What is to be felt with a clarifying keenness is that all these varied vistas are really radiating from a single centre in the depths of your heart and that each of them leads to the same wide circumference - the Mother -surrounding your life like an embrace from some infinite unknown. When you succeed in feeling these two truths, the little Argus will mature and realise something of that infinite unknown within himself and exclaim to the Supreme Beloved in the words of the young Aurobindo romantically mysticising in some clear evening at Cambridge in mid-spring:
My spirit is a heaven of thousand stars
And all these lights are thine and open doors on thee.
(4.10.1986)
There are a number of good insights in your letter: (1) "a lover's right never to be satisfied", (2) "I want to return to her my right to choose", (3) "Your strength is mine and if ever You let me go I will fall like a stone." Your "fresh 'free verse'" is also insightful in the lines:
Like yesterday's delicious dinner,
Like the day before's dear gods,
Like last month's tears and smiles.
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Like last year's spring and winter,
Like friends of times gone by,
All things of old and gold
Have their special place,
Their particular slot,
Not anywhere else, and yesterday's bliss
Could be today's curse.
Numbers (1) and (2) of what I have called "good insights", as well as the second line in the above free-verse are especially fine. The first statement might be a suggestion of greed, but the word "lover" lights it up and frees it from the penumbra of egotistic grumbling. A sunshine from the depths is in that word and the term "satisfied" has a sort of smile in it which shows appreciation and happiness at the same time that the lips seem to be open with a mute plea for more nectar. No. (2) has a couple of bright truth-points - the realisation that you have been given "freewill", the right to choose and that it is out of your own heart's wish, your liberty to say "Yes" or "No", you offer yourself to the Mother and place your life in Her hands to do with you what She desires in her wide wisdom. The phrase "Like the day before's dear gods" indicates the Infinite ever ahead of us and the ever-progressive movement of life, as pictured in the sestet of a sonnet of mine:
For the Divine is no fixed paradise
But truth beyond great truth, a spirit-heave
From unimaginable sun-surprise
Of beauty to immense love-lunar eve,
Dreaming through lone sidereal silence on
To yet another alchemy of dawn.
The phrase concerning "gods" is particularly profound: the others which bring in "dinner", "tears and smiles", "spring and winter", "friends" suggest that new things have to come into the picture but not necessarily that these novelties
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would be essentially better, whereas the one about "gods" sparks off the sense of the supreme and the paradox of the "supremer", which is the core of true progress - the seeming highest giving place to a still greater peak and so on in an astonishing succession of epiphany-splendour and initiation-secrecy. The adjective "dear" for "gods" is also significant. While the context directs us with the noun to the perennially largening objective dimension of spirituality, it makes us aware by this adjective of the increasing subjective largeness needed: the Yogi has constantly to outgrow the cherishing, the devotion, the worship which his heart offers, he must be ready to give up the degree in which he held as precious to himself whatever he took to be the Ultimate and go in for an intenser love exploring the Unknown for a marvel sweeter and sublimer. The adjective and the noun form a simple spontaneous combination lit with inevitability.
I was particularly struck by your light-hearted and at the same time light-packed phrase: "the route I have taken on this hard but fun-filled road." You have hit off to a profound nicety the character of the Aurobindonian Yoga. We have been summoned to accomplish a labour that can make a Hercules blanch and yet the summons is from the mouth of a Heavenly Humorist who can make the yoke which is implicit in the term "yoga" rhyme most naturally with "joke", for there is abundant play (yes, play and not only action) of grace, a smiling sweetness with surprise after surprise of sunshine for us when all seems gloomy and the way ahead obstructed. This sunshine can indeed be fun-shine.
(27.10.1986)
You are right in thinking that continuing on the path of Yoga is itself a progress even if no markedly impressive development may have been there. Not only is the persistence a sign of progress but the Force at work is such that we are bound to go further and further, however subtly and imperceptibly, just as we can't help being carried on in the earth's rotation
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around its own axis and the earth's revolution around the sun as well as its journey forward with the whole solar system which is moving towards the star Vega in the constellation Lyra. What is essentially required to ensure this automatic Yogic advancement is a basic resolve to do one's best- one's fairly feeble best in most cases - to be sincere in self-dedication to the Divine. Then in the course of time the hidden benefits will break out, like flowers from seeds secretly lying in the earth and waiting for sun and rain to call forth their colour and fragrance.
Yes, Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga lays out a superb programme. Even to traverse in mind the wonder after wonder of spiritual experience it discloses to the aspirant is to attain a permanent opening - an empty space, no doubt, but one which constantly invites the multi-splen-doured Plenitude. The Synthesis is most helpful if we can feel that Sri Aurobindo is not merely describing states of the Spirit: he is letting these states communicate themselves in a mode of expression proper to prose-writing. Prose has to be true to the gods of clarity and order so that the thinking mind may be able to grasp things and discern a system in them, but it has also to convey something of the beauty of whatever it holds forth as truth. Prose and not only poetry is an art, and the sense of perfect form is to be kindled by it. This is what Sri Aurobindo does to an extreme degree and in doing so with an "overhead" afflatus he brings to the intellect simultaneously a moving series of lucid concepts and a call to the imagination to prepare an inner silence in which these concepts may serve as shining shadows of realities beyond the intellect's ken, realities waiting to become life on earth.
Regarding contact with those who have passed away, I believe that occasionally we do meet them in the early period after their departure. Since departed sadhaks and sadhikas live with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and since the latter two are established on the subtle-physical plane our dead friends are also there. But I conceive that they are absorbed in being with the dual Divine and do not bother to be concerned.
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with earth-affairs. Only rarely will they make contact with us in their form-aspect, though psychically they may be reached by us in the midst of their absorption. In not more than four or five instances, when I have dreamed of my wife Sehra in the last six years, could I feel sure she was concretely with me.
What you say about poetry has always been my view. I hold that all poetry is "dramatic" in the sense that the poet does not express merely his experience. I use "experience" in a wide connotation. I mean not only actual incidents but also actual suggestions - suggestions coming both from one's own sensory or mental movements and from books, particularly from poems of others when a phrase or an image in them starts proliferating in one's consciousness. Whatever the stimulus, the creative faculty begins drawing to oneself all sorts of relevant features extending the contents of the experience, deepening their original shock-surprise, enriching their initial glow of thought and warmth of feeling. The seeing mind and the responsive heart link up with what Sri Aurobindo calls the "soul" in his Future Poetry - not the psychic being as such, to which his later directly Yogic writings give that name, but the inmost intuitive self in whatever plane the poet is poised on. If we like, we may consider this self the psychic being's representative within that plane. Of course, infiltrations from the "overhead" also take place, mostly getting coloured by the atmosphere of one's habitual inner level. At times, poetry is "dramatic" in an extraordinary sense: something from the inner or higher levels comes sheer and the poet is entirely a passive channel with no recognisable life-experience except for the general sadhana-state to spark off the "muldfoliate" expression. Many of Nirod's poems are outburts or downpours of this nature. Broadly speaking", all poetry is a god taking a cue from a man.
This cue-taking can occur independently of poetry. That is what you are after, so that every movement of life finds its profound or uplifted significance. You are asking for the
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process of this intensifying or immensifying of all life. I know of only two keys. One is the practice of a standing back - a self-detaching silence in the midst of the world's rumble and your own grumble - a reposing in some vast background studded with "calm faces of the gods", as it were,
The other key is the simple formula: "Remember and offer." With the first key the mystery of the universal Spirit gets opened, with the second the secrecy of the true individual soul gets unlocked. I may add that accompanying the hushful withdrawal there awakes an awareness of the Unthinkable above, so that one may feel, as Emily Dickinson says, the top of one's head blown away. One may not always be able to assert, with Sri Aurobindo,
My consciousness climbed like a topless hill,
but one may have the intuition of an enormous sun-blazed or moon-glinted or star-tingled dome replacing the usual feel of one's thick-wooded or sparse-growth'd or desert-bare skull. If one succeeds in standing back in a poised spread-out serenity and then from the centre of that circle whose circumference tends to be everywhere one makes the continuous gesture of giving everything - one's own inner movements and the outer to-and-fro of "time's unrest" - to a gracious Presence whose finite form of human-seeming loveliness with yet an endless aura of the unknown stretches out welcoming hands - if one carries on this twofold process all happenings within and without will catch a revelatory hint of some Supreme Design, some Archetypal Order waiting to be manifested. Ordinary phenomena will disclose enchanted meanings, unfold signs of a superhuman existence appearing to shadow forth the Ineffable. Thus the experience of love between human beings, with the heart beating faster in joy, could turn into that vision a la Flecker:
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A red immortal riding in the hearts of men.
Tennyson's quiet, solemn, simple representation:
Twilight and evening star
would change into that revelation made by an Aurobindonian poet intimately known to you:
The wideness with one star that is the dusk.
Small events from day to day would become apertures across which gifts of inner development would be received. All words, all acts, whether one's own or of others, would be stepping-stones athwart the flood of transience towards eternal truths,
(8.11.1986)
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9
You may remember my speaking to you of the difference between the "lonely" and the "solitary". Apropos of it I may dig up some lines that arose in me at the Samadhi at 5 p.m. on October 10. There was suddenly a pull from some profound within, threatening to take away whatever might be the dearest joy of one's days. I say "threatening" because that is how the pull seemed at first, but soon the sense of loss was gone and a recompense beyond one's highest hope was felt. Then the lines took shape:
Suddenly life's sweetest love was snatched away
To a veiled Within that gave no marvel back.
Then a strange silence found its final word:
"This paradise must swallow up all bliss,
Each smile and laugh and earth-intoxicate cry
Must plunge beyond its goldenest dream to a deep
Of heaven-honeyed loss, a void ever full,
Where sits the Solitary who is All,
Drunk with the infinitude of the One Self."
Now for the sentence Shraddhavan quoted from me to you: "Our past is the only thing we can change." Rather a cryptic and paradoxical pronouncement. The interpretations you have offered are valid and perhaps partake in their own ways of what I meant. You have written: "Our past is the only thing we can call ours and hold in our hands: the present is too slippery - one moment being the future and nearly the next the past. Since most of the time we are living unconsciously or with partial consciousness we see only the superficial part of any past, by exploring it more and more consciously we go on revealing to ourselves layer after layer or page after page and in the process of revelation of the ever new we may as well term it a change. Another approach would be to use the past to build a future as what the past
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could have been - this also amounts to changing it." My own meaning was as follows:
"The past's character depends on the nature of the present to which it has led. No matter how unlovely it may look, it can become beautiful if somehow the present gets touched by a glow from beyond the usual series of events, the normal chain of cause and effect. Realising the inadequacy, the wrong-headedness, the erring zigzag of times gone, we may awake keenly to the need of being different, the soul in us may stir to its creative sweet sadness at the sight of our life's and mind's missing of the true way, a light from our depths may suddenly leap out in response to the sense of frailty and futility in all that we have done. Then the past alters its whole aspect and grows a stepping-stone towards the Ideal. All its old appearance of a tale of mistakes and miseries and mischances, logically leading to nothing more than a variation on the same theme of the human, ail-too human, takes on a new significance and becomes - to put the matter in an extreme form - hell's hidden way to heaven. To let the past be what it has been to the outer consciousness or to transmute its lines and hues by giving them a novel denouement lies in our hands. And as the past is our only established and achieved possession in the process of time, it is the sole thing we have the power to reorientate by a spurt beyond our common selfhood. By such a spurt we begin to see behind all that has happened the secret Lover and Master manipulating the twists and turns of our life. A strange scheme emerges into view, everything falls into its proper place and all the scattered paths are found to come together and point to our true home that is the deep heart. At times what has impressed us as a graving in granite disperses like a mist: the entire past can vanish if the soul can give itself entirely to the Divine. The Mother has said that all Karma can be wiped out at a stroke by a sweeping self-dedication to the Divine. This would be a changing of the past in the most radical sense."
A word on some other topics. Yes, it is good to know
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what the Divine within wants to manifest. But we must beware of a too mental notion which would tell us merely what we want to be manifested. While being aware of one's main trend, it is best to lay one's complete being in the Mother's hands, asking her to manifest herself as fully as possible through us. She will know what we have to express. I think you are doing this well enough.
(6.1.1987)
You have asked me what provoked the lines of 10 October. They are linked to the poem "At Last" about the "Unfading Rose" which was written on 15 May 1986. The present "life-situation" was an extension of what became "finalised" then. The earlier phase was a psychic one: here is a deepening from or through the psychic into a sense of the Self - the ckaitya vurusha opening "backwards" into something of the Atman. I have mostly had in a very general manner the awareness-touch of a wide luminous tranquillity as the background of my being and, along with it, the frontal movement of a little soul offering its littleness to the Divine Beloved in a stream of sweet warmth. But this withdrawal through the "Unfading Rose", as it were, into a vastness as of some secret ever-still air was quite unusual. I am reminded in a small way of the Yoga of the Upanishads. This Yoga is, as a rule, taken to be an ancient Jnana Yoga, a Path of Knowledge through the discriminative mind. But, as Sri Aurobindo once pointed out to me, it was an entry into the Universal Self via the heart-purusha, the being "no bigger than the thumb of a man, who is like a fire without smoke and is the one who was in the past and is the lord of today and the lord of tomorrow". As soon as "the knot of the heartstrings" is "rent asunder" the "mortal" is said to "enjoy even in this body immortality." This "immortality" is twofold: the realisation of the inmost soul that never perishes and goes on growing through birth and death across the ages and the realisation of the single infinite Being who is unborn and
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undying and is "the immensity which alone is felicity."
I have sketched broadly the "life-situadon". The particularity attached to it may be seen as a pull inward beyond all objects of love, rending all ties and destroying the mortal music played on the heart-strings. Yet, in the swallowing up of its delight by an abyss ever-deepening, the cherished objects disappeared not into sheer nothingness but into the unlimited essence of their own selves. And this essence was at the same time touched with individuality and liberated into an All-ness. In a poem entitled "Ananda" many years ago occur lines that seem appropriate to the experience here as one to which the other which brought in the rose-image has led:
Rapture that cuts away time-transient shows
Like petals from the odour of a rose.
Now for a little turn away from myself. Your "jottings" interested me by the peeps they gave of your inner movements day after day. They have in places apt expressions matching the inner movements - "Legs may shake, stomach may flutter, chest may heave, but keep your hands uplifted firmly" - "Her promises wonderful and undeserved but taking too long to get fulfilled" - "I am the sea, the sea-gulls dipping for a fish, the moonbeam-fingertips dancing on wave-crests and suddenly dipping into the depths in between" - "touches of memory like whispers of eyelashes" -"And everywhere is Your name, Your expanse softly enclosing, pervading" - "empty interstellar space softly vibrated by self-revolving" - "it is self-eroticism, the Unmanifest tickling and then shivering and smiling and creating out of the joy and movement all manifestation for its own ecstasy" - "all of a sudden I realise that all I have achieved, all wonderful happenings and visions and day-dreams have been petals of Grace, drops of honey from heaven, chunks of moonbeams which somehow I plucked" - "sometimes I am a cloud looking from above and happy that soon I will come down and join earth, come down in drops, showers, even possibly torrents" - "the tussle between the old habit of mental
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control and control by the soul, mental discipline versus withholding of sanction by the Purusha is now near the surface, no more hidden" - "No more do I want to look from a mountain peak, that can never be tall enough and even it may be my vision is still limited, restricted. O, it is a joy to talk and pray and tell the Mother everything at least once a day and through Her loved ones whenever I write or talk to them."
(20.1.1987)
I see you are advising "patience" to yourself. Sri Aurobindo has asked for it too in the sense that we should realise how high and far the Supermind is and we should give ourselves time in order to gain Eternity instead of imagining or hoping that we can reach out to the Supreme in a few strides. It is also necessary to remember that the great planes have to be gradually climbed and we must beware of mistaking for them the surprising illuminations that occasionally come to us. In a number of letters Sri Aurobindo has warned enthusiastic or ambitious sadhaks against fancying they have penetrated into the Overmind, if not even into the Supermind, just because some spiritual dawn-glimmer has touched their usually benighted heads. To have a frequent sense of the realms of Light above is good progress but it is different from being settled in any stratum of them or from receiving a constant downpour of God-gold from the strata nearest our mind. While writing this I recall four lines of mine summing up the overhead planes: (1) the Intuition as a general category of the immediate Overhead, (2) the Overmind as the crown of the spiritual adventure in general, (3) the Supermind as the Divine who is formative of all things and facing its own formations and (4) the Absolute that holds the source of the Supermind but is the sheer transcendent, the everlastingly world-free:
Streak on gold streak wounding the illusive night —
Miraculous monarchy of eagled gaze -
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Eternal truth's time-measuring sun-blaze -Lonely omnipotence locked in self-light.
Returning to the topic of "patience", I may recount to you an incident between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Once, it appears, the Mother was animatedly pressing for the Ashram's progress. Sri Aurobindo expressed surprise at this change from the usual calm attitude towards her erring children. "Yes," the Mother said, "I am now impatient." Maybe some foreboding was there that extra demands might be made on her in the years to come (as actually happened after December 5, 1950 when Sri Aurobindo left his body) and she wanted something fundamental to be done before that
Sri Aurobindo himself seems to have shown impatience only about two months before his passing away. Nirod, his scribe, was taken aback when Sri Aurobindo said: "I want to finish Savitri soon." It was the very first occasion that the disciple, during his twelve years of attendance on the Master, had found him reckoning with the time-factor. On completing the somewhat intractable Book of Fate, Sri Aurobindo gave the impression of believing that he had done all that was immediately necessary. The Book of Death and the Epilogue were brought to his notice, but he set them aside, saving: "Oh, that? We shall see about that later on."
Perhaps impatience on his part may be read also in a letter he wrote to me in 1948. There he said that the situation had become too serious for him to have any time to waste on "intellectualities".
Why do you doubt my attitude to you? Of course you are very precious to me. Rarely does one find a soul with such trust, such openness, such concern. But this is only one side. The other side is the quality of the soul which is shown even more by its profound turn towards the Divine than by its capacity to have the trust, the openness, the concern relating to me.
(8.2.1987)
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Your poem -
That intense concern
Hid in poems and songs
Expressed in extended hands
ready to hold and lift,
In thoughts and prayers ready to reach
beseeching minds, |
n joys of silence and smiles of peace
ready to enrich aspiring hearts,
What happened?
Where did it go?
And when?-
your poem goes on finely up to the last three short lines. No doubt these express genuinely a life-situation but being true to actuality does not necessarily give poetic truth. Poetic truth has to be distilled from facts. Poetry is not satisfied by wondering what happened. What happened has itself to become wondrous or rather to reveal the core of surprise within its common existence. Perhaps, you should have said something like
What took it away
and left this empty searching stare?
I like what you say after mentioning your sense of boredom and aloneness which is partly relieved by painting: "Fun is still there as if interspersed like a few trees proclaiming spring amongst a forest in autumn." I think "fun" is the keynote of your nature as it is also of mine. The artist nature is always like that. But we must distinguish the artist from the aesthete. The aesthete depends on outward stimulus in order to feel happy. The artist has an inner fount which splashes everything with an iridescent spray and creates beauty or, more truly, washes off the surface of ordinariness from the world and lays bare the "crimson-throbbing glow"
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which is the world's heart. An artist can live amongst objects or circumstances that commonly would be considered unattractive and still be full of bubbling bliss. When he looks at a puddle he does not shrink like the aesthete from its apparent dirt but sees light reflected in it and feels that there must be light hidden in it to make it light-reflective. Lying in a gutter he would not be overpowered by the filth and the stink: he would be absorbed in all the clarity and colour he can watch in the sky above him and all the freshness he can intuit in the wide sweep of air across the open spaces there. Nothing can really depress him and everywhere he will discern some magical coming together of lines and shapes - some pattern bringing to him a shock of perfection in what the aesthete might regard as commonplace or chaotic.
Yes, the artist has a far deeper source of living and perceiving than the aesthete, but it is not yet the deepest. We may say he is like the Yogi who has realised the infinite beatific Brahman in all that exists, while the other fellow will mark Brahman springing forth in some areas and being depressingly absent from many spots. But even the aesthete character can have a contribution to make to the complete ideal we as Aurobindonians should keep before us. For there are two kinds possible of the other fellow: the selective and the creative. Ordinarily the aesthete picks out the beautiful and recoils from the ugly. The extraordinary aesthete would wish to change the ugly and refashion whatever does not answer to his quest for beauty. If the artist, who is impervious or oblivious to the broken and the disordered around him and lives in the light of his dream of the whole and harmonious, could add to his being the extraordinary aesthete's desire to transform the uncomely he would be more than a Shankarite seer of the Ananda Brahman and the overlooker of the phenomenal flawed universe: he would be the Aurobindonian visionary-cum-worker who not only knows that all this vast varied universe is basically nothing save Brahman but who also aims at transmuting into delightful beauty all the flaws, all the phenomenal short-
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comings that are still present in spite of his realisation with the Mundaka Upanishad that "the Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere."
(4.4.1987)
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10
I wonder what disturbed you so much. Earthquakes should be out of place in your life now unless they can bring up a Himalaya out of nowhere. Perhaps the meeting with a sadhak who can leave everything to the Mother was a Himalayan discovery. But can one really call this chap's condition Mount Everest? "Total reliance" on the Divine can be assessed only if an Ever-rest is felt towering within one while a veritable Kanchenjunga of calamity looms in front of one's nose. In the common run of events a naturally optimistic temperament, when turned to Yoga, can become optimystic with no great difficulty. The true test arrives when everything goes crashing about one's ears. Can one in such deafening circumstances still say -
Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us?
This line from Sri Aurobindo's Ahana has been a great favourite of mine both as a guide in the spiritual life and as an example of poetry fulfilling one of its basic functions. As you must know, poetry is hard to define with one single formula. We have to approach it from several viewpoints. Its intrinsic nature may be considered at least fivefold. It is:
1.Not only sight but also insight.
2.At the same time light and delight.
3.Passion building up peace.
4.Intensity held within harmony.
5.Magic leading into mystery.
The last definition is perhaps most applicable to the work of Sri Aurobindo and the line I have quoted is a striking instance of it. That "flute" is surely a mysterious entity. To us Indians it is suggestive of Sri Krishna, the soul's magnet, the love-lord of a divine hide-and-seek. To the Westerner it will
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be the touch of a baffling beauty - the elusive hint of some enchanting power of protection and direction in the midst of life's constant uncertainties. Essentially it should bring home to us the sense that ahead of us, as if knowing the path which is vague and fraught with danger and as if guiding us through it to a distant goal, an unseen friend and lover asks us to follow him with happy faith.
Technically, there is a special point in the words "heart" and "peril". Particularly through perils the flute is intended to sound clearest and sweetest. The very phonetics of "peril" are flutelike. While the r and / have a trill and roll at once rousing and lulling, the p with its demand on our lips closing and opening to articulate it conjures up the act of managing a wind-instrument with the mouth. The noun "heart" bestirs us to feel that there is a secret depth in each danger, a centre where a concealed life has its steady rhythm which can take all seeming disorder and disruption to an harmonious end.
To end my own comments harmoniously I should draw your attention to the hexametrical mould of Sri Aurobindo's line. The hexameter, with its 17 possible syllables at its fullest (5 dactyls and 1 spondee or trochee), has not only given the poet his best chance to complete his complex play of idea, emotion and image at one stretch but also helped him convey to us the sense of a long sustained continued movement through time and space, a life's journey of repeated risks with yet the Divine's presence subtly assured as going with it. And both the companionship and the risks are hinted at as being constant by the r-note running from start to finish - 5 times audible ~ across the line.
(6.5.1987)
What light is shed on the nature of poetic inspiration in general by Sri Aurobindo's line: "Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps"?
This line from Savitri is meant primarily to sum up the
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Mantra, the poetry of the highest spiritual truth flowing out "in metres that reflect the moving worlds" - and it is itself an exemplification of mantric utterance. But it also sheds light on the nature of poetic inspiration in general. For, if the Mantra is the ideal poetry, all poetry that is genuine must represent or shadow forth in its own way the mantric essence.
We gather from the line, first of all, that the ultimate source from which poetry comes is what we may term the soul, the true being of us, which is not our body or our life-force or even our mind. Our self of sensations, our self of emotions, our self of ideas are not the fountain of poetic speech. All of them have a part to play, all of them can be instruments, indeed must be instruments if the poetic speech is to be full. But that speech is basically from the true being of us which is not only deep within but also itself a great depth, holding as it were a vast secret ocean of experience-movements in which the Divine Consciousness is hidden and in which there is a concealed oneness of our individuality with the whole world. Sensation, emotion, idea are here involved or contained in a thrilled intuitive awareness focussed for poetic purposes into a subtle vision which is at the same rime a subtle vibration taking the form of rhythmic words.
Sight is the characteristic function of the poet: he catches the shine, the colour, the shape, the gesture of things, his is a concrete seizure of significances - vivid pictures, imaginative figurations, symbolic suggestions, these are the poet's fundamental powers and means by which he enjoys the world within and the world without and by which he traces the beauty and truth of things and attains to a comprehension of details, interrelations, totalities.
But mere seeing, however intense, is not all that there is to poetry. Whatever the poet intensely sees carries with it an expressive harmony as if every picture, every image, every symbol spoke out its own heart: the poet's act of seeing is simultaneously an act of hearing. They are not two processes really - the sight-substance comes fused with the sound-
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form, the vision is its own word, the right manifesting word which is not just "transmissive" but "incarnative", embodying with a living intimacy and .concrete directness the gleaming stuff and stir of the soul's revelatory contact with reality.
Furthermore, this sound is like a march of waves, it has its pattern of rise and fall, its rhythm variously modulating on a basic recurrent tone and breaking upon the receptive heart and mind and sensation with the powerful spontaneities, the profound felicities of soul-experience.
We may sum up in the words of Sri Aurobindo: "Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision, and the great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation, kavayah satyairutah, seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word."
One of the basic calls of the Yogic life on us is to understand that while being omniscient and omnipotent can wait we have to lose no time in being, in a certain preparatory sense, omnipresent. The drift of this rather cryptic pronouncement will be caught if you take as your purchase-point the word "time" in the preceding sentence. "Omnipresent" theologically means existing everywhere at the same moment. It is impossible for us to have such an existence - as Sir Robert Boyle, a scientist of the 17th century, realised when he protested in a particular situation: "Sir, how can I be in two places at once? I am not a bird!" Not as referring to God but as referring to man, "omnipresent" has to do with "time", not "place". We must learn to live always and altogether in the present. As Jalal-u-din Rumi put it long ago:
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Past and future veil Him from thy sight -
Burn them in fire.
Omar Khayyam, whose Sufi light was transcreated by Fitzgerald into Epicurean delight, gets through to us a similar message though with a smiling sadness in English rather than with the original Persian inward laughter:
Come, my beloved, fill the cup that clears
Today of past regrets and future fears -
Tomorrow? Why, tomorrow we may be
Ourselves with yesterday's seven thousand years.
Khayyam's cup and Rumi's fire indicate the same wonderful secret of true Iife:^he soul, the psychic being, hidden within, like a golden key to liberate us from the leaden room locking us up with obsession by what has been and what is to be. The inner cup waits to be filled with our ever-flowing outer consciousness and give us happy security in an immortal remembrance of the Eternal Now. The concealed fire, lifting ever upward and tasting at all times with its thrilled tongue a perpetual paradise, is ready to shrivel up the veil of miserable memories and anxious anticipations which keep us away from the sun of Supreme Truth that neither rises nor sets but is always poised over our fluctuant universe. Not looking backward, not looking forward - forgetting the flicker of the days that have gone, getting rid of the quivering hopes for the nights that are ahead, we must gather all our thoughts and feelings and dreams in the living moment, make it an outward-inward offering to the Divine Mother.
An offering to her, made with full absorption in the sense of her luminous beauty, will wipe off the script of karma and render us new-bom and,, if we let the offering keep out the worry over the uncertainty of the future with faith in her care for us, all such forebodings as you have will take flight. When you think how tied down you are by past happenings and how choked up you are by the mist and fog of whatever
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threatens to happen, hold on to the Mother's revelation that the long dragging chain of events which appear to make our present a vanishing link between an unchangeable past and an ineluctable future is just a superficial impression. According to her, the universe is re-created every second, so that we are essentially free. There is an appearance of sameness and continuity, for a line of sequence has been established, antecedents and consequents run on as if bound together in a succession of instants, but within this scheme of what seems law and logic the Divine's perpetual freedom keeps smiling, ready to act with those secret "incalculables" that are the despair of the historian or else on rare occasions with inexplicable turns that flash in our faces the impression of miracles which, try as we may, we cannot absorb into our scientific minds.
A clue for us at all times to the Mother's revelation of what a phrase in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri calls the Divine Magician's freedom pacing in the same step with law and thus leaving for us also a breathing-space, as it were, of liberty - this clue is our intuition of "freewill". Without knowing the reason - namely, that the world emerges fresh and new all the while from the Divine's depth — we have continually the awareness that we are somehow never completely constrained by any hangover from the past nor wholly affected by concern for the future but can choose our line of action as we want, in however limited and momentary a measure. This intuition has always been a puzzle in a cosmos of causality in the scientific view, a cosmos of foreknowledge and fate in the spiritual vision. But, if at each instant there is no determination from either the past or the future and the cosmos is born straight out of eternity, an utter freewill, an absolute liberty to choose would be just the thing expected. We humans are small consciousnesses: so the utterness and absoluteness are in a miniscule form, nothing more than the pigmy power of the inner Watcher, the back-standing Purusha, to say "Yes" or "No" to what seems to be the flux of inward and outward Nature, Prakriti.
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But this power is a mysterious pointer to the truth the Mother has surprised us with. And I may venture to suggest that the strange disclosures modem physics goes on making - Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy about the simultaneous measurement of position and velocity, the replacement of the old calculus of certainty by the "wave"-mathematics of probability about the place of an atom or a photon in a multitude of either entity - are also a vague index to the same truth.
If you hold fast to this truth and make your mind and heart detach themselves from preoccupation with what old Khayyam in another quatrain terms
Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday
and steeping your being in the rapt felicity of the Soul that is both child and sage, live in its attunement to that truth, you can repeat to your own tingling ears the line following the one on "tomorrow" and "yesterday",
Why fret about them if today be sweet?
Here is the "new value-system" you have to recognise and establish in the strange philosophising mixture of laughing Democritus and weeping Heraclitus which names itself You. Let this letter be the "blessing" you desire from your less mixed-up friend.
(13.6.87)
Apropos of the small sample you have put before me of your way of translating Mallarme, may I say a few personal words on the "how" of translating this super-symbolist poet, as if I were penning a postscript to my book on him?
In the work of modern translators of old writers, there is a tendency to adopt a style with vivid appeal to current cleverness and with a phraseology answering in present-day
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terms to expressions thought apt in a past period. Here the question is not only of what Mallarme might have written if English had been his native medium: the question is also of the kind of English which would have echoed his particular sensibility, his peculiar mentality. Thus the line in Brise Marin
Sur le vide papier que la blancheur defend —
which I have translated
On the empty paper guarded by its own white
has been rendered by you:
On the blank veto of an empty page.
This is a fine example of transposing Mallarme's suggestive utterance into a speech combining forceful explicitness as in "veto" with imaginative wit as in "blank", which hints at the old French "blanc" (- "white") as well as means "unrelieved, sheer". Though there is the danger that the ordinary reader may find "empty" tautologous after "blank" a keen scanner will get something of the Mallarmean feel of the purity which would be violated by the act of writing. But the sense of the profanation likely to be caused by inscribing anything in ink on what seems to represent a sacred Ineffable which is void of all world-stain and which inwardly inhibits the attempt to penetrate it - does such a sense waft to us with the breath of a sacred presence haunting the blank sheet of paper? The boldness of your rendering, though more in keeping with contemporary idiom, misses the delicacy always going with Mallarme's audacity.
Carried over into another age no less than into another language, Mallarme should still preserve his characteristic temper and tone - provided he is saved from the unconsciously awkward or the deliberately archaic in our effort to be faithful to his unique past. A certain amount of liberty is
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unavoidable and even desirable in transferring his individuality from French into English, but we should avoid the temptation to rewrite him and preserve only what we may consider his substance. We should keep in mind, in a slightly adapted sense, his little dig at Degas when that painter complained that although he had plenty of ideas he couldn't write poetry; "My dear friend, poetry is not written with ideas - it is written with words." The kind of words Mallarme used, the kind of connection he made between them, the kind of expressive whole he aimed at have to be conveyed from one language to another with, of course, whatever little alterations are syntactically demanded. The Platonic archimages glimmering out of a Buddhist "neant" which is a white voicelessness - this double-aspected essence has to be mirrored in a special turn of phrase in order to achieve, in the Mallarmean mode,
Pour la Rose et le Lys le mystere d'un nom.
(For Rose and Lily the mystery of a name.)
Tiny linguistic shades, small image-nuances have a crucial say in this matter. A sensitive faithfulness, both to the way Mallarme makes the solid world disappear towards subtle secrecies by means of words and to the manner in which the symbol-charged words relate to those secrecies so that le mystere du nom becomes musicienne du silence, is of capital importance. And I may add, wherever Mallarme has cast his symbolist creations in a rhymed poetic form, the English version should have, however flexibly, rhyme as well as metre. Else the typical effect of the ensemble -
Une agitation solennelle par l'air
De paroles -
(A solemn agitation in the air
Of words -)
will be missed.
(21.6.87)
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I would have enjoyed overhearing the talks you and your daughter had about the young poets who went to war in 1914-1918 and got killed. I personally think Rupert Brooke had the greatest promise, though none of his once-famous sonnets had the grim heart-break of Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth", which some critics rank as one of the finest in the English language. Brooke was more inclined to be romantically sentimental. But he had a gift of crystallised phrase, as we may see from "The Great Lover", and once he achieved a wonderful piece of half-symbolist half-mystic suggestion that is unforgettable. It is the sestet of his sonnet "The Dead". To appreciate it sharply you have to read the octave first:
These hearts are woven of human joys and cares.
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth,
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved, gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this
is ended.
Here Brooke is at his level of normal felicity of phrase, semi-romantic semi-sentimental, with two or three outstanding expressions: "washed marvellously with sorrow", "gone proudly friended", "sat alone". Then comes a sudden burst of sheer vision in the next six lines:
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after.
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
The passage from life to death by the young soldiers could
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not have been poetically immortalised with keener sight and subtler insight. If it stood by itself, it might even conjure up a Yogi's trance, a Nirvanic world-transcendence and would be a Mallarmean poem in a more fluid, more open pattern than the interplay of the obscure and the mysterious, the complex and the cryptic which was Mallarme's typical Symbolist art.
(22.6.87)
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11
I was delighted to get from you for the New Year the quaint coloured picture of a Lamb sitting on one of the paws of a Lion. I construed it immediately as showing the relationship of Lamb-Amal to Lion-Sri Aurobindo. The in-drawn majestic yet most forbearing and compassionate look of the Master is very well suggested. So also is that of the disciple with his wide confident smile, his eyes lit happily with a dream of the future, his big ears stretched out to catch the message of the Lord's silence. Lamb-Amal is sitting on that paw which has a wrist-watch above it, symbolising Lion-Sri Aurobindo's time-manifestation. I see that the golden Lion is clothed in green, the supramental Truth-Consciousness putting its presence into the vital world. The white Lamb - symbol of the psychicised purified being which I seek to reflect - is wearing a chequered red coat, the sign of the physical plane. In the earth-work these complementary factors are significant. So too are the different modes in which the arms are crossed. The lion has put his left wrist over his right, while the Lamb has done the opposite. If the Lion's left with the watch on it represents a time-involvement, the upper position of the Lamb's right points to an eternity-evolvement. The whole composition with its overall message of peace illustrating in a new manner a famous Biblical saying has gone home to me so much that I am going to stick it on one of my doors. When you come in the course of this year it will be the first thing you'll see on visiting me. And if it at all stands for something true as between Sri Aurobindo and me I shall consider myself worth visiting by my beloved friend. Nothing short of this harmonising of the high and the low is the goal of my aspiration.
I know that your aspiration's goal is essentially no other. So let me wish you too a New Year of all-linking all-equalling all-transforming Peace.
(3.1.1983)
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I have read the extract from Time (March 23, 1987) and given thought to your question: "Since the scientific theory estimates that the sun has a finite life (even though measured in billions of years), what is the effect of this apparently inevitable cessation of earth-life on our aspirations for the transformation of the human race and the establishment of the Divine on earth?"
Not only science but also all past spiritual tradition has considered the world to have an end. In Christianity the Second Coming of Jesus is taken as the mark of the world's end, accompanied by a resurrection of the dead and an uplifting of the resurrected bodies of the faithful into heaven after a Last Judgment which will separate the sheep from the goats, the latter going to hell, I suppose. Islam reflects more or less the Christian vision. In Zoroastrianism we find the background of much of Christian belief. After the liberation of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity by the Persian king Cyrus (559-530 B.C.), who helped them rebuild their temple at Jerusalem and whom the Book of Isaiah hails as "Messiah", Zoroastrian doctrines entered Judaism and through Judaism infiltrated Christianity. Zoroastrianism believes in heaven and hell, the soul's survival and the resurrection of bodily life at the end of time when a saviour, mystically continuous with Zoroaster's "seed", is expected, with a Last Judgment following.
In the traditional Indian vision there is a pralaya, a drawing back of the universe into the Divine after ages and ages of human history and then a new creation or rather a new projection of the universe. This process goes on interminably. According to esoteric belief, there have been seven projections and withdrawals. Now there is, in the view of us Aurobindonians, a different kind of history because of the descent of the supreme dynamic consciousness which Sri Aurobindo called Supermind. The pralaya comes because the principle manifested at each projection so far has been limited: it can progress thus far and no farther. The Super-mind-principle brings the infinity of the Transcendent and so
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an endless progression is possible, revealing deeper and still deeper ranges of the ultimate Divine. There will be no need of a pralaya. But if no pralaya is contemplated, what are we to make of the scientific theory of the sun's death and the consequent disappearance of the life on earth? Endless progression and this cutting short of the earth's existence seem to contradict each other.
However, even on the basis of science may we not hope for interstellar travel and the colonisation of one or another of the millions of heavenly bodies which astronomy assumes to have conditions comparable to our earth's? Technically, their number is said to be in the neighbourhood of 1020. Science does not envisage a divinisation of man but it looks forward to immense technological development which could make man the scientist independent of the earth in the remote future. So the future Aurobindonian man, whom we may designate the divinised scientist, need have no worry even on purely scientific grounds. They will permit him to go past the extinction of our sun.
But the divinisation which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother hold out as the culminating hope in the time to come brings a transformation of the very stuff of man's physical being and implies certain powers: total plasticity, adaptability, invulnerability, plus immunity from disease, stoppage of the ageing process, freedom from the stroke of death. Along with this transformation of one's matter, there must come a power over matter in general, which could change world-conditions, affect even the stellar cycle of "contraction and re-expansion" which the Time-extract speaks of. The world in which lives Man turned Godlike cannot remain subject to the laws we scientifically regard as inexorable. Not only his own being but also his environment will be subject to the Divine Will set active fully in the universe of time and space. The physical sun is a symbol of the highest supramental creative and transformative Light: when that Sun of the Truth-Consciousness which is apostrophised in the Rigveda and the Upanishads and which the descent of the Supermind a la
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Sri Aurobindo is meant to make completely operative, even "the fate of the sun" which science predicts according to its present observations cannot be binding. Such a prospect seems incredible, but it is nothing beyond conception by the logic (which is also the magic) of the Integral Yoga.
(31.3.1987)
P.S. After writing this I came to read, in some detail, about what is known as the Anthropic Principle in physics. It is a speculation put forward by some scientific thinkers and they claim that on the basis of it one can make certain predictions which are testable and thus fall within the purview of physicists. A spur to it was given by the role of the "observer" in current quantum mechanics, a role which is sometimes taken to be such that, in a world which is subject to probability instead of classical causality, the observer, by choosing a particular set-up of observational apparatus, gets a particular picture of the physical world realised: he thus creatively turns its probability into a fact. Whether this concept of his participation in the nature of reality be correct or not, the Anthropic Principle has a philosophical basis, on the strength of which it peers both back into the past and forth into the future.
The principle takes into account the plain truth that the physical universe must be so built as to permit the observer's physical existence as an intelligent being. William McCrea, a TLS reviewer, has rightly said that," roughly, the Anthropic Principle states that we cannot discuss the universe at all unless the universe includes us. In other words, the universe is what it is because we were to be its end-product. This view specially crystallised when astrophysics found a number of near-coincidences of pairs of astrophysical quantities which "happened" to enable crucial processes to proceed in the way they do. If the minute difference in size between these quantities had been the other way around, these processes would have been impossible and the scientists would not be
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in existence to know it. The near-coincidences depend on the values of what are termed the fundamental constants of physics such as the masses of the hydrogen nucleus (proton) and of the electron, light-velocity, the gravitation constant, the electron-charge, Planck's quantum constant. We are told that in addition to the constants there are necessarily a series of parameters serving as initial conditions for the universe. Observation shows the number of radiation quanta to be about a billion times the number of "baryon" particles like the proton, and this is one of the parameters. It determines the cosmic epoch at which galaxies can form and finally plays a part in the various numerical coincidences crucial for the evolution of life whose ultimate outcome is the observer "anthropos".
The Anthropic Principle in its strongest formulation argues not only that the universe has an age by which alone the phenomenon of man can emerge from the initial "big bang" on a carbon-based life-evolution: it argues also that this emergence would have no sense if humankind were to die out before its full potentiality is realised. Man will continue to live and progress and expand his knowledge and power: he will gain control of all matter and forces and, if necessary, spread into all space. Catastrophic warnings of the sun's death will naturally have no meaning at that stage.
Such a consummation has been called the reaching of Omega Point, after the terminology brought into fashion by the priest-palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard spoke of the evolution of a collective being in the far future, a super-organism with a super-consciousness compassing the whole world. But, under the influence of orthodox Christian theology, he envisaged a world-end when the souls sharing the super-consciousness will break away from matter and pass into a non-spatial non-temporal dimension. The Omega Point postulated by the Anthropic Principle is unlike Teilhard's, a perpetual fullness of being within the framework of time and space.
There it makes contact from the scientific side with the
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vision of the Integral Yoga. But there is no sign in it, as there is none also in Teilhard's "super-consciousness", that man the mental being will go beyond the utmost possibility open to mind itself. A widening of the mental consciousness and its achievement of technological mastery on a grand scale are the limits of its prognosis. But, if the cosmos is anthropos-oriented and if life emerges from matter and mind from life, there can be no necessary terminus with mind in however wide and powerful a form: a future Supermind is naturally on the horizon of this cosmos. Again, an anthropos-oriented cosmos must have behind it as well as within it a secret divine dynamism working itself out through conditions that are a total concealment of it in sheer matter-energy. The Anthropic Principle must make room, as in Sri Aurobindo's vision, for a principle of Theos, the hidden drive of a pre-existent God through an evolving universe whose aim is a divine fulfilment, the varied manifestation of One about whom we may aver in Meredith's words:
His touch is infinite and lends
A Yonder to all ends.
I like the lines you have quoted from Rilke after a search in him for the "overhead" expression-
Dir wird die Stille im Weltall niemals verkundet,
Wie sie sich schliefst um ein Wachstum -
lines which you have tentatively put into English as
Never are you informed of the cosmic silence.
As it envelops a growth.
Rilke is full of subtle suggestions. What I gather here against the background of my general sense of the Rilkean
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Weltanschauung is something like: "Whatever develops on earth is secretly protected and fostered by a cosmic Presence. This Presence is a vast and deep silence by which alone all earthly expression gets its true and full form, but we hardly know of its nourishing ministry: it never obtrudes but with its all-accepting embrace both serves and moulds us. The more we become aware of its pervading mystery, the more we realise our authentic self, and grow into the archetype of our being which waits within that ever-watchful stillness like a guardian angel."
The series your German publisher has started is very fascinating. The choice of Meister Eckhart as the first to be compared with Sri Aurobindo is well made, for Eckhart is the one great figure in European mysticism who comes nearest to the Eastern Wisdom. Some of his formulas are pure Upa-nishad, beautiful variations on the theme of tat twam asi -"thou art That", God as the human soul's own essence and ultimate self. But these formulas which frightened the orthodox church and laid their maker open to the charge of heresy are not the whole of Eckhart. They express the Eckhart who wrote in German. The Eckhart who wrote in Latin manifests another shade of spiritual vision, the more typically Christian sense of the soul as distinct from God even when united with Him, enjoying a permeation by Him and not an identification with Him. The fact is that this sense is not actually a contradiction of the other but has been deemed such by the narrow divisive Schoolman-mind. In India it would be taken as one phase of the many-sided Truth, a shade of difference from God in order to feel the rapture of adoration and love. Shankara who was a supreme Monist was yet an impassioned singer of hymns to the Divine Mother. The Gita presents us with Brahman-Nirvana as well as with the creative Ishwara and even this Ishwara's human incarnation so that a prominent part of its message is happily summed up in the Savitri-]ine:
Living for Me, by Me, in Me they shall live.
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An appreciation of the two sides of Eckhart and an attempt to reconcile them would be a great step forward in bringing Christianity closer to Oriental and especially Indian mysticism.
By the way, my derogatory reference to the Schoolman-mind was somewhat overdone. It was not incapable of piercing beyond obvious divisions. It recognised a faculty which could do the piercing. The mind's analytic movement and its resort to logic was attributed to "ratio", the purely rational power. The power to see unities was termed "inte-lectus", an overall grasping - what would more appropriately be termed an intuitive movement as distinguished from the discursive, the movement by which wholes are recognised not by an outwardly additive activity but by an inwardly perceptive comprehension of the universal in things. It is such a comprehension, an intimate light of knowledge, that in connection with the highest religious turn Spinoza designates "amor intellectualis Dei" - "the intellectual love of God" - the mind's ardent seizure of the underlying unifying Reality by a direct intuition which is at bottom the One knowing the One or, in Plotinus's phraseology, "the return of the Alone to the Alone". But the Schoolman frowned on Spinoza's pantheism and refrained from extending the function of the "intellectus" to seeing God as the highest Universal, the supreme common factor and essence of all, whether as Pantheos or as the transcendent Deity who is not exhausted by the cosmic existence. To the medieval thinker God's omnipresence in the cosmos was not by a secret substance in all but only by a secret action and the transcendent poise was of a Creator who did not make the world from his own self but by a bringing of it into existence from nothing. The Indian vision is of a supra-cosmic Infinite who emanates or looses-forth the world out of His own being in whatever form He chooses.
Of course Eckhart is not the sole thinker possible for comparison, Leibnitz, Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, Steiner are others who in various ways can provide a hold. Nor is
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Heidegger so far astray as you believe from the Aurobindonian line. His Being and Time, an early work, with its stress on Angst - anxiety — over one's finitude may not seem fruitful in the Aurobindonian context, but the Heidegger of 1927 was not the same as the Heidegger of 1953 when his Introduction to Metaphysics appeared. Here, as if feeling an incompleteness in his old theme, he widens it out to its true shape, and thus, without annulling it, he plays on it a momentous variation. I may cite something I wrote ten years back:
'To the mature Heidegger, we have fallen out of Being, we have lost Being's 'nearness and shelter'. We run after one thing or another instead of seeking the 'Ground' through which all things are - Being in its own self. Being that is the 'Holy' (Heilig) and that is 'Healing' (Heilen) and is 'Whole'. We should not get lost in the superficial mass-man nor in the outer life's disconnected 'beings' - 'from genes to spaceships', as a commentator puts it: an inner return to a direct experience of the one Being should be our pursuit. The negative inner intensity of each of us existing 'towards our end', which is death, and thus facing Nothingness, has been transformed into a positive expansion of the self into its basic reality which, as the absence of all separate superficial states, is a superb Nothing.
"We must distinguish the nature of Heidegger's being from the psychological means by which it is to be attained. Those means are dreadful and dark, yet they conduct us to a different condition, one of radiant happiness. 'Knowing joy... is a door to the Eternal.' Being is associated with 'light' and with the 'joyful', Being 'calls the tune'; 'to think Being' is to arrive at one's true home. No doubt, Heidegger not only criticises technological society and the role of science: he also turns away from common religion; but, as another commentator remarks,'Heidegger has no place for God, whose absence nevertheless plays an important role in his thinking. He does not exalt human goals but sees human existence as a cult of being - a notion not unlike certain notions of God.' "
(6.6.1986)
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Reading Plotinus is indeed a very good occupation. The Enneads are an old friend of mine and, in my view, next to Plato's Dialogues they are the profoundest philosophical scripture of the West. In a certain sense Plotinus, whose source is Plato, is a river that is better than its source, for though the source is the crystalline mind, the river reflects something higher. For it is a paradoxical river and it does not flow down from the source but flows up from it. While Plato was a superb idealist, Plotinus was a master-mystic - though we have to guard against the ultra-mundane drift of his mystical consciousness and keep hold of Plato's Socratic sense that the Divine is present even in the market-place and remember always the prayer of Socrates that the outer should be brought into tune with the luminous inner. Plotinus is reported to have had an aversion to mirrors lest he should chance to see that contemptible thing, his body.
(14.7.1986)
It's good to find you in such fine fettle and at the same time a philosopher putting, as you say, your "hits" and "misses" in the right perspective. Rather fancifully I picture the 'hits" as masculine and the "misses" - as the very word suggests - as feminine. The former stand out with their forward-moving vigour, as men would: they come with a future-facing enterprise. But behind them are the subtle forces like those of women: many a Miss with sweet and silent visage bringing about a delicate deepening of our nature saves us from brashness and crudity, refines our strength for the future by a distillation of wisdom from the past. To adopt another imagery, the "hits" are the mental-vital personality, the "misses" bear a breath from the psychic being: they teach us humility and allow us time to look around and contemplate and render our dynamism selective in the goals towards which it sets its course. Once the exquisite lesson taught by the Miss has permeated the consciousness of the Mister who wants to make a hit in the world, the time to come will bear
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the stamp of the progression hinted at by the memorable close of Goethe's Faust which I may render:
The Eternal Feminine
Is Leading us upward.
I discover that my fanciful picture has terminated in conjuring up with Goethe's final phrase the presence of the Divine Mother whom Sri Aurobindo has put at the head of our human march.
(11.5.1986)
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12
"Compassion" for us cannot mean the same thing as what is talked about by good-natured worldly people. When I think of it I see Buddha before me. "Nirvana" and "Compassion" are his two characteristics at its highest and they interpenetrate. Budddhist compassion is the envelopment of the poor suffering non-Buddhas with the "peace, stupendous, featureless, still" of the "illimitable Permanent" which Sri Aurobindo's sonnet about his own experience suggests to us. It is to be able to free people from their suffering with the help of one's mighty inner liberation. One doesn't oneself suffer: one merely reflects the sufferer's state in a clear unmoved mirror of true perception - but here is not the cold perception of the distant mind: here is the warm yet undisturbed perception of a close-beating heart, giving the sufferer a feeling of intimacy with the healer. No doubt, none of us is in the Nirvanic category yet, but some faint image of "the mute Alone" can be in our being and along with it some echo of the compassionate response accompanying it. The sweet serenity of the deep heart's sense of human suffering can be in us to a certain degree - in preference to the merely considerate calm of the inner mind's knowledge of it. In any case there should not be in us the contagion of the sorrowful condition we want to relieve: such contagion is not necessary for genuine compassion of the spiritual kind. In fact, it may even prevent the authentic soul-help.
(4.4.1986)
Here are my answers to your questions.
(1) The experience of a presence silently radiating love from the heart is surely of what Sri Aurobindo calls the "psychic being", the true soul. But the psychic being itself is Something of the Divine flowing out to Everything of the Divine beyond ourselves from the same Everything within
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us. In order to be authentically psychic, the radiation you speak of has to be of a deep quiet intensity that gives and gives and never feels wasted if there is no response from the human recipient, for it really goes forth to the Divine who has worn the face and form of this or that person. Actually it streams out not only to persons but also to non-human living creatures and even to objects, that is, to all manifestation. I may add that it creates in one a happy constant sense of self-dedication and self-consecration to the Supreme.
(2) In the course of individual evolution it is the psychic being that "grows" through the various experiences from life to life. The apparent movement is towards the True, the Good, the Beautiful, but inwardly the movement is towards the Divine and when this inward fact is recognised the genuine spiritual life has begun and one is aware of one's soul directly and not only of the reflection or rather emanation of it in the mental-vital-physical complex. I may add that no matter how much the psychic being grows, it still remains a child - simple, straight, trusting, humble. But this child is at the same time an extremely wise one, with the experience of ages enriching it and a spontaneous truth-feeling derived from its transcendent origin. Nor is it a weakling: its inherent immortality gives it a natural strength - strength to endure, to help, to conquer circumstances - strength born from the unfailing intuition of an omnipotent Loveliness accompanying it at all rimes.
(11.4.1986)
What is happening in you is the drawing together of all the strands of your life into the central personality who is for ever a child of Sri Aurobindo and the Divine Mother. Once the commonly diffused being finds itself unified, there takes place by force of the psychic concentration an opening into a new dimension so that the future going forth of one's consciousness into the time-and-space experience, which we know as our life from day to day in the midst of changing
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circumstance and shifting company, is no longer a diffusion as before but a laser beam moving uniformly towards the Supreme under all conditions. A flow of endless warmth, which is felt as gleaming as well, goes on from the deepmost heart, seeking the Divine, carrying upon itself the whole sense of one's being and carrying in a movement of offering the sense of all events, persons, interrelations, problems. I said "seeking the Divine" but actually what is a seeking at one end is a finding at the other. The reality of the Divine's existence and presence is felt at all moments, and no matter where the eyes are cast there is never the least forgetting of it and everything is spontaneously surrendered to that existence, confided to that presence. A softness and sweetness in the being, that is at the same time a subtle strength - a profound peace within that manifests as a secret power without - an all-enfolding love which, instead of grabbing its objects to one's own little breast, bears it towards some ever-receptive infinitude: these states, these experiences grow more and more a part of one's life. With their growth, problems cease to be pressures and are either surprisingly solved or pleasantly postponed or borne with a smiling discomfort like a child in a petulant mood in one's arms.
(27.3.1987)
It is interesting that when you remember me you always see me smiling. I have used the word "remember" as if you had met me and were carrying a memory of me. It is certain that your inner being has established a concrete contact with me -no wonder it has the impression of a smile playing perpetually on my mouth, for indeed, as with many in this Ashram, there is a quiet happiness all the time deep within - yes, all the time precisely because it comes from something that does not begin with one life or finish with it but runs like a gleaming thread on which life after life of various shades is hung. I am sure you also feel in yourself the smile of the immortal in the mortal, which the seers call the Soul. All of
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us who have been touched by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have wakened to it but the whole travail of Yoga lies in keeping alive the sense of that touch of theirs by which the inner is brought close to the outer.
The soul's smile is also the best weapon against difficulties which the hostile forces raise in our path. To smile at their doings instead of raging at them or feeling depressed is to make them realise how little importance we give them. Failing in their attempt to upset us, they themselves are disappointed and get exhausted. The smile is, in addition, a secret message from us to what stands behind the apparent hostile forces. For behind them and under the mask of the Devil is the Divine, paradoxically helping us through the trials and troubles which bring up our weaknesses and challenge us to be strong. Of course this does not mean that we should look for difficulties. But when they come we must feel Sri Aurobindo manipulating what the hostile forces believe to be their own working. The Lord takes advantage of every crisis to create for us a short cut towards our own fulfilment. And when we have the vision of the Supreme hidden within His seeming opposite we at once lose the sense of infirmity and hopelessness at being hard hit. Nothing in Yoga happens without the Mother's mysterious hand somewhere in it. And our smile speaks of our recognition of it and immediately draws the Grace towards us across the darkness. The moment we feel its presence at the back of everything, our hearts begin to sing in answer to trumpets of victory sounding from afar. The assurance comes to us that there is no abyss so deep that the Grace cannot lift us out of it sky-high.
So, dear friend, keep a smile wreathing your lips in all circumstances. It will also help you, among other things, not to be upset if you don't hear from me for long. I have a lot of work - reading, writing, editing - and I may not be able to answer your sweet letters very frequently. But have the smiling certainty that 1 have not forgotten you and that I appreciate fully your deep feeling for me.
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I was sorry to learn of your headaches and tiredness, but I am sure they are passing things, and the hands of our Gurus are always holding you and leading you onward and inward and upward to your own true self which is eternally their child, "the Purusha no bigger than the thumb of a man, who is like a fire without smoke and who was there in the past and will be there in the future".
(7.10.1987)
You wrote your letter in the evening, the time to close the day with the books of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In that holy time your thoughts come to my place. I am happy to learn of this association. I am writing.the present letter to you in the early morning when my own thoughts rise like the birds whose throats are touched by the golden rays to a skyward melody. You are also like a bird, belonging at once to earth and sky, but as yet for me a migrating bird between India and Europe and therefore in two senses a rara avis -"rare" because you are not always in sight of Amal's opening eyes but more because you are a special species, one with eyes extraordinarily open to the secret Sun of Truth and Beauty.
The Uttarpara Speech of Sri Aurobindo which you have just finished reading before writing to me is particularly an eye-opener in the spiritual sense. The basic experience at the back of it is even more significant than the one that came to Sri Aurobindo in that upper room at Baroda in three days' time - the experience of Nirvana. For Nirvana drew his eyes inward to the infinite silent Brahman clear of all cosmic limitation, a necessary farness and freedom for the soul. But it made the cosmos appear a colossal illusion. On the other hand, the experience of which we hear in the Uttarpara Speech was an inner illumination which yet drew the eyes outward to the cosmos to reveal there the creative and transformative presence of the plenary Person who is birth-less and deathless and still has chosen not only to put forth
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the ever-moving scene within which our souls and bodies play their manifold part but also to enter with His own self the play of up and down and light and shade. He has chosen to be a companion and a leader to us with a mysterious call and magic lure and guiding love which Sri Aurobindo suggests in that enchanting line:
Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go
before us....
The very title of the document from which we learn of Sri Krishna Vasudeva appearing to Sri Aurobindo in Alipore Jail and taking charge of his life is symbolic of the new expe-rience: it is a Speech - delivered at Uttarpara. The Nirvanic realisation was, as I have said, of a Supreme Silence. The realisation figured now was of a Supreme Speech: the Transcendent self-expressed and become not only the universe and its in-dwelling resident but also manifested in it as the Avatar, meeting our humanity on its own level and uplifting it towards its ultimate destiny, the incarnate Divine. And from what Sri Krishna did for Sri Aurobindo we can have the assurance that Avatar Sri Aurobindo will do likewise for you and me if we give ourselves to his warm protective clasp.
(19.2.1988)
I have not replied to you for eight days. The delay has changed the formula I mentioned in my last letter: "You are frequently in my thoughts" to "You are constantly in my thoughts", for all the time I was thinking, amidst my thousand and three occupations, of writing an answer to your deeply felt affectionate note.
It makes me happy and proud to read that while you were aspiring to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in the middle of the night I suddenly appeared on the scene, I hope it means that 1 am with them in reality over and above being asso-
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dated with them in your friendly consciousness.
The question of being with them brings in your cry "Oh Divine! How far art Thou!" for a bit of comment. I know that the way your soul has expressed itself must cause what you call "a tint of pain" in your aspiration. But I should like to point out that it is not the Divine who is far: the Divine is always with us. His very attribute of "Omnipresence" assures this: it is we who keep far from Him, mostly due to incapacity and not perversity. But the fact of our being far must not blind us to the truth of His perennial proximity. And the Divine who is always near us is quite aware how much we the sadhakas of the Integral Yoga need Him and how painful to us is our own incapacity to feel close to Him. Knowing the sad situation. He is unremittingly at work to remove the incapacity and make the relationship of "He-we" a glowing mutuality. Please remember that He is as eager as we are that He should be a blaze of beauty in our being. If we have sought Him from day to day, it is because He has secretly beckoned to us night after night. The whole mystery behind our misery is summed up by St. Augustine when he addressed God at the beginning of the famous Confessions: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,"
(20.2.1988)
Once I gave five definitions of poetry and illustrated the last of them - "Magic leading into mystery" - by quoting that line of Sri Aurobindo's, which is a favourite with me:
before us,...1
Now I should like to say a few things about the first and the most general of my definitions: "Not only sight but also insight." And I shall take up a line from Sri Aurobindo which
1. See Mother India, October 1987, pp. 636-37.
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initially seems nothing save a vivid seeing. It will be a good opportunity to elucidate genuine poetry's invitation to the reader in diverse ways to its "great riches in a little room".
The true poet looks out over the" world of men and nature and while his eyes disengage certain curves, colours, forms, scenes he gazes into things, as it were, trying to seize their significance to his mind, their suggestions to his heart. A simple instance of what happens is that snatch from the very first poem, "Songs to Myrtilla", which gives the title to Sri Aurobindo's earliest published volume of verse;
Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks.
The poet responds to the freshness of a mountain stream and to its swift movement down the hill-side. But he goes further than the mere observation. To him the water appears as if eager to get away and get along. It is "hurrying." Here is a subtle psychological shade, which would be absent from expressions like "speeding" and "rushing", even though the former would alliterate with "sweet" and the latter with the last two words of the line. "Hurrying" immediately makes us ask "Why?"
Before answering this question, let me dwell a little on what we may call the immobile activity of the rocks. They are said to be "reluctant". Again a psychological shade is introduced. By their rigid poise they offer resistance and seem to want to hold back the variously adaptive freshness flowing around them. Simultaneously they show a kind of forceful hindrance and a sort of desire to keep to themselves the crystalline fluidity. The poet has hinted at a living presence in what strikes one ordinarily as inanimate. And the aptness of the insight is brought home to us by the play of recurrent sounds - the r-sound which comes five times, weaving the line into a unity and, in one place - "hurrying" - it even conveys by the urge slightly to roll the r the impression of water quickly running. The alliteration of "reluctant" with "rocks" serves to make reluctance the very nature of rocky
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entities, something intrinsic to them and not something added to their existence, as would be by, say, the adjective "impeding". Another epithet, "obstructive" has a better effect because of the cluster of the consonants - b,s,f,r -which tend to hold back the voice, but the meaning is primarily physical. "Reluctant", over and above having ct and nt in close succession, bears a subjective shade, an emotional attitude lurking in it, in tune with the poefs entering into a hidden life of natural phenomena.
We asked why the water was in a hurry. One answer is that it did not enjoy being made captive by ruffians like rocks. Another is that it felt the call of a far sea across the sloping miles and it was intent on keeping its own liberty to reach the great expanse of its own substance in as short a time as possible.
A final point needing to be touched upon is the very first word in the line: "Sweet". It has an easily-found air and may even be charged with sentimentality or sugariness in the mode of Tennyson at his most Victorian. We have more than once referred to the freshness of mountain water, but the adjective "fresh" would be flat and prosaic as a line-opener here. "Cool" would be appropriate to the lack of response of the water to the clasping by the rocks, a virgin purity averse to their seizure, but it would not show the water to be worth clasping, attractive enough for them to try to hold it back. To imply its allure as well as its pleasure-giving contact, "sweet" with its suggestion of both an unsullied charm and a nectarous quality is, for all its sentimental or sugary surface, the mot juste.
All this comment may be dubbed fanciful. But actually it is an echo of the reader's sensitive imagination to the lively imagination of the poet who at his best achieves intuitive felicities of uncommon experience even in the most simple phrase about common happenings.
(12.10.1986)
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You write: "On page 19, line 8 of the new edition of The Future Poetry I stumbled over translating the following passage: 'Nevertheless, mere force of language tacked on to the trick of the metrical beat does not answer the higher description of poetry...' The word 'trick' in the sense of 'device' does make sense, but could it not be that the original has the word 'tick' which seems to fit in more perfectly here?"
Your perplexity over "trick" and "tick" has a point, but I am afraid "tick" won't do: "the metrical beat" is itself a "tick", so there will be an unnecessary repetition hardly conducive to either substance or style. In this context, "trick" means not only "device" but "feat of skill or dexterity, knack, best way of doing something". It is suggestive, in addition, of "peculiar or characteristic practice or habit, mannerism". The metrical beat is a thing which one can learn and be an expert at and employ to striking effect, like the trick of a conjuror. All these shades would be lost if "tick" is used, signifying no more than mechanical recurrence, which, as I have said, is already implied in "beat". The background sense of Sri Aurobindo's phrase is not that the metrical beat is always a "trick" - in fact, metre is a great truth of inspired utterance - but that it can become just a skilful device by which uninspired utterance may try to pass off as genuine with the help of the repetitive and therefore impressive swing of the language. True poetry is measured speech with a moving precision in it: there metre or at least marked rhythm serves as a winging power which makes the moving precision go home to the depths in us and become a memorable part of them. However, metre can also be a contrivance because of the general regularity in it of short-long or slack-stress and one can be a good hand at it without achieving what the poet Hopkins calls
The rise, the roll, the carol, the creation,
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and, at the intensest, the mantric pitch, what Sri Aurobindo terms with the mantric pitch itself
(26.6.1987)
Some words of yours have put me on the track of what is happening to you. Generally speaking, you are in the transitional passage between one yuga (age) and another, when the past is a disembodied spectre and the future an unembodied ghost. It is important to realise that there are two things. If one feels that everything is just the past grown empty, one becomes the current "you" and speaks of
my thoughts,
my desires and impulses
pale, dull images
of once-bright sculptures.
What is necessary in the transitional passage is to discern shadows cast by events still to occur. Sculptures, that are bright but beyond, throw into the mist of this passage their images. Naturally these images are pale and dull. They are so not because their reality has vanished and lies in an irrecoverable past but because it is waiting to appear in its true solid shape. You have to look forward and try to discern what is ahead from what has fallen - as Shakespeare would visionarily tell you -
In the dark backward and abysm of time.
The difficulty is that the "once-bright" is fused with the "not-yet-bright". Only the soul in you who, as the Katha Upani-shad implies, is today from yesterday and will be tomorrow from today can do on the individual scale what Shakespeare with another powerful vision, refers to as being done by
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the prophetic
Soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
You are "disinterested", as you put it meaning "uninterested", because the "gone" is lost for ever and there's no sense in catching at phantoms. Perhaps you'll protest that even the future does not attract you and you don't care about what may materialise from the fog in front. Your double-aspected indifference, which is like being suspended in a void, is due to your not understanding the Mother's cryptic declaration that the Supramental Transformation has already been achieved but hasn't yet taken physical expression. The glory promised by her and Sri Aurobindo is nothing uncertain any more than India's Independence previsioned by the Mother in 1920 was such. Sri Aurobindo too said to Purani that the fiat for the country's freedom had gone forth and he need not be agitated about it but plunge gladly into the non-political life calling him to Pondicherry. Both our Gurus have done in the subtle dimension what they came into the gross to announce and prepare and, if possible, establish. That is why the Mother once told me that Sri Aurobindo had so arranged his work that nothing could stop its fulfilment on earth - even if the present civilisation broke down, the work would come to pass in due course. You may also remember his saying that what he had willed had always happened and would happen no matter what hostile attacks might delay it and even create the semblance of its failure. If you hold the light of this certainty in your heart and mind, your present neutral grey will slowly feel upon its cloudiness a faint rainbow and the "disinterested" condition will be like a suppressed smile rather than like an unexpressed sigh.
You have asked for "illumination" from me. Here is at least a candle to help you grope your way to your own hidden glory.
(11.11.87)
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I thank you for remembering me and sending me such a nice present for my eighty-second birthday.
The day passed very harmoniously. People asked me what special wish I had made for it, I replied, "None. There is one single wish running through all the years - and that is to be open more and more to the transforming grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. On each birthday it gets an extra spurt."
The prayed-for opening is not a boon only for me. By it I would be rendered more helpful to my friends - a deeper sense of my oneness with them will grow, an intenser feeling of gratitude to them will develop and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo will be more present with them.
Somebody put me the question: "Where in your being is the centre of your sadhana?" As I write on various subjects and read also a lot and have been a frequent expositor of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy, the expectation seemed to be that I would point to my head. It appeared to be a surprise when I put my hand on the middle of my chest. But ever since I came to the Ashram it has been my aspiration to be open there. Again and again at the beginning of my stay I used to plead with the Mother to break open the heart-centre to the Divine. I did not realise at that time that the Divine Himself has His central presence in us deep in our heart and that the true soul of us is secretiy poised there, an evolutionary emanation of the Divine and His developing companion through the ages. Of course one can be aware of the Divine from any centre, but He is approached most directly through the heart.
It is interesting to note that when one is speaking of oneself and affirming the "I" in some way or other, one never puts one's hand on one's head or one's belly but always instinctively on the middle of one's chest.
Apropos of the subject in hand I may recount a little episode from the Indian epic Mahabharata. Once when Draupadi, the heroine, was about to be disgraced in public by her enemies, she appealed inwardly to Sri Krishna for
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help. "O Sovereign of the Highest Heaven, come!" No response. "O Master of the Seven Worlds, come!" Nothing. "O Ruler of the Four Quarters, come!" Still no answer. Then desperately Draupadi called out, "O Dweller in my own heart, come!" Immediately Sri Krishna appeared to her subtle vision and signed to her not to be afraid. The enemies were foiled in their attempt to undrape her. The sari went on unfolding endlessly. Later Draupadi chided Sri Krishna and asked why he took so long in coming. He explained: "You see, the Highest Heaven, the Seven Worlds, even the Four Quarters are far away and it takes time to come from them. But when you called me from your own heart where I dwell, I could come at once."
(27.11.1986)
I am sorry to learn that your mother passed away a few days back. You must be feeling rather lonely, but if that is our Divine Mother's Will you have to accept it as the best thing for you, no matter what the appearance. Whitehead once said, "Religion is what one does with one's loneliness." Plotinus much earlier framed the famous formula: "The flight of the alone to the Alone." So surely there is an inward-pulling and upward-pushing power in the state of loneliness. But in Aurobindonian terms a deeper truth lies in a spirituali-sation of that remark of Emerson's that the most developed man is he who preserves a state of solitude in the midst of a crowd. Or else the converse may be visualised as a complementary truth to the full Aurobindonian: against a background of the realisation of the one immutable Brahman there has to be a foreground realisation of the multitudinous many-splendoured Divine - a combination of what is called in Savitri
White chambers of dalliance with eternity
And the stupendous gates of the Alone.
I hope you will excuse me for this semi-poetic semi-
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philosophic sidetrack from the subject of your dear mother's death. But perhaps this digression - in tune with my typical digression-full lectures on poetry which you were always interested to attend - may help to take you out of whatever sadness you were plunged into by the departure of a longstanding or at least long-sitting if not long-reposing affectionate companion who had been ailing of late.
I was indeed glad to hear from you - a voice from the past so sweetly wafted and reminding me of a happy occasion when I had the pleasure of speaking to fresh young souls and I was myself just across the border of being sixty years old and felt much less loaded with years, for, as Wordsworth put it when face to face with a bank of daffodils,
A poet cannot but be gay
In such a jocund company.
The "secret of secrets" which I passed on to this company from the Mother's whispering lips has been my master-key right up to now and has opened many locks which otherwise would have remained deadlocks in my life. I must, however, add something which is also equally important. I wonder if I referred to it twenty-three years ago. While the gesture of "Remembering and Offering" is to be made all the time from the heart confronting the world, there has to be in the background an attitude as of an eternity supporting that gesture - an attitude pictured in those three unforgettable lines from Savitri:
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look, on time's unrest
Faced all experience with unaltered peace.
Your letter has asked me to go back not only by twenty-three years but also more than sixty, requesting me as you
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have done to recount the incident of the "shoes". I had already felt the call of the Infinite and started my search for a teacher. I had come across a number of Yogis but none touched me to the core. A theosophist friend who had met Sri Aurobindo had said to me that nobody except Sri Aurobindo would satisfy a complex fellow like me. I had read somewhere that Sri Aurobindo was a great philosopher and linguist and poet on top of having Yogic attainments. But somehow he had not come alive to my soul. Then, one day, I went to the Crawford Market of Bombay to buy a pair of shoes. The shopkeeper put my purchase in a cardboard box and wrapped the box in a big newspaper sheet and tied it up with a string. When, on reaching home, I untied the box and unwrapped it, the newspaper sheet fell open right in front of me and disclosed a big headline: "A Visit to the Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose." I at once started reading the article. At the end of it I said to myself: "This is the place for me." The destined Guru's Grace had come to meet the searching soul. I wrote to the Ashram seeking permission to stay in it. In those days nobody was allowed except after his photograph had been studied by the Master and the Mother. In the reply to me through Purani who used to manage the correspondence of Gujarat no photo was asked for: I was simply told that I could come. A few months after, I went to the Ashram with my wife who was later given the name "Lalita" by Sri Aurobindo - I went wearing those very shoes: they proved to be the shoes of a pilgrim on his march to the Goal. Most seekers are drawn to the Divine through their hearts or through their heads: He drew me through my feet. Quite a feat, I should think, even for an omnipotent God!
I may say that once a seeker's feet are caught he can never go astray from the path, no matter what the mobile heart and the mutable head may suggest in the course of the trying journey that is Yoga. In spite of all my vagaries of emotion and thought Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have kept me treading "the razor's edge".
(14.1.1988)
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You have put me a question which is not easy to answer, but I shall make an attempt to meet it.
Face to face with the Divine - either the Divine incarnate or the Lord in the heart - we have to be absolutely, unreservedly, transparently truthful - there sincerity, straightforwardness, openness cannot be crossed by the slightest shadowness. With regard to human beings, one surely should not indulge in lying, but there is no obligation to be utterly transparent on all occasions. Frankness and the avoidance of falsehood are ideals here too - and yet we have at times to be discreet, judicious, diplomatic. For we are in the midst of a huge ignorance which may misuse our virtues. This does not mean we can freely deceive people; in that case we ourselves add to the huge ignorance. What we have occasionally to do is to be careful about our words: the substance of our speech has to be the truth but the form can be so shaped that without creating a lie it may not give out information that may be misused.
A famous instance of this "equivocation" is St. Athana-sius's reply in a moment of crisis. He was being pursued by his enemies who had heard of his being in a place but had not seen him. They did not know what he looked like. He took a boat and went down a river which had many bends clustered with groves and thick-growing trees. His enemies were behind him. He turned round a bend and then instead of going straight ahead he veered in the opposite direction and went sailing towards his pursuers. They naturally could not take him to be the man they were after. And they asked him: "Did you see somebody go down the river?" St. Athana-sius answered: "Just a while back a man went round this bend." This was the exact truth, but no lie could have served better to put the enemies off his track. He saved his life by an equivocation In certain circumstances we can equivocate. It may be that in a complicated world like ours even a lie may be justifiable in a rare situation if the cause to be served is particularly great - like saving one's own life or somebody | else's. But as far as we can help it we must be strictly truthful.
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It is difficult to sit in an armchair and dictate what is perfectly right and perfectly wrong in the savage hurlyburly of life. Still, some broad principles can be enunciated - and that is what you must take me to have done.
(1.5.1956)
Your remark about wintertime reminds me of two poets in whom the cold season somehow set free the inner founts of creativity. First, Milton whose inspiration used to flow most in the six months after the autumnal equinox. Somehow the chill of the grey months without used to stir the blind poet and evoke the heat within to generate Paradise Lost. Then there was the arch-symbolist Mallarme who wrote of
L'hiver, saison de l'art serein, l'hiver lucide
(Winter, serene art's season, lucid winter)
with the sheet of snow mutely suggesting the beyond of some ineffable White towards which his reverie yearned.
The onset of winter, which, as you say, makes your gaze turn more inward, should ultimately lead you to your final decision - the word from the depths, telling you whether for the nonce you should stay in the West or soon pack up your present concerns and make for the Samadhi-centred silence waiting for a new world to be bom. Of course, even where you are, you can hold that silence within you - the advantage of the Ashram is that one does not only hold the Divine but also feels the Divine enveloping One from all the quarters. However, do not be in a hurry to make up your mind. Go on doing the work that comes most sweetly to your hand.
What you have chosen to do sets me thinking of myself. I cannot but identify myself with "the elderly and handicapped" to whose needs you are helping to minister, except that I have a fire in my heart which age cannot quench and 1 do not look backward to muse on past irrecoverable joys but gaze forward to a future of more and more bliss of self-giving
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to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. AH the same I can be called "elderly" because of my semi-bald head and a bit of difficult hearing. If the latter is due more to some extra wax in the ears than to any defect in the tympanum I should be able to say, "My deafness waxes and wanes." As to being handicapped, I have to plead guilty, though the appropriate term would be the coinage "legicapped" rather than "handicapped". As long as my fingers can tap the keys of my typewriter I don't feel debarred from the world's work - but finding my legs deteriorated during the last ten years I feel I can't quite be considered "alive and kicking". Perhaps this shortcoming which enforces a peaceful existence may save me for more time than otherwise from kicking the bucket.
(12.11.1987)
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I feel very happy and proud that my photo is in front of your typewriter. To be close to you in any way adds value to myself. The place you have chosen is most appropriate, for I am so often near my own typewriter with the aspiration that from a worker with types I may rise to be a worker with archetypes and create Platonic perfections - images of
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariots.
What you say of my appearance is quite encouraging. But impressions can differ. Twelve years ago a Sannyasin came to see me. After a while he asked me: "What is your age?" I said: "70". He looked a little surprised and said: "You don't look it." With a shy smile I inquired: "Really I don't?" His prompt reply was: "No. You look 75." A good prick to my ego! But I was soothed when I realised during the course of further talk that he meant I looked as wise as if I had been 75. I suppose a lot of wisdom can be gained within that 5-year period. Now having completed 82 last November I must have the face of a super-sage! But I would prefer to embody AE's vision:
Age is no more near than youth
To the sceptre and the crown.
Vain the wisdom, vain the truth -
Do not lay thy rapture down.
(17.1.1987)
I know that the day of Savitri hasn't come yet. The "Symbol Dawn" in which its truth and beauty will be seen by all hasn't broken in people's consciousness. But here and there
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we shall find inner wakers. They have to be people with a wide sense of poetry and not sticklers after one kind or another and they must be ready to feel and see and hear even when they can't quite grasp. By sensitive feeling, penetrative seeing and sympathetic hearing they will begin to make out the substance and realise the traffic of the gods both as they move in their own empyrean and as they cast their shining shadows on the earth. A profound aesthetic approach is demanded by all poetry, for here is an art and, although art should not be cut off from life nor should meaning be a matter of indifference, it is by a receptivity to form that poetry goes home to us. There must be a response to the gesture made to the sensuous heart by the suggestive way the words are linked, the images interplay, the sounds get woven together, to evoke by the vivid expression a sense of the inexpressible. The epithet I have prefixed to "aesthetic approach" is important: the approach, for all its aestheticism, has to avoid being superficial - else we shall have only a preoccupation with the technique. 1 have spoken of "the sensuous heart" and my epithet "profound" points to this inner enjoyer. What I am trying to say with regard to Savitri is that if one searches the art of it with no fixed ideas as to what a poem should convey and how it should do so, one is bound to be touched by it.
I was delighted to learn that you are a Sagittarian, for so am I. I was born on November 25. What's your date? The astrological sign - a Centaur shooting with a bow - suits me very well. To be at least half a horse is a great honour. Horses have been my passion ever since my childhood and because of the defect in one of my legs I have lived dangerously on them. Five poems of mine bring them in. Sagittarius also sums up the essentials of education in ancient Persia, the country in which the ancestors of modern Parsis lived. Herodotus records that the Persian youth was taught three things: to ride a horse, to shoot straight and to tell the truth. I suppose the straight shooting implies psychologically not only accuracy of mind but also straightforwardness of heart,
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leading to a characteristic like yours: being outspoken to a fault, telling the truth without mincing matters. Of course, truth-telling can have subtler forms: one's writings may be directed to reveal verities, get to the living centre of every topic and, at the finest point, lay bare the fundamental reality of things. Do the astrologers actually say that the Centaur-natures aim darts carelessly as you say you do? Some degree of horse-play is to be expected, a kind of jolly practice of hurling arrows suddenly on all sides and tearing through pretences and disturbing humdrum. I don't think you are irresponsible. People may be taking you to be such because you may not be discreet. But surely there's no indiscretion in telling me that you have doubts about the feasibility of convincing anyone at present of Savitri's unique status in world-literature.
(4.12.1987)
I have dipped into a book of poems inspired by the conviction that the "Sacred" is the goal of all genuine poetry, not necessarily by a direct reference to it but essentially by a feeling of its "Presence" as permeating whatever one refers to. From the few passages I have gone through I get a sense of "tears in the nature of things", as C. Day Lewis translates Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum". These tears are inevitable as long as things yield only a glimmering evidence of the Great One. Merely to experience things as symbols is not enough. The reality symbolised has to be known in one manner or another: either the Light beyond the mind has to be caught or the Liberty of the universal Self has to be1 entered or else the Laughter that is causeless and endless in the deeps of the heart where the Soul, at once child and sage, is seated has to be shared - any of these secrecies must be penetrated if not all of them possessed. Then alone can the sadness which persists in spite of what the symbol transmits fade away or at least weaken sufficiently to get shot through by the ultimate Mystery which a favourite poet of yours has hailed:
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Fount of all, fire of all, fate of all - Bliss!
Poets of "the Presence" need to set their feet on the mystical path if their faces are to be serene and smiling.
Perhaps these poets will say: "Such faces are bound to be cold, wrapt in their own happiness." Here is a big mistake. To live in the Spirit's presence in a direct way is not to be self-confined: it is to be free of the ego and capable of going out to meet the Divine who is the same hidden splendour in others as in one's own being. Warmth of an understanding sympathy will flow forth and seek to kindle the identical happiness everywhere and words will come into play which will guide others to find within their depths the very glow whereby the poet turned mystic carries that serenely smiling face. What this poet will not undergo is an answering quiver to the grief or the pain of others. He will surely know their grief or pain, for has he not felt it in the days when he was like them? Nor is it necessary for one's heart to be wrung and torn in order to console and heal. The balm will come automatically from the inexhaustible source of joy he has tapped. And indeed along with that tapping goes the winning of an insight which gets a precise sense of the sufferer's condition without having to receive a similar wound. Rather it is the woundless state that can best salve the stricken by communicating to them the power to rise above their hurt. Why is the figure of Buddha the supreme representative of compassion? It is so because he has passed beyond the Virgilian "mortalia" which Lewis in the second half of that wonderful line renders by "human transience". Buddha's compassion is so mighty because his Nirvana is so complete, so transcendent of all sorrow. One who has not himself become whole cannot truly heal.
What you say about Sri Aurobindo's poetry and mine is not necessarily "heresy". My work is possibly closer to "the literary intelligentsia" by being more sophisticated, more modemly diverse in subject-matter and imaginative mood. It is not so Himalayan as his, but perhaps more accessible to the contemporary mind. If it can get accepted, the way to
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Mount Everest may prove easier. But I doubt whether even I can get easy entrance. When long ago I sent a copy of a small collection of poems written in the Ashram to a well-known English poet and critic, I got the opinion that a number of pieces "spoke" to her but she picked out only one from nearly a hundred as being almost "English poetry". This was the short poem "Each Night". I dare say others may not be so doctrinaire as she. You should be a good judge of the English poetry-loving public, I have always in mind your plan of "Collected Poems of K. D. Sethna." Just yesterday I looked again at the various sets already made. By my side the latest one - of poems discovered in the nooks and corners of my rambling attic, as it were - I chanced upon a semi-pathetic lyric written ever so long ago, addressed to the Mother. The date is 24.3.1954, a little after my second home-coming. The first was on 16 December 1927, the second on 19 February 1954. Do you mind my typing it out for you? I hope you'll find it not too un-English in sentiment and expression.
AN APPRECIATION AND AN APPEAL
Thus far you've drawn my soul
Out to the doors of sense -But now you are pushing my sight
Deep to the hushed intense
Core of the secret heaven
Hung in the heart Where sits your beauty forever
Alone, apart
From the crowding hands of the world -
A love complete, Offering to one sole clasp
Its deathless feet.
If my life takes not their seal, Never shall I win
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Safety from gloom and greed: The abyss is all within.
Time must be conquered there
For the Eternal's play To flower into flesh
And never fade away.
I know that your sweet limbs
Withdraw from gaze and touch Because the outward light
I crave and prize too much.
1 know that the dim distance
You place between us two Is only the beckoning path
Of an inward rendezvous.
But O my earth-embodied
Darling divinity, Be not too swift in the grace
You are plunging now on me.
Keep yet a visible smile -
How in so short a span Do you hope to make a griefless
God of this fragile man?
I have received your picture-card with its revelatory reminiscence of the Mother's words that to some she gives red roses and these are the people she wishes to make Knights of the Order of Truth (Chevaliers de la Verite'). Your allusion, with the parenthetical phrase "even en rive!", is evidently to the dream I had at night after the very evening on which the Mother left her body - 17 November 1973. In that dream she
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gave me a bunch of red roses and told me to put them on my head. Receiving red roses from the Mother in a dream seems rather appropriate if they point to the Order she has mentioned, for it is to the inner being that the honour and the duty of it are given. To be asked to put the roses on the head is directly symbolic of the role allotted, since the mental self is the chief warrior in the lists of Truth. They would serve to suggest also a spontaneous intuitive rising up of the correct conception in the mind, a natural emergence Of illumining secrets of existence. I should think the rose-emblem a pointer to the Keatsian formula: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" - and the redness is a sign that the Verity discovered is not a cold abstraction but a living vision, a glowing insight into the ultimate Mystery, a glimpse of the heart of the Unknown.
The word "heart" is significant here - a necessary term in the colourful rose-context. A mind which both sees subtly and feels sensitively is the Truth-finder whom the Mother would appoint: it brings, in a deeper connotation than the Spinozistic, the amor intellectualis Dei, "the intellectual love of God". A further shade of the Truth-finder's activity may be caught from the Mother's French phrase for "Knights of the Order of Truth". The Knights are Chevaliers, riders of horses, drawing strength from those swift embodiments of vitality: the Truths found are life-values as well as thought-values -they are spiritual idees-forces. And the Mother not only appoints Chevaliers but also empowers them. As I remarked during your last visit to me, when the Mother gives one a work to do she gives at the same time the capacity for it and the joy in it.
"Your last visit" - the phrase is almost like the word "forlorn" which brought Keats back from his nightingale to his "sole self". It was such a delight to be with you and talk endlessly. Now that the "immortal bird" that is in you - or should I mention Browning's equivalent apropos of his Elizabeth: "half angel and half bird"? - has flown, my forlornness is somehow not as bad as Keats's, for the commu-
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nication can still go on by means of letters. There is also the prospect of the Air-line making Madras a stop and letting you have the chance of partaking more frequently in the golden silence of the Samadhi and the perhaps-not-too un-silver speech at your friend's place.
(3.3.1988)
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15
You write that you owe me "many a debt". I think the commerce has been two-sided as it was bound to be in a genuine friendship. But perhaps one of the gifts I in particular have tried to force home is the artistic conscience. And I hope that in the pleasure of being a devotee you haven't forgotten the duty of being an artist. Poetry is a precious medium, not to be chosen without a sanctification of the lips. And this sanctification does not come merely of a noble subject and its adequate treatment. For, even though you breathe of God with every syllable properly significant, you serve Him ill if your verse itself is not Godlike.
What do I mean by "Godlike"? As an extreme example towards whose quality all of us Aurobindonians should tend, let me quote those two stanzas from our master;
Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces
Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings.
Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions
Blaze in my spirit.
Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;
Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
May I add that poetry can be Godlike even if the poet has no belief or faith in God? Of course if one consciously puts oneself in tune with a higher realm one is likely to be more receptive of the afflatus, provided one has the true poetic turn. But if that turn is present in a sceptic or an atheist he can still by means of the artistic conscience create great verse. Did not Elizabeth Browning refer to the Roman poet Lucretius as denying divinely the Divine? Sometimes Lucretius is indeed stupendous, as in those phrases where he describes
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the philosopher Epicurus, of whom he was a disciple, triumphing over the crude superstitions of popular religion that blocked the way of rational investigation:
Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.
1 have attempted to English these grand hexametres somewhat freely:
Therefore his vivid vigour of mind stood
everywhere victor; Forward afar beyond the world's flaming walls
he ventured,
Crossing all the immensities, led by his thought and
his longing.
(23.9.1981)
What you write about your wish to omit my "Heloise" from the collection Altar and Flame could not have been more perfectly put: "I can admire this poem, but I cannot overcome a difficulty which I have with some of its images. I could say more about this, but then it would take on too much significance, especially in view of my general and almost complete enthusiasm and love for your poems." I know exactly your response as well as your reaction. I may; however, say a few words on some points in the poem. They are not meant to recommend it for the collection. The piece would be out of place there - especially as it would not be flanked with compositions in a similar mode to render it more at home and help its edges fit better into the design of the whole. Actually it did stand in the midst of poems bearing an affinity to it. My plucking it out of their company was like throwing Heloise stark naked among shapes that came with a somewhat different attitude - poetic forms
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achieved by another process of art. I did not quite realise her incongruity without her "sister-songs". But I may explain to you the use of certain expressions which struck your ear rather oddly. Let me first quote the poem to make my remarks more apposite:
Heloise
{After a passage in one of her letters)
Holier is the wife's name -
But, O my love, to the core
Of my heart would I truer be
As thy worthless whore,
Fallen at thy feet with no hands to lay
On the torch of thy fame!
I would live most low
To feel like a flame
The height which my heart-throbs know
Of thy beauty and brain.
What tribute could I pay
Deeper than harlotry
Smiling at sneers as vain
If Abelard be my stain?
The head and front of the poem's offence are the expressions "whore" and "harlotry". They are terms with a strong medieval atmosphere and they must be understood in their old associations. They do not mean what we take as prostitution, the selling of one's body for money. Their significance is anticipated by contrast with the word "wife" in the very first line. In the Middle Ages what is meant now by "mistress" was subsumed under "whore" and "harlot". At the same time the two latter words had no necessary connection with the sale of sexual pleasure. A woman having sex-relations with a man not her husband - a man who may not
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be anybody else's husband but is simply not married to this woman — would be looked down upon and labelled as "whore" or "harlot". The terms have got debased in our time. A still greater debasement has occurred with "mistress'. This word in older English connoted no more than one's beloved, aside from being a general counterpart to "master" (now turned into "mister"). Marvell's "coy mistress" was - to his great impatience and disappointment -just the opposite of a bed-fellow. I may add about the other terms that they did not even point to any promiscuity as an inevitable shade in them. A woman, however deeply in love with one man alone, would still be branded with those terms if she was not married to her man. It is only the opprobrium of not being the legal wife that attaches to them. And this opprobrium would not come out in my poem if any other names were employed.
The names I have adopted are "strong meat" but essential. They are needed also in order to stress the tremendous self-giving, the unconditional love-surrender, the utter abnegation of personal importance, the intense voluntary renunciation of all advantages accompanying a wife's status, the absolute lack of claim and the complete granting of freedom to the beloved. We have to put ourselves into the 12th century as well as into Heloise's heart of passionate adoration, face to face with Abelard's "height of beauty and brain", to receive in full the living substance and the vibrant art, which are intended to convey by a powerful paradoxical movement a most exalting sensation. Both content and form would suffer, if not even grow null, without the shock-tactics I have brought into play, the extremism into which I have cast both the idea-gesture and the word-posture.
(22.6.1974)
Your mention of loneliness and aloneness calls forth a few distinctions in my mind - from the Yogic standpoint. The former involves a strong sense of the physical absence of
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loved ones, the latter the feeling of freedom from bondage even to these and at the same time the glad recognition of their ever-presence of soul along with oneself in the depths of the Divine. Loneliness carries a bitter-sweet of memory, aloneness an entry - small or large - into an inner realm where one loses all loss not because one is oblivious but because there is no need to recall anything: one touches or penetrates a wideness of omni-possession within a more-than-human reality.
Another term for "aloneness" is what the Upanishad mentions as the rending asunder of the knot of the heartstrings, except that this experience relates to everything connected with one's feelings, and does not relate merely to the dear people to whom one is attached. It marks a passage from the finely and profoundly psychological to the sheer spiritual. A prominent aspect of it is shown in those lines of Sri Aurobindo:
A wide unshaken look on time's unrest,
A step beyond this aspect, carrying into the supracosmic the large freedom achieved against a cosmic background, comes in the stanza from Sri Aurobindo:
He who from time's dull motion escapes and thrills
Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast
Unrolls the form and sign of being.
Seated above in the omniscient silence.
Your medical curiosity about the effect the rending of the heart's knot would have on the physical cardiac organ finds me somewhat at a loss. I may only surmise that in the long run one may echo the Aurobindonian state:
Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's -
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or progress inwardly as Amal has always hoped to do
Till all the heart-beats of my life's increase
Count but the starlike moments of His peace.
(3.3.1986)
It's good news that you will be Pondying for three days. Yes, the time is rather short, but as the awful punster in me is tempted to say, going about in shorts near the Divine's Samadhi is better than indulging in long pants for the Divine's presence far away. Punning as execrably in prosodic terms, I may affirm that to execute a pyrrhic (two shorts) or a tribrach (three shorts) here is preferable to performing a spondee (two longs ) or a molossus (three longs) elsewhere. To play on words in a more sober spiritual way, let me state that to long sincerely for the Mother in however brief a span of time is not to fall short of her expectations of her little ones.
(1) The experience of a Presence silently radiating love from the heart is surely of what Sri Aurobindo calls the "psychic being", the true soul. But the psychic being itself is something of the Divine come down from the Transcendent and flowing out to everything of the Divine beyond ourselves from the same everything within us. In order to be authentically psychic, the radiation you speak of has to be of a deep quiet intensity that gives and gives and never feels wasted if there is no response from the human recipient, for it really goes forth to the Divine who has worn the face and form of this or that person. Actually it streams out not only to persons but also to non-human creatures and even to objects since the Divine is hidden in them as well: that is, to all manifestation. I may add that it creates in one a happy
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constant sense of self-dedication and self-consecration to the Supreme.
(2) In the course of individual evolution it is the psychic being that "grows" through the various experiences from life to life. The apparent movement is towards the True, the Good, the Beautiful, but inwardly the movement is towards the Divine and when this inward fact is recognised the genuine spiritual life has begun and one is aware of one's soul directly and not only of the reflection or rather emanation of it in the mental-vital-physical complex. I may add that no matter how much the psychic being grows, it still remains a child - simple, straight, trusting, humble. But this child is at the same time an extremely wise one, with the experience of ages enriching it and a spontaneous truth-feeling derived from its transcendent origin. Nor is it a weakling: its inherent immortality gives it a natural strength - strength to endure, to help, to conquer circumstances — strength bom from the unfailing intuition of an omnipotent Loveliness accompanying it.
Your mention of evening reminds me of a line in one of my poems:
It seeks to catch in terms of a spiritual mood a phase of Nature or perhaps I should say it tries in words to reflect by empathy an inward-going moment of the Earth-soul. The dusk suggests the movement of withdrawal from outer wakefulness into a sense of dreamy mystery and the single star represents the emergence of a one-pointed depth-consciousness, a unifying intensity discovered within. The combination of vague shadow and gemlike shine is set in a perception of calm immensity - a perception which seems to make the wideness a natural accompaniment of the concentrated withdrawnness.
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Facing such a sight you would spontaneously turn your thoughts to Pondicherry. Perhaps Pondicherry would appear to you as a wideness with Amal as a tiny twinkler nestling in the tranquil omnipresence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Perhaps "twinkler" is not quite an accurate term. The evening star is a planet and planets are steady and I think Amal also has a certain steadiness in his temperament; but whatever calm there may be is not anything cold, unresponsive. A heart can beat steadily, yet there is still a pulsing. However undisturbed in its rhythm, the pulsing shows the feeling it has for the Master and the Mother and for their children, near or far.
The far child that is you will soon be near. He will be all the more welcome because his farness is only an appearance. His friends always feel him near just as he feels ever close to the true home of his soul. Soon we shall have the joy of seeing again his warm, sincere, handsome face with the God-dreaming eyes.
(4.4.1988)
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16
I am so glad my earlier letter has proved helpful to you, both inwardly and in regard to your health. I have been very much concerned about your physical condition and again and again I have offered it to the Mother with intense concentration at the Ashram Samadhi which I visit from 4.30 to 5.30 p.m. every day as well as at the inner Samadhi which I carry in my heart. I am sure there is such a Samadhi within you also. If your health does not permit a flight to Pondicherry, do not feel discouraged ever. As long as the urge to fly over is present, the Samadhi in your heart will grow more and more powerful and render an actual visit unnecessary in the existing state of your body. If in my little way I have been instrumental in making more and more real in your consciousness the Divine Presence at that sacred spot in the midst of worship-breathing flowers and heavenward-aspiring incense, I feel most humbly happy in the service of our two Masters who have brought their immensity home to us by being at the same time our souls' parents.
Of late a certain method of sadhana has been taking an increasingly concrete form with me. In the face of difficulties, however large-looming, and of sensitive situations when one's self-importance is hurt, and of personal problems whether psychological or physical, the best thing to do is immediately to make an offering of the whole affair to the Mother. Mostly one tries to get the shape of the problem clearly in one's mind and then decide on one's attitude. What I am saying is that without spending a single moment, without giving the slightest thought, one must catch the sense of the problem at the place where it occurs - that is, in the region of the "funky" or "touchy" heart - and pull it off from there and push it towards the Mother, delivering it into her ever-outstretched hands or laying it at her feet which are ever-waiting to receive the world-wanderer back to his starting-point beyond time and space.
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This instantaneous gesture has to be made in a very realistic way as if one were physically plucking something from the heart-region, freeing oneself from all relationship with it. At once there will be a tremendous relief - far greater than any to be experienced if one has spent even one minute revolving the occasion in one's thoughts. The next step is not to figure out the occasion and wonder how the Divine will act. Stop bothering about it altogether - as if it had completely vanished from your life. Leave the Divine to work out the solution. I don't mean that one should sit motionless and see what happens: one should go about one's business but not expect this or that result. The Divine will do all that is necessary and you will have won a wide persistent peace. If a solution is to come, it will surely come, but often the problems that arise do not require a solution: they need only a dissolution. And the gesture I have indicated will bring it. Of course, one should not lose one's practical sense: if, for example, a medical course is to be followed, it should be followed, but whatever worrying situation takes shape has to be dealt with in this manner which is simultaneously self-abnegating and self-liberating because it calls the Supreme into immediate remembrance and unhindered action. Believe me, the results are amazing.
What you write about Savitri gladdens me a great deal. We are so lucky to have this gigantic treasure-trove of spiritual truth and beauty at the disposal of tiny creatures like ourselves. All that Sri Aurobindo did was charged with - to quote one of his happy coinages - "immensitude" and yet within this vastness there vibrates a knowledge of all our minute needs. Along with
Words that can tear the veil from deity's face
we get
Words winged with the red splendour of the heart.
The illimitable Beyond reveals a rich concern for our little
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throbbing souls and brings - as a disciple of Sri Aurobindo has said -
A love that misers not its golden store
But gives itself and yearns to give yet more,
As though God's light were inexhaustible
Not for his joy but this one heart to fill!
(By the way, the word "misers" as a verb, transitively used here, is a coinage of the disciple referred to, whom you must have recognised.) You have alluded to some passages of Savitri which you have got by heart. Some day when you have time you may tell me what they are. Knowing them I shall feel closer to your inmost being and get in keener touch with their beauty and truth in the depths of the sweetness and light that are you,
I should say "you here", for there is a "you yonder", a high-above counterpart to the deep-below Psyche, the Divine-impelled aspirant. It is the "you yonder" who is hidden in the glowing red sun you saw in your dream-vision, the bliss and fire which have to take possession of the sweetness and light already with you. Of course the sun is the transcendent Truth-Power, not exactly unquiet and stuggling, as you say, but intensly acting for the highest Self of you to break out from it and, blazing through those trees in your vision, be in close contact with the Psyche. I think the "dark tall coniferous trees" are the cosmic ignorance in us which is still an aspiration, however blind it may be, towards the luminous Unknown. They are an upward call but rooted in the earth's dense inconscience. The downward pressing sun is at once an answer to them and their conqueror. They surge towards some uncomprehended fulfilment, which, paradoxically, would destroy their present character of darkness in the very act of responding to them and fulfilling their instinctive cry. The fiery red of the sun seems to be the supramental arch-mage of the dull red of the earth. And it occurs to me that a great Force of the Divine has announced
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its coming to work on your very body. Meet it with a great calm, a wide silent happiness, a quietly self-dedicating receptivity - and whenever you take any medicine do so with a thankful awareness of the Mother making a special intervention on your behalf, taking a particularly direct hand in your treatment.
(22.11.1987)
I am always happy to hear from you, for there is always a soul-touch in your letters and the breath of deep things wafts to me from them. Sadhana means a great deal to you — in fact it is your way of life and that is why whatever you write brings the soul in me to the surface or, rather, makes the surface feel more intensely the soul which is mostly hovering there after all these years of seeking for the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with the waking consciousness. They have said, while not discouraging meditation, that to remain calm and concentrated and self-consecrated in the midst of one's occupations in life is more helpful towards our goal than being locked in a shut-eyed in-drawnness. For, is it not our goal to manifest dynamically the Divine Truth in our day-to-day dealing with the physical world? This Truth has to become a normal active part of our bodily awareness instead of remaining a static supernormal fact of inner experience. A smiling equality of attitude as the wide background of the constant act of remembering and offering - such is the state in which we are expected to be on the way to our goal, the state best expressed in a certain phrase of the Gita: "a fire burning steadily upward in a vast windless space."
Let me add that what the tongues of this fire convey to the Supreme is not only a keen "Take me, take me" but also a glowing "Thank you, thank you." For a gratitude, moving Divine-ward for all the Grace that has come to one, is a true sign of the awakened soul and the more grateful one feels the closer will one get to the infinite freedom of the all-blissful,
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all-bountiful - the "Beauty of ancient days that is ever new," as St. Augustine puts it at the beginning of his Confessions.
It is indeed good news for me that your health is better. Quite often, when I sit facing the Samadhi, a warmth from my heart goes forth, carrying an image of you in a prayerful gesture to that Silent Source of Blessings. On your part I would ask you to keep a memory of the Samadhi vivid at the same time that you invoke our Gurus. For here is something that can serve as a symbolic physical link with their subtle omnipresence. This way you will increase the effectivity of the healing Force which already your spontaneous call has set soothing your trouble. When I say "call' I do not mean that you have asked the Divine just to cure you: you have sent out your cry basically for the Divine just to come. There is nothing wrong in praying for the welfare of your body, but the core of every invocation is the appeal to the Divine to fill wholly your being and make it a humble part of his perfection. I remember those lines of the poet AE.
Some for Beauty follow long
Flying traces - some there be
Who seek Thee only for a song -
I to lose myself in Thee.
Now for your selections from Savitri.To get mental guidance from the lines is naturally the immediate response we make and even when we have profounder responses this guidance is never absent, for even the most recondite expressions in Savitri communicate a glint of seizable significance. Savitri is not what passes most often as Surrealism in Europe, over-entangled emblems or else disjointed apparitions from the subconscious. Savitri has both clarity and harmony: if we fail to get them altogether, it is because the clarity is colossal, the harmony immense - too great for us to catch at one stroke or at the start. Some purchase-point, however small, is invariably there and from it we try to fan out our consciousness into the unknown to receive the
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impact of the many-gloried Secrecy. Sri Aurobindo gives us always a visible spectrum to begin with, but it is often a pulsating pull towards the infra-red of the sheer mystical, the intricately revealing, or towards the ultra-violet of the pure spiritual, the straightforwardly revelatory. Perhaps we should say that everywhere the grip is felt of what is beyond the mind: the only difference between the two kinds of phrases is that in the latter the "overhead" power is felt mostly through the rhythm, whereas in the former it touches us predominantly through the vision. I may try to illustrate the difference. Take that favourite of most readers:
All can be done if the God-touch is there.
There is an organ-music of the wide-spreading "overhead" in the rhythm. The substance is comprehensible to every religious mind. Even a non-religious one can make out its message without believing in it. A little baffling to both is a verse such as:
Years like gold raiment of the Gods that pass.
We get a sense of the mysterious in our temporal process, making it strangely radiant by a hint of the formations of light in which divine beings appear during their courses of action in the supra-terrestrial. Perhaps a denser challenge to the day-to-day intelligence is:
Earth's winged chimeras are truth's steeds in Heaven.
Possibly as dense yet intuitively more graspable comes the line:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.
Half mystical half spiritual is the notation of an all-transcending experience:
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Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgement ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
The passages you have chosen are very good for practical spirituality - practical in the sense of the efforts we make to keep going on the Great Path. The heart-warming declaration -
An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives -
and its sequel are surely a tremendous encouragement in sadhana, as is the grand assurance breathing through the lines starting with
His failure is not failure whom God leads
and ending in
And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?
I have found great solace in these two phrases:
One who has shaped the world is still its lord...
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all...
The passage from
At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate
to
Below, the wonder of the embrace divine
is one of the finest in Savitri, revealing the Divine Mother in magical words that can stand full comparison to what I have termed the mantra of mantras, the description of the Divine Mother's incarnation in the young Savitri, breaking upon our marvelling eyes and wondering ears with
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Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven
and leaving us ecstatically dumb with the final sweep of the Love-God's satisfaction:
In her he met his own eternity.
In this long passage comes that masterpiece of complex cryptic vision which, for all its strangeness of image and word, bursts upon us like a revel of light:
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.
Your selections from Book Six, Canto Two, excerpts from Narad's speeches, are deep-toned and such as might change one's tenor of life or at least lift one above distressing vicissitudes. Especially memorable are lines like
Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,
For through small joys and griefs thou mov'st
towards God,
the second of which creates by its long-drawn-out run of monosyllables ending with "God" the sense of life's littlenesses adding up to a sight of the Infinite, the Eternal, who from the distance pulls silently the labouring soul. (The preposition "towards" can be a monosyllable, pronounced "tordz" or "twordz",) The other passage - "Thy goal, thy road... the indwelling God" - seems a counterpart to the
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earlier one. While the latter gives the feel of outer time and space as the field of spiritual realisation, the former points inward, the "road" of days and nights leading to a discovery of the Immortal within - "thy secret self", "the indwelling God."
Book Seven, Canto Two provides you with a brief vision of the height to which our Yoga has to mount and the depth from which it has to work out its destiny. High above "There is our aspect of eternity" and towards it the "greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts" toil with help from overhead and from deep within. What is deep within is given a clear sight in the phrase about "our soul" acting from "its mysterious chamber" and this clear sight is widened when we read:
Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart
The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil...
And step into common nature's crowded rooms...
The master-key is here - the emergence of the psychic being without which the "hidden greatnesses" cannot find their full play. This key on the one hand conducts us to a fulfilment of light and power in our relations with the outer waking world and on the other hand it breaks open a way to
Our summits in the superconscient's blaze...
The long passage in Book Seven, Canto Five is dear to me also. One line from it struck me a long time ago with an "emphatic" force touching the full reality of its theme with a marvellous brevity:
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.
A fitting close to your cullings is that cry, "O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven... And made of the body a capitol of bliss". (The word "capitol" meant originally the temple of
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Jupiter in Rome, Here it seems to connote a supreme divine habitation.) From this passage and from all else I can reach out to the centre of your Aurobindonian life: that centre is the "crimson-throbbing glow" of the inmost heart where the supreme Harmonist, the divine Flute-player, is our beloved and refuge and trail-blazer,
(8.2.1988)
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I feel proud to have my photo so loved and honoured. Most photos that have an appeal are better than the actual persons in the sense that a good side of them is caught there whereas they themselves are changeable and subject to various moods. I am sure I also fall short of what my picture suggests to you, but I have always tried not to be a creature of moods. One of the first requisites of the Yogic life is a certain equableness of disposition - not to be on top of Mount Everest one moment and at the bottom of the Pacific the next or at least not swinging too much from gay sunshine to glum shadow. Of course it would be ideal if one were always in the light, bringing home to people the splendour of God's creative joy or, if one is a little distant with spiritual absorption, then a calm night-sky would meet the world with star on star softly smiling out the unutterable mystery of the transcendent Divine. Anyway, let me hope I'll be able to live up to the impression you have of my picture.
The affinity between you and me which you speak of is striking if long before you came to know that a fellow named Amal Kiran was knocking about in the Ashram you had a sense of his presence. I am glad my introduction as a writer came to you through Light and Laughter and not through any of my other books. For perhaps then you might have thought me a dry-as-dust thinker and considered me rather unapproachable. Did I tell you what a sadhak once told me? He said: "We read X and Y and Z and others like them in Mother India - and only when we have nothing else to read we read you." I told him: "Well, I have to be thankful for small mercies. And that in whatever circumstances you do read me at all is God's grace enough." Under my breath I said: "Maybe it is a bit of God's grace to you also."
Your relatives seem greatly struck by my library which forms the background in that photo. Yes, 1 do have a fairly large store of books and they are on a wide diversity of
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subjects, for I have been interested in many fields of human activity and have also written books on various topics. I believe about twenty-two have been published, two are in the press and about twenty remain in typescript ready for publication as soon as the money appears out of the blue. I am not sure whether, even with the money, so many unpublished books can come out in my lifetime. Some people are generously helping me, but how far can they go? Besides, close on 84, do I have enough time left to see all my books through the press? And even if I have it for these old creations, what will happen to the new ones that are sure to be born during that period? In order that my lifetime may cover the publication of all my stock at present, I must stop writing any further. I seem to be like "Fate" in Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes and having writ
Moves on...
What you say about people's maladies entering into you is rather disturbing. If you have the power to heal, it must not be exercised at the expense of your well-being. To take upon oneself the illnesses of others keeps the sum of illnesses in the world the same. Moreover, if the healer herself begins to suffer, she may even die and then who will heal the sick? The power must be used safely. It must be something that comes from the Divine through your soul and cures people without any in-take of their troubles. Though a sympathetic attitude is helpful in opening them to you, no identification of yourself with them must take place. You have to be only the instrument. The illness must be thrown out of people by the power that passes through you. If you yourself get ill, your healing gift is being misused by a hostile force. Whenever I have had the rare privilege to cure somebody, no reaction has occurred in me. A stream from the soul has entered the ailing party and infused a "brightness" in both mind and body without bringing about any "pallor" in my own self.
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I think you are mixing an uncontrolled pity with the curative process and allowing your over-generous emotional-vital to get sucked into the person who seeks your help. This is an unhealthy transaction. Instead of the spiritual power using the human, the human uses the spiritual power in the human's ordinary terms. Not emotional-vital pity but a radiant psychic peace, communicating the presence of the Divine, has to be in play. Don't endeavour to heal: be quiet and invoke the Divine who is in your soul to transfuse light into the patient. If you can't do this, stop your healing activity until the orientation of which I am speaking takes place.
You must develop a protective zone around you. Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me about such a development. Call the Mother's presence, try to be in tune with her Will in whatever you do: then a zone of light and peace will form. Nothing will be able to penetrate your atmosphere and only what you wish to give out of your depths will go through it to people - with no unhealthy after-effects on yourself. As you are sensitive even to letters, appeal to the Divine before opening them, offer them to the Divine and keep the sense of offering while reading them. If the zone of protection is there, the psychological aura of any letter which may affect you adversely will be kept out and you will remain safe. Of course, if a letter carries the Mother's light and peace it will automatically pass through the zone into you, for it will be in accord with the vibration there and serve to increase it.
(4.6.1988)
You speak of "depression". It is something you must never accept. The Mother has told us that all kinds of wrong movements can get into one when one goes on being depressed. (One must immediately shake oneself free of gloom. And really where is the room for sustained gloom when the Divine Herself came to earth and allowed us to be Her children? Her presence is ever with us and there is no
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cause for despair. Of course, at times we don't feel quite on top of the world, but we should take care not to persist in the bottom-of-the-world feeling.) For, I have always said: "There is no hole so deep that out of it the Divine grace cannot lift us up sky-high."
Your dream-vision about your crushed head is strange but not without meaning. The particles of your brain being all separate but at the same time golden suggests that the Divine Light has touched your physical mind but its effects are not yet integrated. Their floating in water seems to imply that the God-touched particles are separate because your outer mentality is affected very much by the vital element in you which is fluid and moving in diverse directions - being subject to moods, impulses, changing impressions, passing sensations. The vital element needs some order and the mental part needs to be less dependent on this element so that it may be less dispersed. The golden light which is somewhere within you should get a good chance to assert its own power and to make steady your being and organise it in a happy pattern of self-dedication to the Divine's presence which your soul feels in the midst of all human weaknesses.
(17.7.1988)
I woke up this morning with four lines of poetry on my lips -
This scattered life, both flux and flame.
You must seize as one and stamp
As a love-letter to Eternity
From the transience of a tramp.
The lines are not a remembrance but a reminder. They are my own and they point in the same direction in general as the end of your latest letter to me. "Love" was the cry of your being, love for the universal as well as the transcendent "That" of the Isha Upanishad's ending. This "That" is hit off in a slightly different but essentially similar vein by those two verses in Savitri:
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The triune being who is all and one And yet is no one but himself apart.
The philosophy of these verses is caught epigrammatically in the single line elsewhere in the poem:
Universal he is all, transcendent none.
I say "philosophy" but actually nothing in Savitri which looks philosophical is coin of the speculative intellect: everything carries the stab of revelation and presents a pull towards realisation. If I may use some words of the Isha-quotation, "That is far and the same is near." It seems a vision gleaming in the distance, but the living language which conveys it makes us feel it like a truth already embodied by the one who has given it visionary expression, a truth whose seed is implanted by that expression into our own body for sprouting and leafing and flowering and fruiting.
My use of the word "body" takes me back to a passage in your letter which goes home to me very vividly:
"body's hold." "hold on the body," "loosening of the hold on the body." "Surrender increasingly progressive of the body to the Divine, by the soul, by the other parts and by the body itself unknown to the others": all these seem to me to be progressive stages of attaining freedom. I think of a bird, which has nearly forgotten to fly, fluttering its wings and wondering with thrill and fear at the pressure of upswinging air built up by the wings' action!
This is a beautiful passage and "surrender... of the body... by the body itself" strikes a chord which has been the keynote of my Yogic life for many months now - more and more pervadingly the aspiration of the outermost to reflect the innermost and to echo the uppermost or rather to feel
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something of its own archetype - the innermost's and the uppermost's outermost, so to speak: the "subtle body" and the "causal body" inherently belonging to them and waiting to manifest along with the subliminal self and the self that is superconscient. I know that the archetypal-physical is beyond our capacity to realise in any true sense at present, but a distant feeling of it is not ruled out and such a feeling is essential for a total consecration of our lives to the Perfect and the Absolute so that we may respond in however faint a way to the whole of that sovereign Overmind utterance by Sri Aurobindo of the Integral Yoga and not respond merely to its second, third and fourth lines:
(By the way, the expression "taking" should not raise the question: "taking what?" It is an intransitive present participle and with the preposition "to" it makes the composite meaning: "having recourse to", "adopting as help", "being drawn or attracted to".)
One of the major signs of the body's direct "intuition" of its archetype would be a complete disappearance of the sex-urge. Long ago, shortly after joining the Ashram, I had for a few seconds the sense of a total sexlessness. At that time -the early '30s - the Ashram was a complex of several separate houses with their own courtyards which were connected by small "tunnels". Every evening, after the Soup Distribution the Mother used to pass through a "tunnel" from the Library House towards her own building. Dara would be carrying a hurricane lantern in front of her. I used to go ahead and wait on the other side. It was once during my brief passage through this "tunnel" that I had that sudden experience of a total sexlessness. And it was not anything negative but a wonderful crystalline transparency of being, a quietly intense
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bliss, an all-sufficient emptiness which was a rapt fullness of freedom. An initial representative of this state would be the pervasion of the emotional and sensational self by the sheer psyche, a deep happy spontaneous purity. Neither the representative nor the original is loveless or insensitive to beauty, but the drive of desire, the pull of possessiveness are gone - and, though women may remain a part of one's life, there is not the slightest physical ache for any of them.) In that blessed condition we can live out what Sri Aurobindo expresses in his "Bride of the Fire": we become ready to unite inwardly with that "living Sun", the sovereign Shakti of the ultimate Godhead. The "Bride of the Fire" is, according to me, the one whom Aswapati hails in Savitri with the cry:
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,...
O radiant fountain of the world's delight,
World-free and unattainable above,
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find,
Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue...
(2.6.1988)
You write: "I have one tendency - to take everything in my stride and because of that I do not very often get wonder-struck - marvel as anyone else would - don't know if that is a gain or a loss - Grace or non-Grace." To my thinking as well as a bit of experiencing, to take everything in one's stride is one of the best ways of getting ready for Yoga. Perhaps I should say it is already a beginning of Yoga, even if one is not consciously a Yogi. It implies a calm competence to meet every turn of life - not to be taken by surprise, not to lose one's poise - it implies a wisdom in the very act of being aware, an automatic understanding of the variable quality and character of the world-movement. I don't see why it should prevent one from being wonder-struck. What you
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have in mind is possibly a kind of indifference, a lack of interest, even a thick-skinned attitude. Not being ruffled or elated by whatever happens but being "equal" to all vicissitudes is not to lose one's sense of the shades of things. When the self in us - the Purusha - stands back and watches somewhat like Alexander Pope's God
Who sees, with equal eyes as lord of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
we need not, by giving up personal reactions, give up noting the distinction between a hero and a sparrow or the difference between one hero and another or how the same hero does deeds of dissimilar degrees of courage and endurance. The condition should be, on a generalised scale, akin to an artist's, who can feel beauty everywhere, in even the mud-pool and haggard old age, and depict everything with revealing line and hue, but who knows also the high notes and the low, the intensity or immensity in one manifestation of beauty more than in another. Perhaps I should say he is wonder-struck all the while yet he is aesthetically aware of the varying range of some eternal light piercing the passing show of time.
My four lines, with which I woke up on 2.6.88, I called a reminder and not a remembrance. The last word should have stopped you from asking when they were written. They were composed at the moment of waking or, more correctly, the waking moment gave them to me as a programme or project to be worked out. Yes, they point towards "integration", but an integration into the Yogic state and the main sign of it is that Eternity should be the Beautiful One to whom must be addressed all the quiverings of the heart and mind - "flame" and "flux" - which are now vagaries and wanderings in a world of finite loves and fancies. All should be gathered together in one gesture of warm self-offering and total loyalty to the Divine, (The four lines I quoted from Sri Aurobindo sum up this gesture in its fullness as well as in its fulfilment.
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His starring with "arms" and then proceeding to "Life" and "Mind" and Will-"Force" does not signify that Yoga has to concentrate on the body first. Also we must see that under "Life" the heart is subsumed as we can catch from the expression "close breast". An Aurobindonian Bhakti Yoga is mainly hinted at here, just as a Jnana Yoga a la Sri Aurobindo is touched upon in the third line and a Karma Yoga as visioned by our Master in the last. What Yoga the first line suggests may be imagined as a blend of Hatha Yoga and the Tantrik discipline. But, of course, all is to be viewed sub specie Aurobindonis. The stability and strength and super-powering of the body which Hatha Yoga aims at after a strenuous complicated labour of posture and breathing is no direct part of the Integral Yoga nor is the paradoxical purity which the Tantrik experimenter dangerously tries for. We do not attempt to raise the Kundalini, the "Serpent Shakti" from below to energise through the diverse poses of the limbs the physical organism to an occult capacity. We do not with the aid of the same Shakti fill our nerves with the erotic impulse in a new orientation which through the feminine partner evokes the sense of the Goddess filling one with an illumined vitality. We invoke the free Goddess-Power of the higher realms to descend into us and release both occult and spiritual potentialities in the body and ultimately fit it to receive the Causal Sheath of inherent immunity and immortality which carries with it an ineffable and immutable Bliss ("voiceless supreme delight"). Our Bhakti too is something beyond the emotional exuberance of the proverbial devotee turning his heart to the chosen deity: we seek to bring forward the secret Dweller in the deep heart - the chaitya purusha - which has at once the poise of Purusha and the elan of Prakriti so that there is a quiet intensity of love moving most naturally towards the Divine. Our Bhakti is activated by that speciality of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's spiritual path - the Psychic Being - the true Soul which lies behind what they term the desire-soul and which passes from birth to birth in a subtle progression and is not set on reaching
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merely some beatific Beyond like the Vaishnava Golok but is intimately connected with earth-existence. It is the core of Life - the core by which Life is able to meet "the Eternal with close breast", taking the outer heart and its bodily sense along with it as a passage for that glowing Within. Our Jnana Yoga exceeds the static vastness of the Atman-realisation -essentially equivalent to the experience of the Silent Brahman or of Nirvana - which would find its end in the leap "to fade in the Unknowable" instead of being ready to "thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite", across which the creative and transformative Supermind may sweep to terrestrial shores. The Aurobindonian Karma Yoga is not content with one's becoming an instrument of Sri Krishna's power of action: our consciousness has to receive the descent of Sri Krishna and realise Him acting as our own selves from our very bodies, not just from above them. And, along with His action, there is the experience of the everlasting Plenitude which needs no action because in it everything is already achieved and all is complete in a marvellous consummate crowning peace ("unimaginable rest").
Your astrological reflections are a little puzzling. How can the Indian system of Zodiacal signs differ so much from the western so that one who is symbolised by a bull in the former gets characterised by a horse in the latter? How can I have faith in astrology after this revelation? Of course it would be nice to have these two suggestive signs at the same time. Historically, both the bull and the horse have the honour of going back to Rigvedic antiquity and being spiritually significant as well as anthropologically meaningful. But the bull appears to be more basic to the old Aryan thought. The supreme godhead is designated a Bull, never a Horse. That is one of my grievances against the Rishis no less than against the composer of the Gita who dubs Arjuna "Bull among the Bharatas" and nothing like "Horse among the Pandavas". Sri Aurobindo, however, has given pride of place to the horse through Savitri's father Aswapati, "Lord of the Horse". In an earlier version, a whole section was called "Yoga of the Lord
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of the Horse" - and when I asked Sri Aurobindo whether this horse was the Vedic white courser Dadhikravan which ever marched towards the Dawn, he replied that it was. After my question he even wrote a long passage on the theme but found it unsatisfactory and ran a line over it, completely cancelling it.
Although the ancient Aryans are nowadays remembered most as the first domesticators of the horse, they themselves did not specially emphasise this animal - nor even the bull, for all its figuring the creative power of the Godhead. The cow was the focus of their symbolic spiritual thought. But one of the most laudatory expressions in the Rigveda connected with it has given rise to India's agelong prohibition of cow-slaughter. The Mother of the Gods, Aditi, the Infinite Consciousness, gets the title "Cow unslayable", pointing to her immortal nature, the epithet "unslayable" was caught hold of by later commentators and interpreted as forbidding the slaughter of cows. Actually, it is used as a distinguishing mark of Aditi from cows that are slayable. Modern researchers like our own Sankalia as well as western scholars like Macdonell and Keith, authors of the Vedic Index, deduce from several expressions that the spiritual forefathers of the Indian people were non-vegetarians or at least not rigidly imitative of their own cows and horses in their dietary habits.
Mind you, I am not defending meat-eating. My own natural instinct is in the opposite direction, but I have a respect for historical situations. Furthermore, the faddist identification of vegetarianism with spirituality, as if abstention from animal flesh gave one the right to the feeling of "holier-than-thou", irks me. I don't believe that even our Mother ever encouraged this faddism. I recollect her to have always been ironical in such matters.
Apropos of the cow-theme, a curious amusing idea strikes me. My birth-sign is Sagittarius, the Centaur, half man half horse. As you know, I am a passionate horse-lover. And I think I am fairly masculine, but Sri Aurobindo's name
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for me - Amal Kiran, 'The Clear Ray" - can have both a bovine and feminine overtone if we follow the esoteric reading of the Rigveda. For, according to Sri Aurobindo, the word go, connoting "cow", means also "ray". So I could be addressed as "The Clear Cow"! I suppose I thus get assimilated to the Krishna-legend and become a part of his herd and would stand out by being clearly recognisable as his ward and by being clear in recognising him as my leader. There is also the Vaishnava fancy that if Krishna is the one unique Divinity with whom the soul has to unite, all souls are feminine and He the single Male, Master, Lord, Husband. So the sex-change suggested by my ray-hood is nothing to worry about.
Nor should it be a subject of worry that your sadhana seems to you to proceed only as if you were compering with a snail. While keeping a healthy desire of the moth for the star going, one should not disturb one's nerves by forgetting what difficult jobs we are for the Divine to manage. The Divine can't help our being slow. But we should forget the slowness and carry on our job: "Remember and Offer." Preoccupation with how much we are advancing every day would be a sign of egoism. However, we can pray to the Mother: "O let all of me belong to you - may your light take possession of me wholly!" What we shouldn't do is to ask ourselves: "Why am I not getting a halo soon and sprouting wings swiftly?" Not that impatience is forbidden. But there has to be a difference in the temper of it. The soul, not the ego, has to cry for speed in Yoga. Perhaps the difference may be phrased by noting that the soul concentrates on the Divine and appeals to the Divine to come close speedily while the ego wants itself to reach the Divine fast. The soul's impatience is humble and quiet, the ego's is pushy and clamorous. The soul, though its devotion strains to something afar and wants it to be near, is yet ready to wait for the response: the ego frets that, in spite of its insistent call, the response is not immediate.
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I am afraid my rather rambling epistolary response to your two letters has been somewhat slow, but as I am very distant indeed from being anything divine you may well complain without being considered egoistic.
(9.7.1988)
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18
Before I try to answer your questions let me quote them back to you so that my reply may have a better look of relevance. You write:
"I do not wish to take up your time, but one thing I cannot stop myself from asking and that is: if we have Savitri with us, if we keep uttering Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's names, if we have their symbols affixed on our doors or are wearing them, if we carry the Mother's Blessings Packet with us, can the hostile forces still come to us and try to lead us astray? If Yes, then in what and where is the protection from them? Only in our own minds and hearts? One has heard the story of an evil force having taken the form of Sri Aurobindo and daring to come to the Mother herself. For her it was child's play to find it out, but what happens to those on a low plane? For, despite the protection the above things offer, if the hostile forces can still dare come to mislead and harm people, where is the progress? Is it that the soul only has to be advanced - nothing else is really protected? And then is it not also that the more advanced the soul the greater the attack?"
First of all, to attempt to rise higher than the ordinary consciousness, superior to the common way of living, is to open ourselves to two kinds of forces: the spiritual ones that come to help our aspiration and the anti-spiritual that endeavour to block it by creating difficulties - in both the inner life and the outer. Psychologically one has to develop the state which Sri Aurobindo describes Aswapati as having achieved:
A wide unshaken look on time's unrest.
"Time's unrest" is, of course, not only outside: it is also inside: our own weaknesses, our own painful responses to ordinary stimuli, our own general indispositions. These are
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part of what in Yoga we call the Prakriti side of us, the "Nature"-component. The Purusha side, the self who watches and acts on this nature, has to develop equanimity, stand aloof unaffected and offer to the Divine all that happens for whatever result the Divine may will. The Divine's help is always there, but we have to be prepared for hitches to our choice of the higher life. Whether we feel protected or not depends on how receptive we are to the help given to save us from being overwhelmed by the complex of events.
Secondly, the Mother's central concern is our soul. Her blessings are for the soul's progress. This progress may take place through various experiences which may not in every case look like the Divine's favours. Even death may be a part of the Divine's grace. Just because we have received the Mother's blessings we cannot expect success in all we do or a straight flower-strewn path. But once we have her blessings we can be sure that our souls are being looked after. We must constantly keep this faith burning and do our best to let the rest of ourselves co-operate with the Mother-embraced soul.
Thirdly, although we may not keenly realise the fact, we do have our outer being also protected when we have turned towards the Mother. Here we must think of all the bad things that might have happened but have not. Since they have not happened we think that they could not have taken place. Sometimes we find ourselves narrowly escaping harm. Then we become aware of our good luck. But when we escape altogether we don't realise it. The harm has been avoided from the beginning. We must not doubt that the protection has been present. To put ourselves in the Divine's hands and think at the same time that the Divine is not with us every moment is irrational. It is true that the Divine, by being omnipresent, is with each person, but since we have directly dedicated ourselves to Him, He is with us in a special sense. And if that is so it is simple logic to believe that many perils are spared us by Him without any sign we might notice.
Fourthly, as we are not at all moments in conscious touch
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with the Mother through our souls, the protection she has granted us can be pierced by the hostile forces. The Mother has often said that the protection is not unconditional. Quite often it acts in spite of us, but there are bound to be occasions when some part of us goes out of the radiant atmosphere she puts around us and then an opportunity is given to the hostile forces to break in. Merely to keep Savitri with us or put the symbols of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother upon our doors or even to carry them and the Blessings Packets in our pockets does not automatically ensure protection. Of course their presence may serve to keep us reminded of the Divine and thus serve an important purpose, but just a superficial remembrance does not always work. In great crises I have seen that the sheer fact of the Blessings Packet being there is talismanic. But in such crises the consciousness also turns spontaneously to the Divine and this helps to make the special power invested in the packet hyper-effective.
Finally, there is the universal Ignorance in which all of us live. We cannot claim to be unconnected with it. One way of being connected with it is to be connected with so many people who are not consciously attempting to be in tune with the Mother. Even without this relationship our natural being has emerged from the universal Ignorance and still has links with it, mostly in our subconscious depths. Sri Aurobindo has said somewhere that blows fall on everybody as a part of their fate in common with all mankind.
I may add that calamities can become gateways for our souls towards higher realisations - provided we offer the calamities inwardly to the Divine and do our best to seek out the secret Godhead who is behind everything. The right attitude can work wonders so far as our inner development is concerned. We must ask Sri Aurobindo: "O Lord, what is the gift you would give me through this horror of an event? In what way does your hand reach out to touch my soul across this dire hurt to my human heart?" I have known again and again in my life how the cuts from the hostile forces in the shape of calamities can go suddenly into the profound
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recesses of the being and prove short-cuts to a new light which had been glimpsed afar but could not be attained over years of good fortune.
(5.9.1988)
Thanks for ringing me from distant Austria on August 15. To be thought of by you is honour enough, but to be associated in your mind with an anniversary of the epoch-making birth of Sri Aurobindo is to feel beatified and sanctified.
Thanks also, in a different-seeming yet not really unrelated dimension, for the letter-paper specially chosen by you. One of the two horse-heads printed on it has a soft inquiring look; "Am I not still dear to you?" The other eyes me quite confidently: "I know we are dear to each other." Well, horses, apart from my having loved them from early boyhood and ridden them for nearly twenty years in the past, are an important symbol of my Yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, when the Rigvedic Rishis mentioned horses in their mystic hymns they meant the Life Force - and unless Sri Aurobindo's own Yoga is expressed in the terms of the Life Force it is not Aurobindonian at all. Did he not once write: "1 have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco"? What was the old fiasco? A fine illumined state within but in the world without, in the terms of the Life Force, the same blundering self-centred restless being. The Mother has told us a story which I may put in my own words as follows. A man was deep in meditation in his room, feeling happy and elevated. Somebody knocked on his door. He got up and, opening the door, shouted: "You fool, don't you know I am meditating at this hour? How dare you come to disturb me?" The Mother commented: "This man's meditation was worth nothing!"
Not to be disturbed by anything or anybody: that could be a short definition of my attempt at Yoga. I must be pretty much of a failure in many spiritual things, but I have tried my utmost to practise equanimity. When someone comes to me
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without notice and apologises: "I hope I am not disturbing you", I often answer: "To say this is hardly a compliment to me. Do you think I can be disturbed so easily?" People laugh in appreciation, but I am afraid they feel encouraged to come again in the same way. And why not? Truly speaking, I don't mind their bursting upon me. They have always something interesting to say and I stand to profit in one manner or another. They too, I think, get benefited, and it is a pleasure to me to be able to give help. As for my work being interrupted, a link always remains in my mind and I can carry on the work afterwards as if nothing had happened.
Now let me get back to my horses. They are not only the symbolic medium in which the soul has to fulfil its aim: "the Life Divine." To reach this fulfilment one has to note first how very human - or, as Nietzsche has said, "all-too-human" - life is. It has to be changed. The need to change it and the way to do so are the work the Avatar comes to show us. The Divine becomes human so that we may learn to make the human divine. The horses have to be controlled and trained. They have to be - scientifically speaking - equus caballus Linn.: domesticated horses, ready to be harnessed to pull a carriage or to be saddled for a ride. Of course, to be domesticated does not mean that the animal loses its spirit. Not at all. It remains fine-strung, a sensitively fiery creature, cavorting and tossing its head, saying - as the Bible puts it -"Ha, ha" to the sound of the trumpets, but everywhere obedient to its master: the inmost self as well as the highest. It is the purified vitality serving to express an enlightened consciousness along the many-directioned paths of earth, the consciousness which Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri has named "Aswapati", the heroine's father, literally "Lord of the Horse", metaphorically "Lord of Life".
(14.9.1988)
Quite a cataract of good luck - letter after letter rushing to me from you, bringing a multitude of thoughts and fancies and
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feelings. First is the big purple sun drawn by Sonia the Symbolist, along with the line which Sri Aurobindo added to Savitri -
And griefless countries under purple suns -
when I quoted to him Virgil's
Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.
C. Day Lewis translates these two hexameters:
What largesse of bright air, clothing the vales in dazzling
Light, is here! this land has a sun and stars of its own.
The prose rendering I sent to Sri Aurobindo read: "Here an ampler ether spreads over the plains and clothes them in purple light, and they have a sun of their own and their own stars." In Latin the adjective "purpureus" has a double meaning: "purple" and "extra-bright". Lewis has accepted the second sense, whereas Sri Aurobindo has caught an esoteric occult hint and to my question: "What plane is spoken of by Virgil?" he replied' "I don't know, but purple is a light of the Vital. It may have been one of the vital heavens he was thinking of. The ancients saw the vital heavens as the highest and most of the religions also have done the same. I have used the suggestion of Virgil to insert a needed line."
You - with your sun generously and mysteriously endowed with fourteen rays, double the ancient sacred number seven - have plunged into an entirely new dimension of sight and insight. Your focus is on "griefless", and for you it is from the purple suns that grieflessness is radiated. You pass beyond all vital heavens which, for all their felicity, limit one and are not in inner accord with the ever-evolving human psyche. Something of a divine transcendence both of typal worlds and of travailing earth is what you have in view.
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Your cry is evidently to Ahana, the God-light breaking upon the striving and aspiring human consciousness. In Sri Aurobindo's words it would run:
Open the barriers of Time, the world with thy
beauty enamour -
You have well distinguished past poetry from future poetry and the characteristic of the poems in my Adventure of the Apocalypse as freedom from "the touch of tears", and as outflow from the "griefless countries" of the inmost self. This self reflects the Sun of Truth spoken of in the Isha Upa-nishad, whose "most blessed form of all" is Eternal Bliss.
You have a rare "empathic" understanding of these poems when you say that if "Griefless Countries" or "Griefless Suns" does not appeal to me for the title of my "Collected Poems" my "title should suggest fire, flame, light or radiance". You have told me: "Your theme is always the longing to capture your shining quarry in a net of sound." Here I am interested by your finding in me an affinity with Rimbaud rather than with Mallarme. Perhaps the most thrilling prophecy of the new magnificence that has to emerge from the unexplored mystery beyond us is in those two lines of Le Bateau Ivre:
Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles,
Millions d'oiseaux d'or, O future Vigueur?
Is it adequate to English them thus? -
Within such fathomless nights do you sleep, exiled,
Millions of golden birds, O Force to come?
...I find most attractive and apt your definition of poetry. You have written:
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"If you would like me to add something to your definitions, I would like to add Truth. You have spoken of sight and insight, light and delight, passion and peace, intensity and harmony, magic and mystery and secrecies beyond.... You will tell me truth is implied, and I know it. Nevertheless, let us say that poetry is
Words charged with the music of Eternal Truth.
I almost said:
Words lit by the lightning of Eternal Truth.
"Lightning is a most fascinating phenomenon. Did you know that it strikes upwards, not downwards, as we think? On the earth below the clouds there is a build up of positive electricity, a mirror image of the negative charge above. When the differences in potential become enormous, a leader track begins to zigzag its way to earth. But, when the leader track is within a short distance from earth, streamers leap up from earth (we don't see them) but when one happens to make contact a brilliant spear of light soars UPWARD. It is the return stroke that we see.
"Lightning is a pretty accurate image for what happens in poetry. The aspiration builds up, leading to the unattained heights. Then contact is made, the illuminating flash occurs, the music of that inevitable line is the RETURN FLASH THAT WE SEE -
A thunder wearing the lightning's streak of smile,
as you have written somewhere,"
Do you realise that both your definitions are themselves perfectly moulded poetry - beautiful pentameters with extremely apposite modulations on the iambic base? You begin with a striking spondee showing the full weight of the spiritual message put forth from the heights of Being. Then
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there is an anapaest with its quickening of the pulse, as it were - an emotional leap - as you disclose the power that has gone into the verbal form. Next is a low-stressed iamb "...ning of" - which seems at the same time to distance and to connect the last part of the statement and the rest of it that has gone before. Thus the two concluding words stand by themselves poised on two regular iambic feet - "Eternal" significantly stretched out to three syllables quantitatively short while the single-syllabled "Truth" is an intrinsic "long" as well as the bearer of a full stress, well-fitted both ways to be the grand finale of a momentous penetration into the essence of poetry.
I am glad you have included "Eternal Truth" openly in this essence, thereby pointing to the loftiest range of inspiration, the Overmind which is the ultimate fount of all poetry and whose basic motif is Truth above everything else, though this truth, being Eternal, has always a mould of Beauty because out of an infinite self-existent Bliss it is projected into basic cosmic creation and activity.
The Vedic poets call themselves "seers and hearers of Truth". Your two definitions bring in seeing and hearing, by means of the words "lightning" and "music" but in separate lines. How about trying to combine them? What about a Soniamal manifesto like
Words glowing with music of Eternal Truth?
Perhaps a more vivid present participle than "glowing" and a more multiple-meaninged sequel to it would come if we said:
Words kindling to a music of Eternal Truth.
"Kindling" is nearer to your vision of "lightning" and "to a" signifies simultaneously a passionate responding and an intense becoming.
(22.8.1988)
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19
Your letter with the two poems came a few days back. "A Heart's Call" will usher in the New Year or should I say the New Ear? Indeed the old habit of audition, bent towards outer voices, has to change and what more likely to bring this about than a call of the heart? But this summoning has to be repeated before the tympanum turns its vibratory response inward and grows intent on discovering the true needs of the being instead of letting the being get moulded by the demands of the world around. The Upanishads have spoken of the Ear behind the ear. This has to be awakened. How? Of course, the regular spiritual discipline is the full answer. But short of it the best answer is: poetry and music.
They seem to hail from outside us but they have come from the poet's and the musician's depths and if one listens with a quiet mind they will reveal their secret source, the God-haunted movement which runs below the echoes they make to the roaring, the purling, the whispering, the kissing by which the cosmos communicates with us. Nor is that movement something alien to the cosmos. The cosmos itself has a presence in it which behind the communications made by a million differing forms waits to commune from a divine wideness with a superhuman profundity within us. When that communion takes place, there is no division left between outer and inner. But, for this division to go, a certain practice of inwardness is needed. In the terms of what I have indicated here, more music is to be heard, more poetry is to be read aloud.
The latter act admits of two modes: the declamatory and the soft-toned. Both have their uses, but when there is no audience except oneself the soft-toned mode is naturally the most effective. What should be guarded against is a slurring of the words. As one knows what one is reading, one is likely to blur one's articulation. If this is done, the very purpose of the loud reading is subverted. Each word should come out
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clear and keep its right connection with its fellows. Catching the general rhythm is not enough. The poet is said to be "a miser of sound and syllable". All has been most carefully, most sensitively fingered, caressed, collected. The rhythm in all its minute particularity has to be realised so that the special vowels or consonants on which the poet has doted may come endeared to us also and touch our heart.
Shakespeare will have wasted his inspiration on us if we do not respond like a lover, with detailed attention, to the exquisite overtures to us by that stanza in one of his sonnets:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves or few or none do hang Upon the boughs that shake against the cold Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Or take single-line examples: Tennyson's piercingly felt
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
or on a sublimer scale Wordsworth's meditatively discovered
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Not only do such lines with their directly subjective suggestion require close loving attention. Even those that seem to have a purely objective reference have to be relished for their magic: Gerald Manley Hopkins's strikingly structured evocation of nineteenth-century Oxford -
Towery city and branchy between towers -
or Burgon's single-phrased entry into poetic immortality with his softly spell-binding conjuration of ancient Middle-East Petra, now in picturesque ruins:
A rose-red city half as old as Time. -
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The litterateur in me has let himself stray too far afield apropos of the opening words of your poem. I must be on guard against a similar temptation offered by your "Helen"-lines which I have reserved for the Mother India of February 21, the anniversary of our Divine Mother's birthday. They are liable to set me off on another trail of enchanting quotations starting with Marlowe's never-stale ecstatic confrontation of the spirit invoked by his Faust:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium? -
and Vaughan's less picturesque yet equally thrilling appeal to the intuitive aesthete in us:
Rapt above earth by power of one fair face.
(29.10.1988)
Your letter has been lying with me for 12 days - rather a good number since it is Sri Aurobindo's. The very name "Sri Aurobindo" runs to 12 letters. This number is also representative of the Supermind's creative and transformative power which is at the basis of the cosmic manifestation and whose secret presence there must have led Sri Aurobindo to say in one place that the light of our sun has 12 and not 7 rays as well as that our solar system has really 12 planets (though only 9 have so far been discovered). It is also a fact that at least from 1902 onwards events of capital importance have happened in Sri Aurobindo's life in every 12th year: 1914, his first meeting with the Mother - 1926, the descent of the Overmind Consciousness into his body - 1938, about which the Mother has said that in that year she used to see the Supermind entering into his physical substance without yet getting fixed there - 1950, when Sri Aurobindo gave up his body in a tremendous fight to bring the realisation of a new consciousness which would pave the way towards the final
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victory. Do we not know that for five days after the certified clinical death his body was charged, as the Mother declared, with the Supramental Light as an overflow from the subtle-physical plane? We have also the Mother's statement that the moment Sri Aurobindo left his body the Mind of Light was realised in her - the consciousness which she has defined as the physical mind receiving the Supramental Light - an experience which, according to her, has been revelatorily expressed in the two opening lines of a poem by me:
The core of a deathless sun is now the brain
And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.
To turn now to less exalted themes: I hope my 12-day delayed letter will have for your life some sort of importance, however shadowy, from the Aurobindonian plane of vision. At present your life seems to be a curious mixture, if not a medley, of various pulls. My hoping is perhaps not unjustified when I understand, from what you write, that when your life gets Amalgamated with mine in your imagination you feel better. I too feel happy whenever you are in my thoughts and I renew my knowledge of your presence in my heart.
The exchange of calm and unrest is nothing peculiar to you: it is part of the general human condition. What you have to do is to let the spells of calm outnumber those of agitation. Don't harbour too many regrets when "things like anger, resentment, etc." crop up in you. These are difficult moods to manage - people who have lived in the Ashram for years are not free from their occasional visits. The right course is always to reject the sense that you are justified in having them. On the other hand, you mustn't indulge in too much remorse. Just catch them whenever they come and, without thinking any more, offer" them to the Mother and keep offering them to her until you feel clear and calm. You must also learn to look at their causes - namely, as you say, "not having things the way I wanted" - as carrying secret mes-
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sages to you from the Divine. I have always held that we can let the Divine reach us through everything. And if we look for the hand of Grace even in adverse circumstances it will stretch out to us and bring us benefits we have never dreamt of. I don't say that we must never want circumstances to be different from what they are. We may work towards a different denouement and yet reap profit from a situation that seems to cut across our plan. Everything becomes a gift of God in one way or another when we offer it to Him and await in our hearts His touch through it. This is one of the great lessons I have learnt and it is one of the paths to permanent peace. You have a deep sincere aspiration to live quietly and joyously as the Mother's child. It will carry you safely through all the ups and downs of earthly days. Have faith in your destiny of inward light.
(5.11.1988)
You write of borrowing a "walking stick" from me in the form of Equanimity. But at present I am using two sticks to help me walk, the so-called Canadian Canes. Symbolically they stand on one side for Equanimity and on the other for the accompanying principle and practice of "Remember and offer". Equanimity serves as the vast background, the standing back by the consciousness from the sensitive surface self, giving no ordinary responses to the touch of things, the impingement of persons - freedom from all reactions of hurt feeling, resentment, anger, frustration, despondency, sorrow. This is a poise of what I may call "positive passivity" -positive because here is no mere indifference which is a turning away from life, no avoidance of contacts. Life is faced but from an inner farness where the small complex tangled-up ego disappears or, at the most, hovers like an ineffectual ghost. I am speaking, of course, of the ideal condition aimed at. The actuality may be a mixture of deep peace and a faint haunting presence of the ego's reacting habit. Especially because of such mixture another movement of Yoga is
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needed. In itself too this movement is necessary because ours is not a Yoga of withdrawal: it is a Yoga of what in French military terms would be the strategy of reculer pour mieux sauter - "drawing back in order to leap forward better." Balancing the "positive passivity", there has to be an "uplifting activity". In our ordinary traffic with the world the activity is always horizontal, a pull or push on the common human level. Now, everything done, whether on one's own initiative or in answer to a stimulus from others or by confrontation of circumstances, has to be raised above that level: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are to be remembered and made the receiving-end of all our doings. Inwardly we must offer to the Divine whatever activity is ours, praying to the Divine to take it up and turn it to a luminous spiritual use in accordance with the highest Vision and Will.
Particularly when something we don't like is to be met, this gesture of remembering and offering must spring from us without any thought of our own personal grappling with the problem. If there is a call on us to take any measure, our move must come after the moment of utter surrender of the occasion to the Divine: calmly, as if we ourselves were not concerned at all, we must wait for the higher inspiration and behave at its command. If our behaviour, however dynamic-seeming, passes swiftly from one point of peace to another, we may be sure that we are guided from a level beyond the purely human. Even when we are alone and there is no question of being related to the presence of others or to a public situation, the same remembrance and the same offering have to take place. No doubt, I am putting before you a counsel of perfection. We are bound to fail now and again. This must not discourage us. But an effort must be made to weave every occasion into the pattern of consecration I have suggested. That weaving I do my faltering best to carry out against the background of the attempted equanimity.
Shall I picture how one may feel such a double endeavour going on? At some distance behind one a wide silence may
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hang like an eternal self-existence, unaffected by anything. It would be linked to one as if one's inmost heart were a small projection from the centre of that infinite expanse. From this projection into the time-world may go forth a cry to the Mother and a submission to her of all that happens - one's own actions or what is done to one. One feels the cry to be a constant movement, the submission to be intermittent in the natural course. There may be times when one has deliberately to put upon the "flow" of the constant cry some problem which has become acute. And it is not just once that the deliberate offering may have to be made. Again and again it is required if one expects a result.
I may add that the inmost heart and its gestures may themselves be a mode of the Divine - they may be like a part longing for the whole. The inmost heart in each of us is the core of earth-existence, the pure psyche which, as I recently wrote to a friend, Sri Aurobindo has characterised as sweetness that is at the same time light, an emanation or delegate of the Supreme Ananda and Truth in the midst of the evolutionary grope. I quoted to my friend three lines from a poem of mine. There I have called the delegate
A Flame that is All,
A Sun grown soft and small.
I am writing this letter on November 24, the recurrence of the date sixty-two years ago which made a special milestone on the path of the Aurobindonian Yoga. On that date in 1926 there was the descent of the Consciousness of the plane Sri Aurobindo calls "Overmind" or the plane of the great Gods, into Sri Aurobindo's body. According to him the Overmind is the highest step of the Cosmic Ladder, the top of the series of the Worlds, from where the transcendent is to be attained. This descent is also termed the coming of the Krishna-Consciousness to aid Sri Aurobindo's work. Krishna, the greatest Avatar of the past, manifested himself from the
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Transcendent through the Overmind. The time has arrived now for the Transcendent to manifest directly from the plane designated by Sri Aurobindo the Supermind, the level where the Transcendent has formulated an archetypal or ideal cosmos which is to be worked out evolutionarily in the terms of the present physical universe. Sri Aurobindo is the Avatar of this Supermind with all the rest of the Transcendent waiting its turn in the distant future of our earth. Spiritual manifestation as an evolutionary phenomenon is a slow systematic process. Now that the mind-grade has been reached it is possible to co-operate in evolution consciously. The accelerated co-operation is what we know as the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, though that also is a systematic process which cannot be rushed if it is to gain established results. In the event on November 24, 1926, the foundation was laid for the fulfilment to begin of Sri Aurobindo's mission proper. The mission is the divinisation not only of the inner being but also of the outer, including the very body at the ultimate stage, by the descent into us of the Supermind's perfect originals of all our parts.
In the course of this gradual fulfilment, a radical step is the gathering up of our varied self-awareness into the poise of our true soul - "the psychic being" in our Yoga's terminology. Along with the movement towards this poise, there has to be the aspiration for the Supramental Consciousness to make that poise the fount of its transcendent all-divinising radiation here below. That is indeed a far prospect, but it is also far from being impossible if we set ourselves sincerely to live in and from the soul which the ancient Upanishad has described: "The being within us that is no bigger than the thumb of a man is like a blazing fire without smoke; he is lord of his past and of his future; he alone is today and he alone shall be tomorrow."
I hope I haven't lectured out of turn. To do so is the danger always besetting fellows like me who are professional pen-drivers.
(24.11.1988)
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Recently two Russian scholars from Moscow were brought by Balkrishna of SABDA to have a talk with me. They said the Russians had replaced tradidonal religion by a much worse one - the worship of Stalin - from which they were now free. I gave them an example of the absurd length to which this substitute had once gone. They were amused by it. I recounted how the poet Lermontov came to be celebrated for his work. A huge statue was built of Stalin holding in one hand the book of Lermontov's poems!
When the subject of Gorbachev came up I tried to explain the Indian vision of the Avatar and the Vibhuti. The Avatar is the Divine Himself incarnate with full knowledge of His being. The Vibhuti is an instrument driven by the Divine to do His work but not necessarily aware of what is driving him. And I said Gorbachev struck me as a Vibhuti by his masterly attempt to break the rigours of a system that had come short in his country as well as the deadlock between Soviet Rusia and the U.S.A. so as to avert the nuclear threat to the world by the antagonism of these two superpowers.
My visitors were talking now and again in Russian. The topic of linguistics came up. We discussed the difference between agglutinative languages and inflected ones, the former proceeding by the addition of word to word without changing their forms, the latter by changes in their terminations according as the words relate to different genders and cases. Thus in English the word door or doors remains unchanged with any preposition or verb, whereas in Latin we have various forms: porta, portae, portam, portarum, vortis, portas. The lady remarked that Russian also had inflections.
Then we spoke of the way certain studies have been carried on in countries with a materialistic turn of mind. The study of religion is subsumed under 'Anthropology" which undertakes, among other things, a comparative research in culture - culture being defined as the manner in which social
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groups live, both physically and mentally. Thus the mode of cooking in India would be put on a par with the Indian mode of conceiving God and both the modes would be examined without the slightest notion that there might be a reality answering to the God-concept.
Now to your problem, which very much relates to God's reality. Your lament about sadhana issues from an inadequate idea of what we are supposed to do as practitioners of the Integral Yoga.(It is idle to imagine that such a Yoga of complete transformation by a power beyond all that has worked so far on earth - namely, "Supermind" - can be done fully on his own by any johnny who has a spiritual aim From the beginning Sri Aurobindo has said that this Yoga can only be done by the Mother for and in each of us. The Mother too has declared that the best thing in this Yoga is for the sadhak not to stand in her way but allow her to work towards making him a true Aurobindonian. One of the basic things in our spiritual path is, as you know, samata, "equality of consciousness", which empties us of personal reactions and produces a huge vacuum in which the impersonal Self of selves can slowly emerge and draw into that serene wideness the light and love of the Mother. I may add that another central need in our Yoga is that this samata should be self-giving. The presence of the Mother has always to be kept in the heart's view. Then the samata is not only a superb passivity but a fount of illumined activity by something infinitely more than our tiny being - something at once calm and dynamic:
Force one with unimaginable rest —
as a line of Sri Aurobindo's puts it, creating a Mantra born of what he has characterised as the ideal state of a poet for such messages - namely, "a hushed intense receptivity turned upwards" - and invested with the potency to re-create us in the very image of our Master.
(31.12.1988)
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I have read a little about Stephen Hawking and I know of at least one revolutionary development of scientific theory by him. The "black holes" in space, which had been believed to be so gravitationally powerful that nothing could come out of them, not even light, were theoretically proved by him to emit gamma rays! This may be poetically compared with his own situation - how, from a physically stricken condition which would seem to prohibit any fruitful manifestation of the mind, Hawking has proved himself capable of making fundamental contributions to physics, so much so that some people have dared to speak of him in the same breath as Einstein.
It is news for me to hear from you that he favours the Einsteinian re-entrant universe - "a cosmos," as you say, "which is both finite and boundless, comparable to the surface of the earth which begins and ends nowhere." According to Einstein, gravitational masses so affect the "field" round them that objects move in it as if space were not flat, as in Euclidean geometry, but curved as in the geometry of Riemann. It is the curvature of space which renders the universe re-entrant. Thus, a ray of light starting anywhere would travel in a huge curve and ultimately reach back to its starting point. What further development Hawking has made of the Einsteinian concept I don't know yet. The book you mention hasn't come into my hands.
You may be interested to know that Sri Aurobindo adopted Einstein's expression: "boundless finite". In Savitri, after describing in brief all the "overhead" planes - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition - up to Overmind he begins the description of the Overmind:
Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time's buffer state bordering Eternity...
(Centenary Ed., 660: 23-25)
The overhead planes, including Overmind, are boundless
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because there is an infinite in them but each infinite is of a particular aspect of the Supreme and not the totality of the Supreme's aspects. That totality would be the true infinite: everything else would be a finite even though boundless in a particular aspect. Similarly we can speak of the Supermind's boundlessness as the true one, charged as it is with an infinity of infinites, being the Supreme itself fronting from the Transcendent Sat-chit-ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) its own creation. The planes that are not overhead can also be designated each "a boundless finite" in terms of the Cosmic Ignorance as contrasted with each member of the overhead series which is so in terms of the Cosmic Knowledge - "Knowledge" being defined as the inherent experience, the natural pervading realisation, of the One Self everywhere. The extended meaning of the Einsteinian phrase in Sri Aurobindo's hands is suggested when he lists the hierarchy of levels -
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law -
and ends with the lines about the Supermind:
A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;
In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,
The light began of the Trinity supreme.
All there discovered what it seeks for here.
It freed the finite into boundlessness
And rose into its own eternities.
{Cent. Ed., 89: 24-29)
I gather from the report you have sent that for Hawking the processes of physics can explain the universe and therefore God even if He exists is not necessary. An Aurobindonian can understand such an outlook whereas the conventional religious or spiritual world-visions would think it absurd and shocking. For, Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution has two sides. On the one hand he posits a Supermind,
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a Divine Truth-Consciousness, both creative and transformative, which holds a super-cosmos of perfect originals of all that is gradually evolving in our space-time. These originals are not like the Platonic archetypes aloof from the flux of time which can only give vague broken reflections of them. They are dynamic and work towards their own incarnation, as it were, in the forms of that flux. The forms are themselves aspiring to incarnate them, aspiring deep down in their being although the outer self may not always be aware or cooperative. And these arise across millennia of slow development from a beginning which is apparently the very opposite of the Perfect, the Divine. Sri Aurobindo calls this opposite the Inconscient. But the Inconscient, the apparently lifeless, mindless, soulless process known to physics, still carries hidden and locked within it the whole Superconscient. Because of the utter secrecy of the Superconscient, the process is bound to create the impression of a blind brute existence, a Godless universe, such as scientists like Hawking begin with but contemplating which they are likely to be amazed at life and mind appearing in the course of the ages in it and even an open or indirect soul-search for a God. Thus Sri Aurobindo grants a ground for the possibility of materialism and atheism without really legitimising them as being anywhere near a final reading of the cosmic riddle.
As for Hawking's concessive formula - "God is the embodiment of physical laws" - it seems to be a variation of Einstein's "religious" outlook: God is the intelligence embodied in the cosmic order. Here too God is impersonal, but this intelligence which renders the universe comprehensible to our minds evoked in Einstein what he termed "the cosmic religious emotion" which he put as the fount of all true scientific quest for some all-synthesising, all-harmonising, all-explaining "unified theory". Here he is nearer than Hawking to the philosopher Spinoza. There seems to be something cold-blooded about Hawking. Spinoza is even more suffused than Einstein with the cosmic religious emotion. In fact he has a mystic in him and that is why he was
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called "God-intoxicated" although from the orthodox Jewish or Christian viewpoint he was dubbed an atheist. Actually he was a pantheist to whom the universe was an infinite reality manifesting to us two of its innumerable modes: thought and extension. The thought-mode he named natura naturans, the active energy responsible for the world-order, while the extension-mode he labelled as natura naturata, the passive matter undergoing the order. One may see the two as the mind and body of the universe and to him they are not only inseparable but also constitute the whole of reality. There is nothing beyond the cosmos for Spinoza but the cosmos is God, and Spinoza compares his feeling of it to St, Paul's spiritual sense when he told the Athenians: "In Him we live and move and have our being." Even if no recognisable Transcendent is granted by Spinozism, the pantheist in Spinoza takes at the same time the universe as God and God as the universe without realising that the latter formula is open-ended, as we mark in Indian pantheism where the Divine is perceived beyond the physical world as well as in it. The Mundaka Upanishad, in Sri Aurobindo's translation, says with a super-Spinozistic enthusiasm;
The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere. This magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal.
The same Upanishad goes on to declare with a seer's exaltation what exceeds the cosmos:
There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth.
In the light of such knowledge one would like to reverse Hawking's "God is the embodiment of physical laws" into
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"Physical laws are an embodiment of God." This, of course, does not mean that science should give up its ardent search for the how and the why of things on the assumption that no supernatural agency is at work. A pragmatic materialism and atheism is the very source of scientific inquiry for immediate causes - an inquiry which has to be pressed as far as it can go without taking soul or God as necessary. But I believe with Sri Aurobindo that if science pushes more and more into the depth of things with an unabated honesty and an unprejudiced mind it is bound to touch upon a background of vital and mental and psychic forces and a basis of spiritual dynamisms. And these subtle realities will help the scientific consciousness to discover finer and wider complexes of physical laws, for in their true functioning such realities are not meant to distract our intelligence from the realm of matter and energy but to make it explore and utilise and enrich this realm in various ways, one important way of which is that of science with its working method of not invoking supraphysical causes. Man spiritualising himself will in addition bring to bear upon the natural world a keener insight, a larger grasp, a light of intuitive comprehension out-Hawking Hawking.
(17.11.88)
To try to follow the ideal and example of a Schweitzer without sharing his faith is, no doubt, possible: the ethical nature is not dependent on the religious motive for its instinctive impulsion and emotional exaltation. Even intellectually it can justify itself without that motive: to do unto others as we would others to do unto us may seem capital sense to the thinking mind. But there are two levels of thought - the provisional-pragmatic and the fundamental-philosophic. Although the first level can provide the ethicist with "sensible" supports, the second will give him no standing ground except religion - of course the truly felt and
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not just the conventional kind. For this level lays bare the full implication of the ethical consciousness. Ethics is essentially normative: its key-terms are: "right", "duty", "obligation", "good", "ought". These terms cannot be derived from natural factors with any finality.
The study of natural factors is science - a study which is purely descriptive and not in the least normative. The universe of the scientist is impotent to yield those terms. Not even a human natural factor like "society" can be their source, for it can only impose on the individual what many individuals consider to be advantageous to collective existence: its will is not from any plane higher than that of the individual and hence cannot have a definitively binding character. Mere numbers cannot make a thing right. Nor can any punishment visited on the recalcitrant individual prove the duty of not being dishonest, cruel and selfish: it can impress him only with the inexpediency of certain types of behaviour, convince him merely of the need to be clever enough to get away with dishonesty, cruelty and selfishness instead of being foolishly found out.
The real logic of ethical conduct can lie in nothing else than a Law eternal behind the codes and statutes of men, a Law which men strive to embody according to their best lights. Our ideals and morals may not always image the divine depths of the eternal Law, but logically there can be no idealism and morality without an effort or aspiration to image the depths that are divine of a Law that is eternal. The sense of unconditioned imperativeness and inherent validity, without which no "ought" can have justification, must argue that we are ethical inasmuch as we strain to express a supreme Reality faultlessly guided by its own Truth-light. Ethics can be neither valid nor imperative without a religious sanction.
Of course, merely to be religious does not guarantee that one is ethical: religiousness often has a self-righteous fanaticism as its bedfellow. What is needed is a genuine religious
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life - or, rather, a life of inward-plunging and outward-radiating spirituality. But, philosophically, we may aver that if religion means a feeling of divine operation, it is the sole reliable basis of ethics. Good-will has its strongest logical support in a sense of God-will.
(1976)
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Your account of your various experiences is a clear sign to me that you have a fine inner life. The darshans of gods and goddesses must have brought great joy to you. Even to read about them brings a sparkling smile to my thought. I was specially interested in your experiment with a flower. I
The ugly things you see at times belong to the vital or the subtle-physical plane. I have marked many such scenes and figures - more deformed, more desiccated than anything on earth, just as on the opposite side there are beauties far transcending anything in our world. For instance, the subtle counterpart of the Pondicherry sea is a magically sinuous, many-colour-crested mass of liquid laughter set to some ever-varying rhythm of rise and fall like a poet's unrealisable-seeming fantasy!
Thanks for your fervent wish that I should live up to 120. It is a tall order. Of course, the Rishis of the Rigveda must have looked beyond even what they called "a hundred autumns", for they speak of seeing their grandchildren bom when they would themselves be a century old. You may wonder, in the first place, how Rishis, who were highly spiritual persons, could consent to be grandfathers and, in the second place, why they had to wait such a long time to
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have grandchildren. In ancient days the continuation of the race - especially in the form of sons - was regarded as a sacred duty. Furthermore, the Rishis were not like ordinary begetters. Their minds must have' been different from those of the common householders by the very fact that they could dandle grandsons and granddaughters on their knees at only so ripe an old age. The basis of this fact is the prolonged period of brahmacharya - sexless studentship - in the Rigvedic epoch. The period was 48 years. Old books mention several periods - 12 years, 24, 36 and finally the extreme I have mentioned. I remember reading in the Indica of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the court of the Indian king whom the historians of Alexander the Great called "Sandrocottus" (= Chandragupta), that the age of marriage for the Brahmins was 37. Evidently, around 300 B.C., this was the extreme. In the most ancient India it went still beyond. If it was nearly half a century, then naturally the sons of the Rishis would follow the same plan, so that when their fathers reached almost 100 years the sons would have their children.
The Upanishadic limit appears to be less than the Rigvedic. Don't we read in the Isha Upanishad the injunction about desireless and detached activity: "Doing verily works in this world, one should wish to live a hundred years"? In ancient Greek books too the longest life-span was put at a century and they equated this length of time to three generadons. Nowadays we count a generation as 25 years instead of a little over 33 as did Herodotus.
How is it that you get fatigued when people visit you? They must be drawing upon your vital energy and you must be letting it flow out in sympathy according to your generous nature. Whatever inner help goes forth from you should be out of a depth of serenity - the Divine Force using you as a calm pellucid medium.
The suggestions that sometimes harass you - "No progress, I am hopeless" - are from invisible hostile beings. You are going on quite well in your quiet way. All of us have the
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aspiration to come nearer and nearer our divine Gurus — Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - but we should never despair and never accept such notions of non-progress. We are in their hands and they will always help us go forward. Our one aim should be to give ourselves to them more and more in devotion and surrender and leave the problem of our progress to their profound and far-reaching vision. Our standards of advancement may be egoistic, looking only at apparent immediate results. A lot of spiritual working by the Divine is done behind the scenes for one who is dedicated to Him, We must trust in His wisdom and judgment and cast our gaze ahead. Advancement is assured if we can always pray to the Mother: "Please never let go your hold on me -even if I am foolish enough at times to lose my hold on you!" Not our own serious-minded strength so much as our all-confiding light-hearted weakness before her enfolding presence is the true way to our goal of integral transformation.
My good wishes are always with you, along with the prayer that the Mother may look after you and make you an ever sweeter child of hers.
(20.12.1988)
Congratulations on your coining a new word and enriching the English language! It is new and yet the most natural-seeming. You have written "lightful" and added to the store of beautiful English adjectives. I wonder why nobody before thought of a word-formation which could jump so easily from the pen. If we speak of "delightful", why not of "lightful"? Especially fitting it looks in the phrase you have made: "Very many thanks for your loving and lightful letter..."
I on my part must thank you not only for the pleasure you have given me by this verbal coinage in so well-turned a sentence but also for the compliment you have paid to my writing and, through the writing, to the writer. To be at the same rime "loving and lightful" is to be expressive from the
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depth of one's being. People can be "loving" from the vital-emotional nature or they can be ''lightful" from the ideative mind, but it is only when one acts from the true soul that one can be both warm and illuminative and bring the atmosphere of a consciousness which has a spontaneous sense of the truth of things.
(24.1.1989)
The dream you have recounted is very significant. The fact that you find yourself in Pondicherry shows at the same time your soul's sense of its true home and of its true relationship with me as a companion of your inmost being. My sitting in a chair is the most natural pose for me. The greater part of my day is spent like that - in reading or writing or typing, when I am not talking to people who come with their questions. In your dream you also came with a question about my accepting a gift from you for February 21 this year. And my answer, "We should ask the Mother," is typical. For when anybody puts me a question, my first instinct is to put it inwardly before the Mother and let the answer stream out, as it were, on the warm flow I feel going out of my heart towards the Divine. In your dream, the immediate appearance of the Mother in our midst shows how close she always is to those who appeal to her - all the closer is she when the appeal is from one who really feels helpless without her aid but who also feels that
Once, when a few of us were gathered, as we were wont to do, in the "Prosperity" room in the Library House, in the evening before the hour of the Soup Distribution by the Mother in the room downstairs, the Mother brought her file of 'Prayers and Meditations' written in her own hand. She asked each of us what his or her favourite sentence was. I chose the one which in the English translation reads: "O
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divine and adorable Mother, with Thy help what is there that is impossible?" The Mother immediately cut out for me from her manuscript the passage which opens with these words, stuck it on a separate piece of paper, wrote "a Amal" on top in the right hand corner and the date at the bottom on the left. The date was Pondichery, le 21 }uin 1932. The Prayer itself bore the date: Pondichery, le 25 Septembre 1914. She gave to everyone present a manuscript-clipping like this of the passage they liked best. And she signed each piece of paper.
Suggestively enough, my sentence is the beginning of the Prayer whose ending served, with an appropriate change of the tenses, as the Mother's Message soon after the Supramental Manifestation on February 29, 1956, in the earth's subtle-physical layer, what she called the earth's "atmosphere".
Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute,
A new light breaks upon the earth,
A new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.
This Message is reproduced on the imprint-page of Mother India every month. Mother India's motto from the very start has been: "Great is truth and it shall prevail." We may say that with the manifestation of the Supermind, the supreme dynamic divine plane which is both creative and transformative and which Sri Aurobindo designated "Truth-Consciousness", the prophecy about Truth prevailing has essentially proved right, and the seed has been sown for a Divine Life to emerge for man in the future.
Indeed there has been the realisation of what had looked "impossible" in the midst of modern materialism and its rat-race and, on a backward gaze, the burden of the long career of human folly down the centuries despite the appearance of sage and saint and prophet and Avatar. Perhaps the most "impossible"-looking event from my own personal viewpoint - a change in the life of fumbling, stumbling, grumb-
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ling though luckily, never crumbling Amal Kiran - could also take place just by his constant appeal to the divine and adorable Mother for help.
It may be of interest to you to know what the Mother said when once in the meeting in the "Prosperity"-room the question arose as to who most often made a call to the Mother for help. She named Duraiswamy, a well-known advocate of Madras who used to come to the Ashram on weekends, and the fellow who is writing this letter. Evidently, we two were most in difficulties again and again and finding ourselves in dire need of more-than-human guidance and assistance. Her picking us out did not mean any special spirituality in us but simply the sense we had of our own weakness and our being constantly confronted by inner problems and outer quandaries.
To go back to your dream. Your spontaneous gesture of putting your head on the Mother's feet without the slightest delay is exactly like you - the child-soul's straight answer to its spiritual birth-giver's presence. What the Mother did and said are quite significant. She sweetly encouraged you and fully supported your idea of celebrating her birth-date. Your hearing her words in Gujarati is no illusion. She has explained in one of her talks that when a message is sent from a region beyond words, the region of pure ideas which is beyond that of thoughts, the word-formulation in whatever language is natural to the speaker can be received by the hearer in the hearer's own habitual tongue. My smile at the close of the dream is not uncharacteristic, for I believe in what the Mother has written somewhere: "If you smile at life, life will smile back at you."
(8.2.1989)
As regards the Samadhi and you, both are very much together. Quite often you are on the stream of self-offering that flows out of my heart. Sometimes it is like the Ganges "pacing leonine to the sea". At other times the gentler
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Jamuna would represent the inner movement - Jamuna with its memories of Krishna and the Gopis. Your presence can go well with either, for there is in you something delicately soft as well as something bravely strong - the former spontaneously yields to the Mother, the latter is what you are when the Mother has accepted you. Both these aspects of you I see in your dealings with your illness. You leave everything to the Mother and at the same time stand up to the illness, looking with a quiet courage beyond it. Yes, you must always cast your gaze into the future - a free and firm future with all the trouble left behind.
The disease you mention must be kept at bay by a change of diet and whatever medication may be necessary. I am sure it will be so with your profound faith in the invisible Skill that exceeds the capacity of a million doctors and with your taking to heart the statement: "A smiling equality of attitude as the wide background of the constant act of remembering and offering - such is the state in which we are expected to be." You are bewailing that "precisely this constant is still the main problem" in your endeavour. I should think that if you feel its absence so acutely, the constancy desired is very much there behind the scene and is pushing towards being a presence in the days ahead. Along with aspiring for it as an emergence from your own soul, pray to the Mother for it as a gift of Grace.The Mother has always been eager to do our sadhana for us and the more we put ourselves helpless in her hands the swifter we are carried forward. We must learn to surrender to her not only our non-sadhana, the dull dragging part of us, but also our sadhana, the bright winging part, so that her strength and swiftness and not just our own soul-power may take us up and keep us lifted in
The shining blue of the immortal light.
Mention of "blue" brings me to your first dream-vision. The pebbly footpath, at which you were looking while walking along it, seems to me to represent your none-too-
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easy life-movement. The green meadow-lining which you mark may be a sign of the vital plane. What next happens is really an enchanting discovery: "Suddenly there shot up between the stones and out of the lawn small lovely blue flowers." What I have called "discovery" is in fact "revelation". The spiritual world which we are seeking is shown to be secretly with you even here on earth and not only in what is high above. You receive -
Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears
The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence -
the grace of those moments in the very midst of the ordinary course of time in the form of these little blue flowers. The hidden soul-element in earth-existence has given you a preview of the spiritual Reality that is your true home. The soul-element is clearly indicated by the flower-symbol - and, as the psychic being in us is a representative of our highest Spirit-Self, its pushing into your sight sparkles of a blue beauty is quite natural. This dream-vision is a reminder to you of the Divine's presence pervading your life and penetrating with its love and bliss all your hours.
The other dream-vision — a bright flame burning vividly on your horizontally lifted right forearm and giving you a happy feeling afterwards - strikes me as signifying two things. First, the activity going forth from you towards the world in general. Second, the dynamic guidance of a greater light than our own intelligence - simultaneously enlarging the range of your sight and imparting the truth-touch to all your work. To be the effective bearer of this inwardly satisfying as well as outwardly creative force, one does not have to be a wide-scale worker, much less an epoch-maker. Within one's own private circle this force can act with equal authenticity. The problem is the same everywhere: to be the instrument of the inner being's Truth-Will.
(1.12.88)
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You are never absent at the back of my mind and quite often you spring into the front. Yes, smiling, though occasionally your eyes are a little wistful. I am glad for this combination; without that peering into unknown distances, without wondering, as a poem of mine puts it,
what visionary urge
Has stolen from horizons watched alone
Into your being,
the smile on the mouth will be just a surface rose with no roots in the soul, a smug satisfaction with common humanity's present state, lacking the secret sense of the Mother's depth of beauty to be explored and Sri Aurobindo's height of truth to be scaled.
(18.7.1988)
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The therapies you are following strike me as effective. The doctor has full faith in them and you must do the same. But not only is perseverance required: patience too is to be practised. For, while perseverance makes for the active dedicated drive of the mind towards the end in view, patience stands for a certain quietude in the being, rendering it receptive in its depth and helping to set right the jangle of the nerves.
Do not look upon the disease as exclusively your enemy. It has come for a purpose - and that purpose you have yourself intuited: "I must confess that by this disease my Sadhana has got such an intensity as I would never have reached without it" This does not mean that you should ask to be more and more ill in order to feel the Mother's Force increasingly. It only means that She stands behind everything and sometimes makes use of abnormal circumstances to find short-cuts to us.
Last night, during my sleep, I was for hours in the Mother's presence and the atmosphere of Her beauty and serenity and infinite graciousness is all around me still. So your letter reached me at a time when, if ever I can be Her instrument, I
Don't let yourself be disturbed by the difficulties you have with your sleep. Invoke a sense of restfulness. To worry about not being able to sleep properly is worse than being sleepless.
(1.8.87)
Your letter of the 20th August brought me great joy, for it connected me instantly with your inner being - a being deep,
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wide, clear, intense, from whose higher, mysterious, awaiting reaches came the sleep-vision you have written of. The powerful yet limpid blue sky was surely the overhead consciousness, leaning down in all its secret majesty to your soul - a glorious night connecting and communicating with your dream-depths, your psychic centre. The immediate overhead plane was what Sri Aurobindo has called the Higher Mind, the first link between our normal self and the levels of existence that are above it. The deep blue colour is indicative of this plane and the thin white-blue border is the sign of the planes beyond it pressing to break through. But what has somehow broken through, on however small a scale, is a glint from the highest - Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's supramental light - as shown by the golden crescent on one side of the sky and a golden star on the opposite side. There cannot be a greater promise of a sweet and profound future. The crescent bears in its arms the gift of the Mother's healing bliss and the star symbolises intuitive knowledge, bringing to you as a counterpart from Sri Aurobindo the boon of spiritual insight, the truth-touch that removes all distortions, inner or outer. Surely with such heavenly hints of the divine presence watching over you there can be no doubt that you will come smiling through whatever ailment has been troubling you. Try to live as much as possible in the memory of this vision.
(4.9.1987)
As regards your balance-sheet of plus and minus points, the minus ones indicating what you have lost strike me as very promising, they are plus points in disguise, empty spaces waiting or calling for touches from beyond our humanity. You are on the ambiguous, borderline of a new life without quite knowing it. When one is on the spiritual path, the falling away of old movements without new ones taking their place are not really losses. The succession of them is no mere piling of negatives. The result of the adding up of subtrac-
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tion-symptoms may prove unconsciously to be like the music of Browning's Abt Vogler: out of two notes there may be made not a third but a star! When the minuses reach a peak point a sudden surprising break away from the ordinary life may occur. A small significant sign seems to be present in your falling into a common misuse of a word. You write: "My disinterest in routine work." What you feel is a certain absence of something that was habitual and you intend to express your non-interest, your uninterested state. But the soul within has made your pen slip to show the underlying truth waiting to emerge. What is about to develop is a sustained disinterestedness, a continuous exceeding of the personal element in the work, a preparation for a consecration of it to the Divine. You are on the verge of getting out of the small self which was there whether you enjoyed doing your job or felt it to be bothersome. To pass into "disinterest" across a seeming no-man's land will be a great step forward, a move into a divine distance between yourself as you were and the true You.
(27.3.1986)
I have read of the recent chapters of your "sad" story. I say "sad" from the external point of view, but from the viewpoint of the soul there is nothing sad or glad: everything can be an occasion for a step forward on its journey towards the Divine. Sri Aurobindo has written: "The psychic being in us takes its account even of the most perverse or contrary as well as of its more benign experiences and grows by the rejection of them or acceptance: it extracts a divine meaning and use from our most poignant sufferings, difficulties, misfortunes." To realise this alchemy of the soul we have to be in contact with the alchemist and then the outer self in us will be pervaded more and more by the psychic consciousness which is like an unflickering flame burning ever upward in a windless place, a flame which can bring to the common human heart of us a warmth of self-existent happiness, a
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A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.
(23.5.1986)
As your letter introduces an important literary subject I feel inclined to reply at once and at some length.
The subject is a little complicated. First of all, there is the sense of a piece of writing being one's very own. Here one does not consider the quality of the piece. Here the individuality of the writer is the main concern. But surely the writing has to be as good as possible? Then the sense of authenticity comes in. There are two shades in this matter. To begin with: what one had in mind, what one wanted to mean makes the thing authentic but one can convey a certain meaning in either a crude or a refined way. Now the sense of form enters the scene. The writer has to be some kind of artist - at least a good word-combiner - and aim at clarity and
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order. Clarity and order are the presiding deities of prose. But there are surface thoughts and there are depth thoughts. The latter have an element of subtlety and a greater art is required to give them authentic expression. The more subtle they are the more insight one must have into what exactly is trying to get expressed. The writer has to question himself and develop an intuitive feeling. This is particularly necessary when one writes poetry - even free verse; for all poetry has delicate shades, profound gleams, wider bearings than the actual subject's significance. One has to get at them in order to give one's piece its full and final shape. And, of course, one has to be sensitive to the sound-values of words as well as to the relative positions of the words. Now, the question is how far the writer is accustomed to do the probing I speak of - the requisite inward-looking habit.
Not all poets develop it. Unless it is developed, one gets involved only in the immediate thoughts one has had while writing. What I have tried to do with your father's poem God is to get at the inspiration behind it and the various implications it must have had. Take the first line:
Every flower, every tear, every smile....
What is "flower" doing here? The transition to the next items is sudden and arbitrary. "Tear" and "smile" are antithetical and suggest that in even opposites God is present since He is everywhere in the world, whether openly or secretely. Something linked to "flower" is missing - and without it the item is unsupported in this first line. It stands as a pretty feature without poetic logic. Poetry should always have both magic and logic, not separately but playing into each other or closely linked. Here, to balance a God-phenomenon in Nature to the God-phenomenon in human life, I proposed "Every flower, every thorn" to go with "every smile, every tear". An alternative version could be:
Every flower, every dewdrop.
Every smile, every tear....
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Instead of a balance of antitheses, a balance of analogies is introduced. Both the movements can be read in the original inspiration. We may say that now the magic and logic are fused, while in the other version they stood close and jointly contributed to the poem's communication. My intention in making what seem like corrections is really to get into touch with your father's inspiration-source and catch its true secret urge.
I am not a schoolmaster. From years of learning from Sri Aurobindo what the heart and art of poetry are, I try to help my brothers-in-verse. If my attempt is not seen in the light in which I would request them to see it, I am not disappointed nor am I annoyed. It is natural, as you say, that "they express their ideas in the words they think are most appropriate" and so "in such cases it becomes very difficult to make them agree to any change in their creation". Of course, to alter things in toto or in great measure is hardly to help a writer: what one should endeavour to do is just to suggest alterations which would make the writer's own theme and expression reach complete blossoming so that the writer does not feel replaced but taken further along his own line and fulfilled in his true self.
I have referred to Sri Aurobindo as my teacher in poetry. I may give you an example of his fine perception - an example apropos of your reference to a writer's own sense of appropriate wording. Sometimes a writer trying to become more appropriate in his words can come quite a cropper. Here's a sonnet I wrote long ago - 27.8.1936:
Puma
Men call thee bare because they fear thy light.
The dazzle of far chastity that brings
A joy but with the whole heart void of things
Dear to brief clay; yet grows thy simple white
The virgin mother of each passionate tone,
Save for the mind that will not follow fast
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The visionary winging of thy Vast
Above the narrow blisses earth has known.
He whose desire from mortal love is freed
Catches the treasure veiled in thy pure speed
And, from the bare white, views a luxury burst:
Truth-pulsing gold to which the sun were black,
A griefless carmine that all roses lack,
One ample azure brimming every thirst!
Sri Aurobindo commented: "A very fine sonnet in all respects." But the next day I got it into my head to do what Shakespeare considered "wasteful and ridiculous excess" -namely, "to gild refined gold , to paint the lily... or add another hue to the rainbow." I wrote: "I am sorry to have sent that rather raw version of my sonnet. Here is a more coherent one." The latter suggested lines 4-10 to run:
...yet grows thy virgin white
The mystic mother of each passionate tone,
Save for the mind that will not dare to cast
All life within thy visionary Vast
Whoso from mortal love has sought release
Attains the treasure locked in thy pure peace...
Sri Aurobindo passed over the two concluding lines' variation but exploded in the margin of the first four: "Man alive! The virgin mother was magnificent, and you kick her out! And the two last lines in their original form were the finest in the poem and you reduce them to something good but not above the ordinary!! Beware of the meddling correcting mind.'' I believe the lines Sri Aurobindo refers to as "the two last" are the ones immediately following those which the new version has modified. They bring the octave to its close.
Sri Aurobindo's vehement warning is against the merely
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critical intelligence's interference with inspiration, trying to get things mentally precise instead of letting an intuitive inevitability have its way. Another example of its interference I remember. Something that had come out perfect in a poem called "Singers of the Spirit" I attempted to modify under a false idea of communicative poetic power. Thus I changed
Our tones of fathomless joy instil
A taste of the Ineffable
With tones of fathomless joy we instil
A taste of the Ineffable,
and the deeply moving "psychic cry" went out of the opening line and along with it suggestive spontaneity too, giving place to a thought-out statement with an obvious turn.
Of course, when from one's profundities one can raise the level of a line to a finer plane the poet has the right to interfere with his own production. Now one moment of inspiration is substituted by another which is greater. Thus Sri Aurobindo transformed an early Savitri-line
Concealed because too brilliant for our sight
to one graver, more directly visual in a mystic sense:
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear.
(18.3.1986)
It is too much of an honour to me that I should be requested to give my views on the subject you have chosen for your dissertation: "Mind Power in Military Application." I can
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only offer a few suggestions. I suppose the immediate importance of this power lies in gauging enemy plans and preparing to meet them and in being able to rise to the challenge of any sudden development on the battiefield. But to have the ability to do such things the mind has to be both keen and deep. Keenness can be acquired by training it on various problems, trying to get at the centre of each by tackling Its greatest difficulty first. Depth comes from the ability to hold one's mental faculties in voluntary silence, not exercising them but turning them inward, as it were, so that one tends to exceed the individual frame in which the intelligence is set and lay oneself open to what may be called the secret "universal mind'. Our mind is inclined to be active all the time: mastery of it consists partly in one's power to control this activity and turn the consciousness to a meditative posture in which it can be receptive to what is beyond it -
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.
People generally do not believe that there is a greater mind than ours and that by coming into contact with it in one way or another we can have intuitions which go to the heart of a situation. Apart from the practice of the presence of such a wider inward potency, it would be a good thing always to draw back for a moment into a short silence before launching out on any scheme of action. All skill of the mind depends on how much it has been enriched not only by its employment but also by its being put at the service of a profound peace in the midst of life's vicissitudes. I believe that master-strategists and commanders like Napoleon could somehow tap resources above their own natural movements. Napoleon's victories were like little miracles as if he were an instrument of some superforce. Even against heavy odds he could make inspired moves to nullify them. And behind them all were
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his own fearless spirit and his faith in what he called his "star". His series of pitched battles ending in magnificent victories - Austerlitz, Ulm, Marengo, etc. - is known to all military students. But few remember what I consider his greatest triumph. It was won without a shot being fired.
You may know of his escape from Elba where he had been exiled after the contretemps he suffered at Leipzig where a number of nations combined to attack his depleted army returning from Russia. After his escape he marched with a handful of men towards France. The Bourbons had been restored to the French throne and the whole army was at the service of the new regime. A substantial contingent was sent to check Napoleon before he could approach Paris. It came in sight of his small group and made him out at the head of it. The soldiers were ordered to train their rifles on him and frighten him out of his supposedly hare-brained ambition to effect a coup. Napoleon, instead of being stopped, broke away from his group and kept striding towards the long line of rifle-ready troops against him. The soldiers watched the well-known figure in the three-cornered hat and long grey coat open in front along the whole body-length as if exposing it to their deadly aim. When he came within earshot of his old army he shouted: "Where is the Frenchman who will shoot his emperor?" That single cry was enough to turn the tables. The entire contingent rose as one man and throwing away its rifles ran frenziedly towards Napoleon, exclaiming "Vive l'empereur.'" The soldiers knelt down at his feet, catching his hands and kissing them. The tremendous personality and genius of the man who had started as "the Little Corporal" and become conqueror of all Western Europe achieved now his mightiest conquest. At the head of the very troops that had been sent to stop and capture him he marched on Paris.
The sequel is common knowledge. After a hundred days there was the confrontation at Waterloo - the British under Wellington and the Prussians under Blucher facing the returned terror of Europe. Napoleon lost the battle and there
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was rejoicing in England as if there had been a severe beating given to him. But what did Wellington himself have to say? His words are: "It was a damned near thing." Actually, up to the end nobody could have said what the issue would be.
I am tempted to go into the details of the battle to show that no fault of Napoleon's was responsible for his defeat. Unexpected circumstances undermined his masterly plan. Unforeseen accidents of Nature's "caprices" or of human folly can come in the way even of geniuses. But perhaps there was a decision by the Gods to check Napoleon who had so far been their instrument of progress in his defence of the France of the Revolution against the surrounding feudal remnants of the past. He seems to have overdone the "mission" he had been given and the time was ripe for a new turn of European affairs. If we do not take these factors into account, what we see in his life is a certain drawing upon invisible reserves of mind by a constant poise and an opening to "inspiration".
I don't know any specific books to recommend. One important study would be of how the minds of the great soldiers of history - from Alexander to MacArthur - worked. But possibly the main help would come from the sharpening and "poising" of your own mental faculty.
Have I been of any help to you by all the above remarks? Maybe some little urge has been communicated towards realising that, as Wordsworth says, "we are greater than we know" and that much can be done by getting into relation with the Unknown within and beyond us. We must let it raise to a climax of efficiency whatever gifts we ourselves possess of mentally coping with the challenge of events or, if we so like to phrase it, with the tests of the Unknown outside us.
(23.4.1988)
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You have inquired about the life here. I'll touch on what appears new to me. The call from the Beyond which is also the Within has been growing more and more intense in a particular point for a year or so. It is as if we were drawn to plunge not only our mind and heart but also our sense of being a body into that alchemic crucible which is the soul. This means — in addition to offering our body in service to the Divine - the attempt to remove, from our outermost being, all push of desire, all pull of attachment, and make every component clod of it rhyme with God.
So far the body used to be a devoted channel for the inner being to flow in the direction of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Now one feels thrown out into one's physical stuff and called upon to realise its own divine inwardness, so to speak, its own soul-dimension. The stress of the Yoga is put on the most external consciousness - on one's very feeling of having physical limbs. This stress does not make for much comfort in the being, but when the response of the external consciousness is keen, there is, as it were, a far and faint mirroring intuition of some supernal substance out of which are made
Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line,
These two verses from a poem I wrote long ago may seem a flight of fantasy, but Sri Aurobindo has considered them to be revelatory along with another couplet in the same poem which refers to the God-goal of our Yogic life -
All things are lost in Him, all things are found:
He rules an infinite hush that hears each sound.
To be "revelatory" means that the expression catches a
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profound truth not only as an idea accompanied by emotion and image but as a word-form springing directly from a supra-intellectual reality and carrying the very self-sight and life-thrill of this reality in any of its aspects.
(20.10.1985)
Thanks for your solicitous inquiry whether I had reached my eightieth year. I arrived at that milestone on November 25, 1984. So now I have gone a little beyond the point at which, according to the Mother, complete blossoming should take place. We do not have enough records of what this point meant in the lives of well-known people. But some mixed interesting information is available about a few of them.
Sophocles, on becoming an octogenarian, heaved a sigh of relief, saying: "Now at last I am free from passion." A pretty good climax to the human drama - as notable an achievement as having penned Antigone or CEdipus Tyrannus. Goethe at the same age put the finishing touch to his Faust, the last lines of the great chorus with which it ends. In English they would read:
Is leading us upward.
Around this time I believe Goethe had also his last affaire du cceur, falling in love with a girl in her late teens. Victor Hugo at 80 was in full blast both as poet and novelist. In addition, he had eyes so good that he could recognise all his friends from the top of Notre Dame de Paris, had his entire set of teeth in such strength that he could crack the hardest nut, kept his shock of hair with nothing in it to tell his age except its greyness. His facial hair is said to have been so stiff that barbers blunted their razors trying to shave his beard and advised him against being clean-shaven. About Bernard Shaw, the critic and iconoclast and humbug-hater, it was reported that his satiric temper remained unabated in his old
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age and that we could suggestively declare: "The only difference between Shaw young and Shaw old is that his beard which was red with anger is now white with rage!"
To go to a higher grade of the world's life: we may record that Sri Aurobindo at 78 was in full career not only as a master Yogi but also as the mighty poet of Savitri and, though his eyes had grown somewhat hazy in the physical sense, the subtle seeing behind them was supreme: one could well quote his own epic -
A universal light was in his eyes -
or
His wide eyes bodied viewless entities -
and assert that whatever he dictated to Nirodbaran had the vision and vibrancy of the Mantra:
Words that can tear the veil from deity's face.
If he had decided to live longer and cross the 80-year mark he would have gone from glory to greater glory in his world-work. Our Divine Mother at 80 was playing tennis every afternoon and participating in the Ashram's activities and giving us the benefit of what Sri Aurobindo had called "the Mind of Light" which, as she told me, had got realised in her the moment he had left his body and about which I wrote a poem in 1954, whose first two lines she declared to be sheer revelation:
Of course, it would be absurd to expect Amal Kiran to have so brilliant a record as even the non-Aurobindonian oldsters, but he has the well-founded hope that by the time you return to India his body will not have faded to a shadow and his post-80 blossoming will have something more to show than a
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blooming fool. How can his body shrivel up or his mind lack brightness or his heart lose warmth when he has the invigorating luck of being among your "loved ones"?
(17.12.1985)
I am glad you are delighted with the anthology you have bought of 400 years of English poetry. Your re-discovery of Donne (pronounced "Dun") must have been thrilling. The lines you quote are famous but are surely worth repeating:
Our two souls, therefore, which are one
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion
Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.
They are representative of his inspired wit, his blend of vivid feeling with curious bits of learning. But one would miss the full music of the lines if one didn't know how to say "expansion" as Donne wanted according to the seventeenth-century and earlier usage. To get the true rhythmic value of line 3, you have to expand this word to "ex-pan-si-on", four syllables which will make the line a tetrameter like the others and set it rhyming with the opening verse ending with "one".
The several phases you have touched upon of your present state are all promising. The diminished flow of memories is perhaps the most important. When the soul in us, the hidden "psychic being", takes control of our life and gleams on its very surface, everything that belongs to the old self tends to get erased - not necessarily that part alone which we would wish to erase but also the normally good part which used to alternate with the peccant one. The old goodness no less than the old badness may fade away, for both are complementary, and sometimes the former by its self-satisfaction is more a covering up of the psyche. The sustained emergence of the soul removes the need of the past
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happiness, the past sweetness which existed in contrast to their opposites, and brings forth a spontaneous light, either a sheer steady smiling white or a dancing play of rainbow hues, a shimmering sequence of varied rapture, a condition whose both aspects may produce an annulment of the past. I should add that even the future ceases to pose hopeful or fearful questions: nothing is there except an all-pervading present in which we are effortlessly carried from one exquisite intensity to another. This is the salvation to which we are pointed by that picture of the Mother under which is written, "Have faith and He will do everything for you."
You have mentioned Ganapati Muni. Yes, I met him long ago. He was a fine traveller on the Upward Path - not with the substantial solidity of a Raman Maharshi evocative of the Eternal, but with a delicate fluidity, as it were, suggesting the Temporal as the Eternal's mirror. When he first attended the Morning Meditation with the Mother and all of us, the result was unusual: the Mother remarked afterwards that the area of light had been distinctly enlarged by his being there. I think the story of his having been allowed to visit either Sri Aurobindo or the Mother without any appointment is apocryphal. There never was any meeting between Sri Aurobindo and him, with or without appointment. I have watched Ganapati Muni getting inspiration in Sanskrit. Purani jotted down the translation Ganapati made of several passages of Sri Aurobindo's little book, The Mother.
The ghaza! you have translated is pretty: it has some charming poignancies typical of the Persian temperament at its inwardly sensitive. What is wanting is the sheer plunge to the innermost for the Divine Beloved:
Your spirit in my spirit, deep in the deep,
Walled by a wizardry of shining sleep.
But, of course, there is room for all kinds of poetic attempts to utter the Unutterable with as unforgettable a failure as possible.
(15.12.1985)
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What you say about words and their sounds is quite like my own perception. It has been so ever since my childhood when at the age of five and a half I was found repeating through half the night the expression "Lafayette Galeries" after having visited that place of pictures with my papa and mamma during our stay in Paris. The expression seemed to be sheer nectar in my mouth. I suppose all poets are enamoured of verbal music. I can imagine Shakespeare smacking his lips when he wrote -
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang -
and Sri Aurobindo must have had a delicious moment in Baroda, composing the line in Love and Death -
Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?
The largest opportunity to get wonderful effects out of words and their combination was in ancient inflected languages where one could shift words as one liked because their tails automatically linked them to make sense no matter how separated they stood for the sake of euphony. Thus in Latin, if one fancied the sonority, one could arrange, without impeding the sense, Sri Aurobindo's line in some such pattern as
Fierce in too flood art whelmed this wailing thou.
In modern times Mallarme practised harmoniously mysterious rearrangements of common sequences as far as the partly inflected nature of the French tongue would allow. His aim was not only musicality but also a suggestion of strange secret dimensions of being by an unusual distancing of noun and adjective, verb and adverb.
I can understand your delight in ghazals which marry Sanskrit to Arabic words and Hindi words to Persian ones and bring out an extraordinary beauty of both sense and
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sound, particularly when the wedlock is guided by an inner feeling and not just by the ear's joy in match-making. Actually, in the inter-marriage of different languages the most natural and successful medium is English which has assimilated Greek, Latin, French, even a bit of Hebrew and Hindi, into its Anglo-Saxon structure and its mixture of Celtic sensibility with Teutonic strength. Thus in that line from a Shakespearean sonnet, "Bare" is Old High German, "ruined" is Medieval Latin Frenchified, "choirs" is Old Latin, "late" is Germanic Latin, "sweet" is Gothic, "birds" is Old English and "sang" Germanic.
I fully sympathise with your cry, "O Mother! I am tired of not getting tired, of not getting impatient." I have often had the sense that I was happily stagnating. But when this cry arises in the midst of such a state, one has to understand the situation with some intuitive penetration. The urge to sadhana is surely shown by an appeal to make the Mother spur one to greater effort; but at the same time the strange happiness accompanying the sense of stagnation shows that one is in touch with one's soul and one is slowly progressing by the baby-cat method, in which effort is almost nil but by which one is carried forward by the mother-cat in a quietly careful way. So long as one is not complacent but is peaceful around a small inner flame, one need not believe that one is in a bad situation. No doubt, the inner flame has to spring up and break through to a beatific Beyond without limit, but fretting does not help. What does help is giving oneself up more and more to the baby-cat consciousness, so that the-feeling of being happily carried becomes intense and the small inner flame suffuses one's whole outer being and an ecstasy of self-surrender fills every limb.
Why are you afraid of being swallowed by the sharp-toothed giant of "aloneness"? If you could really be alone you would, by a paradox, know omnipresence - as promised by a poet you know well:
Silence that, losing all, grows infinite Self.
(10.1.1986)
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It's gladdening news that you are physically better. Perhaps your friends and your family were interested in your health problems, but I would expect them to make at least a faint inquiry about your inner life - what they might consider your erratic rush to the hellish heat of unknown India from the equable climate of that familiar paradise: Lausanne. Maybe they feel it wouldn't be tactful to refer to your "folly". Otherwise it is inexplicable how they can refrain from showing the slightest interest - unless they are in Cimmerian darkness. Perhaps they are - and that is what you mean when you say they are still in what Sri Aurobindo designates as the "conventional" stage of social evolution.
I can see that the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are proving a great standby in the sort of world you are living in. As to your question about the rending of the veil I can't say offhand what is meant in The Life Divine without the context being given. In general I should think the expression means four different things. First, the passing from the outer to the inner consciousness, culminating in the discovery of the true soul that is a pure emanation of the Divine. Then, the opening out into the Cosmic Consciousness - the still Self of selves or the dynamic play of a universal Force. Next, the breaking through into the infinite luminosity above the mind. This is the state described in the following lines of Savitri:
For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above...
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault...
Abolished were conception's covenants
And, striking off subjection's rigorous clause.
Annulled the soul's treaty with nature's nescience.
All the grey inhibitions were torn off
And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid;
Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room...
Fourthly and finally, there is the entrance from the Overmind into the Supermind. The Overmind is the top of the
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"lower hemisphere". After it begins the "higher hemisphere" consisting of the Supermind, the Bliss-plane, the plane of Consciousness-Force and that of sheer Being (Vijna-na, Ananda, Chit-Tapas and Sat). I may add that the lower hemisphere consists of two parts: the universe of Ignorance and the universe of Knowledge. The emergence of the human consciousness from the one into the other is spoken of in the Savitri-line I have quoted. "Knowledge" here means the inherent experience of the one Self in all.
As to your inquiry about ancient Indian physics, we can't properly appraise it unless we understand that it is based on the direct spiritual perceptions of the ancient Rishis. It may sound queer by modern standards, especially its nomenclature may distract one, but if one took it in the way it was meant a good deal of light would be shed. In matter itself the Rishis saw several levels. What science has explored so far is the level of "Agni" - the formative fire-principle. Here there are three kinds of fire: the earthly, the electric, the solar. Science has reached the solar fire, what is known as the constant explosion of the hydrogen bomb, so to speak, in our sun, accounting for its inexhaustible-seeming energy of light and heat. Beyond the level of "Agni" is that of "Vayu" - the aerial principle which makes contacts and interactions possible, preliminary to the formation of objects. Sri Aurobindo has said that only when this level is penetrated we shall have the true explanation of "gravitation". As you know, Newton's theory of gravitation has given way to Einstein's, which yields very good observational results. But it is as queer as anything a modern scientist may see in the old physics of India. We are asked to believe that space is not filled with any subtle matter such as the physicists of the nineteenth century called "ether" - space is utterly empty and yet physical bodies create a "curvature" in it along which lesser masses gravitate towards bigger ones. Thus sheer emptiness can be structured! This is one of the concepts of the famous general theory of relativity. Perhaps I am just as comprehensible when in a jocular mood I summed up to an
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Ashram audience the result of my research in physics. I said something like: "Newton showed that all physical bodies attract one another. Einstein with his relativity theory provided the reason for it. He said that the attraction is due to the fact that all these bodies are relatives!" Don't you think I deserve the Nobel prize for this illuminating rapport 1 have made between Newton and Einstein? So far they have been set at loggerheads.
(1.2.1986)
The Upanishad's saying is: "When the knot of the heartstrings is rent asunder, the mortal, even in this body, enjoys immortality." The rending takes place either by a spontaneous growth of the being - a calm detachment from the world and a happy devotion to the Divine - or by a stroke of circumstances, causing keen disappointment and deep distress. The first way is naturally straight, the second may be quite winding. For the stroke may not drive home the Gita's high liberating world-pessimism: "Thou who hast come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me." The stroke may make one yearn for a better experience with one's fellow-creatures or with life's chances. Then it takes long to "enjoy immortality" - that is, to come into close warm touch with one's psychic being or into wide cool contact with the single Self of selves, and thus experience something within one that is for ever and participate in the Ultimate Reality. Of course, this experiencing may not be full at once, but even a hint or glint of feeling
is enough to make one know the abyss of difference between the grip of the world's delusion and the breakthrough into a luminous Beyond. With most of us the way to inner freedom is a mixture of a sincere attempt to walk, as you say, without crutches and a forcible taking away of crutches by "fate".
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Yes, our attempt is sincere, but we are not prepared for quick results. We want a slow independence of props. The Spirit presiding over Yoga is not averse to giving us time, but when it notes that the central part of us is ready for a leap and that only peripheral parts are holding us back, it lets circumstances so shape themselves that we get pushed into crutch-lessness and are forced to find the needed balance of unaided walking.
The state into which we are thrust is not easy to cope with, but if we attend to the call with which it comes - the call to take our consciousness deeper in order to draw the necessary strength to meet the new outer situation - the going on without comfortable props will be less painful than it is likely to be on account of the sudden push towards developing stronger legs.
Are you answering sufficiently the more inward pull which would make this push more bearable? Here some relevance may be discerned of my past comment: "Not to think of living but only of loving will take you out of the world where life-problems exist." For a turn of events may be such as to put us ill at ease and someone we love may do things we never expected and may thus take on an unlovable aspect. At this crisis-point of the heart, the soul's capacity to love without demand has to come to the fore, replacing the emotional self's demand that the one we love should prove worthy of being loved, as then alone living would be worth while. If we can get beyond wanting such a rationale for life and let the psychic being's "joy without a cause" relate itself to our immediate circle in the form of "love without a reason" we shall get out of the grip of the world of life-problems. To effect the change, one's personal effort is required, but it must mainly be directed towards putting one's various personalities- mental, vital, physical - more and more into the Divine Mother's ever-stretched-out hands of help. In other words, the effort is towards becoming free of effort - towards getting those hands to draw closer and closer and catch hold increasingly of all one's personalities.
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This would be the dynamic, active surrender which I have spoken of - the constant happy cry to be at all moments the child of the Divine Mother.
I am glad you have no doubts that you are very near me. You have really been so from the beginning of our friendship. But perhaps now you realise that you are sharing in whatever little Yoga I may be doing - and, strange as it may seem, you are sharing it most when you write: "There is no zest either for living or for dying" - but a small impediment enters when you add: "I am impatient with this long transition." You are impatient because you have not understood that passing beyond the pleasure and pain of either living or dying is to be within the aura of the state whose description I have quoted from the Upanishad. For, the immortality spoken of there is that of a consciousness unbound by the process of birth and death - on the one hand the true soul which goes from embodiment to embodiment by surviving death again and again as well as by transcending life repeatedly - on the other the secret spirit whose delegate is the soul and which never enters the birth-and-death process and is the individual focus of the universal Atman. You fail to realise the great thing that has happened to you because you have caught it by the negative end and missed the positive: namely, the zest of neither living nor dying. I suppose the negative experience has to be gone through first, but if you understand it to be a blessing in disguise the "transition" to an entry into the aura of the great deliverance with its two-sided blissful beyond will not be "long" and whatever span of time will occur will be faintly tinged with the psychic silver or the spiritual gold or, by their blend, a mystic platinum.
Perhaps you will ask me why I mention only the "aura". I mention it because I myself can claim no more than a distant glimmer and I make it a point generally to refer to nothing that I have not personally known in however vague a manner - unless, of course, when I am Sri Aurobindo's philosophical exegete, the Mother's intellectual expositor, rather than one who, echoing that invocation "O divine
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adorable Mere!" from Prieres et Meditations, reveals the truth of his life:
O not by keen conceiving is she known:
Our very self must mingle with her own!
Descend, O seer, from thy majestic top
Of azure contemplation, learn to implore
With sightless awe and frailty's fear of sin,
Disclosure of the unutterable Grace
Whose image is her blissful countenance!
Enclasp her feet in prostrate ignorance,
Till, from the measureless vacancy within,
A holy gleam is shed on the dark gaze,
And the still heart drinks heaven drop by drop.
(25.3,1989)
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24
You have asked me to clarify Sri Aurobindo's statement: "...to be able to take, without insistence or seeking, any food given and to find in it (whether pronounced good or bad by others) the equal rasa, not of the food for its own sake, but of the universal Ananda."1
The words "any food" have puzzled you. They imply that we must get rid of preference for a particular stuff to eat or for a special style of cooking. A certain equanimity should be there and an inner feeling that whatever has come on the table has come from the Divine and is an expression of the Divine's undiminishable delight in all that He has made. An attempt to participate in that delight would constitute "the equal rasa", the self-same enjoyment, spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. He wants us to get over the usual habit of the palate, the likes and dislikes of the tongue. He does not encourage us, as you seem to think, to test ourselves by going in for what is considered unwholesome food and taking it in an undisturbed way. Some hygienic sense has to be present, but in case we get something unpleasant and we need to eat it in order to have sustenance, we should have no shrinking. Surely we should not compel ourselves to seek it out. Furthermore, when we set it aside in any situation, the setting aside should be done on hygienic grounds, with a calm mind, and not because of a vitalistic reaction. What Sri Aurobindo means is that our usual likes and dislikes should be transcended and eating done with a quiet attitude and a movement of aspiration towards the Divine through whatever is set before us.
Knowing what both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have taught, I would add that food has to be taken with a gesture of inner offering of it to the Divine and of praying that it may go to the growth of His Consciousness within us.
If something is cooked in a slipshod way we may seek to
1. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 24, p. 1468.
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correct the way, but everything must be done without the ordinary sensational response. Sri Aurobindo always said that cooking should be done cleanly and efficiently, but we are not supposed to fly into a temper if there is a mistake.
Sri Aurobindo's statement must always be understood as advising samata and a healthy confrontation of circumstances. Extremist interpretations would be out of tune with the supreme poise and the profound insight as well as the highly inspired common sense that are behind his pronouncements.
Apropos of the subject of food I may recall some words of the Mother. When, after six and a half years of Ashram life with its vegetarian regime I went to Bombay for a short stay, I asked the Mother how I should live there - what my attitude should be to food and drink. She said: "Live as people in Bombay do. Don't do anything unusual." True, the Mother enjoined vegetarianism on the Ashram, but she had no rigidity of mind. She never made a fad out of vegetarianism, least of all believed like some people that by being strictly vegetarian they were ipso facto more spiritual. There can be greed for food even in a vegetarian. It is this greed that is primarily banned in the spiritual life - and, along with greed, marked preferences. The Mother has disapproved of "the constant thinking by people of what they will eat and when they will eat and whether they are eating enough". To conquer the greed for food, she wants "an equanimity in the being" to be developed.2 She has also recommended the attitude: "I eat what I am given, and I don't bother about it"1 As for non-vegetarian food, she has freely allowed a fixed quota of eggs. If really from the point of view of health something other than eggs is necessary she has put no bar. In a case of persistent diarrhoea she is known to have ordered a certain type of fish, called "sole", to be cooked according to her directions and given to the sufferer. It is amusing to
2,Health and Healing in Yoga - Selections from the Writings arid Talks of the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1979), p. 187.
3.Ibid., p. 189.
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recount how insistent she was. When the girl told the Mother that she could not bear the smell of the fish given to her and had vomited, the Mother said: "You vomited? All right, vomit - and then go back and sit down and finish it. Each time you vomit go back to eat."4
In general, the Mother has said: "Everything is allowed. I haven't refused meat to one who needed it. There were people who ate it because they needed it. But if someone comes asking me for something just in order to satisfy a desire, I say 'No', whatever it may be, even ice-cream!"5
Lastly, there is a point worth noting. The Mother has remarked: "For an ordinary man, living an ordinary life, having ordinary activities.... it is all right for him to eat anything at all, whatever agrees with him, whatever does him good. But if one wishes to pass from his ordinary life to a higher one, the problem begins to become interesting; and if, after having come to a higher life, one tries to prepare oneself for the transformation, then it becomes very important. For there certainly are foods which help the body to become subtle and others which keep it in a state of animality. But it is only at that particular time that this becomes very important, not before; and before reaching that moment, there are many other things to do. Certainly it is better to purify one's mind and purify one's vital before thinking of purifying one's body. For even if you take all possible precautions and live physically taking care not to absorb anything except what will help to subtilise your body, if your mind and vital remain in a state of desire, inconscience, darkness, passion and all the rest, that won't be of any use at all. Only, your body will become weak, dislocated from the inner life and one fine day it will fall ill."6
The point I would like you to note is that as we are pretty
4.Vignettes of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: Three Hundred and Sixty True Stories, Compiled by Shyam Kumari {Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1989), p. 112.
5.Health and Healing, p. 196
6.Ibid., p. 197.
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tar from the stage when bodily transformation begins to be a concrete fact, it is absurd to make much of small deviations in food from the Ashram regime. "Oh, he is sometimes taking fish, he goes in occasionally even for meat!" This kind of exclamation must wait for a long while indeed to become relevant and carry significance. Surely the inner life can be as intense with these "lapses" or "peccadillos" as without them. But, of course, one must not veer in the opposite direction and cock a snook at the Ashram regime, as if it were a mere superficiality, a sheer superfluity to be waved away in favour of an "uncharted freedom". I am only having a dig at long faces of disapproval on the slightest pretext. The Mother puts everything right when she says: "One must begin from above, first purify the higher and then purify the lower. I am not saying that one must indulge in all sorts of degrading things in the body. That's not what I am telling you. Don't take it as an advice not to exercise control over your desires! It isn't that at all. But what I mean is, do not try to be an angel in the body if you are not already just a little of an angel in your mind and vital; for that would dislocate you in a different way from the usual one, but not one that is better. We said the other day that what is most important is to keep the equilibrium. Well, to keep the equilibrium everything must progress at the same time."7
The two master-words in regard to food as in regard to everything else are: "equilibrium" and "equanimity", a sense of balance and proportion, a sense of poised detachment.
(5.5.1989)
You have asked me: "How should I tackle objections - some from members of my own family - to my interest in the Aurobindonian Yoga which they think more akin to Hinduism, when in their opinion the religion into which I was bom shows the easier way?"
7. ibid., pp. 197-98.
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What is meant by "the easier way"? One does not adopt a way just because it is easier. One goes after what one considers a greater Light, as you yourself term what is "being set forth in all the books received from the Ashram". Perhaps the members of your family mean the lack of necessity according to them to go after another "religion" than the one revealed to One's ancestors and in which one has grown up. But they overlook an important historical fact.
.From time to time spiritual teachers who have entered into a more than human consciousness appear on earth. If we stick always to the religion into which we were born, no such teacher would be able to get a following. When Jesus appeared, what would have been his effect if everyone had insisted on sticking to Moses? Or - to be more relevant to your case - in Mohammed's time, would there have been any Islam if people had clung to the religion prevalent among the Arabs in that period? We have to be plastic to new messages.
Then there is another point. Sri Aurobindo is not only one more teacher with direct spiritual experience: he is also quite evidently a master of the widest spirituality compassed so far on earth. I am a Zoroastrian by birth, a member of the Parsi community. Compared to what Sri Aurobindo discloses, Zoroastrianism is elementary. And, in the light of my study, so too is every other religion of the past. Hinduism itself, though providing a background to Sri Aurobindo, falls short in spite of its admirably broad outlook.) When I finished reading for the first time The Life Divine, which seems to be your own favourite, the impact of its multi-dimensional knowledge conveyed in a language of unfailing inspiration -at once precise, sweeping, symphonic - was such that I could not help crying to myself: "The author of this book must be the author of the universe!"
You have asked about having a guru from amongst your associates for practical day-to-day spiritual guidance. This is a ticklish business. If there is an Aurobindonian who is sufficiently immersed in the Integral Yoga, you may seek his help and advice. But to open yourself to somebody out of
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tune with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is not a prospect I would encourage. Of course, one may always take an example from whoever you feel is leading a more-than-ordinary life of the inner consciousness, but you should be careful to note that the person is not entrenched bigotedly in any presently prevalent system of creed and dogma and ritual. The living awareness of someone consciously leading a spiritual life is always a help, but how will you find among your associates a companion with an inner wideness, an inner freedom from current religiosity? An open-minded, deep-hearted aspirant towards spiritual light can alone be of genuine assistance to you. The best way is to feel more and more the subtle presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother within you and around you and above you. Their books are the best guru.
The ending of your letter is indeed poetic: "We are into another Iranian New Year. Our old year climaxed with several falls of abundant snow and the mountains around here still keep their wonderful pure whiteness, which is all so calm and helps the inner calm too. With God's help and protection always things move along well and hopefully for us all to the vistaed future for which we long and pray always."
(April 1989)
Your wise as well as witty remarks about "thrice-blessed stumbles" and about "rogues and scoundrels" fathering saints in themselves remind me of Oscar Wilde's epigram: "Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future." There is also the great Christian theme of "Felix Culpa" - "the Happy Blunder", "the Fortunate Fall" of Adam without which there would have been no need for a Saviour to come on earth, for the "Son of God" to visit man's world in order to atone for the "Original Sin". I recall too a poem of Longfellow's which begins -
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Saint Augustine! well hast thou said
That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame -
and ends:
Standing on what too long we bore
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern, unseen before, A path to higher destinies.
Nor deem the irrevocable Past
As wholly wasted, wholly vain, If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.
You have very well put a certain aspect of the situation between us all and our gracious Gurus, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: "Once a stray thought occurred to me to the effect: 'What if They desert me?' Immediately a response arose from within: 'But I will never desert Them,' And something within me laughed. If we are hopelessly captive to the Divine, one senses in an infallible way that the Divine is equally captive to us." This shows admirable insight and amounts to that well-known and deeply reassuring statement by Sri Aurobindo: "He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite/'
My own dealing with this problem in the past had a slightly different shade. It was an earnest prayer to her never to loosen her hold on me even if by any chance I was tempted to move away from her. Whenever I left Pondicherry - and the last time I did so I stayed away for sixteen years, excepting a few short visits back - the link between the Mother and me never broke although outwardly I may be said to have strayed from the Path and got myself entangled in "mortal coils". Throughout those sixteen years my contact
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with my Gurus remained firm and both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother treated me as if I had been sitting at their feet every moment. Once when there was a fairly long interval of non-communication by letters after an illness of mine, Sri Aurobindo went out of his way to write me a letter which in addition to its momentous opening part in relation to me - a colossal though tiny-seeming act of grace - may be quoted in extenso tor its remarks on a very promising young Englishman (soon to get killed in World War II) whose letter and picture had been sent from Cambridge by my younger brother, as well as for its sidelight on the Ashram at the rime and the slowly developing Savitri, instalments of which Sri Aurobindo had been sending me privately when I had been in Pondicherry. The letter's last para is a simple spontaneous gesture of the Master's compassion for airing humanity. Here is the whole document:
Pondicherry 1
3.11.38
Amal
I write to get news about your progress in recovery -1
I have not yet been able to answer Homi's letter. You can tell him from me that the Mother and I were both extremely well-impressed by Bosanquet's photograph which shows a remarkable personality and great spiritual possibilities. I may be able to write about his (Bosanquet's) letter in a few days. If he comes here, we shall be glad to give him help in his spiritual aspiration.
There is nothing much to say in other matters. The Ashram increases always, but its finances are as they were, which is a mathematical equation of doubtful validity and is not so much an equation as an equivoque.
I have done an enormous amount of work with Savitri. The third section has been recast - not rewritten - so as to give it a more consistent epic swing and amplitude and
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elevation of level. The fourth section, the Worlds, is undergoing transformation. The "Life" part is in a way finished, though I shall have to go over the ground perhaps some five or six times more to ensure perfection of detail. I am now starting a recasting of the "Mind" part of which I had only made a sort of basic rough draft. I hope that this time the work wil] stand as more final and definitive.
In sending news of yourself, you will no doubt send news of your mother also. I saw a notice of a remedy (in the Marin) for hernia which they say has succeeded in America and is introduced in France, very much resembling the defunct Doctor's discovery8 (the one who treated Lalita's father), but perhaps more assuredly scientific; it is reported to get rid for good of belts and operations and to have made millions of cures. It will be a great thing for many if it turns out to be reliable.
Sri Aurobindo
Pertinent to the first para of this letter is a communication from the Mother at a time when I was in two minds about my return to the Ashram. The communication is most memorable for resolving the perplexity in which I had been struggling. She wrote on a Darshan day:
24.4.39
Amal, my dear child, Blessings of the day.
Just received your letter of 21st; it came to me directly (without the words) three days ago, probably when you were writing it, and my silent answer was categorical: remain there until the necessity of being here will become so imperative that all else will completely lose all value for you.
My answer now is exactly the same. I want only to
8. Sri Aurobindo's actual written word was "recovery" - quite obviously a slip of the pen in the context - I
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assure you that we are not abandoning you and that you
will always have our help and protection.
With our love and blessings.
MIRA
Today is April 20. Four days ahead is again April 24, fifty years after this letter. The letter brings forward three truths. One is that the Mother's cosciousness could catch our thoughts and feelings at any distance without any verbal transmission by us. Secondly, she wanted our choice of the spiritual life to be not only free but also whole-hearted. In the third place, her Grace, extending to us help and protection, could not be accounted for by our small-sighted vision: it did not depend on surface circumstances but acted from its own absolute depths of light.
When I look back, the numberless acts of grace during that half-century from 24.4.39 crowd upon my memory. After the accident to Sri Aurobindo's right leg on the night of November 23, 1938, all correspondence with him was stopped except in the case of Dilip Kumar Roy and myself. We were allowed to keep writing to him up to the time he left his body. Through Nirod he replied to every letter from me and commented on whatever poetry or prose I sent him. Not only spiritual questions but also literary ones drew him out. The two longest letters I ever got from him were discussions on poetic problems, one of twenty typed sheets and the other of twenty-four - both received during my supposedly renegade stay in Bombay.
How steadily the inner contact with him and the Mother persisted may be guessed from a statement she made in one of her twice-weekly talks at the Playground to the Ashram children. On 23 December 1953 she spoke about accidents and how their damage gets minimised if one is constantly in touch with her through the "consciousness" remaining "wide-awake" and "in contact with one's psychic being". In the course of her talk she said: "I knew someone who, indeed, should have died and did not die because of this. For
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his consciousness reacted very fast. He had taken poison by mistake: instead of taking one dose of a certain medicine, he had taken twelve and it was a poison; he should have died, the heart should have stopped (it was many years ago) and he is still quite alive! He reacted in the right way. If these things were narrated they would be called miracles. They are not miracles: it is an awakened consciousness."
The letter I have quoted from Sri Aurobindo indicates what the Mother meant by "many years ago". The "mistake" of which she speaks occurred about six months before that letter of 13.11.1938. How serious it was may be understood from the fact that the Mother's mention of twelve times the dose was an oversight due perhaps to the information given to her years earlier that the normal dose of the potent drug was one-twelfth of a grain. Under a misconception I had taken four grains, a dose forty-eight times the normal quantity! According to the heart-specialist Dr. Gilder, onetime attendant of Mahatma Gandhi, this was four times the dose prescribed to stimulate a horse.
The Mother has referred to the consciousness being awake and surely the sense of her presence has to be there for extraordinary interventions by her to take place, but where I am concerned I would attribute them not so much to her being in my consciousness as to my being in hers in continuous response to that earnest appeal of mine to her: "Please never give me up." It is easy for me to think of you as saying to yourself: "I will never desert Them." You are, psychologically, a strongly-built person. Mentally and morally you are master of yourself. I am not making out of you a paragon incapable of any lapse, but centrally you have a solid, determined character with the will-power to carry out whatever you plan. You have certainly an artistic and literary side too, but they don't make for any marked weakness or variability. I am by nature a denizen of the Latin Quarter of Paris - extremely susceptible, chameleonish, a-moral (that is, free from conventional rules), a predominantly artistic nature, though luckily lacking in the so-called "artistic
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temperament" which means really a creature of moods, irresponsible, swayed by every gust of circumstance. The chameleon in me is receptive and responsive to all kinds of life's demands and can adapt itself to diverse calls and needs of people and feel at home in the strangest of situations, but it is never prone to misunderstanding, never easily hurt, never wrapped up in its own likes and dislikes, never fickle in friendship, as is the temperament usually ascribed to the artist nature. The freedom from such a temperament has helped my attempt as a sadhak to move towards an equanimity which would have no personal reaction, no twinge of resentment, no impulse of retaliation, no shadow of frustration. But whatever degree of equanimity I may have caught from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the person who went out of the Ashram's precincts and lived in Bombay for years was exposed in the sensational part of him to life's "glamours" as much as any dweller on the Left Bank of the Seine. Yet all the time the Mother's assurance that she would ever keep her grip on him was like a secret flame in him burning always upward. So sure was he of her clasp that he ran blithely into danger zones and came out essentially unscathed. The Mother had at last to pull him up and tell him: "We have saved you again and again, but don't exploit our protection as you have been doing."
I have written at some length in an autobiographical vein just to contrast my weakness with your strength. I am not making a brief for my turn of character - nor do I mean by speaking of my non-retaliatory attitude that you should not fight against the varied infamy you find rampant in places. Follow your own heroic dharma.
(19.4.1989)
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25
What is this talk of depression and weeping? Let me tell you a small true story.
You must have heard of Martin Luther, the German priest who initiated the Reformation and started Protestantism as opposed to the Roman Catholic Church. Once he got into a mood of great depression. For days he would not smile and would hardly talk. One day his wife, fed up with his "blues", dressed herself in total black as if for mourning and appeared before him. Luther was surprised and asked why she had worn such clothes. She exclaimed: "God is dead!" Luther angrily retorted: "God can never die!" Then his wife quietly said: "If that is so, what is there in the world to depress anyone?" Luther immediately came to his senses and from that day never wore a gloomy look.
As long as the Supreme Light and Love exists behind all the changing play of sun and shadow that is human life -even more when "that many-splendoured Thing" has become not only a mental intuition but also a golden presence in the heart - how can we let any cloud hang over our consciousness? Until we have established complete equanimity, little pricks are bound to occur, yet they should not last: each prick should rather be a further call to the Divine within us to come to the surface of our being and meet the hurting touch with a smile - a smile lit up with the sense that there can be no loss ever while deep in us dwells the "crimson-throbbing Glow" which can never be quenched and which holds the quintessence of every possible delight and is a self-subsistent fullness.
I have gone through many difficult times - even what the world would term "tragedy" has struck at me on a number of occasions, but from the day I saw Sri Aurobindo I realised his all-soothing power and this power took its place in my heart. Vasari, the biographer of the great painters of the European Renaissance, wrote of Leonardo da Vinci: "With the splen-
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dour of his most magnificent countenance he could make whole every broken spirit." You must have heard that in one of his past vibhuti-embodiments the one whom we name Sri Aurobindo was this master-painter who gave us that unforgettable as well as that unfathomable beauty of a picture known as "Mona Lisa", the picture of a noble lady who is said to have been a past emanation of our Ashram's Divine Mother. Once, looking at the long finely moulded fingers of the Mother in a certain pose, I remarked to her: "How much your hand resembles Mona Lisa's as depicted in Leonardo's great painting!" She very quietly said: "Sometimes even small physical characteristics are carried over from life to life." Then she smiled. Eternal bliss seemed to radiate through that delicate curving of her lips and I knew once again what had come as a conviction to me ever since my eyes first fell on her face - a conviction which a line from Savitri has best served to express for me:
They who have looked on her shall grieve no more.
And I am profoundly grateful for the lavishness of the joy the Mother has heaped on her spiritual children so that we almost take overflowing grace for granted, failing to realise intensely enough what a gift we have received. A poem of mine starts:
Because you never claim of us a tear,
O Silent Love, how often we forget
The eyes of countless centuries were wet
To bring your smile so near!
Perhaps you would like to know the continuation of this poem? Here it is:
Forgive if I remember not the blaze,
Imperishable, perfect, infinite.
Of far omnipotence from which you lit
Your lamp of human face.
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Make me a worship-vigil everywhere.
Slumber and wakefulness one memory
That you are God. O let each pore of me
Become a mouth of prayer!
Apropos of the phrase "mouth of prayer", may I make a comment on a bit of news you have given me? You write, a little ruefully, that on 17 May a tooth from your lower row of teeth fell out. That's nothing to worry about. 1 have only 22 teeth in my mouth now. I believe I never had 32 as is said to be the rule. I had only 26 or 27, from which the first extraction of a left molar was done when I was 56 years old. Now there are only 16 in front (8 upper and 8 lower) and the rest distributed on the sides. At over 84 years of age, what can one expect? The path to the Supermind, which is our Integral Yoga, is a long one which is to be trodden through several lives. Time and again we shall be supra-dental before becoming supramental. But surely even a toothless mouth can pray and be happy?
(31.5.1989)
Your appeal to clear the confusion in which the members of your Centre have fallen sets me thinking along several lines. What you quote from the Advent of February 1988, p. 12, seems to give a picture of the general process of higher powers from beyond the mind coming down to act in the aspiring consciousness in the course of the Integral Yoga. Here the Supermind, no less than the Spiritual Mind with its four levels - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - has been at play, but more indirectly than otherwise. The first direct action of the Supermind in the human constitution in a regular way took place on December 5, 1950, when, as the Mother told me and as she also declared in a Talk in the Ashram Playground, the "Mind of Light" which had hitherto been elusive or at most an intermittent power had been permanently realised in her the
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moment Sri Aurobindo had left his body. I may remark, in passing, that this fact gives us some insight into what Sri Aurobindo achieved in making what we have come to consider a sublime strategic sacrifice, his glorious body's absorption of all hostile destructive forces in order to clear for the Mother and thus for the future world the way of the descending Supermind. The Mother defined to me the new state as "the physical mind receiving the Supramental Light". In a poem which I wrote a few years later she found the first two lines to be a perfect revelation while the rest were an imaginative reconstruction. These lines, according to her, caught in exact word-form the truth of the Mind of Light, the precise experience which had got fixed in her. They ran:
The core of a deathless Sun is now the brain
But, of course, this realisation is only the first though extremely momentous step towards complete supramentali-sation. The latter would imply, as an ultimate consequence, a total divinising of the human body, rendering it infinitely adaptable, entirely invulnerable, quite free of inertia, full of a subtle radiance, ever-energetic, immune to disease, decay and death.
This point brings me to another dimension of the subject. I may distinguish two sides here - what I may rhetorically call the Yoga of evolutionary transformation and the Yoga of revolutionary transformation. The one means the slow progressive march of the human race through centuries under the influence of the Supermind established in the earth-nature. The establishment was done on February 29, 1956 in an initial though definite manner. But the Mother made it clear that it was achieved in the subtle-physical layer of the earth, what she termed the earth's atmosphere, and not in the gross-physical. Once this was done the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could be said to have been
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fulfilled so far as the evolution of man as a race was concerned .'The supramental principle was made a part of the earth's future history. Not with full strength even in the subtle-physical but with a gradual potency would the new entrant in the cosmic field operate, for, as the Mother said, the agelong entrenched agencies of darkness arose in revolt to overwhelm it. Through their siege the Supermind has to push forth its powers. As compared to their long-standing existence in the evolutionary arena it may be considered a new-born child, but one who is essentially almighty and intrinsically destined to triumph in the long run.
Revolutionary transformation means the bodily divinisation about which 1 have written. It is an individual process and, in the early days of the Ashram, it was openly thought feasible in one life-time. Not only were Sri Aurobindo and the Mother sure to be the grand exemplars of it, their followers also were considered candidates. No doubt, these were expected to observe certain conditions in order to qualify. But these conditions were not such as would be beyond their capacity. Thus one sadhak was told to have an inner detachment that would keep the human heart free from its usual sentimental ties and to see that he did not let any accidental damage happen to his body, which might permanently affect its vital organs. What was incredible was that he could be given the intoxicating assurance of the plenary achievement. He can never forget the absolutely amazing occasion in May 1929 when the Mother told him that he would have "the great transformation" in his present life itself. Neither can he get over the ecstatic shock on 31 January 1934 when Sri Aurobindo, in answer to this sadhak's inquiry whether like a self-deluding fool he could have misunderstood the Mother, replied that what the sadhak had reported was "quite accurate". Nor can this sadhak feel sufficiently grateful for the gracious statement of the Mother's to him on 19 May 1944: "...there were things which might act to delay your spiritual realisation and might be otherwise dangerous for you. This does not mean that the
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realisation will not come." Even less than a decade before she left her body she could allay his doubt and diffidence with the words: "I have not withdrawn my assurance. You are perfectly capable of participating in the realisation and will participate in it." All these personal memories - difficult for so faltering a person as that sadhak to credit -1 mention here not for boosting his spiritual career, but to underline the enormous hope held out to the disciple up to a very late period in the Ashram's history, Sri Aurobindo's departure, which was like an earthquake to many of us and to me in particular who had never for a minute wavered in my faith that he would fulfil in entirety the ideal he had set before us, did not deter the Mother from holding out supreme expectations to us. When, however, she quitted her body, I for one knew for a certainty that the programme had changed for all of us. The revolutionary transformation was, for some reason beyond our comprehension, postponed, as Nolini once put it.
Apropos of this kind of earth-change, I should clarify two terms often mixed up. Strictly speaking, the word "descent" which has been so much in the air in relation to the Supermind is proper only to an individual being who is turned towards the Integral Yoga. We have various levels at which diverse forces in us work. The level of the life-force is centred in the region of the abdomen, the emotional in the area of the heart, the mental in that of the brain. Pragmatically, there are lower and higher levels. Above the brain-mind are planes of consciousness to which we may be said'to ascend and from which there can be descents. But this terminology fails to apply under another set of circumstances. The Supermind "descends" so far as the individual being is concerned. When a universal breakthrough by the Supermind occurs we have to speak of a "manifestation". This is the distinction the Mother herself made when referring to the event of 29 February 1954 in a talk with me. Though the terms are somewhat flexible, it is best for clarity's sake to observe the distinction. The irrelevance of speaking of
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descent in connection with the 1956-event was hard for me to grasp. But the Mother cut short my intellectual curiosity. It would seem that there is only one universal existence with diverse aspects which from the individual viewpoint we may describe as planes below and planes above.
The descent of the Supermind leading to bodily divinisation would be the crown of the Aurobindonian Yoga. As late as 1969, on my birthday, the Mother told me, among other things, that though it was an error to say that the Supermind had not descended into Sri Aurobindo's embodied being, for indeed it had done so a long time before, yet his physical substance had not been supramentalised. Then she caught hold of the flesh of her own arm and said: "This too is not supramentalised." However, there was no relinquishment of the ideal intended to be materialised. For, on my saying I wanted to live long enough to see her Victory she said: "Bon" — which means "Very well".
Even when that Victory had not been won, the presence of the Supermind in the bodies of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought about some effect on their bodies' own functions so that we felt that they were not like us at all and could transmit inner force and light and bliss, and could influence purely physical movements in us too. Right down to their subtle-physical there was transformation and naturally this had its radiant result in their gross-physical but not to the extent aimed at by the Integral Yoga. So we may opine that now when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are not with us gross-physically, that power is operating on us from their achieved perfection in the subtle-physical counterpart of the earth. And, along with this phenomenon of descended Supermind behind the gross earth-scene, there is the phenomenon of the manifested Supermind pressing on that scene from behind it. Today none of us in his senses hopes to divinise his body in his present life. But a movement has been set going towards that grand goal in some shining vista of the future. For the present, whatever is possible short of bodily divinisation is the legacy our Gurus have left us. And
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indeed a tremendous amount of inner transformation verging on a broad effect on the outer self is within our range and can be realised if we practise as wide an equanimity as we can and keep up the practice of remembering the Mother and offering to her all our movements inner and outer.
By the way, the statement you have quoted about the Supermind and 29 February 1956 from Mother India, February 1988, p. 96 - "Now on February 29, late in the evening it came down for good. What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had worked for during 30 years happened at last" - was made before the details of what had happened had come to my knowledge. It speaks in terms of coming down - of descent. It represents what I thought and not what the Mother afterwards told me. Even your closing item which provides the picture of the manifestation has the word "down", so difficult it is to avoid it: "The Mother has declared that 'the Supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow', after she had shattered to pieces the massive golden door separating the world from the Divine." But the picture , is of a universal event as contrasted with the individual event which I had in mind.
This picture, in its specific contents, was not laid bare in 1956. It was disclosed on 24 April the next year. Only the general import of it was given in 1956 - except to a couple of people. One was verbally told the specific contents and he tried to write what he had been told. The report was sent to the Mother after it had been touched up by an English friend. The Mother remarked to me that human beings make such a mess of things. Most probably if the actual note in French, which, as the Mother informed me, she had made of her experience had been seen and understood, the report might have been better. The other person who came to know the specific contents had the rare luck to read the very note. On his birthday, 25 November, in the year of the manifestation, when the Mother asked him to select books as a gift, he asked only for the grace of being shown the note of which
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she had spoken. During his interview with her in the evening she let him read the marvellous account. Of course he had to keep the disclosure secret. I have told elsewhere the full story of the grace. I am sketching here merely the bare outline of it.
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26
Reading your letter I find a great affinity with you. I am reminded of the occasions when the Mother asked for a definition of Yoga from those Ashramites who had the good fortune to form a happy semi-circle in front of her every evening just before the Soup Distribution which was a part of the Ashram's daily life for a few years in its early period. My definition was : "To feel always a warmth and a glow in my heart in my relation with the Mother." One may have expected from a supposed "intellectual" a more brainy attitude - a definition bringing in "a heat and a light in my head". But, as I said in one of my talks to the students here, I had lost my head over Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the moment I had seen them and that was surely the heart's doing. Since then the chief motive-power has been something other than the thinking mind. Not that I have renounced thought, but thought has been a winging rather than a pacing or even a running that it usually was. The change was due to the inmost kindling that took place in the presence of the two Gurus I had found - or, more accurately speaking, who had found me, a wanderer on the world's labyrinthine way, and pulled me straight to themselves.
"The inmost kindling" - the adjective in the phrase is important and significant. For the heart has a within and a without. The latter is often a blind whirl, a dangerous movement, but hidden in it is a shining enchantment which leads to a beauty drawing one to the eternal truth of things. Such seems - esoterically - the disclosure in that line of Sri Aurobindo's which 1 can't help quoting and requoting:
Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us...
In the midst of what I have termed "a dangerous movement" is the "within" to the emotional self and there glides forward the divine flute-player who is the unfailing
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saviour calling us to himself and guiding us to our own being's secret plenitude. In this secret plenitude the essence of our whole existence, our entire multiform activity, is treasured . From that concealed core emanate the warmth and the glow I have spoken of - the real sense of the Yoga to me. Please don't fancy that I experience these wonders in their fullness all the time. I wish I did. But by the grace of my Gurus something of the marvels has been gifted and if that sdmething were to vanish I would be as good as dead.
Forgive me for writing so much apropos of my definition of Yoga. It can be a long preamble to a brief answer to your query about how "the stress of the Yoga put on the most external consciousness" mentioned by me in October 1985, has acted in the succeeding year. One or two things I may say in general. The external consciousness, with its turning this way and that and its looking at a hundred sources of stimuli, realised one day - May 15, to be precise - that the true joy lies exclusively in the mysterious place whose physical entrance, as it were, one feels in the middle of one's chest and which I have designated the heart within and differentiated from the emotional self, the heart without. An intense awareness of an everlasting "paradise" which alone gives point to the word "bliss" came up with an extra dimension to the warmth and the glow I have been writing about. I have known this paradise in various aspects and to diverse degrees all these years but never with the uniqueness and absoluteness that was granted to me now.
'Paradise' is a Persian word and means "garden", particularly a royal one. We always talk of the Garden of Eden, don't we? - and the term "paradise" is used for Eden as in the title of Milton's epic, Paradise Lost. And I think the garden-concept is rather appropriate because there is a natural sense of flower and fragrance in connection with the profound consciousness of the psychic being, Yeats has sung how all things uncomely and broken and cruel "wrong thy image, O Rose in the deeps of my heart". Especially the sense of a rose is spontaneous since the physical heart is
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associated with blood, the crimson stream of life which is gathered and dispersed from the cardiac organ. Perhaps it is truer to say that the heart's blood is red and the poetic imagination brings up the rose-sense because in mystical experience a vast rose is actually glimpsed and felt both in the deep heart of God-love and in the high "overhead" of God-delight. Does not Sri Aurobindo make one of his most Mantric poems dilate through five stanzas on the "Rose of God"?
When I awoke, as never before in so concentrated and concrete a manner, to the secrecy in the middle of the chest, as if the body itself were feeling the psychic being at that spot, I could not help the rose-vision in a poem which took shape. I hope you won't be bored if I quote the verses:
At last the unfading Rose-
Felt mine yet sought afar
That proved but surface sheens,
Mirrors of a Mystery
They spread in the whole world's air.
Gold distances breathe close.
Worship burns everywhere.
Unveiled within, Light's spire,
At last the unfading Rose.
Let me come now to some othter questions of yours. My
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health is good. Several people have my welfare at heart. The greatest care is lavished on me by my young American friend Minna. By luck I have still my own teeth and my eyes are giving fair service - of course through glasses, thick ones after the removal of cataracts years back. Only my legs are rather troublesome. But I make it to the Samadhi every afternoon - not walking from my flat but from the Ashram gate to which a friend drives me in a car. Left safely there, I go on my own to a chair under the clock opposite the Samadhi. In walking I have to take the help of what are nicely termed "Canadian Canes". I spend nearly an hour and a half in that chair - from a little before 4.15 to just past 5.30, trying to be suffused with the sense of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. My memory is almost as good as before inasmuch as important things are concerned. Much of it has to do with a lot of poetry that keeps coursing through it from mostly my old reading. But in the midst of it, names and faces from the past and present bring a quiet smile to my lips and a great affection goes forth to people near and far, in India and abroad. Among them one of the most precious is you.
(5.11.1986)
You are a real beauty of a soul! The qualities natural to the psychic being are in most active play in your life. The three outstanding qualities are: sweetness, light, strength. Yes, strength in addition to sweetness and light, for the inmost soul is the secret cavern where burns the godhead Agni. This godhead's tongues of flame not only illumine us with divine mysteries which guide us in the right direction, not only taste at all hours a hidden paradise - thus shedding both light and sweetness: they also keep at bay with this holy heat the adversary Wolf and temper the will in us to bear the strokes of fate or else cut through opposing circumstances. In some people, one quality or another out of the basic three predominates but I see in you on most occasions all of them
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jointly at work. The way you are facing your body's troubles without losing even an iota of faith in the Divine Mother and with actually finding in them subtle opportunities to have a more intense relationship of love with her shows how strong the sweetness is and how radiant the strength and how calm and warm the light. It is this interfusion of the three qualities and their well-proportioned co-presence that led to the exclamation I make in the first sentence of my letter.
It makes my heart happy that you believe I have been of some help to you in your crisis of illness and tests of faith. There is not an afternoon at the Samadhi when I have failed to conjure up a sense of you near me and to offer you into the Mother's hands. A warmth streaming out from some depth within me envelops my sense of you and bears you towards that silent fragrant fountain of Grace which is the Samadhi. While reading your letter, on reaching the words - "a renewed change of my disease for the worse which was so intense as never before" - I could not go further a few minutes, for a powerful inwardness seized me and a dumb intense cry went up to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to protect you always and improve your health and prolong your life. It was not in my power to come out of this inwardness at will. So I just sat with eyes half-closed and waited for the Divine-ward movement to come to its own intended end. Then I resumed reading. I seemed to live with you the vicissitudes of your ailment, especially as I could feel from your words the Mother carrying you onward through the grim shadow which ought to have darkened into death but which gradually began to thin away towards the end of March and abruptly yielded to a change for the better which your new homeopath doctor had been expecting. I feel thankful at the same rime to this doctor and the one who was treating you earlier, for it was honest on her part to admit that she could go no further, even though she had still the confidence that nothing short of such a desperate strait would make her confess failure.
To aspire after good health is nothing unspiritual. At one
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period in the past there was the notion that a sickly and weakened body was a help to the soul's development. Of course, anything that happens to us can be made a path to the Divine, but to put a premium On suffering and sickness in order to advance spirituality is to be both ignorant and sick in mind. Such an attitude forgets that the body too has the Divine in its substance and such an attitude has its eyes set chiefly on the life beyond. All this is old-worldly. In reaction to it science has put an over-stress on the body, particularly as it has serious doubts whether anything of us survives physical dissolution. The right balance is preserved by the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
It has three intuitions. First of all, the present life is not the only one: a series of embodiments has preceded it and a series will follow because God is to be realised and established on earth. As the Koran splendidly makes Allah say: "Thinkest thou that I have made the heavens and the earth and all that is between them in a jest?" Here is a truth not properly gauged by Allah's own followers. Though they have rightly felt a great vital force released by their Prophet, their goal is still the life beyond just as in Christianity and Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Buddhism, except that Buddhism for all its emphasis on a supra-cosmic Nirvana as the summum bonum has the doctrine of reincarnation which implies a sustained interest in earth-life rather than a looking forward to a heaven at the close of merely one brief experience in physical existence. Hinduism too is reincarnationist but has in addition the insight unforgettably expressed in this sentence in the Swetasvatara Upanishad: "That green bird hopping about, that other with the red eye, even that old man bent over his stick - these too are Brahman." The underlying godhead, the essential sacredness of Matter itself has always been part of the Hindu faith. Greatest of Matter's phenomena is the recurrent Avatarhood visioned by Hinduism - the series of special descents of the Supreme in a human form . In a more generalised shape we have the statement of one of the mightiest Avatars, Sri Krishna, in the
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Gita: "They who disdain or misuse the body forget that I am seated within it." All this prepares for the culminating truth revealed by Sri Aurobindo that the very tenement of clay which has so far been found, even by Hinduism, subject to disease, degeneration and death has a divine destiny - a perfect body waiting to come down from the Supermind which holds the archetypes of all things and a corporeal perfection waiting here in embryo for development out of the profundities of the Supramental Power involved in Matter and seeking to evolve from them and assimilate in terms of earth the substance of heaven.
I am afraid I have made rather a detour to arrive at the importance Sri Aurobindo attaches to the body and to the life terrestrial as the final scene of God's manifestation. So health should be our aim, but health so as to provide us with the chance to do to the maximum the work of belonging integrally to the Mother. A spur towards such a stand is the Mother's reminder that in the adventure of earthly evolution bodily life is naturally the only field of sadhana The main object of a sound body living as long as possible is an ever-increasing openness to the realisation of the fourfold ideal of our Yoga as flashed forth in that stanza by Sri Aurobindo which hails from the highest plane of spiritual inspiration available to us, the sheerest Mantra in which a vast yet precise vision takes up a deep and intense yet poised emotion and fully expresses it in revelatory word and rhythm:
Read these lines clearly and slowly, letting each verbal vibration surround and penetrate you. A mantra like them has both an illuminative and a formative power in the highest degree to evoke the soul and open not only the mental and the vital being but also the body to the Ineffable that presses
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towards us to make all things new and true.
In the midst of the inner and outer atmosphere created by such lines, the idea of death grows shadowy, for the sense of immensity is all about us in which our small selves with their little bits of physical stuff lose the usual importance we give them. There is no room left for fear. For that immensity is not an alien grandeur. Within it are the Sri Aurobindo and the Mother we know and within them is the truth of each of us. A calm viewing of death, as well as of life, results. No desire remains for the former as a cure of our ills nor any shrinking from it as if the cure were worse than the disease. From what you write I have the impression that you have the correct attitude towards both life and death. Serenely and happily you have left them to the Mother's decision, yet realising that persisting health is necessary for enough time to proceed on your path to the Divine. The "order", along with the assurance, you heard in April when awakening from a nap -"Surely, 1 will help you, but you must not be impatient!" - is, without any doubt, the Mother's own voice. What you did, on hearing it, is a moving act: "I offered at once this impatience, which is one of my various weaknesses." I am glad you didn't repeat the famous prayer to God by a man lacking patience: "Please cure me of my impatience - at once!"
(21.6.1989)
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You say you are preparing for the birthday of Sri Aurobindo, August 15. May I put down a few thoughts that occur to me? They would, no doubt, apply to all Darshan days and not only to the one that is just ahead of us.
On a Darshan day now we have not only to think of Sri Aurobindo but also to visualise him, with the Divine Mother sitting on his right. Visualisation is important, for he and she are the Lord and his Executive Power in a physical shape and unless the physicality of them goes home to us in a vivid way we may fail to receive the full impact of the Light and Love they sought to transmit through a materially concrete channel to us who are so sadly caught in the density of our own bodies. Only by the Divine becoming human can we humans best approach divinity. So we would do well to focus our minds on their photographs - preferably on the picture taken on the Darshan day of 24 April 1950 which shows them both together. Those who have seen them with their own eyes do not need the picture but even they are likely to have got the image of Sri Aurobindo a little hazed because he was seen no more than four times a year. So the photograph can be helpful to them also. Of course, we don't have to go on staring at it: we may surely shut our eyes to meditate, but the sense of it should be there.
Some of us don't find it necessary to keep our eyes closed for meditation, for it is not so much the head meditating as the heart doing it with a spontaneous flow from the depth where the true soul of us knows itself a child of God. I have heard that Sri Aurobindo mostly kept his eyes open during much of his sadhana for the earth. In the old days he would be walking for six or seven hours a day. Nine years I spent in the two first-floor rooms which he had once occupied for six years or so. His persistent walk across them had dug a slightly curving path. Cementing had been done over it and I often retraced its winding progress in the hope that I might
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find my way to the Supermind sooner by literally walking in Sri Aurobindo's footsteps! He was a vigorous walker, as 1 know from having sat at times in the meditation hall on the ground-floor of the Ashram's main" building and heard him moving on the floor above in the corridor next to his room. Surely, his eyes being generally open during meditation to and fro was not due only to the spiritual movement going on in the soul-profundities, the inmost heart, rather than through the mental consciousness playing about the brain. A greater action was going on along with it. His mind was eternally silent and what acted in him was a self-luminous immensity above the head which reached out towards an endless Beyond and transmitted its magnificent mysteries to his embodied being. Do you remember those two stanzas from his poem, Descent?
Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;
Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions.
The Mother, by contrast, used to shut her eyes very often. Sometimes, even in the midst of a conversation she would suddenly go within. This was so because she would receive messages from all over the world for help. She was like a wireles operator and the SOS would come to her at any moment and, being the gracious Mother of all, she would be bound to answer her children - appeals from helplessness, invocations for assistance, direct prayers to the Unseen, desperate cries of unbelievers to they-knew-not what. Often her in-drawn movement was for getting into touch with the inner state of those in front of her so that she might meet
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their needs most effectively. But occasionally she would keep her eyes open during a whole half-hour of general meditation as if she were trying to draw subtle realities into physical action by herself looking at them across bodily sight. On Darshan days she would be compelled to look outward, but even then she would snatch a moment of in-drawnness between meeting the gaze of one devotee and facing that of another as they passed before her.
Darshan days were special occasions when the fact of the Divine's physicality grew more intense - and to match the effect of these days we may try to render most real to our perception the marvel of their embodiment, the grand outflow of the Ultimate through the intimate achievement of Avatarhood.
And with what attitude should we approach the vision of their consenting to be our companions in flesh and blood? I would answer: "A happy blankness." We must have nothing to ask, nothing worked out in our minds, nothing even to be offered. Happiness should be ours because they are there and because they are our father and mother ready to give us new birth into a greater life - blankness we must carry to them so that they may find us ready to receive from them what they wish to give us, our beings a wide white space empty of our usual self and waiting for them to write on it the golden story of our soul's manifestation and their radiant presence with us for ever. And if at all there is to be any message from us to them, it should simply be this of gratitude and aspiration: "You have become like us in appearance, may we be like you in reality!" .
(8.8.1989)
It is 7 past 11 p.m. on August 15. Your letter - most welcome as always - came yesterday. I carried the thought of it and the image of its writer to the Samadhi this afternoon. I was very thankful to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for the help they had given you to be within sight of normality at last. My
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heart was really singing at the news you have reported. No matter how weak and stumbling you may feel yourself to have been, it is the pervading presence of the psychic being in the midst of all frailty and falling short, that has kept you going with what I may paradoxically call a smiling sigh on your lips. And the same soul-presence I feel when you write: "My faith in the Divine Grace is unshakable. But whatever, strictly speaking, the Mother decides to be my fate, I will accept without the slightest hesitation."
Ever since I woke up this morning and remembered what a wonderful day it was and looked at the photo of Sri Aurobindo on my bedside table, the photo which the Mother had titled "Compassion", I have carried within me a quiet coolness, a silent steadiness which even the body seemed to reflect by its unhurried movements, its calm gestures. But this state was no self-absorption. Out of it flowed unwaveringly a self-forgetful warmth towards the twofold Divinity I had had the supreme good fortune to have seen and touched. Such a state remained - sometimes just as vivid as in early morning, sometimes a little vague while doing my writing work - throughout the day. Even now, when I am ready to go to bed after finishing this letter it is still there, a happy depth not shut up in itself but with doors thrown wide open to the world. This inwardness taking spontaneously a form of outwardness is permeating the sheet on which I am typing. I am sure it will be felt by you as Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's love channelling itself through one human being to another, through something like what a poem of mine has called "a sun grown soft and small".
The four-lined Mantra in my last letter, which has so impressed you -
Force one with unimaginable rest -
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has to be made vibrant in its original English, set free from all translations which have been published. Perhaps the most foolish rendering is the German to which you have referred. The "taking to" of the first line cannot be deprived of its preparation and the present participle should not be made to have as its object the remainder of the line: it means at the same time devotedly moving towards an ultimate radiance and resorting to a refuge of perfect rapture, a distant marvellous Ineffable which yet gives itself in silent response to the earth's reaching out for it. The second line's "Eternal" hardly bears to be changed into "Eternity". The "Eternal" here is a glowing Super-Person whom our psychic-vital self can intimately touch. "Eternity" is not a word to be scorned as too abstract: it can be made living by a line like Sri Aurobindo's
White chambers of dalliance with eternity,
but here it is out of place and would denote simply a transcendent state rather than One who is such a state and who can be in warm contact with us. "Force" in the last line is certainly a substantive, as you have discerned, both in the grammatical sense and in the sense of being a Power that is a palpable substance, as it were, going forth to create and transform without losing a self-possession and a poise and an inherent plenitude as if what it seeks to achieve in terms of time and space has alrady been achieved beyond them. There can be no disturbance in the Divine despite his millionfold activity. The German version, construing "Force" as a verb, would signify that the "Arms", "Life" and "an unwalied Mind" compel us by means of something unimaginably restful. The word "one" is not the object of a supposed verb "Force";-it stands for "identical". I am afraid the translator has made a hash of an utterance at once massive and wonderfully winged from a Himalayan height which yet goes thrillingly home to the aspiring human heart.
(15.8.1989)
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There is a character in Proust's famous novel, translated as Remembrance of Things Past, who on failing to attend some important occasion would send a wire: "Impossible to come. Lie follows." My case is different. I don't have to invent an excuse for not writing to you earlier. My colossal criticism of the famous Finnish scholar Asko Parpota's huge new thesis -a splendid synthesis of varied research - hasn't yet come to an end. Twice I thought I had done with it, but new points cropped up and the perfectionist in me couldn't rest. Perhaps a couple of days will be needed before I sit back and heave a sigh of relief. So many things have been set aside. Some fascinating books have been forced to wait. Perhaps they may have to wait for some time even after I have finished with Parpola (or should I say "Finnished" in view of my equally long and detailed article?). For my eyes have been strained, both by poring over small type and by not shutting long enough in sleep. On several successive days I have gone to bed at 2 or 2.30 or even 3 a.m. and got up at 6.I never sleep during the day -1 have only about half an hour of quiet lying-down. Luckily I am alone at night and there is nobody to worry about my health. Ostensibly what I am doing is to bum my candle at both ends, an indulgence supposed to be dangerous when one is 85, but as I am enjoying it enormously and never worrying about the consequences, 1 believe the candle will attend to my mood and, dwelling on each bright moment, burn more slowly than it would ordinarily do and thus I shall be saved from any shortening of my life. It is anxiety and the frightened imagination that do most harm. There are untapped resources in us which can cope with unusual demanding circumstances. I hardly feel any the worse for sitting up at my typewriter till the small hours. Besides, there is a trick of drawing in or pulling up subtle-vital energy through the abdominal region as well as a way of recuperation by opening upward to an immense ether of an infinite Power emanating from an eternal Peace.
The eyes, however, have not found a means of getting easily refreshed. Too much time would be spent in doing Dr.
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Bates's exercises. I resort at bedtime to Locula 30% - drops which burn like hell but tone up the "optics".
I am glad to have been the subject of a talk between you and Ravindra Khanna. He has been a very affectionate friend for years and we have a keen common interest in poetry. If he or 1 pop off, the survivor will have nobody left to swap lines of poetry with from memory. His memory is more richly stored than mine - I believe he knows almost the whole of Ghalib and Iqbal by heart in the original Urdu or Persian. I don't think I can recite at short notice even my own poetical works in toto. But a good number of lines of English poetry float through my mind at all hours and if a particular word of note is brought up it recalls half a dozen or more lines of various poets in which it occurs. For the joke of a test 1 am picking out the word "note" in the preceding sentence and jogging my memory. Some lines from Sri Aurobindo are responding at once. First a triplet from Savitri about whose source 1 had questioned him and he had replied: "It may be the intuitive inner mind with the psychic fused together." Here it is:
But joy cannot endure until the end. T
here is a darkness in terrestrial things
That will not suffer long too glad a note.
The second visitor is from The Life Heavens:
Heaping note on enrapturing new note.
This pulls in another phrase from the same poem:
A high note and a fiery refrain.
The next discovery is provided by Descent:
Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,
Cry that anthem,finding the notes eternal...
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Going backward in rime I find the ending of Reminiscence:
A song, not master of its note, a cry-
That persevered into eternity.
Next, further back in years are a line and a half towards the end of Love and Death:
A single grasshopper
Near him repeated fierily its note.
Out of a pre-Pondy past the last line of a poem by another poet peeps out but I am not sure of the wording:
The songs are forced, the notes are few.
I shall ask that walking treasury of verse, Ravindra Khanna, to tell me the correct version and its context.1
Well, enough of this tomfoolery! Let us go to more serious things. I don't know how the topic of death arose in your chat with Ravindra. Perhaps the mention of "disease" triggered it off. The Mother's letter which he quoted to you seems to be an answer to some apprehension of dying as the result of a disease. When she writes - "Keep quiet and fearless - everything will be all right" - she can't mean that if Ravindra keeps quiet and fearless he won't ever "shuffle off this mortal coil". She must mean that he need not fear he may die because of some bodily trouble he may be suffering from at the moment. Or possibly she means that even if R dies there is nothing to worry about since she is there to take care of him. But her message - "This suggestion of death comes from the 'ego' when it feels that soon it will have to
1. Postscript Note: On consulting Ravindra I have learned that the line I was trying to recollect occurs in Blake's lyric "To the Muses" about the rarity of true poetry in the 18th century and really runs:
The sound is forc'd, the notes are few.
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abdicate" - gives us the idea that, if the ego abdicates while we are still alive, not only will the suggestion of death never come but also we shall enter a condition in which we shall rise above both life and death into the consciousness either of the inmost immortal soul, the true individual, or of the highest eternal Self of selves, the universal One within the many.
You are very lucky in your sleep-state. I think it is the constant presence of the psychic being in all your actions and reactions that makes your sleep a rendezvous with Nolini again and again and even with the Beyond-Nolini.
Your latest dream is indeed amazing. It shows how close your heart and mind are to your friend's and how illumined your inner contact can be. The dream that I am "concentrating on Vedic verses" and that you are feeling "their atmosphere" brings into view, without my telling you anything, my present preoccupation for the last several days. In the course of my critique of Parpola's treatment of India's antiquity I got steeped in the Rigveda and have been haunted by its hymns. Especially has the God Varuna come alive to me. Glorious verses connected with him(who is at once like an all-encompassing ether and an all-pervading ocean are part of my thought day and night or rather he has taken my thought at all hours into his infinity. Here are some renderings by Sri Aurobindo:
"Luminous Varuna has embraced the nights; he holds the Dawns within him by his creative knowledge; *vi-sioned, he is around every object."
"He is the hidden ocean and he climbs passing beyond heaven; when he has set the sacrificial words in these dawns, then with his luminous foot he tramples asunder illusions and ascends to Paradise."
"Vast is this wisdom which I declare of Varuna the far-heard, the mighty Lord, for he stands in our mid-world as with a measuring-rod and wide he measures our earth with his ilumining sun."
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"Vast is this wisdom of the godhead, greatest in seer-knowledge and none can do violence to it; for into him, the one, the ocean, the bright fostering rivers pour their waters, but they cannot fill him." "
I shall stop now, leaving you with the vision of this Aurobindonian immensity, within which as co-sharers of its blissful transcendence are carried Amal and his precious friend, close-hearted to each other, hand in hand in their aspirations.
(20.8.1989)
If the study of astrology has led you to the distressing question - "Am I at all free to do anything or is everything destined so that 1 am just a puppet?" - it is high time you laid aside your astrological chart. I shall not go into theological questions, for you have not raised the crucial point which at one time drove me nearly crazy as you may learn from the book Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran. I shall touch only on a simple fact of psychology which is relevant to your context.
What is the basic psychological difference between the mentality of animals and ours? Surely, animals are conscious but they are not conscious of being conscious. We humans have a self-observing poise. Something in us stands a little apart from the diverse processes going on in our physical-vital-mental system. It knows that it can watch these processes to a certain extent, adopt an attitude towards them as if it were not identical with them though at any moment it may plunge into them and be carried along in whatever dull or dynamic, weeping or laughing, vicious or virtuous turn the endless movement within us may take. The very fact of this witness-posture, however limited and precarious it may seem, the very fact of its ability to judge even if it be at an inch's distance the never-ceasing stream of thoughts, feelings, proclivities and sensations is evidence of a degree of
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freedom in us - a degree of being uncaught by that stream and a degree of being the acceptor or rejecter of it. Such freedom as an inherent part of our make-up and of our existence should convince us that no astrological chart can completely rule our life - unless we are sophists enough to argue that our very conviction or decision that it cannot rule our life is itself predicted in it and therefore fixed! But then we can play counter-sophists and say that we can be fated to be free!
My general advice is: "Get out of the astrological obsession." Astrology at its best shows a graph of physical possibilities. By saying "physical" I don't exclude the life-force and the mind, for, while being essentially non-physical, they have their surface-manifestations which are closely linked with material factors. Physical possibilities do not exhaust the range of our existence. And, remember, the astrological chart can show no more than what can tend to become actual, for man the witness, the stander-back, can say - at least for one critical moment - "Yes" or "No" from his in-drawn poise.
(5.9.1989)
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The whole basis of the Vibrational Theory which you present as the way to supramentalise the body's cells is most shaky in the sense that without a supramentalisation of the inner consciousness one can't hope to supramentalise the body. Of course, by mantra-power one may subtilise the physical being but to supramentalise it is a different cup of tea - or, to hark back to Rigvedic terminology, a different goblet of Soma, the nectar of Immortality. Your friend appears to make his followers believe that by merely quieting the mind and the vital nature one can have the power to supramentalise the physical instrument by means of a mantra. No follower of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother can subscribe to this facile sadhana, this "Yoga without tears".
Now to another topic on which you seem unclear. The impression of importance the Mother gives to a person has to be understood by the deepest heart and not by the superficial mind - the deepest heart which instinctively knows the Divine's wonderful way with the soul. In the ras lila, the traditional play of the Divine with the human, every Gopi felt that Krishna was all hers and that she was the whole world to him and that he gave her a supreme value. The Lord, we are told, multiplied himself innumerably in his dance with his devotees and each devotee had the experience that she and he were all in all to each other. Our Mother's Grace was something like that to us. I remember Counouma once telling me that one could have quite a delusion about oneself if one did not know well enough the Mother's way with those who had an intimate relationship with her. She often made them feel wonderfully unique. Something of this Krishna-like Grace is sought to be pictured in the last lines of my poem. The Triumph of Dante:
For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes
Mirror the love whose smile is paradise?-
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But gives itself and yearns to give yet more.
Not for His joy but this one heart to fill!
You must not be misled by the quotation of some censures passed by the Mother on this person or that. Actually she has said things in the same vein about the very person from whom you quote. Only in connection with certain specific occasions has she made critical remarks about people. They were never meant to be final summings-up carved in monumental alabaster. As the occasions change, the very opposite comments would come forth. Besides, the critical remarks themselves were spiritual actions on a subtle plane aimed at remedying the defects criticised: they were a secret favour to the people concerned and never .- as we might misconstrue them - an effusion of ordinary vindic-tiveness. To see them otherwise is to be dense to the way of a supreme spiritual consciousness.
The Divine Light acts in two manners, (It lays bare to us our own depth, "the imprisoned Splendour", as Browning names it. It also reveals the darkness covering and constricting that beauty. It gives us depth-evoking compliments and also passes deeply-searching censures to counteract the obscuring elements. Yes, "to counteract" - that is, work upon them not in order to expose our weaknesses for blame and contempt by the world but with the aim to dispel them by subjecting them to the Light. How and when the occasion would arise for this dispelling has to be left to the Mother's discretion. We cannot dictate to her what she should do. But we must have the faith that all she does is for each one's spiritual good. And we would quite misunderstand her motive if we tried to use her comments with the intention to do the other person down and bolster our own egos.
(28.11.1985)
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A word again on the business of Mantra. I know that the Mother attached a great importance to "Om Namo Bhaga-vate" and found its vibrations extremely helpful to the process of awakening the cells to the Supreme and transforming them. But, to direct the Mantra to this work, there must be the true mystical state in the Mantra-repeater. And the more psychic, the more spiritual, the more supramentally oriented one is, the better the transforming effect of the Mantra, For, indeed, without the Psychic's up-kindling thrill, the Spirit's widening peace, the Supermind's illuminating touch, the Mantra is sure to become an empty enchantment. Sadhana as taught by both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother -yes, by the Mother even in the period when she was busy with the Mantra's magic - is the sine qua non. What I understand your author to harp on is that a little quieting of the mind and of the vital being are all that is required as the background to the Mantric practice. Naturally, one has to reduce the great Supramental Yoga to this if one's purpose is to catch the ear of a large following, particularly in the West. This is what 1 would consider a distortion of the world-saving message of our Gurus. Such a distortion is that cheapening of the Truth which I dub "Yoga without tears", that is, Yoga in which everything is toned down to the capacity of the average man who does not want to exert himself to gain God but desires everything to be made easy, God to be almost brought to him on a platter. "Yoga without tears", in my sense, has nothing in common with the "Sunlit Path" to which you equate it but which is the path of the soul's spontaneous leap towards the Divine and its effortless increasing of its core of self-existent happiness to become the universal and transcendent Ananda that I once sought to crystallise in words with the following couplets:
Like petals from the odour of a rose:
One breath of luminous all-absorbing hush -
So wide a love that nowhere need it rush:
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Calm ether of an infinite embrace -
Beauty unblurred by limbs or longing face.
(24.10.1985)
You have asked whether I can say from experience if we are able to manipulate the world by sheer will-power. There have been occasions when I wanted something to happen or to be done and a force went forth from the ideative mind but backed by an urge from the heart-centre and a drive from the vital being - and Io, the impossible-looking event which had been willed and aspired after took place. But on other occasions there was only a passing on to the Mother of what I wished for and surrendering entirely to her the desired result - without any anxiety for that result, any exercise of will towards its fulfilment. Most surprisingly, a turn of events took place and the problem to be solved, the end to be reached, were tackled in the most natural manner which I was bound to call supernatural.
Your friendly letter has been before me all these days but I could not get down to answering it - partly because I had a lot of work on my hands demanding immediate attention and partly because the bright part of my friend was getting eclipsed again and again. I was much moved by your deep feeling for me which has persisted down the years, but I was saddened by the hymn of hate in the rest of the letter where others came into the picture. My concern is not with those I do not come into contact with: my concern is about people who are constantly in touch with me. When they keep nursing their hurts and letting unhappiness overshadow them and all their fine qualities suffer abeyance in any respect, I feel very disappointed. Please pull yourself out of this dejection, this sense of frustration, this violent personal reaction. When, in spite of all your efforts, something cannot
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go the way you want, you should put it out of your mind and not allow the memory of it to cramp your future possibilities. Infinity is calling us, divinity is stretching warm glowing hands towards us: shall we stand stuck in grievances over past misfortunes instead of letting them be lost
In the dark backward and abysm of time
and turning our eyes
To the bright forward and empyrean of eternity?
Behind every setback, behind every contretemps, Sri Aurobindo waits for us to ask him what secret of swifter progress, what paradox of a greater leap forward hides in that distressing obscurity. If we inwardly go on offering the trouble to him and praying to him either to remove it or else, if it is for some reason irremovable, to make it open a deeper revelation of his presence within us, we shall not have wasted the uplifting love he brings to his children at every moment, be it day or night of the soul.
(5.3.1986)
The idea of utkata or ineluctable karma is, I believe, a Jain doctrine. In one of the talks reported by Nirodbaran, it was brought to Sri Aurobindo's attention by Dr. Manilal (a Jain) after the mishap to the Master's right leg on the night of November 23, 1938. The point raised was whether the accident had been due to what is called utkata karma. Sri Aurobindo ruled out this explanation and referred to the constant battle he had been waging against "adverse forces" that were ever on the alert to baulk him. He did not comment
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further on this kind of karma. I don't recollect anything written by him on the subject. What we may suppose on the strength of Sri Aurobindo's general outlook on karma is that certain actions create results which are very difficult to prevent or transcend and that we have to suffer them as long as we haven't found a way to rise above the plane on which they have their rationale. In other words, we may have to wait for freedom from them until we can ascend to the highest level of spiritual consciousness. I don't believe that there is no possibility of freedom. An absolute impossibility would not fit within Sri Aurobindo's scheme. That is perhaps why he has nowhere a word on the alleged karma of such a type.
A number of difficulties in one's being may not be amenable except to what Sri Aurobindo has called Supermind, the highest dynamic divine consciousness. These difficulties may be due to one's karma or to the play of universal forces or to the folly of other people. Take, for instance, the attack of polio which my left leg suffered when I was two and a half years old. Much was done by way of surgical intervention in London where my father, himself a doctor, had taken me three years after the attack. But, though later I could cycle, even ride horses, a certain defect remained. The Mother once told me: "One day I hope to cure you. But the cure can be effected only by the Supermind. Not even the Overmind can help here." She meant that the traces of physical damage which lingered were of a rigidity that overpassed the capacity of all hitherto-known spiritual agents. Whatever the cause, the condition may be termed utkata in relation to "the powers that be" but not in an ultimate sense.
In conventional Christian theology the "sin" of Adam's disobedience in the Garden of Eden may be designated as utkata karma in an agelong shape, for all descendants of Adam are said to incur this "original sin" and, in consequence, are deprived of adequate power of winning "grace". So extreme is the inherited sinfulness believed to be, that no
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human being can atone for it. One who is taken to be God's own Son is understood to have shouldered the responsibility for it and become a human being and paid the price for it. The price is said to be his "crucifixion" as a common "criminal" on a charge of violating Jewish orthodoxy and transgressing Roman authority. By this act he is commonly credited with opening man to Divine Grace through man's faith in him as the one and only Son of God, the single universal Saviour.
I am mentioning all this as a possible illustration, not recommending the semi-mythological and narrowly sectarian form in which the doctrine of a great soul's self-sacrifice for the good of mankind has often been couched.
(Feb. 1959)
You have touched upon an extremely personal as well as delicate subject when you ask me what I have to say apropos of the Mother's having once referred to me in the Agenda with the French term imbecile for having written to Sri Aurobindo about Savitri in what is termed a questioning vein. You are also asking me whether I consider the Mother to have made a mistake in using that word.
I may begin by saying that the censure would be more drastic if the word were taken in its English sense. In colloquial French I believe it means something in-between silliness and stupidity. I see that the translator of the Agenda into English has gone one better and employed the label: "moron." A moron is an adult with an intelligence equal to that of an average child of 8-12. To be moronic is to have an in-born defect of mind. It can never be got rid of. Surely the Mother did not mean this? For else she could easily have employed this label. But, even as regards the other term, would I say that she made a mistake?
The matter is rather complex for me. It has always appeared to me that the Divine, by the very fact of assuming a body, through the common human process must be prone
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at times to make mistakes, at least small ones. But I have also always held that the Divine's mistakes are still divine. They happen to probe in a baffling way layers of our selves which are secretly at odds with our conscious intentions. If we can probe in turn these seeming mistakes, they can provide us with short-cuts to outgrowing our hidden weaknesses, and prove actually a grace and not a mere punishment. So, in the fundamental assessment, they are no mistakes at all.
My "questioning vein" about Savitri was intended to serve as an objective filter to isolate what might be Sri Aurobindo's oversights, which can certainly accompany on some occasions the incarnate Divine's insights. In addition, I wanted to anticipate whatever criticism of the new poetry the literary world at large might make, so that the poet might not unnecessarily expose himself to it. Finally, knowing the kind of poetry Savitri was meant to be, I was anxious for the "Overhead" level to be kept as high as possible and was eager to draw Sri Aurobindo's attention to whatever might strike my critical tympanum, rightly or wrongly, as not quite gloriously Aurobindonian. I believe Sri Aurobindo understood all these motives and knew too my basic breath-bereaved admiration of his revelatory art and was aware of how 1 longed to kindle up my own work with the help of his solar splendour. Let me quote to you a passage from one of his letters:
"...I can perfectly understand your anxiety that all should be lifted to or towards at least the minimum Overhead level or so near as to be touched by its influence or at the very least a good substitute for it. I do not know whether that is always possible in so long a poem as Savitri dealing with so many various heights and degrees and so much varying substance of thought and feeling and descriptive matter and narrative. But that has been my general aim throughout and it is the reason why I have made so many successive drafts and continual alterations till I felt that I had got the thing intended by the higher inspiration in
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every line and passage. It is also why I keep myself open to every suggestion from a sympathetic and understanding quarter and weigh it well, rejecting only after due consideration and accepting when I see it to be well-founded."1
There is also the fact, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful or discover a completely adequate ground - the fact that Sri Aurobindo, without my directly asking for the favour, chose me as the only disciple to see in absolute secrecy Savitri in the making. Morning after morning he used to send me in a sealed envelope passages of the poem in his own hand. 1 would type them out and put, in the margins, appreciative remarks or queries from a literary standpoint.
Obviously, in this there was nothing culpable on my part. But at times there must have been in me an urge, however faint, to find fault with Savitri in a few rare places in the light (or twilight) of my own aesthetic sense. I am positive the Mother's "imbecile" hit out at that lurking imp. The imp must have fed its own ego by remarks of Sri Aurobindo's like the one to Nirod on getting back the latest composed matter of Savitri which he had sent me during my visit to the Ashram in August 1947 after a long absence. He asked: "Is Amal satisfied?"
I may add in general that the Mother's censures at any time are never meant to be ultimate pronouncements -proposed as epitaphs like "Amal the Imbecile, was born such on 25.11.1904 and died likewise on..." You must counterpoise the sarcasm we are discussing with the several compliments Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have paid. Sri Aurobindo's are already in print. As for the Mother's I may mention the known fact that when in the early days she was allotting to various rooms little paintings by me of flowers with their significances, she asked me to put in my own room a painting of the flower whose significance is: "Krishna's light in the mind." In later times I remember her once telling
1. Letters on Savitri in the Centenary Edition of Savitri, p. 759.
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me during an interview: "If I told you what Sri Aurobindo and I think of your mind, you would get puffed up." I refrained from asking what they thought. I tried to remain unpuffed-up. Even if I had learnt from her their precise thinking, I don't feel I would have let it obscure my knowledge that on the one hand I have many serious gaps in my mind and that on the other it is she and Sri Aurobindo who are responsible for making me deserve any compliment.
I recognise very well my ail-too human fallibility in general and how miserably I fall short in quite a number of specific fields - mathematics, linguistics, sociology, economics, business. During Mother India's initial period - nearly 2 years — when it was a semi-political fortnightly I developed an understanding of political ideas, issues and events, but that was due to Sri Aurobindo's inner help for a job he wanted to get done through me. Before Mother India was launched, all concerned with it had a meeting with the Mother. I was expected to write editorials on politics from the point of view of Sri Aurobindo's world-vision. I said to the Mother: "I have no interest in or knowledge of politics." Surprisingly she remarked in response: "Neither have I." Then I gaped and asked: "How will I manage?" She replied: "There is Sri Aurobindo. He will do everything for you," And he jolly well did! Once his work was done, I think I have become the same old ignoramus.
And I may honestly testify that if I have any more-than-ordinary proficiency in any sphere it is Sri Aurobindo's creation out of whatever little potential I may have had to start with. For instance, can I ever believe that I could have written "Overhead poetry" in any bulk - tapping at times the plane which Sri Aurobindo has called "Overmind Intuition" and even receiving "an Overmind touch" - without his labouring upon my thick skull for years to bring about something of the situation hit off by him so overheadily in those lines of his own? -
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(7.5.1988)
Sometimes my correspondence becomes rather a heap and a few letters get buried out of sight. This morning I chanced upon a letter from you dated as far back as 3.2.84, on the envelope of which I had scribbled as a reminder: "Reply soon." 1 am sorry two years and five days have elapsed since then.
You have asked me about a word in Savitri in the Centenary Edition, page 310, line 17:
Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss...
You report that you have heard a cassette of Nolini's recitation in which he has said not "glad" but "blind". Thinking he might have had access to unpublished information I have checked with the copy which has recently come to me from our Ashram Archives for a scrutiny of the corrections proposed on the basis of Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts. The printed text is correct. I don't know where Nolini got his epithet from. Sometimes one misreads: I have myself, while recording Savitri or Won, read some words wrongly, but I have been pulled up by the alert friend acting as my recorder: Chandrakant. Perhaps nobody was vigilant enough with Nolini.
However, there are rare occasions possible when some inner guidance may make one misread the published version. Thus the line 13 of page 702 in Savitri -
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! -
was read by the Mother as it runs but heard within herself with "powerful" instead of "beautiful". She inwardly consulted Sri Aurobindo and asked why she had changed the
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adjective and how the mistake had come about. I don't recollect the Mother's exact report, but I can say that Sri Aurobindo replied in effect: "It is a truth you have heard, but a truth of the future. At present the truth is 'beautiful' and not 'powerful'." Nolini's slip does not strike me as belonging to the same category. It is oversight rather than far-sight like the Mother's. So you may confidently stick to "glad".
(8.2.1986)
Postscript: A friend has pointed out that Sri Aurobindo does have some words on utkata karma on p. 468 of Vol. 22 of the Centenary Edition. While admitting the difficult problem, he says: "Here too the achievement of the spiritual consciousness and life is supposed to annul or give the power to annul Karma. For we enter into union with the Will Divine, cosmic or transcendent, which can annul what it had sanctioned for certain conditions, new-create what it had created, the narrow fixed lines disappear, there is a more plastic freedom and wideness."
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29
It is hardly surprising that in the wake of immersing yourself in the grand passages I had sent you from Sri Aurobindo's translations of the Rigveda's hymns to the God Varuna you should dream of a deluge. This deluge is nothing else than the presence of Varuna with his all-enveloping infinity which at once overwhelms and embraces us and washes away our small many-stained self from us and with wonderful waves of the ever-widening resonance of a Mantra merges us in a supreme mystery of our own being.
Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.
Naturally our normal consciousness is a little alarmed at such an enormous sweep of divine grace and we think of looking for a place of safety, as you did - but, thank God, there is no safety from God! Once we have taken His Name and invoked His endless secrecies of a Bliss which turns all human happiness pale and poor, escape is impossible. Of course, we still want to cling to our tiny gleams of transient joy until billow on billow of a giant light breaks the bounds of our hearts and no longing to escape is left any more.
That is indeed the climax of our lives. And to live in the sense of it at all moments is to convert every occurrence of our day-to-day commerce with the world into a unique discovery of the Divine - either a truth that leads into the depth of things or a beauty that opens our eyes to ineffable dreams or a power clearing a path each hour for a love to smile at us out of whatever difficulty falls to our mortal lot.
(6.10.1989)
You have asked me not to give you "the slightest thanks". But I cannot stop the Mother from giving expression to a gratitude from the depths of me. It was She who from your
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deepest part sent help through you - with that typical soul-quality: the sense of being only a channel of Grace. And it is with a spontaneous outflowing of happiness on recognising that soul-quality by a similar presence in me that I write this letter.
Perhaps you will query: "How can the Divine give thanks? All is rightfully the Divine's!" But surely the Supreme Mother has concealed her divinity in the shape of an ignorant universe striving towards light and, whenever a spark of success is struck, a smile of humble bliss gleams out from her hidden greatness. It is as if she never expected to succeed - such was the stupendous gamble of looking for the infinite All through the play of infinitesimal dust - and thus most naturally the Supernatural itself is surprised on being found again and there breaks forth a "Thank you." Particularly is it so when the generosity is both spontaneous and substantial.
All this may sound like semi-Fichtean semi-Hegelian -metaphysics but it is really Aurobindonian truth Amalianly poeticised.
(25.9.1989)
I have received all your letters and the photographs. They give me an insight into your soul and the general mood of your good friends. I can see that simple devotion to the Divine is the very life of your life. The ceremonies are no mere religious gestures. They are there because of tradition but there is true love of God finding expression through these old forms. And I am happy and proud that you have mingled me with the spontaneous approach you have to the World-Mother. To be remembered in the movements of your inner being as at the same time a fellow-devotee and an intimate brother is indeed good fortune for me and gives an extra intensity to my own turning towards the Divine. Looking at the beautiful photographs I feel the past occasion a living reality. The consecrated expression on the faces of all
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the participants and specially on the face of my dear friend adds a new glow to the self-surrender I always aspire to make to Sri Aurobindo and to his Shakti, the transcendent and universal Creatrix who not only meets us as a close personal presence in the depths of our hearts but brought for year on sunlit year an embodied beauty and bliss to our adoring eyes and worshipping hands.
Someone has said that it is not by arguments that a man gets converted to belief in God. It is the sight of true believers in their spontaneous act of prayer and worship that turns a mere hypothesis of the Holy into a palpable reality and a life-enveloping radiance.
(4.10.1989)
You want to know the most memorable event for me this year (1986). In your earlier letter you said you were continuing the course in healing, and hope to be proficient enough to give me some healing influence when next you visit Pondicherry. This influence would have been quite welcome two months back when I had one of the worst tosses in my long life of many sudden and violent contacts with the ground, thanks to my inefficient legs. And this fall brought for me paradoxically the high-water mark of the current year in Yogic consciousness. Already I have written the story of this memorable event to some friends. Let me repeat it to you.
I have always valued old Confucius's maxim: "Our greatest glory lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall." Of course, the Chinese sage was not speaking in reference to treacherous lower limbs, but I found his words quite appropriate to my tumbling career. And I have ever been quick to get up. This time - at about 7 in the evening - I took long. The pain was so intense and wide-spread that I had to keep lying on the floor for nearly an hour. My friend Minna happened to be watering my little garden which is of her own making. Hearing me gasp several times she rushed
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in and sat down on the floor beside me. I don't know how the fall occurred. I was getting up from my chair, the same in which I had been sitting on the two occasions you had graced my flat with your visit. Suddenly my knees sagged. With a twist in my waist I fell backward and one of the comers of the small table fixed to my chair butted into me like a bull - or rather I was like an idiotic matador backing into the horns of a bull waiting for him. The butting was just near my spine and somehow it affected my breathing. The pain caused by it as well as by the contorted way I fell on the floor was of a kind unknown to me: it was as if swords of fire were slashing into me at a number of places. But as I lay supine in great physical distress I made a strange discovery. In the midst of the intense pain my mind and heart were absolutely at peace. Not a twinge of fear, not a tremor of anxiety!
Utter tranquillity seemed the very substance of my consciousness, I had never realised that such perfect calm had been permanently established in me by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, To the inner being, nothing had happened. I am almost inclined to say that the fall was worthwhile just for me to discover this profound serenity.
In former days I had found myself facing calamitous events as if from what Sri Aurobindo has called
The silent Being within
Who sees life's drama pass with unmoved eyes.
But I had never dreamed that my own physical disasters could be looked at in the same imperturbable manner. And this unshaken state was also different from the detached condition in which I had undergone the pain about 9 years earlier when I had slipped on the wet courtyard of Dr. Sircar's house and had hurt both my legs so badly that my wife Sehra had thought I would never be able to walk again. On that occasion of getting bedridden for a time I could draw myself inwardly away from my body's lower part, but there was some link subtly left with the body. Now it was like
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standing quite apart from it. "Standing" may sound an odd word to use when I was lying flat on the floor. Yet it is really the mot juste to drive home the fact that my body and I were two separate things and that the toss still left me unfallen in mind and heart,
(1986)
You have stated your puzzlement over certain expressions in my little piece of poetic mysdcism, "When Poems are Born." Let me first quote it, then cite your questions and then attempt an explanation step by step. Here are the 16 lines:
When poems are born
No man and woman meet:
A lion and a nebula
Vanish in a single heat.
A light that is nameless and formless
Plucks up the master of life -
Limbs of carved thunder take
An infinite silence for wife.
And, by the unfathomed fusing
Of below with beyond,
A mystery leaps out of slumber, .
Breaking time's bond.
A cry like immortal honey
Foretastes of the truth behind
Our human grope - the almighty
Body of Supermind,
You have written: "I know in the animal world examples of the female swallowing the male after conception. I have also no difficulty in understanding that a thought-parent is dissolved while the child - the words - is born from some
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brain ceils, but 1 have never known both parents vanishing in a sclience instance while heat of conception and delivery are almost simultaneous. Obviously this does occur since you describe it so beautifully. Will you explain in some detail what your 'lion' and 'nebula' stand for?"
Now for my reply. Although hints are taken from the physical world of mating and breeding, the process described should not be judged according to what happens in biology. The very first line gives a warning that here is a metabiological process pictured. But this process is envisaged in an extreme functioning - the creation of a mystic poem. However, such creation is still in the realm of poetry and what happens during its production is foreshadowed in all poetic activity. So I may begin with the nature of all poetry.
The near and the far, the earth and the empyrean, the conceivably concrete and the intuitively sensed, what is clear to sight and what is figured out by insight, the vital formative power and the spiritual creative elan from some depth or height of revelatory secrecy - all these go to the birth of a poem. The two elements coming together from two ends, as it were, are imaged by my "lion" and my "nebula". These entities enclasp each other, interpenetrate, catch fire, grow one blaze of beauty, disappear as separate existences and forces, become something which at the same time combines both and is a different transcendent "third". This culmination gives point to the word "vanish" in my piece.
The first stanza is to be read in conjunction with the less radical expressions of the second and the third. "A light that is nameless and formless" is the "nebula", "limbs of carved thunder" are the "lion". The former - the empyrean reality -takes into itself the latter who is called "the master of life", while this master makes that reality, termed now "an infinite silence", merge with himself as his wife. The "lion" stands for the shaping energy in its extreme drive to incarnate a supreme perfection on earth. The "nebula" is "an infinite silence" which gives to the expressive shape hewn by the
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artist vitality an archetypal significance, a profundity of suggestion, a liberating atmosphere of the endless evermore. When matter's inconscience is made to meet by creative art the divine "beyond", then from that "below" of grandly moulded "slumber" the hidden Godhead - "a mystery" -breaks forth, setting earthly limitations ("time's bond") at nought. The result of the "single heat" in which the "below" and the "beyond" participate and lose themselves is the poem. That result is the "immortal honey" distilled into a lyric "cry", a flow of light and delight, a beauty that is truth and a truth that is beauty, conveyed by the magic of a form whose lines at once shine with a seizable message and shade off into those rapturous "reasons of the heart which the mind cannot know".
This chiselled yet shimmering shape comes as a blissful anticipation - in verbal terms - of that flawless formulation of the Divine Being, which Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental Body. The formulation without a flaw, while already existent in the empyrean as the guide of "our human grope", is waiting to descend with its "almighty" artistry to refashion the outer no less than the inner life of earth.
In short, every authentic poem prefigures in one way or another in the world of words the Integral Yoga we are striving to practise in order to bring, into the evolutionary products of the Supreme who has hidden in the Inconscient, the all-transformative power of the Skabda Brahman, the Logos which articulates in time the marvels of the Eternal -the Aurobindonian Supermind.
(4.7.1985)
I am glad to receive a photograph of your recently born son. Now an important part of your life is to see how the little one becomes a big one in the course of time. And when I say "a big one" I do not mean merely a growth in size. Of course, the bodily welfare has to be looked to, but equally momentous is the development of the inner being. And this
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development depends to a considerable extent on its environment, especially its psychological environment.
A child is extremely sensitive and easily absorbs something of the presence of things and of persons around it. An atmosphere of harmony and happiness is the best gift one can make to one's child. The art of bringing up a child is in its own way a kind of Yoga. Faith in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is, no doubt, an important matter, so that the infant soul may catch their subtle presence. But faith is not enough. The manner of life counts a great deal.
Between the two parents there must be a play of sweetness and light, those two natural attributes of the Psychic Being. Also, one's individual and personal habits create an aura of their own. The consciousness has to be calm, clear, bright and has to express itself in a certain attitude and activity of the outer being, which must practise poise, orderliness, bodily care, regularity, balance of movement. Spontaneously the child will take in through its twinkling eyes the drama of life around it and by its sensitive soul, which will be very much on the surface during its first few years, it will tend to be an image of its parents.
Please forgive me if I seem to be preaching a sermon. But I have no intention of putting forth goody-goody advice. What I have said is what I myself try to put into practice, although I have no baby to take care of (thank God!). Rather I am myself a sort of baby. But this baby feels very intensely Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as its parents and has tried to absorb something of their presence. So it knows how your own baby will be disposed to act in response to its physical and psychological surroundings.
I have written to you as your friend who has a great affection for you and something of this affection extends to both your wife and the child and I would wish all three of you to live in the vast creative sunshine which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have brought into the ordinary life. May this new year unfold a rich inwardness and outwardness for all three of you.
(12.1.1988)
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30
Thank you very much for holding me so deep in your heart and so high in your mind. To be given such value might lead the common man in me to a swollen head, but as I have sought to serve the Divine it spurs me to look for all the defects that prevent me from deserving the compliment you are-paying me. Your profoundly appreciative attitude sets me on the alert to shoot whatever "Clear Ray" ("Amal Kiran") Sri Aurobindo has put in me to mark out and pierce the multitude of defects still lurking in my nature. Reading your letter led me at once to feel extreme gratitude and to be aware of so much that is necessary to realise in order to be worthy of your affectionate praise.
Suddenly my mind went back to a greater challenge in a somewhat different way. When the Supramental Manifestation in the subtle-physical layer of the earth, which the Mother named the earth's "atmosphere", took place on February 29, 1956, there were two effects. On the one side all that was turned towards the Sun of Truth sprang up like
A fire whose tongue has tasted paradise.
New powers within us came into view and a glorious goad was felt urging us to reach out towards what Sri Aurobindo has called
Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit Space.
Not only was there a glorious goad; there was also a permeation of our selves by a force I may poetically term a laughing golden ease which swept away in many of us several obstructions we had been striving against for long.
On the other side, undreamt-of darknesses rose into our
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ken. Strange difficulties in the form of desires that seemed unnatural to the normal self confronted people. They learned of defects in themselves which had never before pestered them. The Mother was told of this weird counterpoint to the sense of exaltation and of heavenly help to deal with our life-problems and Yoga-demands. She explained that the new illumination could never cause them: it could only disclose what was already there, hidden from our usual sight. A more penetrating beam had fallen from on high upon our subconscious to reveal noxious matter crouching there and needing to be coped with some time or other.
Answering the question "Why have difficulties increased for quite a large number of sadhaks?", the Mother brought up an additional aspect of the situation: "There is yet another reason. When the Force which is at work is stronger, more insistent, naturally what resists, resists as strongly. And if instead - it is here I have to say something that's not very pleasant - if instead of being hypnotised by your little difficulties, your little inconveniences, your small discomforts, your 'big' defects, if instead of being hypnotised by all that, you tried to see the other side, how much more powerful the Force is, the Grace more active, the Help more tangible; in a word, if you were a little less egoistic and less concentrated on yourselves and had a little wider vision in which you could include things that don't concern you personally, perhaps your view of the problem would change."1
Most of us did follow the Mother's advice. And after a while the frightening self-exposure passed. There remained only the wide quiet impression of a supreme gift from the Divine, a soft smiling security in the air around us as if the earth's future were no longer ambiguous. Whatever the appearances henceforth, the path to perfection had been secretly laid across the ages to come. From the distant future the saviour arms of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were stretched out to us just as from the past they were gently
1. Questions and Answers 1956, p. 220.
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pushing us forward and in the present upholding us with a loving word in our ears.
1 remember the Mother telling me about the divine movement corresponding from the opposite direction to the manifestation of the Supermind. 1 had thought that the Supermind involved in the earth's being, just as the life-force and the mind had been involved, had emerged even as they had emerged. The Mother proved me wrong but declared: "Now the emergence of the involved Supenrtind is certain. It is only a matter of time."
Perhaps this too will take place first in the subtle-physical layer of the earth? And when it does, the manifested Supermind will triumphantly appear in the gross-physical along with the involved supramental consciousness emerging there. Then shall be seen on a grand scale - here, there, everywhere - in a most literal and ultra-Miltonic sense "the human face divine."
Writing to me about my eighty-fifth birthday you have repeatedly wished me "a long life". I can't think I shall live long enough to see that great evolutionary consummation. Possibly, were I to achieve the feat of becoming a Parsi Methuselah to match the legendary Jewish patriarch who, according to Genesis 5.27, went on living for 969 years, I might look at a whole world of such faces with, at least partially, a "human face divine" on my own neck, too -provided, of course I sustain the Yogic aspiration over the centuries.... In actual fact, my life has been unexpectedly long as it is - unexpectedly because I was born rash and have taken all sorts of risks, at first with a deep-rooted confidence in an inexplicable vitality behind my own and later with an inner sense that the Divine, would see me through every adventure. As you know, the Mother once told me: "We have saved you from all kinds of disasters and it is indeed good that you have so much faith, but don't go on exploiting our protection." This means that I must have more wisdom, more forethought, though not necessarily what is called worldly wisdom and fear of the future. I am doing my best to
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live long both because I am happy and can give happiness and because I want as much time as possible to go nearer to Sri Aurobindo's luminous Truth and the Mother's radiant Beauty. All the same I am ready to say "Hurrah" whenever they tell me, "Your time is up."
(21.11.1989)
You have asked me to comment on differences of temperament in Yoga. I have known a pair in the Ashram, one of whom - the husband - happened to have an optimistic temperament, while the wife was rather serious-mooded. Not that she couldn't laugh, but there had to be proper times for it. Thus with a laugh she had forbidden her partner to crack a joke before she had had her morning cup of tea! Jokes would be quite out of place if she hadn't been rightly conditioned by that warming-up beverage. She used to wonder how this fellow could be chirpy even on just getting up from bed.
Perhaps you'll imagine he was more in touch than she with what is termed the "psychic being" in our Yoga, the entity hidden deep within us which is constantly lit up because it is constantly in the Divine's secret Presence. You'll be wrong. Actually the wife was much more than he in the aura of the psychic being, for she had an intense love for the Mother, a rare self-giving devotion, so much so that the Mother once told the man that his wife's soul dwelt all the time in the Mother's own bosom! But she had a worrying-and hypersensitive temperament. I am sure that if she had lived long enough, it would have been quieted down. But such a turn of nature doesn't easily develop a mental standing-back from the surface of things, undergo a determined discipline of detachment, studiously practise non-reacting to the impingements of the outer life. One has consciously to create conditions that may keep going in all circumstances whatever degree of the sunny psychic sense one may happen to have.
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A special effort is to be made of what the Mother has called "Remembering and Offering". Here the most important thing is that the offering to her of those outer impingements must be immediate - before we start thinking of how we should respond. The temptation to give thought to them is great. Those who worry and are hypersensitive are liable to yield to it. A certain toughness of mind is required to resist it. And the habit of non-response has to become one of our main preoccupations. Activities which are usually supposed to be important should be made merely occasions for us to remember and offer instead of returning all-too-human answers or else making reactions according to our personal idea of spirituality. Not that we have to be passive in our daily life. We certainly need to act at many points, but the acting has to come out of an initial inner passivity in the hands of our Gurus - without private grudges, grievances, frustrations in relation to our fellow-sadhaks.
Please don't run away with the fancy that the man who is preaching here is an equanimous paragon. At least once a year he badly loses his temper for a second or two, generally over a trifle - and he feels profoundly ashamed for doing so. What I have tried to describe is a type of temperament in its perfection, towards which he strives hard because of a spontaneous affinity to it.
(9.11.1989)
The phrase haunting you - "divine Aurobindo died" - from a poem of mine which you couldn't find has somehow been ringing in my own ears time and again during the last month or so. It is not only "stunning", as you say: it is also heart-shattering. It sums up in three climactic words the long tragedy of our untransformed world. And there is a concentrated art in it which drives it home with a terrible poignancy as if putting a final seal on the transience and unhappiness of the cosmic condition. The art lies in the consonance-assonance of the two words "divine" and "died" in the midst
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of diametrically opposite suggestions. And the art of this connection gets a secret support from the occurrence of the d-sound in the name "Aurobindo", a sound which subtly counteracts the four-syllabic length of the name dividing -triumphantly, as it were - those two suggestions. The horror and the hopelessness of the mutability of even the greatest factors - or actors - in the earth-drama are clinched by the three-worded phrase's position at the end of the many-visioned sonorous octave of the sonnet. Then comes the sestet's surprise - the conjuring up of the paradox of a death that is a breakthrough into a new life for a humanity that has always dreamt of the undying although faced everywhere with the passing of the most beautiful, the most lofty. Yes, "dreamt", but mortality has ever intruded to make the vision splendid fade, and the most disastrous touch came when the hope was at its highest - during the career of Sri Aurobindo, the Supramental Avatar. The sonnet appears on page 38 of Altar and Flame. Here it is:
Heaven's Light and Mortal Doom
The Parthenon's pillars built to upbear the sky
Could keep not even an earthly roof; and all
That colour kindled for the Eternal's eye
In deep Ajanta fades; no rhythms recall
The two grand plays the terrible chisel-stroke
Of the titan mind of Aeschylus set beside
Prometheus Bound: their power Time's brute hand broke.
Heaven's light passes - divine Aurobindo died.
But this one death where Heaven's own self gave room
For dire eclipse of its eternity
Has spent the whole blind force of mortal doom
Against the soul's vision of a wondrous sod
In which the Undying can work His artistry.
Now Man breaks free to grow for ever God.
(25.3.1988)
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The story of your experience on the staircase leading to the Meditation Hall on the first floor on one of your birthdays in the 'sixties at a time when the Mother was not seeing people is most enchanting. I marked two or three points in it for comment. You wrote of sitting at "the foot of the stairs". 1 think it was a soul-instinct which made you choose the place, as if you were at your Guru's feet. The foot of the stairs which went up and up and the remembrance of the One who was at the top recall to me an early poem of mine with the name "Kanchinjanga" in its title. The name means "Golden Ganges". No appellation could be more apt for our Mother, the radiant fount of Divine Grace. Here is the poem:
At the Foot of Kanchinjanga
I have loved thee though thy beauty stands
Aloof from me,
And hoped that dwelling in thy sight
From dawn to dawn at last I might
Become like thee -
Become like thee and soar above
My mortal woe,
And to the heavens, passionless
And mute, from dawn to dawn address
Thoughts white like snow.
The second point I marked was your phrase: "a force was descending in me." Now again the Ganges-suggestion was unavoidable. All of us know the wonderful story of Rishi Bhagiratha's invocation and the descent of the Ganges from heaven through the wide-growing hair of Shiva's head -' Shiva who offered his Himalayan head to bear the terrific impact of the heavenly river so that it might not fall directly and unbroken upon little earth and shatter it to bits. Here another poem of mine swept through my memory. Let me quote it to you:
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O Ganga of the In-world!
O Ganga of the In-world! luminous
With the calm passion of the Master's Will,
Celestial Grace, thou flowest unto us,
Voiceful from the remote Inerrable -
Pure in thy beauty, softening the might
Of summits absolute for our valleyed ways,
That like a wondrous yet familiar light
Eternity may mingle with our days,
And in thy deep melodious ecstasy
Drowning all fear, our souls go fordfied,
Daring the ultimate peaks of destiny,
Seeking the dazzling fountain of thy tide,
To contemplate the illimitable form
Of Shiva silent like a frozen storm!
Point three is apropos of the felicitously bold phrase with which you end your short account of the descending force: "It was so peaceful, so sweet, so delightful and at the same time so powerful that I felt my head would melt into honey!" I am reminded of Rishi Vamadeva's mystic words in his hymn to Agni;
"May we taste that honeyed wave of thine which is borne
in the force of the waters where they come together." -
Apam anike samithe ya abhrtah,
tam asyama madhumantam ta firmim. (IV. 58.11)
What you experienced was a touch of the divine Ananda which is no passive bliss but a dynamic beatitude. What finer, what greater gift could one expect from the Mother on one's birthday?
You have asked me: "Did it descend from outside or did it emerge from deep within?" I should answer: "The soul in you which is deep within opened up to its own supreme
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potentialities which are hidden above in the empyrean of the Spirit. When they are on the verge of being realised, the within and the above grow suddenly one - or rather the secret truth of their oneness breaks forth; the inmost soul's aspiring consciousness turns into the sheer sparkling nectar that comes from the Spirit, dissolving all bounds."
It is true that I forgot the exact date of your "bonne fete". I forgot because you drew my attention to it too far ahead. If you had written to me about it a couple of days before the happy occasion, my still continuing preoccupation with the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola's thesis would not have covered it up from my sight. But, of course, you are always in my heart and mind. You have asked me whether I did anything on that occasion which would distinguish it. Well, my friend Madanlal, who recently recovered from a fractured "neck of the femur" and bravely carries on with his handicap and meets me with a smile every afternoon at the Samadhi, asked me in view of my rather secluded life: "Do you ever feel like going to the seashore or, if you can't, do you feel sorry on missing the freshness and openness that are there?" Spontaneously I said: "Why should one? Within us there is a glorious self-sufficiency." I meant: "If one lived in contact with one's inmost being, one would miss nothing. One would have the sense of all journeys done - of having reached that home of oneself for which all journeys seek."
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31
I am glad you are reading my series "Life-Poetry-Yoga" with interest. The personal vein in which it is cast gives me a lot of liberty to express myself. And it seems to help people in their inner and outer problems. I receive encouraging words from several sadhaks when I go and sit my hour and a half at the Samadhi every afternoon. Generally it's the only outing I have and even the walk from the Ashram gate to the chair under the clock and the return "Marathon" plod gateward are trying. It is so fine of you to ask me to consider your Bombay flat my home, and to tell me that 1 should come there if ever I need to visit my native city. But my legs refuse to get along with that kind of feat. They have become noticeably unsteady, which is natural when I use a "walker" at home and "Canadian Canes" outside. My arms get stronger and stronger and the legs lose their "kick" - except when they will have to kick the bucket. As I wrote to a friend of mine, the "Canadian Canes", which are ordinarily my mainstay, become dangerous when the ground is wet from unexpected rain, I have to be very careful how I set them on the ground when picking my steps over the wetness lest they should slip. For, if I don't put the canes vertical I would myself at once become horizontal!
Symbolically, this wouldn't be undesirable. In our Integral Yoga the movement has to be both a vertical one from the earth-plane to the higher realms of consciousness and a horizontal one in which we widen out to embrace the earth-plane itself (though not necessarily in the sheer physical sense in which I sometimes do the embracing when I have a toss). Many sadhaks are content to soar into inner freedom and bliss but do not know how to be in their outer lives a centre of light from which their being may spread into a subtle oneness with the Universal Spirit and permeate with bliss all who come in touch with them. An indrawn and up-drawn concentration is surely an important part of our
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sadhana, but the final test of success is to be an illumined soul come forward into the waking state and feeling the Divine Presence radiate forth in all one's actions and relationships. At least this is the ideal I pray for and strive after in spite of repeatedly falling short of it. If I have any desire to go beyond my already excessive 85 years, it is to have a little more opportunity to realise my ideal.
(16.12.1989)
You asked me in the Ashram: "When our scriptures say that God is within us, do they mean what Sri Aurobindo calls our 'psychic being', the true soul in us?" I gave you a short answer on the spot. Let me make myself fully clear now. Our psychic being is not the same as the Divine within - it is the Divine's immortal delegate for evolutionary purposes. We may name it in our immediate context, at our present stage of evolution, the Divine projected in a subtle quintessential human form to manifest divinity in terms of mind, life-force and body - itself serving as a centre to them of a profound sweetness and light and strength: it is their guide carrying God's mandate of transformation. The Divine within is the psychic being's eternal companion — not only companion but also its direct origin, the Secret Splendour from which it is put forth on a small scale with a gradually unfolding infinity. The psychic being is inwardly one with that greatness but outwardly different as a developing entity.
When we become aware of it, we are bathed in a soft radiance, a warm happy glow is all about us and there is a constant intuition of the Divine's presence and a ceaseless self-giving to it at the same time that we feel held within an intensely intimate yet all-transcending vastness of purity and peace fused with power and rapture. From this unique experience, as if from an inexhaustible source, a stream of causeless inherently existing joy keeps running into the world around. Upon that stream every happening and everyone we come across are felt floating as a spontaneous
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offering from us to the Universal Lord and the Supreme Mother. No personal ego-sensitive reaction takes place and whatever we meet receives a silent blessing, an undemanding love. Not that we cannot discriminate between the good and the bad in the world before us so as to respond with the right insight, but there is no leap of superficial judgment. An invocation arises to the One who is beyond all error to intervene and help His Truth to find expression in the complex of earthly circumstances. Dynamic activity on our part is not ruled out; it is even imperative, at least at times. However, it issues across an inner passivity to the hearing of that Truth by our psychic being.
(17.12.1989)
Your letter of 21 November brought a number of significant themes - the chief being the grateful exclamation: "We have been so blessed in our lives, to be caught up in the blazing comet-trail of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, our life-span crossing a line of Earth's destiny." After creating such a vividly profound sentence you don't have to bewail: "I don't know how to express this. I wish I had your gift for words."
What you posted on the 27th illustrates your own gift in another fashion - that enchanting birthday-present to me, your poem:
Go words! and dance your way across the paper!
Make me a minuet to please my friend.
Join hands, process and part to stately measure -
But vex me no more with meanings that depend
On dictionaries. Follow the deeper note,
And weave a saraband or roundelay!
Whirl me a waltz — a tarantelle - gavotte —
A galliard for Amal's natal day!
The ant embraces the ant in wordless greeting;
A pulse of delight moves the delicate steps of the deer;
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All nature dances for joy at fortuitous meeting.
And treads out a burden of bliss in the listening air.
So words! I send you to Amal in Pondicherry.
From bondage to reason and rhyme I set you free.
Let your message of friendship, O words! be simple
and merry:
Dance my "pas seul" on the air of his ear like a bee.
. The very measure of the verse is exquisitely Terpsicho-rian. And the personal strain imaginatively woven into the word-pattern meant to celebrate a particular occasion, "Amal's natal day", sets us two - despite your "pas seul", your solo dance — delightfully together as partners tripping out of the poem into some subtle actuality to the rhythm of more than metrical feet. I don't know whether your conscious mind intended this overtone of suggestion, which is punningly there in the very words "pas seul" meaning "not alone" no less than "solitary step". But, as you know, poetry — even if deliberate workmanship has gone into it - is much more than the poet's doing and re-doing his speech. Yeats has somewhere said that though a lot of conscious labour may be spent upon a poem the result is worth nothing if it does not read like "a moment's thought". This "thought" exists originally beyond the poet's conscious mind, and if the latter toils, it is merely to dig a channel for that secret wonder to flow through, destroying all appearance of the passage prepared for it. And what breaks out from within carries often much more than the toiling poet is aware of. You have invoked "the deeper note" that goes past the "dictionaries", and I like the way you have delicately conjured up a sense of the ultra-real by bringing in the instinctive touches of movements that are earthly but outside the reality obsessing us - the human "bondage to reason and rhyme". Of course, "rhyme" in the present context spells the rational fitting of parts with a mechanical logic and not poetry's echo of things surprisingly blended by intuitive magic. I am charmed by the third quatrain about the ant and the deer, where such
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intuitive magic has play everywhere and not only at the rhyme-end of lines. The final "bee" too pleases me, for it hums its way to my ear, loaded with the honey of the heavenward heart of the poet in you.
I think it's the first time that "Pondicherry" has figured in a poem. Originally I heard of this town in connection with a competition in an old Times Literary Supplement. That was before I joined the Ashram. Readers were asked to invent a name for a book such as would never tempt anybody to buy and read it. The first prize was won by the title: "How to ride a tricycle." The second by the title: "The roads of Pondicherry." Evidently Sri Aurobindo was still unknown to the English public in general before 1927, the year of my Hegira. In literature proper the town had a minor place in Conan Doyle's second Sherlock-Holmes novel; The Sign of the Four. The four conspirators fixed on Pondicherry as their venue. This was still earlier than my TLS - much before Sri Aurobindo had made the capital of French India his Seat of Yoga. Now the name of the town is on everybody's lips, but none till the day of your verses has put it in poetry. You have even made it an end-word evoking the rhyme-phrase "simple and merry". If not for anything else your piece should be published for the sake of its making music with this name. The poem may also get noted for the phrase "Amal in Pondicherry". So far Pondicherry was associated thunderously with colossal Sri Aurobindo: now it may also be linked whisperingly with a tiny disciple of his.
I should like to dwell a little on your command to words to "be simple and merry" in their message of your friendship. Basically you have voiced here something appropriate and inevitable between us as followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and not only as two individuals who chime in unison and are joined all the more by both being in love with poetry. By the way, poetry itself is, according to Milton, "simple" no less than "sensuous and passionate" - "simple" in the special sense that it is a direct language rather than one that is complicated by speculative discourse - a fresh-welling
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utterance due, as Milton himself says, to dwelling
on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.
What dwells on such thoughts is something within us which has an intuitive drive bypassing the usual activity of the mind. Here, by a different route, we hark back to "a moment's thought" a la Yeats.
Now to my point about us as Aurobindonians. There is no single path for them to the goal, for the goal marks the convergence of all possible movements of human nature towards an all-fulfilling transfiguration. But there is a path which Sri Aurobindo names "sunlit". The naming reminds me of the closing lines of my poem "Psyche":
The true soul in us which Sri Aurobindo has called the Psychic Being represents in terms of the evolving manifestation of the Divine on earth a central flame which has infinite potentialities. It is as if the Supreme Himself started as a luminous seed sown in the cosmic Ignorance and, with a nature of sweetness and light, exerted His secret strength against the surrounding darkness. The dynamic Truth that is the Supermind and whose symbol from the time of the Rigvedic Rishis has been the sun of our planetary system is present as a diminurive delegate in the inmost part of us which is our true soul. The Psychic Being is the Divine Child in us: it turns spontaneously to the Eternal as to a creative Mother of the worlds. With no egoistic demand, with no complicated side-issues involved, it goes straight to what it feels to be the sovereign source of the true, the good, the beautiful. An instinctive simplicity of self-surrender to God is its distinguishing mark. And this giving of itself is an act of
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joy: there is nothing forced, nothing strained, for indeed its very stuff is a causeless happiness. Every movement of it is a smile - it is a smiling repose, it is a smiling activity, it smiles in solitude, it smiles in company - and with its inherent smilingness it transmits to others its own endless rapture — its interplay with people is a healing balm, a dispelling of their shadows. Thus, along with its childlike simplicity is a childlike merriment. No matter how difficult the outer life may be, no matter what adversities may come from day to day, it is bathed in bliss. So your wanting your words to "be simple and merry" in the hearing of Amal in Pondicherry is a mission given them to evoke in him a remembrance of his psyche. The sunlit path is the one on which the heart of man, surging out of its depths rather than floating on from its surfaces, can go dancing to the Divine instead of toiling towards the Transcendent. Perhaps we may even sum up the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as being in its most concentrated and swiftest form an injunction to be sublimely simple and seraphically merry: that is to say, to bring forth the Psychic Being as the leader of the march from the limited human to the liberated superhuman.
(18.12.1989)
Your letter - deeply felt when written and as deeply felt when read - was most welcome. I have used the word "deeply" not just to indicate emotional intensity but also to point to a region of the being which goes beyond, our separate outer selves, a profundity where all of us are one and where our oneness reaches into a single divine Source underlying everything, A sweetly vibrant touch of this double-aspected depth was there both at the time you wrote and at the time I read. For you have spoken as if you were the mouthpiece of a multitude, the representative voice of all those who turn to Mother India for a glimpse of Sri Aurobindo as their guide, a whisper of the Mother as their impeller. And you have spoken thus because you have intuitively caught
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the sense I often have of being a channel, however limited and imperfect, of Sri Aurobindo's light and the Mother's love, two felicitous forces which have a universal movement behind every individual-seeming action and which through that universality bring to our fumbling and aching selves the hope of an all-consummating future, as envisaged in Savitri:
A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,
A Will expressive of soul's deity,
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow for its shade.
You have quoted what I wrote in the April issue of Mother India last year, p. 239. Nothing could have pleased me more to remember. My latest birthday wish was the same as the one you have appreciated so much. Only the words were not the same. My appeal to the Divine was: "Open me inward and upward to You more and more. Come through this opening and live in my heart with ever greater intensity. Then open me outward to You who are hidden in each of my fellow-beings and make me feel You opening them inward and upward to Your eternal truth in all that changes, Your immortal Beauty in everything that passes."
The postcard you have sent me, reproducing the painting by Leonardo which hangs in the Munich gallery and whose frame you have reverently touched shows in the figure of the Virgin and the Child the Transcendental Beauty watching from above with meditative tenderness the image of the Supreme Truth it has created in our world in the form of a perfect littleness destined to grow to fullness in the course of time. Here in her lap is a transparent embodiment of what the Upanishads have visioned as "the Being in the heart no bigger than the thumb of a man, who is like a fire that is without smoke and who was in the past and is now in the present, the lord of his today and the lord of his tomorrow -the truth which thou hast to seek."
Leonardo's Virgin looks downward while the Child looks
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upward at some invisible point with both his little arms stretched forward to it. Again, an intent of forward striding is suggested in the way his two stretched legs are poised. One hand of the Virgin clasps the Child at the back, the other gently touches the last finger of his raised right hand as if to assure him of her subtle support. The Virgin's head is crowned with golden curls. On her right shoulder hangs a golden wrap which emerges more fully and brightly below as part of her dress, in almost the centre of the lower part of the picture. There seems to be some symbolism in this golden colour at the centre-top and the centre-bottom, for this is the colour of the divine Truth-light. Two other shades make up the Virgin's dress: a brown underjacket and over it a blue robe - emblems of earth and sky. Her slightly bent head is against a black background which is the middle of a wall with two arched openings on either side of the head. Through these windows we glimpse a landscape of brown earth, greenish vegetation, blue mountain-rocks under a faint whiteness with light blue above it. The suggestion is of a slow several-aspected ascension made visible to us through those apertures in the dark background of the Virgin's fair face. All this appears to be significant of the varied conditions under which the Divine Mother consents to work in her earthly manifestation through the development of what we term the Psychic Being down the ages, the inmost Soul projected from on high to bring gradually the heavenly plenitude on the terrestrial scene.
If my understanding of Leonardo's lovely pattern at once of peace and mobility, outer shape and inner sense, has any validity, it may be because of what, as you remind me, Sri Aurobindo wrote to me - that according to his impression I may have been present during the Italian Renaissance as well as in Restoration England. (Ancient Athens was, of course, a certainty for me.) You have recalled my saying that I may have been "a footling of a painter" tutored by the master mind and revelatory hand which gave us "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper". Handing paint-brushes to that past
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maniiestation of Sri Aurobindo, during the Creadon of those great visions, was perhaps my happy job.
At the Samadhi on November 25 I thought several times of the hour it would be in Grafelfing. Your information that 11.45 there would be 4.15 here and 1 on your wrist-watch be 5.30 on mine proved a good guide to my imagining what you might be doing at any particular moment in that span of seventy-five minutes. Once I imagined that you were at a window and the lines from my poem "Far Flute" floated into my mind:
What visionary urge
Into thy being like a fathomless smile?
It may interest you to know that the second line has been characterised by Sri Aurobindo as "Intuition with Overmind touch." May I mention a few of the other phrases in my poetry which have received the same touch, thanks to Sri Aurobindo's grace? I should like to quote them, because if one learns from Sri Aurobindo what plane is at work, one can absorb more livingly its atmosphere through the rhythm and the vision, and let not only the spiritually-turned aesthetic sense but also the very substance of the soul feel the impact and grow more Aurobindonian.
(1)The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind. "Intuitive with Oveirnind touch."
(2)Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,
The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind...
"Illumined Mind with the Overmind touch."
(3)An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I
"Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed together."
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Now back to the Samadhi and you. A second imaginative look at you found you poring over a book, but the book seemed to be one in which the true essence of all things was gathered together. Recollecting this scene I am now put in mind of a particular aspect of Dante's vision in the highest rung of Paradise. Slightly modifying the beginning of line 2,I may cite Laurence Binyon's English rendering:
Leaves I beheld within the unfathomed blaze
Into one volume bound by love, the same
That the universe holds scattered through its maze.
I can only think of a "volume" like The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga which in terms of earthly literature could reflect the state of Divine Consciousness Dante hints at, a state wherein the multiplicity and diversity of the phenomenal world interweave and blend to discover their all-hansforming unity or, rather, meet in a warm and glowing union which discloses the truth of each in all and all in each.
I must cry halt now with my best wishes for you to move towards the healthy, the happy and the holy.
(30.11.1989)
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